Author: Daniel Friedman

Antiracism, Anti-Semitism, and the False Problem of Jewish Success

Published by Daniel Friedman

On October 17th, the New York Times published an op-ed celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Million Man March that neglected to mention the anti-Semitic history of its organizer, Louis Farrakhan. In response, former Times editorial board member Bari Weiss tweeted that the institution had adopted “a worldview in which Jew hate does not count.” The author of the Times op-ed, Howard University professor Natalie Hopkinson, replied that “ppl who have become white”—that is, Jews like Weiss—“should not be lecturing Black ppl about oppression.” Apropos of nothing in particular…I’m almost done w/ “Caste”. Ppl who have become white should not be lecturing Black ppl about oppression. Need to focus on the man w/actual power caging children and rigging elections. Hitler never had more than 38% of popular vote. — Just wash your hands. (@NatHopkinson) October 18, 2020 Exposing and objecting to racial disparities became the purpose of the New York Times around August 2019, when executive editor Dean Baquet called a town hall meeting attended by the paper’s staff. He announced that, with the Mueller probe winding …

Is the My Little Pony Fan Community Really Full of Nazis?

Published by Daniel Friedman

The Atlantic recently published an exposé on the urgent problem of Nazis in the subculture of “Bronies,” adult fans of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic cartoon. The "bronies," adult fans of the children's TV show "My Little Pony," have tacitly allowed white supremacists into their ranks for years. But following Black Lives Matter protests, they're finally waking up, @kait_tiffany reports: https://t.co/V0mvSbmxYx — The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) June 23, 2020 This was interesting to me, because I have argued in the past that the influence and scale of the far-Right or alt-Right is wildly exaggerated in mainstream media, and, in a 2018 article for Quillette, I supported this claim by pointing out that the 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which was the largest gathering of far-right activists in many years, attracted only 500 attendees while the 2018 Bronycon, an event for adult men who love My Little Pony, attracted 11 times as many people. But could it be true that the Bronies themselves are far-right activists? What do Bronies really care about? …

Streaming Will Never Be as Bad as Cable

Published by Daniel Friedman

Apple and Disney launched new subscription video streaming services in November 2019, joining Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, CBS All Access and HBO, which will become HBO Max in 2020, placing HBO branding and original programming at the helm of a subscription service to stream the content of the AT&T Warnermedia conglomerate. Comcast/NBCUniversal will be launching a streaming service called Peacock in 2020 as well. Since every major media company will soon have its own streaming subscription, we can expect them to stop licensing their film catalogs and their archives of television shows to existing streaming services like Netflix. If you are a current Netflix subscriber, you will lose access to popular shows like Friends and The Office as well as Disney, Pixar and Marvel content. Hulu is losing South Park and Rick and Morty, which will stream on HBO Max, while Disney, which owns much of Hulu, will be adding shows from the FX network to that service, to try to replace some of what Hulu will be losing to HBO Max and Disney+, That …

Good Men Aren’t Getting Harder to Find

Published by Daniel Friedman

In a recent editorial, Wall Street Journal editor at large Gerard Baker noted that the share of female college graduates has risen to 57 percent, and posited that the disproportionate number of college-educated women is affecting the dating market. Since there are now four female college graduates in their 20s or 30s for every three college-educated males of the same age, and since women prefer not to date men whose status is lower than theirs, there must not be enough men to go around. This hypothesis fits conveniently with a number of narratives, promulgated across the political spectrum from Bernie Sanders to Jordan Peterson, about boys and men falling behind or being abandoned by society. However, on closer examination, the story is a bit more nuanced. Baker makes a mistake common in trend pieces on higher education: He takes a statistic about “college graduates” and draws a conclusion that fails to consider the differences among the huge range of degree-granting institutions in the United States. Every year in the US, nearly 2 million students enroll …

How Free Speech Dies Online

Published by Daniel Friedman

Last year, I explained why it is wrong to consider weakening speech protections to allow bans on speech by the alt-right, neo-Nazis, or other far-Right groups: it is safer to let Nazis speak in a society that places high value on individual rights and has strong legal protections for those rights than it is to risk letting Nazis take control of institutional power in a society where protections on individual rights have been eroded. I explained, with specific examples, how easy it would be for a far-Right regime to turn restrictions on violent or hateful speech against its enemies. However, since then, while free speech has remained a controversial topic, the focus of the debate has moved away from restrictions on speech by state actors, and toward the question of how corporate entities that privately control the platforms which host a great deal of our speech and debate should regulate and moderate their users. These platforms are not bound by the US Constitution or by other legal regimes that protect private speech from state coercion, …

What New York’s Public Schools Could Learn From Stuyvesant

Published by Daniel Friedman

The class of students who will enter Stuyvesant High School in 2019 include only seven black students. This isn’t particularly unusual; Stuy, which is the most academically selective public school in New York City, typically admits only a handful of black students each year, and every year there are a few op-eds and some social media outrage about the school’s demographics. This year, however, criticism of the school seems especially intense following a call by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to dismantle the city’s elite specialized high schools and during a period of renewed focus on admissions policies in the wake of the Varsity Blues college corruption scandal. Echoing de Blasio’s 2018 condemnation of the specialized schools, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared Stuyvesant a “system failure” and an “injustice” in a tweet that received over 50,000 likes. New York Times education reporter Eliza Shapiro tweeted that these “grim statistics” would force officials to confront “segregation” in the elite schools, and Atlantic writer Vann Newkirk tweeted that Stuy’s demographics discredit the idea of an American meritocracy. …

Why Elites Dislike Standardized Testing

Published by Daniel Friedman

On Tuesday, March 12 2019, federal prosecutors exposed a crooked college admissions consulting operation that bribed SAT administrators and college athletic coaches in order to get wealthy, underqualified applicants into elite universities. Also charged were 33 wealthy parents who had paid for admissions bribes, including actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, Gordon Caplan, a co-chair of the international law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and Douglas Hodge, the former chief executive of Pimco. As this story unfolds, there will be numerous takes and analyses about what the exposure of such widespread corruption in college admissions could mean. People are going to say that this scandal is proof that the meritocracy is broken and corrupt. And it’s likely that many commentators will use this event as an opportunity to attack the SAT and the ACT. Progressives view test-based admissions as inequitable because some marginalized groups are significantly underrepresented among the pool of top-scoring college applicants. But millionaires and elites also hate standardized admissions tests, because their children’s admission to top colleges is contingent upon test scores. …

The High Cost of Free College for All

Published by Daniel Friedman

During the 2016 Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders advocated a new federal entitlement making U.S. public colleges and universities tuition free. Since then, Democratic Socialists and some mainstream Democrats have begun supporting such a proposal. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Bronx, NY candidate running on a socialist platform who became a media star after unseating a senior House Democrat in a primary upset, has made it one of her central campaign issues.   Sanders argues that countries like Germany, Finland, Norway and Sweden have successfully made college free, but there are some major differences between the education systems of continental Europe and those of the United States that make Sanders’s proposal impractical. Everyone has access to higher education in the United States According to data collected by the U.S. Census, 90 percent of adults between ages 25 and 34 have a high school degree or its equivalent, and after high school about two-thirds of adults went on to one of America’s more than 4,500 institutions of higher education.  While many people’s archetypal idea of “college” is a selective private …

Nobody Should Listen to Twitter Mobs

Published by Daniel Friedman

Last fortnight, the New York Times stood behind its new editorial board hire Sarah Jeong, after critics on the right dug up Jeong’s offensive tweets sarcastically mocking white people, saying things like “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” and using a #CancelWhitePeople hashtag. The Times argued that Jeong’s tweets were a sort of counter-trolling response to sustained harassment she endured as a young Asian-American female technology reporter.  Jeong’s critics noted that her offensive tweets weren’t in direct response to any harassment, and that they displayed a degree of hostility to white people that would be considered racist and out of bounds if directed toward any other group.  Nonetheless, the Times did not fire her. This was the right decision.  People shouldn’t lose jobs and opportunities over old tweets.  But if the New York Times did the right thing here, then, by the same standard, several prominent media companies, including the Times, have made wrong decisions in the recent past. Nobody should be …

Free Speech Doesn’t Protect Nazis. It Protects Us From Nazis

Published by Daniel Friedman

Free speech has recently become a cause célèbre of the nationalist and racist right-wing in the United States, as provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos bring their roadshows to college campuses, flout the values of progressive students, and then publicize and ridicule those students’ emotional or sometimes violent responses. As a result, some on the Left have become skeptical of the benefits of the First Amendment. Prior to last year’s violent confrontation in Charlottesville, VA, during which an alt-right protester rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a woman and injuring others, the ACLU defended the right of neo-Nazis and white nationalists to demonstrate in support of Confederate monuments. For this, the ACLU was widely criticized by progressives, and since then, some progressives have begun to argue that a society with unfettered free speech is one that fails to protect marginalized communities. Former ACLU legal director and Berkeley law professor john a. powell recently told a reporter from the New Yorker that absolutist free speech rules in the United States fail to weigh the value …