Hungry Woodchipper

"FEED ME FEED ME FEED ME" -- the woodchipper

A remarkable piece of reporting at the New York Times, of all places, doesn’t finish the thought about why. “When the Culture Wars Came for NASA,” a podcast on the NYT website that’s well worth the time to listen to, is about the James Webb Space Telescope, which is a very mean and triggering telescope that doesn’t like LGBTQIA+++ people.

Summarizing a complicated narrative, activists demanded that the Webb telescope be renamed — because it bears the name of a former NASA administrator who, the claim went, was a vicious bigot. So an astrophysicist, Hakeem Oluseyi, researched the claim and disproved it. Among other things, he found that an aggressively homophobic quote attributed to Webb was misattributed, leaving no evidence that Webb had ever said anything like it, and he found that Webb had led the racial integration of NASA facilities in the South. Then he wrote an article reporting his conclusions: James Webb, not a bigot.

Annnnnd then Oluseyi was attacked as, you’ll be shocked to hear this, a bigot — specifically, a trespassing bigot who had written about a topic he had no business discussing. Hakeem Oluseyi is black, and he grew up poor in rural Mississippi before finishing an astrophysics PhD at Stanford and working at places like MIT, but he has the tragic flaw of being heterosexual, which means that OMFG shut up Nazi. A straight physicist, critics wrote, lacks the standing to address claims that a science administrator was a homophobe, and has committed an act of homophobic cruelty by assuming that he can discuss that. Another physicist, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, wrote an article saying this about the misattributed quote: “But that correction changes nothing.” She also demanded that the Webb telescope be renamed the Harriet Tubman Space Telescope, presumably because Prescod-Weinstein wishes to honor Republicans. But anyway.

Applying for an academic job, Oluseyi became the target of vague and often anonymous claims that he had stolen grant money and sexually harassed female colleagues. He tried to keep someone out of the woodchipper, so he went into the woodchipper.

“At this point in the story,” the NYT podcast host says to the reporter (around the 31:20 mark, if you’re listening), “you’re looking into the reputation of someone who was attacked after looking into the reputation of someone else who was attacked, and perhaps all these attacks are coming from the same set of sources.”

Watch the reporter’s response, because we’re about the change the subject: “Yes, this is the politics of personal destruction that accompany so many disputes these days, where one challenges the consensus around a particular issue, and it’s not enough to argue with that, to say, ‘no no no you’re wrong, because of X, Y, and Z’ — you need to take that person down. And personal reputations are destroyed. It’s an unfortunately common aspect of intellectual debate these days.”

That’s not it. Cancel culture needs new targets for new cycles; we destroyed someone on Monday, but now it’s Tuesday and we still need to prove how pure we are. Woke culture has an endless appetite for folk devils. Lysenkoism resides in the declaration that some other poor dumb bastard isn’t doing true Marxist-Leninist science; a Lysenkoist needs colleagues to accuse, so Lysenkoists have a longer list of victims this week than they had last week.

The problem isn’t the culture of “intellectual debate these days.” The problem is more narrowly the culture of the increasingly depraved expert classes in the overlapping left-facing worlds of academia, media, and government, who respond to criticism and counternarratives the same way Oluseyi’s critics responded. Listen to the podcast, as the host and the reporter grapple with the, um, interesting, uh, way that Oluseyi said things that were, uh, true, like, factually, but, um, it somehow didn’t matter.

This is the culture of Woke accusation, as the congressional hearings with FBI whistleblowers this week showed. “But that correction changes nothing.” Stop using facts, Nazi!

They aren’t kidding.