As they say on social media: “THIS!”
This is the best speech of 2022, at least so far, and perhaps the most needed piece of oratory of the last several years. It is the speech that best captures just how broken our culture has been by a new “Illiberal Ideology”—she also calls it “the UnAmerican Revolution”—and just how non-negotiable a total break from it, for the sake of radical reform projects—i.e., “new foundings” of new institutions like Weiss’s brand-new University of Austin—, has now become.
It is a Jeremiah 6:14-type speech, one that divides now, for the sake of a future peace-building. You are either with Weiss, in her “Coalition of the Sane,” or, via cowardly silence or open participation, with the UnAmerican Revolution.
I will link to a transcript below, but you’ll really want to hear this one, titled, “The New Founders America Needs” , by Bari Weiss, some date in June, 2022, at the University of Austin’s inaugural classes (albeit at a Dallas location). The link here is to the recorded speech, available at Weiss’s Honestly podcast series
It is the speech that most effectively gives a quick sketch of the basic shape of the “Enemy” Ideology—enemy to the core Liberalism shared by both conservatives and “old-school” liberals—, and which conveys how it has already disoriented every one of us. I think that is the most moving and powerful section of the speech:
….a profoundly illiberal ideology that has infiltrated our largest companies, our media, our universities, our medical schools, our law schools, our hospitals, our local governments, our elementary schools. Our friendships. Our families. Our language.
This next part you won’t quite find in the transcript—it begins at 8:23:
…others pretend away this ideological revolution for more craven reasons. Because to see it, would be to give up too much status…But deny it as they might…it is very much here. And I think, it is happening right under our noses, it is happening to us, and it promises to reshape the country, and indeed I think it already has.
As most of you know, Weiss left the New York Times in 2020, and that fact allows her to springboard to her most profound insight here:
…it has come to impact my friendships, my relationships, and my career. …I got off on telling people I worked for The Times. Part of me imagined I would work there forever...
Then again, I also imagined I’d live in a world where I could say with confidence and clarity: I know where I want to work. I know where I want to live. I know where I want to raise my kids. Or send them to school. Or where they should apply to college.
But the truth is I don’t know any of those things with certainty anymore.
Anyone in this room–and those Americans who are truly alive to the moment we are in—we don’t have the luxury of steady ground. It’s simply not the moment we are living in.
The moment we are in requires something different . . . and something seemingly paradoxical.
It requires us to both build totally new things . . . but also in the same moment, to conserve very old ones. [8:23-11:00, emphasis added]
The line about steady ground is key—it reminds me of something I wrote last year in an unpublished draft, that in 2020, it felt as if the concrete foundations beneath one’s feet, ones according to which you had shaped your whole life-plan, had been silently transmuted into sand. Leading up to that annus horribilus one began to notice at least some of one’s own colleagues, friends, and relatives falling into what could only be called doctrines of political insanity, and as for the institutions and institutional patterns one had counted on, by mid-2020 one realized that in the next storm of common-opinion madness, they could fire you for the most patently unjust reasons, unless you were prepared to voice whatever Lie of the moment the managers had embraced as mandatory. Similarly, it was entirely logical to think that if one voiced opposition in a strong way, a mob might be directed to one’s front-door, or that all accessible platforms would become closed to you.
But back to Weiss’s speech. It hints at what kind of Coalition will be necessary to defeat the new ideology and begin rebuilding, composed on one hand, of “Old-School” Liberal- and Liberal Arts- types, and on the other, of Conservatives, especially religious ones who like (the liberal, and incidentally, lesbian) Weiss believe that the ultimate grounding of equal rights is God’s creating each of us in His image.
That perhaps makes the speech sound more focused on broader politics than it is. But its hints about needed coalitional moves make sense because, even if initially, it seems to be a speech primarily about how cancel culture has ravaged our institutions of higher education, it announces a basic truth that “now, the whole country is a campus.” Thus, rescuing liberal education, and rescuing liberal democracy, are now topics which must be discussed simultaneously. The founding of UATX is undoubtedly a political act, even if it is also, and most obviously, an educational/cultural act.
And choosing to be a student at UATX will be, for most, a political act as well. Weiss doesn’t tip-toe around that, but invites prospective students to join the scholars there in a new act of Founding, and to regard themselves as a new Founding Generation. Cue the Hamilton songs, and this 2021 one, by Van Morrison, which says we must can’t go back to the way it was, but must start on a new path to Freedom.
She has ten principles one must adopt if one is to be a new founder—here are most of them, which I lay out as a last preview:
1. To be a founder in 21st-century America means to reject the politics of resentment and to recognize our privilege.
She means the privilege of being raised in America.
3. To be a founder means to defend freedom of speech.
4. To be a founder means to break your addiction to prestige.
In other words, which are hers: “Worship God more than Yale.” Notice how those are conservativism-friendly words!
6. To be a founder means to defend witches.
I.e., men like Jonathan Katz, and women like Abigail Shrier and J.K. Rowling.
8. Being a founder means refusing to submit your relationships and friendships to political litmus tests.
10. Above all, to be a founder is to build new things.
A transcript of the speech, which is in places is a tad more-developed than the delivered one, but in key sections is weaker than it, is available here.
Yes, I am going to be saying more about this speech! I encourage you to study-up on it, for it really is worth a careful consideration like a classic American speech or document, and it sets the table for a number of the key discussions we need to be having these days.
Carl's discerning eye appraises another precious jewel. Perhaps it could be read in tandem with the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, in a lineage of new births of freedom.
Catching up on my PoMo Con account... Well, one cheer for Bar Weiss. I’ll have to look at the rest of the speech. But, sorry, wasn’t this the same Bari Weiss who busied herself with canceling Trump supporters during her tenure at the NY Times? Seems she, and this type of “classical liberal,” only became alarmed by cancel culture upon noticing how the wokerati turned on her own narrow ethnic interests (Judaism/Zionism), and on her feminist cause. Her notion of liberty is suspect and would end up recapitulating the very nightmare we’re now in, as she fails to see how the problem of identity is intrinsic to feminism ab initio. There is no cordon sanitaire between feminism (of whatever “waves”) and wokeism/transgenderism. This comes out well in Weiss’s severely blinkered essay “How Feminism Got Hijacked” (actually written by Zoe Strimpel, but published at Weiss’s Substack and, suffice to say, ratifies Weiss’s own thinking to a T given other things of hers I’ve read).
Gosh, here we learn that impugning motherhood as an ideal for girls, implementing no fault divorce, promoting promiscuity to young women, and competing economically with men had nothing to do with teaching girls to behave...like men!
Now, the article does make some sound criticisms. This, because it wants biology or nature at its most elemental. But once things “close to the body” (greater economic/material parity between the sexes) are satisfied, it seems to me you have not a “highjacking” by gender theorists, but rather a transition or segue to eventual transhumanism and tranny politics. If I’m not mistaken, I’ll have to consult Strauss again on this, but I seem to recall Strauss makes this same intimation in his seminar on Plato’s Symposium and in his seminar on Marx...
My friend Scot Zentner once crystallized the point re identity/feminism culminating in a “flying blind” self-constructionism very well years ago in a paper arguing against same-sexual marriage, a paper, low and behold, that focuses on the differences in soul between men and women:
“This implicit desire for liberation [from the constraints of nature] is not new; it is a part of human nature itself. Many religions throughout history, for example, have included hopes for the transformation of the world, the creation of wholly new kinds of human beings. Social constructivist theorists, feminists included, often express similar hopes. But unlike religion, the origin of their visions is all-too-human; it rests upon modern man's hubristic attempt to master and transform human nature. “The feminists were so assertive, Harvey Mansfield explains, "as to conceive, announce, and establish a new definition of woman and, somewhat incidentally, of man. The new definitions were in a sense non-definitions - - no more than possible identities - - so as to help create the new gender-neutral society." But such non-definitions leave us without guidance, without freedom in any meaningful sense, for they deny what is essential to woman and man.”