We refuse to go quietly, says cancel culture cabal

Speakers accused universities of clamping down on free speech and censoring conservative thinkers.

Peter Thiel says the antonym of ‘diversity is university’. Picture: AFP

“This is war,” Joshua Katz warned a rogues’ gallery of Americans who had fallen foul of so-called cancel culture.

Katz was one of the headline speakers at an “academic freedom conference” in California at which panellists railed against the “woke” orthodoxy on gender, race, religion and pandemic policy.

They included a tech billionaire, an anti-lockdown doctor ­accused of ruining America’s Covid-19 response and a professor who said the US would be improved by having fewer Asians.

Speakers accused universities of clamping down on free speech and censoring conservative thinkers, with allegations that campuses were hostile to anyone with nonconformist views.

Katz was sacked from his role as a tenured classics professor at Princeton University in May for allegedly failing to fully co-­operate with a sexual misconduct ­investigation.

His supporters, however, said his dismissal was disgraceful. They claimed he was pushed out because he opposed the univer­sity’s anti-racism policies after the death of George Floyd.

Katz, 53, told the conference, sponsored by the Stanford Graduate School of Business, that he had been abandoned by his friends and left a “condemned man” for criticising the so-called anti-racist policies, which he claimed were themselves racist.

“The way forward is to stand firm, to show the bastards that you have the strength of your convictions and that mob rule won’t prevail,” he said.

Katz added that many of his former colleagues in academia were “truly horrible people” and “if I were as horrible as they are, I could dish up serious dirt on dozens of them”.

He added: “And that is what makes this whole thing so extraordinary. The willingness of deeply flawed people to be mendaciously merciless towards others, while acting as though they themselves were invincible, honest actors. They are not honest. And they are not invincible. This is war. And our job is to vanquish them.”

Amy Wax, a Pennsylvania University law professor, was accused of white supremacism after saying the US would be “better off with fewer Asians” and that black students performed poorly in her classes. Wax, 69, said her university dean was trying to push her out of the school.

She, too, railed against “woke conformity” and called on other tenured professors to stand squarely behind the right to freedom of speech.

Wax accused the “progressive left” of wanting to “destroy and demolish our legal system with its safeguards, procedures and practices, a system that is the envy of the world”.

She said: “The goal is to take our carefully constructed First World legal system and send it back to Third World status.

“The only upside I can see of this project, it might alleviate our immigration problem. Why would people want to come to us for the same miseries and injustices they have at home?”

Peter Thiel, the keynote speaker, opened his address by saying: “The antonym of diversity is university.”

Thiel, 55, a Silicon Valley tech billionaire and prominent supporter of Donald Trump, has backed Republican candidates for the Senate in the forthcoming midterm elections.

He joked about Elon Musk slashing jobs at Twitter, saying remaining workers could still “go to the office and smoke pot all day and earn decent pay ­cheques”.

He warned of the dangers of a totalitarian state: “Once you get that, hard to see where it ends.”

Scott Atlas, 67, a radiologist, served as a coronavirus adviser to Trump. He fought against lockdowns, questioned mask mandates and was accused of pushing misinformation about the virus. The Washington Post editorial board published a piece on Atlas in June titled: “How one doctor wrecked the pandemic response”.

The Stanford University faculty senate condemned his work.

Atlas said scientists and academics had betrayed the public and could not be trusted. “It’s not just academic freedom,” he said. “There is an unprecedented ­denial of fact.”

He referred to Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights leader, while calling for “people with ­integrity” to rise.

Other speakers at the two-day conference included Ilya Shapiro, who resigned as an administrator at the Georgetown University Law Centre over a comment on President Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a black woman for the Supreme Court. Shapiro tweeted that Biden should pick Sri Srinivasan, the Indian-born judge, but added that he would end up with a “lesser black woman”.

Jordan Peterson, the academic who refused to use gender-­neutral pronouns, also featured.

The conference, which began on Friday, was intended to be closed to the public before critics accused the organisers of trying to avoid scrutiny. More than 50 Stanford faculty members signed a letter saying a conference ­behind closed doors would have protected “racist lies and other mistruths”.

The Times