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The American Association of University Women Silicon Valley Branch (AAUW Silicon Valley) hosted a virtual discussion titled School Book Banning: A Primer for Readers of All Ages with Jennifer Lynn Wolf, senior lecturer at Stanford Universitys Graduate School of Education and former high school English teacher.

The March 14 discussion had more than 60 attendees.

According to PEN America, book banning is defined as Anyaction taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a previously accessible book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished.

Wolf focused onthe particulars of book banning in schools. She said that the current surge in book banning is similar to a pandemic in the number of attempts (531 from Jan. 1 to Aug. 31, 2023, for example) involving 3,923 titles.

This surge is not new attempts to ban books go back to the early part of the 20thcentury. Wolf cited a case study of books being burned by the Nazis at the urging of the German Student Union in 1933. In the 21st century, the controversy on books began with the banning by the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee of the childrens graphic novelMausthat described the terrors of the Nazi regime.

The audience was encouraged to learn that in 2023, California passed AB 1078, which prohibits book bans.

According to Wolf,the current schoolbook banning movement is being driven by Moms for Libertyandhas great impact on both children and families.

She pointed out that the American Library Association tracks and challenges attempts to ban books nationwide.

Wolf offered this advice on how to protect the right to read:Read and gift banned books, use your public library, learn whos on your local school board and hold candidates forums, and watch, listen to or read documentaries, podcasts or books on book banning.

In a question-and-answer session after her talk, one attendee said that San Joses AAUW has already gone to board meetings of four school districts and learned that the true reason for book banning is to discredit public schools and to promote private parochial schools.

In response to another question, Wolf said that in her opinion it is impossible to learn and grow without some discomfort, so the fact that children do experience some unease through reading shouldnt be a reason to ban books.

Wolf concluded with the comment that currently there are more questions than answers about book banning, particularly with regard to who (parents, school boards, teachers, legislators, the courts, for example) should decide what children should learn and read.

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AAUW speaker warns of rise in book censorship, 'similar to a pandemic' - Los Altos Town Crier

Used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others: report

The National Science Foundation is paying universities using taxpayer money to create AI tools that can be used to censor Americans on various social media platforms, according to members of the House.

University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and MIT are among the universities cited in the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government interim report.

It details the foundations funding of AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools, and its repeated efforts to hide its actions and avoid political and media scrutiny.

NSF has been issuing multi-million-dollar grants to university and non-profit research teams for the purpose of developing AI-powered technologies that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others, states the report, released last month.

Funding for the projects began in 2021 and was issued through the NSFs Convergence Accelerator grant program, which was initially launched in 2019 to develop interdisciplinary solutions to major challenges of national and societal importance such as those pertaining to AI and quantum technology, it states.

In 2021, however, the NSF introduced Track F: Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.

The NSFs 2021 Convergence Accelerator program solicitation stated the goal of Track F projects was to develop prototype(s) of novel research platforms forming integrated collection(s) of tools, techniques, and educational materials and programs to support increased citizen trust in public information of all sorts (health, climate, news, etc.), through more effectively preventing, mitigating, and adapting to critical threats in our communications systems.

Specifically, the grant solicitation singled out the threats posed by hackers and misinformation.

That September, the select subcommittee report notes, the NSF awarded twelve Track F teams $750,000 each (a total of $9 million) to develop and refine their project ideas and build partnerships. The following year, the NSF selected six of the 12 teams to receive an additional $5 million each for their respective projects, according to the report.

Projects from the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, MIT, and Meedan, a nonprofit that specializes in developing software to counter misinformation, are highlighted by the select subcommittee.

Collectively, these four projects received $13 million from the NSF, it states.

The University of Michigan intended to use the federal funding to develop its tool WiseDex, which could use AI technology to assess the veracity of content on social media and assist large social media platforms with what content should be removed or otherwise censored, it states.

The University of Wisconsin-Madisons Course Correct, which was featured in an article from The College Fix last year, was intended to aid reporters, public health organizations, election administration officials, and others to address so-called misinformation on topics such as U.S. elections and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

MITs Search Lit, as described in the select subcommittees report, was developed as an intervention to help educate groups of Americans the researchers believed were most vulnerable to misinformation such as conservatives, minorities, rural Americans, older adults, and military families.

Meedan, according to its website, used its funding to develop easy-to-use, mobile-friendly tools [that] will allow AAPI [Asian-American and Pacific Islander] community members to forward potentially harmful content to tiplines and discover relevant context explainers, fact-checks, media literacy materials, and other misinformation interventions.

According to the select committees report, Once empowered with taxpayer dollars, the pseudo-science researchers wield the resources and prestige bestowed upon them by the federal government against any entities that resist their censorship projects.

In some instances, the report states, if a social media company fails to act fast enough to change a policy or remove what the researchers perceive to be misinformation on its platform, disinformation researchers will issue blogposts or formal papers to generate a communications moment (i.e., negative press coverage) for the platform, seeking to coerce it into compliance with their demands.

Efforts were made via email to contact senior members of the three university research teams, as well as a representative from Meedan, regarding the portrayal of their work in the select subcommittees report.

Paul Resnick, who serves as the WiseDex project director at the University of Michigan, referred The College Fix to the WiseDex website.

Social media companies have policies against harmful misinformation. Unfortunately, enforcement is uneven, especially for non-English content, states the site. WiseDex harnesses the wisdom of crowds and AI techniques to help flag more posts [than humans can]. The result is more comprehensive, equitable, and consistent enforcement, significantly reducing the spread of misinformation.

A video on the site presents the tool as a means to help social media sites flag posts that violate platform policies and subsequently attach warnings to or remove the posts. Posts portraying approved COVID-19 vaccines as potentially dangerous are used as an example.

Michael Wagner from the University of Wisconsin-Madison also responded to The Fix, writing, It is interesting to be included in a report that claims to be about censorship when our project censors exactly no one.

According to the select subcommittee report, some of the researchers associated with Track F and similar projects, however, privately acknowledged efforts to combat misinformation were inherently political and a form of censorship.

Yet, following negative coverage of Track F projects, depicting them as politically motivated and their products as government-funded censorship tools, the report notes, the NSF began discussing media and outreach strategy with grant recipients.

Notes from a pair of Track F media strategy planning sessions included in Appendix B of the select subcommittees report recommended researchers, when interacting with the media, focus on the pro-democracy and non-ideological nature of their work, Give examples of both sides, and use sports metaphors.

The select subcommittee report also highlights that there were discussions of having a media blacklist, although at least one researcher from the University of Michigan objected to this, citing the potential optics.

MORE: Feds give professors $5.7M to develop tool to combat misinformation

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NSF paid universities to develop AI censorship tools for social media, House report alleges - The College Fix

Is it really news if an unmarried, childless, 48-year-old science and self-improvement podcaster lied to some women he was dating? Evidently so: the latest New York magazine expos devotes 8,000 words to explaining how popular podcaster and Stanford professor Andrew Huberman maintained multiple long-term girlfriends, all of whom thought they were in a monogamous relationship.

The fact that it is news highlights two features of the contemporary culture that emanates especially from Americas West Coast. Firstly, the gulf between what California-inspired therapy culture promises and what it delivers; and secondly, the viciousness with which contemporary audiences now routinely go after high-profile role models especially men.

Huberman has reportedly been marinated in therapy culture since his parents divorced messily in his teens. According to the article, he seems expert in wielding its vocabulary to convey emotional attunement to his multiple girlfriends. I hear you saying you are angry and hurt, he texts in response to one discovering infidelity. I will hear you as much as long as needed for us [sic].

As a discursive register, therapy-speak was developed with the aim of enabling sincerity and authentic encounter; Hubermans proficiency with it suggests that with skilled bad-faith use its equally effective as a tool for manipulation. Still more striking, though, is how neatly this story fits another contemporary pattern: the speed and urgency with which male role models are first deified and then, just as swiftly, attacked.

Im not sure it really is newsworthy that a highly intelligent and highly sexed man with a painful family history and a world-class vocabulary for emotional manipulation should have had multiple concurrent girlfriends. It is news, though, for a high-profile male role model to have feet of clay in a culture that seems deeply conflicted about masculinity and authority. Before Huberman there was Jordan Peterson, another clearly wounded man who offered advice particularly to young men, and who subsequently and very publicly imploded.

The moment such a male role model achieves prominence, the hunt is on for the ways in which he is less than perfect. These are then wielded to deflate any pretensions he may have had to serving as a figure for admiration or emulation. Its a pattern that repeats, on a symbolic level, the repeated statue-toppling incidents since the BLM riots. Its hard to avoid the sense that as with the statues, whats being attacked is less the specific sins of a particular flawed hero and more the idea that any male figures should stand out and be emulated full stop.

Its common, when discussing the so-called crisis of masculinity, to blame it on loss of economic opportunity, the changing educational landscape, or other structural factors. A more uncomfortable possibility, though, is that at least part of this crisis is attributable less to structural shortcomings, or even the failings of individual men, than something more insidious. That is, a kind of baseline cultural hostility to the idea of prominent men entirely, particularly those who offer themselves as role models.

Heroes have always had feet of clay. Even Achilles had one weak spot. This isnt news. But today, for some reason, its become a sackable offence. Im perhaps less troubled than some by Hubermans very ordinary philandering, but the point is that if he wasnt in the stocks for infidelity, the Greek chorus of cultural levellers would have found something else to attack.

Its unclear what is driving this collective determination to be disappointed by every would-be avatar of masculine competence and agency. But I suspect that in the terms beloved of California therapy-speak we wont resolve the so-called crisis of masculinity until we work it through.

More:
Is Andrew Huberman the new Jordan Peterson? - UnHerd

God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time

God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth.

Jordan Peterson, during his June 2018 debate with Sam Harris.

When you understand the level of evil in the world, you understand that (following the second law of thermodynamics) the only equal but opposite force to that must be God

Even God as a concept becomes a real thing. If you have a thousand people and they believe in God and that makes them act righteously, even as a concept God becomes a real force.

Andrew Tate

Whatever disagreements they might have, what Peterson and Tate are both expressing in the above quotes is a false faith, a bluff. They may believe in God but find that their faith is inchoate so far as their ability to articulate it. Thats a question we cannot judgewhat they do articulate, however, is technically speaking an idol.

To worship an imaginative and collective representation of consciousness across time, that is, within our heads and within time, rather than beyond these, is technically idolatry.

To worship a force that is opposite but equal to evil, and a concept whose reality consists in affecting behaviour, is no different.

Given the prominence of Tate, I should addalthough it isnt the focus of this essaythat whether or not he is guilty of the crimes for which he stands accusedhe obviously promoted moral rot through gambling and a webcam business. This track record remains significant insofar as his legions of fans have yet to hear him explicitly repent, so far as I know (a lack of repentance which may be related to his tendency to argue for Gods existence as a socially useful operating system rather than as a genuine transcendent source of moral truth).

It is a technical matter of religiosity, to my mind, that sin should be repented from publicly if sin was promoted publicly. During his interview with Candace Owens, the two agreed that one should not regret past mistakes. Fair enough. But a mother who had a child with a man who was not her husband need not regret the life of that child to repent of the adultery.

Tates un-repentance for pushing moral corruption may well go hand in hand with his tendency to think about God as a social operating system.

We have here two prominent, globally-known spokesmen for what we might call the anti-woke, sociologically right-wing side of things. That they invoke personal and social utility to justify belief in God, rather than classical theistic formulations, at once more robust and more straightforward, strongly suggests that we are dealing with what the historian Oswald Spengler called second religiosity (or second religiousness) in his Decline of the West. What this term means is that earlier, earnestly-held religious beliefs are rehashed largely as a cultural stance against declining social conditions and the establishment.

I should add that I dont agree with the details of Spenglers narrative of historical development and decline, but this particular concept is very helpful in understanding where we are today.

In fairness, Spengler tends to describe second religiosity as more of a dreamy, soft-headed desire to believe, a giving up on proofs and precision. On the face of it, this sounds more like New Ageism than the masculine affectation of a Tate would allow.

Ultimately, however, the Peterson-Tate line fits Spenglers model, not only in relinquishing the classical traditions philosophical lucidity, but also in being a late, pseudo-morph that comes across as embarrassed at the older, simpler idea of God and feels the need to rest it instead on empiricist, psycho-social grounds.

It isnt the social and political content that Peterson wants to give religious faith thats the problem.

In fact, I would go quite far in this direction and point out that the Bible often refers to nations as units of spiritual edification; communities of salvation.

It isnt wrong for people to articulate universal principles, including the worship of God, in the context of what some would refer to as nationalism. Furthermore, historically, reactions against treacherous, exploitative political elites have tended to take on some kind of a charismatic, spiritual character; upheaval against a system that is found to hate its own core demographic is often marked by the character of religious revival, as the historian Arnold Toynbee points out (see Revolt of the Core). Todays truckers and farmers demonstrating against the policies that cause their purchasing power to plummet throughout the West are an example.

Philosophically speaking, the universal must always be expressed in a particular. You dont get to have beauty in the abstract. A transcendent quality like beauty requires that the beautiful racing horse be fully a horse, the beautiful sunset fully a sunset.

If a universal good is pursued abstractly (rather than treating particular wholes and their harmony as its proper manifestation), then this pursuit damages life. Concepts of unity and justice turn into terrible experiments of totalitarian homogenization and monocultural globalism.

Spiritual principles and religious faith must be pursued in terms of existing local cultural forms and identities. Religious traditionalists will often deny this and devalue politics, culture, local identity as altogether secular, inferior forms of human endeavour.

The mistake of many religious traditionalists towards excessive abstraction mirrors the mistake of the second religiosity. One denies particularity from above, saying that politics and identity dont matter; the other from below, making it all about politics.

A culture, a community, a nation, no less than a person or household, is a little archetype, a very specific name for God. Nothing exists but that God is saying something through it. If the second religiosity is to give way and the rebellion of the Wests internal proletarian is to constitute itself as a church (to use Toynbees idiosyncratic terms), it must ultimately reject its own empire. It would need to be anti-Caesarian (the political correlate of second religiousness, per Spengler), and instead reach for a new communitarianism of the sort effected by the Christian revolution when it transmogrified the Roman slave-owning villa into a medieval village.

Link:
The Godless Return: Peterson, Tate, and Spengler's Second Religiosity - The European Conservative

The Jordan B. Peterson PodcastMar 25, 2024

In this DW+ exclusive Sessions interview, Dr. Jordan Peterson and Bret Weinstein discuss the evolutionary and individual perception of consciousness, protective biases, when not to change your mind, and the necessity of intellectual freedom in order to avoid pitfalls and foster progress.

Dr. Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist who specializes in adaptive trade-offs. His current focus is on the interaction between genetic and cultural evolution. He has studied tent-making behavior in neotropical bats and worked for 14 years as a professor at The Evergreen State College. He has testified to the U.S. Congress, and been a visiting fellow at Princeton University. He hosts the DarkHorse Podcast and is a New York Times best-selling author. Bret has been a frequent guest on The Joe Rogan Experience and has done live events with Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein, Peter Boghossian, Sam Harris, Douglas Murray and has been interviewed by Bill Maher, Russell Brand, Glenn Loury, Dax Shepard, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Glenn Beck, Bari Weiss, Derrick Jensen, and Lex Fridman, among many others.

- Links -

2024 tour details can be found here https://jordanbpeterson.com/events

Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com/

For Bret Weinstein:

DarkHorse Locals Community https://darkhorse.locals.com/

On X https://x.com/BretWeinstein

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Sessions | Bret Weinstein - The Daily Wire