Founders Wanted
Bari Weiss offers some wise words to the first students of University of Austin (UATX)
I’ve been on the road a lot, so I’ve been finding some great podcasts and audio content.
I love Bari Weiss’s speech because it’s a response to cancel culture that goes beyond recognizing, validating and commiserating. She is speaking to the students at a brand new university - one that was created as a response to the systematic hijacking of our higher education system.
So, there’s hope!
And I love hope!
Weiss is no stranger to cancel culture. She was basically cancelled for acknowledging it. So she gets it:
In this revolution, skeptics are recast as heretics. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots, subjected to boycotts and their work to political litmus tests. The enlightenment, as the critic Edward Rothstein has put it, has been replaced by the exorcism.
What we call “cancel culture” is really the justice system of this revolution. And the goal of the cancellations is not merely to punish the person being canceled. The goal is to send a message to everyone else: Step out of line and you are next.
It has worked.
But maybe… fingers crossed… we’ve reached a turning point.
Is it possible that being censored, silenced and deplatformed has forced us all to evolve and create new ways forward? After all, adversity cultivates. And some of these folks have certainly accessed their courage and creativity in response to some of the challenged thrown their way.
I mean, they can’t cancel ALL of us (not without cancelling Substack anyway).
So what are we to do?
The answer is not liberalism, if liberalism means defending the Ministry of Truth as necessary to fight disinformation or protesting outside the homes of Supreme Court Justices in the name of justice. Nor is it conservatism if conservatism means defending the rights of Big Tech to shut down the public square to conservatives, or fawning over European autocrats and theocracies and calling for a similar model of government to dawn on our shores. That’s why the founders left there for here.
No, we have to get more fundamental, more foundational. We have to get beyond the tired and rotted out ideas about left and right and ask: What are the virtues and values that have made America and the West the best, freest, most enlightened, most tolerant of minorities, most open to new ideas, most innovative places in the history of the world?
She gets into it… so please read on.
There are people forging a path forward. Let’s be curious. And hopeful!