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[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]
I’m not sure what the etiquette is for a podcaster borrowing clips from another podcaster, but here’s where I shall find out.
The other podcaster I’m going to plagiarize here is Richard Hanania, whose book The Origins of Woke came out last year to much swooning and pearl-clutching from Establishment reviewers. One common complaint: Hanania posted a handful of pieces here at VDARE.com fourteen years ago under the pseudonym “Richard Hoste.”
Hanania’s December 28th podcast was given over to an interview he did with Professor Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Prof. Wax had reviewed Hanania’s book for the American Conservative, not unkindly[The Woke and the Asleep, December 11, 2023], and that’s what prompted the interview.
Followers of VDARE.com will be familiar with Prof. Wax. She has never posted at VDARE, but we have posted plenty of commentary on her: “about 146 results” said Google when I did a site search on her name, but our internal search engine says 80. Some 44 of those VDARE.com posts about her were written by your genial host here, the longest I think a 2,000-worder I posted following some comments Prof. Wax made about immigration at the 2019 National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C.
My acquaintance with Prof. Wax goes back further than that: nine years further back. In April 2010 we were both panelists in a discussion held at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the subject of the discussion being a book she had just published. You can read all about that at my own website: Remarks at a Panel Discussion, University of Pennsylvania Law School, April 5, 2010. The subject of the panel was Revisiting Race and Remedies: Should the Government Play A Role in Eliminating Racial Disparities in Education and Employment?
So I’ve known Amy Wax for some years. The first thing to be said about her is that she is a very smart person indeed, IQ I would guess up around four standard deviations from the mean, perhaps 160.
She started her academic career with a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford University at age 23. From there she switched to biology, getting a Doctor of Medicine degree from Harvard at age 28—cum laude. The final year of that degree she had also been studying at Harvard Law School, graduating J.D. at age 34, working as a consultant neurologist while completing her legal studies. In her late thirties she was arguing cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Smart? Oh yeah. And that, of course, is what you’d want in an Ivy League academic.
While it may be what you or I would want, though, it’s not what Ivy League administrators want in the 2020s. What they want today is someone who’ll sing along with the Diversity chorus, even if the singer’s IQ is only room temperature. They want Claudine Gay.
So Prof. Wax has been in trouble with the University of Pennsylvania administrators for speaking honestly and openly about race, culture, immigration, and related topics. They’ve been struggling mightily to get her fired. That’s not easy in the case of a tenured professor, but they’re determined.
They’ve been subjecting her to the same kind of expensive, time-consuming lawfare we here at VDARE have undergone a t the hands of New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and for the same reasons. Prof. Wax holds heterodox opinions, opinions at odds with ruling class ideology, and voices them publicly, fearlessly. That cannot be permitted.
Here’s another striking thing about Prof. Wax: not only is she supernaturally smart, she’s also fearless.
Back in 2021 she invited our friend and occasional contributor Jared Taylor to be the featured guest speaker to her Law School class on “Conservative and Political Legal Thought.” She also took him as a guest to lunch with her students at the law school cafeteria. The university authorities reacted by ramping up their lawfare against her and making it ever more plain that they were determined to fire her, tenure or no tenure.
In defiance of that, Prof. Wax last November invited Jared Taylor again to address her class. Here’s a quote from Jared’s account of the event.
The class itself—a one-hour-and-45-minute seminar—went smoothly. I explained race realism and white advocacy to an intelligent and sometimes critical group of students who, so far as I could tell, showed no signs of feeling “debased” or “unsafe.”
By the time the class was over, 70 or 80 people had gathered in the hall. They jeered and hooted as each student left the room. This was disgusting. Demonstrators were welcome to bellow at me or at Prof. Wax, but it is contemptible for students to try to humiliate fellow students for going to class.
Prof. Wax and I were the last to leave and were rewarded with a spirited chorus of banality: “One, two, three, four, Amy Wax, there’s the door. Fix, six, seven, eight, Penn Law tolerates hate.”
Most people would have scurried down the corridor away from the crowed. Not Amy Wax. I wish I had a video of what happened next. She took out her cellphone camera, and walked right up to screaming protestor after screaming protester, taking pictures of their faces and the signs they were holding. She walked from one end of the group to the other and back again, no more than a foot or two away from people howling for her head. I smiled and waved at the crowd until Prof. Wax returned to my side and we walked back to her office.
Amy Wax: The Most Fearless Academic in America, American Renaissance, November 29, 2023
So: not only brilliant, but brave—fearless!
You may have gathered by this point that I regard Amy Wax with an attitude not far removed from hero worship. In fact I would say not removed at all: I regard Prof. Wax as a hero for our time … although I guess that should be “heroine.” She is a true dissident, valiant for truth, in the mold of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Liu Xiaobo.
That’s what got me listening to her interview at Richard Hanania’s podcast, the podcast I started off this article by mentioning.
The whole podcast is an hour and twenty minutes, so if you’re not as devout an Amy Wax groupie as I am you won’t want to listen all the way through. Here’s just a two-minute snippet I particularly liked. It starts at one hour, five minutes, fifty-eight seconds in.
[Clip.] The one thing I will say though, is that in dealing with the Penn administration for the last couple of years with these charges against me, I cannot tell you what a clown car—and here I’m borrowing your expression—what a clown car Penn is, all right? It is run by a bunch of midwit gynocrats. These people are as intellectually mediocre and undistinguished as you could possibly imagine. All right? I mean, the notion that they care about consistency or coherence or, you know, objectivity, principles, that’s a joke. They don’t care. It’s all about spin. It’s all about PR.
Let me tell you a short anecdote that just sums it up. Okay?
When my lawyer, David, was dealing with the general counsel’s office trying to get a settlement in my case, which wasn’t going to happen because I wasn’t going to accept any penalty of any kind, David said: “You know, we will take you to court and we will challenge any penalty and then we’ll have the subpoena power and we’ll be able to show that the dean lied about this and that you’ve been inconsistent about that and all that dirty laundry will come out.”
And the general counsel, the guy in the office said: “You don’t understand, we don’t care about any of that stuff. We don’t. We could be shown to be hypocrites, liars, you know, fools. We will get past it. All we care about is the students apply and the money rolls in.”
And when they say the money rolls in, they mean federal money. That’s where they get most of their money. He said, and as long as those two things happen, we’re good. And that is the attitude of the Ivies. And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense.
Amy Wax Versus the “Midwit Gynocrats”, RichardHanania.com, December 28, 203
“Midwit gynocrats”—I love that! And of course, a great deal of what’s wrong with higher education in our country, and with the Ivies in particular—some of it illustrated by the Claudine Gay fiasco at Harvard—a great deal of it is encapsulated in that two-minute clip of Amy Wax speaking. “Midwit gynocrats”: that’s who’s in charge.
Can these institutions be saved? I doubt it. If I were to attain total power in these United States, I would issue a notice to all personnel at Ivy League universities to evacuate their premises within 48 hours. That done, I would send in the U.S. Air Force to bomb those premises to rubble. That done, I would call in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to plough the rubble under and sow the ground with salt.
A completely fresh start, that’s what’s needed …
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
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noun: judeo-latry ; portmanteau of judeo and idolatry
What a judeo-latrous definiton of hero.
If you want to write about an academic hero that talks the talk and walks the walk, write about Steve Salaita.
Steve Salaita was fired in 2014 and was driving a bus to pay the bills in 2019, assuming he started work as a professor in 2020, that means he spent six years as an academic pariah. His six years ended only after getting a job in a third world country. For all intents and purposes he remains a pariah in the Jew dominated Anglosphere.
Steve Salaita demonstrates honesty, resilience while exposing the hypocrisy and Jewish domination of American institutions.
I encourage everyone to read this https://stevesalaita.com/an-honest-living/ the writing is very similar to Lin Dinh and Charles Bukowski
I strongly admire Amy Wax for strongly supporting American Renaissance man Jared Taylor’s right to free speech on her college campus. I dislike her views on immigration, but I also admire her for being open to race realism and for being against Woke racial fetishism.
A completely fresh start, that’s what’s needed …
Agreed. That’s why I am a Separatist.
amy wax is a great woman, love her
Philosophy? Medicine? Law? Pffft. That might impress people at VDare, but here at Unz we know (that is, iSteve and the iStevettes know) that only physics matters.
Video Link
Destroy Ivy League universities ? You want to cut off the top of the ladder. You need to start with pre-school and work your way up from there. The whole system is rotten.
This fawning over a Jewess law professor by Derb, Jared Taylor, VDare, et al., because she’s said white racialist stuff is embarrassing. And no doubt a lot of the motivation in supporting her is because she’s a Jewess. The JQ is conspicuously absent in all of their writing and so is her being a Jewess the reason for their lionization (and the reason she hasn’t been summarily dismissed from academia and unpersoned).
Btw, here’s Amy Wax from Wikipedia:
I like Asians and think we need more of them here, especially the beautiful NE Asian variety like Mrs. Derb. It’s the limey bastards they bring with them that’s the problem.
It’s not just the Ivies, U of Michigan spends $30 million and has 241 staffers on its DIE staff. I’m sure just about every high-end college or university is the same. Maybe the small, Christian schools don’t. Maybe that’s the future? Or maybe it just keeps getting worse?
Amy is 100% right..most Asian vote Democrat, despite the fact that Democrats hate them and discriminate against them…
And over 40% of Whites, sometimes over 50%, also vote democrat even though the democrats hate us. I’ve had White folks explain to me how the democrats are for the “working people”. Likes it’s 1932. We’re voting ourselves into extinction.
Conservative and Political Legal Thought doesn’t sound like a law school class-it sounds like something taught in the political science department. Professor Wax also teaches a course in Remedies.
If Professor Wax is as brilliant as John claims, she should be teaching the most difficult courses in law school, which are usually statutory courses. Examples are bankruptcy (the Bankruptcy Code has a reputation of being the most difficult statute to interpret), Uniform Commercial Code, estate and trust taxation and advanced income tax (especially anything involving international taxation, such as calculating the foreign tax credit or intrepreting tax treaties). If Professor Wax taught some of these courses, she might find her tenure quite secure, as probably only 10% of the faculty at Penn’s law school even understand these subjects, let alone are capable of explaining them.
My understanding is that Prof Wax is forbidden from teaching any required courses because the poor students couldn’t handle any opinions that made them uncomfortable. I think she has some kind of court case against Penn because of this. Penn Law is currently ranked as the 4th best law school in the US.
Amy Wax is a brave woman, but it seems people like Derby are wetting their pants over her because, for some reason, Jewish voices carry more weight than none Jewish ones.
It’s like Paul Johnson making the extravagant claim that Thomas Sowell is the greatest intellectual in the world. Would he have said it if Sowell weren’t black?
Wax deserves much credit for independent-thinking, but what a sad state of affairs that certain views carry more weight simply because of the ethnicity of someone who said them.
It’s like celebrity politics. Unless a celebrity says it, it carries no weight.
So many whites feel, ‘unless a Jew or black says it, it lacks significance’.
She writes with common sense and respect for national identity. Let’s face it: You don’t like Amy because she’s Jewish. Look, in politics, you don’t get to pick your friends. Your friends get to pick you.
Even Norman Finkelstein (a surprise) and N. Chomsky (not a surprise)
refused to support Dr S. Salaita.
Here is a view from inside an Ivy League institution, from a rather hard-core theoretical physics field. The reality is that even core physics, engineering and mathematics departments are now captured by these “midwit gynocrats”. It is is essentially impossible to go without a single day and not hear from these about some DIE initiative or other.
Every proposal one submits to the Federal agencies now requires a statement on “inclusive and equitable” research. So imagine I am trying to understand some hairy physics problem, say in high-energy physics. Even the equations can’t be understood by 1 in 100,000 people. Well, it does not matter. I need to write a 3 page document on how I will ensure this research is done in an inclusive and equitable way. Now, this statement needs to be reviewed by some DIE Commissar who is likely a black woman. She will have much to say, wasting hours of my time in figuring out how I can involve some “minorities” in my research. Never mind that these mathematical fields require very specialized skills and have very few women, leave alone black or Hispanics in them.
But it does not end here! The midwit gynocrat will evaluate my annual appraisal to ensure I have a statement on diversity and how I plan to contribute to it over the next year. Of course, one midwit is not enough for a large department, so we need to hire many more to keep up with all the DIE crap constantly churned in the bowels of the said midwits. This is a exponential process: more midwits, more DIE crap and even more midwits need to be hired. At one point the whole university will become a giant DIE jobs programs and all actual scholarship will be considered a completely irrelevant thing. We are almost there: consider Claudine Gay. No need to say more.
The reality is that, as you concluded here, these institutions can’t be saved. The rot has spread everywhere, from top to bottom. The higher you go, the more mediocre, bland and boring the administrators get. They all sound the same: diversity drones that could be replaced by ChatGPT without much loss (and a lot to gain!). Sadly, there is very little that can be done. No one has the courage to take these institutions apart. They are now a part of US Empire and as long as that exists, these institutions will also exist, providing a steady stream of useful idiots for the warmongers in Washington.
Japan’s press freedom has plummeted in the last 13 years and now they’re trying to intimidate anyone who doesn’t have to comply with the kisha club’s requirements.
As toothless as this is, I find it worrying that media with larger reach are completely silent on the matter. Well, not that it will affect them.
It’s almost amusing though to see how self-centered these japanese nationalists are. It reminds of the incident at a UN’s human rights committee when a Japanese official claimed Japan is one of the most advanced countries in terms of human rights and told delegates to “shut up” when they started laughing.
Your point is a good one, but the type of courses that I mentioned are almost never required;
Basic enemy statement is “All is one, One is all.”
After that, you get the equality, equity, solvency, mindlessness, and omnicide.
More basic problem: certain races prefer certain theories, AKA worship certain gods.
We’re fighting people whose gods are themselves. It’s a superform of solipsism. They won’t stop until they physically feel death coming.
Well Derb, if I had the resources, I’d join in on the rejuvenation of not just academia, but every institution in America. I wouldn’t bomb all buildings, some are beautiful pieces of architecture, target mindless and useless boxes filled with DIE/WOKE hate, all of them, until everything they represent is annihilated and sent into the ash heaps of history.
Happy New Year.
“Amy is 100% right.”
“As long as most european ashkenazim support Democrats (at 85% vs East asian 66%) and help to advance their positions,
I think the United States is better off with fewer european ashkenazi and less euro ashkenazi immigration.”
She claimed that european ashkenazi are ungrateful for the advantages of living in the US
and vote disproportionately for the “pernicious” Democratic Party, which she called “mystifying” because the Democratic Party “demands equal outcomes despite clear . . . group differences” and “valorizes blacks.”
Wax is also 100% hypocritical in that a higher % of her ethnic group vote Democrat (85%) than East Asians do (at 66%)
though 2 faced hypocritical right wing zionists like her & most cuckservatives ignore that double standard while they single out the foreign looking slantly eyed yellow pipo.
And btw what do you think her position is on the 100 years of open borders mass migration of forreigners from Europe & America into british colonized Palestine against the will of the native Palestinian people
that slowly demographically transformed their homeland aka the “Great Replacement of semitic Palestine aka what Chaim Weissman called “the Greater Palestine Project”?
Bc it seems like SAME type of great replacement migration that demographically transformed Palestine (supported by 99% of cuckservatives ) is happening to America(hypocritically opposed by those same cuckservatives lol)
Thank goodness more & more people around the world & POC in western nations are getting sick of white & anglo zionist double standards
Another commenter was 100% right about left wing neoliberal & right wing neocon cuckservatives:
“So many whites feel, ‘unless a Jew or black says it, it lacks significance’.”
Yes, as another blogger jibed: Too many Whites still think the Democratic Party is like it was in the 1930s, when that nice Mr. Roosevelt is going to keep the bankers from taking away the family farm.
OT. I’ll just leave this here. How (normie media) presents things. This is the lead story on CNN.
https://vdare.com/radio-derb/amy-wax-boomer-tech-100-years-since-lenin-and-thwarting-deportation-etc
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/2024-01-12.html
Dear Minion,
Is this the one where he discusses Gaza?
I mean, it’s not Amy Wax’s problem she’s the only one with the chutzpah to say something. Sounds like Salaita was ahead of his time; maybe he should talk to Harvard.