4. Mike Flynn addressed the Young America’s Foundation at the Trump Hotel in DC on Saturday November 12, 2016. The young woman who introduced him said to start, “As a young person I kind of want to pause & reflect just for a quick moment on what sitting here tonight, after this week, in this building, means to our students.”
5. Then Mike Flynn says, “This was not an election. This was a revolution. This was a revolution. And I have uh been doing this a bit for him.”
6. At 13:53 in the video he says: “We have an army.”
7. “We have an army of digital soldiers,” Flynn said. “This was an insurgency, folks. This was run like an insurgency. This was irregular warfare at its finest. In politics. And that story will continue to be told here.”
8. He tells “the young ones here” that the previous night he’d been hanging out with Dinesh D’Souza “and Milo…Myopolis. I tag him on Twitter,” & then decries some of the same things Sam does in his editorial, re the marginalization of ‘conservative’ voices on college campuses, & applauds Milo’s courage in confronting this “shutting out of ideological diversity.”
9. The first time the word ‘diversity’ appeared in the Sarah Lawrence administrative structure was in the title of a committee that started in 2005 in the Office of Student Affairs, before I chaired our first official Diversity Committee in 2010
10. —the same Office of Student Affairs that sponsored the Our Liberation Summit that made Sam Abrams feel like an oppressed minority.
11. “I was taken aback,” Sam wrote in his editorial in the New York Times, “by the college’s sponsorship of such a politically lopsided event.”
12. —which included workshops on “Black Lives Matter and justice for women as well as for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and allied people,” called things like “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” “Microaggressions” and “Understanding White Privilege.”
13. According to Sam, this reflects a nationwide “warped ideological distribution.”
14. I teach a non-fiction writing class called To Tell the Truth, during which yesterday some of the students were discussing Sam’s editorial. “What does he want?” one student asked. “Workshops called “Stay Sick, Stay Asleep”? “How To Defend White Supremacy”?
15. Someone else earlier in the day had noted that the Times editorial bio says Sam is “a professor of politics,” but not that he’s also affiliated with American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Foundation, & the Heterodox Academy.
16. As it happens, I gave a talk in DC last June at the annual gathering of the American Association of University Professors, and attended a workshop given by faculty affiliated with the Heterodox Academy.
17. —headed by Jonathan Haidt, who semi-instantly retweeted Sam’s editorial yesterday.
18. Here are 2 paragraphs from Tamsin Shaw’s March 21 story in the New York Review of Books, “The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops”: