Fascism and Bad Faith

Bad Faith And The Creation Of American Thought Crime

Higher education officials fell for the right's bad-faith bullshit. Now students are paying the price.

There was this Shit Head with whom I attended the University of Maryland’s journalism school in the early 2000s. I’ve been thinking of Shit Head a lot lately.

Shit Head wore one of a few t-shirts to class every day: A red Rush Limbaugh shirt, a white shirt with a huge American flag emblazoned across the chest, and another shirt – I forget the color – featuring the Republican Party elephant.

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Even at twenty years old I understood how inappropriate it was for a journalism student – a person learning how to do journalism, how to hold power to account – to function as a billboard for one of the country’s two major political parties. It was uncouth, at best. And it was designed to trigger the rest of us into turning Shit Head into a victim. It’s what he wanted.

Almost every day Shit Head would raise his hand and say something purposefully inflammatory, comments that would all but end a real journalism discussion among young folks eager to learn how to report and write (I was on the J-school’s print side, people who washed their hair and shaved and plucked their eyebrows and wore nice clothes to school every day were on the broadcast side). In the post-9/11 era, people still learned to “create content” for reasons beyond becoming famous and earning a living one Instagram ad at a time.

During a discussion about whether American journalists in Iraq had a duty to remain neutral even if they were embedded with U.S. troops invading the country for whatever reason, I recall Shit Head saying something to the effect of: American reporters and soldiers are on the same team, we can’t pretend otherwise. We have a rooting interest in this fight and it lies with the American troops. We can’t and shouldn’t side with the terrorists.

The rest of us got really fucking mad about that incendiary bullshit – that it was the function of the American press to propagandize its citizens with an imperialist agenda – and said some less-than-polite things to Shit Head. We called his statement shameful and anti-democratic and a betrayal of journalism’s most basic principles. We were right, of course, but being right didn’t matter to our professor. She urged us to calm down and to engage in discourse with Shit Head about how American media outlets should cover the country’s trauma-induced descent into imperial madness.

Shit Head’s explicitly fascistic viewpoint was just as valid as any other, we were told. This was simply a difference of opinion, our professor said. And all opinions are the same. Shit Head smiled through all of this. He had successfully turned himself into the tread-upon victim of the left-wing mob that ran rampant on the Maryland campus, young folks with Bush Derangement Syndrome, an affliction that beset critics of the worst president in U.S. history. It was not only Shit Head’s right to make these ridiculous pronouncements about the role of journalism in western democracies, it was his right to for these statements to be on equal footing with legitimate viewpoints in keeping with the tradition of journalists who had used their crafts to expose injustice, hold power accountable, and make the US a freer and fairer place for all.

Alongside these principled stances, Shit Head inserted the following: Journalists are to Support The Troops no matter what. This only happened because Shit Head got institutional backing. It was a hard lesson in how bad faith opens an avenue for toxic ideas to enter mainstream discourse. We were told good and bad things are exactly the same.

'This looks like a project to control education'

Twenty years after Shit Head successfully legitimized an utterly illegitimate viewpoint about journalism in the United States, officials in Republican-held states are using robots to control college curriculum, ensuring young people in red states do not learn about histories of oppression and injustice that might lead them to oppose right-wing ideology, and specifically the Republican Party.

There is a vast anti-intellectual censorship regime running roughshod over every campus in the US and it's the eighth biggest story on any given day.

Higher education's widespread acceptance of so-called conservative viewpoints – rife with hatred and discriminatory impulses – couldn’t have happened without college and university officials falling for the right’s coordinated, bad-faith campaign to position conservatives as the helpless victims of a massive far-left censorship campaign no different than what one might find in a totalitarian regime.

The right’s campaign against vaguely liberal professors and campus officials starts and ends with the entirely bad faith position that all conservatives ever wanted in higher education was an equal playing field, a place where all viewpoints could be considered by students and faculty. This was never what the American right wanted. Led by masters of bad-faith politics like Chris Rufo – who freely admits to operating in bad faith to manipulate centrists and liberals – conservatives appealed to liberals’ debilitating sense of fairness for decades in order to collapse existing higher-ed power structures and replace it with a disciplined right-wing censorship machine designed to capture the hearts and minds of young people who would otherwise be raised to oppose the radicalized, anti-democracy Republican Party.

The right always wanted control of American higher education, and for now, they have it in the form of state lawmakers eager to bend institutions of learning to their will and a Trump regime that has extorted universities that have so much as raised a skeptical eyebrow at the idea that colleges should become far-right propaganda mills.

Right-wing weirdos think we have no choice but to create a master race of robots to rule us forever. I wish this were an exaggeration.

First, however, they had to pretend as if they only wanted their voices heard on campus. Maybe this started slowly, with questions about whether the ultra-rich should be taxed less or whether workers in certain sectors of the economy can be required to join a labor union. That quickly accelerates – it always does – into questions about the legality of abortion and the rights of same-sex couples and whether the civil rights movement was a mistake.

It keeps accelerating until the heinous solutions to these so-called problems are forced into mainstream discussions: The jailing of people seeking abortion care, the obliteration of the basic rights of LGBTQ folks, and questions – always questions – about whether slavery was good or bad. These vile concepts have no place in the political mainstream of a functional democracy. I guess that’s why we are infected by them.

The Texas Tribune reported this week that the federal government is dictating what American college students can and cannot learn – a stunning part of our descent into competitive authoritarianism. Colleges and universities in the unfree state of Texas are using artificial intelligence to audit courses that might run afoul of the state’s rules around “gender identity” lessons that drew fascist outrage back in September.

AI tools are being used to crawl through every last lesson plan to make sure Texas students do not learn the truth about gender as a social construct, a concept that would undermine and totally delegitimize the right’s entire worldview.

At Texas A&M, internal emails show staff are using AI software to search, syllabi and course descriptions for words that could raise concerns under new system policies restricting how faculty teach about race and gender. At Texas State, memos show administrators are suggesting faculty use an AI writing assistant to revise course descriptions. They urged professors to drop words such as “challenging,” “dismantling” and “decolonizing” and to rename courses with titles like “Combating Racism in Healthcare” to something university officials consider more neutral like “Race and Public Health in America.”

It gets worse. AI, as you may know, can be easily manipulated because the machine wants to please its human master. Imagine a true believer campus official using an AI program to not only ban certain words, but redefine entire concepts, maybe to make white people look like the victims of "discriminatory" pro-diversity measures, a common thread in the right's rush to install their unreality as our reality. The robot would eventually understand this was the end goal of its master's prompts and it would help make it so.

“Very often, a thing that happens when people use this technology is if you chide or correct the machine, it will say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry’ or like ‘you’re right,’ so you can often goad these systems into getting the answer you desire,” Chris Gilliard, co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute, told the Texas Tribune. “I’m not convinced this is about serving students or cleaning up syllabi. This looks like a project to control education and remove it from professors and put it into the hands of administrators and legislatures.”

At Texas State University, "administrators flagged 280 courses for review and told faculty to revise titles, descriptions, and learning outcomes to remove wording the university said was not neutral," the Tribune reports. Dozens of courses were singled out for "neutrality concerns," including Intro to Diversity, Social Inequality, Freedom in America, Southwest in Film, and Chinese-English Translation.

Neutrality, I think, is an interesting term for describing educational material. A neutral course curriculum, I suppose, would strike a healthy balance between reality – what has happened, what is happening – and unreality as dictated by fascist media in our age of fragmentation. "Neutrality" brings me back to my journalism classrooms of the early 2000s, where a real shithead managed to put his perverse idea of journalism alongside the real ideals of journalism as an equal viewpoint deserving of respect and even praise. For a university to demand "neutrality" in learning is to cede control to right-wing forces instead of telling them they are wrong and they should feel bad about being wrong.

Institutions of higher learning are bending to the will of a wannabe tyrant unwilling to do the (terrible) things tyrants do to enforce their edicts. The Trump regime in its first weeks back in power introduced long lists of forbidden words and concepts that could no longer be taught or even uttered in college classrooms (a Bad Faith Times contributor wrote back in February about the dystopian horror show of having these thought-crime terms sent to every inbox on campus).

Violations of the fascist command would be considered thought crime, a concept Republicans have wailed about for generations (in bad faith). No one ever actually accused them of thought crime; their only goal was to take charge of higher education to create thought crime and use it against educators and students to silence dissent and install their worldview as the only legitimate worldview.

All their crying about censorship was in fact an admission: They always wanted to censor their cultural and political enemies, to place strict limitations on what their enemies could teach to young Americans with impressionable minds. This impulse for censorship is the beating heart of mainline conservatism, and always has been. They were never interested in debate or an expansion of political theories considered by students and educators. This was always the lie, and anyone who paid attention to the cesspool of the almighty far-right media machine over the past twenty-five years could have told you as much.

The American right does not crave fairness or an equal playing field; it craves domination, it craves subjugation, it craves the humiliation of its myriad enemies, both real and perceived. This explains why Elon Musk would seize Twitter – a major advantage for pro-democracy forces – and transform it into a fascist propaganda machine poisoning minds every hour of every day with the normalization of white supremacy and, naturally, fascism. For the right to have its way, it must first substitute reality for an unreality that makes the embrace of fascist ideology not just viable, but imperative.

What better way to do this than to stop young people from learning about reality?

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.