On YouTube, a British influencer named Tom Torero was once the master of “daygame”—a form of pick-up artistry in which men approach women on the street. “You’ll need to desensitise yourself to randomly chatting up hot girls sober during the day,” Torero wrote in his 2018 pamphlet, Beginner’s Guide to Daygame. “This takes a few months of going out 3-5 times a week and talking to 10 girls during each session.”

Torero promised that his London Daygame Model—its five stages were open, stack, vibe, invest, and close—could turn any nervous man into a prolific seducer. This made him a hero to thousands of young men, some of whom I interviewed when making my recent BBC podcast series, The New Gurus. One fan described him to me as  “a free spirit who tried to help people,” and “a shy, anxious guy who reinvented himself as an adventurer.” To outsiders, though, daygame can seem unpleasantly clinical, with its references to “high-value girls,” and even coercive: It includes strategies for overcoming “LMR,” which stands for “last-minute resistance.” In November 2021, Newsweek revealed that Torero was secretly recording his dates—including the sex—and sharing the audio with paying subscribers to his website. Torero took down his YouTube channel, although he had already stopped posting regularly.

[Read: To learn about the far right, start with the ‘manosphere]’

This was the narrative I had expected to unravel—how a quiet, nerdy schoolteacher from Wales had built a devoted following rooted in the backlash to feminism. Instead, I found a more surprising story: Tom Torero was what I’ve taken to calling an “extremophile,” after the organisms that carve out an ecological niche in deserts, deep-ocean trenches, or highly acidic lakes. He was attracted to extremes. Even while working in an elementary school, he was doing bungee jumps in Switzerland.

As churchgoing declines in the United States and Britain, people are turning instead to internet gurus, and some personality types are particularly suited to thriving in this attention economy. Look at the online preachers of seduction, productivity, wellness, cryptocurrency, and the rest, and you will find extremophiles everywhere, filling online spaces with a cacophony of certainty. Added to this, the algorithms governing social media reward strong views, provocative claims, and divisive rhetoric. The internet is built to enable extremophiles.

In his daygame videos and self-published books, Tom recounted a familiar manosphere backstory of being bullied by his male peers and friend-zoned by girls. But that wasn’t the whole picture. While doing my research, I received a message from Tom’s ex-wife. (In the podcast, we called her Elizabeth, a pseudonym, because she feared reprisals from his fans.) Elizabeth said she had been at university with Tom Ralis—his birth name—at the turn of the century. They’d met in the choir. He was “quite tall, and quite gawky … he had a kind of lopsided grin and he was sort of cheery and chirpy and wanted to make people laugh,” she told me. Elizabeth was a music student, and she was—unusual for Britain—a follower of the Greek Orthodox faith. How funny, Tom had said. He was interested in that religion too. But he didn’t expect to become her boyfriend. He was happy just to be friends.

[Read: To learn about the far right, start with the ‘manosphere’]

When Elizabeth’s father had a car accident, though, Tom started love bombing her. He turned up at her room in college with tea bags and biscuits, and told her that he did in fact want to date her. This proposal came with an implicit threat: “If I wouldn’t be with him, he would disappear,” she told me. “And the way that he talked about it … there was a kind of threat of suicide, that he would kill himself if I wouldn’t be with him.”

Confused, worried, and under pressure, Elizabeth said she “let him take over.” She began to date Tom, and they got married while still at university. Then, she recounted, they moved to a Greek island, where Elizabeth taught English, and Tom, who had started dressing all in black, went on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos—an Orthodox monastery that bans women and even female animals to maintain its purity. When he returned, Elizabeth said, Tom announced that he wanted to become a monk.

I was surprised by this revelation: The man who became famous for teaching seduction had considered a vow of celibacy? But to Elizabeth, the announcement made perfect sense. When she first met Tom, he was a biology student who “hero-worshipped” the geneticist and atheist Richard Dawkins, she said, before he became “disillusioned with science and rationalism.” The common thread between all of these different Toms—Ralis and Torero; ardent atheist, wannabe monk, and YouTube pick-up artist—was a psychological need, a desire to be respected, to be listened to, to be a preacher. It was the role he wanted. The subject matter that he preached about came second.

[Read: Am I being love bombed? Are you?]

Not every internet guru follows this pattern. Some influencers have developed a genuine interest in a single topic and decided to make it into a career. But many other corners of the internet are full of serial enthusiasts who have pinballed from one ideology to another, believing in each one deeply as they go. These flexible evangelists are perfectly suited to becoming online gurus. They believe, and they need to preach—and because of the lack of gatekeeping on social media, the most talented talkers can easily find an audience online.

Andrew Tate is another extremophile. The misogynist influencer, a former kickboxer and reality-show contestant, used to describe himself as an atheist, but he announced last year that he had converted to Islam because—as one interviewer, the British rapper Zuby, summarized Tate’s view—“Christianity is kinda cucked.” Once Tate decided that God exists—which he had deduced because evil exists, and therefore so must its opposite—it was important to him to find the religion he deemed the most hard-core. (After all, a man who keeps swords in his house could not have become a mild-mannered Episcopalian.) On the other side of the gender divide, Mikhaila Peterson, a second-generation influencer who became known for advocating a “lion diet” as a cure for immune conditions, revealed in 2021 that she had found God through taking psychedelics. She now talks about religion healing her soul with the same intensity that she speaks about her all-meat diet healing her body.

Shortly after Tom Ralis returned from Mount Athos, Elizabeth escaped the Greek island, and their marriage. When they divorced in 2006, YouTube was in its infancy. Throughout the 2010s, she would search for him online occasionally, and she watched him develop his daygame model. It was like the love-bombing technique he had used on her but condensed from several months into a single date. In December 2021, she discovered from a text message sent by a mutual friend that Tom had taken his own life. He had often spoken of his experience with depression, but his death still shocked her. In April last year, several of his online friends organized a tribute in London, and talked about Torero’s effect on their life. He had successfully become the secular online version of a preacher—a YouTube guru.

Tom Torero wanted to be an authority figure, and he found the cultural script that best fulfilled his needs. On my journey through the gurusphere, I encountered many stories like his. Take Maajid Nawaz, whom The New York Times anointed a member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” in 2018. Before becoming famous as a heterodox public intellectual, Nawaz had been jailed in Egypt for four years in the early 2000s for being a member of the Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. After renouncing that ideology, he became an antiextremism adviser to then-Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, and at the same time stood as a candidate for Britain’s centrist party, the Liberal Democrats. Having failed to succeed in politics, Nawaz became a talk-radio host and became radicalized again, this time into COVID denialism. He left the broadcaster LBC in January 2022 after claiming that mandatory vaccination was “a global palace coup” by “fascists who seek the New World Order.”

[Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Extremism has spread into the mainstream]

Nawaz is, I would argue, another extremophile. This 2015 description of him by The Guardian could just as easily apply to Tom Torero: “Nawaz’s powers of verbal persuasion are something even his detractors concede. There’s a strong line to take in every answer. But equally, there’s very little sense of being open to persuasion himself.” Unlike most of us, with our needling doubts and fumbling hesitation, extremophiles are fervent in whatever their current belief is. And they want to tell other people about it.

For this reason, extremophiles have always made particularly good op-ed columnists—and now podcasters and YouTubers. The Hitchens brothers are a traditional example: Christopher was a Trotskyist as a young man, yet he became a supporter of the ultimate establishment project, the Iraq War. Peter moved from socialism to social conservatism, and has used his Mail on Sunday column to oppose strict COVID policies. Their analogue in the social-media age is James Lindsay. He believes that America is under threat from a Marxist-pedophile alliance, and he frequently collaborates with the Christian Nationalist Michael O’Fallon. But Lindsay first entered public life in the 2010s, writing books in support of New Atheism. At that time, he saw himself on the left. Although his middle name is Stephen, he told me that he wrote his atheist books as “James A. Lindsay” to deflect any backlash from the conservative community where he lived. As far as he is concerned, he has always been a rebel against the prevailing political climate.

Not everyone with an internet following is an extremophile. Someone like Russell Brand, a left-wing British comedian and actor now dabbling in anti-vax rhetoric and conspiracy theories about shadowy elites “concretizing global power,” strikes me as having a different psychological makeup. He is merely a heat-seeking missile for attention. His mirror image on the right is Dave Rubin, a gay man who has built a fan base among social conservatives opposed to homosexuality, as well as a Trumpist who—sensing the wind changing—recently boasted about attending the inauguration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Extremophiles are more like the sociologist Eric Hoffer’s “true believers,” the people who fuel mass movements. “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not,” Hoffer wrote in 1951. Hoffer’s formulation reminded me of a friend telling me about a mutual acquaintance who had been in two cults. I felt like Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell: To be in one cult may be regarded as a misfortune; to join two looks like carelessness. Or think about the Mitford sisters, the quintessential English aristocrats of the early 20th century. As children, Unity was a fascist, and Decca was a communist. Their childhood sitting room was divided down the middle; one side had copies of Der Stürmer and Mein Kampf; the other had hammers and sickles. The only point of political agreement between the two girls was that the mere conservatives and liberals who visited the house were boring.

My journey reporting on the gurusphere has led me to confront my own extremophile tendencies. After being raised Catholic, I became interested in New Atheism in the 2000s, because it was a countercultural phenomenon. Like pretty much everyone else, I would argue that my political beliefs are all carefully derived from first principles. But the ones that I choose to write about publicly are clearly influenced by my own self-image as an outsider and a contrarian. Being self-aware about that helps me remember that my fear of normiedom has to be kept in check, because the conventional wisdom is often right.

Researchers of extremism are now studying its psychological causes as keenly as they are its political ones. “Psychological distress—defined as a sense of meaninglessness that stems from anxious uncertainty—stimulates adherence to extreme ideologies,” wrote the authors of a 2019 paper on the topic. Many people become radicalized through “a quest for significance—the need to feel important and respected by supporting a meaningful cause.” The COVID pandemic was so radicalizing because one single highly conspicuous issue presented itself at exactly the same time that many people were bored, lonely, and anxious. Cults usually try to isolate their followers from their social-support networks; during the pandemic, people did that all by themselves.

The extremophile model helps us make sense of political journeys that are otherwise baffling to us, like the monastery-to-pick-up-artist pipeline. We might be tempted to ask: Who was the real Tom Torero—atheist bro, aspirant monk, or master seducer? The answer is: all of them. He was a true believer, just not a monogamous one.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Elections have consequences. Florida’s governor has decided to root out wrong-think at one of Florida’s public colleges, and his harebrained meddling will likely harm the school, but he has every right to do it.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Republicans’ 2024 magical thinking March 2023 cover story: We’ve lost the plot. Montana’s Black mayor

Florida’s Soviet Commissars

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.

Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”

As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.

Rufo is part of a new generation of young right-wing activists who have managed to turn trolling into a career. Good for him, I guess, but these self-imagined champions of a new freedom are every bit as dogmatic as the supposed leftist authoritarians they think they’re opposing. Their demands for ideological purity are part of an ongoing hustle meant to convince ordinary Americans that the many institutions of the United States, from the FBI in Washington down to a college in Sarasota, are somehow all scheming against them.

But Rufo is absolutely right about one thing: If Ron DeSantis wants to put him in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.

Elections have consequences. If the people of Florida, through their electoral choices, want to wreck one of their own colleges, it is within the state’s legitimate power to do so. In fact, Florida could decide tomorrow to amend its own constitution and abolish state universities entirely. There’s no national right to a college education, and if Florida wants to unleash a battalion of Guy Montags on its own state colleges and their libraries—well, that’s up to the voters.

But something more important is going on here. At this point in any discussion of college education, we are all supposed to acknowledge that colleges have, in fact, become ridiculously liberal. There’s some truth to that charge; I included some stories of campus boobery when I wrote about the role of colleges in America some years back. And only a few weeks ago, I joined the many people blasting Hamline University for going off the rails and violating basic principles of academic freedom while infantilizing and overprotecting students.

Fine, so stipulated: Many colleges do silly things and have silly professors saying silly things.

But the Sovietization of the New College isn’t about any of that. Something has changed on the American right, which is now seized with a hostility toward higher education that is driven by cultural resentment, and not by “critical race theory” or any of the other terms that most Americans don’t even understand. College among conservatives has become a kind of shorthand for identifying with all kinds of populist grievances, a ploy used even by Republicans with Ivy League educations as a means of cozying up to its non-college-educated and resentful base.

GOP attitudes about education have changed fast. As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.

It doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing to realize that those four years tracked with the rise of Donald Trump and a movement whose populist catechism includes seething anger at “the elites,” a class that no longer means “people with money and power”—after all, Republicans have gobs of both—but rather “those bookish snobs who look down on our True Real-American Values.” The Republican message, aided by the usual hypocrites in the right-wing entertainment ecosystem (such as Tucker Carlson, a prep-school product who told kids to drop out of college but asked Hunter Biden for help getting his own son into Georgetown), is that colleges are grabbing red-blooded American kids and replacing them with Woke Communist Pod People.

This is a completely bizarre line of attack: It posits that a graduate student making a pittance grading exams is more “elite” than a rich restaurant owner. But it works like a charm, in part because how Americans measure their success (and their relative status) has shifted from the simple metric of wealth to less tangible characteristics about education and lifestyle. Our national culture, for both better and worse, has arguably become more of a monoculture, even in rural areas. And many Americans, now living in a hyperconnected world, are more aware of cultural differences and the criticism of others. Those self-defined “real Americans” partake in that same overall national culture, of course, but they nonetheless engage in harsh judgment of their fellow citizens that is at least as venomous as what they imagine is being directed by “the elites” back at them.

Which brings us back to DeSantis—a graduate, he would apparently like you to forget, of Harvard and Yale. DeSantis is now a “populist,” much like Trump (Penn), Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard), Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale), and Elise Stefanik (Harvard and the Ferengi  Diplomatic Academy). He has tasked Rufo (Georgetown and Harvard) to “remake” a school meant for the sons and daughters of Florida’s taxpayers not so that he can offer more opportunity to the people of his state, but so that he can run for president as just one of the regular folks whom reporters flock to interview in diners across the mountains and plains of a great nation.

Look, I live in New England surrounded by excellent public and private institutions, and I candidly admit that I couldn’t care less what kind of damage Florida does to its own schools. If Florida parents really don’t want Ron DeSantis appointing ideological commissars to annoy deans and department chairs, then they should head to the ballot box and fix it. But in the meantime, faux populists, the opportunists and hucksters who infest the modern GOP, are going to undermine education for the people who need it the most: the youngsters who rely on public education. And that’s a tragedy that will extend far beyond whatever becomes of the careers of Ron DeSantis or Christopher Rufo.

Related:

How Ivy League elites turned against democracy The professors silenced by Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation

Today’s News

A sixth Memphis police officer has been suspended from the force during the investigation of Tyre Nichols’s death. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is starting to present evidence to a grand jury in its criminal investigation into Donald Trump. The evidence focuses on Trump’s role in paying hush money to an adult-film star during his 2016 campaign. The Ukrainian air force warned that it would not be able to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles, should Russia obtain them.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf collects reader perspectives on how to improve policing. Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn attend a party with a very specific heart- and belly-warming theme. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how coffee became capitalism’s favorite drug.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman during HBO Films Pre Golden Globes Party Inside Coverage at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California (Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic / Getty)

The Luxury Dilemma

By Xochitl Gonzalez

Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.

As a born-and-raised New Yorker without a driver’s license, I found the hotel the perfect place to park myself for a day of meetings in the era before Ubers and WeWorks and Soho Houses. I used to go there in the 2000s, back when I was a wedding planner. It was like a celebrity safari; stars would walk by, within arm’s reach. You could “do Los Angeles” without ever needing to move. I never could have afforded a room there, but I knew by reputation that at night it offered entertainment of a different sort: luxury and licentiousness and debauchery, unbounded by any rules.

In more recent years, I’ve returned to Los Angeles in a different career—as a screenwriter traveling on someone else’s dime. Naturally, I didn’t want to just take meetings at the Chateau; I wanted to stay there, to be a fly on the wall where the wild things were. Only I couldn’t.

I was told, in early 2021, that the hotel was not taking any new bookings.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård sit together in "Infinity Pool" (Neon Films)

Read. “Poem Beginning With a Sentence From My Last Will & Testament,” by Donald Platt.

“Lucy, when I die, / I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes / of Virginia Beach.”

Watch. Infinity Pool, in theaters, is a gory, existential horror film with a premise deliciously nasty enough to keep you invested—even if it can’t quite keep up with its initial hook.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I usually take this final word in the Daily to direct you toward something fun or interesting, often derived from my admittedly oddball taste in pop culture. Today, I’m going to ask for your indulgence as I offer you something that I wrote yesterday in our Ideas section.

Some years ago, I wrote about the young losers and misfits among us who suddenly explode and commit mass murder. Even before the recent shootings in California (which actually are outliers in the general pattern of attacks by younger men), I’d decided to revisit this question. I wanted to think more about why America—and, yes, other nations as well—has produced so many lost young men who turn to performative and spectacular acts of murder or terrorism. I think the growth of narcissism is one of the answers, but I discuss it all at more length in this article, which I cannot say is pleasant reading but, I hope, offers a path toward more productive discussions about how to prevent such tragedies.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

One might assume that when your boss finally comes to tell you that the robots are here to do your job, he won’t also point out with enthusiasm that they’re going to do it 10 times better than you did. Alas, this was not the case at BuzzFeed.

Yesterday, at a virtual all-hands meeting, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti had some news to discuss about the automated future of media. The brand, known for massively viral stories aggregated from social media and being the most notable progenitor of what some might call clickbait, would begin publishing content generated by artificial-intelligence programs. In other words: Robots would help make BuzzFeed posts.

“When you see this work in action it is pretty amazing,” Peretti had promised employees in a memo earlier in the day. During the meeting, which I viewed a recording of, he was careful to say that AI would not be harnessed to generate “low-quality content for the purposes of cost-saving.” (BuzzFeed cut its workforce by about 12 percent weeks before Christmas.) Instead, Peretti said, AI could be used to create “endless possibilities” for personality quizzes, a popular format that he called “a driving force on the internet.” You’ve surely come across one or two before: “Sorry, Millennials, but There’s No Way You Will Be Able to Pass This Super-Easy Quiz,” for instance, or “If You Were a Cat, What Color Would Your Fur Be?”

These quizzes and their results have historically been dreamed up by human brains and typed with human fingers. Now BuzzFeed staffers would write a prompt and a handful of questions for a user to fill out, like a form in a proctologist’s waiting room, and then the machine, reportedly constructed by OpenAI, the creator of the widely discussed chatbot ChatGPT, would spit out uniquely tailored text. Peretti wrote a bold promise about these quizzes on a presentation slide: “Integrating AI will make them 10x better & be the biggest change to the format in a decade.” The personality-quiz revolution is upon us.

[Read: ChatGPT is dumber than you think]

Peretti offered the staff some examples of these bigger, better personality quizzes: Answer 7 Simple Questions and AI Will Write a Song About Your Ideal Soulmate. Have an AI Create a Secret Society for Your BFFs in 5 Easy Questions. Create a Mythical Creature to Ride. This Quiz Will Write a RomCom About You in Less Than 30 Seconds. The rom-com, Peretti noted, would be“a great thing for an entertainment sponsor … maybe before Valentine’s Day.”  He demonstrated how the quiz could play out: The user—in this example, a hypothetical person named Jess—would fill out responses to questions like “Tell us an endearing flaw you have” (Jess’s answer: “I am never on time, ever”), and the AI would spit out a story that incorporated those details. Here’s part of the 250-word result. Like a lot of AI-generated text, it may remind you of reading someone else’s completed Mad Libs:

Cher gets out of bed and calls everyone they know to gather outside while she serenades Jess with her melodic voice singing “Let Me Love You.” When the song ends everyone claps, showering them with adoration, making this moment one for the books—or one to erase.

Things take an unexpected turn when Ron Tortellini shows up—a wealthy man who previously was betrothed to Cher. As it turns out, Ron is a broke, flailing actor trying to using [sic] Cher to further his career. With this twist, our two heroines must battle these obstacles to be together against all odds—and have a fighting chance.

There are many fair questions one might ask reading this. “Why?” is one of them. “Ron Tortellini?” is another. But the most important is this: Who is the content for? The answer is no one in particular. The quiz’s result is machine-generated writing designed to run through other machines—content that will be parsed and distributed by tech platforms. AI may yet prove to be a wonderful assistive tool for humans doing interesting creative work, but right now it’s looking like robo-media’s future will be flooding our information ecosystem with even more junk.

Peretti did not respond to a request for comment, but there’s no mistaking his interest here. Quizzes are a major traffic-driver for BuzzFeed, bringing in 1.1 billion views in 2022 alone, according to his presentation. They can be sold as sponsored content, meaning an advertiser can pay for an AI-generated quiz about its brand. And they spread on social media, where algorithmic feeds put them in front of other people, who click onto the website to take the quiz themselves, and perhaps find other quizzes to take and share. Personality quizzes are a perfect fit for AI, because while they seem to say something about the individual posting them, they actually say nothing at all: “Make an Ice Cream Cone and We’ll Reveal Which Emoji You Are” was written by a person, but might as well have been written by a program.

Much the same could be said about content from CNET, which has recently started to publish articles written at least in part by an AI program, no doubt to earn easy placement in search engines. (Why else write the headline “What Are NSF Fees and Why Do Banks Charge Them?” but to anticipate something a human being might punch into Google? Indeed, CNET’s AI-“assisted” article is one of the top results for such a query.) The goal, according to the site’s editor in chief, Connie Guglielmo, is “to see if the tech can help our busy staff of reporters and editors with their job to cover topics from a 360-degree perspective.” Reporting from Futurism has revealed that these articles have contained factual errors and apparent plagiarism. Guglielmo has responded to the ensuing controversy by saying, in part, that “AI engines, like humans, make mistakes.”

Such is the immediate path for robot journalism, if we can call it that: Bots will write content that is optimized to circulate through tech platforms, a new spin on an old race-to-the-bottom dynamic that has always been present in digital media. BuzzFeed and CNET aren’t innovating, really: They’re using AI to reinforce an unfortunate status quo, where stories are produced to hit quotas and serve ads against—that is, they are produced because they might be clicked. Many times, machines will even be the ones doing that clicking! The bleak future of media is human-owned websites profiting from automated banner ads placed on bot-written content, crawled by search-engine bots, and occasionally served to bot visitors.

[Read: How ChatGPT will destabilize white-collar work]

This is not the apocalypse, but it’s not wonderful, either. To state what was once obvious, journalism and entertainment alike are supposed to be for people. Viral stories—be they 6,000-word investigative features or a quiz about what state you actually belong in—work because they have mass appeal, not because they are hypertargeted to serve an individual reader. BuzzFeed was once brilliant enough to livestream video of people wrapping rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded. At the risk of over-nostalagizing a moment that was in fact engineered for a machine itself—Facebook had just started to pay publishers to use its live-video tool—this was at least content for everyone, rather than no one in particular. Bots can be valuable tools in the work of journalism. For years, the Los Angeles Times has experimented with a computer program that helps quickly disseminate information about earthquakes, for example. (Though not without error, I might add.) But new technology is not in and of itself valuable; it’s all in how you use it.

Much has been made of the potential for generative AI to upend education as we’ve known it, and destabilize white-collar work. These are real, valid concerns. But the rise of robo-journalism has introduced another: What will the internet look like when it is populated to a greater extent by soulless material devoid of any real purpose or appeal? The AI-generated romcom is a pile of nonsense; CNET’s finance content can’t be trusted. And this is just the start.

In 2021, my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote about the dead-internet theory, a conspiracy rooted in 4chan’s paranormal message board that posits that the internet is now mostly synthetic. The premise is that most of the content seen on the internet “was actually created using AI” and fueled by a shadowy group that hopes to “control our thoughts and get us to purchase stuff.” It seemed absurd then. But a little more real today.

Efforts are underway in Florida counties to comply with a law championed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis that requires the approval of books in classroom libraries leaving some teachers feeling fearful and confused.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked, “What do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries?” Dozens of readers shared their personal experiences, good and bad––so many, in fact, that I’m going to run some additional responses on Wednesday (if you haven’t yet signed up for the newsletter, do so here).

Today, we’ll start with four people who’ve led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in some capacity, and then we’ll hear from people who’ve been on the receiving end of diversity training at work. E. is a cynic about the aims of diversity work in corporate America:

I have worked in HR for Fortune 500 companies for 25 years in diversity, diversity and inclusion, and as an Equal Employment Opportunity officer. The intent of DEI training is for executives to think they are improving the organization for “minorities,” LGBTQ people, women, people with disabilities, etc. Spend a little money without any accountability or significant change. DEI training is to check a box. It is not meant to improve anything, and it doesn’t. Some trainings––the Intercultural Development Inventory, unconscious bias––make things worse. In general, DEI training exists to make executive teams and boards feel good.

M.V. is “enthusiastic about DEI work” and believes the grassroots group he leads at his workplace conducts it better than most outside consultants:

Far too often we trust external experts to bring solutions, which can neglect the critical value of truly centering employees and building culture from the bottom up. I’ve sat in corporate training sessions in which well-intended academics identify behaviors like “avoiding eye contact” as racial microaggressions. These generalities can do more harm than good; what if the person who can’t keep eye contact has social anxiety? Have we propagated that anxiety by encouraging the recipient to assume the worst implication?

The road toward reinforcing separation and the road toward building connection are, in fact, two different roads with different approaches. So how does our group approach DEI?

First, we value personal storytelling, which has been championed by the Moral Courage College founder Irshad Manji. There is a difference between hearing, say, about the importance of pronoun use from a nonbinary employee as compared to a training module. A discussion about labels with a diverse set of employees drives home the message that the “correct” term for a person can’t just be looked up but can only be gleaned through personal connection and the grace that comes with knowing the limitations of words.

Second, we adopt the teachings of Loretta Ross and Loan Tran on “calling in the calling-out culture,” which they offer in a superb online course. Though call-outs have their place, building trust and fostering mutual vulnerability are superior for having challenging conversations.

Third, we promote genuine curiosity and asking questions. The work by Mónica Guzmán of Braver Angels—including her book, I Never Thought of It That Way—teaches us to strive to understand the people we read and hear about but never meet. As she states, “Whoever is underrepresented in your life will be overrepresented in your imagination.”

Personal storytelling, calling people in, and getting genuinely curious: These three sets of tools can transform a culture and really help people be seen for who they actually are, not just the phantoms that fill the gaps in our heads, which are the root of much bias. These approaches that challenge the usual corporate DEI programming are largely championed by women of color (Manji, Ross, Guzmán, Chloé Valdary). For skeptics of DEI alternatives who also believe in centering the thinking of women of color during these times, I can suggest no stronger slate of philosophies to challenge their thinking.

Taisha has worked in the diversity industry for 15 years and believes a shift in its approach is needed: In a crisis-prone world, she writes, we need to organize people around shared goals, not shared identities. If a diverse group focuses on a goal (such as higher wages) that would benefit everyone working toward its, or a goal (such as reducing carbon emissions) that would benefit society in general, diversity goals will be achieved as a by-product of everyone cooperating.

She writes:

A common goal motivates people to handle themselves, so their personalities become less of a hindrance to the group’s purpose; to identify and develop their unique assets to benefit the group; and to recognize and mobilize their peers to do the same for the group’s good. Humans are inherently selfish and self-centered. But when we find something to believe in, we are more willing to set aside our personal likes and dislikes to work alongside others who share our goals. Then we think less of our identity differences. This sameness of purpose achieves inclusion without sacrificing differences.

The success of current unionizing efforts illustrate this new approach to DEI that I call  “Purpose not Personalities.” Unions organize a diverse group of people around a centrally compelling purpose (better treatment, higher wages, etc.) that motivates them to set aside whatever issues they might have with one another and dedicate the best of themselves, including their unique perspectives and skills, to help the group achieve success. To solve the many crises facing us, organizations can and should shift their DEI efforts to encourage less focus on personality or identity differences and more on group GOOD, trusting people to work out their differences as they lose sight of themselves.

Now on to the great majority of correspondents who have experienced DEI training sessions as participants. John agrees with the notion that an emphasis on shared goals tends to yield success:

I spent 24 years in the organization that, in my opinion, has done the best job with diversity and inclusion: the U.S. military. The real success happened at a cultural level: We all had a unifying mission. Anyone not in the military was the other, for the kinds of people that need an “other.”  And if someone did bring their prejudices and racism to work in the military, they were dealt with quite harshly. In this example, we should see a way forward. It is a shared mission and shared purpose that brings all people together. Anytime you substitute some other word for human, dehumanizing behavior occurs.

Our leaders, DEI educators, and media should all stress our shared culture and humanity. Instead, our leaders and DEI educators emphasize and exacerbate differences. We are doing the opposite of the right thing to bring about less racism and prejudice.

It’s noteworthy, I think, that the military took this approach with race far earlier than with sexual orientation, with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell formally in place until 2011, when the unifying mission (and the justness of equality under the law) was treated as mattering more than the difference in identity.

J., a high-school teacher in Canada, writes:

Diversity training is not about diversity. Diversity training is about providing excuses to institutions that don’t want to tackle poverty and the fundamental inequality of our capitalist system. Instead, they blame “institutional”' racism, an intentionally obscure term. What does it look like? How does one measure it? Who is implicated?

The conceit of these sessions during my 20 years as a teacher: You frontline workers, YOU are the reason these students fail. In my context—high schools—the only “proof” required for this conceit is the fact that some demographic groups do worse than others. We know that outcomes tell an incomplete story when variables like income, family, mental health, etc. are ignored. Diversity training is privileged people (professionals, administrators, politicians, professors, academics, many of whom make a good living as “experts” in this field) advancing a story, a theory. Yet, the literature demonstrates no meaningful successes to this decades-long progressive experiment.

We need viewpoint diversity in our institutions. Our fixation as progressives on dogma, and a narrow, Orwellian definition of what counts as diversity, is as much fuel for the culture wars as the excesses of the right. It’s just that we lefties are, ironically, too blind to our own privilege—educational privilege, class privilege, trauma privilege, etc.—to see it.

S. used to love being a professor:

I am a Bernie Sanders voter. I have spent 25 years working toward countering racism. I have lost friends and family, as I was “too woke.” I had my dream job, teaching mostly underprivileged students. I now almost loathe my job.

Faculty have been subjected to an authoritarian agenda of DEI/social justice since George Floyd was killed. His death had nothing to do with our campus or state, but it’s as if nothing matters anymore but racism, DEI, and payback for his situation. We are constantly peppered with meaningless utopian aspirations toward “equality of outcomes,” which is patently absurd, even within a family, let alone a state, school, nation, or planet. We are forced to listen to meaningless equity language and endure tortuous training and workshops, often required. They are usually run by unimpressive people whose qualifications seem dubious, usually taking the chance to scold the white faculty who have earned master’s and Ph.D.s and are established and renowned teachers who committed their lives to average-to-low pay for the sake of equity and justice.

Nobody dares offer any dissent. I have spoken to high-level administrators, people white and nonwhite, and they will not say anything. Nobody dares counter the social-justice/equity people. All are fearful of cancellation or firing. All have families and bills to pay and err on the side of lethargic caution. Everybody knows none of this is helping students.

I will never vote conservative on any policy, for what it’s worth. I will, however, wonder if I am in the most Orwellian career imaginable. My irritation is endless and my despondency palpable. My friends are tired of hearing about it. I’m a tenured, published, respected professor in California. on the verge of depression for the first time in my life.

Sherri, a gay woman who worked from 1988 to 2017, shared her thoughts on diversity training:

I’m a Ph.D. chemist, meaning I spent my career in a very male-dominated industry at a time when senior-level women were very rare, much less senior-level out LGBTQ people. I was closeted for the first 10 years of my career and then very out. In the ’90s, while I was still fairly junior and still closeted, my company, like many in the chemicals industry, started a Leadership Training protocol that in part focused on diversity awareness. I am convinced it is one of the worst things the company could have done.

They took a gaggle of senior managers off-site, away from day-to-day work pressures for a week; raised their awareness ofn “diversity”––which really just focused on representation––then sent them back with no skills for truly creating change. They all then felt that they “got it” and weren’t the problem. But day to day, they went back to their ingrained behaviors. Only now they felt enlightened and didn’t even try to look in the mirror.

Later, when I was out, I became a popular speaker on the internal circuit of department meetings to discuss what it felt like to be a gay senior woman at the company. I spent a fair amount of time trying to sensitize people to the concept of privilege without calling it that. The analogy I used was a fish versus a scuba diver. Both could survive in the ocean, but the fish did so effortlessly as the environment was built around their needs and capabilities. The scuba diver needed an oxygen tank, wet suit, fins, and had to expend a fair amount of energy to just survive in the ocean, much less thrive. The scuba diver was constantly aware of his difference and how much conscious effort it took to navigate underwater, and it was exhausting. The fish didn’t even know what water was.  

We are all fish in some ways and scuba divers in others. Where you are a fish, remember what it feels like when you are a scuba diver. And reach out to the scuba divers and help them survive.

We are so bent out of shape focusing on what we consider a “defining characteristic” that we miss what is most important: seeing each person as an individual human. We generalize and make assumptions based on gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, or what have you. Maybe instead we should follow the Ted Lasso model of being “people curious.” Teach people about unintentional bias that all humans carry and use nontraditional examples like assumptions about how someone dresses or the school they went to or their accent. Then focus on the fact that bias in and of itself isn’t bad; it’s what you do with the knowledge that you carry bias. Don’t focus so much on someone’s speech or behavior as much as on what they should learn from it.

We will all make mistakes; we will all offend; in most cases it is not intentional. We all want to be seen as fully human and treated with respect. Can’t we just focus on that?

Richard is an engineer and describes how the DEI initiatives he’s been exposed to have changed:

In 2000, I moved from the U.K. to the U.S.A.

It was a job-related move, within a large company, working with semiconductors for automotive applications. About three years later, I encountered my first corporate DEI initiative. In the simplest terms, the company informed us that hiring practices were changing to increase profit. The training consisted of a few pages of reading, followed by a discussion during my manager’s weekly group meeting.

My boss provided us with a relevant example, and a nod in my direction. “Imagine a car with a subsystem design flaw that’s only exposed when driving on the left-hand side of the road.” He’d made his point: having a diverse team working on a problem would result in a more robust solution.

By 2018, I was working for a different tech company. I was also living in a much redder state, and DEI had become a divisive issue. Arriving extremely late to the game, my employer started rolling out DEI training. The introductory reading material was reluctant to mention the profit motive for maintaining a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce. DEI was presented as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

Over the course of a year, a new branch appeared on the org chart, a vice president was hired, corporate goals were set, support groups established, and mailing lists created. Personal DEI goals were defined, refined, and aligned with corporate goals. Employee-development task lists were expected to feature several DEI-related objectives. Progress would need to be demonstrated on a quarterly basis. Mostly, my DEI training consisted of online “unconscious bias” courses provided by an external company.

At first, I was enthusiastic. Engineers like knowing how things work, and I thought I might gain some insight into my biases. But I soon realized that instead of gaining an increased level of self-awareness, I was simply learning the names of a long list of biases. Meanwhile, the continuing stream of emails from the DEI branch of the organization prompted me to set up an email filter, and my enthusiasm for the initiative began to wane. I started to feel like my corporate parents were openly expressing a preference for one of my siblings. It turns out you definitely can have too much of a good thing.

During one of my unconscious-bias courses, I learned that groups who’ve enjoyed an unchallenged, privileged position are the same groups most likely to feel threatened by change. What the courses didn’t mention was that any backlash directed at the intended beneficiaries of DEI initiatives would have been misplaced. I certainly felt exasperated with my employer, though.

The company seemed unwilling to explicitly state that certain new employees provided extra, unquantifiable value. And at no point did the company decide that some of that value should be returned to each new hire in the form of a higher salary. In fact, while the DEI initiative was being rolled out, salary ranges were tightened to prevent perceived discrimination. I’ve become less tolerant of heavy-handed corporate initiatives. A corporation should be able to profit by becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive while maintaining the morale of existing employees. In my experience, hitting the optimum rate of corporate culture change is difficult.

Greg, 61, says diversity training at the large aerospace company where he works has been addressed more intelligently and effectively than he would have anticipated based on media coverage.

He writes:

The training we had was pretty good, even to a skeptical observer. I remember a compelling discussion by one diversity trainer who said that we most frequently associate diversity considerations with gender and race, but that was in part a historical accident because those groupings were particularly important in the 1960s and 1970s when thinking about diversity as a workplace concept emerged. This trainer used an alternative case of employees in today’s workplace with prominent tattoos, a group that may be viscerally disturbing to older employees based on our conditioning when we were young, but tattoos are essentially irrelevant to workplace performance.

After President Donald Trump was elected, about 2,000 of our senior-level employees were on a quarterly phone call with our CEO. One asked: Given the change in administration, were we going to change our diversity policies? Our CEO replied that we would change nothing, because our policies were not to curry political favor. Our diversity strategy was to out-compete our rival companies, because we would expand our access to talent by addressing issues that have historically undervalued certain groups of people.

K. resents the training she was subjected to while doing civic work:

I have volunteered with the City of Madison (Wisconsin) Clerk’s Office every election since the 1990s and in recent years have worked as a special voting deputy helping with voter registration, taking absentee ballots to nursing homes, and the like. The city clerk’s office motto is “We exist to assist,” and most of us there let that be our guiding light in the service of democracy. Because our city is deeply concerned about equity, “diversity training” has been required for city personnel for the past several years. These sessions seem to be aimed at people who have never considered—much less worked to ameliorate—the problem of inequity and have only served to offend and alienate me.

I am an old progressive whose first professional position was bringing support services to migrant farm workers and their families. As a female raised in the 1960s, I know ALL about discrimination; you don’t need to describe it. The condescension implicit in these “woke” puppies presenting the novel idea that some people start off at a disadvantage to others is offensive.

I love my city, deeply respect its staff, and am still fully committed to equality as a cause, but showing me diversity slide shows has not had what I am pretty certain was the desired effect. And, yeah, it’s not about me, but please. I’ve been trying all my life. All. My. Life. I’ve been trying to make a difference.

Megan believes the DEI programming she has seen in higher education doesn’t address academia’s most pressing problems:

Grad school is a toxic environment: Students on assistantships are paid poverty wages, given health care they can barely afford, are overworked by advisers who perpetuate the bad mentorship practices they experienced, and get degrees in fields flooded with people vying for jobs. This is a bad environment for even a cis white male or female with good mental health … and the focus is increasing departmental diversity and pronoun training.

How is any person supposed to thrive here?

T.M. doesn’t fit neatly into any identity box:

I’ve worked as an adjunct professor for over a decade, mostly at a prestigious northeastern university. I’m also of Assyrian descent, with a heavy mix of old-school New England. I sometimes think the reason I wound up in American studies as a discipline is because in 1991, while I was doing a genealogy project for fifth-grade social studies, the teacher told me I couldn’t be an American. Here I was, 11 years old, the United States had gone to war in Iraq, and I didn’t feel comfortable trying to explain who or what Assyrians are. Iraq didn’t exist in 1906 when my father’s family came to America.

I don’t consider myself white-passing, but it’s been obvious since I was young that my grandfather and great-grandfather were of darker complexion than I am. I’m aware that I’ve been privileged by my white complexion, but I am often met with resistance to my belief that DEI is actually reinforcing the arbitrary cultural signifier of whiteness rather than decreasing it. Today, because I don’t fit neatly into one box, I find that the administrators at the university where I teach lack the same nuance as my fifth-grade social-studies teacher. My questions as to the efficacy of trainings are met with vague, bureaucratic language.

Echoing the language of Martin Luther King Jr., we at the university are told we are now a “beloved community,” but unlike MLK, the DEI initiatives ignore economic equity or inclusion. Diversity, instead, is merely a way to fit people into categorical racial boxes. It’s no wonder some people are resentful of being categorized into something that is so ill-defined.

The academy has failed to generate conversations that truly explore the functions of race and class. It’s off-putting to get boilerplate messaging about racial diversity from people who make six-figure salaries when they are the same people who cut my health care last year. I don’t see the equity or inclusion of that decision, but yet we are now “beloved.”

How can we truly be diverse, equitable, and inclusive when over half the faculty who teach in higher education are treated as disposable? We’re denying the very cracks in our foundation the administrators claim to be fixing. DEI isn’t a solution. It’s a corporate orthodoxy that creates problems. I am distrusting of these initiatives.

Caleb scoffs at “equity” efforts that ignore income:

I was an administrative assistant at a law firm in Maine. Through six hours of mandatory DEI trainings, professional and administrative staff alike were educated on the nuanced definitions of equality and equity, complete with visual aids of children standing on different sizes of wooden boxes. Meanwhile, there was an elephant in the room that was never acknowledged: the attorneys sitting in on these Zoom trainings with us were, and are still, paid in the range of five to 20 times what the administrative staff make.

During the pandemic, while we were expected to consume gas and time commuting to the office, masked up and at risk of infection, to sort and scan mail, print checks, etc., the professional staff could work from home, expense meals, and receive compensation for work-related travel. When I asked if I could receive compensation for my 90-minute commute, I was laughed out of the office. The consensus of the administrative staff after our mandatory six hours of preachy DEI trainings: They are a cruel joke so long as they ignore financial inequality. Of course, they could hardly be so popular in the business world if they highlighted the outrageous economic inequality it fosters.

Jaleelah, a student, describes how diversity programs feature in the world of competitive debate in Canada:

Virtually all debate teams and competitions have “equity officers” (a name that would give Ron DeSantis an aneurysm) who are responsible for “making sure participants are comfortable.” In practice, this means that barely trained university students are tasked with a wide range of responsibilities. Here is a list of equity functions I support:

Arranging subsidies for students who can’t afford to pay for competitions Communicating with organizers to ensure disabled debaters are only assigned to rooms they can physically access at tournaments Ensuring that there are no conflicts of interest between judges and the teams they are assigned to adjudicate

Here is a list of functions I oppose:

Mandating that trigger warnings be given before speeches (thankfully, this practice is not ubiquitous) Vetoing debate topics on the grounds that they might prompt people to make offensive arguments

And here is a list of functions that I have a neutral or varying opinion on:

Constantly reminding people not to make sweeping generalizations about groups of people Mediating conflicts between students (some equity officers are horrible mediators, but I generally support the approach) Providing input on debate topics (when it is clear that students are not permitted to issue vetoes)

That’s a long list, but equity teams usually run pretty smoothly. I suspect that there are three reasons for this. First, equity’s power in debate is sufficiently limited. Judges do not penalize teams for the sole reason that a speaker said something “inequitable.” Equity teams cannot intervene in debate rounds (outside of a situation where one competitor is screaming targeted slurs or physically assaulting another), nor can they alter the results. Their most severe power of removing people from clubs and competitions is almost exclusively reserved for students who have committed crimes against other students (and those people usually resign anyway). When people perceive overreach, they complain loudly. Trigger-warning mandates for speakers have been greatly reduced because a number of people (including me) argued that they are ineffective.

Second, there are social incentives for equity officers to avoid doing stupid things. All equity officers are also debaters. It’s a bad idea to harshly punish someone for accidentally saying something offensive when you know you’ll have to spend an entire weekend with their friends. Equity officers are not above other students. This is sharply different from DEI trainings in the corporate world where a team of outside instructors assume a position of power over a given office or team.

Finally, the debate community assumes that people have good intentions. When conversations about ideological bias arise, conservatives and communists never accuse liberals of intentionally rigging rounds against them—they analyze the ways in which common unconscious biases cause judges to favor certain arguments.

And last in today’s roundup, an anonymous reader shares a diversity-training experience that caused him a lot of anxiety:

After years of teaching history at the college level, I took a job at an elite private high school, drawn in part by their stated goal of investing time, energy, and money in DEI education and initiatives. The school had a contract with a DEI-training company to educate all the faculty and administrators via a three-day retreat on race. My research and teaching has focused on race throughout my career. In a real sense, talking and writing about race is my job. Due to my personal and professional goals, I signed up to go.

We were immediately told by the facilitators that the purpose was not to train us in DEI but instead to have us spend the entire time reflecting on our own racial journeys. It was immediately clear that the space was designed to be a sort of deconstructed learning experience, where we were expressly forbidden from discussing the issue from the standpoint of research or debate. Instead we would discuss it at a personal level. Such ideas and stories, once shared, were subject to attack by the facilitators.

One white, female teacher was talkative and engaged in the first couple sessions, and the facilitators called her out for what they felt was a race-based domination of the space. Certainly, she’d made some “mistakes” in what she said about race, but the goal appeared to extract some kind of mea culpa. She meekly apologized and never spoke again.

Later, we were told with the utmost confidence that none of us talk about race in the classroom and that when the subject comes up we all shy away from it out of fear and cowardice. When a couple of teachers, including me, said that we were required to talk about race as part of the subjects we teach, this was met with a reiteration of the assertion that we do so reluctantly. The white facilitator then sat down cross-legged on the floor and spent an hour telling us how racist she was. I’m not being flip: The gist was that she once thought she wasn’t but then learned that she was and now understood that no matter how much she learned, she’d never escape her racist origin. She asked the whites in the room for their thoughts.

No one said anything for a long time. Then a white teacher started crying and said she'd been picked on for being poor and dark-skinned as a kid. The facilitators made it clear that this was the wrong answer.

On the final day, the most notable activity was one in which the group was split into white and people-of-color affinity groups. Afterward we came back to the main room and reflected. A Black teacher talked about positive stereotyping of Black people being just as reductive as negative stereotyping. I responded that this was something I've taught about in the case of the Middle East, saying that Orientalism not only perpetuates nasty things about Middle Eastern peoples (e.g. “All Muslims are sexist”) but posits supposedly good characteristics as uniform (e.g. “All Muslims are hospitable”). After a break, we came back together and the facilitators said that before we went on they wanted to tackle something.

Facilitators: “In the last session, you used the word ‘Orientalism.’ We want you to know that ‘Oriental’ is a very racist term to describe Asian people. But you put an -ism at the end and we wanted to ask what you meant by that.”

Me: “Um, well, ‘Orientalism’ refers to a group of scholars who called themselves ‘Orientalists’ because they studied the Middle East, and from the 1960s onward, were criticized by other scholars (especially Edward Said) for their reliance on Western biases.”

Facilitators: “Well, that is the scholarly, academic world. Here, in this space, ‘Oriental’ is a racist term. And we want you to reflect on that.”

Me: “I’m, um, sorry if anyone took it that way. In my work, this is a term we use to talk about racism …” [face red, heart racing]

Facilitators [interrupting]: “We’re out here, in this space. That space is academic. In this space, this is a space where ‘Oriental’ shouldn’t be said.”

I was fuming. To me, that exchange totally undermined any authority they had to speak on race, if they didn’t even know the primary word used to describe racism against Middle Eastern people. It doesn’t matter if people who are supposed to be experts in race have never heard of the term “Orientalism,” as if they missed the post-9/11 debates over Western biases against anyone deemed “Eastern”––I could lose my job over being called racist.

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