I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

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The reason, it seems, is that he doesn't think the internet has raised significantly new questions about free speech, and in any case there is already an extensive literature on web censorship. At its core, however, beneath the variegated surface, the book is an anguished cri de coeur against pervasive cultural, political, and intellectual rot—an unapologetic defense and exegesis of the heavily maligned "Western canon" (John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Kant, DuBois, Frederick Douglass, and the like), a sustained lamentation over how far the left has fallen, a furious denunciation of rampant philistinism and pusillanimous groupthink (quoting Mill: "That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time"), and a proudly unfashionable celebration of such quaint notions as Truth, Reason, and Justice (which Finkelstein capitalizes, in a consciously anti-postmodernist flourish). Despite knowing the probable consequences of giving the wrong answer, he unhesitatingly said he deeply admired Chomsky and was grateful for his support—which, of course, was the wrong answer. One might object that he's painting with too broad a brush here, that advocacy of the interests of minorities and women can, depending on the context and the cause, indeed be an essential political program, but he wouldn't deny this.

It's ironic that many self-styled anarchists advocate increasing the power of unaccountable bureaucrats to control what is said and what isn't. Political conservatives, too, have complained about the humorlessness of the woke crowd, but if you're alienating even die-hard leftists, maybe it's time to rethink your messaging.As Finkelstein says, Kendi embraces the woke conceit that, over four hundred years, "African-Americans haven't registered any progress in the struggle against racism. One difficulty with the book is that it has a sprawling and meandering character, consisting variously of memoir, brutal polemic, dense argumentation, forensic dissection of texts, scores of long quotations, innumerable long footnotes, and very funny ridicule of everything and everyone from Michelle Obama to Bari Weiss, from the New York Times to woke terms like Latinx ("why would an ethnic group want to sound like a porn site? Meanwhile, her book White Fragility has sold almost a million copies and has had quite an influence on woke culture, helping to instill a collective fixation on—incidentally—the same idée fixe of Ta-Nehisi Coates (according to Cornel West): the almighty, unremovable nature of white supremacy.

facile judgments but instead will engage with the book's substance, because it has important things to say. A connection that binds will be forged by you, united in the heat of battle facing a common enemy, each marching beside the other, each lifting the other, each protecting the other. But if the likes of Marx wouldn't qualify for a tenured appointment at a first-rank university, isn't that a reductio ad absurdum?Collins Dictionary, again, defines the phrase as dealing with a problem or a difficult situation when it comes up and “not to anticipate difficulties”. On Amy Goodman (whom he doesn't name): "Goddess of Wokeness…a woke machine, churning out insipid clichés as her mental faculty degenerates to mush. With I'll Burn That Bridge, he shows his willingness to burn bridges not only with the establishment but also with the "left" of today, for which he shows scarcely mitigated contempt. You're fallible, you're imperfect vessels… If you unite to change the system, then your psyches will fall into place. Nor would I even try, because I couldn't possibly reproduce the distinctive Finkelsteinian humor—and most of this very long chapter consists of (factually grounded) ridicule, directed at nearly everyone in Obama's presidential coterie, a "revolting retinue of bootlickers.

The strategy of pure suppression is apt to lead many to think there might be something "dangerously truthful" to it—"the establishment doesn't want us to hear this because it's threatened by its truth! He relates an anecdote from when he was a graduate student at Princeton in 1984: his work exposing a bestselling scholarly hoax on the Israel-Palestine conflict had gotten the favorable attention of the editor of the New York Review of Books and his friend (Arthur Hertzberg) at Columbia University, and he sensed that career possibilities were opening up for him. More problematic than such defense is to make a cult of group differences (group "pride") in the way of the woke, and to place class issues at the bottom of the heap rather than the top, where they belong.That such a person can be widely considered to be more or less on the left is a crushing indictment of the state of the left.