from the land-of-make-believe dept
Before she was hired by right wing billionaire Larry Ellison to turn CBS into a right wing propaganda and safe space, Bari Weiss tried her best to create a fake propaganda-fueled college in Austin.
If you recall, Weiss (alongside Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale) helped create the University of Austin in 2021 under the pretense they were creating an “anti-woke” (read: right wing) corrective to “campus leftism running amok” (read: a handful of young people annoyed by systemic racism, broad U.S. corruption, or Benjamin Netanyahu’s industrialized mass murder of toddlers).
The “university” pretended to champion free speech and the truth, but, much like the “renovation” of CBS, the pseudo-university is really part of a larger right wing initiative to reshape journalism and education in order to coddle right wing ideology, eradicate uncomfortable truths right wingers don’t like and distort reality into a strange, delusional safe space (the exact thing the experiment professes to be combating).
There’ve been a lot of desperate efforts to pretend this is some storied institution, despite the fact the billionaire-backed prop comprises just a few floors of an Austin office building. It’s just a few blocks from the Joe Rogan “anti-woke” Comedy Mothership man-baby safe space in Austin,which is effectively trying to similarly disembowel U.S. comedy.
There’ve been hints for a while that the adorable fake university hasn’t really fared all that well. Like earlier this year, when one staffer was unceremoniously cancelled from the “free speech” focused university for politely suggesting on LinkedIn that the war on inclusion in diversity had maybe gone a little too far.
But a recent piece in the Chronicle reveals that a raft of departures have left more questions than answers, and paints a picture of an institution struggling to find its footing, and increasingly resembling a Potemkin village.