Before we delve into part two, I’d like to take you on a side quest. Readers who have followed my work for a while will be familiar with my three-part series about the Evergreen State College. For those of you new to my work, I consider this an essential accompaniment to The Reformers, and though I strongly recommend viewing the full 90-minute version, I’ve reworked it into a more consumable 30-minute presentation above.
The Evergreen series came from a discussion the hoax crew and I had with Professor Bret Weinstein and his wife, Professor Heather Heying, while we were scheming together in Portland.
Bret and Heather are evolutionary biologists who were let go by TESC following a series of student and faculty protests centred on accusing Bret of racism.
When an event of this kind is covered by the mass media, it undergoes a memetic selection process that strips away its intricacies, leaving only a few remnants of truth for news consumers to reckon with. If you ask someone who’s familiar with the media version of these events to recount what happened, they’ll likely tell you that Evergreen students exploded into protest after Bret refused to participate in a ‘day of absence,’ where white staff and faculty were asked to stay home so that non-whites could have the campus to themselves. While this is technically accurate, it’s somehow not true in a broader philosophical sense of the word.
After recording Bret and Heather’s retelling, I began my own investigations, which led me to someone I now consider a good friend, Benjamin Boyce, a student at the time of the protests.
Working through his meticulous video archival work, I became enthralled by the Evergreen protests and have come to consider it an important case study for the ideology critiqued by the hoax project.
I’d like to avoid getting too analytical with it here and let the footage speak for itself.
The Reformers - An Accompaniment