One my betes noires has been in the news lately. Jonathan Haidt has been annoying me since at least 2012, when I was critical of his bothsidesism on the culture wars.

At the time, he was a concern troll, posing as a liberal worried about other liberals who were, he claimed, misunderstanding Republicans. Whereas liberals thought of Republicans as bigots and misogynists, concerned with preserving their own position in racial and gender hierarchies, Haidt explained that they actually had their own set of values, based on order, purity, honour and loyalty. The wheels started falling off that one when Donald Trump, the antithesis of all of these things, came along and received the unqualified support of the supposed believers in purity.

Haidt responded by reinventing himself a free speech advocate, concerned about cancel culture and the coddling of young minds. He hung out on the “Intellectual Dark Web” with Bari Weiss and Stephen Pinker. Now that Weiss is busy suppressing reporting of Trump’s crimes, the IDW appears to have shut up shop.


Haidt’s next reinvention was an almost complete backflip. Despite having no relevant research background (as discussed his previous focus was on adult voters, followed by a shift to scolding college students) he suddenly became an authority on the effects of smartphone use on teenagers. His concerns about freedom of speech suddenly went out the window, replaced by a fear that the speech teens encountered on their phones was making them depressed as miserable.

Haidt’s work writings on this topic inspired the Australian government to pass legislation aimed at banning access to social media platforms for people under 16. It’s been mostly ineffective, but for the minority of kids who have left social media, a notable impact has been reduced access to news.

Possibly because recognition of this failure is spreading, Haidt has gone back to the “coddling” theme in a commencement address at NYU, for which he was roundly booed. Haidt appears not to have noticed that, far from protecting students from views that might upset them, NYU is busy suppressing speech by students that offends the administrators and of course the Trump Administration.

The kind of concerned punditry of which Haidt is an exponent never goes out of style, even if the topics of concern change from time to time. Given his ability to leap from one topic to the next with a fine disregard for consistency, I expect he will be around to annoy me for a long time to come.