The cautionary tale of David Austin Walsh

History professor wanna-be and social justice champion self-destructs on X (Twitter)

Meet David Austin Walsh.

Fourth-year post-doc (Yale) .... single .... thirty-five years old … newly-minted author ... geeky history professor wanna-be and sometimes turtleneck-wearing hipster (he grew a really nifty beard a couple of years ago) … and fierce keyboard warrior for all things Left.

He’s also a charter member of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) movement which has swallowed Academia over the past decade. Corporate America got swept up in DEI-mania in 2020, hiring fresh-faced bureaucrats by the thousands, but has since regained its wits and is again hiring and promoting based on merit rather than identity.

However, DEI administrators and Title IX compliance gendarmes still lord over most academic disciplines, especially the social sciences and humanities, where standards are soft and hiring committees can’t bankrupt their schools if they enlist only posers and incompetents. As Noah Smith points out, in the hard sciences — engineering, physics, technology, etc. — there are at least some scholarship guidelines, and people are disqualified because they simply can’t do the work. But the number of people who can do something that looks like “social science” is vast, so those departments lean heavily on ideology and identity.

Paradoxically, the higher education DEI ecosystem has created a dilemma for social justice superheroes like Walsh.

He’s male, and white, and he won’t shut up.

Therein lies his problem.

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The Twitter Tirade

For those who don’t know, a post-doc position is a sort of low-paid purgatory where people with PhDs are sent to keep doing research when they can’t immediately get jobs as professors. This is where Walsh currently resides, as an associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism.

He’s also the author of a recently released book, Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right.

But right now Walsh is best known as a vocal and highly opinionated commentator on X (Twitter). He whinges, loudly and often, about oppressors … targeting Republicans, the “Alt-Right” and conservatives in general. But moderate Liberals aren’t immune from his bitterness. His posts often carry incendiary terms such as “fascist” … “racist” … “colonizers” … “white supremacy” … “genocide” — you know, the usual fare for Progressive outrage performers.

But last week, Walsh went rogue. On the same day that actor Robert DeNiro and a few other goodfellows showed up outside the Manhattan courtroom where Judge Juan Merchan and porn queen Stormy Daniels were saving democracy from Darth Trump, Walsh “went viral” with a memorable rant.

It seems the hipster post-doc can’t find a tenure-track job as a history professor …

… then laments to the world exactly why …

Tripwire hit. He said the quiet part out loud. All of Twitterdom witnessed real-time online self-immolation.

The response was instantaneous … and savage.

Walsh’s pity party riled everybody, from Progressives who flamed him as just one more mediocre white guy who assumes he’s more qualified than women and people of color, to conservatives who said he got his comeuppance for his allegiance to DEI dogma.

The only thing all sides could agree on that day was they all despised Walsh.

A day-long siege ensued. Walsh eventually issued a stumbling apology, confessing that he had “breached solidarity” with his social justice partners. But his arrogance still showed through as he blamed everything on “right-wing assaults.”

He also got into a tet-a-tet with a nonwhite, female history professor (identified as “big b and the b stands for ‘bedour’”) who not-so-gently poked him in the ribs.

Apparently, “big b” saw Walsh as a big buffoon. Soon after, he locked his account.

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Personality Profile: Beta Male

David Austin Walsh has an elite education — he went to the University of Minnesota and did his PhD at Princeton. Now he teaches a class at Yale while he applies for tenure-track positions.

Clearly, judging by his online history, hubris, and who he blames for his troubles (hint: it isn’t him), Walsh thinks like an Elite, Not long ago he took a practice LSAT and didn’t do well, then blamed his performance on the test questions being “right-wing.”

A quick look at Walsh’s online profiles (Linkedin, “Professor Watchlist,” etc.) reveals he holds the requisite Progressive credentials. He identifies with the #Resistance, and claims the moral high ground on all “-isms.” He proudly displays PRIDE colors and frequently self-flagellates his whiteness like a 14th-century Roman Catholic penitent.

Walsh also champions himself as a male feminist. He despises “The Patriarchy,” and patronizes any female voice in the room. Unfortunately for him, he fits the Venn diagram of the “friend-zoned” Beta Male who can’t get laid.

Somewhere during his academic journey, Walsh must have misplaced his testicles. Perhaps they froze off when he was an undergrad at Minnesota, or maybe he offered them up as a sacrifice to the DEI lords at Princeton. Alright, perhaps not literally but metaphorically his gonads are now no-nads, and he has unwittingly become the poster child for “Soy Boys of America.”

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Postscript

OK, I know I’m being too harsh on the young man. After all, there are trolls of all stripes slithering about on social media. The number of people making fools of themselves counts in the hundreds of thousands, many of whom are polar opposites of Walsh politically and intellectually. And I’ll admit the testicle thing was a cheap shot for laughs.

But the irony of his ideological zealotry — and then becoming marginalized by that same ideology — is not lost on me. Lesson from Aesop: Be careful of what you wish for.

Hopefully, Walsh recovers from all of this and comes to understand something most people my age have learned as an immutable truth: life can be unfair and cruel, and how you respond to it is the true test of character.

So let’s root for him to become Professor Walsh, and to land his dream job at a reputable university teaching 20th Century History. And keep the beard. It looks good.

Just a word of advice: stay away from social media.

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Jim Geschke was inducted into the Marquis Who’s Who Registry in 2021.