Fed Governor Lisa Cook's Record Is a Reminder of the Social Justice Insanity of 2020

Trump is attempting to fire a Federal Reserve board governor.

President Donald Trump is attempting to fire Lisa Cook, one of the board members of the Federal Reserve. Mainstream commentators have described this as an unprecedented attack on the Fed's autonomy—no president has ever dismissed a member of the board, which is supposed to operate independent of political pressure—while conservatives say the allegations against Cook make her a special case. (Many libertarians, on the other hand, care less about tinkering with the Fed's composition and instead want to abolish it outright.)

The Trump administration has accused Cook of committing mortgage fraud; William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, penned a criminal referral alleging that she made false statements about her principal residence in order to obtain more favorable mortgage terms. She has yet to be charged and deserves the presumption of innocence, just like anyone else. Whether this justification is sufficient for the president to remove Cook "for cause" is a matter up for debate: Reason's Damon Root writes that the constitutional questions are not fully settled.

On one hand, Trump is in a long-running dispute with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and wants to bend the Fed to his will in order to get monetary policies that would benefit the administration in the short term. Firing Cook is clearly political, in that sense. On the other hand, it's reasonable to expect Federal Reserve board members to have their own finances in relatively perfect order.

But what has interested me most about Lisa Cook is a totally separate controversy from five years ago. I had completely forgotten about it, but the kerfuffle is worth revisiting—not really because it says that much about Cook, but because it's a useful reminder of just how crazy everything was in 2020.

What am I talking about? Well, I was doing research on Cook to prepare to discuss her firing on Rising and Free Media, and I came across some scrutiny of a paper she had written about the impacts of racism on black entrepreneurs between 1870 and 1940. According to the abstract, Cook found that political violence against black Americans during that time period caused them to receive 1,100 fewer patents.

That conclusion seems straightforward enough: It's reasonable to assume that the rise of segregation was a serious impediment to black achievement. A subsequent study, however, suggested that Cook got her figures wrong. This prompted the conservative activist Christopher Rufo to audit her writings and conclude that, as with former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, Cook was somewhat incautious when it came to quoting, paraphrasing, and copying other scholars' work. (Cook taught at both Harvard and Michigan State University.) In other words, there may be a pattern of carelessness here.

But in researching the academic misconduct scrutiny, I came across something else: Cook was involved in the effort to oust Harald Uhlig, then editor of the Journal of Political Economy, for crimes against wokeness.

The Uhlig affair was a classic example of cancel culture run amok: In the summer of 2020, Uhlig wrote a few tweets in which he politely but firmly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement for embracing the slogan "Defund the police." His most provocative sentence was "George Floyd and his family really didn't deserve be taken advantage of by flat-earthers and creationists," with reference to said supporters of defunding the police. That barely qualifies as a spicy statement. White supremacy, it isn't.

Nevertheless, in response to those tweets—as well as unproven and somewhat ridiculous accusations that he had said something negative about Martin Luther King Jr. while teaching a class at the University of Chicago in 2014—a progressive mob called for Uhlig to lose his job.

Among the economists demanding Uhlig's head were Paul Krugman, Justin Wolfers, Janet Yellen, and Lisa Cook. Wolfers was particularly emphatic: He wrote on Twitter (now X) that by continuing to employ Uhlig, the University of Chicago was effectively telling minority scholars that the quality of their work would be judged by someone who "consistently tried to minimize the legitimacy of Black Lives Matter in favor of racists."

Cook also penned a thread on Twitter, in which she called for the prompt removal of Uhlig. The thread is really something, and it betrays her commitment to basically every speech-related woke shibboleth.

I, like others, support your removal as editor of JPE. Plus, I would hope the UC investigation results in removing yr access to students. Racial harassment should be treated like sexual harassment, another means of impeding the free flow of ideas in the economics profession. 13/N

— Dr. Lisa D. Cook (@drlisadcook) June 14, 2020

Cook writes that "free speech has its limits" and should not be used to "spread hatred and violate the dignity of other people." She suggests that any and all criticism of MLK Jr. causes psychic harm to marginalized communities—"this is real pain you are inflicting"—and likened it to actual racist violence against civil rights protesters in the 1950s and 1960s.

Again, we are talking about a series of tweets in which Uhlig said that defunding the police was a bad idea, as well as an insinuation that he once said something mildly critical about MLK Jr., perhaps in jest. And the cancel culture campaign was successful, albeit temporarily: Uhlig was placed on leave pending an investigation, though eventually reinstated after cooler heads prevailed.

I guess that having a sane view on these kinds of things is not a prerequisite for working at the Fed, but I don't think it speaks well of Cook that she took the view that Uhlig should lose his job over this. Uhlig, by the way, got her back in 2022, when President Joe Biden nominated Cook to the Fed board. Uhlig wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal titled: "The Fed Doesn't Need a Censor." Nevertheless, the Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed her nomination. She is currently suing Trump to keep her job.

Why do I bring all this up? Perhaps seeing the movie Eddington, which is all about the madness of summer 2020—when opposition to pandemic restrictions and widespread anti-racism protests provoked caused mass social unrest—has left me feeling retrospective about the time period. So many aspects of that era now seem completely insane, including this one: It is actually crazy that a sitting member of the Federal Reserve board called on somebody to lose their job for such a trivial reason. The fact that most people today would probably recognize this madness for what it is just goes to show the extent to which the tides of wokeness actually have receded. Many things about U.S. politics are decidedly not normal—and maybe never will be—but with respect to cancel culture, social media mobs, and progressive cultural overreach, 2025 looks downright sane.

This Week on Free Media

I'm joined by Amber Duke to discuss Trump firing Cook, the new ban on flag burning, the federal government buying a stake in Intel, and more.

 

Worth Watching

My aforementioned review of Eddington will be available in the next issue of Reason magazine. Overall, I did not actually like the film—but after my brother and I saw it, we stayed up until 4 a.m. talking about it. That's an endorsement, of sorts.