When the anti-woke right mirrors the woke left’s pathologies.
By: Frederick Alexander
Published: Jan 18, 2026
Twenty years ago, Tucker Carlson wore a bow tie and argued with liberals on CNN. This was in a different age – a different dimension, almost – to the one we live in today. People on either side of the aisle could disagree vociferously on things both could agree was part of a shared reality. Nobody felt the need to establish first whether the Holocaust happened or if men could have babies.
Today Carlson nods along as a podcast guest describes Winston Churchill as the real villain of World War II – worse than Hitler. The man who stood against fascism is recast as the monster by the sort of person who thinks nose rings and pink hair spell the end of civilisation.
This would be fascinating if it were just one man’s strange descent into the murky waters of conspiracy theory and paranoia. But Carlson is far from alone. He’s merely the most famous example of a new orthodoxy on the right that’s turning conservatism on its head and employing many of the same tricks as their adversaries on the woke left: purity spirals, grievance hustling, language policing, and more.
What “right” are we talking about?
This isn’t people on the right in the conventional sense. It’s not about the sort of voting behaviour or policy preferences that brought Reagan or Thatcher to power. It’s certainly not ordinary conservatism. It’s not even about Trump and the MAGA crowd, although there’s some obvious overlap.
I’m talking about a way of thinking, an epistemology that’s spread through parts of the anti-woke ecosystem, especially online. It’s what author James Lindsay coined the “woke right” – the curious phenomenon of people who claim to oppose woke ideology adopting its psychological habits.
Crucially, both the woke left and woke right refuse to engage with reality on reality’s terms. The woke left elevates “lived experience” above evidence, whereas the woke right declares all liberal establishment claims false by definition. In both cases, facts are adopted or discarded to support the original contention.
Isn’t distrust rational, given the last few years?
Yes. In fact, if you’re not sceptical of what our institutions and media are telling you by now, you might want to pause before sending the Nigerian prince another large sum. He’s probably not being straight with you either.
COVID was the breaking point. The truth is that institutions lied, the media played along, and those in charge gaslit the public with a mask-wearing straight face. The lab-leak hypothesis was plausible from the start yet treated as lunacy until it became the most obvious cause of the pandemic.
Then came Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was brushed off by the liberal media as foreign disinformation. Big tech suppressed any mention of it until the New York Times decided it was actually what everyone else said it was.
People noticed the lies and gaslighting – especially those on the other side of the political aisle, the ones who knew what a woman was and had little time for the knee-posturing of the progressive class.
But then something important happened.
“Show me the evidence” quietly mutated into “I’ve already decided you’re lying”. Rational scepticism ceased to be a powerful tool in the service of truth. It became irrational and selective, treating claims about reality as true or false based on who made them rather than the evidence and arguments at hand.
How does this style of thinking actually work?
One of the biggest tells is the inversion, which takes the following form:
If the liberal establishment says X, the truth must be not-X.
Churchill a war hero? He must be the villain. We put men on the moon? Obviously filmed in a studio – that thousands of engineers, astronauts, rival nations, and hostile intelligence agencies all politely agreed to keep quiet for half a century is put to one side.
These claims sound ludicrous because they are, yet they have real purchase among people convinced every official statement is a lie, every established fact a story for dupes. Exercise the smallest bit of critical thinking and it collapses. But that’s beside the point. The content barely matters because the possibility that we’re “in the matrix” is just too seductive, too thrilling to let go.
It borrows the aesthetic of inquiry but fails to direct scrutiny at itself. Questions are asked, but only in one direction. Counter-evidence is treated as suspect while expertise becomes “gatekeeping”. Professional historians are dismissed as regime functionaries, while the guy “doing his own research” on Telegram is granted room to posit debunked ideas as the host nods along and strokes his chin in agreement.
What about issues like Russia and Ukraine?
Here’s where the woke right’s selective criticism and moral inversions first showed themselves on the international stage.
In 2019, Carlson asked a guest on Fox News: “Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which, by the way, I am”.
Carlson later went on to insist that Ukraine wasn’t a democracy but a “tyranny”. When Russia invaded, he asked: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?”
Then came the notorious Putin interview in February 2024. Carlson sat there nodding along, apparently gripped by Putin’s two-hour propaganda lecture that blamed Ukraine, NATO, and the West for Russia’s invasion. Not once did Carlson mention Russian war crimes. The imprisonment of opposition figures like Alexei Navalny didn’t merit a single question. Carlson just nodded and wore his “I’m serious” face while giving Putin the sort of leeway he would never give to, say, Angela Merkel or Macron.
The same Tucker Carlson who built a career prosecuting liberal hypocrisy gave an uncritical platform to a dictator who poisons opponents, defenestrates dissidents, and treats the rule of law with contempt.
This is woke right inversion in a nutshell. If Western elites support Ukraine, Ukraine must be the villain. If they oppose Putin, Putin must be doing something right. Principled scrutiny gets left at the door.
How about Israel and Gaza?
Here, the same inversions play out, but it’s even worse.
Candace Owens spent years mocking the progressive left for playing identity politics and treating certain groups as sacred victims beyond criticism. This was a good and necessary intervention by an articulate black woman, pointing out obvious progressive hypocrisy.
Somehow, she went from that to accusing Israel of “genocide” and claiming Jews were behind the transatlantic slave trade. She’s called Israel an “occult nation” because of the Star of David on its flag – a “cultic hexagram” – and suggested Israel was behind JFK’s assassination.
Owens adopted the same framework as the woke left in her anti-Israel, antisemitic rhetoric: Palestinians are the oppressed and Israel is the oppressor. The October 7 massacre never gets a mention.
Clips of Carlson and Owens regularly surface obvious signs of what we’re looking at. But if there was any doubt, a recent study by the Jewish People Policy Institute analysed roughly 3,000 YouTube videos showing that for Owens, 96% of her mentions of Israel were classified as negative. 75% of her videos mentioning Jews in the past six months were flagged as antisemitic – nearly double the rate from earlier in the year. Carlson’s anti-Israel content jumped from 49% to 70% negative over the same period.
How did seemingly serious people end up here?
Carlson and Owens aren't stupid, which makes it worse. They know exactly what they're doing – they've just discovered that conspiracy pays better than principle.
In the attention economy that is YouTube and social media, outrage is the currency of choice. Combined with moral certainty and “just asking questions”, woke right commentators have struck gold – and the more extreme the position, the higher the engagement. Caution and nuance work in the opposite direction, weakening the brand or even inviting accusations of selling out.
Woke-right inversion is about maintaining a performance of truth-seeking while doing the opposite. The liberal establishment supports Ukraine? Russia must be in the right. It defends Israel? Hamas must have its reasons. The framework is identical to the woke left’s: identify the powerful, reverse the moral judgment, and monetise your audience.
Why does this thinking slide so easily into conspiracy?
Because once “power explains everything” becomes your operating system, nothing is allowed to be accidental. For the woke right, every institutional failure, every bad policy, every disappointing outcome – all of it must be connected, deliberate, and part of the plan.
More importantly, there’s money to be made from the outrage, the relentless and escalating provocations and protestations. Candace Owens didn’t peddle theories that Macron’s wife is a man because she got stupider. She went there because the algorithm rewarded it, the audience demanded it, and the revenue followed. This is why the internet is flooded with political grifters on the left and right. It pays.
Is this why antisemitism keeps showing up?
Of course. Conspiracy thinking always wants to put a face to the “mysterious forces” and “powerful cabals” controlling everything.
Enter the world’s oldest hatred. Sometimes introduced openly, but more often through euphemism, Jews offer one culprit for everything, one malevolent force to explain away personal grievances and the failures of your tribe.
People like Nick Fuentes don’t materialise out of nowhere. They’re what you get when “just asking questions” is mistaken for bravery and “spotting patterns” gets called insight. Carlson hosted Fuentes on his show in October 2024 – a white nationalist who denies the Holocaust – and offered no meaningful pushback.
The woke left spent years making Jews an acceptable target through “anti-Zionism”. Now the woke right is trying the same trick, the same ancient hatred pretending to be political analysis.
Aren’t you just doing “both sides are bad”?
What I’m talking about is a betrayal of Enlightenment liberalism by those who once claimed to defend it.
The backlash to woke excess was inevitable and justified.
What’s tragic is that parts of that backlash have abandoned the very habits of mind that made the original critique so effective. Where one side elevated lived experience above truth, the other decided truth itself was an establishment trick.
But truth is the one absolutely non-negotiable standard of a liberal civilisation. It’s what anchors the open society and prevents it from drifting into epistemic tribalism. Defending it means doing the boring job of providing evidence and being sceptical while staying rational. It means being willing to accept facts that don’t flatter your side. You don’t get to discard those just because your enemies abused them first.
What’s actually at stake here?
What began as resistance to one orthodoxy ended up creating another. Real dissent – the kind that might actually fix what’s broken – risks being absorbed by a version of scepticism that excuses the indefensible and treats every moral judgment as just another establishment lie.
The irony in all this is that a movement which began by mocking safe spaces and trigger warnings has built its own. Worse, each side feeds the other. The woke left's excesses prompt the woke right's conspiracies, which in turn validate the woke left's warnings about fascism. It's a perfect doom loop, and both sides need it to continue.
The anti-woke right was supposed to defend Western civilisation from ideological capture. Instead, parts of it got captured by the same psychology – the same purity tests and moral inversions. The same substitute religion, but with different saints and demons.
The ultimate villain, of course, is always the same. The woke left made Jews acceptable targets through “anti-Zionism.” The woke right is trying the same trick while rehabilitating old libels about Jewish control of finance and media, secret cabals pulling the strings.
Both sides think they're brave truth-tellers on the right side of history. In reality, both are abandoning reason, evidence, and moral clarity for the tribe. Neither will admit – or can even see – that civilisation depends on the principles they're busy discarding.
"What we are witnessing on university campuses across North America is not by accident, or incidentally about the rejection of reason and the rejection of the Western intellectual inheritance. Its central object is to destroy the past, and remake the present through the practice of the raised fist."
– Janice Fiamengo (2015)
If we’re going to preserve the freedoms we cherish, we must find the courage to stand up for our ideals.
By: Julian Adorney and Mark Johnson
Published: Jun 10, 2024
There’s a sense that the liberal order is eroding.
What do we mean by that? By “liberal order” we mean three things: political liberalism, economic liberalism, and epistemic liberalism.
Politically, it’s tough to shake the sense that we’re drifting away from our liberal roots. Fringes on both sides are rejecting the liberal principle that all human beings are created equal and that our differences are dwarfed by our shared humanity. On the left, prominent activists are endorsing the idea that people with different immutable characteristics (race, gender, etc.) have different intrinsic worth. For instance, in 2021, Yale University’s Child Study Center hosted a psychiatrist who gave a speech titled, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” where she compared white people to “a demented violent predator who thinks they are a saint or a superhero.” In response to Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, Yale professor Zareena Grewal tweeted, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” Across the political aisle, Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams called black Americans a “hate group” whom white Americans should “get the hell away from.”
If a core component of political liberalism is that all human beings are created equal, then many prominent voices are pushing us rapidly toward an illiberal worldview where one’s worth is determined by immutable characteristics.
Increasingly, members of both parties seek to change liberal institutions to lock the opposition out of power. Their apparent goal is to undermine a key outcome of political liberalism: a peaceful and regular transfer of power between large and well-represented factions. On the right, prominent Republicans have refused to concede Trump’s loss in 2020, and many are refusing to commit to certifying the 2024 election should Trump lose again. “At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump,” Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) said in response to repeated questions about whether or not he would accept the election results. On the left, prominent Democrats advocate for abolishing the Electoral College, partly on the grounds that it favors Republicans; and for splitting California into multiple states to gain more blue Senate seats. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tina Smith (D-MN), among others, have called for expanding the Supreme Court explicitly so they can pack it with Democrats.
This disdain for democratic norms isn’t limited to political elites on right or left; it is permeating the general populace. According to a 2023 poll, only 54 percent of young Americans (aged 18-29) agree with the statement, “Democracy is the greatest form of government.”
Economic liberalism is also under attack. In 2022, Pew found that only 57 percent of the public had a favorable view of capitalism. Those numbers are even worse among young Americans; only 40 percent among those aged 18-29 had a positive view of capitalism. By contrast, 44 percent of the same age group reported having a positive view of socialism. Faced with the choice of which system we should live under, it’s unclear whether young Americans would prefer economic liberalism over the command-and-control systems of socialism or communism. And while young people typically hold more left-of-center views and often become more conservative as they age, the intensity of young peoples’ opposition to capitalism should not be discounted. From 2010 to 2018, a separate Gallup poll found that the number of young Americans (aged 18-29) with a positive view of capitalism dropped by 23 percent.
Epistemic liberalism is on the ropes too. As the Harper’s Letter warned, “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” In recent years, even prominent intellectuals have been terrified of being canceled for daring to write outside of the lines set by a new and predominantly left-wing orthodoxy, adversely affecting out discourse. Again, this disdain for liberalism is more acute among young people: a 2019 survey found that 41 percent of young Americans didn’t believe that the First Amendment should protect hate speech. Furthermore, a full majority (51 percent) of college students considered it “sometimes” or “always acceptable” to “shout down speakers or try to prevent them from talking.”
As Jonathan Rauch argues in The Constitution of Knowledge, a necessary precondition of epistemic liberalism is that everyone should be allowed to speak freely, a precondition increasingly unmet in recent years.
In their book Is Everyone Really Equal?, Robin DiAngelo (of White Fragility fame) and Özlem Sensoy even challenge the foundation of epistemic liberalism itself: the scientific method. This method mandates that hypotheses be tested against reality before acceptance. “Critical Theory developed in part as a response to this presumed infallibility of scientific method,” they write “and raised questions about whose rationality and whose presumed objectivity underlies scientific methods.” Of course, once we jettison the principle that ideas should be tested by holding them up to reality, all we have left are mythologies and accusations. One of the great triumphs of the Enlightenment was giving us the scientific tools to more accurately understand the world, but those tools—like other facets of liberalism—are increasingly under attack.
So, what went wrong? Why do so many Americans, particularly young Americans, harbor such disdain for our liberal order? Why have we seen the rise of widespread social censorship, and why do books telling us that not all humans are created equal become mega-bestsellers? We believe a key reason is that too many proponents of the liberal order (ourselves included) have failed to defend our ideals vigorously. In the face of our complacency, a small but impassioned minority intent on dismantling the pillars of liberalism has been gaining ground, both within institutions and within the hearts and minds of the younger generation.
Why haven’t many of us stood up for our ideas? We posit two reasons. First, there is a sense of complacency: a lot of us look at illiberalism and think, “It can't happen here.” The United States was founded as an essentially liberal country. We were the first country to really seek to embody Enlightenment ideals (however imperfectly) from our birth. Throughout our 250-year history, despite fluctuating levels of government intervention in Americans' social and economic lives, we have never lost our political, economic, or epistemological liberal foundations. This long track record of resilience has led many of us to overlook the rising threat of illiberal ideals, assuming our liberal system is too robust to be torn down.
Adding to this complacency is the fact that many threats to our liberal social contract are largely invisible to those outside educational or academic circles. Cloaked in the guise of combating racism, Critical Race Theory takes aim at the liberal order; however, most people who haven’t been inside the halls of a university in the last 10 or so years may not be aware of this aspect. Critical Theory—including Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, and others—generally opposes Enlightenment thinking, but its arguments are wrapped in jargon and mostly live in academic papers. For example, the book Is Everyone Really Equal? criticizes political, economic, and epistemic liberalism, but it’s not a mainstream bestseller; instead, it’s a widely-used textbook for prospective teachers. What begins in the academy often seeps out into schools and eventually permeates the broader society, and many teachers and professors of these ideologies explicitly describe themselves as activists or as scholar-activists whose goal is to turn the next generation onto these ideas. The threat is real, but the more anti-liberal facets of these ideologies aren’t exactly being shouted by CNN, which makes it easy to miss.
Second, as humans, we often abandon our ideals in the face of social pressure. Consider an organization consisting of ten people: one progressive and nine moderates. In 2020, each member starts to hear about Black Lives Matter (BLM). The progressive enthusiastically supports BLM, and loudly encourages his colleagues to do the same. What happens next illustrates how prone we are to jettison our ideals if doing so brings social rewards.
The first moderate faces a choice. He could thoroughly research BLM by investigating police violence nationwide, examining the evidence of systemic racism or system-wide equality, exploring BLM’s proposed program and what they actually advocate for, and making an informed decision about whether or not he supports the organization. But that’s a lot of work for not a lot of return. After all, his job doesn’t require that he understand BLM; the only immediate consequence is his colleague’s opinion of him. Consequently, he engages in what Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman calls “substitution.” As Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” For example, when participants were asked how much money Exxon should pay for nets to prevent birds from drowning in oil ponds, they did not perform an economic calculation. Instead, what drove their decision-making process was emotion: “the awful image of a helpless bird drowning, its feathers soaked in thick oil.”
Thus, the moderate engages in substitution. Instead of tackling the complex and difficult question “What do I think of BLM?” he asks himself an easier but more emotional question: “How much do I care about black people?” For any decent person, the answer is “quite a lot”—and so he signs on with his progressive colleague. The fact that he’s now supporting an illiberal ideology—one of BLM’s co-founders said in 2019 that “I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society"—never occurs to him.
When the next moderate is asked the same question about whether he supports BLM, he has the same incentive as his colleague to engage in substitution, but with added social pressure: now two of his nine coworkers support BLM, and he risks losing social capital if he does not. As humans, we are social animals. Sociologist Brooke Harrington explains that we often value others’ perception of us more than our own survival, as social ostracism in our distant past often meant death anyway. As she puts it, “social death is more frightening than physical death.” And so, motivated by the social rewards for supporting BLM and the fear of social punishment if he does not, one coworker after another agrees to support BLM.
Adding to our social calculus is the fact that we all want to be seen as (and, even more importantly, see ourselves as) empathetic. In the example of BLM, we don’t want to be perceived as racists. If this means going along with an organization that says that police “cannot [be] reform[ed]” because they were “born out of slave patrols,” then that’s a small price to pay. This same desire to be seen as empathetic (again, especially by ourselves) holds when we are called to cancel a professor for saying something insensitive, or to condemn cultural appropriation, or to read and praise books and articles claiming that liberalism has failed marginalized people and that a new, totalitarian system is necessary for their salvation.
But why shouldn’t we be complacent? Why shouldn’t we go along to get along, and let our values bend here and there so we can fit in with the new illiberal crowd? One reason is that the stakes are no longer trivial. There is nothing magical about the liberal order that guarantees it will always triumph. History shows us that liberalism can give way to totalitarianism, as it did in Nazi Germany; or to empire, as in ancient Rome. In England, new rules regulate what people are allowed to say, with citizens facing fines or imprisonment for saying something the political establishment does not like. In Canada, a new bill supported by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would criminalize speech that those in power consider hateful. The United States is not immune to these dangers. Our Constitution alone is not a sufficient defense, because laws are downstream from culture. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be interpreted by illiberal justices (and have been in the 20th century); and when this happens, our rights can erode very rapidly indeed. Our freedom is sustained not by our geography or even our founding documents, but by our willingness to fight for liberalism—to defend it in the court of public opinion.
If we’re going to preserve the freedoms we cherish, that is what it will take. We must find the courage to stand up for our ideals—to speak and act based on principle alone. We must be open to new evidence that might change our views, but at the same time resist having our minds changed for us. We must prioritize truth over popular opinion.
In essence, we must think and act more like August Landmesser.
[ Source: The Lone German Man Who Refused to Give Hitler the Nazi Salute (businessinsider.com) ]
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About the Authors
Julian Adorney is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving our liberal social contract. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.
Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneering Leadership and a facilitator and coach at The Undaunted Man. He has over 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies—he writes at The Undaunted Man’s Substack and Universal Principles.
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Whatever its flaws, every alternative to liberalism is a nightmare.
Afua Hirsch’s new book confirms that the narcissism of the new elites is undermining the Enlightenment.
By: Brendan O'Neill
Published: Nov 11, 2023
One of the weirdest things about identitarian activists is that they hate being asked where they’re from but they love telling you where they’re from. Politely inquire about their ethnic or cultural origins and they’ll damn you as a racist. ‘How dare you, I’m as British as you!’, they’ll yell, either to your face or in a column in the Guardian in which they’ll document at great, yawn-inducing length the horror of having some dim pleb ask about their family origins.
Then, in the next breath, before you’ve even had a chance to splutter your apology, they’ll tell you their entire ancestral history. You’ll know where their great grandmother was born, the exact quantity of melanin grandad had in his skin, which maternal haplogroup they belong to, as revealed by 23andMe. Just don’t say ‘Oh, that’s where you’re from’, because they’ll call you racist again.
This political schizophrenia of taking offence at the question ‘Where are you from?’ while simultaneously feeling a burning urge to tell the entire world where you are from was best captured in the Ngozi Fulani controversy. You remember Ms Fulani: she’s the black charity worker from Hackney in London whose ‘racist’ run-in with long-serving royal aide Lady Susan Hussey hit the headlines last year. Lady Hussey’s crime? At a Buckingham Palace do, she asked Ms Fulani where she is from. Call the cops! What a bigoted old bat.
Not so fast. Ms Fulani was adorned in African threads at the palace. She frequently decks herself out in the Pan-African colours and Africa-shaped earrings. To constantly suggest to the world that you are from somewhere else and then reach for the smelling salts when someone asks ‘Where, exactly?’ is a bit much, no?
Now, in literary form, Afua Hirsch has done the same thing. Ms Hirsch is an author, broadcaster and writer for the Guardian. Her first book, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, was all about the horror, the sheer indignity, of ‘The Question’. The question, of course, is ‘Where are you from?’. I am asked this ‘every single day, often multiple times’, said Hirsch. Really? Where’s she hanging out? It feels like a ‘daily ritual of unsettling’, she wrote. Oh, please. If I penned a sad book every time someone asked me, on account of my very un-British name, ‘What part of Ireland are you from?’, or ‘Where were your parents born?’, I’d be the most prolific author in Christendom.
Now, we have Ms Hirsch’s second book, Decolonising My Body. And you’ll never believe it: it is an eye-wateringly detailed answer to… The Question! Here’s my question: if Hirsch hates being asked where she is from, why has she written a whole tome on where she is ‘from’?
I now know more about Ms Hirsch’s ethnic and cultural origins than I do about my own. To her credit, she admits that this is because she comes from a staggeringly privileged background. I ‘know quite a lot about my ancestors’ and ‘there’s a privilege attached to this’, she says. Her African ancestors were not the ‘enslaved’, but rather were ‘antecedents about whom written records were kept’. Fancy. As someone who knows next to nothing about his colonised forebears – largely thanks to the Potato Famine of the 1840s and the catastrophic fire at the Public Records Office in Dublin in 1922 – I confess to feeling envy while reading Ms Hirsch’s comprehensive tale of her origins. How the other half live, eh?
When I say her new book is detailed, I mean it is detailed. In her first book, she told us off for being nosey about her family origins; in her new book, she’s telling us about the time she got her butthole lasered. She finds herself in ‘the undignified position of spreading my butt cheeks under the chill of a laser clinician’s hosepipe-like nozzle, as atoms are excised, electrons rise and fall, and light beams are making their way into my crack’. The whole thing cost her £1,000. They must be paying well at the Guardian if contributors can splash out a grand on having their anal fluff zapped.
Surely we need to talk about how easily the identitarian elites can shift from exasperation at being asked ‘Where are you from?’ to absolute blaséness about telling the world what their ringpieces look like. Don’t you dare ask where my family is from but please listen to me describe the hair follicles on my arsehole. Excuse me, what?
As its title suggests, Hirsch’s book is a somewhat narcissistic endeavour. It’s all about her body. More specifically, it’s about how empire and colonialism interrupted the mystical traditions through which Hirsch’s African ancestors marked and celebrated their bodies – with tribal tattoos, menstrual festivals and whatnot – and how Hirsch now wants to rediscover all that stuff.
She says she wants to ‘decolonise’ her body of its ‘Western’ expectations – thinness, hairlessness, white-defined attractiveness – and let it become more African. Imagine how time-rich, and literally rich, you would need to be to spend so much energy obsessing over your own flesh and skin. To publish a book about decolonising the body of a privately educated Guardianista while everyone else is wondering if they have enough cash to keep the lights on speaks to the pathological self-regard of the new elites. In this era of economic, military and moral crises, Hirsch is going to have to work a lot harder to convince me that the fact that her period ‘still often takes me by surprise’ is something we need to know.
Hirsch’s argument is that she has been violently ripped from the ‘magical’ traditions of her African history by colonialism and capitalism. So where her historical forebears held menstruation ceremonies and celebrated women for having hairy legs and insisted upon the tattooing of female flesh, our new era heaps shame on women for bleeding, discourages female hair growth, and idolises ‘pure’ over ‘marked’ flesh. None of this is quite right though, is it? Period chatter is everywhere these days. You can’t so much as click on Instagram without seeing some feted female influencer showing off hair-covered shins that would make Peter Sellers wonder if he should reach for some Veet. As for tats – not having a tattoo is the great shame in the 21st-century West. What, you haven’t had a tribal slogan pasted on your pasty flesh by a needle-wielder in Camden? What’s wrong with you?
And yet our body-decolonising Ms Hirsch perseveres, regardless. To counter the evil West’s disdain for old African tribes’ celebration of menstruation, she takes her poor daughter to a tribal period shindig in south London. They have to traverse the South Circular, ‘one of the most congested roads not just in London, but in the world’, and Hirsch, under instruction from the London-based tribal priestess, must wear all-white clothing, which in this case means a ‘floor-length summer robe, made from soft sheets of cotton’. Still, at least it connects Hirsch to her tribal lineage, even if her daughter, by Hirsch’s own admission, would rather be anywhere else.
Hirsch’s favourite word is ‘conditioning’. She thinks women like her – women of non-British origins – have been ‘conditioned’ to discard the tribal rituals their elders engaged in. Perhaps. Or perhaps black women and all women in London in 2023 would just rather buy some tampons for their pubescent daughters than subject them to an old-world menstrual ritual in a posh garden in south London. Who can tell?
Hirsch says ‘the forces of globalisation’ lead to a situation where ‘people like me’ – people of colour – have been ‘conditioned’ to behave and think in a particular way. That is, in a Western way. There’s a darkly ironic twist here. Hirsch’s obsession with the idea of ‘conditioning’ means she ends up viewing African-origin people in a similar way to how old colonialists viewed them – as vacant-brained entities swayed this way and that by the messaging of their superiors under capitalism. It smells like neo-colonialism disguised as anti-colonialism.
Hirsch thinks that even she – an expensively educated, successful writer – has been ‘conditioned’. She wonders if her submission to laser hair-removal is a craven acceptance of Western culture’s white-supremacist loathing of female hair. ‘Why do I keep on coming back’, she wonders, ‘to uncomfortable and expensive appointments, just to squash the capillaries which nature, in its wisdom, wanted us to have in our nether regions’? Again with the nether regions. She ends up staring at her vagina and reminiscing about her lost hair. She beholds the ‘pathetic little tuft of hair clinging to my bikini area, with a forlorn sense of having banished something that may have loved me’. I cannot imagine ever having a deep thought about my pubes – is that only me?
Who is responsible for the fact that even Hirsch, with all her education, has done things to her body that she later thinks she shouldn’t have done? It’s Charles Darwin. It’s always Charles Darwin. On the thousands of pounds she’s spent on ‘pink-packaged razors’ and ‘painful, expensive waxing’, Hirsch says, ‘The person I do blame… is Charles Darwin’. You might think of Darwin as the most important scientific figure of the period of Enlightenment, the brilliant man who revealed to us the truth of both nature and humanity, but to Ms Hirsch he’s the bloke whose ‘paradigm-shifting work on evolution’ led to the inexorable destruction of ‘attitudes to body hair [that] were as diverse as the cultures [they were] rooted in’.
In short, Darwin’s exploration of the origins of species, of the origins of man, helped to nurture a colonial discomfort with tribal culture. Imagine witnessing the epoch-shaping discoveries of a man like Darwin and thinking: ‘He’s the reason I feel compelled to get my butthole lasered.’ The narcissism of it, the anti-Enlightenment of it.
Anti-Enlightenment is the right phrase for where Hirsch ends up. Throughout the book she dabbles not only with tribal cultures – which, in my view, declined and fell for good reason – but also with astrology and even witchcraft. She quotes authors who bemoan the disdaining by ‘intelligent persons’ of ‘witchcraft, magical healing, divination, ancient prophecies, ghosts and fairies’. It falls to her sensible-sounding parents to keep a check on her descent into pre-modern hysteria. Her father, the esteemed geophysicist Peter Hirsch, responds to her pleas that a planetary ‘conjunction’ in the sky must be a sign that she should change her life by saying: ‘It’s just from our arbitrary viewpoint that the planets appear close together… It doesn’t mean anything deeper.’ Yes, dad!
Her mum is even better. Asked by Afua why women of African origin don’t wear ‘waist beads’ anymore, her mum essentially says: ‘Because we have nice knickers now.’ Hirsch discovers, alongside the wonder of menstrual rituals and tribal tats, that wearing beads across one’s belly is a great African way to demonstrate a) that you are fertile and b) you have a chunky ass. Why don’t you wear them, she asks her Ghanaian-British mum? To which comes the glorious reply: ‘As soon as we heard about Marks & Spencer’s underwear, we stopped wearing beads…’ Exactly. All those desperately poor African ladies who hold up their sanitary / undergarment equipment with beads around their bellies would love a pair of comfy high-street knickers, even if wealthy writers like Afua Hirsch frown upon such basic desires. Give me good underwear over tribal realness any day of the week.
Fundamentally, this is a daft book. It bemoans Western capitalism while singing the praises of billionaires like Oprah Winfrey and Rihanna. (And the people, black and white, whose labour is exploited by Oprah’s media machine and Rihanna’s make-up machine? Shush! Don’t mention them.) It attacks cultural appropriation while telling the tale of this hyper-privileged Londoner who gets ‘adorned’ in the fashions of ancient Africans.
I hate to be the one to ask this, but how is it any different for a privately educated woman of colour from Wimbledon to experiment in the cultures and jewelleries of African nations than it is for a right-on white ‘appropriator’ to do the same? It would be like me donning the animal skins my ancestors wore as they searched high and low for grub in the wilds of pre-modern Ireland. ‘Wanker’ would be the cry of friends and family if I were to put on the rough uniform of my tragic, regressive forebears.
Hirsch’s retreat from modernity into the witchy traditions of old is some rich lady shit. Anyone who can traipse through London to attend menstrual rituals and traverse Africa to examine beads and pants is clearly someone with too much time on their hands. And that’s the rub. Identity politics is a fundamentally privileged pursuit. Indeed, it is the means through which the well-off launder their class privilege and turn it into oppression. There is nothing in Ms Hirsch’s plush, lovely life that can be described as oppression – apart from being asked The Question, of course… – and so she plunders ancient communities for little pieces of victimhood she might claim as her own. And thus is her cultural power in the here and now fortified, with more of that hottest currency of all: ethnic suffering.
Hirsch’s book confirms that the new elites have retreated from reason, fleeing from Enlightenment into the tattooed arms of fashionable tribalism. ‘Educated people, and people like me, [were] brought up to learn about, understand and respect science’, she writes, but now many of us are ‘following our curiosity’ and embracing ‘systems of ancestral knowledge’. Yes you are. From ‘decolonise the curriculum’ to the upper-middle-class fads for everything from African jewellery to Tibetan spiritualism, the right-on and rich are turning their backs on modernity and its gains and knowledge. Knock yourselves out. The rest of us, however, who have no cultural clout to gain from dabbling in magic and other ancient bullshit, prefer science, civilisation and comfortable undergarments.
==
These people are fucking bonkers. They think they're the most fascinating and enlightened people on the planet, when they're just the most mediocre, narcissistic people, using big, empty, academic, jargony words to hide the fact they're completely fucking insane.
For the record, Hirsch's ancestors are Norwegian, German-Jewish, British and Ghanaian. So her appropriation of African aesthetics isn't actually any more meaningful than espousing her Norwegian viking ancestry.
The Enlightenment, humanism, and democracy are under attack by an illiberal, postmodernist movement known as Critical Social Justice. We bri
By: Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman
Published: Oct 2, 2023
Note: A version of this article will appear as an invited chapter in the forthcoming volume The Free Inquiry Papers edited by Robert Maranto, Lee Jussim, and Sally Satel.
1. An age of unreason
The liberal enlightenment, humanism, and democracy are under siege. A once-obscure postmodernist worldview, Critical Social Justice (CSJ) [1-3], has escaped the academy and is quickly reshaping our institutions and society at large. Long-standing merit-based practices in science are rapidly being subordinated to practices based on the tenets of CSJ theory [4]. Increasingly, scientists must compete for funding, no longer only on the basis of scientific merit, but also on the basis of how their proposed research will promote the goals of CSJ. As an example, an NIH neurology program requires grant applications to include a “plan for enhancing diverse perspectives” with the goal to “bring about the culture change necessary to address the inequities and systemic biases in biomedical research….” [5] Similarly, funding for fundamental research in chemistry and physics now depends on researchers demonstrating their commitment to “promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence” [6].
In the academy, faculty hiring and administrative appointments are increasingly made on the basis of the candidate’s identity [7-9]. Merit-based admission to schools and universities is being weakened, with standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT being abandoned on “social justice” grounds [10,11]. K–12 is affected as well. Some school districts have stopped giving D and F grades in order to improve “equity” [12]. In math classes, activist teachers claim that getting the right answer and showing your work are white supremacist concepts and are advocating, instead, a supposedly anti-racist CSJ pedagogy [13,14]. Accelerated mathematics programs for gifted students, necessary to prepare them for advanced training and careers in STEM [15], are being dismantled in the name of “social justice” [16-18]. Many school districts have eliminated honors classes altogether in the name of “equity” [19]. The resultant weakening of the workforce has already contributed to the fall of the US from its position as the world leader in science [20].
In the university, faculty and staff are instructed to use Newspeak—neopronouns and other neologisms—in their written and verbal communications for the purpose of “inclusivity” [21,22]. To be avoided are such apparently un-inclusive terms as “strawman,” “brown-bag lunch,” and “picnic” [22–25]. Professional societies and corporations are following suit, proscribing terms such as “field,” “dark times,” “black market,” “double-blind study,” “nursing mother,” “hip-hip hooray,” “smart phone,” “homeless,” and “the French” [26–30].
In biology, an education paper recommends that teachers emphasize the sexual diversity across species in nature, which includes “organisms such as ciliates, algae, and fungi [that] have equal-size gametes (isogamy) and do not therefore have gametic sexes [that is, binary sexes, as mammals do].” This is supposed to promote inclusivity of LGBTQIA2+ students in the classroom [25]. Chemistry education also needs to be reformed, according to the journal Chemical Education, which published a virtual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) collection of 67 papers exploring such topics as decolonization of the chemistry curriculum, chemistry and racism, and gender and sexual orientation identities in the chemistry classroom [31]. A recent paper in the same journal describes “a special topic class in chemistry on feminism and science as a tool to disrupt the dysconcious racism in STEM,” which explores “the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism.” “To problematize time as a linear social construct,” the paper says, “the Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of wave-particle duality was utilized” [32]. No, Deepak Chopra was not a co-author of the paper.
In STEM, prospective faculty are asked to pledge their commitment to the ideology of CSJ and to document their activism in advancing DEI [8,9,33,34]. Medical schools are abolishing long-accepted assessments of competency in order to improve racial parity in residency programs [35]. A pamphlet published by the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health claims that public health anti-obesity campaigns are an example of “fatphobia,” that public health’s “focus on body size is rooted in racism,” that “higher weight is not causal to worse health outcomes," and that “focusing on weight ignores systematic injustices” [36,37]. Under the doctrine of gender-affirming care, adolescents are offered life-changing transgender treatments, often after only perfunctory psychological assessment, despite the poor understanding that medicine currently has on the risks and benefits of these treatments [38–40].
[ Unreason and intolerance. Upper left: Yale students protest “offensive” Halloween costumes (2015). Lower left: Activists burn books by J.K. Rowling (2023). Right: Students at UC Davis disrupt a film viewing by throwing a bag of manure into the room. ]
Free speech itself, the cornerstone of liberal democracy, is under attack. As viewed by CSJ activists, free speech is dangerous, harmful, and equivalent to violence [41]. Adherents of DEI ideology believe that DEI should trump academic freedom [42]. Institutions essential for providing a platform for the marketplace of ideas, information exchange, and debate have largely abandoned their mission in the name of social justice activism. Articles in the press are infused with CSJ ideology [4]. Scientific publishers from Scientific American to the flagship journals Science and Nature have become mouthpieces for CSJ [43–56]. Universities, whose primary mission is education and truth seeking, have become complicit in censorship, scholarship suppression, indoctrination, and intimidation [57–59]. Universities and professional organizations have compromised their mission as seekers and communicators of objective truths by abandoning traditional institutional neutrality in favor of political activism, taking official positions on elections, police reform, abortion, wars, and other social issues [60,61], leaving dissenters out in the cold. Where debate, constructive disagreement, and discussion were once cultivated, conformity and dogmatism, enforced both top-down (by CSJ-infused DEI trainings [62,63]) and bottom-up (by ideologically driven activists [58]), now reign.
On campus, another essential provision of democracy, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, no longer guides procedures for resolving conflict. Suspensions and terminations of professors without a hearing in response to offense taken by students, faculty members, or administrators has become commonplace (see, for example, Ref. 64–67). A predictable consequence is that there is now an unprecedented level of self-censorship by students and faculty [57,68,69]. Proposed changes to Title IX regulations will further erode the free speech of students and the protection of due process [70].
CSJ adherents accuse dissenters of being indifferent to existing inequalities and historic injustices, of being bigots, of having nefarious motives, and of perpetuating existing power structures. We reject these accusations. We oppose the practices of CSJ because they harm everyone, including those groups they purport to elevate [71-73]. It is precisely because we care about the existing problems in the world and about real social justice that we oppose CSJ.
What we are witnessing today—curriculum “decolonization,” the elimination of honors classes in schools, the ubiquitous war on merit [4], the imposition of political litmus tests for academic positions, Newspeak, the renaming of everything in sight, and on and on—are not isolated excesses perpetrated by a handful of overly zealous but otherwise well-meaning individuals; they are symptoms of a wholesale takeover of our institutions by an illiberal movement that currently has the upper hand. The current situation is not a pendulum that has swung too far and will self-correct [74]; it is a train hurtling full speed toward a cliff. Those of us unwillingly to go over the edge can either jump off—leave academia (or maybe start up alternative institutions)—or fight to get the brakes applied before it is too late. The remainder of this chapter is about the latter course of action.
2. Why we should fight
To put it simply, we should fight because it is the right thing to do. It is not only our duty to the next generation, but an opportunity to pay our debt to the previous generations of dissenters who fought against forces of illiberalism to create the free and prosperous world that we enjoy today [75,76]. By fighting, we, too, can fend off the forces of unreason and restore the values of humanism, liberalism, and The Enlightenment. Inaction and submission will only enable the further spread of illiberalism. The history of past illiberal regimes, such as the USSR and Nazi Germany, provide ample lessons and motivation to stand and fight today. The train is gaining momentum; the longer we wait, the harder it will be to stop it. We must act now, while we still can.
Although there are uncanny parallels with totalitarian regimes of the past [23,77–80], we are still living in a free, democratic society. Despite the advances of illiberal ideology, manifested by the rise of censorship, the spread of cancel culture [23,57,58,81–83], and the proliferation of institutionalized structures (such as DEI bureaucracies) to enforce CSJ ideology, the dissenters of today do not face incarceration in prisons, labor camps, and mental hospitals. Nonetheless, we can learn from history.
In his book To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter [84], Vladimir Bukovsky [85] describes his experiences as a dissident who refused to comply with the Soviets and challenged the regime. Bukovsky describes the apathy and complacency of the majority of the population at that time. People understood the corrupt and inhumane nature of the regime, but they chose to keep their heads down because—as the Russian proverb goes—“No man can splay the stone” (in Russian: плетью обуха не перешибёшь).
Because of this complacency, the economically bankrupt, oppressive, and inhumane Soviet regime lasted as long as it did (70+ years). But it was the actions of dissidents that ultimately catalyzed its downfall. Consider, for example, the impact of the books of Solzhenitsyn, who told the world the truth about the atrocities of the Soviet regime [86]. In addition to meticulously documenting the scale of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn explained that they came to be, not due to deviations from the party line or shortcomings of its individual leaders, but as the direct result of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
In Bukovsky’s time (the late 1950s to mid-1970s), open dissent was rare. Growing up in the Soviet Union, I [Anna]—as most of my peers—did not even know dissidents existed. It wasn’t until Perestroyka in the late 80s, when I read Solzhenitsyn’s books and learned about Sakharov [87] that I found out. Yet, it is through the actions of the dissidents that the West came to understand the Soviet regime as an “evil empire,” and this understanding propelled the political forces in the West that ultimately decided the outcome of the Cold War. The impact of the dissident movement on the Soviet regime has been illuminated through a series of memoranda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, stolen and published by Bukovsky in his book Judgment in Moscow [88]. The acts of individuals splayed the stone after all.
I [Anna] was born (in the then-Soviet state of Ukraine) into the luckiest generation in the history of the USSR—the generation that witnessed the fall of the Wall when they were still young. We could escape to the free world, live as free people, and build successful and fulfilling careers in the West. Had the regime lasted another 20 years, my generation would have been yet another of the long list of those whose lives were ruined by the Soviet regime. I feel a personal debt to the dissidents of the day.
Now, it is our turn to be the dissidents and to fight the good fight.
Fighting for what is right is not just the right thing to do; it is empowering. Standing up and speaking your mind is liberating, even exhilarating; while hunkering down in fear, hoping the storm will pass, is a bleak experience. Being honest feels good, while being complicit in lies is dispiriting. Fighting the good fight puts you in control, whereas passive submission leaves you helpless. Whether we ultimately win or lose this fight, those who choose to remain silent will look back and ask themselves why they did not act when they could. As Martin Niemöller wrote after World War II,
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Eventually, this illiberal movement, like those of the past, will come not only for the dissidents, but for the silent bystanders as well (and, eventually, for its own vocal supporters).
There are myriad excuses, as old as the history of totalitarianism and oppression itself, invoked to justify inaction, complacency, and collaboration. Bukovsky [84] enumerates a few of the more familiar: “What can I do alone?”; “I’ll be more effective after I get the promotion”; “It’s not my job; I’m a scientist.” “If I don’t collaborate, someone else will anyway (and I’ll probably do less harm).” These reasons may seem logical, even compelling; however, they are self-deceptions. Not pushing back against bad ideas allows them to spread. Not fighting back against illiberalism allows it to grow. Not standing up for truth permits the lies to flourish. Not confronting the CSJ ideologists permits them to advance. And when they advance, we lose. It is a zero-sum game.
The choice to fight in the face of potential consequences is personal [89] and not an easy one to make. But as you contemplate whether to act or to lay low, consider the importance of truth and integrity in your life. To paraphrase Bari Weiss: Worship truth more than Yale. As she says:
[D]o not lose sight of what is essential. Professional prestige is not essential. Being popular is not essential. Getting your child into an elite preschool is not essential. Doing the right thing is essential. Telling the truth is essential. Protecting your kids is essential. [90]
Sure, no one wants to become a martyr for free speech or experience bullying, ostracism, and professional damage [81,91–93]. Cancel culture is real, but the risks are not what dissenters to totalitarian regimes faced historically or face today—cancel culture does not put you in jail. One still can write a dissenting op-ed without the fear of being stripped of their citizenship and expelled from the country, as Solzhenitsyn was for his writings [83]. We still can criticize DEI policies without fear of being put under house arrest, as Sakharov was for his vocal opposition to nuclear weapons and his unwavering defense of human rights [87]. But if we delay, some of the totalitarian nightmares of the past may become a reality. There are already worrying signs of this totalitarian-style repression in America: parents opposing CSJ in schools have been accused of terrorism and investigated by the FBI [94]; a journalist who wrote about collusion between the government and social media was paid a surprise home visit by the Internal Revenue Service [95]; a student who questioned the concept of microaggressions [96] at a mandatory training was expelled and forced to “seek to psychological services” [97]. These incidents in America today are chillingly similar to practices in Russia in the Soviet era, when the KGB routinely investigated dissidents, and dissent from Soviet ideology was considered a psychiatric disorder [84,88]. In the absence of resistance, this illiberal movement, like illiberal movements of the past, will gain ever more power, and we will face ever worse repression and erosion of individual freedom.
Inaction does not guarantee survival, but fighting a successful fight does. The only way to defend yourself against repression by an illiberal ideology is to stop the spread of the ideology.
The dangers of inaction are real, but how much risk one should take must be a personal decision [89]. Above all, it rarely does any good to get fired. Getting fired is playing into their hands. It’s one less enemy in the organization to fight against its ideological capture. Should all the dissidents get fired, the ideology wins. Full stop.
But it’s not hopeless. As we elaborate below, there are ways to maximize the impact of your actions and minimize the chances of negative consequences of resistance.
3. How to fight
Although there is no sure-fire roadmap to solve the current crisis, there are some do’s and don’ts. A recently published handbook, Counter Wokecraft (which we highly recommend), written by an anonymous STEM professor, provides concrete recommendations for staging the resistance [98]. It convincingly explains how small but deliberate actions add up to big change and elaborates on the perils of delaying action. In what follows, we offer our view on how to fight, and we share examples of successful acts of resistance that give us reason for hope. Small contributions add up, so do something rather than nothing. As Gad Saad writes in The Parasitic Mind:
The battle of ideas knows no boundaries, so there is plenty to do. If you are a student and hear your professors spouting postmodern nonsense or spewing anti-science drivel, challenge them politely and constructively. If you are a graduate and your alma mater is violating its commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of thought, withdraw your donations—and let the school know why. If your Facebook friends are posting comments with which you disagree, engage them and offer an alternative viewpoint.... If you are sitting at your local pub having a conversation about a sensitive topic, do not refrain from speaking your mind. If your politicians are succumbing to suicidal political correctness, vote them out of office. [99]
1. Educate yourself; knowledge is power.
To effectively counter the ideology of CSJ, it is crucial to understand its nature and the tactics it employs. As two-time Nobel Laureate Marie Sklodowska-Curie said:
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so we may fear less.
Although Curie was referring to phenomena of the natural world, the observation applies equally to the world of ideas. By understanding the origins and tenets of CSJ, we can fear less—and fight more effectively.
For me [Anna] and my former compatriots, who were forcibly schooled in Marxist-Leninism and experienced its implementation as Socialism firsthand, it is easy to recognize the current illiberal movement’s philosophical roots [78,79]. We recognize the familiar rhetoric and the Orwellian co-option of the language: the media outlet of the Communist Party, which disseminated its lies, was called Pravda (Правда), which is Russian for “truth”; victims of Red terror were called “enemies of the people” (враги народа); Soviet troops invading other countries were called “liberators” (освободители); and nuclear weapons were developed with the slogan “nucleus for the cause of peace” (атом—делу мира). We are used to looking behind the facade of nice-sounding words and seeing their real meaning to those in power [100]. It is not hard to see that today’s “Diversity,” “Equity,” and “Inclusion” have about as much in common with the noble concepts of diversity, equality, and inclusion as Orwell's Ministry of Love had to do with love or his Ministry of Plenty had to do with plenty. (A more-fitting operational definition of DEI would be Discrimination, Entitlement, and Intimidation.) This linguistic tactic is used because it works. It has fooled many STEM academics and ordinary citizens and has enabled the illiberal ideology to get its foot in the door [3].
As Counter Wokecraft explains, the tactics CSJ employs to gain power in our institutions include the use of liberal-sounding “crossover words” to shroud the illiberal aims of the movement [98]. The concise essay “DEI: a Trojan Horse for Critical Social Justice in Science” by the same author offers insights into the philosophy that undergirds the CSJ movement and clearly elucidates its aims [3]. For a deeper dive into CSJ, we recommend the book by Pluckrose and Lindsay [1].
2. Use all existing means of resistance, but first and foremost, the official ones.
Mechanisms of resistance are available through existing institutions, even if the institutions themselves are failing to protect their mission [101]. These mechanisms can be exploited to change the institution from within.
Bukovsky describes how their dissident group worked within the legal boundaries of the Soviet regime [84]. He contrasts this approach with anarchism and revolutionary destructivism, which, he argues, lead to outcomes that are worse than the original evils. Bukovsky and his dissident comrades structured their activism and resistance within the framework of the Soviet constitution—which many legitimately considered to be a joke. When allowed to speak in court, Bukovsky framed his defense to emphasize the constitutional rights of Soviet citizens, for example, to peacefully demonstrate. Bukovsky attributes their success to this strategy. As an example of an important victory, he describes how he and his fellow political prisoners managed to resist and ultimately eliminate mandatory “corrective labor” for political prisoners. Following legal protocols, they rolled out a concerted effort of filing official complaints. Although isolated complaints never had any effect (they would be registered, duly processed, and dismissed), by flooding the bureaucratic system with a massive number of such complaints (which each had to be properly registered and responded to), they pushed the system beyond its limits. The sheer number of complaints compelled administrative scrutiny of the prison and its officers. And the prisoners won the fight.
Today, we can work within the system of our universities and professional organizations, even if they have already been ideologically corrupted. We can participate in surveys; communicate our concerns to leadership; nominate candidates committed to liberal principles to committees and leadership; vote against CSJ ideologues; speak up against practices that violate the stated mission of the institution [43,102,103]; publish well-reasoned opinion pieces [4,14,15,23,82,83,102]; and insist that our institutions adhere to their stated institutional (and legal) commitments to free speech and non-discrimination, such as being equal opportunity employers. Counter Wokecraft [98] provides concrete suggestions on how to effectively oppose the advances of the CSJ agenda by simply insisting that standard protocols of decision-making be followed—that is, through formal meetings with organized discussions that adhere to a set agenda, vote by secret ballot, and so on. In short, the existing governance structures and institutional policies can still be utilized to defend and even restore the institutional mission, even when the institution’s workings have been undermined by CSJ activists.
The following success stories illustrate the effectiveness of working within the system.
At the University of Massachusetts, a faculty group fought—and won—against a proposed rewriting of the university mission statement, which would have redefined the purpose of the university as engaging in political and ideological activism, rather than pursuing the truth [104].
Faculty at the University of Chicago succeeded in having departmental statements that violated institutional neutrality (by voicing collective support for specific social and political issues in violation of the University’s Kalven Report [105]) rescinded [106].
Also at the University of Chicago, in response to faculty complaints to the institution’s Title IX coordinator and general counsel, at least seven programs that gave preferences to specific races or sexes in violation of Federal regulations were discontinued [106].
The faculty of the University of Washington voted down a proposal to require DEI statements for all tenure and promotion candidates [107]. As reported to us, an email campaign initiated by a single faculty member was decisive in defeating the proposal.
At the University of North Carolina (UNC), the Board of Trustees adopted [108] the Chicago Free Speech Principles [109] and Kalven Report [105]. The former articulates the university’s commitment to free speech and is considered to be a model policy on this issue; the latter ensures institutional neutrality, prohibiting units of the university from taking stands on moral, political, or ideological issues, unless they directly affect the mission of the institution.
Also at UNC, responding to a faculty petition, the Board of Governors moved to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements from its hiring and promotion process. The mandate states that the university “shall neither solicit nor require an employee or applicant for academic admission or employment to affirmatively ascribe to or opine about beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles regarding matters of contemporary political debate or social action as a condition to admission, employment, or professional advancement” [110].
In California, mathematicians organized a petition that has, so far, blocked the implementation of radical, CSJ-based revisions to the K–12 math curriculum [18]. At the time of publication, the fight is not over; but they’ve won so far.
A new nonprofit, Do No Harm, has been formed to fight against the encroachment of identity politics in medicine [111]. Among their successes, filings with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against two medical schools has resulted in the elimination of race as a requirement for certain scholarships. Scholarships “meant for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, [a] worthy goal, can and should be met without racial discrimination,” writes the organization’s founder [112].
Adverse publicity and mockery, too, can cause Universities, which are sensitive to their public image, to roll back woke policies, as the following examples illustrate.
The administration of MIT reversed its own decision and reinstated the use of standardized tests for admission [113], the elimination of which had been mocked by dissidents [114].
The Stanford University “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” website, which listed 161 verboten expressions, including “beating a dead horse,” “white paper,” “insane,” and even “American,” was taken down after sustained mockery in the press and on social media. The university’s president ultimately disowned the initiative and reaffirmed the university’s commitment to free speech [29].
At the University of Southern California, the interim provost made a clear statement that “the university does not maintain a list of banned or discouraged words” in response to the mockery [115] of an earlier memorandum the university's School of Social Work announcing the cancellation of the word “field” as racist [26,29].
At Texas Tech, the administration announced that it was dropping mandatory DEI statements from the hiring process [116], after details of how these statements influenced hiring decisions had been publicized [9].
These examples illustrate the maxim that sunlight is the best disinfectant [117]. We can use social media and the press to shine a light on the excesses of CSJ to bring about change.
Pressure from state governments can also force universities to change course away from DEI ideology. Facing threats from the state assembly to cut funding, the University of Wisconsin system has announced it will eliminate mandatory DEI statements for job applicants. As we are writing this chapter, the state assembly is also threatening to eliminate funding for administrative positions at UW dedicated to DEI [118].
Arizona has also dealt a blow to DEI ideology. The state’s Board of Regents has mandated that public universities drop the use of DEI statements in hiring. The move was in response to a finding by the Goldwater Institute that DEI statements, which were required in over three-fourths of job postings, were being used “to circumvent the state’s constitutional prohibition against political litmus tests in public educational institutions” [119].
Organizations such as the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have successfully used institutions’ own governing policies and bylaws as well as the law to defend scores of scholars who have been attacked for their extramural speech and threatened with administrative discipline or firing [120,121].
A move is afoot to strengthen universities’ commitment to academic freedom by encouraging them to officially adopt the Chicago Trifecta (the Kalven report, the Chicago Principles, and the Shils report). The “Restoring Academic Freedom” letter [122], which calls on universities to do so, has garnered 1700 signatures so far.
3. Don't play their game: You can’t win.
We are trained to seek compromises and solutions that bring different groups on board; we seek consensus. That is a fine approach under normal circumstances, when all agents are acting in good faith. But we must recognize that we are up against agents who are driven—knowingly or unknowingly—by an ideology whose goal is to take over the institution. Every compromise with them brings them closer to their goal [1,3,74,98,123]. Therefore, we must stand our ground.
A major advance in the spread of illiberalism has been the establishment of DEI bureaucracies in our intuitions to enforce CSJ ideology through policy [3,8,98,124-127]. It is important to understand the power of this system and to distinguish the system from the people. A DEI apparatchik can be a nice, well-meaning individual, who has been fooled by the movement’s deliberately deceptive language [1,98]; a cynical opportunist who seeks power and career advancement; or a True Believer. A DEI administrator may be completely unaware of the philosophical origins of CSJ, whose goals the DEI machine has been installed to implement. But just as a Soviet apparatchik need not have read Das Kapital to have been an agent enforcing conformity to Marxist doctrine, a DEI apparatchik need not have read the works of the critical theorists Gramsci, Derrida, Foucault, Bell, Crenshaw, and Delgado to be implementing CSJ-inspired ideology. But even participants who are naive of the movement’s history, philosophy, or ultimate goals are furthering its aims; they are still cogs in the machine. Do not be fooled by DEI administrators who may naively or deceptively deny that they are advancing CSJ ideology. They are, whether or not they know it or acknowledge it.
The power of the system—the DEI bureaucracy—and its ideological foundation make the motivations of the individual participants irrelevant. The story of Tabia Lee illustrates this point [128]. Lee—a black woman who directed a DEI program at a community college in California—questioned anti-racist and gender orthodoxy, declined to join a “socialist network,” objected to land acknowledgments and Newspeak terms such as “Latinx,” “Filipinx,” and neopronouns, and supported a campus event focused on Jewish inclusion and antisemitism. Lee describes her non-orthodox worldview as follows:
I don’t have ideological or viewpoint fidelity to anyone. I’m looking for what’s going to help people and what will help our students and how we can be better teachers and our best teaching selves. [128]
This attitude was found to be incompatible with the ideology of DEI. When Lee refused to change her worldview to comply with the orthodoxy, she was terminated from her position [128].
The establishment of the DEI bureaucracy in our institutions represented a tectonic shift from CSJ as a grass-roots movement to CSJ as an official power structure within the university equipped with a massive budget to promote its ideology [124,126,129-132].
A 2021 report by the Heritage Foundation [130], which documented the size of this new bureaucracy, identified 3,000 administrators with DEI responsibilities among the 65 universities they surveyed [124,131]. This number is in addition to the already extensive staff of Federally mandated Title VI, Title IX, and disability offices, who also perform DEI-related tasks. The new diversicrats already outnumber the mandated staffers. For example, the average university examined had 4.2 DEI personnel for every one ADA compliance administrator [124]. Given the sheer number of DEI officials and their generous salaries (one-third of chief diversity officers are paid more than $200,000 annually [132]), it is not surprising that DEI budgets are enormous; for example, in 2021, UC–Berkeley dedicated 41 million dollars to DEI [129].
The DEI bureaucracy is given official status within the university and is empowered to interfere in faculty hiring, to disseminate CSJ ideology by means of mandatory trainings, to infuse the ideology into teaching [10,13,16,25,31], and to curtail academic freedom [42,127]. Khalid and Snyder provide insight into the logic and financial incentives behind the DEI machine:
This attitude was found to be incompatible with the ideology of DEI. When Lee refused to change her worldview to comply with the orthodoxy, she was terminated from her position [128].
The establishment of the DEI bureaucracy in our institutions represented a tectonic shift from CSJ as a grass-roots movement to CSJ as an official power structure within the university equipped with a massive budget to promote its ideology [124,126,129-132].
A 2021 report by the Heritage Foundation [130], which documented the size of this new bureaucracy, identified 3,000 administrators with DEI responsibilities among the 65 universities they surveyed [124,131]. This number is in addition to the already extensive staff of Federally mandated Title VI, Title IX, and disability offices, who also perform DEI-related tasks. The new diversicrats already outnumber the mandated staffers. For example, the average university examined had 4.2 DEI personnel for every one ADA compliance administrator [124]. Given the sheer number of DEI officials and their generous salaries (one-third of chief diversity officers are paid more than $200,000 annually [132]), it is not surprising that DEI budgets are enormous; for example, in 2021, UC–Berkeley dedicated 41 million dollars to DEI [129].
The DEI bureaucracy is given official status within the university and is empowered to interfere in faculty hiring, to disseminate CSJ ideology by means of mandatory trainings, to infuse the ideology into teaching [10,13,16,25,31], and to curtail academic freedom [42,127]. Khalid and Snyder provide insight into the logic and financial incentives behind the DEI machine:
DEI Inc. is a logic, a lingo, and a set of administrative policies and practices. The logic is as follows: Education is a product, students are consumers, and campus diversity is a customer-service issue that needs to be administered from the top down. (“Chief Diversity Officers,” according to an article in Diversity Officer Magazine, “are best defined as ‘change-management specialists.’”) DEI Inc. purveys a safety-and-security model of learning that is highly attuned to harm and that conflates respect for minority students with unwavering affirmation and validation.
Lived experience, the intent–impact gap, microaggressions, trigger warnings, inclusive excellence. You know the language of DEI Inc. when you hear it. It’s a combination of management-consultant buzzwords, social justice slogans, and “therapy speak.” The standard package of DEI Inc. administrative “initiatives” should be familiar too, from antiracism trainings to bias-response teams and mandatory diversity statements for hiring and promotion. [127]
The DEI bureaucracy is a categorical enemy. Don't deceive yourself that you can work with it to accomplish good for your institution [128]. This bureaucracy is founded on ideas that are in direct opposition to the liberal enlightenment and humanism [1,3,4,42,79,99,125–128,133,134]. Their goals are not your goals; consequently, you cannot ally or compromise with them. We must, instead, focus our efforts on stripping the DEI bureaucracy of its power, ideally, ridding the institution of it completely. This will not be an easy fight, but neither is it an impossible dream. State legislatures are already taking action against DEI. At the time of this writing, 35 states have introduced bills that would restrict or ban DEI offices and staff, mandatory DEI training, diversity statements, and/or identity-based preferences for hiring and admissions [135]. Recognizing that such bills could go too far and compromise academic freedom, the Manhattan Institute has drafted model legislation that would abolish DEI bureaucracies on campuses while preserving academic freedom [136]. To date, at least one state, Texas, has enacted legislation based on the Manhattan Institute’s model [137].
Another reason not to attempt to work with the DEI bureaucracy is that CSJ ideology leaves no space for rational dialog. As explained by McWhorter [71], Pincourt [3,98], Pluckrose [1], Saad [99], and others, CSJ is not a rational or empirical worldview, but an ideology whose adherents have accepted a set of unfalsifiable tenets that may not be questioned. Thus, CSJ ideologues are not open to reasoned arguments that contradict their worldview; it is, thus, futile to argue with them. We need, instead, to reason with those of our colleagues who have not yet drunk of the Kool Aid.
Finally, since the goal of CSJ is to take over the institution, small compromises with them ultimately lead to large losses for us. Give CSJ an inch, and it will take a mile. Consider, for starters, the following example, in which the dean of the Duke Divinity School made the mistake of conceding to student activists, which led to ever-increasing demands and personal attacks on the dean herself [138]. “The chickens have come home to roost at Duke’s divinity school,” writes John Staddon. Dean Heath, the dean of the school, fully allied herself with the CSJ agenda, rolled out a variety of DEI initiatives, issued a self-flagellating editorial admitting the “structural sins” of the school, and forced non-conforming faculty to resign. Yet, despite these concessions, the demands of “marginalized groups” only grew stronger, culminating in uncivil acts, such as the disruption of the dean’s state-of-the-school address by “four dissident female students bearing bull-horns and chanting, ‘I am somebody and I won’t be stopped by nobody,’ followed by a rap, a little theatrical performance [of a rude nature].”
Staddon writes:
There is poetic justice in this incident. Despite the dean’s earnest attempts “to provide a welcoming and safe place for students,” even after she designed “a space for the work of Sacred Worth, the LGBTQIA+ student group in the Divinity School”—even after disciplining, and losing—Professor Griffiths [a non-conforming faculty], in spite all this, she has apparently not done enough! The LGBT folk want more, much more, in the form of 15 demands. “We make up an integral part of this community, and yet our needs remain deliberately unheard.”
The demands include:
“To appoint a black trans woman or gender non-conforming theologian” as well as “a tenure-track trans woman theologian” and a “tenure-track queer theologian of color, preferably a black or indigenous person.”
A dissident MIT website, the Babbling Beaver [139], illustrates the same point by a mock resignation statement by MIT’s former President Reif:
You would think giving them a Women’s and Gender Studies Program, hiring six dozen DEI deans and staffers, most of whom couldn’t pass 18.01 [MIT’s introductory math course] if their lives depended on it, and cancelling invited lecturers to appease shouting Twitter mobs would be enough,” lamented the weary lame duck. “But noooo ... The only thing I accomplished by giving in to the incessant demands was encouraging additional demands, each more strident than the last.” [140]
The statement is satire, but the concessions made by the president and the ever-increasing demands were real.
Stories of how CSJ, once it is let in the door, rapidly infiltrates the organization and eventually takes it over are too many to enumerate. We present but one example, where the process has been meticulously documented. The report, spon.sored by the organization Alumni and Donors Unite, explains how CSJ took over University of San Diego “first gradually then suddenly.”
Gradually, over the course of a decade, CSJ-DEI became sown into the university’s fabric through changes in hiring committees and curriculum. Then suddenly in 2020–2021 the administration, outside all normal channels of decision-making, initiated a hostile takeover of USD and adopted a radical woke agenda into nearly all facets of the university’s life. [141]
The devaluation of merit and intellectual honesty in the guise of social justice that we now witness will inevitably lead to the decline of our institutions, if not to their destruction [4]. A case in point is The Evergreen State University, which, in 2017, experienced a notorious CSJ uprising on campus [142]. Since then, the university has suffered a 25% drop in enrollment and has lost 45 faculty through lay-offs and attrition [143].
Learn how to recognize and take on categorical enemies [98]. Remember—it is a zero sum game.
4. Focus on truth, not partisanship. Do not fear verbal attacks.
When you take on CSJ, there is something you will need to come to terms with: you are going to be called names, and your views and beliefs are going to be distorted and misrepresented. These are standard tactics of the CSJ movement. Since the adherents of CSJ have adopted an ideological, rather than a rational, worldview, they cannot rationally defend it; so they use the only tools they have: personal attacks and strawman arguments. They will call you transphobe, racist, misogynist, alt-right, Nazi, etc., no matter what you say or do. They will use deliberate misrepresentation of your expressions to subvert and discredit them [98]. They will use the “Motte and Bailey” trick [144] to derail conversations. Learn about these tactics so that you can anticipate, recognize, and counter them [98]. As Gad Saad explains:
The name calling and accusations are locked and loaded threats, ready to be deployed against you should you dare to question the relevant progressive tenets. Most people are too afraid to be accused of being racist or misogynist, and so they cover in silence.… Don't fall prey to this silencing strategy. Be assured in your principles and stand ready to defend them with the ferocity of a honey badger. [99]
Because you will be attacked no matter what you believe, what you say, or how carefully you say it, there is no point in affirming in your interactions with CSJ ideologues that you are committed to traditional humanistic, liberal values. They don’t care. In her essay “I'm a Progressive, Please Don't Hurt Me,” Sarah Haider calls this practice of hedging “throat-clearing” and explains why it is not effective [145]. She also points out the hidden bigotry of it, that is, the implicit assumption that those on the other side of the aisle are inherently evil. Haider writes:
Before touching on any perspective that I knew to not be kosher among other Leftists, I tended to precede with some version of throat-clearing: “I’m on the left” or “I’ve voted Democrat my whole life.”
I told myself that this was a distinction worth insisting on because 1) it was the truth and 2) because it helped frame the discussion properly—making clear that the argument is coming from someone who values what they value.
But there was another reason too. My political identity reminders were a plea to be considered fully and charitably, to not be villainized and presumed to be motivated by “hate.”
The precursor belief to this, of course, is that actual conservatives should not be taken charitably, are rightfully villainized, and really are motivated by “hate.”
But I’m done sputtering indignantly about being mischaracterized as “conservative,” or going out of my way to remind the audience that I really am a good little liberal.
She goes on to explain that throat-clearing is counterproductive because: (1) it doesn’t work, you won't be spared; (2) it is a tax on energy and attention; (3) it is bad for you; and (4) it is bad for the causes you care about.
So we should stop worrying about our group loyalties and focus on our cause. Truth wears no clothes, so do not try to dress it up in partisan attire. Say what you mean, mean what you say, and move on.
It may be tempting to stay out of the fight in order to preserve friendships. It is true that some people you thought of as friends may turn against you—privately or even publicly. It has happened to us, and it hurts. But it also lets you know who your real friends are—those who stick up for you whether they agree with your views or not. And you will find new friends and allies who share your values. These relationships, forged fighting the good fight, will be enduring and empowering.
5. Do not apologize.
We cannot stress this enough. Your apology will be taken as a sign of weakness and will not absolve you—in fact, it will make matters worse. Apologies to the illiberal mob are like drops of blood in the water to a pack of sharks. Additionally, your apology can be interpreted as an admission of guilt, which can come back to haunt you in the event you need to defend yourself legally or in an administrative proceeding. The Academic Freedom Alliance advises: “If you confess to an offense you didn’t commit, or if you concede to a claim or accusation that is factually inaccurate or not truly an offense, the admission can and will be used against you.” [146] Recognize that the CSJ activists on Twitter do not care about your apology; they care about publicly flaying you in order to sow fear among other potential dissenters [147]. Someone claims to have been offended by your speech? Someone claims it caused them pain? Fine, that's their problem [148]. You know what your views are. And your friends do too. Stay on message.
6. Build a community and a network.
Communities and networks provide moral support and there is safety in numbers. Some groups already exist. The Heterodox Academy (HxA), for example, provides a platform to organize communities (e.g., HxSTEM is a community of STEM faculty) and to connect with colleagues who are open to reasoned debate, as per the HxA statement, which each member is asked to endorse: “I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education.” The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) also provides resources and support to those who push back on anti-humanistic policies, especially in schools, universities, and in the medical profession.
Organizations like FIRE and the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) provide educational resources, opportunities to network, and—most importantly—protection, including legal representation. Join and support them. Build groups and act as a group—e.g., write an op-ed piece with a group of co-authors. Ten people are harder to cancel than one. Counter Wokecraft describes how to identify the allies among your colleagues and how to build effective resistance at your workplace [98].
Stand up for others. Next time they will do it for you. When you see a colleague being ostracized for what she said, think first, “Which parts of her message do I agree with?” not “Which parts do I disagree with?” If you agree with the main message, say so, and be charitable about imperfect expression. Way too often do we hear colleagues justifying their silence with excuses like “I agree with her in general, but she should have been more careful about how she said this or that.”
Some communities, including mathematicians and psychologists, in response to CSJ takeovers of their professional societies, have simply started new ones [149,150]. Perhaps we need more of these to send a strong message to the old societies that they need to change course. We see evidence of the effectiveness of this strategy; for example, the American Mathematical Society [151] cancelled its CSJ-dominated blog shortly after the establishment of the new Association for Mathematical Research [149], whose apolitical mission is simply to “support mathematical research and scholarship.”
In 2022, in response to increasing ideological influence and censorship in their profession, behavioral scientists founded the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, dedicated to “open inquiry, civil debate, and rigorous standards” in the field [152]. It publishes the Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, which commits to “free inquiry,” “rigorous standards,” and “intellectual exchange” [152]. Notably, its terms and conditions state that the journal will base retraction decisions strictly on the basis of the widely accepted COPE guidelines [153]; otherwise, the terms and conditions state, “We will never retract a paper in response to social media mobs, open or private letters calling for retraction, denunciation petitions, or the like....” [154]
There is even a new university—The University of Austin (UATX)—established in response to the current crisis in higher education [155]. The message on the UATX webpage—“We are building a university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth”—makes clear what void in the American academy UATX aspires to fill [156]. That the university received over $100 million in donations and over 3500 inquiries by professors from other institutions within six months of the project’s announcement, makes clear the demand [157].
The success of such new initiatives will inspire more educators and scientists to stand up and defend the key principles of science and education. And it will send a strong message to our leadership. Even if we cannot appeal to their sense of duty, the financial considerations (Go Woke, Go Broke [158]) and the effect of negative publicity of the excesses of CSJ (such as DEI loyalty oaths, “decolonizing” the curriculum, renaming everything, and Newspeak [9,23,24,139]) may provide incentives to straighten out their act.
4. Conclusion
Will we succeed? Will we stop the train before it goes over the cliff? We do not know what will happen if we fight. But we know what will happen if we don’t. The task ahead might look impossible. But remember the USSR. It looked like an unbreakable power, yet in the end it collapsed like a house of cards. The Berlin Wall looked indestructible, yet it came down overnight. Recalling his 20 years’ experience in the gay marriage debate, Jonathan Rauch told us: “I can tell you that the wall of received opinion is sturdy and impenetrable...until it isn't. And that it's the quiet people in the room who are the swing vote.... and please illegitimi non carborundum [159].”
We are not helpless. We have agency and we should not be afraid to exercise it. We should fight not just because it is the right thing to do, but because fighting brings results. If we behave as if we were living in a totalitarian society, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Afterword
A Russian proverb says, “Fear has big eyes” (у страха глаза велики), meaning that people tend to exaggerate danger. Accordingly, it may feel like resisting the mob will inevitably lead to career damage. But this is not the case; the flip side of risk is reward. In recognition of her activism, including her publication of “The Peril of Politicizing Science” [23], which “launched a national conversation among scientists and the general public,” Anna Krylov, co-author of this chapter, was awarded the inaugural Communicator of the Year Award, Sciences and Mathematics, by the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences [160]. In “Victory Lap” [161], Lee Jussim, co-editor of the book in which this article will appear, documents how as a result of his public resistance to a mob attack on a colleague falsely accused of racism, his career enjoyed a variety of benefits including additional conferences invitations, massive positive public support for his activism, national attention to his scholarship, and an appointment to a departmental chair (with commensurate increase in salary), which he was offered because he had demonstrated that he could take the heat.
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Stop saying "nO oNe iS sAyInG aNy oF tHiS!!" They are. You know they are. Dotted throughout the article are references to sources for quotes and claims. For the list of references, see: References.
Liberalism really is under attack. It's always been under attack from the religous right, but its influence has diminished over time, with society becoming increasingly secular and irreligious, or at least indifferent to religious influence. And principles like the US's First Amendment keep it, at least in theory, from breaching the threshold.
But where the religious attack is on the downswing, the attack from the illiberal left is on the upswing, and both more rapid and more successful, having infiltrated everything from government to science and even knitting clubs. And it hides behind nice-sounding words like "equity" and "diversity," people don't recognize it for what it is, and welcome it inside in a way they don't welcome religious intrusion.
This isn't about left vs right. It's about do we want a liberal society, or do we want a rampantly illiberal, or indeed anti-liberal society?
Universities cannot withstand the assault on objective truth.
By: Mark Goldblatt
Published: Feb 7, 2023
Several years ago, in the pre-pandemic world of in-person meetings, a newly hired colleague at Fashion Institute of Technology proposed an LGBT-themed sociology course before the School of Liberal Arts. This is a necessary step in getting the course approved by the college-wide curriculum committee. It’s a time for constructive feedback and occasional tweaking before the final committee vote.
It was a good course. The proposal was clear and concise, indicating not only a command of the relevant literature but a sensitivity to students’ interests, expectations, and ability to handle the workload. But I noticed an apparently minor, easily correctable issue. Among the learning outcomes listed was a requirement that students develop a greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ perspectives and rights. That struck me as problematic. I happen to think that such acceptance is a good thing, but to stipulate it as a learning outcome raises a knotty question. If a student masters the course material, turns in the required work, and passes the exams, but doesn’t exhibit that acceptance, is he going to fail?
After expressing my general admiration for the course, I raised my misgiving in the following way (and this is nearly an exact quote): “We need to keep in mind that we’re a state university. Our mission is to pursue, ascertain, and disseminate objective truth, and to equip our students to do the same. Given that mission, I don’t think we can list a learning outcome that requires students’ assent on a matter of personal morality. The other learning outcomes are fine. You don’t need that one, so I’d just cut it.” My colleague was fresh out of graduate school and not yet tenured, which (theoretically) put her in a vulnerable position. Nevertheless, she became apoplectic; so angry, in fact, that she had difficulty getting out her first sentence. “I can’t believe people still think that way!” she spluttered. “Queer Theory has deconstructed objectivity!”
Her words hung in the air as I glanced around the room. Not a single faculty member, not even those in math or sciences, seemed fazed by her categorical statement. Since I was a tenured professor, I was reluctant to debate an untenured colleague during a school meeting. So, I let the matter drop. The course was approved without revision by the School of Liberal Arts, and went on to gain approval by the curriculum committee. And that is how my college got into the business of winning converts.
That moment haunts me as I begin my final semester before retirement—not only because faculty on the state payroll have deliberately crossed the critical line from pursuing the truth to professing The Way, but also because the Enlightenment sensibility that finds such mission creep objectionable seems to be passing from the scene. The “deconstructive turn”—as the critic Christopher Norris once called it—is nothing more than a verbal sleight-of-hand. It invites us to tease out secondary and tertiary senses of words to show how a text contradicts what it seems to be saying, free-associate our way to philosophical banalities or outright non-sequiturs, and finally glaze the mishmash with a layer of impenetrable jargon. If a reader is foolish enough to attempt to make sense of what is being said, he’ll get bogged down before he can figure out nothing is being said at all.
When Jacques Derrida, the renowned “father of deconstruction,” was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University in 1992, 20 of the world’s preeminent philosophers—including W.V. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus—signed a letter of protest, in which they argued:
M. Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some marks of writings in that discipline. … In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor. … M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists. … Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.
The claim that Queer Theory has “deconstructed objectivity” means only that a certain number of academic performance artists have doodled with a cluster of words related to the concept of objectivity in order to gain university employment, win friends, and influence a distressingly large number of gullible fans. But no epistemological breakthrough has come of their efforts: if it had, it would be self-refuting since it would consist of an objective truth about the impossibility of objectivity. (At a lecture I attended 40 years ago, a debonair British postmodernist stated that Derrida had shown us how it was possible to formulate a consistent argument with a contradiction in it. When I inquired how, in that case, we could recognize an inconsistent argument, the question was met with actual hisses from his acolytes. I’m still waiting for an answer.)
Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis. The statement “Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis” is itself objectively true. And Queer Theorists make objective truth claims all the time—as when they cite statistical evidence of harms visited upon the LGBT community or proving the reality of climate change. One of the silent faculty members at the meeting I mentioned, also near retirement, had devoted his entire distinguished career to combatting the effects of global warming. You’d think he’d be miffed at the suggestion that such effects were not objectively real. But no, he just sat in silence like everyone else.
Either he didn’t understand or didn’t take seriously the implications of what our new colleague was saying. The latter possibility seems the far likelier one. My sense, based on hundreds of informal conversations I’ve had with STEM faculty, is that people working in the hard sciences tend to roll their eyes at the alleged insights of postmodernism. They inhabit a world in which truth is still gauged by correspondence between belief and reality, and in which reality exists independently of our beliefs about it. Generally speaking, they don’t give a rat’s ass about discourse communities and meta-narratives. They want to know if the equations balance, if the instruments work, and if their hypotheses match empirical outcomes. In other words, they are interested in discovering if what they believe to be true is objectively true. They are certainly not interested in the ethnicity, sexuality, or gender identity of the people making truth claims.
Put all of that together, and you’ve got the makings of a schism. The humanities and social sciences are undergoing a mission reversion—they’re returning to a pre-Enlightenment view of the purpose of higher education. Prior to the Enlightenment, universities were sites of religious instruction that trained clergy. Harvard was founded in 1636, a mere six years after the settlement of Massachusetts Bay, to ensure that future generations of New England Puritans would be served by learned ministers. That goal is found among Harvard’s original “Rules and Precepts”:
Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome [i.e., at the base of the boat, to keep it steady in the water], as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.
That’s a version of what we’re seeing with the rise of the subjectivist movement in the humanities and social sciences. It is a new secular faith, a version of The Way. Instruction in radical progressive curricula is baptism by accreditation. It’s witness and testing. You gather for three hours a week to dwell in the spirit, commit yourself to individual rituals and collective causes, despair the fallen state of humanity, call out and cast out demons, immerse yourself in sacred texts and memorize venerable chants, then venture forth to spread the gospel. The end is performative, sacramental. Let me tell you the many ways you’re oppressed so that you may be a river to the masses.
Increasingly, that is the state of the humanities and social sciences at public universities in the US. Whatever you think of that development, it signals an existential crisis for higher education because instruction in the STEM fields at American universities remains traditional, objectively focused, and globally competitive. The reversion of the humanities and social sciences to religious preparation cannot coexist indefinitely with the Enlightenment mission of STEM instruction. Something has to give.
What, for example, becomes of science textbooks that report that only female mammals give birth? (Pity the poor seahorse, hitherto famous as the only species in which the male gives birth. But for how long?) You cannot be told in your morning sociology seminar that the pursuit of objectivity is an instrument of white supremacist culture, which must therefore be deconstructed, and then be told in your afternoon biology class that identical twins are objectively always the same sex.
It’s natural to expect the demand for severing ties to come from the professoriate on the STEM side, from a desire not to be sidetracked in their pursuit of objective truth. More likely, though, as evidenced by that liberal arts meeting at FIT, the demand will come from the humanities and social science side, caused by the unbearable adjacency of reality-based standards and scholarship to the postmodern insistence that the demand for objectivity is oppressive.
Entrance into STEM fields requires rigorous standards of assessment, as does progression and graduation. Rigorous standards of assessment, however, don’t produce equity or (objectively!) diverse student populations. Asian students are currently overrepresented in STEM, black students underrepresented; male students are overrepresented, female students underrepresented. According to the tenets of progressive activism, demographic imbalances of that nature constitute de facto proof of racial and gender bias since in an unbiased system every demographic would be proportionally represented. How long will student activists, encouraged by humanities and social science faculty, tolerate this alleged injustice on their campuses?
The disintegration of academia is coming. Whichever side precipitates the break, it will be a necessary development. Higher education is a serious intellectual endeavor, and nothing is less intellectually serious in contemporary academia than the suggestion that the pursuit of objectivity has been discredited. Empirical observation, mathematical inquiry, inductive and deductive reasoning, and falsifiability are the sine qua nons of higher education. As courses of study in the humanities and social sciences depart from such things, they cease to be higher education in the Enlightenment sense.
[ Via: https://archive.is/vQvgg ]
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It's pivotal moments like this that inform what comes next. That realization something was really wrong here, with that hesitation, that second-guessing, that telling the truth might upset them, that it would just be easier to let this one slide, that instinct to just go along to get along, and the creeping recognition a group delusion was going on.
Who would have thought that the downfall of western academia could be powered by the worst, most pretentious and puerile French philosophy which can be encapulated as an academic formalization of the Equivocation Fallacy, and language games worthy of a 7 year old who just discovered a book of knock-knock jokes?
It was a mistake to think that nobody would take this seriously. It was a mistake to think that it wouldn't leak out of the bogus Fantasy Studies domains within Humanities which they'd invented and credentialed themselves in. And it was damn sure a mistake to give them a seat at the grown-ups table as far as knowledge claims and knowledge production.
To paraphrase Sam Harris, those who reject objective reality belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of knowledge.
Denying objective reality should be regarded as an announcement they do not live in it. This is a definition of delusional, not a definition of intellectual.
There is one other possibility to explain the oddity of the Enlightenment thinkers ending up so prominently in the firing line of our era. And that is this: The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth. The project that Hume and others worked away on was to ground an understanding of the world in verifiable fact. Miracles and other phenomena that had been a normal part of the world of ideas before their era suddenly lost all their footholds. The age of reason did not produce the age of Aquarius, but it put claims that were ungrounded in fact on the back foot for the best part of two centuries.
By contrast, what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: “my truth.” The idea that I have “my truth” and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking. Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out.
And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: “me.”
-- Douglas Murray, “The War on the West”
In the pre-Enlightenment times, the Word of God was authoritative. How he could know was through divine wisdom, inaccessible to no one. God knew everything, and his word was not to be questioned or doubted.
As we lurch towards the risk of a post-Enlightenment era, the Word of Me becomes authoritative. How “Me” could know is through “lived experience,” inaccessible to no one else. The subjective is the way to know everything, and “my truth” is not to be questioned or doubted.
