#idea laundering

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This might be funny if it wasn't pipelining pure toxic excrement into the waters of our knowledge-making institutions.

By: Michael Shermer

Published: Nov 21, 2024

The day after the 2024 election, journalist Paul D. Thacker posted on his X account a series of expletive-filled posts from Laura Helmuth’s Bluesky account, in which she apologised “to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists,” upbraided high-school classmates for celebrating Trump’s win—“fuck them to the moon and back”—and described her home state of Indiana as “racist and sexist.”

The ensuing media firestorm led Helmuth to delete the comments and offer an unconvincing apology for her “offensive and inappropriate posts,” asserting that she ‘respects and values people across the political spectrum’ and remains “committed to civil communication and editorial objectivity.”

Even Elon Musk got in on the pile-on after Helmuth asked for advice on what workplaces could do to help people “devastated” by the election results—implying that her colleagues had all voted Democrat.

Shortly afterwards, the president of Scientific American, Kimberly Lau, released the following public statement:

Laura Helmuth has decided to move on from her position as editor in chief of Scientific American. We thank Laura for her four years leading Scientific American during which time the magazine won major science communications awards and saw the establishment of a reimagined digital newsroom. We wish her well for the future.

Helmuth made her own announcement on Bluesky, stating that she had “decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years” and was “going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching).” Birdwatching here is the equivalent of an embattled politician who resigns in order to “spend more time with my family.” The pretext fools no one, but is plausible enough that the proclaimer may hope readers will believe that other people believe it.

I was a monthly columnist at Scientific American for nearly 18 years. On hearing this news, I emailed a number of people associated with the magazine to inquire what had transpired there—and more broadly why they think Helmuth and others allowed, or even encouraged, far-left politics to intrude into the pages of that once-storied publication. Very few people responded and those who did not only offered no comment but asked me to not even mention the fact that I had contacted them. What is going on here?

In his 2008 book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker notes:

Merely being asked certain questions can put a person at a disadvantage, since one answer might be damaging, the other would be a lie, and a refusal to answer would be a de facto confession that those are the respondent’s two options. Witnesses who exercise their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination by refusing to answer a question often do incriminate themselves in the court of public opinion.

I asked Pinker how this might apply to this specific case. He responded by email:

[C]ommunication takes place on two levels: the content of the message, and the common knowledge that stating the message generates. A source that ratifies what you (and the world) already know—that Helmuth was temperamentally unqualified for the job and damaged the institution, while they went along with it—would be confessing their own lack of integrity and courage, together with their willingness to kick a former colleague while she’s down. On the other hand, they could not deny it without forfeiting all claims to credibility and honesty. And by saying “no comment” they’d be acknowledging (that is, generating common knowledge) that those were their two options.

There is an additional factor at work here, of course: left-wing political bias. Imagine what would have happened if the editor-in-chief of Scientific American had spoken about or published articles on the average difference in IQ test scores between white and black Americans and argued that the gap might be partially due to genetics—or, alternatively, if she had correctly stated that, on average, women score higher than men in trait Neuroticism on the Big 5 personality scale and suggested that that is why there are fewer female than male Fortune 500 CEOs. She would surely have been summarily fired and publicly denounced and we would have been told that such comments or articles “do not reflect the positions or policies of Scientific American or its governing board or staff; we apologise to all who have been harmed by them.” She would almost certainly not have been thanked for her years of loyal service and offered good wishes for her future.

The ideological capture of the publication began years before Laura Helmuth took the helm in 2020, as I documented in my first Skeptic Substack column.

I wrote 214 consecutive monthly columns for Sci Am, from 2001–19. Only two of these were rejected, both in 2018. One, on “The Fallacy of Excluded Exceptions,” argued that sexually abusive parents have not always been victims of childhood sexual abuse themselves. As I explain, counterfactual examples refute the hypothesis that being an abuser can be attributed to having experienced abuse oneself. There are sexually abusive parents who were never abused as children, and there are abused children who grow up to be loving, non-abusive parents. But my editor rejected the article on the grounds that “we’re unwilling to publish a piece that suggests… that sexual harassment and the phenomenon of abused children growing up to be abusers are less of a problem than most people imagine.” This response misses the point entirely, as I explained to him at the time:

I understand why we need to be sensitive to victims of abuse, but from a purely scientific hypothesis-testing perspective, it doesn’t serve society to refuse to consider the other cells in the matrix that contain disconfirming evidence of the hypothesis just because someone is committed to the hypothesis that abused children grow up to be abusers, and abusive adults were abused as children. The evidence shows otherwise. It should be okay to point that out.

He still found the thesis unacceptable and I had to revise the column into its much blander published version.

Sci Am also rejected my next column—“Dreams Deferred”—which was ultimately published here in Quillette. In that piece, I argue that Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” is now being undermined by identity politics, which I describe as “the collectivization of individuals into groups competing for status and power,” not only by race but also by gender identity, sexual orientation, class, religion, ethnicity, language, dialect, education, generation, occupation, political party, disability, marital status, and more. “The division of people into such aggregate identities is a perverse inversion of Dr. King’s dream,” I write. The editor summarised the argument of this piece as “everything is wonderful and everyone should all stop whining” (which is not at all what I wrote) and asked me to submit an entirely new column on a completely different topic.

Historian Robert Conquest once observed that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” I would modify this slightly: Any organisation that is not explicitly politically neutral eventually drifts to the political left. This tendency has been apparent at Scientific American for some time now. The following articles were all published under Laura Helmuth’s editorship.

In “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy” (5 July 2021), author Allison Hopper asserts that creationists are ipso facto white supremacists because in the Genesis story of Cain and Abel, Cain is punished for his fratricide by “a darkening of his descendants’ skin.” However, this is not how mainstream creationists interpret that passage and, indeed, polls consistently show a larger percentage of blacks than whites hold creationist beliefs, motivated in this by religious faith, not racism.

“Modern Mathematics Confronts its White Patriarchal Past” (12 August 2021) asserts that the reason why women and black people are underrepresented in mathematics departments is because of misogyny and racism. This ignores the gender and racial imbalance among applicants for such jobs. As a 2019 Women in Mathematics survey points out, “senior faculty composition both reflects the BA and PhD pipeline of prior years, and also influences the gender composition of new graduates.” In addition, men do not dominate all academic fields. In fact, a 2019 Council of Graduate Schools study found that—for the eleventh year in a row—women earned more doctoral degrees at US universities than men (41,943 vs. 37,365, i.e. 52.9 vs. 47.1 percent). Although women make up a smaller proportion of doctorates in engineering (25.1 percent), mathematics and computer sciences (26.8 percent), physical and earth sciences (35.1 percent), and business (46.7 percent), they outnumber men in public administration (73.6 percent), health and medical sciences (71 percent), education (68.4 percent), social and behavioural sciences (61 percent), arts and humanities (51.9 percent), and biological sciences (51.4 percent). Are we to believe that patriarchy and misogyny exist only in some fields but not others?

In “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson” (29 December 2021), published three days after the renowned evolutionary biologist’s death at the age of 92, author Monica R. McLemore writes that “we must reckon with his and other scientists’ racist ideas if we want an equitable future.” This calumny against one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century was so egregious that it caused a cavalcade of Wilson’s colleagues, post-docs, students, friends, and supporters to come to his defence.

“The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather is Wrong” (1 November 2023) ignores the fact that a comprehensive overview of all studies has shown that only 6–16 percent of hunter-gatherer societies “show signs of female hunting with any regularity” and that “even in societies where women hunt, they hunt to a much lesser extent than do men.” The authors extrapolate from the almost certainly false idea that prehistoric women hunted as much as men did to the conclusion that “[i]nequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” This is pure blank slate pablum, which can be controverted by a single observation: As she herself has admitted, Serena Williams would not be able to beat any of the top 100 male tennis players.

Perhaps the most absurd of these articles is “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ is Problematic for Describing Programs that Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” (23 September 2021). The authors argue:

Although they’re ostensibly heroes within the Star Wars universe, the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work. They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.). The Jedi are also an exclusionary cult, membership to which is partly predicated on the possession of heightened psychic and physical abilities (or “Force-sensitivity”). Strikingly, Force-wielding talents are narratively explained in Star Wars not merely in spiritual terms but also in ableist and eugenic ones: These supernatural powers are naturalized as biological, hereditary attributes.

Phallic lightsabers?

Then there were the public endorsements of presidential candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and—as if all this were not problematic enough for a magazine with the word “scientific” in its title—the editors threw their weight behind the youth gender medicine and trans lobby, claiming that gender-affirming care for trans kids is good health care (it isn’t), that “rapid onset gender dysphoria” is not a thing (it most certainly is), and that biological sex is on a spectrum (it is binary). Numerous scientists published rebuttals of these dubious claims, including evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins and biologist Colin Wright.

As investigative journalist Jesse Singal argues:

Scientific American has hermetically sealed itself and its readers inside a comforting, delusional cocoon in which we know youth gender medicine works, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and only bigots and ignoramuses suggest otherwise. Over and over, SciAm simply took what certain activist groups were saying about these treatments and repeated it, basically verbatim, effectively laundering medical misinformation and providing it with the imprimatur of a highly regarded science magazine.

When Wright corrected birdwatching enthusiast Helmuth’s claim that white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis) have four sexes, she simply blocked him:

Does anyone actually believe such things? It seems some do and Laura Helmuth appears to be one of them. That is the most charitable assessment I can make of what has happened to the publication that inspired a dozen generations of budding scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians, and scholars. As in other science publications, along with mainstream media outlets, some corporations, and nearly all academic institutions, the people promulgating these woke ideas are mostly true believers—and the fervour of their faith only makes them all the more able to convince themselves of the truth of claims that everyone else can see have little-to-no contact with reality. Men do not menstruate and cannot get pregnant; women do not have penises and do not produce sperm; and transwomen—who are men—do not belong in women’s sports, locker rooms, bathrooms, prisons, or any other spaces designated for women only. No amount of ideological wishful thinking will change this.

Perhaps some—or even most—of the staff at Scientific American and other similar institutions do not support these ideological contaminations of science; they just want to go about their lives without being harassed by activists. Some may be virtue signalling without actually believing in any of the nonsense they are spouting, while others may be opportunists, capitalising on pluralistic ignorance: i.e. the fact that each individual is under the illusion that everyone else believes such shibboleths as the idea that human beings have more than two sexes (although, in fact, most people do not).

But the social environment is rapidly changing. Thanks to Donald Trump’s election, together with relentless pushback from political centrists and old-school liberals who are sick of being harangued by overzealous activists who accuse anyone who disagrees with them of bigotry, the pendulum may at long last be starting to swing back towards normalcy. Election postmortems and surveys have consistently identified the fact-free ideological capture of the Democratic party as a major factor in their defeat. The Left is in dire need of a course correction. Will that happen? Given what we know about the power of irrational belief, I am not at all confident that it will. Let’s hope I’m wrong, though—not only for the sake of the future of a once-great magazine, but for the sake of the American nation.

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[ Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/birt.12844 ]

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When I say that the Humanities is rife with academic fraud, I worry that people think I'm kidding, being hyperbolic or otherwise exaggerating. On the contrary. It's not possible to undersell it.

All of this is fake. It's bogus. It's fraudulent. It does not exist.

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By: Michael Sherman

Published: May 8, 2023

On May 7, 2023 a new documentary series by the filmmaker Michael Nayna, titled The Reformers, premiers on Substack (Part 1 is free, the additional 3 parts are paywalled). It's worth watching. The series is about the Sokal Squared hoaxed papers that revealed the hallow obscurantism of grievance studies. Here’s the description and trailer:

Skeptic magazine revealed the first Sokal Squared hoax paper, titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies.” The original paper is full of academic balderdash. For example:

We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.

And:

We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.

And:

Inasmuch as masculinity is essentially performative, so too is the conceptual penis. The penis, in the words of Judith Butler, “can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility” (Butler, 1993). The penis should not be understood as an honest expression of the performer’s intent should it be presented in a performance of masculinity or hypermasculinity. Thus, the isomorphism between the conceptual penis and what’s referred to throughout discursive feminist literature as “toxic hypermasculinity,” is one defined upon a vector of male cultural machismo braggadocio, with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of action.

In their exposé the authors of the hoaxed paper, James Lindsey and Peter Boghossian, offer two reasons for their hoax: (1) the pretentious nonsense that often passes for scholarship in postmodernism studies, and (2) the lax standards of some peer-reviewed journals. Critics of the hoax pounced on the second, claiming that the journal that published their nonsensical paper, Cogent Social Science, is a lowered-tiered journal and therefore the hoax was a failure. My motivation for publishing the exposé focused on the first problem. To me, it wouldn’t have mattered if the hoax were published in the Annals of Improbable Research, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, or even the Onion. The point, for me, is not to fool journal editors, but to expose scholarship that passes for cogent argumentation in support of a thesis that is, in fact, what Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, and their colleagues call “pseudo-profound bullshit.”

Bullshit, they write, is language “constructed to impress upon the reader some sense of profundity at the expense of a clear exposition of meaning or truth.” Bullshit is meant to impress through obfuscation; that is, to say something that sounds profound but may be nonsense. It may not be nonsense, but if you can’t tell the difference then, to quote Strother Martin’s character from the 1967 Paul Newman film Cool Hand Luke, “what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” Compare, for example, any of the passages from the “Conceptual Penis” hoax to the abstract for the 2016 paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Human Geography titled “Glaciers, Gender, and Science”:

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers—particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge—remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

When this paper was published I thought it was a hoax, so I contacted the University of Oregon, the institution of the paper’s authors, and confirmed it was real. And this is just one of countless examples, posted daily on Twitter @RealPeerReview and retweeted all over the Internet to the amusement of readers who cannot decipher what most of these articles are even about, much less comprehend their arguments and gain value from their conclusions.

What matters to me is the truth about reality (lower t and lower r), which science is best equipped to determine. Ever since the 1980s there has been a movement afoot in academia in which postmodernism has encroached on some of biology, much of social science (especially cultural anthropology), and most of history, literature, and the humanities, in which the claim is made that there is no truth to be determined because there is no reality to study. Nearly everything—from race and gender to genes and brains—is socially constructed and linguistically determined by our narratives. And the more obfuscating those narratives are about these socially constructed non-realities, the better. This is the very opposite of how science should be conducted and communicated, and it is, in part, why we are currently witnessing the campus madness involving student protests—and even violence—when their unscientific postmodern unreal worldviews collide with the reality of contradictory facts and opposing viewpoints. It’s time we put a stop to the lunacy and demand critical thinking and clear communication.

The Morality of Hoaxes

The beauty and power of a well-executed hoax is that it reveals deeper truths not only about both the victims of the hoax and the hoaxers themselves, but about human nature and the foibles of our belief systems.

Decades of careful and extensive research into cognition and the psychology of how beliefs are formed reveals that none of us simply gather facts and draw conclusions from them in an inductive process. What happens is that most of us most of the time arrive at our beliefs for a host of psychological and social reasons have little or nothing to do with logic, reason, empiricism, or data. Most of our beliefs are shaped by our parents, our siblings, our peer groups, our teachers, our mentors, our professional colleagues, and by the culture at large. We form and hold those beliefs because they provide emotional comfort, because they fit well with our life styles or career choices, or because they work within the larger context of our family dynamics or social network. Then we build back into those beliefs reasons for why we hold them. This process is driven by two well-known cognitive biases: the hindsight bias, where once an event has happened or a belief is formed it is easy to look back and reconstruct not only how it happened or was formed, but also why it had to be that way and not some other way; and the confirmation bias,, in which we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence.

Given this state of our cognitive limitations, it should not surprise us that a movement arose in the 1980s that is variously described as postmodernism, deconstructionism, or cognitive relativism. Going far beyond cognitive psychology and leaning heavily on Marxist notions of cultural and class determinism, this academic movement came to believe that there are no privileged truths, no objective reality to be discovered, and no belief, idea, hypothesis, or theory that is closer to the truth than any other. In time, the movement spilled out of lit-crit English departments into the history and philosophy of science, as professional philosophers and historians, swept up in a paroxysm of postmodern deconstruction, proffered a view of science as a relativistic game played by European white males in a reductionistic frenzy of hermeneutical hegemony, hell bent on suppressing the masses beneath the thumb of dialectical scientism and technocracy. Yes, some of them actually talk like that, and one really did call Newton’s Principia a “rape manual.”

In 1996 the New York University physicist and mathematician Alan Sokal put an end to this intellectual masturbation with one of the greatest hoaxes in academic history. Sokal penned a nonsensical article entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” choc-a-block full of postmodern phrases and deconstructionist tropes interspersed with scientific jargon, and submitted it to the journal Social Text, one of two leading publications frequented by fashionably obtuse academics. One sentence from the article, plucked randomly from the text, reads as follows:

It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.

Sokal’s article was accepted for publication (as “real”, whatever that means in postmodernism), and upon release Sokal revealed it was all a hoax, and did so, deliciously, in the chief competitor of Social Text, the journal Dissent. Sokal called it a nonsense parody, but because most of what passes for postmodernism is nonsense and indistinguishable from parody, the editors of Social Text could not tell the difference! Q.E.D.

Subsequently, Sokal published a comprehensive book-length explanation, Beyond the Hoax, that provides readers with an annotated edition of the original article (explaining how he came up with each and every meaningless phrase!), the subsequent article in Dissent in which he explained himself to the disgruntled readers of Social Text, and a number of subsequent articles and essays he wrote in the decade since the hoax in which he elaborated on the problems inherent in postmodern philosophy of science. The golden nugget within this longish book—worth the price of admission by itself—is the annotated parody. For example, explaining the above passage, divided up into the semi-colon phrases, Sokal writes (with ellipses denoting the phrase explanations):

This statement is, of course, absurd, but it reflects several conceits of “postmodern” theoretical writing. First of all, reality (even physical reality) has become in certain circles a no-no concept, which must be placed in scare quotes. … This assertion is a commonplace (dare I say a cliché) in radical-social-constructivist writing about science. Like most clichés, it contains a grain of truth but greatly exaggerates the case. Above all, it fails to make the crucial distinction between actual knowledge (i.e. rationally justified true belief) and purported knowledge. … The theory-ladenness of observations goes back at least to physicist-philosopher Pierre Duhem in 1894; it poses problems for the most naïve falsifiability theories but by no means undercuts the epistemic claims of science. … This statement is silly, but it strikes the right emotional chords: against “privilege” (especially scientists’ privilege) and in favor of the “counter-hegemonic”, the “dissident”, and the “marginalized”. … Note, finally, that the four assertions contained in this sentence are at the very least debatable (if not downright absurd); certainly some argument in their favor ought to be required. But the editors of Social Text were happy to publish an article in which these assertions are taken for granted. Apparently in certain circles nowadays these assertions are taken for granted.

Hoaxes are one of the most powerful tools of instruction and edification ever created because they reveal a weakness in human cognition involving gullibility and self-deception. As long as no one is hurt in the process and the reveal in the end is complete and honest, hoaxes are a form of magic.

Magicians, for example, intentionally deceive their audiences, but as long as they are not claiming to use paranormal or supernatural powers (so-called “real magic”), magic can be one of the best tools for understanding how the mind works by revealing how easily it is tricked. From a scientist’s and skeptic’s perspective, magicians like Penn and Teller are effective because they not only deceive their audiences, they often also reveal how the tricks are done in order to make a deeper point about deception, self-deception, and honesty. A properly executed hoax can be as entertaining and educational as a good magic show.

Moral objections to hoaxes should be reasonably considered, of course, but as long as no one is hurt in the process and the hoax is revealed in the end and shown to be executed with good intentions to make a deeper point, there is nothing unethical or immoral about hoaxing, and in fact the beauty and power of a well-executed hoax is that it reveals deeper truths not only about both the victims of the hoax and the hoaxers themselves, but about human nature and the foibles of our belief systems.

Why do people fall for such hoaxes? The hindsight bias and the confirmation bias. Once you believe that science holds no privileged position in the search for truth, and that it is just another way of knowing, it is easy to pull out of such hoaxed articles additional evidence that supports your belief. It is a very human process, and since science is conducted by very real humans, isn’t it subject to these same cognitive biases? Yes, except for one thing: the built-in process known as the scientific method.

There is progress in science, and some views really are superior to others, regardless of the color, gender, or country of origin of the scientist holding that view. Despite the fact that scientific data are “theory laden,” science is truly different than art, music, religion, and other forms of human “knowing” because it has a self-correcting mechanism built into it. If you don’t catch the flaws in your theory, the slant in your bias, or the distortion in your preferences, someone else will, usually with great glee and in a public forum, for example, a competing journal! Scientists may be biased, but science itself, for all its flaws, is still the best system ever devised for understanding how the world works.

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It's enlightening, but also disturbing, to see the nonsensical academic shibboleths that we're surrounded by today are unchanged from Sokal's hoax almost 30 years ago when he spotted the problem.

They've been concocting buzzword-laden nonsense, peddling intellectual fraud as wisdom, and inventing fake credentials through bogus journals - aka "idea laundering" - for no less than that long.

They don’t even actually arrive at a conclusion. They start with their grievance, create their conclusion, then work their way backwards.

Published: Nov. 24, 2019

You’ve almost certainly heard some of the following terms: cisgender, fat-shaming, heteronormativity, intersectionality, patriarchy, rape culture and whiteness.

The reason you’ve heard them is that politically engaged academicians have been developing concepts like these for more than 30 years, and all that time they’ve been percolating. Only recently have they begun to emerge in mainstream culture. These academicians accomplish this by passing off their ideas as knowledge; that is, as if these terms describe facts about the world and social reality. And while some of these ideas may contain bits of truth, they aren’t scientific. By and large, they’re the musings of ideologues.

How did this happen? How have those worked in what’s come to be called “grievance studies” managed to extend their ideas far beyond the academy, while convincing people that their jargon adds something meaningful to public discourse? Biologist Bret Weinstein, who was run out of Evergreen State College by a leftist mob in 2017, calls the process “idea laundering.”

It’s analogous to money laundering. Here’s how it works: First, various academics have strong moral impulses about something. For example, they perceive negative attitudes about obesity in society, and they want to stop people from making the obese feel bad about their condition. In other words, they convince themselves that the clinical concept of obesity (a medical term) is merely a story we tell ourselves about fat (a descriptive term); it’s not true or false—in this particular case, it’s a story that exists within a social power dynamic that unjustly ascribes authority to medical knowledge.

Second, academics who share these sentiments start a peer-reviewed periodical such as Fat Studies—an actual academic journal. They organize Fat Studies like every other academic journal, with a board of directors, a codified submission process, special editions with guest editors, a pool of credentialed “experts” to vet submissions, and so on. The journal’s founders, allies and collaborators then publish articles in Fat Studies and “grow” their journal. Soon, other academics with similar beliefs submit papers, which are accepted or rejected. Ideas and moral impulses go in, knowledge comes out. Voilà!

Eventually, after activist scholars petition university libraries to carry the journal, making it financially viable for a large publisher like Taylor & Francis, Fat Studies becomes established. Before long, there’s an extensive canon of academic work—ideas, prejudice, opinion and moral impulses—that has been laundered into “knowledge.”

They then have an answer when one asks the obvious question: “How could fat be just a narrative? There’s overwhelming medical evidence—A1Cs, the surge of type-2 diabetes, demonstrable risk factors—reliably indicating that excess fat is a health hazard. This has nothing to do with ‘stories we tell ourselves’ or ‘societal power structures,’ and instead directly corresponds to facts about the human body.”

In response, grievance scholars point to articles in the peer-reviewed journal Fat Studies: “Toward a Fat Pedagogy: A Study of Pedagogical Approaches Aimed at Challenging Obesity Discourse in Post-Secondary Education.” Not knowing any better, and seeing a veneer of scholarly rigor and scientific peer review, people reasonably assume that such articles are trustworthy sources of knowledge. (They assume this because it’s how the peer-reviewed process has traditionally worked: Academics try to disconfirm or falsify claims, as opposed to seeking support for them.) These articles tell us that obesity is but a narrative and there are other narratives, such as being healthy at every size, and there’s no reason to “privilege” one narrative over another.

It doesn’t stop there. Grievance scholars then use articles like those published in Fat Studies to credential themselves and receive promotion and tenure. They proceed—from the safety of professorships they’ll hold for life—to design courses around this literature. They test students on the material, marking answers right or wrong according to how closely they replicate the laundered ideas.

Within their academic ecosystems, grievance scholars hire new faculty members with similar moral commitments who’ve written for the same journals. Eventually, they institutionalize their ideas in the larger academic system. This process, which has been propagating laundered ideas for at least three decades, now has enough “scholarship” behind it to have a significant cultural impact.

Students leave the academy believing they know things they do not know. They bring this “knowledge” to their places of employment where, over time, laundered ideas and the terminology that accompanies them become normative—giving them even more unearned legitimacy. And this is why you’ve heard some of the terms we began with: cisgender, fat-shaming, heteronormativity, intersectionality, patriarchy, rape culture, and whiteness. They’ve been laundered through the peer-reviewed literature by activist scholars, then widely taught for years, before being brought into the world.

Now, at least, you won’t mistake them for knowledge.

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This academic corruption has built a canon of intellectual pseudoscience presented as quotable, citable scholarship. Despite not being subject to hostile peer review, falsification or disconfirmation - or even being in any way testable. It simply builds upon, reinterprets or invents wholecloth from its own mythology, and declares it to be insightful truth. To suggest they should look further afield than the confines of their confirmation bubble is to declare yourself to be a heathen.

These are articles of faith, like sin and salvation and the influence of the devil.

If science worked this way, science faculties would have departments of Flat Earth Sciences, Anti-Vax Sciences, Intelligent Design Sciences, and Phrenological Medicine. All ideologically motivated and internally self-referential. 

What’s scary is that that’s exactly what some ideologues are actively working towards.