#ideological capture

By: Ben Appel

Published: Mar 24, 2026

A new podcast series on tensions within the so-called LGBTQ movement delivers major revelations.

On Friday, Longview’s Reflector podcast debuted Strange Bedfellows: When LGB met T, a three-part series about how the gay rights movement became the LGBTQ movement. Ben Kawaller, a cohost of the series and its lead reporter, interviewed me for it a number of months ago. The portion of our conversation included in the final product focuses largely on my time working as a News & Rapid Response intern at GLAAD in 2017—particularly how uneasy I felt about the organization’s quickness to condemn public figures who voiced reasonable objections to trans rights initiatives or who perhaps misspoke about trans-related issues.

According to the series, GLAAD adopted this punishing ethos not long after its current president and CEO, Sarah Kate Ellis, joined the organization in 2014. Prior to that, former GLAAD president Herndon Graddick told Kawaller on the podcast, the strategy when a public figure erred was to “try to figure out a way to heal—not throw people off your side permanently, but kind of figure out a path forward that you wind up being friends.”

Graddick’s words felt vindicating, as did the message I received from a former GLAAD employee the day the podcast premiered. This individual, whom I’d never met, wrote to thank me for “verbalizing everything I felt then about the switch under SKE [Sarah Kate Ellis].” They continued: “All of a sudden, I was being asked to make the case for someone being a bigot rather than documenting their actual bigotry.”

What felt even more vindicating, though, was hearing what Graddick told Kawaller in Episode 3: “I think we need to correct what’s wrong first. And so that’s a big thing. I mean, particularly the medicalization of children.”

Kawaller narrated: “He thinks that the time has come to admit it was wrong to medicalize so many of these kids.”

Graddick continued: “Teenagers and kids should not be given the power to make these life-altering decisions that medicalization causes.”

Kawaller’s cohost, Andy Mills—who produced the 2023 podcast series The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling—was as shocked as I was to hear Graddick say this out loud. “Wait, so you’re saying that the former head of GLAAD told you it was a mistake to unquestionably support the medical treatment of these minors?” he asked Kawaller.

“Yeah,” Kawaller said, before rolling another Graddick clip.

“I just think that we should completely stop doing anything that might harm children, even if it [means we admit] that we got something really wrong, and my understanding is that we have,” Graddick said. “I think that there’s been a lot of fear about discussing things openly for fear of being called transphobic, and I think that we’re at a place that we can really have those conversations without that fear. And certainly transphobia has nothing to do with my motivation to say this, but more like, you know, let’s just get our side of the street totally clean.”

This is a big deal. Graddick joined GLAAD in 2010 and served as its president from 2012 to 2013. It was under his leadership that the organization began to shift its focus to transgender issues, even going so far as to change its name from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to simply GLAAD. In May 2013, after Graddick announced his resignation, Chad Griffin, then president of the Human Rights Campaign, issued a statement thanking Graddick for leading GLAAD in its “new and groundbreaking work” to “lift up transgender voices across the country.” That same day, The Advocate reported:

Graddick was also instrumental in GLAAD’s awareness and media competency campaigns around issues impacting the transgender community. GLAAD worked closely with the Colorado family of a transgender 6-year-old whose school refused to allow her to use the girl’s bathroom, filing a complaint with the state civil rights commission and elevating awareness about the situation.

Graddick also led GLAAD’s efforts to educate the mainstream media on how to report on transgender people, including, most recently, the murder of Cemia Acoff, reports of whose death was bungled by local media in Cleveland. In November, the organization published a comprehensive report about transphobic violence and irresponsible media reporting called Doubly Victimized, that offered guidelines for mainstream media reports on transgender issues.

On YouTube, there’s a clip from 2013 of Graddick introducing trans-identified boys Jazz Jennings and Coy Mathis—ages twelve and six at the time—on stage at GLAAD’s annual awards gala. “Earlier tonight I was asked by Ketel One who was my inspiration, and I wrote the both of you,” he told them.

No word on where Coy Mathis is today, but we know how things turned out for Jazz. He had his puberty blocked at 11 and started cross-sex hormones at 14. At 17, he underwent bottom surgery, which was unsuccessful and required at least two surgical revisions. He now battles severe mental health issues and obesity.

One of Jazz’s surgeons was Dr. Jess Ting, who was the surgical director of Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery. Last month, news outlets reported that the Epstein files revealed that Ting performed personal favors for Jeffrey Epstein, including giving 35 stitches to one of his girlfriends, a Russian undergraduate, while she was “laid out” on Epstein’s dining room table. Ting visited Epstein’s island with his own girlfriend and her children. According to Ting’s Mount Sinai profile, “Dr. Ting performs research in transgender health and his clinical practice is limited to the surgical care of the transgender/gender non-conforming community, as well as victims of female genital mutilation.”

Jazz’s other surgeon was Marci Bowers, a transwoman and the former president of WPATH. Here’s an excerpt from my book, Cis White Gay, about Bowers:

During a 2022 Duke University symposium, Bowers stated that every male whose puberty is blocked at Tanner Stage 2—the stage when the body begins to sexually mature—has never and possibly will never experience a proper orgasm. (This, of course, is on top of the fact that medical transition sterilizes them.) Bowers revealed the experimental nature of gender-affirming care by wondering aloud to the audience what the solution to this could be. Options range from removing the blockers and letting “a little bit of puberty come back” to encouraging the child to masturbate so that they know what an orgasm feels like.

As Bowers made this latter suggestion, he acknowledged that some males might experience dysphoria around their penis, but went on to say, “All a penis is is just a large clitoris—it’s all the same material—so, you know, use it for the pleasurable purposes that partially it was intended!”

To this, any thinking person might respond, “If a child getting over his dysphoria about his body is such a reasonable possibility, then why are we cutting off his penis?”

Unfortunately, none of the other panelists made a peep.

Bowers said that his work with female genital mutilation survivors, whose physical trauma has affected their ability to be intimate with their partners, is what “raised the red flag” for him about this particular issue in gender care.

To this I would say, “When the ‘care’ you provide to adolescents can be compared to female genital mutilation—that is, the excision of women’s clitorises, performed in the name of Islam, to deny them sexual pleasure—you might want to rethink what you’re doing.” And leaving aside for a moment the total impropriety of an adult encouraging a pre-pubertal child to masturbate, I find it tragic that clinicians are taking away his possibility of having his own organic sexual awakening. Rather, he is a lab rat. His sexual life begins in a sterile clinic.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’ve been speaking out against the medicalization of gender-nonconforming youth since at least April 2022, when Newsweek published my op-ed, “The New Homophobia.” Since then, I’ve been—and there’s really no other way to say this—afraid of GLAAD, which wields considerable financial, political, and cultural power. A 2024 New York Times investigation revealed the organization’s “lavish spending,” especially when it comes to Ellis, whose contract allows her to earn up to $1.3 million per year, including bonuses. The Times article begins with Ellis being chauffeured in a Mercedes to “the Tivoli Lodge, a seven-bedroom chalet that cost nearly half a million dollars to rent for the week,” where she and her colleagues stayed during the World Economic Forum in Davos. (In 2017, when I interned at GLAAD, the organization did not pay its interns.) Graddick’s remarks on the podcast, as well as the messages of support I’ve now received from two former GLAAD employees, come as a huge relief.

In the podcast,1 Ellis stands behind the medicalization of minors: “This is finished business. It’s politicians and junk science, who’s creating some kind of debate or argument about this.”

She went on: “It is not a debate. We are actually looking at the single source of truth and they are creating a conversation that doesn’t exist. It’s deeply rooted transphobia. That’s what it is, at the end of the day.”

By: Aaron Sibarium

Published: May 14, 2026

David Blackman, a native of Plano, Texas, was thrilled to be starting law school at Penn State in the fall of 2025.

A former 911 call operator and a veteran of the Texas State Guard, Blackman, 26, loved the university's football team and its location in the Appalachian Mountains.

"I’ve been a fan of Penn State since I was a teenager," Blackman told the Washington Free Beacon. He arrived on campus in August 2025, a 50 percent merit scholarship in hand, excited for game nights in Beaver Stadium and a three-year reprieve from the Texas heat.

Then he sat through his first anti-racism class.

On the first day of "Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws," a required course for all first-year law students, Blackman listened as a transgender faculty member, Emily Spottswood, explained why the course was mandatory.

"It’s not optional," Spottswood said, because "being a lawyer is about recognizing and combating injustice."

In audio of the session obtained by the Free Beacon, Spottswood said that this "institutional message" was "baked into" the law school's "DNA," adding that, as a "trans woman," the course's focus on "combatting oppression … is meaningful to me."

Spottswood's remarks followed a presentation by Jeffrey Dodge, the law school's associate dean, and Shaakirrah Sanders, who was introduced as "the first associate Dean of anti-racism and critical pedagogy in the country." The presentation made clear that Blackman wasn't in Texas anymore; he and his classmates were now conscripts in a political "coalition" that, as Dodge put it in his talk, was dedicated to "building a more anti-racist" future.

"We are taking action to disrupt and dismantle systems that racialize, subordinate, and oppress," Dodge said. "We … want to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism … as a foundation for this course."

Thus began a series of struggle sessions in which professors demanded students affirm activist talking points and ultimately drove Blackman, whose first-choice law school had been Penn State, to withdraw from the school after just one semester. (The Free Beacon reviewed Blackman's transcript.) Over the course of three 150-minute lectures, speakers described all white people as "privileged," called to "eradicate patriarchy," and asserted that the justice system is "about keeping black people in their place." One assignment said students should "consider" framing their essays around "the reality of systemic racism," implying that doing otherwise could affect a student's grade.

"Consider drawing on the instruction we provided on design thinking as a way to frame your assignment," the essay prompt read. Linked below were slides from the first session of the class, which defined "institutional anti-racism" as "acknowledg[ing] the reality of systemic racism, subordination, and oppression."

Launched in 2020 at the height of the George Floyd protests, the class is now raising questions about whether a public law school violated the First Amendment and the Civil Rights Act. Blackman withdrew from the law school after a committee convened by law school dean Danielle Conway refused to grant him an exemption from the course, which he said amounted to compelled speech. In an interview with the Free Beacon, he also noted that the course vilified white people and law enforcement and that professors assigned texts by critical race theorists without presenting an alternative perspective.

"My law degree is not worth sitting through a mandatory DEI class that spits on my entire background," said Blackman, who helped the Texas Guard deliver emergency supplies during Hurricane Beryl. "You have a lot of people who say DEI is bad, but I gave up a law career because of it."

Penn State is a land-grant university with significant ties to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (D.), who controls 9 of the 36 voting spots on the board of trustees. Along with the law school's strategic plan, which pledges to expand "employment opportunities for candidates who are underrepresented in the University," the course is a stark example of how DEI remains entrenched in many Democratic institutions even as the legal threats to such programs continue to grow.

The America First Policy Institute told the law school in April that the class creates "a racially hostile educational environment in violation of Title VI." And the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) said Penn State may have violated the First Amendment by pressuring students to "acknowledge" contested claims about white supremacy.

"That would in many cases be compelled speech," said Zach Greenberg, an attorney at FIRE, adding that the analysis would turn on whether students could question those claims without being marked down. "Even if there is not a legal case to be made, we hope that universities are open to a wide array of viewpoints when they’re teaching students."

For his part, Blackman felt pressured to toe the line. Asked to submit an essay on "systemic racism in the law," he wrote about Texas's strict drug laws—which he believed should be reformed—but framed the issue as a matter of racial justice rather than colorblind fairness.

"I added a lot of color that doesn't really stand up with my beliefs to get a passing grade," Blackman said. Penn State did not respond to a request for comment.

Blackman had been willing to put up with the readings from Paul Butler, a Georgetown University Law Center professor who argues that police are "looking for a reason to arrest" black men, and with Penn State's propensity for progressive neologisms, such as "intersectional liberal democracy." The straw that broke the camel's back was a statement from Conway, the law school's dean, condemning Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"This weekend's blanket of snow with its clean, white veneer starkly contrasts with the conflagration enveloping the rule of law," Conway wrote in a school-wide message on Jan. 26, 2026, referencing the deaths of two anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota earlier that month. "Our power lies in activating critical pedagogy to teach and learn about the importance of our nation’s constitutional order in real time and to voice the need for accountability and transparency to our representatives."

Blackman drafted a reply to the email, thanking Conway for her "effort to create space for reflection" but politely pushing back on her "one-sided view of deeply contested events," which he said could "undermine confidence in the school's neutrality."

"Leadership communications, as the public-facing voice of the law school, carry special weight," he wrote to a school-wide listserv. "It is not in the best interest of the law school, or our educational mission, to appear to prematurely assign blame before … an investigation is concluded and all facts are fully established."

But when Blackman attempted to send the email, he was notified that a moderator for the listserv had blocked the message.

"Your message was rejected by a moderator for these recipients," read the note from Kalene Faircloth, the law school's senior associate director of academic and student services, who did not provide a rationale for the decision.

Fed up with the blatant act of censorship, Blackman filed a petition with the provost's office demanding a "University-level audit of the Race and the Equal Protection of the Law … course and the concurrent administrative suppression of student speech."

"Evidence demonstrates that Penn State Dickinson Law has established a 'Closed Loop' of state-enforced orthodoxy," the seven-exhibit complaint read. "The Dean broadcasts the ideology (Exhibit D), the Curriculum compels students to advocate for it (Exhibit C), and Administrators censor legal dissent (Exhibit F)."

But rather than launch its own audit, Penn State punted the petition to Conway—the very dean who was the subject of the complaint. Conway, the executive director of Penn State's Antiracist Development Institute, was also the driving force behind the creation of the anti-racism class, which she credits with exposing students to "the structure that supports the nation's constitutional democracy."

"REPL allows us to teach that through the lens of enslavement and racism," she said in a press release about the course. "We use critical pedagogy to analyze how a governing system founded on a pledge of democratic ideals produces systemic inequity when legal, social, economic and civil obstacles limit liberty for those othered in society."

The 2024 press release also noted that Conway attends every session of the class.

"It was an obvious conflict of interest," Blackman said. He quoted a Latin saying, "nemo iudex in causa sua," which means "no one should be a judge in their own case."

On Feb. 26, the law school informed Blackman that he would not be excused from the class.

"We conclude that none of the remedial actions you seek to have the university take are required," law professor Jud Mathews said, writing on behalf of a committee Conway had convened. "To graduate from the law school, you will need to complete all required courses, including REPL."

That was the last straw. Blackman withdrew from the law school rather than complete the course, returning to Texas for a master's degree in business administration.

Before he left, he gave Conway one final piece of his mind.

"As a former member of law enforcement in the Great State of Texas, I abhor everything this class teaches and will no longer be even a passive participant in such a farce," Blackman wrote in an email on Feb. 27. "I am 'free to think, and speak as I wish, not as the government or law school demands.'"

The full audio recordings of two class sessions are included below.

==

This is "Emily" Spottswood, the man speaking in the beginning of the first audio recording.

You don't get to pretende to be "oppressed" when you can coerce others into mimicking your opinions with the threat of an undeserved failing grade.

By: George Leef

Published: Jun 17, 2026

Suppose you have a friend who knows little about American higher education but is eager to learn about it. You might want to recommend to him a book that introduces the subject with readily understood essays covering the range of problems we face.  A good choice would be Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think. The book consists of nineteen essays by people who have been on the front lines in the battle to rescue our colleges and universities from the menaces of mediocrity and politicization.

So, what has gone wrong with American higher education?

One theme that recurs throughout the book is that most of our colleges and universities have lost their sense of mission. As Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn writes in the foreword, they have converted the “sublime activity of education” into a “manufacturing operation.” Rather than working with young minds to help them learn how to discover truth, most colleges just want to process through as many graduates as possible. And worse, instead of enlightenment, students are often steeped in conflict, taught that certain groups are oppressors and others oppressed.

In his introduction, Christopher Rufo observes, “The great project of liberal education, designed to inculcate knowledge of the truth, appreciation of the beautiful, and the civic virtue necessary to advance both, has been replaced by bureaucracies, activism, anti-Western ideology and empty credentialism.” College degrees that used to betoken a wide range of knowledge and skills now signal nothing. Rufo argues that education and liberty are inextricable and we need to worry for our civilization because many students now graduate without the slightest appreciation for liberty.

Among the reasons why college has become such a poor value is the way the federal government makes it so easy to borrow to pay for it. In his chapter, Preston Cooper concludes, “For too long, colleges have taken advantage of an opaque and dysfunctional financial-aid system to strong-arm students into paying higher tuition than they would in a free and competitive market.” That’s what we need.

Can’t American students depend on colleges for a high quality education? Supposedly, our accreditation system ensures that they do, since colleges and universities (at least those that accept federal funds) have to obtain accreditation from an agency approved by the Department of Education. Unfortunately, obtaining the stamp of approval from an accrediting agency does not ensure that students receive a sound education. In their chapter, Jonathan Butcher and Madison Marino Doan disabuse readers of the notion that accreditors ensure that students receive a good education.  Accreditors, they observe, don’t actually investigate courses to see if they have serious academic standards, but instead focus on institutional inputs—and sometimes those inputs are the wrong types, such as “diversity” among faculty.  

That many American students receive a weak education in college is the theme of the chapter by Adam Kissel and Madison Marino Doan. They investigated the course offerings at many of our supposedly finest schools and found that it would be easy for students to avoid intellectually challenging ones and coast along taking courses that focus on pop culture and politics. And, generally, colleges have cashed in by luring in students with weak academic preparation by dumbing down the curriculum and offering lots of enjoyable amenities. Kissel and Doan conclude that it’s time to make college hard again and to stop subsidizing it with easy government loans.

One of the most frequently heard complaints about our colleges is that they allow faculty members to substitute political advocacy for objective teaching. In “The Leftist Monopoly Problem,” Andrew Gillen shows that this is a serious concern. Many academic fields are now completely dominated by professors who embrace a leftist worldview that is hostile to individualism, limited government and free enterprise. Such professors usually want to hire only ideological allies by screening out applicants who might voice differing views. Gillen makes it clear why this matters, writing, “When one side dominates, only truths that conform with that political ideology will be acknowledged. Inconvenient truths will be ignored, dismissed, or explained away.” Academic fields thus become hidebound and intolerant.

What is the experience of college like for today’s students? In his chapter, Kyle Washut argues that it is far different from what it used to be. He writes, “For many students, going to college at a legacy institution involves faculty who do not teach, the students themselves spending little time on learning (and what time is spent studying is on classes of little rigor or in slanted “studies” departments) and immersion in terrible experiences of loneliness and anxiety, all while spending vast amounts of money and garnering large quantities of debt.” In short, we have lost sight of the purpose of education. He argues that one step in the right direction would be a law that would empower universities with large endowments to create smaller colleges under their umbrellas with a traditional academic focus.

At the heart of our drift away from the serious, useful college education of the past into the often feeble and politicized education of the present is poor leadership. Few college and university presidents have been willing to say “no” to the ruinous trends. In his chapter, George Harne drives that point home. He writes, “Unfortunately, leaders of colleges and universities frequently derive their leadership not from the natures and highest purposes of their institutions but from the worlds of leftwing politics, moralistic-therapeutic culture, the corporate book trade, or some combination of the three.” If we are going to restore academic standards and integrity, we will need to choose leaders who are deeply committed to the educational enterprise, not to promoting themselves or their personal views.

And there is also the faculty problem, which John Sailer discusses in depth. He writes, “Today, an increasing number of faculty have come to see their scholarship as a means for advancing a political agenda. These scholars—more accurately, scholar-activists—place primacy on the categories of race, sex, and ethnicity. They often invoke faculty-lounge neologisms, such as ‘racial capitalism’ and ‘decolonization.’” Over the last several decades, the pipeline into academic life has been altered so that it greatly favors candidates from “underrepresented” groups, so long as they favor leftist activism. Those who don’t fit are filtered out.

Our college leaders love to spend money but much of their spending is on projects and programs that are inimical to the nation’s long-run good. For that reason, Jay P. Greene argues, donors ought to stop ladling money carelessly into college coffers. He suggests that billionaires direct their educational giving toward the founding of new institutions that will once again provide higher education that is untainted by politics. As for wealthy Americans who don’t have the funds to start new universities, Greene suggests that instead of trying to establish good programs at existing schools, which are apt to be taken over by leftists eventually, they direct their money to help programs at those new schools, such as the University of Austin.

Kenneth Marcus, in “Antisemitism on College Campuses,” shows how virulent that has become, as student organizations, faculty committees and even administrative programs spout anti-Semitic rhetoric and commitment to intifada. This has come about, he argues, because “ideological movements have gained influence in the humanities and social sciences, replacing the older ideal of the university as a neutral forum with a model in which higher education serves as an instrument for social and political transformation. When that view takes hold, the safeguards against bias and partiality weaken.” They certainly have.

By: Eden Cohen

Published: Aug 4, 2025

A coordinated campaign is reshaping how the world understands Zionism, Jewish history, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Wikipedia’s broken system is helping it happen.

If you’ve ever Googled anything about Jewish history, Zionism, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, chances are one of your first stops was Wikipedia. The site isn’t just another online resource; with over 15 billion page views per month, it’s become the default reference for nearly everything — from personal research to school assignments to media coverage.

But what happens when that reference point is deliberately manipulated?

Over the past year, activists have mounted a coordinated campaign to reshape how millions of readers understand the Jewish story, from ancient history to modern Zionism to the Israel-Hamas war. They have removed references to Hamas’ antisemitic charter, reframed Zionism as racism and colonialism, and systematically pushed fringe narratives into the mainstream. 

They’ve rewritten the narrative around the expulsion of Palestinians, erased records of suicide bombings to portray Palestinians as more innocent, and revised articles on ancient history to downplay or omit the Jewish people’s presence and historical connection to the land.

The issue isn’t just the edits themselves. It’s that Wikipedia’s own systems, which rely on unpaid volunteer labor, minimal oversight, and a confusing governance structure, have no reliable way to stop this kind of coordinated manipulation.

This isn’t an obscure internet issue. Wikipedia’s content shapes Google search results and powers knowledge panels (the summary boxes that appear at the top or side of your screen) for countless search terms on a wide range of topics, including “Zionism.” It also influences what’s considered “neutral” information across academia, government, social media, and newsrooms.

When Wikipedia gets Jewish history wrong, the whole world does.

So how exactly did activists hijack Wikipedia’s coverage of Jews, Israel, and antisemitism — and what does that mean for the future of truth online?

Let’s unpack it.

How Wikipedia actually works and why it’s so vulnerable

At first glance, Wikipedia looks like the internet’s ultimate democracy. Anyone can edit nearly any article at any time. Its open model invites collaboration and constant improvement… or so the theory goes.

In reality, Wikipedia is run by a relatively small group of highly active editors who dominate entire topic areas. These core contributors are enthusiastic, but often bring ideological zeal to the table instead of the neutral point of view that Wikipedia claims to uphold. They also frequently lack deep subject matter expertise. Many of these editors frequently manipulate and weaponize academic citations to fit their agendas, giving fringe ideas the appearance of scholarly legitimacy. While Wikipedia claims to value “neutrality,” that neutrality is often shaped by whoever controls the editing process for a given subject.

Administrators and arbitrators — Wikipedia’s closest equivalents to moderators or judges — are unpaid volunteers elected by other editors. Crucially, there is no requirement that admins have expertise in the subjects they oversee, even on complex or contentious topics like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Jewish history. Their authority is granted primarily through demonstrated familiarity with Wikipedia’s internal policies and social norms, not on any outside credentials. That means major editorial decisions often come down to procedural gamesmanship rather than informed judgment.

This setup can create serious vulnerabilities. Editors with coordinated agendas can influence content by outlasting or overwhelming opposition in what are known as “edit wars.” When conflicts escalate, the Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) is supposed to step in as a kind of Supreme Court. But it has just a handful of active volunteers, months-long backlogs, and a limited appetite for policing content disputes.

Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation — the nonprofit organization that oversees Wikipedia — explicitly avoids editorial involvement except in cases of legal liability. It operates more like a constitutional monarchy: the Foundation is a largely symbolic sovereign, while the real power rests with the self-governing volunteer editors.

This decentralized governance means Wikipedia depends on goodwill, expertise, and transparency to function. But when it comes to politically charged topics, those qualities are often in short supply.

In the case of Israel and Jewish history, activists with sophisticated coordination and strategic know-how have ruthlessly exploited the system’s weaknesses.

A coordinated campaign to rewrite Israel and Jewish history on Wikipedia

Since at least 2022, and with increased intensity after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks, a group of roughly 40 editors has worked systematically to reshape Wikipedia’s coverage of Israel, Zionism, Jewish history, and related topics.

This wasn’t a series of isolated edits. It was a full-scale information operation, targeting dozens of pages, including “Zionism,” the “History of Israel,” biographies of Jewish figures, and articles about terrorist organizations.

For example, the 1988 Hamas Charter, which explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews, was scrubbed or downplayed in key articles. The page on Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader who met with Hitler, was edited to remove or bury photographic evidence of this well-documented historical fact.

More alarmingly, some edits softened or sanitized descriptions of Hamas and Hezbollah, questioned their terrorist designations, and whitewashed their violent histories.

Behind the scenes, a group calling itself Tech for Palestine (TFP) coordinated many of these edits off-platform. Operating through a private Discord server, TFP used job boards, task tracking tools, and even “office hours,” to assign Wikipedia edits tasks like a political campaign.

TFP even tried to pressure British politicians by manipulating their Wikipedia pages ahead of elections in the United Kingdom. Once exposed by investigative reporting, the group deleted its logs, shut down the Discord server, and attempted to cover its tracks — but the damage had already been done to over 100 articles.

This isn’t Wikipedia malfunctioning; it’s Wikipedia working exactly as designed, and being exploited by those who know how to weaponize its vulnerabilities.

What the edits actually changed

The activists didn’t just make minor tweaks to wording. Their campaign fundamentally altered how Wikipedia presents Jewish and Israeli history. Here are some of the most significant changes:

Redefining Zionism: Articles reframed Zionism from a national liberation movement into a form of settler colonialism or racial supremacy. Language that was once confined to activist academic circles has been pushed into one of the internet’s most-read encyclopedia pages (See the current Zionism article for context).

Removing ancient Jewish history: References to the ancient Jewish presence in Israel were minimized or deleted in many articles, downplaying Jewish peoplehood and national identity in favor of more politically convenient narratives.

Whitewashing Iran’s record: Pages covering Iran’s regime were edited to remove references to Holocaust denial, antisemitism, and human rights abuses. The result is a sanitized record of one of the world’s most hostile governments toward Jews and Israel, and a leading state sponsor of terror.

Softening descriptions of Hamas and Hezbollah: Their terrorist designations were questioned or removed, and historical evidence of violence was softened or erased. Editors also rewrote the narrative on the expulsion of Palestinians and removed listings of suicide attacks to present Palestinians in a more innocent light.

Freezing debate through a moratorium: In an unprecedented move, a Wikipedia admin imposed a year-long moratorium on editing a disputed section about Zionism. This meant that no one, regardless of sourcing or new evidence, could propose changes. The biased language was effectively locked in as the “truth.” Veteran editors say such moratoriums are virtually unheard of in content disputes, highlighting just how broken Wikipedia’s internal processes have become.

A system that can’t fix itself

Wikipedia isn’t just vulnerable to manipulation; it has no effective mechanism to respond when it happens.

The Arbitration Committee serves as the platform’s Supreme Court but is hampered by its tiny volunteer base, extensive case backlog, and lack of advanced tracking tools to detect coordinated abuse. Its decisions often focus on banning individual users rather than addressing systemic bias or organized editing campaigns.

Core Wikipedia policies, including the requirement for a Neutral Point of View (NPOV), discouragement of coordinated editing (“meatpuppetry”), and prohibition of canvassing, are routinely violated on Israel-related pages. Enforcement of these policies are rare, inconsistent, and often influenced by politics.

As one longtime insider described it, Wikipedia has become a “barn fire,” a platform run by obsessive hobbyists, ideologically-driven editors, and moderators who either ignore or enable the very problems they’re supposed to prevent.

Attempts to bring in balanced, well-trained editors have mostly failed. Newcomers are often discouraged or overwhelmed by entrenched groups, while reform efforts are treated like constitutional amendments — possible in theory, but nearly impossible in practice.

Wikipedia, Google, and the pipeline of misinformation

It would be bad enough if these distortions stayed on Wikipedia. But they don’t.

Google heavily relies on Wikipedia for its top search results and Knowledge Panels — the summary boxes that appear on the right side of search results of the screen when you search for a person, place, or concept. These panels offer a quick snapshot of information, often appearing above all other sources, and are widely viewed as authoritative.

Studies estimate that Wikipedia powers more than 60% of these panels. This creates a dangerous feedback loop: Biased Wikipedia edits shape what billions of people see when they search terms like “Zionism,” “Israel,” “occupation,” or “Gaza.”

Google’s 2012 decision to cancel its own competitor project, Knol, and rely entirely on Wikipedia further entrenches this dependency and increases Wikipedia’s influence even further.

Worse still, generative AI tools like Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot pull data directly from Wikipedia when summarizing complex topics. This means misinformation is not only available but actively amplified by emerging technologies.

Why this should matter to everyone

If you care about history, truth, or the ability to have informed debate, what’s happening on Wikipedia should deeply concern you, especially if you care about how the Jewish story is told.

Wikipedia shapes how the world understands Zionism, Israel, and Jewish identity. It influences students, journalists, algorithms, and even policymakers.

When photos of Amin al-Husseini meeting with Nazis are scrubbed, when Jewish indigeneity is erased, or when antisemitic terror groups are given the benefit of the doubt, this isn’t just sloppy editing. It’s historical erasure. It distorts the Jewish story, reframes antisemitism as legitimate resistance, and rewrites reality under the guise of neutrality.

This is not harmless internet bias. It is deliberate, widespread disinformation, designed to legitimize antisemitism and delegitimize Jewish presence in their indigenous homeland.

The fight for accuracy isn’t over

Some activists and watchdog groups are pushing back. Some editors involved in coordinated manipulation have been banned. Tech for Palestine shut down its Discord server after exposure.

Reports by the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Journal, and others have helped raise public awareness.

However, reforming Wikipedia from within looks increasingly unlikely. The platform’s decentralized volunteer model and minimal oversight make systemic change difficult, especially in the face of well-organized campaigns.

Much of the power to address this problem lies with platforms like Google, which amplify Wikipedia content extensively. Experts and activists are calling for Google to stop treating Wikipedia as a primary source for contentious topics like Israel and antisemitism. Some are petitioning Google to sever Wikipedia as a source in Knowledge Panels until proper safeguards and oversight mechanisms are established. 

Others argue for creating redundant, auditable systems to monitor and verify information on contentious topics (CTOP). At a minimum, CTOP Wikipedia articles should be removed from first-page search results on major search engines until their neutrality can be independently verified. 

Google shareholders must recognize the liability risks tied to Wikipedia’s exploitation for antisemitism weaponization. Beyond Google, there are calls to engage other tech giants like Yahoo and Microsoft to deprioritize Wikipedia in their search algorithms or, at the very least, increase transparency and accountability around how its content is sourced.

Most importantly, the public needs to understand Wikipedia’s structural fragility and how easily it can be hijacked by ideological actors. A crucial part of the response is education, exposing how the platform’s exploitation to rewrite history, deny atrocities, and invert narratives is key to mobilizing broader pressure for reform.

Wikipedia is one of the most powerful information platforms on Earth. Yet its systems were never designed to handle the ideological warfare now playing out on its pages. Just a few hundred anonymous editors are deciding what billions of people read online. 

Without greater accountability, real oversight, and widespread awareness, the digital rewriting of history will continue unchecked. And this problem will not stop with Israel.

==

Compare with the entry in Grokipedia.

By: Gabrielle Temaat

Published: Jul 21, 2026

Word ‘obesity’ exacts ‘violence on fat people,’ course claimed

University of California Los Angeles and University of California San Francisco medical schools each removed requirements for certain diversity, equity, and inclusion courses following reports by the Washington Free Beacon. 

The schools told the House Committee on Education and Workforce this month “that they had discontinued mandatory social justice courses that claimed weight loss is a ‘hopeless endeavor’ and endorsed unlawful takeovers of public infrastructure,” according to the Free Beacon. 

School officials provided testimonies on UCLA’s “Structural Racism and Health Equity” course and UCSF’s “Justice and Advocacy in Medicine” course while the Trump administration is investigating the first-year curricula at these schools. 

The UCLA course condemned the use of the word “obesity,” claiming it is “used to exact violence on fat people.”

The San Francisco medical school’s social justice course “promoted an anti-Israel protest that shut down the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, delaying the delivery of frozen organs and putting transplant patients at risk,” the Free Beacon reported. 

UC San Francisco chancellor Sam Hawgood said the course didn’t meet the school’s “standards for relevance and scholarship.”

The courses were created to comply with since-removed accreditation standards mandating that medical schools teach “the importance of health care disparities and health inequities.”

At the hearing, committee chair Tim Walberg said, “These classes are filled with propaganda.”

“They are focused on topics that have nothing to do with medical science—because they seek to make medical students not into competent doctors, but into far-left activists,” he said. 

Other medical schools have also been accused of teaching ideologically-driven content. 

A 2025 Speech First report found that top medical schools are enforcing beliefs such as “weight inclusivity,” racial justice, and gender ideology on their staff and students, The College Fix previously reported. 

For example, the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School offers a “Developing Outstanding Clinical Skills” program that teaches students to embrace “weight inclusivity, arguing that weight-loss strategies foster a ‘culture of shame.’”

Students also are instructed to avoid terms such as “overweight” or “obese.”

Additionally, the Oregon Health & Science University and Portland State University School of Public Health hosts an initiative to combat “anti-fat bias,” according to its webpage. 

“The purpose of the Fat Justice Working Group is to engage students, faculty and staff of the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health (SPH) in learning, activities and advocacy to reduce weight stigma and anti-fat bias in ourselves, our School and society at large,” the webpage states.

––

BBC clean-up set to loosen activist grip on trans reporting

Censorship by the specialist LGBTQ news desk could be coming to an end after journalists were told to challenge accusations of transphobia

By: Rosamund Urwin and William Turvill

Published: Nov 15, 2025

After Tim Davie resigned as the BBC’s director-general last Sunday, a meme zipped around staff WhatsApp groups. It showed the presenter Martine Croxall reading the news above the mock headline “Tim Davie (he/ him) resigns”, with the ticker reading “anonymous BBC source rolls eyes”.

Just three days earlier, Croxall had been found to have breached impartiality guidelines when she appeared faintly exasperated after correcting “pregnant people” on her autocue to “women”.

That the BBC had been “captured” by activists promoting a “pro-trans” agenda to the detriment of women’s rights is one of the criticisms in the memo that helped precipitate the resignations of Davie and his chief executive of news, Deborah Turness.

[ Tim Davie at New Broadcasting House after his resignation as director-general ]

In this document, sent to the BBC board last month, Michael Prescott, a former journalist, claimed that the specialist LGBTQ news desk had effectively censored stories that “raised difficult questions about the trans debate”. He accused the desk of “a constant drip feed of one-sided stories … celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”.

Women within the BBC have been making that case for seven years. Emails seen by The Sunday Times show that female staff raised a catalogue of complaints with senior executives, including Jonathan Munro, now the interim head of news, Richard Burgess, the director of news, and Stuart Millar, digital news editor, but felt they were rebuffed or ignored.

Their objections ranged from stories that referred to transgender sex offenders as women despite their being biologically male, to articles that avoided using the words “girls” and “women” when discussing menstruation and birth control.

The women also described a culture of fear that had developed in the BBC where even seasoned correspondents did not dare veer from the Stonewall-mandated position on trans issues in case they were accused of “transphobia”. They added that the BBC ignored stories that could be deemed as critical of the transgender movement, despite this being covered by other outlets.

One staffer said: “Any questioning or insufficiently enthusiastic championing risked being labelled as bigoted … It felt like activism, not news.”

This took hold particularly after the publication of the 2018 LGBT Progression Review, which said that the BBC’s culture was “heteronormative” and noted: “There was a general feeling that News & Current Affairs output often presents balanced debates on LGBT issues, which were at odds with the BBC’s corporate stance on LGBT inclusion.”

Edwina Wolstencroft, a former editor on Radio 3, said she raised concerns on coverage of trans issues with both Munro and Burgess, but felt they were dismissed.

Samantha Smith, a former editor of the southwest edition of Inside Out, spoke up about reporting on the case of Karen White, a prisoner who was a biological male but identified as transgender and sexually assaulted two inmates at a women’s prison.

[ Karen White was referred to as a woman throughout the BBC’s coverage ]

Smith, who left the BBC in 2020, felt that the broadcaster should have reported that White was a man, but when she raised this in a meeting of senior managers, was told: “Trans women are women.” She felt the “undercurrent” of this statement was that she was a “bigot” who needed to be “re-educated”.

She said: “The conversation was shut down, which is a bit of a metaphor for everything that’s happened.”

Smith mentioned this experience in a submission to the 2021 Serota Review, which was set up in the wake of the Martin Bashir scandal to examine editorial processes. “I believe there is a wealth of evidence that the BBC has surrendered its core editorial principles on this topic and that has led to flagrant beaches of impartiality and loss of trust among significant parts of the audience,” she wrote.

Last year, BBC News was also criticised for referring to Scarlet Blake, a murderer and cat killer, as a woman without noting that Blake is transgender.

In 2021, LGBT activists at the BBC argued they should be involved in commissioning meetings for Radio 4’s Today although this idea is understood to have been rejected by Phil Harrold, then Davie’s chief of staff. “He gave them very short shrift,” said a BBC correspondent. “But it shows how much influence they had that they even thought this could be acceptable.”

Last year, disquiet deepened after the BBC upheld a complaint against Justin Webb, the Today presenter, who told listeners that trans women were “in other words, males”. He had been discussing the International Chess Federation’s decision to bar transgender women from competing in women’s events. Some journalists have hoped that the next director-general would overturn the rulings against Croxall and Webb and apologise to them both.

[ Justin Webb had a complaint upheld against him in the trans debate ]

After the Supreme Court ruling in April, two BBC executives wrote to members of the corporation’s LGBT network, BBC Pride, inviting them to a “listening session” and noting: “The last few days have been difficult for many of you,” upsetting some female staff who felt they had not been afforded such kindness when they felt isolated by the corporation’s position on gender.

The BBC is not monolithic, however. Deborah Cohen, who has investigated subjects including de-transitioning, told The Guardian last week that she had not felt any pressure to alter her reporting.

There are signs of change too. Last year, in a guide to reporting on sex and gender BBC presenters were told to challenge guests who accuse others of transphobia after the broadcaster admitted that news reports on JK Rowling did not meet its editorial standards. That shift seems to have accelerated since Prescott’s memo was published.

On Wednesday, Burgess told staff that the broadcaster had made mistakes in its coverage of trans issues. “Have we got everything right on it? No, I don’t think any of us would say that, but I am also pleased with the progress we have made in terms of covering that story,” he said.

That afternoon, on The Media Show, Jamie Angus, a former editor of Today, said the corporation had struggled with how to cover trans issues. “The BBC should never be in the vanguard of pushing societal change,” he argued.

The shift was arguably noticeable in the BBC’s more sympathetic interview with the Darlington nurses who were protesting against a transgender colleague’s use of their changing rooms. This month it described their colleague as “a biological male who identifies as a woman” — a significant linguistic change.

A presenter said: “Everybody in the building sees that: it has a galvanising effect. The next step is to identify correctly men who murder or rape women and pretend to be a woman — that’s a huge deal online and is damaging to the BBC’s reputation.”

One persistent flashpoint is the BBC’s style guide, which still instructs journalists to use an individual’s preferred pronouns — in effect accepting self-identification — meaning the broadcaster uses “she” for convicted male rapists who identify as women.

Cath Leng, a former chief writer who said she felt forced out of the corporation in 2023 for her gender-critical views, said: “I think the problem isn’t solved while they still have self-ID in the style guide — that is the definition of institutional bias because it means that even if journalists want to say ‘he’ [about a sexual predator], they can’t.”

She added that Turness had, however, understood the issue, writing to Leng six days before her resignation: “I am happy to assure you that we fully agree that biological sex is real and that is reflected in our editorial approach.”

Nick Wallis, a former BBC journalist known for his work on the Post Office scandal, recently turned his attention to covering transgender issues. “I think the reason that women in the BBC were ignored is just rank misogyny,” he said. “It shows how easy it is for powerful men to brush aside serious and valid concerns because they are coming out of the mouths of women.”

A BBC insider disputed the idea that the institution had been ideologically “captured” on trans issues, and said that the corporation had made changes in its recent reporting.

By: Dana Stangel-Plowe

Published: Mar 15, 2026

Five years ago, I blew the whistle on a school I loved. Did it make a difference?

I taught high school English at an independent school in New Jersey for seven years. I loved the school’s focus on resilience and growth. I loved my colleagues, who challenged and nurtured our students, including my own children, who attended the school. And I felt lucky to be part of such a vibrant learning community. That all changed in 2014. 

A young dean, fresh from an education conference hosted by the National Association of Independent Schools, led the faculty in what we now recognize as a “privilege walk,” in which participants were forced to take a step forward or back based on their identities.

[ Dana Stangel-Plowe resigned from teaching in 2021. 5 years later, she is sad to see that the environment in K-12 schools has only gotten worse. ]

Where they end up in relation to their colleagues signals how much privilege or oppression they supposedly experience.

Soon, the school hired a DEI officer, who admitted privately that her job was to “transform” the school. The oppressor–victim ideology soon appeared everywhere: weekly student programming, faculty training, and course offerings.

In my department, “dead white males” were explicitly “disinvited” from the core curriculum.

Colleagues debated whether emphasizing “logical” thinking was too Western compared to other ways of thinking. By my final year, the institutional transformation was complete.

Faculty was informed that the central assumption of the ideology — the pervasiveness of systemic oppression — could no longer be debated.

Colleagues began speaking openly about “deprogramming” and “de-radicalizing” students who disagreed with their orthodoxy.

The cost of the ideological takeover was unmistakable. My teenage students censored themselves. In class, they stopped engaging authentically with the material and one another, afraid of harming their classmates or being labeled a bigot. I had repeatedly raised concerns with the school. Many colleagues agreed with me, but only behind closed doors. The administration completely ignored me. 

So I decided to resign publicly, out of a sense of duty to my students and the school itself. I was terrified. I lost many friends, near and far.

Even well after my resignation, my children were disinvited from alumni events. I had no idea what would come next.  

So what did I accomplish? I wish I could say that K-12 education has changed for the better, but it has only gotten worse. 

After my public resignation, I connected with education reformers who shared my concerns. I started work in the advocacy space, where I met hundreds of parents and educators who saw the harm of this new orthodoxy in schools. I now understand that the problem wasn’t isolated to my school, but instead, it is systemic. The organization I work for recently released a groundbreaking report that explains the institutional nature of the problem.

As we detailed in the report, the harmful ideology perpetuates itself systemically through a pipeline that runs from teachers’ colleges and unions directly to K–12 classrooms, reinforced by state accreditation and licensure rules, school boards and curricula. 

What we are witnessing is a fundamental remaking of the role of the educator. I have seen how many well-intentioned educators, in addition to some parents, embrace moderate forms of the ideology when it is packaged as “equity.”

This language sounds like it increases fairness and reduces bias, but it masks the underlying political drivers that shut down alternative viewpoints and, in its most extreme forms, calls for the dismantling of America and its institutions. 

Within my left-leaning profession, I know that most teachers are not radical activists. But their good intentions make them susceptible to the path of least resistance paved by those who are. In a captured system, the politicization of education becomes the air that teachers breathe.

They often perpetuate the ideology without recognizing what it is: political.It may sound like an abstraction to say the ideology fuels hostility toward anyone it casts as an oppressor, but it’s all too real. 

In my school, the more radical and often younger educators aggressively insisted on this new approach. They pushed the school to reduce complex issues, such as racial or gender inequities, into moral binaries and treat contested conclusions as settled truth. 

Back then, Thursdays meant student assemblies. The administration brought outside activist speakers and led identity-focused sessions aimed at rewiring group identity into our community. Week after week, I saw my students become demoralized by assumptions that, by design, cast someone — themselves or a student sitting next to them — as the villain. 

Children are especially susceptible to absorbing this dogma as truth, which, for radical activists, is the point. These were real-life struggle sessions.Clear incidents of antisemitism — swastikas on the field and in the bathroom — were perfunctorily managed; they weren’t a concern because Jews had so much power at the school. According to the identity hierarchy, Israel and Jews are oppressors, despite a history of persecution. It was not up for debate.

It was tragic to watch teenagers grow confident in their newfound moral certainty, while failing to develop curiosity or humility.

One student openly condemned Jewish slaves in the Exodus story because, as oppressors, they caused the death of the Egyptians. It’s hard to imagine anyone condemning slaves — or enslaved peoples — from any other period in history for escaping their captors. 

In my work now, I see even more extreme versions taking hold nationwide. 

Organized activists from the Democratic Socialists of America and other political groups are brazenly working their way into the classroom through political and labor union organizing, school district partnerships, and curricula that often fixate on Israel, omitting key historical facts and competing perspectives in favor of their biased political narrative. 

No school — private, public, rural, suburban, urban — is immune from this orthodoxy. 

Education is supposed to anchor our civic life. It is supposed to equip children with knowledge, skills, and habits of mind that democratic life requires. But we are failing at scale, and that failure has consequences far beyond the classroom. It’s time to stop whispering and start sounding the alarm. 

Dana Stangel-Plowe, an attorney and educator, serves as the Chief Program Officer at North American Values Institute (NAVI).

==

Dana Stangel-Plowe speaks out, from Jun 2021:

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: Aug 5, 2026

(This is a transcript of a talk given at the 2026 Heterodox Social Sciences Conference at the University of Buckingham)

Nearly everybody in this room agrees that Critical Social Justice—or “woke”—has become a serious problem within the academy: one hostile to objective truth, academic freedom, individual liberty and scholarly standards. The disagreement is not over the diagnosis but the cure: should disciplines shaped by Critical Social Justice be abolished or reformed?

That disagreement was neatly illustrated in a recent exchange between Nicole Barbaro Simovski of Heterodox Academy and J. D. Haltigan, Professor of Developmental and Evolutionary Psychopathology. Writing in defence of reform, Simovski argued that the real question is not whether ideologically homogeneous departments should be preserved or abolished, but whether universities will do the harder work of reopening them to genuine inquiry. Viewpoint diversity, she argued, is not a token gesture but a necessary condition for knowledge production.

Haltigan’s response was blunt:

“You don’t introduce viewpoint diversity into something like Gender Studies. You abolish it. It is not science. It is not knowledge. It has no place in the university.”

At first glance, these positions appear irreconcilable. I don’t think they are. Once we distinguish between what universities study and how they study it, much of the disagreement dissolves. Sex, gender, race, ethnicity, culture and identity are all legitimate subjects of inquiry. The problem is not the subjects. It is the epistemological framework through which they are increasingly being studied.

This distinction is reinforced by the recent Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. The report recognises that excellent scholarship exists in every field it examined, but says:

“The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project.”

If we want to preserve the humanities, this is the problem to solve. Crucially, it is not merely the conclusion of outside critics but one reached by many scholars within these disciplines.

It is also what my colleagues and I set out to test in the Grievance Studies project. We deliberately wrote papers around political conclusions chosen in advance, supported them with impossible or implausible claims, stretched theory to fit, and abandoned ordinary scholarly standards. Rather than rejecting this, reviewers urged us to push further.

One reviewer expressed a wish to make our argument that queer astrology is as valid as astronomy a reality in physics classrooms. The leading feminist philosophy journal accepted, in nine days, an argument that criticism of Critical Social Justice should itself be treated as oppression and punished by universities. A paper claiming that nightclubs are inherently rape-condoning spaces and that men should be trained like dogs based on implausible observations of thousands of incidents of “dog humping” won an award from a feminist geography journal.

The absurdity is obvious. The real tragedy is what this does to rigorous scholarship within these fields.

That was brought home to me by two emails I received after our award-winning geography paper was exposed. One came from a group of empirical feminist geographers studying sex discrimination in the allocation of medical resources in South Asia, deeply concerned that the publication of work just like ours was undermining theirs. The other came from a scholar who blamed me for damaging the journal’s reputation because she had a paper due to appear in it. When I suggested that the real damage was being done by scholars publishing papers like ours in complete seriousness, she concluded that this merely demonstrated my racism and misogyny.

Those two responses captured the divide. Some scholars wanted higher standards. Others defended the framework that had allowed obvious nonsense to pass as scholarship.

The abolitionists’ objection is almost never aimed at scholars doing rigorous research on sex, race, identity or culture. It is aimed, quite rightly, at the critical-theoretical framework that has come to dominate large parts of Identity Studies. The reformers’ proposal is not to preserve that framework, but to subject it to rigorous scholarly standards and competition, requiring it to justify itself or fail.

Reform is often cast as the cautious option, and abolishing departments called things like “Gender Studies” as the radical one. The opposite is true. The source of the problem is not departments or course titles, but an epistemology, coupled with an authoritarian certainty, that has spread far beyond them. Abolishing a handful of departments is a cosmetic fix; it cannot address the way of thinking now running through much of the university.

Critical Social Justice rests on a distinctive postmodern understanding of knowledge, power and language. It treats knowledge as something constructed through relations of power and perpetuated in language. Those who embrace this framework regard themselves as uniquely able to perceive these hidden structures, while dissent is read as ignorance or complicity. There is nothing new in this: religious zealots and conspiracy theorists have been doing it for centuries.

The Humanities Report identifies exactly this problem, describing:

“A long-standing and deeply rooted current in contemporary humanistic scholarship that regards the idea of scholarly objectivity with profound suspicion.”

This is not the uncontroversial observation that scholars are fallible or influenced by their social context. It is the far more radical claim that truth, objectivity and reason are themselves expressions of power. As the report continues:

“A scholar who repudiates the language of truth and evidential support will see the political standards she brings to bear in assessing scholarly proposals as no less legitimate than any other standard...”

Once that premise is accepted, political commitments become not merely legitimate criteria for evaluating scholarship but the only valid ones. The report calls this a ‘catastrophe’ for the humanities. I think that is the right word.

If the problem is ultimately epistemological, authoritarian and widespread, it becomes clear why abolishing departments or courses cannot solve it. That approach removes wokeness in conveniently identifiable chunks while leaving intact the conditions that allowed it to spread. It has two problems.

First, it risks destroying legitimate scholarship along with the ideological excesses. We saw this last March, when the Trump administration proposed measures targeting courses and research that used terms such as race, gender, class or equity, referenced transgender ideology, or were deemed anti-Israel. Universities hurriedly removed anything that might attract scrutiny. Sociologists and economists studying social mobility, historians and legal scholars researching America’s racial history, and international relations scholars analysing the Israel–Hamas conflict were all caught in the net. Biomedical datasets went too, affecting, to my knowledge, researchers studying HIV in the United States and even those opposing puberty-blocker trials in England.

Second, it mistakes the symptoms for the disease. Critical Social Justice has spread far beyond Identity Studies. Remember that our most notorious paper was published in geography, and our flagship paper in philosophy, a discipline the report identifies as containing both outstanding scholarship and serious problems. The fields in which I was penalised for referring to evolutionary biology were history and literature. The academics and students who contact me now most often come from teacher training, social work, clinical psychology, nursing and medicine.

Trying to cure universities of wokeness by targeting its most visible manifestations is like lancing the boils of a systemic infection while leaving the bacteria in the bloodstream. You remove the obvious symptoms, but the disease remains alive and well.

Meanwhile, academics genuinely committed to Critical Social Justice can simply change their terminology while leaving their epistemology and their hostility to free inquiry entirely intact. This is a central theme of Cynthia Burack’s excellent forthcoming book, How Gender Studies Broke the University. Burack, a gender studies professor, describes how her colleagues responded to external pressure not by abandoning their assumptions, but by changing their language, reorganising institutional structures and creating hidden processes that continued to privilege affirming scholarship while excluding dissent. As she concludes:

“This is how I know a piecemeal, guerrilla warfare approach to respect for free speech and debate is bound to fail. Free inquiry requires institutional infrastructure.”

I suspect everyone here agrees with the second sentence. The real question is what that infrastructure looks like. Burack argues that free inquiry cannot be sustained by reacting to bias or censorship whenever it appears. Those interventions are necessary, but reactive. Instead, free inquiry must be built into the university itself, modelled by academics and administrators, reflected in policy, taught explicitly to students, and upheld whenever disputes arise.

For her, this is fundamentally an epistemological commitment. Universities should cultivate the critical thinking that makes knowledge possible: evaluating arguments, weighing evidence, engaging seriously with criticism, and recognising logical fallacies and cognitive distortions. Students should encounter serious arguments from competing perspectives, learn when questions can be answered empirically and when they turn on values or interpretation, and see academics modelling intellectual humility by acknowledging uncertainty and engaging fairly with those who disagree.

That is why I do not think we should simply aim to abolish departments because they use language or concepts we now recognise as “woke”, as some abolitionists recommend. What we need instead is something much more ambitious: a renewed commitment to the purpose of the university itself. It means rigorous methods grounded in the assumption that knowledge is obtainable; an uncompromising commitment to individual liberty and free inquiry; and the restoration of reason, evidence, coherence, viewpoint diversity and responsiveness to criticism as the common currency of scholarship.

That is reform—not of subjects, but of epistemology.

Some scholar-activists argue that insisting on evidence, reason and viewpoint diversity simply imposes another worldview. It does not.

Universities should not impose a single worldview or require historians, philosophers or political scientists to reach particular conclusions. Different disciplines ask different questions and use different methods. Not all of them even seek empirical truths. Literature can be interpreted and aesthetically evaluated. Philosophers must be free to challenge evidence, reason or freedom itself. Political scientists must be able to hold political views and argue from them. What universities should demand is not neutrality, but something harder to evade: intellectual honesty, openness to criticism, and scholarship demonstrably fit for purpose. This does not enforce agreement on conclusions, only standards for reaching them.

Interpret a poem, and you owe no one evidence. Make a claim about the world, or impose a policy on other people’s lives, and you owe them coherence and, where the claim is empirical, evidence.

Critical Social Justice does not confine itself to interpretation. It makes claims about the world and prescribes policies for it, and to prescribe a policy is to claim that it will work—a truth claim answerable to evidence. Its advocates must therefore choose. Either they want their claims warranted, and have already accepted the standards they profess to reject, or they do not, in which case they give us no reason to believe them, fund them or act on them. A framework that denies that objective knowledge is obtainable cannot coherently demand to be believed.

This is where woke claims have struggled. Unconscious-bias training, rolled out across universities, corporations and public institutions, has repeatedly failed to produce its promised effects, and where effects appear, they often run in the wrong direction. One large study of over 800 US firms found that the share of black women in management fell by 9 per cent on average after five years of mandatory diversity training. Compulsion provoked the very resentment it was meant to dissolve.

Universities already refuse certain grounds for knowledge: a researcher cannot appeal to divine revelation or diagnose criticism as demonic possession. We call this not persecution of the devout, but the price of admission—an expectation that claims must be supported by evidence and defended against criticism. Critical Social Justice has been exempted from that price, and I see no reason to keep exempting it.

As activists like to say, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” They’re right. Subjecting Critical Social Justice to the same standards as every other scholarly tradition is not oppression. It is equality.

And none of this bans a single idea. Perhaps we are all wrong, and queer theory, the critical theories of race and the rest have more to offer than they appear to. If so, there is a way to find out: let them compete on an even playing field, defending their claims according to the standards required of any rigorous scholarship and engaging seriously with competing hypotheses, not dismissing critics as unenlightened or declaring topics ‘not up for debate’.

Imagine what a genuinely reformed Gender Studies department might look like: an open debate in which gender conservatives, who see gender roles as a natural and good expression of sex differences, weigh their ideas against those of gender-critical feminists, who see those roles as socially constructed and harmful to women; queer theorists, for whom an internal sense of gender is more fundamental than biological sex; and evolutionary psychologists, who draw on biology and psychology to understand psychological sex differences.

Does anyone really think queer theory would emerge from that process strengthened?

My suspicion is that, if required to submit their ideas to such critique, many advocates would simply leave the academy. But they would not have been banned, no-platformed or silenced. They would not acquire the glamour of forbidden knowledge and retreat while crying persecution and gaining support on those grounds. They would simply have conceded that their methods do not meet a university’s standards. Those who stayed to argue would only demonstrate the poverty of their arguments.

This is where reform and abolition turn out not to be so different. Bad ideas are not defeated by prohibition. They are defeated properly and lastingly by being exposed to rigorous criticism and shown to be false, incoherent or indefensible. There is no better place than a university for that to happen.

This approach also plays the long game. We do not establish the precedent that governments, managers or prevailing orthodoxies may decide what can be researched or taught. Nor do we risk those ideas returning, or other equally bad ones replacing them, whenever political fortunes shift. Instead, we restore the conditions that transcend politics and make scholarship possible.

Serious scholarship exists across these disciplines; serious epistemological corruption exists alongside it. The university exists to produce knowledge, and that requires evidence, criticism, humility and openness to revision. Those who accept those conditions should be free to participate, whatever their politics. Those who reject them reject the purpose of the university itself.

I don’t think the choice is between reform and abolition. I think we should reform the epistemic conditions of scholarship in order to abolish the ideological exemptions that have corrupted it. My argument is not that epistemic reform offers an easy path, but simply that, if the problem is epistemological, only epistemological reform addresses it at its source.

If we can preserve the subjects but restore academic rigour, Critical Social Justice will not need to be banned. It will simply need to defend itself against competition.