Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay reveal how fabricated papers—like Queer Performativity and Rape Culture at Project Project (7 accepted, 4 published in 10 months)—exposed gender studies’ embrace of absurd claims, from "dog humping" as a social critique to dildos curing transphobia. Their research highlights academia’s moral orthodoxy, where dissent risks Title IX threats and ideological dogma silences debate, even influencing EU policies. While critics dismiss them as grifters, private academic support suggests public pushback could fracture this extremism, mirroring post-communist resistance. The pair warn of polarization-driven radicalization, from "diversity math" in schools to tech’s progressive infiltration, urging Rogan’s audience to scrutinize these trends beyond surface-level outrage. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, let's explain what you did and what was ridiculous.
What we're talking about, what was ridiculous, is there's many fields of studies that you can get legitimate degrees in that are absolutely preposterous.
Literally filled with nonsense, taught by nonsense people who live in these nonsense bubbles.
And then they give these degrees, and these people go out in the real world and they infect things.
Their ridiculousness infects certain, particularly tech industry businesses.
So the process with everything in academia is really slow and a lot of people don't know this.
So you send off this article, the editor looks at it, and the editor either gives it the thumbs up or the thumbs down.
If they give it the thumbs up, it goes off to peer reviewers, and that process takes months, often as long as – I mean, with one paper, there was eight months under peer review.
So the reviewers look at it, they try to figure out if the arguments are good, they try to figure out if the research is good, they evaluate that, they give extensive comments, they send it back to you, then you have to revise it according to whatever they say, make it better is what's supposed to happen.
So now you're probably three, four months in just the review process, not to the writing, which should also take months.
And then the editor will either send it back to the reviewers to see if it was good enough, or they'll just evaluate it themselves, depending on where it stands.
And then they'll make a decision as to whether or not to accept it or reject it or ask for more revisions.
And then when they accept it, that means the journal's ready to publish it.
But then the publishing process requires all the typesetting, proofing, all the stuff that goes into making it professional for an academic journal.
So the ideal is one paper every year in the humanities, broadly.
So if you, that's how you credential yourself.
That's how you get tenure, which is a job for life.
That's how you get to teach people these ideas who then, as you said, go out into the workforce five, six years later and infect everybody with total silliness.
You know, the other paper that this one also, they had the whole thing like if a male dog humps another male dog, especially men would freak out and break it up.
So they would claim it's incorrectly that we fabricated statistics.
But we wrote other papers one was fat bodybuilding.
So that claim that there should be a category introduced in traditional bodybuilding called fat bodybuilding, where people come and display their fat before the audience.
And we didn't manufacture any statistics for that.
And they love that.
They thought it, you know, one line in that paper was, a fat body is a built body.
unidentified
And then one of the reviewers was like, I wholeheartedly agree or something like that.
It's unethical to make fun of anything to do with social justice.
Right.
And so if you want to make fun of things that don't have anything with social justice, that's good.
So if we wanted to make fun of men, that's great.
If you want to make fun of white people, that's great.
If you want to make fun of anything to do with social justice, that's a problem.
So we said that, you know, South Park's a huge problem.
The Simpsons is a huge problem.
We went into talking about how Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have the right idea.
But then the journal was like, ah, but they're straight white males.
So you have to nuance around that to make it clear that their position is white men, even though they're on the side of social justice, it's not quite good enough.
Gross generalizations do not treat people as individuals.
Absolutely.
It's very strange.
It's very strange that this is the left.
You know, I was a kid in San Francisco in the 1970s.
We lived in, you know, like the hippie times.
And that's, I lived there from age seven to 11.
And it kind of formed a lot of my opinions about people like the who gives a shit part of my appreciation for any group, whatever it is, whether it's race or gender or sexual orientation.
And I just, I don't understand it from either way.
I certainly don't understand it from a racist perspective, but I really don't understand it from racism that's condoned because it's racism against white people.
This is the left.
These are the people that are preaching against hate.
And these are the people that used to be the people that were supposedly so open-minded and so open to ideas.
And now they're trying to stifle creativity and stifle dissent and stifle anything that doesn't fit inside that very narrow paradigm that they're trying to push.
The good name of the civil rights movement is kind of the brand that they ride on.
They're fighting against racism.
They're fighting against sexism, misogyny, et cetera.
And the thing is, that's not really what's going on here.
They've actually tapped into this, to throw around the term, this postmodern notion that everything in society has to do with power dynamics.
And the power dynamics have to be understood in terms of groups and how those groups have traditionally held power and exercised power.
And so immediately it becomes stuck in this idea that it's all about this group or that group and how they relate to one another.
And I don't mean like, hey, let's get along relate.
I mean like white people are imagined to always be over black people and therefore, you know, there's always this natural power dynamic of oppressor versus oppressed.
And this is stuff that came straight out of this weird postmodern philosophy where you saw these dissatisfied French philosophers in the 60s, you know, all when all this stuff you were talking about was going down.
They saw all this stuff and they said, wow, you know, okay, power dynamics are the thing because I should go back a step.
The postmodern philosophers like Foucault and all of this got all hooked up on power because they were dissatisfied with seeing what they called grand narratives, Christianity, capitalism, Marxism.
They saw all these huge explanations for how the world works and said, you know, they're not working.
Look how bad communism failed.
Look how there's so much bullshit coming out of this or that from religion.
It's not working.
We need to just get rid of all of it.
We're going to deconstruct this.
We're going to break it down to its power dynamics.
And then we're going to look at it in terms of who has masterhood over who, who's oppressing what, where's dominance.
And it's just kind of grown.
It got picked up in the academic culture in the 1960s.
That's how old this stuff is.
And then it took this huge turn in the 1990s and got really vicious.
And that's where it really got, you know, that's when it turned intersectional, actually.
This stifling of creativity is the most disturbing part about it.
Like the agreement that South Park and The Simpsons are a real problem.
It's so bizarre.
Because here's the thing.
If they miss the mark and it's not funny, it won't work.
And then it'll be a bad show and no one will like it.
But if it's funny, there has to be something about it that people find ironic, satirical.
There has to be something about it that people are enjoying that has to point to some truth.
And the denial of this, and instead, like the saying, oh, it's white males that are causing this problem, and you shouldn't attack this or that, or there's subjects that are off-limits, and social justice should never be attacked.
Like, to agree to that, it's so, it's so preposterous.
All the various strange things in the spectrum of human behavior and all the things you encounter in life.
And to segment and limit what is and is not, what's off limits and it's not off limits based on race, based on things that a person can't control at all.
You're just born white.
So if you're born white, you're born an oppressor.
You're born a victimizer.
And if you're a white male, you're a fucking piece of shit.
And you literally took Mein Kampf, the actual words from Mein Kampf, and put it in this paper and replaced the word Jews with the word white men, and they accepted it.
I mean, so with that one, what we did was we took the whole document online and we just searched the word Jew.
And we just started picking sentences and paragraphs.
So what was it?
At the end, it was something like, if we don't combat whiteness, it's going to be the funeral wreath for mankind.
That's straight out of Mein Kampf.
Yeah, they didn't accept that paper, though, because that paper turns out was written from the perspective of a white lesbian who hated her own whiteness, and they said that it was positioning her as a good white.
And because she's making herself out as a good white, again, allyship isn't as all it's cracked up to be.
She, you know, was making a problem.
She should have really been forwarding the ideas of the black scholars that she read way more and not talking about herself so much, even though it was a paper designed to be talking about herself.
Like, so much of the stuff they come up with is a creative idea.
Maybe there's something to some of this stuff, right?
But what they're putting forward is hypotheses.
And then they're treating them as conclusions.
So they're putting forward this idea.
I saw one on Twitter today.
It was something like, this is about South Park, how it's been laundering racism into society and making everybody comfortable with racism.
And that's why everything's so racist and people are shooting Jews is because South Park made it normal.
But they're treating that as a conclusion, but that's a hypothesis, right?
So we could test that.
It's conceivable that you could actually try to parse out what variables need to be controlled, see, you know, South Park came out, started doing these themes, how does it track?
Statisticians can do kind of amazing things with that stuff.
They're like, oh, South Park presents these ideas, which they then cherry-pick because there's other ideas that they don't talk about that are, you know, point the other direction.
These ideas are problematic.
That's the big word.
Theoretically, that's a problem.
Why?
Because they, and I'm not joking, they literally believe that use of language creates the power dynamics that define society.
So, South Park's using language and imagery that creates a power dynamic that makes people more comfortable being racist.
Boom.
Theory, done.
No test needed, no even attempt test.
And then, if the test happened, the test itself would be racist unless it confirmed the hypothesis.
Right, so they start with an agenda, and then you mentioned the word laundering, which your former guest, Brett and Heather, talked about idea laundering.
So, we wrote this paper saying that straight men are generally transphobic, meaning in particular the kind of niche, weird definition that you see on the internet and activists sometimes that they aren't interested in having sex with trans people who have penises, trans women who have a penis in particular.
And so, we said that, well, that's a kind of transphobia.
And clearly, the reason that they might be transphobic is because they don't practice putting things in their butts.
So, if they start putting stuff up their butts, in particular, we called the paper dildos.
So, you can imagine what we were saying, they should put up their butts.
So, we argued that if straight men just penetrated themselves and had their girlfriends peg them through exposure therapy, you know, you start small and then work your way up, you can remediate transphobia.
Yeah, we'll make them less transphobic self-penetrating or having your girlfriend peg you, you can be less transphobic.
So, we basically off of eight interviews, really 13 interviews with men.
And I say really eight, 13.
There were 13 interviews documented, but five of them were gay people, not even straight people.
So, they don't really apply.
So, then we have these eight interviews with straight men.
We made one of them a conservative.
And he's just so we could just put in like you know, crazy things that a conservative might say about this.
And they were like, Why don't there more conservatives participating?
So, I was like, Well, I'm going to run with this.
And I wrote this whole thing.
We invited six conservatives to participate, and only one accepted.
And to kind of summarize why, in the words, and this is in the paper, in the words of one, I don't want to be a part of some stupid liberal study about shoving things up your butt.
What I was saying before the show started, that I read one article that was really diminishing the impact of what you guys have done, saying, like, what?
They had a whole, there is a paper out there about that show, and it's all about how, you know, hot sauce has everything to do with masculinity and being manly, and they didn't have enough women on the show.
Because it's sexist, and the hot sauce, I think, was the sexist part.
And it has all these bizarre conclusions.
We cited that in the paper we wrote about Hooters.
We put in a part that there was, you know, masculinity contest of eating the hot wings, who can eat more hot wings, and then they'd say, oh, I ate 20 hot wings.
Drawing on the simultaneously mundane and omniscient qualities of food as a medium for interrogating, interrogating ideas about feminism and identity performance.
In the commentary and criticism section, the authors introduce a diverse sample of case studies that demonstrate the emergence of feminist ideas in and through food media.
I was going to write a paper about how cornbread is being gentrified, and that's why we'll never get over racism because white people are making like pumpkin spice cornbread.
Well, the idea was supposed to be that you work your ass off for a few years, and then you, it was supposed to be to defend academic freedom.
So you get tenure, then you can go forth and put out some crazy ideas, really dig into some stuff, and they can't fire you for coming up with maybe weird stuff.
And then people would argue about it.
But now it's kind of become the situation where people get in this situation.
They get in their job and then you can't get rid of them.
You know, I mean, the only thing I can think of, it's like, is if you taught at a Christian school and then you went in and took videos and posted them on YouTube of defecating the Bible and then just walked into the school.
So I think it's kind of similar in that they have bought hook, line, and sinker into microaggressions, trigger warnings, safe spaces, diversity initiatives.
There's no questioning.
And it's something for me that makes me deeply uncomfortable when my students can't ask questions, when they can't, they're just uncomfortable to voice their opinions about things.
And I think that, to say the least, a lot of people are enraged at me.
But exactly what Jim said, some people will come and be like, oh, thank you so much.
Well, you know, through the videos from Everett Green State, you can see Brett Weinstein's interactions with not just students, but also some of the professors that were there, some of these preposterous people that he had to work with that are buying in hook, line, and sinker to this stuff, and they live in these insulated worlds.
And they just, they create these people that also want to stay inside these insulated worlds and then just sort of stew in these ideas and then again go out into the real world.
And I made the comment, I said, everybody has something.
Everybody has a preference.
Like, you can't say that no one had a preference.
I said, it would be as if it would be as if I said, well, you know, I don't want to date someone who's 400 pounds.
So that comment then got turned into something when they called somebody else in, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion called someone else in, and it was made that I was rendering my opinion about people who are 400 pounds.
When my, what I was doing is saying that homosexuality itself, there's no reason to give that, it's just not a moral thing, but people lump it in.
But the main point of this whole thing is that we have situations in which professors can't talk about protected classes.
It's like you see people in society, it's like, oh, the Black Lives Matter people go nuts, and then all of a sudden the white supremacists are out and they're like, white people have it hard too.
The second somebody hears, oh, black people have it hard, somebody's got to be like, white people have it hard too.
That's competitive victimhood.
And so then when you have like a moral economy, if you will, where you can kind of cash in and gain status or gain access to speaking or whatever it happens to be by holding a certain status of victimhood or grievance, then you're going to find people competing to find ways to get that for themselves.
Everybody's going to go, I mean, you have the infrastructure there.
Everybody's going to go after trying to maximize their own utility within that.
So people over seven feet tall aren't a protected class yet, but the second they realize that they might be able to cash in on it, they might lobby for it.
All of this stuff is coming from the canons of knowledge, their bodies of literature, their peer-reviewed.
And that's the idea laundering thing again, which we should get to.
So all of that stuff is coming from this.
And if you want to make, if you want to get back to constructive politics, to get back to people having conversations.
And that's the thing.
Like, that's, I think, one of the reasons that your show has been so successful is it's a combination of authenticity with you can have, you're totally willing to have conversations with no holds bar, right?
You can't have that in the academy.
So people need to go to you to hear these thoughts and to wrestle with ideas and to engage.
They're afraid they're going to damage their brand or whatever it is.
Where does that work?
Who works on that?
Bullies, right?
So these people, why are they so pervasive in the academy?
Why are they so pervasive in media?
They know they can bully these people.
They know that they can go lean on this stuff, and somebody's going to be cowardly, and then they're going to be able to make something change in the direction they want it to change.
You see it even creeping into politics.
They try to do it with policymakers.
You see it a lot more in a lot of other countries.
Right now, we're in this massive backlash against it in American politics.
Well, you're not even guaranteed to achieve the goal you're claiming.
So it's, again, it goes back to theory.
In theory, and I mean theory in terms of postmodern critical theory that this stuff's all based in that we studied.
The idea is that if you have a particular identity, now you have a particular view of the world.
And people of other identities have different ones.
And in fact, there's this whole thing called standpoint epistemology that says that if you have a marginalized identity, you know more about the world than other people because you live in two worlds at once.
So the idea is, oh, if we get a black guy in here, he's had a different life experience.
Therefore, he can speak truly to that.
If you get a Chinese lady in here, she can speak to that, so on and so forth.
So the guess is that by virtue merely of bringing in people who look different with different races or genders or sexes or sexualities, then you automatically get a diverse set of opinions.
But that doesn't work.
That's not how that actually works.
You could take people of every race, educate them on the exact same social justice curriculum, and they all think exactly the same thing.
So they write these academic papers, and they come up with these ideas.
They start with their conclusion, they push it through, it gets published, and that's just like, it's like the academic equivalent of money laundering.
You take some money, you got ill-gotten money, you put it through this shell company or this thing or the other thing, and it comes back to you, and now it's had a legal trail that makes it legit, right?
Well, here you take some prejudice, you write it down as an academic paper, you publish the thing, it gets the academic stamp on it.
It's the gold standard of knowledge now.
And now this prejudice you started with now looks like legitimate knowledge that can go straight in the classroom.
It can go straight to activists or policymakers.
It's a real problem.
unidentified
Yeah, and when that's really funny, though, that you're saying it's like academic money laundering.
No, they've got this idea that, I mean, we talked a moment ago about privilege, and we kind of, you know, brushed real close to the idea that it fits kind of like original sin.
And so they see that the downside of privilege, the opposite side of discrimination or racism, sexism, et cetera, hate is the big word, you know, fight hate.
He's using hate.
This is hate speech.
That's where I think they got the term.
That's like the evil thing.
You're born with privilege.
That's like original sin.
So what do they want to do?
They want to fix, they save the world by clearing out the evil of privilege, by clearing out hate from the world.
For them, utopia means nobody hates.
And by hate, we mean something like racism, sexism, et cetera.
So it's a noble idea.
But then when you start looking at it in this ridiculous way, like you're born with privilege and now you're just stuck with it, right?
What can you do?
It's original sin.
You can be sorry for it.
You can try to be an ally and work it off.
You can check it, whatever the hell that means.
You can do a lot of things, but you can't actually atone for it.
You can't get over it.
You can't get rid of it.
Then you get the situation where it's like they really, really need to take desperate measures.
Like, let's lock it all down.
Let's tell these people that they're wrong.
Let's try to point out how white supremacy is in them because they're white.
Let's point out how masculinity is an ideology that needs to be destroyed.
And that's a sad thing because their response to this has been, oh, we're going to screen better to see who is actually writing these papers so they can't trick us.
Because they can't differentiate real scholarship from bullshit because they're in this crazy ecosystem in which their ability to make discerning judgments about things has been dulled because they put an agenda before the truth.
The dog park paper is pretty funny, but we were actually trying to learn what's going on there.
Thanks for noticing.
Somebody finally did.
But that means, of course, they don't want to admit that we actually learned this stuff because then when we say it's shit, they're stuck with somebody who knows what they're talking about saying it sucks.
I think they're the people who are trying to build the kingdom of God on the planet Earth.
You know, to draw a metaphor, a religious metaphor, they are people who see an evil and they want to purge the world of that evil by any means necessary.
Here's the one difference, and I think this is a key difference.
The reason that it's easier, and I mentioned this to Pendula when we did a talk, and he just couldn't believe it.
The reason that it's easier to talk to a Christian, for example, about faith or about their religion is because at the end of the day, it comes down to faith.
These people don't have any faith.
They have knowledge, quote unquote.
They have their bodies of scholarly literature which were ideal laundered.
That's what they have.
So they can point to these things and say, well, I don't have any faith.
Yeah, I think actually there's pretty decent understanding of that from the perspective of moral psychology.
You've got this idea that somebody has seen something as good.
So it elevates them, it makes them better.
So clean eating might be good, right?
Whatever clean eating means, for some people, it's vegan.
For some people, it's like all you eat is grass-fed beef.
Who knows?
But you've got clean eating and you've got dirty eating, and you go into the clean thing.
And so you've got this kind of like purity thing.
And eventually you take this so seriously that it becomes kind of a sacred value to you.
Well, what's sacred mean?
You know, we have this kind of vague sense, oh, you know, holy, this, that, that's sacred, and it's something really important to somebody.
Well, what it really means is that it's taken on so much moral importance to somebody that they no longer will allow it to be questioned.
With something sacred, it's now been removed from the sphere of being doubted, questioned, or whatever.
And so when you have this idea like that, let's say that privilege is the cause of racism, and you've elevated that, or the problem with everything in society, even, and you've elevated that to like a sacred value that can't be questioned.
You can't say, maybe there's another dimension to it.
That's when you start getting these kind of religious-like behaviors.
Start getting these problems because you've got a place where it can't be A, questioned, B, made fun of.
We were talking about the comedy earlier.
This is killing comedy, right?
It's absolutely killing comedy because you can't make a joke because if the joke goes a little bit wrong, now you've committed a heresy, you're a blasphemer.
So this is really interesting because if we take their theory about humor at face value, right?
That you can only go against a power thing.
So we say, okay, you know what?
We wrote a paper, one of our papers, The Jokes on You, is about that.
Let's say they're right.
Why do people love it?
Well, it's because everybody knows these guys have power.
They're trying to pretend that they don't have power, that they're the victims, they're the oppressed.
Meanwhile, they're bullying everybody into everything.
They're firing people for saying the wrong thing in class, you know, whatever it is.
That's only possible if they have power.
And the joke, when South Park makes fun of, like, what was it, PC principal or whatever?
When South Park makes fun of that, the only reason people laugh, if their theory is right, is because they're powerful.
If their theory is wrong, because it's just funny, then we can talk about something different.
But if they're actually right, if they're actually making a point here, they're not recognizing that they're admitting that they have seized a lot of cultural power.
And that's why people celebrate when you go back against stuff.
That's why people have sent us so many emails like, this is the greatest thing ever.
Thank you so much for doing this.
There's all this shit like, you guys are heroes, blah, blah, blah.
Why?
Because they wanted to see you laughed.
Why?
Because it's funny as hell, is why.
And why?
Because these people are influencing the shit out of stuff.
And if they weren't, if they were just, you know, victims who don't have a voice, who can't make any impact, who aren't bullying people, everybody will be like, why are you bullying those guys?
And I've read some articles about some things that we've said on this show that are just fucking completely preposterous and taken totally out of context and presented as some evidence of, you know, whatever transgression that's impossible to defend.
It's very strange.
It's a very strange time for communication.
It's a very strange time for ideas.
But I also think it's really exciting.
It's exciting that all this nonsense is going on.
That's one of the things that I really loved about what you guys have done.
It's exciting.
It's exciting that you guys have infiltrated and had these fucking dummies public, not just publish your shit, but praise it and say how amazing it is that you wrote a bit about fat bodybuilding.
Like they'd look at you and you've got all the, you know, because you're muscular too, so you wouldn't just be straight white, heterosexual, cis, et cetera.
unidentified
I mean, you've got health privilege and you've got health privilege and also an ableist.
Yeah, and that's really important, though, because the point of that is to say if your doctor tells you you're fat and it's a health concern, then you don't have to listen.
But she was talking, she was also using, like really misusing some studies on, there was some, there have been some studies on people who are overweight and that there could possibly be some health benefits to being overweight.
These studies have been widely dismissed now.
Not only dismissed, but they go in direct contrast to the great volume of studies that show how terrible it is for your health to be that fat and that heavy.
But this person, I don't remember who it was or why she was doing this, but she was clinging to these one or two studies that have been dismissed.
These are biased epidemiological studies that have been dismissed, but she was putting them in this blog as if this is some sort of evidence that not only is it not unhealthy to be fat, but it might be healthy to be fat.
They think it's like when the doctor says you're overweight, it's a concern for your health.
They see that as a form of fat shaming, saying that they're not all right the way that they are.
They're not being accepted the way that they are.
There's a power dynamic that healthy people are imposing upon overweight people.
They have myriad issues that they come up with.
And I mean, sure, some of these complaints have got to be somewhat real.
You know, they don't make as many oversized clothes, you know, plus-size clothes.
It's harder to get styles.
There's some legit stuff, you know, that they might want to say, hey, can we do something about this?
But on the other hand, the whole thing that like saying that it has nothing to do with health, it has nothing to do with your triglyceride levels, hearts.
Well, you can, but you see, there's people of color, and then there's BIPOC, which I don't know how you pronounce that.
I don't know if it's BIPOC or what, but that would be black and indigenous people of color because they have even more oppression than the other people of color and they've got to fight over.
So, but then that's even a problem because Indigenous has recently been branded a racist term because you're not actually honoring, yeah, you're not hitting the actual tribal identity.
If you get right on the cutting edge of the stuff, it's like really going into meltdown.
So you can see, again, the competitive victimhood going on, who gets to claim more of the victimhood pie.
And, oh, now we've got this thing about people of color, so they get, you know, victimhood status.
But why, if that goes to all people of color equally, that's not fair because these people of color are even more discriminating, so they should get more of it.
It's really, they're fighting over a piece of a pie of victimhoodness.
And think about what it does to the students that pick this stuff up.
You go to college, you pick this up, you start majoring in it.
You could be majoring in something where you actually learn to do critical thinking, to engage with ideas.
If you're disadvantaged going into college, that's your best chance to get out of that situation is to grapple with great critical thinking, learn some great skills, whether that's engineering and the sciences, something like that, whether it's even if it's you want to get into like studying race and sociology, soft sciences, or you want to get into just literature.
Do it honestly and you're going to get somewhere.
But you get into this stuff where you can literally just make up your conclusions.
What are you doing?
You're teaching these people how to think about problems.
They're seeing the burger in the Santa Monica Pier is a problem now.
I see it everywhere I go after I did this for a year.
So you get the people in the habit of seeing problems everywhere.
And I think talking about the problem, like just explaining what you've already explained on this podcast and actually having those studies that you did publish and the whole thought process behind creating them would be a great book.
We're telling this one guy, a buddy of ours, and he's like, oh, my God, I know a documentarian who's like investigating all this shit going on in the universities already.
He's already interested.
Would you guys be interested?
This would be a compelling documentary.
Would you guys be interested in talking to him?
So we get in touch with him and he's like, listen, you know, I'll shoot this.
I think there's a film here.
I think you're going to ruin your career, so that's what I'm going to film.
But in any case, I'll film this, but here's the deal.
I'm only going to shoot it if you commit 100% to transparency.
Let me tell the full story, honestly, what's really happening.
You know, we don't get to sugarcoat anything and make you guys look good.
And of course, he thought we were just going to crash and burn everything.
Well, I maybe would never get another job if I wanted to go back into academia, for example.
Or, I mean, I still, it hasn't happened yet, but you see people who do academic misconduct get banned from ever publishing academic papers again.
That could still come down for me.
I don't know.
It probably won't, but it might.
And if it does, you know, then if I try to get a job working for like a think tank or university or anything that depends on that, I'm locked out of that now.
So especially is going to ruin Pete's career, too.
Let's be honest.
He works in not just the University of Portland State.
When there was that scene in the wherever it was, conference room or wherever it was, when the kids were telling him to put his hands down because he was being aggressive with his hands.
But I think this is also some sort of a symptom of this culture that we live in, where everyone gets to voice their opinion.
Everyone feels entitled to voice their opinion because of social media and because of this instantaneous ability to post whatever you feel about anything, whether it's a comment on YouTube or a tweet or a Facebook post.
This nature of everyone putting in input, instead of earning your right to be heard, you know, and through merit and through your work and through people saying, hey, this guy is smart.
Before we used to criticize people from a point of expertise, now people who have absolutely no expertise feel that they're entitled to not only criticize, but have everybody else listen to their criticisms.
And so there's this like kind of competitive jealousy kind of thing going on.
And I think we've seen that a lot.
You know, these kind of people who don't have a lot to bring to the table and they want to get, you know, maybe it's a spot on a podcast.
Maybe they want to get on a conference or something, a speaker at a conference.
And we've seen this for years.
What happens is, well, you know, you got some big name that's coming.
Well, let's just like can him and say, well, he's a sexist.
He said this terrible thing.
Now he can't be at the conference or we'll protest.
Get him out, put one of our guys in.
Or when they start to get more power, it's like, let's make sure half of our people are there or else we're going to make sure that we say your conference is racist.
Then that becomes like just a hot mess.
Nobody wants to go to the conference.
It's not going to be financially soluble.
So it falls apart.
I mean, this stuff has been going on.
This seems to be what's going on.
And I think you're touching something where social media, Tom Nichols talks about it too, generating a kind of narcissism where people feel entitled.
Like, I have a voice.
Nobody's listening to me, but they should listen to me because they, of course, think their ideas are great.
You know, if you have a problematic person, you have a person that you feel is they have ideas that are questionable, you bring in a person whose ideas you feel are counter to those ideas.
And you let the audience see how these individuals discuss these things.
When I was in high school, Barney Frank debated some guy from, he was some very conservative person.
I forget what the there was a ridiculous conservative group that had some really funny name.
I forget what it was, but he was like this really canned Ronald Reagan style conservative.
And Barney Frank was, I think he was still in the closet back then, but he was this like very articulate, powerful left-wing guy.
And they did it inside, you know, this court, this community center in our high school, whatever it was, you know, some auditorium.
And I got a chance to watch this one guy talk about all these different, you know, whatever it was, gay marriage or whatever his conservative ideas and values and a marriage should be between a man and a woman and all these different things that would today at a lot of college campuses, you'd want those shut down.
You don't want someone propagating these ideas.
But Barty Frank came on after him and eloquently dissected what was stupid about it and what the Constitution is all about.
What makes America great is our freedom and our ability to express ourselves.
And by doing so, me as a 16-year-old kid and the audience got to see ideas dissected and ideas debated and to see two people from polar opposite perspectives just battle it out and let the best idea win.
And I'm sure there was probably some people that were in that audience that came out of it with a different perspective.
Like, yeah, gay people shouldn't get married.
And yeah, marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman.
Yes, you're talking about the very foundation of liberal society.
You're talking about Jon Stuart Mill here.
I mean, you're talking about John Adams.
You're talking about the foundation of a liberal society here.
And that's what the scholarship runs that we looked at runs directly counter to this.
Remember, the idea is that if people are putting out language, the idea that some people are going to come away with a heteronormative idea or a homophobic idea, that's already a catastrophe.
It's like, what happened where these kind of interactions between contrary ideas is so it's it's it's so dangerous that one or two people could possibly be shifted even if it's 30% of the audience I mean who the fuck knows what what's going to happen when people are sitting there listening and who's to say that you're right or you're wrong that the way to challenge ideas is not pulling the plug on the speakers it's better ideas if you if
you fundamentally subscribe to the idea that heteronormativity let's use it as the example if heteronormativity is the power structure that's holding down gay people and preventing them from having equal opportunities if you fundamentally believe that anybody else getting convinced anybody being reinforced under the idea of heteronormativity isn't just a few like 70 percent change their mind and 30 stuck with it that's just bolstering the already imagined to be completely dominant view it's really kind of anti-progress right because
it views the idea that power structures can't change they're always rooted in some identity whoever has you know there's more straight people than gay people are okay so therefore straight people always have power therefore anything that reinforces heteronormativity is going to be a catastrophe that reinforces the next thing you know people are going to be beating gays in the snow or something like that it's also the complete infantilization of young adults because you're you're telling me these young adults aren't smart enough to differentiate between
good ideas and bad ideas well if they're learning all this grievance study stuff like i just said their critical thinking is getting hobbled but here's my point if you are a person who's a young progressive well-read person who's got some rock-solid ideas about people being able to live their lives without discrimination and all the things that I'm sure we all agree on.
And you sat and listened to some right-wing alt-right asshole spewing hate.
Is it going to change you?
Is it going to affect you?
Of course it's not.
So who is it going to affect?
Like, who are these ideas going to reach?
Why do we assume that people are so much more easily influenced than we are?
I think, you know, in general, human beings, we all put forth our best ideas and we're all wrong most of the time.
We can be a smart guy or a smart woman, whatever.
We're all pretty stupid.
We put forth a lot of ideas.
Most of them are wrong.
It's true for everybody, true for you, me, everybody.
And what we should really be relying on is, you know, I put down an idea and you're like, well, I don't know about that.
And so we start cutting away the bullshit that I tucked into my idea, the stuff I didn't have right.
We do that, and now the idea that survives that process is better.
And then somebody else comes along and says, wait, wait, wait, that part's probably a little bit bullshit, but this you could add to it and make it better.
And then some of that's wrong.
And this is the process of how we really produce knowledge.
And it sounds like I'm just going to go after religion, but it's actually the culmination of my study of religious psychology.
And so really, what it was was targeting, I mean, it talks about what's going on with religion and why people believe religion and what God actually stands for in terms of psychology as it might see it.
But then what it was really targeting was I saw all these people who are like, you know, loudmouth atheists.
And they were like this and that and the other thing.
And they have this whole community.
And I saw, holy shit, they're doing the same thing.
I watched a whole speech like smoking a joint and laughing my fucking ass off at this dork who was speaking in front of some other group of dorks that were all part of the Atheism Plus movement.
And he just kept just ranting about sexual harassment and diversity and all these different things and attaching them to atheism.
But you would have to step so far out of your belief system and be so objective and so self-aware that you're realizing you're in some sort of a preposterous group.
And very few people are willing to admit that most of their life's work has been nonsense.
So everything they put out about thetans and volcanoes or whatever they've got, all of a sudden, that's not like just crazy, you know, L. Ron Hubbard, was it Dianetics or whatever?
That's gold standard knowledge, academic press, Oxford, you know.
I don't know if you saw a year before all this, we did this really, you know, bad attempt at it, conceptual penis as a social construct.
So we said that penises are a social construct and they cause climate change.
And this got a little bit of attention.
I've been getting emails ever since then from some member of EU Parliament.
And they're like, we have another gender initiative that we're going to try to basically foist upon EU, and then it's going to dictate how Europe now works with Africa going forward about climate.
And so because I wrote this conceptual penis and climate change thing, and it's all based on making fun of gender studies, it was at the time anyway.
They were like, you know, you're an expert.
So now the EU's calling me, you know, what do we do about this gender initiative?
But that's real, right?
The EU Parliament's not like nothing.
That's not, that's not, you know, it's not like a meeting of some dorks at a conference.
That's real.
They're coming up with policy to dictate how they want to interact with Africa for the next, you know, 20, 30 years.
That's real.
And these people are emailing me saying this scholarship that you guys are criticizing is really, you know, it's on the agenda of the EU Parliament.
That actually, there was a journal, and then it got so out there that it got criticized out of existence.
But it's a big thing.
There's some big paper I was reading just before we went public with all this, and I got asked about it.
Luckily, I read it because we did the Mein Kampf.
Of course, Israel's like, you got Mein Kampf published.
Oh, my God, we need to talk to you.
Israel, like, TV, you know, I was on Israeli TV.
What the hell?
And so all these Israeli journalists are calling me, talking to me about it, and over the Mein Kampf, and I read this one paper.
They're like, well, do you think that Jewish studies is like this?
And I found this paper just before this all came out that was Jewish studies criticizing critical whiteness studies because there's this whole thing about how the critical whiteness people accuse the Jews of being white.
And then there's all this, you know, who's where does the oppression lie?
Because, you know, the Jews have had it pretty rough over, you know, the last 2,000 years or thereabouts.
But then you got the critical whiteness people being like, no, they're white.
It's a white privilege, blah, blah, blah.
And then the Jewish studies people are like, hold up.
Don't put us up here and say that we're all white supremacists.
We were gassed by the white supremacists.
Chill out.
So there's this huge critical studies fight between the Jewish studies people and the critical whiteness people over whether Jews count as white people or not and have white supremacy built in.
And they asked me about this, the Israeli journalist did, and I was like, well, you know, I have to sympathize with what their argument is, but they're still using the same broken methods.
And so you still want to see better methods, right?
I think the Jewish people have a point.
You know, we've been pretty heavily oppressed for 2,000 years.
You start with the Romans decimating them and then the diaspora and then the Holocaust.
It's just not good.
So I think they have a point that, you know, don't just say, oh, we have crazy white privilege and are therefore white supremacists.
But if you want to do that, you know, maybe this methodology of complaining about it's not the best way to go.
It's complicated stuff, but at least they're against the critical whiteness stuff.
The Journal of Whiteness Studies or something like that.
Or critical whiteness.
It lasted for about three years, and I don't know exactly why it fell apart, but it fell apart because I was really upset because I wanted to send a paper to it, and it doesn't exist anymore.
The rewrite of Mein Kampf where the woman, the lesbian woman, excoriates her own whiteness.
I was going to send it to that journal, and then it doesn't exist anymore.
So I had to send it to a critical race journal who then said, ah, it's a good idea, but you're positioning yourself as a good white, and that's a problem.
One of Sweden's most merited and acclaimed political scientists and long-term critics of identity politics, Bo Rothenstein, Rothstein, has argued that identity-based disciplines like grievance studies, which deals with the concept of collective guilt, have no place in academia.
Yeah, it's like this desperation to try to find a unique identity that you can consider to be super special or whatever.
It's totally, and you want to see even crazier as you go into, like you go on these blogs, and I think they're mostly on Tumblr or something.
It violates my rule, never use Tumblr, where they talk about the different sexuality identities, like different kinds of, you know, I'm interested in this kind of person, but not this kind of person under these circumstances, but not under those, that has like some, you know, 18-syllable academic word for it now.
And there's people whose whole, I don't think they're academics, I think they're activists and geeks on Tumblr, but they come up with these crazy descriptions.
That's, I think, so that was the other part of, I guess, one of the things that Jim said when I said I was more cynical.
I think that the, in general, the critics tend to be angry.
And I'm not saying that their anger is legitimate or illegitimate, but they tend to be angry.
They seem to be almost universally underaccomplished.
So they're upset at you because you have whatever a big show or Lauderfall, whatever they're upset about, big platform or audience.
They're just generally disagreeable people.
And they found these communities of other people who are enraged, who are also underaccomplished, who they can lash out at people together and then virtue signal, you know, get rewarded for, oh, you know, Rogan, that bat, whatever they want to call you, or whatever they want to call us, or whoever else.
And there's something that it's so, I don't know how we can deal with that.
I mean, our attempt to do this was to try to delegitimize where they get their knowledge from, like what they call knowledge, what they could point to.
We tried to say it's not knowledge and delegitimize it.
But we really do need to get back to some kind of productive discussion, productive politics, where the far right disown their lunatics and we disown our lunatics.
And we get back to work about whatever, the oceans, plastic, whatever it is that we're talking about.
Because right now the discourse is corrupted.
We're not doing what we need to do in the academies.
These people are continuing to pump out this nonsense that's totally untethered to reality.
Like we did the thing about the people of color and the black indigenous people of color.
They fragmented.
You see when you get into the critical race literature that it's like, okay, so you're brown or you're black, but you have slightly lighter skin, slightly darker skin, slightly darker than that, really dark.
They have different levels of privilege, and it's just cutting things apart.
The idea, though, that this is going to create some kind of a coalition that can then defeat, you know, the plurality or something like that is ridiculous.
So what do you see?
You see this stuff starting to blow up.
You see the Democrats bleed seats.
They've lost like a thousand legislative seats across the U.S. since Obama got elected in 2008.
How are you going to get your agenda if you don't have any legislators, if you don't have anybody elected?
And so then what happens?
2016.
I can't say that the reason that Trump got elected, because there's lots of reasons, had something to do.
No, I will say it had something to do with this because every conservative person I know that's not just a reactionary is like, and I live in the Southeast, man.
I know some conservatives.
Most of my friends are conservatives because I don't have a choice.
If I want to have friends, they're going to be conservatives.
It's who lives there.
So I talk to them and they're like, oh, yeah, they're tearing down this kind of statue.
Oh, yeah.
And it's not like they're tearing down Confederate statues.
There's that big stink just now about the Victoria Secret Fashion Show where they had their indigenous colors and their feathers they were wearing and walking around half naked.
You can't do that.
So it's the idea mostly that people are going to take costumes that are insensitive to other people.
I got an email yesterday asking for that one again.
So even though we've come public.
So with math, mostly where you see this stuff hitting, though, they don't, I mean, some people are saying that math has inherently got sexism or racism because I guess apparently women and minorities are going to be naturally bad at numbers is what they're assuming.
I don't know what they're assuming.
That's ludicrous.
But they mostly go after education.
So they say, oh, look, the scores, the SAT math scores or whatever for men, white men are higher than for black men or something like that.
Why could that be?
Well, you know, maybe there are a lot of factors that go into that, but they don't give a shit about a lot of factors.
It's racism.
So therefore, math education must be racist.
Therefore, we need social justice initiatives in math education.
And that's exactly what they do.
And so then you have diversity math, and I don't even know what that is.
But it's not something that you would see like at mathematics research level.
It's something that you see at junior high school, elementary school that they're teaching your kids, which is why it's scary as hell.
Maybe there's some kind of Silicon Valley connection there or whatever where, you know, Silicon Valley is in the kind of Bay Area, California.
You've got a lot of the liberal hippie stuff that started out, as you were talking about, in the 60s and 70s.
So it's kind of in the water there.
In general, I would say that what you're seeing is that this stuff has, the big turn to making this applied was in the 90s, right?
So they've had an entire generation of students that have just been really getting this stuff crammed down their throat.
They really have taken over the education in the last 10 years.
It was just starting when I left academia in 2010 that, you know, it was like, oh, we're going to focus on diversity.
We're going to have diversity commitments.
It's going to get in the general curriculum.
So you're getting more and more students that are getting educated in this that are now going out into the workplace, right?
So if half your workforce in tech, because tech moves so fast, I'm just guessing why this might be a thing.
Tech moves really fast.
So you've got to have some fresh training to go in there.
If they've been educated with diversity stuff crammed down their throat the whole time, and there's huge initiatives to try to increase representation of women in particular in tech, and these are seen as automatically good initiatives.
If there's been, this is the culture that they're being educated in, and then they take that culture to the workplace and think this is what tech is about.
And then they're surrounded by like-minded people who encourage it, it's totally plausible that what you've got is sort of a tech echo chamber that's bouncing these things around and keeping it there.
When you have this sort of environment of these nonsense ideas that are accepted as fact and taught and put into published papers, then you have a situation where the left routinely attacks itself and devours itself for not being left enough.
You're always having people that are upset that someone's not progressive enough.
Yeah, so that's when what was the biggest fear for every Republican congressman then was that they're going to get primaried from the right.
So they were going to have some populist Yahoo go screaming about whatever they scream about.
It's going to be more to the right, harder conservatism, conservative movement, capital C, capital M, kind of thing.
And they're going to just drill into the, you know, the reason that the conservative politics aren't succeeding is because we're not conservative enough.
That's the prevailing view where I live in the Southeast.
It's the same thing as you see in the universities, but reversed in terms of polarization.
But with people on the bottom of the bottom, it's an excuse combined with a commitment to the ideology, whether it's conservative movement ideology, whether it's social justice, scholarship, whatever it happens to be.
You see, this is the kind of behavior you see in a panic, a moral panic, for example.
And so Helen and I, the third person who worked on the project with us, Helen and I wrote an essay about a year and a half ago and talking about how the extremism on both sides is really the problem, and most people reject it and should fight it.
Most of us are sensible people in the middle who hate this.
In fact, data just came out showing that it's 80% of the population hate the fringes, both sides.
And only 8% are on the left, and 12% are on the right of the fringe, however that works out.
And so we wrote this thing and we said that what's going on actually, we called it existential polarization.
So you have this idea that everything's an existential crisis.
So the far right, we'll start with them, sees that if the Democrats get power, oh, it's open borders.
The terrorists are coming in.
Our entire way of life is going to be destroyed.
Catastrophe, catastrophe.
Oh, no, Judith Butler is going to be 95 genders.
Quick, stop the Democrats no matter what.
And then you have the left, oh my God, if they get power, everything's going to be racist.
We're going to be beating gays in the snow.
It's going to just be the worst thing in the whole world.
That's actually kind of a joke.
But it's for real, though.
That they think that the world is going to fall apart if the other side gets power.
And so when you have that kind of a situation, you have a panic and you see the slightest bit of advantage happening on the other side is just something to completely freak out about.
And then what do you do?
You say, oh, well, the only possible recipe to balance the scale is to turn further our way.
If we go toward the middle, that puts the balance.
Say if the right goes really far right and we on the left move toward the middle, now the whole balance has moved right.
So the only way to keep the balance close to the middle is if they go right, we go left.
Right?
So then that's going to keep the balance.
But what that actually does is this is going to get nerdy.
Hang on.
That actually puts all of the weight on the outsides.
And you think about a spinning thing, right?
It's got centrifugal forces happening.
What's that trying to do?
It's going to rip the spinning thing apart.
Well, if you have all the weight crammed in the middle, like a wheel, it doesn't come apart, right?
Now, imagine if you had like two billiard balls and you have like this big long stick and there's two holes for the billiard bars.
They don't go in it like locked in.
They're just sitting there.
And you spin that.
What's going to happen?
They're going to fly right off, right?
So if you have all the weight on the outside and you start spinning a thing, so that's like the political conversations dynamic.
It's going to rip the thing apart the more weight gets to the outside.
So one side going to the fringe doesn't mean the other side should go to the fringe.
There's really a damn good YouTube video floating around out there where somebody takes a jet of water and spins a skateboard wheel until the centrifugal force gets so high from it spinning so fast, it rips it apart.
It's worth looking up.
I don't know what the hell you'd search to find it, but it's a powerful visual, and you can see it.
As stuff moves to the outside, the centrifugal force goes up and up and up until finally the thing, the structural integrity of the thing that's spinning, can't hold itself together anymore.
Links, we explained what every paper does, why we wrote it, what we were trying to show with writing the papers, what the problem is that we need to address, and what, you know, what we think that this shows and what we can do.