How academia launders activism

Why you don’t need ten degrees to recognise nonsense when you see it

Apr 17, 2024

I write quite frequently about institutional capture by cultish progressivism. While this has a number of drivers, any satisfactory analysis of the spread of such groupthink must account for the way in which it disseminates from the universities outwards. Central to this process is the repackaging of political activism as ‘objective’ expertise, which in turn helps fuel the proliferation of dogma in society more broadly.

The modus operandi for many people working in a range of influential intellectual fields - neatly if somewhat over-simplistically summed up as the social sciences and humanities - is to ‘begin from the assumption of a grievance and then bend the available theories to confirm it.’1 A very high percentage of academics in, and students of, these disciplines are guided by a quasi-religious, often empirically questionable/false belief in the oppressive nature of Western societies, in the oppression of certain groups by others, and in the primacy that must be accorded to that supposed oppression when trying to explain almost anything. Confirmation of that worldview takes precedence over the pursuit of truth.

Moreover, a significant proportion of what gets held up as profound or cutting edge progressive political thought2 and ‘critical theory’ is in fact little more than pretentious, ideologically-driven nonsense (as someone who spent three years studying this stuff in granular detail at Cambridge I feel I’ve earned the right to say this).

It’s quite the racket. Deeply politicised, unfalsifiable and at times comically ridiculous claims and arguments (E=MC squared is a ‘sexed equation’; children’s cartoons embody and uphold the interests of the ‘bourgeoisie’; the fact that schools expect kids to turn up on time and not to wear hoodies or shout at their teachers is a form of racism, and so on - all real examples by the way) are treated as chin-rubbingly profound, even ‘seminal’. They are then referenced, cited and re-cited by other academics, usually writing similarly ideological dross, whose own work is cited in turn by yet more academics. Journalists and politicians then use that output as evidence to support their own liberal agendas. And so on.

The sort of bollocks that gets cited by other academics, who are usually also talking bollocks. This is an actual quote fyi.

Competitive roles and significant funding are awarded to ideologues who acquire prestige by signalling their fluency in the language and theology of elite groupthink. Studying ‘(De)colonial ecologies in 21st-century insular Hispanic Carribbean film’? Here’s £205,5433. Looking into ‘Self-Authoring Feminine Blackness [and how to develop] Decolonised Practice Methodologies within British Contemporary Dance’? Great, have a juicy grant - you may now call yourself an ‘authority on race relations’ (both real examples - for a long list of others see

Charlotte Gill

’s recent series of articles on this topic).

What odds would you give me on this study’s author not being a hyper-liberal activist?

The work being put out by these people is beyond parody. It’s like someone ate a dictionary of woke buzzwords then vomited up random sections. Yet seek to challenge this or to call out the grift, and you’ll be told to ‘trust the experts’, that you lack the qualifications to have a view on the matter at all, and also probably that you’re racist, white supremacist, sexist, and a dumb conservative for good measure….you know the drill.

What we’re talking about is an absolutely prime example of credentialism. Namely, the reliance on (largely bullshit) qualifications or certifications to determine whether someone is permitted to undertake a task, speak as an expert or work in a certain field. Activist academics with an ideological agenda produce highly politicised work that itself relies upon other similarly politicised and often completely moronic ‘research’ and ‘theory’, which in turn feeds into and shifts wider public debate, policy and culture. Attempt to push back against any of this and you’ll be accused of disagreeing with ‘the experts’, of ‘bias’, and so on by the very people who buy into, and support, the worldview propagated by these activist academics.

The general point of this article summed up in one image.

There is a profound Emperor’s New Clothes quality to all of this, a fact that was beautifully demonstrated by what has become known as the ‘Grievance Studies Affair’, a project conducted by three dissident academics—James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose. Their aim was to investigate and demonstrate the problem of poor scholarship within what they termed ‘Grievance Studies Academia’ (broadly, theoretical branches of social sciences academia dominated by postmodern and critical theory-influenced research including Gender Studies, Race Studies and so on). In order to do this they wrote deliberately senseless articles and submitted them to top progressive academic journals.

The articles make for hilarious reading. In ‘Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon’, dog parks are described as “oppressive spaces that lock both humans and animals into hegemonic patterns of gender conformity that effectively resist bids for emancipatory change”. This was not only published in Gender, Place and Culture but was commended by a reviewer for its academic excellence. Another paper, a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory (essentially, the word ‘Jews’ was swapped for the word ‘men’), was accepted by the Gender Studies journal Affilia. A third ‘The conceptual penis as a social construct’,which argued that penises are not ‘male' but rather should be analysed as social constructs was given a place in a peer-reviewed journal. A fourth argued that straight men should insert stuff in their arses to fight transphobia. That too was published.

In short - appeals to authority based on the supposed expertise of professors and researchers in these areas should be treated with a massive dose of scepticism. In fact, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, you are arguably more likely to form an accurate understanding of the social world by directly inverting what they have to say, or by entirely ignoring it, than by unthinkingly adhering to the beliefs and ideas they seek to promote (see pic below).

Believing everything that ‘the experts’ tell you doesn’t make you more intelligent if the experts are frauds.

A common rebuttal to all this is that there are politically-motivated social scientists on all sides of the spectrum, so it’s no big deal. Well, while it’s true that there are undoubtedly some low calibre conservative ‘thinkers’ out there - the field dramatically skews left. Indeed as Wilfred Reilly notes4, looking at the US (the figures are similar in the UK) ‘18 per cent of social-science professors identify as Marxists/communists, another 21 per cent as ‘activists’ and 24 per cent as political radicals. In at least one field, sociology, there seem to be literally zero truly prominent Republican scholars. According to a 2005 study, 59 per cent of academic sociologists are partisan Democrats, 41 per cent are independents or backers of a minor party, and zero per cent are Republicans.’ It’s also worth pointing out that this study was from 2005 - things have hardly become less woke since then.

This gives rise to a conformist environment. A large percentage of university researchers report feeling pressured to avoid certain un-PC topics and being very likely to censor results of their own work. Conservative students are more unwilling than others to express their views openly on campus. And academics who reject progressive narratives, for example providing evidence that disparities between social groups reflect cultural or natural differences and preferences, or that they have been overblown to begin with, often attain near pariah status among their colleagues (and beyond). This is unsurprising when you realise that entire university departments exist in which almost nobody holds views that run significantly counter to a left or liberal position.

When confronted with this state of affairs, progressives often either deny it’s happening or claim it’s a positive thing, because it represents ‘moral progress’. The first claim is gaslighting, the second is essentially just propaganda. Look beneath the verbose language and what you often find is that the policies and positions these professors and their fellow activists support are internally inconsistent, highly suspect, and reliant upon the selective framing or dismissal of available data and evidence.

Thus it’s on university campuses that we find mobs of students and academics who claim we must be ‘actively anti-racist’ at all times, yet respond to the mass murder of Jews and others by an army of genocidal extremists by claiming they feel ‘exhilarated’, celebrating and proclaiming their support for the killers. Who claim the tolerant West is a Handmaid’s-Tale style dystopia, that we must believe all women, and that ‘rape culture’ is everywhere, and yet instantly dismiss all evidence of the sexual assault and murder of women and girls by an army of hyper-mysogynistic, bloodthirsty jihadists. Who claim we must never challenge the ‘lived experience’ of ‘people of colour’, yet force black professors who conduct large-scale studies that contradict the preferred liberal narrative on race into hiding. Who hold themselves out as ‘LGBTQ activists’ while siding with gay-hating Islamic fundamentalists to shout down and abuse Iranian secularists. I could go on and on and on (and have - read my other articles).

Of course not all students subscribe to this stuff by any means, and there are vast numbers of academics who are doing vital, high quality research that has nothing to do with it. Nor should all ‘woke’ scholarship be written off as rubbish, like all belief systems it has its strengths and weaknesses.

But the fact remains: often what is held up as ‘expert opinion’ is little more than highly politicised work by progressive activists that has been laundered through the academy. The idea that we mere mortals lack the capacity or qualifications to call out such dross when we see it is nothing more than a means of shielding bad and unpleasant ideas from much needed scrutiny.

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