Geoff Shullenberger in The Hedgehog Review:
Ever since physicist Alan Sokal published a hoax paper in the journal Social Text in 1996 to skewer the “fashionable sectors of the American academic left,” a mini-industry of polemicists has dedicated itself to exposing the ideological excesses and intellectual bizarreries of humanities scholarship. In 2018, the provocateurs James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose performed Sokal’s stunt on a larger scale, to considerable fanfare.1 A host of pundits have since built careers assailing critical race theory and “gender ideology.” The Trump administration is now bringing these efforts into policymaking, canceling grants based on keyword searches for terms that seem to betray a woke orientation, such as “Latinx” and “systemic,” and pressuring universities to rein in what it claims are the anti-white and antisemitic views of some faculty.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.