OK
Is the light OK in here?
I just read my e-mail we have our first win.
The dog park paper has been accepted
they don't know, we're about to tell them.
I've got to read you something.
Dear Dr Helen Wilson (laughs)
I've now closely considered the revision of your manuscript, Dog Park
(laughs)
And will recommend its publication in Gender, Place & Culture.
(Laughs) You've done very good work to address the issues
that were raised and then clarified your arguments.
Thank you for your contribution to Gender, Place & Culture
and I hope to be seeing your manuscript in print.
Yours truly, [redacted] PhD, Managing Editor, Gender, Place & Culture
We have an accepted paper in the number 1 feminist geography journal.
[Voiceover]: Since approximately June of 2017
I along with two other concerned academics
Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose,
Have been writing intentionally broken academic papers and submitting them
to highly-respected journals in fields that study gender, race, sexuality
and similar topics.
We did this to expose a political corruption that has taken hold of the universities.
By this point several of these papers have been accepted in highly-respected journals.
and one, that claims that dog-humping incidents can
be taken as evidence of rape culture,
has been officially honoured as excellent scholarship.
I'm not going to lie to you, we had a lot of fun with this project.
The reviewers were worried that we didn't respect the dogs' privacy
While we were inspecting their genitals
But don't let that lead you believe that we're not addressing a serious problem.
If you have a few minutes, I'll try to explain.
To be clear up-front, we think studying topics like gender,
race and sexuality is worthwhile.
And getting it right is extremely important.
The problem is how these topics are being studied right now.
A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions
are allowed, like those that make whiteness and masculinity problematic.
The fields we're concerned about put social grievances ahead of objective truth.
So as a simple summary, we call the problem grievance studies.
To test the depth of this problem my collaborators and I dedicated ourselves
to a one to two-year secret project
Targeting top grievance studies journals with an agreement to publicly
release our findings, no matter what the outcome.
We started officially on August 16th, 2017
and by Thanksgiving we were in trouble.
We'd begun ambitiously and mostly stupidly
Our first papers were really only suited to test the hypothesis
that we could penetrate their leading journals with
poorly researched hoax papers.
That wasn't the case, and we were wrong for thinking that we might be able to.
So by late November it looked like all we had accomplished was ruining our reputations.
Peter: If this doesn't achieve anything, it would actually frighten me.
[Voiceover]: We needed to change our approach
So we walked back from the hoaxing and began to engage with the existing scholarship in these fields more deeply.
This led us to learn a lot more about the inner workings of grievance studies.
Jim: The best I can tap into is there's this kind of like religious architecture in their mind
where privilege is sin. Privilege is evil.
And then they've identified education at the place where it has to be fixed.
So you can come up with these really nasty arguments,
like let's put white kids in chains on the floor at school as an educational opportunity.
And if you frame it in terms of overcoming privilege,
and you frame their resistance
that they won't this to happen to them, that they would complain about this
If you frame that in terms of 'oh they only complain about that because they're privileged and
they can't handle it because their privilege made them weak.'
Then it's right in.
[Voiceover]: Papers started getting in.
Jim: You f**king have got to be s**ting me that this happened!
[Voiceover]: By March, with 2 papers accepted and 1 published it would be fair
to say that we had become accepted grievance scholars.
By June, it was 3, with 1 having been officially honored by the journal
as excellent scholarship. By July it was 5.
By August, 7.
This shouldn't have been possible.
So far what we're learning is rather astonishing, but the data we've gathered
requires more analysis to fully comprehend.
What appears beyond dispute is that making absurd and horrible ideas
sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated
at the highest levels of academic grievance studies.
Jim: We rewrote a section of Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism and
this journal has accepted it.
Social work.
[Voiceover]: This is deeply concerning because the work of grievance scholars goes on to be taught
in classes, to design educational curricula, to be taken up by activists
to influence how media is produced, and to misinform
journalists and politicans about the true nature
of our cultural realities.
No one tolerates this sort of corruption when they find out an industry is funding biased
research to make itself look a certain way.
The same scruitiny should apply to research when it pushes a political agenda
and we have uncovered enough evidence
to suggest that this corruption is pervasive among many disciplines,
including women's and gender studies,
feminist studies, race studies,
sexuality studies, fat studies,
queer studies, cultural studies,
and sociology.
[Music] Truth will set us free
[Voiceover]: You may be thinking that the work done in these fields must be good,
because it seems to continue the noble work of the civil rights movements.
Well after having spent a year immersed in it,
and becoming recognised as experts in it
we have to disagree.
Grievance studies does not continue the work of the civil rights movements
it corrupts it.
And it trades upon their good names to keep pushing a kind of social snake oil
onto a public that keeps getting sicker.
Progress is easier without grievance studies.
My collaborators and I are left-wing academics
who can now say with confidence
these people don't speak for us.
This is now a plea to all the progressives and minority groups
these people claim to speak for
We suggest you spend some time critically engaging
with the ideas coming out of these fields
and decide for yourself whether they speak for you.