"Critical race theory" and ... Immanuel Kant (?!?)

An eye-rolling editing FAIL at the Washington Post has begotten something rare: an interesting and substantial thread about Immanuel Kant.

The impetus for this was an op-ed by professional Republican hack Marc Thiessen on the Republicans' favorite bogeyman this season, The danger of critical race theory 11/11/2021. He writes:

Critical race theory, [Allen] Guelzo says, is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded. Kant believed that “reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives” and so he set about “developing a theory of being critical of reason,” Guelzo says.

Yes, folks, Immanuel Kant, author of What Is Enlightenment?, an essay often taken as a kind of general program for ; the Enlightenment, was an enemy of the Enlightenment.

Zack Beauchamp flagged how silly it was:

I just can't get over this. It's a thing the Washington Post actually published — a thing that is so completely and indefensibly wrong that anyone who has taken a single intro to philosophy course could explain why https://t.co/v5OteD8X5F pic.twitter.com/JBfX6Pb3PD

— Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp) November 12, 2021

David Neiwert followed up with this comment:

I’m sure @marcthiessen won’t bother acquainting himself with the history of philosophy, but Kant was mostly critiquing the Rationalist school of epistemology. The Empiricists, a competing school, are usually credited (particularly Locke and Hume) with influencing the Founders. pic.twitter.com/zxGd0zw3O9

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) November 13, 2021

Philosophy professor John Holbo then stepped in to recount this bit of philosophical background:

The Pantheism controversy, in German ideas & letters, starts when the philosopher Jacobi tells the philosopher Mendelssohn the playwright Lessing confessed to him to having been a closet Spinozist. 3/ pic.twitter.com/bfNCJJfjXf

— John Holbo (@jholbo1) November 13, 2021

Check out Holbo's whole thread.

The anti-"Critical Race Theory" narrative is a conspiracy theory. An especially sleazy one if you take the time to dig into the "hghbrow" version of the backstory as articulated by unsavory characters like James Lindsay and Christopher Rufo.

Conspiracy theories present a common dilemma in political contests. The Republican media network has clearly educated its viewers and followers that "critical race theory" is a tribal slogan for Their Side. So a Republican politician just needs to say, "I will ban critical race theory from the schools," and its a clear signal to their side.

But if Democratic candidates try to answer it by going into some detail explaining what a sleazy and dishonest conspiracy theory it is, it risks adding credibility to it in a "where there's smoke there's fire" sense. But it shouldn't be the kind of challenge the Democrats too often assume it to be when confronting a hot Republicans "culture war" slogan.

Gene Lyons has an idea how they can go about it, i.e., by approaching it as the promotion of a moral panic (Trump's Mob: Gullible, Conspiracy-Minded, And Willfully Ignorant Of History National Memo 10/13/2021):

Because [Tucker Carlson's target audience is] gullible and prone to apocalyptic thinking — "the rapture" was all the rage in evangelical circles not long ago — one result has been a succession of what can ... only be described as "moral panics" over largely imaginary threats such as "Sharia Law," "Cancel Culture," and "Critical Race Theory." Since 2010, for example, several states have found it necessary to ban Islamic religious courts from exercising legal authority.

As if.

Susceptibility to conspiracy theories has to do with what is known as "anti-intellectualism." Historian Richard Hofstadter did a well-known book on the topic, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963). But the phenomenon has hardly gone away in the ensuring six decades since it was published.

But it's also the case that conservatives are also eager to give even crackpot theories some kind of intellectual heft. Hofstadter noted that there are "lowbrow" versions of far right conspiracy theories as well as "highbrow" ones. He also suggested that a "middlebrow" category could be helpful, but that term doesn't seem to have caught on generally. (Though I use it myself.) In his most famous essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Harper's Nov 1964)

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

A tremendous amount of additional research has been done on this topic since then, so Hofstadter's 1964 essay is scarcely the last word on the topic. But it's still a useful read.

There are many conservative think-tanks and assorted journals that crank out their own "middlebrow" and "highbrow" versions of these theories. The Claremont Institute and a faction associated with it called the West Coast Straussians is one such institution among many. Their perspective was very influential on the "1776 Project" which provides what passes for what the anti-CRT propagandists would like to see taught in American schools.

The Lost Cause narrative retrospectively justifying the Confederate revolt to preserve slavery that also became an ideology for the overthrown of Southern state democracies established during Reconstruction is a huge example of such a false, crackpot theory that not only served as a useful ideology for bad ends but screwed up the teaching of history in the US for generations.

So journalists, political analysts, and scholars do have to pay some attention to the backstories in such ideological theories, even if election campaigns are not the right place to attempt elaborate and nuanced discussions of them.

While we're on the topic of current paranoid conspiracy theories, I've noticed lately some tendency on the "highbrow" right to treat the term "narrative" as a pejorative. In that view, viewpoints of the Mean Libruls are "narratives," i.e., false and deceptive, while their own stories around something like the alleged Critical Race Theory conspiracy are simple statement of truth. There is an analogy here to some Christian fundamentalists - I've heard Pat Robertson do this - that their version of Christianity is not only the True Religion, but it's actually the only actual "religion" because all the other ways of thinking that call themselves religion are false, evil, Satanic, etc.

I recommend against putting a lot of effort into trying to uncover some chain of reasoning behind that. It's more the psychology of Us Againt Them.

Understanding the purpose of the agitation against "critical race theory"

Randall Kennedy takes on the Republican/far-right conspiracy theory around "critical race theory" in The Right-Wing Attack on Racial Justice Talk The American Prospect 09/28/2021.

The right has set up critical race theory (CRT for short= as "a target useful to its aims, which include taking the country back to an earlier era of accepted white hegemony."

As Kennedy explains, the rightwingers use "critical race theory" as a bogeyman. My own translation of the Republicans' message with the phrase would be, "Scary Jews! Scary black people!" The agitation focuses on promoting anti-black racism, but the conspiracy narrative behind it incorporates the far-right anti-Semitic "cultural Marxism" trope which blames Political Correctness and CRT on conniving Jewish Marxists.

After briefly sketching the actual acadrmic theory that did adopt the label "critical race theory" and related developments in actual academic fields, he explains:

In the far-right commentariat, “critical race theory” has become a catchall phrase that refers not so much to a discrete body of thought as a bogeyman onto which those who invoke it negatively can cast fears, resentments, and prejudices. Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute admitted as much when he declared that “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” He remarked similarly that “We have successfully frozen their brand — “critical race theory” — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” According to Rufo, “critical race theory is the perfect villain.” He ought to know: The “critical race theory” that he attacks incessantly is, in large part, a figment of his creation. [my emphasis]

He also reminds us that rightwing agitation against decent textbooks and educational practices is not some new with the hysteria against CRT: "The history of American education at every level is full of examples of textbooks blocked, library books pulled, and instructors fired on account of right-wing objections to teachings about racial injustice."

Kennedy does stress the need to recognize the propaganda goal of the anti-CRT narrative. So treating it as a good faith effort to improve educational practices is not likely to move its advocates. "It is, for the most part, a race-baiting ruse to gin up the Trumpian base, to vent the status anxieties of aggrieved whites, and to bait progressives into saying and doing things that alienate potential allies."

Republicans' memory laws against "critical race theory" (their current favorite bogeyman concept and conspiracy theory)

I've been saying that the "critical race theory" (CRT) slogan the Republicans are using as their political battle cry right now, and which they are using to try to ban any mention of white racism from school curriculums, is a code phrase for, "Scary Jews! Scary black people!"

Because that's what it is. The thin conspiracy theory narrative on which it is based blames German Jewish Marxists of 90 years ago for making white people in America have to reconsider their racial attitudes in 2021.

Henry Abramson discusses the impact of the anti-CRT laws Republican legislatures are passing in Banning critical race theory will gut the teaching of Jewish history JTA 07/08/2021:

The bans on teaching with a critical race theory framework aren’t really against history per se, which is in the past and therefore stubbornly resists regulation. Rather, these decrees fall more precisely within the category of what are called “memory laws.” Historian Timothy Snyder described these laws as “government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past… by asserting a mandatory view of historical events, by forbidding the discussion of historical facts or interpretations or by providing vague guidelines that lead to self-censorship.” [my emphasis]

Abramson argues that the anti-CRT laws are similar to laws currently being used to promote jingoistic, ehnonationalist history by rightwing authoritarian governments, including Vladimir Putin's in Russia:

Putin ... pioneered a new approach to memory laws: Rather than protecting the weak, they also can be weaponized to strengthen the powerful. In the context of Russian history, the counterpart to American slavery is the Holodomor, a terrible famine that killed millions of Ukrainians from 1932-1933. Beginning in 2008, Russia’s Duma assembly passed legislation that forbade the discussion of Russian government policies that contributed to the genocidal nature of the famine, and established entities like the “Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests” (an ideological antecedent to the now-defunct 1776 Commission, then President Trump’s last-minute attempt to promote a “pro-American curriculum”).

This is the intellectual home of the CRT bans. They share educational space with Poland’s ridiculous, offensive and dangerous 2018 law that criminalizes the suggestion that Poland bears any responsibility for the crimes committed by the Germans during World War II. The object of Poland’s memory law is not to prevent the resurgence of extremist antisemitism; it is to prevent Poles from confronting the complex legacy of collaboration with the Nazi occupation. [my emphasis]

I posted about Poland's memory laws in The "historical policy" of the ruling Polish rightwing party PiS 07/31/2020, in which I also note Timothy Snyder's phrase for such narrow nationalist approaches to history, "the 'politics of eternity': a displacement of the real challenges of the actual world with a myth of a sacred past that must be protected."

Abramson explains how the Trumpista approach now becoming embedded in state laws by Republican legislatures would affect teaching about anti-Semitism:

Despite the 1776 Commissions promise to “unite, inspire, and ennoble all Americans,” these laws will chill honest engagement with hard truths, forcing teachers to lie to their students, even if only by omission.

Furthermore, anyone teaching Jewish history will be challenged to find a way to present the legacy of antisemitism without running afoul of these regulations. The historical linkage between Catholic theology and the persecution of Jews, for example, is rife with difficult topics. They range from the medieval charges of host desecration and the horrendous blood libel to the pope’s kidnapping of 6-year-old Edgardo Mortara in 1858 (we could, unfortunately, continue at length). Protestants would also be discomfited by Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish screed, “On the Jews and their Lies” (1543). The list of countries where Jews have lived in their diaspora is pretty much identical to the list of countries that have discriminated against Jews. [my emphasis]

Another JTA article (Eleanor Stern, When Holocaust education meets critical race theory: A partisan history debate unfolds in Louisiana 07/07/2021) describes how rightwing Republicans proposed a law that nominally advocated teaching about the Holocaust in Louisiana schools as a stalking-horse for a rather singular view of history:

The Holocaust education bill seemed potentially uncontroversial when Hodges introduced the measure in April. The original text simply called for “instruction regarding World War II and the Holocaust for middle and high school students and training for teachers relative to such instruction.”

Many Jewish groups have called for exactly that kind of requirement, arguing that education is the key to increasing tolerance and preventing genocides in the future. Currently, 17 states require some form of Holocaust education in schools. Louisiana, which one study pegged as having one of the lowest percentages of Holocaust-aware young people in the U.S., is seen as especially in need of similar mandates. The state also recently became the new home of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, boosting the visibility of Jews in the region.

But as lawmakers held hearings on the bill, it became clear that many of its supporters had a different vision — starting with [Valerie] Hodges, an evangelical ex-missionary and prominent conservative who has served in the Louisiana State Legislature for a decade. Hodges initially accepted, then declined, an interview with JTA.

On her professional Facebook page during the bill’s debate period, Hodges shared an image of Hitler with a caption calling him “everything today’s liberal craves.” Another post compared Nazi Germany to critical race theory and the New York Times’ 1619 Project, writing, “World War II was about RACE, yet liberals objected to it being included in my bill … Hitler had been laying the groundwork for at least 15 years before the Holocaust. It began with the organization of college students who would be the ones to help him implement his reign of horror.”

During hearings, Hodges made her arguments while seated beside David Barton, founder of the Texas-based advocacy group Wallbuilders, which aims to promote the idea that the U.S. is an inherently Christian nation founded on biblical principles. The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies Barton as an “extremist” who is “a key bridge between the mainstream political right and radical-right religious ideology.” [my emphasis]

If you design things around crackpot notions, it shouldn't surprise anyone that results wind up being cracked pottery.

Christian white lady from Blaze TV explains how Mean Libruls and their "critical race theory" are forcing polite white folks to form a "White Identitarian movement"

Allie Beth Stuckey is part of Glenn Beck's Blaze TV operation, which of course is highly ideological and very conservative, even radical rightwing. She has a podcast in which she presents conservative views from a Southern Baptist perspective. In the recurring schisms in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) she currently seems to be on the right wing of the SBC, which is by general American standards, already very rightwing.

I'll start out by giving her credit for criticizing the creepy idea that Tucker Carlson recently proposed on his FOX News White Power Hour that public school classes should all be recorded on camera. In order to make sure the innocent white en aren't being poluted by "critical race theory" (CRT), the Republicans' latest bogeyman conspiracy theory, of course. "Critical race theory" as it used by the Republicans actually is code for "Scary Jews! Scary black people!"

The Republicans didn't go all in on the CRT conspiracy theory until this year. But now it's become the Republican "Tea Party" of 2021.

Stuckey had this to say, though (07/08/2021 YouTube post):

But she's with Blaze TV, and she's all in on pumping up the CRT scare, so I'm not going to take that as any sign of emerging liberalism on her part. Maybe she's just enough of an adult to recognize some of the ways that children could be hurt by this, including in ways that have nothing to do with what's being taught.

I'm linking to her recent video on CRT, not because it contains anything substantive, but because it shows a couple of things about the limitations of the CRT slogan that I found a bit surprising to see: Critical Race Theory: The Left Loves It ... But Doesn’t Understand It 07/09/2021.

The rightwing meme on CRT is a sleazy conspiracy theory, which not only incorporates another longtime conspiracy theory on the far right called "Cultural Marxism," but seems to be pretty much just a rebranding of it. I've posted numerous times about both on this blog. Here I'll just summarize the narrative. It claims that a group of Jewish Marxists in Germany in the 1930s came up with a theory about culture that later spawned something called "postmodernism" and Political Correctness and now CRT, and it's all about destroying capitalism and undermining White Pride.

As with any conspiracy theory, refuting it can have the unfortunate effect of spreading it. But when the US Republican Party makes a slogan like CRT central to their political identity as they are doing in the current moment, it's also not really possible for non-Republicans to completely ignore it.

The two things that most strike me about this presentation are (1) she seems to recognize that that some of the pushback from even mainstream liberals is likely to be effective for people who aren't besotted true believers in the Glenn Beck Republican Gospel, and (2) in trying to explain in more detail how terrible CRT is to give her listeners additional arguments to use, she winds up making the Republican CRT meme actually sound like the silly mush that it is.

Because once you get beyond CRT being scary anti-white-people stuff and start talking in the slightest detail about what the concept of "whiteness" means among the theorists she's condemning, you have to at least hint at the idea that race is a social construct that does is applied to defining and reinforcing social power relations. And that already starts to dilute the message of, "scary Jews! Scary black people!"

Once she starts actually laying out the arguments of the fairly narrow legal academic field whose advocates themselves call "critical race theory," she quotes arguments that involve more serious points than "white people are all evil," for instance in citing the book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (Third Edition, 2017) by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. She uses the term "liberal order" as something she defends, which is sure to befuddle most of her audience. She says, "CRT rejects the idea of judging people by their individual actions and rather judges people by group and by the systems they uphold either actively or just complicitly [sic]." (29.00 in the video)

Anyone who reads a few pages of the Delgado-Stefancic book is likel to see right away that the critical race theory that actually identifies with the name will see that it's an introduction to a specialized academic field. But Stuckey in that podcast spends a lot of energy into repeating that this is some kind of a comprehensive ideology that is Communism and Marxism in thin disguise. Maybe she didn't get to the page in the book that says, "Critical race theory has yet to develop a comprehensive theory of class." (Hint: Class is kind of a key concept in Communist theory. But, hey, class, race, oppression, colleges - it all sounds like icky Commie stuff, amirite?)

She repeats again and again with an arrogant smile that the CRT bugaboo is aimed at creating racial discrimination against white people, which FOX News viewers of course hear constantly, so most will just hear that and say, "Yeah, that's what I already knew." And if you're a self-righteous scold looking for ways to complain about black people in a respectable middle-class way, you might pick up a useful phrase or two.

But, apart from sporadically citing a couple of books published within the last 20 years, it's not really a whole lot different than what a Bircher or White Citizens Council fan would have been saying in 1960, or 1965, or any time since. In other words, the Mean Libruls are all Commies who are helping the Jews and black people take over. And, oh yeah, public schools are dangerous for nice white children, so better to send them to a Christian private school or homeschool them with fundamentalist Christian texts.

In other words, even a presentation that tries to expose CRT as a dangerous new menace in what would count on the right as an intellectual presentation - Stuckey does speak in complete sentences with understandable syntax - it winds up as mainly a list of all the white nationalist fears that segregationist-minded white people have been passing on from generation to generation. Stuckey's presentation is too sad and boring to be infuriating, although it does rise to the level of mildly annoying at points. Still, it's deeply dishonest rightwing propaganda.

She manages to stay on her dreary script most of the time. But near the end, just after 54:00 in the video, she warns her audience that CRT is meant to be "anti-White Power." She thinks that is a bad thing. She assures her listeners that CRT is "anti-white," but mealy-mouths around that point a bit, because that make it sound like she's being thoughtful, or nuanced, or something.

To make sure she summarizes the key points at the end, she explains that how CRT "manifests itself is in the explicit condemnation of white people as a whole." And then not-too-subtly suggests that it's time for a "White Identitarian movement" to counter CRT ("Scary Jews! Scary black people!") - not that she's advocating it, you see, it's just that some white people will "inevitably" take that as a necessary response to CRT ("Scary Jews! Scary black people!"). "White solidarity is going to come together as a reaction to [white] people being constantly maligned," she says.

This is nasty stuff. Seriously boring, but nasty.

Jeet Heer takes on the "critical race theory" theme

Jeet Heer has a column from two weeks ago in which he makes an important point about when refuting a crackpot conspiracy theory like the "critical race theory" scare that Republicans have taken up, be careful about giving it more credibility than it deserves by focusing on refuting bad-faith claims: Critical Race Theory as a Bogeyman Substack 06/02/2021.

As he puts it on Twitter:

If someone is saying "A bunch of Jews created CRT to stir up race war in America & kill white people" you don't respond by saying, "Well, I have a much more modulated criticism of Adorno & Horkheimer's's Dialectic of Enlightenment." You say "that's an anti-Semitic myth."

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) June 18, 2021

His basic point is correct. The Republican bogeyman of "critical race theory" is actually a dogwhistle phrase meaning, "Scary Jews! Scary black people!"

It's actually a variation/continuation/mutation of the longer-standing far-right conspiracy theory about "Cultural Marxism." And it really does boil down to what Heer summarizes in that tweet. The basic narrative is: the Frankfurt School of the 1930s (Jewish Marxists) begat postmodernism (not even close to accurate) which begat Critical Race Theory. In other words: Scary Jews! Scary black people!

But, as with all conspiracy theories, refuting or debunking it can contribute to actually spreading the conspiracy theory. Debunkers need to be aware of that and be careful. But it's a risk that can't entirley be avoided. Jeet's column itself is an attempt to manage that risk while recognizing that people trying to counter the conspiracy claim need to have some understanding of what is being said in the conspiracy narrative, even if it's more-or-less nuts.

I've recently posted about "critical race theory" and the Cultural Marxism trope from which it derives.

Jeet's column has a link to a disturbing argument from Ruy Teixeira on how the Democrats should respond to this propaganda claim by resorting to a stock Democratic response, which typically does not provide impressive results:

But Jeet does miss something on the brief summary of the claim that he provides:

Fact checking is a necessary but tedious affair. One could go through Woolery’s comments and note that there is no Frankfort school (unless there is a stronghold of Marxism in Frankfort, Kentucky that I’m not aware of. In which case, apologies). The critical theory of the Frankfurt school isn’t to be confused, despite similar names, with critical race theory. The Frankfurt theorists are no longer alive, let alone ruling the roost in Columbia. And Frankfurt school social theories, with the exception of Herbert Marcuse, had little truck with anti-racism. In fact, if the Frankfurt school is to be taxed with anything, it is a tendency towards apolitical quietism and alienation from activism. [my emphasis]

Axel Honneth, one of the leading contemporary philosophers, was head of the present-day Frankfurt School (ISR) until 2018. And he's current a professor of philosophy and Frankfurt (Germany, not Kentucky) and at Columbia University. Other living philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School critical theory" perspective include:

• Jürgen Habermas, who is considered Second Generation Frankfurt School, is generally considered Germany's most important public intellectual. At age 90, he published a two-volume history, 1700-page history of (mostly Western) philosophy with a focus on faith and knowledge.
• Oscar Negt, who is currently publishing a multi-volume history of political philosophy
• Wendy Brown, author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (2015)
• Seyla Benhabib, author of Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (2021)
• Rainer Forst, author of Tolerance in Conflict (2016)

Hoax studies and crackpot rightwing theories (including their favorite of the moment, "critical race theory")

I recently listened to some of a boring podcast featuring a writer named James Lindsay talking to a conservative Christian podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey. Lindsay is the co-author with Helen Pluckrose of a book with a long slogan as its title, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (2020).

Lindsay is also associated with a blog called New Discourses, which seem to be a rightwing anti-"wokeness" website. He was for a while associated with the New Atheist movement, which operates in the more-or-less "highbrow" intellectual space as Jordan Peterson and what was recently known as the Intellectual Dark Web. PZ Myers who also identified with that group expresses his disappointment with Lindsay, including his role at New Discourses, in The grift, oh the grift Pharyngula 08/09/2020.

He cites a conference at a white nationalist conference in London at which Lindsay, Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian appeared. Those three are listed as the first of several contributors at the New Discourses blog, which Myers says is owned by "Michael O’Fallon, who wants to promote conservative Christian Nationalism" and heads a group called Sovereign Nations.

Zack Beauchamp, reports on a project a few years ago by Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian in The controversy around hoax studies in critical theory, explained Vox 10/15/2018. It involved writing papers and sending them to academic journals advocating for philosophical/theoretical positions they didn't actually support. Several got published and the authors mocked the journals for publishing them. A "highbrow" version of "owning the libs," I guess.

The idea was that the authors wrote things they themselves claimed to be ridiculous and then claim it discredits the journals that accepted them because they should have recognized it as ridiculous. Beauchamp recalls a case that attracted attention in academia and among positivist-minded skeptics/New Atheists, in which physicist Alan Sokal placed an article on gravity in a journal called Social Text that he used as a kind of intellectual "sting." Ben Goldacre wrote a glowing mini-review of Sokal's later book on the action. (The Sokal affair Guardian 06/05/2003) Stephen Hilgartner took a more academic looks at the Sokal stunt in The Sokal Affair in Context Science, Technology, & Human Values 22:4 (1997).

Beauchamp notes, Sokal's stunt "was self-consciously more limited than the Pluckrose et al. sting." It was focused more particularly on a certain kind of argument about all of science as a social construction. Lindsay and his two collaborators were trying to discredit a larger and more amorphously designed philosophical/sociological kind of position. But Beauchamp also argues about it and the more recent one, "These hoaxes are not so much about academic hygiene as they are about discrediting one’s political opponents." Although it seems to me that Sokal was actually trying to make a point about the philosophy of science.

Hoaxing to "own" the other side can encourage bad habits. And as Beauchamp points out, achieving publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal is not an endorsement of the author's conclusion. It means that the article was judged to meet certain standards. And criticism of the article is part of scholarly, scientific, and academic processes. In fact, for someone just entering an academic field, an article by a leading figure in the field disagreeing with the article, even savaging it, can be great for the writer's academic career. Also in the 1990s, a sociologist named Daniel Jonah Goldhagen became a kind of rock star in the field of Holocaust studies with his book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) in just that way. His work was criticized by leading specialists in the field on good grounds, and few accepted the key conclusion of the book about the nature of German anti-Semitism. But the fact that so many leading Holocaust scholars gave it serious attention raised the book's and Goldhagen's prestige and fame.

But it's one thing to claim you made an experiment you didn't. Or to falsify the results. Or to plagiarize someone else's work. Or to libel someone in an article.

It's another matter to make a scholarly argument that may somehow not be completely in line with one's innermost beliefs. I'm not fond myself of Karl Popper's treatment of Hegel's legacy, for instance. But if I wanted to - I don't, but if I did, I could construct an argument in a paper to defend Popper's position. If I then persuaded some academic journal to publish it, it wouldn't in itself reflect any discredit on the journal if I came out after it was published and said, "Aha! I didn't actually believe that argument and the journal editors didn't figure that out! It might just mean I have some talent as a philosophical ghostwriter.

Beauchamp elaborates at some lengths on why he finds that the Lindsay-Pluckrose-Boghossian trios claim that their experiment/stunt discredits the field they sought to attack doesn't hold up well. The factors he cites apply to academic papers on hard-science topics as well as liberal arts:

[A]ny field can be hoaxed if you lie about the data you’ve gathered and hide your true intentions: The entire system depends on good faith and honesty. When people break it, by submitting bad-faith arguments or by manufacturing data, the system is not well-equipped to catch it.

My colleagues Brian Resnick and Julia Belluz, for example, have done extensive reporting on problems with statistical research in psychology and health, respectively. A shockingly large percentage of papers, even in leading journals, can’t be replicated in follow-up experiments. Part of the problem is researchers selectively reporting the results of their research to make their conclusions seem rigorous when they aren’t, a trick enabled by a kind of a statistical cheat called p-hacking.

Peer reviewers can’t tell if a statistical paper is flawed in this way, because by definition they don’t have access to research results that are excluded from the paper. They have to trust that the researchers came by their conclusions honestly; the entire peer review system depends on establishing a certain level of trust.

This is why it matters, as Engber notes, that the most striking papers from the hoax actually invented interviews and data from observation. “We know from long experience that expert peer review offers close to no protection against outright data fraud,” he writes. “These examples haven’t hoodwinked anyone with sophistry or satire but with a simple fabrication of results.”

In order to draw the big ideological conclusions about gender and identity studies that Pluckrose et al. want to, you need to show that this is something different from the standard problems with academic publishing. [my emphasis in bold]

Science is said to be a self-correcting field because claims can be evaluated and experiments validated by other researchers. Here, Popper's concept of designing scientific experiments that can invalidate claims is very important, though it may not have quite the universal relevance positivists claim for it. See: Stephen Thornton, Karl Popper (2021) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Section 4. Basic Statements, Falsifiability and Convention.

Here is another example of this particular Jordan-Peterson-esque train of rightwing argument from New Discourses .This is another example of a rightwing analysis treating the "critical race theory" trope as an extension of the crackpot, anti-Semitic, far-right Cultural Marxism theory: Matthew Nielsen, When Critical Theory Took on Race 06/09/2021.

It's frustrating to offer any kind of reality-check about propaganda constructions based on bad-faith arguments. In the case of the "critical race theory" the Republican are raving about today, it really means nothing much more to most of them than, "Scary black people! Scary black people!"

Nielsen explicitly calls the concept of critical theory as defined by Frankfurt School scholars Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse in the 1930s with the new Republican bogeyman concept "critical race theory." Nielsen calls the Horkheimer-Marcuse concept the "philosophical parent" of "Critical Race Theory," which he capitalizes for some reason. In the terms of the highbrow neighborhood in the far-right swamp, that the link between the crackpot conspiracy theory about "Cultural Marxism" and the current Republican "critical race theory" dog-whistle slogan.

The cultural-Marxism conspiracy theory is the idea that the Frankfurt School invented "postmodernism," which is just not so. Nielsen writes, "In other words, 'critical' arguments are formed and founded in rhetoric - only. You cannot test their claims with any instrument of measurement. This is Critical Theory in a nutshell."

In fact, the most famous and influential work of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s were the Studies on Authority and the Family (1936) and the Studies in Prejudice sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, both of which were based on extensive original sociological research. Both looked at the "authoritarian personality," an idea describing how family and social structures produces a certain percentage of people who are psychologically very inclined to support authoritarian movements and regimes and to distrust democracy and the equal rule of law. An outstanding recent treatment of the subject is Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers (2020) by John Dean and Bob Altemeyer.

The notion that all this work was based only on rhetoric is worse than silly.

The Republicans obsession over "critical race theory"

"Critical race theory" (CRT) is the faddish new Republican phrase for, "Scary black people! Scary black people!"

Florida just passed a law banning its teaching, without much effort to define what it is. Because, as Julia Craven explains in What Florida’s “Critical Race Theory” Ban Tells Us About Anti-Antiracism Slate 06/11/2021:

As the Florida law demonstrates, the goal of the anti-CRT effort is put the analysis of ongoing racism out of bounds—to treat any inquiry into the material inequities that define the color line in America as something equivalent to Holocaust denial, and to reframe discussion of ongoing injustice as an insult to “white persons.” Other campaigners go as far to equate CRT with Marxism, as if a true accounting of racism in America were somehow going to upend capitalism. Such intentional misreadings allow conservatives to create a dichotomy where considering how racism shaped the country is unpatriotic and anti-American.

There actually is a particular kind of academic analysis that constitutes critical race theory in the academic world. It's essentially a small but important sliver of Constitutional law. David Theo Goldberg gives us a capsule guide to the academic function of critical race theory (The War on Critical Race Theory Boston Review 05/07/2021):

Among CRT’s critics little distinction is drawn, in particular, between the academic disciplines of critical race theory and critical race studies. Critical race theory refers to a body of legal scholarship developed in the 1970s and ’80s, largely out of Harvard Law School, by the likes of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence, III, among others. Though varied in their views, what unites the work of these scholars is a shared sense of the importance of attending explicitly to race in legal argument, given the perpetuation of racial and other hierarchies through the structure of colorblind law instituted after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The framework has since been taken up, expanded, and applied more generally to social discourse and practice. As a jurisprudential and social theory it is open to critique and revision, even rejection with compelling counterargument — all notably absent from the current attacks. [my emphasis in bold]

Then there is the more vague category, "Critical race studies, by contrast, encompass a broader, more loosely affiliated array of academic work. Some far more compelling than others, these accounts have been taken up, debated, and indeed sometimes dismissed in the expansive analysis of race and racism in and beyond the academy today."

But - to state the obvious - Republicans are not concerned that innocent white high school students will find their delicate minds overwhelmed by the subtleties of the postcolonial theorizing of Achille Mbembe. As Goldberg sums it up, "The exact targets of CRT’s critics vary wildly, but it is obvious that most critics simply do not know what they are talking about."

Nor do most of them care.

This is related to the endless conservative whining about "political correctness" and "wokeism", including the crackpot far-right construction, "cultural Marxism." David Neiwert has been following the development of that notion, very influential among the Jews-will-not-replace-us far right internationally: How the 'cultural Marxism' hoax began, and why it's spreading into the mainstream Daily Kos 01/23/2016. See also: Paul Rosenberg, A user's guide to "Cultural Marxism": Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, reloaded Salon 05/09/2019.

My favorite stereotypically stodgy source, Britannica Online, also has an entry on critical race theory 04/02/2021.

But it's a longtime conservative schtick to pluck some academic concept to offer up for ridicule of the Real (White) Amurcans. So it's important not to confuse the ideological use of such concepts as political polemics to the actual field of thought whose label they have borrowed.

"Critical race theory"

President Bunker Boy brought up "critical race theory" as one of his cult's bogeymen recently. He has no idea what it is, of course. And in the FOX News/QAnon bubble, all they need to know is: "It has something to do with colleges and black people so it's bad and we hate it."

In case you are wondering what it might be in the real world, though, here is a two-paragraph definition from Paula Groves Price (Critical Race Theory Oxford Research Encyclopedias, accessed 09/20/2020):

Race has historically been, and continues to be, a significant issue in all aspects of American society. In the field of education, racial inequality is prominent in the areas of access, opportunity, and outcomes. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a framework that offers researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers a race-conscious approach to understanding educational inequality and structural racism to find solutions that lead to greater justice. Placing race at the center of analysis, Critical Race Theory scholars interrogate policies and practices that are taken for granted to uncover the overt and covert ways that racist ideologies, structures, and institutions create and maintain racial inequality.

In the field of education, CRT is a helpful tool for analyzing policy issues such as school funding, segregation, language policies, discipline policies, and testing and accountability policies. It is also helpful for critically examining the larger issues of epistemology and knowledge production, which are reflected in curriculum and pedagogy. As education is one of the major institutions of knowledge production and dissemination, CRT scholars often push the field to critically examine the master or dominant narratives reproduced in schools and the counter-narratives that are silenced. CRT is a theoretical framework that provides education researchers, policy makers, and practitioners with critical lenses to deconstruct oppressive policies and practices and to construct more emancipatory systems for racial equity and justice.

The translation into Republican-speak, as I indicated is: It has something to do with colleges and black people so it's bad and we hate it.

Erwin Chemerinsky (Trump’s administration attempting to ban the Critical Race Theory is intolerant and unjust Sacramento Bee 09/18/2020):

Critical race theory began in law schools in the 1980s and then became part of other social science disciplines. It focuses on the way white supremacy and racial power are maintained over time, and especially the role of law in this regard. It focuses on how race and racial oppression shape law and society. It seeks to end anti-Blackness and racism in society.

Cheryl Harris also has a reality-based explanation of it in What Is Critical Race Theory and Why Is Trump Afraid of It? The Nation 09/17/2020:

The mischaracterization of Critical Race Theory - a body of scholarship led by people of color centered in the legal academy - as anti-white propaganda is more than a caricature: It is a ploy intended to gin up the idea that anti-racist work is itself racist - against whites.

The bogeyman that the memo seeks to evoke is a familiar figure, designed to appeal to Trump’s base, reprising some infamous billboards on Alabama highways, sponsored by the white nationalist White Genocide Project, asserting that “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white,” and “Diversity means chasing down the last white person.”

But inhabitants of the FOX News/QAnon bubble scare easily, bless their hearts.