July 16, 2025 • 48 mins
Is “wokeness” dangerous? To find the answer, we tell the story of James Lindsay. James and his colleagues pulled off one of the most revealing hoaxes in modern times – and in the process, uncovered the true nature of wokeness.
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Red Pilled America dot Com Now on.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
With the show.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
This episode was originally broadcast on February twenty fifth, twenty
twenty two. To normal people, the ideas of the woke
crowd sound ridiculous. Common sense Americans just can't stop laughing
at their strange worldview.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
A feeling like trans people are a threat to you
in a space like a bathroom or a locker room
is actually a version of internalized misogyny.
Speaker 5 (00:55):
Well, this question says, what do your students call you?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Since you're non binary? Mequals one of my students, what
are you coming to?
Speaker 6 (01:01):
Miko?
Speaker 7 (01:01):
They them jib to deconstruct the way a professional needs
to look, because that's white capitalism.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I am a white, transmasculine, feminon binary, disabled, neurodivergent, obsessive, compulsive,
chronically ill, Unitarian, universalist.
Speaker 7 (01:15):
Raised Jewish.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Their ideas may sound ridiculous, but is there anything dangerous
about wokeness.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I'm Patrick Carrelci and I'm Adriana Cortes, and.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
This is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
This is not another talk show covering the day's news.
We are all about telling stories.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Stories. Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
The media marks stories about everyday Americans with the globalist ignore.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
You could think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries,
and we promise only one thing, the truth.
Speaker 7 (01:57):
Welcome to Red Pilled America.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
We've all heard the term woke. It's the idea of
being awakened to the alleged power white men have over
other oppressed identity groups. The woke believe that being white
carries an unjust privilege, and that white males keep their
power by setting up systems that oppress so called minorities
that is, black and brown people, gaze, trans, Asians, Indigenous,
(02:27):
the hefty crowd, and the countless number of genders that
make up each of those groups. They believe whites, and
in particular white males, have set up systems to oppress
them all. This woke group has some wacky ideas that
sounds almost like satire.
Speaker 6 (02:45):
I believe we should move beyond all meat. The assumption
that the best protein comes from corpses is a racist belief.
Twenty first century animal eating requires our complicity in a
new colonialism, especially affect girls and young women. Your hamburger
(03:08):
comes with a dose of misogyny. Meat eating is also
one of the ways gender based structures of oppression are perpetuated. Masculinity,
a construct of the gender binary facing constant destabilization, feels
always under threat, and eating animals is its protection racket.
(03:29):
White supremacists weaponized it. Eating meat, eggs, and dairy and
the baiting of liberal men as so called soy boys
are all part of the neo Nazi messaging. I heard
all your laughter. I know some of these must be
new ideas, or you think they're fringe or whatever. Our
(03:49):
whiteness is part of the problem of meat eating.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Too many wokeness is simply nonsense, But with the rise
of this ideology seeming to spread throughout American institutions, it
has common sense. Americans wondering is wokeness dangerous. To find
the answer, we hear the story behind one of the
most revealing experiments in modern times, and in the process
we learn how wokeness has massive implications on society at large.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
We've all pulled different kinds of pranks in our lives,
sometimes little ones like tepeeing a friend's house. Other times
we might get a bit more elaborate, maybe we set
up a booby trap at home that surprises a loved one.
Then there's a level of prank that very few have
the gumption to pull off, the kind of prank that
has the potential to embarrass a lot of very powerful
(04:51):
people and even expose a broken system. This last category
is where we find a guy named James Lindsey. James
is the purveyor of New Discourses dot com. His team
planned an extra ordinarily important hoax that had the potential
to not only expose a broken sector of academia, but
also revealed the true nature of wokeness. Their plan was elaborate,
(05:13):
so much so that they had to commit at least
a year to executing it successfully. But just as they
were in the middle of pulling it off, a few
people started to get suspicious about what they were doing.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
A handful of small journalists picked it up and wouldn't
let it go.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
That's James.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
They just literally wouldn't let it go. They had like
a dog sinking his teeth into something and just not
letting go. And I was like, uh oh, this is
the end of our professional lives.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And his fear was warranted because the people he was
fooling are perhaps the most intolerant people in America. They're
the kind of folks that if you cross them, they'll
work to erase you from polite society. The build up
to James Lindsay's hoax is almost as interesting as the
hoax itself. James is originally from upstate New York, but
(05:59):
around nineteen eighty four, when he was kindergarten age, his
family moved to East Tennessee for work. His mother was
an accountant and his father was a chemical engineer.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
And so it was kind of this funny thing, you know,
where in doing the kind of things in kindergarten that
people do in kindergarten, and we're talking about different things,
and the teacher doesn't know what to do with me
because I'm like rattling off Newton's laws and things because
my dad's like indoctrinating me into science. You know, from
day one, we had the whole like how high can
you count? Test? And they finally had to like stopped me,
(06:27):
and I got mad that they stopped me because I
wasn't done.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yet, whether it was nature or nurture. At a very
young age, James showed an aptitude for analytical thinking. By
the time he reached his junior year of high school,
he thought he'd study meteorology. He was really interested in weather.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
But then I took physics in high school and I
was like, this is what I want to do. Physics
is it?
Speaker 1 (06:47):
So he enrolled in the local college, Tennessee Tech. He
got a degree in physics, and along the.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
Way, specifically when I took electricity and magnetism, I decided
I do not like physics and this is not what
I want to do.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
So he began looking for a different field of study.
He landed on mathematics.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Because I realized that what I actually liked in physics
was the math, and so I just enjoy solving mathematical
puzzles and I really liked once I started doing it
and learning how to do it. Doing mathematical proofs. I
really like that style.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Of thinking, a style of thinking based on concrete, provable facts.
James got his master's then entered the mathematics PhD program
at the University of Tennessee, but all along the way
he noticed something changing in academia.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
So the goal was no matter what is to keep students,
keep their scholarships, keep whatever you keep them, and don't
fail anybody. It was like, I teach math, like, what
are you talking about. Lots of kids can't do math
and they're going to fail and they should not carry
on to become college educated people that can't do math.
And they said no, no, no one student per semester or
(07:51):
per class or whatever can fail one. And I was like,
that's not going to work. That's definitely not gonna work.
And so it was like, I don't really want to
be a part of this. I can't do the job
that I want to.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Do with James discovered was if an amenon that crept
into universities years earlier. I'd actually witnessed it myself in
the early nineties. At the time, I was a professor's
aid for a thermodynamics class. One day I was administering
a mid term exam when I noticed that someone was
cheating on the test. It was the only female in
(08:22):
the class, and she was looking at a tiny crib
sheet in her hand. I walked over to the professor
and discreetly said, Sir, that student's cheating. What should we do.
He looked at her, then back at me, and said nothing,
We'll talk about it after class. I was confused. If
we let her finish, she could just dispose of the evidence,
but he insisted on letting it go. After class. He
(08:45):
pulled me aside and said that the mechanical engineering department
was getting pressure to admit more females. There was less
than a handful in the entire program, and the cheater
was the only female in this course. If we officially
caught her, he explained, she'd be expelled, further reducing the
number of women in the department. Professor decided to let
it slide. I was shocked. I mean, this wasn't some
(09:08):
frivolous discipline like Chicano's studies or feminism. Many of these
students would go on to design products where life or
death was at stake. If we let them cheat their
way through these courses, the end result could be horrific.
At the time, it troubled me to my core and
was one of the reasons why I left academia. This
was what James Lindsay was witnessing some fifteen years later.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
I didn't know anything about the woke stuff that was
happening or creeping in the university at the time. I
didn't realize that was one of the hooks by which
the university would be snared into wokeness, which is that
if they can't get rid of the most complaining students,
those students are going to be able to direct the
school one way or another. So the you know, the
most fragile or agitated or upset one percent of students
(09:52):
or two percent of students, the wokest two percent, who
are constantly making their demands and throwing their fits about
everything not being exactly the way they wanted to be,
gain outsized power if the university is is absolutely willing
to bend over backwards to keep them happy and keep
them in.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
One of the earliest public indications that wokeness had gotten
a foothold in the sciences came while James was working
towards his PhD.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
In January two thousand and five, Harvard President Lawrence H.
Summers spoke at a conference focused on the topic of
diversifying the science and engineering workforce. The goal of the
gathering was for participants to address the cause behind the
low number of women in high level positions within science
and engineering and to potentially propose a solution. The discussion
(10:41):
was supposed to be off the record so that speakers
could talk freely on the subject. In Larry Summer's speech,
he proposed three primary factors that attributed to this phenomenon.
The first was the role differences between men and women.
He offered that at a critical time early in their careers,
men were willing to think about work for eighty hours
a week, just as women were in their crucial churches
(11:03):
child bearing years. The second factor he proposed was that
men and women had innately different aptitudes for science and
engineering at the higher levels of the field, And finally,
he concluded that there was possibly a socialization culture that
perhaps led to some discrimination against women. He ultimately concluded
that women weren't in high level positions within science and
(11:23):
engineering primarily because of innate differences in interest and aptitude. Discrimination.
In his estimation, played a minor role well. His conclusion
led to a response that would eventually become the new norm,
a media outrage championed by feminist activists masquerading as journalist.
The Boston Globe ran a story highlighting one female biologist
(11:46):
that stormed out of the speech, claiming that if she
hadn't left, she would have either blacked out or thrown up.
TV reporters also took their jabs at the Harvard president's comments.
Speaker 8 (11:56):
Lauren Summers said the innate differences between men and women
are one reason fewer women succeed in alliance and math careers.
Summers says his remarks were made just a spurred debate
le Some academics say such thinking as a disservice to
female students.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
They turned to a local female science student for a response,
talk from a young age that nothing could hold her back.
Davis was surprised by the comments made by Harvard University's president.
I don't think that.
Speaker 5 (12:24):
You know your biological difference.
Speaker 6 (12:26):
Your biological makeup makes the difference of what you turned
out to be.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Larry Summers was painted as a misogynist. Harvard's faculty quickly
passed a motion claiming they lacked confidence in his leadership.
A year later, Summers resigned from the Harvard Presidency. Many
believed it was related to a speech the Larry Summers
Affairs showed wokeness was making its way into the sciences again.
James lindsay, by the.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Time I finished my PhD in twenty ten, I wanted
to leave you un diversity system pretty much completely.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
He saw the writing on the wall. Something was changing
in academia. He'd eventually leave the university system, but stayed
connected to the community through participating in online discussion groups,
and he started to notice the trend that Larry Summers experienced.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
And people are getting accused primarily. At the time, it
was kind of like the pre me too era, So
everything was sexism, everything was misogyny. It wasn't so much
about race occasionally that would come up with it was
almost always sexism, misogyny, rape culture, blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
James took notice, but it wasn't until he read an
outrageously ridiculous twenty sixteen academic paper that he decided that
he had to address the problem of wokeness head on.
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to Red Pilled amer So, while studying for his pH
d in mathematics, James Lindsay began to see wokeness creep
into the sciences in an alarming way. Professors were pressured
to keep students within the math department that would otherwise
be failing. By twenty ten, James wanted out of the
university system altogether. He participated in online discussion groups within
(15:23):
his field and began to see the wokeness trend there
as well. Claims of sexism and misogyny were being thrown
around with high frequency. James took note, but it wasn't
until he read an outrageously ridiculous twenty sixteen academic paper
that he decided he wanted to address the problem of
wokeness head on. The title of this academic paper was
(15:45):
Glacier's Gender and Science, a feminist glaciology framework for global
environmental change research. Now keep in mind, glaciology is the
technical study of glaciers, you know, those big, slow moving
ice and snow formations near Earth's North and South poles.
James recalls the absurd positions expressed in the paper.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
So the science of glaciology is intrinsically masculinist and sexist
and has to be revamped through feminist theory in order
to overcome those biases. And the science itself, and maybe
science more broadly that they suggest is actually profoundly sexist
and therefore not coming to the right kinds of conclusions. So
I'm reading this thing and thinking it can't be real,
(16:31):
But it's real.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
It was published in a respected journal called Progress in
Human Geography.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
It's like one of the top ones in geography, and
so I'm reading this and it's making arguments like that
we have to include indigenous mythologies about glaciers. We have
to start understanding that some glaciers are male and some
are female, and the glaciers have sex with one another
and under certain conditions, and that if you fry bacon
fat too close to a glacier, it'll become mad and
it'll do things. And then they took these indigenous findings.
(17:00):
They report this in the paper to a glaciologist and said, well,
what do you think about these things? And the guy,
they said and the paper, stared at them and then
closed the door in their face. He didn't want to
talk about it. And that was just proof that he
was a masculinist. You know, patriarchal jerk and that didn't
want to expand the purview of the science. And then
it gets worse, if you can believe it. So they
(17:20):
start telling these stories about like some woman that she's
a feminist and she's a painter and she paints pictures
of glaciers and she says, well, you know, they look
at photographs and satellite photographs and things like this of
glaciers all the time, but they don't look at this
woman's art. And they were like, well, it's because they're sexist,
this gleciologists or sexist because they won't look at the
paintings but they'll look at satellite photos. But I'm like,
(17:43):
holy smokes, what is this.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
James muscled through reading the entire paper. His colleague, a
philosophy professor at Portland State University named Peter Bagosian, picked
up the article as well.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Peter read part of it and was like, this is
too stupid. I can't deal with it.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
They might have just forgotten about the study and moved
on with their lives, but then a famous science journal
wrote about it.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
A journalist my name is Matt Ridley had written an
article and his exact phrasing was very close to I
still hold out that this is a hoax. Talking about
that particular paper.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Matt Ridley's comment reminded James and his colleague of a
famous incident that occurred two decades earlier.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
In nineteen ninety six, an NYU physics professor named Alan
Sokel noticed that academics within the social sciences and humanities
fields were venturing into weird philosophies untethered from reality. Alan
Sokile discussed the issue at the time.
Speaker 9 (18:38):
But I'm a leftist in the old fashioned sense that
I think working people are getting a bum deal and
we should try to change that. So it seems to
me the job of academic social scientists who call themselves
leftists is to uncover some of the facts about how
our economic and political system really operates, and to discuss
the publicly and see what we can do to propose
(18:59):
constructive changes. But unfortunately, there's some segment of so called
academic left that's gone off into very strange philosophies French
imports like deconstruction and post structuralism, some homegrown American inventions
like them in a standpoint epistemology, and they've lost contact
(19:19):
with the real world.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
So Alan Sokle thought he'd conduct an experiment. He wanted
to see if a leading North American journal of cultural
studies would publish an article that was quote liberally sulted
with nonsense end quote. He's surmised that to get into
one of these journals, his paper would have to sound
technically good while simultaneously flattering the editor's ideological predispositions. So
(19:49):
he wrote an article entitled Transgressing the Boundaries towards a
Transformative Hermanuetics of Quantum Gravity, and he submitted it to
an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies entitled Social Text.
Sokal's article proposed that a form of gravity was a
social construct. The paper was basically fancy sounding nonsense, filled
(20:12):
with technical jargon that fell right within the journal's political bias.
To Sokol's astonishment, the science journal published his paper. This
was not supposed to happen. Legitimate science journals require peer review,
a process that claims to be intellectually rigorous, to ensure
(20:36):
published articles meet a high threshold of quality. Sokal's experiment
revealed that some cultural studies journals likely had zero critical
review of their articles. This peer review process is an
extremely important aspect of not only science journals, but of
a functioning society at large, because it forms our pool
(20:56):
of knowledge. Again, James lindsay, So, the way.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
That peer review is supposed to work is so I
do some kind of research or whatever, and I want
to publish that research, and I want it to be
considered serious by professionals in the field. To submit the
paper that I want to publish it I write as
a result of that research to an academic journal. The editors,
who are also professionals in the field but not necessarily
highly specific experts, will read over the paper. If they
(21:22):
think it's probably good enough to go further, they will
send it off to some number of peer reviewers, usually two, three,
or four. And so the idea is, well, let's have
other professionals in the field look at it before we
publish it and decide is it strong enough? Is it crazy?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
These peer reviewers read it and typically propose corrections, point
out weaknesses, ask if the author has considered a particular perspective,
and so on, and.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
They will deliver back a series of comments. And if
the peer reviewers are happy enough and they will send
a recommendation along with all of those corrections to the
journal editor, and.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
The journal editor will then make a decision to either
work towards publishing the paper or politely pass on it.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
And so you can see that it's supposed to be
a filtering mechanism that keeps junk research out. The problem
is is that if there are fashionable conclusions, for example,
like in the thing that you mentioned, where well, there's
a pressure that if we were really trying to keep
women in engineering, if there's some pressure that's other than
the actual academic quality, that pressure can capture the peer
(22:26):
reviewers and the journal editors and the researchers working in
the field, and they can actually just be kind of
wandering down this path toward nonsense, towards some political agenda
as opposed to, for example, getting rigorous research on whatever
the particular subject is.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
And this corrupted peer review process can have grave cultural
consequences because if a politically soaked unscientific research paper gets published,
it becomes part of our pool of knowledge policymakers and
use them to create public policy. Right around the time
that James Lindsay read the ridiculous feminist Glacier study, a
segment of American society was tragically suffering from public policy
(23:06):
based on flawed academic research, and it was destroying people's lives.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
In two thousand and seven, a campus sexual assault study
funded by the Justice Department was released. Three years later,
NPR and the Center for Public Integrity, both far left
media organizations, used this report to publish their own study
entitled sexual Assault on Campus. In the report, they referenced
the two thousand and seven study and made a shocking
(23:36):
claim stating, quote, according to a report funded by the
Department of Justice, roughly one in five women who attend
college will become the victim of a rape or an
attempted rape by the time she graduates end quote one
in five. NPR then took their report to the US
Department of Education and got the Assistant Secretary of Civil
(23:56):
Rights within that department to make a public promise, we.
Speaker 10 (23:59):
Will use all of the tools at our disposed, including
referring to justice or withholding federal funds, to ensure that
women are free from sexual violence.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Again, James lindsay.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
The next thing you know, you have the White House
issuing a Dear Colleague letter, Obama coming out and talking
about this rape epidemic on campus.
Speaker 11 (24:21):
We're here to talk today about an issue that is
a priority for me, and that's ending campus sexual assault.
This is a problem that matters to all us, and
estimated one in five women has been sexually assaulted during
her college years.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
One in five. The problem was that everyone that was
citing the two thousand and seven sexual assault study, including Obama,
was citing it incorrectly. The one in five meme was
so widespread that even the researchers of the original study
expressed concern that their conclusions were being misrepresented. The researchers
(24:58):
only surveyed two schools, meaning their study wasn't meant to
represent an national trend. Also, critics argued that the two
thousand and seven methodology was highly flawed and it should
have been obvious. A US Department of Justice study done
just seven years earlier reported that two point eight percent
of college women had either experienced rape or attempted rape
(25:20):
over the four preceding years. If people were to believe
the NPR report, they'd have to believe that the sexual
assault of college women had gotten over seven times worse
in just seven years, when the national incidents of rape
and sexual assault were drastically decreasing over the same time.
As critics dug into the two thousand and seven report,
they learned that the study used an anonymous online questionnaire
(25:41):
that resulted in a very low response rate. Some credibly
argued that the overwhelming majority that didn't respond likely had
no experience with sexual assault. If the numbers were included,
critics claimed the assault numbers would have been a fraction
of what the study reported. Also, the assault number included
unwanted kissing and groping actions that technically met the definition
(26:02):
of battery but hardly qualified as attempted rape, as the
NPR report claimed. At a minimum, the one in five
sexual assault meme was highly inflated, but that didn't matter.
The narratives stuck again, James Lindsay and.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Then this claim was then put to politically actionable uses.
It was a disaster through the early twenty tens for say,
Title nine kangaroo courts as they got called, and what
Title nine inquisitions.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Title nine is a federal law that, among other things,
allows colleges to bypass the Bedrock American legal doctrine of
due process in cases involving claims of sexual assault, and
replaces that doctrine with what could be called a guilty
until proven innocent approach. When these sexual assault research papers surfaced,
it gave feminist activists the academic credibility to force colleges
(26:47):
to deal with the so called campus rape culture with
an iron fist.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
All of a sudden, you know, the administrations of these
colleges went on witch hunts and destroyed a few women,
but mostly men's lives in response to false things. And
it just absolutely you undermine due process, undermined constitutional protections
as citizens have, and created a nightmare.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
In one instance, just a few weeks after Obama's rape
culture speech in twenty fourteen, Rolling Stone published a bombshell expose.
In it, a female student from the University of Virginia
claimed that she was violently gang raped at a fraternity party.
The story was too good for the media to pass up.
Speaker 12 (27:29):
One of the most illegue universities in the country is
under the microscope after a Rolling Stone article painted a
picture of rampant sexual assault on campus and in action
by university officials.
Speaker 5 (27:41):
Quote from the article grab its leg She heard a
voice say, and that's when Jackie knew she was going
to be raped. She remembers every moment of the next
three hours of agony, during which she says seven men
took turns raping her.
Speaker 13 (27:54):
This is the fraternity where the most violent of those
alleged sexual assaults took place, the Phi Kappa Psi house
here and this graphic article from Rolling Stone has sparked
outrage and backlash across campus about the college community and
more specifically, the administration's handling of sexual assault on campus.
Speaker 14 (28:13):
The University of Virginia has suspended all fraternities for the
rest of the year following allegations of sexual assault at
one fraternity. It's the latest and a string of incidents
involving Greek life at campuses nationwide.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
I think the great community needs to do some serious
soul searching about the way that it has behaved, about
the behavior it's tolerated, about what its future is going
to be.
Speaker 6 (28:34):
And I'm really, really, really furious at the culture of
rape and the complete inaction of the administration and the
complete complacency of the student body.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
The Rolling Stone article quoted the one in five meme,
stating quote, one in five women is sexually assaulted in college,
though only twelve percent reported to police end quote. The
writer took to the media to proclaim that the University
of Virginia was just the tip of the feminist glacier.
Speaker 7 (28:57):
I was told that University of Virginia is actually quite typical,
even though the things that I just governed at University
engineer really horrifying. What I was told is that really
what happens that UVA is probably fairly normal at a
college canvas.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
The Rolling Stone story was everywhere. Corporate media rallied against
rape culture and the misogyny of fraternities and universities that
enabled it. The only problem was key details of the
victims story crumbled under scrutiny.
Speaker 12 (29:27):
Rolling Stone is now dealing with blowback from all sides
as the magazine changes its story. Following its sweeping expose
of an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia
fraternity house.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
There, law enforcement couldn't verify the alleged victim, Jackie's story.
In fact, what they did verify was that the party
she claimed to be gang raped at didn't happen. The
Columbia Journalism Review did a forensic investigation on the story
(29:59):
and concluded that the article was a product of failed methodology.
Five months after publishing the article, Rolling Stone retracted the
story and pulled it down from their site. The Dean
of UVA filed and won a defamation lawsuit against the
magazine and the author of the article. It later came
out that Jackie had become obsessed with another male student
(30:20):
and made up key elements of the story to gain
his pity.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
The entire rape culture, public policy and witch hunt was
given academic credibility from a paper with an imprecise research method.
Very serious ramifications come from these flawed academic studies. So
when James Lindsay and his colleague Peter Bagosian saw the
feminist Glaciology paper in twenty sixteen, it triggered an idea.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
We saw something that was there that the woke had
done that we decided as like, okay, that's enough, that's
too far.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
James colleague Peter came up with the way to expose
these science journals.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
And there's all these articles that are published in the
academic literature that people think are knowledge, but in fact
they're just opinion, just prejudices, an opinion. The best way
to discredit that isn't to argue against it, or rather
to expose it for what it is by pulling a
joke on it, showing that people can't tell the difference
that are producing this stuff between something real and something
(31:16):
obviously farcical. We knew who Alan Sokle was. Peter was
actually friends with Alan, so Alan Sokle famously did a
hoax paper on a journal called Social Text in the
nineteen nineties where he said that gravity's a social construction
and like just wrote all this postmodern gobbledygook, and they
accepted it. And so Peter was like, these people are
(31:37):
ripe for another hoax. They didn't learn their lesson.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
They decided to commit at least a year on their hoax,
but little did they know how much their lives would
change when all was said and done. Do you want
to hear Red Pilled America stories ad free? Then become
a backstage subscriber. Just log onto Redpilled America dot com
and click join in the top menu. Join today and
(32:01):
help us save America one story at a time. Welcome
back to Red Pilled America. So, after James Lindsay and
his colleague Peter Bagosian wrote a ridiculous academic paper about
infusing glacier science with feminism, the two decided the peer
reviewed science journals were broken and needed to be taught
a lesson. They began researching the origins of the words
(32:23):
and ideas littering these pseudo science academic papers, and eventually
found which disciplines were pumping them out.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
We narrowed in on the gender studies academic literature and
the feminist theory academic literature, and we started to read
some of this literature and we were like, this stuff's crazy,
and so we thought it would be fun to write
an academic hoax. Just thought it would be fun. So
we wrote an academic hoax carrying the title The Conceptual
Penis as a Social Construct, and we argued that penises
are best thought of as a social construct rather than
(32:53):
as anatomical organs, and that they cause all of our problems,
especially climate change.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
They argued that man spreading the complaint that men sit
with their legs spread apart was quote akin to raping
the empty space around him end quote. In May twenty seventeen,
a science journal called Cogent Social Sciences published the paper,
shortly after James and his colleague Peter admitted to the
stunt and basically proclaimed they'd proven the farcical nature of
(33:19):
gender study scholarship, but their critics shot back, saying they'd
missed the mark. They claimed that the journal that published
their paper was a pay to publish journal that regularly
publishes terrible papers. In the eyes of gender study supporters,
their prank proved nothing. James and Peter had spiked the
football too soon. But what their critics hadn't realized was
(33:42):
that they were providing James and Peter a how to
guide on the most effective way to pull off their hoax.
James recalls what his critics.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Were telling him, if you wanted to prove your point,
this is what you would have had to have done.
And we said, okay, there's a roadmap. Let's do it again.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
On August sixteenth, twenty seventeen, they officially started their second
tempt at the prank. A few weeks later, they enlisted
Helen Pluckrose, a British cultural and political writer. The three
created fake author names and got to writing hoax research papers.
The first six they wrote were rejected by science journals.
They hadn't yet figured out the secret sauce to getting
(34:20):
their research papers accepted, so by late November twenty seventeen,
they regrouped and dug in deeper into the scholarship in
what they called grievance studies, which includes feminist studies, women
in gender studies, race studies, sexuality studies, queer studies, fat studies,
cultural studies, and sociology. The grievance scholarship may look ridiculous
(34:41):
to the outside world, but within these fields of study,
they play by a set of rules. The pranksters needed
to make a commitment to figure them out. Within a
few months, they began to understand the rules, and that's
when the trios started to have some success. By March
twenty eighteen, two papers were accepted. By June twenty eighteen,
a third was accepted again.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
James Lindsay there were three that stand out.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
In one paper, they rewrote a section of Hitler's mind
comp by replacing Hitler's movement with intersectional feminism.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
And then just created this whole new idea that we
called solidarity feminism and literally just rewrote Hitler's words with
an eight point plan and the whole thing to create
a new kind of feminism that completely throws out the
idea that women should be able to choose how they
represent themselves or be feminist, or what it means to
(35:32):
be a woman or be feminist. No, it has to
be intersectional solidarity, no half measures, blah blah blah blah blah,
whole thing. So we rewrote a chapter of mind comp
and a feminist social work journal accepted that for publication.
The second paper that was accepted that got rather a
lot of attention was that we claimed that the sport
of professional bodybuilding is intrinsically fat phobic because it only
(35:54):
cares about big bodies that are built with muscles rather
than big bodies built with fat. And so as a result,
there must be a new category added, a new competition
category added to professional bodybuilding is a sport called fat
body building. Fat bodybuilding would be it can't be a
competition because they're against competition, So it's actually an exhibition
(36:15):
where everybody wins, but that you get up on stage
and you wear fattionion of your choice and exhibit your
fat to the audience. And the more politicized your fat
exhibition is in kind of a queer theory sort of
way where it intersects with fat studies, the better. And
so that would be required for professional bodybuilding to continue
(36:39):
as a sport, because you know, the privileging of muscle
over fat is just fat exclusionary. And so you know,
we titled that paper, who are they to judge?
Speaker 2 (36:49):
They did get some feedback from the peer reviewers.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
We actually said that it was a final Frontier for fat.
Turns out Peter is a fan of Star Trek rather significantly,
so we thought it'd be fun to put like a
little star Trek, you know, the final frontier illusion in there.
And they were like, the word final indicates that there's
an end point to fat activism, which there's not, so
you can't use the word final. And then the word
(37:11):
frontier evokes memories of the genocide of Native Americans, so
choose a different word. So we couldn't call it the
final Frontier for fat activism anymore. We had to change that.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
But the one that got the most attention was a
research paper about dog sex.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
So what we claimed was that you can use the
way that people react dogs humping each other at dog
parks as kind of an implicit bias test to determine
how they feel about rate. And so we claimed that we,
as a feminist researcher, went to dog parks and observed
nearly ten thousand dogs, which there are not ten thousand
dogs in any given dog park in the course of
(37:46):
a year, but there's like forty, maybe because it's like
a neighborhood. But anyway, we said we observed ten thousand
dogs and hundreds or thousands of incidents between dogs, and
just made up all these fake numbers about how the
dogs behave. But what we were interested in was how
the owners reacted if it was a male on female
dog rape versus a male on male dog rate. And
(38:10):
we then said that this proves that dog parks are
petrie dishes of canine rape culture, and the people are
accepting of this, particularly when it's straight dog rape, and
so men in particular are big fans of straight dog rape.
Get her, get her, boy, get her, you know, kind
of attitude hearing the dog on. And that this proved
(38:32):
that obviously that the dog parks and also human nightclubs
are rape condoning spaces and rape cultures out of control.
And so what we should do is train men the
way that we trained dogs, literally leashes, shot collars, things
like that, in order to overcome rape culture. And however
(38:53):
stupid you think the paper is, like, I just made
it sound really really smart and great, it's really worse
than that. It's the dumbest thing that's probably ever been written.
And not only was that accepted by the leading feminist
geography journal, it was actually held up as exemplary scholarship
in the field of feminist geography, given an award for
Excellence in scholarship.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
James couldn't believe they'd gotten these ludicrous research papers accepted.
Things were going along swimmingly, but as they plugged away,
trouble was brewing.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
So what ended up breaking the whole thing open was
that the dog Park Paper, the dog Sex Paper, got
out there and they published it, and it was out
in the world, and we weren't done. We're still writing
other papers, and people noticed it's insane. There was an
account on Twitter, I don't know if it still exists
that was called Real Peer Review that was actually chronicling
these ridiculous papers that come out, and they found the
(39:47):
dog Park paper.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Real Peer Review tweeted it out and indie journalist immediately
began picking it up.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
The degree of insanity of that paper is literally the
highest of all of them. They got accepted, but once
that hit like the it was article after article after article,
articles just kept coming and kept coming in the stress
was mounting and mounting and mounting.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
At the time, they'd only had three papers accepted. If
journalists kept digging, they would discover their experiment before James
and his team had a critical number of ridiculous research
papers accepted to make an impact.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
And so, you know, we had a lot on the
line that what we're going to lose all of this.
You know, we're going to get embarrassed, We're going to
be shut down. It's not going to have the necessary
intended effect unless we can, you know, hopefully get more
papers through.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
As the articles on the dog Park Paper piled up,
they tried to ignore the journalist, hoping to get more
of their ridiculous, woke research published.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
So we were like, keep your head down, keep your
head down, keep your head down, keep your head down.
And the dog Park Paper was so insane that the
handful of small journalists picked it up and wouldn't let
it go. They just literally wouldn't let it go. They
had like a dog sinking as deeth into something, just
not letting go.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
The journalist tried reaching out to Helen Wilson, the fake
author for the dog Park Paper. Their inquiry landed in
James's inbox. He and his colleagues ignored the emails, hoping
it would buy them enough time to get more of
their papers published. But that's when the journalists got smart.
They decided to pull in one of the biggest media
outfits in America to help apply pressure, and a journalist
(41:19):
from that outlet began digging in and.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Then all of a sudden, the email came from the
Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
From a reporter named Gillian K.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Melcher.
Speaker 3 (41:32):
I was like, oh no, this is too big. This
isn't like campus reform. I can ignore them. This isn't
like one of Thosts. This is the Wall Street Journal.
I was like, we're not going to get away with
lying to the Wall Street Journal. And then boom, the
other email comes from the journal.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
The Science Journal that published their dog sex paper.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
So then the journal contacts us and it's like, what's
going on? Who are you really? You know? Can you
prove your identity so we can get these people off
our backs And I was like, uh oh.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Right before the Science Journal and the Wall Street Journal
called James team thought they had at least five more
months to get the critical number of papers accepted.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
And we suddenly had days or weeks with it being
unclear what the finish line was going to be, and
so incredibly stressful that this huge project that could essentially
detonate our lives if it goes wrong, had just left
our control very suddenly, very very unexpectedly, and not exactly
(42:29):
in circumstances that we were fortuitous. We were like, this
is the end of our professional lives, and now the
journal is on us, The Wall Street Journal is on us,
and it's like, all right, we got to come clean.
So I emailed Jillian at the Wall Street Journal emailed
her back and I said, Okay, this is Helen Wilson.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
The fake author of the dog Park paper.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
And I will talk to you on the phone about
what's going on tomorrow off record. And then we had
this whole argument about whether or not the call could
be off record or on record when we first started
the call, but eventually she agreed and said it'll be
off record, or at least some of it would be.
And then I told her what was going on the
first thing she called and I answered, and I don't
(43:15):
sound like somebody named Helen, and so she was like,
are you trans and I was like, no, that's not
the scandal here. I'm just a man and my name
is James, and so I just started going through the
whole thing with her and she's like, oh my god,
I think she saw possible pullets aer in her eyes
or something at this moment, And so we talked for
like an hour.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
James and his team knew they couldn't ask the Wall
Street Journal to hold the story. They're a financial outlet.
They'd never agree to it. They had to find another
way to hold up the publication until more of their
papers were accepted. So they decided on a two pronged plan. First,
keep the Wall Street Journal busy with the flood of
information that they'd have to thoroughly check, and then leave
(44:01):
holes in the story that they'd have to slowly find
and need to resolve.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
That bought us a couple of months to get our
affairs in order.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
In that time, James and his team got seven of
their ridiculous woke papers accepted and had seven more studies
in various stages of being approved. On October two, twenty eighteen,
just as The Wall Street Journal released their story on
their hoax, James and his team released a video describing
what they'd done.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
Since approximately June of twenty seventeen, I, along with two
other concerned academics, Peter Burgoshen and Helen Pluckrose, have been
writing intentionally broken academic papers and submitting them the highly
respected journals and fields that studied gender, race, sexuality, and
similar topics.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
The story exploded across the globe.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
I think we were on the front page over four
hundred newspapers worldwide.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
They had unequivocally proven their point. The scholarship of these
woke academic fields were anything but scholarship. It was largely
a pile of gobbledegook masquerading as knowledge.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
James Lindsay and his colleague Helen Pluckrose wrote a book
about their experiment entitled Cynical Theories, and there are now
two of the leading thinkers on the phenomenon of wokeness.
Their colleague, Peter Bagosian joins them in that status. But
as a result of working on the Grievance Studies affair,
as it's come to be known, he's faced some serious consequences.
In twenty eighteen, his employer, Portland State University, initiated an
(45:26):
investigation into whether he'd violated ethical guidelines by conducting research
on human subjects without their approval. Many leading academics saw
the move as retaliation for the academic establishment being embarrassed.
Peter's defenders included famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychologist Stephen Pinker,
the loss of her Daniel Dennett, and psychologist Jordan Peterson. Later,
(45:49):
in twenty eighteen, the university ruled that Peter had indeed
violated ethical research guidelines. In twenty twenty one, he resigned
his position at Portland State University, claiming that it had
become a social justice factory, which brings us back to
(46:12):
the question is wokeness ridiculous or dangerous? The answer is both.
Wokeness may be absurd, but it is not benign. Wokeness
is profoundly dangerous because it has the potential to unravel society.
Wok academics in the fields of cultural studies and the
humanities published politically soaked research based on junk science. Woke
(46:36):
activists then use these broken studies to force politicians to
make disastrous public policies based on these flawed findings. After
the Rolling Stones heralded sexual assault article fell apart, the
college rape culture narrative looked like it was on the ropes.
But then a few months after the article was retracted,
a new academic paper was released that upped the ante.
(46:58):
It was no longer one in five. The academic community
now claimed nearly one in four college females are raped
or sexually assaulted.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
The paper was blowing it out by a factor of
ten to one at least versus what's really going on,
because they were ideologically captured enough to want to be
able to make this claim, and then this claim was
then put to politically actionable uses.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
James Lindsay thinks he understands why his team's hoax research
made it through the peer review process.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
I think that it's working the way it's opposed to.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
In other words, the peer review process within certain disciplines
is designed to give academic credibility to dangerous political causes.
That's why wokeness is dangerous. It will not be removed
without a fight, But a fight we must commence, because
if wokeness isn't removed from American institutions, the evil these
cult like activists spew will continue to break down society
(47:51):
as we know it.
Speaker 4 (47:52):
A lot of people, when they hear the term pedophile,
they automatically assume that it means a sex offender, and
that isn't true, and it leads to a lot of
misconceptions about attractions toward miners.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
Red Pilled America's an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's produced by
me Adriana Cortez and Patrick Carelchi for Informed Ventures. Now,
our entire archive of episodes is only available to our
backstage subscribers. To subscribe, visit Redpilled America dot com and
click support in the topmenu. Thanks for listening.
This is Red Pilled America. Why aren't you a Red
Pilled America dot com subscriber? We need your support. You
can listen to all of our episodes add free by
going to Redpilled America dot com and clicking join in
the top menu.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
If you believe in honesty and value the truth in storytelling,
then join us.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Become a Red Pilled America fanband member by going to
Redpilled America dot com and clicking join in the topmenu.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Red Pilled America dot Com Now on.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
With the show.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
This episode was originally broadcast on February twenty fifth, twenty
twenty two. To normal people, the ideas of the woke
crowd sound ridiculous. Common sense Americans just can't stop laughing
at their strange worldview.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
A feeling like trans people are a threat to you
in a space like a bathroom or a locker room
is actually a version of internalized misogyny.
Speaker 5 (00:55):
Well, this question says, what do your students call you?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Since you're non binary? Mequals one of my students, what
are you coming to?
Speaker 6 (01:01):
Miko?
Speaker 7 (01:01):
They them jib to deconstruct the way a professional needs
to look, because that's white capitalism.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I am a white, transmasculine, feminon binary, disabled, neurodivergent, obsessive, compulsive,
chronically ill, Unitarian, universalist.
Speaker 7 (01:15):
Raised Jewish.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Their ideas may sound ridiculous, but is there anything dangerous
about wokeness.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I'm Patrick Carrelci and I'm Adriana Cortes, and.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
This is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
This is not another talk show covering the day's news.
We are all about telling stories.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Stories. Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
The media marks stories about everyday Americans with the globalist ignore.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
You could think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries,
and we promise only one thing, the truth.
Speaker 7 (01:57):
Welcome to Red Pilled America.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
We've all heard the term woke. It's the idea of
being awakened to the alleged power white men have over
other oppressed identity groups. The woke believe that being white
carries an unjust privilege, and that white males keep their
power by setting up systems that oppress so called minorities
that is, black and brown people, gaze, trans, Asians, Indigenous,
(02:27):
the hefty crowd, and the countless number of genders that
make up each of those groups. They believe whites, and
in particular white males, have set up systems to oppress
them all. This woke group has some wacky ideas that
sounds almost like satire.
Speaker 6 (02:45):
I believe we should move beyond all meat. The assumption
that the best protein comes from corpses is a racist belief.
Twenty first century animal eating requires our complicity in a
new colonialism, especially affect girls and young women. Your hamburger
(03:08):
comes with a dose of misogyny. Meat eating is also
one of the ways gender based structures of oppression are perpetuated. Masculinity,
a construct of the gender binary facing constant destabilization, feels
always under threat, and eating animals is its protection racket.
(03:29):
White supremacists weaponized it. Eating meat, eggs, and dairy and
the baiting of liberal men as so called soy boys
are all part of the neo Nazi messaging. I heard
all your laughter. I know some of these must be
new ideas, or you think they're fringe or whatever. Our
(03:49):
whiteness is part of the problem of meat eating.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Too many wokeness is simply nonsense, But with the rise
of this ideology seeming to spread throughout American institutions, it
has common sense. Americans wondering is wokeness dangerous. To find
the answer, we hear the story behind one of the
most revealing experiments in modern times, and in the process
we learn how wokeness has massive implications on society at large.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
We've all pulled different kinds of pranks in our lives,
sometimes little ones like tepeeing a friend's house. Other times
we might get a bit more elaborate, maybe we set
up a booby trap at home that surprises a loved one.
Then there's a level of prank that very few have
the gumption to pull off, the kind of prank that
has the potential to embarrass a lot of very powerful
(04:51):
people and even expose a broken system. This last category
is where we find a guy named James Lindsey. James
is the purveyor of New Discourses dot com. His team
planned an extra ordinarily important hoax that had the potential
to not only expose a broken sector of academia, but
also revealed the true nature of wokeness. Their plan was elaborate,
(05:13):
so much so that they had to commit at least
a year to executing it successfully. But just as they
were in the middle of pulling it off, a few
people started to get suspicious about what they were doing.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
A handful of small journalists picked it up and wouldn't
let it go.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
That's James.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
They just literally wouldn't let it go. They had like
a dog sinking his teeth into something and just not
letting go. And I was like, uh oh, this is
the end of our professional lives.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And his fear was warranted because the people he was
fooling are perhaps the most intolerant people in America. They're
the kind of folks that if you cross them, they'll
work to erase you from polite society. The build up
to James Lindsay's hoax is almost as interesting as the
hoax itself. James is originally from upstate New York, but
(05:59):
around nineteen eighty four, when he was kindergarten age, his
family moved to East Tennessee for work. His mother was
an accountant and his father was a chemical engineer.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
And so it was kind of this funny thing, you know,
where in doing the kind of things in kindergarten that
people do in kindergarten, and we're talking about different things,
and the teacher doesn't know what to do with me
because I'm like rattling off Newton's laws and things because
my dad's like indoctrinating me into science. You know, from
day one, we had the whole like how high can
you count? Test? And they finally had to like stopped me,
(06:27):
and I got mad that they stopped me because I
wasn't done.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yet, whether it was nature or nurture. At a very
young age, James showed an aptitude for analytical thinking. By
the time he reached his junior year of high school,
he thought he'd study meteorology. He was really interested in weather.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
But then I took physics in high school and I
was like, this is what I want to do. Physics
is it?
Speaker 1 (06:47):
So he enrolled in the local college, Tennessee Tech. He
got a degree in physics, and along the.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
Way, specifically when I took electricity and magnetism, I decided
I do not like physics and this is not what
I want to do.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
So he began looking for a different field of study.
He landed on mathematics.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Because I realized that what I actually liked in physics
was the math, and so I just enjoy solving mathematical
puzzles and I really liked once I started doing it
and learning how to do it. Doing mathematical proofs. I
really like that style.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Of thinking, a style of thinking based on concrete, provable facts.
James got his master's then entered the mathematics PhD program
at the University of Tennessee, but all along the way
he noticed something changing in academia.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
So the goal was no matter what is to keep students,
keep their scholarships, keep whatever you keep them, and don't
fail anybody. It was like, I teach math, like, what
are you talking about. Lots of kids can't do math
and they're going to fail and they should not carry
on to become college educated people that can't do math.
And they said no, no, no one student per semester or
(07:51):
per class or whatever can fail one. And I was like,
that's not going to work. That's definitely not gonna work.
And so it was like, I don't really want to
be a part of this. I can't do the job
that I want to.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Do with James discovered was if an amenon that crept
into universities years earlier. I'd actually witnessed it myself in
the early nineties. At the time, I was a professor's
aid for a thermodynamics class. One day I was administering
a mid term exam when I noticed that someone was
cheating on the test. It was the only female in
(08:22):
the class, and she was looking at a tiny crib
sheet in her hand. I walked over to the professor
and discreetly said, Sir, that student's cheating. What should we do.
He looked at her, then back at me, and said nothing,
We'll talk about it after class. I was confused. If
we let her finish, she could just dispose of the evidence,
but he insisted on letting it go. After class. He
(08:45):
pulled me aside and said that the mechanical engineering department
was getting pressure to admit more females. There was less
than a handful in the entire program, and the cheater
was the only female in this course. If we officially
caught her, he explained, she'd be expelled, further reducing the
number of women in the department. Professor decided to let
it slide. I was shocked. I mean, this wasn't some
(09:08):
frivolous discipline like Chicano's studies or feminism. Many of these
students would go on to design products where life or
death was at stake. If we let them cheat their
way through these courses, the end result could be horrific.
At the time, it troubled me to my core and
was one of the reasons why I left academia. This
was what James Lindsay was witnessing some fifteen years later.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
I didn't know anything about the woke stuff that was
happening or creeping in the university at the time. I
didn't realize that was one of the hooks by which
the university would be snared into wokeness, which is that
if they can't get rid of the most complaining students,
those students are going to be able to direct the
school one way or another. So the you know, the
most fragile or agitated or upset one percent of students
(09:52):
or two percent of students, the wokest two percent, who
are constantly making their demands and throwing their fits about
everything not being exactly the way they wanted to be,
gain outsized power if the university is is absolutely willing
to bend over backwards to keep them happy and keep
them in.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
One of the earliest public indications that wokeness had gotten
a foothold in the sciences came while James was working
towards his PhD.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
In January two thousand and five, Harvard President Lawrence H.
Summers spoke at a conference focused on the topic of
diversifying the science and engineering workforce. The goal of the
gathering was for participants to address the cause behind the
low number of women in high level positions within science
and engineering and to potentially propose a solution. The discussion
(10:41):
was supposed to be off the record so that speakers
could talk freely on the subject. In Larry Summer's speech,
he proposed three primary factors that attributed to this phenomenon.
The first was the role differences between men and women.
He offered that at a critical time early in their careers,
men were willing to think about work for eighty hours
a week, just as women were in their crucial churches
(11:03):
child bearing years. The second factor he proposed was that
men and women had innately different aptitudes for science and
engineering at the higher levels of the field, And finally,
he concluded that there was possibly a socialization culture that
perhaps led to some discrimination against women. He ultimately concluded
that women weren't in high level positions within science and
(11:23):
engineering primarily because of innate differences in interest and aptitude. Discrimination.
In his estimation, played a minor role well. His conclusion
led to a response that would eventually become the new norm,
a media outrage championed by feminist activists masquerading as journalist.
The Boston Globe ran a story highlighting one female biologist
(11:46):
that stormed out of the speech, claiming that if she
hadn't left, she would have either blacked out or thrown up.
TV reporters also took their jabs at the Harvard president's comments.
Speaker 8 (11:56):
Lauren Summers said the innate differences between men and women
are one reason fewer women succeed in alliance and math careers.
Summers says his remarks were made just a spurred debate
le Some academics say such thinking as a disservice to
female students.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
They turned to a local female science student for a response,
talk from a young age that nothing could hold her back.
Davis was surprised by the comments made by Harvard University's president.
I don't think that.
Speaker 5 (12:24):
You know your biological difference.
Speaker 6 (12:26):
Your biological makeup makes the difference of what you turned
out to be.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Larry Summers was painted as a misogynist. Harvard's faculty quickly
passed a motion claiming they lacked confidence in his leadership.
A year later, Summers resigned from the Harvard Presidency. Many
believed it was related to a speech the Larry Summers
Affairs showed wokeness was making its way into the sciences again.
James lindsay, by the.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Time I finished my PhD in twenty ten, I wanted
to leave you un diversity system pretty much completely.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
He saw the writing on the wall. Something was changing
in academia. He'd eventually leave the university system, but stayed
connected to the community through participating in online discussion groups,
and he started to notice the trend that Larry Summers experienced.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
And people are getting accused primarily. At the time, it
was kind of like the pre me too era, So
everything was sexism, everything was misogyny. It wasn't so much
about race occasionally that would come up with it was
almost always sexism, misogyny, rape culture, blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
James took notice, but it wasn't until he read an
outrageously ridiculous twenty sixteen academic paper that he decided that
he had to address the problem of wokeness head on.
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to Red Pilled amer So, while studying for his pH
d in mathematics, James Lindsay began to see wokeness creep
into the sciences in an alarming way. Professors were pressured
to keep students within the math department that would otherwise
be failing. By twenty ten, James wanted out of the
university system altogether. He participated in online discussion groups within
(15:23):
his field and began to see the wokeness trend there
as well. Claims of sexism and misogyny were being thrown
around with high frequency. James took note, but it wasn't
until he read an outrageously ridiculous twenty sixteen academic paper
that he decided he wanted to address the problem of
wokeness head on. The title of this academic paper was
(15:45):
Glacier's Gender and Science, a feminist glaciology framework for global
environmental change research. Now keep in mind, glaciology is the
technical study of glaciers, you know, those big, slow moving
ice and snow formations near Earth's North and South poles.
James recalls the absurd positions expressed in the paper.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
So the science of glaciology is intrinsically masculinist and sexist
and has to be revamped through feminist theory in order
to overcome those biases. And the science itself, and maybe
science more broadly that they suggest is actually profoundly sexist
and therefore not coming to the right kinds of conclusions. So
I'm reading this thing and thinking it can't be real,
(16:31):
But it's real.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
It was published in a respected journal called Progress in
Human Geography.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
It's like one of the top ones in geography, and
so I'm reading this and it's making arguments like that
we have to include indigenous mythologies about glaciers. We have
to start understanding that some glaciers are male and some
are female, and the glaciers have sex with one another
and under certain conditions, and that if you fry bacon
fat too close to a glacier, it'll become mad and
it'll do things. And then they took these indigenous findings.
(17:00):
They report this in the paper to a glaciologist and said, well,
what do you think about these things? And the guy,
they said and the paper, stared at them and then
closed the door in their face. He didn't want to
talk about it. And that was just proof that he
was a masculinist. You know, patriarchal jerk and that didn't
want to expand the purview of the science. And then
it gets worse, if you can believe it. So they
(17:20):
start telling these stories about like some woman that she's
a feminist and she's a painter and she paints pictures
of glaciers and she says, well, you know, they look
at photographs and satellite photographs and things like this of
glaciers all the time, but they don't look at this
woman's art. And they were like, well, it's because they're sexist,
this gleciologists or sexist because they won't look at the
paintings but they'll look at satellite photos. But I'm like,
(17:43):
holy smokes, what is this.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
James muscled through reading the entire paper. His colleague, a
philosophy professor at Portland State University named Peter Bagosian, picked
up the article as well.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Peter read part of it and was like, this is
too stupid. I can't deal with it.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
They might have just forgotten about the study and moved
on with their lives, but then a famous science journal
wrote about it.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
A journalist my name is Matt Ridley had written an
article and his exact phrasing was very close to I
still hold out that this is a hoax. Talking about
that particular paper.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Matt Ridley's comment reminded James and his colleague of a
famous incident that occurred two decades earlier.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
In nineteen ninety six, an NYU physics professor named Alan
Sokel noticed that academics within the social sciences and humanities
fields were venturing into weird philosophies untethered from reality. Alan
Sokile discussed the issue at the time.
Speaker 9 (18:38):
But I'm a leftist in the old fashioned sense that
I think working people are getting a bum deal and
we should try to change that. So it seems to
me the job of academic social scientists who call themselves
leftists is to uncover some of the facts about how
our economic and political system really operates, and to discuss
the publicly and see what we can do to propose
(18:59):
constructive changes. But unfortunately, there's some segment of so called
academic left that's gone off into very strange philosophies French
imports like deconstruction and post structuralism, some homegrown American inventions
like them in a standpoint epistemology, and they've lost contact
(19:19):
with the real world.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
So Alan Sokle thought he'd conduct an experiment. He wanted
to see if a leading North American journal of cultural
studies would publish an article that was quote liberally sulted
with nonsense end quote. He's surmised that to get into
one of these journals, his paper would have to sound
technically good while simultaneously flattering the editor's ideological predispositions. So
(19:49):
he wrote an article entitled Transgressing the Boundaries towards a
Transformative Hermanuetics of Quantum Gravity, and he submitted it to
an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies entitled Social Text.
Sokal's article proposed that a form of gravity was a
social construct. The paper was basically fancy sounding nonsense, filled
(20:12):
with technical jargon that fell right within the journal's political bias.
To Sokol's astonishment, the science journal published his paper. This
was not supposed to happen. Legitimate science journals require peer review,
a process that claims to be intellectually rigorous, to ensure
(20:36):
published articles meet a high threshold of quality. Sokal's experiment
revealed that some cultural studies journals likely had zero critical
review of their articles. This peer review process is an
extremely important aspect of not only science journals, but of
a functioning society at large, because it forms our pool
(20:56):
of knowledge. Again, James lindsay, So, the way.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
That peer review is supposed to work is so I
do some kind of research or whatever, and I want
to publish that research, and I want it to be
considered serious by professionals in the field. To submit the
paper that I want to publish it I write as
a result of that research to an academic journal. The editors,
who are also professionals in the field but not necessarily
highly specific experts, will read over the paper. If they
(21:22):
think it's probably good enough to go further, they will
send it off to some number of peer reviewers, usually two, three,
or four. And so the idea is, well, let's have
other professionals in the field look at it before we
publish it and decide is it strong enough? Is it crazy?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
These peer reviewers read it and typically propose corrections, point
out weaknesses, ask if the author has considered a particular perspective,
and so on, and.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
They will deliver back a series of comments. And if
the peer reviewers are happy enough and they will send
a recommendation along with all of those corrections to the
journal editor, and.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
The journal editor will then make a decision to either
work towards publishing the paper or politely pass on it.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
And so you can see that it's supposed to be
a filtering mechanism that keeps junk research out. The problem
is is that if there are fashionable conclusions, for example,
like in the thing that you mentioned, where well, there's
a pressure that if we were really trying to keep
women in engineering, if there's some pressure that's other than
the actual academic quality, that pressure can capture the peer
(22:26):
reviewers and the journal editors and the researchers working in
the field, and they can actually just be kind of
wandering down this path toward nonsense, towards some political agenda
as opposed to, for example, getting rigorous research on whatever
the particular subject is.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
And this corrupted peer review process can have grave cultural
consequences because if a politically soaked unscientific research paper gets published,
it becomes part of our pool of knowledge policymakers and
use them to create public policy. Right around the time
that James Lindsay read the ridiculous feminist Glacier study, a
segment of American society was tragically suffering from public policy
(23:06):
based on flawed academic research, and it was destroying people's lives.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
In two thousand and seven, a campus sexual assault study
funded by the Justice Department was released. Three years later,
NPR and the Center for Public Integrity, both far left
media organizations, used this report to publish their own study
entitled sexual Assault on Campus. In the report, they referenced
the two thousand and seven study and made a shocking
(23:36):
claim stating, quote, according to a report funded by the
Department of Justice, roughly one in five women who attend
college will become the victim of a rape or an
attempted rape by the time she graduates end quote one
in five. NPR then took their report to the US
Department of Education and got the Assistant Secretary of Civil
(23:56):
Rights within that department to make a public promise, we.
Speaker 10 (23:59):
Will use all of the tools at our disposed, including
referring to justice or withholding federal funds, to ensure that
women are free from sexual violence.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Again, James lindsay.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
The next thing you know, you have the White House
issuing a Dear Colleague letter, Obama coming out and talking
about this rape epidemic on campus.
Speaker 11 (24:21):
We're here to talk today about an issue that is
a priority for me, and that's ending campus sexual assault.
This is a problem that matters to all us, and
estimated one in five women has been sexually assaulted during
her college years.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
One in five. The problem was that everyone that was
citing the two thousand and seven sexual assault study, including Obama,
was citing it incorrectly. The one in five meme was
so widespread that even the researchers of the original study
expressed concern that their conclusions were being misrepresented. The researchers
(24:58):
only surveyed two schools, meaning their study wasn't meant to
represent an national trend. Also, critics argued that the two
thousand and seven methodology was highly flawed and it should
have been obvious. A US Department of Justice study done
just seven years earlier reported that two point eight percent
of college women had either experienced rape or attempted rape
(25:20):
over the four preceding years. If people were to believe
the NPR report, they'd have to believe that the sexual
assault of college women had gotten over seven times worse
in just seven years, when the national incidents of rape
and sexual assault were drastically decreasing over the same time.
As critics dug into the two thousand and seven report,
they learned that the study used an anonymous online questionnaire
(25:41):
that resulted in a very low response rate. Some credibly
argued that the overwhelming majority that didn't respond likely had
no experience with sexual assault. If the numbers were included,
critics claimed the assault numbers would have been a fraction
of what the study reported. Also, the assault number included
unwanted kissing and groping actions that technically met the definition
(26:02):
of battery but hardly qualified as attempted rape, as the
NPR report claimed. At a minimum, the one in five
sexual assault meme was highly inflated, but that didn't matter.
The narratives stuck again, James Lindsay and.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Then this claim was then put to politically actionable uses.
It was a disaster through the early twenty tens for say,
Title nine kangaroo courts as they got called, and what
Title nine inquisitions.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Title nine is a federal law that, among other things,
allows colleges to bypass the Bedrock American legal doctrine of
due process in cases involving claims of sexual assault, and
replaces that doctrine with what could be called a guilty
until proven innocent approach. When these sexual assault research papers surfaced,
it gave feminist activists the academic credibility to force colleges
(26:47):
to deal with the so called campus rape culture with
an iron fist.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
All of a sudden, you know, the administrations of these
colleges went on witch hunts and destroyed a few women,
but mostly men's lives in response to false things. And
it just absolutely you undermine due process, undermined constitutional protections
as citizens have, and created a nightmare.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
In one instance, just a few weeks after Obama's rape
culture speech in twenty fourteen, Rolling Stone published a bombshell expose.
In it, a female student from the University of Virginia
claimed that she was violently gang raped at a fraternity party.
The story was too good for the media to pass up.
Speaker 12 (27:29):
One of the most illegue universities in the country is
under the microscope after a Rolling Stone article painted a
picture of rampant sexual assault on campus and in action
by university officials.
Speaker 5 (27:41):
Quote from the article grab its leg She heard a
voice say, and that's when Jackie knew she was going
to be raped. She remembers every moment of the next
three hours of agony, during which she says seven men
took turns raping her.
Speaker 13 (27:54):
This is the fraternity where the most violent of those
alleged sexual assaults took place, the Phi Kappa Psi house
here and this graphic article from Rolling Stone has sparked
outrage and backlash across campus about the college community and
more specifically, the administration's handling of sexual assault on campus.
Speaker 14 (28:13):
The University of Virginia has suspended all fraternities for the
rest of the year following allegations of sexual assault at
one fraternity. It's the latest and a string of incidents
involving Greek life at campuses nationwide.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
I think the great community needs to do some serious
soul searching about the way that it has behaved, about
the behavior it's tolerated, about what its future is going
to be.
Speaker 6 (28:34):
And I'm really, really, really furious at the culture of
rape and the complete inaction of the administration and the
complete complacency of the student body.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
The Rolling Stone article quoted the one in five meme,
stating quote, one in five women is sexually assaulted in college,
though only twelve percent reported to police end quote. The
writer took to the media to proclaim that the University
of Virginia was just the tip of the feminist glacier.
Speaker 7 (28:57):
I was told that University of Virginia is actually quite typical,
even though the things that I just governed at University
engineer really horrifying. What I was told is that really
what happens that UVA is probably fairly normal at a
college canvas.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
The Rolling Stone story was everywhere. Corporate media rallied against
rape culture and the misogyny of fraternities and universities that
enabled it. The only problem was key details of the
victims story crumbled under scrutiny.
Speaker 12 (29:27):
Rolling Stone is now dealing with blowback from all sides
as the magazine changes its story. Following its sweeping expose
of an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia
fraternity house.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
There, law enforcement couldn't verify the alleged victim, Jackie's story.
In fact, what they did verify was that the party
she claimed to be gang raped at didn't happen. The
Columbia Journalism Review did a forensic investigation on the story
(29:59):
and concluded that the article was a product of failed methodology.
Five months after publishing the article, Rolling Stone retracted the
story and pulled it down from their site. The Dean
of UVA filed and won a defamation lawsuit against the
magazine and the author of the article. It later came
out that Jackie had become obsessed with another male student
(30:20):
and made up key elements of the story to gain
his pity.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
The entire rape culture, public policy and witch hunt was
given academic credibility from a paper with an imprecise research method.
Very serious ramifications come from these flawed academic studies. So
when James Lindsay and his colleague Peter Bagosian saw the
feminist Glaciology paper in twenty sixteen, it triggered an idea.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
We saw something that was there that the woke had
done that we decided as like, okay, that's enough, that's
too far.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
James colleague Peter came up with the way to expose
these science journals.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
And there's all these articles that are published in the
academic literature that people think are knowledge, but in fact
they're just opinion, just prejudices, an opinion. The best way
to discredit that isn't to argue against it, or rather
to expose it for what it is by pulling a
joke on it, showing that people can't tell the difference
that are producing this stuff between something real and something
(31:16):
obviously farcical. We knew who Alan Sokle was. Peter was
actually friends with Alan, so Alan Sokle famously did a
hoax paper on a journal called Social Text in the
nineteen nineties where he said that gravity's a social construction
and like just wrote all this postmodern gobbledygook, and they
accepted it. And so Peter was like, these people are
(31:37):
ripe for another hoax. They didn't learn their lesson.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
They decided to commit at least a year on their hoax,
but little did they know how much their lives would
change when all was said and done. Do you want
to hear Red Pilled America stories ad free? Then become
a backstage subscriber. Just log onto Redpilled America dot com
and click join in the top menu. Join today and
(32:01):
help us save America one story at a time. Welcome
back to Red Pilled America. So, after James Lindsay and
his colleague Peter Bagosian wrote a ridiculous academic paper about
infusing glacier science with feminism, the two decided the peer
reviewed science journals were broken and needed to be taught
a lesson. They began researching the origins of the words
(32:23):
and ideas littering these pseudo science academic papers, and eventually
found which disciplines were pumping them out.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
We narrowed in on the gender studies academic literature and
the feminist theory academic literature, and we started to read
some of this literature and we were like, this stuff's crazy,
and so we thought it would be fun to write
an academic hoax. Just thought it would be fun. So
we wrote an academic hoax carrying the title The Conceptual
Penis as a Social Construct, and we argued that penises
are best thought of as a social construct rather than
(32:53):
as anatomical organs, and that they cause all of our problems,
especially climate change.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
They argued that man spreading the complaint that men sit
with their legs spread apart was quote akin to raping
the empty space around him end quote. In May twenty seventeen,
a science journal called Cogent Social Sciences published the paper,
shortly after James and his colleague Peter admitted to the
stunt and basically proclaimed they'd proven the farcical nature of
(33:19):
gender study scholarship, but their critics shot back, saying they'd
missed the mark. They claimed that the journal that published
their paper was a pay to publish journal that regularly
publishes terrible papers. In the eyes of gender study supporters,
their prank proved nothing. James and Peter had spiked the
football too soon. But what their critics hadn't realized was
(33:42):
that they were providing James and Peter a how to
guide on the most effective way to pull off their hoax.
James recalls what his critics.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Were telling him, if you wanted to prove your point,
this is what you would have had to have done.
And we said, okay, there's a roadmap. Let's do it again.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
On August sixteenth, twenty seventeen, they officially started their second
tempt at the prank. A few weeks later, they enlisted
Helen Pluckrose, a British cultural and political writer. The three
created fake author names and got to writing hoax research papers.
The first six they wrote were rejected by science journals.
They hadn't yet figured out the secret sauce to getting
(34:20):
their research papers accepted, so by late November twenty seventeen,
they regrouped and dug in deeper into the scholarship in
what they called grievance studies, which includes feminist studies, women
in gender studies, race studies, sexuality studies, queer studies, fat studies,
cultural studies, and sociology. The grievance scholarship may look ridiculous
(34:41):
to the outside world, but within these fields of study,
they play by a set of rules. The pranksters needed
to make a commitment to figure them out. Within a
few months, they began to understand the rules, and that's
when the trios started to have some success. By March
twenty eighteen, two papers were accepted. By June twenty eighteen,
a third was accepted again.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
James Lindsay there were three that stand out.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
In one paper, they rewrote a section of Hitler's mind
comp by replacing Hitler's movement with intersectional feminism.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
And then just created this whole new idea that we
called solidarity feminism and literally just rewrote Hitler's words with
an eight point plan and the whole thing to create
a new kind of feminism that completely throws out the
idea that women should be able to choose how they
represent themselves or be feminist, or what it means to
(35:32):
be a woman or be feminist. No, it has to
be intersectional solidarity, no half measures, blah blah blah blah blah,
whole thing. So we rewrote a chapter of mind comp
and a feminist social work journal accepted that for publication.
The second paper that was accepted that got rather a
lot of attention was that we claimed that the sport
of professional bodybuilding is intrinsically fat phobic because it only
(35:54):
cares about big bodies that are built with muscles rather
than big bodies built with fat. And so as a result,
there must be a new category added, a new competition
category added to professional bodybuilding is a sport called fat
body building. Fat bodybuilding would be it can't be a
competition because they're against competition, So it's actually an exhibition
(36:15):
where everybody wins, but that you get up on stage
and you wear fattionion of your choice and exhibit your
fat to the audience. And the more politicized your fat
exhibition is in kind of a queer theory sort of
way where it intersects with fat studies, the better. And
so that would be required for professional bodybuilding to continue
(36:39):
as a sport, because you know, the privileging of muscle
over fat is just fat exclusionary. And so you know,
we titled that paper, who are they to judge?
Speaker 2 (36:49):
They did get some feedback from the peer reviewers.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
We actually said that it was a final Frontier for fat.
Turns out Peter is a fan of Star Trek rather significantly,
so we thought it'd be fun to put like a
little star Trek, you know, the final frontier illusion in there.
And they were like, the word final indicates that there's
an end point to fat activism, which there's not, so
you can't use the word final. And then the word
(37:11):
frontier evokes memories of the genocide of Native Americans, so
choose a different word. So we couldn't call it the
final Frontier for fat activism anymore. We had to change that.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
But the one that got the most attention was a
research paper about dog sex.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
So what we claimed was that you can use the
way that people react dogs humping each other at dog
parks as kind of an implicit bias test to determine
how they feel about rate. And so we claimed that we,
as a feminist researcher, went to dog parks and observed
nearly ten thousand dogs, which there are not ten thousand
dogs in any given dog park in the course of
(37:46):
a year, but there's like forty, maybe because it's like
a neighborhood. But anyway, we said we observed ten thousand
dogs and hundreds or thousands of incidents between dogs, and
just made up all these fake numbers about how the
dogs behave. But what we were interested in was how
the owners reacted if it was a male on female
dog rape versus a male on male dog rate. And
(38:10):
we then said that this proves that dog parks are
petrie dishes of canine rape culture, and the people are
accepting of this, particularly when it's straight dog rape, and
so men in particular are big fans of straight dog rape.
Get her, get her, boy, get her, you know, kind
of attitude hearing the dog on. And that this proved
(38:32):
that obviously that the dog parks and also human nightclubs
are rape condoning spaces and rape cultures out of control.
And so what we should do is train men the
way that we trained dogs, literally leashes, shot collars, things
like that, in order to overcome rape culture. And however
(38:53):
stupid you think the paper is, like, I just made
it sound really really smart and great, it's really worse
than that. It's the dumbest thing that's probably ever been written.
And not only was that accepted by the leading feminist
geography journal, it was actually held up as exemplary scholarship
in the field of feminist geography, given an award for
Excellence in scholarship.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
James couldn't believe they'd gotten these ludicrous research papers accepted.
Things were going along swimmingly, but as they plugged away,
trouble was brewing.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
So what ended up breaking the whole thing open was
that the dog Park Paper, the dog Sex Paper, got
out there and they published it, and it was out
in the world, and we weren't done. We're still writing
other papers, and people noticed it's insane. There was an
account on Twitter, I don't know if it still exists
that was called Real Peer Review that was actually chronicling
these ridiculous papers that come out, and they found the
(39:47):
dog Park paper.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Real Peer Review tweeted it out and indie journalist immediately
began picking it up.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
The degree of insanity of that paper is literally the
highest of all of them. They got accepted, but once
that hit like the it was article after article after article,
articles just kept coming and kept coming in the stress
was mounting and mounting and mounting.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
At the time, they'd only had three papers accepted. If
journalists kept digging, they would discover their experiment before James
and his team had a critical number of ridiculous research
papers accepted to make an impact.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
And so, you know, we had a lot on the
line that what we're going to lose all of this.
You know, we're going to get embarrassed, We're going to
be shut down. It's not going to have the necessary
intended effect unless we can, you know, hopefully get more
papers through.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
As the articles on the dog Park Paper piled up,
they tried to ignore the journalist, hoping to get more
of their ridiculous, woke research published.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
So we were like, keep your head down, keep your
head down, keep your head down, keep your head down.
And the dog Park Paper was so insane that the
handful of small journalists picked it up and wouldn't let
it go. They just literally wouldn't let it go. They
had like a dog sinking as deeth into something, just
not letting go.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
The journalist tried reaching out to Helen Wilson, the fake
author for the dog Park Paper. Their inquiry landed in
James's inbox. He and his colleagues ignored the emails, hoping
it would buy them enough time to get more of
their papers published. But that's when the journalists got smart.
They decided to pull in one of the biggest media
outfits in America to help apply pressure, and a journalist
(41:19):
from that outlet began digging in and.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Then all of a sudden, the email came from the
Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
From a reporter named Gillian K.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Melcher.
Speaker 3 (41:32):
I was like, oh no, this is too big. This
isn't like campus reform. I can ignore them. This isn't
like one of Thosts. This is the Wall Street Journal.
I was like, we're not going to get away with
lying to the Wall Street Journal. And then boom, the
other email comes from the journal.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
The Science Journal that published their dog sex paper.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
So then the journal contacts us and it's like, what's
going on? Who are you really? You know? Can you
prove your identity so we can get these people off
our backs And I was like, uh oh.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Right before the Science Journal and the Wall Street Journal
called James team thought they had at least five more
months to get the critical number of papers accepted.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
And we suddenly had days or weeks with it being
unclear what the finish line was going to be, and
so incredibly stressful that this huge project that could essentially
detonate our lives if it goes wrong, had just left
our control very suddenly, very very unexpectedly, and not exactly
(42:29):
in circumstances that we were fortuitous. We were like, this
is the end of our professional lives, and now the
journal is on us, The Wall Street Journal is on us,
and it's like, all right, we got to come clean.
So I emailed Jillian at the Wall Street Journal emailed
her back and I said, Okay, this is Helen Wilson.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
The fake author of the dog Park paper.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
And I will talk to you on the phone about
what's going on tomorrow off record. And then we had
this whole argument about whether or not the call could
be off record or on record when we first started
the call, but eventually she agreed and said it'll be
off record, or at least some of it would be.
And then I told her what was going on the
first thing she called and I answered, and I don't
(43:15):
sound like somebody named Helen, and so she was like,
are you trans and I was like, no, that's not
the scandal here. I'm just a man and my name
is James, and so I just started going through the
whole thing with her and she's like, oh my god,
I think she saw possible pullets aer in her eyes
or something at this moment, And so we talked for
like an hour.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
James and his team knew they couldn't ask the Wall
Street Journal to hold the story. They're a financial outlet.
They'd never agree to it. They had to find another
way to hold up the publication until more of their
papers were accepted. So they decided on a two pronged plan. First,
keep the Wall Street Journal busy with the flood of
information that they'd have to thoroughly check, and then leave
(44:01):
holes in the story that they'd have to slowly find
and need to resolve.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
That bought us a couple of months to get our
affairs in order.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
In that time, James and his team got seven of
their ridiculous woke papers accepted and had seven more studies
in various stages of being approved. On October two, twenty eighteen,
just as The Wall Street Journal released their story on
their hoax, James and his team released a video describing
what they'd done.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
Since approximately June of twenty seventeen, I, along with two
other concerned academics, Peter Burgoshen and Helen Pluckrose, have been
writing intentionally broken academic papers and submitting them the highly
respected journals and fields that studied gender, race, sexuality, and
similar topics.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
The story exploded across the globe.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
I think we were on the front page over four
hundred newspapers worldwide.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
They had unequivocally proven their point. The scholarship of these
woke academic fields were anything but scholarship. It was largely
a pile of gobbledegook masquerading as knowledge.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
James Lindsay and his colleague Helen Pluckrose wrote a book
about their experiment entitled Cynical Theories, and there are now
two of the leading thinkers on the phenomenon of wokeness.
Their colleague, Peter Bagosian joins them in that status. But
as a result of working on the Grievance Studies affair,
as it's come to be known, he's faced some serious consequences.
In twenty eighteen, his employer, Portland State University, initiated an
(45:26):
investigation into whether he'd violated ethical guidelines by conducting research
on human subjects without their approval. Many leading academics saw
the move as retaliation for the academic establishment being embarrassed.
Peter's defenders included famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychologist Stephen Pinker,
the loss of her Daniel Dennett, and psychologist Jordan Peterson. Later,
(45:49):
in twenty eighteen, the university ruled that Peter had indeed
violated ethical research guidelines. In twenty twenty one, he resigned
his position at Portland State University, claiming that it had
become a social justice factory, which brings us back to
(46:12):
the question is wokeness ridiculous or dangerous? The answer is both.
Wokeness may be absurd, but it is not benign. Wokeness
is profoundly dangerous because it has the potential to unravel society.
Wok academics in the fields of cultural studies and the
humanities published politically soaked research based on junk science. Woke
(46:36):
activists then use these broken studies to force politicians to
make disastrous public policies based on these flawed findings. After
the Rolling Stones heralded sexual assault article fell apart, the
college rape culture narrative looked like it was on the ropes.
But then a few months after the article was retracted,
a new academic paper was released that upped the ante.
(46:58):
It was no longer one in five. The academic community
now claimed nearly one in four college females are raped
or sexually assaulted.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
The paper was blowing it out by a factor of
ten to one at least versus what's really going on,
because they were ideologically captured enough to want to be
able to make this claim, and then this claim was
then put to politically actionable uses.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
James Lindsay thinks he understands why his team's hoax research
made it through the peer review process.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
I think that it's working the way it's opposed to.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
In other words, the peer review process within certain disciplines
is designed to give academic credibility to dangerous political causes.
That's why wokeness is dangerous. It will not be removed
without a fight, But a fight we must commence, because
if wokeness isn't removed from American institutions, the evil these
cult like activists spew will continue to break down society
(47:51):
as we know it.
Speaker 4 (47:52):
A lot of people, when they hear the term pedophile,
they automatically assume that it means a sex offender, and
that isn't true, and it leads to a lot of
misconceptions about attractions toward miners.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
Red Pilled America's an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's produced by
me Adriana Cortez and Patrick Carelchi for Informed Ventures. Now,
our entire archive of episodes is only available to our
backstage subscribers. To subscribe, visit Redpilled America dot com and
click support in the topmenu. Thanks for listening.
Hosts And Creators
Adryana Cortez
Patrick Courrielche
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