Idea Laundering

Grievance Studies is "Idea Laundering": James Lindsay

James Lindsay :

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Helen, we're on the front page of the New York Times

Oh man, there's a picture of us too. Look at that.

Wonder who took that picture. Turn it to the camera

"With Canine Sex and Hooters

Papers jab at academic journals"

I've been getting a lot of messages today that 

The New York Times is a white

supremacist sexist organization

So I think I think they came down in our favor

It's hard to make sense of what the hell is going on here --

We're talking for what months now 

about this moment and there was 

an expectation that we'd be utterly destroyed --

For good reason. Look what happened 

to Bret [Weinstein] and Heather [Heying], 

but that hasn't happened to us. 

It hasn't happened to us. 

What's happening. Can you...

No, I can't. I have no idea what's happening. 

Something is happening. I don't know, 

then something might still happen

but yeah at the moment we've

We're being taken seriously

mostly and read in good faith. 

And that's surprising.

That's there are hundreds of thousands 

of words to read through to even 

begin to understand what we did --

Simplifying this into a book would 

even be difficult because it's so long;

Usually you have to talk about ginning 

something up to book length, but summarising 

this down to book length is difficult...

So there's a great deal that people 

are gonna have to take in. 

Do you think this thing could fizzle out as 

a result of people not properly understanding 

what is going on behind closed doors here?

Yeah, if people don't understand that 

this is a form of corruption. 

That's that's political in nature, that's trying 

to change how we validate ideas... 

Bret Weinstein called it idea laundering, 

which is a brilliant term that you have 

these these prejudices and opinions

Our work shows that that you can start with the conclusion and

Work your way there so you can conclude nearly anything as long as it's hostile to the right

Things: privilege in particular and so then then the universities are the these grievance studies

fields take them in

they do the peer-review thing obviously in a way that's very concerning from our work and then

They put them out and now they have this respectability of knowledge when they still are just prejudice and opinion.

Critical race theory is a mess. For example, it is explicitly political situation in which whiteness has to be bad and

Therefore it can't ever do anything right.

And they they take these ideas and launder them through the academic process and these departments exist

specifically to launder these ideas, to put them to the academic process and give them the appearance of being rigorous studies

So then activists can go on say "Oh a study has shown"

These ideas disseminate straight out of the university into culture. They're everywhere people run into them all the time

Everybody's confused about issues of race and racism and sexism now because they seem to have been redefined and this whole power structure is

becoming the the water we we swim in and

this whole thing that everybody and everything is racist and sexist would never have been able to take off and get much traction if it

Weren't being made to look legitimate by a scholarly enterprise that's been pushing it for five decades

It's about knowledge. It's about how we decide what is true. People don't tend to think about the ways in which they

decide what is true.

It just seems to come naturally to them because it comes from the water that we swim in and we are just gradually bit-by-bit undermining

the long history of ...of going with evidence of going with

consistent liberal ethics. It's... it's frightening