Understanding the Marxist Underpinnings of Education

How the US moved from a high trust society to needing to verify 'virtually everything'

James Lindsay, founder of the website New Discourses. Brendon Fallon/The Epoch Times

“This corruption of scholarship,” says James Lindsay, “creates an entire Lysenkoist artifice that poisons the whole enterprise, the twisted perversion you get when the knowledge generating enterprise gets completely corrupted.”

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek meets with Lindsay, founder of the website New Discourses, to discuss Marxist corruption in education. Lindsay is the author of “The Marxification of Education” and “Race Marxism,” and co-author of “Cynical Theories.”

He also belongs to the group behind the Grievance Studies Affair, or Sokal Squared Hoax, which managed to publish a number of fake papers in critical-theory-based journals. That story is detailed in Mike Nayna’s new documentary “The Reformers.”

Jan Jekielek: We have this new film by Mike Nayna about the Sokal Squared Hoax, which you and two others created some years back. It opened my eyes to a whole crazy reality that I wasn’t fully aware of. You also have a new book, “The Marxification of Education,” about Paulo Freire and why our education system is the way it is.

James Lindsay: 2017 to 2018 is the timeline. Two colleagues of mine—Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose—and I decided that one of the best ways to expose the corruption in academia would be to get a large number of papers published in leading academic journals: feminist theory and philosophy, gender studies, and critical race theory.

We took a year and wrote 20 papers. Seven were accepted for publication, and four of them actually got published. It’s a slow process. All of the seven would have been published. One was given an award for excellence in scholarship. The Wall Street Journal figured out what we were up to, and we came clean. In October 2018, the final scoreboard was seven accepted, seven under peer review, and six that hadn’t succeeded.

We were aiming to show that the scholarship upon which we build our knowledge base, our public policy, and our journalism is suffering from political corruption, to the extent that we could make up fake articles with ridiculous conclusions that were politically fashionable. Some were funny, and some were heinous and disturbing. We got them through the peer-review process, and they were regarded as genuine academic literature.

Mr. Jekielek: You figured out that if you used certain keywords and structured the logic in a certain way, you would get in. Is that the idea?

Mr. Lindsay: Yes. The six that failed—the first that we wrote—showed us there was a learning process. At some point, we got the hang of it by asking, “What are the peer reviewers looking for? What do the journal editors believe about the way the world operates? How do we phrase this?” It’s really about a certain language they speak.

One of the articles was prescient for the moment because it said that we needed—and this is meant to be funny—to be wary of advanced artificial intelligence. Rather than allowing AI to be guided by masculine bias, which might end in a calamity that destroys the world, we need to make an interactional feminist. We argued for a feminist AI.