The Patriot Post® · The Divisive Practice of 'Idea Laundering' in Academia
By Richard McDonough
“It was made very clear to me that I could not pass my Masters and … do a Ph.D. if I were to keep insisting on … biology … being a reality.” —feminist historian and “left-leaning liberal” Helen Pluckrose, “How Idea Laundering Is Crippling American Universities”
If one ever wondered why so many silly divisive ideas — e.g., “woke” concepts like “the patriarchy,” “intersectionality,” “rape culture,” “critical race theory,” etc. — emerge from academia into everyday discourse where they create division between different social groups, one must acquaint oneself with the practice of “idea laundering” common in the “grievance studies” programs in academia. The term was coined by Bret Weinstein, a former highly respected progressive biology professor at progressive Evergreen University in progressive Washington state, who, with his distinguished professor wife, Heather Heying, was driven off campus and lost his tenured job because he objected to the racist effort to bar one racial group, white people, from campus on a day of learning. By “idea laundering” he means the dishonest practice, analogous to the criminal practice of money laundering in the financial world, of laundering bogus ideas through rigged academic journals to make them look legitimate.
Money laundering is concealing the source of illegally acquired dollars to make it appear that they have originated from legitimate sources. Criminals move illegally obtained funds around the globe using various intermediaries, banks, shell companies, etc. In one novel strategy, a novice artist with political connections might sell mediocre paintings to overseas political actors for inflated prices in exchange for political favors.
The reason many people have heard of ideas like “the patriarchy” and “intersectionality” is that activist scholars have developed these concepts for at least three decades, and the ideas have begun to escape from the university into mainstream culture, where they are represented as genuine knowledge. Many of these ideas have emerged from the area called “grievance studies,” a nexus of academic areas that identify some demographic such as black people, “queer” people, Native Americans, women and the like who have allegedly been marginalized. Academic journals are established in these areas staffed by activists with little to no academic standards in order to push the grievance narrative.
It is important to stress that many people in these groups do have legitimate grievances, and many conservatives are happy to address them in order to attempt to resolve the problems. It depends very much, however, on how precisely one accomplishes this. The traditional fields of sociology, anthropology, economics, history, philosophy, etc. have developed various time-tested rational methods for formulating, examining, and evaluating such ideas.
The problem arises when the grievance practitioners abandon these time-tested rational processes. It begins when some aggrieved academic has some strong moral (or perhaps immoral) impulse about something — e.g., someone may have grown up feeling they were born in the wrong gender and suffered abuse as a result. It is natural that a sociologist or anthropologist might want to do research to help people achieve a better understanding of the issues. So far there is no problem. In America, people have every right to stand up for their communities. That is how we learn. Unfortunately, “grievance studies” activists, suffering from a pernicious, relativistic, postmodernist philosophy that rejects the idea of objective truth, decide that traditional beliefs — e.g., using Helen Pluckrose’s example, the view that males are naturally attracted to females — are neither true nor false but just stories that an oppressive Christian or “the patriarchy” teaches about people in order to cement their control over the rest of the population. Actually, no! That view is based on biological science. As Pluckrose puts it, the grievance activist begins with the assumption that there is oppression, and then they try to find evidence that it exists, not stopping until they do. Since postmodernists believe that knowledge is constructed, not discovered, they see no problem in constructing their own bogus evidence, i.e., making it up with deceptive language and methods.
When a critical mass of grievance studies scholars arise, they create their own journals, staffed exclusively by people who share their grievance ideology. These activist professors then publish articles in these rigged grievance journals, which then are cited by other grievance activists as evidence that their favorite grievances have been validated in professional journals (as if this is real social science or philosophy). These grievance views are then taught as fact to students. Naïve students, who tend to trust their professors, are tested on these “grievance” claims and forced to repeat the required answers in order to pass the course — e.g., to state on tests that the United States in a patriarchy that holds down women, black people, gay people, and so on. It becomes a condition of graduating from university that one accepts the “grievance culture.” After a generation or two, these grievance dogmas seep out into the media and wider culture as certified fact. Since virtually everyone at the university is forced to agree, it must be true (an ad populum fallacy that does not take account of indoctrination).
A fake history is created by laundering bogus ideas through ideologically driven activist journals that are uninterested in the truth and were created to provide a fake pedigree to advance a preordained political agenda, usually on the left. For example, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project has been judged historically inaccurate even by liberal historians. Naturally, Hannah-Jones felt aggrieved when the inaccuracies in her pseudo-historical narrative was exposed.
None of this means that scholars should not investigate the grievances of women, black people, LGBTQ people, Native Americans, etc. Many of these groups have been marginalized in certain ways. Recall the scene in the “Crocodile Dundee” movie where, in a bar, Dundee squeezes a flirtatious transvestite’s private parts, thereby humiliating her in front of the entire bar. That kind of behavior is not funny. One can disagree with people, but a line is drawn at humiliation. However, the investigation of these grievance issues should be done through the time-tested rational scientific methods and adjudicated by the full range of academic scholars in free and fair discussions, not by an artificially constructed group of single-minded activists with preordained conclusions. If such grievances are tested in free and fair discussion, it will be found that many of them have some basis in fact, but it is also virtually certain that the accounts of these grievances that will emerge in a fair way will be much more balanced and nuanced.
The practice of “idea laundering” in academia was not designed for genuine understanding or to solve social problems. It is meant to secure money, power, and position for the people who engage in it, just as money laundering is meant to secure money, power, and position for the people who engage in it in the financial world. That is, it is selfish behavior. Since the academic practitioners of idea laundering benefit from divisions in society, aggrieved people often want to cause problems, not solve them. They have successfully damaged the United States.