(October 5, 2018) Three left-leaning professors recently exposed widespread sophistry at a number of “respected” academic peer-reviewed journals. They submitted a total of twenty articles, all hoaxes. As of earlier this week when they called a halt because a reader finally challenged one of the articles, seven of the submissions were accepted for publication, seven were still under review and six had been rejected. Significantly, however, the authors had improved their acceptance rate after learning to use topic-specific jargon and to reach conclusions consistent with prevailing viewpoints of the agenda-driven magazines.
The topics fall under the rubric of “Grievance Studies,” which spans at least fifteen subdomains, including (feminist) gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, race theory, whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy. The professors tried to make all the articles humorous, at least in small ways and often in big ways. The research was always shoddy and the conclusions laughable.
The authors selected topics by meeting to ponder ridiculous questions. For example they discussed whether they could get a magazine to publish a feminist rewrite of one chapter from Adolph Hitler’s Mien Kampf. The answer turned out to be “yes,” since the feminist social work journal Affilia recently accepted it. Eventually the authors learned that just about anything could be made to work, so long as it fell within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrated an understanding of the existing literature popular in the applicable field. The Mien Kampf rework, for example, was titled “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.”
In another case the authors considered whether they could get an article published urging that men be trained as if they were dogs in order to combat rape culture. The resulting, “Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon” was published in Gender, Place and Culture. The authors claimed that they had inspected the genitals of about 10,000 dogs while questioning their owners about their sexual behavior. The magazine and its reviewers accepted at face value their tongue-in-cheek claim to have observed one dog rape per hour at Portland dog parks. The magazine even commended the article as one of its best submissions of the year.
The professors tell their story in the video below.
Despite the trio’s focus on “Grievance Studies” they overlooked the bias in American history publications concentrating on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Such publications routinely portray white Southerners of the era as demons, Yankees as avenging angles and present-day blacks as a minority with legitimate grievances against white Southerners but none against Northern Republicans of the nineteenth century even though the Yankees abandoned blacks after the Party realized they did not need the freedman’s vote in order to retain political hegemony.
Consider, for example, how modern academic historians induced the federal government to establish a National Reconstruction Memorial in Beaufort, South Carolina that focuses on the black experience but almost totally ignores the challenges faced by Southerners of other races. In addition to the racial injustices against blacks, the entire post-war South was exploited as an internal colony and forced into peonage for nearly a century after the war. Despite the Beaufort memorial’s focus, poverty among all races in the South was widespread and protracted. As late as 1940 half of the region’s sharecroppers were white and their average earnings $0.15 – $0.25 per day was the same as for blacks.
The teachings of such prejudiced historians is brainwashing, not education. As such, they are largely responsible for the destruction of Confederate monuments, widespread disdain for Southern heritage and a general animus toward present-day Southerners who dare to challenge their propaganda.
Civil War Chat 