The Eric Metaxas Show - Socrates in the Studio: James Lindsay

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Exposing the Insanity of Modern Academia

Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Eric Mataxis show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you can protect your wealth with noble gold investments. That's noble gold investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Did you ever see the movie The Blobs starring Steve McQueen? The blood-curdling prep of The Blob. Well, way back when Eric had a small part in that film, but they had a to cut his scene because the blob was supposed to eat him, but he kept spitting him out. Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster. Anyway, here's

the guy who's not always that easy to digest. Eric Mattaxas! Hey there, folks. It's a Socrates Day on the Eric Metaxis show. As most of you know, for 25 years,

I have been doing a thing called Socrates in the city, where I have had some of the most glorious conversations ever with some of the most extraordinary guests ever. We normally do them, you know, in big venues in Manhattan. We're doing them all around the country with, you know, 200 people and it's a big thing. But we've also started doing Socrates in the studio events, which means we can do even more of them. I did a whole bunch in England. I think that's what we're airing today.

I'm not sure. But I've done so many recently. I did a few in New York recently for Socrates in the studio. And these are, you know, it's kind of like a more of a PBS vibe, right? But it's something that I feel very strongly about. The guests that we choose our guests very carefully. These are some brilliant people. They're not all on the same page as I am, theologically or politically, but who cares, right?

That's not the point. The point is to explore the big question. because I have this kind of crazy idea that if you're actually looking for truth, you're going to be moving toward the God who is truth. And I have felt this for most of my adult life, and that's why we do Socrates in the city. So let me say that today you're listening to a Socrates in the city conversation that I had. Socrates in the city, we have a YouTube channel. I ask you please to go there to subscribe to the Socrates and the city YouTube channel, like the videos.

If you do that, YouTube promotes it way, way more. And we're trying to get these conversations way out there for all kinds of people who are seeking, who are curious, who have questions. It's just something that I feel very strongly about. I feel God has called me to do Socrates in the city. So we have a YouTube channel. I've also, well, you can go to Socrates in the city.com. You can sign up for our events. You can sign up for the newsletter because there's more and more happening that I can't possibly get to on this radio program podcast.

And I would say, Eric, what's exciting is that if you've ever wanted to come in person but live around the world, if you sign up for Socrates Plus, which is the streaming platform, there's all kinds of other things, including free live stream of the event. So it comes with the subscription. You can live stream the event. Thank you. I think I would have forgotten. Socrates Plus, it's like $5 a month. It comes with all kinds of stuff. You'll see if you go to Socrates Plus.

Go to Socratesandcity.com and you'll see it. But one of the things, which I think is the coolest, is whenever we do an event, you can live stream it. So it doesn't matter where you are, you know, if you can't get to California or in New York or wherever we're doing our event, you can live stream it. And the live stream is always, it has a little bit of a raw quality because it's before we edit it. So whatever dumb stuff I say that gets edited out by the brilliant young people who do this, I would like you to hear it anyway. So Socrates plus you get the live, you get the live events. We're doing an event in Manhattan in May, which is, I mean, my goodness, that's going to be a big event. We're doing an event.

Some of you know about the Greek cruise. If you want to know about the cruise, go to soccer. Sorry, the cruise, the Greek cruise is Ericmetaxis.com slash cruise. Ericmetaxis.com slash cruise. You have to sign, you have to call the number if you want to go. It's Ericmataxis.com slash cruise. But right before the cruise, we are doing several days in Athens, including a Socrates event. in Athens.

We're narrowing down the possibilities of who will be my guest. But it's going to be in Athens. You could live stream it. Unless you want to actually come to Athens, you're welcome to do that. But that's Socrates and the city.com is the website. Socrates Plus enables you to live stream these events. I really can't believe we're going to be doing one in Athens. That's absolutely crazy.

So yeah. Socrates in the city. is something I just want everyone to know about. And I want to say it again, the website is Socrates in the city.com. The streaming service, I'm sorry, the platform Socrates Plus just opens up all kinds of stuff to you.

You have to go there to see more of what it is. But we worked really hard on it. I'm proud of it. If you go to Socrates and the city website, most of my books are available there. You can get autographed copies and also books of most of our guests because I, again, this is our idea behind Socrates in the city is to introduce you to a world of thinkers and writers. And again, I've been doing this for 25 years. So we have quite an archive.

And I just want people to know about it. And I want to say again, I would appreciate it if you share this with your friends, because there are people all over the country, all around the world. I have been in Europe, and people come up to me and say, thank you for Socrates in the city. And I think, what? I'm in Europe. What are you talking about? They go, oh, yeah, I've been watching it for years.

It has fed me intellectually, spiritually. Sosocratesin the city.com is the website. we have some new swag there. Gorgeous stuff. I mean, really very, very high quality, beautiful, beautiful stuff that's there. And what else do we have there? I was just going to say something

and it went out of my head. That's what happens. Anyway, when you go to the YouTube channel, Socrates, oh, I'm sorry. I was going to say, our first Socrates in the city book It is a number of conversations. It's on the page. You'll see it when you go to Socrates in the city.com,

but it is the edited transcripts. I edited it of some of the best conversations I've had in the last 20 years. It's the book. It's the Socrates and City book. It's a beautifully printed book and produced book. But the conversations in it, I think of the one I had with Alice von Hildebrandt.

she was 91 years old. These are some of the best conversations I've ever had. And if you're looking to deepen the life of the mind, that's a big part of what I hope to do, to think about the big questions, what we always jokingly describe as life, God, and other small topics. Socrates and City, you know, it's meant to be the place where you get to do that and where there's no pressure to think a certain way. this is just to help people think about the big questions. And I keep saying I started Soxie's and City 25 years ago because I thought, you know, we live in a world where you're not encouraged to think about the big questions.

You're encouraged to think about shallow garbage. You know, you go to news websites and they're just pushing whatever is sensational. Thinking about the big questions, taking the time to think about the big questions, it's important, folks. We're very distracted. So that's what Socrates and cities meant to be. I should say part of the reason it's called Socrates and the city, it's not just because I'm Greek. But Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living.

He said it's important to think about the big questions. I agree with him on that. And I think that if you're honestly searching for truth, you're even asking, is there such a thing as truth? That's, you're on the right path. And that's really, really vital that you be encouraged to think about the big questions. Let's say you're already a person of faith. That doesn't mean you have it all figured out. You need to think more deeply about what does it mean to say, I believe in truth.

I care about truth. That's what Socrates and City is. So the website is Socratesin the city.com. The streaming platform is Socratesplus.com. That's $5 a month. And then, of course, the YouTube channel. Please subscribe, like the videos. That's the Socrates and the city YouTube channel.

So today, I'm not sure which conversation we're playing, but I do know that it's important. It's wonderful. And I recommend it to you. Thank you for tuning in. Numbers don't lie. The impact that balance in nature makes every single day is astounding. You can see the numbers for yourself on their website.

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because the academy is always in the forefront of things that decades later kind of trickle down in other ways. So the peer-reviewed academic literature, for good or for ill, represents that which our society at the highest level of this activity authenticates as the, what will act as though is true. So, for example, should some issue go to court, the judge is going to bring in, he's a judge, he's busy doing law things, right? So it's say it's a medical issue about transition or something. What are they going to do? They're going to bring in expert witnesses.

We're going to report on what the academic literature says. And so some person is going to get hired by, you know, the attorneys and is going to come in and say, well, there's all these papers that say that if you put things, somewhere, then, you know, you can, whatever. So this, we use this as the authenticating piece of what is true in our society. Now, as for the theme of the decline of the West, if the centerpiece of how you decide what is and is not going to be regarded as true, is this corrupt, there will be decline. This is inevitable. The rot is so in such a dangerous place and such a significant place

that the only really real metaphor to it is that there's the well that everyone will now drink from has a dead body in it. And it's only a matter of time until everybody's sick and dying as a result. Hey, the folks, welcome to Socrates in the studio, which is under the Aegis or rubric, if you will, of Socrates in the city. in this case being London, England. We are, for this season of Socrates in the studio, talking about the larger question, what is the future of the West? Today, with my guest, Dr. James Lindsay,

we may ask the question, or we may be talking about whether the West is in decline in any event, who some of you are asking, is Dr. James Lindsay. Let me tell you, Dr. James Lindsay is the best-selling author of many books, among them, cynical theories,

the Marxification of education, and most recent, the queering of the American child. He holds a PhD in mathematics, yes, from the University of Tennessee, of Tennessee. Dr. James Lindsay,

welcome to Socrates in the city. I'm excited to be here. I am excited to talk to you about all of this stuff. Let me start by asking you to tell the story of how you came into the popular consciousness not many years ago

by writing those papers, those academic papers. I love this story. So start with that. Yeah, well, I think a lot. of people will have noticed that academia is a bit off the rails. Insane is a closer term. I'm sure we can come up with an even more fitting adjective for how crazy they've become. Well, some friends of mine, Peter Bogotian and a woman Helen Pluckrose, who joined in laterers,

Peter and I initially noticed that the leftist academia was a bit nuts, maybe by as early as 2013 or 2014. I mean, actually it was way before that. Sure, but we... And when you say nuts, let's be clear. By nuts, we mean crazy. And by crazy, we mean nuts. It's hard for people outside of the academy to realize there's no hyperbole here. And so...

It was difficult for us to realize, as a matter of fact. So we were looking at some of these academic papers that were coming out of fields like feminist theory and gender studies and so on. At one point, there was a paper that came out that suggested that menstrual blood need to be considered as a social construct and how it's constructed as a tool to keep women socially in their place, nothing to do with the actual physical act of menstruation. Just insane things. There were papers about how, you know, the reason that men play football and other team sports is so that they can have kind of a homoerotic bonding ritual with other men that's socially sanctioned and may. space. I mean very crazy. As crazy as these things sound, it's all the crazier, because I just don't want my audience to lose this, that these are being written up as academic papers and being published in peer-reviewed journals. So it's one thing for somebody to have some crazy idea. It's another thing for them to write it up as an academic paper and then have that paper accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. So that's what you were noticing. Yeah, I mean, there were papers about the culture of squirrels and various cities. I mean, just absolutely, I mean, the kind of thing that now we're all discovering that USAID was funding and we're all aghast.

And these things, we started to see these papers and Peter and I are making fun of them kind of publicly. We're writing about this problem. Nobody cares. And we're being told, oh, well, you're white men. You don't have an opinion on this matter. We thought that was alarming. And so kind of one thing leads to another. And eventually this particularly egregious insane paper in our opinion came out.

And this paper was about the science of glaciology, the study of glaciers, and its relationship to climate change. And you think, oh, that's where the crazy part is. No, no, no, no. That was well within the realm of sanity by comparison. This was about how the science of glaciology, in order to address the problem of climate change, needed to transform itself into a feminist science. And so indigenous myth and feminist art would have to inform the people studying ice in order to not be a sexist. pursuit. All right.

I just feel like we should pause. Yeah, I thought you might want a breath. To take that in. That's what I had to do. I spent three days reeling after I read this paper. Reeling, because I came from the sciences. So to see this paper about the sciences, saying insane things like that, you know,

the scientists are sexes. You know, so they look at the glaciers with satellites. The glaciers are on mountains. The glaciers are, you know, on the edge of Antarctica or whatever in the ocean. And they want to see where the edges of the glaciers are, whether you believe the climate change narratives or not, you still want to know maybe where the edges of glaciers are. So you have to take a satellite photo of the glacier. So can you guess what word they use to describe the process of satellite photography of glaciers? Because you're on the spot. This is a fun one.

It just feels like a patriarchal top-down kind of imposition of Western scientific names. norms to... But there's a specific word, one word, pornographic. Well, obviously. Yes. And so... Wait, wait, wait, wait. You're not kidding. I'm not kidding. Okay, so continue.

Not only that, but it was rendered as the God's Eye View from nowhere, imagining that the satellite confers objectivity that's not present in any part of social reality, but that the scientists believe in. And thus, there's a feminist who paints pictures of glaciers and why are we not considering her paintings as part of the study of glaciology. This is for real, Eric. What year did you and Peter read this paper? This paper was published in the summer of 2016 from the University of Oregon on a half a million dollar national science foundation grant. So that's taxpayer money dedicated to the sciences.

to publish this garbage and we were alarmed. And so there's a man here in London named Matt Ridley, he's a journalist, and he wrote an article about this paper and gave us a world-changing idea. He said, I still maintain that this whole paper is an elaborate academic hoax whose authors have not owned up to it yet. And the University of Oregon denied it, and the authors denied it. They got a TED talk where they talked about all of these mythologies about glaciers. and Peter and I got on the phone and said, that's an idea.

Now, wait a minute. Just to go back here. So what was the grant? How much was the grant for? $470 something thousand dollars, almost half a million. Okay, so this is taxpayer money. So there's several levels of to note. Number one, taxpayers' money.

So it's one thing for kooky people to do kooky stuff, right? But this is a lot of taxpayers' money. As you said, ostensibly. not just ostensibly, but explicitly marked for science. This is for science. For science. And so I think a lot of people would just say, well, that's just these crazy academics or crazy this or crazy this.

But it's taxpayer money. It's officially within the realm of science meant to advance science. And so the logical, the happiest conclusion you might draw is, oh oh don't be alarmed it's a hoax right in other words you you would hope that it would be a hoax but so you're saying that no they looked into it and not only was it's not a hoax they denied it and they get a TED talk trying to explain why this is um something people should take seriously but as you just said you and peter thank the lord i just love this is so delicious got an idea yeah because you thought oh yeah

What if someone were to write a paper like this, but as a hoax? That, when I first heard about this, it was so appealing to me. I was just tickled to death. I never thought I'd get to meet you. So keep going. Yeah, so Peter and I decided to write a paper, one paper, and I don't know, by early 2017. So a few months after all of us, we've finally come up with an idea and we've cobbled together. We get on the phone and have a hilarious conversation.

Let's be real about how the funniest. conversations. And so we come up with this idea that we should say in homage to the menstrual blood as a social construct, we said, well, we should just say that the penis is a social construct. It doesn't really exist, causes all of our problems, and of course, especially climate change. So we write this paper as a proof of concept called the conceptual penis as a social construct. And we write the most gratuitous varsity blues, puerile nonsense about, you know, all these metaphors to masculinity and rapacious against nation, you know, all these just lewd references to the male organ on and unlike children. We're having such a good time. Three thousand words.

Academic sounding language. Oh, it causes certain machismo in men, you know, all is nonsense. And it, of course, causes climate change. In this, we submit to a masculinity's journal. I don't even know at the time what masculinity studies is, but it seems like the right place. I never heard of masculinity study. This journal had already published some kind of postmodern exploration of the male organ, as we'll phrase it. And so we thought, well, it fits. We'll send it there.

And this journal, as it turns out, was in the Taylor and Francis umbrella. So it's a large academic publisher. And they did not want the paper. They rejected the paper. They rejected to their credit. The hoax paper. The hoax paper. So here we accidentally uncover a genuine academic scandal, which is they said they, and the editor of that journal,

which was called Norma, which is an abbreviation for something, an acronym for something. I forgot what, North something, masculinity is the M. But at any rate, the editor sends us a letter. We are not interested in this paper. However, we have a sister journal that we would happily internally forward your paper to them, and we think they would be interested in. Now, I'd published a paper in mathematics. Peter had published a handful of papers.

I've never heard of a journal forwarding a paper to another journal. journal, but we said, okay, whatever. So they send it off to this journal called Cogent Social Sciences, which sounds a little lowbrow. And it turns out what it is, is under the same Taylor and Francis umbrella, it's a predatory journal, which means if you pay them, they'll publish whatever you send them. And the going rate, as it turns out, that journal was $1,300 per paper. But it was on a half off sale.

Now, hang out a second. This is really wild. Most of us who are not in the academy, would assume that the point of peer-reviewed journals is objectivity to maintain standards. So one journal rejects the paper, but then says we'd like to forward it to a sister journal. So yes, that does seem curious. But then you're bringing up the second issue that they're saying, oh, and by the way, if you pay money, they may be willing to – I've heard about this.

I can't remember where I, just recently somebody was talking about this. And you think, well, that's wild because it's, this is supposed to be objective. It's supposed to be about knowledge and the furtherance of truth or science or whatever it is. So you're saying that at that point you realized something strange is happening. No, we were actually kind of monomaniically focused on getting our paper accepted. Uh-huh. Right. So we were excited that this goes off.

to another journal, you know, very naive thinking about how this one might all work. But what we'd actually discovered was a Taylor and Francis that's like a economic publisher, I guess legitimate in the broadest sense, journal Norma, has now passed it off to one where if we pay Taylor and Francis money, they'll publish so we can pat our resume or whatever reason we might use to do that. So we send it to this, they send it off to this other journal. We don't know it's predatory at the time, but lo and behold, they accept the paper. no challenges through peer review, no problem. They want the paper.

And then they forget to charge us and publish the paper. And then they send us an email the next day. We forgot to charge you. Will you please pay? And we said no. And we will not. And we come out with our ex-poise. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

When you say you come out with your ex-pizet, so you've published a fraudulent paper. Yes. And then you decide after getting this one paper published, this utterly fraudulent hoax paper, you decide to reveal that it's a hoax and to call them on the carpet. Correct. We were trying to make the point that the academic enterprise called gender studies itself is fraudulent because it would accept a paper like this. And then we could compare against other papers and say, well, obviously what they're doing is not objective. It's also not even legitimately academic.

It's just, you know, politically driven nonsense. Yeah. That was the intention. Well, because this journal will accept anything for money, we didn't, in fact, prove a point, and we got called on it. And so a couple of people, including the legendary Alan Sokol, who in the 1990s wrote an academic hoax of the Duke University Press journal called Social Text, which was on something about the hermeneutic of quantum gravity. He wrote this nonsense social sciences paper about how everything's oppressive or whatever regarding gravity. And I think it was, in fact, the gravity is the social construct, it doesn't really exist. Yeah.

Quite funny. Alan Sokol lives here in London, actually. He's a wonderful man. He's a physicist and a mathematician. Brilliant man. And we were kind of walking in his, you know, very big shoes. So Alam Sokol writes a very thoughtful article about what he thought we demonstrated and didn't demonstrate. And he concludes, well, it's definitely making a point by parity.

But at the same point, you know, at the same time, did they prove their point about the field of gender? studies, and he said yes and no, but mostly no. Had they wished to prove their point, they would have done A, B, C, and D, which were things like higher ranking journals, more papers, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so in other words, if you really wanted to blow this whole thing open and show the corruption that has entered the academy, he's saying you should do it this way. So more papers, higher level journals. So, but I guess by now, were you not outed? Did people, in other words, well, keep going. Keep going. Yeah, yeah. Well, it turns out, you know, we wrote that under fake names. We could make up more fake names. Aha. Yeah.

Got on board a Westbound. If you're going to perpetuate a, if you're going to put forward a hoax, use fake names. All right. Please continue. So Peter and I took this criticism, you know, into heart. And we said they have a point. In fact, that some of our actual critics, Alan being kind of, you know, very generous and charitable with his analysis. And then some people were very not charitable writing for leftist magazines came out and said actually the same things, if they wish to prove their point. And it was the same list of things to do. Peter and I got on the phone and said, well, why don't we do those? Let's set aside some time and let's write as many academic papers for maybe a year as we can write and send them off to the highest raking journals that we can get them in.

And if the big journal doesn't take it, we make lists. We just go right down the list for each subdiscipline. So if we're in gender studies, it's this journal and that journal's the next best one, and we just go down the list to one of them takes it. And Peter was betting that if we wrote enough papers, we could probably get two or three accepted in a year to a year and a half's time. And I was convinced we could get zero. I didn't think academia was so broken that it would take any of these things.

So we recruit our friend Helen Pluckrose to help us because she already kind of speaks leftist academic from her master's thesis she had to write. And we knew that about her. And she had defended our attempt on the first paper. And so we set off for a year and wrote 20 academic articles. Now, a lot of people don't understand it. An academic article, usually a productive academic writes one or two per year. They're a major production. We wrote 20.

We run every two weeks, actually, for just over a year. Now, can you share some of the titles of some of these hoax papers? Some of them are a little adult. I don't know what the T-rating is. The extremely adult ones, but they do have funny titles. The most famous of the papers that we wrote bore a title. Let me see if I can't even do this from memory. There was something like queer performativity.

and rape culture in urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon. So we claim... No, no, no, no. This is too much. Do one more time because this is... Queer performativity and rape culture in urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon. In urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon. Yeah.

So the idea was we thought it would be funny to write a paper from a feminist perspective saying that what would solve problems, the problem of men in society is if we trained men the way we trained dogs. And then Peter had some dogs, and he lived in Portland, and he took his dogs to the dog park. I said, well, just sprinkle some stuff in from your experiences at the dog park

to make it more believable and funny. And so Pete writes this completely mad paper. It's just positively insane. And what he comes up with is this idea that, well, we can assess how supportive of rape culture, as the feminist put it, that people think rape must be okay. somehow, how supportive men are or people are by how they react to seeing dogs interact in

that sexual way at the dog park. So we made up a bunch of, say, stories about men, straight men who were like, kidder boy, you know, they were into it. And then the women were horrified, oh, I don't do that, you know, and the gay men were, oh, I don't do that. It's even interesting to me that in an academic paper relating, again, you're making this up, but relating anecdotes like this. as some kind of evidence.

That's at least interesting that would be acceptable. And so, yeah, so this paper was completely absurd. Yeah. And not only was accepted by the leading feminist geography journal, it was published by that journal. It was also given a recognition for excellence and scholarship in the discipline of feminist geography by that journal. Okay, there's a, we don't have a snare drum in the studio.

But, wow. Any other papers that you remember the titles of? Well, we gave a lot of them kind of cute, cheeky titles where the title is something, and then the subtitle is long and complicated academic stuff that tells you what it's really about. But we had a paper where we said that straight men would be less transphobic if they practiced putting things somewhere. And I'm assuming you can guess where? You're really, I mean, it's amazing. So you wrote these as academic papers.

The title we gave that paper was going in through the back door. All right. So you wrote how many papers did you write and how many were accepted? We wrote 20. Yeah. Seven of them had been accepted. Four of them had actually been published. There's quite a time delay between acceptance and publication and academic publishing frequently.

Yeah. Four had actually been published, the one had gotten an award. Of the 20, seven first. of the papers were still under peer review. And a sociologist not related to us did a, you know, post-mortem on our project after this came out. It turns out the Wall Street Journal figured out because this dog paper was so insane that journalists wouldn't leave it alone. A college student figured out this can't be real, whereas the academics could not figure out that this can't be real. So this college student just, college journalist working for campus reform or some small, you know, publication of this sort, just.

wouldn't leave it alone. And finally, this builds up enough weight of what's going on questions to where the Wall Street Journal got involved. They started asking much too hard of questions, and we decided this is all coming out. We have to come clean. So we had seven of our papers still under review, and the sociologist concludes that it would have either been 11 or 12 out of the 20 that had been. But seven were, seven had been. And there was an eighth that, just by the way, that the peer reviewers' comments and editors' comments came back. We were certain was any day now. Would have been added to the list.

But, yeah, seven had been accepted. Okay, so one would expect that this would blow up and that the whole academic world would be red-faced, humiliated, and there would have been some kind of reckoning as a result. Yeah, that's not what happened. They said that we were mean, and that we took advantage of the good faith aspect of academic publishing, that you can trust that when somebody submits something that they meant what they submitted,

and they wouldn't do something so underhanded as to submit a paper in bad faith, as we had done. And they otherwise ignored it. They pretended it just didn't happen and waited for the scandal to blow over and go away. Except at Portland State University, where Peter worked, They brought him up on various ethics charges with the university and harangued him. One of his accusations, so one of our papers, we actually took the 12th chapter of Hitler's Minkv, and it's about how to build our movement. So we throw out our movement, we throw in intersectional feminism, we rewrite it as a feminist screed.

A feminist social work journal accepted that paper. Wait, using MnKompf's Chapter 12 as a template. Yes. And either way, that was Our struggle is my struggle. Make like the Mr. Big, they dig a hero. There seems a little question

that what you're describing is at the heart of the decline of the West because the academy is always in the forefront of things that decades later kind of trickle down in other ways. So the peer-reviewed academic

literature for good or for ill represents that which our society at the highest level of this activity authenticate as what will act as though is true. So, for example, should some issue go to court, the judge is going to bring in, he's a judge, he's busy doing law things, right? So it's say it's a medical issue about transition or something. What are they going to do? They're going to bring in expert witnesses who are going to report on what the academic literature

says. And so some person is going to get hired by, you know, the attorneys and is going to come in and say, well, there's all these papers that say that if you put things somewhere, then, you know, you can, whatever. So this, we use this as the authenticating piece of what is true in our society. Now, as for the theme of the decline of the West, if the centerpiece of how you decide what is and is not going to be regarded as true, true is this corrupt, there will be decline. This is inevitable. The rot, the rot is so, in such a dangerous place, in such a significant place, that the only really, real metaphor to it is that there's the well that everyone will now drink from has a dead body in it. And it's only a matter of time until everybody's sick and dying as a result. The fact that you did this, you know, gives some people hope. And one would hope that it would cause some people to do something about it. But it seems like that's not the case. In other words, it seems like in the world, some things are so far gone, maybe there's no helping them. I don't know. So we're at this conference here in London,

and there are thousands of people here from all over the world, including many from Europe. I think, you know, probably a couple thousand people here from Europe and or the UK. And I've been approached by dozens if not a hundred people who have had the same message that those papers that we wrote, and this all came out in 2018, that those papers that we wrote and published six, seven years ago, and I heard this this morning, as a matter of fact, from two guys from the Netherlands, said that these papers that we published have significant implications for Europe today with thanks that we did it. So it did not immediately have an effect, but the fact of us having done that cannot go away. It happened. And as people have finally started to realize, I think, in the intervening half decade or a little over half decade, that something has gone badly wrong, and they're looking for the causes and the sources. There is this monument that we, in a sense, erected that says, here lies a problem. And people are starting to turn to it. And I've heard phrasing like, it got called in the wake of everything. It ended up being named, according to Wikipedia. It's called the grievance studies affair. And so I've heard people say,

that the grievance studies affair has never been more relevant, especially as Claudine Gay's plagiarism scandal broke. And then we start to see plagiarism rampantly throughout the DEI-related literature in higher education. Yeah, Claudey. The former president of Harvard University, clearly caught plagiarizing really dramatically, not a little bit. And this is not an academic.

This is the president of Harvard University. yeah, the rot goes very, very deep, so deep down that it's right at the top. Yeah, and so we've, like I said, what this amounts to at this point is it's a very bright sign, maybe with neon lights if they can be turned on at something, pointing that the corruption, it doesn't matter the issue. Is it this race and gender identity stuff that's everywhere? Is it climate change? Can we trust the academic canon upon which we've been making,

these decisions. When these guys go out at a big European forum or the Davos forum or the UN or whatever and they trot out, well, studies show that blah, blah, blah, we have, because of this sign that Peter and I and Helen stuck in the ground, we have to at some point start to realize we have a question here. Can we trust what those studies said given that they've published this assonine paper about dogs?