 Okay, is the light okay in here? I just read my email. We have our first win. The dog pork paper has been accepted. They don't know. We're about to tell them. Gotta read you something. Dear Dr. Helen Wilson, I have now closely considered the revisions of your manuscript, Dog Pork, and will recommend its publication in gender, place, and culture. You have done very good work to address the issues with your race and to clarify your arguments. Thank you for your contribution to gender, place, and culture, and I hope to be seeing your manuscript in print. Yours truly is a phd managing editor. We have an accepted paper in the number one feminist geography journal. Since approximately June of 2017, I along with two other concerned academics, Peter Burgosian and Helen Pluckrose, have been writing intentionally broken academic papers and submitting them to highly respected journals in fields that study gender, race, sexuality, and similar topics. We did this to expose a political corruption that has taken hold of the university. By this point, several of these papers have been accepted in highly respected journals, and one that claims that dog-humping incidents can be taken as evidence of rape culture has been officially honored as excellent scholarship. I'm not going to lie to you, we had a lot of fun with this project. The reviewers are worried that we didn't respect the dog's privacy. That's the concern. Who do you respect in their chapter? But don't let that lead you to believe that we're not addressing a serious problem. If you have a few minutes, I'll try to explain. To be clear up front, we think studying topics like gender, race, and sexuality is worthwhile, and getting it right is extremely important. The problem is how these topics are being studied right now. A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed, like those that make whiteness and masculinity problematic. The fields we're concerned about put social grievances ahead of objective truth, so as a simple summary, we call the problem Grievance Studies. To test the depth of this problem, my collaborators and I dedicated ourselves to a one-to-two-year secret project creating top Grievance Studies journals with an agreement to publicly release our findings, no matter what the outcome. We started officially on August 16th, 2017, and by Thanksgiving we were in trouble. We had begun ambitiously and mostly stupidly. Our first papers were really only suited to test the hypothesis that we could penetrate their leading journals with poorly researched hoax papers. That wasn't the case, and we were wrong for thinking we might be able to. So by late November, it looked like all we'd accomplish is ruining our reputations. If this doesn't achieve anything, it would actually frighten me. We needed to change our approach, so we walked back from the hoaxing and began to engage with the existing scholarship in these fields more deeply. This led us to learn a lot more about the inner workings of Grievance Studies. The best I can tap into is that there's this kind of like religious architecture in their mind where privilege is sin, privilege is evil, and then they've identified education as the place where it has to be fixed. So you can come up with these really nasty arguments, like let's put white kids and chains in the floor at school as an educational opportunity. And if you frame it in terms of overcoming privilege, and then you frame their resistance, they won't want this to happen to them. They would complain about this. If you frame that in terms of, oh, they only complain about that because they're privileged and they can't handle it because their privilege made them weak, then it's right in. Papers started getting in. You f***ing have got to be s***ing me that this happened! By March, with two papers accepted and one published, it would be fair to say that we had become accepted Grievance Scholars. By June, it was three, with one having been officially honored by the journal as excellent scholarship. By July, it was five. By August, seven. This shouldn't have been possible. So far, what we're learning is rather astonishing, but the data we've gathered require more analysis to fully comprehend. What appears beyond dispute is that making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated at the highest levels of academic Grievance studies. We rewrote a section of Mein Kampf as Intersectional Feminism, and this journal has accepted it. Social work. This is deeply concerning because the work of Grievance Scholars goes on to be taught in classes to design educational curricula to be taken up by activists, to influence how media is produced, and to misinform journalists and politicians about the true nature of our cultural realities. No one tolerates this sort of corruption when they find out an industry is funding biased research to make itself look a certain way. The same scrutiny should apply to research when it pushes a political agenda. And we haven't covered enough evidence to suggest that this corruption is pervasive among many disciplines, including women's and gender studies, feminist studies, race studies, sexuality studies, fat studies, queer studies, cultural studies, and sociology. You may be thinking that the work done in these fields must be good because it seems to continue the noble work of the civil rights movements. While after having spent a year immersed in it and becoming recognized as experts in it, we have to disagree. Grievance studies does not continue the work of the civil rights movements. It corrupts it, and it trades upon their good names to keep pushing a kind of social snake oil onto a public that keeps getting sicker. Progress is easier without grievance studies. My collaborators and I are left-wing academics who can now say with confidence, these people don't speak for us. This is now a plea to all the progressives and minority groups these people claim to speak for. We suggest you spend some time critically engaging with the ideas coming out of these fields and assign for yourself whether they speak for you.