 All right, let's do it. I think we're supposed to kind of walk out at roughly the same time. Oh, we're gonna walk out at the same time? Yeah, if you can. Yeah, you guys, there's visuals. I'm gonna start by showing you a video. It is? No, it's good. I'm gonna show you a video, one video. It's all very dramatic, isn't it? It is. All right, when you're ready. Okay. So what do we press to make it go? Uh, space bar should do it. Since approximately June of 2017, I along with two other concerned academics, Peter Grigosian and Helen Clarke-Rose, have been writing intentionally broken academic papers and submitting them to highly respected journals. Some fields that study gender, race, sexuality, and similar topics. We did this to expose a political corruption that's 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. We didn't respect the child's privacy. 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 targeting 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 in 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 that they won't want this to happen to them, but 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 Mind Conf 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 movement. 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 in minority groups these people claim to speak for. I suggest you spend some time critically engaging with the ideas coming out of these fields and decide for yourself whether they speak for you. Wow. Seven. You got seven. Currently. So far, there might be a couple more, yeah? What is your first impression of that, though? What do you think? Oh, I mean, this is the right way, I think, to go about exposing what this is, because those of us who have encountered it, you know, casually in the course of trying to live our academic lives come to understand that there's something really wrong there, but it's far too easy to just caricature that broken scholarship as if it were random. And it isn't random. It actually does abide by a certain kind of internally consistent logic. And in some sense, the only way to really reveal how broken that logic is is to figure out what the rules are. And so I'm very impressed that at the point that simple hoax papers didn't fly, you went forward and attempted to figure out what these disciplines actually were saying. And the truth is, what they're saying is crazy, but it is not totally arbitrary. It's dismissive to imagine that they're not making any sense at all, that they're not playing by any rules, and we imagine that at our peril. All right, so you guys are discovering the rules and then presumably revealing the rules at some level. I thought I knew the rules, but there were more layers and layers of rules than I thought. And I've actually been studying it for seven years. Do you think that there's a kernel inside all of this that has some integrity? I don't think so, because that base isn't, you know, it isn't liberal feminism, it's not gay pride, it's not the civil rights movement or anything like that. The base is post-modernism, which has then had the layers of critical theory and then joined on the end of the civil rights movements and appropriated it. So right at the base there is the whole there is no objective knowledge, everything is systems of power. So it didn't have a chance from the start. The foundation is rotten. I think this is a mistake that people like us make when we see post-modernism in this mix, that we imagine that all of the people who are deploying these arguments that we know have some basis in post-modernism are post-moderns. Most of the people deploying these arguments have never read any post-modernism. They don't understand why that term is coming up. They are basically foot soldiers in a battle that started somewhere else. They don't know the generals and in fact they're dealing with a generation down the road from where this all began. And so they... The woke army. The woke army doesn't really resonate with the challenge that they are behaving in a post-modern way that what they are saying is post-modern. Therefore analytically bankrupt because it does deny a sort of reality that can be studied, that skepticism works to unearth. So that challenge to them falls flat because I think most of them don't know what we're talking about. No, you have to actually go for the ideas. To be fair it is the same with everybody. I could ask practically anyone on the street a certain number of questions and so many of the answers would go back to Augustine. And people wouldn't have perhaps ever have heard of Augustine because these things are in the air. They are the water that we're swimming in. These documents you guys are looking at we call that the fact sheet. It summarizes everything. And it's kind of the kid pointing at the emperor saying he's got no clothes. This is going public soon and we need help making sure that kind of like the two audiences understand it. There's the public audience and they've got the video you just saw. And then there's the academics who are going to hate that video. So in my academics you mean all academics? I mean like I'll just go full on. Oh they're really going to hate it no matter what. They're going to hate everything. But we're talking you know like the well I am very interested in what you've done and I would really agree however I will have to look at all the details and great length for three to seven years before I say a word about this. I am after all a scholar. And what if they fire me and put a Title IX investigation on me because I secretly know that's going to happen. First of all the fact of you having begun this as a matter of simple hoaxing and then discovered what you did is really you're in because you did discover that there was substance there. It's an internally consistent system. It's an internally consistent system is what we did. So here's the thing you are actually in a position to speak to what is the middle ground here. The middle ground is this is not random. This is about something and it is internally consistent. It actually touches reality way more than anybody assumes to. Right. I think it touches way more reality. I've been saying stuff like this since the evergreen thing happened. You know the fact is we're not going to get very far if we don't have a legitimate concept of racism that we can invoke where it is necessary. And the point is as long as it's being used for this other purpose we're now stuck. Likewise white supremacy. We're stuck. Transphobia. Stuck. Islamophobia. Stuck. We don't have the substitute terminology to use and so the point is they've actually successfully hobbled addressing real problems that exist in the world by taking all of these terms and weaponizing them for their own purposes. Exactly how I see it. If you stood up for hey we're taking those terms back and they are going to take on the appropriate meaning for us to utilize them against the real problems. Why? Because actually we are interested in social justice not the brand but the meaning of those terms if you put them together in common parlance. This is going to be a far easier sell to people. To the people for whom the video is aimed at than to academics. Faculty are the most entrenched. I mean most faculty they totally buy into this. They're just swimming the pond. It's all they see. It's just their worldview. Well but you're not going to get the scholars in these fields. Maybe you'll get somebody who has quietly woken up behind the scenes and is waiting for an hour to get those people first but what you can do is you can rob them of an audience by taking people who have been persuaded by the fact that maybe they've encountered transphobia and then they hear transphobia named and they think well I've seen it and here's what it means and then they go out there as a foot soldier. Maybe if you capture those people's attention then the point is well these fields will either shape up or dry up. Well maybe the intended audience both for the video at least for the video is yes the public but specifically students because students are reachable much more so than faculty. Students are flocking to these fields because it sounds like Brett has used this language a lot that they've wrapped up something that is quite ugly in a very pretty box and put a name on it that sounds beautiful and it's the wrong name and it's the wrong rapping it's ugly inside. But students go to it because they don't know. What you're going to get back is attacks of many different kinds and I will say there is one hallmark I'm hesitant to say it out loud because I don't want to destroy it but I think this is important enough that it might be worth having it which is you'll get back extremely forceful arguments in mutually contradictory directions. That's the sign that you're on the right track so personally I've gotten back what you've said is completely obvious and you're dead wrong right? Like you hear those two things and it's like aha I must be on to something right? So what you are going to get back is something like you have overstepped in some massive egregious fashion that is morally intolerable and you're going to get back the argument that there's nothing to be seen in what you've done, that it's empty and so those two things together are likely to be the hallmark of that's the flack when you're over the target. I am deep in the summaries of the papers that you guys have written I've arrived at masturbation of sexual violence with the title rubbing one out defining the sexual violence of objectification through non-consensual masturbation and then there's the mind comp chapter translation Well you did it a couple times, right? Well we did one that was an auto ethnography because the book is very auto ethnographical and we made that about white people and whiteness. We just swapped Jews for whites. Yeah and then so that's an auto ethnography and then we did one that was actually an argument that was based off the chapter of mind comp where Hitler argues why we need the Nazi party and what it should consist of. And that's been published. That one's been accepted and it might be published in my pocket in my phone right now. I don't know. I accepted the page proofs like three days ago. And we have three other ones that are literally on the cusp of getting it. So what happened was that real peer review tweeted it out and then the right-wing machine made fun of it and then one journalist ended up for one of these outlets got a hold of it and called the journal and started asking them a ton of questions like how do you know this author's real? No one's ever heard of the Portland Ungendering Research Initiative and so all of a sudden they asked us to prove our identity and then this started to snowball because we weren't going to. We're not going to forge documents. There's a point where the deception becomes outright lying and it doesn't feel right and that's not the point and we're not doing that. So you're the only one with a university position at the moment and there's four others of us here who have been associated with universities and colleges in the past and are no longer. I don't think that's an accident. You walk away willingly or not and you gain the ability to say whatever you want. Is PSU going to be okay with this? They will come for me. Yeah, I think they will and they'll weaponize Title IX, they'll weaponize something. Exactly. I wish there was something comforting I could say about the fact that you'll be alright in the end and I can't. The fact is I know from our situation that I thought we would be alright in the end and it turns out I think that we will be alright in the end but that that is not because of the fact that we thought we'd be alright within the framework of higher ed. Alright. And what made us exceeded in protecting us from a catastrophic fate was actually Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Eric Weinstein, Sam Harris and the fact that they spoke up quickly. If they hadn't I think my assumption at least that we were sufficiently well positioned, we were sufficiently popular with our students, had enough friends that we would have been able to survive it, that would have been wrong. We assumed that there was some safety in our position because we were wildly successful and popular professors teaching actual things to students who were being challenged and enjoying it. I'm under no such illusion. It was not sufficient. I know what they've already done to me and I know the charges of misconduct and I know how they think I mean I told you that I asked incredibly politely the officer of diversity and inclusion to meet with him to have a conversation about diversity and inclusion and he reported me for professional misconduct. For asking to speak with him? Yeah. Which is a fucking job. That's straight out of the playbook actually. That's his job. That's literally his job. If this does not cause something to come for you it's because you haven't succeeded in doing what you were attempting to do. So to succeed is to invite something dire coming back precisely because of the part that is about power. To the extent that you're saying something forceful and hard to dismiss and important that's going to rob people who don't deserve power within the academy from power that they have managed to capture there is an awful lot of pressure built up that is going to come back at you like a fire hose. So you can't fear the fact that it's going to come for you. What you can try to do is you can try to use that force as rocket fuel to the extent that you can take the force of the fire hose that's being pointed at you and you can use it to propel the conversation that needs to be had to a higher level into a different venue that's the way I think to succeed.