65 - Helen Pluckrose - Cynical Theories and Their Liberal Opponents

Helen’s book, co-written with James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (2020) can be found here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everything-Identity/dp/1634312023.

Helen’s writing for Areo magazine can be found here:
https://areomagazine.com/author/hpluckrose/

For more on the Sokal Squared hoax, which Helen perpetrated, alongside James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian see:
https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/

You can follow Helen on Twitter @hpluckrose

Further Notes
Alexander Pope, Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle II: To a Lady on the Characters of Women (1743) (I misremembered the title as An Essay on Woman):
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44893/epistles-to-several-persons-epistle-ii-to-a-lady-on-the-characters-of-women

Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1991):
https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mapping-margins.pdf

Walt Anderson, The Fontana Postmodernism Reader (1996)

For more on the Evergreen story, see my interview with Benjamin Boyce:
https://soundcloud.com/twoforteapodcast/27-benjamin-boyce
and this video series by Mike Nayna:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2WeWgcSMk

For the Ravelry knitting group scandal, see:
https://quillette.com/2019/02/17/a-witch-hunt-on-instagram/

Herbert Marcuse “Repressive Tolerance” (1965):
https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEMarcuseToleranceTable.pdf

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1929–35), for the concept of hegemony

Andrea Lynn Lewis and Liam Kofi Bright’s letter exchange on Critical Race Theory:
https://letter.wiki/conversation/322

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind (2015)

Isabel Wilkinson, Caste: The Lies that Divide Us (2020)

Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (2019)
Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (1993)

Timestamps
2:40 Helen reads a passage about how people can stand up for liberalism without having to go down the woke route
5:35 Cultural and moral relativism
9:14 How postmodernism developed into critical theory: knowledge, power and discourse
19:45 The two evolutions of postmodernism: in the late 1980s and 2010s and the rise of identity politics
25:42 Being woke
26:59 The impacts on wider society and politics
30:08 Why social justice isn’t neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism
34:50 The influence of critical theory on academe
38:00 What is the relationship between critical theory as theory and critical theory as practice
41:37 How people are being affected in the workplace
49:01 How much should we focus on economics and how much on identity
53:03 Freedom of speech
56:15 Why is it called “theory”?
57:08 Why should we take the danger of critical theory seriously and not just see it as a moral panic?
1:00:15 Trump’s announced ban on Critical Race Theory in federal training
1:05:25 Helen’s crimes against food
1:07:35 Collective guilt, identity politics and standpoint epistemology
1:15:51 The responses to Helen as a whistleblower
1:21:09 Helen reads from the introduction to the book