I want you to picture a dog park. Okay, I am
picturing it. It is a sunny Tuesday in Portland,
Oregon. You have got golden retrievers chasing
tennis balls, maybe a pug sniffing a fire hydrant.
Owners are standing around sipping coffee. It
is just the most mundane, wholesome scene imaginable.
Right. Just a normal Tuesday. Exactly. But now
I want you to put on a very specific pair of
glasses. You are an academic researcher. You
look at that scene and you do not see dogs playing.
You see a breeding ground for rape culture. Wow.
And, you know, not just rape culture. You see
queer performativity among the canines. Yeah.
And you conclude that the way humans try to control
these dogs is actually evidence of deep -seated
gender bias in society. Right. And so you write
this up. You use incredibly dense, impenetrable
jargon. argue that dog parks are actually petri
dishes for human moral corruption, and then you
submit it to a prestigious academic journal.
Specifically, gender, place, and culture. Yes.
And here's the thing. It does not get rejected.
It gets published. The reviewers do not just
accept it. They call it incredibly innovative
and rich in analysis. It sounds like a skit from
a sketch comedy show, honestly. It really does.
This is exactly what happened in 2018. And it
wasn't just one paper. It was part of one of
the most elaborate, controversial, and polarizing
stings in the history of academia. It is absolutely
wild. So today, we are doing a deep dive. into
the grievance studies affair, which is also sometimes
known as Sokol Squared. Right. We have combed
through the papers, the emails, the media fallout,
the academic rebuttals. Our mission today is
to look at all of this source material and answer
a really uncomfortable question. Did three people
just prove that entire fields of university study
are fraudulent? Or on the flip side, was this
just a mean -spirited prank that proved nothing
other than, well, liars can trick people who
trust them? Exactly. It is a messy story. But
the implications are huge because this touches
on everything from how we define truth to how
universities spend money to the very structure
of how scientific knowledge is vetted in the
first place. It really does. So let's start with
the architects of this chaos. Who decides to
spend a year writing fake papers about dog parks?
So the trio behind this are James A. Lindsay,
Peter Boghossian, and helen pluckrose and at
the time they described themselves as left -wing
liberal skeptics Left -wing liberal skeptics,
that feels like an important distinction. It
is hugely important. Because they weren't coming
from the conservative right. They explicitly
claimed they were trying to save the left from
itself. Save the left from itself. That implies
they saw some kind of rot inside the House. Exactly.
Their target was a specific set of academic disciplines
that they labeled grievance studies. What falls
under that umbrella? They're looking at fields
like gender studies, fat studies, queer theory,
post -colonial studies. their hypothesis was
that these fields had stopped being science in
any traditional sense. Instead, they argued these
fields had become ideology mills. Meaning they
start with the conclusion and then just work
backward. Precisely. The argument the hoaxers
made. is that in these fields, you start with
a grievance. For example, society is systemically
sexist. And then you bend your research, your
data, and your theory to confirm that grievance.
So the idea is if you confirm the grievance,
you get published. If you challenge it, you get
rejected. Right. And so their mission was to
prove that the emperor has no clothes. But to
understand how they actually did it, we have
to talk about the underlying philosophy they
were attacking. Okay, lay it on me. This is where
it gets a little technical, but we really need
to unpack a term Helen Pluckrose uses constantly,
which is applied postmodernism. Applied postmodernism.
Okay, break that down for us. Think of this as
the engine under the hood. Traditional postmodernism,
going back to the 1960s and philosophers like
Foucault, was all about radical skepticism. It
questioned whether objective truth even exists
at all. It argued that what we call knowledge
is really just a product of power dynamics. Perfect.
So biologists might say there are two sexes.
And a traditional postmodernist would say that's
not an objective fact. That's just a linguistic
category created by a society that values binary.
OK, I follow that. But where does the applied
part come in? Pluckrose argues that something
shifted in the late 80s and 90s. This new wave
of scholars in gender theory or critical race
theory kept the skepticism about science, but
they completely dropped the skepticism about
their own beliefs. Wait, so they do not believe
in objective biological truth, but they do believe
that systemic oppression is an objective reality.
Exactly. That is the applied part. They apply
postmodern deconstruction to things they dislike.
like biology or Western structures, but they
apply rigid, almost religious certainty to their
own theories about privilege and power. It is
like a paradox. It is. Pluckrose calls this the
reification of the grievance. Okay, let me see
if I have this right. The hoaxer's theory was,
if I can speak this specific language, if I can
mimic this discourse of power and privilege,
I can say literally anything, no matter how absurd,
and the gatekeepers will just let me in. That
was the bet. Yeah. And I should mention, they
were inspired by an earlier hoax, the Alan Sokol
hoax in 1996, where a physicist got a nonsense
paper published in the cultural studies journal
Social Text. Right, hence the nickname Sokol
Squared. Exactly. But to prove their point this
time, they went industrial. This wasn't a one
-off prank. They spent 10 months across 2017
and 2018 writing 20 distinct academic papers.
20 papers in 10 months. That is a massive undertaking.
It was a full -time job. They created fake authors
like the fictional Helen Wilson for the dog park
paper. They even borrowed the identity of a real
retired professor, Richard Baldwin, to add a
veneer of credibility to some of the submissions.
And they didn't just write gibberish, right?
This wasn't just mashing the keyboard. They actually
studied the material they were mocking. That
is the truly scary part. They did their homework.
They read the leading papers in these fields.
They learned the lexicon. They figured out that
if you want to get published in fat studies,
you need to use terms like fat affirming and
body size normativity. They learned the secret
handshake. They absolutely did. Let's look at
the results because some of these titles are
just, well, they defy satire. We already mentioned
the dog park paper. Right. Human reactions to
rape culture and queer performativity at the
dog park. Again, published in Gender, Place,
and Culture. And the reviewers praised it for
its reflexivity. Reflexivity. That is a buzzword
we should flag for a second. What does that actually
mean in this context? Well, in traditional sociology,
reflexivity usually means the researcher is aware
of their own bias. But in this context, the hoaxers
used it to mask a total lack of data. How so?
Instead of providing evidence, they just wrote
page after age about how they felt about the
dogs and how their own whiteness impacted their
interpretation of the dogs. And the reviewers
ate it up? They loved it. They saw it as deep
engagement rather than a lack of rigor. Wow.
OK, then there was the paper that I think is
arguably the most damning of the whole bunch,
the Mein Kampf rewrite. Oh, this is the one that
really shocked the public. They took a chapter
from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. They kept the
exact structure of the arguments, but they just
swapped the variables. So wherever Hitler talked
about Jews, they swapped it for white men or
privileged groups. Exactly. Wherever he used
Nazi rhetoric, they swapped it. for fashionable
intersectional feminist jargon. And they titled
it Our Struggle is My Struggle. Which is the
literal English translation of Mein Kampf. That
is incredibly bold. And it was accepted? It was
accepted by Ophelia, which is a peer -reviewed
journal for women and social work. Just pause
on that for a second. Let that sink in. A feminist
journal accepted a paper that was structurally
fascist simply because the target of the hate
was acceptable to them. That is the implication
the hoaxers drew. It suggests that the reviewers
weren't looking at the logic or the morality
of the argument at all. They were just scanning
for the right moral sentiments. As long as the
paper was attacking privilege, the underlying
fascist structure was completely invisible to
them. There were others, too. The dildo paper
comes to mind. I cannot believe we are talking
about this on a deep dive, but here we are. We
have to cover the sources. The title of that
one was Going In Through the Back Door. It argued
that straight men could cure their transphobia
and toxic masculinity by engaging in self -penetration
with sex toys. And that was published. Published
in Sexuality and Culture. And let's not forget
the one about fat bodybuilding. Right. Who are
they to judge? Overcoming Anthropometry and a
Framework for Fat Bodybuilding. Published in
Fat Studies. What was the argument there? It
argued that we should include fat bodybuilding
as a legitimate sport. Essentially ignoring the
physical reality of what bodybuilding is and
arguing that excluding fat people from bodybuilding
displays was a form of bigotry. So they are churning
these out. They have 20 papers in the pipeline.
What was the final scorecard when the clock finally
ran out on this project? Well, they didn't bat
a thousand. Out of the 20 papers submitted, four
were published online, three more were accepted
but hadn't been printed yet, six were outright
rejected, and seven were still sitting in peer
review and the story broke. So seven out of 20
basically got the green light. That is a 35 %
acceptance rate. In the world of academic publishing,
is that high? For top -tier journals, it is astonishingly
high. especially for authors with no previous
track record who are using fake data and writing
intentionally absurd arguments. Usually the rejection
rate for these prestige journals is massively
high. You mentioned when the story broke because
they didn't actually get to finish the experiment,
right? I read the plan was to keep going until
January of 2019. No, the wheels came off early
in the summer of 2018. It actually started with
the dog park paper. What happened? The editors
at Gender, Place and Culture started trying to
verify Helen Wilson. They couldn't find a university
record for her. They couldn't find an online
footprint. Because she didn't exist. Exactly.
And at the exact same time, the Wall Street Journal
was sniffing around. A reporter named Jillian
K. Melchior figured out something was wrong.
So the hoaxers realized they were about to be
outed, and they decided to go on the offensive.
They blew their own cover. Yes. In October 2018,
they admitted everything to the Wall Street Journal.
And they released this massive Google Drive archive
containing all the papers, the drafts, and crucially,
the reviewer comments. And that is when the academic
world just exploded. It was like a bomb went
off in the faculty lounge. Explosion is the right
word. You immediately saw two completely entrenched
narratives form. On one side, you had the hero's
narrative. Who were the cheerleaders for this?
Well, you had some very prominent public intellectuals.
Yasha Monk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins,
is the one who coined the term Sokol squared.
What was his take? He called the result hilarious
and delightful. He said it proved that these
journals cannot distinguish between genuine scholarship
and morally troubling bullshit. Morally troubling
bullshit. That is quite a quote. Steven Pinker
and Richard Dawkins jumped in, too, didn't they?
They did. Pinker basically asked, is there any
idea so outlandish it will not be published in
these journals? And Dawkins defended Bogosian
specifically. He compared the whole sting to
satire like George Orwell's Animal Farm. using
fiction to reveal a deeper truth. And Jonathan
Haidt, the social psychologist, I know he weighed
in. Yes, he called them whistleblowers. He said
they risked their careers to expose a subculture
that tolerates intellectual fraud. The core argument
from all these supporters was simple. If the
experts cannot spot a fake gold bar, then their
expertise on gold is worthless. Which seems like
a slam -dunk argument at first glance. But, and
this is crucial for us to cover impartially,
there was a very strong counter argument. The
villain's narrative wasn't just people saying,
oh, you hurt our feelings. There are some really
substantial scientific critiques of what they
did. Absolutely. And we need to give these weight.
because they highlight the limitations of what
the hoax actually proved. The biggest critique
came from scientists like Sarah Richardson at
Harvard. She pointed out a fatal flaw in their
methodology. What was the flaw? The lack of control
group. Break that down for us. What would a control
group even look like in an academic hoax? Well,
the hoaxers claimed that grievance studies are
uniquely corrupt. But to prove they are uniquely
corrupt, you would also need to submit freak
papers to other fields, like sociology, economics,
maybe even physics, and see if they get rejected.
Ah, I see. So if I submit a total nonsense paper
to an economics journal and they publish it too,
then the problem isn't grievance studies. The
problem is just that peer review is broken everywhere.
Exactly. Because they didn't test other fields,
Richardson argued you cannot scientifically claim
this is a problem specific to gender or race
studies. It might just be a problem with the
process of publishing itself. That is a very
valid point. There is also the argument about
the trust model of peer review. Yes, this was
Carl T. Bergstrom's point. He is a biologist.
He noted that peer review is not designed to
catch deliberate fraudsters. It operates on good
faith. Meaning what exactly? Meaning if you tell
a reviewer, I observed 1 ,000 dogs at a park,
the reviewer assumes you aren't lying. They check
if your conclusion logically matches your data.
They do not send a private investigator to check
if your data is real. So if I lie about the data,
I can trick a physics journal just as easily
as a gender studies journal. Theoretically, yes.
Bergstrom argued that tricking a system built
on trust proves nothing other than that you are
willing to violate community norms. He basically
said, congratulations, you prove that liars can
trick people. But wait, the hoaxers did have
a rebuttal to this, didn't they? It's not like
they only targeted the fringe journals. That
is true. They did submit to sociology journals,
which is a much more established data -driven
field. And interestingly, all the papers submitted
to sociology journals were rejected. Oh, so the
control groups sort of did exist and it worked.
In a limited way, yes. It suggests that fields
relying on hard data were more resistant to the
nonsense than the fields relying purely on discourse
and theory. Also, the journals with higher impact
factors were more likely to reject the papers.
So some standards did hold up. Beyond the scientific
critique, there was also just a lot of anger
about the wasted resources. Huge anger. Reviewers
are unpaid volunteers. They're academics doing
this on their nights and weekends. They spent
hours giving detailed feedback to Helen Wilson,
who doesn't exist. A group of professors at Portland
State actually wrote an open letter about this.
They called the project spiteful and said it
showed a perverse interest in public humiliation
rather than actual scholarship. They argued this
wasn't research, it was just content creation
for YouTube. Speaking of Portland State, we have
to talk about the fallout for the authors themselves.
Because this wasn't just a theoretical debate
on Twitter. Peter Boghossian was a professor
at Portland State. And the university went after
him. They initiated a formal research misconduct
inquiry. But the charge was really surprising.
They didn't charge him with fraud, exactly. They
charged him with conducting human subject research
without approval. Human subjects. But they didn't
study humans. They studied journals. Well, the
university argued that the editors and the reviewers
were the human subjects. Boghossian was running
a psychological experiment on them to see how
they would react to fake data. And that requires
oversight. Yes. In academia, you need an ethics
board, an institutional review board, or IRB
to sign off on any experiment involving people.
He obviously didn't get that. That feels technically
true, but also maybe a bit like a bureaucratic
weaponization of the rules. It is definitely
a gray area. And his supporters argued it's just
an excuse to punish him for exposing the university's
ideological bias. But the charge stuck. Bogusian
eventually resigned from the university, citing
the harassment and what he called the ideological
constriction of the institution. And what about
the papers themselves, the ones that got published?
Retracted, scrubbed from the record completely.
They exist now only as artifacts of the scandal.
So here we are looking back at this years later.
The dust has settled. What are we actually left
with from this deep dive? It is a really complicated
legacy. On one hand, you could argue the hoaxers
undeniably proved that there is an echo chamber
in these specific fields. They proved that if
you validate the political biases of the reviewers,
your work doesn't need to make logical sense.
Right. You can literally publish a fascist argument
if it is dressed up in feminist language. That
is a terrifying realization for the state of
academic knowledge. But on the other hand...
On the other hand, did they prove these fields
have absolutely no value? Probably not. What
they proved is that they have a massive quality
control problem. And they proved that the boundary
between high theory and utter nonsense is dangerously
thin. That is the part that really sticks with
me. There is a scholar we looked at in the sources,
Mikko Lagerspets, who analyzed this whole affair.
And he pointed out that the line between the
hoax and the real thing became completely blurred.
Yes. The hoaxers got so good at using the jargon
that they were effectively producing the very
thing they were mocking. It is like if I write
a poem specifically to mock modern poetry, but
it turns out to be a really good poem by their
standards. Am I a satirist or am I just a poet?
Exactly. And if the experts cannot tell the difference,
does the intent of the author even matter? If
the content is identical, but one author is sincere
and the other is joking and the journal treats
them exactly the same. What does that say about
the content itself? It implies the content. intent
itself is meaningless outside of having the right
intent or the right buzzwords. It really does.
It brings it all back to you, the listener. Why
does this matter to someone who isn't an academic
fighting for tenure? Because these ideas do not
stay in the academic journals. The concepts of
fragility, implicit bias, structural oppression,
these are now standard parts of corporate HR
training, school curricula, and public policy.
and they originate in these exact grievance studies
departments. So if the factory making the ideas
has no quality control, then the products we
are using in society might be defective. If the
research backing a new law or a new corporate
policy is susceptible to this kind of basic manipulation,
that matters for everyone. It matters for how
we hire, how we teach, and how we govern. It
leaves us with a really provocative thought to
walk away with. We know they got a rewrite of
Minkoff accepted just by using the right academic
buzzwords. We do know that for a fact. So take
a look at the headlines today. Look at the new
studies constantly cited in your news feed. How
much of what we accept as settled social science
is actually rigorous truth? And how much is just
sophisticated jargon dressed up to look like
knowledge? And without another massive hoax,
how would we ever really know the difference?
That is a thought that will keep you up at night.
thanks for joining us on this deep dive into
the grievance studies affair stay curious