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Welcome to the Eric Mataxus Show with your host Eric Mataxus.

Taxis show I'm Eric Mataxus and I'm in Tampa. I don't know how this happened.

I don't even have time to look into it. I'm just here and I'm doing my show.

And the beauty of being at a turning point USA convention is you get to bump into people that normally you wouldn't bump into.

For example, today, right now, I'm going to speak with James Lindsay.

Who's James Lindsay, you say? I don't have an easy answer for you.

All I can tell you is that, well, two things.

He has a new book called cynical theories, how activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity, and why this harms everybody.

He's co-written the book with Helen Pluckrose. First James, let me at least say welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me.

You came to my attention. I want my audience to get this because this is so delicious, so wonderful that I just, I said to earlier, my head exploded to use the cliché de joux.

I heard that some academics who were sane people, maybe conservatives, I don't know, had decided to scam the world of what do you even call that world?

You know, critical theory. The academic nut house, the academic booby hatch where everything is about, you know, the patriarchy and Marxism and feminism.

And just the looniness of that world that you and some others had written papers and submitted them to academic journals and that you were, I mean, this was obviously stuff that you made up for the fun of it.

And you submitted them and they were accepted and published.

When I heard that, I just could not believe how wonderful this was, and I said, someday I got to meet this guy, so I'm thrilled to meet you today. Tell my audience the provenance of that exercise and, you know, where you were at that point in life.

Sure, I mean, it's a little bit of a complicated story. I don't want to bog it down too much. What's that, what's that's called, usually, by the way, is the theoretical humanities, which is a terrible, it's like a totalitarian phrase, I think.

Well, of course it is. It's made up the theoretical humanities. It's not reality based. It's theoretical and ideological. It's crazy, but it exists in academia. And so you decided to play the game, make fun of it.

Yeah, exactly. And it's very much, it's a little bit ironic because, you know, we were looking for a metaphor a moment ago, and it's more like a cuckoo than it is, because it lays the egg in the nest and it displaces real scholarship with this bogus Marxist critical analysis of everything.

Critic as Marx said, ruthless criticism of everything that exists. So what turns out is we were actually the three of us were all atheists. We were involved. Who are these three? So Helen Pluckrose did it with me and another fellow named Peter Bergotian, but three of us wrote these fake papers together.

And where were you physically? I was in Knoxville and Peter is in Portland, Oregon and Helen is in London. Okay. And so the three of you knew each other somehow Twitter. Okay. So you discovered each other through Twitter.

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