Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young,

and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

You can support our podcast by visiting... Toby Young and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Welcome to the Quillett podcast.

This is Jonathan Kay hosting from Toronto.

Among conservatives who attack the ideological excesses of the modern academy,

one popular assumption is that our English language universities

have been taken over by postmodern French intellectual movements

led by such thinkers as Jacques Deride and Michel Foucault.

But in France itself, this claim is actually seen by many as increasingly far-fetched.

In fact, many French academics and writers now complain about the opposite phenomenon, claiming that French universities are now being taken over by critical race theory, intersectionality, and other American race-centered doctrines.

My guest today, prominent French sociologist Natalie Aeneke, says that what we often call the excesses of French theory is now really an American export commodity.

This month, Enique and other like-minded French academics created an organization to fight

dogmas centered on decolonialism and identity politics that they regard

as inapplicable to the French intellectual tradition.

And this movement has a political dimension as well. In a recent speech, French President Emmanuel Macron

attacked what he called certain social science theories imported from the United

States. And his education minister described an intellectual matrix in his words involving

...