I think of academia, following the lead of our own resident alcoholic, James Reed, as being like a toxic waste site, where the deadly poisons eventually leak intro the wider society, destroying all in their glowing green path.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-11574634492?mod=rsswn
“The reason you’ve heard them is that politically engaged academicians have been developing concepts like these for more than 30 years, and all that time they’ve been percolating. Only recently have they begun to emerge in mainstream culture. These academicians accomplish this by passing off their ideas as knowledge; that is, as if these terms describe facts about the world and social reality. And while some of these ideas may contain bits of truth, they aren’t scientific. By and large, they’re the musings of ideologues. How did this happen? How have those working in what’s come to be called “grievance studies” managed to extend their ideas far beyond the academy, while convincing people that their jargon adds something meaningful to public discourse? Biologist Bret Weinstein, who was run out of Evergreen State College by a leftist mob in 2017, calls the process “idea laundering.” It’s analogous to money laundering. Here’s how it works: First, various academics have strong moral impulses about something. For example, they perceive negative attitudes about obesity in society, and they want to stop people from making the obese feel bad about their condition.
In other words, they convince themselves that the clinical concept of obesity (a medical term) is merely a story we tell ourselves about fat (a descriptive term); it’s not true or false—in this particular case, it’s a story that exists within a social power dynamic that unjustly ascribes authority to medical knowledge. That’s stage one. After several more stages, all involving dishonest practices that pass off ideological conviction as substantive knowledge, this stuff is taught to students, who are tested on it, and whose academic careers depend on parroting it back to their woke professors. More: Students leave the academy believing they know things they do not know. They bring this “knowledge” to their places of employment where, over time, laundered ideas and the terminology that accompanies them become normative—giving them even more unearned legitimacy. And this is why you’ve heard some of the terms we began with: cisgender, fat shaming, heteronormativity, intersectionality, patriarchy, rape culture, and whiteness. They’ve been laundered through the peer-reviewed literature by activist scholars, then widely taught for years, before being brought into the world.”
I agree with James Reed now, that the best way of stopping toxic waste leaking into the environment of wider society is to clean up the waste site. The sooner, the better, before it is all too late. Tear down the universities now!