Duped

10/7/2018 Duped academic journal publishes rewrite of 'Mein Kampf' as feminist manifesto | The Times of Israel
FEMI-NAZIS
Duped academic journal publishes rewrite

‘Mein Kampf’ as feminist manifesto
To highlight alleged intellectual bias in university ‘grievance studies’ programs, three scholars write 20
papers; seven are accepted to top publications
By AMANDA BORSCHEL-DAN  | Today, 5:08 pm
Perpetrators of an elaborate hoax against academic journals (from left) mathematics Ph.D. James Lindsay, UK academic Helen Pluckrose and philosophy profess
Boghossian. (courtesy)
The term “Femi-Nazi” became all too accurate when a trio of academic tricksters participating in an elabora
submitted portions of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” rewritten through a feminist lens to a leading peer-revie
feminist journal. The satirical paper was accepted this past academic year for publication by Affilia: Journal
Women and Social Work.
The sting operation against academic journals became public this week.
In a truncated year-long project highlighting the influence of extremist dogma and confirmation bias in aca
the trio wrote 20 farcical “scholarly” papers — three of which were based on rewrites of “Mein Kampf” — fo
cultural studies journals.
https://www.timesoﬁsrael.com/duped-academic-journal-publishes-rewrite-of-mein-kampf-as-feminist-manifesto/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=d… 1/7
One of the papers, “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliber
Choice,” was written under the alias Maria Gonzalez, PhD, who claimed to be based out of the fictitious Fem
Activist Collective for Truth (FACT).
According to the real-life authors, “The last two-thirds of this paper is based upon a rewriting of roughly 3,6
of Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of ‘Mein Kampf,’ by Adolf Hitler, though it diverges significantly from the origina
chapter is the one in which Hitler lays out in a multi-point plan which we partially reproduced why the Nazi
needed and what it requires of its members.”
Hailing from differing countries and fields, the trio of academics is made up of self-proclaimed liberals who
want to fix a broken system, not ban the fields of study themselves: Helen Pluckrose, a UK-based English lit
and history scholar; Australian James Lindsay, a math PhD; and Peter Boghossian, a professor of philosophy
Portland State University. The project was documented by Australian filmmaker Mike Nayna, who released a
YouTube video with an authors statement on the project this week.
The scholars targeted high-ranking journals in the humanities subject they label as “grievance studies.” The
relatively new fields, which have become popular in the past 50 years with the rise of the civil and women’s
movements, examine the lives of the historically and traditionally oppressed: women, racial, religious and c
minorities, and the LGBT community.
With a steep learning curve, the team quickly retired six papers. But after adapting their products based on
reviewers’ comments, within a few months, an unheard of seven absurd papers were accepted. Leading the p
“research” on rape culture at urban dog parks, which was recognized by leading peer-reviewed feminist geo
journal Gender, Place, and Culture as “exemplary scholarship.”
It was skeptical media attention after the publication of the dog parks paper which brought the project, init
scheduled for 18 months, to an abrupt end this summer. All papers are available online, as well as the name
comments of the peer reviewers.
According to the scholars, it is likely that another six fictitious papers would have been accepted for publica
their experiment in “reflexive ethnography” within the world of grievance studies progressed.
Steven Pinker
@sapinker
Is there any idea so outlandish that it won't be published in a

Critical/PoMo/Identity/"Theory" journal? Helen Plucrose et al.
submitted a dozen hoax papers to ﬁnd out.
areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/aca… via @areomagazine
7:22 AM - Oct 3, 2018
Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship

This essay, although hopefully accessible to everyone, is the most
thorough breakdown of the study and written for those who are already
areomagazine.com
1,648 697 people are talking about this
The trio contends that the fields have been infiltrated by radical and intolerant theories. And what better w
prove their point than turning to one of the most extreme manifestos in recent history — “Mein Kampf.”
Mathematician Lindsay told The Times of Israel on Thursday, “We decided to try to rewrite something from
something old and nasty, and ‘Mein Kampf’ not only is the pinnacle document, it proved accessible for our m
Theological fire and brimstone writing “didn’t transliterate easily,” Lindsay said. However, “much of ‘Mein K
an autoethnography.” This style of self-reflective writing is en vogue in the grievance studies’ academic jou
therefore the substitution of feminist or anti-patriarchal terminology for Hitler’s well-known screed was
undetectable to the peer reviewers.
A German edition of Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ (‘My Struggle’) on display at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, December 11, 2015. (Matthias Balk/
According to a comment from the co-editor of the journal, the reviewers were “supportive of the work and n
potential to generate important dialogue for social workers and feminist scholars.”
A quest to expose ‘sophistry’

In a long co-bylined essay in Aero Magazine, which Pluckrose edits, the trio wrote that during the course of
experiment, “the reviewers’ comments are in many ways more revealing about the state of these fields than
acceptances themselves.”
The team explained their motivations and methodology: “We set out with three basic rules: (1) we’ll focus a
exclusively upon ranked peer-reviewed journals in the field, the higher the better and at the top of their
subdisciplines whenever possible; (2) we will not pay to publish any paper; and (3) if we are asked at any po
journal editor or reviewer (but not a journalist!) if any paper we wrote is an attempted hoax, we will admit it
The basis of each paper was “something absurd or deeply unethical (or both) that we wanted to forward or c
We then made the existing peer-reviewed literature do our bidding in the attempt to get published in the ac
canon,” they wrote.
“This is the primary point of the project: What we just described is not knowledge production; it’s sophistry
it’s a forgery of knowledge that should not be mistaken for the real thing. The biggest difference between us
scholarship we are studying by emulation is that we know we made things up,” they wrote.
In undertaking the hoax, the use of satire was often employed. According to the authors, every paper “all al
endeavored to be humorous in at least some small way (and often, big ones).”
The team was so successful that four journals asked the papers’ fictitious authors to become peer reviewers
themselves. For “ethical reasons,” they declined.
The proverbial wheels came off as a Twitter account called “New Real Peer Review” sniffed something foul f
Dog Park essay. Soon, local newspapers became suspicious, and eventually, in cooperation with the hoax tea
Wall Street Journal broke the story this week, with an ever-widening international ripple effect and coverag
Perpetrators of an elaborate hoax against academic journals (from le

mathematics Ph.D. James Lindsay, UK academic Helen Pluckrose and
professor Peter Boghossian. (courtesy)
Satire as social commentary

It is not the first time scholars have written hoax papers to illustrate a broken academia. While other fields
equally guilty of publishing unscientific work, gender studies in particular has already been repeatedly flagg
problematic.
After the current hoax experiment became public this week, author and Harvard lecturer Yascha Mounk pro
on Twitter that “Three intrepid academics just perpetrated a giant version of the Sokal Hoax… Call it Sokal
The result is hilarious and delightful. It also showcases a serious problem with big parts of academia.”
In 1996, mathematics and physics Prof. Alan David Sokal submitted a nonsensical paper to Duke University
Text journal called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gra
(successful) experiment illustrating editorial bias and the prevalent incorrect use of scientific terms.
The Sokal hoax was the basis for a May 2017 experiment when two of the current project’s authors Boghoss
Lindsay attempted to replicate his success with the publication of a fake paper that claims “that penises con
cause climate change.” They write about the experiment in an essay, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Con
Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies,” which discusses the problematic nature of “pay-to-publish” open acc
journals.
In September 2017 the duo became a trio with the addition of Pluckrose and the new, much more elaborate
was launched.
According to the scholars, the goal of the current project was not to end the study of these niche academic
disciplines, rather highlight the intolerant thinking within in their lock-step that is infiltrating popular cult
Asked by The Times of Israel if academic journals in the field of Jewish Studies would also be in their sights,
answered that the team didn’t fully examine this particular field. “The grievance studies methods are dubio
hope they don’t take them up,” he said.
“I’ve only looked closely at one paper in Jewish Studies

and it seemed to use similar methods but criticized a nasty
streak of antisemitism in critical race scholarship,” he
wrote via Twitter, citing a paper called, “Critical
Whiteness Studies and the ‘Jewish Problem.'”
The cited paper was written in response to the

increasingly trendy theory proposed by Critical Whiteness
Studies and promoted by young American Jews on college
campuses, social media, and even mainstream Jewish
media, that Jews are not “white.”
According to the paper’s abstract, “‘whiteness” is used as a

critical concept denoting those who enjoy white privilege
in American and other Western societies.” Calling a Jew
“white,” however, “is more than controversial, for it
assimilates the most persecuted minority in European
history to the dominant majority, while downgrading the
significance of antisemitism.”
Mathematician James Lindsay, part of an elaborate hoax highlighting
problematic peer review in several humanities journals. (screenshot)
The fact that this type of topic itself is being debated

within the ivory tower and infiltrating popular culture is not what appears to bother the scholars. Rather, it
that there are few skeptical and critical checks within peer-reviewed journals and a “kind of blatant corrupt
through confirmation bias is pervasive in the fields.
“Politically biased research that rests on highly questionable premises gets legitimized as though it is verifi
knowledge. It then goes on to permeate our culture because professors, activists, and others cite and teach t
growing body of ideologically skewed and fallacious scholarship,” writes the team.
“We managed to get seven shoddy, absurd, unethical and politically biased papers into respectable journals
fields of grievance studies. Does this show that academia is corrupt? Absolutely not. Does it show that all sc
and reviewers in humanities fields which study gender, race, sexuality and weight are corrupt? No,” they wr
Perpetrators of an elaborate hoax against academic journals (from left) mathematics Ph.D. James Lindsay, UK academic Helen Pluckrose and philosophy profess
Boghossian. (courtesy)
However, when a journal publishes — without revisions — a paper written in under six hours by a man whic
describes “moon meetings” for women in womb rooms with vulva shrines, something is amiss. Or when an
which promotes the pedagogical boon of silencing and chaining “privileged” pupils to the floor to affect “ex
reparations” is taken under serious consideration and given notes for improvement, you have to wonder abo
Ivory Tower’s foundations.
The authors call upon the universities to conduct a thorough review of the grievance study fields “to separa
knowledge-producing disciplines and scholars from those generating constructivist sophistry,” they write.
“Research into these areas is crucial, and it must be rigorously conducted and minimize ideological influenc
further results on these topics diverge from reality, the greater chance they will hurt those their scholarship
intended to help.”
READ MORE:
· Jewish Times
· academia
· Jewish studies
· academic study
· Mein Kampf

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10/7/2018 Duped academic journal publishes rewrite of 'Mein Kampf' as feminist manifesto | The Times of Israel

Duped academic journal publishes rewrite

Is there any idea so outlandish that it won't be published in a

Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship

1,648 697 people are talking about this

A quest to expose ‘sophistry’

Perpetrators of an elaborate hoax against academic journals (from le

Satire as social commentary

“I’ve only looked closely at one paper in Jewish Studies

The cited paper was written in response to the

According to the paper’s abstract, “‘whiteness” is used as a

The fact that this type of topic itself is being debated

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