WSJ: How the Smithsonian Lost America's Plot

Nothing about this surprises me.

I haven't read the report yet, so in some sense I reserve judgment. But I'd actually be surprised if it weren't generally right. A by-now-familiar mishmash of leftist political ideas, derived largely from now-rather outdated Continental philosophy, French literary theory, feminism, postmodernism, and critical theory has become the quasi-official ideology of the intellectual left. These ideas are pretty thin gruel, but they cohere with leftist politics, and they're easy to master. Once you learn a few names and a few simple rhetorical moves, you're set. You can pretend to understand the philosophical underpinnings of any subject, even if you've never read a word of Aristotle or Descartes. It takes little training and even less brains to simply issue an accusation of racism (or sexism...or "transmisogynoir" or WTF ever...) against anything you dislike or disagree with. Name-drop Fanon or Judith Butler. Memorize a few quip-templates like "As Foucault has shown, everything is power," or "It is long past time that we decolonize x." It's much more demanding and time-consuming to refute such bullshit than it is to introduce it into a discussion. And it generally functions like one of those smoke bombs villains deploy in comics and movies--when dialectically cornered, just throw some of that into the discussion and escape in the confusion...

Such ideas are fine to discuss in philosophy seminars--though the time would be better spent on almost anything else. Part of the problem is that the ideas are so poorly-justified and of such low quality. It's more like a collection of curiosities. But to dogmatically accept such curiosities as orthodoxy across so many areas is madness. Bad ideas are one thing. Unquestioned orthodoxies are another. The two together are very bad indeed.