A review of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.

REVIEWED BY GABRIEL ANDRADE

THE MURDER OF GEORGE FLOYD IN 2020 sparked mass protests across the United States. Some of these protests are understandable, inasmuch as police brutality is real. But establishing that the police killings of blacks is racially motivated is much harder to prove, inasmuch as each one has a back story of encounters between police and blacks that start off routine and escalate into violence. To many protesters, this seemed to matter very little. In fact, it wasn’t long before it became apparent that many protests— particularly those that erupted in violence and morphed into riots—were not really about police brutality. As statues of Confederate officers and even Columbus began to be toppled, it became clear that these acts were symbolic of larger issues involving long simmering racial tensions.

Whenever such sudden unrest begins, conspiracy theorists typically look for culprits who allegedly agitate crowds, all with the evil purpose of selfbenefit.

This time, George Soros was the target of such conspiracy mongering.

Needless to say, this is delusional. But, it is not inaccurate to conclude that, indeed, the current wave of protests was a long time in the making. No, a Jewish billionaire is not behind it. But, some particularly pernicious ideas have played a major influence in the current chaos.

These ideas have been around for quite some time in academia. Some call it “woke ideology,” but the academic term for it is “Critical Theory.” In their new book, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay do a fine job in dissecting these ideas. They call them “Cynical Theories” because, ultimately, their defenders (postmodernist scholars such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Judith Butler, and others) care little about truth. In their worldview, facts do not matter and objectivity is a farce. What does matter? Power.