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We are entering a triumphant new phase of the era of #MAGA, and seeing signs that the Left’s stranglehold on the culture is already slipping and wokeness is already in retreat. But the serious work of rooting out this toxic ideology from its most deeply entrenched strongholds – our so-called institutions of higher learning – has only just begun, and there is a daunting amount of worthless trash to be thrown out.
Having long been captured by postmodern Critical Theorists – whose mission is not to open the minds of students to the extraordinary legacy of humanity’s best and brightest, but to “deconstruct” and destroy it – humanities departments (of which I was once a proud graduate) have devolved into hubs of anti-civilizational sabotage. Identity politics and gender theory have infected every discipline from philosophy and classics to English lit and art history, re-orienting them all away from the liberating pursuit of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful to the enforced establishment of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
But the hard sciences have not been immune to the intellectual corruption of wokeness, which decries reason and the scientific method as “white colonialist” constructs that need to be replaced by “other ways of knowing.” The field of mathematics, for example, has been under assault for years by agents of subversion who aggressively promote the woke argument that two plus two can equal five. Their aim here is not to explore an interesting new theory but to undermine the solid footing of rationality itself, to destroy the underpinnings of certainty and truth in order to collapse our civilization and build a new, non-Western utopia on its ruins. For if 2 + 2 does not equal 4, then as Pontius Pilate once wondered, what is truth?
That brings us to Kathryn Yusoff, a “professor of inhuman geography” at Queen Mary University of London. On her university page she describes her work as employing “historical, geophilosophical and black feminist methods to speak to issues of environmental change, empires of geologic practices and the politics of planetary states.” Right off the bat, this intersectional jumble of disciplines and the pompous jargon (“geophilosophical,” “empires of geologic practices”) are a dead giveaway that Prof. Yusoff’s work has nothing to do with teaching geography classes and everything to do with serving as a committed foot soldier in the cultural Marxist assault on the West.
“My teaching builds on my ongoing pedagogical commitment of decolonizing geography, through a focus on the examination of unequal environments,” she admits before disgorging the following neo-Marxist blather about her teaching approach: “Modules engage how pedagogic encounter is racial, social-economic and gendered in relation to normative understandings of ability and disability.” Students, enroll at your own risk.
The UK Telegraph reports that Yusoff’s recent book, Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race, argues that geology itself began as a “colonial practice” that created hierarchies, promoted materialism, destroyed environments, and led to climate change.
And you thought geology was just a value-neutral science. Nope, and neither is paleontology, the study of prehistoric life through fossils, which Yusoff has labeled – I hope you’re sitting down for this – “pale-ontology.” This would be funny if her position of influence weren’t taken so seriously.
Yusoff believes the theft of land, mining, and other geological consequences of colonialism have led “toward the white supremacy of the planet” and resulted in “geotrauma.” Yes, geotrauma. “To tell a story of rocks is to account for a eugenic materialism in which white supremacy made surfaces built on racialised undergrounds,” she writes. She predictably asserts the natural superiority of “black, brown, and indigenous subjects… [who] have an intimacy with the earth that is unknown to the structural position of whiteness.” Yusoff insists that “geology continues to function within a white supremacist praxis.”
Pro tip: anyone who uses the word “praxis” unironically is not an educator but a woke political activist, and the same goes for any professor who indoctrinates students to don the blinders of cultural Marxism and see the boogeymen of structural racism and white supremacy everywhere.
For a taste of the book’s obfuscation disguised as profundity, here is a partial description of it on Amazon; presumably it met with Yusoff’s approval:
Examining the conceptualization of the inhuman as political, geophysical, and paleontological, Yusoff unearths an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. This colonial practice of geology organized and underpinned racialized accounts of space and time in ways that materially made Anthropocene Earth. At the same time, Yusoff turns to Caribbean, Indigenous, and Black thought to chart a parallel geologic epistemology of the “earth-bound” that challenges what and who the humanities have chosen to overlook in its stories of the earth. By reconsidering the material epistemologies of the earth as an on-going geotrauma in colonial afterlives, Yusoff demonstrates that race is as much a geological formation as a biological one.
Here’s the link, because I’m sure you’ll want to own a copy.
Tragically for naïve students who still think institutions of higher learning will teach them how to think and not what to think, Kathryn Yusoff is no kooky outlier in the groves of academe. The Telegraph notes that the push by such radical lecturers and student activists to “decolonize” university courses has swept across UK universities. The same agenda is inflicted on students here in the U.S.
In all fairness, not all academics are anti-intellectual activists. The Telegraph quotes Dr. John Armstrong, a reader in financial mathematics at King’s College London, for example, who correctly (and bravely) denounced decolonization as “politically contentious, anti-scientific, and consistently associated with calls to lower academic standards.”
Chris McGovan, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, addressed Yusoff’s work more bluntly: “Geology is no more racist than ‘fish ’n’ chips’! It is an entirely neutral term. Those seeking to decolonise the curriculum are, in fact, building their own sinister empire of thought-control and intolerance.”
McGovan went on to note that the “exploitation” of the earth is as old as mankind itself and not race-dependent, but those are inconvenient facts that Marxist activists like Kathryn Yusoff must ignore in order to idealize (and idolize) non-Western cultures and target for destruction the Eurocentric achievements and prosperity of the capitalist West.
One of the very first steps we must take to reclaim cultural domination from the grip of these hateful poseurs and to Make Western Civilization Great Again (unfortunately, that slogan makes for a terrible acronym) is to liberate our universities from this nihilistic, Godless, intellectual fraudulence and offer a real education to our youth. With Donald Trump headed back to the White House, the momentum seems to be swinging our way toward doing just that.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior