Epistemology

Plus the whole issue that it has been very well understood by the United States that some of these terrorist outfits are very useful proxies to work with.

Now, you wrote a chapter with a beautiful title, Ethnic Democracy, sorry, Epistemic Whitewashing, Ethnography of a Conference and Counterterrorism.

What do you mean by epistemic whitewashing? I think that's a very interesting term.

Right.

So, you know, as an anthropologist, I was happily surprised when UNDP published invited me to a conference, which was in 2016 in Oslo.

Before I get into our article i do want to note that she is the author of two books Agora Toxica: Uncivil Society in The Internet Age which is about how anti-democratic actors use influence operations and digital platforms to mobilize and undermine democratic societies And La Terreur Masculiniste In Twenty twenty four an Investigation Into Masculinist Radical Milieus their Ideologies Networks and the Use Of Violence As A Political Strategy both are published by Editions du Détour I think unfortunately they're--I mean unless you speak French then it's very fortunate But They Are IN FRENCH obviously I'M GOING TO BE READING [laughs] Uh STEPHANIE'S ARTICLE IN ENGLISH AND HERE IT GOES THE HUNT FOR JASON ARDEY Race science is a pseudoscience that feeds far right propaganda long relegated to the margins It Is gaining traction in universities and seeks to establish its proponents as arbiters of knowledge.

The hunt that led to Jason Ardey’s death reveals how this machinery of epistemic domination operates—and who helps normalize it From day one everything pointed to the fact That jason arday the black neurodivergent Cambridge professor Who died in August of 2026 Was being subjected To racist and ableist harassment Exactly the kind of targeting he himself had described Ardey Had been marked as quarry Long before the fatal media pileon An open and immensely well funded race Science international network Enabled Its hunters to unleash the pack To give the pursuit scale reach and political unity But to break out of the margins of race science the chase had to become something else His extremist ideology needed to Be laundered into a story About scientific and journalistic integrity The media had ample evidence to challenge the frame imposed On them By the eugenicists Instead they adopted it Running with the hounds And in doing so legitimized Both the aims and Epistemic authority of race scientists Marking the Quarry The Hunt For Professor Jason Arde Began Quietly Three Years Earlier Couched At The Civilized Nodes OF A Scholarly Society A PROFESSOR WHO WAS MERELY ASKING QUESTIONS In May of 2023 Dave Harris a retired white academic and professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University began examining Ardey’s publications Ardey’s appointment as professor of sociology and education at Cambridge had made national news AT THIRTY SEVEN HE was the youngest Black professor in the university's history FROM THE MOMENT He arrived at CAMBRIDGE ArdEAY WAS TARGETED BY Freedom oF Information requests In tHE United States Christian nationalist organizations opposed to teaching and researching Drawing ON Critical race theory CRT WHICH EXAMINES AMONG OTHER THINGS HOW RACISM IS REPRODUCED THROUGH LAW AND INSTITUTIONS WERE already explicitly encouraging Their supporters to USE public records procedures to target academics and Then identify Or manufacture misconduct SUCH SMEAR campaigns ARE now part OF THE ACADEMIC FAR RIGHT'S repertoire AIMED PARTICULARLY AT researchers wHO examine power relations BUT ALSO AT those whose VERY presence Whose perceived identity appears to embody the gains of diversity equity and inclusion policies THe largely covert campaign against BLACK scholars also surfaced in TWENTY TWENTY THREE WHEN THE WORK O f Claudine Gay Harvard’s first Black president came under heightened scrutiny AGAINST A backdrop of misogynoir Christopher Rufo a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation BOTH CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST ORGANIZATIONS IS ONE OF THE principal architects of the American campaigns Against CRT and DEI He helped turn the plagiarism allegations against gay INTO A broader POLITICAL offensive AGAINSt minority representation in American institutions WHAT connects RUFO to what would later come for ARDAY is not only the method but Also the NETWORK Rufo has repeatedly promoted RACE SCIENCE FOCUSED online magazine Aporia And appeared on ITS podcast in TWENTY TWENTY THREE Research by the Anti Fascist organization Hope Not Hate identifies aporia as the Public Facing arm of the Human Diversity FOUNDATION OR HDF A Wyoming registered company created as the successor to the Pioneer Fund the American Eugenics Organization established in NINETEEN THIRTY SEVEN Bylined Times reports THAT RufO and hdf also shared a funder Tech entrepreneur Andrew Conru invested One point three MILLION DOLLARS IN HDF WHILE HIS foundation gave $TWENTY FIVE thousand DOllars to rufo's documentary foundATion in twenty twenty one Aporia Repeatedly provided a platform for Nathan Kaufman the race science researcher who Would Later propel the Allegations against RDay to a mass audience H df cofounder Emil Kierkegaard HAD met Peter Thiel in TWENTY NINETEEN According to Kirkegaard's own account thiel subsequently asked him to recommend other Researchers kirkegaArd NAMed KaufmaN AND Noah Carl APORIA'S EDITOR Both HAVE BEEN run OUT OF Cambridge foR THEIR MEDIOCRE WOrK AND OVERT racism THIS Network ALSO overlaps directly WITH Britain’s free speech union FSU founded b Y spectator Magazine associate Toby Young whO HAS HIMSELF advocated What he CALLED progressive Eugenics Aporia's NOAH CARL is the CODIRECTor oF skeptics LTD the publishing COMPANY controlled BY YOUNG while aporIA contributor Eric Kaufmann sits on the FSUs advisory councilThe funding of race science by christian Nationalist and extractive industry billionaires including surveillance capitalism serves a political functionAs historian of neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian shows in Hayek’s Bastards racialist theories and the obsession with IQ Make It possible to naturalize inequality Social hierarchies are no longer presented as the product of Power Relations but as the expression of supposedly objective biological differences that are hereditaryIn Largely secular Societies race science therefore provides chRiSTian nationalists With a substitute for the Authority religion No Longer commandsIt also Provides intelligence obsessed techno masculinitesWith a SCIentific veneerFor the Hierarchies THEY seekto uphold or even reinforceTHE DAY claudine GAy resignedas HARVARD PRESIDENT Ruffo announced AN initial ten Thousand dollar FUNDfor Plagiarism Huntingat Elite UNIVERSITIES Explicitl y tyingthe bountyHUNTTO his CampaignTo defeatwhathe calledracialistideology Plagiarism hunting reconfigures legitimacy.

Promoters of the junk science that is race science reposition themselves as arbiters of scientific integrity, from which position they can disqualify those who expose the cultural foundations of systems of power.

By June twenty twenty-four, Black academics were describing the climate in their universities as open season.

But there is something in Kant's work that has perhaps fascinated me even more, and moved me even more deeply than the call for enlightenment, because it is the foundation of enlightenment itself.

And that is the theory of knowledge that Immanuel Kant presented.

Perhaps you know, the Italian philosopher of history and law, Giambattista Vico, who lived from 1668 to 1744, he had, with his principle verum ipsum factum, which is Latin and translates to, truth is what is made by man, essentially anticipated modern scientific thinking.

Giambattista Vico thus said that man can only understand what he himself has created, And therefore man cannot fully know nature, because it was, according to Vico, made by God.

That was more epistemology work.

So it's like, how do they know a rocket is safe? Those kind of things.

Epistemologies?

Yeah, the theory of knowledge.

So like, they would use words.

Section 2 1.

Epistemology is not logically fundamental.

Footnote.

Some of the principles of logic are logically prior to any proposition that is deduced from other propositions.

nor has it freed itself logically from the common sense dualism of psychology.

On the contrary,

Epistemology,

from Locke until today, has been and has remained, in part at least, a branch of psychology.

But that's the basic divide, you know.

And, um, the problem is that, you know, I make the point a lot, and particularly in this, in my longer form, the 20th century was, was so defined by this dialogue with Marxism, and then in terms of praxis with Soviet power and revolutionary imperatives therein, and approximately caused, you know, by, uh, these factors, that, uh, Marxist- Epistemic priors, even if people didn't accept them in ethical or in, uh, historical terms, it ca- came to characterize the conceptual vocabulary of how we talk about historical processes and political theory, if that makes any sense.

So these things became de- so deeply insinuated into the discourse that even, uh, even left-wing partisans that don't sit around reading Das Kapital or, or, or reading, you know, the Philosophy of History, they, they've just internalized as epistemic priors.

You know, and, and when they argue, when, when, when, when they, when they suggest, uh, absolute postulates about the advance of history as they see it, they're, they're basically, they're arguing a quasi-Hegelian paradigm of, of dialectical materialism, where human mind, the human mind in exi- in, in isolation is the primary movant of historical processes.

Trump says that there was election fraud, has produced no evidence, but he says, so therefore we all have to go along, at least not contradict him.

Epistemologically, I think the Republican Party as a whole has embraced a conspiracy-centered approach and an authority-centered approach and has abandoned the reality-centered approach.

So if you agree that that's happened, I think that even if they can keep their anti-Israel side in check, until someone comes along with a more reality-centered approach, I don't see that the Republicans are going to be a party that I can support.

What are your thoughts?

Nothing is appealing.

No, it's not appealing.

But yeah, it's, it's, it, Epistemologically, it's emotionalism.

And if you look back on Hitler's speeches, you can see that it's all an appeal to emotion.

For years, the obstacle appeared to be secrecy.

Perhaps the decisive difficulty is now epistemology.

First there were claims, then institutions, then records.

The remaining threshold is not greater institutional seriousness.