Sep 23, 2026 · 29 min · 11 segments
In this episode of Mortification of Spin, Todd and Carl welcome back Neil Shenvi and Patrick Sawyer to discuss their new book, *Post Woke: Asserting a Biblical Vision of Race, Gender, and Sexuality*…
Neil ShenviGuest
Patrick SawyerGuest
Todd PruittHost
Carl TruemanHost
Do you think that the big scandal coming out of Cambridge with Jason Arday, Is that just going to be a speed bump or are we going to learn something?
So for listeners, if you guys didn't follow along, there's a Cambridge professor named Jason Arday who was the youngest black tenured professor at Cambridge in history.
And he was discovered to have basically committed massive plagiarism and all kinds of fraud, lies about his past.
But actually, Todd, what I would say is the takeaway from that – so he resigned recently in the midst of flurry of accusations and plagiarism.
What I would take away from that is not actually that he was caught and effectively forced to resign, but that the academic community – expressed incredible support for him and dismissed all criticism of obvious plagiarism as racist.
There were, what, hundreds of fellow professors and academicians lining up around the block to call all of his detractors racist up until the point when he resigned.
So the only point, I think the takeaway for us is, yeah, as you said, these ideas are so deeply embedded and entrenched within these powerful elite institutions that they are not going away.
And you have the resonance of the language of critical theory, victimhood, oppression, etc., etc., resonates with the therapeutic culture.
That DEI is the most obvious presenting problem, we might say, in the Jason Arday case.
But I was always struck, and I think Neil and Pat, you may have a comment on this.
I was amazed in 2020, 2021, when suddenly critical theory that had always struck me as an abstruse interest of seminars and had somewhat passed its peak in the 1980s.
was suddenly the shibboleth that determined whether one could be an acceptable member of society or not.
And most of the people parroting this stuff on Twitter, I guess, had never actually read a single text of critical theory in their life.
And that tells me that this isn't just being driven by some elite political cultural cabal.
Do you think that the big scandal coming out of Cambridge with Jason Arday, Is that just going to be a speed bump or are we going to learn something?
So for listeners, if you guys didn't follow along, there's a Cambridge professor named Jason Arday who was the youngest black tenured professor at Cambridge in history.
And he was discovered to have basically committed massive plagiarism and all kinds of fraud, lies about his past.
But actually, Todd, what I would say is the takeaway from that – so he resigned recently in the midst of flurry of accusations and plagiarism.
What I would take away from that is not actually that he was caught and effectively forced to resign, but that the academic community – expressed incredible support for him and dismissed all criticism of obvious plagiarism as racist.
There were, what, hundreds of fellow professors and academicians lining up around the block to call all of his detractors racist up until the point when he resigned.
So the only point, I think the takeaway for us is, yeah, as you said, these ideas are so deeply embedded and entrenched within these powerful elite institutions that they are not going away.
And you have the resonance of the language of critical theory, victimhood, oppression, etc., etc., resonates with the therapeutic culture.
That DEI is the most obvious presenting problem, we might say, in the Jason Arday case.
But I was always struck, and I think Neil and Pat, you may have a comment on this.
I was amazed in 2020, 2021, when suddenly critical theory that had always struck me as an abstruse interest of seminars and had somewhat passed its peak in the 1980s.
was suddenly the shibboleth that determined whether one could be an acceptable member of society or not.
And most of the people parroting this stuff on Twitter, I guess, had never actually read a single text of critical theory in their life.
And that tells me that this isn't just being driven by some elite political cultural cabal.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.