standing up to bullies

Christine Fulcher's and my recent book has sold quite a few copies. But so far only one reader has reviewed it on Amazon. If you agree with what it says – or you disagree but dislike left-wing hegemony anyway – you should leave a review. Reviews can be ultra brief and don't have to be super positive. Number of reviews is what counts.

Maybe it takes a bit of courage to comment on our allegation that the academic system is promoting Marxism, and that academics have a vested interest in doing so. But courage is what's needed these days. (By 'academic' in what follows, I'm referring to the academic humanities.)

Leftists dominate publishing and the cultural establishment. They can readily generate reviews for their products. Dissidents need help. The counter-revolution isn't going to happen by itself. Think the Trump effect will last, and by itself bring about a change of hegemony throughout the West? Think again. By 2030, the current tiny renaissance of pluralism may well be over. Chances are, it'll be back to inexorable wokeism and censorship.

Our book accuses the university system – primarily the British and American, but the same no doubt applies throughout the West – of peddling social theories that are essentially Marxist, under concealing terms such as 'Critical Theory'.

What the book doesn't go on to argue, but what's likely to be the case, is that the relentless peddling of Marxist-inspired theories to students of literature and other arts subjects, over a period of decades, has played a major part in converting young people to leftist perspectives and turning them against non-leftist perspectives. (Non-leftist perspectives are described by professors as 'ideological', 'oppressive', 'unjust'.) The conversion doesn't happen at college alone: if it was only professors selling leftism, the effect might be limited. But there's now a whole class of quasi adjunct professors active in the cultural world: in the BBC, in arts institutions, in magazines, in Hollywood. People of an intellectual bent who were influenced by the ideology of their professors, and who go on to reproduce that ideology in the work they do for museums, TV companies and publishers.

Leftist perspectives are ultimately damaging to society. While supposedly about increasing human rights, they eventually provide support for authoritarianism. (Arguably, those authoritarian tendencies are visible, if you look closely, right from the start.) Leftists seek to bring about what they regard as virtuous ends through ever-increasing legislation and regulation.

Only in two areas are leftist policies still unambiguously 'liberal' in the original sense of that word; ironically, the two areas where liberalism currently seems least appropriate: immigration and crime. We can see the consequences in Britain, long at the forefront of left-wing thinking and policy. London is gradually sinking into lawlessness, while seaside towns such as Dover are becoming uninhabitable. Meanwhile discussion of topics of major significance is increasingly censored, policed and criminalised. This hardly deserves the moniker 'liberal'.

What most people seem not to have realised is that academia represents a locus of enormous power, in the arena of politics and social policy. The power may be background and secondary, but its relative invisibility makes it all the more potent and insidious. Professors, and the quasi-adjunct intellectual class in the broader cultural world, between them have acquired the ability to define the meaning of words, and to assign moral values ('virtuous' versus 'unjust') to viewpoints. This is an extremely important power. If you want to know why the term 'right-wing' has acquired an aura of moral dodginess, look to academia. If you want to know why the word 'capitalism' is nowadays usually followed by critical remarks, while the word 'socialism' rarely is, look to academia. If you want to know why critique of immigration is habitually categorised as 'racism', look to academia.

This may all sound too much like a conspiracy theory for many people's tastes. Surely the entire academic establishment can't be in on a massive con trick? Surely someone within the system would have blown the whistle by now, if it were true? But we're dealing with a set of perspectives, and with bias against rival perspectives; it therefore isn't anything like as straightforward as (say) the theory that the moon landings were faked. There's no faking going on; simply a belief system that has taken hold of a global institutional complex, making people inside the complex feel justified in promoting the belief system and suppressing criticism of it. As to why they choose to promote that particular belief system, we propose that a desire for ideological power, possibly unconscious, is at least one of the drivers. Read the book for more detail.

It's not so much the fault of individual academics, though there's clearly some rabid high-profile leftists among humanities professors – particularly (these days) in the US – who catalyse the rot. The problem may be due primarily to the system in which academics work: a system that's institutionally set to favour the promotion of collectivist ideology. The basic assumption of academia that 'trained' analysts can deduce – via a process of armchair theorising, loosely informed by data – what is 'best for society' leads, paradoxically, to conclusions and policies that benefit no one, and that are harmful to many.

Unfortunately, a world in which old-fashioned bourgeois standards have been dropped, in favour of expediency and ideological correctness, is one in which 'conspiracies' do become more likely. If most people adopt an attitude of 'whatevs', and moral condemnation is readily meted out to anyone who dissents, tacit conspiracies can happen almost by default. You only need to look at the Post Office scandal to realise, 'yes, in modern Britain it's perfectly possible for a large-scale major miscarriage of justice to go on for years; and for it to be suppressed, by middle-class professionals colluding to conceal it'. We're living in a culture of 'conform or punish'. This is the reality of modern leftism.

Increasingly we seem to have to rely on a lone individual, who is willing to endure rubbishing and taunting, to speak up for truth. In the Post Office case, it was postmaster Alan Bates. In the case of free speech in Canada, it was Jordan Peterson. Donald Trump – for all his faults and his dumbed-down rhetoric – also falls into this category. I have mixed feelings about Trump's tariffs, though at least he is tackling the West's problem of over-dependence on Asia. But he's the first major politician since Margaret Thatcher to dare to take on the left-wing intellectual hegemony. Most other political leaders now simply kow-tow to leftism, even if they're notionally 'right-wing'. In other words, they have become cowards. (As have most other people who may dissent in private, but are careful never to contradict 'social justice' dogma in public.) It's what gives modern politics that remote-elites and echo-chamber feeling that so many voters have become fed up with.

In its own small way, Oxford Forum has tried to oppose the trend towards the shutting down of genuine analysis and its replacement by pseudo-debate. The latter receiving spurious imprimatur by being located in 'universities' and other authorised institutions.

Celia Green is not primarily a political philosopher. Her trenchant analyses lack the po-faced pseudo-professionalism, and the gobbledygook, of academic texts. Nevertheless her writings have, for decades, provided an important counterpoint to the collectivist ideology generated by a ballooning academic system. Because of her anti-leftist tendencies, her work has been shunned by university intellectuals and other bien pensants. Unlike other female intellectuals who have benefited from recent pro-female bias, she has continued to suffer from the same anti-female prejudice that affected her early career.

Our book Power-mad and Hypocritical sounds a vehemently dissident note, by accusing universities of disseminating political ideology, and of doing so for reasons that have little to do with promoting justice, but rather with desire to influence and control narratives – what we call 'ideological power'.

The vehemence derives from our belief that current academic trends are profoundly toxic for the future of academia, for the future of debate generally, and for the future of individual freedom. Academia increasingly promotes values (moral indignation, quasi-religious fervour, censorship, suppression of the 'wrong' kind of data) that represent an inversion of what academia should be about (balance, neutrality, dispassionate objectivity). This is toxic for culture, and ultimately toxic for everyone.

Among other negative effects, the suppression of dissent encourages extremism. Because the academic Left suppressed the observation that Critical Theory is essentially a cultural form of Marxism, the idea of 'cultural Marxism' was forced underground. The result: it turned extremist, becoming associated with an antisemitic conspiracy theory. This in turn seems to have given leftists the feeling it was right to suppress the dissenting perspective, and that suppression should be increased further. The mere use of the phrase 'cultural Marxism' is now habitually denounced as antisemitic.

One has to wonder whether extremification was actually the intended result all along, given that it has made it easier to dismiss any mention of an important feature of the current university system: what's being presented to thousands of undergraduates as 'critical' techniques is actually political doctrine.

The academic Left are controlling language and manipulating narratives. The result: more and more non-leftist ideas and arguments are classified as 'racist', 'sexist', or conveniently popped into other derogatory pigeonholes that provide those in power with the excuse to suppress those ideas and arguments.

A book accusing academia of crypto-Marxism is not going to win any brownie points from the cultural elites (journalists, magazine editors, etc) who, to the extent they are not academia-based, are generally submissive towards academic authority. In publishing our exposé of cultural Marxism in academia, we're running foul of a cultural establishment that is ready to brand anyone as 'far right' if they oppose too strongly the basic assumptions of leftism. We were willing to do it because we think it's important, and because it's the right thing to do.

We also wanted to quash the spurious association between the idea of 'cultural Marxism' and antisemitism. Look at any field of creative endeavour, and you're likely to find a disproportionate number of individuals with Jewish ancestry. It makes no sense to associate Jewishness with Marxism, any more than it makes sense to associate it with neoconservatism, theoretical physics or modern literature.

But there are limits to how brave my colleagues and I are willing to be in the battle to allow people to express non-leftist perspectives – let alone to have those perspectives represented by professional politicians. As it is, we've occasionally been sneered at in the street, and at times have had to put up with the mysterious presence of police vans outside our houses.

More than publish our ideas we cannot do; at any rate not without additional funding. We have no major power and no major influence (at least none that's visible), and our financial resources are limited.

Il-liberal hegemony is, ultimately, predicated on the theories and perspectives developed in universities: in other words, on theories developed by state-financed intellectuals, working in large collectivised institutions. Fire must be fought with fire: toxic theories must be opposed with counter-theories. But the development of alternatives needs to avoid the collectivist features that nowadays tend to be automatically associated with the concept of 'research'. Corporatism, and institutionalism – i.e. giving priority to organisations over individuals, in the realm of ideas – is likely to generate the same pro-collectivist biases that already monopolise current highbrow thought.

Opposing the hegemony with populism, and the rubbishing of intellectuals generally, can work temporarily, and up to a point. But given the average level of education these days, it probably can't change the dominant ideology, any more than Mrs Thatcher's government was able to have a significant impact on the teaching professions, the NHS, the universities, or on Britain's overall cultural landscape – all of which went blithely on in their merry ways, both during and after.

Of course most people who spend money on books or magazines prefer to be presented with narratives that are sunny and warm, and that offer ready-made solutions for increasing human happiness. But occasionally unpleasant truths must be grasped, otherwise systemic problems don't get tackled.

If genuine alternatives to the intellectual roots of il-liberal hegemony are to develop, independent academics need to be supported.

An alternative to an ideology obsessed with anti-sexism, anti-racism and 'social justice' doesn't mean developing pro-sexist or pro-racist perspectives. That is part of the power and the dishonesty of hegemony: the claim by the ideologically dominant that they alone occupy the ethical positions, and that anyone who dissents must therefore be wanting to promote unethical positions. (The early Christian Church made good use of this strategy as a way of suppressing dissent.)

Alternatives may, however, mean abandoning some of the key dogmas of the humanities, such as the idea that one must always consider the 'social good'. We are sceptical of how meaningful the latter concept is, and whether it is genuinely about the welfare of individuals, or merely an excuse for expanding the power of the state.

If you agree with any of the above please link to us, rate/review our books on Amazon and Goodreads, and donate to us if you can spare the funds.

And if you're wondering why dissident intellectuals aren't currently sitting in shiny glass and steel offices if they're serious about what they're doing, then perhaps you haven't quite understood what it means to be a dissident, and the economic and social consequences thereof.

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© Fabian Tassano

published 20 August 2025

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