When Trantifa Attacks

Parisian paint-slinging at the Sorbonne today

Prof. Xavier-Laurent Salvador, after trans attacks

Today at the Sorbonne, the storied Paris university, some professors held a small public discussion about transgenderism. Some were critical, but as one who is pro-trans delivered his talk, a couple of trans activists in the audience slung pink paint on them all. Watch:

I met most of the professors who were involved in this not long after it happened. We had lunch at a nearby restaurant. Two of them, including Prof. Salvador, came in splattered with pink paint. Fortunately, they know the names of the activists who did it, and plan to press charges.

I had conversations with several of these French academics involved in the anti-woke movement here. I was given to understand that all of them are on the Left, but they are classic liberals who believe in free speech, and free inquiry. They all tell terrible stories about French academia, and how it has been entirely captured by wokeness. One of them, Dr. Leonardo Orlando, suffered the cancellation last year of a course he was going to teach in evolutionary psychology at Sciences Po, a top French university. Why? Because he defends Darwin — and the woke within the university will not tolerate it. Dr. Orlando, who holds advanced degrees in science and politics, told me he had given up on academia across the board. It has been fully captured. Dr. Orlando said that he had believed for a while that the hard sciences would not be captured, but he was wrong. Their corruption is the worst, in his view, because the scientists within those fields “know that they are lying.”

I talked to others who told horror stories about what they’re seeing in French universities. These stories are familiar to Americans who follow the woke phenomenon in academia, but when you actually sit down with an academic scientist and listen to him talk about the implications of this madness for the progress of human knowledge, it’s beyond scandalous. We truly are making ourselves stupider and less competent because we cannot bear knowing things that make us anxious. For most of my life, the scientific community has been afraid that fundamentalist Christians were the real threat to their work. But fundamentalists have never really had power. The woke have lots of power — and they exercise it.

The scientists and academics I talked to today told me that the overwhelming majority of French academia has been compromised by wokeness. They figure that most academics know this is insanity, but they lack the courage to stand up. They would rather live by lies than risk having pink paint slung on them by fanatics, or worse, being treated by their colleagues as persona non grata. I sat across from one eminent scientist this evening, a man who is part of this group, drinking beer and hearing his war stories about resisting the woke takeover. I’m not easy to shock about this stuff, but, well, I was.

We are living through the collapse of a civilization. This is not an exaggeration. Everybody likes to think that this stuff is going to burn itself out, and we are going to get back to being serious. Maybe it will, but the fanatical hatred for knowledge that doesn’t conform to this bizarre ideology is effectively burning through entire libraries. Young scholars will have come out of a culture in which they were trained not to ask questions that could get them on the wrong side of politics. They won’t want to know things that could cost them their careers.

The thing I heard over and over today, no matter who I talked to, was an angry lament for the lack of courage in academia, and broadly in our society. Few people will stand up to these bullies. I think everyone of the group that I talked to is on the political and cultural Left, but they welcomed me into their group, and I told them how much I have learned from Kamila Bendova’s dictum that when fighting totalitarianism, one must make courage the basis for one’s alliances. Whether you are on the Left or the Right, there will be plenty of people who share your views, but very few of them who will take even the slightest risk to defend them, or you. When you find people who will take those risks, whatever their political or ideological beliefs, you need to become their friend. Courage is the only thing that counts in this fight.

Xavier-Laurent Salvador, Leonardo Orlando and the other scholars at the Observatory of Identity Ideologies are doing very brave work, standing up for free speech and free thought. I hope you will click through the the Observatory website and learn more about them — and, if you are in a position to help them, please do. They have lots of connections with anti-woke US academics, but they would love to know more.