https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-war-on-merit-comes-to-science/
And in this country, starting at the turn of the 20th century, “scientific racism” or “Social Darwinism,” and its practical application in eugenics, was prominent in our most prestigious universities. Thousands of women deemed “unfit” to reproduce were forcibly sterilized, and these pseudo-scientific theories gave Jim Crow segregation and bigoted immigration policies a patina of science that deflected their illiberal and antihuman motives. Worse yet, these ideas significantly influenced Nazi anti-Semitic policies and atrocities like the Holocaust.
More recently, our universities have seen the corruption of history by fanciful theories like Afrocentrism or “systemic racism” dressed up in the protocols of historiography or political philosophy, but in fact subordinated to political ideologies and factional interests, especially identity politics.
Earlier in the Nineties, academic feminism went down the rabbit-hole of the “Great Goddess” and its fake history fabricated from myth and the abuse of academic archaeology. This deity was allegedly worshipped in prehistoric “Old Europe.” Like the Golden Age of Hesiod, this was a time of idyllic harmony with nature, vegetarianism, peace, nature-worship, and communal egalitarianism. And it was matriarchal. This dubious history became a New Age fad in popular culture, its Noble-Savage Indianism and romantic environmentalism making it attractive for leftist doctrinaire feminists and romantic environmentalists.
As with other fake history, this fad flourished in universities, especially in Women’s Studies departments and programs. But traditional academic disciplines like archaeology and religious studies also lent their prestige and authority to a belief system that resembles a cult rather than the product of empirically based research.
For example, the work of the late UCLA professor of prehistoric archaeology, Marija Gimbutas, has been central to this dodgy academic sub-field. Especially important was her study of prehistoric statuettes like the Venus of Willendorf and its exaggerated breasts and buttocks, of which more than 80 intact or fragmentary artefacts have survived.
Although there are several different hypothetical explanations for these sculptures’ functions, Gimbutas accepted and encouraged the radical feminist assertion that they were evidence for the existence of a Goddess worshipped in prehistoric Europe. From this interpretation a whole fanciful history was created to explain not just the details of this imagined civilization, but the story of its demise at the hands of Indo-European horse-riding invaders called “Kurgans,” who conquered and occupied Old Europe, and sowed it with all the cultural, religious, and political dysfunctions of the West: slavery, colonialism, war, private property, patriarchy, inequality, and especially war. Notice how this fantasy dovetails with the Marxoid animus against, inter alia, colonialism and private property, that is central to leftist and “woke” ideology.
Gimbutas’ credentials and authority, moreover, sanctioned proponents of this myth-history to claim that it is fact-based. For example, one feminist champion of the Goddess, Merlin Stone, maintained that “archaeological, mythological and historical evidence . . . has proved that Her religion has existed and flourished in the Near East and Middle East for thousands of years.” But this historical fact has been rejected and suppressed by scholars because of their “sexual and religious biases.” Gimbutas herself made similar claims, evoking her “lifelong study” and the “preponderance of evidence” for the Kurgan invasion.
Yet few archaeologists and paleo-historians accept this history. In the preface of one textbook actually sympathetic to the Goddess theory, the authors acknowledge the “underlying tension between describing (the data, the interpretation, the past) and transforming these through a feminist lens.” The empirical evidence simply doesn’t exist to make the thesis persuasive.