The culture of critical discourse (CCD) is an historically evolved set of rules, a grammar of discourse, which (1) is concerned to justify its assertions, but (2) whose mode of justification does not proceed by invoking authority, and (3) prefers to elicit the voluntary consent of those addressed solely on the basis of arguments adduced…The shared ideology of the intellectuals and intelligentsia is thus an ideology about discourse.

Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class.

The anti-authoritarianism of Socrates was not a rejection of tradition, but rather an appeal to remembering what certain traditions are for in order to keep them lively rather than merely alive, as opposed to rooted in ignorance, then to be exploited by authoritarians. This is by no means to deny that Socrates was committed to his own brand of authoritarianism in which there were men of gold, silver and brass. That is not my point, however, nor Alvin Gouldner’s I do not think. Rather, it is that a ‘Culture of Critical Discourse’ is not inherently in contradiction with tradition. For if anything at all, whether the New class or Old (dating back to Ġgantija before the State and standing armies as shown by Peter Watson in Ideas), there is no dispute that intellectuals, broadly conceived, preside over values.

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I shared previously my thoughts that the demolition of academic freedom is a self-inflicted wound. I am now fully persuaded to hold the opinion that this dynamic is a controlled take-down from within the hallowed halls of the so-called ivory tower. A new university is needed for a new ‘normal’ reality – and the crushing of dissenting opinion, nay the ‘Culture of Critical Discourse’, is essential to the new reality techno fascists seek to impose on the world. Now scientists, formerly the darling of Western academia are facing a best-before date, just as their colleagues in the social studies have, unless, of course, the latter prove themselves useful to the propaganda ‘nudge units’ of the ‘Fourth Industrial’ mega-State.

As shown by the growing repression of scientists who stray into the realms of moral order, normative claims and social ethics by challenging (what Foucault called) the ‘discursive formations’ of Welfare-Warfare Statist intellectuals (e.g., bureaucrats, politicians and Think Tankists etc), we would do well to reconsider this chronocentric view. Rather, guided by Lewis Mumford’s comment in Myth of the Machine, volume I: The Pentagon of Power, we may consider that we are on the cusp of a renaissance of CCD among scientists:

Whatever the Church might say or do, the fact is that kings and emperors, from Frederick II of Sicily onward, repeatedly accorded scientists favor. Once, indeed, scientists decided to exclude theology, politics, ethics, and current events from their sphere of discussion, they were welcomed by the state. In turn…scientists habitually remained silent about public affairs and were outwardly if not ostentatiously ‘loyal’.

With propaganda and the dimming of the lights on academic freedom mimicking the (now admitted chemtrail) dimming of the skies, I find the decision of the (‘caretaker’) government of Serbia – the creation of Bill Clinton, NATO and the Collective West who destroyed Jugoslavia – to crush scientists who dare to look up from their Petri dishes to support students against corrupt government is a remarkable story. In its magnanimity, the Serbian government is allowing scientists only one hour of research per week! The Serbian government is not only biting its nose to spite its face, they are manifestly demonstrating that most politicians are threats to civil society and the nations over which they impose themselves. Yet, for all the lessons it provides, I suspect few academics in the West will take notice or even think of voicing protest in solidarity with their peers ‘over there’.

The take-down of the university will take a parallel track to what financial dissenters like David Rogers Webb, G. Edward Griffin, Catherine Austin Fitts, Richard Werner and others predict is the coming planned take-down of Western economies by: a) the grifters in central banks, especially the BIS, who print money backed by the fraudulent hypothecation of the nations people (i.e., Birth Certificate scam) and everything beneath and on the ground, b) commercial banks/credit card companies that de facto create money through credit-debt fraud and c) insolvent governments through the fraud of taxation and inflation (a tax on money)to enslave the people through the maritime/admiralty jurisdiction scam. As they are doing in Serbia, when people recognize their true power is inherent to them, and, is the source of government, they will stop the destruction of the foundations of life itself because government is servant to the people in all contract. The defence of the CCD, then, is I believe, but one of many actions in this three-dimensional plain that are an energetic counterpart to spiritual reclamation and transcendence. We struggle, after all, not only against Principalities and Powers…

Be that as it may, in the case of Serbia, the repression of students protesting the slave system erected and maintained by corrupt politicians and their paymasters in central banking is, I think, the pretext needed to fully capture and pacify the university. Why?

First, more so than anywhere else, academia is the one place where (dangerous) ideas and criticism are the life blood of a rationally disputatious community whose modus vivendi is what Alvin W. Gouldner called a ‘culture of critical discourse’ (CCD).

The point is that if academia is anything, it can only be such when doctrine and dogma give way to rationally persuasive opinions; or, to what Thomas Kuhn identified as the historical moves between ‘paradigms’ and ‘anomalies’ in the sciences. Without the open forum of CCD, despite the tendency of even scientists to treat the reigning paradigm as an inviolable doctrine, they cannot long hold out against the compelling evidence and reason of anomalies. Not so in the social ‘sciences’, however, which is much more obstinate because of the appeal to sentiment over reason. Whereas scientific inquiry can be repressed by limiting hours of access to laboratories, the hedging about of CCD among social theoreticians by ‘hate laws’ and the invocation of the ‘danger’ of ‘hurting’ people’s feelings imposes a forbidding chill no less contrary to open inquiry.

Second, with the only other exception that I can think of being the judiciary, tenure is a hallmark of academia. It is a not a guarantor of comfort, but a privilege and obligation that should make moral courage superfluous in exercising the responsibility to vigorously pursue ideas and researches – no matter how unpopular these may be with university administrators, politicians and oligarchs etc.

As with the controlled demolitions I referred to above, I believe academia is being destroyed from within. Yes, as James K. Galbraith noted in a much under utilized book – The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too – which I think is marred by too lightly letting liberal bureaucratic and corporate kleptocrats off the hook, as if they are substantively different from colleagues across the aisle, my chief take-away is a neo-Weberian one: bureaucracy, be it in the public or private sector, is a parasite sucking the life (i.e., labour and moral value) out of human existence.

It strikes me as deeply ironic that it is the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal, Chemistry World, in which the item on the crushing of academia in Serbia comes to us. The irony has nothing to do with either the Society or the journal themselves, but rather that it is with another chemistry journal in which the warning bells peeled loudly that the crushing of the professoriate is an immanent fact. I am here referring to the German chemistry journal, Angewandte Chemie, which is the flagship journal of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker. My now deceased colleague Tomas Hudlicky, a Brock University Canada Research Chair (CRC) in chemistry, published in Angewandte Chemie an invited retrospective in 2020 of his comments on the state of chemistry in his 2007 book The Way of Synthesis: Evolution of Design and Methods for Natural Products. Hudlicky committed the cardinal sin of averring the prescribed doctrine of EDI was having deleterious effects on the field of chemistry. While I disputed Hudlicky’s claims, I defended his right to academic freedom in a 2020 op-ed in the St. Catharines Standard.

Interestingly, as if to punish me, that newspaper has the title of the essay available, but has made it impossible to read. Evidently the point is to ‘punish’ me for my purportedly “hurtful” anti-Zionist writings. Then as now, I stand firm that genocide was wrong in 1945, and it is wrong in 2025. To cut through Zionist bullshit, everyone should listen to famed “Former Zionist operative and Jewish defector” Benjamin Freedman’s prescient 1961 speech, The History of the Jewish People and the World Wars,[1] and, read his uncompromising mea culpa ‘Facts are Facts’: The truth about Khazars (the so-called Jews). Too ‘anti-semitic’? Then listen to Jews themselves, indifferent to their own inhumanity and self-indictment in these clips of Louis Theroux’s documentary The Settlers.

This is the way of academia now: feelings, not facts and analysis grounded in the CCD is the arbiter for the merit of scholastic criticism and commentary. Even as I write these words, me and other dissenters to received doctrines and dogmas at Brock University – be it the prescribed doctrines of BLM, CoVID-19(84), DEI, feminism, ‘global warming’ (no wait, ‘cooling’), Land Acknowledgments, World Government and Zionist mass murder etc – are being subjected to bullying and scapegoating as threats to enrolment and the (social justice) reputation of Brock University and, in my case, the Sociology Department.

As I said to colleagues whom I invited to publish a criticism of the Brock administrations imposition of medical tyranny in 2020 – which, for the record, was known to be contrary to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Act and the Tri-Council Policy on Research Ethics – we would do well to recognize that the attack on academic freedom, freedom of thought and free speech and expression begins with scapegoating academic dissenters, artists, poets, novelists and other like free thinkers. My colleagues did not join me to repudiate scientific scientism – they thought it best not to buck the meme of ‘safe and effective’ and demurred to support the right of free and informed choice.

Where are we now? Be they on the Left or Right, a false distinction avers G. Edward Griffin, there are those in, and, outside of academia who cheer the crushing of their ideological opponents. Rather doing the oh so difficult task of setting their objections down on paper for the community of critical discourse to engage with, they take snipes in press soundbites and are gleeful when dissenters are ‘punished by process’ (a term I borrow here from a fellow Brock dissenter), are crushed by economic excommunication, or, drop dead from heart attack. The evidence is here, that through collapsing enrolment, rampant corruption in administration, fiscal crisis of colleges and universities, tenure is fast becoming a thing of the past. At least for the lucky who will keep their jobs but under such tight constraints it is an open question whether academia as we believe we knew it will survive unless the CCD is defended. Indeed, with Timothy Kaufman-Osborn’s The Autocratic Academy, we may have to confront the fact that the golden age of a ‘Culture of Critical Discourse’ to which Gouldner refers may have largely been an illusion. Alternatively, Kaufman-Osborn’s treatise might suggest there was always a struggle over academic freedom, and, we cannot fail to defend the CCD as a good in itself.

I suppose when it is their time to be crushed, unless they have temporarily escaped into the higher reaches of administration (see Stanislav Andreski’s merciless pillorying of administrators in Social Sciences as Sorcery), those who cheer the gulag for their colleagues will gladly go to the breadlines, camps or firing line for the ‘greater good’. Failing this, on the fateful day their victory in silencing all enemies of the prescribed order is proclaimed, they will, out of shear dread of wrongspeak, utter their discontent in hushed tones in the faculty lounge. With thoughtcrime on the way, of course for their own good, they may not even get the chance to do that, as not even their thoughts will be their own. Whatever the case may be, academics who believe there is a magical line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ may find that Serbia is not ‘over there’ – it is already here.

Acknowledgments:

I wish to thank my colleagues who provided feed back on an earlier draft of this commentary.