I found my anger simmering as I read Rosen’s summary of Foucault’s thesis. Foucault was obviously wrong from the beginning and yet the American elites embraced his thought with the terrible consequences Rosen acknowledges.

Why am I angry? Because Rosen and Bari herself are part of this elite class who pretended for over a generation that Foucault’s lies were true--and wrecked America. They’ve certainly destroyed the non-STEM American university system.

A friend of mine was accepted to Harvard Business School in the mid-80s. A month later she sent me a copy of Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization”. She was a B-School student and was being socialized to ingest Foucault as part of the entrance requirement for becoming a member of the Master Class.

A few years before, Yale’s star literary professor and the single individual most responsible for infecting American thought with what Rosen calls the “playful” school of Post-Structuralism, Paul de Man, was revealed to have been a Belgian Nazi. The rising star French-Algerian professor Derrida, like Foucault of Jewish descent, rose to the defense of Paul de Man, who was his close colleague and collaborator. In the name of tolerance these people promulgated lies, Nazism and the demoralization of America’s finest institutions.

And now we’re meant to be moved by the very late realization of these successful candidates for the ruling class that their intellectual mentors were liars, and that reality has consequences? As I look around at the vast cultural, social and political wreckage for which Foucault, de Man and Derrida bear a heavy responsibility, I am not inclined to be forgiving to their eager American collaborators.