It’s fascinating though hardly surprising to watch purportedly oppositional or heterodox intellectual posturing give way to ever more naked hatred of complex and critical thought.

But the real point is and has always been to attack the institutions that foster and protect this.

For this reason, there is no amount of explaining, no degree of caution nor any commitment to discussion that will halt or prevent these kinds of attacks.

The truth isn’t the point. Nuance isn’t the point. The attack is the point. And the attack is a rote series of accusations.

The point of the exercise is to find the shortest path to denouncing any complex idea or challenging piece of research (and more importantly, its sources) as woke, PC, SJW, Marxist — or to what have been painstakingly portrayed as their academic equivalents: postmodernism, etc.

This takes, and is designed to take, no effort whatsoever. Even the basic intellectual operation of reading the offending work is dispensed with — indeed, with a flourish. What would be embarrassing in the context of a real intellectual exchange becomes proof of anti-woke virtue.

If you put any effort into combating such attacks, be assured that you are the only one doing so, and assured too that the effort — so far as your pretended interlocutor is concerned, at least — is pure loss to you. There is no chance of winning; no real debate ever occurs.

What you have to say is irrelevant, because at the end of the day (as at the beginning) you are, after all, just a postmodern SJW Marxist, indoctrinated in left-wing academic groupthink, who knows nothing and will say anything Theory dictates.

Impossible conversations, indeed.

Any hint of schadenfreude people in humanities or social science disciplines feel at the spectacle of mathematicians falling victim to the same brainless assault should be tempered by the realization that the point all along has been to wreck the institutions that house us all.