How They LIED for 60 Years - Eric Kaufmann Exposes the Progressive Myth (#44)
23 October 2025
With Eric Kaufmann
Global
Professor Eric Kaufmann traces the ideological system that has shaped Western institutions since the 1960s — what he calls "cultural socialism" — and explains why it is now unravelling. His analysis of how universities and public bodies were captured by a progressive consensus speaks directly to what the Cass Review documented in British gender medicine: a field where evidence was subordinated to ideology for decades before the reckoning arrived.
Professor Eric Kaufmann spent twenty years at Birkbeck, University of London before leaving to found the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. In this conversation with the Beyond Gender hosts, he offers a historian's account of how Western institutions — universities first, then healthcare and public services — came to be governed by what he calls "cultural socialism": an ideological system distinct from economic Marxism, rooted in the moral upheaval of the 1960s and reinforced through successive decades of institutional practice. Kaufmann's starting point is what he terms the "moral Big Bang" of that decade. A new moral framework, generated initially by guilt over racial injustice in the United States, embedded itself into universities, courts and public bodies through mechanisms including disparate impact doctrine, affirmative action and diversity mandates. Challenging these arrangements came to seem not merely mistaken but indecent. He traces the line from Berkeley in the 1960s through Nixon-era policy to the executive orders of recent US administrations, arguing that what looks like sudden political disruption is in fact the first serious reversal of a sixty-year settlement. The UK parallel is hard to miss. The Cass Review, published in April 2024, documented how gender medicine in Britain had been captured by advocacy frameworks that suppressed clinical scrutiny. Researchers who raised questions were marginalised; evidence standards routine in other areas of paediatric medicine were set aside; professional bodies deferred to ideology rather than data. Kaufmann does not address gender medicine directly in this episode, but his account of how institutions lose their epistemic independence maps precisely onto what Cass found: a moral consensus that makes dissent feel illegitimate, sustained by professional incentives that reward conformity. His decision to leave Birkbeck after two decades and establish an independent research centre is itself a telling detail. The Centre for Heterodox Social Science exists because, on certain questions, heterodox thinking cannot survive within the institutions meant to host it. This will be familiar to NHS clinicians who tried to raise concerns about paediatric gender transition and found professional bodies unreceptive, and to researchers whose evidence submissions went unanswered. Where rigorous, independent research gets done when mainstream institutions are captured is not an abstract question. The episode was recorded before Kaufmann published his October 2025 report documenting a dramatic decline in transgender identification among young Americans — a finding with direct implications for the argument that the recent spike in youth gender presentations owed more to social and cultural factors than to any stable biological reality. Whether the broader pattern he traces — ideology entrenches through institutions, holds for decades, then breaks — also predicts the trajectory of gender medicine in Britain remains contested. What his historical framework helps explain is why the Cass Review, NHS England's service restrictions and judicial scrutiny of gender clinics felt, to those inside the system, like such shocks: evidence rarely moves a captured institution until the wider ideological ground has already shifted.
