JUST when you thought academia couldn’t become more biased and irrelevant, a group of ‘academic scholars’, many of whom hold professorships at leading institutions and have been advisers to their national governments, have published a handbook for ‘navigating democratic backsliding’.
This handbook is next-level gaslighting (see the abstract below). They are claiming that it is anti-democratic that self-declared academic elitists such as them (the very people who have censored and cancelled others whose opinions they do not share) should themselves be subject to any kind of scrutiny when it comes to what they publish. In particular, they don’t believe that mortals inferior to themselves (such as the President of the US) should have any say in what funding they receive. It is especially pertinent to note that many of the authors are using funding from various multi-million-dollar-funded government ‘research projects’ to produce this garbage. Also pertinent is that one of the authors is the previous Biden-appointed ‘disinformation Czar’ Nina Jankowicz, best known as ‘Scary Poppins’ (see below).
Here is the abstract in full:
‘The Anti-Autocracy Handbook is a call to action, resilience, and collective defence of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism. It tries to provide guidance to scholars navigating the growing global trend of democratic backsliding and autocratization, in particular in the US.
‘To this end, it sets out how autocracies often follow a common playbook, built around the “3 Ps”: populism, polarization, and post-truth. Leaders present themselves as voices of “the people” against “corrupt elites”, inflame societal divisions, and undermine facts to avoid accountability. This leads to a cascade of dangers for scholarship, including censorship, restrictions on funding and research collaboration, and even violence. The Trump administration serves as a contemporary example, with policies that curtail international scientific cooperation, revoke research grants, and suppress studies related to public health, climate change and minority issues. Because open inquiry and dissent are central to science and academia—qualities antithetical to authoritarian control—academia is often among the first targets of autocrats. To help scholars resist authoritarian developments, the handbook highlights both historic and contemporary measures aimed at attacking scholars, their institutional environments, and their scholarship.
‘The handbook also sets out a framework for action based on personal risk level – low, medium, high, or extreme. This is designed to help scholars think about their own risk and purposefully choose actions in line with it. The handbook considers tools for enhancing digital safety and highlights the importance of ongoing documentation, preserving imperilled data, and creating distributed archives as a defence against erasure. It also calls on scholars to tell their stories—publicly or anonymously—to inspire others, maintain accountability and preserve a historical record.
‘Accompanying the handbook is a living wiki that will continue to incorporate new developments and provide updates on global efforts by scholars to push back against authoritarianism and safeguard the democratic foundations that enable free inquiry.’
For those who never saw it, here is Nina Jankowicz demonstrating her incredible academic credentials:
With some analysis of that performance here:
This article appeared in Where are the numbers? on June 20, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
