In my other response, I have addressed purely the power-structure aspect of my comment and your reply, independent of the accuracy of your objections and commentary on the accuracy of leftist thought. Here, I examine whether your comments about leftist thought are accurate. In summary: no, they're not; the far-left, including the critical-theory-derived fields, despite having what seem to me mostly noble goals, neither align very well with evidence, nor do they have much respect for the need to.

Your key claim might be summarized as, "the ‘left wing activist response’ is usually very much backed up by evidence". I think the "usually" is at best "sometimes" and very often the evidence is poor. A couple of decades ago I would have almost completely agreed with you, but the far left has moved over the intervening decades.

If it is a contest with the equivalently far reaches of the right wing, then I agree that the left wins on points, and by a substantial margin. But on an absolute scale, I think there are a huge list of tacitly and explicitly accepted far-left positions that are strongly at odds with evidence, including those that are harmful to people in positions of minimal power. Because of this, the parallel is even greater to the one you highlighted of going with the consensus (but wrong) view, punching "down", etc..

The far-left positions that are at odds with reality (and often self-contradictory) include

* Men and women are identical save for socialization

* Always believe women when they say something bad about what men have done

* Usage of "patriarchy" to mean all kinds of phenomena that have nothing to do with men being in control (e.g. enrichment of investors at the expense of employees)

* Sex is a spectrum

* The only problem with being overweight is the social stigma associated with it

* Trigger warnings promote well-being

* Poor working-class white people disagree with the far left because they're privileged hateful racist homophobic sexist transphobic bigots

* The point of conservativism is cruelty

* Climate change is rendering the planet uninhabitable

* Narrative is a sane way to understand society-level problems

* Truth is determined by social conventions that protect the powerful, not by "reality"

* Male and female brains have no differences, but trans women have women's brains and trans men have men's brains

* Children need to be shown role-models who "look like them", but it is perfectly psychologically healthy to emphasize that colonialism was perpetrated by white people over and over to grade-schoolers.

* Personal responsibility is irrelevant (unless you're in a position of power and abusing your power)

* The more oppressed you are, the more morally upstanding you are and the wiser you are at understanding how to solve large-scale social problems (at least inasmuch as we should take "lived experience" as truth, and ignore contrary research as wrong or biased because people in that group have "presumed competence").

* Well-being is served by focusing on divisions (c.f. "intersectional identity").

* Societies and systems of government are easy to get right from first principles, so it's okay to break ("deconstruct") everything since you can build something better on the first try

* There is no human nature, only social construction

* Society does not need to be structured to help motivate people to contribute

* Quantifying oppression and contrasting it to other effects is unimportant: the qualitative status of oppression is all that matters. (You may wish to rank some oppressions as worse than others, but nothing beyond that.)

And so forth and so on.

A lot of accepted wisdom in academic circles is based not on the strength of evidence but on the eloquence of speech being used to establish a dominance hierarchy of ideas; there is increasingly little tolerance for exploration of alternative ideas, to the point where even some less far left leftists have gotten alarmed enough to support things like the Heterodox Academy.

That this is the case is evidenced by people in the harder sciences generally being left but considerably less left than the squishy "sciences".

Additionally, there are a lot of careful studies done by people of various different perspectives (mostly left-leaning), but despite new studies coming out all the time, older less-well-done studies that show big effects tend to get cited over newer better-done ones that show something else less favorable to the preferred narrative. For example, if you had to cite a study regarding whether race inferred from name alone impacted job prospects, which one would you pick?

The darlings of current far-left thought tend not to be held in particularly high academic regard within the relevant evidence-backed fields. For instance, the 1619 project is not, as far as I have seen, particularly highly regarded by historians as a balanced view of history. As a perspective, sure, it doesn't have too many egregious factual errors, but as history at best it's a companion work to a real history text...except...it doesn't say what it's a companion to.

You say, "Again, look at CRT, queer theory, intersectional feminism, anti-neocolonial perspectives etc. - these all originated in academia and came to influence society based on the evidence of their validity."

But this isn't the case. CRT didn't come to influence based on the evidence of its validity. Maybe it's evidence of its plausibility, but if you look back through the early works and the movement and you ask: who was pushing back? How did they answer their critics? You find...very little. You find thought developed in mutual support, but without strong challenge or, in most cases, strong evidence. Indeed, in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (3rd ed.), criticisms are sometimes raised but typically are left as questions for the reader to discuss, or are simply left hanging.

CRT and queer theory both inherit the pro-intellectual but anti-evidential and anti-scientific outlook necessitated by Critical Theory's commitment to activism over scholarship. One would predict, and observes in practice, that activist-scholarship produces poor, heavily-biased scholarship.

And so on.

So, no, I reject your characterization.

It's a shame, because the aspirations of the far left seem mostly pretty good (until the ideology pushes things into illiberalism and anti-humanism, which happens too often). Furthermore, much more than with the right, it's often intellectually-inspired which gives a head start in considering evidence and asking tough questions.

But the farther left you go, the less evidence-based and reality-constrained things become, and these days you don't have to go very far (e.g. the fields/areas you listed) before comporting with reality is far, far down on the list of priorities. Even if something isn't actually contradicted by evidence, the amount of motivation to test whether it's true rapidly approaches zero.

For instance, take the BLM cry of "defund the police". Nobody seemed to care to carefully nail down the details of how to make changes in an evidentially-supported way, or even get the slogan right. The countries who do policing that is most respectful of lives train their police much more than happens in the United States, and often are better equipped (not with guns, but with other tools to aid nonviolent solution of problems). Multiple studies have shown a short-term inverse correlation between policing and number of people killed, which means that even if you don't literally mean to reduce police funding, your expectation should be that if anyone mistakes "defund the police" to be a call to reduce or eliminate funding for the police, the consequence will be a lot of black lives lost. Did any of that matter? Not really, not in the U.S.!

Finally, I reject that the difference in intent matters to the outcome. "But a key difference is the intent. [...] Even if a left-wing writer gets their facts wrong, the outcome isn’t the maintenance of oppression," you say. But why would that be? If the left-wing writer gets facts wrong, any changes to policy or society will not necessarily be based on reality, which means that we can't predict what the outcome might be--it very well might be the maintenance of oppression, given that the powerful are usually the best equipped to successfully handle changes, and the left-wing is usually quite partial to change.

The difference in intent does matter to the humor value, because it's mean to make fun of people who are already having a tough time. But that's why I came up with a scenario under which the power structure really was inverted. (E.g. on Medium where it pretty much is.)