From a woke perspective, “expert” is a status for selected individuals one can trust. These are often representatives from science, media, or civil society. Since woke activists have already infiltrated many universities, woke discourses are often dominant there, also because critics remain silent out of fear of social, media, or professional disadvantages (see New Left).155 Many woke experts are rhetorically skilled and support each other with networks in which they mutually reference one another. Using such networks, non-woke viewpoints are denounced as “unscientific” or “populist”. Anyone who contradicts anyway is portrayed as a lone voice discrediting an allegedly existing consensus. Dissenters are to be ignored as alleged lone voices to avoid a so-called “false balance” against the allegedly inevitably correct consensus.156
Woke activists often demand “trusting science” on all issues.157 It is not grassroots democratic consent that should legitimise political decisions but an allegedly non-partisan scientific consensus. With the so-called “Grievance Studies Affair”, critics proved how easily fabricated theses can be published as scientific expertise.158 The often low validity of academic theses proclaimed by activists as an alleged consensus increasingly threatens the seriousness of university operations. Therefore, the theses of alleged experts should be treated with caution; especially when authority arguments distract from substantive arguments and lack democratic legitimacy.
The list of influential activist academics is long; in the German context, networks around Naika Foroutan and Karim Fereidooni are exemplary.159160 How strongly scientific expertise can be shaped by activism is rarely conveyed to the public.161