The Strauss cult may be mostly dead in political science departments, but it lives on on Twitter/X. Predictably, my saying out loud what philosophers always say about the “master” riled up the faithful on social media. A highlight was someone named Alex Priou, who teaches at the University of Austin (not the real university in Austin, but this one), who offered as a mocking example of my “rigorous scholarship” that the publisher misspelled Nietzsche on the cover of one edition of my 2002 book. Seriously. (This response to this silly man was apt.)

Even more amusing was the appearance after more than 20 years of a still wounded member of the Strauss cult, this one not even pretending to be a scholar, namely Rob Light. Mr. Light reports:

I remember, too, Leiter once saying “all one has to do to see the mediocrity of Straussian scholarship compared to analytic philosophy is read Bloom’s essay on the Republic, & then read Julia Annas’s” – well I did, & JA’s was utterly inferior.

The less they know, the less they know it.

UPDATE: A philosopher at a top department writes:

Thanks for fighting the good fight against the Straussians!

I don’t know if you’re aware but the new Civics schools (Florida, UT, UNC, Ohio State, Tennessee, etc) are hiring a ton of Straussians. Straussianism is very much alive on the right as a political movement….[W]hile I of course agree with you about the intellectual merits here, I think you may be understating how alive it is in the movement to remake the humanities from the right (hence Oliver Traldi’s timely (in my view) essay).

ANOTHER: A reader points out that Mr. Priou went straight from his rapier wit to the gutter, digging up events from a decade ago to defame me. Classy character, but about what I’ve grown to expect from folks whose lives revolve around social media rather than actual professional accomplishment.