French postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault, whose writings have become central in modern woke ideology, has been accused of sexually abusing children as young as eight-years-old while living in Tunisia during the 1960s.

Foucault, a vocal proponent of paedophilia in his writings, signed a petition to legalise sex with 13-year-old children in 1977.

A contemporary intellectual, Guy Sorman, told Britain’s The Sunday Times that he witnessed Foucault courting young boys during his time in Tunisia when the French philosopher took a philosophy professorship at the University of Tunis.

“Young children were running after Foucault saying ‘what about me? take me, take me’,” Sorman said.

“They were eight, nine, ten years old, he was throwing money at them and would say ‘let’s meet at 10 p.m. at the usual place’,” he said, adding: “He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised.”

Sorman said that while he regrets not coming forward with the accusations earlier, the French media was covering up for the philosopher, saying: “There were journalists present on that trip, there were many witnesses, but nobody did stories like that in those days. Foucault was the philosopher-king. He’s like our god in France.”

Despite Foucault’s self-professed Marxist leanings, Sorman said that his behaviour in real life was indicative of French elitism, noting that Foucalt “believed there were two morals, one for the elite, which was immoral, and one for the people, which should be restrictive.”

“He thought his arguments gave him permission to do whatever he wanted.”

“France is still not a democracy, we had the revolution, proclaimed a republic but there’s still an aristocracy, it’s the intelligentsia, and it has had a special status. Anything goes,” Sorman said, suggesting that now “the world is suddenly changing.”

The accusations have sent shockwaves throughout academic circles, with Cambridge University reader in historical geography, Phil Howell, saying: “There’s a big potential for that to have an impact on him. Foucault was interested in sexuality and wrote about it, but child abuse is another thing.”

The most prominent biography of the philosopher, The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller, noted that Foucault expressed interest in the sado-masochism displayed in American homosexual bathhouses, however the book made no mention of alleged paedophilia in Tunisia.

Foucault was one of the first openly gay public figures in the 20th century, dying of AIDS at the age of 57 in 1984.

Foucault has been a frequent target of Canadian psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson, who has cited him, alongside other postmodernist thinkers such as Jaque Derrida, as major players in the Marxist takeover of Western academia.

In a lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017, Dr Peterson said that following the mass deaths witnessed under communist regimes such as the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, leftist thinkers such as Foucault were forced to shift their rhetoric away from classical Marxism.

“They transformed the Marxist dialogue of rich versus poor into oppressed versus oppressor and Foucault, in particular, who never fit in anywhere and who was an outcast in many ways and a bitter one, a suicidal one his entire life, did everything he possibly could with his staggering IQ to figure out every treacherous way possible to undermine the structure that would accept him in all his peculiarities,” Peterson said.

“It’s no wonder because there would be no way of making a structure that could possibly function if it was composed of people who were as peculiar, bitter, and resentful as Michel Foucault,” Peterson added.

This assessment was backed up by late British conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, who wrote in 2012: “Foucault’s approach reduces culture to a power-game, and scholarship to a kind of refereeing in the endless ‘struggle’ between oppressed and oppressing groups. The shift of emphasis from the content of an utterance to the power that speaks through it leads to a new kind of scholarship, which bypasses entirely questions of truth and rationality, and can even reject those questions as themselves ideological.”

Foucault is the most cited academic in the world, with over one million citations according to Google Scholar.

In December, Daniel Miller in The Critic magazine wrote that “it is almost invariably Foucault to whom contemporary activist studies departments trace their intellectual foundations.”

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