In our July 2025 special issue, Julian Strube and I noted that calls to scrutinize potential connections between esotericism scholarship and the far right had so far been met with pushback.1 Sedgwick’s and Piraino’s response illustrates some of what we noted there.

Sedgwick and Piraino primarily take aim at Strube, but apparently have nothing to say about the facts at the core of his heavily footnoted article.2 Instead, they accuse the author of lacking ‘courtesy’, ‘implying’ things, and of almost ‘smearing’ colleagues.3 It must be stressed that these are not aimed at any concrete arguments Strube actually expressed in his text, but at views that are imputed to him based on advanced exegesis of how many persons are required for a plural ending or the meaning of the term “obscured”. Unfortunately, the bulk of the response thus confirms our observation that critique in this area tends to be evaded rather than engaged with.4