I learned during my foray into education policy that footnotes have a genealogy. When I’d read a paper I would actually go find the papers that the footnotes refered to. After a while I could detect something of a daisy chain of references.
Ward Churchill comes to mind, citing his own “work” as reference.
Excellent work, detecting a daisy chain of self-affirming footnotes. Well done.
This thread title was written more than sixty years ago when a young William F. Buckley Jr. penned “God and Man at Yale” in 1950.
Integrity is less important than the agenda, ever since.