Probably, you’ll want to listen to the debate before reading my brief review: https://youtu.be/7x6Oc1iTv3A
Here’s the problem. Russel claims he does not (and cannot) know the truth about anything, except he frequently maintains throughout the conversation to know the truth about many different (and often difficult) things, including but not limited to interpretations of postmodernist texts, where and how science has gone wrong, and that essentialism is false.
At which point Russel faces a dilemma. Either his position is self-refuting or irrelevant. Rectenwald pushes him on this, but it didn’t occur until the end (unfortunately, as time was running out), and Russel retreats by saying it’s a mere suggestion to be a postmodernist. Well, is it a good suggestion, a valuable one? Surely, he’s committed to saying it is, otherwise what’s the point? Russel also commits to saying it’s true that his brand of postmodernism is compatible with libertarianism. So the his retreat does not work; at most it only delays the force of the dilemma. To re-iterate, if Russel’s position is true, it’s false, and if it’s false, it’s irrelevant.
As for Russel’s critique of essentialism, he makes a conflation. Just because people have been wrong about what the essence of something is (or working with an incomplete grasp) doesn’t mean we don’t live in an essentialist world. You don’t need postmodernism to appreciate that; essentialists — real essentialists, anyway — admit this (see David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism).
– Pat
PS – Recently I offered a brief defense of essentialism on The Catholic Man Show: https://thecatholicmanshow.com/captivate-tag/pat-flynn/