Professor Pedro Domingos, comes to mind. He's been fighting them lately through twitter (@pmddomingos). They've tried to ruin his career by reporting him to his employer, IIRC. But yes, unfortunately, academics rarely get involved for obvious reasons. This reminds me of the Intelligent Design, Creationism, "Teach the controversy" etc debate from the late 2000s, during Richard Dawkins' God Delusion era. It's amazing how everything changed.

The Facct (Fairness, Accountability and Transparency) conference ended recently (https://facctconference.org/). it might be a good start to find different research contributions.

Even if LeCun is totally right, he was a fool for allowing himself to be drawn to the center of such a debate.

Serious academics flee from such topics for good reason. See for example Eugenics.

So nobody should ever be the fool? You’re describing a world where people are afraid to speak academically about things that matter.

LeCun is quoted twice in this article and the quotes are logically inconsistent with each other. So he can't be right, unless you just pick one.

And since they're positive claims we can't know either of them are right without evidence, which is not provided.

The statements are logically consistent. You're incorrectly assuming he meant "only" in the first statement.

Those two statements are part of the same thread and LeCun makes it more clear in that thread. And the article says, right after the second statement: "If you read that thread, you’ll see that LeCun seems well aware of everything I’ve laid out in this post"