alt Hacker NewsI'm not the person you replied to, but I assume it was more of an overly broad generalization than an intentional attempt at "myth-building".
A lot (but yes, not all) of that research is publicly funded and then locked away behind corporate paywalls.
JSTOR is a major repository of twentieth-century humanities publications. When these come from the US, they are usually privately funded research. HN is dominated by a STEM crowd that tends to think only about that scholarship, which is often publicly funded, but in a discussion like this one needs a good familiarity with what JSTOR is and what it contains.