Name the Enemy with James Lindsay

When faced with a threat, it is essential to name your enemy. James Lindsay did just that in a masterful speech before the European Parliament. The enemy? Marxism. In his remarks, James methodically laid out how Marxism has infiltrated America, where it came from, and where we are heading. James is an author, mathematician, and an expert on Critical Race Theory. He joins Lisa to discuss why the culture war matters and how we must fight for freedom against tyrannical forces. Don't miss this important and substantive discussion!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I've interviewed a ton of people for this podcast, so
many smart and thoughtful people, thought provoking conversations. But this
next interview is one of the more interesting ones I've
had to date. I watched a speech that our next guest,
James Lindsay, gave before the European Parliament. I reached out
to him after watching it to have him on the show.

(00:21):
Let's just take a listen to some of what he said.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
I wrote a book called Race Marxism, and I defined
critical race theory as it really is in that book.
On the first page, I said that critical race theory
is calling everything you want to control racist until you
control it. But couldn't we say the same about Marxism.
It's calling everything you want to control bourgeois until you
control it. As we tell our children, being white is bad.

(00:45):
Being white is oppressive. You automatically hurt people of other
races by your very existence. But by the way, if
you become queer, we'll celebrate you, and you can create
a radical army of people who identify as gender minorities
and sexual minorities at seven years old.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
So the entire speech is worth watching. But what he
did so well was to name the enemy that we're facing.
The enemy is Marxism, this march towards tyranny that we
are on. You know, he articulated that threat better than most,
that threat that we face, What it looks like, where
it comes from. You might know him from Twitter as
conceptual James, but doctor James Lindsay is an American born author,

(01:27):
a mathematician, and, as he says, a professional troublemaker. He
has written six books and has been really leading the
charge against critical race theory. And he joins me, next,
trust me, this one is absolutely worth listening to. James.
It's great to have you on the podcast. I've been

(01:48):
following your work for a while. I watched a speech
he recently gave in the European Parliament, and you really
touch on the societal decline that we are facing, which
is probably the most important issue today.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Well, yeah, thanks. They invited me over to the EU
to speak about what is woke. It's kind of a
funny thing they perceive, although you know, here in America
we look over at Europe and we think, wow, they're
really far down the old socialist road way ahead of us.
And they look over at us and they think we've
gone crazy and they don't think that we They say

(02:24):
that in Europe they don't really have woke yet. You know,
men are still men and nobody's confused about this. People
know what a woman is and the race issue is present,
but it rings a little off key. So they don't
really have kind of the same woke movement, but they
do have a very you know, strong and active leftist culture.

(02:45):
So the European Union, actually a group called Identity and Democracy,
which is a center right party throughout Europe which has
some representation in the Parliament, invited me over to a
conference that they were hosting to speak about woke and
it's it's kind of making its way into Europe with
a particular emphasis on what is it and how can

(03:05):
they stop it from kind of doing to Europe what
it's doing to the United States and Canada.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Well, and what's interesting is I feel like a lot
of times, you know, we talk about these terms like
equity or woke or critical race theory, and what you
did so well in this speech was defined them. You
said at the end of the speech, you said you
came to name the enemy for the audience. Who is
that enemy? And what should people know about that enemy.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Well, there are kind of two questions with regard to
the enemy, and those questions are really who and what?
And so the who is a little bit, you know,
obviously more accusatory to start naming names, but the organizations
that are facilitating this upon us usually tend to go
by acronyms. I would name the United Nations as a

(03:53):
central actor in this story, the primary coordinator. I was
talking to my wife last night and I said, it's
almost like the transmission of the car that makes the
power go from the engine to the wheels is the
World Economic Form, which meets in Davos, you know, every January,
and it meets in China in the summer, mentioning China.
The CCP is somehow involved in these other big organizations

(04:15):
like the World Health Organization WHO, the Council for Foreign
Relations CFR. It's kind of this acronym soup of tyranny.
But the primary actors for the concerns in the West,
I would say overwhelmingly are the United Nations in coordination
with the World Economic Forms. That's the who, the what,
And that was the thesis of my speech is that

(04:37):
this is the updated form of Marxism, adapted to take
over the Western context. It you know, Marxism took over
the Russian context with the Russian Revolution led by the Bolsheviks,
took over the Chinese context using Mao and his strategies
to do first a kind of traditional revolution in nineteen
forty nine forty six to forty nine, and then a

(04:59):
full blown culture revolution to transform China starting in nineteen
sixty six. And what we are actually seeing is a
cultural revolution has a very Maoist kind of substructure has
been brought to the West using Western technology in a sense,
cultural technology, whether that's identity politics in the form of race, sex, gender,

(05:20):
and so on, whether that's literally corporate power, which is
the way that Western power really kind of operates, the
growing managerial what they call public private partnership, the revolving door,
if you will, and arrangements and agreements between big capital
and big government.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
What is the intention with this form of Marxism that
we're facing here in America.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Well, I mean the form of Marxism overall, always in general,
is to create a single global system of administered political
and socioeconomic economy. The goal is to be able to
take control over all of the means of production, and
that means the kind of physical, literal material production, whether

(06:06):
that's goods or services, but also the production of who
we think we are and in fact who we are
as people. This has always been the goal, going back
to Marx's early writings, even before the Communist Manifesto, writing
in say, eighteen forty three eighteen forty four, it was
always the goal to seize the means of production of mankind.
But it's also to create, in a more prosaic sense,
a perfectly controlled and stable system that doesn't have the

(06:31):
kind of boom and bus cycles that get out from
underneath their control. The idea is that they need perfectly
controllable consumers, perfectly controllable political entities or citizens, so that
they can have a perfectly smooth economy that operates according
to their changing whims as they go. And so that's
the overall goal, is to create a single global system

(06:55):
that in a sense is, if I might use their
word for it, sustainable. On the other hand, and the
woke movement as kind of a cultural revolution, is meant
to in many of the things that we see like this, esg.
Scoring of corporations, the strict environmental net zero policies. We
just saw the new king talking about the ESG or whatever,
the net zero protocols that he was instrumental in organizing.

(07:19):
It's law in the UK. Those are actually meant to
economically and culturally break and destroy Western civilization so that
this new culture and this new model can can replace it.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
Is that the point of equity to drive everything down?
You'd mentioned in this speech about equity. Where did the
term come from? What should people know about it?

Speaker 2 (07:38):
To answer your question about equity, first, the answer is
kind of that's the point of equity. It's certainly the
effect of equity. The question is as a side effect
or an intended effect, and I think in this case
it's actually both. I think they know that it drives
things down, and then they use the degradation that it
creates to drive more of their initiatives, because this is
how the left operates. They create problems, than they blame

(08:00):
somebody else for the problems, and demand more power to
solve the problem that they in fact themselves created. And
so equity does. My saying for that is equity equalizes
downward because it must. Because if in my speech I
gave the definition of equity and the definition of equity
is an administered socio political economy in which shares are
adjusted so that citizens are made equal. I should probably

(08:22):
pause and let people rewind and listen to it again,
because it's a lot of big words. But what that
is is socialism. That's literally the definition for socialism. It
is the socialism that was originally envisioned by Stalin that
would extend beyond economic socialism and reach into cultural and
political and social spheres to make genuine, full communist equality.

(08:43):
And so it's a rebranding and kind of fulfillment of
the concept of socialism. And it must because it redistributes shares.
It doesn't create, it doesn't build. It redistributes shares so
as to make citizens equal. Now, the term equity arose
in the public administration and administive state or managerial state literature.

(09:03):
They started to arise in the US following World War Two.
This kind of literature started to blossom in about forty
five to forty eight. Dwight Waldo wrote a book called
The Administrative State. In nineteen forty eight, he held a
series of conferences later called the Minnobrook Conferences, and at
one of these Mino Brook conferences, the definition of social
equity was given, and it was argued that the administrative

(09:27):
state has an obligation not just to consider efficiency an
economy when they're trying to determine what they should do,
say mass transit or whatever else. It shouldn't just be
efficient and economical, it should also be equitable. So they
added a third leg to the stool of how public
administration should prioritize, where that goal was to redistribute share

(09:49):
so that citizens are made more equal. Well, this of
course is saying explicitly that the administrative apparatus of whether
it's corporations but actually large nations in the West should
start tooling themselves specifically to redistribute shares an opportunity to
try to adjust for social inequality, and that was always

(10:10):
its intention. Well, like I said, that's always going to
lead downward, not upward. It always means taking from somebody
and then redistributing through an inefficient mechanism that doesn't have
actually kind of full contact with This is too abstract.
I should really simplify what I'm saying, But.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
Oh, go for it, say whatever you want.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah. So at time, so the government is what's called
a third person consumer and spender. This is the first person,
second person third person model. If I'm a first person consumer, right,
So let's say you run a coffee shop and I
come to your coffee shop and I'm like, I want
coffee and I'm going to buy coffee, and you say,
coffee cost ten dollars, and I have to sit here

(10:54):
and I have to calculate in my thoughts, is Lisa's
cappuccino worth ten dollars? In other words, am I willing
to part with ten dollars in order to obtain the
cappuccino that you make? And maybe you make a world
class cappuccino that I want sometimes and it's worth ten bucks.
Maybe you don't. And I think, now you know what?
So I have to take into account two variables when

(11:14):
I make my purchasing decision as the first person, which
is quality and cost. I care about both of those things. Now,
if it's a second person decision, I'm using somebody else's money.
I'm going to go. You know, you say, hey, I'll
buy you a coffee, So now it's your money, I
get the coffee. I care about quality, but I don't
care about cost. You care about cost, but you don't
care about quality. Do you see how that works? So

(11:35):
in the second person decision, only one of those two
variables is actually being optimized around. The government isn't even
second person, it's third person. The administrative body, the bureaucracy,
This administrative apparatus is a third person buyer. It doesn't
care about quality because it's not the consumer, and it
doesn't care about cost because it's ultimately not responsible for
the spending. They may write the check or pay the

(11:58):
bill or whatever. They may purchase the coffee physically, but
they're using somebody else's money, so cost and quality are
not concerned. So what you end up with when you
have an administrative bureaucracy is a very inefficient. It's not
even you know, if you used an individual who cares
they're processing is not one hundred percent efficient. Nothing is.

(12:18):
But when you go to a third person kind of consumer,
like a government, you now have an overwhelmingly inefficient process.
So when equity goes to redistribute shares, what it's doing
is it's taking value from somewhere running it into a
horrifically inefficient machine where it doesn't care about cost or quality.
So outcomes and inputs become sort of these abstract, irrelevant

(12:41):
entities to them, and what comes out the end is,
you know, not nearly as good as what would happen
if we had you know, tons of individual largely autonomous
consumers going out and making individual purchasing decisions, weighing out
both variables for themselves. So the effort to I know
that was a little high follutin, but that's actually a
large or you know, profoundly important reason why socialism or

(13:05):
equity initiatives are always going to actually make things worse,
not better. There's no such thing as a government that's
a first person buyer, that cares about the relevant variables
or that can be held to account properly, so its
efficiency level is far lower in this kind of schema,
so you can expect that it's going to do bad results.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
Well, I'm picking up what you're putting down. And then
of course you know, the people in charge, the rulers,
aren't necessarily subjected to some of this. I mean, you
can look at examples like Cuba, when you know, if
the tel Castros net worth was something like nine hundred,
you know, million dollars. So of course, if you're either
part of the World Economic Forum or are some of
these these world leaders. You're not that worried about what

(13:45):
this means for your general income or what it means
for you.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, of course not, because you know, you're in a
sense very insulated from all of those concerns. It's not
just having what some people call fu money. It's that
you're actually even and further insulated from anything. These things
layers and layers of insulation. So it's not really important
to you. So your little theory about how the world
should work, it's something that if you can gather up

(14:11):
the power to start to implement it, because you don't
get hit with the impacts of that, it doesn't really
matter to you. Now. Of course, we saw what happens when,
you know, people test this theory. For example, when Governor
DeSantis decided to send a bunch of illegal immigrants to
Martha's vineyard. All of a sudden, that was like the
most horrific thing that anybody could possibly have done. He

(14:32):
was like a super racist, xenophobic, something, hate crimes, you know, whatever, words,
every apoplectic word that the left uses came out. Somehow
it was probably transphobic. Somehow they were so angry that
all of a sudden, you know, the normally fully ensconced
people would have to actually deal with the consequences of

(14:54):
their policies, even in a very minor and short term way,
and to take it, you know, with public relations on
the as a result, and they didn't like that one bit.
So you can tell that they're used to being, you know,
policies for the but not policies for me. They're used
to feeling above the laws, above the effects of their decisions,

(15:14):
and they can therefore tinker around in what a friend
of mine calls perfect ideal land about how the world
should be, and then they can just kind of force
other people to live in the crappy world that that
creates while they get to kind of float above it
and grift off of whatever's happening while holding themselves out
as you know, the great moral paragons of our time. Oh,
we're the ones who are solving the biggest social issues

(15:35):
and cultural issues and economic issues of our time. Look
how great we are. And meanwhile, you have a few
of these people that are tucked within them, proportionally speaking,
a few that are just grifting for the power that
they can get out of it. They are actually into
the idea of implementing not just kind of whimsical failures
of ideas, but ones that increase the level of social

(15:58):
control in the next iteration wards, they're tyrants. Tyrants will
be drawn to opportunities like this, and we'll exploit them.
And history has taught us that this is the case
every single time, and it's the case this time as
well well.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
And we saw that in abundance and with absolute clarity
during COVID, when we were lectured to about certain things,
and then our leaders did the exact opposite, whether it
be Obama throwing a rager in Martha's vineyard while telling
everyone else to isolate and stay away from people, or
doctor Burke's or you know, Gavin Newsom or you know,
the list goes on. But you had mentioned tyranny. Isn't

(16:32):
that really what this is about, is a fight against tyranny?

Speaker 2 (16:36):
Yeah, absolutely, that's what this is. This is this all
boils down to tyranny versus liberty. Everybody's kind of looking
for the axis. Is it left versus right? Is it
Republicans versus democrats? The answer is no, it is tyranny
versus liberty. It is Some people will try to say
that it's control versus freedom, or control versus liberty. But
it's really tyranny. The goal with all of these kinds

(16:57):
of huge programs that are kind of tucked into woke
language or environmentalist language or whatever else, is to create
social control mechanisms very much like the ones that I
would go so far as to say, we're piloted in China.
So what we see happening in China with the kind
of very strict social credit system, with the kind of
neighborhoods that have these extraordinary lockdowns and turnstile gates you

(17:20):
have to pass through and scan your face so the
government can track your movement and know where you are.
All of this kind of extraordinary tyranny that you were
seeing emerge in China is the pilot for what they
want globally, what they want in the West. And so
we're dealing with tyrants whose ambitions for us are to
keep us. You know, you will own nothing and be

(17:40):
happy is probably ambitious. You will own nothing is probably correct.
I don't know that they actually are genuinely that concerned
with their happiness. They just want us unable to revolt,
and the call being unable to revolt happy just like
you know, they did with white fragility. I remember they
called you white, or they called you racist, and you said,
I don't think I'm racist, and I said, oh, that's
white fragility. Your emotion only fragile. You can't handle the accusation.

(18:02):
And the opposite of fragility in their literature is resilience.
So if you're a good resilient person, when they call
you names, you shut up and take it. Well, it'll
be the same thing this way, you'll own nothing and
you'll be happy. Where happy happens to mean that you're
not revolting, you're not complaining, because if you complain, it'll
get worse for you. And so see you look how
happy everybody is. Not a single person put that they're

(18:24):
unhappy on the survey. Everybody is still clapping for Stalin.
Nobody sat down. It's amazing they love him. Well.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
I really do think Omicron saved us from some pretty
dark times here in the United States, because I do
believe they were looking at what was happening with China
and China's zero tolerance policy or zero COVID policy, and
what they were trying to achieve there, and that was
the direction we're heading in and then Omicron kind of
deprogrammed people because all these people who looked at getting

(18:51):
COVID as being unclean or what have you, they got COVID,
and then it was, oh, you know, time to move on.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
It's not that bad.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
You know, you're not a bad person if you get
COVID as someone who didn't get the vaccine. You know,
obviously we were on the receiving end of calls to
not be able to live our lives to you know,
potentially end up in some sort of government facility.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
Yeah. I mean, so COVID gave us a very very
clear window into the ambition, the tyrannical ambition that we're
up against, and that it was willing to do not
just damage to the economy, not just damage to you know,
with failure of public health policies or whatever else or

(19:31):
whatever they did in the hospitals, but it was willing
to do damage, vicious damage sociologically and psychologically to people.
It was willing to openly, viciously to divide the population
and create an unclean class that is the scapegoat for
the society's problems, that when it's controlled or done away with, everything,
will finally be allowed to get better. I mean, this

(19:53):
is straight out of the Tyrants playbook. And yes, Omicron,
for you know, wherever it happened to come from, whatever
caused to come into being totally disrupted and dismantled their ambition. There.
You talk about a train running down the tracks and
hop in the rails. This thing came all the way
off the rails and ended up in the ditch. And
now they very sheepishly are kind of trying to you know,

(20:14):
they just recently admitted, oh, the emergencies over, we finally
defeated COVID, and they're trying to kind of salvage themselves.
But for whatever reason, we got two things there. One
is Omicron did disrupt, for whatever reason, wherever it came from,
whatever it was, being a much mild or very virulent
and completely you know, transparent to the vaccine strain of COVID,

(20:40):
completely disrupted the program. But before that happened, and even
some after that happened, we got a very very clear
look behind the curtain at what these people who are
in charge are after and what they're interested in, what
lengths they're willing to go, and how many of our
natural and inalien rights they're willing to just trample upon

(21:02):
in order to get it by setting people the most
cruel ways, setting people families against one another, with this
kind of again clean versus unclean narrative.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
Well, and you've really got a glimpse for how quickly
society can turn and how quickly friends can turn on you.
You know, family, people, colleagues, you know people who know
you. You sort of get a glimpse of how quickly and
easily that can happen in societies and how it could
lead to atrocities. Talk about how Mao used identity politics.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, so a lot of people don't understand that what
we're going through right now actually mirrors things that happened
in the Maoist regime very specifically, maybe a little less.
Of course, Mao used crises, etc. To advance as powers,
so we could compare to COVID. But when we look
at the woke phenomenon, the identity politics phenomenon, it's exact.

(21:57):
The only difference is that we're using categories relevant to
Americans rather than categories relevant to Chinese communists. And I
say that that way very specifically. So what happened just
to get little historical context of people understand how Mao
used identity politics, and why has identity politics worked the
way that it did. Mao actually took power twice. He

(22:19):
was in power, then he actually had to step down,
and then he got back into power. So there were
actually two different periods when Mao had power. The first
of those was following a real old school, genuine military
coup of the Chinese Nationalist government, which was called the
Guomingdong was the name of the party, and so that
was a military coup that was a classic communist revolution.

(22:43):
Mao took power at the end of nineteen forty nine.
He immediately in nineteen fifty fired every teacher in the
country and made them all get re educated into socialist doctrine.
He totally brainwashed him If they didn't satisfactorily get thought
reform or brainwashing, wouldn't let them come back to the classroom. Ever,
by nineteen fifty two, the entire education apparatus had been

(23:05):
transformed into Maoist propaganda brainwashing instead of education. And so then,
for whatever reason, Mao advances in nineteen fifty eight launches
this program called the Great Leap Forward, which sounds ominously
like the Great Reset, and it's a disaster kills upwards
of sixty million. Fifty to sixty million Chinese is the

(23:28):
estimated number of deaths from starvation and other things from
this program that he tries to leap China forward into
being a grand industrial economy like the United States and
Soviet Union. Some tens of millions die, the economy is
utterly devastated. So in nineteen sixty two they make him
step down in shame. This, of course just makes him
really mad because he's a dictator and a narcissist. So

(23:48):
in nineteen sixty six he unleashes his revenge where he
takes those radicalized students. And this is why I wanted
to give this preamble. You have to understand that by
the time Mao came back in nineteen sixty six for
his bid to power and launched what was called the
Cultural Revolution, which people have heard of, there had already
been sixteen years of socialism in China, in sixteen years
of socialist education, so everybody under the age of sixteen

(24:12):
years old had never seen anything else in this actually
twenty one years old, because they're at five years old
when they start school. So everybody under the age of
twenty one had only seen maoist brainwashing and their education
at this point, and so the categories he used were
socialist in kind of the traditional sense, and that made
sense before that, before he had power and did this

(24:32):
in the nineteen twenties and thirties. They actually used the
racial strife between the fifty six races of China, with
the Han Chinese being by far the biggest and kind
of a prototype of critical race theory that we see today.
But after this it's all socialists. So Mao created for
the Cultural Revolution ten identity categories, and I've heard that
these expanded later in his regime because he needed extra

(24:54):
good guys and bad guys to keep the power going.
But the original ten five were classified as bad and
they were given the color black, and five were classified
as good and they were given the color red. And
the goal was to create a system that worked like
a pressure pump to push people that were in the
black identities, the bad identities, into the red good identities,

(25:15):
and to take the people who are in the red
ones and concentrate them into more and more radical activists.
Now that should already start to sound familiar. So he
had bad categories that were like landlord, rich farmer, counter revolutionary,
so if you were against him, that was bad, bad influence.
We call them domestic extremists, I think today at the
Department of Justice, and then right winger just rightest people

(25:38):
who were right wingers. He later added revisionist, which has
a specific meaning. And so these are the bad guys.
And if you were a bad guy, your kids were
the bad guys. If you were a bad guy, your
grandkids and great grandkids automatically got a black identity and
they got mistreated at school. They were, oh, you're shameful,
you're a black identity. You need to do better, blah
blah blah, the whole kind of thing. And if you

(25:59):
had a red identity, you were treated better. So you're
creating this pressure pump based on who you are, based
on things like who your parents are, how you were born.
The good identities were a little different. They're a peasant
and laborer because it was communism. So that's a hammer
and sickle if you didn't know. The sickle is the
peasant and doing the farm work, and the hammer is
the laborer working in the factory. And then you had

(26:21):
basically three categories of revolutionaries. You had revolutionary activists, revolutionary cadres,
which is the word they used for kind of the
leadership class of the revolution and revolutionary martyrs, people who
had died for the cause. Those were red identities, and
red identities were somewhat heritable too. But if you were
a kid with a black identity and you wanted to

(26:41):
get the better treatment of a kid with a red identity,
you'd have to do something like confess that you were
against the people, sell out your parents, rat out your father,
condemn your father, something like this in order to you know,
my parents are landlords and that makes them enemies of
the state, and I hate them. And then you can
go start to become a revolutionary and they'll reassign your identity.
Sometimes in fact, they gave you a new name. A

(27:04):
lot of people changed their names, kind of like we
see with the trans phenomenon. And we have this exact
same identity politics pressure pump happening today under intersectionality. In fact,
intersectionality is just this repurposed I recently spoke at Northwestern
and gave this history that Mao's ideas about identity politics
inspired Herbert marcusa who laid down the program of the

(27:26):
New Left, which inspired the radicals of the seventies who
formed a thing called the Combahee River Collective and the
kamba He River Collective gave the idea that all forms
of identity based oppression are interlinked, which became intersectionality in
nineteen eighty nine when Kimberly Crenshaw gave it that name.
And so this is ultimately a maoist program. So you
have things like, you know, your race is bad. You're straight,

(27:49):
that's bad, you're white that's bad. You know you're a
man that's bad. You're a thin and able body that's bad.
And so you have these black identities about who you are,
and then you can do something about it. You can
be an ally. That's a good identity. Sort of, it's
not good enough. You can. When I said that you
can be an ally, I said this part in the
speech at Northwestern and I said ally. The woke people

(28:11):
booed because they knew that ally is not good enough.
Solidarity is not enough. But you can become an ally.
You can become an activist. You can you know, do
any of these things. But you can also now adopt
a queer identity. Because queer identities unlike your race, which
you can't change. You can't go Rachel doleas all yourself
and declare yourself black. If you're white. You can, however,
declare yourself pan sexual and nobody can question you. Or

(28:36):
gender fluid or non binary or trans and nobody can
question you. And now all of a sudden, you have
one of these good, radical revolutionary identities. And you get
brought to, you know, or if you're a child, to
clubs after school, like the Gay Straight Alliance now known
as a Gender Sexuality Alliance, and you get affirmed and
you get celebrated, and you get love bombed, and you
get dragged into this and you get taught that it's

(28:58):
a political identity that you have to It's not enough
to be LGBTQ. You have to be politically LGBTQ. It's
not enough to be As Aana Presley put it, she said,
that's a congresswoman said, we don't want any more blackfaces
who don't want to be black voices, and we don't
want any more brown faces who don't want to be
brown voices. What that means is you better be an activist.

(29:21):
It's not enough to look one way or another. You
have to be an activist. And this is the exact
same dynamic. This is the identity politics of Mao Zedong,
updated from socialist categories that would worked in nineteen sixty
six China to identity categories that work in twenty twenty
three America.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
Quick commercial break more with James Lindsay, Well, why do
you think the desire to be accepted is so strong,
because obviously none of these things would matter if there
wasn't this intense desire to fit in.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
Right, Yeah, Honestly, we're a social we're very very social entities.
People are not terribly good at being individuals, and I
don't necessarily think there's something wrong with that. It's literally
how we are. It is part of human nature to
seek the approval, to see ourselves and wonder how other
people see us, and to judge ourselves. This is actually

(30:17):
called psychosocial valuation in the psychological literature. To understand ourselves
and valuate ourselves as a good person or a bad person,
a valuable member of the community, essential or non essential
in the language of COVID, based upon how others might
perceive us. So it's very important to us to fit in,
and there's only this kind of weird fringe. About twenty

(30:40):
percent of the population that seemed not to care as
much about it and that will resist these kind of
heavy social pressures. So this is articulated in various ways
in the psychological literature. I've been banging a drum. I
don't know all social psychology theories. I kind of keep
at arm's length, but I've been banging a drum for
actually over ten years now, well before I started talking
a lot about woke about this theory in social psychology

(31:03):
called social identity theory. And I'm not claiming to buy
into all of social identity theory or any of this,
but I think that this concept of social identity that
we form an identity around a social group we perceive
ourselves to be a member of, and then we define
ourselves in terms of looking good and fitting into that
group very strongly, and we also define ourselves as part

(31:23):
of that in not liking those people who are outside
of that group. And so if we think of this
as a natural human tendency and one that can therefore
be driven like virtually any other one to access into madness,
I think we can see where this kind of desire
to fit in and identify through the class, especially when
it's hard to stand out, which I think is a

(31:43):
very important lesson and point in our present environment becomes
very strong and I think that it's the communists who
are oriented in the idea of developing literally a class consciousness,
whether that's economic class, racial class, sexual class, whatever. They
want you to be very conscious of which class you're
in and what it means to be in class solidarity.

(32:05):
They want you to think of yourself as a member
of a class before they think of you yourself as
a person. They even say that, By the way, Crenshaw
says that in our big paper called Mapping the Margins
about intersectionality, she says that there's a fundamental difference between
I'm a person who happens to be black and the
statement I am black. She says that the first one
makes a mistake of striving for personhood first, this idea

(32:28):
that there's this universal person you can be and you
happen to be some other category, whereas I am black,
she says, admits that that category is imposed upon you
and adopts the identity as what she calls a discourse
of resistance, which is obviously divisive. So they literally want
you to think in terms of class. They don't want

(32:49):
you to think in terms of individual and so they
can exacerbate that tendency to social identity, flare it up,
and start turning it to kind of very zealous ends.
We see with this kind of activism and people just
screaming their heads off trans women or women, which is
like a rallying cry around the idea of whatever it

(33:09):
means to be trans as a class. But I think
it's humans are this way now. Just if I might ramble,
I said, it's when it's harder to stand out as
an individual, this becomes maybe more poignant, and that's important today.
We'll think about this like when you when we were kids.
I mean, maybe you're a lot younger than I'm. Probably
you are, I don't know, thirty eight, Okay, so we're close.
So when we were kids.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Appreciate that though, yeah, but certainly.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
When our parents were kids, right, So when our parents
were kids. This is unequivocal. If you say, picked up
the guitar and decided to play guitar, and you got
okay at the guitar, and you play maybe at church
or whatever, and you're like, wow, you know, you're the
least is great at guitar. You know, you're like a
big deal because you're great at guitar, and then you
get to go off to the state and you find
out that actually you're not that good at guitar. There's

(33:53):
these amazing other people ever, but you were like the
bee's knees And when you come home, you kind of
this nostalgic, you know, not real image, but you're still
the great guitarist of you know, po Dunk QSA, right,
and you're competing against that kind of local neighborhood. But
now you're competing against people on YouTube who do things
that I'm almost positive aren't humanly possible. I've watched some

(34:15):
of these guitarists or the gymnasts or the athletes on
the internet. I you know, it was a big thing
ten years ago. I'd watched these videos. My friend and
I like, let's go watch some motivational videos. Then we'll
go work out or whatever. And we'd watch them and
I started to notice and I said to him when
I was like, these are demotivational, Like I'm never going
to be able to do that, Like I just am fat.
There's no way that's happening. Like I'm never going to

(34:35):
climb a pole like that and stick off like a flag.

Speaker 1 (34:38):
Well not with that attitude, that's what he said.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
But the truth is, I think it's just real, right
like I was in my thirties, like this isn't going
to happen. And so think about being like sixteen years
old and you've just picked up a guitar or whatever
for the first time, and you jump on YouTube and
there's all these tutorials and there's all these guys that
are so good at it, and you're super inspired, and

(35:00):
you figure out real quick that it's hard to play
a guitar at first, and yeah, there's great lessons, but
you're definitely never going to be like Alexander Misco or
no time soon, or you know, one of these guys
that you're watching that does these amazing things that inspired
you to pick it up in the first place. So
I think it makes it harder for people to feel
like they're standing out when they're competing not with their

(35:20):
town or the school or you know, the church, but
now they're competing against Instagram, which I think that this
is a I mean, we're tangential to kind of the
big point, but I think this matters with understanding why
so many young people are so susceptible to feeling like
they have to identify as something completely ridiculous like their

(35:41):
skin color or their genitals or something in order to
feel value.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
Well, you know, I agree in this sense of you know,
social media is what is sort of pushing this desire
to be accepted and also defining what is acceptable and
what is not, which too many young people are obviously
adhering to. You got into this a little bit, but
you know, there are obviously numerous quotes, numerous examples of
name the dictator who has highlighted how the youth are

(36:10):
important to controlling societies. Talk about a little bit further
with some of this trans issue, I worry that it's
a mechanism and a means to try to turn young
people against their parents.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
It is, I mean, it certainly is. I'm sure it
has a multitude of uses, Like the pharmaceutical industry is
not crying about what's going on in the trans phenomenon
in any way whatsoever because they're making crazy money off
of it. But it certainly is a mechanism used to
is the same as MAO. So we're going to dip
back to MAO with that, which the goal with Mao

(36:43):
was that he had to overcome Confucian society, and like
rule numro uno in Confucian society is you know, thou
shalt not disgrace thy father. If you had to kind
of lay it down your father is like the you
never would insult your father. You would always try to
save face for your father. And so the goal was
very often say your father was what he called a

(37:05):
landlord or a bad influence or whatever, so he's got
a black identity. They give you a black identity. The
goal was to get you to denounce your father, which
is like a sin like throwing away your religion. In
the West, it'd be like blaspheming Christ if you're a Christian,
to denounce your father in Confucian society, and so this
wasn't something that was extremely emotional, extremely powerful, but the

(37:26):
goal was to split families if they the Confucian family
organization was so strong and tight. And then the reports
of people who went through the brainwashing programs in China
and the revolutionary universities say Robert Lifton has written about
with many case studies. He says a lot of the
times it was actually family piety and family love that

(37:48):
stopped people from getting fully brainwashed into becoming communists under
now and fleeing, you know, to the West or Taiwan
or Hong Kong or somewhere else to get away because
that family is so powerful, and so Maw knew that,
and so he knew he had to break that apart,
and his identity politics were designed to give you reasons
to denounce your family. And now the same thing here.

(38:09):
The goal with the trans if you can pressure kids
into these sexualities, first of all, it becomes extremely important
to them. It's tapping into something very powerful in what
it means to be human. But then you tell your parents,
and they are first primed to believe they're told, they're
groomed to believe that their parents will reject them when
they do this, and then their parents often are at

(38:30):
least confused pan sexual what is that? Or they make
fun of them, or they tease them or whatever. And
this is designed to put wedges between children and their parents.
This is one hundred percent designed to do that, and
it's a very sophisticated mechanism they used. It's also maliced
because what they're trying to do is to get you.
The reason they want to wedge away from the family,

(38:52):
is that the family pulls them, would pull somebody away
from the cult. They want you to be in the cult,
and your family is a competitive that they have to destroy.
And so Mao framed this out with a formula he
said he created in nineteen forty two, which is called
unity criticism Unity. I think I talked about that in Europe.
He said that you start by creating the desire for unity,

(39:15):
the desire to fit in, the desire to in our
current parlance, belong. You want to make the environment inclusive,
so you want people to feel like they're included, and
then you engage in criticism and struggle. So that's the
middle part. After the people desire for belonging or unity,
you then induce criticism. The reason we don't have unity.

(39:35):
We would have unity, but some of you in here
are transphobic, so our trans friends can't feel included, they
don't feel like they belong. So you have to fix
your transphobia so that everybody feels like they can belong.
And maybe you need to know some trans people. Maybe
you need to come to the club after school. Maybe
you need to form a gay straight alliance and get
to form what they call in the literature relationship allyship,

(39:56):
maybe you need to dip your toes in yourself to
ask yourself the questions. But you also need to criticize
your own transphobia, find out what's stopping you, et cetera.
And if that's your family's, you've got to criticize your
family too. And then what MoU says is on the
other side of his formula is you have what he
says unity on a new basis according to a new
standard that he called for him socialist discipline. But we

(40:18):
call a inclusive environment or inclusive school or inclusive society.
So we're going to have a new basis on sustainability
and inclusion to be more kind of complete to the
whole program. And it's the exact same model though, and
trans as any of the actually gender and sex stuff
is a very profound and powerful way to create very

(40:41):
dramatic wedges between children and their parents, and they have
to because the goal is to bring you into a
political activism cult that's meant to overthrow society, and the
family is literally standing in the way of that.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
Well, what worries me as well is this all seems
to be coming at a time when critical thinking seems
to be on the decline as well, whether it be
because of the access and the ease of information with
everything being accessible online, or just lack of educations today's schools.
You know, there does seem to be a decline of
just critical thinkers in America.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
Well, I think that there's a war against critical thinking,
and I think that we can actually trace that. We
can see it in the literature. Our education system uses
that phrase critical thinking a lot, but they're using it
in a quite disingenuous way because what they're doing is
they're conflating the idea of critical thinking with the idea
of critical theory through the word critical, which they are

(41:35):
using in two ways at once. So they can pull
this trick. They'll often say that we have to, you know,
enhance thinking critically or critical thought, but what they actually
mean is criticism. And there's a paper that's really actually
explicit about this that was published by a fairly influential
education theorist and whiteness scholar by the name of what

(41:57):
was her name, Alison Bailey. She published it in Hypatia
in two thousand and seventeen or eighteen seventeen. I think
it's The paper is about a concept she invented called
privilege preserving epistemic pushback, which is a lot of words
that makes it really easy to find. If you want
to go find this article yourself, you can type in
privilege preserving epistemic pushback Bailey and you'll find it. So
Alison Bailey writes this paper, but she has this couple

(42:19):
of paragraphs and she says explicitly in them that critical
theory and critical thinking are not the same thing. And
she says it explicitly in the context of education that
critical education or critical pedagogy as she calls it, is
not the same thing as critical thinking. And she says,
here's what critical thinking is. It's about caring about things

(42:41):
like she's a philosopher, so the vocabulary is challenging, but
she says, it's caring about things like epistemic adequacy, knowing
what you know and how you know it. It's about
soundness and validity of arguments. It's about weighing the evidence.
It's about stepping back and you know, analyzing things objectively.
And she says the critical theory or critical pedagogy the

(43:01):
approach to education that is overwhelmingly dominant in our country
and has been now at least since the nineties, by
the way, so this is why the kids are not
so good at critical thinking. That they're not doing critical
thinking or training critical thinking, they're learning critical theory. And
she says that has a completely different set of assumptions.
It's based in what she says. She explicitly says the
neo Marxist Frankfurt school approach, and it is explicitly neo Marxist,

(43:25):
and it doesn't teach you to try to understand in
what we normally think of as a critical thinking way.
It teaches you instead to analyze power structures and how
power structures are used to maintain people's power, privilege, and
advantage unfairly and unjustly, thus to create and perpetuate injustices.
She says that explicitly, and that what she's arguing for
is a shift away in education from the idea of

(43:48):
critical thinking evidence, you know, soundness and validity of arguments,
logical reasoning, and toward critical theory, which is analysis of
power and how it generates and maintains social advantages that
are unjust. And she says that she had one of
the reasons that the shift is necessary, is it critical
thinking itself is invoked in order to maintain power. In

(44:11):
other words, she's doing a critical theory analysis of critical
thinking and says that if we teach kids critical thinking,
what they're going to do. This is why it's called
privilege preserving epistemic pushback is when you say something to
them about racism or transphobia or whatever else, they'll use
critical thinking and say, maybe that's not logical. And what
they're actually doing, in her kind of demented worldview, is

(44:32):
defending what she calls their epistemic home turf. They don't
want to let go of their power. They aren't saying
it's not logical because it's really not logical. They're saying
it's not logical because they want to stay transphobic and racist.
And that's actually what she says explicitly in that paper.
So if we take that for granted, and we take
another Marxist education theorist, Isaac Gotdisman from Iowa State University

(44:54):
at his word. He says that by nineteen ninety two
our colleges of education were completely connected to and promoting
critical pedagogy, then we can see exactly why critical thinking
has been on the decline. Where they tell us. We
have whitewashed education because they want to teach CRT to
fix that allegedly. The fact is we have red washed education.

(45:15):
We have education that's been washed over in communist revisionism,
leaving out the history of communism and its atrocities, leaving
out what communism is and why it's a problem, and
also teaching critical theory in place of critical thinking, so
that critical thinking can't be used to stop the critical theory,
which again Bailey made that explicit in this paper about education,

(45:39):
written and publishing a high ranking feminist philosophy journal just
five six years ago.

Speaker 1 (45:45):
Quick commercial break more with James Lindsay. James, how do
you define woke?

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Having critical consciousness? So woke, obviously is a slaying term
that means woke up right or awake? And what are
you awake to a different consciousness of the world. So,
when you are unconscious and asleep, you're unconscious. When you
are awake, you are conscious. You have consciousness or your
consciousness has awakened, and so it refers to having what
they call critical consciousness. Well, this thing I just discussed,

(46:15):
called critical pedagogy, is defined specifically as education designed to
raise critical consciousness. It was created original. The term originates
for the most part with an educator from Brazil who
was a Marxist by the name of Palo Ferrari, and
Poalo Ferrari wrote a book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
And when I cited Goddessman a moment ago, it's specifically

(46:35):
Palo Ferrari's Pedagogy of the Oppressed that he said, by
nineteen ninety two had achieved its current place and status,
which is to say that it is in pride of
place everywhere. And so that's where that actual date and
remark came from. Is that the idea of using education
to do critical consciousness raising in that critical consciousness is

(46:57):
itself being woke. So, in other words, or education has
been retooled to be woke, has been firmly established in
college colleges of education since nineteen ninety two, is historically grounded.
What it actually means, according to Ferrari, to be critically conscious,
in other words, to be woke, is that you understand
that the very terms of society are in fact corrupted

(47:17):
with the power dynamics of society. And so what you
have to do is learn to understand that every context
that you're in contains the various dehumanizing forms and what
he calls domesticating modes of being and learning, and they
have to be called out or denounced, as he puts it.
This is where this is parallel to where Mouse said

(47:39):
that the young people had to be awakened to a
socialist consciousness and destroy the four olds of society, which
is what they went around doing. So what it would
be is that racism's contained in everything, and it's your
job to learn to be able to see that and
call it out. Transphobia is contained in everything, and it's
your job to learn to be able to see where
it's hidden and call it out. And that's why we

(47:59):
see so many young people, especially in Brooklyn journalist jobs,
writing why air is racist, why trains are somehow transphobic,
why going outside is racist. It's because they've been trained
to have critical consciousness. And critical consciousness means believing that
the world is organized in this way. And whether we

(48:19):
pin that on Frairi, who is I think the progenitor
of the concept of certainly the first really big promoter
of the concept of critical consciousness and the idea that
education is geared for it, or we give it to
Max Horkheimer, who created critical theory. He said he created
the critical theory specifically because, in his view, the very

(48:41):
terms that society has written on in every sense, social, legal, etc.
Are corrupted by the systems of power, and therefore an
ideal society, he said, cannot be expressed on the terms
of the existing society. All we can do is identify
the problems in the existing society and denounce them. That's

(49:01):
what being woke is about, is thinking that there's a
the whole of society is corrupted by all of these
systemic evils, and that you can be trained to see
them and call them out. Marcusa another Herbert Marcusa, another
critical theorist from the mid part of the last century,
said very explicitly that the ideal society is contained within

(49:23):
the existing society. So if you can criticize all of
the excess off the outside, all the racism, transphobia, et cetera,
then the ideal society can emerge and blossom and fill in.
It's in there, but we've got to carve the racism off, etc.
It's almost like a sculptor, right, you have a statue
and starts as a block of marble. You want to
make it into a lion or something. So you get

(49:46):
a chisel and a hammer and you chip chip, chip, chip,
chip away, and it starts to look more and more
like a lion. And the sculptor says, well, I didn't
carve the lion. The lion was in there, and I
removed all the excess. They think that all these bad
things like racism and sexism and so on are the excess,
and if they can just carve those away, the perfect
society will be in the middle the lion. But in
their mythology, it's actually the myth of Pygmalion. If you

(50:08):
go back to the Greeks, the statue, when made perfect,
the existing society will come alive and the gods will
grant it life and it will live its own life. This,
of course, is fiction. So what happens is they think
that they must not have got the statue perfect, and
they carve off more things, and they carve off more
things until there's nothing left. And that's why it's inherently destructive,

(50:29):
because the statue is never going to come to life.
But I've digressed quite a bit, but that's what woke means.
Woke means believing all that woke means believing that we
could have a perfect society if we just carved off
everything that is a problematic racism, sexism, and so on,
by learning to see it in everything and calling out
how it manifests, and handing over power to the people

(50:51):
who understand that, allegedly, because otherwise we'll just repeat the
same patterns.

Speaker 1 (50:57):
But some people don't want to fight the culture war.
What's at steak everything? I mean, I really encourage people.
You know, people have seen. People have seen a lot
of either books or films.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
About when the Nazis took over. This is a familiar phenomenon.
We know a lot less in the West in general
about what it was like after, say the Bolsheviks took
over in Russia, or Mao took over in China, or
Polepot took over in Cambodia. Although we know more about
that because of the movie The Killing Fields did get
some play. I actually ask audiences a lot in my

(51:30):
public talks, who's heard of this? Who's heard of that?
Who's heard of the Holidamore in Ukraine? Very few people
who've heard of you know, various Soviet things. Very few
people who's heard of you know, the Great Leap Forward.
Very few people who has heard of the Killing Fields,
usually about half the audience, And I think that's because
there was a film, But we don't hear a lot,
We don't learn a lot about that. But what people
need to understand is that we are in that same story. Now,

(51:54):
we are under a cultural revolution, and what is at
stake is all of your liberty. The other side of this,
there will be very little liberty. All of your liberty
will be privileges granted for whatever good behavior or acceptable
behavior that you've demonstrated. All the freedoms that you've enjoyed

(52:14):
so far in your life are going to be taken
away from us. And we're going to live under a
totalitarian state that has absolutely no concern for us, like
we already talked about, and that may active actively hate us.
And so if you don't want to get involved, I understand.
I don't particularly like being involved myself. People ask me
how I got started. I say, I fell backwards into it.
And I think that's the story for a lot of people.

(52:35):
Other people they see what's going on and they say,
enough is enough. My friend Chris Elston, it goes by
Billboard Chris has that story. He said he heard about
puberty blockers. He had two young girls. He said, what
are puberty blockers? He said, he went to the internet
and he looked them up. Turns out there exactly what
they sound like. They are. They block your puberty causes
all these health problems. And he was like, not my girls,
not in this lifetime. This is child abuse. And he

(52:56):
started to stand up and do something about it. But
what's at stake is if you want I don't want
to go full or well and say, if you want
a vision to the future, imagine bootstamping on a human
face forever. I want to say, if you want a
vision of the near term future, you need to look
at what's going on in China with its social control mechanisms.
And if you don't want to live in that world,

(53:17):
you'd probably better start speaking up. If you think it's
going to blow over, it's not. They've invested probably a
trillion dollars or more into this project. They're not just
going to give it away, and the big entities playing
in it have trillions to win if it goes the
way they want it to. They're not going to stop.
They are all in at this point. So if you
don't want to get involved, I understand, But unfortunately, if

(53:40):
we want to be a little poetic about it in
a way that I think is dangerous. History has visited
this moment upon us and it wasn't ours to choose.
But we have to take responsibility for where we are.
This is a bid to transform the world into a
global tyranny, and there's no reason to mince words around anymore.

(54:01):
And if we don't speak up and do something about it.
I encourage people to look at countries that are further
along the path than we are. South Africa as an example,
it's further along the path than we are. Especially with
the critical race theory direction, China is the kind of
model for what the first round of social control is
supposed to look like. Whether that's through a vaccine passport

(54:22):
they didn't succeed in getting, whether it's creating digital ideas
and currencies with a Everify or whatever else they're fooling with. Now,
this is our future, and if you want your to
have your freedoms, and you want your children and their
children to have their freedoms, you had better start saying something,
doing something, and doing something prudent and judicious about this

(54:46):
something informed, starting to work together with other people who
are are kind of you know, getting their feet under them,
and doing a lot of things locally and primarily just
as long as I'm saying things people should do, bonding
with your own children and to protect them from the
fact that the state is trying to break that bond.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
I've interviewed a lot of people for my podcast. This
is one of the most interesting conversations I've had to date,
So I truly appreciate your time and your voice and
what is the most important fight that we're facing, both
in America and just society worldwide.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
Yeah, well, I really appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
That's very kind of you to say, thank you so
much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (55:24):
Yeah, well, I hope to talk again soon.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
That was James Lindsey. You know, look, I've interviewed a
lot of people on this podcast, and I found that
to be one of the more interesting conversations I've had
to date. I hope you feel the same. I appreciate
you guys listening to the show every Monday and Thursday,
but you can listen throughout the week. Give us a review,
Give us a rating. On Apple Podcast love looking at
those What do you think? John Cassio, my producer, for

(55:52):
putting the show together. Until next time

Speaker 2 (56:00):
You