The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 104 One of the most famous and most evil techniques of Maoist Marxism is the "struggle session" (dòuzhēng, 鬥爭; or pīpàn dòuzhēng, 批判鬥爭, “critical struggle”; or sometimes just pīdòu, 批鬥; also called “denunciation” sessions). They were made famous during Mao's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but they were utilized in the Chinese thought-reform (xǐnǎo, 洗脑, lit. "wash brain" or brainwashing) prisons starting in the early 1950s under the CCP. Th...
Dec 27, 2022•2 hr 26 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 103 What the F is Social-Emotional Learning? It's a serious question. Behind all the flowery language is a history, and that history demands looking at. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and its chief lobbying organization, CASEL (the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning) emerged in the mid-1990s from a place called the Fetzer Institute. What is the Fetzer Institute, though? Created by a twentieth century radio magnate na...
Dec 19, 2022•2 hr 58 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 102 Education has been stolen from our society and from our kids. This should be intolerable. Doing something about it, as we're learning, requires understanding how this robbery has occurred and how it keeps running. Fortunately, that's comprehensible and can be summarized in a single short sentence: our kids go to Paulo Freire's schools. You may not know who Paulo Freire was, but his theory of education (critical pedagogy, as it came to be...
Dec 09, 2022•1 hr 10 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 101 James Lindsay, host of the New Discourses Podcast, gets asked all the time about what really got him started in his campaign against Woke Marxism. Invariably, the conversation includes a discussion of the Grievance Studies Affair, but what triggered that? Before the Grievance Studies Affair (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/01/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/ ), there was "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Const...
Dec 05, 2022•3 hr 16 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 100 We all know academia is in trouble. In fact, we’re not even sure it can be saved. To put it simply, the university is dying. To be sure, it’s a strange death, however, because the university is in some sense going back to its roots, returning to being theological seminaries, though in a completely new religion. That religion is the transformative religion of Dialectical Leftism, and its materialist watchword in the 21st century is “Susta...
Nov 28, 2022•2 hr 46 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 27 Holistic thinking isn't just a feature of the weird New Age and spiritualists; it's also a centerpiece of Marxist thinking. For Marxists (like all Hegelians), the goal is to understand the parts in terms of the whole in which they are a part, and this is what's meant by "holistic" thinking. What Marx and Hegel mean by this form of dialectical thought is that they understand the whole, like the whole of History itself including its purpose, and you don't. Thus, they...
Nov 21, 2022•15 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 99 We all know academia is in trouble. In fact, we’re not even sure it can be saved. To put it simply, the university is dying. To be sure, it’s a strange death, however, because the university is in some sense going back to its roots, returning to being theological seminaries, though in a completely new religion. That religion is the transformative religion of Dialectical Leftism, and its materialist watchword in the 21st century is “Sustai...
Nov 14, 2022•2 hr 28 min
The Marxification of Education Workshop, Session 4 of 4 The hottest buzzword in education today is Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), but it's not just a buzzword. It's a huge program with almost universal installation (thanks to the Every Student Succeeds Act, ESSA, of 2015) and billions upon billions of dollars behind it. What is it? Where did it come from? Should we trust it? To the last of these questions, there are excellent reasons to believe that we shouldn't. In fact, we shouldn't want it ...
Nov 10, 2022•1 hr 52 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 26 Education is being stolen from our kids and our society. In fact, for the most part, it has been stolen already. The way it's being and been done is through using something that is known as the "generative themes" approach, which derives from the work of the Marxist educator Paulo Freire. Generative themes are supposed to generate particular kinds of political conversations in the context of presenting some other kind of educational lesson. In this episode of New D...
Nov 09, 2022•20 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 98 Schools all across the United States and wider Western world are rapidly incorporating Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) into all aspects of the educational experience and environment. Can we trust it? There are excellent reasons why we shouldn't (https://newdiscourses.com/2022/08/the-dark-truth-about-social-emotional-learning-sel/). Everyone seems to be pushing it, though. Not just our state and federal government, and governments througho...
Nov 07, 2022•1 hr 59 min
The Marxification of Education Workshop, Session 3 The word of the year in education and regarding our children has been "groomer," which is widely banned across social media now as a result (along with James Lindsay from Twitter for calling this problem out). In the Marxification of education, which is its remaking into a system of Marxist conscientization, schools can be said to have been transformed into groomer schools. Specifically, while the terms "thought reform" and "brainwashing" have b...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 42 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 25 With the possible exception of our would-be overlords, we all know Nazis were bad. Fewer of us, especially in the younger generations, understand that Communists are also bad. Do you understand these two movements and how they're actually both bad because they're actually both part of the same current of thought? That current of thought is progressivism, especially of the collectivist-socialist kind, which is more broadly an actionable manifestation of the Romantic...
Nov 02, 2022•33 min
The Marxification of Education Workshop, Session 2 How on Earth did education get so messed up and stolen from our society and our kids? While the critical turn in education enabled this "transformation" of our education system, the crucial piece that allowed it to happen is the work of a Brazilian Marxist by the name of Paulo Freire. Paulo Freire completely transformed education, not least by Marxifying it. That is, in addition to creating the conditions to swap out actual education for politic...
Oct 31, 2022•1 hr 48 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 24 Trauma and harm. Trauma and harm. Harm and trauma. It seems virtually everything Woke these days is justified on the back of some obviously nonsense appeal to "trauma" or "harm." Schools are arranged as being "safe and welcoming" and "places where everyone feels like they belong" in response to the pervasive "trauma" and "harm" of everything else in society. What's going on? In Woke Marxism, like everything else, trauma and harm are understood systemically. They're...
Oct 27, 2022•14 min
The Marxification of Education Workshop, Session 1 Education has been stolen from us and from our children. Yes, stolen. It was deliberately transformed from within into something that is barely education at all anymore. Instead, it's a systematic program of thought reform (brainwashing) into neo-Marxist belief and activism. How has this been accomplished? The formal name for the transformation is "the critical turn in education," which "turned" education from traditional models of pedagogy to "...
Oct 23, 2022•1 hr 44 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 97 We have devoted a lot of time on the New Discourses Podcast to breaking down the work of the Brazilian Marxist "educator" Paulo Freire, who proved to be a pivotal figure in the history of Marxism in several ways at once. This work needs to continue, so it will continue. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay offers a summary of what it means to be "Freirean" in education, following from his detailed explanation ...
Oct 17, 2022•1 hr 42 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 23 You have probably heard the quip: "data is the new oil." What does that mean, and what does it imply? In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay walks you through the concept, making it clear that data, like oil and gold before it, are not just extremely valuable commodities but can also serve as the basis for the next iteration of our currency. This has profound implications for life in the coming digital era if we don't get ahead of it now by p...
Oct 13, 2022•15 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 96 We all know academia is in trouble. In fact, we're not even sure it can be saved. To put it simply, the university is dying. To be sure, it's a strange death, however, because the university is in some sense going back to its roots, returning to being theological seminaries, though in a completely new religion. That religion is the transformative religion of Dialectical Leftism, and its materialist watchword in the 21st century is "Sustai...
Oct 10, 2022•2 hr 14 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 22 We've all heard it and done everything we can to avoid rolling our eyes now. "It's my lived experience!" as though that's evidence or, actually, even better than evidence. "Lived experience" is a particular result of Leftist dialectical thought, however, that allows them to convince people that whatever they say is right and whatever anyone else says is dumb or bad. It is, in fact, the dialectical synthesis of evidence and the Leftist phenomenological interpretatio...
Oct 06, 2022•23 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 95 We all know academia is in trouble. In fact, we're not even sure it can be saved. To put it simply, the university is dying. To be sure, it's a strange death, however, because the university is in some sense going back to its roots, returning to being theological seminaries, though in a completely new religion. That religion is the transformative religion of Dialectical Leftism, and its materialist watchword in the 21st century is "Sustai...
Oct 03, 2022•1 hr 45 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 21 Leftist thought for at least the past 250 years has taken a particular form that is not the usual form of thinking and understanding we know and love. It's something completely different. The Left, perhaps since Rousseau and definitely since Hegel, has been dialectical in its thinking. It is the Dialectical Left. What is the dialectic, though? What is dialectical thinking? In short, it's the fusion of opposites in a way that understands them from a higher-level per...
Sep 29, 2022•32 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 94 Paulo Freire is a Brazilian Marxist who is responsible for "Marxifying" education (https://newdiscourses.com/2022/05/paulo-freires-marxification-of-education/), thereby ruining it. In effect, what he did was created a Marxist Theory of being educated (https://newdiscourses.com/2022/05/paulo-freires-schools-new-discourses-bullets-ep-7/), and what this did, in turn, was create a Marxist Theory of knowledge and knowing. Who gets to be consid...
Sep 26, 2022•41 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 20 There are certain advantages to understanding not just how the Dialectical Left (including Marxists and Wokeness) think but how their thought evolves over time. Theirs is a wholly Leftist religion that operates through a completely dialectical faith. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay spends a few minutes unpacking the dialectic and how it works. He then uses this information to trace the development of Leftist thought over the last 260 y...
Sep 22, 2022•22 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 93 Redefine the words; redefine the society. That's the basic idea of "critique" and the way so much of Marxist activism proceeds. Recently, James Lindsay explained this phenomenon in an essay (https://newdiscourses.com/2022/09/three-terms-communists-redefined-to-subvert-society/) on New Discourses with relation to three key terms that allow a subversion of society: "inclusion," "democracy," and, most concerningly, "citizenship." In this epi...
Sep 19, 2022•1 hr 17 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 19 Apparently a lot of young people believe not only in something nonsensical but also specifically in socialism. I recently heard an example of a young woman talking about how all the necessities of life both "should be free" and "should be paid for by the government." Obviously, if they're paid for, they're not free, but she means that they're free for her and paid for by everyone, thus partly her, through the intermediary of the State. This is a terrible idea. To b...
Sep 15, 2022•16 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 92 We have to talk about Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). It's not the first time it's been addressed here on the New Discourses Podcast, but the full picture hasn't been painted for you yet. Social-Emotional Learning is evil and must be stopped. It isn't a nice little program to help at-risk kids deal with the difficulties of learning. It's the central pillar of a nefarious attempt to remake and control society. Host James Lindsay walks you...
Aug 29, 2022•4 hr 5 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 18 What is a woman? That's the question of the year, it seems, and we're all aghast. The thing is, almost nobody understands what that particularly nasty bit of confusion is about. Luckily, the most high-profile case of the problem, which occurred in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Kentanji Brown Jackson, gave us the answer. She said she didn't know what a woman is (while being a woman) because she's not a biologist. In other words, to know what a woman is,...
Aug 26, 2022•18 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 91 The churches are under attack, not just from without but also from within. Marxist subversion has been brought deeply into them, and they are already falling. The model for how this is being accomplished mirrors the model used to steal education, so it's little surprise that the Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire is at the bottom of it. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay picks up out of the Critical Edu...
Aug 22, 2022•3 hr 11 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 17 Woke Marxists talk endlessly about the need to "destigmatize" this, "normalize" that, "affirm" this other thing, and "celebrate" whatever they say is best. They want you to think that these things are all the same, though, and any one who doesn't take the slider all the way from "destigmatize" to "celebrate" on any of their causes célèbre is somehow a conservative (or a bigot or a "Nazi"). In fact, these gradations are necessary to a healthy society, and their boun...
Aug 18, 2022•14 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 90 Critical Education Theory Series, Part 20 This episode of the New Discourses Podcast continues a long miniseries exploring Paulo Freire’s landmark 1985 book The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation (https://amzn.to/3IJ4ZOT), and it is embedded in the broader Critical Education Theory series (https://newdiscourses.com/tag/critical-education-theory/). In the previous part, James Lindsay presented the ideas in the ninth chap...
Aug 15, 2022•1 hr 59 min
