Name the Enemy with James Lindsay

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.

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 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.

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.

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 they stop it from kind of doing to Europe what it's doing to the United States and Canada.

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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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. 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. 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 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

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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.

these these world leaders. You're not that worried about what this means for your general income or what it means for you.

to you. So your little theory about how the world should work, it's something that if you can gather up 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 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 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, 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 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

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.

it's really tyranny. The goal with all of these kinds 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 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 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. 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 unhappy on the survey. Everybody is still clapping for Stalin. Nobody sat down. It's amazing they love him. Well.

and then it was, oh, you know, time to move on.

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 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, 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,

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 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.

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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.

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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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.

out that actually you're not that good at guitar. There's 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 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 climb a pole like that and stick off like a flag.

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 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 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

skin color or their genitals or something in order to feel value.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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

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.

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, written and publishing a high ranking feminist philosophy journal just five six years ago.

they call critical consciousness. Well, this thing I just discussed, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 who understand that, allegedly, because otherwise we'll just repeat the same patterns.

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, 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 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. 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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.