Speaker 1: I've interviewed a ton of people for this podcast, so
Speaker 1: many smart and thoughtful people, thought provoking conversations. But this
Speaker 1: next interview is one of the more interesting ones I've
Speaker 1: had to date. I watched a speech that our next guest,
Speaker 1: James Lindsay, gave before the European Parliament. I reached out
Speaker 1: to him after watching it to have him on the show.
Speaker 1: Let's just take a listen to some of what he said.
Speaker 2: I wrote a book called Race Marxism, and I defined
Speaker 2: critical race theory as it really is in that book.
Speaker 2: On the first page, I said that critical race theory
Speaker 2: is calling everything you want to control racist until you
Speaker 2: control it. But couldn't we say the same about Marxism.
Speaker 2: It's calling everything you want to control bourgeois until you
Speaker 2: control it. As we tell our children, being white is bad.
Speaker 2: Being white is oppressive. You automatically hurt people of other
Speaker 2: races by your very existence. But by the way, if
Speaker 2: you become queer, we'll celebrate you, and you can create
Speaker 2: a radical army of people who identify as gender minorities
Speaker 2: and sexual minorities at seven years old.
Speaker 1: So the entire speech is worth watching. But what he
Speaker 1: did so well was to name the enemy that we're facing.
Speaker 1: The enemy is Marxism, this march towards tyranny that we
Speaker 1: are on. You know, he articulated that threat better than most,
Speaker 1: that threat that we face, What it looks like, where
Speaker 1: it comes from. You might know him from Twitter as
Speaker 1: conceptual James, but doctor James Lindsay is an American born author,
Speaker 1: a mathematician, and, as he says, a professional troublemaker. He
Speaker 1: has written six books and has been really leading the
Speaker 1: charge against critical race theory. And he joins me, next,
Speaker 1: trust me, this one is absolutely worth listening to. James.
Speaker 1: It's great to have you on the podcast. I've been
Speaker 1: following your work for a while. I watched a speech
Speaker 1: he recently gave in the European Parliament, and you really
Speaker 1: touch on the societal decline that we are facing, which
Speaker 1: is probably the most important issue today.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, thanks. They invited me over to the EU
Speaker 2: to speak about what is woke. It's kind of a
Speaker 2: funny thing they perceive, although you know, here in America
Speaker 2: we look over at Europe and we think, wow, they're
Speaker 2: really far down the old socialist road way ahead of us.
Speaker 2: And they look over at us and they think we've
Speaker 2: gone crazy and they don't think that we They say
Speaker 2: that in Europe they don't really have woke yet. You know,
Speaker 2: men are still men and nobody's confused about this. People
Speaker 2: know what a woman is and the race issue is present,
Speaker 2: but it rings a little off key. So they don't
Speaker 2: really have kind of the same woke movement, but they
Speaker 2: do have a very you know, strong and active leftist culture.
Speaker 2: So the European Union, actually a group called Identity and Democracy,
Speaker 2: which is a center right party throughout Europe which has
Speaker 2: some representation in the Parliament, invited me over to a
Speaker 2: conference that they were hosting to speak about woke and
Speaker 2: it's it's kind of making its way into Europe with
Speaker 2: a particular emphasis on what is it and how can
Speaker 2: they stop it from kind of doing to Europe what
Speaker 2: it's doing to the United States and Canada.
Speaker 1: Well, and what's interesting is I feel like a lot
Speaker 1: of times, you know, we talk about these terms like
Speaker 1: equity or woke or critical race theory, and what you
Speaker 1: did so well in this speech was defined them. You
Speaker 1: said at the end of the speech, you said you
Speaker 1: came to name the enemy for the audience. Who is
Speaker 1: that enemy? And what should people know about that enemy.
Speaker 2: Well, there are kind of two questions with regard to
Speaker 2: the enemy, and those questions are really who and what?
Speaker 2: And so the who is a little bit, you know,
Speaker 2: obviously more accusatory to start naming names, but the organizations
Speaker 2: that are facilitating this upon us usually tend to go
Speaker 2: by acronyms. I would name the United Nations as a
Speaker 2: central actor in this story, the primary coordinator. I was
Speaker 2: talking to my wife last night and I said, it's
Speaker 2: almost like the transmission of the car that makes the
Speaker 2: power go from the engine to the wheels is the
Speaker 2: World Economic Form, which meets in Davos, you know, every January,
Speaker 2: and it meets in China in the summer, mentioning China.
Speaker 2: The CCP is somehow involved in these other big organizations
Speaker 2: like the World Health Organization WHO, the Council for Foreign
Speaker 2: Relations CFR. It's kind of this acronym soup of tyranny.
Speaker 2: But the primary actors for the concerns in the West,
Speaker 2: I would say overwhelmingly are the United Nations in coordination
Speaker 2: with the World Economic Forms. That's the who, the what,
Speaker 2: And that was the thesis of my speech is that
Speaker 2: this is the updated form of Marxism, adapted to take
Speaker 2: over the Western context. It you know, Marxism took over
Speaker 2: the Russian context with the Russian Revolution led by the Bolsheviks,
Speaker 2: took over the Chinese context using Mao and his strategies
Speaker 2: to do first a kind of traditional revolution in nineteen
Speaker 2: forty nine forty six to forty nine, and then a
Speaker 2: full blown culture revolution to transform China starting in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty six. And what we are actually seeing is a
Speaker 2: cultural revolution has a very Maoist kind of substructure has
Speaker 2: been brought to the West using Western technology in a sense,
Speaker 2: cultural technology, whether that's identity politics in the form of race, sex, gender,
Speaker 2: and so on, whether that's literally corporate power, which is
Speaker 2: the way that Western power really kind of operates, the
Speaker 2: growing managerial what they call public private partnership, the revolving door,
Speaker 2: if you will, and arrangements and agreements between big capital
Speaker 2: and big government.
Speaker 1: What is the intention with this form of Marxism that
Speaker 1: we're facing here in America.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean the form of Marxism overall, always in general,
Speaker 2: is to create a single global system of administered political
Speaker 2: and socioeconomic economy. The goal is to be able to
Speaker 2: take control over all of the means of production, and
Speaker 2: that means the kind of physical, literal material production, whether
Speaker 2: that's goods or services, but also the production of who
Speaker 2: we think we are and in fact who we are
Speaker 2: as people. This has always been the goal, going back
Speaker 2: to Marx's early writings, even before the Communist Manifesto, writing
Speaker 2: in say, eighteen forty three eighteen forty four, it was
Speaker 2: always the goal to seize the means of production of mankind.
Speaker 2: But it's also to create, in a more prosaic sense,
Speaker 2: a perfectly controlled and stable system that doesn't have the
Speaker 2: kind of boom and bus cycles that get out from
Speaker 2: underneath their control. The idea is that they need perfectly
Speaker 2: controllable consumers, perfectly controllable political entities or citizens, so that
Speaker 2: they can have a perfectly smooth economy that operates according
Speaker 2: to their changing whims as they go. And so that's
Speaker 2: the overall goal, is to create a single global system
Speaker 2: that in a sense is, if I might use their
Speaker 2: word for it, sustainable. On the other hand, and the
Speaker 2: woke movement as kind of a cultural revolution, is meant
Speaker 2: to in many of the things that we see like this, esg.
Speaker 2: Scoring of corporations, the strict environmental net zero policies. We
Speaker 2: just saw the new king talking about the ESG or whatever,
Speaker 2: the net zero protocols that he was instrumental in organizing.
Speaker 2: It's law in the UK. Those are actually meant to
Speaker 2: economically and culturally break and destroy Western civilization so that
Speaker 2: this new culture and this new model can can replace it.
Speaker 1: Is that the point of equity to drive everything down?
Speaker 1: You'd mentioned in this speech about equity. Where did the
Speaker 1: term come from? What should people know about it?
Speaker 2: To answer your question about equity, first, the answer is
Speaker 2: kind of that's the point of equity. It's certainly the
Speaker 2: effect of equity. The question is as a side effect
Speaker 2: or an intended effect, and I think in this case
Speaker 2: it's actually both. I think they know that it drives
Speaker 2: things down, and then they use the degradation that it
Speaker 2: creates to drive more of their initiatives, because this is
Speaker 2: how the left operates. They create problems, than they blame
Speaker 2: somebody else for the problems, and demand more power to
Speaker 2: solve the problem that they in fact themselves created. And
Speaker 2: so equity does. My saying for that is equity equalizes
Speaker 2: downward because it must. Because if in my speech I
Speaker 2: gave the definition of equity and the definition of equity
Speaker 2: is an administered socio political economy in which shares are
Speaker 2: adjusted so that citizens are made equal. I should probably
Speaker 2: pause and let people rewind and listen to it again,
Speaker 2: because it's a lot of big words. But what that
Speaker 2: is is socialism. That's literally the definition for socialism. It
Speaker 2: is the socialism that was originally envisioned by Stalin that
Speaker 2: would extend beyond economic socialism and reach into cultural and
Speaker 2: political and social spheres to make genuine, full communist equality.
Speaker 2: And so it's a rebranding and kind of fulfillment of
Speaker 2: the concept of socialism. And it must because it redistributes shares.
Speaker 2: It doesn't create, it doesn't build. It redistributes shares so
Speaker 2: as to make citizens equal. Now, the term equity arose
Speaker 2: in the public administration and administive state or managerial state literature.
Speaker 2: They started to arise in the US following World War Two.
Speaker 2: This kind of literature started to blossom in about forty
Speaker 2: five to forty eight. Dwight Waldo wrote a book called
Speaker 2: The Administrative State. In nineteen forty eight, he held a
Speaker 2: series of conferences later called the Minnobrook Conferences, and at
Speaker 2: one of these Mino Brook conferences, the definition of social
Speaker 2: equity was given, and it was argued that the administrative
Speaker 2: state has an obligation not just to consider efficiency an
Speaker 2: economy when they're trying to determine what they should do,
Speaker 2: say mass transit or whatever else. It shouldn't just be
Speaker 2: efficient and economical, it should also be equitable. So they
Speaker 2: added a third leg to the stool of how public
Speaker 2: administration should prioritize, where that goal was to redistribute share
Speaker 2: so that citizens are made more equal. Well, this of
Speaker 2: course is saying explicitly that the administrative apparatus of whether
Speaker 2: it's corporations but actually large nations in the West should
Speaker 2: start tooling themselves specifically to redistribute shares an opportunity to
Speaker 2: try to adjust for social inequality, and that was always
Speaker 2: its intention. Well, like I said, that's always going to
Speaker 2: lead downward, not upward. It always means taking from somebody
Speaker 2: and then redistributing through an inefficient mechanism that doesn't have
Speaker 2: actually kind of full contact with This is too abstract.
Speaker 2: I should really simplify what I'm saying, But.
Speaker 1: Oh, go for it, say whatever you want.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So at time, so the government is what's called
Speaker 2: a third person consumer and spender. This is the first person,
Speaker 2: second person third person model. If I'm a first person consumer, right,
Speaker 2: So let's say you run a coffee shop and I
Speaker 2: come to your coffee shop and I'm like, I want
Speaker 2: coffee and I'm going to buy coffee, and you say,
Speaker 2: coffee cost ten dollars, and I have to sit here
Speaker 2: and I have to calculate in my thoughts, is Lisa's
Speaker 2: cappuccino worth ten dollars? In other words, am I willing
Speaker 2: to part with ten dollars in order to obtain the
Speaker 2: cappuccino that you make? And maybe you make a world
Speaker 2: class cappuccino that I want sometimes and it's worth ten bucks.
Speaker 2: Maybe you don't. And I think, now you know what?
Speaker 2: So I have to take into account two variables when
Speaker 2: I make my purchasing decision as the first person, which
Speaker 2: is quality and cost. I care about both of those things. Now,
Speaker 2: if it's a second person decision, I'm using somebody else's money.
Speaker 2: I'm going to go. You know, you say, hey, I'll
Speaker 2: buy you a coffee, So now it's your money, I
Speaker 2: get the coffee. I care about quality, but I don't
Speaker 2: care about cost. You care about cost, but you don't
Speaker 2: care about quality. Do you see how that works? So
Speaker 2: in the second person decision, only one of those two
Speaker 2: variables is actually being optimized around. The government isn't even
Speaker 2: second person, it's third person. The administrative body, the bureaucracy,
Speaker 2: This administrative apparatus is a third person buyer. It doesn't
Speaker 2: care about quality because it's not the consumer, and it
Speaker 2: doesn't care about cost because it's ultimately not responsible for
Speaker 2: the spending. They may write the check or pay the
Speaker 2: bill or whatever. They may purchase the coffee physically, but
Speaker 2: they're using somebody else's money, so cost and quality are
Speaker 2: not concerned. So what you end up with when you
Speaker 2: have an administrative bureaucracy is a very inefficient. It's not
Speaker 2: even you know, if you used an individual who cares
Speaker 2: they're processing is not one hundred percent efficient. Nothing is.
Speaker 2: But when you go to a third person kind of consumer,
Speaker 2: like a government, you now have an overwhelmingly inefficient process.
Speaker 2: So when equity goes to redistribute shares, what it's doing
Speaker 2: is it's taking value from somewhere running it into a
Speaker 2: horrifically inefficient machine where it doesn't care about cost or quality.
Speaker 2: So outcomes and inputs become sort of these abstract, irrelevant
Speaker 2: entities to them, and what comes out the end is,
Speaker 2: you know, not nearly as good as what would happen
Speaker 2: if we had you know, tons of individual largely autonomous
Speaker 2: consumers going out and making individual purchasing decisions, weighing out
Speaker 2: both variables for themselves. So the effort to I know
Speaker 2: that was a little high follutin, but that's actually a
Speaker 2: large or you know, profoundly important reason why socialism or
Speaker 2: equity initiatives are always going to actually make things worse,
Speaker 2: not better. There's no such thing as a government that's
Speaker 2: a first person buyer, that cares about the relevant variables
Speaker 2: or that can be held to account properly, so its
Speaker 2: efficiency level is far lower in this kind of schema,
Speaker 2: so you can expect that it's going to do bad results.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm picking up what you're putting down. And then
Speaker 1: of course you know, the people in charge, the rulers,
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily subjected to some of this. I mean, you
Speaker 1: can look at examples like Cuba, when you know, if
Speaker 1: the tel Castros net worth was something like nine hundred,
Speaker 1: you know, million dollars. So of course, if you're either
Speaker 1: part of the World Economic Forum or are some of
Speaker 1: these these world leaders. You're not that worried about what
Speaker 1: this means for your general income or what it means
Speaker 1: for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course not, because you know, you're in a
Speaker 2: sense very insulated from all of those concerns. It's not
Speaker 2: just having what some people call fu money. It's that
Speaker 2: you're actually even and further insulated from anything. These things
Speaker 2: layers and layers of insulation. So it's not really important
Speaker 2: to you. So your little theory about how the world
Speaker 2: should work, it's something that if you can gather up
Speaker 2: the power to start to implement it, because you don't
Speaker 2: get hit with the impacts of that, it doesn't really
Speaker 2: matter to you. Now. Of course, we saw what happens when,
Speaker 2: you know, people test this theory. For example, when Governor
Speaker 2: DeSantis decided to send a bunch of illegal immigrants to
Speaker 2: Martha's vineyard. All of a sudden, that was like the
Speaker 2: most horrific thing that anybody could possibly have done. He
Speaker 2: was like a super racist, xenophobic, something, hate crimes, you know, whatever, words,
Speaker 2: every apoplectic word that the left uses came out. Somehow
Speaker 2: it was probably transphobic. Somehow they were so angry that
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, you know, the normally fully ensconced
Speaker 2: people would have to actually deal with the consequences of
Speaker 2: their policies, even in a very minor and short term way,
Speaker 2: and to take it, you know, with public relations on
Speaker 2: the as a result, and they didn't like that one bit.
Speaker 2: So you can tell that they're used to being, you know,
Speaker 2: policies for the but not policies for me. They're used
Speaker 2: to feeling above the laws, above the effects of their decisions,
Speaker 2: and they can therefore tinker around in what a friend
Speaker 2: of mine calls perfect ideal land about how the world
Speaker 2: should be, and then they can just kind of force
Speaker 2: other people to live in the crappy world that that
Speaker 2: creates while they get to kind of float above it
Speaker 2: and grift off of whatever's happening while holding themselves out
Speaker 2: as you know, the great moral paragons of our time. Oh,
Speaker 2: we're the ones who are solving the biggest social issues
Speaker 2: and cultural issues and economic issues of our time. Look
Speaker 2: how great we are. And meanwhile, you have a few
Speaker 2: of these people that are tucked within them, proportionally speaking,
Speaker 2: a few that are just grifting for the power that
Speaker 2: they can get out of it. They are actually into
Speaker 2: the idea of implementing not just kind of whimsical failures
Speaker 2: of ideas, but ones that increase the level of social
Speaker 2: control in the next iteration wards, they're tyrants. Tyrants will
Speaker 2: be drawn to opportunities like this, and we'll exploit them.
Speaker 2: And history has taught us that this is the case
Speaker 2: every single time, and it's the case this time as
Speaker 2: well well.
Speaker 1: And we saw that in abundance and with absolute clarity
Speaker 1: during COVID, when we were lectured to about certain things,
Speaker 1: and then our leaders did the exact opposite, whether it
Speaker 1: be Obama throwing a rager in Martha's vineyard while telling
Speaker 1: everyone else to isolate and stay away from people, or
Speaker 1: doctor Burke's or you know, Gavin Newsom or you know,
Speaker 1: the list goes on. But you had mentioned tyranny. Isn't
Speaker 1: that really what this is about, is a fight against tyranny?
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, that's what this is. This is this all
Speaker 2: boils down to tyranny versus liberty. Everybody's kind of looking
Speaker 2: for the axis. Is it left versus right? Is it
Speaker 2: Republicans versus democrats? The answer is no, it is tyranny
Speaker 2: versus liberty. It is Some people will try to say
Speaker 2: that it's control versus freedom, or control versus liberty. But
Speaker 2: it's really tyranny. The goal with all of these kinds
Speaker 2: of huge programs that are kind of tucked into woke
Speaker 2: language or environmentalist language or whatever else, is to create
Speaker 2: social control mechanisms very much like the ones that I
Speaker 2: would go so far as to say, we're piloted in China.
Speaker 2: So what we see happening in China with the kind
Speaker 2: of very strict social credit system, with the kind of
Speaker 2: neighborhoods that have these extraordinary lockdowns and turnstile gates you
Speaker 2: have to pass through and scan your face so the
Speaker 2: government can track your movement and know where you are.
Speaker 2: All of this kind of extraordinary tyranny that you were
Speaker 2: seeing emerge in China is the pilot for what they
Speaker 2: want globally, what they want in the West. And so
Speaker 2: we're dealing with tyrants whose ambitions for us are to
Speaker 2: keep us. You know, you will own nothing and be
Speaker 2: happy is probably ambitious. You will own nothing is probably correct.
Speaker 2: I don't know that they actually are genuinely that concerned
Speaker 2: with their happiness. They just want us unable to revolt,
Speaker 2: and the call being unable to revolt happy just like
Speaker 2: you know, they did with white fragility. I remember they
Speaker 2: called you white, or they called you racist, and you said,
Speaker 2: I don't think I'm racist, and I said, oh, that's
Speaker 2: white fragility. Your emotion only fragile. You can't handle the accusation.
Speaker 2: And the opposite of fragility in their literature is resilience.
Speaker 2: So if you're a good resilient person, when they call
Speaker 2: you names, you shut up and take it. Well, it'll
Speaker 2: be the same thing this way, you'll own nothing and
Speaker 2: you'll be happy. Where happy happens to mean that you're
Speaker 2: not revolting, you're not complaining, because if you complain, it'll
Speaker 2: get worse for you. And so see you look how
Speaker 2: happy everybody is. Not a single person put that they're
Speaker 2: unhappy on the survey. Everybody is still clapping for Stalin.
Speaker 2: Nobody sat down. It's amazing they love him. Well.
Speaker 1: I really do think Omicron saved us from some pretty
Speaker 1: dark times here in the United States, because I do
Speaker 1: believe they were looking at what was happening with China
Speaker 1: and China's zero tolerance policy or zero COVID policy, and
Speaker 1: what they were trying to achieve there, and that was
Speaker 1: the direction we're heading in and then Omicron kind of
Speaker 1: deprogrammed people because all these people who looked at getting
Speaker 1: COVID as being unclean or what have you, they got COVID,
Speaker 1: and then it was, oh, you know, time to move on.
Speaker 2: It's not that bad.
Speaker 1: You know, you're not a bad person if you get
Speaker 1: COVID as someone who didn't get the vaccine. You know,
Speaker 1: obviously we were on the receiving end of calls to
Speaker 1: not be able to live our lives to you know,
Speaker 1: potentially end up in some sort of government facility.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, so COVID gave us a very very
Speaker 2: clear window into the ambition, the tyrannical ambition that we're
Speaker 2: up against, and that it was willing to do not
Speaker 2: just damage to the economy, not just damage to you know,
Speaker 2: with failure of public health policies or whatever else or
Speaker 2: whatever they did in the hospitals, but it was willing
Speaker 2: to do damage, vicious damage sociologically and psychologically to people.
Speaker 2: It was willing to openly, viciously to divide the population
Speaker 2: and create an unclean class that is the scapegoat for
Speaker 2: the society's problems, that when it's controlled or done away with, everything,
Speaker 2: will finally be allowed to get better. I mean, this
Speaker 2: is straight out of the Tyrants playbook. And yes, Omicron,
Speaker 2: for you know, wherever it happened to come from, whatever
Speaker 2: caused to come into being totally disrupted and dismantled their ambition. There.
Speaker 2: You talk about a train running down the tracks and
Speaker 2: hop in the rails. This thing came all the way
Speaker 2: off the rails and ended up in the ditch. And
Speaker 2: now they very sheepishly are kind of trying to you know,
Speaker 2: they just recently admitted, oh, the emergencies over, we finally
Speaker 2: defeated COVID, and they're trying to kind of salvage themselves.
Speaker 2: But for whatever reason, we got two things there. One
Speaker 2: is Omicron did disrupt, for whatever reason, wherever it came from,
Speaker 2: whatever it was, being a much mild or very virulent
Speaker 2: and completely you know, transparent to the vaccine strain of COVID,
Speaker 2: completely disrupted the program. But before that happened, and even
Speaker 2: some after that happened, we got a very very clear
Speaker 2: look behind the curtain at what these people who are
Speaker 2: in charge are after and what they're interested in, what
Speaker 2: lengths they're willing to go, and how many of our
Speaker 2: natural and inalien rights they're willing to just trample upon
Speaker 2: in order to get it by setting people the most
Speaker 2: cruel ways, setting people families against one another, with this
Speaker 2: kind of again clean versus unclean narrative.
Speaker 1: Well, and you've really got a glimpse for how quickly
Speaker 1: society can turn and how quickly friends can turn on you.
Speaker 1: You know, family, people, colleagues, you know people who know
Speaker 1: you. You sort of get a glimpse of how quickly and
Speaker 1: easily that can happen in societies and how it could
Speaker 1: lead to atrocities. Talk about how Mao used identity politics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so a lot of people don't understand that what
Speaker 2: we're going through right now actually mirrors things that happened
Speaker 2: in the Maoist regime very specifically, maybe a little less.
Speaker 2: Of course, Mao used crises, etc. To advance as powers,
Speaker 2: so we could compare to COVID. But when we look
Speaker 2: at the woke phenomenon, the identity politics phenomenon, it's exact.
Speaker 2: The only difference is that we're using categories relevant to
Speaker 2: Americans rather than categories relevant to Chinese communists. And I
Speaker 2: say that that way very specifically. So what happened just
Speaker 2: to get little historical context of people understand how Mao
Speaker 2: used identity politics, and why has identity politics worked the
Speaker 2: way that it did. Mao actually took power twice. He
Speaker 2: was in power, then he actually had to step down,
Speaker 2: and then he got back into power. So there were
Speaker 2: actually two different periods when Mao had power. The first
Speaker 2: of those was following a real old school, genuine military
Speaker 2: coup of the Chinese Nationalist government, which was called the
Speaker 2: Guomingdong was the name of the party, and so that
Speaker 2: was a military coup that was a classic communist revolution.
Speaker 2: Mao took power at the end of nineteen forty nine.
Speaker 2: He immediately in nineteen fifty fired every teacher in the
Speaker 2: country and made them all get re educated into socialist doctrine.
Speaker 2: He totally brainwashed him If they didn't satisfactorily get thought
Speaker 2: reform or brainwashing, wouldn't let them come back to the classroom. Ever,
Speaker 2: by nineteen fifty two, the entire education apparatus had been
Speaker 2: transformed into Maoist propaganda brainwashing instead of education. And so then,
Speaker 2: for whatever reason, Mao advances in nineteen fifty eight launches
Speaker 2: this program called the Great Leap Forward, which sounds ominously
Speaker 2: like the Great Reset, and it's a disaster kills upwards
Speaker 2: of sixty million. Fifty to sixty million Chinese is the
Speaker 2: estimated number of deaths from starvation and other things from
Speaker 2: this program that he tries to leap China forward into
Speaker 2: being a grand industrial economy like the United States and
Speaker 2: Soviet Union. Some tens of millions die, the economy is
Speaker 2: utterly devastated. So in nineteen sixty two they make him
Speaker 2: step down in shame. This, of course just makes him
Speaker 2: really mad because he's a dictator and a narcissist. So
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty six he unleashes his revenge where he
Speaker 2: takes those radicalized students. And this is why I wanted
Speaker 2: to give this preamble. You have to understand that by
Speaker 2: the time Mao came back in nineteen sixty six for
Speaker 2: his bid to power and launched what was called the
Speaker 2: Cultural Revolution, which people have heard of, there had already
Speaker 2: been sixteen years of socialism in China, in sixteen years
Speaker 2: of socialist education, so everybody under the age of sixteen
Speaker 2: years old had never seen anything else in this actually
Speaker 2: twenty one years old, because they're at five years old
Speaker 2: when they start school. So everybody under the age of
Speaker 2: twenty one had only seen maoist brainwashing and their education
Speaker 2: at this point, and so the categories he used were
Speaker 2: socialist in kind of the traditional sense, and that made
Speaker 2: sense before that, before he had power and did this
Speaker 2: in the nineteen twenties and thirties. They actually used the
Speaker 2: racial strife between the fifty six races of China, with
Speaker 2: the Han Chinese being by far the biggest and kind
Speaker 2: of a prototype of critical race theory that we see today.
Speaker 2: But after this it's all socialists. So Mao created for
Speaker 2: the Cultural Revolution ten identity categories, and I've heard that
Speaker 2: these expanded later in his regime because he needed extra
Speaker 2: good guys and bad guys to keep the power going.
Speaker 2: But the original ten five were classified as bad and
Speaker 2: they were given the color black, and five were classified
Speaker 2: as good and they were given the color red. And
Speaker 2: the goal was to create a system that worked like
Speaker 2: a pressure pump to push people that were in the
Speaker 2: black identities, the bad identities, into the red good identities,
Speaker 2: and to take the people who are in the red
Speaker 2: ones and concentrate them into more and more radical activists.
Speaker 2: Now that should already start to sound familiar. So he
Speaker 2: had bad categories that were like landlord, rich farmer, counter revolutionary,
Speaker 2: so if you were against him, that was bad, bad influence.
Speaker 2: We call them domestic extremists, I think today at the
Speaker 2: Department of Justice, and then right winger just rightest people
Speaker 2: who were right wingers. He later added revisionist, which has
Speaker 2: a specific meaning. And so these are the bad guys.
Speaker 2: And if you were a bad guy, your kids were
Speaker 2: the bad guys. If you were a bad guy, your
Speaker 2: grandkids and great grandkids automatically got a black identity and
Speaker 2: they got mistreated at school. They were, oh, you're shameful,
Speaker 2: you're a black identity. You need to do better, blah
Speaker 2: blah blah, the whole kind of thing. And if you
Speaker 2: had a red identity, you were treated better. So you're
Speaker 2: creating this pressure pump based on who you are, based
Speaker 2: on things like who your parents are, how you were born.
Speaker 2: The good identities were a little different. They're a peasant
Speaker 2: and laborer because it was communism. So that's a hammer
Speaker 2: and sickle if you didn't know. The sickle is the
Speaker 2: peasant and doing the farm work, and the hammer is
Speaker 2: the laborer working in the factory. And then you had
Speaker 2: basically three categories of revolutionaries. You had revolutionary activists, revolutionary cadres,
Speaker 2: which is the word they used for kind of the
Speaker 2: leadership class of the revolution and revolutionary martyrs, people who
Speaker 2: had died for the cause. Those were red identities, and
Speaker 2: red identities were somewhat heritable too. But if you were
Speaker 2: a kid with a black identity and you wanted to
Speaker 2: get the better treatment of a kid with a red identity,
Speaker 2: you'd have to do something like confess that you were
Speaker 2: against the people, sell out your parents, rat out your father,
Speaker 2: condemn your father, something like this in order to you know,
Speaker 2: my parents are landlords and that makes them enemies of
Speaker 2: the state, and I hate them. And then you can
Speaker 2: go start to become a revolutionary and they'll reassign your identity.
Speaker 2: Sometimes in fact, they gave you a new name. A
Speaker 2: lot of people changed their names, kind of like we
Speaker 2: see with the trans phenomenon. And we have this exact
Speaker 2: same identity politics pressure pump happening today under intersectionality. In fact,
Speaker 2: intersectionality is just this repurposed I recently spoke at Northwestern
Speaker 2: and gave this history that Mao's ideas about identity politics
Speaker 2: inspired Herbert marcusa who laid down the program of the
Speaker 2: New Left, which inspired the radicals of the seventies who
Speaker 2: formed a thing called the Combahee River Collective and the
Speaker 2: kamba He River Collective gave the idea that all forms
Speaker 2: of identity based oppression are interlinked, which became intersectionality in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty nine when Kimberly Crenshaw gave it that name.
Speaker 2: And so this is ultimately a maoist program. So you
Speaker 2: have things like, you know, your race is bad. You're straight,
Speaker 2: that's bad, you're white that's bad. You know you're a
Speaker 2: man that's bad. You're a thin and able body that's bad.
Speaker 2: And so you have these black identities about who you are,
Speaker 2: and then you can do something about it. You can
Speaker 2: be an ally. That's a good identity. Sort of, it's
Speaker 2: not good enough. You can. When I said that you
Speaker 2: can be an ally, I said this part in the
Speaker 2: speech at Northwestern and I said ally. The woke people
Speaker 2: booed because they knew that ally is not good enough.
Speaker 2: Solidarity is not enough. But you can become an ally.
Speaker 2: You can become an activist. You can you know, do
Speaker 2: any of these things. But you can also now adopt
Speaker 2: a queer identity. Because queer identities unlike your race, which
Speaker 2: you can't change. You can't go Rachel doleas all yourself
Speaker 2: and declare yourself black. If you're white. You can, however,
Speaker 2: declare yourself pan sexual and nobody can question you. Or
Speaker 2: gender fluid or non binary or trans and nobody can
Speaker 2: question you. And now all of a sudden, you have
Speaker 2: one of these good, radical revolutionary identities. And you get
Speaker 2: brought to, you know, or if you're a child, to
Speaker 2: clubs after school, like the Gay Straight Alliance now known
Speaker 2: as a Gender Sexuality Alliance, and you get affirmed and
Speaker 2: you get celebrated, and you get love bombed, and you
Speaker 2: get dragged into this and you get taught that it's
Speaker 2: a political identity that you have to It's not enough
Speaker 2: to be LGBTQ. You have to be politically LGBTQ. It's
Speaker 2: not enough to be As Aana Presley put it, she said,
Speaker 2: that's a congresswoman said, we don't want any more blackfaces
Speaker 2: who don't want to be black voices, and we don't
Speaker 2: want any more brown faces who don't want to be
Speaker 2: brown voices. What that means is you better be an activist.
Speaker 2: It's not enough to look one way or another. You
Speaker 2: have to be an activist. And this is the exact
Speaker 2: same dynamic. This is the identity politics of Mao Zedong,
Speaker 2: updated from socialist categories that would worked in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: six China to identity categories that work in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: three America.
Speaker 1: Quick commercial break more with James Lindsay, Well, why do
Speaker 1: you think the desire to be accepted is so strong,
Speaker 1: because obviously none of these things would matter if there
Speaker 1: wasn't this intense desire to fit in.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, Honestly, we're a social we're very very social entities.
Speaker 2: People are not terribly good at being individuals, and I
Speaker 2: don't necessarily think there's something wrong with that. It's literally
Speaker 2: how we are. It is part of human nature to
Speaker 2: seek the approval, to see ourselves and wonder how other
Speaker 2: people see us, and to judge ourselves. This is actually
Speaker 2: called psychosocial valuation in the psychological literature. To understand ourselves
Speaker 2: and valuate ourselves as a good person or a bad person,
Speaker 2: a valuable member of the community, essential or non essential
Speaker 2: in the language of COVID, based upon how others might
Speaker 2: perceive us. So it's very important to us to fit in,
Speaker 2: and there's only this kind of weird fringe. About twenty
Speaker 2: percent of the population that seemed not to care as
Speaker 2: much about it and that will resist these kind of
Speaker 2: heavy social pressures. So this is articulated in various ways
Speaker 2: in the psychological literature. I've been banging a drum. I
Speaker 2: don't know all social psychology theories. I kind of keep
Speaker 2: at arm's length, but I've been banging a drum for
Speaker 2: actually over ten years now, well before I started talking
Speaker 2: a lot about woke about this theory in social psychology
Speaker 2: called social identity theory. And I'm not claiming to buy
Speaker 2: into all of social identity theory or any of this,
Speaker 2: but I think that this concept of social identity that
Speaker 2: we form an identity around a social group we perceive
Speaker 2: ourselves to be a member of, and then we define
Speaker 2: ourselves in terms of looking good and fitting into that
Speaker 2: group very strongly, and we also define ourselves as part
Speaker 2: of that in not liking those people who are outside
Speaker 2: of that group. And so if we think of this
Speaker 2: as a natural human tendency and one that can therefore
Speaker 2: be driven like virtually any other one to access into madness,
Speaker 2: I think we can see where this kind of desire
Speaker 2: to fit in and identify through the class, especially when
Speaker 2: it's hard to stand out, which I think is a
Speaker 2: very important lesson and point in our present environment becomes
Speaker 2: very strong and I think that it's the communists who
Speaker 2: are oriented in the idea of developing literally a class consciousness,
Speaker 2: whether that's economic class, racial class, sexual class, whatever. They
Speaker 2: want you to be very conscious of which class you're
Speaker 2: in and what it means to be in class solidarity.
Speaker 2: They want you to think of yourself as a member
Speaker 2: of a class before they think of you yourself as
Speaker 2: a person. They even say that, By the way, Crenshaw
Speaker 2: says that in our big paper called Mapping the Margins
Speaker 2: about intersectionality, she says that there's a fundamental difference between
Speaker 2: I'm a person who happens to be black and the
Speaker 2: statement I am black. She says that the first one
Speaker 2: makes a mistake of striving for personhood first, this idea
Speaker 2: that there's this universal person you can be and you
Speaker 2: happen to be some other category, whereas I am black,
Speaker 2: she says, admits that that category is imposed upon you
Speaker 2: and adopts the identity as what she calls a discourse
Speaker 2: of resistance, which is obviously divisive. So they literally want
Speaker 2: you to think in terms of class. They don't want
Speaker 2: you to think in terms of individual and so they
Speaker 2: can exacerbate that tendency to social identity, flare it up,
Speaker 2: and start turning it to kind of very zealous ends.
Speaker 2: We see with this kind of activism and people just
Speaker 2: screaming their heads off trans women or women, which is
Speaker 2: like a rallying cry around the idea of whatever it
Speaker 2: means to be trans as a class. But I think
Speaker 2: it's humans are this way now. Just if I might ramble,
Speaker 2: I said, it's when it's harder to stand out as
Speaker 2: an individual, this becomes maybe more poignant, and that's important today.
Speaker 2: We'll think about this like when you when we were kids.
Speaker 2: I mean, maybe you're a lot younger than I'm. Probably
Speaker 2: you are, I don't know, thirty eight, Okay, so we're close.
Speaker 2: So when we were kids.
Speaker 1: Appreciate that though, yeah, but certainly.
Speaker 2: When our parents were kids, right, So when our parents
Speaker 2: were kids. This is unequivocal. If you say, picked up
Speaker 2: the guitar and decided to play guitar, and you got
Speaker 2: okay at the guitar, and you play maybe at church
Speaker 2: or whatever, and you're like, wow, you know, you're the
Speaker 2: least is great at guitar. You know, you're like a
Speaker 2: big deal because you're great at guitar, and then you
Speaker 2: get to go off to the state and you find
Speaker 2: out that actually you're not that good at guitar. There's
Speaker 2: these amazing other people ever, but you were like the
Speaker 2: bee's knees And when you come home, you kind of
Speaker 2: this nostalgic, you know, not real image, but you're still
Speaker 2: the great guitarist of you know, po Dunk QSA, right,
Speaker 2: and you're competing against that kind of local neighborhood. But
Speaker 2: now you're competing against people on YouTube who do things
Speaker 2: that I'm almost positive aren't humanly possible. I've watched some
Speaker 2: of these guitarists or the gymnasts or the athletes on
Speaker 2: the internet. I you know, it was a big thing
Speaker 2: ten years ago. I'd watched these videos. My friend and
Speaker 2: I like, let's go watch some motivational videos. Then we'll
Speaker 2: go work out or whatever. And we'd watch them and
Speaker 2: I started to notice and I said to him when
Speaker 2: I was like, these are demotivational, Like I'm never going
Speaker 2: to be able to do that, Like I just am fat.
Speaker 2: There's no way that's happening. Like I'm never going to
Speaker 2: climb a pole like that and stick off like a flag.
Speaker 1: Well not with that attitude, that's what he said.
Speaker 2: But the truth is, I think it's just real, right
Speaker 2: like I was in my thirties, like this isn't going
Speaker 2: to happen. And so think about being like sixteen years
Speaker 2: old and you've just picked up a guitar or whatever
Speaker 2: for the first time, and you jump on YouTube and
Speaker 2: there's all these tutorials and there's all these guys that
Speaker 2: are so good at it, and you're super inspired, and
Speaker 2: you figure out real quick that it's hard to play
Speaker 2: a guitar at first, and yeah, there's great lessons, but
Speaker 2: you're definitely never going to be like Alexander Misco or
Speaker 2: no time soon, or you know, one of these guys
Speaker 2: that you're watching that does these amazing things that inspired
Speaker 2: you to pick it up in the first place. So
Speaker 2: I think it makes it harder for people to feel
Speaker 2: like they're standing out when they're competing not with their
Speaker 2: town or the school or you know, the church, but
Speaker 2: now they're competing against Instagram, which I think that this
Speaker 2: is a I mean, we're tangential to kind of the
Speaker 2: big point, but I think this matters with understanding why
Speaker 2: so many young people are so susceptible to feeling like
Speaker 2: they have to identify as something completely ridiculous like their
Speaker 2: skin color or their genitals or something in order to
Speaker 2: feel value.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I agree in this sense of you know,
Speaker 1: social media is what is sort of pushing this desire
Speaker 1: to be accepted and also defining what is acceptable and
Speaker 1: what is not, which too many young people are obviously
Speaker 1: adhering to. You got into this a little bit, but
Speaker 1: you know, there are obviously numerous quotes, numerous examples of
Speaker 1: name the dictator who has highlighted how the youth are
Speaker 1: important to controlling societies. Talk about a little bit further
Speaker 1: with some of this trans issue, I worry that it's
Speaker 1: a mechanism and a means to try to turn young
Speaker 1: people against their parents.
Speaker 2: It is, I mean, it certainly is. I'm sure it
Speaker 2: has a multitude of uses, Like the pharmaceutical industry is
Speaker 2: not crying about what's going on in the trans phenomenon
Speaker 2: in any way whatsoever because they're making crazy money off
Speaker 2: of it. But it certainly is a mechanism used to
Speaker 2: is the same as MAO. So we're going to dip
Speaker 2: back to MAO with that, which the goal with Mao
Speaker 2: was that he had to overcome Confucian society, and like
Speaker 2: rule numro uno in Confucian society is you know, thou
Speaker 2: shalt not disgrace thy father. If you had to kind
Speaker 2: of lay it down your father is like the you
Speaker 2: never would insult your father. You would always try to
Speaker 2: save face for your father. And so the goal was
Speaker 2: very often say your father was what he called a
Speaker 2: landlord or a bad influence or whatever, so he's got
Speaker 2: a black identity. They give you a black identity. The
Speaker 2: goal was to get you to denounce your father, which
Speaker 2: is like a sin like throwing away your religion. In
Speaker 2: the West, it'd be like blaspheming Christ if you're a Christian,
Speaker 2: to denounce your father in Confucian society, and so this
Speaker 2: wasn't something that was extremely emotional, extremely powerful, but the
Speaker 2: goal was to split families if they the Confucian family
Speaker 2: organization was so strong and tight. And then the reports
Speaker 2: of people who went through the brainwashing programs in China
Speaker 2: and the revolutionary universities say Robert Lifton has written about
Speaker 2: with many case studies. He says a lot of the
Speaker 2: times it was actually family piety and family love that
Speaker 2: stopped people from getting fully brainwashed into becoming communists under
Speaker 2: now and fleeing, you know, to the West or Taiwan
Speaker 2: or Hong Kong or somewhere else to get away because
Speaker 2: that family is so powerful, and so Maw knew that,
Speaker 2: and so he knew he had to break that apart,
Speaker 2: and his identity politics were designed to give you reasons
Speaker 2: to denounce your family. And now the same thing here.
Speaker 2: The goal with the trans if you can pressure kids
Speaker 2: into these sexualities, first of all, it becomes extremely important
Speaker 2: to them. It's tapping into something very powerful in what
Speaker 2: it means to be human. But then you tell your parents,
Speaker 2: and they are first primed to believe they're told, they're
Speaker 2: groomed to believe that their parents will reject them when
Speaker 2: they do this, and then their parents often are at
Speaker 2: least confused pan sexual what is that? Or they make
Speaker 2: fun of them, or they tease them or whatever. And
Speaker 2: this is designed to put wedges between children and their parents.
Speaker 2: This is one hundred percent designed to do that, and
Speaker 2: it's a very sophisticated mechanism they used. It's also maliced
Speaker 2: because what they're trying to do is to get you.
Speaker 2: The reason they want to wedge away from the family,
Speaker 2: is that the family pulls them, would pull somebody away
Speaker 2: from the cult. They want you to be in the cult,
Speaker 2: and your family is a competitive that they have to destroy.
Speaker 2: And so Mao framed this out with a formula he
Speaker 2: said he created in nineteen forty two, which is called
Speaker 2: unity criticism Unity. I think I talked about that in Europe.
Speaker 2: He said that you start by creating the desire for unity,
Speaker 2: the desire to fit in, the desire to in our
Speaker 2: current parlance, belong. You want to make the environment inclusive,
Speaker 2: so you want people to feel like they're included, and
Speaker 2: then you engage in criticism and struggle. So that's the
Speaker 2: middle part. After the people desire for belonging or unity,
Speaker 2: you then induce criticism. The reason we don't have unity.
Speaker 2: We would have unity, but some of you in here
Speaker 2: are transphobic, so our trans friends can't feel included, they
Speaker 2: don't feel like they belong. So you have to fix
Speaker 2: your transphobia so that everybody feels like they can belong.
Speaker 2: And maybe you need to know some trans people. Maybe
Speaker 2: you need to come to the club after school. Maybe
Speaker 2: you need to form a gay straight alliance and get
Speaker 2: to form what they call in the literature relationship allyship,
Speaker 2: maybe you need to dip your toes in yourself to
Speaker 2: ask yourself the questions. But you also need to criticize
Speaker 2: your own transphobia, find out what's stopping you, et cetera.
Speaker 2: And if that's your family's, you've got to criticize your
Speaker 2: family too. And then what MoU says is on the
Speaker 2: other side of his formula is you have what he
Speaker 2: says unity on a new basis according to a new
Speaker 2: standard that he called for him socialist discipline. But we
Speaker 2: call a inclusive environment or inclusive school or inclusive society.
Speaker 2: So we're going to have a new basis on sustainability
Speaker 2: and inclusion to be more kind of complete to the
Speaker 2: whole program. And it's the exact same model though, and
Speaker 2: trans as any of the actually gender and sex stuff
Speaker 2: is a very profound and powerful way to create very
Speaker 2: dramatic wedges between children and their parents, and they have
Speaker 2: to because the goal is to bring you into a
Speaker 2: political activism cult that's meant to overthrow society, and the
Speaker 2: family is literally standing in the way of that.
Speaker 1: Well, what worries me as well is this all seems
Speaker 1: to be coming at a time when critical thinking seems
Speaker 1: to be on the decline as well, whether it be
Speaker 1: because of the access and the ease of information with
Speaker 1: everything being accessible online, or just lack of educations today's schools.
Speaker 1: You know, there does seem to be a decline of
Speaker 1: just critical thinkers in America.
Speaker 2: Well, I think that there's a war against critical thinking,
Speaker 2: and I think that we can actually trace that. We
Speaker 2: can see it in the literature. Our education system uses
Speaker 2: that phrase critical thinking a lot, but they're using it
Speaker 2: in a quite disingenuous way because what they're doing is
Speaker 2: they're conflating the idea of critical thinking with the idea
Speaker 2: of critical theory through the word critical, which they are
Speaker 2: using in two ways at once. So they can pull
Speaker 2: this trick. They'll often say that we have to, you know,
Speaker 2: enhance thinking critically or critical thought, but what they actually
Speaker 2: mean is criticism. And there's a paper that's really actually
Speaker 2: explicit about this that was published by a fairly influential
Speaker 2: education theorist and whiteness scholar by the name of what
Speaker 2: was her name, Alison Bailey. She published it in Hypatia
Speaker 2: in two thousand and seventeen or eighteen seventeen. I think
Speaker 2: it's The paper is about a concept she invented called
Speaker 2: privilege preserving epistemic pushback, which is a lot of words
Speaker 2: that makes it really easy to find. If you want
Speaker 2: to go find this article yourself, you can type in
Speaker 2: privilege preserving epistemic pushback Bailey and you'll find it. So
Speaker 2: Alison Bailey writes this paper, but she has this couple
Speaker 2: of paragraphs and she says explicitly in them that critical
Speaker 2: theory and critical thinking are not the same thing. And
Speaker 2: she says it explicitly in the context of education that
Speaker 2: critical education or critical pedagogy as she calls it, is
Speaker 2: not the same thing as critical thinking. And she says,
Speaker 2: here's what critical thinking is. It's about caring about things
Speaker 2: like she's a philosopher, so the vocabulary is challenging, but
Speaker 2: she says, it's caring about things like epistemic adequacy, knowing
Speaker 2: what you know and how you know it. It's about
Speaker 2: soundness and validity of arguments. It's about weighing the evidence.
Speaker 2: It's about stepping back and you know, analyzing things objectively.
Speaker 2: And she says the critical theory or critical pedagogy the
Speaker 2: approach to education that is overwhelmingly dominant in our country
Speaker 2: and has been now at least since the nineties, by
Speaker 2: the way, so this is why the kids are not
Speaker 2: so good at critical thinking. That they're not doing critical
Speaker 2: thinking or training critical thinking, they're learning critical theory. And
Speaker 2: she says that has a completely different set of assumptions.
Speaker 2: It's based in what she says. She explicitly says the
Speaker 2: neo Marxist Frankfurt school approach, and it is explicitly neo Marxist,
Speaker 2: and it doesn't teach you to try to understand in
Speaker 2: what we normally think of as a critical thinking way.
Speaker 2: It teaches you instead to analyze power structures and how
Speaker 2: power structures are used to maintain people's power, privilege, and
Speaker 2: advantage unfairly and unjustly, thus to create and perpetuate injustices.
Speaker 2: She says that explicitly, and that what she's arguing for
Speaker 2: is a shift away in education from the idea of
Speaker 2: critical thinking evidence, you know, soundness and validity of arguments,
Speaker 2: logical reasoning, and toward critical theory, which is analysis of
Speaker 2: power and how it generates and maintains social advantages that
Speaker 2: are unjust. And she says that she had one of
Speaker 2: the reasons that the shift is necessary, is it critical
Speaker 2: thinking itself is invoked in order to maintain power. In
Speaker 2: other words, she's doing a critical theory analysis of critical
Speaker 2: thinking and says that if we teach kids critical thinking,
Speaker 2: what they're going to do. This is why it's called
Speaker 2: privilege preserving epistemic pushback is when you say something to
Speaker 2: them about racism or transphobia or whatever else, they'll use
Speaker 2: critical thinking and say, maybe that's not logical. And what
Speaker 2: they're actually doing, in her kind of demented worldview, is
Speaker 2: defending what she calls their epistemic home turf. They don't
Speaker 2: want to let go of their power. They aren't saying
Speaker 2: it's not logical because it's really not logical. They're saying
Speaker 2: it's not logical because they want to stay transphobic and racist.
Speaker 2: And that's actually what she says explicitly in that paper.
Speaker 2: So if we take that for granted, and we take
Speaker 2: another Marxist education theorist, Isaac Gotdisman from Iowa State University
Speaker 2: at his word. He says that by nineteen ninety two
Speaker 2: our colleges of education were completely connected to and promoting
Speaker 2: critical pedagogy, then we can see exactly why critical thinking
Speaker 2: has been on the decline. Where they tell us. We
Speaker 2: have whitewashed education because they want to teach CRT to
Speaker 2: fix that allegedly. The fact is we have red washed education.
Speaker 2: We have education that's been washed over in communist revisionism,
Speaker 2: leaving out the history of communism and its atrocities, leaving
Speaker 2: out what communism is and why it's a problem, and
Speaker 2: also teaching critical theory in place of critical thinking, so
Speaker 2: that critical thinking can't be used to stop the critical theory,
Speaker 2: which again Bailey made that explicit in this paper about education,
Speaker 2: written and publishing a high ranking feminist philosophy journal just
Speaker 2: five six years ago.
Speaker 1: Quick commercial break more with James Lindsay. James, how do
Speaker 1: you define woke?
Speaker 2: Having critical consciousness? So woke, obviously is a slaying term
Speaker 2: that means woke up right or awake? And what are
Speaker 2: you awake to a different consciousness of the world. So,
Speaker 2: when you are unconscious and asleep, you're unconscious. When you
Speaker 2: are awake, you are conscious. You have consciousness or your
Speaker 2: consciousness has awakened, and so it refers to having what
Speaker 2: they call critical consciousness. Well, this thing I just discussed,
Speaker 2: called critical pedagogy, is defined specifically as education designed to
Speaker 2: raise critical consciousness. It was created original. The term originates
Speaker 2: for the most part with an educator from Brazil who
Speaker 2: was a Marxist by the name of Palo Ferrari, and
Speaker 2: Poalo Ferrari wrote a book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Speaker 2: And when I cited Goddessman a moment ago, it's specifically
Speaker 2: Palo Ferrari's Pedagogy of the Oppressed that he said, by
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety two had achieved its current place and status,
Speaker 2: which is to say that it is in pride of
Speaker 2: place everywhere. And so that's where that actual date and
Speaker 2: remark came from. Is that the idea of using education
Speaker 2: to do critical consciousness raising in that critical consciousness is
Speaker 2: itself being woke. So, in other words, or education has
Speaker 2: been retooled to be woke, has been firmly established in
Speaker 2: college colleges of education since nineteen ninety two, is historically grounded.
Speaker 2: What it actually means, according to Ferrari, to be critically conscious,
Speaker 2: in other words, to be woke, is that you understand
Speaker 2: that the very terms of society are in fact corrupted
Speaker 2: with the power dynamics of society. And so what you
Speaker 2: have to do is learn to understand that every context
Speaker 2: that you're in contains the various dehumanizing forms and what
Speaker 2: he calls domesticating modes of being and learning, and they
Speaker 2: have to be called out or denounced, as he puts it.
Speaker 2: This is where this is parallel to where Mouse said
Speaker 2: that the young people had to be awakened to a
Speaker 2: socialist consciousness and destroy the four olds of society, which
Speaker 2: is what they went around doing. So what it would
Speaker 2: be is that racism's contained in everything, and it's your
Speaker 2: job to learn to be able to see that and
Speaker 2: call it out. Transphobia is contained in everything, and it's
Speaker 2: your job to learn to be able to see where
Speaker 2: it's hidden and call it out. And that's why we
Speaker 2: see so many young people, especially in Brooklyn journalist jobs,
Speaker 2: writing why air is racist, why trains are somehow transphobic,
Speaker 2: why going outside is racist. It's because they've been trained
Speaker 2: to have critical consciousness. And critical consciousness means believing that
Speaker 2: the world is organized in this way. And whether we
Speaker 2: pin that on Frairi, who is I think the progenitor
Speaker 2: of the concept of certainly the first really big promoter
Speaker 2: of the concept of critical consciousness and the idea that
Speaker 2: education is geared for it, or we give it to
Speaker 2: Max Horkheimer, who created critical theory. He said he created
Speaker 2: the critical theory specifically because, in his view, the very
Speaker 2: terms that society has written on in every sense, social, legal, etc.
Speaker 2: Are corrupted by the systems of power, and therefore an
Speaker 2: ideal society, he said, cannot be expressed on the terms
Speaker 2: of the existing society. All we can do is identify
Speaker 2: the problems in the existing society and denounce them. That's
Speaker 2: what being woke is about, is thinking that there's a
Speaker 2: the whole of society is corrupted by all of these
Speaker 2: systemic evils, and that you can be trained to see
Speaker 2: them and call them out. Marcusa another Herbert Marcusa, another
Speaker 2: critical theorist from the mid part of the last century,
Speaker 2: said very explicitly that the ideal society is contained within
Speaker 2: the existing society. So if you can criticize all of
Speaker 2: the excess off the outside, all the racism, transphobia, et cetera,
Speaker 2: then the ideal society can emerge and blossom and fill in.
Speaker 2: It's in there, but we've got to carve the racism off, etc.
Speaker 2: It's almost like a sculptor, right, you have a statue
Speaker 2: and starts as a block of marble. You want to
Speaker 2: make it into a lion or something. So you get
Speaker 2: a chisel and a hammer and you chip chip, chip, chip,
Speaker 2: chip away, and it starts to look more and more
Speaker 2: like a lion. And the sculptor says, well, I didn't
Speaker 2: carve the lion. The lion was in there, and I
Speaker 2: removed all the excess. They think that all these bad
Speaker 2: things like racism and sexism and so on are the excess,
Speaker 2: and if they can just carve those away, the perfect
Speaker 2: society will be in the middle the lion. But in
Speaker 2: their mythology, it's actually the myth of Pygmalion. If you
Speaker 2: go back to the Greeks, the statue, when made perfect,
Speaker 2: the existing society will come alive and the gods will
Speaker 2: grant it life and it will live its own life. This,
Speaker 2: of course, is fiction. So what happens is they think
Speaker 2: that they must not have got the statue perfect, and
Speaker 2: they carve off more things, and they carve off more
Speaker 2: things until there's nothing left. And that's why it's inherently destructive,
Speaker 2: because the statue is never going to come to life.
Speaker 2: But I've digressed quite a bit, but that's what woke means.
Speaker 2: Woke means believing all that woke means believing that we
Speaker 2: could have a perfect society if we just carved off
Speaker 2: everything that is a problematic racism, sexism, and so on,
Speaker 2: by learning to see it in everything and calling out
Speaker 2: how it manifests, and handing over power to the people
Speaker 2: who understand that, allegedly, because otherwise we'll just repeat the
Speaker 2: same patterns.
Speaker 1: But some people don't want to fight the culture war.
Speaker 1: What's at steak everything? I mean, I really encourage people.
Speaker 1: You know, people have seen. People have seen a lot
Speaker 1: of either books or films.
Speaker 2: About when the Nazis took over. This is a familiar phenomenon.
Speaker 2: We know a lot less in the West in general
Speaker 2: about what it was like after, say the Bolsheviks took
Speaker 2: over in Russia, or Mao took over in China, or
Speaker 2: Polepot took over in Cambodia. Although we know more about
Speaker 2: that because of the movie The Killing Fields did get
Speaker 2: some play. I actually ask audiences a lot in my
Speaker 2: public talks, who's heard of this? Who's heard of that?
Speaker 2: Who's heard of the Holidamore in Ukraine? Very few people
Speaker 2: who've heard of you know, various Soviet things. Very few
Speaker 2: people who's heard of you know, the Great Leap Forward.
Speaker 2: Very few people who has heard of the Killing Fields,
Speaker 2: usually about half the audience, And I think that's because
Speaker 2: there was a film, But we don't hear a lot,
Speaker 2: We don't learn a lot about that. But what people
Speaker 2: need to understand is that we are in that same story. Now,
Speaker 2: we are under a cultural revolution, and what is at
Speaker 2: stake is all of your liberty. The other side of this,
Speaker 2: there will be very little liberty. All of your liberty
Speaker 2: will be privileges granted for whatever good behavior or acceptable
Speaker 2: behavior that you've demonstrated. All the freedoms that you've enjoyed
Speaker 2: so far in your life are going to be taken
Speaker 2: away from us. And we're going to live under a
Speaker 2: totalitarian state that has absolutely no concern for us, like
Speaker 2: we already talked about, and that may active actively hate us.
Speaker 2: And so if you don't want to get involved, I understand.
Speaker 2: I don't particularly like being involved myself. People ask me
Speaker 2: how I got started. I say, I fell backwards into it.
Speaker 2: And I think that's the story for a lot of people.
Speaker 2: Other people they see what's going on and they say,
Speaker 2: enough is enough. My friend Chris Elston, it goes by
Speaker 2: Billboard Chris has that story. He said he heard about
Speaker 2: puberty blockers. He had two young girls. He said, what
Speaker 2: are puberty blockers? He said, he went to the internet
Speaker 2: and he looked them up. Turns out there exactly what
Speaker 2: they sound like. They are. They block your puberty causes
Speaker 2: all these health problems. And he was like, not my girls,
Speaker 2: not in this lifetime. This is child abuse. And he
Speaker 2: started to stand up and do something about it. But
Speaker 2: what's at stake is if you want I don't want
Speaker 2: to go full or well and say, if you want
Speaker 2: a vision to the future, imagine bootstamping on a human
Speaker 2: face forever. I want to say, if you want a
Speaker 2: vision of the near term future, you need to look
Speaker 2: at what's going on in China with its social control mechanisms.
Speaker 2: And if you don't want to live in that world,
Speaker 2: you'd probably better start speaking up. If you think it's
Speaker 2: going to blow over, it's not. They've invested probably a
Speaker 2: trillion dollars or more into this project. They're not just
Speaker 2: going to give it away, and the big entities playing
Speaker 2: in it have trillions to win if it goes the
Speaker 2: way they want it to. They're not going to stop.
Speaker 2: They are all in at this point. So if you
Speaker 2: don't want to get involved, I understand, But unfortunately, if
Speaker 2: we want to be a little poetic about it in
Speaker 2: a way that I think is dangerous. History has visited
Speaker 2: this moment upon us and it wasn't ours to choose.
Speaker 2: But we have to take responsibility for where we are.
Speaker 2: This is a bid to transform the world into a
Speaker 2: global tyranny, and there's no reason to mince words around anymore.
Speaker 2: And if we don't speak up and do something about it.
Speaker 2: I encourage people to look at countries that are further
Speaker 2: along the path than we are. South Africa as an example,
Speaker 2: it's further along the path than we are. Especially with
Speaker 2: the critical race theory direction, China is the kind of
Speaker 2: model for what the first round of social control is
Speaker 2: supposed to look like. Whether that's through a vaccine passport
Speaker 2: they didn't succeed in getting, whether it's creating digital ideas
Speaker 2: and currencies with a Everify or whatever else they're fooling with. Now,
Speaker 2: this is our future, and if you want your to
Speaker 2: have your freedoms, and you want your children and their
Speaker 2: children to have their freedoms, you had better start saying something,
Speaker 2: doing something, and doing something prudent and judicious about this
Speaker 2: something informed, starting to work together with other people who
Speaker 2: are are kind of you know, getting their feet under them,
Speaker 2: and doing a lot of things locally and primarily just
Speaker 2: as long as I'm saying things people should do, bonding
Speaker 2: with your own children and to protect them from the
Speaker 2: fact that the state is trying to break that bond.
Speaker 1: I've interviewed a lot of people for my podcast. This
Speaker 1: is one of the most interesting conversations I've had to date,
Speaker 1: So I truly appreciate your time and your voice and
Speaker 1: what is the most important fight that we're facing, both
Speaker 1: in America and just society worldwide.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1: That's very kind of you to say, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I hope to talk again soon.
Speaker 1: That was James Lindsey. You know, look, I've interviewed a
Speaker 1: lot of people on this podcast, and I found that
Speaker 1: to be one of the more interesting conversations I've had
Speaker 1: to date. I hope you feel the same. I appreciate
Speaker 1: you guys listening to the show every Monday and Thursday,
Speaker 1: but you can listen throughout the week. Give us a review,
Speaker 1: Give us a rating. On Apple Podcast love looking at
Speaker 1: those What do you think? John Cassio, my producer, for
Speaker 1: putting the show together. Until next time
Speaker 2: You