Woke Marxism undermines law, and for it to succeed, it must pervert law to advance its own ends. So far, it has been extremely successful at this, from the Critical Legal Theory movement in the 1970s and 1980s through Critical Race Theory and outright legal and judicial activism. If our remaining judiciary remains unaware of the infiltration and subversion, we will probably lose our country. If it wakes up and discharges its duty more… judiciously… we can save our country the same way they’re trying to take it from us: without firing a shot, as the saying goes. Such is the power of law, and such is the power of judges who adjudicate on the law.

The issue is that judges are very busy and asked to render legal judgments on an array of cases filled with subject matter in which they are not, cannot be, and should not be expected to be experts. This represents a major crack in the legal and judicial armor that’s susceptible to legal subversion. A great deal of this subversion has already taken place in both low courts and high, though we’re also seeing a wakening judiciary quickly starting to realize the problem and its underlying nature. This rousing of the judiciary is patently visible in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, especially in light of Justice Clarence Thomas’s remarks about misapplications of substantive due process in that and other decisions. We see it also in the recent Supreme Court decision about racial discrimination in college admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, challenging the entire basis for the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” industry by reversing much of the logic of Bakke v. Board of Regents and Grutter v. Bollinger. The awakening of the American judiciary seems to be arriving just in the nick of time.

The fact is, law is being subverted and has been subverted. This has been the result of decades of intentional activism. Aside from the direct legal activism resulting from activists taking the roles of judges, another form of subversive legal activism exists as well, one that exploits the gap in the judicial armor in two ways: by having hijacked language and expertise. Busy judges have to go significantly on domain-specific information that they are given, prepared through testimony and amicus briefs and the likes. Their domain is the law, not necessarily the domains upon which they have to adjudicate the law. In that breech, the lies of activists flourish.

This activism is definitely intentional and purposed, and its purpose is to undermine the institution of American law and turn it toward Marxist ends. Going back to one of the fathers of Western Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, Marxist strategy in Western nations has been largely subversive rather than overt. Gramsci described a Western world that is ruled over not merely by a class of people but by a powerful cultural force he alleged is produced and maintained by those people for their own benefit. This force he called “cultural hegemony,” and he said the only way to bring socialism (and Marxism) to the West would be to infiltrate and subvert the cultural institutions that generate cultural hegemony and turn them from within so they instead produce a “counter-hegemonic” view that can then trickle out into the cultural milieu and make it ripe for revolution. The five domains Gramsci identified for infiltration and capture are religion, family, education, media, and law, with a special emphasis on education because all professional activities are downstream from schooling.

Gramsci wrote this in the 1920s and 1930s, and the thesis was picked up by Rudi Deutshke, who called it “the long march through the institutions” in the mid-1960s, and Critical Marxist thought-leader Herbert Marcuse, who demanded this march from his activists in his 1972 work Counterrevolution and Revolt, which has set the stage for Western Marxist activism ever since. The goal was to infiltrate the institutions and turn them from within. Simultaneously, using Marcuse’s Critical Theory, which he adapted from his Frankfurt School colleague Max Horkheimer, the entire fabric of Western Civilization and culture was to be hauled into “ruthless criticism” and turned inside-out.

Today, the results of these two initiatives—the Long March and Critical Theory—we have a credentialed expert class and expert-credentialing apparatus (the higher education system and professional organizations) that are effectively completely captured. When students pass through, even if they are not taken in by the Critical Marxist, or Woke, perspective, they’re flooded with it such that it no longer rankles their sensibilities when they encounter it later in life. Meanwhile, the professional class of experts who might show up to inform the judiciary on crucial cases is filled with purposed and well-funded activists who make sure to render their fake-expert opinion in the best professionalese in every case of relevant importance. If judges aren’t aware that expertise itself has been tainted, they’re likely to fall for the distortions of this bogus professional cadre and the bogus studies they use to back their activist claims. Justice, the domain of the judiciary, is the victim.

This professionalese is also laced with activist language, words that have obvious everyday meanings but specialized activist meanings that are easily equivocated upon. Some key examples are words like “diversity” (which actually means “expert in Diversity as a theory”), “inclusion” (which means excluding and censoring anything that can be construed to create a disparate impact of exclusion of discrimination), “hate” (which means not giving the activists their way), “harm” (which means the psychological discomfort experienced by the activists when not getting their way), and “trauma” (which means the result of the injuries of “hate” and “harm” as described above). These words are myriad, if not legion (in the biblical sense). Without awareness that Critical Marxism has equivocated much of the language itself—take “diversity” in the context of the Bakke and Grutter decisions, for example—rendering sound adjudications is simply impossible.

Our judiciary, insofar as it still cares about this country, needs to be made aware of these two gaps so that prudence and discernment can return to their rightful positions in rendering judgments on these important cases. I’m in no way calling for judges to become experts in “Woke” language or ideological subversion. Instead, I’m calling for a growing sense of awareness that both language and expertise are at least partly captured and being weaponized so that sound judgments cannot be made on prima facie understanding of expert testimony or the plain meanings of words. The experts are often fake, the expertise manufactured to purpose, and plain meaning of words plainly not meant.

While both of these issues are extremely important for our nation’s judges to be aware of and to take into account when rendering their decisions, the issue of captured, equivocal language is particularly important. Smart people—such as judges are—are some of the most susceptible to the wizardry of equivocal language because they’re the most likely to be certain they already know the plain meanings of many words. Furthermore, simply through these linguistic equivocations, the entire meaning of a law or ruling can be changed or even reversed without changing any of the relevant wording. As an example, the Fourth Amendment protects against government seizure of property, but it does not protect against the seizure of stolen property. If, through “land acknowledgements” or whatever other Marxist manipulation, a judge can be convinced that the property held by some entity is in fact “stolen,” whether from indigenous tribes or through the illegitimate accumulation of capital through exploitation of Man or Nature, the Fourth Amendment would cease to protect that property from seizure—a trick Communist countries used again and again in their own legal contexts. All of contract law is vulnerable to this kind of linguistic exploitation as well once certain activist clauses are inserted into the contract itself or the underlying set of assumptions upon which it is based.

If we are going to save this nation and restore and establish a fair Rule of Law, the Gramscian infiltration and subversion of law must be stopped. Much of this subversion takes place by taking advantage of a judiciary that does not fully comprehend how tainted expertise, expert testimony, and language are as a result of decades of Critical activism. My hope is that this essay sounds an alarm and starts a movement to shake them awake before it’s too late.

Queer Theory, which nearly all of the gender and sexuality education in America is ultimately based upon, has nothing to do with "LGBT" education. This is evident to anyone who reads it, not only because its goals are diametrically opposed to LGBT acceptance and normalization in our society, but because they say so themselves very specifically over and over again. For one example, quoting Emily Drabinski, the openly politically Queer and Marxist current president of the American Library Association, from her 2013 paper “Queering the Catalog,” “Queer theory is distinct from lesbian and gay studies.” It could hardly be more blunt. She adds, “where lesbian and gay studies takes gender and sexual identities as its object of study, queer theory is interested in how those identities come discursively and socially into being and the kind of work they do in the world.” Her conclusion? “Lesbian and gay studies is concerned with what homosexuality is. Queer theory is concerned with what homosexuality does.”

What does Drabinski mean about “the kind of work they do in the world” when referring to “queer identities” and what they “do in the world”? She means activism. Nothing more and nothing less.

“Queer” is not an identity like gay, lesbian, or bisexual. It is by definition an explicitly and intentionally activist identity. That is, it is a political stance, not a fact of who someone is—in fact, not an identity at all. Again, this is by definition in Queer Theory. As David Halperin defined it in his 1995 book Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, a few pages away from a rousing discussion of the transformative potential of “anal fisting” as an ideal sex act,

Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.

Halperin takes great pains to distinguish homosexual being from political homosexual doing and insists that the latter is all of and exactly what Michel Foucault meant by the term “the homosexual,” which he often employed. As he explains, “[Queerness] can now be constituted not substantively but oppositionally, not by what it is but by where it is and how it operates. Those who knowingly occupy such a marginal location, who assume a de-essentialized identity that is purely positional in character, are properly speaking not gay but queer.” Drabinski obviously drew upon this view to form her own.

And what is it Queer Theory does? It disrupts. By definition. The definition of “Queer” in Queer Theory, as we see, is that which resists and challenges all norms and expectations of normalcy. So bringing into education materials based in Queer Theory, including so-called gender-critical perspectives that separate sex and gender as though they are completely different phenomena, is meant to make children activists in this disruptive, destabilizing mode of misunderstanding the world. That has no place in our educational institutions, especially when it’s happening outside of parental knowledge and approval.

Think I’m exaggerating? Here is what the educational paper “Drag Pedagogy,” arguing for Drag Queen Story Hours in schools, says about the matter: “Ultimately, the authors propose that ‘drag pedagogy’ provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but living queerly.” Those italics are in the original. The authors elaborate upon this notion of “living queerly” by stating,

It may be that DQSH is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.

In my professional work, I have struggled to find a word more adequate than the officially disallowed word “grooming” to describe “a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship” based around “living queerly.” These unacceptable projects, hidden behind a street-slang pun, are core objectives of Queer Theory in education, described unambiguously in their own words. “As an art form,” they tell us, “drag is all about bending and breaking the rules, and so its aims are totally different from a normative classroom.” Because, they insist, “In a broader context, fostering collective unruliness also helps children to understand that they can have a hand in changing their environment.” This, they also tell us, allows both drag performers and children to “recognize the arbitrariness of rules,” engage in “queer play,” and “feel [their] fantasies.”

Queer educators damn themselves with their own words, so I'll quote one more to illustrate one more core, often-repeated goal of Queer Theory in education. As explained by Hannah Dyer, a Canadian researcher, in a paper titled “Queer Futurity and Childhood Innocence,” the innocence of childhood and the established understanding of child developmental psychology all needs to be Queered. She writes, “Here, I help to illustrate how some of the affective, libidinal, epistemological, and political insistences on childhood innocence can injure the child’s development and offer a new mode of analytical inquiry that insists upon embracing the child’s queer curiosity and patterns of growth.” What is that about? This paper is specifically about and contains a section heading on “Queering the child’s innocence,” which is perfectly in line with what the “drag pedagogy” people want. Queer Theory in education is therefore so destructive that it aims to rewrite the innocence of childhood as an evil that prevents children from developing “queer curiosity and patterns of growth.”

None of this is remotely appropriate, and the inherently activist position it takes and seeks to instill into our children (through damaging them) is in many respects the least of its problems. It is, at the least, deranged, though it is more properly cultic and evil. It is far past time to give these damaging materials and the people pushing them into our schools the benefit of the doubt. It is long past time to say “no more, not any of it; it all has to go.”

The Grievance Studies Affair has never been more relevant. Back in 2017 and 2018, when we did it, it was obvious that the part of academia sometimes called the “theoretical humanities” had been given over essentially wholly to what we dubbed Grievance Studies—that is, Woke Identity Marxism. We also saw worrying trends in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and all of the social sciences, but at the time it was considered extremely controversial and even unfair to suggest the “soft sciences” were infected with Woke Marxism. Today, that’s completely out the window. Everything is touched by the putrefying finger of Woke corruption. Major medical journals, engineering journals, virtually all education journals, and even premier science journals like Nature routinely publish undeniably Woke “scholarship.”

In the Grievance Studies Affair, Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and I set out to demonstrate that Woke “scholarship” is trash. We recognized the peer-review system has a simple, catastrophic weakness: political corruptibility through the corruption of the key gatekeepers of the system, academic “peers.”

Though we didn’t understand the Gramscian, Maoist, Marcusian strategy of the Long March Through the Institutions or its mechanisms at the time, we certainly could see the fruits of it in operation in the corner of scholarship we targeted. In short, through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the halls of academe were increasingly filled with neo-Marxist and postmodern activists who reliably place their social and political prejudices ahead of any pursuit of truth. We perceived that those ideological biases were a key element in getting peer-reviewed literature into academic journals in a wide array of theoretical disciplines, and we took advantage of that as a means of trying to expose it.

Through whatever set of chances on our journey, a rather talented documentary filmmaker named Mike Nayna got brought into our very narrow inner circle early in the project’s development, and he did what documentarians do, started recording and documenting everything. He thought we were crazy at first but that it might be a fun side project. Little did he realize.

Now, after several years of fighting his own Woke industry and preposterous delays and restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic so he could get the documentary series he was producing together and out into the world, his time to tell this story has arrived. It is perhaps bizarrely fortuitous—maybe providential—that these delays hindered the delivery of this important documentary. What wasn’t easily visible a few years ago is blatantly obvious now, and it demands the kind of explanation this documentary can provide right when people are the most ready to see it.

Flatteringly, Nayna calls the multi-part documentary The Reformers, nodding to the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation that challenged the corruption of the late Medieval Catholic Church. Nayna rightly sensed all along that the problem in our universities is that they have become corrupt, inbred purveyors of a religious doctrine posing as social science—one badly in need of a Lutheran hammer on the door.

In fact, this assessment is exactly right. Our universities have become increasingly insular seminaries for a neo-Gnostic cult religion that passes itself off as social science and theory. To flatter them can win you indulgences, and to disagree with them will lead them to visit purgatory upon you in the form of personal and professional inquisitorial “struggle.” To say the whole apparatus needs reforming is understatement bordering on the absurd.

Personally, it’s an interesting experience for me to look back on that pivotal phase of my life, including a lot of footage I didn’t know Nayna had taken and that I’ve never seen. The story, ranging from our humble and rather stupid beginnings through to our eventual success and vindication is both hilarious and harrowing. I hope you’ll find it as informative and entertaining as I did.

All that said, though, don’t miss the point. The Grievance Studies Affair has never been more relevant. Entire institutions, including national governments, huge megacorporations, global NGOs, the entire establishment media apparatus, and most terribly our universities and schools are wholly in thrall to the fraudulent ideology we exposed almost five years ago. Little of what we’re going through now is based in reality, and the arc of this documentary series makes that undeniable in a way that simply wasn’t visible when the story first broke in 2018.

The Reformers exposes what we all know about the corrupt academic scholarship misshaping our world: it’s all based on nothing more than the prejudice and opinion of activists and activist scholars who have hijacked academia.

Watch Episode 2 of The Reformers here, on Mike Nayna’s Substack.