New Discourses
Politics • Spirituality/Belief • Writing
National Divorce Is National Suicide
February 01, 2024
Guest contributors: ConceptualJames
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Should the United States split up? The country is more polarized than it ever has been, at least since the Civil War, having divided not so much geographically but culturally and ideologically. The two broad factions in this split are what we might call the “Red Team” (conservatives) and the “Blue Team” (progressives)—the irony in these color designations not being lost on many. Now that things are so divided, might it just be better to go our separate ways as peacefully as possible so we can get on with life? Might it be time for a “National Divorce”? Blue Team can keep the beach house, and Red Team can have the farm, and we can all move on to live happily ever after on our own terms?

No. National Divorce is National Suicide, and we’re only considering it because we’re being driven into the despair necessary to commit it.

Straight away, we can see that National Divorce means the death of the nation in the most banal and uninteresting way. If the United States splits, it won’t be united anymore, and so the nation we have today will have committed suicide. That’s not what I mean, though. If we were to proceed with a National Divorce, it will not be peaceful, and the ultimate result will be a state I refer to as Game Over—global tyranny under exactly the evil force provoking us to this extreme in the first place.

On Terminology

I’m going to use the term “National Divorce” for a catch-all for anything that breaks up the existing United States into more than one piece. This would include some split of states, like we might imagine, the secession of even a single state, or the outbreak of a second civil war. It also includes attempts to balkanize or “regionalize” the existing United States into contiguous geographical areas that declare some kind of sovereignty apart from the federal union we call the United States. Quibbling over the difference between these circumstances is distracting from the point and would require far too much development.

I have already introduced the terminology “Red Team” (conservatives) and “Blue Team” (progressives). These terms refer to the current rough big-tent political factions in the United States that roughly but inexactly correlate with support for the Republican Party, which is coded red, and Democratic Party, which is coded blue. They are meant to describe even people who tend to lean one way or the other in this rough divide and is not meant to indicate support or alignment with the political parties in any way. Perhaps think of it as “likely to vote ‘red’ or ‘blue’ in a national election.” Since it’s a placeholder, don’t take it too seriously.

These will develop into the terminology “Red State” and “Blue State” following the “National Divorce.” I am using those terms to signify the approximate new political entities after a binary division. Further balkanization doesn’t need to be discussed because it only makes matters worse.

“Game Over,” as indicated, represents the state in which the global tyrannical program, which is roughly enough Communist in its approach and structure, is able to move inexorably to a pan-Western or even global government under its control. It means the death of liberty. To put a finer point on it, if we reach Game Over, your children will grow up to be slaves, and most of your remaining years will suck.

The Case for National Divorce

This section will admittedly be cursory because it’s not the point. A National Divorce is a terrible idea, but, if we’re going to show that, it’s worth reviewing what people believe it will accomplish in the most charitable terms possible. In my opinion, these terms are fantastical, and the primary driver of these ambitions is catharsis—the letting go of pent up frustration against the corrupt regime, which seems to admit no outlet. That is, I want people to understand that “National Divorce” is not a serious or wise option but an emotional outlet for people who feel trapped and desperate. The goal of this essay is to discuss the possibility of a National Divorce in real terms in the world we actually inhabit and to urge people to understand we are making enough progress not to need to follow unrealistic but cathartic paths of action.

There are three primary arguments for National Divorce, one of which isn’t even really an argument. These are (1) to escape tyranny and live on our terms in new states; (2) to allow the Red Team to consolidate resources and power with which to fight back against Blue Team more effectively; and (3) it’s inevitable anyway (the non-argument). As you can imagine, I don’t believe in (3) at all and don’t think it’s doing anyone any good to believe in it, and I think (1) and (2) will not be allowed to occur in reality given the nature of what’s happening in the world and why. The bulk of this essay is dedicated to painting a picture of what I think would really happen instead.

Both (1) and (2) depend on the belief that Red Team will be able to create Red State that is no longer subject to the tyrannical overreaches of the current U.S. federal government. (Last reminder: “Red State” might represent more than one actual state, but we’re staying in the binary situation for simplicity.) Freed from the tyrannical overreaches of the current U.S. federal government and even international organizations like the United Nations, Red State could then chart its own course, build its own economy and society unfettered, build its own military, and engage in all the activities of a functional nation—perhaps even a mature Constitutional republic—which is impossible under the current U.S. federal government. The strongest argument in favor of National Divorce in this vein is that the current U.S. government and global environment present a genuine threat not just to our livelihoods and liberties, but to those of our children. For reasons that aren’t hard to imagine, it would even be able to out-compete its new Blue State neighbor and thus become the thriving nation the United States should be today, or at least something like that. Furthermore, freed from tyranny, it could also consolidate the necessary economic and military power to be a significant player on the world stage, if needed, and keep its enemies at bay.

Proponents of National Divorce often argue that such a move is not only beneficial but necessary. Some, on the more extreme end, posit that the U.S. Constitution, thus the United States itself, is already functionally destroyed with no hope of recovery. National Divorce would therefore allow us to reconstitute a new state (“Red State,” here) that enables us to recover the most of what the United States stood for and preserve the American way of life. This despairing sentiment is common, though not always stated so extremely, throughout the movement. Proponents also tend to argue that we don’t know what will happen and that we may well drastically overestimate the power of the national and global Blue Team, if not also their malice.

The justification for the need for such a split is that our differences, Red Team and Blue Team, are so irreconcilable that it isn’t possible to share a single political entity with one another. Each side finds the other side’s way of life, values, and aspirations inadequate to building a society worth living in, if not repugnant or degenerate. Since the rift is so significant and perhaps permanent, it’s time to go our separate ways as peacefully as possible. They tend to insist the essence of the National Divorce—it’s Geist, so to speak—has already occurred, as evidenced by the irreconcilable differences and irreparable rift between “blue” and “red.” They liken the situation to spouses who are legally still married even though their marriage in all meaningful respects has already died. Certain challenges will arise, but through the normal operation of statecraft, diplomacy, economy, and whatever else, the new states can settle into a new political arrangement on the North American continent and ease the pressure of this extreme, maybe deadly polarization.

National Divorce Lite: The Big Sort

Before moving into National Divorce properly, we need to discuss its precondition, which is known as “The Big Sort.” The reasons we need to discuss it are two: first, it ends in National Divorce, and, second, it’s being encouraged now, especially by elements on Team Red. (Arguably, Team Blue is doing the opposite and trying to infiltrate currently “Red” areas as heavily as it can afford to.) The general idea is that people should move to areas that match their politics, so conservatives should move to “red” areas and states and progressives to “blue” ones. Further, at least in “red” areas, the increased concentration in political power should be leveraged to make those areas more “red.” Everyone generally agrees that “blue” areas will do this kind of consolidation of power by default, though it will be accelerated by increasing their proportions in areas conservatives abandon. Many who encourage National Divorce consider this to be unstoppable anyway, so conservatives might as well circle their wagons in “red” areas, though they would never characterize it as running away. This Big Sort is a terrible idea.

Naturally, there’s already a “Big Sort” in the United States, but it’s not drawn very neatly on state lines except in presidential electoral maps. The divide is much more accurately urban versus rural, and all fifty states at present contain both urban and rural areas that tip either “red” or “blue.” It has been identified for at least fifteen years as a major problem and driver of destabilizing political polarization in the United States. A national Big Sort would amplify that dynamic tremendously and at scale, with the same dialectical conflict playing out in the urban/rural divide within each state, particularly the “red” ones. What this suggests is that a deliberate state-level Big Sort, or even increasing the urban/rural Big Sort (“get out of cities!”) will push us into more polarization, not less, and increase the chances of a National Divorce, which I argue ends in Game Over.

“The Big Sort” is therefore best thought of as “National Divorce Lite.” The term “The Big Sort” actually comes from a book from 2009 by Bill Bishop titled The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart. The primary point of the book is to argue that people were already moving to more like-minded areas, though he focused primarily on the urban/rural and urban/suburban divides, and that this dynamic was creating conditions that accelerate political polarization. Bishop was offering a diagnosis for American political polarization, to be clear, not prescribing some globalist plan, and his diagnosis wasn't good. The urban/rural “Big Sort” he identified was characterized as “tearing us apart,” he argued, threatening national unity going forward.

The idea of a “Big Sort” wasn’t limited to a book that only a relative few are aware of. At least as recently as 2022, for example, state propaganda outlet NPR was publishing articles about The Big Sort, by that name, which it insisted was being accelerated at the state-to-state level by Covid-19 policies. “America is growing more geographically polarized—red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes are becoming bluer. People appear to be sorting.” Their conclusion generally agrees with Bishop’s: “‘The Big Sort’ may be making Americans more politically extreme.”

That’s not how the article ends, however. It ends somewhere more encouraging of The Big Sort: “Moving to areas with people you agree with has advantages.” It’s worth reading the final portion of the article in its entirety for how instructive it is about the dynamic:

What a difference a new city makes. Twelve-year-old Mya Wooten is taking a social justice class at her private school in downtown Austin, an opportunity they would not have found in Greenfield. 

Mya says a recent assignment was to pick an issue to protest. “It was ocean pollution, women’s rights, or LGBTQ rights,” she says. “So my topic was women’s rights, and I made a poster of an open woman's mouth and it said, ‘I have the right to be heard.’” 

By moving to Austin, the Wootens joined The Big Sort. They made Greenfield a tad less purple, and Austin a smidgeon bluer. Tiffany sometimes wonders if they've done the right thing. 

“I’m not sure that it’s super healthy for us to be completely putting ourselves in a box and saying, ‘I’m gonna be with the blue people because they think exactly like me.’ We need to be able to communicate with each other even if we do not fully agree with each other.” 

The Wootens miss having their ideas challenged and engaging with the other side. On the other hand, she says, “We feel among our people in Austin.”

NPR, in other words, seemed to be encouraging The Big Sort in 2022, even while acknowledging that it increases the political polarization of local, state, and national politics. From this fact, we might conclude that The Big Sort is advantageous to the political objectives pushed by NPR.

Why would that be the case? You might be thrilled to find out there’s a proposed solution to The Big Sort, and it even has a name you’ll likely recognize now. The proposed solution to The Big Sort is called “The Great Reset.” 

As it turns out, The (Ze) Great Reset is not just some big evil plan by the executive chairmain of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, means to be initiated and accelerated by Covid-19 after being officially inaugurated by now-King Charles (then Prince). It started out as an innovative new idea in urban planning that could solve The Big Sort, as detailed in a 2009 book by Richard Florida titled The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity. The premise of the book is that “history teaches us that periods of ‘creative destruction,’ like the Great Depression of the 1930s, also present opportunities to remake our economy and society and to generate whole new eras of economic growth and prosperity.” The Big Sort is characterized as part of such an “opportunity,” although the book’s primary focus is the Great Recession of 2008.

“We’ve reached the limits of what George W. Bush used to call the ‘ownership society,’” Florida warns in the earliest pages, after discussing how Karl Marx analyzed the upheavals and “resets” characterizing the birth of that period. Economic polarization between urban centers and suburbs, as well as between cities and rural areas, overlaps with ethnic and sociopolitical polarization under the economic Big Sort. His solution is a “Great Resettle” into the urban centers of what he calls economic “megaregions,” which appear to operate effectively like an early draft of what we would today call SMART 15-Minute Cities.

Of some note, on the cover of the newest edition of The Great Reset, Florida’s 2019 book The Rise of the Creative Class is mentioned and promoted. Of course, “the creative class” is exactly what the World Economic Forum today says will be the upper, or ruling, class of the new world, as opposed to the “useless” class of dispossessed laborers who have all their labor performed by machines and artificial intelligence. Taken as a whole, these points raise some serious red flags about the willful political separation of the United States, however frustrating it is to live nearby complete idiots who hate your way of life.

The Israeli Disengagement Experiment

Big withdrawals of a more extreme kind may also provide some clues as to the wisdom of encouraging The Big Sort. For example, in 2005, Israel formally disengaged from Gaza under a plan proposed by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The Israelis dismantled twenty-one settlements in the Gaza Strip as part of the “Disengagement Plan Implementation Law,” compensating Israelis living in Gaza to relocate into Israel as residential areas were fully demolished.  The rationale was straightforward. Lacking any possibility for a possible peace with the Arabs calling themselves “Palestinians,” who were largely represented by the radical Palestinian Liberation Organization and the terrorist group Hamas, Sharon decided to disengage to strengthen its control in the State of Israel. In other words, this is the same logic as is driving conservatives in the United States toward a National Divorce plan.

The results are, in fact, that Israel was able to consolidate its power, which was already considerable due to U.S. and U.K. support, within the State of Israel, and it was pressured into a permanent defensive posture by allowing a permanent antagonistic terrorist quasi-state to develop on its borders with the chartered intention of destroying Israel completely. As it turns out, the bad guys were able to consolidate power in the unchecked environment too.

There are many parallels to draw from this experiment for an American Big Sort or National Divorce. By fleeing your “blue” state as a conservative—perhaps because Conservative Influencers, some of whom have a financial stake in it—told you to, that “blue” state loses some of the remaining capacity to check the power growing within it. That power is broadly Communist, so it can be expected to operate in a permanently antagonistic and even terroristic way because it hates everything that isn’t Communist, including you. It will be able to do so not just in “blue” states but also from within “blue” cells located inside your “red” state, located heavily in every “blue” city. 

Far from weakening the Blue Team, in exchange for some temporary reprieve in your conditions (and, of serious note, safety for your children), this action enables a great consolidation of Communist power in regions under their control and thus weakens and eventually ends any capacity to drive those agendas and develop outward-facing political force. Since free people do not willingly move to Communist regions very often, this migration is effectively one-way, replicating some of the conditions of the Israeli Disengagement Experiment.

In return, you’ll be able to consolidate “Red Team” power in your “red” states, though, right? No. You will not successfully consolidate “Red Team” power anywhere, really. People who aren’t Communists—unless they are Fascists—don’t act like Communists, so they don’t readily consolidate power. Furthermore, the “red” states will remain fully infiltrated since their cities are already “purple” or “blue,” complicating the situation. This leaves “red” states with a constant internal and external pressure dynamic to turn “blue” or to go all bad by embracing Fascism. Supposing those regions want to stay “red,” they eventually therefore have to abandon the Constitution and turn increasingly Fascistic, which, among other things, leads to undermining and throwing out the Constitution and its protections on individual liberty, which just so happens to coincide with the Communist goal on the ever-concentrating Blue Team.

Eventually, in other words, this path results in rupture, which can look like secession of one state or several together or in serial, (civil) war, or National Divorce, which I'm using as a catch-all term for these phenomena. The point is, The Big Sort is a precondition for the Leftist agenda because it ends here, as both the polarizing logic of The Big Sort and the evidence of the Israeli Disengagement Experiment indicate.

National Divorce

What would happen, realistically, if the United States fractured because of Blue Team (Communist) provocation from the federal government, intolerable conditions in “blue” states, foreign interference, and an escape campaign from the Red Team that definition isn’t nice to call “running away from their responsibilities to their own backyards”? Nothing good. First of all, the United States wouldn't exist anymore, and both remnants—Red State and Blue State—would be weaker. This end of the United States is the banal end of the United States mentioned near the start of this discussion, which is not the same as Game Over. The Constitution, however, would be dead, and both Red State and Blue State would have to decide on how to re-constitute themselves.

It isn’t hard to imagine what would happen in the Blue State in that regard. It would immediately modify the Constitution to look rather like Canada or California, in order to “fix” it. Whatever its political construction, which would likely include a drastic increase in executive power, it would almost certainly limit free expression (First Amendment), eliminate the right to bear firearms (Second Amendment), and encode “equity” into the fundamental “rights” of its citizens (Fourteenth Amendment). In other words, it would trend softly Communist immediately. It would also ally itself with the rest of the “civilized” world, including the European Union, the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and very likely China.

For its part, the Red State would likely attempt to maintain something very much like the present Constitution, at least at first, though there would immediately be huge internal strife over whether any liberties should be curtailed in order to prevent turning “blue” or to handle “blue” infiltration, which is already significantly present, entrenched, and incorporated institutionally within its borders. These debates would be furious and polarizing. The Red State would likely be declared a rogue state, and it will find allyship with other nations to be difficult, if not impossible, in the present global environment, which will likely be primed to turn against it, despite economic possibilities. This will suit the isolationists but will not be strongly to the advantage of the Red State in a global political context.

Meanwhile, we can also bet that the rest of the world will not be idle during this turmoil. Lacking the stabilizing presence of the united United States military on the global stage, we can presume nations like China, Iran, and Russia, at the least, will make some significant territorial and other moves to maximize their own advantage during RIP-America’s turn into political chaos and reorganization. Israel may or may not survive. Taiwan almost certainly wouldn’t. South Korea is an open question.

Neglecting the world stage (for the most part), two paths run from here, and both are terrible. Nobody wins this. This “divorce” includes a Communist (narcissistic abuser) side who will not live and let live, so bad stuff is coming. I don't know which of the following two paths is more likely, however, for one specific reason: nuclear weapons exist.

National Divorce Scenario 1, The Fast Option

After divorce, the Red State will find itself in the aforementioned turmoil, with issues internal and external. Getting organized will not necessarily be a smooth process, and elements on at least two factions of the Red Team and at least two locations (internal and external) of the Blue Team will be working against its unity. This circumstance will, at least temporarily, severely cripple Red State, which is not to its advantage.

Another consequential fact also bears here: former U.S. military and nuclear arsenal installations are still on Red State lands. Blue State won't just give them up. In fact, they’ll go to great lengths over them. Conflict rapidly escalates in this scenario, and Blue State will immediately call upon its global allies and the United Nations, at the very least to secure the nukes. Simultaneously, those military bases become a real problem. For context, Fort Sumner in Charleston Harbor played inside this story in 1861, and that specific conflict started the Civil War. Should that happen over a military installation in a National Divorce situation today, we rapidly progress to Game Over for the reasons that will be made clear below, just put on a more urgent timeline.

Because of the nuclear arsenal and the likely standoff over Blue State ("U.S.") military installations inside Red State, the instability of a National Divorce would immediately trigger a global emergency, demanding every possible sanction and pressure on Red State to prevent it from being a nuclear-armed rogue state. The more aggressively Red State works to take over a military base or, worse, secure a nuclear installation, the more urgent and powerful the global response will be against it. At best, the resulting war will be terrible. In reality, Red State has few realistic prospects in such a conflict, even without the massive internal turmoil weakening its chances.

Imagine what such a scenario would look like. The Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus all around the rest of the globe will immediately insist that this is the New Confederacy but with nukes, and it will be the focus of the entire world's resources to break it immediately, even in its new-nation disarray. The military in those bases will be divided, and with the Constitution undermined, their loyalties will be confused. The former United States, which is now Blue State, will insist these are theirs. They also control the necessary operational codes for the nuclear installations. Attempts to seize a nuclear installation will be met with ungodly force with all the urgency that nuclear deterrence demands.

You might be cowboy enough to think Red State could fight its way through that, but that's not likely and would leave a wrecked world. You might die on your feet, but you and your kids still die, and it's not remotely desperate enough a situation in the currently existing United States to justify that risk yet. In fact, however, Red State will almost certainly not be organized or cowboy enough to secure operable nuclear weapons for itself in this scenario. Even tampering with them would demand a global response, including a nuclear response. Red State isn't the US; it's a rogue state, so it would be globally justified. Almost all of the world would declare itself Red State’s enemy with nuclear urgency.

You can imagine it easily. Blue State is allied with the UN, China, and the other Five Eyes nations. The entire West Coast, New England and several Atlantic states, and all of Canada immediately open themselves as water and land routes for a full-scale invasion to secure America’s teetering nuclear arsenal and control Red State as a rogue actor. Supply lines will largely be cut to Red State from the rest of the globe, crippling its nascent economy, supposing it even has a military to equip. The operation would be quick, brutal, and total. Red State would cease to exist with many of its intrepid citizens dead.

This is the “Fast Option” because Red State would likely last only a few months before collapsing under global pressure or all-out war. Then it's over. This is Game Over. Anything in the process that triggers civil war, with a National Divorce formal or not, triggers this outcome, and it will be quick. Nothing is left to stop the Left Globalists, who therefore win. Everyone who survives is a global slave (“global citizen”) and the resistance is destroyed. We all arrive at Game Over.

National Divorce, scenario 2: The Slow Option

There is a more insidious path that is also more typical of the evil we’re dealing with in the world today. A National Divorce leading us onto this path would, as just outlined above, depend upon a more-or-less peaceful full nuclear disarmament of Red State plus the sacrifice of most of its potential military capacity, which it might not make. Supposing it makes the necessary concessions to Blue State and the world to avoid the Fast Option to Game Over, however, it enters onto the Slow Option to Game Over.

In the Slow Option, the states separate somehow or another more or less peacefully into Red and Blue, the Red is forced to let Blue take back most of the former U.S. military and all of the U.S. nuclear arsenal as a minimal price of entry to a peaceful divorce. There’s little doubt about that. Otherwise, it will be the fast option to Game Over.

The next two years or so of the Slow Option are going to be awesome for most former U.S. citizens in the two usual ways. Blue State, after rapidly completing its soft Communist revolution will leave the revolutionary phase and enter the phase of “building socialism.” That means it will rapidly clean itself up like San Francisco did and dedicate itself to rapidly building an economy in the model of China. It will likely receive major global help. Things will be much cleaner and efficient. Their alliance with China, the UN, and the rest will be tight. Life will become very good in Blue State. Business will thrive, people will make money, stuff will work again. Blue State residents just have to deal with the Woke “Sustainable and Inclusive” program, but not to the extent that it disrupts business or energy production. Those will be deemed necessary to Build Back Better, given the circumstances.

People from Red State will also have it relatively good, at least psychologically. They will be free from Woke “Sustainability and Inclusion” and able to start growing as a new, freer nation (unless they go Fascist). There will be some internal turmoil, and life will be relatively hard but exciting and largely free again. Of course, Red State residents will be propagandized to the fullest extent Blue State powers can reach to encourage them to move to the seemingly utopian Blue State, which abandoned the worst of its destructive ways. They will be allowed to move to Blue State whenever, but only through thoroughly renouncing their “red” values, and this demand will be reinforced by law, social credit, and a new Constitution that “fixes” the old one. This will be the minimum precondition to enter into the Built Back Better Blue State world. More than a few will leave, but few will come the other way, to Red State.

That’s because for all its potential, Red State will find it difficult to make friends on the world stage and, by demand of the “global community,” will in many ways be sanctioned by the rest of the world. Having lost much of its coastline, it will be limited in trade and national defense. Still, there will be all kinds of building up, Red State style! Homesteading, “making it happen,” developing a new economy, growing up a homegrown militia as the new Red State military—these will all occur more or less unhindered except by the limitations of the global environment. Access to supply lines will be limited, prices will be high, but there won’t be heavy restrictions.

Of course, former Blue Team residents of Red State will be a constant problem, at least those who stay—and many will, as spies, subverters, and infiltrators. Blue State and foreign entities will almost certainly encourage this, and Red State will find it difficult to maintain freedom against this constant internal problem. It may find itself having to jettison many of the Constitutional freedoms it separated specifically to try to preserve, and this will be encouraged by its radical contingent within. It’s likely Red State will become a version of exactly what it sought to escape, just with different priorities, in the need to deal with these issues and under the pressure of its own “redder” radicals.

Nevertheless, Red State will have access to just enough to be able to struggle forward, but life will actually improve. It must be allowed to gain strength, but Blue State will be a far nicer place. This will cause brain drain, population issues, talent issues, etc., for Red State. Again, at the same time, Red State is likely to drift or even lurch at times further “red,” which is to say toward Fascism. The Constitutional protections of the United States that Red State presumably sought to preserve somewhere will mostly be lost by necessity. All of this will be amplified by the global community’s Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus into relentless propaganda against Red State, which it will destroy your social credit to question or challenge.

Red State must be allowed to consolidate and grow in strength, maybe even with a Fascist-style government that has no use for “lib’rals” and throws them out, strengthening Blue State, which would already be beyond tolerating useless radicals—but that would fund them to be exactly that while they remain in Red State. Constitutional protections will be jettisoned to prevent re-subversion, and this will keep conflict high inside, and the “global community” will be forced to become more and more wary of Red State and its trajectory. Sanctions and other international issues would likely mount for Red State, adding to its challenges.

A few years down the road, notably after Red State develops a functional semblance of its own military, the world together with Blue State will simply provoke a war with Red State. The pretext might be the increasingly Fascistic turn Red State was forced to take. It might be that Red State feels a bit of its new strength and decides it’s time to take action to remedy the unfairness of its global standing. In any case, it will come about in the typical Blue Team way: through a provocation that sets Red State up to be the first militant actor. Now the world has to act and it must act decisively to “preserve democracy” on “the global stage,” or some such rhetoric. 

This event, which immediately becomes an urgent global emergency against the rogue Red State launches the world back onto the Fast Option pathway to Game Over. Maybe Red State can put up more of a fight in the short term, but it will be the entire world against Red State, which hasn’t had a chance to organize sufficiently to deal with such an onslaught. The world will be led to believe through the by-then-very-sophisticated Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus that Red State is the aggressor it was always painted out to be. The Slow Option therefore also ends at Game Over and gets there at full velocity.

National Divorce Is National Suicide

National Divorce, which starts with The Big Sort and through pushing desperation into foolish action even before such a sort could be accomplished, results in Regime Change (Game Over) ultimately, and the Red Team has no realistic pathways to coming out on top. We might feel great for a little while, but it’s a short road to Game Over.

To divide the United States and break the reach of its Constitution and Bill of Rights will create a scenario in which all the power tips to the Global Enemy. You, no matter where you find yourself in that world, will not have a future unless you brainwash yourself and join the Global Collective. Your children will not have a future unless they are part of the Global Collective. This is not a peaceful path to restoring anyone’s way of life. This isn’t 1776. These aren’t the British. We are dealing with Global Communists who have already entrenched themselves in massive arrays of power and are making a legitimate bid for global control.

You might believe, like mentioned near the beginning of this discussion, that what is described above is inevitable, so we might as well “rip the Band-Aid off.” That’s not true. A National Divorce is not inevitable. In fact, it's completely avoidable, allowing us to assert the power of the Constitution of the United States to secure the rights of our people and then to be a beacon of freedom and life to the world again, the world’s “last best hope.” We’re already making incredible strides in that direction, and rather than directing our enmity at our complicit countrymen as new challenges arise, we can continue to channel that into justification to expose and ultimately dismantle the revolution banging against our doors. Every evil move they make can be turned into discrediting them with a far broader audience. The rats orchestrating the revolution will jump ship if the deal looks like it’s going bad, and then they can be incentivized to talk. When they talk, the Enemy—not the country—goes into a downward spiral. The Constitution can prevail, and American can be made great again, with the rest of the free world behind it.

We are already making progress, even in hard states like California. The Courts are siding with us more and more. People are awakening. DEI and ESG are damaged badly. We know how they play their games and do their tricks. We realize how much bait they put in front of us. Their scams and schemes are backfiring. Inconvenient truths for their continued power surface week by week. The tide is turning.

The way out begins with faith in our nation, its Constitution, and most of all its good people. Faith in God, including the sacrifices you need to make and courage you need to show to prove that faith, is also warranted. Winning, though, also means taking the difficult road of sticking up for the place you live.

If you live in a “blue” place, and being as much sand in the gears against the Communists as you can. By organizing—which is impossible if you leave—you can consolidate local-level and eventually greater power that can keep the Communists from taking another inch. Look at Take Back Alberta in Canada, which is a country worse off than the U.S. Look at Garry Tan and his stand for San Francisco. Look to the millions of Americans waking up to the fact that they have to win back control over their back yards by standing and fighting, not retreating to some desperate last stand for them and their kids. Groups like Moms for Liberty are activating parents in almost every state and making progress, taking the fights to the local and state levels first so that we can keep all fifty stars on our Star-Spangled Banner. These examples are the real stuff. Be careful with what ideas you get from influencers. Edge sells but loses. Not all of them are even honest. Communists infiltrate and then rise up from within, leading patriots into traps.

Keep faith and fight for the integrity of the US and its Constitution! A National Divorce is National Suicide. Suicides are deaths of despair. The Communists are provoking us to despair so we’ll, as a nation, take our own life. They want us thinking this is Cowboys versus Communists so they can get us to make the very mistakes outlined in this discussion. It’s not. It’s those who have faith in the integrity and strength in this nation and its founding ideals against those who do not, and we’re showing up far too successfully to throw it all away with delusional fantasies of a “National Divorce.”

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In the fight against the Woke, there is so much to be done. Luckily, there are also many hands eager to help in the work. Personally, as I travel the country and speak and meet with thousands of everyday Americans, many express to me their fear that they're too small to make a difference. Nothing could be further from the truth! In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, I, James Lindsay as your host share an important message about how everyone, no matter how small they feel against the global threat we all face, can make a huge difference. Join me for this inspiring little message.

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Our present circumstance is a political warfare battlefield, like it or not. That means we are inundated with propaganda from all sides. Propaganda, of course, takes many forms, and one of the most common, subtle, and effective is what can be called "telling the truth, falsely," or "being right, wrongly." In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay outlines this bread-and-butter propaganda tactic to help you become better able to see it and resist it. Join him to improve your psychological warfare skill set.

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Leftism Means Coveting Power

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There are many ways we could conceive of Leftism, and one of the best is that it is a covetous relationship with power. It's easy to understand how toxic and bad that is, if not evil. Yet here we are at a crossroads in world history, and we're being led toward precisely that pit. There's a popular line out there now that goes something like this: "the Left wants power, and conservatives don't. That's why conservatives always lose." The implication is that conservatives should also desire (or covet) power. This line adopts the Left's relationship to power and fails to articulate the healthier relationship to power embraced by conservatives: that of faithful service to others, which conservatives often gladly shoulder. In this important episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay covers this line and a healthier way to move forward into the responsibility we have to shoulder. Join him for the discussion, then chew on it.

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4 hours ago

I have a concern with the legal battles coming up in the US regrading Queer Theory. To date I have not heard a single person on team sanity mention English Etymology or get the word gender correct. As James mentioned, educating judges will be important. For all the gender discussion I have heard, all have been wrong. To me, this whole non-sense looks like a short put but no one has got it correct so far. I fear it could cost us.

Etymology is the study of the history of the English language. It's origins are traced back some 4,000 years. The Oxford Etymology Dictionary is the gold standard. It's very helpful to know in the medical field. Just to get to the point.

Gender is a grammatical word. That's what the (gram.) means in the pic. It is an English word that describes other English words. XIV means it appeared in English in the 14th Century, 700 year ago. There are 3 genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Gender does not refer to any sort of living flesh. Like the word noun it is a word that ...

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A Communist Manifesto for Christian Nationalists: Testing the Woke Right
by James Lindsay

As many of you know and fewer appreciate, I have been aiming to expose a phenomenon called the “Woke Right” for some time now. This whole matter is an issue of considerable and rather fierce debate.

Is “Woke” the right word for them? Are they really “Right”? Should we call them something else? Is this really even happening? Does it even matter? Is this even important?

Each of these is a worthy enough question and matter for its own debate, but regarding the question of whether “Woke” is the right term for them, I haven’t been fully convinced despite my heavy use of the term. As you’ll see momentarily, I’m now far more convinced.

So far, I have attempted in various X (née Twitter) arenas to explain why I think the term “Woke Right” fits and to identify some examples, and I’ve done a couple of podcasts explaining the phenomenon and making the case more fully. I’ve also done a number of interviews. Still, it remains an open question, are they really Woke, so I decided to do a little experiment. A throwback to an earlier James, if you will. And, as it happens…

We are so back.

To put the conclusion out front before I explain myself, I figured a good way to test the “Woke Right” for Wokeness would be to submit a little hoax essay to what I presume is their flagship publication, American Reformer. To produce this “Woke Right” hoax, I took a couple thousand words straight out of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (better known as the Communist Manifesto), and lightly modified it into a “Woke Right” critique of liberalism, which the so-called “Woke Right” hate. They published it: The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right (It’s archived here in case they take it down).

I figured there’s nothing more definitively Woke than the Communist Manifesto, so I think we can drop with the inverted commas here and get on with calling them the Woke Right after this. They published Karl Marx’s definitive Communist work, dressed up to resemble their own pompous, self-pitying drivel, when it was submitted from a completely unknown author with no internet footprint whatsoever bearing the name “Marcus Carlson” (get it? Haha).

That question answered raises the deeper second question above—which I will not address here—about if they are really on the “Right,” as they consistently claim they are. For them on this, I’ll only say, I have been using the term “Right Hand of the Left.”

So what did I do, and why did I do it? Before explaining myself, I’ll explain the mechanics of this little prank.

I started by taking the preamble and then just short of six continuous pages of text from the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto. This chapter is titled “Bourgeoisie and Proletarians” and is the part of the manifesto where Marx and Engels make the case that the bourgeoisie (middle class, owners, management, and wealthy) as a class is abusive of the proletariat (workers) as a class in just about every way you could imagine. I then rather crudely swapped out references to the bourgeoisie with something to do with either liberalism, liberals, classical liberalism, or their real and mighty bugbear that they call “the post-war liberal consensus,” which they believe oppresses them. Concurrently, I swapped out references to the proletariat with references to an object they call the “New Christian Right” as a way of referring to themselves. I then massaged some of the specifics for fit, flourish, and flow, cut a bunch and consolidated to fit the word count requirement, attached the document to an email from a made-to-order burner account, and hit “send.” A few days later, they published it on American Reformer with minimal edits.

So far as these terms of art go, meaning “post-war liberal consensus” and “New Christian Right,” I didn’t invent them. I took them from a couple articles published on American Reformer aiming to describe their own movement, what it’s about, and what it believes oppresses them. While these are technically terms to explain in another time and place, what I noticed (when re-reading The Communist Manifesto to prepare a pair of podcasts about it) is that Marx’s complaints about the bourgeoisie and vision of the proletariat match what I had read on American Reformer itself about the Woke Right with regard to the “liberal consensus” and liberalism along with their vision for a New Christian Right. It required shockingly minimal editing to make Karl Marx’s arguments transform into Woke Right arguments about American liberalism. (In fact, I have the original first step document in its raw form, if anyone wants to see it, revealing just how fast the connection is.)

So, that’s what I did. Why did I do it? And why target American Reformer?

I don’t have any particular animus against American Reformer to speak of, but so far as I know, it’s the flagship publication for what I’ve been calling the Woke Right, or at least the Protestant “Christian Nationalist” (or, “Ecumenical Integralist”) wing of the Woke Right. It makes a good target, though, because American Reformer represents not the cringe-inducing (antisemitic) fringe of the Woke Right but its more respectable, mainstream wing. Beyond that, I know rather little about it because, as I’ve said many times, I mostly find the Woke Right to be an enormously irritating distraction that I don’t actually give much time to and try to avoid thinking about entirely. Wandering into Woke Right thinking is far too easy a mistake for us to keep making, I keep telling myself, but we, as a loose coalition, keep making it. Maybe that’s because it has a ton of money behind it and because they use divisive Woke dialectical tactics to divide movements and collect supporters….

What I learned doing the Grievance Studies Affair, however, is that if you can’t tell people about an ideological problem out there in the world, you can show them instead by participating directly, if disingenuously. That is, you can hoax them and get them to publish a blatant caricature of their own beliefs in an embarrassing yet informative way. Rather famously, I, et al., got a feminist social work academic journal to accept a rewrite of a chapter of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a pathway forward for intersectional feminism as a movement.

Moreover, I learned that if you’re going to target publications for a “hoax-ish” exposé, you should aim at the most significant one you can. That turns out to be American Reformer, which I also featured in one of my podcasts about the Woke Right. (Incidentally, I learned almost all I really needed to know about the Woke Right, their arguments, their mentality, etc., from that one article I read for the podcast, which isn’t surprising because Woke Right “philosophy” is effectively just another Grievance or Woke architecture, and these are all extremely easily produced once you know the names for various pieces and the specific accusations attached to them.)

Why did I do it? That’s a lot simpler. I suspected that the so-called Woke Right really is Woke; many people disagreed; and I wanted to test that hypothesis instead of arguing about it to very little effect. Up to now, when I have pointed it out, argued it, explained it, and discussed it, I’ve been vigorously assured I’m completely wrong and this “New Christian Right” is not Woke at all. In fact, I learned I’m the bad guy here: “attacking Christians,” “punching Right,” “punching down” (amusingly), “gatekeeping,” and “being subversive, divisive, or [insert any of many slurs].”

Well, I’ve been here before, and back then a simple test sufficed. I ran this test once in the Grievance Studies Affair to expose the Left in academia. It was easily replicated against the so-called Woke Right. The result, though limited in scope, is a positive one. The Woke Right is Woke enough to argue against liberalism in exactly the same pompous and conspiratorial way (literally) Karl Marx argued against his own class enemy. So, if by “Woke” we mean running the Woke operating system and sociopolitical architecture, the Woke Right is clearly Woke.

So, circumstances relevant to the Woke Right also compel me to ask, is this me attacking Christians or “dividing the right”? Well, no. You are free for yourself to decide if the “New Christian Right” represents Christians or Christianity, but this was little more than a simple test to see if they’re a Woke duck. They walk like a Woke duck. They talk like a Woke duck. They’re a Woke duck.

They considered a lightly modified excerpt from the Communist Manifesto to be a “powerful article” for who they are and what they think (that we can expect they will not stand behind now that they know what it is, of course). If that aligns with Christianity is something for others to decide. If spotting this worrying Woke trend as it permeates the movement to stop Woke is “dividing the right,” maybe using terms like “right” here isn’t what we need to be doing. Maybe we should just be stopping Woke, however it presents itself.

Does this mean I’m saying the Woke Right are Communists? No, not at all. Historically, Fascism was a reaction to Communism that adopted the Communist operating system but not Communism or its specific agendas. In fact, they adopted the operating system of Communism specifically to be “anti-Marxist” (according to Mussolini)—just like the Woke Right. I do not think the Woke Right are Communists—aside from some infiltrators who must certainly be taking advantage of the Woke Right movements. I think they have taken up the Woke operating system, nothing more, nothing less. I do hope we won’t now repeat obvious historical mistakes, but I’m not accusing them of being Communists. They did not accept a Communist, qua Communism, text but a modified version that flatters their sensibilities.

In fact, it’s rather the opposite, in a way. The Woke Right, or at least the nerd-macho “New Christian Right” at American Reformer, etc., positions itself as the only viable solution to Communism in the West. In fact, their niche is something like being the only outfit, broadly construed, that is capable of equipping the American Church of resisting Communism—and certainly they have positioned themselves vigorously against my work as being productive to that particular cause. Well, as is evident, they haven’t done their homework at all. Clearly, my hoax essay only passed editorial muster because, it is now abundantly clear, these particular fellows are unlikely even to have read the Communist Manifesto. If winning a war requires knowing your enemy, as Sun Tzu said, they don’t even recognize him when he shows up on their own front door.

As a final question, you might be wondering how tight this hoax is. I’ll let you judge for yourself. Here (pdf), you’ll find a document showing the whole story in four appendices: a comparative back-and-forth text, the final submitted text (American Reformer published a very lightly edited version of this), the relevant sections of the Communist Manifesto, and my initial word and concept–swap so you can see my process before the final editing. A small sample of the back-and-forth text, from beginning and end, are offered here as a taste.

Communist Manifesto:

[p. 27, preamble] A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

American Reformer:

A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right. Moreover, all the existing powers of the American Regime since the end of the Second World War have aligned themselves against it and its re-emergence from the shadows of American civic life, politics, and religion—the Marxist Left and its neo-Marxist “Woke” descendant, the liberal establishment, the neoconservatives, and their police and intelligence apparatuses.

There are two consequences of this unholy alliance. First, the Christian Right itself is recognized by all these forces to be a power and thus a threat. Second, it is time for this arranged order to end and for a New Christian Right to emerge and stake its rightful claim on twenty-first century American politics.

The Communist Manifesto:

[pp. 36–37, ch. 1] This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself.

American Reformer:

This organization of the New Christian Right into a movement will continually be upset again by the competition between its various factions, but it is rising. We take no enemies to the Right and always redouble our efforts to our Left. In that way, we ever rise up again, stronger, firmer, mightier for all these contests. For this reason, in the end, we will win back our culture and take back our communities, and the liberals can go ahead and thank themselves.

I’ll close here and open the space for discussion. This is my explanation for this little experiment. My conclusion is that I validated my hypothesis in a significant way that will advance the debate. The Woke Right is Woke. They saw themselves in what can only be called a “Communist Manifesto for Christian Nationalists.”

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The Curse of Postmodern Neo-Marxism in North American Education
by Logan Lancing

Postmodern Neo-Marxists

For the last few decades, North American education schools have been ground zero for two dangerous intellectual movements: critical theory and postmodernism. While they may seem like they don’t mix well on the surface, both of these ideologies have taken over teacher training programs, creating a twisted form of education that’s designed to indoctrinate rather than teach students anything useful. 

Critical theory, which I generally refer to as “Critical Marxism” (following Marxist educator Isaac Gottesman), claims to expose hidden systems of oppression and inequality in society. Postmodernism, which I generally refer to as “Postmodern Marxism,” questions reality itself, insisting that there are no universal truths, no fixed meanings, and no stable identities. In their hands, education has become a battleground where the primary goal isn’t teaching students how to think but how to become a Marxist and tear apart society.

This story is a big one and I’m obligated to leave out more than I can include because a full deep dive would require a book-length explanation. Luckily, you can find a large part of that story in James Lindsay’s The Marxification of Education and Lancing (me) and Lindsay’s The Queering of the American Child. Rather than get bogged down in too many intricate details, this essay will focus on the merging of critical theory and postmodernism. 

You’ll notice I referenced Critical Theory as Critical Marxism, and Postmodernism as Postmodern Marxism. While I do this because I think it is technically correct, I also do it because it gives the game away at the starting line. Critical Theory and Postmodernism mix well together and synthesize because they both share the same root system: Marxism. This merger, with deep roots feeding both strains of the same wicked program, has warped the field of education, pushing radical ideas into classrooms and turning schools into breeding grounds for activism rather than places of learning.

Critical Theory (Critical Marxism)

Critical theory started in the early 20th century with the Frankfurt School, a group of German intellectuals who claimed to have figured out how oppression really works in society. They believed that capitalism and Enlightenment reason were tools used to control people and blind them to the “true” perception of reality. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse spent their careers arguing that mass culture, from television to movies to schools, wasn’t making people freer or more informed but was brainwashing them into accepting their place in a rigged system.

It didn’t take long for these ideas to find their way into education. By the 1960s, educators influenced by the Frankfurt School and the Marxism of the New Left were arguing that schools didn’t just pass on knowledge; they reinforced social hierarchies and reproduced the status-quo—which they referred to as the “hidden curriculum.” This gave rise to a “problem of (social) reproduction” in which the institutions of society, like schools, churches, parents, media, law, etc., reproduce the existing society rather than producing fertile ground for a cultural and/or economic revolution.

The “problem of reproduction” was difficult to solve, and Marxists spent a long time banging their heads against their desks lamenting the fact that everyone was too stupid to see how miserable they really were; too stupid to see “the truth” of Critical Marxism. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and The Politics of Education were major turning points in solving it. 

Freire, a Brazilian Marxist and Liberation Theologian, believed that traditional education was just another way to keep the poor and oppressed in their place and created a Marxist theory of education and of knowing. Instead of teaching students how to succeed in society, he wanted education to become a tool of revolution. His ideas led to the rise of critical pedagogy—a form of teaching that encourages students to challenge authority, question all forms of power, and, essentially, become revolutionaries. Paulo Freire’s methods offered the critical theorists a way to solve their problem of reproduction by allowing them to hide radicalizing material inside everyday academic curriculum.

This shift in thinking about education, from being a neutral place of learning to a place where students should be mobilized against "oppressive" systems, was just the beginning. Freire’s ideas caught on in education schools across North America, and suddenly teaching wasn’t about passing on knowledge; it was about creating social activists. More than that, teachers and students were now charged with “joining History and theology” into a “prophetic vision of social justice” that would “create the Kingdom of God here on earth.” (Quotes from Henry Giroux’s foreword to The Politics of Education.)

Postmodernism [Postmodern Marxism]

While critical theory was busy making everything about power and oppression, postmodernism came along to undermine the very idea that there was any truth to fight for. Postmodernism, which became influential in the latter half of the 20th century, rejects the idea that there is such a thing as objective truth or meaning. Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault claimed that all of our beliefs about truth, history, and identity were simply “grand narratives”—stories manufactured by powerful and privileged people in society designed to maintain the status-quo; the sheet pulled over everyone’s eyes to blind them to the fact that their reality is built upon a mountain of shifting sands. What is a mountain, anyway?! Of course, they were merely reproducing Marx’s critiques of what he called “ideology” in a slightly new way.

Lyotard, for instance, declared the “end of grand narratives,” meaning that we could no longer believe in the big stories that shaped Modern thought. Derrida went further by saying that language itself is unstable, and that words and symbols never have fixed meanings. This kind of thinking might seem abstract, silly, and easily relegated to some dark corner of the University, but when it makes its way into children’s education it does real damage. If you tell students that there’s no truth and that everything is up for interpretation, you leave them with nothing solid to hold onto; you leave them with only shifting sands underneath their feet; you leave them relying on “experts” who get to perceive their world for them.

Postmodernism created a world where everything is questioned, but nothing is ever answered. This intellectual paralysis found its way into the classroom, making education less about learning and more about endlessly debating the meaning of everything, even the most basic facts of life. Postmodernism quite literally is the death of common-sense. It leads to the types of insane responses and outrage you get when you post something benign like “water is wet” or “the sky is blue” on X (Twitter).

Critical Postmodernist Pedagogy

At first glance, critical theory and postmodernism seem like they shouldn’t mix. “Very Smart People” get rather upset when you suggest that the two have merged. Critical theory is all about exposing power structures and “creating the Kingdom of God here on earth,” which is really just “social justice,” while postmodernism says there’s no such thing as stable meaning or truth. So, how can you mix a “grand narrative” [Critical Marxism] with a grand narrative destroyer, Postmodernism? The answer is rather straightforward: education schools. Enter “critical postmodernist pedagogy.” Why there? Because they had a problem (of reproduction) to “fix,” and they would pick up and use any tool they could to get it done. Because the two schools of thought ultimately come from the same source, Marxism, the task wasn’t as hard as the “Very Smart People” assume.

To help us understand this delightful twist, we turn to world-renowned socialist educator Peter McLaren, a guy who wrote a whole lot about “comrade Jesus” in his book Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution. McLaren realized that postmodernism’s skepticism about truth and meaning threatened the ability of critical pedagogy—which stems from the Critical Theory tradition applied to education—to pursue “social justice.” After all, if there are no truths, how can we fight for justice? If everything is fake and made up in the service of power, how do we grab hold of anything? 

On the surface, it would appear that playing with postmodernism was a surefire way to tether one’s self (what is “self” anyway?!) to a rocket to nowhere, rather than tangible Marxist activism. Instead of rejecting postmodernism as a result, however, McLaren and his colleagues twisted it into something they could use. They added new receptor sites to Critical Theory so postmodernism could plug in. They argued that while postmodernism’s critique of universal truths was valuable, it didn’t mean abandoning the fight for social change. Instead, educators should embrace the uncertainty of the postmodern world while still pushing students to challenge power and work for social justice. Sure, there is no truth—except for oppression. Surely that exists, and if oppression exists then it can be used as a North Star for figuring out how to properly apply postmodernism to achieve one’s revolutionary political goals.

“Critical postmodernist pedagogy” therefore combines Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux’s critical pedagogy with postmodern tools: a postmodern neo-Marxism for educational domains. It’s a method of teaching students that their identities and realities are socially constructed and shaped by power dynamics, but at the same time encourages them to fight back against those very dynamics because one thing is for certain; oppression exists and humanity must be liberated from it. “Oppression” is the one grand narrative that can’t be touched. It alone survives the postmodern impact; an escape hatch to hang on to Critical Theory as the dialectical engine of History while at the same time claiming that we can’t really know the true nature of our reality, aside from the fact that the oppressed have a reality they must reveal to us so we can join them in revealing the Kingdom of God here on earth.

Kincheloe’s Critical Constructivism

What McLaren and others began in the 1980s—merging critical theory with postmodernism—eventually evolved into what Joe Kincheloe later solidified with his theory of critical constructivism. In his 2005 book, Critical Constructivism: A Primer, Kincheloe took the groundwork laid by Freire, Giroux, and McLaren and codified it even further. He argued that education wasn’t just about teaching students to critique the world around them; it was about helping them actively construct a new reality based on their own perceptions of social justice; based on their own “concrete conditions” and “lived experience” of reality.

Kincheloe’s critical constructivism is built on the idea that there is no neutral way of seeing the world. He states, “No truly objective way of seeing exists…what appears as objective reality is merely what our mind constructs.” (Kincheloe, 2005, p. 8). According to this view, every fact, every piece of knowledge is filtered through our consciousness, which is shaped by the social forces and power dynamics around us. For Kincheloe, this means that education isn’t about teaching students objective truths because, in his view, no such truths exist. Instead, teachers must awaken their students to the social constructions that influence their understanding of the world. Once this critical consciousness is awakened, students can begin the process of critically constructing a new, more just reality. Students can become “world builders” equipped with “dangerous knowledge” and an “emancipatory source of authority.”

Kincheloe wasn’t satisfied with just teaching students to see the world as unjust—he wanted them to be empowered to take it apart and reconstruct it. In Critical Constructivism, he writes that teachers must “become aware of the ways their own identities and views of the world have been shaped by power relations.” Only once this critical self-awareness is developed, he argues, can educators help their students awaken to the social forces shaping their lives. This process of awakening, or developing critical consciousness, turns teachers into critical constructivists—educators who actively work to transform their students into Marxist revolutionaries. 

Of course, this is the same process of self-transformation Paulo Freire said is required of all teachers (and priests and pastors) and compared to living through a personal Easter of death and rebirth on the side of the oppressed (The Politics of Education, chapter 10). It is also the “qualitative change” in every individual demanded by the most influential of the Critical Marxists, Herbert Marcuse, throughout his writings—this being for Marcuse what makes socialism possible. It is also the “complete return of man to his social (i.e., human) nature” according to Marx in his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (pdf). In the Marxist religion, there’s nothing new under the sun!

Kincheloe’s critical constructivism builds directly on McLaren’s earlier work by adding a layer of (postmodernist) constructivist theory, which argues that individuals actively construct knowledge through their interactions with the world. By merging this with critical theory, Kincheloe pushes the idea that not only must students challenge power structures, but they must also understand how their own perceptions and beliefs are constructed by those very structures. This “worldview,” according to Kincheloe, is “a theory of how humans learn, a unified system that includes epistemology, cognition, and the nature of human existence.” (Kincheloe, 2005, p. 7). As noted, Kincheloe’s contributions aren’t really contributions at all. He understood Paulo Freire’s program deeply and the Marxism behind it. There is nothing new added here that Paulo Freire himself did not argue himself. Kincheloe simply provided a more accurate translation in plainspoken English.

Conclusion

North American education schools have become the perfect incubators for these radical political programs. Critical theory and postmodernism mix well together because they share the same roots—Marxism. Marxism, in its own rights, has deep roots too, roots that trace all the way back to philosophers like Hegel, Kant, and Rousseau. All the way back to the first people who questioned the nature of our reality and concluded that everything exists in the mind. It’s no coincidence that the people who have merged Neo-Marxist critical theory with postmodernism think that they can take handle merging their grand narrative with the grand narrative destroyer. They get to do it because they have the right ideas about the true nature of reality, and they can’t wait to place our faces under their boots so we can admire the view.

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How Woke Marxists Stole Reading: What is Critical Literacy?
by Logan Lancing
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