New Discourses
Politics • Spirituality/Belief • Writing
Queer Theory is the Doctrine of a Sex-Based Cult
by James Lindsay
March 12, 2024
Guest contributors: ConceptualJames
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The following is derived from the preparatory notes I made for my February 20, 2024, remarks to the University of Pittsburgh TPUSA chapter, as pictured, which was protested but very well received.

I’m here to talk about Queer Theory. Some major points can be summarized very easily.

  • Queer Theory is the doctrine of a religious cult;
  • That religious cult is based on sex;
  • That sex-based religious cult primarily targets children; and
  • Almost none of it has anything to do with gay identity.

Let’s address the last point first because it’s the least obvious.

The term “queer” in “Queer Theory” gets its definition from David Halperin in a 1995 book called Saint Foucault. The first words of the relevant paragraph (on p. 62) are “Unlike gay identity.” There, Halperin explains that gay identities are grounded in a positive fact of homosexuality. That means homosexuality is in some way real. “Queer,” by contrast, he says, need not be based on any positive truth or in any stable reality. There’s nothing in particular to which it refers. It’s an identity without an essence. That means it’s not based in reality.

What is Queer Theory, then, if it’s not based in reality? It’s a radical political view. Halperin tells us “queer” means adopting a politics that is whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant. Just to prove I’m not making it up, here’s the relevant quote.

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.

To underscore his point, he then continues with,

“Queer,” then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices.

In other words, you cannot be queer. You can only do queerness. It’s an act. 

So nobody is “queer.” People feel “queer” against some standard, perhaps imagined, and people act queerly. By that, it means they act defiantly against normalcy and legitimacy while denying reality. You can only perform queerness—or, if you refuse, straightness. Performing straightness, to Queer Theory, isn’t being who you are if you’re straight; it’s just another kind of performance, one that upholds the allegedly oppressive “status quo” instead of opposing it.

Now let’s consider the Drag Queen Story Hour curriculum paper from a couple of years ago.

It explains in a section titled “from empathy to embodied kinship” that queer programs are presented as improving LGBT empathy, and that Drag Queen Story Hour makes use of such “tropes,” their word.

It then says that’s not really what Drag Queen Story Hour, queer education, or “queer worldmaking” are about, though. Instead, they use the “tropes” of empathy “strategically” as a “marketing” platform to justify getting it into schools, libraries, and in front of kids, but it’s actually about leading kids to see the world and themselves in a queer way. Here’s how they word it:

Finally, it is often assumed that the primary pedagogical goal of queer education should be to increase empathy towards LGBT people. While this premise has some merit – and underlies many sincere projects in educational and cultural work, including DQSH – the notion of empathy has also been critiqued by feminist scholars of colour and others for the ways in which empathy can enable an affective appropriation of an individual’s unique experiences and reinforce hierarchies of power. … Whether through literature or virtual reality, these tropes tend to reflect an overstated ability to understand difference, as well as empathy’s potential to preclude meaningful relationships of solidarity.
It is undeniable that DQSH participates in many of these tropes of empathy, from the marketing language the programme uses to its selection of books. Much of this is strategically done in order to justify its educational value. However, we suggest that drag supports scholars’ critiques of empathy, rather than reifying the concept…This approach can support students in finding the unique or queer aspects of themselves – rather than attempting to understand what it’s like to be LGBT.

That’s what Drag Queen Story Hour is actually about. It’s not about empathy—that’s a marketing strategy that is, in fact, a bit problematic. It’s about getting kids to discover any aspects of themselves that might be considered “queer” and developing those into a queer political stance that will be conflated with who they believe they are. More than that, they’ll be told they’re not truly allowed to be who that is, even though it’s who they really are. Society will object. Their parents will object. It has to be kept secret from their parents in case it isn’t affirmed by them.

Now, I’m not supposed to use the word “grooming” to describe this grotesque set of activities. It’s part of a major controversy—one the Pitt students showed up (potentially menacingly, but in fact as clowns) to protest outside. So I’ll ask a question instead. I’m going to show you something, and then I want to know what word am I supposed to use for this. This self-characterization for the program comes up shortly thereafter in the same paper.

Drag Queen Story Hour presents itself as “family friendly” in a way that it characterizes as a “preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship.” What does that mean? 

It then says that the “family” in “family friendly” refers to a “queer code” for the “other queers [they connect with] on the street.” So they’re not just lying about the empathy but also what they mean by “family”—which is a “queer code” for a “new family” that Drag Queen Story Hour is teaching kids to be “friendly” to. 

The paper repeatedly invokes the concept of a “drag family” for the kids too, and then the paper ends with “we’ll leave a trail of glitter that will never come out of the carpet.” What’s the carpet here?

Here’s the full quote of the “family friendly” part, so you don’t think I’m lying.

Queer worldmaking, including political organizing, has long been a project driven by desire. It is, in part, enacted through art forms like fashion, theatre, and drag. We believe that DQSH offers an invitation towards deeper public engagement with queer cultural production, particularly for young children and their families. 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.

So, I’m asking. What word am I supposed to use for that? I know which one I can’t use, and that puts me at a complete loss.

So here’s how Queer Theory works. You can’t describe it unless you support it—just like a cult, one we now see targets kids. If you criticize it, that’s “hate.” The rumor widely printed about me is that my using that word, “groomer,” to describe that, above, implicates me in some social crime called “anti-LGBTQ hate,” which is very bad, very serious, and utterly toxic. It’s not just “harmful rhetoric” but a “conspiracy theory.” I am a very bad person, apparently, for naming the obvious, not as a result of inference or guesswork but from their own proudly printed writings.

The accusation and resulting social dynamic, which is always hostile, is straight out of Maoist China. I am alleged to be engaging in a crime called “anti-LGBTQ hate,” and “the right side of” society is to judge me and hold me to account for that crime by whatever means it can manage. This bullying is to continue until I learn to recognize from the “queer position” (that is, standpoint) how what I said was socially criminal and pledge to reform my thought, adopt Queer Theory, and not only do better but also become an activist on behalf of Queer Theory. This is identical to the thought reform of Maoist China with a slightly different ideology.

The accusation is obviously nonsense, but that’s not the point. The point is to initiate the social struggle session on me to “transform” my views. The accusation is of an old Marxist standard form, though. It’s a truth married to a lie.

Here’s the truth: Gays and lesbians fought for decades to break the public perception that they are predators and groomers of children. Here’s the lie: That’s who and what I’m talking about when I criticize their theory and activism, which is the very groomery thing I just described previously, in their own words.

As we saw from Halperin and from the “marketing” admission in the Drag Queen Story Hour curriculum paper, Queer Theory doesn’t represent gay identities. It hides behind them and uses them. 

The truth is that “queer” used to be a slur for gay people, one many activists took to describe themselves in defiance of prejudice and bigotry. The lie is that Queer Theory ever represented a civil rights movement for anyone. It’s a destructive form of radical activism that actually historically opposed gay civil rights and equality. Why would it do that? Because gay equality and acceptance would normalize being gay within society and legitimize gay people as fully equal members of society, and Queer Theory is, by definition, radically opposed on principle to anything normal and legitimate. They even have a word for it, homonormativity, which is also very bad.

Gay activists from the 1990s will readily attest that the Queer Activists were often strongly opposed to their ambitions: civil and legal equality, marriage, and social acceptance. Queer Theory needs radical activists, not stable citizens who can go about their lives in a society that doesn’t discriminate meaningfully against them. Those activists fought hard for decades to overcome stereotypes of predatory behavior and the idea that they’re intrinsically groomers. That’s why the Queer Activists can claim that calling out their blatant grooming is an “anti-LGBTQ” theme. Those were stereotypes that good people fought like hell to overcome.

The fact is that Queer Activism, exactly as described here, puts the appearance of glaring truth back into those stereotypes, and then the Queer Activists hide behind gay people and say, “see, they’re attacking you; see, everyone hates you.” Of course, everyday gay people who are good citizens lose the most from this little trick, and the Queer Activists gain the most. Queer activism is strictly parasitic behavior.

On the theme of grooming, specifically into a cult, I want to direct you to another scholar, Kevin Kumashiro, who wrote a paper in 2002 called “Against Repetition.” In that paper, he describes the purpose of queer education of children. Kumashiro explicitly says that teaching children about social justice, including about ideas from Queer Theory, induces emotional and identity-based crises in them.

He then says that’s why it’s important to have queer educators who can guide the vulnerable students who are experiencing their crises to resolve them in favor of social justice and Queer Theory beliefs and actions. The relevant quotes are these:

Repeating what is already learned can be comforting and therefore desirable; students’ learning things that question their knowledge and identities can be emotionally upsetting. For example, suppose students think society is meritocratic but learn that it is racist, or think that they themselves are not contributing to homophobia but learn that in fact they are. In such situations, students learn that the ways they think and act are not only limited but also oppressive. Learning about oppression and about the ways they often unknowingly comply with oppression can lead students to feel paralyzed with anger, sadness, anxiety, and guilt; it can lead to a form of emotional crisis. (p. 74)

Once in a crisis, a student can go in many directions, some that may lead to anti-oppressive change, others that may lead to more entrenched resistance. Therefore, educators have a responsibility not only to draw students into a possible crisis, but also to structure experiences that can help them work through their crises productively. (pp. 74–75)

This practice is indoctrination, and it is knowingly willful and deliberate. In a 2019 paper, Torres and Ferry say explicitly that what their model of education represents is indoctrination. Here’s how they said it.

For all the criticism teachers receive for ‘indoctrinating’ students, turning them into liberal-minded cry-babies, not much has been said in defense. At the very least, a shy denial is made. It is time for educators to own this criticism and admit that is exactly what we do. (“Not everyone gets a seat at the table!” p. 33)

What Kevin Kumashiro is describing, though, is worse than indoctrination. The cycle of inducing crisis and then resolving it toward a doctrine, though, isn’t indoctrination. It’s a technique called trauma bonding, which is a practice of cult grooming and ideological transformation—that is, thought reform or brainwashing.

It can be said plainly, then. Queer Theory practices thought reform because Queer Theory is the doctrine of a religious cult. That cult is based on sex and primarily targets children, and it has little or nothing to do with being gay.

Nobody joins a cult to join a cult. People join a cult because they are suffering in some way, and the cult offers them a resolution to their suffering. Virtually everyone who has escaped a cult tells the same story: they wanted to belong, they wanted a social circle, they wanted understanding, and they wanted purpose. The cult preys upon these people and slowly locks them in.

Trauma bonding is as harmful and manipulative as it sounds. It is a technique of cult initiation and abuse. It’s like a kind of hazing. The basic formula is simple. First you traumatize your targets until you’ve harmed them enough for the process to work, and then you celebrate them when they do what you want.

In Queer Theory, you tell them the world isn’t at all the way it seems. It isn’t the way they’ve been led to believe. If they’re different, it’s because they’re oppressed. If not, it’s because they’re hurting other people. If they’re interested in exploring, even though they’re young, they should. If they’re uncomfortable with their bodies for any reason, perhaps their body is wrong for who they really are. If their parents might disagree, they shouldn’t be included in the decisions. Queer Theory is then offered as the lens that resolves all of the confusion, shock, dissonance, and pain. 

Then you affirm and celebrate them when they show interest. You lead them to believe they’re making brave decisions that are worthy of interest and respect. You coerce their social groups to participate in this ritual and tacitly threaten anyone who doesn’t want to go along with it. You make them feel like they belong and that they—just for being who they are—are special and have a special purpose to fulfill. You teach them special words that describe the very small but growing number of people who identify just like them.

This cult programming—or grooming—takes predictable paths. First, it leads people into emotional vulnerability followed by resolution. This generates personal and social interest, then psychological and social commitment. This is then deepened into an increasingly deep social and emotional commitment achieved largely through trauma bonding techniques, among others, detailed below.

This process creates emotionally and socially bonded members who populate the wide majority of any cult’s membership: those who are socially and emotionally locked in even without necessarily understanding the doctrine. This is sometimes called the “outer school” of the cult. The social, psychological, and emotional cues are steadily deepened over time, particularly increasingly playing upon themes of guilt, shame, isolation, alienation, and confusion on the one hand and hope, excitement, inclusion, and belonging on the other. Shunning “haters” who don’t support and affirm them, even within their own families, is also increased to make sure the cult environment is the predominant influence in the victims’ lives.

When commitment is high enough, a process of “study” begins, where the more committed outer school members start learning the cult doctrine. Here, they’d be studying Queer Theory. They’re not just learning how to use pronouns, present themselves, denounce everything against Queer Theory, and shut people out of their lives for disagreeing with what the cult thinks is good. They’re learning to defend it with pseudo-intellectual arguments based in Queer Theory. They’re also doing a lot of Queer Activism, which in turn deepens commitment. Why would you do this stuff, which is unpopular and difficult, when you have other and better things to do unless you are really committed? These people, who are socially and emotionally dependent on the cult and intellectually committed to it form an “inner school.” They are the “adepts” of the cult, where the “outer school” are its initiates. Most of the scholars and community organizers in the Queer Theory cult are in this tier.

There’s another tier, of course. The so-called “inner circle.” The members of the inner circle of a cult direct it and profit from it. They might or might not believe its doctrine, depending on their motivations. With Queer Theory, undoubtedly some of the biggest organizers and financiers of the movement, which primarily targets our children, do not believe it in itself but fully believe in its destructive and disruptive potential. Others believe in the enormous amount of profit that’s available from destroying lives and turning them into permanent, complicated medical or psychiatric patients. Others see the political utility of a permanently disaffected group with partially legitimate demands against a system they hate. Others see getting millions of people participating in the cult and its affirmations as a way to affirm themselves in their own “journeys,” and they just so happen to have the money to finance a campaign for mass affirmation.

The most important thing to remember about these tiers is the basic structure and the guiding principle behind each. The “outer school” initiates are seeing psychological and social reward through the cult’s manipulative offering, and they’re the overwhelming majority of captured cultists. The “inner school” seeks the same with existential fervor and some degree of intellectual and moral superiority. The “inner circle” is very small in number and ultimately is using the whole cult to their own twisted purposes. In the case of Marxist cults, the inner circle always uses the revolutionary cult of the era and then disposes of it when it’s time to move on to the next “phase of the revolution.”

The environment in which cults transform their victims is worth understanding in greater depth. According to Robert Jay Lifton, who studied the Maoist cult in detail as it was happening, cults effectively take advantage of up to eight qualities. Queer Theory very obviously utilizes all of them in sophisticated ways. I’ll touch upon them briefly.

Milieu control: Cults control the environment and make sure it only reflects cult doctrine. This is why they cut people off from friends, family, and outside information and views. This is your inclusion policies to ensure institutions and people only present cult-agreeable views and affirmation and remove anything that might cause doubt in the cult. This is cancel culture. This is immersive media and messaging from all levels.

Mystical manipulation: Cults create an appearance of total agreement (silencing all disagreement), inevitability (“there’s a change coming and there’s nothing you can do about it but get on the right side of it”), planned spontaneity (organized protests that look organic), and a higher purpose (like being on “the right side of history”) in order to convince their victims of their power and influence. It makes the cult appear more “right” and righteous to those captured within its spells. Think of the film The Truman Show. Jim Carrey’s character, Truman, was at the center of a huge operation of mystical manipulation within a fully controlled milieu.

Demand for purity: Cults are almost always puritanical in their values systems. They present their victims with stark contrasts of good and evil, right and wrong, on virtually every issue, and they demand purity with being on the “right” side of every issue. These dynamics manifest in dichotomies like pure vs. impure, absolutely good vs. absolutely evil, sacred vs. profane, or, specifically in the “social justice” cults like Queer Theory, affirmation vs. existential denial and care vs. “hate.” They are also interested, if not obsessed, with the binary of innocence vs. initiation to various levels of standing within the cult, including inclusion in the cult itself. In the extreme, this demand for purity sets up a dichotomy as stark as “the people” versus “the enemies of the people,” who must be destroyed in the name of “the people.”

Cult of Confession: The demand for purity leads the cult’s victims to readily identify how they fall short of cult perfection, leading them to both fear and desire to confess their failures and evil ways. Cults often encourage this behavior to facilitate the trauma bonding process. The trauma bonding wheel-of-pain is turned through pressuring people to confess—say to homophobia or transphobia or being a made-up gender or sexuality, and then rewarding them when they do—only to later indicate the confession wasn’t sufficiently total or sincere enough, initiating another round.

The milieu control and demand for purity come together to create a uniquely exquisite psychological environment. In this environment, almost everyone believes everyone else is pure while they, themselves, are not. You are the one falling short, even though you see your “classmates” confess to their own failures. You alone have the deepest, darkest failures. The guilt and shame are overwhelming, and they fuel even more accusation (criticism) and confession (self-criticism). This is the part of the environment that does the bulk of the thought-reforming work.

A “Sacred Science”: At the heart of the cult is what Lifton refers to as a “sacred science” that is infallible—though people can and do fail it all the time—into which people are being brainwashed. The point of the cult of confession dynamic is to force people to confess their failure to understand, internalize, enact, and even embody the “sacred science,” while accusing others of their failings as much and often as possible. The point of the confession is to get people to willingly adopt the lens of the sacred science so they can “recognize their crimes” against it and pledge to “do better.” “Do better” means “ideological remolding.” Here, Queer Theory is the correct understanding of sex, gender, sexuality, and all “normal” features of society. 

Doctrine over person: Cults place doctrine over people (“History uses people and then discards them.” -Hegel) The person isn’t even a person if they don’t hold and enact the doctrine. “Not to have correct political opinions is like not having a soul.” -Mao)

Loading the language: This is painfully obvious at this point, isn’t it?

Dispensing of existence: At the deepest level, the cult decides whose existence counts and who doesn’t. The punchline is that those who accept the cult doctrine (the “sacred science”) and its application are people, and no one else is. Only the doctrinally legitimate are allowed to exist. Others are “haters,” effectively enemies and non-people, justifying their abuse, disenfranchisement, silencing, etc.

Under the standard Iron Law of Woke Projection, the dispensing of existence aspect of cult environments is why Woke activists say everything is “denying their existence” or a “genocide.” They’re projecting. You don’t have a right to exist if your beliefs “deny their right to exist.” In Queer Theory, this means if you don’t affirm their embodied political activism against the legitimate and the normal, you’re denying their existence. You are therefore beyond the pale of humanity and do not deserve to exist. All totalitarian genocides come from this darkest piece of cult logic.

Frankly, we could go a lot deeper into the cult nature of Queer Theory than this. We could talk about how it’s ultimately a Gnostic and Hermetic conception of the world with “normal society” acting as an evil spirit that imprisons everyone into performing a fake persona for the world so they can never be liberated to be who they truly are. I’ve done that at length elsewhere.

That would require us to talk in depth about one of Queer Theory’s progenitors, Judith Butler, and her belief that gender and sex aren’t actually real but are performances we learn and repeat to satisfy normal society. Her whole body of work could be summarized in six words and a little explanation: “Drag is life; life is drag.” Everyone, always is doing drag in everything they do, whether they realize it or not. Society writes the scripts for how their drag (usually “cishetero”) is to be performed, and that imprisons their souls, which they then have to script physically onto and through their bodies. Becoming aware of the “doingness” of gender and even sex and sexuality opens a door to a “queer horizon” of possibilities beyond the norm.

Judy got those ideas in turn from people like the postmodern philosopher, sadomasochist, and pedophile Michel Foucault, from whose work David Halperin derived his definition from Queer. Foucault was asking what it means to be a homosexual absent society’s definition of the term, absent the homosexual versus heterosexual binary and privileged status of being straight within it, and absent the patterns of discipline and punishment that enforce these definitions on people through society, most frequently through themselves. The idea that it is the soul that imprisons the body, exactly in this way, didn’t originate with Judith Butler. She got it from Foucault.

Interlaced into aspects of Queer Theory from the broader milieu of the sexuality studies and sex-positive radical feminism from which it was born are the ideas of people like John Money and Alfred Kinsey, among others, who sought to divorce sex and “gender identity” completely and to liberate sexuality to the greatest possible extent.

Most of the inspiration, outside of the sexual aspects of Queer Theory, however, derive from gender-critical feminism, as it evolved eventually into the sex-positive branch, which went to war with its prudish sisters primarily through the 1980s and eventually won. That, in turn, means to understand this cult deeply, we’d have to start with the first truly gender-critical feminist, Simone de Beauvoir, who initiated the pressing question of our day way back in 1949: What is a woman? Her point was the same as Foucault’s: what does it mean to be a woman when no one else—and particularly society and patriarchy—are defining it for the people who actually are women?

In short, we are imprisoned by the features of our social reality but can escape with the right hidden insights about who we really are and into what we have been thrown. The thinkers above derived this transformative Sociological Gnosticism from earlier mystics of greater fame. We don’t have time for that now, but it’s not a hard legacy to trace from characters such as Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx through Beauvoir, Foucault, and Butler to arrive at the conclusion that we’re dealing not with social science but social alchemy here. One of its primary laboratories is our children.

Why children? Four reasons, mainly. First, children in schools and even with their entertainment are a captive audience. Second, children have not achieved the necessary cortical development to distinguish reality from fantasy, so the mystifications of Queer Theory can be considered plausible to them where adults would be less interested. Third, children are going through the developmental process of identity formation, which needs to be hijacked for this ideology to take firm root. Finally, children become a gateway and a wedge to other targets, like their families, faiths, and other institutions in which they take part.

So that is Queer Theory. It’s the doctrine of a religious cult. That cult is primarily sex-based. It predominantly targets our children. And it has little to nothing to do with being gay. But what can we do? 

Normally, we would turn to our institutions and ask them to see the light and step in. That isn’t working. We face a problem of captured institutions. Our institutions accept and promote Queer Theory. We therefore cannot count on our institutions—educational, psychological, medical, or governmental—to help us here. They are all captured. They are all part of the controlled milieu, creating the mystical manipulation, and peddling the sacred science of Queer Theory.

We find ourselves in the position of a pilot who has lost all of his instrumentation on his aircraft and has to fly it safely to a runway and land. No navigation computer, no altimeter, nothing—just him and his wits and hopefully his ability to see what’s in front of him and do the right thing. Our institutions are like the instruments in the cockpit but for society. Right now, they’re putting out all the wrong information. They cannot help us find the runway or land the plane safely, upon which our lives and the lives of others depend. What would we do? We would use our senses directly to find the runway, line up and lower the plane, and land it. We wouldn’t look to the broken instruments at all. We’d look at reality and navigate without the intermediary. That’s what we need to start finding ways to do at the societal level now—one individual at a time.

What, individually, though? What we must do is start with the truth. Not the mediated “truth” peddled by the corrupt institutions. The plain, simple truth. There are two sexes. Most people are straight. Gay happens. Queer isn’t an identity; it’s a defiant political stance we don’t have to tolerate or accommodate. If someone claims to have an identity or sexuality that requires an explanation, it’s fake and doesn’t demand our respect. Predatory behavior of any kind in any place and perversion outside of the confines of consenting adults acting in private do not deserve our tolerance and shouldn’t be given it. Pornography doesn’t need to exist in children’s libraries, and children do not benefit from its presence there. Enough.

Regarding the truth, though, I want to make a point. It’s important to say the truth, but you actually have to do more. You have to love the truth. You have to love the truth with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and all your strength, and then you have to love your neighbor enough as you would yourself to tell him the truth that you love. These are basic commandments.

But you have to love the truth. If you love the truth, you’ll say it. You’ll also seek it and defend it. You’ll defend other people saying it. You have to love the truth because if you don’t, when the pressure mounts, you’ll eventually buckle. You’ll be asked to care and affirm, but there’s no caring and no affirmation that isn’t built upon the truth first. So you must love the truth. Every time you tell a lie to be nice or to fit in, you’re selling a piece of your soul. You have to stop doing that. That takes loving the truth.

When you do this—which is what it means to be based—you break the milieu control. You break the mystical manipulation. You call doubt upon the sacred science. You break the cycles of abuse and confession. You tell people that it is okay to trust their eyes and ears and even their gut intuition that what they’re experiencing from Queer Theory is abusive and manipulative.

Queer Theory is the doctrine of a cult religion based on sex that primarily targets our children. It is our necessary responsibility to learn about it and to oppose it. If you are so inclined, I’m releasing a new book, primarily written by Logan Lancing with my contributions, called The Queering of the American Child. I recommend you pick it up and get in the fight.

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The Third Rail and the Fifth Column
by James Lindsay

During the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, Nationalist Generalissimo Francisco Franco advanced on Madrid with the intention of taking it with four columns of soldiers. In the midst of the advance, another Nationalist general, Emilio Mola, was asked on a radio broadcast which of the columns would succeed in taking over the city and finalizing the Nationalist coup. Mola replied that it would be the hidden “fifth column” of supporters and sympathizers within Madrid who would prove decisive by rising up and sabotaging the Republican defense from within.

Ultimately, General Mola was wrong. No “fifth column” arose from within the city, and the Republicans held Madrid. Nevertheless, the phrase immediately caught on. A fifth column to this day refers to a group of people who undermine a larger group, institution, movement, or nation from within.

The Woke Right is a Woke fifth column working internally against America, MAGA, the (American) Republican Party, and the American conservative movement, which is the last anchor tethering our country to the Constitution, common sense, and reality. Whatever might be its primary sources of intention and energy—be those foreign influence, “Deep State,” Democrat, or an organic and opportunistic paleoconservative revolt, or some combination—being a fifth column in the Woke assault against American and the West is the role it certainly plays.

The question is how it has been so successful at recruiting and gaining momentum, given that many of its views are wildly out of step with American values and the traditional perspectives of conservatives in America. Their nativism, isolationism, (genuine) racism, hostility toward Jews and Israel, racial minorities, women, sexual minorities, and legal immigrants, and undeniable antisemitism, not to mention their skepticism of free-market economies, the Constitution, religious liberty, conservatism itself, and a minimalistic state, do not reflect the values of generations of American conservatives or America overall.

Many reasons can be given for their meteoric and bewildering sudden rise. Among them, broad distrust in established institutions and favoring “trusted voices” within the movement who appear to be leading them astray is perhaps at the front. Frustration with the difficulty in pushing back against the Woke Left and its infiltration into our institutions is surely another significant component. Multiplying and tapping the alienation of our young men is definitely another. The outright force of money and the apparently sudden shift of so many voices all at once just in the last year, taking the movement by sudden surprise, must also contribute.

Both within and beyond these reasons, however there is a motivating factor that demands our attention: recruitment upon the “third rail.” The third rail, unlike the fifth column, is a metaphor. It literally refers to the electrified “third” rail subway trains use to power themselves. The idea is that if you were to fall down into the tracks, touching either of the first or second rails, where the wheels of the trains run, would result in nothing particular, but stepping on the electrified third rail would result in your electrocution and destruction.

The “third rail” metaphor therefore describes locations in political discourse that, if touched, will blow up your (professional) life. To the politically naive, these opinions appear to be benign, perhaps even statements of fact, but they work like a political tripwire, causing a huge reaction when they’re aired. A classic American example is attempting to explain the cultural significance of Confederate symbols to many (especially Southern) Americans. No matter how accurate, nuanced, or careful the speaker might be, it will likely be taken as a defense of slavery and sedition, and damage someone’s reputation or career (especially a political career).

Here’s the problem. A population can be pushed to the point where it will regard as bogus and evil the destruction an honest person can expect to receive for stepping on a third rail. For example, someone who earnestly defends the meaning he and many others hold for Confederate symbols might get blown up for “defending slavery,” even though he didn’t. If that happens enough, in unfair enough ways, for long enough, the public might revolt against the injustice of the political third rail.

That’s where we find ourselves with many issues all at once now as the lies of the extended Woke Left collapse around us, and the Woke Right fifth column is recruiting precisely by taking advantage of that situation.

There are two particular dynamics that have played a crucial role with regard to what we might call the Politics of the Third Rail that has enabled the rise of the Woke Right as a fifth column.

First, there’s the uncomfortable fact that many points that reside on the third rail are at least partially true but remain completely politically incorrect. This mismatch is a political powder keg; a bomb waiting to go off. When people aren’t allowed to say true things for undeniably political reasoning, the taboo is regarded not as politeness but censorship of potentially important or meaningful views. A reaction that embraces these views is more or less eventual in such a circumstance, and chances are, it won’t be nuanced when it arrives.

In fact, it usually will not be nuanced at all. The nuanced, careful, accurate voices will already have been shouted down, punished, or destroyed by the time the backlash arrives. The only voices left will not only be less careful by definition but will also be angry enough to assert more than the full truth of the issue. With regard to the issue of the Confederacy, they will not stop at the idea of revering a “heritage” of sovereignty and not being told what to do by a meddling federal government or outside power. They may start explaining why, in their view, slaves were better off than black freemen later, up to and including today.

Because these brash voices look brave and honest compared to the effete political correctness they’re shattering, they’re attractive. They will recruit followings. These followings will, by their intrinsic dynamics, go too far. Worse, by then, even if more reasonable voices step into the fraught space, they’ll sound timid, rather than brave, for their measured approach to the controversial issues, and they’ll fail to stem the tide as it flows toward radicalism and insanity

Second, there’s the fact that the “politically correct” Woke Left has created more, and more obviously bogus, political third rail space than any polite society ever could dream of—or that one will tolerate indefinitely. Undeniably true things like that it is perfectly acceptable to mention the completely banned “n-word” without using it—say by quoting Huckleberry Finn, or explaining the historical use of the term itself, or quoting a popular hip-hop song that says it every second line, or explaining that certain words in Mandarin and Korean sound similar but aren’t it and saying those—are rendered completely verboten, and seemingly arbitrarily. One will notice, for example, that “black people are allowed to say it,” and that many do, enthusiastically, casually, and even viciously, but that a racial double-standard has to be maintained for what appears to be “Woke” reasoning.

The result of this Wokification of discourse is that there’s an incredible and intolerable amount of patently ridiculous discursive and political “third rail” space that makes a great deal of honest discourse and real, necessary problem-solving impossible. As problems mount, the maintenance of the political third-rail space rightly begins to be identified as a big part of the festering problems, and it will be rebelled against. As this political and discursive pendulum swings back, as described above, it will not do so gently.

This isn’t a matter of mere perception, petulance, or, especially, latent bigotry, as the Woke Left and too many in polite society might assert. It is actually the case that the Woke Left has over the last two or three decades succeeded in turning an incredible number of legitimate political and cultural concerns into third-rail space that can hamper communication, prevent finding solutions to genuine problems, chill speech, and unjustly ruin lives. It is as though the Woke Left turned the first and second rails into electrified rails, preventing the train from being able to run and making its very carriages pose a real danger of electrocution.

It is both in and upon this greatly expanded third-rail space in political discourse that the fifth-column Woke Right has succeeded in doing most of its recruiting. Both in the name of and by “boldly” stepping onto the first and second rails, which are unjustifiably electrified, they have occupied both bogus and real third-rail political space and stand inside it as defiant rebels, unafraid of the shocks and calling people to join them. What it represents is freedom, fun, and liberation from an oppressive political, professional, and discursive regime that took advantage of the fundamentals of polite political taboos in order to steal and abuse power. It is therefore a successful recruiting methodology for a radical reactionary movement that rejects not only the bogus political correctness of Woke Left cultural mores but also the genuine guardrails of polite society in favor of a new form of liberation.

The fifth columnists in the Woke Right are using this dynamic to recruit and to drive wedges that undermine their political targets, particularly the United States itself and its conservative movement and institutions therein.

When we see commentators like Tucker Carlson “just asking questions,” what he is doing is stepping into third-rail space and recruiting, including many people who know better but are also now too pissed-off to care. When we see agitators like Nick Fuentes transgressively violating taboo after taboo (with what amounts to Right-wing Queer Theory), what he is doing is standing directly on the third rail and laughing as he redirects the bolts back at his enemies. When we see hordes of “Dark MAGA” influencers follow suit, they’re leading an army of mostly disaffected young men to fill the vacuum created by altogether too much third-rail space in contemporary cultural and political discourse, much—but importantly not all—of it artificial, odious, and purposefully malicious in the first place.

Thus, a fifth column that seeks to destroy America through its conservative movement has been able to recruit an angry army that has become shameless in the process of shedding false causes for shame. The are the fifth column standing on the third rail, and they threaten to undermine our shining city on the hill from within as our enemies advance upon us from without.

How can they be dealt with? One way only exists to us. We must steal their thunder (pun intended

We have to be honest. We have to occupy third-rail space ourselves with honesty, integrity, and nuance. We must be unafraid to tackle well these touchy issues that the Woke Right fifth-columners are tackling badly, and we must create a new civic norm of championing, not attacking, those who enter those spaces honestly and in good faith in order to deal earnestly with what partial—or sometimes full—truths reside there.

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Reciprocal Tolerance
by James Lindsay

In a footnote in his famous (or infamous) The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper relates a famous (and famously misunderstood) idea called the Paradox of Tolerance. It is, as it turns out, one of the most important concepts that any free society much reckon with—and solve.

Popper only devotes a single paragraph to this fundamental paradox of freedom, which can be summarized as “being tolerant of intolerance eventually results in an intolerant society, but being intolerant of intolerance is already a feature of an intolerant society.” In that paragraph, he outlines a solution, though he’s thin on the details. Here’s how he phrases it, in full:

Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Radicals on both the Left and the Right have run with this famous paradox of free societies in various ways. For example, it is popular on the Left to present only Popper’s conclusion about claiming the right to suppress intolerance without expressing his rather strict criteria for that suppression. On the (radical) Right, on the other hand, this formulation has been criticized (e.g., by R.R. Reno in Return of the Strong Gods) as planting a dialectical seed that turns tolerance into totalitarian intolerance over time

In these analyses, the Left is dishonest, and the Right is simply wrong, as is their wont in each case. The Left desires, like their Nazi pseudo-nemesis Carl Schmitt, to have the power to declare the intolerant enemy and have him destroyed without acknowledging how seriously Popper takes the conditions of such action. The Right simply fails to recognize that the devil is in the details for working with such a situation in reality. Of course, by way of its error, the Right also desires, like their Nazi semi-hero Carl Schmitt, to have the power to declare the enemy and have him destroyed.

Though Popper doesn’t develop the idea further, and though the devil will remain in the details, he does lay out criteria by which intolerance of the intolerant might be acted on wisely, as opposed to unwisely, to borrow from his own phrasing. This is where the rubber meets the road for the Paradox of Tolerance, to quote the relevant section again

…for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

What Popper is proposing here, though thin on the details, is a theory of tolerance in free society. He is saying we must retain the right to suppress intolerance that might answer our tolerance with a combination of irrationalism, intolerance, and violence. He clearly states we should regard such militant and subversive intolerance as a kind of incitement and refuse to protect it as free expression.

In practice, this is trickier than can be contained in a footnote. It is not sufficient to invoke legal intolerance against views that are merely irrational, anti-rational, that denounce argument, or that forbid followers from listening to rational arguments because they are allegedly deceptive. The law already has some mechanisms for dealing with intolerance that looks to answer arguments with fists and pistols, imperfect as those might be. Further, these are not the central part of the problem of overreaching tolerance.

Popper seems to miss the most essential characteristic for finding a strong solution to his paradox. This essential characteristic is located in the fact of the paradox itself: the intolerant will not reciprocate tolerance, given the opportunity. In essence, what he is looking for, but does not find, is a Golden Rule for the issue of tolerance.

We might call such a strong solution Reciprocal Tolerance. In short, Reciprocal Tolerance would be a doctrine like: we, the people of a free society, should extend tolerance only to any who, given power over us, would also extend tolerance to us in return. That is, we will treat others as we can reasonably expect they would treat us, as determined from their own words, deeds, charters, relationships, and organizational principles.

This principle of Reciprocal Tolerance is not reversible like through some postmodernist trick or psychopathic “DARVO” because it is applied from a free society. In full generality, it is that free societies are perfectly free to be intolerant of any politically intolerant political organization.

This principle is also not a principle regarding speech. People are free to say whatever intolerant, hateful, or bigoted thing they want, even in their group settings. It would apply to any political group and its members or leadership that organize a faction with the expressed intention of acquiring political power at least in part in order to revoke tolerance from others who, absent the case of such intolerance, would not revoke tolerance from them.

Free societies live or eventually die based on their solution to the Paradox of Tolerance. Tolerance cannot be unlimited or it will be exploited and taken advantage of, but it also must be broad enough to keep society free

The solution is toleration in the bounds of good-faith, Reciprocal Tolerance. We are under no obligation socially to tolerate subversives who operate in bad faith, nor are we under any obligation legally to tolerate any demand for tolerance that would not be reciprocated if the people making the demand themselves got their hands on the levers of power. While the first of these may only be a social convention unless people are illegally deceived and defrauded, the latter certainly falls within the range of legally actionable responses to intolerance we could enforce well within the boundaries of the Constitution, which we are seeking to protect and preserve.

Once either of these fouls against a free society is detected and verified, some generally acceptable and legally narrow mechanism of intolerance against them must be able to be employed. Practically speaking, at a minimum, there is no reason to extend tax-exempt status to nonprofit organizations that explicitly espouse agendas to amass power to abolish the existing tolerant political order in favor of intolerant ones that would, if successful, revoke tolerance of those who allowed their growth. Further, entities that espouse or articulate such beliefs that receive funding from foreign sources should not be tolerated.

A principle of Reciprocal Tolerance could therefore serve as a solid basis for both social norms and legal activity to better navigate the Paradox of Tolerance that lies at the heart of every society that wants to be free. Organized intolerance ought not to be tolerated for precisely the reason that it would withdraw tolerance from those it seeks to rule.

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What George Washington’s Death Can Teach Us About Woke
by James Lindsay

President George Washington died at his home on December 14, 1799, at the age of 67. He died, as it turns out, of a particularly bad and sudden upper respiratory infection, most likely strep throat, that the doctors of his day (the best available) did not know how to treat. (Penicillin as a treatment wasn’t discovered until 1928.)

After going out on a cold and wet evening on December 12 to inspect his fields, President Washington returned to Mount Vernon to rest with a tickle in his throat. On December 13, he continued to work outside in the cold, wet conditions, and by evening realized he had a problem. By morning on December 14, he had a full-blown, emergency infection and got Martha to summon help. Doctors were on the scene and went to work that morning.

Not knowing how to treat President Washington’s sudden illness, his doctors made his predicament worse by using the best of 18th century “medicine” on him, starting with extensive blood-letting. In fact, they drained nearly half of the great man's blood from his body hoping to cure him. It made things worse, at the very least weakening him greatly while he was otherwise afflicted.

They also had him drink and gargle a number of potions that would have blistered his throat and increased the inflammation while doing nothing to combat the infection. Some of these included Spanish fly, potions made out of infusions of beetles, and a solution of butter, molasses, and vinegar. They also gave him a completely unhelpful enema.

Washington, certainly partially as a result of his “medical care,” succumbed to this now-trivial disease in under 24 hours, said goodbye to his family as the end drew undeniably near, closed his eyes one last time, and died, allegedly with the words “‘Tis well” being the last words from his lips before he went. That night, America lost a giant, perhaps in an untimely fashion.

Now imagine for a moment that among his doctors one had a stroke of divine inspiration (or connecting the dots between other observations he had made in similar circumstances) that led him to conclude before any treatment began that, in fact, The President was suffering from a simple bacterial infection of the upper airways and trachea. Imagine further that he was able to convince his fellows of this stroke of accurate and correct insight.

Would acquiring this accurate diagnosis have cured President Washington? No, not on its own.

Would President Washington still have succumbed and died of this simple but aggressive infection? Probably, but that cannot be known.

Even if he would have still died, would that diminish the value of the accurate diagnosis? Not at all, and that’s the point.

The accurate diagnosis alone could not have saved President Washington’s life, but one thing we might guess is that understanding that his illness was caused by an invading pathogen growing in his throat that had nothing to do with “bad blood” or “evil humours,” he may well have avoided the blood-letting in his treatment, saving much of his strength for fighting the severe but routine infection.

Furthermore, the potions and concoctions he was given to gargle and drink might have been better purposed to deal with a direct infection, per long experience with animals or other people, and perhaps would have been chosen in a way that was more beneficial or benign, especially if some understanding of the role of inflammation was part of the blessed miraculous insight of our hypothesis. Maybe they would have been chosen only for his comfort and to keep his airways clearer.

It’s very unlikely that his doctors would have realized that a certain strain of mold properly prepared and administered would have surely cured him, but they might have realized their primary focus should have been on keeping him breathing as well as possible while his body fought the infection, potentially preventing many of the other, harmful things they did.

One young doctor did propose such a solution, in fact, recommending a radical new surgical technique at the time called a tracheotomy, which was not performed. Whether or not he understood the situation (likely not), he did understand that the emphasis was to keep Washington breathing until he could recover under his own power (which would have been increased had he not been drained of half his blood and given to drink various potions, some of which were surely unhealthy). Had that surgical intervention been performed cleanly and correctly, many today think, Washington likely would have survived.

In other words, a correct diagnosis might or might not have saved President Washington in that last dark month of the eighteenth century, but it would have certainly achieved at least three effects:

1) It would have ruled out dangerous false “solutions” like blood-letting and perhaps some of the concoctions he was given;

2) It would have focused energy and attention on doing more productive, even if insufficient, things than were done, which combined may actually have saved The President's life; and

3) It still would have been correct and therefore a robust foundation for pursuing and achieving real, reliable solutions to the same problem in future circumstances, independent of Washington’s fate.

That is, getting an accurate diagnosis matters even when the diagnosis itself is not sufficient to solve the problem at hand. The likelihood of finding a viable solution to a problem goes up dramatically with an accurate diagnosis, and the likelihood of avoiding bad false “solutions” in the process also goes up dramatically in this case.

Now let’s turn our attention to Woke, a societal infection if ever there was one.

Woke, which is ultimately a group-based victimhood complex channeled through social philosophy, is always an incorrect understanding of the phenomena of society. It therefore cannot lead to correct solutions, only to ridiculous things like blood-letting (criticism, in metaphor).

It does not matter if we are talking about left-wing Woke, right-wing Woke, postmodern Woke, modern Woke, or premodern Woke. Woke is a petulant misunderstanding of the circumstances, therefore it cannot provide a correct diagnosis. Therefore, again, it cannot, except by a combination of luck and failure, produce a meaningful solution.

To wit, Marx did not have good criticisms of society, capitalism, free markets, free trade, liberalism, feudalism, slavery, or anything else he criticized—as is often asserted—because all of his criticisms relied upon his own modern-era Woke theory of social alienation and conflict that is fundamentally not correct. (It is sociognostic and just as heretical as any other Gnostic heresy, as such.) The solutions he applied are wrong not merely on their own but also because his diagnostic framework is wrong.

Keeping the diagnostic framework while recommending different solutions (right-wing Woke, or Woke Right) will not fix the fundamental problem because the diagnostic framework is still wrong. Therefore, the prescribed solutions will also be wrong. Right-wing Woke, maybe like Washington’s enema, is not an answer to left-wing Woke.

Getting accurate diagnoses about bad social theory—not by using it—is not on its own a solution any more than one of President Washington’s doctors realizing he has a strep infection would have been a cure. It is, however, the foundation for finding a cure, or at least for favoring minimal and palliative care dedicated toward the right objectives (keeping him breathing and full of his own blood while his body fought the infection) rather than taking detrimental wrong turns.

Similarly, Woke theories and obsessions with power, victimhood, and group identity, but for “right-wing” causes, is an easily avoidable wrong turn that can be avoided by understanding that Woke theory and its obsession with power, victimhood, and group identity are the disease itself. Or, more deeply, that both are aspects of the same dialectic that is making our society sick.

I hope Western Civilization can survive, even if we are unaware of the cure. Like the body of President Washington in December 1799, it already has many of the resources (like the Constitution) needed to fight the Woke infection it is currently suffering from—as long as we keep it breathing and don’t unnecessarily weaken it with false “solutions” like more Woke, more criticism, more victimhood, more identity politics, and more obsession with power, even if they’re pointing in the “other” direction.

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