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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3 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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