“What is culturally relevant teaching?” That is the question I set out to answer four years ago.

Back in 2020, my wife and I were preparing to be parents and I had started researching the state of our educational system. I quickly realized that I knew essentially nothing about what was happening in our schools, despite attending them for the first twenty-two years of my life.

The buzzwords were everywhere – “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),” “social-and-emotional learning (SEL),” “restorative justice (RJ),” and “culturally relevant teaching,” to name a few. I was completely lost, but I knew that some people on the TV were telling me that DEI, for example, meant teaching kids to respect others and treat people equally. Others were telling me that DEI was “brainwashing.” Clearly DEI was a point of contention, which confused me. How could anyone have a problem with diversity? How could anyone have a problem with equality? How could… wait. Does “equity” mean “equality”? What the hell is equity? I was curious.

After some quick google searches, I learned that “equity” meant “giving all kids an equal shot at the same outcome.” “Well,” I thought, “that’s insane!” I had recently read some Thomas Sowell, and he completely dismantled the “disparities equal discrimination” spell that I had fallen victim to in my early 20s. I knew that all children were different and, for various reasons, should be expected to reach different educational outcomes. The only way to produce equal outcomes between children is to artificially create unequal inputs between children. If you want all kids to cross the finish line at the same time, you must create a custom track for each child. Fast kids get weighted vests and obstacles. Slower kids get rollerblades and a slope.

How did schools get the idea that equality of outcomes was at all possible, let alone desirable? I was curious, so I started researching the “equity” pages of various school websites in my area. It was there that I kept running into “culturally relevant teaching” as an “equitable” practice for schools. Apparently “culturally relevant teaching” was a way to help schools produce equal outcomes between students.

“Ok,” I thought. “Let’s figure out what culturally relevant teaching is.” I was curious. I wanted to know what it was and how it was tied to “equity.” I wanted to know how I had never encountered the term in my early schooling, yet it was now ubiquitous on every district page I looked at. “It had to have come from somewhere,” I thought. Who created it?

I moseyed on over to Google Scholar for the first time in over a decade. I searched for “culturally relevant teaching,” and hit “enter.” I received over three million results in a tenth of a second. Whoa! The results overwhelmed me, so I set my eyes on the two most cited – Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy (over 12 thousand citations); and But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy (over 6 thousand citations).

Both articles were authored by Gloria-Ladson Billings in the mid-1990s. I started with Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy, the most cited result. It was there that I first encountered the term “critical consciousness,” which Billings identifies as the central learning objective culturally relevant teaching. “Culturally relevant teaching must,” she wrote, “[lead to the] development of a sociopolitical or critical consciousness.” I now know that critical consciousness is the cult belief that everything in society is designed to oppress you, and the only way to come to know “the truth” of the world is to become a Marxist committed to the “prophetic vision of social justice,” to quote Henry Giroux (writing about Paulo Freire’s critical theory of education.) But, at the time, all I knew was that I needed to know more. “Wait… what? The central goal of education is the development of a *political* consciousness,” I thought. “What the hell is going on here?” I was curious.

In But that’s just good teaching, I encountered Paulo Freire’s name for the first time. I learned that culturally relevant teaching is an “approach similar to that advocated by noted critical pedagogue Paulo Freire.” I also learned that “critical consciousness” was something Ladson-Billings wasn’t mincing words about. “Students,” she said, echoing her statement in Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy, “must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order.”

“Excuse me?!” Culturally relevant teaching was all the rage in every school district I investigated. I now recognized Gloria’s name all over the source documents I found. Why on earth are all of the schools invested in a program that teaches kids to “challenge the status quo of the current social order?” Who is Paulo Freire? What are “inequities,” and why must students learn to “critique the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain” them? How did all of this become “good teaching”?

I tell you this story for a purpose, though. A purpose that starts with a question.

I have a nagging question, one that I haven’t been able to shake since the very early days of my research: what happened to curiosity?

I didn’t fall into the rabbit hole that is “woke.” I was dragged into it by my curiosity. I had no choice in the matter. What am I looking at? Where did this come from? Who decided this should be in schools, and what is the objective? These are the questions that broke the cult’s spell over me.

Ten years ago, I was fully immersed in the Woke “cult milieu.” I didn’t ask any questions, I just assumed that I was a “good person” on the “right side of history” because I supported anything and everything that sounded virtuous. It never occurred to me that the language I was using may hide contrived terms and radical agendas; never occurred to me that education today could be extremely different than the education I received 20 years ago; never occurred to me that there may be reasons why six-out-of-ten children in Wisconsin aren’t proficient in reading or math.

According to Robert J. Lifton, an American psychiatrist who has spent decades studying cult psychology, “the most basic feature of the thought reform environment…is the control of human communication.” Cults do everything they can to control what their disciples can see, read, think, hear, say, and write. One of their primary tools cults deploy for killing a bubbling curiosity that may lead someone to stray from cult doctrine is the “thought terminating cliché.”

“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.”

“But that’s just good teaching!” is a thought-terminating cliché that no longer works on me. It did prior to 2020, but after reading Gloria Ladson-Billings’ work, I now know that, for her, “good teaching” means practicing critical theories of race, sex, gender, and culture on children. That is to say, I now know the “good teaching” children receive in schools is actually systematized brainwashing.

If we’re going to break the spell the Woke cult has caste over our entire educational infrastructure in the United States, we’re going to need curiosity to make a massive comeback. People need to start asking basic questions – the “who, what, when, where, and why” – and follow their curiosity down the rabbit hole.

As I write this, our elite universities are in open revolt. The question of the day is, “How did U.S. universities become so antisemitic?”

Aren’t you curious?

Sources:

1. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491.
2. Ladson‐Billings, G. (1995). But that's just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory into practice, 34(3), 159-165.
3. Lifton, R. J. (1989). Thought reform and the psychology of totalism: A study of "brainwashing" in China. University of North Carolina Press.

All Marxism is cult religious.

All Marxist “theory” begins by believing it uniquely knows what human beings really are (socio-spiritual beings), into what they have been thrown (a mundane world of property ownership, imposed identity, and suffering through scarcity), and to what we must return (a truly social society that transcends individualism). Because Marxists fundamentally believe they know the true and secret socio-spiritual nature of humans whereas (demonic, Demiurgic) social forces have conditioned everyone else not to know them, they feel uniquely entitled to power for the purpose of remaking man into who he is. This explains most of their behavior.

The ultimate goal of Marxism isn’t economic, political, or social control, as most would believe. Those are merely means to its end. Its ultimate goal isn’t even power, though it worships power as the constitutive force of reality. Its ultimate goal is to direct the socio-spiritual evolution of Man. Socio-spiritual in the sense that Man’s true spiritual nature manifests in his social relations. This is the idea of the “New Man” Marxists always speak of. He is Man spiritually evolved to remember who he truly is, a truly social and creative being that is one with all others in his species and, indeed, all of Nature. 

This means that Marxism is just a particularly nasty, vindictive, and deceptive form of Gnostic theosophy, a cult religion. Laid bare of all its details in whatever form, economic, racial, sexual, whatever, it is a drive to seize power to direct the spiritual evolution of Man. Everything else it argues is either rationalization or excuse, none of it is real or legitimate because none of it does anything but serve its actual purpose in whichever moment of resistance it finds itself in. 

What is meant by “direct the socio-spiritual evolution of Man”? In a word, eugenics. Marxism intrinsically practices eugenics, though not necessarily on the “crude” physical level (mundane) but on the more refined spiritual level they believe they uniquely understand. In practice, a lot of the crude part comes out by necessity. The goal is to prune out of mankind those unfit to evolve spiritually to the higher collectivist levels and to transform the rest into socio-spiritual Marxists.

In theosophical cults, Man is believed to have forgotten who he really is by virtue of some Fall. He is truly Spirit and One with God and thinks himself otherwise because of the distortions of his conditions: materialist, social, economic, or otherwise. He has forgotten this because he lacks “God’s wisdom” (theo-sophy) to know who—and what—he truly is, which is a spiritual being at one with the One. Since this is true for everyone all at once, no one is truly separate from anyone else. All is One; All are One. To be an individual in this circumstance is to reject Oneness in favor of individualism, which is Man’s Fall.

The goal of theosophical religious cults is to seize enough power over their adherents to remind them of who they “really are,” which brings them to “at-One-ment” (atonement for their false separation from God) by obliterating their allegedly false consciousness of themselves and Man. They misunderstand themselves and thus misunderstand the society and world around them. Theosophists aim to remind them of who they “truly are” and bring them back to Oneness of spirit and being. They can be kindly enough, but in the end, they are tyrannical because humanity can only evolve as a whole if their presumptions about the nature of reality and Man are true.

These cults are ultimately Gnostic. As the second-century Valentinian Gnostic Theodotus put it: “It is not, however, the bath [baptism] alone that makes free, but knowledge [gnosis] too: who we were, what we have become, where we were, where we have come to be placed, where we are tending, what birth is, and what rebirth.” Theosophists believe we were Spirit but have become mortal; we were in Paradise in perfect union with God but have been thrown into this mundane world; we are tending toward spiritual awakening or destruction; and birth is a Fall and rebirth is accepting their Gnostic cult beliefs and practices. It isn’t all just ancient heresy or New Age hippie nonsense. Marxism is cut from precisely this cloth.

The old Gnostic heresies place the Fall of Man in the Sin of Adam, obviously, blaming the wrath of God for flinging us out of Paradise and our inheritance into this world of work, pain, toil, and death—as individuals, separated from God and Eden. Their belief was that the Serpent in Genesis 3 told the truth, and the God in Genesis is not God but a demonic Demiurge, builder of the world, imprisoner of his spiritual brethren in Man. 

Marxism, qua Marx, places the Fall in the separation of private property (thus individualism) from communal property (thus collectivism). The bourgeoisie is Demiurgic, constructing a political economy in which the masses must labor, suffer, and die. The masses can awaken as a class-conscious proletariat that understands Man’s true nature is socialist, which means being transcendent of private property and the individualism that follows from it. This program goes on through the other forms of Western Marxism.

Critical Race Theory, which is Race Marxism, puts the Fall in the creation and imposition of power-laden racial categories (“whiteness” and “white supremacy”), which is a proxy for Western values including capitalist economics and their cultural hegemony. “White people” become Demiurgic, imprisoning “people of color” in a world not made for them but willing to use them. They can become race conscious, though, and understand Man’s true nature is transcendent of race while retaining consciousness of it.
Queer Theory, which is Queer Marxism and overtly an esoteric religion based on sex, puts the Fall in the assertion of any valid claim to normalcy and legitimacy. “Normativity” is a Demiurgic force that imprisons perverts, weirdos, deviants, and degenerates, in addition to sexual and “gender” minorities, in a world that demands they be normal. They can become consciously queer, however, and understand Man’s true nature is transcendent of any norms or expectations.

The framework is the same in every case, and the details only vary a little as needed. A demonic superpower—the Demiurge, the bourgeoisie, whites, "cis" straight people, or whatever—orders and rules the world for itself. It did this by illegitimately taking a step toward godhood, separating itself from the All, and locked out those who are truly innocent and knowing. It is the projection of Satan onto the godly and godliness onto Satan. On the first page of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels say the whole of their program is put in a word: “oppressor versus oppressed.” The privileged establish themselves as separate and deserving while the innocent are excluded from “godlike” knowing and punished severely when they take a bit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

The Gnostic theosophical myth is that the innocent are excluded by powers who broke away from the unified totality of being to assert their individuality. Maybe they have done this through claiming deity themselves as Creator of the (mundane and Fallen) world, or in a socio-spiritual sense through private property, racial status, social status otherwise, etc. Because these deign to be God but are not, they are jealous and wrathful of anyone who might approach the “hidden truth” of gnosis, which would break their spell and end their illegitimate power. They hide and suppress the “truth” and punish anyone who seeks or stumbles upon it.

The theosophical gnostics know otherwise, though. They know the "gods" are false and that God as a unified totality is real and, in fact, not distinct from themselves. They are therefore spiritually or socio-spiritually advanced but oppressed and must shepherd Man to Liberation. This amounts to a revolution, either of Heaven and Earth or of society, depending on the locus of their beliefs, but it’s all the same. Marxism, Race Marxism, Queer Marxism, and the rest are identical in this form. They are all theosophical religious cults pretending not to be.

One way to put this is that theosophy, whether Marxist or otherwise, is Satan presenting himself as an Angel of Light until he creates a madness in those who follow him that way that possesses them with a spirit of enmity and false superiority presenting itself as righteousness and truth. You can know them by their fruits, it is said. What are their fruits? Entitlement. Narcissism. Self-aggrandizement. Accusation. Deception. Enmity. Sowing confusion, even in their own minds and hearts. Attempting to lead the little ones astray. Destruction, everywhere they go. It is Evil selling itself as uniquely Good.

Marxism cannot escape this cloth because Marxism is cut from this cloth. All Western Marxist “theories” are the same in this. They are destructive theosophical cults. All Marxism is cult religious.

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.