The Unholy Essence of Qu**r | Logan Lancing | EP 473

I saw what happened to you with Bill C16 in Canada. Quickly following that, in May of the following year, I watched they were chasing or attempting to find Brett Weinstein with baseball bats. And then when my wife said that I would be a father, I knew I better get a grip on what's going on in education. I had seen what's going on in the news and I knew something was afoot. You know, there are other parents that don't have the time to dive into this stuff and don't understand what's going on, and they should know, and they should be informed.

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Hello everybody! I had the opportunity today to speak to Logan Lancing, who is the author, along with James Lindsay, who was a guest on my podcast and is a force in his own right, obviously. The new book, "The Queering of the American Child." Well, so what did we talk about? Well, we talked about the intersection between Marxism and postmodernism, right? The strange intersection. Marxism being a meta-narrative, right, a theology that purports to encompass everything. So a totalitarian theology allied with a philosophical school that purports to claim that there are no overarching meta-narratives, despite the fact that Marxism is precisely one of those. How do those two things go together? Well, that's one of the things we investigate: the metastasis of Marxism into postmodern queer theory.

What is queer theory, you ask? Well, that's why you have to watch the podcast. It's not the celebration of gay identity; it's much more than that and much less than that at the same time. Uh, it's a dark discussion, and it'll take you places that, in a happier time, you might be justified in your unwillingness to go. But we're not there at the moment, folks, so down the rabbit hole today with Logan Lancing and the queering of the American child. Join us.

So, Mr. Lancing, you have two books: "The Woke War Path," which is an inquiry essentially into what Marxism and postmodernism fundamentally, the strange alliance between those two things, and then more recently, a very provocatively named book titled "The Queering of the American Child" with James Lindsay. And so, I want to wander through the domains covered by both of those books. I thought I might, as we start, by asking you a fairly blunt question, and it's a question I torment myself with, I would say.

Um, the claims from the radicals on the left is that they're all about the good things. They're all about compassion; they're all about diversity; they're all about inclusivity; they're all about equity. How can anyone oppose such noble views? How do you know that all of your theorizing isn't just a mask for your weird bigotry? You know, to use the terminology that seems to have come rampaging out of the woodwork with the Kamala Harris' coronation. So, but I'm very curious about this. You know, I mean, people accuse me of being a bigot, for example, being homophobic, for example, whatever the phobia of the month is, there's an accusation that goes along with it. What makes you think that you're not, that those epithets don't apply appropriately to you?

Um, well, I think the left has done a very good job at deceiving a lot of people when they use the words diversity, equity, and inclusion. They may share your language, but they don't share your dictionary. Those terms have been deceptively defined, and when they're in a social circle where suspecting people are present, those words mean one thing. And then as soon as they've got an ounce of power, they immediately turn to the esoteric definitions that they've got for those terms and employ them. So, I mean, I know myself, I know I'm none of those things, and I know a majority of people that the left come for are not those things. But under their definitions of those terms, there is no one who could escape being labeled those things because they're all-encompassing. They've got an ism or a phobia for everything on the planet, and they're always going to find one, so you're never going to escape that if you're someone they want to come after.

And of course, those terms are used, you know: racism, homophobia, bigotry. They're used to shut you up, so you don't talk. They're used to drive ideological conformity. Okay, so one of the things that I've seen recently because I've been going after the right-wing psychopathic troll demons that inhabit the virtual universe, and especially with regards to their anti-Semitism. Because I've seen a dreadful spike in anti-Semitism not only since October 7th, when it's become painfully obvious to anyone whose eyes are open that that's precisely what's happening, but long before that, not least because there was some association between me, for example, and Ben Shapiro. And then, of course, I joined forces with The Daily Wire, which everyone knows is run by a cabal of evil Jews, even though the CEO is an evangelical Christian.

So I've seen the worst of the bigots, maybe the worst—I mean hell's a bottomless pit, so the worst is a long ways down—but there is no shortage of the bigoted types that the radical left likes to point to. Now, I personally don't believe that the right-wing anti-Semites are as much of a danger to the Jews and to the general population as the left-wing anti-Semites. I believe there's far fewer of them, for example, and that their arguments are much more transparent and much less credible, in a sense, in an intellectual sense. But they're still as nasty a bunch of scum rats as you could hope to array.

And so those people exist, and so when we're battling against monsters, as Nietzsche pointed out, you know, if you look too long into the abyss, then the abyss tends to look into you, and that if you're fighting monsters, you have to be very careful not to become one yourself. And so I'm going to push you again on this a bit. So, I've been thinking about Chris Rufo, for example, who's been a very effective counter-propagandist, you might say, in Florida. He's certainly put a bee in the bonnet of Harvard University and fought a pretty decent fight with regards to the unsuitability of Claudine Gay to serve there as president.

Um, the DeSantis administration, along with Rufo, are making moves to implement a certain degree of political control over the content of at least one university in Florida. That would mean that there would be one new conservative university compared to 99% of the radical leftist universities. But there's still a danger there, you know, and the danger is that the political starts to explicitly permeate the educational. And you could say, well, the leftists walked right into that because of their insistence that the ideology permeates the educational. But, still, it doesn't look to me like that excuses the potential for an equivalent error on the more conservative side.

So, you know, you said you know that you're not a bigot and you're not a homophobe, etc. But I would say most people who might deserve those epithets—not all of them—would also claim that they're not. What is it about what you're doing that makes you think that you're a reliable commentator on such matters and that you're not just acting out some variant of your own personality pathology by going after the, you know, the hyper-compassionate, all-inclusive utopians of the left-wing sphere?

Yeah, so I'd start with just a quick note on the point about—you indicated that, you know, the left has control of what, 90% to 95% of social institutions. We really worry about it in education; that's where my work is primarily concerned. What do we do when the right becomes very explicit about their intention to look at the left and say, “Look what they're doing; we should be able to do the same”? And I would just quickly note—we can get into this later if you want—that that's precisely playing into the hand of the ideology at the core of the left, which is based in conflict. They need two poles to move history forward; that's really the core of their faith. They need conflict to progress, and they don't care what that conflict looks like as long as things are destroyed in the path.

So, I think that they welcome someone like a Christopher Rufo figure coming in and saying, “We are going to have certain values and we are going to be political,” and whatever it is we do. I think they welcome that because that plays right into their dialectical game. Well, it goes back to the issue of, you know, your own feelings about your own trustworthiness as a commentator. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we do have in-group preferences, for example, as human beings; we tend to prefer the familiar. There's going to be a certain amount of probably at least racial preference that goes along with that; that's in reflexive. You know, that takes a certain amount of conscious effort to overcome. And so you see now and then—I think it was David, was it David Brooks? I don't remember. Someone wrote an article in The New York Times, who said, “You know, are we the bad guys?” And so that's a question that people should always ask themselves.

And so you wrote these pretty provocative books: "The Woke War Path," "The Queering of the American Child." That's a particularly provocative title. Why aren't you precisely the sort of bad guy that the leftists like to point to? And are you in the same camp, would you say, then, also as someone like Chris Rufo?

Um, that's a good question, and I'm not sure. But what I will say in terms of my trustworthiness, I wouldn't consider myself an expert in anything. It's almost like a derogatory term nowadays to hold around the title of expert. All I have done—which is nothing special—is I've spent years, the last five years, reading the left's literature on their own terms and just sharing it, saying, “Look, everyone, this is what they're saying. This is from this book. This is from this academic. Is anyone aware of this literature?" I haven't done anything special; it's just a lot and a lot of reading and saying this is what's out there. This explains why the left takes these actions and not these actions; this is how the left thinks about this issue, and it’s all explicitly done on their own terms.

I worry quite a lot; I beat myself up a lot while I was writing those books because I'm very concerned about misrepresenting someone's ideas. It's just a deep-seated fear; I don't know what it is about my psychology, but knowingly misrepresenting someone is something I've always tried to avoid. I just—I would never knowingly do that. So knowing that, the thing I thought that I could best do is just share their words exactly as they've placed them on the page, and people can determine what they want to do with that information however they'd like. But they should be aware of it because those in charge of education have been doing this for a very long time and they've been writing things for a very long time, and we've ignored them for far too long.

Okay, so you're construing yourself— it sounds like you're construing yourself essentially as a journalist. And so your case is, well, here's what the left says; you can read it. I've cited it; you can read it, and you can decide for yourself. Is that fair enough?

Okay, let's walk through "The Woke War Path." Okay, so lay out your thesis with regards, let's say, to Marxism and postmodernism. Let's start with "The Woke War Path." Lay out what you see as the philosophical underpinnings. Where are we with the philosophy of the radical left, and is the combination of Marxism and postmodernism the right initial lens to view that through?

Yes, precisely. Um, so I'll kind of try and keep track of the things I want to explain here. And because I first heard you use the term yourself, Dr. Peterson, of postmodern neo-Marxism. And I remember thinking the first time I heard it, "Well, that makes no sense. Postmodernism is post-Marxism. How could it possibly be that these two things have combined?" And the first time I saw it used by a leftist academic in print was from a man by the name of Peter McLaren. And he was writing in the 80s, and he was describing what the critical Marxist project, the critical Marxist tradition was doing: was taking postmodern principles and applying them to identity politics and education. So that was the first kind of verification that I saw that, okay, Peterson's onto something here.

To your question about what is at the core of Marxism, this is one of the things I'm most proud of with "The Queering of the American Child." I didn't delve too much into it in "The Woke War Path" because I don't think I understood it at that level yet. Um, but the heart of Marxism, in my view—and I think I could speak for Dr. Lindsay, but have him on and let him, you know, give his interpretation—is that Marxism is a theology. It's not an economic theory. If you read the "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts," I think Marx is very clear. He says human beings are creative, and we're social. Now, I'm a pretty plain guy; I'm not an academic. I have no special training; I don't—I still don't consider myself a writer. So I'm going to put this in plain terms.

When Marx says human beings are creative, he means we see something in the world like a stick, and we've got a vision in our head of what we want to turn that stick into. We've got a vision in our head of what we want the world to look like. So maybe I want to make a spear. I grab a sharp rock; I start cutting away at the stick. I whittle it away; I slowly match what's in my head to the physical reality of my world. That's what Marx meant by humans have a creative nature. And in that, the deeper meaning of that is that when we look into the world, we see ourselves reflecting back at us. We see our creativity, our subjective thoughts, the vision of my spear objectified in the real world. And what he said is we look out into the world; we're humanizing with our creativity and it reflects back our human nature, and we see ourselves as gods, essentially, is what it comes down to.

Uh, Marx said our species being is also social— that's our spiritual species property to use his own terms. And what he means by that is, we're not born in the world alone; we're not born in a vacuum. He said, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” meaning we're born into a world that's already been humanized. We're born into a world where other people have used their creative potential to transform the world into their vision. So in a sense, our consciousness—the burden of what has been, right?

Yes, exactly! And do a little hand gesture and right, and a cackle, an evil cackle that like curls your spine, right? And what freezes the blood of small children? And what Marx said is because we've got this creative potential to transform our world into our own vision, and we're a social creature—what those things differentiate us from the animals. And because we can do those things, we make history. Meaning when I'm born, I'm born into a world others have worked on; they've already transformed nature. If I'm born in a primitive tribe, I'm not going to be going and creating a space-faring civilization. So the history of the people that have come before me preloads my consciousness, and that makes history.

And then the people in my present, my present tribe, whatever you want, your city, those of us attempting to send rockets to Mars, we then socialize the next generation into the world. And Marx's whole theology is the idea that we can arrest this process of history; we can direct it. It's not something that just has to happen, and it's incumbent on those who are oppressed to arrest it because the group in power who's created the society—uh, with capitalism it would be the bourgeois and their private property and the laws, rules, and regulations that have been built up to solidify their social status and their domination—they're not going to overthrow history and direct history in the direction we want it because they're pretty set; they're enjoying their lives; they're happy. So it's incumbent on the oppressed to become conscious of this fact that we can arrest history and we can direct it, and that's Marx's program: the arresting of history through conflict to drive it to an ultimate endpoint, one where we look out in the world and it reflects our humanity back onto us.

Marx said when we look into the world and we're one with nature and nature is one with us. Uh, I think his precise words to describe it in almost biblical terms was he said that when man looks out and he revolves around himself as his own true sun. I mean, it doesn't get any more theological than that. So I think that's the heart of it and everything derives from that. It doesn't make sense that it's an economic theory; it never has. That's why over 100 million people died starving to death in the dark. That's why it doesn't work because he mapped his economics on top of a theology to sell it, is my opinion.

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Okay, okay, so let's delve into the theological side for a moment and then we'll return to the postmodern element. Okay, so there are two things you laid out as far as I am understanding what you're saying. And the first is, well, some support for your argument that this is a theological movement is that, well, it is a post-religious movement. And it's also something that Nietzsche predicted when he discussed the death of God. He said in "The Will to Power" that the human race would run an experiment in the 20th century that would likely doom millions of people to investigate the validity of a resentment-predicated communism, and that if we learned the proper lesson from that, then perhaps the sacrifice of lives would have proved valuable and necessary.

Now, you know, that's a hell of a harsh thing to say, but it's also quite the remarkable prediction. And of course, Dostoevsky saw the same things coming, especially in his book "Demons," which is as accurate a prologue to the gulag as you could possibly hope for. Okay, so let's look at this theologically. Because I think it is a theology; it's a post-Christian theology. No, it's an anti-Christian theology. And so part of the reason it's anti-Christian is because Marx's fundamental presupposition is that the god of power does and should rule, right? So that's quite a claim, and I think actually you can understand the attractiveness of that claim, especially on the economic side, because the idea that there is a small minority of people who hold comparative power in any human social hierarchy has some truth, particularly true if the society is corrupt.

And it is also the case that even the most benevolent of social organizations are corrupted to some degree by power. And so power is a major league god, you might say, and it's very attractive intellectually, especially if you're a rather rigid reductionist and you don't like to think in a sophisticated manner—it is to reduce everything to power, as Foucault did: power and sexuality in Foucault's case. And you can make a credible case for that; you can make a credible case that your relationship with yourself is one of power and your relationship with your wife and your relationship with your children and your so-called friends and every economic relationship. It's all boils down to power and only the naive think differently.

And so the world's a war of power, and that's not only an anti-Christian doctrine in the most fundamental way; it's almost literally a satanic doctrine because in the gospels, for example, Christ is literally tempted by the Satan who offers him power as an alternative to the proper principle of sovereignty. Okay, so, so, so that's the first thing is Marxism is a theology of power. All right, the next thing is that you pointed out was that it's a dialectic of oppressed versus oppressor. And so that's also interesting theologically because the story of Cain and Abel is an oppressor versus oppressed theology. And the spirit of Cain is the spirit of the resentful oppressed who rebels against the—what would you say?—the upward-striving individual who makes the proper sacrifices, destroys him, and rebels against God pridefully and deceitfully, right?

So that's another theological element. Now, the Marxists would say, well, religion—Christianity—is the opiate of the masses. And perhaps Cain, under the sway of Lucifer, who's regarded as an admirable rebel by the Marxists including Marx, is the upholder of the proper revolutionary spirit. But it's certainly the case that the notion that existence itself, history itself, all relationships are a battleground of power between the oppressor and the oppressed is central to Marxism as far as I'm concerned. It's not a Marxist idea in and of itself, but it's central to Marxism.

And it's also a pretty damn saleable idea, especially if your culture is corrupted by power and you have your self-serving reasons for regarding yourself as victimized and oppressed. You know, that was what Nietzsche objected to with regards to the philosophy of resentment, and Marx is—Marxism is the philosophy of resentment writ large. And the problem with that is that there's a lot of things in life to be resentful about, right? So it's easy to sell; it's a doctrine that suits the pathologically immature. And so, okay, so is there anything in my characterization of Marxism as a theology that's at odds with the manner in which you're construing it?

No, I don't think so. And a point to add is not only is it an easy sell, but it's a really easy sell to children, which is the relevant area where I'm most concerned. You know, adults can be set in their ways. Um, and of course, you're going to have those with psychopathologies that really find a lot of value in resentment. And how I conceive of it is a religion that answers all of their questions about why they are where they are in life and why things—what their purpose should be—and why they should be so resentful, and they should be justified in being resentful. I get that. But with children, it’s a super, super easy sell. It’s dividing the world into black and white, and it’s easy to replicate—very easy to replicate.

You know, the structure of classical, what's now called vulgar Marxism, looks something like this: you have some people who decide to create a society in the classic vulgar sense and give themselves a form of private property. They create the idea of private property and build institutions around that to solidify it, and they justify this private property going to themselves in an ideology called capitalism that explains to everyone that this is common sense, neutral, and fair. Things have always been this way; they're justified in having what they have. You're justified in your low position on the totem pole as a worker, and this is how things are going to be. And it's incumbent on those workers to wake up to the fact that the call of history has chosen them to move the dialectic forward, to take historical materialism to the next stage of history.

You can map that into a lot of different domains. It’s amazing. It took them this long to do it. I mean, with critical race theory, you’ve got white people who created a society they’ve given themselves. They’ve invented and given themselves a sociocultural private property called whiteness. Cheryl Harris, in her paper, was the late '80s or early '90s, literally said “whiteness as property” was the title of the paper, and right in there she says it’s akin to a beggar’s private property. They give it to themselves; they create an ideology of white supremacy that says this is neutral, common sense, and fair—this is how things have always been. And it’s incumbent on the oppressed, which in this particular stance would be people who happen to be black or people of color, anyone who's non-white, to rise up and develop instead of class consciousness, it’s been long day, an anti-racist consciousness. And to create things like what Ibram X. Kendi proposed with the Department of Anti-Racism that supersedes all laws and jurisdictions in the United States.

So we can force this on everyone and we’re going to use equity—which is socialism—to redistribute access to resources, and we're going to sum everything up within the sentence "abolition of whiteness" rather than "abolition of private property" as human self-estrangement. You can map that exact structure onto queer theory, which is some people in society created a form of sociocultural private property called normalcy, or being normal, and they gave it to themselves, and they hide it in an ideology of cis-heteronormativity that explains to everyone that this is neutral, common sense, and fair—the way things should be. It’s good to be normal, and it’s incumbent on—and I think this requires a definition, I can go into it if you want—but it’s incumbent on those who are queer—and this is not a statement of essential identity; I can explain precisely what I mean; it does not mean gay; it does not mean lesbian; it’s antithetical to a person happening to be gay or lesbian—but it’s incumbent on them to rise up and abolish normalcy as private property.

It’s all the same; it’s the same engine under the car, Jordan, you know; it’s just painted differently. It’s just a different flavor. Okay, so now we've talked—we've pulled postmodernism into the discussion. So, you know, my sense was I got criticized a lot for using the term postmodern neo-Marxists because all the pseudo-intellectuals—the arrogant pseudo-intellectuals—came out of the closet and said, “Well, doesn’t Peterson know that postmodernism is predicated on the rejection of meta-narratives and that Marxism is a meta-narrative?” And the answer to that is, well, yeah, actually, boys and girls, I was perfectly well aware of that, and so that really wasn't much of a critique as far as I was concerned, except one that was simultaneously appallingly naive and arrogant, which is a hell of a combination.

I saw the perverseness in that because, of course, it was Lyotard who proclaimed that the essence of postmodernism was a skepticism regarding meta-narratives—by which he really meant something like Judeo-Christianity, the Judeo-Christian tradition. But other meta-narratives seem to be perfectly acceptable, so you could have the meta-narrative of unbridled hedonism, for example, or the meta-narrative of unbridled power, and for some reason those escape the criticism of meta-narratives that in principle the postmodernists were up in arms about. And so, is that a contradiction? Well, obviously do postmodern neo-Marxists care about contradictions? Not in the least, so that's no criticism.

Now, my sense was that Marxism was a philosophy of resentment. I think Marx picked the axis along which resentment has the greatest purchase because a small minority of people do control a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth and resources economically. Of course, that's the case with every economic system that has ever been developed and tried by any society anywhere. So to attribute that to capitalism is ill-advised, foolish, naive, counterproductive, and motivated, and certainly far from the fundamental point. So you have Marxism as this oppressive versus oppressed narrative, meta-narrative even, and then what happened with the postmodernists is they metastasized that, as you pointed out. They took exactly the same underlying argument of resentment and turned it into an explanation for a power differential across all possible axes of group comparisons in the human realm—ableism, height, attractiveness, wealth—although they downplay the economic differences interestingly enough, sex, even imaginary dimensions like gender. You name it—every possible axis of distinction became a narrative of power.

And so that's the metastasis of Marxism. It’s a much more perverse version of Marxism, and that's really saying something because it’s already an incredibly perverse doctrine. Now, you said when you heard me use that term to begin with that you were perplexed or skeptical, to say. What I presume is you have changed your mind about that. I have no idea how that played into the development of your thinking, but has your mind apparently changed on that front? How come? And is there a more accurate way of formulating it, do you think, than the metastasis of Marxism, let's say, across these multiple dimensions?

No, I haven't changed my mind, and I came to that conclusion because I read a lot. Again, I don't have any really—you know, I’ve got a four-year degree. I didn't spend any time in school studying any of this. I fell into all of this, so I was starting from scratch. But I read enough of them saying that that's precisely what it is: it's the critical Marxist tradition smashed into the postmodern tactics. And the first time I read someone specifically state this, someone with some weight behind their name was Kimberly Crenshaw, the mother of CRT, which was formed in my backyard in Madison, Wisconsin, in a convent here, you know. And they say, right—if you read Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanek's book "CRT: An Introduction," written at the high school level, mind you, and published in 2000 or 2001—they say in the beginning, you know, we find ourselves at this convent. What an odd place for a bunch of Marxists! But Crenshaw states in her "Mapping the Margins" paper that what she is doing, the project of critical race theory, is taking the critical Marxist tradition—the identity politics—and inserting the postmodern element into it. She's combining them! It's a witch's brew because postmodernism is a really effective tool for them. A tool that they didn't have access to.

So I not only read Kimberly Crenshaw say that's precisely what they're doing, but again, Peter McLaren has a great paper, and the name is escaping me right now from 1989, but he was writing that that's precisely what they're doing. It's the critical Marxist tradition and postmodernism. But the one that really sold it for me was Joe Kincheloe, who is a critical pedagogue in education. He’s since passed, but he is one of the people who is responsible for outlining the technical term for what woke is, and that is critical constructivism. And when I read Joe Kincheloe's work, I mean it just absolutely jumped off the page that this is precisely what they—what has happened. The critical Marxists have adopted postmodernism into their analysis; they use what they like; they discard what they don't like.

Your point about contradiction? Contradictions, Jordan—contradictions for Marxists are a fruitful site of critique. That's where the magic happens; that's where the conflict happens. That's what they're supposed to be resolving. Uh, so it’s no surprise that they enjoy contradictions, and it's no surprise that they enjoy creating contradictions because that’s the whole game: is conflict and contradictions and overcoming it.

Well, so when there was some backlash to my diagnosis, let's say, about the unholy alliance between the Marxists and the postmodernists, it really took me a while because this wasn't something that I had just conjured out of the theater of my imagination. As far as I was concerned, I read these appalling, luciferian, arrogant intellectuals, and that's what they said! So I thought I was just describing what was obvious. It was like in the 1970s, it became declass to pronounce yourself a Marxist, particularly after Solzhenitsyn demonstrated beyond any possible hope of ejection that Stalin and Lenin were murderous repugnant, murderous, vicious, vile thieves and thugs beyond a shadow of a doubt. You couldn't be a Marxist anymore, so it’s like, presto-chango! We'll just alter the terminology a bit, metastasize the entire philosophy of resentment, and away we go.

And as far as I could tell, that was exactly what Foucault, for example— we might as well put him at the top of the heap— says he is the world's most cited intellectual. That's essentially what Foucault said. It wasn't like I was inventing this, and so the fact that I got pushback, especially from the leftists, well, it made me question my sanity for a while. It was like, I'm pointing out what's obvious here, and you're telling me that I don't understand what I'm reading? I don't think so. I actually tend to understand what I'm reading, especially if I actually do the reading.

And so, okay, okay, so now we have this meta-Marxist witches brew, as you pointed out. And Kimberly Crenshaw is a particularly interesting case in point because she's a professor of law who thinks she's a psychiatrist, except her diagnostic ability is limited to one, let's say, one condition: everything is about a power disparity. It's like, well, Dr. Crenshaw, you're actually not much of a diagnostician because it turns out that most complex social and psychological pathologies have a multitude of causes, and you actually have to consider all of them. And you can't reduce everything to a dialectic of power unless you're too goddamn stupid or crooked to not be able to think in a more sophisticated manner or you're motivated in that direction. And in her case, I would say it's some combination of stupidity and crookedness, but it's certainly not sophisticated.

Okay, so now we have—we pulled in the—now let me make a case for the postmodernists for a minute because one of the things we might ask ourselves is the Marxists are attractive and they can sell what they're offering, because resentment is a very powerful motivation, and because power does exist and it does corrupt. And you also pointed out that it's particularly easy to sell to young people, and I suppose that's partly because it's not obvious to young people why they shouldn't be resentful, especially if they've been hurt. And also because, in many ways, young people are at the bottom of certain hierarchies of power. Why? Well, because they're young. Most people who are rich are old.

Now, if you had any sense, you'd notice that, well, young people are rich because they're young, whereas old people are poor because they're old. And most old rich people would trade their wealth for youth at the drop of a bloody hat. But, of course, that kind of gratitude doesn't enter the dialogue, and so it's easier to sell resentment to young people.

Having said that, so back to the postmodernist issue. The postmodernists—so why is postmodernism so attractive? Well, I have a hypothesis about that, and this is actually giving the devil his due because the postmodernists were right about one thing that the enlightenment types are still wrong about: the postmodernists were right that we see the world through a story. They were right about that, and that's actually a revolutionary claim because the empiricist enlightenment rationalist types tend to presume that we can view the world through something like the lens of objectivity, and we can use the objective facts to inform our narratives. But narrative itself is not the same thing as a scientific view of the world.

So the postmodernists did figure out—and bless their hearts, so to speak—they did figure out that we live psychologically inside the confines of a story and that a story is what binds us socially. And so the postmodern metastasis of Marxism is particularly potent because it can proclaim that we live within a story that also makes it, what would you say, it's one of the three most compelling stories, right? The story of hedonism—that's a very compelling story. The story of divine self-sacrifice—that's a very compelling story. And the story of power? Those are the three contenders, and when the story of divine self-sacrifice collapses, the story of power and its twin bedfellow, you might say hedonism, they come popping up like mad, something that Nietzsche observed would happen and Dostoevsky as well.

So, okay, look, it looks like we share something approximating a diagnostic framework. How did you discover all of this? Like, you said you have a bachelor's degree; this wasn't your area of specialization. It’s like, what the hell took you down this rabbit hole? I'm still asking myself that question.

Um, really the answer is, um, as I became a father, I really didn't care about politics or any of this stuff. And that all changed the instant my wife told me she was pregnant. Um, I can't really describe it; it was—not a calling, but it was—I was just drawn, you know. You know what it is? I became curious instantly! I became more curious about the world around me because, in the back of my head, I was thinking, soon I'm going to have a child here in 9 months and I better take my responsibility seriously and understand better what the hell is happening around me. Um, really what happened prior to that prior to that point—which made it so easy once I became a father to launch down this particular path—because it's not just, of course, I wanted to better understand the world as a whole, but I really got focused on education.

But prior to that, in 2016, you could call it my path to radicalization. I saw what happened to you with Bill C16 in Canada. That was the first time I kind of woke up. I—you could describe me as classically liberal—and said, "Well, what the hell is this? We're supposed to value free speech, and controlling someone's tongue is not free speech; it's tyranny." So what's this about? What is my side doing?

After that, quickly following that—correct me if I'm wrong—I think that happened in the fall of 2016 was when you kind of exploded, and you know, you were everywhere. Quickly following that, in May of the following year, I watched Evergreen State College go into complete meltdown. And I was thinking, what the hell is this? I'll never forget the images coming out of there where the president of the college was—for those who aren't aware—was locked in a room and told he's not leaving until he meets the student demands. And he asked the student if he could go to the bathroom, and the student sat him down and said, "You can wait." This is the president of a college in America! I couldn't believe it! They were chasing or attempting to find Brett Weinstein with baseball bats! What the hell is going on?

I think then, following that year, there was a brilliant engineer by the name of James Deore who was fired from Google. And as far as I can tell, after reading the Google memo at the time, the most controversial thing he said was men and women are different on average. And I was thinking, how do you get fired for this? So I was kind of primed. And then when my wife said that I would be a father, I took that responsibility more seriously than anything I ever have in my entire life, and I knew I better get a grip on what's going on in education! I had seen what's going on in the news, and I knew something was afoot, and I started reading and reading and reading, and I've been reading ever since.

Uh, so that's how I ended up in a place that I never imagined I would be and I don't necessarily want to be in. But you know, there are other parents that don't have the time to dive into this stuff and don't understand what's going on, and they should know, and they should be informed.

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Yeah, now you said something worth delving into there, many things, but one thing particularly caught my ear: you said "my side." And you had regarded yourself as a classic liberal. I would certainly say that that was really how I conceptualized myself. I never regarded myself as a conservative. I was an admirer of Jung and Dostoevsky, and they're often regarded by radical leftists as conservative. But, um, I don’t really have the temperament of a conservative because I'm extremely high in openness.

And so that makes me an unlikely conservative. I guess I'm conservative in so far as I do have some understanding of just how absolutely and utterly insane people can become in the absence of an appropriate uniting meta-narrative, let's say, on the social ethos side. And I'm under no illusions, at least intellectually, about that, although I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, perhaps even when I shouldn't. That's a temperamental flaw that goes along with agreeableness.

But, um, my side—so you regarded yourself as a classic liberal apparently. And so what, and you said that it was your dawning awareness that there was something approximating free speech that was being suppressed that made you start to question. Question—were you a Democrat, let's say, politically at this point? What have you said?

Yeah, absolutely at the time! I mean, the entire time. And when I say my side, I think it's because at the time, I really—because of what now I would appropriately I think call cult conditioning—had really split the world into black and white. I had thought it was side by side versus side; oppressor versus oppressed. And that's why I think I thought that way.

Um, but it was free speech too. I took that very seriously because I'm somewhat a student of history, although an amateur, and I know what happens when free speech is stifled and when someone else is allowed to control your tongue. And what happens after that? And it’s just disastrous. And I remember feeling after I saw that fall that, okay, that's weird; that's happening a lot. I remember thinking, you know, five minutes ago there was no such thing as gender identity. There was no such thing as gender reassignment surgery. There was no such thing as cis-heterosexuality expression, gender expression; there was no such thing as this. And now that term—and now I've—you know, I've awakened, and I'm looking around, and I'm seeing it everywhere going, "Everyone else is just kind of acting like this has always been this way." Have we all gone mad? Where has this come from?

And that’s when the combination of seeing these things happen to people like you and James Deore and the people at Evergreen State College and then becoming a father that really ignited my curiosity to go out and look, because I thought, okay, so the father—well, the father element—okay, Deore, Weinstein, myself—that explains things conceptually.

Yeah, now you said that when you became a father, one of the transformations, you took that responsibility with a great degree of seriousness—more than anything in your life. Well, that's, if you actually become a father and you take that with the degree of seriousness that you should, that is what happens to you. That actually means that you've grown up finally because someone is more important than you.

But it's very interesting that it took this particular form. So was that what led to your concentration on education? And if so, why?

Yeah, precisely because I wanted to know what schools my children were going to walk into. I had no idea what the state of the educational system had been, but I had seen some concerning things like schools segregating students on the basis of their skin color—that will raise some red flags. Is that happening everywhere?

I saw things like drag queens performing in front of children as young as four and five without parental consent or knowledge in schools with public dollars—that'll raise some red flags. Like, just what the hell is going on? My child is going to go there to school for seven or eight hours a day. What's happening there? All of a sudden I cared! You know, we all go to school, and we spend a large chunk of our lives in education, but it's quick how fast you forget what it's like to be in there. And I wanted to know what changes had precipitated since I had been in education, and like I said, my curiosity got the better of me, and I really took a deep dive.

Okay, so let’s talk about education just for a moment. Um, and we can take a stripe off the conservatives and the classic liberals—probably most particularly the conservatives, but also the classic liberals who've been asleep at the bloody wheel for four generations. So here are some fun things to contemplate.

So the first thing is, is that education eats up 50% of the typical state's budget—50%! Okay? So half the money that you pay in taxes at the state level goes directly to the education system. So that's a lot of money, and that doesn't account for the amount of money that goes to the education system at the federal level. So half—that's a lot.

All right, so who has a hammerlock on education? Well, how about teachers? Okay, so let’s divide that. Let’s talk about teachers as educated people, and then we could talk about teachers' unions. Okay, so question one: what political party do the teachers' unions overwhelmingly support? Well, that's the Democrats. It's like 97% of their donations are to the Democrats, so that's a good thing to keep in mind when you're thinking about the fact that that's where you spend half your state money.

And then the other thing to consider—and this is called an engineering terminology—a single point of failure that the faculties of education control teacher certification. And so then we might say, “Well, just exactly who are the faculties of education?” And so then we could say the most incompetent and radical possible of all the university disciplines, who simultaneously attract the arguably the lowest quality and laziest students.

And so why would I say that? Well, first of all, because I've been following educational psychology for four decades with some degree of expertise and concentration, and it's—a to call that field appalling is to barely scrape the surface. Virtually everything that education psychologists have discovered is not only wrong scientifically but dangerous ideologically and developmentally. Whole word learning—there's a good example. Social emotional learning, there's another one. Multiple intelligences, there's another one. Self-esteem training, there's another one. None of those things are valid scientifically, and every single one of them is positively and overwhelmingly harmful, and that can be laid at the feet of the educational psychologists.

And then in terms of low-quality students, it's like, well, there's no evidence whatsoever that being trained as a teacher makes you a better teacher. And it's certainly not the sort of thing that the faculties of education have tried to produce evidence about because they're not interested in doing actual science.

And so—and then with regards to laziness, it's like, well, what's the default degree for people who are dragging their ass around university and don't know which way is up? And I'm pretty much attracted by the fact that there's two months of holidays a year. So is that too scathing a diagnosis? Not even a bit; it's not nearly scathing enough.

Now, who might you blame that on? Well, you could blame it on the faculties of education and the universities and the students themselves and the professors, and they all played their role. Or you could blame it on the idiot conservatives who've been asleep at the bloody wheel for four generations and let the radical incompetent resentful leftists take over the entire education system and then gave them half of all the money that the state spent.

So it's like the conservatives—what are they asleep at the wheel? Well, they're still asleep at the wheel because even in Republican states the faculties of education have a hammerlock on teacher certification. And so you want to lose the culture war? Well, hey, boys and girls on the conservative side and the classic liberals, well, you already lost the culture war, so, uh, congratulations on that side.

So your diagnosis about the corruption in the education system is spot on, and is that remediable? I doubt it.

Yeah, I mean that's precisely right. Uh, there's a very illuminating book released by—I think he was at Indiana State University at one point; I'm not sure if he's there now. His name is Isaac Gottesman, and he's a Marxist educational scholar. And he released this book called “The Critical Turn in Education,” where he lays out the critical Marxist infiltration from within the discipline. This is a person who’s working in this discipline of the schools of education starting in the 60s. He starts his book, paragraph one, line one, quoting from Paul Bull’s classic Marxism in the United States. And he says, “Where did all of the 60s radicals go? Neither to religious cults nor Yippies, but to the classroom.” And then he writes an entire book about critical Marxists going rushing into—as prescribed by Herbert Marcuse, who was a critical Marxist I'm sure you're aware of—as prescribed by him in the 60s, right into the education schools, into professions at all levels.

I mean, it’s so obvious! I was reading something the other day; it was released by the CIA, and I'm not sure if that's because someone at the CIA wrote it—it was a collection of documents. It was old; it was published online in like 2003 about the free speech movement of the 60s radicals, which you can hardly characterize it as free speech. You want to talk about a motte-and-bailey? What they were after was not free speech.

Um, he was characterizing it—he's sitting here and it was the president of one of these universities, and he's asking himself, he's completely perplexed by the idea that students have chosen the university to plunder and take over the system. And I’m sitting here reading this like, "Well, conservatives, Mr. Provost or president, of course that's where everyone is certified to do all of the work—that’s where everyone starts their career—in the university!” It's the—the Marxists figured out in the 60s that the problem of reproduction of society is solved in the university, and that's why they rushed in there. And it's absolutely proof positive of what's happening.

You can just—I mean, they've got numerous books; I’ve read dozens of books and hundreds of papers and maybe thousands of dissertations from people within these departments, and they all say the same thing. So it's just miraculous that conservatives have missed—their whole excuse, you know, that's what happens when you put your head in the sand and you’re not interested.

“Why would you bother studying philosophy? Why would you bother studying literature?” Well, how about because literature describes the way we think, and philosophy is the analysis of the structures that guide our perception and our actions? How about that? Well, I'm interested in more practical things. It's like, well, that's all well and good when the underlying philosophy is in place. When the underlying philosophy that's in place is functional and allows you to attend to your practical matters, but it's a pretty dangerous form of willful blindness and disinterest when the whole goddamn thing has become corrupt beyond belief.

Now, you know this takeover of the faculties of education—like, this is truly metastasized in the last 5 years. We're at the point in Canada now, for example, where the university programs that train clinical psychologists, for example, to be weak-kneed lily-livered cowards in relationship to such travesties as gender-affirming care, let's say—they can't get accredited as training institutions for clinical psychologists unless they have a social justice orientation—which basically means a Marxist postmodernist orientation, because of course that's exactly what you want in your clinical psychologist, because everything is about group consciousness at the psychological level.

Or so say the tyrannical Marxists. And it’s not just education; it’s education; it’s law; it’s medicine; and increasingly, it’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And I would say the most blatant evidence for that at the moment is the ideological takeover of the two leading science journals in the world, Science and Nature, by the kinds of Marxists who proclaimed this week, for example, that scientists thought this was nature all around the world are rejoicing between because Kamala Harris's mother was a scientist, and so she's pro-science in the appropriate way. And of course, her father was a Marxist professor, and I don't remember if that made it into the article or not.

And so, there's an explicit political stance being taken on the part of the editors of Nature, which for 150 years was the place where every scientist in the world, regardless of discipline, made their reputation. One publication in Nature, one publication in Science—you can—if you were a first author—you were qualified to be hired at a top-level position at any university there was in a scientific discipline. That's the power those journals have, and they've been taken over by the bloody ideologues.

And so, the infiltration is radical and complete, and conservatives were 100% asleep at the wheel. The same thing can be said about scientists. Like, I saw this coming eight years ago, more probably 10 when I really started to become aware of it. I thought, oh, I see the neo-Marxist postmodernists have taken over the humanities, they've infiltrated the social sciences, and now they're heading for the hard sciences, like the engineering faculties. And people thought or told me, "Well, you know, they never get anywhere with the scientists." And I thought, are you absolutely out of your mind? Scientists are apolitical! The goddamn radicals will go through them like a hot knife through butter! They won't know what hit them!

They’ll have absolutely no defense whatsoever, just like James Deore had no defense! And of course, that’s proceeding at a pace— that takeover, which is really the demise of science—a very fragile enterprise at best—that's proceeding at a pace at a rate that’s really quite miraculous. So the conservatives have plenty on their conscience; like, you guys were asleep at the wheel and you let the radicals infiltrate—the you let them parasitize the wealth of the West that’s been built up since the end of World War II, including the minds of the young.

Painful and shocking, your diagnosis. How much fun for you? It's absolutely brutal! And, you know, we characterize in the book "The Queering of the American Child," we characterize this as a religious cult. We're very forward in the very first line of the book: education is in the grip of a religious cult! And for anyone who has listened to cult survivors or spoken to someone who is currently in a cult, or has studied cults to any degree whatsoever, you quickly find that the levers of control are social and emotional. And those are things we are just all super susceptible to.

And one of the things the left has done a brilliant job with over the last 60 years is developing tactics of social and emotional leverage that can help bulldoze your reasonable and rational faculties. I was just talking to my father earlier this week about this. You know, he was asking me, how can brilliant people believe such ridiculous things? You had talked about Nature. I think it was in as early as 2015, they were publishing articles saying “Sex Redefined: There’s No Biological Basis for Sex; It's a Spectrum.” And we’re thinking, “My God, where is this coming from?” And he said, how do rational, reasonable people who are very well educated—who are doing very well—how do they fall for this?

And the conversation went in a direction where basically I said, well, from the perspective of social and emotional leverage, it's no wonder they’ve fallen for it because we don't have many defense mechanisms for that. And the ones we do have are really dusty and rusty because they've been under attack for a very long time. Um, so it’s not a surprise that so many people are overwhelmed by this because it's not fun to be ostracized or selected out—shot down, singled out, and shot down—definitely. And the—yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! It's a very powerful weapon, right?

Yeah, I mean, we—one of the books we quote in our book "The Queering of the American Child" was Robert Jay Lifton's book, and I'm sure you're familiar with Robert J. Lifton. He was an expert in cult psychology. He wrote a really famous book called "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China." And what he did was he interviewed those who came out of Mao's brainwashing camps, their thought reform prisons, and he kind of laid out how cults operate really for the first time that I'm aware of.

And when you look through his list that now is, I don't know, 60 or 70 years old, you see all of that in places like our schools. It's almost entirely a social and emotional game. So I'm not too surprised that even when people are bright enough to perceive that something was wrong, that they didn't have defenses for it just because that game is a strong one; that magic is very difficult to overcome.

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Yeah, well, the thing is too is that real scientists, let's say, real mathematicians—they're not political. Because if you're going to be a top-performing scientist—let’s say in the top 1% of your field, which is where all the work is done, right? All the other 99%? That's all practice. That's all training; that's all mostly wrong because most studies don't replicate; most scientific research is erroneous, but 1% of it isn't. And if you want to be in that 1%, you better be super bright first of all.

And then you better be like 99th percentile conscientiousness—conscientious—so all you do is work all the time on your area of specialty, like 80 hours a week flat out with your students. You don't have time for anything else, and that's wonderful when the universities have put four layers of wall between you and the—in the world and you're funded by people who actually want to generate knowledge so that you can pursue your obsessional concern with some scientific triviality that might lead to a real discovery for the 15 years that it takes you to become a domain expert.

But it’s completely counterproductive when you’re under assault by resentful parasites, and that's where we’re at. You know, our language is very polluted and perverted as well, and even in this conversation, we're falling prey to the terminology of the radicals. We talk about capitalism—that's a pathological word. We're really talking about free exchange, right? The free exchange of goods, services, and ideas, right? Not capitalism.

And this isn't left versus right. If you oppose the radicals, you’re not right-wing; you're not even conservative. What we have—what we're in is a war between the resentful, hedonistic, and power-mad and everyone else, right? So it’s not a political war, if you're right—and I think you are—it's a theological war. And arrayed on one side are definitely the forces of resentment, hedonism, and power.

Right! And if you're a good cynic, you think that’s all there is because there’s nowhere—where the postmodernism comes into play, there's no uniting meta-narrative outside of the claims of power, hedonism, and resentment, right? And, you know, if you’re cynical and nihilistic, it's very easy to believe that, especially if it serves your self-interest, your hedonism and your desire for power.

And so you can wave that in front of bitter people like a meat-covered bone in front of a ravenous dog and away you'll go, leading them down the path of perdition to totalitarian hell, which is a pathway we've trod several times in the 20th century, to everyone's great dismay. And so, okay, so it's not a political struggle.

So let’s go back to the children. Easy sell to children. There’s something else too that’s hard on the conservative types, let's say. So when the appeal—like the appeal that you described being made by people like Kimberly Crenshaw and Judith Butler, who’s perhaps the worst of the worst, except for maybe Foucault. You see, they also appeal to creative people because a creative person does have an issue with normality because if you're creative—which means you're high in openness—you’re not normal; you’re identity is protean and fluid.

And if you're young and creative, you're in a weird mind because your talent will serve you extremely well if you can find a position where it can be utilized; but it makes you an absolutely brutally miserable employee in a job that requires what? That you inhabit a box and you act like everyone else.

Well, that isn't the creative person's niche, you know? I did a study at Harvard that we never published when piercing and tattooing became common in the 1990s. I did a study with a fellow psychopathologist looking at whether the proclivity to tattoo and pierce—which was still kind of countercultural at the time—was an indication of psychopathology, and we found out that it wasn't; it was just associated with trait openness.

The blue-haired woke type, that hair coloring with the piercings—that's a reflection of openness. And the pathological ideology of the anti-normative radicals does also appeal to creative young people because they actually do have fluid identities and they don't fit in.

And so that's another place where the oversimplifying lie finds a ready audience. So of course, if you're a creative young person, you're going to feel that you're at odds with the heteronormative cis-patriarchy because you are!

Now that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be grateful for the fact that you're not scrabbling around in the dirt like a peasant from the 13th century. But unless someone has sat you down carefully and explained that to you, and that’s certainly not going to happen in the education system, you're just going to feel that the world is arrayed against someone with your generative talents—which of course it is! Because normal society never incorporates the creative because it’s a one-size-fits-all solution.

I should add that children are easier targets for obvious reasons. They just don't have a model of the world; they haven't—they have no way of orienting themselves correctly in the world. They're just too young; they don't have the experience. They're supposed to have adults in their lives that help with that. But I will also add that especially in the domain of queer theory, the abuse is intentional.

Uh, one of the people we quote in the book, Kevin Kumashiro—he's one of these queer educators— and I should, before I continue with that, I should define what I mean by queer because that’s something people immediately get wrong. Our definition—we use in the book, we used the word over 1300 times; it may be a Guinness record—our definition we take directly from David Halperin in his 1995 book "Michel Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography," where he's essentially trying to make Michel Foucault a gay saint.

And in his book, he says that that would—that would be the Michel Foucault who had a proclivity to take young boys into graveyards and have his hedonistic way with them—that St. Foucault. Gentleman who spent his—who bent his IQ of 180 his entire life in service of justifying the perversions that he was absolutely unable to control, even when he had AIDS, even when he knew it—that Foucault—that Foucault. Oh yeah!

So I just wanted to make sure that we were talking about the same person. That's the same Foucault! Who is the most cited scholar in the world? That's right! That Michel Foucault. Okay, well, good! So we’re definitely talking about the same stellar guy!

Yeah, so the definition we use, it's that—it's that Foucault, as David Halperin said—and it is the definition that all of queer theory recognizes, even though when you’ve read their papers, they say it escapes definition; it can't be categorized, of course that's what they’re going to say, because that’s the whole program.

But David Halperin says that queer is defined in this way: he says, “Unlike gay identity, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. Queer 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.” That’s the definition we're going with.

It has essentially nothing to do with being. It's, right away, unlike gay! Nothing to do with it! It's actually antithetical towards it because these—sure, gay is a stable identity; it’s stable! You lose the revolutionary potential if you happen to be gay and you're living a great life and you're happy. You fit into a well-functioning, prosperous society— they’ve lost the resentment; you’re not going to work—get out of here!

So before I continue, I just wanted to clarify that point because that's a point that requires clarification. Yeah, um, that’s crucial because otherwise it sounds—it’s easy for people to presume that queer is just a minor variant of gay. No! And that definition—well, if that definition doesn’t send chills down your spine, you’re dangerously naive because that's a—that's an identity that's predicated on the negation of identity as such, both psychologically and socially. That also means technically that it’s a—and this is relevant to the observations by Jonathan Haidt and others—that radical, that the radical progressive agenda is associated with a marked increase in mental illness.

An unstable identity dooms you to a dirge of positive emotion—that’s hopelessness—and an excess of negative emotion—that's anxiety! Like an unstable identity, an unstable self-questioning, antithetical identity is indistinguishable from psychological suffering and social disunity—they're the same thing, right? So it's a celebration of—well, there’s your postmodernism for you! That would be a fractionation of the metanarrative all the way down to the microscopic. Nothing unifies anything, right?

And it’s not even—I would even suggest, brutal, I would even add that it's—it’s not an identity at all, because there’s no essential quality to it! What it is is it's a spiritual position; it’s a stance you take; it’s an orientation in the world against anything considered normal, anything considered legitimate. And what makes the teaching of this to children—I wanted to add to this—it's not just that kids are easier to brainwash, let’s say; it's that the queer theorists are very specific that their program is abusive to children.

They've got a program that's designed to pull social and emotional levers to make children accept this. So the person I was talking about earlier, Kevin Kumashiro, queer activist, he wrote a few papers that will just floor you. His paper, "Against Repetition," was the reason I wrote this book. I read that paper and I said, okay, that's it—now this is the book. People have to know! He said that educators have a responsibility to pull children into crisis—a responsibility—so that that crisis can be resolved productively.

And what he means by this from within the context of queer theory is that queer theory argues that kids want to be normal, of course they do, and if they're desiring to be normal and to plug into a society that's working—a well-functioning society—then they can't experience the queer—the definition that we just discussed. They can't experience it if that's what they're desiring, so you need to interrupt that desire to fit in with something. And that something is crisis. What he says is one of the ways you do this is you explain to kids that they may hold racist beliefs that they weren't aware of. You might hold homophobic beliefs that you weren't aware of, and then you've got this special knowledge that's coming from the queer theorist about all of the isms and phobias that no one can perceive but them! Just like a cult guru or a cult leader!

They’ve got this Gnostic insight—the special knowledge that you need to be initiated into—and they drive cognitive dissonance into the child. The technical term is trauma bonding. They traumatize the child. “You’re a racist; you don’t know it. You’re a sexist; you don’t know it.” The kid wants to resolve this trauma, and then, to Kevin Kumashiro's words, we help them resolve it productively. So we help use that trauma to—well, resolve it in what?

Okay! I want to ask you that—let me take apart a couple of things that you said. Okay? So the first thing that we should point out is that there is no difference between being socialized and being normal and fitting in—those are the same thing, right? And so the technical way of thinking about that is that, well, if you're socialized, you can play a game with other people—those concepts are indistinguishable!

Now if you can play a game with other people—well, first of all, that means you can play a game, and it also means that other people can stand you, and that you can interact with them peacefully when you cooperate and when you compete, and that you can organize yourselves with others to pursue a joint aim. That's all in the notion of play!

Okay, well, of course you have to be normal and fit in because if you all are playing a game, you all follow the same rules because otherwise you're not all playing the same game! Okay? Now, it’s obviously the case—and this would be the grain of truth—is that you can subjugate that creative essence that might enable you to discover a better game if you're too much of a conformist. But it's still the case that your primary goal as a child from the age of 2 to 18 is fitting in; that's what your goal is, right?

Because that's what it means to be socialized! Now you can understand why that would grate against the conscience of someone whose fundamental orientation was creative, because they're going to be the ones that pay the biggest psychological price for that, in a sense. But at least they'll be able to play games with others, to cooperate, to compete, to take aim with other people, and to have friends—that's not nothing. Plus, it's also what social stability itself depends on!

So we have to be very clear about what it is that’s being critiqued here: they’re actually critiquing socialized maturity itself, right? Right! Okay, now the curious thing would be though, okay, so now you put the child in crisis. Now you could justify that by saying, "Well, there’s no learning without pain." The question is, what's being offered as a resolution? Because if the stance is—um, only the identity that opposes is the—so that's like right out of Milton's "Paradise Lost," right? Because Satan himself is the spirit that opposes. That’s his definition.

He’s nothing but the spirit that opposes, so it’s a very good way of understanding that at a theological level. There’s no unity in the spirit that opposes. You can’t rectify an existential crisis by identifying with the spirit of that opposes, if you identify with the spirit of that opposes, you end up in hell, metaphysically speaking. Well, practically speaking, for that matter, and perhaps even theologically speaking. So what the hell is the resolution supposed to be?

There is none from the outside; there is none. But the way it is sold is the resolution is you find your true self. You find your—you’re your gender identity; it’s whatever you feel it is because, again, it's the—the way—so that basically puts you at the whim of your emotions, your moment-to-moment emotions, correct?

Right! I mean, what like, if it's—if it's what you feel, because I don't know what the hell that means. But let's say it means whatever motivates you at the moment or whatever emotion grips you. What that essentially means is that you occupy precisely the same existential space as a very badly behaved and wayward 2-year-old because that’s the world of a 2-year-old. It’s one emotion after another, one motivational state after another, with no overarching psychological or social unity, right?

That’s all inculcated—you think the constructionists would know that—that's all inculcated as a consequence of cortical maturation and socialization. So I see—so the solution to the existential crisis is what? The clamoring plethora of possession by primordial emotional states? Well, there now you see what the unholy alliance is between the bloody hedonists and the power worshippers. The free child is one who’s the slave of their emotions. Brilliant! What a pathway to misery that is, right?

Yeah, precisely! And it’s um, it's—it becomes really dark when you understand precisely what that process is meant to do for the child. And, you know, Foucault said this and Butler echoed it in "Gender Trouble," and this is a big misconception with people who’ve read queer theory and I've seen their critiques on it, is that Foucault said the soul is the prison of the body. The body is not the prison of the soul. And, and Butler again echoes this and she says—oh my God! Unbelievable! She says—she says, “Unlike what Christian imagery would suggest, the soul is the prison of the body.” And what they mean by this is that we are born into—we are born into a society that has a socio-cultural and political soul to it, a gist.

And what that thing does is it—it possesses us. And under this possession, we are convinced to materialize our bodies, actions, behaviors, love interests, as that society wants us to. So it’s not forcing us—it’s, obviously, that's the definition of social! Right? Animals who aren’t social do exactly what