Mathematician, writer, and Twitter provocateur James Lindsay has his sights set on woke academia. He s going toe-to-toe with the organizations coming after your kids. A former liberal, Lindsay started his career writing books in support of atheism. Then, in 2017, his writing veered in another direction entirely. He started to write about feminism and other leftist ideas. His latest book, The Marxification of Education, details how the education sector has been injected with Marxist thinking throughout the last 70 years. In this episode, James explains the key moments that have devastated our education system, and how you can easily spot woke ideology in your or any kid s classroom. Plus, some of our conversation at the end will be exclusively for Daily Wire Plus members, click the link at the top of this episode s description to get the full conversation with James Lindsay and every one of our awesome guests. If you re not a member yet, click here to join the Daily Wire PLUS membership program and get access to all the latest news and exclusive access to our most listened to episodes of The Daily Wire Podcasts. Subscribe to our newest show, The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, wherever you get your epsiode of the show. Ben Shapiro is the host of the Ben Shapiro show on the airwaves wherever you re listening to the show and wherever else you re getting your news and opinions are available. You can also become a supporter by becoming a patron. Thanks to Ben Shapiro and his team for supporting the show, wherever he gets his or her news and views are found. Ben Shapiro's work is found. This is the best source of all things Ben Shapiro can get the most authentic and most authentic. . Thanks for listening and sharing Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro on the best of what Ben Shapiro does the most effective for you can do the most of what he writes about the truth and Ben Shapiro gets the most value for you, the most important thing he can do most of the most influential guy in the most powerful man in the world. Thank you for listening, Ben is the most honest and most influential person in the best guy on the place you can help you get the best at doing the most out there. - Thank you Ben Shapiro - Ben Shapiro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of This is a Sunday Special? - The Weekly Wire Plus Podcast - Subscribe to This Is The Truth About It?
00:00:29.000Mathematician, writer, and Twitter provocateur James Lindsay has his sights set on woke academia.
00:00:34.000He's going toe-to-toe with the organizations coming after your kids.
00:00:37.000A former liberal, Lindsey started his career writing books in support of atheism.
00:00:41.000Then, in 2017, his writing veered in another direction entirely.
00:00:44.000He, with two others, wrote 20 fake papers for submission to peer-reviewed scientific journals.
00:00:49.000The papers featured purposely absurd topics, woke topics, like rewritten passages of Mein Kampf in support of feminism, and rape culture amongst dogs in public parks.
00:00:58.000The reviewers are worried that we didn't respect the dog's privacy!
00:01:04.000Six of the papers were rejected, but a surprising seven were accepted.
00:01:07.000Seven more were held up under review until the ruse was discovered.
00:01:10.000The stunt became international news, demonstrating how willing today's scientific community is to accept false narratives, so long as they are politically fashionable, no matter how absurd the premise.
00:01:19.000After that experiment, James Lindsay co-authored the best-selling book, Cynical Theories, how activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity, and why this harms everybody, as well as Race Marxism, the truth about critical race theory and praxis.
00:01:32.000His latest book zeroes in on children's education, as he details exactly how the sector has been injected with Marxist thinking throughout the last 70 years.
00:01:39.000The book, The Marxification of Education, Paulo Freire's Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education is available right now.
00:01:46.000In this episode, James explains the key moments that have devastated our education system.
00:01:51.000We discuss the shocking curriculum the UN handed to the United States.
00:01:54.000We uncover the leading education organizations founded in New Age ideals and more.
00:01:58.000We explore the radicalization of children, the redefinition of words like democracy and
00:02:02.000phrases like social-emotional learning, and how you can easily spot woke ideology
00:02:09.000Hey, hey, and welcome to This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
00:02:22.000Just a reminder, some of our conversation at the end will be exclusively for Daily Wire Plus members.
00:02:28.000If you're not a member yet, click the link at the top of this episode's description to get the full conversation with James Lindsay and with every one of our awesome guests.
00:02:35.000James, thanks so much for stopping by.
00:02:42.000All about the takeover of the educational system.
00:02:45.000A lot of us have worried about the educational system, but you've written in the past about how the educational system was actually taken over.
00:02:52.000And I don't think people actually understand the ideas behind it or how concerted that effort is.
00:02:57.000It just feels like all of a sudden it's woke.
00:03:00.000Yeah, no, it's not all of a sudden it's woke.
00:03:02.000A lot of people have heard the phrase, the long march through the institutions.
00:03:05.000It's a phrase coined by Rudy Doichky, who was a communist in the 1960s, 66, I think is when he said it.
00:03:12.000Some people have heard of this other guy, Herbert Marcuse, and he's writing in the 60s and in the 70s, early 70s, and he's saying, we've got to go into the institutions, we've got to bring the ideology into the institutions.
00:03:21.000And the wild 68, 69, we all know about the, you know, the riots and things that broke out with the kind of critical theory revolution.
00:03:33.000People don't like riots, as it turns out.
00:03:35.000And they lost their momentum for the revolution.
00:03:37.000And they said, you know, we're going into the institutions.
00:03:39.000So from the early 1970s, there's been a concerted effort to get into education, to solve what they call the problem of reproduction in communist talk.
00:03:50.000And the problem of reproduction is that we send our kids to school to become educated.
00:03:55.000We define educated to mean Well, what we're going to do is teach you to do the things to make you successful in society.
00:04:01.000You can get a good job, you can live a good life, you can navigate, you know, figure out how to balance your checkbook or whatever the old sayings are.
00:04:07.000We're going to teach you how to participate in society successfully as a professional.
00:04:10.000In other words, we're going to teach you to reproduce society.
00:04:13.000And so, if the schools reproduce society generation after generation, and that's what people want out of schools, the society as it exists is going to keep reproducing itself.
00:05:00.000According to a Marxist educator named Isaac Gottesman, who was at Iowa State, he wrote a book called The Critical Turn in Education, telling this history.
00:05:08.000He says, by 1992, in colleges of education, Paulo Freire's work was where it remains today, which is everywhere.
00:05:15.000And so, for 30 years, they've had 31 years now, they've had the colleges of education under their domain.
00:05:23.000And so, they've just slowly started to change the educational system from within, the content, the curriculum, the pedagogy itself.
00:05:33.000It seems like it came out of nowhere because it required some legal changes that happened, and we can talk about those, you know, and those happened in 2015 primarily, initially.
00:05:42.000Something called the Every Student Succeeds Act is very relevant to kind of why it blossomed so quickly in the last maybe five to ten years.
00:05:49.000So I'm going to go through every piece of that because it seems like there are three pieces of it that we're talking about here.
00:05:54.000One is the theory, this radical education theory.
00:05:57.000The other question is why these institutions caved so quickly?
00:06:00.000What were sort of the holes in Western civilization that allowed for the entire superstructure to fall within a matter of, it sounds like, a decade or 15 or 20 years?
00:06:08.000And then I want to get to the last piece that you mentioned there, this sort of radical shift starting in 2015 legally.
00:06:14.000So why don't we start with what the actual What kind of theory of Freire is?
00:06:21.000Freire's educational theory can be summarized very simply, which is that true education is political education.
00:06:28.000So he says, you know, cutesy phrases like you always hear and sort of, as they call it, dialectical thought.
00:06:33.000He says cutesy phrases like, all education is political.
00:06:37.000You know, you always hear, teaching is a political act.
00:06:39.000These are kind of almost thought-terminating cliches that you hear out of kind of Marxist type educators or woke educators.
00:06:47.000And what he actually means is that a true education is a political education.
00:06:51.000And so, it's not enough to learn the content of the academic material, to learn mathematics, to learn to read, to learn to write, to learn history.
00:06:59.000You have to learn also the context of your lives.
00:07:01.000And in fact, what he devised, so there's actual pedagogy, is that he devised A scheme by which you use the academic material as an excuse to have the political conversation with the children or the students.
00:07:14.000And then the political conversation is done in a particular way that he gives a name, conscientization, to awaken a consciousness of the real conditions of their lives politically.
00:07:24.000In other words, to bring them to a critical Marxist consciousness and then allegedly, Sometimes this is borne out and sometimes not.
00:07:32.000Allegedly, then you're going to go back to the academic mastery now that they have the political awakening.
00:07:37.000So what you have is a sort of, this is why I refer to it in the subtitle of the book, is the theft of education, is you have using academic material, he says, in his words, as a mediator to political knowledge.
00:07:47.000So you introduce a math question and use it to have political conversations.
00:07:51.000But the goal is to make it so that education is about awakening a political consciousness, which in Marxist lingo means a Marxist consciousness of how the world works.
00:08:00.000So to steelman that argument, is there any truth to the idea that all education is political, in the sense that there is, for Marxists, a problem of reproduction.
00:08:08.000I mean, if you go to school and you learn within a particular framework, there is this kind of water in which we swim, and if we're fish, we don't know that it's water.
00:08:14.000And it does teach that America is, for example, a pretty great place, or it teaches that freedom is a good—political freedom is a good thing, that we have particular rights, and that is the backdrop to all the things that we learn.
00:08:23.000So is he wrong that Education is all political, or is where he makes the error, or the vile kind of move, where he says that, yes, it's political, but those politics are bad, and I want to substitute my own Marxist politics for those politics.
00:08:42.000I have a name for this technique, which is, I call it dialectical inversion.
00:08:47.000If you don't know, the dialectical materialism was Marx's philosophy.
00:08:50.000He gets that from Hegel's dialectic, getting old philosophy.
00:08:53.000We don't have to get into all of that.
00:08:55.000But with the dialectic, the idea is the opposites are to be seen as parts of a unified whole, that if you can view it from a higher perspective, what Marxists call sublated, if you can view it from a higher perspective, then you see how they're actually two parts of one whole.
00:09:08.000And so, the dialectical inversion that's being played here is you say, well, all education And Ferreri's words, assumes a theory of man in the world, and thus it's political.
00:09:19.000And maybe it assumes a political theory, for example, classical liberalism in the United States, or whatever, or Lockean, or Jeffersonian liberalism in the United States.
00:09:49.000They can pick out all those problematics and focus on all those problematics.
00:09:53.000They never have to make a positive argument for their own approach.
00:09:56.000And so they say, you're doing politics, we're doing politics, here's why yours are bad so that ours is better.
00:10:01.000And at no point do they say, actually, why theirs is better in practice, and they get to dodge that.
00:10:06.000But the trick is that political means more than one thing.
00:10:09.000There's kind of like layers of political thought.
00:10:12.000There's the substrate kind of, yeah, we make some basic assumptions about what it means to be human, about how the world works, how we're going to interact in the world.
00:10:19.000And what kind of a political organization our society has.
00:10:22.000And then there's the, we're going to impose a very specific political program as though those two things are the same thing.
00:10:29.000Kind of an open and free or liberal society politic is, you can be whatever political orientation you want.
00:10:36.000But under this, there's only one right way to be political.
00:10:38.000So you mentioned the word conscientization.
00:10:41.000It's hard to say, but I had to practice.
00:10:53.000It's the awakening of occult consciousness, and the cult here is critical Marxism or critical theory.
00:10:59.000Gottesman, actually, who I mentioned a moment ago, who wrote The Critical Turn in Education, in the very first page says, you've heard of critical theory, we should call it critical Marxism.
00:11:07.000Like, let's just say what it really is.
00:11:08.000And I think, wow, they just give it away, you know.
00:12:31.000Then you show them why the political content of their lives is problematic, why it's filled with injustices, dehumanization, domestication of, you know, the lower classes, etc.
00:12:44.000And then you make it personal to them to actually activate and radicalize them, which is, in fact, a cult initiation.
00:12:51.000I want to talk to you about Dailyware's most trusted privacy partner and the premier sponsor of my show, ExpressVPN.
00:12:58.000Big tech companies today are masquerading as privacy companies.
00:13:01.000They say things like, just fix your privacy settings, turn off app tracking, and you're all good.
00:13:59.000So let's talk about why this stuff was able to succeed.
00:14:02.000So the American mind is typically pretty open to critique and criticism.
00:14:09.000One of the criticisms that I've heard from many nationalists, conservatives of liberalism itself, classical liberalism, is that because it is so free speech oriented, for example, this allows for the possibility that somebody is going to come in and they don't actually want to engage in the conversation.
00:14:22.000They want to use the tools of critical critical theory to essentially destroy classical liberalism.
00:14:26.000They say, oh, we're having the conversation now, now let's examine all of your sins.
00:14:30.000And all we're going to do all day long is examine all of your sins.
00:14:32.000And the classical liberal says, that's perfectly legit.
00:15:12.000They were so open-minded that they did.
00:15:15.000Actually let their brains fall out and they let radicals come in who had no intention of arguing in good faith using, you know, distorted and double-meaning language.
00:15:25.000And they let them start because it looks very progressive to have a black studies or African-American studies or women's studies or gender studies.
00:15:31.000It looks very progressive to have these departments often emerging out of, you know, feminist circles within English departments and so on and nobody would say no.
00:15:38.000Nobody dared to say no because they knew they were going to get accused of racism or sexism, and also just because they wanted to appear progressive.
00:15:44.000I think Shelby Steele, for example, is very eloquent on writing about this exact, which he participated in, this exact dynamic.
00:15:53.000And so that gave them their entry point into the door, at which point, as you know, once this stuff gets in the door, it's virtually impossible to get out.
00:16:07.000And so I think that that desire to look liberal and open-minded, but there's another feature here I've noticed with academics, which is liberal academics, which I don't think is necessarily part of liberalism, And it shouldn't be, is that they tend not to be very discerning, and they tend to take these arguments at face value.
00:16:26.000And so, rather than adopting even a modicum of that same critical attitude, is, do these people actually have intentions?
00:16:34.000They read the document, say, no, let's read the argument for exactly what the argument seems to say right in front of us.
00:16:39.000And they, sadly, when you have words that mean more than one thing, you know, the communists were very famous, Lenin did it, Mao did it, for redefining the word democracy.
00:16:48.000Democracy only counts when everybody's truly equal, so democracy only exists under communism.
00:16:53.000So if they said democracy, it was a stand-in for communism.
00:16:57.000So they read that through their kind of dumb, frankly, liberal lens and don't perceive that there's a second meaning being used.
00:17:06.000And by taking these things at face value, I think they've missed the boat on what Marxist writers have been doing since the beginning, since Marx.
00:17:14.000They just completely missed it and they let a lot of this stuff in.
00:17:18.000Because they lack that ability to or willingness to say that there might be ulterior motives, there might be double meanings, there might be wordplay going on here to distort and fool and manipulate people.
00:17:31.000And while that seems like a virtue, It's, you know, just like Aristotle said, you know, virtue is somewhere in the middle.
00:17:38.000And if you fail to have the virtue, you end up getting both excesses.
00:17:42.000And this is kind of the trap that they've often fallen into.
00:17:44.000So, what I feel like is, you know, when we look at, was it Franklin that said it's a republic if you can keep it?
00:17:50.000And then the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
00:18:03.000It's almost like they live—the accusation from the Marxists that they live in the abstract rather than the concrete has allowed them to get run around.
00:18:11.000I also wonder whether they just had no systemic immunity to an attack on the system as a whole.
00:18:17.000They had so much faith in the system in the 60s because they were running the system.
00:18:21.000And then a lot of these people came in and they basically said, you are guilty for taking part in the system.
00:18:26.000And instead of saying, no, the system is good.
00:18:27.000It was just flawed and we can fix those flaws.
00:18:29.000They went, well, the only way for me to reestablish my moral authority, this is the point Shelby Steele makes, the only way for me to reestablish my moral authority is to dissociate from the system.
00:18:37.000And then you'll let me back in and I get to maintain my power because I will join you in the attack on the system because I wasn't part of that system.
00:18:42.000I don't want to be a part of that system.
00:19:24.000And they understand it more than anybody else, specifically because for so long, many of their lifestyles and viewpoints were not approved by society.
00:19:31.000And so they were fighting for, we want your approval, we want your approval.
00:19:33.000But in reality, they now reversed it, where now the elites in our society are seeking their approval.
00:19:37.000And that's an endless game, because they can consistently remove that approval and then get you to move on to whatever is the next thing they want you to embrace.
00:19:44.000Yeah, I mean, a lot of people don't realize it.
00:19:46.000They've seen the movie maybe Flatland.
00:19:48.000I, as a mathematician, think there was only a book because I knew about it long before it happened as a film.
00:19:53.000But the idea is that you have these little two-dimensional characters and one discovers the third dimension and kind of jump over the flat land, right?
00:20:04.000A different degree of freedom to be, you know, kind of very literal about it.
00:20:07.000And if you read the critical theorists, they tell you the title of the most influential book in critical theory in the 1960s was Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man.
00:20:17.000And he says the existing society makes you one-dimensional.
00:20:21.000Well, that means that they are coming at, so this challenge to the moral authority that Shelby Steele is articulating, it was simultaneously being With a second dimension, which is the critical dimension in both cases, you're simultaneously dealing with two forces kind of pushing on you at 90 degree angles.
00:20:38.000One is your moral authorities being undermined, and then they've written all this apparently complicated gobbledygook, and then they tell you you don't understand what the words mean.
00:20:45.000So you have these very, very smart people who are desperate to prove how smart they are.
00:20:49.000That's literally their job in academia.
00:22:42.000The language we're hearing now is that the activists and the consultants from these different woke organizations are going to schools and they're recruiting a small percentage of teachers in the school system as co-conspirators.
00:22:52.000That's literally the word they're using, co-conspirators, who help them bring it in even though they know it's against the law, even though they know they can get in trouble.
00:23:00.000And so they get a few people in there who will do the thing to get the ideology in.
00:23:07.000So then when Paulo Freire's next book comes out, say in this case in 1984, you have colleges of education with moles literally inside who are eagerly going to champion that book, press on doing all of these intellectual and moral Manipulations to get the College of Education to accept the book into its curriculum, and then it just kind of metastasizes until it becomes a curriculum.
00:23:29.000And so there's a very prosaic element too, which is when they decided to march into the institutions, they literally decided, they didn't do nothing.
00:23:38.000They started putting people into positions of administrative power, and you only need actually a few percent.
00:23:43.000People always think, well, how do they get so many?
00:23:45.000Because once you have about 3% of people who will be, it's called renormalization, who are absolutely intolerant, the entire kind of go-along-to-get-along institution bends around that intolerance.
00:23:59.000And unfortunately, when we put all of these kinds of factors together, we get a perfect storm in an institution that had maybe the lowest possible resistance to this kind of a manipulation, and the most dedicated attack at the same time, with a very long-range generational strategy that's When you say it, if you imagine you're in 1974 or 5 and I'm telling you, oh, they're going to take over the colleges of education and they're going to get all the teachers, you're going to say, it's a conspiracy theory, right?
00:24:23.000And so it seems very unlikely and impossible, but it turns out that that seems to be how they did it.
00:24:28.000So you mentioned earlier the idea of sort of legal frameworks changing.
00:24:32.000So obviously I grew up during the late 1980s, 1990s, and the education that I was given,
00:24:39.000there were certainly tastes of this in public school, but it certainly wasn't as overwhelming as it is right now,
00:24:42.000where it feels like every single classroom in America is now rife with Black Lives Matter flags
00:24:47.000and Pride Progress flags and critical race theory and gender theory.
00:24:51.000And it's now thorough going to the point where you have the major teachers unions
00:24:54.000in the United States pushing every aspect of this, which is something they certainly wouldn't have dared
00:26:12.000Well, I mean, the big one that I mentioned earlier is the Every Student Succeeds Act,
00:26:15.000but that actually comes off of the back of Common Core.
00:26:18.000And that actually comes off of the back of no child left behind.
00:26:21.000And so you start to see these kind of legal pushes that were changing, and simultaneously you also, and it's very important, you have a slowly metastasizing problem in the Teacher pipeline, the licensure pipeline, the accreditation pipeline, all of these institutions that are related to education are slowly being taken over from within by the small percentage at first of activists who are doing their so-called praxis, which is like theory made flesh to draw off of a Christian biblical example.
00:26:51.000And they're the facilitators that make it happen.
00:26:54.000But what you actually have happening legally is you have this First, well, you have the pipeline.
00:26:59.000You have more and more and more teachers that are learning this.
00:27:01.000In the 90s, if they just get the College of Education by 92, 93, you're not pumping out fully-fledged teachers who are licensed and accredited, who are steeped in it.
00:27:13.000That is an increasing problem to where now it's, you know, hegemonic.
00:27:16.000But what you have going on legally is This increasing step toward accountability standards being mandated largely by the federal government if you want federal dollars to come to your school.
00:27:28.000And so you got them with No Child Left Behind.
00:27:30.000We had this huge push toward, and it was W that did that, this huge push toward accountability standards because of course we want to make sure the schools are good.
00:27:59.000A different Robert Mueller spelled differently at the United Nations.
00:28:04.000But the bigger story there was what if you talk to teachers on the ground during implementation, some of them said, you know, I don't even care about the curriculum changes that much.
00:28:20.000I have to stay over every day till 7 o'clock filling out paperwork, paperwork, because we have to report on how we are teaching all of this stuff.
00:28:26.000In order for the school to qualify, so there's constant reporting.
00:28:29.000Well, ESSA comes in, the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, it's a bill this thick, and adds that you have to start reporting on non-academic competencies.
00:28:40.000And now all of a sudden you start getting the social and cultural competence requirement.
00:28:44.000And meanwhile, there's an organization, it promotes the biggest thing in education, hottest thing in education right now, called Social Emotional Learning.
00:28:52.000The organization is called CASL, the Collaborative for Academic Social Emotional Learning.
00:28:57.000It was founded in 1994 under very weird circumstances, literally at like a New Age theosophical cult organization called the Fetzer Institute.
00:29:06.000And by the way, anybody who goes down that rabbit hole is going to find demons, and I'm not kidding.
00:29:10.000Very weird story, but tangential to our purposes for the moment.
00:29:14.000CASEL was ready with materials, with lobbying.
00:29:17.000Actually, they helped lobby to get ESSA passed and to make sure that provision was in ESSA.
00:29:22.000And then so suddenly the schools have this new thing.
00:29:25.000You have to keep doing your Common Core style reporting even though Common Core is failing.
00:29:30.000But now you have to report on non-academic competency and all of a sudden consultants and worksheets and everything go out all over the country.
00:29:37.000Here's a program that will allow you to do this easily.
00:29:39.000And you can see this is a classic, you know, fraud is what this was.
00:29:43.000There's a classic setup, make the federal bureaucracy require something and then have
00:29:49.000the product ready to fill the gap and capture the whole market.
00:29:52.000And I just testified in writing to a subcommittee in Iowa that's fighting SEL and CASEL right
00:30:33.000You don't want to go re-implement something new a year later if you find out it's bad.
00:30:36.000You have to admit you implemented something bad.
00:30:38.000So they started implementing this, and then they're just kind of hooked.
00:30:41.000They're just kind of stuck in it, and it's grown and grown and grown.
00:30:44.000So what's in social emotional learning?
00:30:46.000People hear that, and they immediately think, oh, well, maybe we're teaching kids to be nice, or maybe we're teaching them to get in touch with their emotion.
00:31:13.000And that's social-emotional learning is the same thing.
00:31:15.000Social-emotional learning, at least from CASEL, which is the biggest organization that does it, is a focus on teaching social and emotional skills.
00:31:24.000And they have this neat little bait-and-switch game they play or false advertising.
00:31:27.000They say, well, we have all this research showing that kids with better social-emotional skills get better grades and do all this stuff better.
00:31:33.000They never actually established that their program improves those.
00:31:39.000But what they teach is these five core competency areas, and there's your reporting on non-academic competencies, and they are, if I can remember them off the top of my head, self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness.
00:32:13.000But the trick is, because of that friary stuff, and by the way, this woman, Linda Darling Hammond is her name, She's one of the architects of SEL.
00:32:22.000She's now an executive emeritus, emerita, I guess, from CASEL.
00:32:27.000She worked with Obama's and Biden's education transition team.
00:32:34.000She actually wrote the foreword to the book called The Handbook of Social Emotional Learning in Research and Praxis back in 2015.
00:32:43.000And in her foreword, she says that a school that's socially and emotionally competent is in line with Ferreri's project of transformation and humanization.
00:32:51.000Which, those are Marxist words that mean that you're making people into Marxist consciousness.
00:32:56.000And so, social-emotional learning is a brainwashing program, frankly.
00:33:01.000And the way that it works is because of Ferreri's model, which we now know in writing that it's based upon, explicitly.
00:33:24.000So we're going to have self-management, right?
00:33:26.000But then what you do is you use that as an excuse to start to have a particular political conversation about what it means to manage yourself in a woke or sustainable or whatever the buzzword of political reference is.
00:33:38.000And they're therefore turning, using social-emotional learning as the entry point to turn every academic subject into a social-emotional subject.
00:33:49.000And then when they turn it into that, it actually becomes taught through an equity lens, an inclusion lens, or a sustainability lens.
00:33:56.000The Sustainable Development Goals from the United Nations are actually a huge thing that's moving into the SEL space right now.
00:34:02.000UNESCO's been writing about it for a few years in very kind of creepy ways.
00:34:06.000The NEA has started to write about it explicitly and deliver model curriculum to teach children from A through 12 to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, and social-emotional learning is the tool by which they're being taught to do it.
00:34:18.000And so it's literally a brainwashing tool.
00:34:20.000That comes in a nice beautiful package of we're going to teach kids to be nice and manage their emotions and so on.
00:34:26.000So do teachers know that they're doing this sort of stuff?
00:34:28.000Like how conscious are the people who are actually implementing this stuff?
00:34:31.000That this is what they're implementing or is it mostly, you know, good hearted third grade teacher, they go into school, this is the program they're given by the principal and so you do what the principal tells you to do.
00:34:42.000I think there's also some knowing, again with the co-conspirator thing, we know that there's a small percentage who know very deliberately that they're doing what they're doing.
00:34:49.000From people I've spoken with, I haven't spoken directly first-hand with anybody from CASL, but I have a second-hand, a couple of second-hand accounts from very smart individuals for, you know, institutional DC types.
00:35:01.000I won't name any names at the moment, but they've gone and had meetings with the CASL, and the people at CASL even don't seem to have any idea of what they're actually implementing in many cases, except if you get maybe up to the executive level.
00:35:11.000So there's this idea with all cults that they actually work like onions.
00:35:15.000There's an inner circle in any given cult, and they actually know what's really going on.
00:35:20.000In a communist situation, that's your party leaders.
00:35:22.000And then around that, there's like a shell of the party, and those are actually fully committed.
00:35:26.000It's not quite the inner circle, but it's still kind of disciple level.
00:35:30.000And then outside of that, you have what's literally sometimes called, at least in China, the inner school.
00:35:37.000In Chinese, it's 内教, the inner school, which is the people who have studied.
00:35:44.000They've studied the relevant doctrine.
00:35:47.000Then outside of that, and this is most of the people that are involved in the cult and the people who are mostly being exploited by the cult, you have what's called the outer school.
00:36:00.000Sometimes they perceive, in fact, often they perceive that there's something wrong with what's happening.
00:36:06.000But that perception of having something wrong is often turned through the inner school cult doctrine into convincing them that they're just not committed enough, and that they're bad people, and that their doubts are part of the problem.
00:36:17.000And you can start to reminisce on your DEI, unconscious bias, white fragility trainings, and see what role those play.
00:36:26.000But you have also teachers who are uncomfortable with it and speaking out, others who think it's just a good thing, others who are, it's just my job, man, I'm just here to do my job.
00:36:35.000The banality of evil, and unfortunately, there's this very ambiguous and vague characterization.
00:36:43.000You can't pick out any given teacher and say, oh, you're a bad person because you're participating.
00:36:57.000It's sold as a means of engagement, of getting the kids more interested.
00:37:02.000It's a great time, actually, to give you that example of how they can weave it into a math lesson.
00:37:07.000This is a real example from a real SEL training that a real teacher who really got fired for calling out SEL in her school told me from one of her trainings.
00:37:48.000Well, it turns out, Ferreri's project is that you pick certain words and use them as generative themes to generate political conversations off of that.
00:37:56.000So, a teacher being trained in this SEL method or cultural competence method or culturally relevant teaching method is going to look at that, give it to the class and say, before we answer the question, let's do this.
00:38:08.000Who's been to an amusement park before?
00:38:10.000See, now you're just getting them engaged.
00:38:11.000You're getting second graders interested.
00:38:13.000Some kids raise their hand, some kids don't.
00:38:14.000You say, well, why is it that some of you have got to go to amusement parks and some of you haven't?
00:38:18.000Why are some reasons why kids maybe wouldn't get to go to amusement parks?
00:38:21.000And you're taught in the teacher training to keep pressing until somebody says, well, maybe not everybody can afford it.
00:38:29.000So now you're ready to have a political conversation you've generated out of the word amusement park.
00:38:34.000You've generated a political conversation about socialism, redistribution, or parental authority, which is a major theme that we're seeing now.
00:38:41.000Well, maybe some parents, should the school be making maybe some of these decisions instead?
00:38:45.000Don't you think you should be making decisions instead of your parents?
00:38:48.000Or you could go off of obviously riding in a car, you're having an environmental conversation, mom and dad, which no normal person two years ago would have thought mom and dad there is a trigger.
00:38:58.000But it's a generative theme, as Freire would call it.
00:39:14.000And they are led into this equity-framing or sustainability-framing dialogue.
00:39:19.000And the math lesson just kind of got set over here and forgotten about.
00:39:22.000And allegedly, it's supposed to make the kids more interested in learning math lessons.
00:39:25.000So what they're being taught in education schools Under the Freerian model and what they're being taught in their professional development training, as in this exact example, is this will make the kids do better in math because it'll make them want to learn math because it'll relate to the real context of their lives.
00:39:41.000And that's the sales pitch and that's the hook.
00:39:43.000But what you've actually done is hijacked a math lesson and instead of working out that problem and maybe 10 others for practice, you've now had a 45-minute conversation about feminism in your math class and called it math.
00:39:54.000Did you know it takes up to 11 weeks on average to hire for an open position?
00:40:55.000Okay, so let's talk about the best way to fight this sort of stuff, because you have seen this battle sort of break out on the right between, I'd say, the libertarian right and the sort of more traditionalist conservative right.
00:41:04.000So Florida's actually a great example of this.
00:41:06.000You have the new college, which is now being taken over, essentially by conservatives, who have said, okay, we're not interested right now in Let a thousand flowers bloom.
00:41:39.000We're going to teach traditional philosophy.
00:41:40.000And then you have some people who are sort of on the libertarian right who say, no, no, no, no.
00:41:43.000It has to look more like University of Austin, right?
00:41:45.000The ideal institution is an institution that's open to all and where you have the critical pedagogy at the institution, but you also have people who are critical of the critical pedagogy at the institution.
00:41:57.000The suggestion that you seem to be making is that the former approach may be better than the latter approach, because you're assuming in the latter approach that the people who are teaching critical pedagogy, or who are teaching based on Freire, that they actually want to be part of the game, and they fundamentally do not want to be part of the game, so what you're really doing when you say, let's open it up to everybody, is you're allowing people who want to destroy the institution into the institution.
00:43:19.000Children do not think the same way as adults.
00:43:21.000You may forget that when you get older, but they don't.
00:43:23.000They have an authority figure telling them these things, some of which are very emotionally resonant, very psychologically and socially resonant.
00:43:31.000We're not operating in a field of, you know, open debate.
00:43:35.000The marketplace of ideas doesn't exist for seven-year-olds.
00:43:40.000They have to grow up within boundaries.
00:43:42.000They, of course, have to, as they age, they have to be able to press on the boundaries.
00:43:45.000And then we figure out, as adults, how to responsibly expand the boundaries according to their, you know, their ability and their demonstrated prowess and whatever else.
00:43:55.000Sometimes we have to restrict some of the boundaries.
00:43:59.000And so when you have teachers, they're not parents, they're acting in loco parentis, they have a similar responsibility placed upon them.
00:44:06.000You're not dealing with a situation where it's like, oh, let's just have an open debate with seven-year-olds.
00:44:12.000Where you have, obviously, an adult and a bunch of kids.
00:44:14.000They talk in critical pedagogy about the democratic classroom, and the teacher is a student, and the student are the teachers, and they learn from each other reciprocally.
00:44:21.000Actually, Polifari literally calls this in Pedagogy of Freedom almost a dozen times, and I quote, the Gnostic cycle.
00:44:29.000They give you no bones about what's actually – when I say it's a cult, I literally
00:44:37.000You have an adult and seven-year-olds.
00:44:39.000You are not talking about a conversation between equals.
00:44:43.000That's why the word groomer is so appropriate because when you have an adult coming down
00:44:48.000and breaking down the boundary of authority between adult and child, which is a boundary
00:44:53.000that gets blurry at the end of adolescence by nature but it isn't blurry with adults
00:44:57.000and children and it must be maintained even through the challenges of adolescence.
00:45:02.000You have a person breaking that down and then adding in the suggestion that maybe your parents won't understand, maybe your parents aren't the people to go back to, and then they're Using a blatant political lens through which to interpret the entire world, that's ideological grooming.
00:45:18.000We don't have to get to the sexual side, which of course it opens the door for.
00:45:21.000Just as the simplest, least accusatory way, how are you going to screen for sexual misfeasance?
00:45:28.000If you can't even tell, if the whole game is to break down boundaries between the adult and the child, how are you going to screen for it?
00:45:34.000And so what do you expect is going to happen?
00:45:36.000The incentives are there, people are going to go into the profession, and the next thing you know you're going to have, just like we see in the news finally now, not a year ago, I got grilled by the Washington Post.
00:45:44.000Where's the evidence that there's real grooming?
00:46:33.000It's not a theory of how the world works in which you can critique the theory or say that the theory has errors here or errors there.
00:46:38.000The only way to truly attack critical race theory is to point to the intentions of the people who are promulgating it.
00:46:42.000And that is inherently unstable, and so what you end up having is critical race theorists claiming that the system that is the United States is motivated by evil, and then you have those people who are responding saying, no, you're motivated by evil.
00:46:54.000So it's just an argument about motivation, so it's not actually an intellectual argument at all.
00:46:57.000It's mainly just a series of accusations about character.
00:47:00.000To get back to the groomer debate, there's been this whole debate inside right-wing circles over maybe we shouldn't use the word groomer now.
00:47:51.000And so, ideological was always written into the word groomer.
00:47:54.000It was only that the left then tried to play this game of, well, it's transphobic or homophobic, and what you're really saying is that a gay teacher is trying to rape a child.
00:48:00.000It's like, that's not what anyone was saying.
00:48:02.000You guys deliberately do what you always do, and you did a linguistic switch here,
00:48:05.000and you relied on the semantic overload that the word groomer can support
00:48:52.000It's written by a trans educator by the name of Harper Keenan and one of the drag queens who goes by Lil Miss Hot Mess.
00:49:00.000That's what's on the academic paper byline, Loomis Hot Mess.
00:49:04.000And they explained that, first of all, I said that word generative with Ferrari, right?
00:49:08.000They explained that the presence of the drag queen and his performance is a generative practice, provocative, evocative for the children and into
00:49:19.000what? Into queer ways of living and being. They say that it's less a sanitizing force against
00:49:25.000drag, to answer that criticism people give of it because it is to bring it into a
00:49:29.000kindergarten, they have to act a little bit differently or they did it first, sanitizing drag from
00:49:35.000its gnarly roots. It's less a sanitizing force and I quote, then it is a preparatory introduction,
00:49:41.000call it initiation, a preparatory introduction into alternate modes of kinship, which they
00:49:46.000then follow by saying drag is family friendly in the sense that we mean family.
00:51:11.000Oh, there's the GSA club after school.
00:51:14.000And if you're having some questions, we will affirm you I'd love bomb you, in other words, and start bringing you in, and then we'll teach you to criticize, you know, yourself for your past transphobia, blah, blah, blah.
00:51:24.000And you can see the whole grooming cycle into this ideological cult.
00:51:28.000It's a perfect example, and that could be if every drag queen that shows up in a classroom is perfectly clean and sanitary and well-behaved, not just within the law, but has no even ill intent, no pedophilic intent.
00:51:40.000It's still very blatantly, even the way they word it and phrase it, Of course, they also say in the paper that all transformative practice is driven by desire, which again, you wrote that down and somebody published it, not in a fringe, by the way, in a major curriculum journal, Curriculum Inquiry, one of the largest.
00:52:01.000And the fact they say it out loud and people are just kind of okay with it because it's put in academic language is really an amazing thing.
00:52:08.000And this is something that I've been sort of re-terminating.
00:52:12.000I've been coining or pushing the rebranding of progressivism into transgressivism because there is a big difference between people who argue in favor of bad socialistic economic ideas and what
00:52:22.000we're seeing now, which is essentially the idea that all rules must be transgressed.
00:52:55.000It is natural for men to dress as men and women to dress as women.
00:52:58.000The burden of proof has now shifted to the parent as opposed to the person who wishes to break all of the systems.
00:53:03.000So explain why is it an affirmative good for men to dress as women?
00:53:06.000Explain why is it an affirmative good for a man dressed as a woman to twerk in front of a child?
00:53:10.000Explain why all of these things are positive for society.
00:53:13.000The burden of proof has completely shifted to Why are you arguing that it's... Are you trying to say something bad about gay people if you say that men shouldn't work in front of children while they're dressed as strippers?
00:53:46.000The buzzword in the academic writing about what they're doing with that when you're liberating the child is giving them autonomy.
00:53:52.000The more rules you break, the more autonomous you are.
00:53:54.000Rules are you following the strictures of society that you're being dictated to by the social constructions and their social and political enforcement.
00:54:02.000So when you break the rules, you're becoming more autonomous.
00:54:05.000Rather than growing into a mature autonomy, Where you're actually a functional person within the boundaries of reality and truth.
00:54:13.000They're teaching them, as you said, I think transgressive is an excellent way to frame this because they use that word all the time.
00:54:27.000They say that they want to be transgressive because ultimately what they want to do, and I'll use the word that they don't usually use for this, is transmute, which is an alchemical word, transmute society into something different.
00:54:39.000So to do that, they have to transmute the economic structure and transmute the people who are going to fill that economic structure simultaneously.
00:54:47.000Why are all the corporations going woke and why are all the schools going woke?
00:54:50.000Because you're going to have kids who have woke competencies as their main academic credentials getting plugged into companies that are hiring off of woke credentials with a new, you know, whatever ESG or whatever model they happen to have.
00:55:03.000So they're building out the economy and the people are going to plug into it.
00:55:07.000Because they understand that the problem of reproduction will then make their hegemony solid.
00:55:11.000And so that's what their objective is.
00:55:14.000And that's why education is in such a dangerous state, not just in terms of how do you get parents to fight back against this, because that starts with even just being able to see what's happening, which is why I wrote Marxification of Education, because nobody can see what's happening.
00:55:29.000Once you see the magic trick, then you can see what the guy did with the card, unless he's really good at it.
00:55:34.000It also is going to take these kinds of steps like figuring out who are the people, at least, who are these people that the activists are calling co-conspirators?
00:55:57.000Outright activists, the kind of things that, like, Libs of TikTok regularly documents, those people who need to at least be in inquiry, probably gone.
00:56:04.000The administrators that are backing this up, gone.
00:56:07.000They've got to be removed from the positions of power that they're abusing, and there's no other way.
00:56:11.000I wish there was another way, but this is well within our rights as a society to say, we've trusted you with, frankly, because it's in loco parentis, a sacred Responsibility and you are throwing it back in our faces in obviously very transgressive ways.
00:56:33.000Folks, this conversation continues for another 30 minutes over at dailywireplus.com.
00:56:37.000We discuss if the radical left's cultural transgressivism—Drag Queen Story Hour, BLM, and the like—are no longer a means to an end goal, but rather the end goal themselves.
00:56:46.000Plus, how corporations weaponize woke ideology, and if corporations have their own kind of quasi-deep state.
00:56:51.000Click the link at the top of the description to join us.