00:00:00.000Okay, everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, James Lindsay joins the program, author of an important new book that you should all purchase, Queering of the American Child.
00:00:08.000Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:01:06.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:15.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:27.000Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
00:01:37.000Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.
00:02:10.000Well, I mean, so yesterday was Easter.
00:02:13.000Yesterday was also Trans Day of Visibility.
00:02:16.000And the Biden administration pushed this issue very hard.
00:02:21.000He made the proclamation, as he has in 22 and in 21, and I guess 23 also.
00:02:27.000He's done it every year since he's taken office.
00:02:29.000He's made a proclamation that we're going to honor March 31st as Trans Day of Visibility in line with International Trans Day of Visibility.
00:02:38.000But he made the announcement this year on Good Friday and he pushed it hard.
00:02:43.000He mentioned absolutely nothing to do with any sensitivity toward Christians.
00:02:47.000And so this creates an ambiguous situation.
00:02:49.000And as I think you and I have talked about many times, an ambiguous situation is an ideal situation for an op.
00:02:56.000And I think that the Biden administration, in this case, is trying to bait Christians into a reaction, an angry reaction based on this insult.
00:03:06.000And it is an insult to the Christians in their high holy day.
00:03:11.000And so what happened on social media all day yesterday is that the entire administration and its functionaries pushed this issue again and again and again.
00:03:20.000Biden even went so far as to, well, whoever tweeted from his account, I should say, went so far as to say, you know, we see you transgender people.
00:03:31.000You're made in the image of God, he said, in fact, to them.
00:03:34.000And so you can see that there's this intentional dabbling into the provocation against Christians.
00:03:42.000And I think that the goal is, as I've said for over a year now, I think there's a goal that's growing to associate the right wing, to associate Trump, to associate conservatives and Republicans with not just Christianity, but with some virulent strain, some virulent heresy that does violent, crazy acts.
00:04:02.000It's like Charlottesville all over again, or it's like January 6th in another fashion to try to discredit both.
00:04:10.000well, three things, Trump, the so-called Agenda 2025, and conservative Christians overall.
00:04:18.000And you said something really smart, which is the reaction is always the stated action, that they are involved in continual provocation campaigns.
00:04:26.000And with that, James, I guess what you're saying is that this was intentional that they went as hard as they went on Easter.
00:05:03.000You can see it on Beautiful Trouble on their website, which is beautifultrouble.org.
00:05:07.000It is one of their tactics and principles.
00:05:10.000And so rather than acknowledging that this is likely to be upsetting to Christians as a true statesman and a true leader would do and say, hey, look, it happens that the Trans Day of Visibility falls on Easter this year.
00:05:24.000And so we want to be sensitive to both our Christians, but we also want to acknowledge the trans, which I think is its own set of problems.
00:05:32.000But that at least would have acknowledged that the administration was trying to thread this awkward needle one way or another at a minimum of provocation.
00:05:44.000Instead, like I said, there was like this being pushed very, very hard from virtually every department in the federal government and lots of other Democrats, state governments copying it.
00:05:55.000Whitmer, the NewJersey.gov account on Twitter put this out too, is going very hard on all of this with absolutely no acknowledgement whatsoever for Christians.
00:06:07.000And so the methodology then they're employing is they want the outrage.
00:06:12.000And outrage is justified here, but even more than that.
00:06:15.000They want to try to get something that then solidifies themselves power, like a January 6th style event, right?
00:06:41.000At the Department of Education, we know that all students do their best when they're seen and they're supportive.
00:06:47.000To the many transgender students across the country listening on this Trans Day of Visibility, we in the Biden-Harris administration want you to know that we see you, we support you, and we celebrate you.
00:07:00.000We also know it's not an easy time to be you.
00:07:02.000Walking into a classroom should be an act of hope, not an act of bravery.
00:07:06.000That every day you choose to show up as your true self, you make this world a more brave, more honest, and more free place.
00:07:14.000In your gift for seeing things as they could be, I see the promise of America.
00:07:19.000Today, we at the Department of Education want you to know that your school, your community, and your country are better because you're a part of it.
00:07:33.000And Biden said the same thing from his Twitter account, or whoever runs it did, saying that they're the bravest people he knows, which were made immediately.
00:07:40.000I thought that's when he said Hunter is the smartest person he knows, is the most preposterous thing I've seen in a while.
00:07:47.000But like I said, I think this is a deliberate provocation in order to get a reaction.
00:07:53.000I'm outraged, as a matter of fact, that this theosophical cult posing as some kind of a support group or whatever, the queer theory being the doctrine of this cult, is being pushed from the highest offices of our country on Easter with absolutely no attempt to make any kind of sensitivity to the awkwardness and the contradiction that's happening there.
00:08:24.000But what I finished the rest of my kind of long tweet or post or whatever they're called with was an admonition to, you know, get grounded, pray for, first of all, these poor people caught up in this, and I mean the kids that are getting sucked into this cult, but also to pray for your enemies that they, you know, repent, that they stumble, that they make the mistakes, that this opens eyes.
00:08:51.000And I actually advised people to spend time on Easter or throughout the entire weekend.
00:08:56.000I think I put it on Saturday to read Matthew 10 in particular as guys.
00:09:45.000Think about what the kind of godly way to approach that would be and to trust that the right words and the right attitudes and the right demeanor would come out so that it actually moves the needle.
00:09:56.000Because the key thing here is they are trying to play for a reaction to play against Christians.
00:10:02.000And if Christians don't take the bait and they rise to the occasion instead of to the provocation, then they'll make a demonstration that will open eyes.
00:10:10.000Rise to the occasion instead of the provocation.
00:10:59.000That the two kind of, let's just say, ops that they run on is Charlottesville and January 6th, both of which are people that were outraged about something that then took to the streets and were either infiltrated, provoked, or brought to levels to do things that they would regret, where a small minority of people did things that, you know, were violent, don't like, that then got represented as a movement whole.
00:11:21.000I mean, that last piece is really the dynamic that people need to understand is that it will be a very small number of the worst actors that will be taken as representative of the entire group if people can't contain themselves.
00:11:34.000And so, you know, a lot of people think that when I say this, I'm saying don't act.
00:11:38.000What I'm saying is that they're setting up pretext for what they want you to do so that when you do it, like Joe Biden said, that's his reason for running.
00:11:48.000And then January 6th has been nothing but a nightmare for conservatives and especially the people who, I guess, not even went into the Capitol, but went within a few hundred feet of the Capitol or something now for several years.
00:12:01.000And it has justified so many of their things that what I'm calling for people to do is to take judicious action.
00:12:08.000I mean, to invoke another Bible verse, it's the turn the other cheek first, which I don't think is very well understood.
00:12:14.000A lot of times I'm even seeing people that claim to be Christians running around on the internet saying that turning the other cheek is kind of how we got here.
00:12:20.000And it means kind of getting run over and bullied.
00:12:24.000What in the world would Jesus be instructing people to let people bully you?
00:12:28.000That's not, it can't possibly be what he's saying.
00:12:31.000But what it does mean is that if somebody offers you an insult, say, point out the fact that they've insulted you and say, go ahead and insult me again.
00:12:48.000Well, they're just called to so many actions in the gospels that make it so easy to turn a tyrant's misbehaviors and misdeeds and misfecins back against them in the court of public opinion, where, you know, Jesus says his kingdom's not of this world, but we live in this world, and this world is not exactly a perfect heavenly world.
00:13:11.000And the court of public opinion may or may not be just, but it is where people tend to get judged.
00:13:16.000And so Christians have an enormous amount of excellent advice in the Gospels guiding them to make judicious decisions in circumstances like these up against tyrants, whether those tyrants are the kings spoken about in the gospels, whether it's Pilate or whether it, you know, in the Romans or whether it's the administration and its global functionaries that we're dealing with right now.
00:13:40.000James, I love how you're quoting scripture.
00:13:44.000And so we're going to keep diving into this.
00:13:46.000I hope everyone understands the profundity of what James is saying here, which is that how we respond is going to determine the future of the civilization.
00:13:55.000And understand, we can use this as fuel to build our ranks to show really what they believe and why they're doing it.
00:14:46.000For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless provider.
00:14:50.000And when I say only, trust me, they are the only one.
00:14:52.000Glenn and the team have been great supporters of the show, which is why I'm so proud to partner with them.
00:14:57.000Patriot Mobile offers dependable nationwide coverage, giving you the ability to access all three major networks, which means you get the same coverage you've been accustomed to without funding the left.
00:15:06.000When you switch to Patriot Mobile, you're sending the message that you support free speech, religious liberty, the sanctity of life, Second Amendment, our military veterans, and first responder heroes.
00:15:15.000Their 100% U.S.-based customer service team makes switching quite easy.
00:15:18.000Keep your number, keep your phone, or upgrade.
00:15:20.000Their team will help you find their best plan for your needs.
00:15:22.000Just go to patriotmobile.com/slash Charlie or call 972-Patriot.
00:15:26.000Get free activation when you use offer code Charlie.
00:15:40.000That is patriotmobile.com/slash Charlie or call 972 Patriot, patriotmobile.com slash Charlie.
00:15:48.000So, James, I'm going to mention three events, and I want you to tell me what they all have in common: Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and January 6th.
00:15:56.000No, those were all setups that they used to move the ball an awful lot.
00:16:02.000Charlottesville created the pretext to where people were able to believe that Trump, you know, was praising white supremacists and thus building out the whole America's a secretly white supremacist nation.
00:16:14.000And then you move into the death of George Floyd, which was a mass line.
00:16:19.000Actually, all three of these are mass line events against the American people as well.
00:16:23.000But the mass line on George Floyd is the absolute biggest one that they've run, with the possible exception of COVID-19.
00:16:30.000And they ran an operation to get the United States to completely change its policy in this reflexive environment where people believed the incorrect take on what was going on due to yet another hoax.
00:16:43.000And then January 6th is the same thing.
00:16:46.000It was a setup and then it was blown completely out of proportion.
00:16:51.000I mean, I don't even know how to quantify how much milk they've been able to squeeze out of that tiny, tiny little cow, but it's unbelievable.
00:17:00.000And the goals have been to run mass line attacks against the United States and its people and its constitution so the Democrats can seize power.
00:17:08.000So, James, Charlottesville, Floyd, January 6th, these are three isolated events that then kind of become narrative and mythologized, right?
00:17:17.000So they're constantly mentioned, they're constantly shown, they're constantly utilized for different purposes.
00:17:23.000Charlottesville, race politics, George Floyd, BLM.
00:17:27.000So similar to race politics, but the Charlottesville thing was like, oh my goodness, look at all the white supremacists around Floyd, obviously, BLM, and police brutality.
00:17:35.000January 6th, about how this movement's going to try to overthrow the government.
00:17:38.000All three of those made the national security state and the regime more powerful.
00:17:44.000They use these events as justification, as dare I say, mini 9-11s, how it shocks the nation, give us power.
00:18:19.000Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years.
00:18:29.000It was there on August of 2017 we saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open.
00:18:38.000Their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging and burying the fangs of racism, champing the same anti-Semitic bile herd across Europe in the 30s.
00:18:53.000And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.
00:19:00.000That's why today I'm announcing my candidacy.
00:19:26.000The goal is to get people to believe this mythology and then to actualize some kind of power grab off of that mythology.
00:19:35.000So there you had this event, whether that was organic or not, or to what degree it was organic, to what degree it was infiltrated is perhaps an open question.
00:19:44.000And it became a defining moment that set up Joe Biden running for president, almost like a TV show.
00:19:49.000And then you have George Floyd die, and it's the same kind of thing.
00:19:53.000Nobody quite knows what's going on, but there's the narrative that we all have to run with.
00:19:57.000And in each case, what you see is that there are massive shifts in their ability to advance their agenda.
00:20:04.000And finally, with January 6th, here's a little piece of funny evidence that they're connected.
00:20:09.000As many people know, I have an extremist profile on the Southern Poverty Law Center website.
00:20:13.000And if you go look at it, the second thing they say about me is that I made a series of jokes mocking George Floyd on January 6th.
00:20:22.000Why on earth would those two things be connected enough to where that's the second thing they have to say about me?
00:20:28.000But it's obvious that the reason is because they're all part of this broad mythology that they're using to justify their take for power.
00:20:36.000And in the same way in Christian theology, we have stories that build our faith, the binding of Isaac, the parting of the Red Sea, the transmission of the Ten Commandments on Sinai.
00:20:47.000The current regime has myths that they need to repeat and tell to pass down to their infantry, to pass down to their activists.
00:20:57.000They say, remember when all those white supremacists brought the Tiki torches to Charlottesville?
00:21:00.000Do you remember where that poor black man was, you know, put the knee on the neck?
00:21:04.000Do you remember when they tried to overthrow our government?
00:21:06.000And remember, each one increases in their ferocity of action against us.
00:21:10.000James Lindsay, he's over the mark here.
00:21:54.000So he started planning a few years ago with his wife.
00:21:56.000And he said, well, I'm going to look and see.
00:21:57.000He's vaguely aware of what's going on with the so-called culture wars.
00:22:01.000And he wanted to look into what was going on in the schools.
00:22:04.000And he saw all of the sexuality stuff, the comprehensive sexuality education and the queering of the American child, as we came to call it.
00:22:11.000And he became concerned and he started to study queer theory.
00:22:14.000And he took up a lot of my podcasts and my writing.
00:22:17.000And he studied a lot of the papers and the books on his own that I hadn't read.
00:22:23.000Eventually, he handed a manuscript to me and said, what do you think of this?
00:22:26.000And I said, let's build this bigger if you want and turn it into the book that it became.
00:22:32.000And so we worked on it together for a few months.
00:22:34.000And we basically, what I loved about the book, besides its accessibility, how easy it is to read, how clear it is about the subject, is that right from the beginning, from the very first sentence, he pulls zero punches.
00:22:46.000He said that the American schools are in the grip of a religious cult in the first sentence.
00:23:43.000It's a very important contribution to knowledge.
00:23:46.000It will definitely not win an award for excellence in scholarship.
00:23:50.000Just so everyone knows, Dr. Lindsay, his claim to fame before all this stuff, and I'm glad that you've added to the bio, but it's just amazing.
00:23:58.000He wrote a series of fake academic papers.
00:24:00.000What was the one that was the dogs getting raped or something, or which one was it?
00:24:06.000So we assess that human beings can find out how much rape culture people accept by watching whether or not they accept dog rape at the dog park.
00:24:15.000So if they went to the dog park and saw dogs humping each other and they were favorable to it, which we claim straight men were, but as long as it wasn't gay dog rape, in which case straight men were not.
00:24:25.000You could find out all kinds of things about people's attitudes about rape.
00:24:28.000And so then we concluded that we should train men the way that we train dogs out of obedience manuals and with leashes and things, if only we could make it politically feasible in order to overcome rape culture.
00:24:39.000And this was accepted by a leading feminist geography journal and given an award for excellence in scholarship in 2018, which was pretty exciting.
00:24:49.000And then they said it was a contribution, like a wonderful contribution to knowledge.
00:24:54.000That was a much more gross paper that was called an important contribution to knowledge, which is more up the queering of the American Child alley.
00:25:01.000We claimed it's straight another paper, which is accepted by a high-level sexualities journal called Sexuality and Culture.
00:25:08.000We claimed that straight men are primarily transphobic because they don't practice putting things up number two.
00:25:14.000And if they practiced, they would become more feminine, more feminist, more sensitive, and much less homophobic and transphobic.
00:25:23.000And that was called an important contribution to knowledge.
00:25:26.000This is the state of the academy, everybody.
00:25:28.000The book is The Queering of the American Child: How a New School Religious Cult, and I'm going to ask James about that in a second, poisons the minds and bodies of normal kids.
00:25:52.000It says here: American children are learning a lot about sex, gender, and sexuality in schools.
00:25:57.000District administrators, teachers, and even librarians are obsessed with pushing inappropriate topics onto kids, all in the name of inclusion.
00:26:05.000The world is in flames, and biotinomics is a complete and total disaster, but it can't and won't ruin my day.
00:27:05.000So, what I'm doing, James, is I'm analytically using the criteria of how we determine something to be a religion, and I want to start to go through those boxes.
00:27:12.000So, please, let's start with those two.
00:27:14.000What is their core text or texts that would comprise the doctrine of queer theory, and what do they worship?
00:27:23.000So, what I would tell you, the core texts would be, and it's not a single text, it's a body of literature, would in fact be the queer theory literature and its antecedents in the postmodern and critical theory literature.
00:27:35.000For example, over the weekend, because of this provocation against Christians that we saw on Easter, I've been sharing from Paulo Fready, the Marxist educator from Brazil, a page out of his 1984 book called The Politics of Education.
00:27:50.000It's kind of far into the book, but he says that what's actually necessary to be on the side of the oppressed is a death and rebirth, in fact, a resurrection.
00:27:59.000He says it's in fact an experienced personal Easter that you have to go through, and that the Easter of the calendar is actually just dead rhetoric with no hope of resurrection.
00:28:10.000So, this is a body of literature from the critical theory approach and from the postmodern view of the false structure of reality leading into the queer theory, which also, of course, has all of its roots down in Karl Marx, whether it's the manifesto or whether it's the economic philosophic manuscripts earlier than that, which is a very religious text.
00:28:33.000In those cases, that body of literature produces the religious texts of this cult religion.
00:28:47.000It's one of the most extraordinarily narcissistic cults in history.
00:28:51.000The queer theory aspect of this is pretty unabashedly the worship of very much so the individual self.
00:29:00.000If we look back a little further, though, and we understand that this derives from Karl Marx, and we make that argument very well in the book, Karl Marx worshipped man, man as a collective, man as a being that sees itself and understands itself to know that it is its own creator, and in fact, a creative species.
00:29:18.000And in other words, a species that's able to do acts of creation.
00:29:23.000And in particular, he creates himself.
00:29:26.000He creates himself by creating society, and then society in turn indoctrinates or socializes man to be who he is.
00:29:33.000Marx believed that happened through economic conditions.
00:29:38.000But as a matter of fact, the queer theory cult believes that happens through the definition of normalcy and legitimacy.
00:29:44.000What conditions do we use to qualify something as being normal and acceptable, or on the other hand, perverse or degenerate?
00:29:52.000So the question, let's keep on going through kind of just agreed upon criteria of religious.
00:30:02.000I mean, not every religion has evangelism as a core tenet.
00:30:06.000For example, in Judaism, they will accept converts, but it is not a core tenant of Judaism to go and seek converts of all nations.
00:30:15.000In Christianity, it is not just suggested it is a primary focus of activity to try and spread the good news, the gospel, to make disciples of all nations.
00:30:25.000Is it in queer theory the idea to expand, to proselytize?
00:30:32.000They fundamentally believe that everybody is intrinsically queer and people have adopted an ideology or mythology of normalcy that prevents them from experiencing their intrinsically queer nature.
00:30:43.000So it's their goal to go reawaken people to who they really are.
00:30:47.000And that requires things like trans day of visibility.
00:30:50.000You have to make it very visible to make people wonder about it and ask questions about it.
00:30:54.000You have to attach a very, frankly, divisive value set called inclusion to where you're a horrible person if you're not participating according to the dictates of the cult.
00:31:04.000And frankly, it recruits through grooming.
00:31:07.000And we're very clear on that in the book.
00:31:08.000And I mean cult or ideological or religious grooming.
00:31:11.000I don't necessarily mean sexual grooming, though in this case, they happen to overlap.
00:31:16.000What I mean by grooming is that they are, In their own words, a guy, Kevin Kumashiro, we quote, makes it very clear.
00:31:25.000They are inducing personal crisis and then structuring the environment around children through queer education, specifically so that they resolve that crisis in the direction that makes them more open to queer theory.
00:31:37.000The verbiage in the Drag Queen Story Hour paper you and I have talked about in the past is explicit as well.
00:31:42.000They call Drag Queen Story Hour a, and I quote, preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship.
00:31:49.000And they reference that it's family friendly, and this is their words, family-friendly in the sense of the queer family that you find on the street.
00:31:58.000So it's very explicitly that they are introducing the ideas, and then they are traumatizing children and sometimes adults into accepting these ideas under the view of inclusion or of self-worth.
00:32:11.000And then they engage in practices like love bombing.
00:32:15.000They go through the entire what they call trauma bonding spectrum, as we outline in the book, to bring people in.
00:32:21.000But evangelistic isn't quite the right word, but it is definitely a strongly proselytizing.
00:32:30.000But they look to expand their ranks, right?
00:32:37.000So would it be fair to say that their theology is original queer, not original sin?
00:32:43.000That you are originally queer at the foundational level and that you've suppressed it through all of the Western society, Anglo-Saxon sort of practices, and that we have to try to reignite what has then been stifled.
00:32:59.000It would be that human beings are intrinsically, we're made, as Joe Biden said, in the image of God, to be queer.
00:33:06.000God would be considered queer for sure.
00:33:08.000And so your state, your unfallen state in the garden would have been queer.
00:33:14.000But then with the advent of the idea of certain people asserting a concept of normalcy or legitimacy to human expression or behavior, all of a sudden the man fell and he became ashamed of how he behaved.
00:33:30.000He became ashamed of who he was, especially if he was perverse and the other people shamed him.
00:33:42.000He believed that we were a fundamentally social species that had forgotten it because of the introduction of private property that estranges us from one another.
00:33:51.000We are a fundamentally queer, limitless, no rules, no limitations species being, and that we have lost track of that due to the social strictures and norms that come with polite society.
00:34:07.000So this is where it goes full circle, James.
00:34:53.000And everything is actually God embodied, but it's shards of the divine trapped within the shape of the mundane.
00:35:03.000And so what you have to do is undergo practices of alchemy to find the truly divine aspects of things or yourself and bring them back together.
00:35:14.000And when all of that has been accomplished, then we will return to the unity of God and we're all part of that unity of God.
00:35:21.000So in other words, we'll all return to the Pleroma or to heaven or whatever.
00:35:25.000The plenitude of God is what that means.
00:35:27.000And so in this case, being queer for the queer theorists or being a socialist for the Marxists is in fact the divine spark hidden inside of your mundane form.
00:35:37.000And the goal is to bring that out by criticizing away the lead so that that spark of gold can blossom.
00:35:45.000And so that's the idea, and that's why it's totally critical is they're constantly criticizing everything that they believe stifles the Gnostic imperative that they think is divinity at their heart.
00:35:57.000And of course, you see this as they did the I Joan thing at the Globe Shakespeare Theater where they readed Joan of Arc and it was non-binary and trans.
00:36:05.000And the actor comes out looking like Harry Potter and says, trans people are sacred.
00:36:10.000And you hear that rhetoric all over the place because that's actually what they believe.
00:36:13.000They believe that they are freeing the divinity inside of themselves that has been imprisoned by the mundane world and the requirements of other people in society.
00:36:23.000So James, I've asked you this question before, but I'm going to ask it again.
00:36:27.000And maybe you might have a different answer the more that you've been reading the scriptures, which I love.
00:36:31.000What is it about Christianity that is such a threat to the queer theory religion?
00:36:36.000I mean, the primary thing that the threat about Christianity is a threat to it is that the first commandment, you'll have no other gods before me.
00:36:46.000When people truly believe that, it's a real problem for believing that there's this transformational religion of remaking yourself into who you really were, or that we're actually already gods or God in unity that doesn't realize it.
00:37:04.000So the line between arrogance and humility really is the first thing, but the most threatening aspect of Christianity overwhelmingly to the queer theory cult is the forgiveness through repentance for anybody.
00:37:17.000So you take your own selfish action and you repent of it and you can be forgiven and you are valid and valued and in fact regenerate.
00:37:27.000You come back into the fullness of your being through basically repentance of your selfishness, which is an arrow of death to these fundamentally narcissistic religions.
00:38:39.000Rest assured knowing that you have emergency antibiotics, antivirals, and anti-parasitics on hand to help keep you and your family safe from whatever the globalists throw at us next.
00:39:33.000I just read Alchemy and Finance by George Soros last week, so I could actually spend a lot of time talking about this.
00:39:39.000But it's a process of transformation of the mundane into the divine, whether that's turning a mundane metal like lead into gold, whether that's turning death into life through the elixir of life, whether that's just meant in a spiritual capacity where we're taking our lower level self and elevating to some astral understanding of ourself or cosmic consciousness or whatever they want to call it.
00:40:03.000The idea is that you are doing something magical to weave in some of a lie about what's divine into the truth of what we really are, which is that we're people.
00:40:27.000But the idea of alchemy is it's come about in critical theory and these critical methods or what would be called negative theologies or apophatic theology is that in fact, the shard of the divine is always trapped within the mundane form.
00:40:43.000And the goal is to tear apart the mundane form.
00:40:46.000Or in other words, in Herbert Marcuse's language, the neo-Marxist, to criticize those aspects of the current society so that the ideal society that is contained within it can come out.
00:40:57.000And so it's an idea of magical transformation or as you said, metamorphosis or transmutation.
00:41:05.000From, yes, transmutation of substance to take a allegedly fallen and mundane substance and liberate its divine aspect and actualize it in reality.
00:41:16.000And what happens when you try to practice alchemy in reality is in the physical sciences, it's impossible and it fails.
00:41:23.000And in the social sciences, you're engaging in manipulation that eventually creates tremendous calamity and discord.
00:41:50.000C.S. Lewis was really clear on this, and he talked about, you know, he actually did this really great thing where he compared it to the Tao so that it wouldn't get caught up in the world.
00:42:08.000Yeah, it's what I said is that if I had the capacity to say this about this topic, it's what I would have said, but I don't have the capacity to write like Lewis.
00:42:20.000There is at least some right ways to live.
00:42:23.000And when you live those ways, you can govern yourself and you don't have to be controlled.
00:42:29.000When you decide to, and what queer really means is to throw away limiting principles, to throw away all of the Tao or the way of living or righteousness, is to throw it away in pursuit of your own selfish desires.
00:42:44.000And when you live that way instead, what happens is things start to go wrong.
00:42:48.000You don't have the capacity to govern yourself against the realities of the world.
00:42:53.000And so what you have to start doing is beseeching or claiming power in order to control the world around you.
00:43:01.000It's the exact inversion of the old advice.
00:43:04.000The old advice is to prepare the child for the road, not to prepare the road for the child.
00:43:09.000But when you decide to liberate yourself of all limiting principles, the only thing you can do is prepare the road.
00:43:54.000It's like the God is dead warning cry.
00:43:56.000And talk about how that connects to your book.
00:43:59.000And he eventually gets into a non-religious statement where he says, look, you could draw from the Asians or draw from Judaism or Christianity the Tao or the way.
00:44:08.000If you do not have an agreed upon way to live, then you're going to have some form of despotic totalitarianism and darkness.
00:44:17.000James, I'd love to have you riff on that and connect it with your book.
00:44:19.000No, well, what's going on, at least as we're exposing it and queering of the American child, is that the queer theory literature really advocates for individuals.
00:44:32.000And I want to put a caveat on this, but go with me.
00:44:35.000They want individuals to act however they want.
00:44:53.000As a matter of fact, when I put this book out, my father-in-law texted me almost immediately and was like, how are you going to define normal kid?
00:45:00.000And I'm like, uh-oh, you know, here we go.
00:45:03.000But the fact of the matter is, is that we're not, we don't have to define normal.
00:45:06.000We define normal as not queer because queer defines itself as whatever, literally whatever is opposed to the normal.
00:45:14.000He explains, David Halperin, who defined queer for the first time in 95, explains that what's meant by queer is nothing essential to the person.
00:45:23.000In other words, it's a purely political stance.
00:45:25.000So a normal kid could be a tomboy, could be a kind of, you know, a feminine boy.
00:45:34.000They're boys and girls and they're fine like they are.
00:45:36.000But what being queer means is having adopted this politics, that it has adopted this kind of this radical rejection of normalcy.
00:45:46.000And so a normal kid is any kid, no matter how they act, who has not accepted a radical politics of destroying everything around them.
00:45:55.000Now, Lewis's point was that that kind of a disposition follows from having essentially no heart put into you through understanding that there is something far more deep than this kind of presentation in the children's book, which is all very, you know, anodyne.
00:46:10.000Oh, the waterfall is nice and you can't make any value judgments about it.
00:46:15.000He's saying, no, no, no, you have to be able to make value judgments.
00:46:18.000And so when you make value judgments, you have yourself kind of filled up and thus resistant to this.
00:46:25.000But when you are in this kind of nihilistic emptiness, at that point, the only thing to fill yourself up with is yourself, which is this vicious circle because it's ultimately empty.
00:46:36.000And what you end up doing is pursuing your own self.
00:46:39.000But with queer theory, what it's saying is it's what's being, not what Lewis is saying, but with queer theory, how it attaches this, is that what you're filling yourself up with is hatred for everything that makes things work.
00:46:56.000So normal kids are however they want to be.
00:46:58.000But the fact of the matter is, is that they haven't adopted an intention.
00:47:01.000Imagine this, though, a child adopting an intentionally oppositional politic, because that's what it means to be queer.
00:47:08.000And if there isn't the, so if we could venture so far to say the Tao is the normal, it's the way, that if you stray off the way, then you aren't normal.
00:47:24.000And then, I mean, we can tie that back to the Bible, of course, which is that when you stray off from the righteous way, what's going to happen is bad things are going to befall you, and you have to be called back to that.
00:47:36.000Again, we come back to why repentance is like the core enemy of queer theory.
00:47:41.000It's setting yourself aside and trying to get back onto the, as Jesus said, straight and narrow way rather than the wide path that leads to destruction intentionally, because when we do that, when we're called back to the righteous way, we flourish.
00:47:58.000James, it is the queering of the American Child.
00:48:00.000I feel like we're just getting warmed up.