00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, one of my great friends, James Lindsay, sits down for an in-depth and powerful conversation.
00:01:21.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:59.000So for those on podcast and on radio, what are we looking at?
00:03:03.000So what you're looking at is a picture of the cover of the book.
00:03:06.000It's a beautiful white cover with the title, but then there's a picture of an apple, right, dead center that has a big giant bite, or maybe two.
00:03:14.000We can talk about Herbert if you want.
00:03:18.000Inside the apple, instead of it being the white flesh of an apple, is the pride flag.
00:03:22.000So they're taking a bite of the fruit and getting why do you choose that as the cover?
00:03:29.000We actually rely on the metaphor in the book quite a bit because the way that the book frames it, the first line of the book is in fact that our schools are in the grip of a religious cult.
00:03:39.000We don't pull any punches at all in labeling queer theory as the doctrine of a religious cult.
00:03:47.000And then we also clarify that it has very little to do with gay people.
00:03:50.000But we want people to understand that they are trying to hold out the fruit to get the kids to bite the fruit, to bring them into a cult through identity crisis.
00:03:58.000So can you build out the difference between what you mean by difference between queering and gay people?
00:04:03.000Yeah, okay, so queer theory is its own doctrine.
00:04:07.000It developed mostly through the 80s and 90s out of what's called sex positive radical feminism with some other influences, the sexology of Kinsey, some of the weird gender stuff of money, of John Money.
00:04:19.000But primarily it came out of sex positive radical feminism, looking for a new way to think about sex, gender, sexuality primarily.
00:04:26.000But what it is, it got defined by a guy, David Halperin, in a book called Saint Foucault, trying to turn, trying to canonize Michelle Foucault.
00:04:36.000Yeah, the pedophile, the French postmodern philosopher, and the father of queer theory, really, trying to turn him into a saint.
00:04:42.000And so it gets its first definition, the word queer does, in the technical sense, in that book.
00:04:47.000And the first three words of the paragraph where it gets defined is unlike gay identity.
00:04:52.000And he says the reason, I won't go into the technical language, which I kind of have memorized, but what he says that's different is that whatever, whether it's a choice or whether it's something more innate, and he actually opens the door that it could be either.
00:05:06.000But queer, he says, is not rooted in any positive truth or any stable reality, and it refers to nothing in particular.
00:05:14.000He says it's an identity without an essence, not based in truth, not based in reality.
00:05:18.000And then he says what it is, is that it takes on its meaning in a political position that is intrinsically opposed to, and he gives three things, the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant.
00:06:04.000So truth, that's legitimate, so it's against that.
00:06:06.000But normal means in accordance with norms, meaning that it's what appears on average, what we consider to be within healthy boundaries.
00:06:14.000And they want to, the word is as a verb, to queer those boundaries so that they no longer exist, to take children in particular, but all people outside of them.
00:06:23.000But as we've talked about before, it's intrinsically, truly occult.
00:06:36.000And what they believe is that all people are intrinsically queer, but they don't know it because they've had normalcy imposed on them through social production.
00:06:43.000They've gone to school, they've had parents, they have a sex assigned at birth by a doctor, and everybody has to live according to their sex assigned at birth.
00:07:22.000In fact, it's not just that they think it's okay.
00:07:24.000It's an inevitable consequence of queer theory.
00:07:27.000And it's from the very earliest writings, an intrinsic part of everything queer theory writes.
00:07:31.000Gail Rubin in 1984 wrote a book, a paper, I should say, called Thinking Sex.
00:07:36.000And she has an entire paragraph or two dedicated specifically to the intrinsic oppression of what she calls boy lovers.
00:07:44.000And she holds up NAMBLA, which is what is it, the National Association of Man-Boy Love, really.
00:07:50.000And she says that this is such a deep oppression that is written in 84, by 2000 or so, we would all be looking back on it, embarrassed that we were oppressing boy lovers, in her word.
00:08:02.000And so pedophilia is right there inside.
00:08:04.000Pedophilia, though, is also opposed to the normal and the legitimate, so it has to be valorized by queer theory.
00:08:10.000So what you can say is that queer theory has a 100% chance of leading toward pedophilia.
00:08:14.000It doesn't have to be done by pedophiles, but it has a 100% chance that pedophilia will be valorized by it.
00:08:20.000And understand this, everybody in the audience.
00:08:22.000Queer theory is not a fringe academic theory.
00:09:39.000They haven't, to be more specific, they haven't developed cortically their frontal cortex of their brain.
00:09:45.000So they'll believe fantasy and reality intermixed.
00:09:47.000They don't have the ability to fully distinguish.
00:09:49.000We often bring up that they believe in Santa Claus or that they believe in other fantastic ideas.
00:09:55.000And they target children, and the goal is to make them queer activists, people who rebel and reject against the normal.
00:10:01.000And the idea that being normal or being healthy, literally healthy, is a form of normalcy, is something that's being imposed upon them by an evil society that needs to be torn down.
00:10:11.000So if we were to make a reference to, say, Mao Zedong in China, where he created...
00:10:30.000The good and bad categories of people.
00:10:31.000And so the Red Guard was a high school primarily in college, but also younger children.
00:10:37.000Millions, tens of millions of these kids going around destroying property, bullying and sometimes killing their parents, turning their parents into the government, killing their teachers to try to transform China.
00:11:01.000The story real quick is that he sent me a manuscript he had written and said, hey, will you look this over and tell me if there's anything I can add to it?
00:12:06.000So there's a queer educator that actually Logan Lansing introduced me to in this book named Kevin Kumashiro.
00:12:13.000And he wrote a paper in 2002 called Against Repetition.
00:12:16.000And in that paper, he actually says that the purpose of queer education is to lead children into an identity crisis, a personal emotional crisis by teaching them about their complicity and oppression, and then to structure the environment around them to lead them to productive resolutions of the emotional crisis.
00:12:33.000Now, in the cult literature, that's called trauma bonding.
00:12:35.000They put them under psychological or emotional or social circumstances.
00:12:46.000I'm trying to remember the name of the paper.
00:12:48.000It has a cute name, but their names are Torres and Ferry.
00:12:51.000And they wrote that for years and years, we, meaning queer theorists and social justice activists in education, have shied away from the word indoctrination.
00:13:01.000We get accused that we're indoctrinating students.
00:14:18.000He defined queer in the same paragraph.
00:14:20.000I'll use a very benign example because there's some stuff I cannot say on air where he glorifies sexual practices in that same book that I can't even talk about on air.
00:14:28.000And you know, I'll talk about anything.
00:15:32.000Rest 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.
00:16:43.000But so she wrote a book in 90-ish, plus or minus two, I forget the exact year, called The Epistemology of the Closet, where she actually argues, it's one of the most Gnostic texts I've ever read in my life, that being in the closet confers a special understanding of the world upon you.
00:16:58.000So the epistemology of being in the closet.
00:17:06.000And so the book is called The Epistemology of the Closet.
00:17:08.000So being put in the closet forces you into a special kind of knowing.
00:17:13.000And she starts talking about how queer theory is constructed around all of these binaries, male, female, straight, gay, and so on, right?
00:17:21.000And that the binaries are actually constructions of power.
00:17:23.000And the one that stuck out to me when I was reading this list, and there's about 30 of them in her list, and she explores most of them through the text, is innocence versus initiation is a binary.
00:18:23.000In other words, they're in the closet, but they don't know they're in the closet.
00:18:26.000So they have to be introduced to the idea or initiated into the idea, removed from their innocence and initiated into the idea that they have a queer identity inside.
00:18:36.000And then that has to be developed, has to be affirmed.
00:19:43.000That's probably part of why, but I don't know for sure.
00:19:45.000And they very explicitly explain that the point of the drag queen is to turn up the excitement, turn up the color, get the kids excited to teach them that there's queer aspects to themselves.
00:19:56.000In fact, yet again, with the, is it about gay kids?
00:19:59.000They have this section near the end of this paper titled, listen to these words.
00:20:04.000I mean, they're big words, but let them sink in.
00:20:13.000From empathy to kinship, queer kinship.
00:20:15.000And I'm not supposed to call these people groomers, of course, as we all know, right?
00:20:19.000And they explain in that section, the very first part of the section is they say, well, there's all these ideas of empathy, that the point of queer education is to introduce empathy for LGBT kids and people.
00:20:30.000They say, well, that's a marketing strategy.
00:20:32.000That's what we use to get it in the door to justify its value, but its real value is deeper.
00:20:36.000Its real value is to introduce kids into ways of living and being queer.
00:20:49.000They want the kid to go and read the book, to have an exploration, to bring it up with the teacher, who then says, well, we have a club after school, the GSA, which used to be Gay Straight Alliance, and I think it's the Gender Sexuality Alliance or something like that now.
00:21:00.000And when you come to this club, you know, maybe it's a pizza party, maybe it's candy.
00:21:04.000We're going to celebrate and affirm you.
00:21:06.000So I want to go through some of these examples here.
00:22:18.000And that answer is some of the kids are LGBT and don't know it.
00:22:22.000And they have to have some representation to awaken the idea in their mind.
00:22:26.000And then there's the real answer, which is at the end of the same paragraph in the Drag Queen paper, which is that it's not about empathy or representation.
00:22:32.000It's about introducing the idea of queerness to every child.
00:22:46.000I mean, this is, and I think you've been really way ahead of the curve, clairvoyant on this, which is these people act as if it's a religion.
00:23:02.000They say things like trans people are sacred.
00:23:05.000They say that I saw a tweet a few weeks ago.
00:23:08.000I mean, it's just some stupid little account.
00:23:09.000It's not a big deal, but it said something like, you know, that they had the privilege of touching a trans body today and that so they got to touch a piece of the divine.
00:23:18.000They literally see this transformational process as a religious aspiration.
00:24:05.000We are not separate from God because nothing is separate from God.
00:24:08.000But the demiurge built the world, the material world, which is an illusion state separate from God, and he imprisoned man's souls inside.
00:24:17.000And so the fruit of the tree in the garden is supposed to confer to man the knowledge that he is what he is, that he's actually pure spirit and inseparable from God.
00:24:26.000And the demiurge is basically the jailer of man in Eden and doesn't want them to know that.
00:24:32.000And so it's actually an evil character.
00:24:34.000And then when Eve disobeys and Adam follows and they eat from the fruit and then they become to know a little bit of this, all of a sudden, what happens?
00:24:42.000Well, the character, the demiurge or God in the Bible, flips out, throws them into the material world to suffer, to live by the toil of their back, the sweat of their brow, the pain of childbirth, and so on, the wages of sin or death.
00:24:56.000And what the Gnostics believe is that we are falsely imprisoned in the world by an evil demon posing as God.
00:25:02.000What Marx did was said, the bourgeois class, as a social and economic phenomenon, actually imprisons the exploited proletariat class in their social values, in their way of thinking, so that they can become exploitable, alienated workers who will make the capitalists more money.
00:25:20.000This same idea gets recapitulated that there are people who, like you and me, who went around and said, you know what?
00:25:27.000We're normal people, but those people are deviants, weirdos, degenerates, perverts, or queer in the academic literature.
00:25:34.000And they don't deserve the full benefits of society unless they conform to our values.
00:25:41.000Under the names of DEI and ESG, the largest asset managers have been using your money, your savings, to push politics into America's corporations.
00:25:51.000For years, they've implemented an agenda that is anti-American capitalism at your expense without your permission.
00:26:28.000Queer theory is really queer Gnosticism.
00:26:30.000That you, there's a secret knowledge that will set you free, that will liberate you or emancipate you from the imprisonment of normalcy.
00:26:38.000And when you have that knowledge, which is queer knowledge, when you become queered, which is to learn to reject the normal and the legitimate, on principle, to reject those and oppose them everywhere they show up, then you can liberate yourself from the impositions of a society that's got you locked in chains.
00:26:56.000What Judith Butler, quoting from Michelle Foucault, said, is that it's not so much that the body imprisons the soul, it's that the soul imprisons the body.
00:27:05.000What they mean is that the social environment, because it's a sociological religion, it's not a transcendent religion.
00:27:11.000What's transcendent is sociology, our interactions.
00:27:14.000That's what it's in the material world.
00:27:16.000That becomes the new religious spiritual realm, is sociology.
00:27:19.000And the sociology sets it up so that you believe you have to be a certain way.
00:29:17.000And of course, the biggest moment of that was where Senator Marshall Blackburn picked it up in the Senate and asked me to ask Brown Jackson.
00:29:55.000Who is a wizard instead, who's mystifying the idea of gender?
00:29:58.000We're not kidding when we say these people are wizards.
00:30:00.000Yeah, they're casting social and emotional spells, particularly on children, to lead them into what they call living queerly.
00:30:08.000So, James, you know, I take my religion very seriously, and you respect how people take religion seriously, and you love the Bible, and you know the Bible well, and it's an objectively beautiful piece of literature.
00:31:09.000And all of a sudden, that's another magic spell, by the way, because now everybody socially, if they don't know what's going on, thinks you're a bad person, and they aren't sure if they should trust you or listen to you anymore.
00:31:19.000And so all of a sudden, they have these two.
00:31:21.000So if we're going to take the Bible seriously in saying that that at the level of the Hebrew itself is what represents the father of lies, then we have to look at their behavior, or as Jesus would say, judge them by their fruits and see that that's exactly in accordance with how they behave and act.
00:31:41.000Torn apart lives, destroyed families, children with wrecked bodies with wounds that will never heal from attempted transitions, sterilized from chemical treatments, cross-sex hormones, and Lupron is a puberty blocker that destroys their reproductive organs from the inside out, can damage their minds, can damage their bodies, their bones even become very brittle.
00:32:01.000There's all of these huge health problems, but then there's social problems.
00:32:04.000Everybody's walking on eggshells all the time.
00:32:07.000Everybody's afraid they're going to hurt somebody's feelings or get accused of something.
00:32:18.000I don't want to, you know, say some sort of like queering of the American kid, and all of a sudden I got a bunch of, you know, alphabet mafia types trying to firebomb my office.
00:32:26.000Yeah, well, um, they're not going to be happy about this book calling it a cult.
00:32:41.000But you had some trans Taliban come, right?
00:32:44.000Well, it was not quite as bad as that.
00:32:45.000They threatened that they were going to, but we had a number of activists show up dressed as clowns, which was, I think, a rather poor choice of their representation.
00:32:53.000But they actually came in, full clown makeup, full clown, the whole thing, like actual clowns.
00:32:59.000And they sat there, and this one girl started crying and left and called her mom very early on in because I came out and I said, I'm here to talk about queer theory.
00:34:23.000That was an amazing spectacle, wasn't it?
00:34:27.000At the National Park Service, as a core activity using the natural park as a vehicle to bring children in to get them excited and then to lead them into various activities.
00:35:12.000That actually, according to the Drag Queen Story Hour paper, at least started officially, or that program of focusing on children started specifically in 2015 in San Francisco.
00:35:21.000I mean, they can nail it down to like the gay men's choir thing.
00:35:58.000By the way, Blake, I don't want to speak out of term, but I think some of these people that are in this video singing were later in some legal trouble.
00:36:47.000Happens bit by bit, quietly and subtly, and you will barely notice it.
00:36:54.000We'll convert your children and make an ally of you.
00:37:02.000James Lindsay, that's, I mean, that's exactly it.
00:37:05.000What they're doing is that the reason that they come after you is they don't want people to see that and understand what it really is.
00:37:09.000They're doing it with a wink and a nod because what it looks like is what it really is.
00:37:13.000But they want to say that they're playing into the trope that's against them to get away from that.
00:37:17.000But what they're telling you is exactly what they're after to initiate your children into their culture.
00:37:21.000Yeah, I think it was the Washington Post when they were a bunch of homosexuals that were marching in the streets last summer and they said, We're coming after your kids.
00:37:28.000And the Washington Post said, That's them using the trope to their advantage.
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00:39:22.000Probably because the government ends up being able to set standards and validate this.
00:39:26.000For example, in education, and we talk about this in detail in the book, The way that the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has taken on queer theory, and especially with regard to the gender identity, which leads to creating these policies at schools and defending these policies in schools where parents are to be shut out of what's going on in the name of protecting the kids.
00:39:49.000Of course, we've seen some of these states that are passing these bills that allow they call it something like trans sanctuary.
00:39:55.000But in many cases, what they do is they open the door, of course, to sex trafficking because all you have to do is get a kid across the state lines and call them trans or whatever, and they go into the care of the state where it's easy to fall through the cracks and every other thing.
00:40:07.000And so there's major problems with these.
00:40:08.000But the government has picked this up to the point where schools can have these policies.
00:40:13.000And if parents fight back, the Department of Education itself is in the Office of Civil Rights.
00:40:18.000And well, yes, the Department of Justice as well has.
00:40:21.000They can come down with the full weight of the Office of Civil Rights, maybe the Department of Justice against parents who stand up to protect the kids.
00:40:27.000I mean, without getting into the details of the last month and a half, I've taken some strong stances about the overextension of the Civil Rights Act.
00:40:34.000Are you saying that the Civil Rights Act is being applied towards queering of American kids?
00:40:38.000It is, and that largely began under Obama, where he sent in 2011 what was called the Dear Colleague letter, and that was to extend the application of Title IX.
00:40:48.000Of course, this same logic got reified, unfortunately, at the part of Gorsuch's decision in Obergefell.
00:40:56.000Very unfortunately, he indicates that it is actually a form of sex discrimination to do gender discrimination or sexuality discrimination, which is not correct.
00:41:05.000So, can you just build this out so the full force of the federal government can be used the same way it was to end racial segregation to try to end what?
00:41:13.000To try to end so, what you're seeing in schools, for example, is that children will choose a preferred identity, the schools will protect that identity, and often against the parents' wishes, the parents will seek restitution for this, and then what will come back is that the parents will be found in the wrong.
00:41:31.000And at some points, we're even seeing in various states, what was the big state that just happened?
00:42:12.000Yeah, I said back in 2019, and I'm rather proud of this prediction, was that if they ever went fully public with queer theory, that they'd shot themselves in the foot, and it was only a matter of time.
00:42:21.000Parents would fall for a lot of the racial justice stuff, but they weren't going to fall for the queering of their kids on a total, like a total societal scale.
00:42:34.000So they're trying to make it one, but that's going to be a gigantic battleground.
00:42:38.000There's no standing that makes any sense to apply sex segregation into gender and sexuality, but they've cooked up legal baloney to make it work that way for the time being.
00:42:53.000It sounds really dumb, but the first thing that we actually have to do is to continue to expose them because a lot of this is actually going to get sorted out in the judiciary.
00:43:03.000This is going to be a result of a lot of litigation.
00:43:05.000Yeah, so this is where I'm not as optimistic.
00:43:07.000The courts have been letting us down with some of this.
00:43:11.000We have the left, the queer apparatus, the human rights campaign being one such organization, the ACLU being another such organization, and then they have all of the American Medical Association, American Psychological, Psychiatric, American Academy of Pediatrics.
00:43:27.000They have all these professional organizations.
00:43:29.000And so when one of these cases goes to court, it is not technically the judge's job to be expert in literally every subject that comes before his bench.
00:43:38.000And so they get blinded by this bevy of fake experts.
00:43:41.000So what we need is the ability to give expert testimony, expert witness, and to start educating the judiciary that this isn't just that, that this isn't just another civil rights question like we saw whether it's the gay civil rights or the racial civil rights movements of the past.
00:43:57.000This is something fundamentally different.
00:43:59.000And yes, so just to be clear, it was Obergafell that expanded parts of the Civil Rights Act to gender theory.
00:44:29.000And what they've done is they've created this crazy argument that if a man shows up dressed as a woman and a woman shows up dressed as a woman, and you say, well, the man cannot come in because he's dressed as a woman, but the woman can come in dressed as a woman, then you're discriminating against the man because he's a man.
00:44:47.000You're discriminating against somebody who is dressed as the opposite sex or trying to enter into a single sex space.
00:44:54.000Now, this is important because if you allow a man to enter a woman's space, that is no longer a segregated, single-sex reserved space for women because it admits some men, which means that that space is no longer a sex-reserved or sex-protected space, which means it's not possible to discriminate on sex because sex doesn't mean anything here anymore.
00:45:15.000Sex isn't the determiner of the quality of the space.
00:45:35.000The Obergefell was nationalization of Bostock versus Clayton County, Gorsuch fell for this little trick that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 64 protects employees against discrimination and therefore based on gender identity.
00:45:52.000And so then the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights immediately, in practice, extended to Title IX as well.
00:45:58.000And that's literally how you get Riley Gaines' story.
00:46:01.000That's literally how the entire experience that she and her fellow swimmers and other athletes are dealing with.
00:46:06.000I'm not going to involve you into some of my intellectual fights I'm involved in, but my contention is that the Civil Rights Act has gone way beyond the scope of its intent.
00:46:13.000That's, I think, actually patently obvious.
00:46:16.000I know, but I get attacked for saying such things.
00:46:18.000But I mean, we can even just look very, very, let's be very narrow about that.
00:46:23.000Let's just look at one Supreme Court decision, which is a very important Supreme Court decision that needs to be on everybody's mind that cares about this issue.
00:46:30.000Whatever you think of the Civil Rights Act itself, in 1971, Griggs versus Duke Power decided that disparate impact, if there's a difference in outcomes, in equity, not inequality, no intention to discriminate.
00:46:43.000Difference in outcomes can be taken as proof of discrimination.
00:46:56.000And the short version is that they were giving a test to go into management, and more white people proportionally were passing the test than black people proportionally.
00:47:05.000The test had no racism found in it whatsoever, but they decided that that, because it had a difference in impact, that there must be racism hidden in it somewhere.
00:47:14.000And so ever since civil rights law, which is primarily done by leftists, we have very few conservatives in civil rights law, have jumped on that interpretation to say anywhere there's a disparate impact, then all of a sudden protected categories like race become protected classes like racial minorities.
00:47:34.000And this changes the intention of civil rights law completely.
00:47:38.000I'm not going to weigh in because I don't fully know and I'm slightly agnostic as to whether civil rights reform is enough to repair this, but I know that getting rid of disparate impact analysis itself will turn the Civil Rights Act into the weapon against woke that we can be able to start filing lawsuits and winning lawsuits and beating this out of our institutions.
00:47:58.000Yeah, and I think lawfare is important.
00:48:54.000Yeah, you know, I'm not going to go to Canada anytime soon.
00:48:56.000I'm okay being a political prisoner at some point, if that's what it's going to take, but not in Canada.
00:49:01.000So, and if you read Walter Isaacson's book, the only reason Twitter reformed is because Elon bought it and he just went in and demanded change, like reinstate this account, reinstate this account.
00:49:22.000Every parent and grandparent and really every honest teacher left in this country, and there are a lot of them, needs to read The Queering of the American Child because they need to understand queer theory.
00:49:31.000I'll brag on Logan because he wrote it in a way that I could not.