Shaun Newman Podcast - #494 - James Lindsay

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

He is an American author, who has his Ph.D. in mathematics, is a cultural critic and hosts the New Discourses podcast. He has appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience and the Jordan Peterson Podcast. Take Back Alberta has him live in Alberta on October 2nd and 3rd in Calgary/Edmonton.  Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastPatreon: www.patreon.com/ShaunNewmanPodcast

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the philosophy of science and postmodern theory. I'm talking about James Lindsay. So buckle up, here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today, I'm joined by James Lindsay. So first off, sir, thanks for giving me some of your time. Yeah, glad to be here. You know, I, I don't know, I follow Jordan Peterson.

I follow Joe Rogan, so like you're not new to me. I'm actually rather excited to have you on, as I kind of mentioned before we started. But, you know, I was throwing out your name to a few different listeners in the audience and some knew you, some had never heard of you. So I thought maybe we'd just start with, you know, who is James and some of your background and we'll see where we go from there. Okay. Well, who am I?

Let's see. Not the easiest question to answer. Is it actually kind of a getting to be a running joke that my background barely makes sense and I'm kind of been all over the place. And so I don't know. Where should we start? I have a PhD in math. So that's, you know, my educational credentials.

that was in 2010. I left academia after I finished my PhD. I didn't want to stay in the academic machine. So I got out. Believe it or not, I was a massage therapist for the next 10 years after that. So, you know, kind of a little change of directions. Why?

I guess when you say it doesn't make sense, well, that's a good start because you go in, you get your PhD and mathematics. Why didn't you want to stay in? in the machine, like, what drove you away? But then I'm now kind of curious, one on earth took you to, you know, the next career for 10 years. Yeah, well, I mean, that actually,

there are two different answers to those two questions. So what drove me out was, and I told this to Jordan Peterson when we sat down in June and talked, in essence, they were coming down on the, you know, introductory level courses, at least in the math department at the university I was at. And they were saying that it was incredibly important for us to do everything we could to maximize student retention. So the goal was, you know, don't give kids bad grades. Don't, you know, discourage them or demoralize them.

Don't lose their scholarships. Find, you know, reasons for extra credit, blah, blah, blah. In fact, it was if you're going to fail more than one student, you need to be prepared to defend yourself for why you failed more than one student. And now I didn't want to be, I never was a big fan of grade inflation. I actually have always kind of believed that college should be a bit difficult. I took some very difficult courses that had very high failure rates. And I think they were formative. I think they were important.

And I kind of agreed with that mentality that, you know, maybe you shouldn't be padding people through that are going to go on to be professionals. And so I, in a sense, had a grand disagreement. with the direction of the purpose of the university and education. I polled my students every semester. I found this to be very discouraging also. And every semester I ask my students, are you here to get a credential, a degree, or are you here to get educated? And over 95% of my students always said that they were there to get credentialed. They were there to get a degree. They did not particularly care if they got educated in the process. And it seemed like the university system was doing the same thing on the other end. It's like, let's just get them through, get them their stupid.

piece of paper so they can go out and get a job or whatever else. I didn't want to participate in that. And so I had no particular desire to continue the academic universe, the machine, so to speak. I didn't want to participate in what it was doing and what it was going. My goal wasn't to participate in a huge kind of rubber stamping process. I wanted to be an educator. And so I said, you know, to heck with it. I'm just going to leave. And so I didn't pursue that. Why did I do? get into massage therapy. Well, like a lot of people, I hurt my back in my 20s and nothing seemed to fix it. So I learned some massage therapy one way or another. And it actually did sort out my back problem. And so I wanted to bring that to other people. My wife was also a massage therapist. So I had

kind of an in to the, to the profession. And so we worked together for 10 years at that point. So that's the long and short of that part that part of my my history when when you talk about the school system and and uh you know basically we're a rubber stamp people just want to get credential bang bang bang what years are we talking like how long ago is this so i mean there was kind of a lurching and there has been a lurching toward you know through the self-esteem movement in education toward making sure kids stay happy and all of this for you know decades but this was a kind of directive that was starting to come down in 2007, 2008, thereabouts, and in the university departments. Before that, you know, we were teaching primarily as graduate students, we were teaching

what are called service level courses. So the courses that people take outside of their major just to satisfy, you know, basic requirements. And so we were not particularly, you know, encouraged to make those courses like failout classes or something like that. But to have it switch and become explicit that we were supposed to, you know, keep kids with their scholarship and basically give them every excuse to get a padded grade just to get them through. I felt at the time like if that's what they want to do, they should just not require you to take a math class. If that's, and if it's sciences don't require a science.

But then I would sort of have other philosophical differences with the point. I always kind of believed in a fairly liberal education or a broad reaching education. And I kind of have a problem with believing that somebody that goes off into the work world with a college degree who's allegedly certified as an educated adult in society doesn't know basic mathematics, doesn't know basic science, doesn't know, you know something about literature. And so I've always been kind of a believer that being educated means that you know some things about these things. If it was just going to be a job certification program, fine, set up a job certification program,

teach kids to code, teach people to do engineering, teach whatever. But let's not pretend that this means that they are an educated, you know, broad educated member of society. So anyway, the timing on that was about 2007 and eight is when it kind of started and it was on an accelerating track until 2010 when I left. So when you, you know, simple math, 16 years ago, give or take a year is when you're seeing this and you're starting to butt heads with it, like I go, so was it just in one college, one university or is it this like top-down approach of, you know, we saw it through COVID with different corporations, different areas where they just pushed everything all at the same time.

Is there any reason to believe or have you seen anything different that would argue against that it was it was all of them all at the same time? Or was this like a trial run? I doubt that the University of Tennessee was chosen as a trial run. I think there were a confluence of factors. I don't know that there was a coordinated like strategy. I don't necessarily chalk this up to a conspiracy. I think there was actually a confluence of factors that led universities to be in the situation. And I didn't learn this until a few years later, but through another university, another state university that I had some inside knowledge of the workings, which turned out to be New Mexico State University. I found out that, as a matter of fact, only two universities at the time,

so guessing around 2010, just a plus or minus a few years. Only two universities at the time were actually operating in the black. If you took in all their tuition money, all the state money, all the federal money, all the sports football money. Only two? Only two were operating in the black. All the rest were operating in the red. How is that possible? Well, this is where it all starts to get very interesting, right?

In the 1990s, in the United States, when Bill Clinton was president, they did a, changed to the law and it's made it so that all student loans were federally underwritten. So in a sense, you can't really default on your student loans. Federal government underwrites all of them. And so now there's this huge shift at the very end of the 1990s where virtually when I went to college, which was at the end of the 1990s, you know, a few people had student loans, but it wasn't like everybody had student loans. Over the course of the next decade or so, it switched to where almost everybody had student

loans. And in the process, what was also happening is that tuition was increasing at eight to ten times the rate of inflation on college campuses. So college was becoming very, very expensive. So for me to come to, you know, a young person today and say, well, I paid for college and I, you know, worked and blah, blah, blah, that's kind of meaningless to them because college has increased in its cost so much quicker than inflation and tuition rates that it's completely, it's a completely different universe. So anyway, this has a lot to do with those student loans. And what caused inflation to go so rapidly in the universities is that all of a sudden there was a gigantic honeypot of money. And so the university started to compete for what students actually care about.

If you go poll 18 year olds, 17 year olds, what are you looking for in a college? You get about that same proportion I would guess of my students that said they were there to get educated. Do you get about five or 10 percent maybe who say they really care about the the quality of education. What they're looking for are cool dorms, cool facilities. They want a rock climbing wall. They want a swimming pool. They want a bowling alley. They want a movie theater. They want cool restaurants. They want, you know, dorms that have sweet arrangements instead of like the virtual prison hall. I went to college with that my dad also went to college with 20 years earlier or 25 years earlier or whatever. They want sweet stuff, right? They want a cool college experience.

That's the main market. And so colleges started doing. building that stuff. When I was at the school I was attending, they had just completed my first year was the first year that it had completed something like an $8 million fitness center. Yeah, we want college kids to have cool fitness centers and cool gyms and stuff. That was never a thing before the mid to late 1990s. And so they started building $10, $20 million athletic centers, $10, $20 million rec centers, $10, $20 million dorms, or $50 million dorms. And all these, these universities ended up in gigantic amounts of mortgage debt, hundreds of millions of dollars of mortgage debt. And the only way to try to triage the amount of money that they were outlaying to build student

services to attract students in the first place was to raise tuition, but they had no particular incentive against raising tuition because student loan money was getting handed out, hand over fist, and it was all federally underwritten. And this is a general principle, by the way, when you create a gigantic subsidy, which you end up with is gigantic. inflation as the industries that are being subsidized try to gobble up that, in essence, free money or public money. And so it's kind of a catastrophe. But this made it so that the universities became financially trapped by their own kind of competitiveness

to attract students by getting involved in this gigantic, you know, facilities building out phase that where they built, I mean, it's absolutely unnecessary. Yeah, a nice dorm is nice. A fitness center on college campus is cool. and it attracts students, but it doesn't actually increase your educational experience. It has nothing to do with education. And so what you had is this whole kind of like, how do we get as many kids in and keep them in and get them to pay for all this stuff because then we can buy the next thing that will attract

more students, kind of arms race. It was all like this new business model of the university that had less and less to do with education. But what it ended up doing, and I didn't understand this when I left the university, what it ended up doing was it created a situation where the university was so terrified to lose even a small percentage of students. It was like, don't fail people who are doing like 20% or below quality work in their service courses. Or if you have, say, a cantankerous group of, whether it's feminists or whatever else, other activists on campus, oh, this campus is a rape culture. We got to

change policies and blah, blah, blah. They don't want to lose those students. So the administration started to bend over backwards for them. And they, they started to hire more and more administrators to serve us all of the new student needs. And the whole kind of gigantic bureaucratic administrative apparatus that we all see at universities now is sort of a result of this gigantic slush fund that they were trying to tap into by, in essence, trying to make 17 and 18 year olds as happy as possible to try to attract business to their program, which therefore took it off of the program of education whatsoever. education became an afterthought to the business model of the university.

And I think that this is a very important part of the story that I wasn't aware of all of this. I just didn't like the direction my job was taking. So I decided to leave. So when you look at like what Jordan Peterson is doing and actually others with online, you know, like bringing together really brilliant minds, is that the 5% or the 10% of, you know, the students you've pulled that are active? searching out what Jordan Peterson is trying to build, which is actually like, I want to be educated.

I want to, you know, we joke about all the time, right? Like kids these days, my kids, you know, who are young are growing up into this weird world. Like on one side, completely insane. On another side, completely insane in a great way. Like they can have access to a guy like Jordan Peterson, all his lectures, and just go and listen to him and be like, holy crap, right? And that list is almost endless now. And if they create something online that, you know, functions, you know, like, wow, right? Like, I mean, who wouldn't want to go to a college or a university that has, like, all these brilliant minds and you get to sit and, like, listen and interact and everything else? Is that why that is such a thing? Or is it because part of the 95% have no clue what they

want? And they think they want one thing and then they get there and they're like, actually, I I wouldn't mind learning a few things. And there's, you know, instead of getting to actually think and argue and, and, uh, challenge some ideas, they're more or less being told this is what we believe. Well, yeah, this is a, this is kind of the weird moment we find ourselves in. I do think that there is a hunger in the younger generation, especially people that are coming out of high school now are starting to realize like they're not getting educated. And I talk to people, it's not all the kids, but I talk to people all over the place all the time.

and they kind of realize that what they're getting is this weird, you know, almost indoctrination and like let everybody feel good all the time. Like it's not, it's not actually intellectually challenging them. So there's a percentage of the population, I think, that is hungry for that. Then there's just the whole kind of thing. Like Jordan Peterson's whole brand is in essence, you know, tapping into kind of a profound level of self-improvement. And his audience is huge because it gets results. And people are seeing, you know, you know, people. people's lives are getting better. And then people say, well, why is your life getting better?

And like, well, I'm listening to this guy, Jordan Peterson and then check out all of his stuff. And I clean my room. And, you know, I clean my room. I take things seriously. All these lessons that, like, dad should have taught me or whatever that I didn't ever learn or that I didn't ever take seriously, even if I did hear them. The, the kind of like, you know, ordered discipline approach to life is just kind of been absent with this whole, like, make everybody feel good, make sure nobody's feelings get hurt. in reality, if you want to get good at stuff, your feelings get hurt over and over and over again. This is just how life is. If you want to get good, whether it's like, you know, a sport, a martial art, an academic pursuit or an artistic pursuit, whatever, it's a big process of being reminded that you suck until you get really good. And that's, that's just what it is.

I mean, I did this through the martial arts and it's just a matter of, frankly, if you're not good, you get beat up and you either, you know, wash out. or you start getting better one or the other. The same in sports. If you can't deliver, you can't deliver. It's not everybody, you know, they can give everybody a trophy at the end or not, but it doesn't win a game. And so there's this kind of hunger for people in a certain contingent of the population that want to succeed. But what I'm finding is that the prevailing attitude among college students outside of this niche is that they don't know why they're there. They're there because you go to college to get a good job.

And so you finished high school. It's just the next thing you do. You go to college. Why? it's what you do next. That's not an answer for why you actually go to college. You don't go to college because it's the thing you do next. You go to college because you want to become educated to become qualified to become something, an engineer, something in the professional class. And so I find this as being reflected on both sides now. I talk to people that do hiring in different corporations,

mid-sized corporations, small corporations, even very large corporations. And they tell me that when they run into people with a college degree, especially in the interview process or whatever, the first thing they think is this person doesn't know what they want out of life. That's why they went to college. They don't have the slightest idea of what they're doing. They're just kind of stumbling through one thing to the next to the next and kind of getting moved along the conveyor belt. They don't have any real drive. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know why they're doing it. I would hope that that's a massive shift from 20 years ago where, you know, a college graduate has somebody who showed that they wanted to take ambition and get further ahead. This is a big shift that's happened. So I'm very concerned about what, our college experience has become and what has represented. Personally, I left because I didn't want to participate in this. But, you know, skipping the Who Am I story in between because now I study Marxism. And one of the things I've dedicated a lot of the last year and a half to studying within Marxism is its impact on education over the past, you know, 50 years or so is that, in fact,

the way I phrase it is that Marxists have stolen our education system from us. and I argue that they've stolen two sides of it. There are two pieces, two fundamental pieces of what education is a process is about. There's the purpose of education, kind of the telos, why do you do it? Why education? What's it for? How does it work? And then there's the mechanism of education.

How do you do it, right? So those are two essential pieces. Well, they've stolen both. And what I've actually been describing so far in this podcast is how they stole the purpose of education. They made entire generations. people believe that you go to college to get a good job. You go to college to get the credential that 95% of my students were after, not to get educated, not to learn how to be a successful and

virtuous, you know, adult in a society, but you go to get a piece of paper that says that I'm qualified to apply for certain jobs so that I can go sign up to that portion of the machine. And so by stealing away the purpose of education, which is to become educated, and changing it to be being credentialed. They've also created an opportunity for which they get to take control over what it means to be credentialed. So they can decide, well, if you don't have your, you know, qualifications up in whatever, you know, whatever social theory of the week happens to be, whether it's critical race theory, whether it's LGBT stuff, whether it's something completely new, whether it's sustainability with this whole agenda. If you don't have that, well, you're not

really credentialed, so you can't really participate in the new economy. And so stealing the purpose of education turns out to be a really big deal that happened kind of, I think partly by intent and partly by, you know, accident. The old saying, of course, is that chance favors a prepared mind, right? So the federal government underwrite student loans. We want more kids going to college. all these kids start going to college, and all of a sudden they see this huge opportunity to start taking advantage of the shifting dynamics of college education to make it about this kind of credentialing model that they've already told people that's why you go to college, which was not like your parents 50 years ago or whatever didn't tell kids go to college

to get a good job because they were trying to brainwash you into a Marxist plot. That was actually the pathway to getting a good job in the professional class was to get college educated. But they seized the opportunity created by this mentality to create a credentialing system instead. So now you have to take, oh, you know, the university is like, yeah, you want to get a degree? Well, you've got to take a math class. You got to take a science class. You got to take a history class. But you also got to take a three section unit on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you can't get your degree. Right. So they can start wedging in other ideologically driven crap in order to earn the credential. Nobody wants to take those classes except for a small

percentage of activists. And over time, all these people get drip fed, a little bit of ideology, a little bit ideology, a little bit of ideology that's being reinforced by the entire program. And they just took advantage of the circumstances by swapping out the purpose of education being to get educated so that you can participate successfully and find a way into the professional class into here's your piece of paper that's your you know your ticket to step into the professional class that's a completely different mentality and I had no idea you know 15 years ago that I was kind of at the forefront of this shift in mentality but that's ultimately what drove me out of the university is I don't want to participate in that well you think about it I mean

it's not like I always say if you know they don't nothing seems to happen like bam there it is You look at the two years of COVID, three years of COVID, whatever the heck I'm going to, three years of COVID, I guess. 300 years of COVID. Fair. You know, like, if they just rolled tanks down the street, everybody would have been like, what the hell is going on? But instead it was like, you know, just one little drip like you sell your thought, you know, just slowly drip, drip, drip, drip. And pretty soon, you know, you're hooked up and you're, you're being fed a lot. When you go back to the school system, you know, it's funny.

you say, well, I didn't know where that was going. I was like, I don't, could you have known? Like, maybe you might talk to an older professor or something, and he might have seen it come in and been like, what the heck. But, I mean, you know, it's hard to see these moves that take, you know, we're talking a decade, you know, like most people, the cycles of elections alone, you know, is four years, right? So it just, for something to go that far, you know,

is, that's hard for anyone to, to fathom. I remember being on this podcast. James, you know, hundreds of episodes go now going like, nobody, nobody thinks in the time, nobody does that, nobody thinks. And then I read Solgenitin and he talked about the long game of, the big game of Solitaire, sorry. And I was like, ah, shit, right? Like, I mean, right away, there it is in the first like 50 pages, maybe 25 pages.

Here's a guy talking about one of the worst atrocities in the last hundred years. And he's like, it's the big game of Solitaire. Some moves are fast. Some moves take, you know, decades, honestly. And you're like, shit, right? So I guess, you know, one of the things that, uh, good friends with the Drew Weatherhead and then David Parker, and they got you coming to Canada. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I was just texting with Drew, uh, last night and then this morning because they announced it and then both your, uh, venues get yanked. You know, they get, they don't, they don't want you coming, you know, so now they've got new, uh, one of the new ones up. They're still looking for one in Calgary. I assume that'll be figured out by the time this airs. but at the same time, one way or another, we'll make sure James has a platform to talk.

I am curious then, you know, that's focused on kids and whether you wanna shift the topic slightly or continue to talk about universities, et cetera. I am curious, like, I assume, you know, from listening to you a bunch, like you have a plan on how you counteract what the heck is going on in society. Well, I mean some, yeah, and it is interesting to me. that these venues got you got yanked i am very curious because i saw one of the the emails and it's

pretty vague we oh we looked him up and he's an extremist and we don't want him there it's like i'm not very extreme i'm wondering what they read you look up your wikipedia page yeah and uh actually i'm i'm going to i'm going to pull it up here and read it off to the audience because yeah it's it's wonderful i i thought it was great because like i i i it's it seems like every second guest has the same uh label attached to them anyways this is what it says. James Lindsay is an American author, cultural critic, mathematician, and conspiracy theorist. And for most of this audience, they go, conspiracy theorist, sign me up. Okay, what do you got to say and let's hear it, you know? But for some reason, they think that word still means what

it used to mean, which it does not. Right. Yeah, well, I've got a Southern Poverty Law Center extremist profile now, so, you know, apparently I'm an anti-government general or something. And so, I mean, that sounds pretty cool. It classified me under general hate and they say that I have anti-LGBQ views, which is a little preposterous, but maybe just the Q. I definitely have some anti-Q perspectives because that's a political stance. I have no beef with people. I have beef with bad politics. But, you know, that's very extreme. You can't say these things. They're so extreme. So anyway, I don't know what they found, but I think it's pretty entertaining. As far as having a plan to counteract this, my plan actually really kind of boils down to

telling people how it works. And this is maybe the stupidest plan in the world. But, you know, what we're just talking about with the, with the universities, it sounds very, since now I'm a conspiracy theorist, it's been outed. It sounds very conspiratorial. And I think that there were intentions to kind of take over the university. But I don't think there was like a step-by-step plan laid out in, say, the 1970s for how to gather it. What they, the activism tends to be is to create a general wind that blows in one direction and to be ready to take advantage of certain openings when they come up. So they're going to blow left all the time, just always kind of have a little bit of pressure that goes left. And when there's a policy opening or when there's a,

you know, something like this, take advantage of it and kind of maximize it in that direction. And I think that's the general strategy. So what you end up with is a conspiracy that doesn't look like a conspiracy at all or that there are very few conspirators. There's very few people with any real plan. There's a whole lot of people incentivize. certain behavior and rewarding people who take that behavior. And so what I kind of want to do is create a wind that blows the other direction. What it turns out to be is that what I found is that somebody even said this famously, and I can't think of who it was, but they said that the thing that the communist fear is more

than anything, more than death, more than anything in the world is exposure, is being exposed in what they're doing, that they actually do have a strategy that they do want to take control. And it turns out that when you expose these things and you see how it works, it turns out that people are able to say, this is what you're doing and we don't want you to do it. The way that they end up being so successful at taking over our institutions step by step by step by step by step is that they have strategies where they get you to fight about something or another. And then they move the ball a little bit while the fight's going on. And if you can catch them in the act of moving the ball instead, they can't move the ball. and then they don't get to take over the institution.

So I wrote this book, for example, I just mentioned with the universities that there's the stealing of the purpose of education, but there's a stealing of the mechanism of education. So I wrote this book about a year ago or almost a year ago called the Marxification of education. And what I was doing was explaining how they stole the mechanism of education in that book.

And the reason was because I ran a teacher, or I shouldn't say teacher, parent after parent after parent. Sometimes it was teachers, but parent after parent after parent who said, I know they're putting this, you know, whether it's critical race theory, whether it's queer theory, whether it's some other, you know, radical activist agenda into the kids school. And I don't know how they're doing it. And I know it's there. And my kids are coming home and they're weird. And I say, the school gaslights me and says it's not there. And I say, I want to see the curriculum. And I see the curriculum and I can't find anything wrong with it. But I know there's something wrong with it. I can't figure out what it is. So I studied the literature, the academic literature that's been creating that left. wind for all these, you know, many years now in education, 50 years in education, I studied the

literature and I figured out how they're doing it. And so now I've written this book to equip parents to be able to say, no, this is what you're doing and how you're doing it. So when you come back and say, we're not doing this or, you know, you're crazy for assuming we're doing this, it's easy to see through the lie. No, here's exactly how you're doing it. So mostly what I'm trying to do is empower people through giving them. For the parents listening, James, sorry to cut in, because there's going to be a lot of parents that just heard that sentence and went, where do I get that book? So what is the book name and where do they find?

I'll hold one up. It is called the Marxification of Education. And you can find it on your favorite bookseller that is named after a jungle in Brazil. For example. So, yeah. And it's funny because the book is actually about a Brazilian Marxist by the name of Palo Ferreari who created a method. so Brazil, who created a method of what he calls education.

It's actually, what they did is they figured out a way to substitute out educational content and substitute in radicalization. But it's like, what's the right way to put it? It's like, I'm trying to think of a good analogy that's not too tortured because the one that just popped into my head's kind of stupid, but we're going to go with the one that just popped into my head. So imagine you have like a chocolate covered cherry, right? everybody knows what chocolate covered cherries are.

There's like that goo inside and there's chocolate on the outside. So imagine you were able to put like a needle in the cherry and suck out all the cherry stuff and they're like put in poison, right? So you substitute out what's on the inside, but you keep the outside exactly the same. So you could give it to somebody. It still looks exactly like a chocolate covered cherry. It hasn't changed at all on the outside, but the inside is now different. That's what they've done with education. So what they did is they keep the external form.

and then they substitute out actual academic content and substitute in radicalization. How did they do this? And that's what this book is about. How did they do this? What they do is, in the words of Paulo Ferreira himself, is that they use academic content as what he calls a mediator to political knowledge. And so here's a real example of the real trick. You give somebody academic content.

So, for example, a word problem in mathematics for, say, elementary school. I think this is second grade, like seven-year-olds. You know, Johnny's riding in the car with his mom and dad on the way to the amusement park. The amusement park is 50 miles away. They've already driven 30 miles. How much further is there to go? Simple. Anybody can answer the question.

The goal is to teach, as a former math educator myself, the goal is to teach the student, in this case a seven-year-old child, to extract the subtraction problem from the words, solve the subtraction equation, receive the answer of 20, and then don't write down. 20, but write down a sentence because you are given a paragraph, write down a sentence, they have 20 miles left to go. So to put the answer back in the form of the question. And so that is the exercise when you're actually teaching mathematics for the word problem. Now, that's the chocolate covered cherry. And what I just described, the mechanism of teaching word problems, that's the cherry and the goo and stuff inside that you want to eat.

Now, what they do is they suck all the goo and the cherry out and they put in poison. They put in political radicalization. What they say is, well, that's not going to be very engaging for the student, right? So what you do to get the kids excited to increase their engagement, and that's a big word in critical pedagogy is it's engagement. That's why you have to have culturally relevant teaching, so it's more engaging to the students so they want to learn. That's the excuse. So what you do is you say, hey, kids, how many of you have ever been to an amusement park? Now notice that we're already not doing math.

We're now talking about amusement parks and who's been and who hasn't been. But when we talk about seven-year-olds, what we're dealing with is a difference. you know there's going to be a difference there. If we had 15-year-olds, you can probably expect everybody's probably been doing an amusement park once in their life by then. Not true with seven-year-olds. And there's a lot of reasons why. Pretty young.

Maybe they went because they have older brothers. Maybe their parents don't think it's time. Maybe, you know, they don't want to justify the expenditure on something with such little kids. There's lots of reasons. So you're going to have difference. Or as the fancy lingo calls it a stratification in the classroom. Some kids are going to have been and some kids are going to know. not have been. And you get the kids, who's been to an amusement park? Well, seven-year-olds are

happy to talk about themselves if the drop of a hat, half the kids raise their hand, half the kids don't or thereabouts. Oh, some of you have and some of you haven't. So now you're no longer talking about the math problem at all. You're not even talking about the amusement park. You're not talking about the difference. See how they've now moved the subject away. This is sucking the educational content out of the chocolate covered cherry so they can stick the poison in. And here comes the poison. The teachers are being instructed in teacher professional development courses. This is a true example from the state of Indiana teacher development course from a few years ago. They are being instructed to continue to ask the children, oh, that's a good, you know, kids are

going to say the darnest thing. Why is it, they say, well, why is it that some of you have been and some of you have not been to an amusement park? And they're instructed to keep priming until the kids give a politically generative answer. In other words, somebody says, not everybody can afford it. Oh, yeah, that's true. Some people, some families can afford to go to an amusement park, but, you know, they're not. they're pretty expensive. Some can't. What could we do to make it so everybody could afford to go so

it's more fair? And then all of a sudden you're getting to have a political conversation about how unfair it is that some people can afford things and other people can't. And the conversation about socialism off to the races, you have kids volunteering, make the rich people pay for it, make it free, make the government pay for it. You're essentially sitting down with seven-year-olds and you've hijacked a math problem to talk about the nationalization of amusement parks or something like this. And so this is the method. This is what Paulo Ferreri did. He called it generative themes, and then you present them as codifications, that you then decodify to teach people to concrete realities of their political experience in life.

And you give them the tools to conscientize, to awaken to the true meaning of their political circumstances. So what they've done is they've kept the outer form. You still have the word problem. It's still happening in math class. If your mom picks up the homework and sees the problem, nobody's going to complain. But what the problem is being used for in the class is the mediator to have a conversation about any number of things. I did one that leads to socialism, but it could run about parental authority instead to divide kids from their parents. Is it fair that some kids get to go because their parents say yes and other kids don't because their parents say no.

Should parents be able to make that decision or should we make that decision at the school? And now you're getting to set the school up as like the savior to the unfairness of the kids experience in their stratified classroom. and the parents become the enemy. You could set it up off of mom and dad to have conversations about feminism or sexuality. You could set it up off of car to talk about environmental concerns, depending on who raises their hand when they, you know, for whatever the, say, the amusement park question, if mostly white kids raise their hand and the other kids don't, you can very easily say, well, is there a racial component here? Why is it that so many white kids have had the chance to go with the other kids haven't? Is that fair? Is there a racism that's keeping people?

And you can have a CRT conversation. So what they do is they take the educational content and turn it into an excuse to have a politically radicalizing conversation with children. And that is actually his method. So I read this guy's books. He's got like 30 of them poured through these books and figured out how it is. And then the guys that wrote books based off of this guy figured out how it is that they were able to steal the mechanism of education. And the reason I wrote the book was to equip parents and even teachers who are kind of caught up in it to be able to. to say this is how you're doing it and this is not acceptable. It's not okay for you to take a math

problem and use it as an excuse to have a culturally, culturally relevant conversation with my kids, where culturally relevant means CRT indoctrination or socialist indoctrination or whatever else. When you come in October, are you bringing books? I just curious. I could. Well, I've just, you know, I'm certainly a plan on being at the shows, so I'm like, well, do I buy one? Like, anyways, that's a side. If you're not, then you just go to the jungle and find your favorite James Lindsay book in a way you go. So that's totally acceptable too. Just curious off the top of my brain, because I'm sure the jungle takes its fair share and yada, yada, yada, so not a big deal.

My first thought when you say all of that is it can't be in all the schools. It just can't. Like, is this a Canadian thing? Is this an American thing? Is this only a state of Indiana? Like, it can't be. I want to be like, I can't. And yet I laugh at myself because, I mean, I literally had on a mom, I don't know, this is, what is this folks?

Two months ago who in small town Saskatchewan, which is about as small as it gets, and they had the A to Z sex cards and sex ed class, right? And that's become a huge thing in Saskatchewan. And the government comes out and said no third parties in and now they're being sued and, you know, and on and on it goes. And I'm like, well, Sean, probably don't be as naive to think it isn't in schools. and they aren't talking about this because I'm sure, you know, in our culture and in our country, there's different ways that they're, you know,

and as I'm saying this, I can hear moms listening to us, James, going, Sean, you know in Alberta they've been doing this. Oh, they have. I don't have to go to Alberta to know that they're doing it in Alberta. So I'll give you some scary stuff that is actually mentioned in the book that made me really want to talk about this. It's not just, oh, they're doing this.

So here's a couple of scary. This one is in the book, and the second one I'll give you not in the book. I learned it later. So the Pollo Ferreari character, I'm saying his name wrong, it's Frady. I always still default to pronouncing it like a white guy, like a gringo. But this guy's method, which is called Critical Pedagogy, there's another book called A Critical Turn in Education that was written by a historian of Marxist education named Isaac

Goddessman, who was at Iowa State University. Yet another one of these American states that's famously conservative. And so he's in Iowa, and he writes this book, and he says that by 1992, Paul O'Ready's Critical Pedagogy method was the dominant method in colleges of education across North America. So that's 31 years ago, for those of you keeping score at home and needing to have a sit down for how old we are now, by 31 years ago, his method was the dominant mode of teaching teachers to teach. It's not to say every teacher picked it up, but every single college of education. But you understand that you've now had three decades of the, I sometimes wonder.

Yeah. And I sometimes wonder, like, I feel like I've been programmed, you know, like, because I want to give the benefit of the doubt. I don't know if that's a human trait. I don't know if that's a taught trait. I don't know what trait that is. But like, you know, you get talking about the amusement park. And the first thing I thought, well, not everybody's going to think they can afford to go to amusement parking kids are going to say some and then use and I'm like so am I like if we had this

conversation before sure I don't know anyways sorry to buddy and I just to me like when you talk about 31 years well I'm 37 you think about that and you go well how many years have I been you know basically soaking in all this type of thought process yeah well I said I was going to give you one more I'll give you two more things to give you an idea of the widespread nature of this just recently I spoken, Birmingham, Alabama. Again, one of these places that you're like, well, if it's not, if it's anywhere, if there's anywhere that it isn't, Birmingham, Alabama probably isn't there. This is, you know, I say this with all the due affection of a southerner, being a

southerner myself, is it is the most like hillbilly city I've ever been to, right? So Birmingham, Alabama. And I was actually on the road traveling from Atlanta, Georgia, over to Birmingham. And I was on my phone, riding in the car. and somebody sent me an example. Didn't even know I was going to Birmingham. It just happened by coincidence. Sent me an example of exactly this kind of thing happening in the Birmingham School District. So it's certainly in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, there's an organization that promotes a thing called transformative social emotional learning here in the United States. It's called Castle,

the collaborative for academic social emotional learning. This got into a big fight in Iowa earlier this year. the Iowa State Legislature decided to ban Castle from their Department of Education. Castle wasn't happy about this, so they filed public comment and tried to fight to keep themselves in. And in their public comment, they boasted that they actually have their programming in 99% of school districts in America. So it is this kind of thing that with the training from the exact example that I gave you with the word problem with the amusement park was from a social emotional learning training in Indiana. The organization that is the dominant certifying organization for social emotional learning in the United States boasts that their materials were in 99% of school districts in the United States. Now, if I might make so bold, I think Canada is a little more screwed up than the U.S., believe it or not in this regard. And so I would tell you that yes, it's in Alberta.

Yes, it's in Saskatchewan. Oh my God, yes, it's in British Columbia. It probably got invented there. You know, it's in Ottawa. It's in Toronto. It's everywhere. You know, when you go back to the cherry analogy, the thing I think, you know, is not only you suck it out the inside, but if you could replace the poison on the inside, but make it look, heck, even taste like the way that,

a cherry, then you'd have no clue. And you just become a part of the system and you'd argue for it and everything else. I got in an argument with a teacher not so long ago. We were talking about parental rights in regards to, you know, their son or daughter, wanting to, you know, be called different names or transition and on this went. And what I got to the bottom of the argument was, James, and I, I, I think I, I, I think I understood it correctly is teachers don't want to out kids. They think that's terrible.

And like parents, what happens if the parents, you know, argue with their children about what they want to be called or transitioning or whatever? And I'm like, yeah, but I mean, what are you gonna, so you're gonna hide everything from the parents? Like just think that thought process through. And I don't think that this person was ill-informed. I don't think they're ill intent.

You know, like they're trying to protect children in their mind. So when I come back to your chocolate cherry analogy, I'm like, that's what's so, I don't know, I don't know the word insane about this. Like is, as they're trying to protect. A good word. Right. In their mind, they're protecting children. Yeah. I mean, well.

Parents who would never understand that their parent, that their child is a trapped in the wrong body or whatever it is. That's right. That's right. Because people in our generation were raised on a boogeyman that, you know, the scary concern. dad who's going to disown his gay kid. And so no, oh, I can't be the person who gets this kid to put, put through this trauma at school, or at home, I mean, by, you know, I learned something about him at school, and I tell the parent and the parent flips out.

And I can't be the person who's the, you know, the messenger that brings that. So they're protecting kids, but protecting kids from not really their parents, but in fact, from this boogeyman of what the parent might be like. like they've got the I'm probably an exaggerated example of the worst possible stereotype of a so-called conservative parent and then they have to treat

all parents as though they're that and then they have to protect these kids from it but then the really bad part is that the lesson planning that they're having in order to promote inclusion and acceptance and all of these belonging and all these good sounding words is actually already

a poisoned cherry in and of itself where they're teaching children at young ages that, you know, gender is actually more complicated. It's if, you know, you could actually be a boy in a girl's body or whatever. And so there's this really perverse set of, you know, well, we've got to help. They think of like the poor kid in the closet who has no example to like live up to, right? So we're going to make all of the education be providing the example so that poor most marginalized kid has the opportunity to see him. himself. Never mind what it does to the other 30, right? Putting ideas in their heads, you know,

or confusing them or whatever else. But we're going to treat all the kids as though there's, let's say there's one kid who has no idea why he feels the way he feels or why he looks the way he looks or why he acts. So they're going to provide all this information geared toward basically catching that one least kid, the kid that's in the worst position, no matter how much damage it does to the other 30. And then they're going to take any of the, of that damage that it does the other 30 and they're going to pretend that the parent is the worst possible it might be the worst possible case so we're going to pretend all parents are like that and you can see what they're doing is they're taking like these most extreme possibilities

mixing them all together and then treating everybody as though they're in the most extreme case that you could possibly have and then this would all be you know pitiful i think is the right word because you see people trying to protect kids trying to help kids trying to you know whatever these motivations at the level of the individual teacher, working with the individual students, except that the entire program that they're using for the education is not coming, you know, from a place of good intentions. It's coming from a manipulative program being set up or that was set up over 20 years ago at the United Nations. All of the sexuality education comes from the United Nations in 2003 is when they codified what's called comprehensive sexuality education

in partnership with the International Planned Parenthood Foundation. This was all laid out. And, you know, you think, well, sex education, what's that about? Well, that's about obviously teaching people about diseases, the mechanics, the reproductive anatomy. Turns out that that's only one out of the seven pillars of comprehensive sexuality education. That's what we called sex ed 30 years ago, which was already controversial as it was. Now they moved into this comprehensive sexuality education, and that's one of the seven pillars. And you think, well, what are the others?

Well, I can't actually rattle off all seven from memory, but I can remember the two that made me kind of stare in, you know, horror. The third of the pillars is called sexual citizenship. So they're teaching part of the sexual education that's being brought in that's part of this programming that's allegedly supposed to help, you know, the one poor gay kid who doesn't understand his life, but all, you know, 700 kids at the school have to get it anyway, is teaching them. the idea of sexual citizenship, that in order to have full participation in society, society has to be geared to satisfy or to accommodate every aspect of their sexuality as it develops and as it changes. If you're gay, there should be gay products that you can buy. You shouldn't have to do activism and spend your time. You should be able to have, you know, exactly identical citizenship. So they've got this whole weird concept of sexual citizenship, which requires sexual

participation, which means teaching kids about sexual participation, which then bleeds into the fourth of the seven pillars, which is pleasure. Pleasure-based sexual education. So this is where you start to see these horror stories, where they're teaching children at five years old, seven years old about masturbation, self-pleasure, people touching each other. And it's like, what in the world are you guys doing, right?

And you start mixing this in with some of these other things, like the drag queen story hour, which explicitly says that it's a project motivated by desire, but that's not being written by like a seven-year-old. It's being written by a creepy guy dressed up as a woman saying that it's a project motivated. by desire to want to dress up as a woman and teach pushing boundaries with children. Like, you're like, hold on.

I don't think I want this happening in my school. You are no longer protecting my kids. It's like it's again that same chocolate covered cherry. It's like they've taken out the content of protecting kids and replaced it with this kind of whole weird system of, you know, the worst possible caricature of protecting kids that you could possibly imagine. But you can't discount the fact that this was being coer. coordinated by an organization, the United Nations and UNESCO underneath it,

without any really good explanation for why in the world, like, why the hell is Planned Parenthood involved in educating children? Like, why? Who ever said, yes, let's do that? Who voted for somebody who was like, yeah, bring that into my kid's school, right? Yes. It's, I don't know. It's almost like, you know, I just rewind the clock on where I was in the podcast when I first started.

And it was like, I couldn't formulate the words to like say why I was uncomfortable with something because it's, it's, you know, it's gized in these words and these acronisms and everything else is like, it's in such a way that it's hard to be like, why can't I get my, my tongue to like spit out what I'm feeling and thinking about this? Like why? And when you go back to your book, trying to just explain it. Or now, you know, you point out to like kids and some of the things are being taught. Or heck, when the mom talks about, you know, like Planned Parenthood being in a grade nine class in Lumsden. And, you know, right off the top, oh, what's wrong with that? You know, like what's the big deal with that? Well, on the surface, nothing really.

But, you know, you know, like extra time they had the AZ sex cards. And I just, I equate it to like, imagine you're at a party and, you know, cards against humanity. That's pretty much what it was, except on steroids. Because some of the things in the A to Z, I've never even heard of. As a grown man, I've never even thought of doing in my sex life ever. And we're going to bring that into a school. That makes zero sense. And then the crazy thing is if you say that aloud, then you're the extreme one.

And what we're finding out is that's not quite the case. you know, there's actually a huge portion of the population that's just like, uh-uh, you know, like here in Canada, and I'm sure you know about this, this million person march for the kids, you know, it was the Muslim community, started out of Ottawa. He's, you know, September 20th coming up here, folks, and in Lloydminster here, there is going to be a march. But they called up, they put a call. Like, everybody lets march, let's protect kids, you know, I don't think there's anything easier to get around than protecting kids.

And when you say some of the perverse things that have been, you know, you hope aren't being taught in every school. And I would really suggest that people go in and talk to their teachers and principals and everything and talk to them, you know, talk to people. That's an important thing to do. But after I'm sitting here listening to James, I'm going, you know, like we probably should have been marching a heck of a lot sooner. But at the same token, at least it's happening.

At least parents and others alike, just people in general are starting to start. stand up and say no. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot of things that are difficult to articulate with it because like you said, it's cloaked in all this good language. And of course you want to help the one, like you don't want the poor one kid who are three kids in the school who are falling through the cracks. You don't want them getting left behind and bullied a margin. Nobody wants that. But the other side of the coin is that there's a double standard here. Like if you say, I don't think any of this is appropriate for my kid and I want that left out of their education, I don't think that I want them to learn about sexual citizenship and pleasure-based sex ed.

All of a sudden, it doesn't matter if your kid is the one falling through the cracks. It only matters if it's a certain type of kid under these certain circumstances that might be falling through the cracks. And even if there's not any at all, just in case. So they're tailoring the entire program to satisfy kind of very extreme outliers while simultaneously justifying, you know, boxing out everyday good parents who want nothing to do with this. there are, there's another level to the question is even if there are, let's say that there are parents in any given district or some given district that are not adequately, you know, attending to whatever the needs of their child are, right? So they're parents that are deficient. The question still remains is that even the government's job through the schools

to pick up the pieces for that situation. And, or if it is, what limitations are there? because we're not talking about, you know, is there a kid who's getting physically abused here? We're necessarily, we're not talking about is there a kid who doesn't have enough food to eat, which seem to be very simple, basic material things. We're talking about very kind of complex psychological phenomena. Is it the school's job to decide that it's going to do kind of universal screening for mental health conditions that are very complicated and abstruse and to start to engage in pathways of correction? and then on the fear that the parent might be the wrong kind of parent,

exclude the parent from this entire decision-making process, at some point, we have completely lost the plot on protecting kids. I mean, completely lost the plot. And so, yeah, I think it's an incredibly important thing for parents to start organizing to come out and to say something like this March. It is not a partisan issue. It's not even, it's the most basic, one of the most basic human,

functions, period, is to protect children, to, you know, including from what up until five years ago was clearly known by virtually everybody outside of a small fringe of activists to be age inappropriate, developmentally inappropriate materials. So it's absolutely incredibly important to start organizing because one of the things that happens when you start to organize is you start to share information. You start to share, hey, this is happening in my school, this is happening in this school, too. This is how, you know, somebody succeeds in dealing with it. This is how I was able to go and talk to my school and get something to change. And that ability to share those resources and share that information is actually extremely

powerful. So I guess I have a little bit more than just expose, expose, expose, give information and teach to give as a strategy for fighting back against this is also the incredibly important part of organizing so that you can share the information with one another. Because some people are going to figure out things that work. And some people are going to figure out, you know, arguments or lawsuits or whatever it happens to be that move the needle or they get politicians involved in a way that matters or get the right people, you know, put into office. And if you're not sharing information, that's kind of a one one drop in a bucket that doesn't really change anything. But if you actually can share information, you can create a whole, you know, title wave and push it the other way.

So these kinds of things I think are just so, so important. But is it in your school? Yeah, probably. Is it your local teacher who's the problem? I mean, there are some activist teachers who are the problem, yes, but probably not in most cases. A lot of them are just doing what they think. There's actually a paper from 1995 talking about this culturally relevant teaching. It's written by the woman who created culturally relevant teaching, who says that she got it from this Brazilian guy, Paulo Frady, and adapted it. And the paper is called, but that's just good teaching. That's the title of the paper, but that's just good teaching. So you have generations of teachers who have learned that this is just what it means to be a good teacher. Some of them are discerning enough to see through

the lie, but a lot of them are not. This is just what it is to be a teacher. This is all any teacher I know has ever done. This is the way that we learned in school. And they just think that this is the way to be a good teacher and help. So are they the problem? Well, they're the vehicle of the problem. But when you start looking up the chain is like, why is the United Nations the one that's setting educational curriculum for, you know, kids in Canada's schools? Why, why is it happening? When did we approve that United Nations is going to decide what a kid in a small town in Alberta is going to learn. You know, it seems inappropriate.

And then when you see what they're actually pushing toward, which is, you know, achievement of the sustainable development goals to transform the entire world, a global activist agenda, like, don't you think that like not necessarily just kids, but their parents should have at least a little bit of a say and whether or not their kids are getting conscripted into a global movement to do some kind of a giant activist agenda? that is from by definition the United Nations, an unelected, unaccountable organization. Don't you think parents should have some ability to say, no, I don't want my seven-year-old conscripted into this activist army.

I think that parents should have that say for sure, especially when you read. I mean, they have their own documents. I was reading one this morning. It's talking about how teaching the kids to achieve the sustainable development goals is mentally taxing and emotionally difficult for them. So they have all these, they're talking about all these tools to build what they call emotional resilience. So in other words, if they can be brainwashed into becoming activists instead of getting educated, and when they have a breakdown, you have these tools to like psychologically get them back on track. Like, how is this education?

At what point do parents have an inviable right to come out and say, no, you don't get to sign my kid up for this? You don't get to choose that my kid's going to be an activist for a United Nations agenda. I didn't elect a single one of you. Even if I did, I would still probably pull them out of this. This is a huge, huge issue where parents and individuals are in effect having their, you know, very inalienable, as we say here in the U.S., inalienable rights stolen right out from underneath them by bureaucrats who decided that they know better for everybody because they can imagine these like weird extremist cases that would be really bad if they happened and maybe one out of a million they do but god there's so many things to say

at once it just frustrates me i could go back to my math where we learned about um universal cancer screening for example you ever notice that we don't do universal cancer screening correct and i've had a guy on here who developed something for the alberta government and wanted to do a test project on it it's my mike kuzmiskis folks and they said all the the hs could handle alberta health uh services could do it, but nothing's ever come of it. And you're like, but that would, anyways, it's, yes. Do you know why we don't do universal cancer screening, though? We don't want to. Why is that? Because when you do universal screening, so normally when people go get cancer screening, they're actually involving in a productive way, something called selection bias.

Selection bias is when there is a bias in the way that people are selected to participate in something. So in this case, the only people who go get checked out for cancer are people who think they might have cancer, right? So they already have some underlying reason to suspect something might be wrong and then they go get checked out. And then they do a screening. So there's just productively using that because here's the thing. If I did a test of universal screening for cancer, right, that cancer screening has a false positive rate. Maybe it's 2%. Right. So let's say that I screen a million people for cancer and two. And two. percent of them are false positives. I found 20,000 people who don't have cancer that I have now told you have cancer. And those people might get stuck on chemo that they didn't need, or they might have, you know, life-shattering complications or fear, concern, issues, follow-ups, all this. And then it turns out that when you actually have something that's a relatively low prevalence in the overall population like cancer, for the 20,000 false positives that you find, you only end up catching maybe a few hundred true positives. And so what you end up doing is freaking people out, giving people treatments

that don't apply in large numbers to catch a very small number. So this is the exact same problem that's happening when you do say universal screening for LGBT crisis, which is what the schools are doing. There's a small percentage of kids who have LGBT whatever issues. So we're going to do a universal screening program to figure out who they are. And an even smaller percentage of them have a parent who's inappropriate for that situation. And so we're going to treat all the kids. as though they're in that situation. It would be like giving chemotherapy to every child in the school just in case one of them has leukemia.

And that's actually what's happening. We don't do universal screenings for diseases. We don't universal screenings for cancer. And the reason we don't do universal screenings is because you're going to find way too many false positives. You end up with a gigantic fear factor that lands on people. You end up giving people treatment for a disease they don't have. It's actually shockingly easy math.

It's stuff I used to teach in a 100-level statistics class that shows why you don't want to do universal screen. I'm actually kind of curious about the cancer's side of things just for one second. So let's say you test a million. You get 20,000. Now, they're saying they're all cancer. Couldn't you have follow-up tests to then narrow it down and be like, listen, we think we got 500. Of the 500, here's your probabilities, et cetera, et cetera, and actually find cancer. or you look at that and go, yeah, but look at all the money you're wasting now.

That's the thing. It's extremely expensive to do that. And those 20,000 people go through some period of time wondering if they have cancer. And so you test them all again, and it still has a false positive rate of 2%. So 400 of those people are still going to get told a second time that they have cancer when they don't. And so those people have now had two positive tests. Imagine what's happening with their psychological state, even though they don't have it. the usual example in the mathematics literature that we used to give was AIDS testing, universal

AIDS testing. So you've now told somebody they have a death sentence, you know, and where they don't. And how many of those tests do you have to go through, you know, to wheedle it down to where you only catch, you know, largely true positives? It's a lot. And it gets very expensive. And you're putting people through a lot of duress. And it turns out to just be the number of people who fall through the cracks by not showing up early enough when they have a problem. Turns out to be a very small, number of people in comparison to the number of people that you torment through false positives. So the false positives of say, I don't know, this thing called the COVID test? Yeah, I may have used this example in other contexts recently as well.

But it turns out that it fits exactly for what they're doing with these kind of like, I don't know how many kids in the Canadian school system there are who are in some LGBT configuration who even outside of like the weird, sex education stuff that's kind of pushing them in that direction and the social pressures that we all know something's wrong there take that even off the table i don't know how many kids there are in the situation whose parents are then going to become a genuine problem but it's not very many but they're treating the entire school as though that disease is endemic to the entire school and that means what they're doing is if we use the analogy of the cancer treatment screening and treatment

they're just jumping to the process of giving it with the, you know, the lessons and whatever, every single kids getting the equivalent of LGBTQ chemotherapy blasted on them. And it's, again, they don't care about the consequences to all of the other kids that don't need this treatment. Once again, sorry, this is why so many parents are pulling their kids out of the public system and homeschooling them or we have, you know, a couple different like Christian academies, that type of thing. that are starting to pop up. I'm sure there's others that I haven't heard about folks. But when you put it like that, some of the things we're exposing children to and just some of the mentalities,

that's what has parents very concerned. And it's almost like, I don't know if this is the proper way to think about it, but it almost feels like the perfect storm when this happens. Because, you know, like I've heard both sides. So I've heard teachers say they need more involvement. Parents, we love to have more involvement, right?

Love to see more parents involved. But the parents, two things come to mind. One is they look at, so teachers go, we're kind of treated like a big giant daycare, which they kind of are. And parents kind of agree with that thought process. But right now, as it sits, you know, the other thing you got happening is, like, the financial, like, implicate, the economics of what's going on right now, specifically in Canada and probably elsewhere, is like both parents are working their bags off.

to try and provide a living so that their kids can have a life, et cetera. They're sent off to school where now the teachers are like, they're not even taking, you know, they're not even having these chats with their kids. Look at how busy they're, you know, they never show up. They never do whatever. Meanwhile, the parents are working their bags off to whatever, and it's almost this perfect storm, if you would,

of like parents are working harder than they ever have. And I'm not knocking earlier generations. It's just that, you know, when I grew up, my mom was a stay-at-home mom, and a lot of families were a single income, and they could survive that way. Today, when you look at it, it's not that case anymore. And so, you know, not having a parent home, at least for the first how many years, that's, it's an interesting problem, I guess, is what I'm trying to point out or spit out to you. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.

And this is, you're right, this is why so many parents are pulling their kids out. and trying to find alternatives because there are these kind of underlying real conditions, but then what the school is doing with the situation is to all appearance is grossly irresponsible. Like I said, I don't know how many kids in Canada would qualify for being rescued by what they're doing, but I can bet you that it's not more than a few hundred, whereas meanwhile, millions of Canadian kids are getting subjected to the entire program. Yeah. Yeah, that's not helping them.

I mean, here's another example, right? So out of the cancer screening, here's another example. Kids that have dyslexia need special training for how they learn to read. Sure. It's different. They learn to read differently than other kids, which is fine. It's not a problem. So in a sane society, what you would do is you identify which kids are struggling.

Then you might check some of those kids. You don't do universal screening. You check some of those kids to see if they're dyslexic. and the ones that are dyslexic, you put them in the alternative reading program and you get them up to scratch with their reading. And then the kids who don't need help, you don't subject to that other method because it's not how they learn to read either. And this is actually kind of literally happening. This isn't just an example I pulled out of thin air. In this case, it's, well, some kids are dyslexic.

So give everybody the dyslexic lesson because the other kids will figure it out anyway. That's the mentality. So you're going to save maybe, you know, a few tens or hundreds of kids while subjecting millions of kids to something that's suboptimal or even damaging in the process. And that's the formula. And that parents are sensing that this is going on. And they know that there's something wrong. And they don't know all the excuses given, you know, well, the parents aren't able to be as

engaged with their kids as they should be, blah, blah, blah. The excuses that they're given aren't adding up to justify why is it that millions of kids are being subjected to something that maybe hundreds of kids would benefit from and not more. And so that sense is what's driving parents to say, well, you know what, I'm willing to whether it's, I have to make some major cuts, whether I have to figure it out, you know, financially, we're going to live on a lot less or whatever it happens to be. I'm going to pull my kids out and I'm going to educate them myself through homeschooling or I'm going to find them an alternative school that's, you know, hopefully not doing this and doesn't start doing this too. This is why

we're starting to see this movement. And this movement is actually, I saw some graphs earlier. I don't know for sure what's happening in Canada, but I know in the United States that, you know, speaking of Canadian things, it's kind of a hockey stick. You know, it's like, you know, how many kids are enrolled in homeschooling? And it's like this wiggly line that then just shoots up starting in 2020, like hockey stick shape. And then how many kids are in the, you know, traditional public school system? It's a wiggly line for the last 20, 30 years. And then that's like a hockey stick down, people leaving the public school system starting in 2020. And I think that's, of course, everybody's kind of said this.

So it's banal to say it again. But the silver line of COVID was that we saw behind the curtain. People, kids are coming home. They have all their lessons remotely. Parents are like, what the heck are you doing at school? You know, and all of a sudden, a massive shift began very, very quickly into parents being very alarmed about what's going on. These parents' movements have risen up.

And like, I just reiterate something you said. It's not a partisan issue. It's not a political issue in the sense of like, oh, yeah, the conservatives are on this side and the liberals are on that side. We're talking about really basic kind of primal human stuff, children, protecting children, educating children. I think it's wild here in Canada. You know, I don't know the full history of Muslims and Christians, but let's just say they haven't been on the same page. And it's not like this picturesque thing where it's been a, you know, a giant everybody coming together.

But at the same time, I'm like, God's got to have a sense of humor. Because I mean, like, he's got Muslims asking all faiths, but here in the Western world, that's predominantly Christians, to walk together to protect children. I'm like, if that isn't a beautiful thing, I don't know what people are, like,

I don't know what else, you know, like to me, that's amazing. Like, I think that's really cool. There's something funnally human that transcends all of these other differences. And I think it starts and ends at the very, you know, if it's going to be just one thing, it's going to be with kids. 100%. You know, you would, I can't remember if I listened to this.

Did I listen to this, folks, or did I read it? It doesn't matter. You said it somewhere. You were talking about destabilization. And if you're stable, they can't destabilize you. So find areas that are destabilized and go and stabilize it. And so the script. school system to you then is a destabilizer.

Would I be fair in saying that? Yes. And so by parents coming together and saying no more, it's a way of trying to stabilize that again so that it can like, they can't get, you know, like, I mean just, I guess in my mind, set your foundation. That's what you're talking about when it comes to different things that they're trying to push on a population or even yourself. If you, if you're in a terrible spot, if you take the individual, you know, this is a

why when you come back to Jordan Peterson, I think some of his rules were just like, people were struggling. And all they did was find a couple of little rules, clean your bloody room, you know? Take it, you know, clean up your house. And by doing that, you slowly start to become stable. And if you can do that, then all of a sudden, all the world, the chaos it's throwing at you no longer affects you. And that's that destabilization that you're talking about, correct? Yeah. Yeah, the idea is that a destabilized population is a population you can change or that will even demand change or they'll go along with change. We look at all the crime breaking out and say California right now where there's shoplifting

and all of this. We all see this. Everybody in the world thinks this is crazy. And what people will start to demand stability one way or another. And so either you can stabilize that by getting, you know, an enforcement, get the law straight and get an enforcement of the law or, well, you know, you could introduce, you know, facial recognition cameras and some new whole surveillance state program because people are going to want stability eventually.

But what they've done is change the entire system by moving through a destabilized portion. So destabilized populations are subject to going through revolutions. Stable populations don't do it. I learned this by reading Marxist literature. They were like, oh, yeah, advanced capitalism stabilizes the working class. They are stable. They don't want to change. They don't want to have a new economic system, blah, blah, blah.

They're not going to go in for a Marxist revolution if they have a functioning capitalist system. So what do you have to do? And they said, well, you go find the people who are. or destabilized. You go into the racial minorities and you inflame that. You go into the sexual minorities and you inflame that. You go into the feminists and you inflame them. So you inflame the identity politics to get another level of destabilization going.

Well, if you can destabilize the kids, convince them that the world's going to end in 12 years, if they don't stop climate change or five years, I guess, if it's a grader 12 years, if it's a O.C, you never know changes. You convince them that they have no future and you get them all shaken up. Like the whole world is all about all this crazy identity politics. politics and nothing's fair and everybody's cheating, everybody else and everybody's participating in it. That's a group of people that are ripe for a system change. They're ripe for a revolution. If you can go into spots where you see there's being destabilization being done, they destabilize the kids through the schools, and you can put stability back in those kids' lives, those kids aren't going to want to have a revolution and create a new Canada or a new United States or a new West.

They're going to want to try to preserve the life that they were starting to build. And that's exactly the thing that they stole education to try to overcome. They know that from generation to generation to generation, parents teach their kids. They send them to school with teachers that are teaching their kids to try to preserve and enhance and grow the society that they're in. And they don't want to preserve enhance and grow the society that they're in. They want a new society that's under their control, whether it's Marxist or whatever else. And so they know that they have to destabilize. And so one of the antidotes is to start, like you said, exactly like with Jordan Peterson on the individual.

level is start to start cultivating the stability where they've destabilized things. Getting, if you're going to walk, you've got to get your feet underneath you first, right? And so the idea is that you've got to get, that's a clean your room mentality. You've got to get your area stable around you. Then you can stand up and say, you know, no more of this or no more of that. And in fact, I don't want to have a big system change. I don't want a surveillance state to solve crime. I want police to show up and enforce the law.

This is a, this is the. kind of mentality that stable societies are able to maintain and unstable societies are not able to maintain because they go through crisis shock after crisis shock after crisis shock and allow you know I don't care just bring a solution get the crime to go away I don't care how you do it fine cameras fine now everybody's in the surveillance mode I don't care how we stop climate change I'll be an activist whatever I have to do I'll change my whole life you get them all destabilized psychologically about it and that's what they're doing with the you know sustainability education and all that so when you think of a destabilized area you talk about you know climate's been

climate up here is an interesting one man the amount of it's probably who am I kidding that's across the planet right now but like when you you talk about just like stabilizing yourself you know and and and trying to get maybe your community so that it's stabilized is that bringing together a group of individuals who are stabilized who then continue to work on different things and you kind of get the idea. Yeah. Is that education, is that all the above, I guess I'm just kind of...

Yeah, well, if you're being destabilized, you get stable by beginning by understanding how you're being destabilized. If somebody keeps pushing you off balance, you can... So here's a better example than pushing you off balance. You ride on like a little train or a subway or whatever and it's jerking you around and you're holding onto the thing or the bus and you're hanging on to the thing. But if you actually learn how the bus moves and you're the train. moves and everything. You can actually let go of the bar. You don't have to hold on to the bar.

You can actually just keep your balance underneath you. But you have to learn how it moves. You have to learn how it feels. And so you start actually by getting educated as to how you're getting destabilized. You see how they're destabilizing you and then it doesn't knock you off your rocker anymore. So, you know, two, three years ago, they're like, oh, there's a virus. Everybody's like, no, a virus. You know, we're already destabilized. Now it's like, there's a new variant. And we're like, come on, right? Because we've got our feedback underneath us. And they can't push us around using propaganda as easily as they could three years ago when we thought we could trust the institutions. So when the institutions pulled the rug out from under us, we're all on our on our on our butts.

But now when they pull the rug out, you know, we just step off of it. Like, okay, what now, you know? So the first, it is education at first. So the, and you actually walked through the whole process, but it is step one is that you have to get informed and educated. Not everybody wants to, but you have to know how the destabilization process is work. You have to figure out how they get you off balance and how they get you paying attention to the wrong thing so you can bring your focus back to the right thing. And then you start to share that information and get organized with one another. I would mention that before.

So it's education and organization, getting people together, building out network, sharing information and resources with one another. So that you actually genuinely become a more resilient community. And from there, after you start, you know, education and organization, then you can actually start to do action. from that organized platform. This is what the left is called community organizing for like 50 years. And they've used to transform entire communities. The same thing works in reverse. You get yourself organized.

You start figuring some things out. You start to network with other people. You start to educate and share information. You get a network of people around you that are getting also informed. They get more organized. Then you start seeing positions and places where you can take action to start changing things. So that a larger group of people who don't have as many, you know, resources to getting stable can be brought under the stability umbrella and it grows outward from there. And you find other groups,

you know, you guys have got stuff going on. I know it sounds really good in Alberta. Well, you know, there's going to be stuff going on in Saskatchewan and you start networking with those people. And you start spreading it, you know, little cells of stability can start to network together like, you know, building bridges across one another. And the whole thing can start to grow very quickly. I'll give you an example in the U.S. We have this organization, Moms for Liberty, that went from being like three moms, literally three moms at the beginning of 2021 to now it's like 135,000, 140,000 moms that represents 47 states. Then they are, it's a completely decentralized organization in the sense that each chapter is local. It does whatever it's, you know, they got some broad charter that they all follow,

but there are no like stated policy positions for the whole organization. Each group does its own thing in its own local way, but they share resources across the different groups. They are organized with one another. They show up to support one another. And so they have a broad base of information, education, resources, and organization. And they're able to take tons of action. They've taken over 250 school board seats across the United States in the previous election. That looks like it's going to grow in the next election. They're changing the composition of their local communities. They're considered a huge threat. Although the big angry left organizations are saying they're extremists, the Department of Justice called them terrorists or

something. So the thing is, yeah, the thing is with the name, calling at this point. It's like, you can call it's whatever you want. Yeah, just put it on a shirt and start wearing it because it's cool at that point. Like, for real. I mean, you know, David's doing like great stuff up there. And it's, it's not an identical model, but it's a similar model. So these two things can end up, you know, as both kind of prove out in their spaces, they could network together and start sharing resources and information. What you end up with then eventually is a very strong fabric of stable kind of pods, you know, of communities of people or organizations of people that are doing

productive things and actually, you know, taking back our communities away from this kind of, you know, driven activism that they can stand up if you want to the wind that's blowing in that same leftward direction all the time and take it, identify the people who are taking advantage of circumstances and take them out of the positions of power that they're abusing and replace them with people who will do the right thing and try to protect the, uh, protect the community rather than, you know, drive it off the edge. Yeah, I, um, I always, to me, just in the middle of COVID, you, everybody thought we're not, you, you were an island, you know, nobody thinks like you do. And what you found out is, you are an island, but you're in a series of islands, which, you know,

is an archipelago, you know, it's just this big giant. And, uh, you can, you can do that as small as you want across small communities. There's a bunch of that going on or as large as you want across the world if you really want to get that big. But there's all these different things that are that are starting to really flourish because people, you know, from where we started to where I'll wrap up here with you is, you know, at the beginning, nobody knew what the hell was going on. And now probably the biggest hurdle is nobody wants to believe it's going on. And certainly it doesn't mean that every teacher or every doctor, nurse, lawyer, all these different professions are all captured. But some of them are, and some of them are nefarious about it, and others are, believe wholeheartedly

in what they're trying to accomplish by these lovely words and these nice little things and trying to make the world better and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, the lovely thing about what you're talking about here at the end is, you know, you just got to look out, reach out, and there's a whole bunch of resources. that are quickly, you know, coming to the surface, that are starting to really become almost life rafts for a lot of different people to share different ideas, successes, et cetera, because, I mean, for the small group here in Lloyd Minster,

you know, getting involved in one of the school boards, that came out of the middle of COVID meetings. A guy had suggested, you know, why don't we run for a school board? We're all, oh, yeah, that's a great idea. And off they went. And I had nothing to do with it, right? I just got to sit back and watch it go. All I get to do is talk to cool people such as yourself, James,

and sharing some of these conversations that hopefully hit people with some different thoughts and ideas and et cetera to help them move along in their days. That all being said, one final question for you before I let you out of here. It's the crewmaster final question, so shout out to Heath and Tracy McDonald. It's, well, I don't know. I don't know if it's easy anymore. I don't know if it ever was. Heath had said, if you're going to stand behind a cause, stand behind it absolutely.

What's one thing James stands behind? I wish I could never it down to one thing. I apparently stand, I mean, I get told that I die on a thousand hills. They're like, oh, this is the hill James is going to die on. I'm like, what hill haven't I died on? But I stand by, I mean, the cause that I stand behind, you know, most, I guess, kind of universally or whatever is the cause of liberty. I think that it is that human beings are at the end of the day in most respects sovereign.

We do, you know, submit to legitimate authority over, you know, having a government instituted amongst men, as we say here in the U.S. and our Declaration of Independence with the consent of the governed. But at the end of the day, it is liberty, I think, that I stand behind, that we should have the absolute fewest impositions put upon us by other people that we can possibly have in order to keep society on the rails. And so I stand absolutely behind liberty. I think deeply about the concept of liberty or liberalism, which is sort of the philosophy of political philosophy of liberty. And I think that's the one. I mean, I've even got my like join or die American, you know,

super American rattlesnake shirt on right now, which is one of the causes of liberty, you know, symbols that we had down here in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War. So what they used to call, you know, here in the U.S. sometimes they call the spirit of 76 or whatever, but the idea of what they called the cause of liberty. That's what everybody fought for 250 years ago,

trying to break free of the tyranny of monarchs and, you know, arbitrary power. The Tennessee state constitution, actually, this Article 1, Section 2 says that the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary powers to be considered slavish absurd into the detriment of mankind or something like this, the good and happiness of mankind. So we are compelled by our state constitution,

here in Tennessee to resist arbitrary power, to resist tyranny. And so that is what I stand behind completely is, you know, the cause of liberty for adults, not this liberation nonsense that they're poisoning the well with, but liberty, human liberty. Well, I appreciate you coming on and doing this, and you've been very generous with your time, and I do appreciate that. I want to make sure that I don't overstay my welcome. The next time we do this, because I hope you there is the next time. I'll make sure to twist your arm for as long as we need, because I certainly enjoy picking your brain. You've got a wealth of knowledge there, and just appreciate you giving me some time today. Yeah, my pleasure. Looking forward to getting up to Alberta, too. Oh, and for

folks listening, that's October 2nd and 3rd, Calgary and Eminton. And in the show notes, I'll make sure there is links so that you can purchase tickets and come see James in person. I think that'd be a really cool experience. That's take back Alberta, David Parker, like you mentioned. Drew Weatherhead, a friend of the show as well, has had you on before to talk to him. And so that's coming to Alberta. And I think anytime

a mind such as yourself, I know they're shutting you down. But I'm like, what more reason to go support it, you know, than when they want to try and shut down discourse in Alberta here, where we're supposed to be about free speech and a bunch of different things. Yep.

Well, thanks again, folks. That was James Lindsay so I appreciate you guys stick around and listen that's there's a lot in there I might have to go back myself I want to make mention we've been talking about social media if there's a part of this interview that you enjoyed Jack and I want to want to hear from you so text me in the show notes the phone numbers there text me your favorite part we'll see if we can't get it clipped and put out on social media also this episode is brought to by Calrock Industries just go to calrock dot CA. They got new, used, and refurbished oil and gas equipment in stock. Calrock is your best bet

when it comes to finding equipment that fits your needs is within your budget and is ready as soon as you need it. Well, that's going to be all for me, folks. We'll catch up to you on the next one.