The Daily Signal - James Lindsay on How the Left Took Over Everything

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

James Lindsay first came to national attention after he and his colleagues published a series of hoax papers in social science journals to demonstrate their loose academic standards. Lindsay used to be a liberal, but recognizes the very real threat ideologies like critical race theory represent for America and became more conservative. "My position though, even when I did identify on the left in the past, has always been, 'I'm going to hold the beliefs that I believe are the most accurate and where I fall is where I fall.'" Lindsay explains, before adding he's "Team Reality." Lindsay joins the show to discuss how he moved from being a liberal to a conservative, and how we can help convince reasonable liberals in our lives about the danger of philosophies like critical race theory.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, February 23rd. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Doug Blair. James Lindsay first came to national attention after he and his colleagues published a series of hoax papers in social science journals to demonstrate their loose academic standards. Now Lindsay, author of cynical theories, is back with a dire warning for America. The Marxist Left could eliminate conservatives forever. Lindsay joins the show to discuss the rise of the Marxist Left and what we can do to stop them.

But before we get to Doug's conversation with James Lindsay, let's hit our top news stories of the day. President Joe Biden addressed the nation on Tuesday afternoon regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This was the first time Biden gave remarks after Russian President Vladimir Putin moved troops into Ukraine. The president announced new heavy sanctions against Russia per MRCTV. Take a listen. So today, I'm announcing the first tranche of sanctions to impose costs. on Russia in response to their actions yesterday. These have been closely coordinated with our allies and partners,

and will continue to escalate sanctions if Russia escalates. We're implementing full blocking sanctions on two large Russian financial institutions, VEB and their military bank. We're implementing comprehensive sanctions on Russian sovereign debt. That means we've cut off Russia's government from Western financing. It can no longer raise money from the West and cannot trade in its new debt on our markets or European markets either. Starting tomorrow and continuing in the days ahead, we'll also impose sanctions on Russia's elites and their family members. Biden said the U.S. will further sanctions with Russia if Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine.

The president also called Russia's actions against Ukraine flagrant violation of international law. For more on the ongoing situation in Ukraine, be sure to check out the Daily Signal's bonus episode with Heritage Foundation Director for Foreign Policy, Luke Coffey. Luke and I discuss the details of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and how the conflict could affect Europe and America. So be sure to catch that conversation. Another religious liberty case is headed to the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, the justices agreed to hear arguments in a case involving a Colorado wedding website designer named Lori Smith. Smith is a Christian who refuses to provide service to gay couples for their weddings. Colorado has a series of civil rights laws that force businesses to serve clients, regardless

of sexual orientation. According to court filings made by her lawyers, Smith is willing to work with all people regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, and gender, but she cannot create websites that promote messages contrary to her faith, such as messages that condone violence or promote sexual immorality, abortion, or same-sex marriage. Smith lost her case last July in a 2-1 decision by the 10th Circuit Court in Denver. Smith is being represented in her case by Christian nonprofit group Alliance Defending Freedom. President Joe Biden is delivering the State of the Union address on Tuesday, March 1st. Republican governor, Kim Reynolds of Iowa, will deliver the response to Biden's address.

Reynolds was chosen to give the Republican response because of the Republican response because of of her leadership on COVID-19 and work to keep critical race theory out of Iowa schools. Reynolds said that she is looking forward to delivering the response to the state of the union because the Biden administration is governing from the far left, ignoring the problems of working-class Americans while pushing an agenda that stifles free speech, free thought, and economic freedom. The American people have had enough, but there is an alternative, and that's what I look forward to sharing on Tuesday evening. The State of the Union is scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern time, and Reynolds' remarks

will follow directly after. Former President Trump's new social media app is taking off. As of Tuesday morning, Truth Social, a product of the Trump Media and Technology Group, was number one on Apple's free downloads chart. Truth Social had a soft launch on Sunday with some issues. Many users who attempted to sign up said they were being placed on a wait list. Additionally, some users reported glitches when attempting to create an account. The platform separates itself from competitors like Facebook and Twitter by branding itself as America's Big Tent social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology, per the Truth Social website.

Trump Media and Technology Group first announced Truth Social last October as part of an effort to stand up to the tyranny of big tech. Since then, the app has been delayed a few times. The full launch was initially set for February 21st, only to be pushed back to March 31st via CNBC. Now stay tuned for my conversation with James Lindsay. At the Heritage Foundation, we believe that every single policy issue discussed in D.C. tells a story. So we want to tell it well. On the Heritage Explains podcast, co-host Tim Desher and Michelle Cordero, take one policy issue a week, mix in a creative blend of clips, narration, and hard-hitting interviews to equip you on crucial issues in under 20 minutes.

So get your story straight. Subscribe to Heritage Explains wherever you listen to podcasts. My guest today is James Lindsay, founder of the website New Discourses, as well as author of the book, Cynical Theory, how activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity, and why this harms everyone. James, welcome to the show. Hey, I'm glad to be here. Of course. Let's talk about woke culture.

This is the sort of cause-de-jure at the moment for the left, and it's incredibly dangerous. But can you explain to our listeners why it is so dangerous? Because it's Marxism. Done. And the interview. The end. No, it really, that's the truth, though. So, you know, we mentioned cynical theories.

I've got a new book out today called Race Marxism that tracks how critical race theory is, in fact, just a reinvention of, to whatever level of granularity and detail you want to go into, of Marxism using race in place of class. If we switch over to queer theory or gender theory, it's a reproduction of Marxism using gender, sex, and sexuality in place of class. And so the reason it's so dangerous is because just like every other Marxist theory, it's an inversion of reality. It's not going to work. It's going to lead to calamity. But it also, wokeness, if we will, is woke Marxism, if you will.

It's kind of very dangerous in its own unique way. It's the most corrosive societal acid that I think I've ever seen. So what is it about Marxism that seems to just not go away? I mean, we were having this conversation back decades ago about how Marxism was a problem. Why is it now resurging again? Well, we never really got rid of it is the problem. You know, the Marxists of the 20th century realized that infiltration and subversion was the necessary tactic, whereas Marxists before thought that, you know, revolution, organizing and revolution would be the tactic.

So organizing meant getting big groups of people to do labor movements and then to show up and to protest and to form huge. unions and do all of this kind of stuff, and then to try to take over the means of production, literally through if you look at, whether it's Lenin, you look at Mao, through violent revolution. Marx himself said that violence is the midwife of revolution. And so that didn't work out. It worked in China. It worked in Russia.

It worked here and there through Central and South America. But it's not been, I mean, it's been a trail of blood, a trail of disaster. And it hasn't been very popular outside of that. And so what they figured out in the 20th century was that if you wanted Western Marxism, instead of the Eastern model, which worked in Russia and worked in China, if you want Western Marxism, you have to infiltrate and subvert. You have to get inside the institutions and change them from the inside. So what happened was with varying degrees of success, they infiltrated whether it's religion, whether it's the government, whether it's corporations.

They got inside of education is a big one. Medicine now is a big one for our society. they've wormed their way into these institutions that make society work, and then they subvert them from the inside. So when you had Joseph McCarthy, for example, outing these guys 70 years ago, well, when the pressure got on and, you know, there's this huge focus on how bad red communism is, they kind of went underground. And what they actually ended up doing, they figured out through the mid part of the 20th century and into the 60s was that they needed to infiltrate education. Because if they get inside education, they get inside the future professionals and every other institution as well. Media professionals come from college. Faith leaders come from seminaries, which are forms of college. You know, it doesn't matter what it happens to be.

New lawyers, doctors, they all go to medical school or law school or whatever. They all come out of college. And then most importantly, our future generations are going to be educated by teachers who come out of teaching colleges. And so they figured out that going kind of under the... a cloak and pretending they weren't Marxists. So I always say Marxist posing as professors, Marxist posing as doctors, Marxist posing as politicians was the mechanism that they switched to in the middle of the 20th century. So one of the things that I find so fascinating about that description is it always seems like colleges have always sort of had a leftward tilt. But in recent decades,

we started to see how that leftward tilt has become a full leftward sprint towards Marxism, progressivism, all of the social justice ideologies that we see today. How exactly did that happen? I can't imagine it just snapped your fingers and it happened overnight. No, it didn't. It was very slow infiltration and it was kind of deliberate and coordinated. The Marxists have been trying to figure out, even the Soviet Union, the USSR, the Kremlin, was trying to figure out how to infiltrate major U.S. institutions starting in the 1920s. And so it turns out colleges were not always left. In fact, for a long time, they were quite conservative, especially when they're primarily seminaries. You know, you look at Princeton,

and it was originally Princeton Theological Seminary. You look at Harvard. It was originally a seminary. They're actually quite conservative. But the Marxists figured out that because of their positioning as theorists, as social theorists and economic theorists, that they could work their way into university faculties. And they actually did very slowly, very slowly, until about the 1960s, when everything kind of blew up and the academic left kind of took over because they had, essentially abandoned the working class. Marxism was always a champion of the working class. You don't think of your elbow patch professors as being the working class because they're not.

In fact, they're explicitly part of the bourgeoisie that Marx hated. But in the 1960s, they realized advanced capitalism, they said, Max Horkeheimer, a Marxist, so-called neo-Marxist of the Frankfurt School, said explicitly, Marx was wrong. He said that Marx believed that capitalism would, immisorate the working class, but in fact it allowed them to build a better life. And so they switched tack. They abandoned the working class and they shifted their attention to building out inside of

these elite institutions, in particular these colleges and universities. So they slowly started to colonize the faculty, slowly started to colonize the administration. And under banners like academic freedom and the claim that they're teaching social theory and the claim that they're just teaching economic theory, they slowly created conditions where they could press out conservatives and preferentially admit progressives. And over the course of literally a few academic generations, so 30 years, they were able to massively change the composition of universities from tilting somewhat conservative to tilting not just slightly but strongly left.

And that's an accelerating process. Once you get far enough left, it just, or right for that matter, it becomes self-sustaining and self-reinforcing. And then they're, like you said, in a full sprint into Marxism right now. Is there any way for us to reclaim the universities maybe for not just the right, but maybe the center, not necessarily so far to the left, just bringing it back to a place that's kind of more moderate? Not easily. It's going to take removing people from positions of power and hanging, funding on denouncing or removing these ideologies. I think we're going to have to see.

we would have to see what amounts to massive purges, which is not a friendly word. We're going to have to see, you know, state legislatures stepping in and saying we're not going to fund this. Or there's, you know, some states are playing around with curriculum transparency bills that make it so that on, if, say, critical race theory or gender theory or whatever is going to feature within a course, it has to be on the syllabus. And if you, as a student, show up to that course and it's on the syllabus, then you're entitled to be able to drop the course and get your money back and not be penalized academically for it. Like we're going to have to see things that create the ability for people to push back, but primarily what we're going to have to see is boards of regents stepping up and starting to swap out administrators for people who want this to be. The university should be for everybody. It shouldn't be a left institution or a right institution.

It shouldn't be a purely religious institution or any other thing. It should be for everybody to go get an education at the higher education level, a broad liberal education or a specific technical education. And it's going to require finding who's, which is virtually every administrator now and a lot of the faculty, who's putting, you know, an ideological and political bias this strongly into it. And what are we going to do about it, which is going to amount to removing them. Marxists don't stop. They don't, you can't ask them to stop and then they'll stop. They have to be taken out of positions of power. Now, this is an issue that affects conservatives, classical liberals, people on the left who are maybe not so absorbed in the wokeism.

I guess I'm curious about you. consider yourself a conservative? No, not really. I do notice that when I talk about conservatives now, I tend to use the pronoun we, so maybe on some psychological level getting down in there that I've started to identify. But I don't know if I mean we conservatives or we people who are standing up for broadly, classically liberal values like the United States was founded upon, team reality, if you will. And if that's conservative, so be it.

My position, though, even when I did identify on the left in the past has always been, I'm going to hold the beliefs that I believe are the most accurate, and where I fall is where I fall. So if other people want to label me conservative, I'm not in the least uncomfortable with that. It doesn't mean anything to me. But if I also don't want to fall into the trap of taking on a label and then using that label to say, oh, well, these ideas I can accept and those ideas I have to go away from because now I'm a conservative, so I have to believe conservative thing. I don't want to fall into that trap either. I genuinely want to be somebody who's open-minded, who's looking at things as objectively as I'm able to do. And they can, you know, read broadly.

And so I don't identify as a conservative. Maybe I'm trans-conservative. I don't know. But no, I'm not uncomfortable with being labeled that way. And certainly most of the people I spend time with and most of the people I find agreement with are conservative. That said, if we look at, you know, kind of staunch conservatives who believe that kind of classically liberal you know, Thomas Jefferson American values conservatives are actually also libs, terrible, like the actual, you know, reactionary right or the actual, you know, kind of conservative hard

right. I get 10 times as much harassment and virulence from them as I do from the woke left. I get much more attack. And I don't know if that is another sign that I'm positioned right of center now. So the purity spiral hits me that way rather than the other way. It used to be the other way around. or if it's that I'm not as conservative. I don't know.

Because the reason I ask is I identify a lot of the things that you're saying with a lot of these classical liberals such as Bill Maher, who politically speaking is definitely not conservative. He's very much a kind of like big government, the social programs that are supported by the state. But he also completely agrees that wokeism is a problem. So I guess my question is there are so many of these people who are coming out. out of the woodwork in terms of free speech needs to be a valuable asset of American society that I question, is this a sustainable model for the left? Is a anti-free speech woke agenda going to succeed or are they moving back from that? Well, you've asked two questions.

Is it sustainable and will it succeed or two different questions? It's not sustainable. Of course it's not sustainable. It's a catastrophe. It's internally contradictory. It's utterly nonsense. It's an inversion of reality. It's a disaster in the making.

It's not sustainable. So what it has is a tremendous amount of momentum, and it has the goal of, you know, you talk about the political pendulum swinging. It has the goal of breaking the pendulum so it can't swing back. It can't go the other way? And so can it succeed? Well, I don't mean to sound like a philosopher,

but it depends on what you mean by succeed. It can seize power, if that's what you mean, and institute a reign of, I guess, tyranny is the only way to put it, that will be very difficult. if not impossible to get out of, given the technological tools they have on their side now. On the other hand, it won't be pleasant, so where's your definition of success? A lot of people, you know, did the Soviet Union succeed? They bring, you know, well, communism is inherently contradictory.

It'll always collapse. And I like to remind them that the Soviet Union lasted 69 years to the deaths of 30 to 40 million people in the process. And the lives lived in that situation weren't exactly good for most people most of the time. In fact, they were really bad for most people most of the time. And 69 years is a long time. So the two different questions on the table are, can it succeed at seizing power? Yes, it could. So we must fight it.

Will it work? No. Is it sustainable? No. Will it end in calamity? Absolutely. If it's allowed to run amok. So it's a nightmare.

It's a nightmare, but it's a dangerous nightmare because it can and will, if allowed to take what institutional power it has and will, ironically enough, capitalize upon that to institute a tyranny under its control, which has always been its goal. So we talked a little bit about racial kind of theory here. We talked about critical race theory, but as well, to me, one of the vanguards of the cultural expression of this type of oaken is Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter has recently been revealed to basically be a scam in the sense that it's. It's kind of scammed a lot of people out of a lot, a lot of money. I think it was $80 million or something along those lines. With revelations like this that organizations based on wokeism tend to be scams, does that affect the popularity of these types of movements? Absolutely.

I mean, what you're seeing is, I mean, I like the analogy of, like, the wheels coming off the bus. Like, the bus isn't running. The wheels are flying off. The thing is skidding with sparks flying everywhere at this point. And people can see it. And so, I mean, you wouldn't. jump off of the moving bus, but supposing you could safely, you'd definitely be getting off

of the bus. So people are diving off of the bus right now. They're definitely, these things are why I'm saying, you know, what they have is a lot of momentum and if they can cross the finish line into tyranny, then we're in a bad place. That's what happened with the Bolsheviks. You know, what they were doing, murdering people like crazy was not popular, but they had enough momentum and insufficient resistance so that they were able to cross the finish line, as it were, and establish a tyrannical dictatorship under Lenin. We're in the same kind of situation, but I think it's losing momentum, partly because it's so obviously fraudulent, so obviously corrupt.

I call it, in fact, the iron law of woke corruption. If you see a woke organization, I guarantee you it's corrupt. It is an iron law. If you see a woke politician, I bet you they're doing something corrupt. If you have a woke corporate leader, I can't name anybody. I'm not accusing anybody, but I bet you there's an embezzlement scam somewhere going, I've got Enron level problems going on here. And so the whole thing is a gigantic grift.

And so, yes, as people see these things come to light, it turns them off. But it does so doubly, in fact, because there are a lot of people who are good mainline liberals and even some conservatives who would have said, well, black lives do matter. We got to care about this. And they kind of got roped in. And when they figure out that they've been betrayed, that they've been scammed, they turn all the way against it. This process is redpilling, you know. it's like they're seeing, I got ripped off. Oh my gosh, this was always a scam. This was never a legitimate organization. The best things you can say about it are terrible. And so then what do

they do? They tell their friends. And this spreads very rapidly. And as the evidence mounts, people realizing they got scammed to start getting curious, how did the scam work? How did I get sucked into it? Oh, well, it's this theory underneath it, this critical race theory. Well, that's probably garbage too. That's what enabled the scammers to come out and do the scam. And so, yeah, It's going to, these things are causing the wheels to be fly. I mean, I don't know how bad we want to beat this metaphor, but the wheels are flying off that. More wheels are coming off than where there. It's like a, you know, like a grand theft auto scene or something.

Just extra wheels are just flying off, sparks everywhere. Now, something you said really resonated with me because I've had this conversation in my life. My mother is, like you said, that sort of a good liberal. She, you know, believes in human rights and all of that, you know, kind of nice, fancy nonsense. But like she will say things like why does it matter to you to talk about these types of issues, like just let it be. Specifically on transgenderism where I will say I'm, you know, against this idea that you can identify as whatever you want. She says, who does it hurt? I feel like these people are reachable, right?

These are very reasonable people. But what do we do? How do we find that common ground to reach these people? I mean, it's different. This is a hard question because it really does matter individually. Like every different person is going to have the thing that kind of pops their eyes open. Like the question of who does it hurt with the trans thing? Well, tens of thousands of teenage girls.

That's who it hurts. And who does it enrich? There's other questions to ask. You know, these weird doctors that are grooming kids into these bad decisions and are going to get them caught on a lifetime of pharmaceuticals. So, you know, broadening that perspective becomes something that might open certain eyes. What I actually formulated very early on after, you know, the woke explosion can happen. It was one of the earliest essays I wrote on new discourses in the summer of 2020. It was called the woke breaking point.

And I had a conversation with a friend, and what it was the idea was, rather than me trying to give you some thing that if you just say this, that'll reach people, it was to ask them, what would be too far for you? What would cause you to hang it up and say, maybe this trans thing is causing harm? And let them sit with it and think about it. What would break your support for this? And where is the line? And maybe you don't have one.

What does that say about you? But if you do have one, what is it? And what you find is a lot of people are actually proceeding in ignorance? They say, well, if I knew that, you know, kids were getting groomed into some kind of a weird, you know, sex cult or something using this as a pretext, then I would be alarmed and I would be horrible. And then it turns out there's evidence for that already, right? And so you can say, well, it turns out that's actually happening. Have you seen this? But if you get that where their curiosity opens up first, you can have a more productive

conversation, I think. It's very difficult, but you never know. You never know what people are going to see. Like you said, you know, when Black Lives Miders scammed people out of $80 million, that is going to open some eyes. It has no leadership now. Nobody knows who's in control of like literally tens of millions of dollars. That'll open some eyes.

You see the right picture at the right time of a 13-year-old girl who's at a double mastectomy because she got groomed by a school counselor. that'll open some eyes. You see a book like genderqueer that shows, you know, pornographic drawings and has blatantly, I don't know if you've read that book, but some incredibly sexual imagery, both verbal and in the form of drawings being a graphic novel. People see that and say, well, what is this? And it's not even just that it's something in the schools. It's that they're fighting like hell to keep it in the schools. That will alarm certain people.

And so, you know, I had a talk I gave recently in Kansas. And there's a black minister there, and he said something about, how do I convince my people? And I was like, sir, I don't mean to sound rude, but you're a minister of the gospel. How do you proclaim the gospel? How do you convince some of the truth of your religion? You just keep doing it. You live it, and you keep saying it. And you catch as many people as you can.

You try to refine your message. That's all I can tell you to do. Does it seem like this is working? Does it seem like we're making progress against kind of the woke tide? Well, as somebody who's been speaking up publicly about it, at least since 2016, and I used to feel like I was, you know, you ever see that? I just said this in another interview recently, too. You ever see that video of the guy with the American flag during that hurricane and he stands out in the street and he's like head banging and he's got long hair and the wind and his whip in the flag and he's literally challenging the hurricane and he's got a video. I felt like that guy, like standing there holding up the flag, you know, challenging the hurricane. And now it feels like the wind's at my back. And so, yes, we're definitely making progress. There are umpteen organizations of parents and mama bears and this and that all over the country standing up for kids and schools. They're going to turn this around. There are, you know, there's national attention on the issues from

policy makers, whether it's at the state level, whether it's at the federal level. You have this being a major campaign issue that flipped Virginia back red in the previous governor election last year. So we're making tremendous progress. As a matter of fact, I'm very, not to understate the threat because the threat is tremendous, but we've made so much progress that I feel as though in, you know, six to 12 months, we have undone most of 70 years of scheming to undermine America. And we're also seeing in America, I don't, you can't use this phrase, because apparently it means something bad also somebody came up with it. But there's a renaissance of American values happening right now. So, um, to careful about how I phrase that.

people are waking up. It's like when the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union fell, Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. When that happened, Americans, so many Americans went to sleep. The red scare is over. Cold war's done. And they're waking back up. And those famous words that were uttered somewhere very close to, well, I think it was in Philadelphia. I was going to say very close to here.

but when the Constitution was framed in 1789 and Benjamin Franklin came out and I forget the woman who asked and said, what kind of government did you give us? And he said, a republic, madam, if you can keep it. We're realizing that if you can keep it matters and that this crap we keep hearing about, we have to defend our democracy. We're not a democracy. We're a republic and we have to defend that republic. We're seeing this renaissance of people caring about the Constitution, reading the Declaration, reading the Declaration, of independence, going back and looking at the philosophy that led to the greatest experiment in basically human flourishing that's ever taken place on the planet. And it's going to, I think, gain momentum for a long time.

Make America Great Again is going to look small in comparison to whatever the next iteration of American greatness is going to look like. I mean, that kind of applies to me a cyclical nature to this kind of thing. I'm imagining Cthulhu sleeping beneath the tides, you know, the woke. mob will come again, right? You know, he sleeps in the city. But is that what we're facing here? Is it sort of just pushing it back until it comes back again? I mean, they say that these things happen roughly every three generations because you forget. People forget. But it comes back, you know, differently. You know, I think about this a lot. I don't have an answer for you. It might be.

It might be that the nature of keeping a republic is that you're constantly going to have to find the new variation of evil. This Marxist strain of evil, however, and it's, specific form. I don't know if it's on its last leg. I mean, wokeism is actually stupid. It's now, you talk about these contradictions, if you will, that reveal to people that something's wrong. Look at the trucker thing going on in Ottawa. And so you actually have a workers movement. You actually have a spontaneous workers movement, almost exactly like Karl Marx predicted, and you have literally the Communist Party of Canada denouncing it. It's like they have gone so far off of what they, you know, what people understand them to be, and the identity theories are so

noxious and so ridiculous denying biological sex, so ridiculous that it's, this may be what I would refer to, Marxism in general is what I refer to as scientific gnosticism. It may be that this attempt is the last stand of this particular type of evil. But I also think this type of evil is what's recorded in Genesis 3 with a snake, which means if you take that as emblematic of the oldest, you know, dramas of humanity, then this is a problem that does keep coming back in different forms throughout time. If it is actually Gnosticism, like I say, Gnosticism had a variety of forms. You know, there was the huge thing in very early part of this era, you know, after the first century or something, Ironaeus and Valentinius, were the huge Gnostic versus non-nostic or anti-nostic

kind of religious fights. This same idea that certain people espouse a position of arrogance and the ability to remake the world and society and mankind to their own designs and images doesn't just go away. So we will have to be ever on guard for it. But I think we also are in an opportunity to learn more about it and to see how it's changed. forms throughout the past, say, 200, 250 years, and you can get a pretty good sense of, you know, predicting what kinds of other forms it might take and thus having a, you know, setting up a guard for it. Biggest failure, in my opinion, of the 20th century is that we never installed. We have awesome anti-Nazi education. It's fabulous, and I'm so glad we have it. And everybody who's sensible and decent. It's so glad people know all about the Nazis. They know about the horrors of the national. National Socialist movement.

But we have absolutely abysmal anti-communist education. Nobody knows what communism is. Nobody knows what Marx was really teaching. Nobody knows what Lenin did or Stalin did or Mao did. And if anything comes out of this, you know, supposing we get out of this. And installing not just as Trump had a patriotic American education, but an anti-communist education throughout as much of the world as can be made free, I think then we've made a gigantic step toward, you know, minimizing the risk of this problem. But if it's the story that's in Genesis,

it's a story of humanity. It's coming back. Before we wrap, I wanted to just get your opinion on what we can do. I think there's this big push for people to just say, what do I do? How do I counterwokeness in my everyday life? So how do we do it? Well, it depends on who you are and what your gifts and talents are. I keep trying to tell people this. Everybody's things, oh, I can't learn all this complicated stuff. Well, actually, it's not as complicated as you think. So, you can learn some of it, first of all. But maybe you don't want to. I talked to a guy in Wisconsin. I found this guy to be a huge inspiration. Just a normal dude, right? He's working with this organization. They put on these events. They bring in speakers. They're doing all kinds

of stuff throughout the state, political and otherwise. And, you know, I got talking to him about some of the theory stuff, and he just stopped me. He's like, Doc, I don't know what you're talking about. And I was like, well, you know, you're with the guys or whatever. He's like, oh, no, no, no. They need somebody who picks people up from the airport. They need somebody who runs the errands. If somebody needs copies, I make copies. I go to the store and pick up the binders so that everybody can have a notebook or whatever. I just run errands for these guys. So there's the people on the one hand who are, you know, if it was like a fight, they're on the battlements. They're shooting the arrows or whatever. Maybe that's the people that are out studying

the theory or that are taking the political moves or whatever it is. Your state lawmakers, people will run for school board and get on a school board. And then you got the people that are handing them water and arrows and stuff from down below. the support staff. Everybody's got to figure out what it is they have to offer. Maybe what they have to offer is to help knit the communities back together. Maybe it's to help, you know, all kinds of helpers are going to be needed. If some giant homeschool movement is coming along to protect the kids from the public schools

until they get straightened out, it's going to require a lot of support. There are people, I mean, it's crass to say, but it's also true. There are people who have financial resources that can give to people that's like handing people bundles of arrows or whatever. So everybody, I learned this listening to a past. pastor speak about two years ago. And he said, everybody has to do something, but you have to, he said you have to pray and find out what your gifts of the spirit are. And that's what you have to do. Maybe you're a good ear for somebody to talk to. Maybe somebody's going through some stuff.

Maybe you have the ability, like I recently, not anymore, it's time flies, but not so long ago I had the opportunity to listen to somebody confess for the first time. A young woman confessed, I'm done with the pronouns. And she started crying because she said she's never, she didn't think she could say that to anybody. I'm done with the pronoun game. and she didn't think she could say it to anybody. And she finally had somebody she could say it to. And so maybe it's just that. Or on the other hand, maybe you're the person that's reading all of the books and getting up and speaking it up.

Maybe you're terrible at Marxist theory, but you're great at American civics. And you're reading that, and you're going to go proclaim and teach, you know, what was this country founded on? Why do we have life, liberty, and property as enshrine values, etc. So everybody has to figure out what they can bring to the fight and then they have to do it. I don't have, again, I don't have a specific recipe for each person. Some people are going to run for school board. Some people are going to help that person run for school board. Some people are just going to be their friend to give them moral support for all the slings and arrows they're going to get when they run for school board.

So somebody's going to probably do some bake sales to raise money for the run for school board. All kinds of things. But you've got to figure out what you can do and you got to do it. Solid advice. That was James Lindsay, founder of the website, New Discourses, as well as author of the book, cynical theories, how activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity, and why this harms everybody. James, really appreciate having you on. Yeah, thank you, man. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Signal podcast.

You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure. If you have not done so already, take a few minutes, leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. And as always, be encouraging other people in your life to subscribe. Thank you so much for listening and we're back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Virginia Allen and Kate Trinko, sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, please visitdailySignal.com.