“Woke Is Maoism With American Characteristics”: James Lindsay Speaks to Lotus Eaters

These are children. Children do not think the same way as adults. The marketplace of ideas doesn't exist for seven-year-olds; it just doesn’t. — James Lindsay.

"If you want to know what your future looks like if we don't stop the woke," said James Lindsay in his speech before the EU Parliament, "look at China, look at the social credit system, look at the oppression, look at people disappearing for having the wrong opinions—we have to fight back against woke."

But to fight back against woke, you have to understand it. "You have to recognise that woke is Marxism evolved to take on the West," Lindsay told lotuseaters.com. "The goal is always to seize the means of control of production and to abolish private property. Marx believed in seizing control through economic means, whereas Woke does it through socio-cultural means." This is why Critical Race Theory calls to abolish whiteness, "because whiteness is a form of private property; why queer theory fights to abolish the property of heterosexuality and 'normalcy'; and why the very American phenomenon of slavery, recently had statues toppled down in Europe—it’s not about history or slavery, it’s about creating a class consciousness that is against this form of property."

Speaking in Brussels at the Woke: A Culture War Against Europe conference, Lindsay unearthed the mechanism, psychology, and history of the phenomenon, informing the stunned audience that Mao used identity politics. "He created ten identities in China and categorised people into these identity categories," such as ‘landlord’ and ‘rich farmer’. "Today," he noted, "Right Winger is a bad category, as is Conservative, or Bad Influence, which is what you are if you think or say the wrong thing, or if the government decides it doesn't like you." Importantly, if you have a bad category, “your children have a bad category by default, so they create social pressure for your children to identify as revolutionaries.”

“Mao did this identity politics through the children in the schools. This should feel very uncomfortable to you here because in the United States, we tell our children that being white is bad, being white is oppressive. You automatically hurt people of other races by your very existence, but if you become queer, we'll celebrate you. You can create a radical army of people who identify as gender minorities and sexual minorities at seven years old, lead them into paths of puberty blockers and transition at seven years old, behind their parents' back. It's the same program that Mao Zedong used to radicalize the youth in China; the only thing different is that the identity categories have shifted. This is what we are seeing in schools today—children turned into social activists. It’s Maoist cultural revolution with American characteristics.”

The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire's Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education is a wake-up call to the West. Articulate and deeply thought out, it demonstrates how Marxist ideology has taken over Western education, robbing children of core knowledge subjects and systematically turning them into social activists. Lindsay shows how, instead of math, English, geography, or algebra, schools preach social and emotional learning, Critical Race Theory, culturally relevant education, Queer Theory, Gender Theory, drag queens, and decolonisation. “Our children are brainwashed by Neo-Marxist thought reform following the work of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist educator whose book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the basis to today’s woke Western education. Parents should know that their children attend Paulo Freire schools.”

LE: Here, James Lindsay speaks of why everyone should know who Freire is, why the future of Western civilization is at stake, and why parents must fight back. I start by asking Lindsay if he stands by his EU Parliament statement that Wokeism poses an existential threat to Europe:

JL: Yes, I think in fact that the woke phenomenon poses a grave danger to any society once it figures out how to infect it. A society or a country is like a cell which has certain receptors on its surface where a virus could get in, Woke works like a virus, it finds a way in and corrupts the cell's existing machinery—in the case of a of a nation or a society, it is the institutions that get corrupted. 

Different societies have different sets of values, in the United States, the infection would centre primarily around race and sex, meaning feminism, gender and sexuality, this is where it has been very successful. Here the colonial argument doesn't work at all but in Europe, the UK, Canada and Australia it makes a very strong argument. In Europe, the feminist side works but the gender thing less so because every European I encountered was abundantly clear on the difference between a man and a woman and that this is a boundary that doesn't get transgressed, but Scotland has gone all in on the transition thing, and you see it all over London with the flags and so on. It’s like an acid that will dissolve the society from within, it will corrupt its institutions to reproduce the virus and spread itself, Woke is an existential threat to every society that can't repel it.

LE: School children of course, are the least able to repel it..

JL: Yes, by spreading the oppressive ideology in schools, you can easily create a radical army of people who identify as gender minorities and sexual minorities at seven years old. You can then lead them into paths of puberty blockers and medical transition behind their parents' back—it’s the same program that Mao Zedong used to radicalise the youth in China. The only thing different is that the identity categories have shifted. It's Maoist cultural revolution with American characteristics and it's being exported to Europe.

LE: The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire's Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education, is an eye-opening read. The majority of our children attend Paulo Freire schools, yet hardly anyone knows who this astoundingly influential Marxist is.

JL: I called it The Theft of Education following Freire’s idea that you don't use the educational material itself to educate, you use it as an opportunity to have so-called engaging conversations - political conversations framed to get children to understand the realities of their lives from a Marxist perspective. It replaces education with brainwashing and radicalisation but cunningly maintaining the outer form of Education—full on Marxist indoctrination masquerading as education, so if any parent looks in, they see the children doing math, science, reading and history lessons, but those lessons are in fact being corrupted to do political indoctrination.

LE: You gave a shocking example of a real math lesson...

JL: Yes, this is an actual example from a real state of Indiana teacher training. They teach the teachers to make the curriculum political so that unless you were in the classroom witnessing it happening, you would never know this took place. Teachers learn how to transform a mundane mathematics word problem at the second-grade level, into a plethora of political conversations—the question is simple, Johnny is riding in the car with his mom and dad on the way to an amusement park, the amusement park is 50 miles away and they have travelled 30 miles so far, how far do they have to go? Clearly, a subtraction problem of 50-30, but teachers are instructed to lead children to issues through questions so they ask: how many of you have ever been to an amusement park? So now you're going to talk about the content of the question itself, you’ve diverted from math. Some of the kids will raise their hand and some will not, in the United States second grade is seven years old so that's at the age when some kids will have gone and some kids will have not, in other words, it's tailored to a room where you're pretty certain there's going to be some division, some difference that you can play upon. 

The teachers are taught to follow up with the question: Why is it that some kids get to go and other kids don’t? And they are instructed to continue to ask until a ‘useful’ answer arises, for example, if one says ‘not everybody can afford it’, the door is now open to say: not everybody can afford it, wouldn't it be more fair if some kids had the government pay for it? What do you think we could do to make it so everybody could go to the amusement park so that would be more fair? Then the kids of course volunteer that rich people should pay for it or it should be free, or the government should do it—you have a successful intervention about socialism with something that might be a real part of their lives, what Freire would call a generative theme.

But it doesn’t end there—a child might say that his parents won't let me go ‘they said I’m not old enough’, and now you can argue about whether their parents should be able to make that decision or maybe fairer if the school made those decisions instead of the parents, so now you talk about Mom and Dad: do all families look like that? And you have a conversation about feminism, sex, sexuality, gender and even the car—environmental concerns. 

If the initial question about amusement parks brought up a racial disparity in who raised their hands, you ask: why does it look like the kids who are white have been and the kids who are not white have not been? What do you think is going on? And now, you can have a conversation about critical race theory. 

The teacher who relayed this example to me told me that at the end of about a few months of this training, they could have turned any academic material that you can possibly imagine into an excuse to have these political conversations. 

Importantly, you’ll notice at no point while you're having your conversation about Socialism, or feminism, or critical race theory or environmentalism, or parental authority, or any of these other topics, you ever actually learn to solve the math problem.

You end up with politically engaged, radicalised and brainwashed students, who don’t know how to do math—large numbers of our children are politically active, they want to protest but less than a third of them can read at grade level, or maybe less than 40 per cent, I forget the exact number but in some districts it's under 20, and sometimes even under 10 per cent can read or do mathematics at grade level, and that's indicative of what I said before that that's a theft of their education—their education has been stolen from them. They kept the school and classroom facade, but the core knowledge content is all taken away—they are not just indoctrinated, they are brainwashed.

LE: Why are so many educators adopting Freire’s method? 

JL: They are selling it as a way to engage young people. This is a well-known problem in education, engaging children in the material, so they come to schools and say that they can reach everybody, so everybody gets as educated as possible, they, of course, blame low engagement levels on teaching being geared toward the white male student so others feel alienated and don’t participate, but this is a lie, they use that to justify bringing the programs in and being a bureaucratic institutional behemoth. 

Educational engagement has always been a problem, historically it's been a matter of just asserting authoritarian discipline from the teacher to say ‘you don't understand why you need to know this you'll understand it later’, but critical pedagogy says we can engage with a culturally relevant curriculum This, by the way, was developed by a woman named Gloria Ladson Billings in the mid-1990s who said explicitly that she was using Paulo Freddie's method and updating it to reflect issues relevant to cultural issues, particularly for racial minorities.  Once the schools take this stuff up it's very hard to get it back out and that's why I think it's been so successful.

LE: Has the UN adopted it?

JL: Yes, the United Nations is pushing it, the UNESCO website talks about Freire frequently, the UN has partnered with the other organisation that Freire worked with through the entirety of the 1970s while he was exiled from South America, the World Council of Churches, Freire worked there for a decade he actually came up with most of the material that became The Politics of Education while working for them in Geneva, so this has been a partnership long in the making, there are other ties and partnerships as well, that has a lot to do with how it's spread so vigorously through the West, especially once the United States and Canada took it up.

LE: Freire’s disturbing Democratic Classroom states that the teacher is equal to the children, and that he/she is not an authority figure. No adult in the classroom sounds like a recipe for chaos...

JL: It's not possible to give enough criticisms of the so-called Democratic Classroom. Freire believes that the teacher and the students should be equals, that they are both learning from one another, that the teacher's role is actually to take information from the students and facilitate it toward political understanding. But of course, children need boundaries to operate within, they need direction, adult guidance and protection. The Democratic Classroom turns everything on its head so now the children are leading the lessons and the teacher learns from the students, literally replacing the teacher with a Pied Piper—it's very confusing, very chaotic. 

But there's another aspect—Democratic Classroom means you're supposed to hear the voices of everybody and pay special attention to the least represented, make sure that their voice is equally represented, so what you always have to do is, whoever is complaining of not being heard, is elevated so what you end up with is this morass where the lived experience of oppression bubbles to the surface, what you end up with is this whole psychological and social infrastructure that elevates the story of the oppressed victim, to the top of everything.

When Communists use the word democracy they mean that the people who represent the voices that they want heard are the only ones that count—in other words, there’s no democracy till everybody is perfectly equal. So what you do in the meantime is suppress the voices of the privileged and elevate the voices of the oppressed, that was called the Dictatorship of the Proletariat by Lenin—they choose who's being oppressed and create a bias against people who have none socialist thoughts, this entire apparatus comes into being very realistically and viscerally through the so-called ideal of a democratic classroom.

LE: It seems like a cruel jungle approach with no structure or order which these confused young minds crave. A twisted denial of reality and a somewhat bizarre insistence on moulding it.

JL: What you are actually relaying here is that very clearly, the romantic philosophy is at odds with reality and human nature as well. One of Rousseau’s most famous remarks is that men are born free but everywhere they are in chains, and the chains he described are actually the social strictures that we put on ourselves as civilised men. As a civilised man you have to be polite, reasonable, dress and act a certain way, so the strictures of society are like chains holding you down from who you could really be, so the romantic ideal is we're going to break free of all of these chains and we're going to live according to our own dictates and have this kind of broad expansive view.

Rousseau’s goal was to create this mixture of what he called savages made to live in cities, people who are as free as the savages but they get to live with the benefits of the city—this is what you see in this democratic classroom, this is why you came to instinctively compare it to a jungle—in the democratic classroom there is no order, hierarchy, structure or authority, what you end up with is this romantic idea that the uncontaminated child is living a more fully authentic life, a more sincere life. In fact, it’s a complete misunderstanding of what it means to be a person, society isn't poisoning people's minds and preventing them from being whoever they could possibly be, which is the Rousseauian romantic, ultimately gnostic belief.

The reality is that these are little people who don't know a lot of things yet, and don't understand, and their brains aren't fully developed yet, and they need a great deal of guidance to develop—it’s a complete misunderstanding of human nature, rooted in romanticism. Here, I would add that communism is a romantic idea, people don't seem to understand that, it’s like the ugliest romantic concept, but it is a romantic idea that we’re ultimately perfectly social beings who can be liberated from the demands of a production economy, this is exactly a romantic idea, just really ugly and turned really violent to try to get what it wants—completely antithetical to human nature.