Marxism is Threatening American Culture | James Lindsay

Transcript:

Rebecca Weber: Hello everyone. I’m Rebecca Weber. And today I’m honored to welcome James Lindsey. He’s a renowned author, writer, and critical thinker. Whose work has made a significant impact in the realms of culture, education, and philosophy. He is the author of several thought provoking books and a leading voice on issues related to ideology, free speech, and critical theory.

His commitment to exploring these complex ideas with clarity and rigor has earned him recognition as a thought leader in this field. James, it’s great to have you with me. Thank you for joining.

James Lindsay: Hey, thank you, Rebecca.

Rebecca Weber: James, it was Ronald Reagan who once said, how do you tell a communist? He says, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin.

And then he said, how do you tell an anti communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin. So before we really, jump into some of the specifics here, would you provide our listeners with an overview perhaps of the differences between socialism, which we hear a lot of, communism, and Marxism, and why these theories fail?

James Lindsay: Okay, so these are technically different, but for all intents and purposes, they’re not different. what they say is a first order, approximation, they’re the same thing. Socialism is a socio economic theory, allegedly. That’s how it’s sold, anyway. I don’t think it is, but socialism is supposed to be a socio economic theory in which the state Owns the means of production.

So the society itself incorporates through the state owns everything. And thus everybody is entitled to the fruits and costs of society. As the state orders things, that’s socialism. Communism is supposed to be the same thing where you no longer need the state to make it work anymore. It works by itself because all the people have transformed.

So you no longer have the state owning all of the means of production and all of the goods in society. You now have. The community so commune communism, and so the community itself is supposed to be the self organizing democratic thing that doesn’t require any governance when everybody’s heart and soul is geared the right way toward caring and sharing as Klaus Schwab put it and it operates the socialist environment with no state force.

Now socialism and communism have a variety of different theories. about how you’re supposed to implement them, how they’re supposed to take power, what they’re supposed to do when they take power. Marxism is one such theory. A competing theory is Fabianism. That’s a word we don’t use enough. We should be talking about the Fabians a lot more.

That’s the British version. They rejected Marx because Marx https: otter. ai Bloody revolution in order to seize power. He believed Marx Karl Marx believed that there was no way for the Working class to seize power and take control of all of the ownership of the means of production and establish themselves as a dictatorship Without a bloody revolution because the people in power already won’t have it And the fabians had a competing theory fabian society was established in 1884 in in london and while the You Communist Manifesto was published in Germany in 1848.

So a lot earlier, but the Fabians had a different theory, which was no, we don’t need a bloody revolution. We get our people into positions of power one by one, We slowly change the policies one by one. It’s called inaction. Incrementalism or gradualism. You slowly change things to where it becomes more and more communist and hard to undo.

So it’s like a ratchet. It turns a little bit and then it doesn’t go back and it turns a little bit more and it doesn’t go back and it turns a little bit more and it doesn’t go back and it’s primarily accomplished through infiltration and small gradual changes that are hard to undo. And so Fabian socialism is a different model for how to implement socialism.

Marxism is a bloody revolution model. Fabianism is a infiltration model, but the goal in both is to establish a socialist state that’s under dictatorial control. So the state is going to own and control everything. So when I say the fruits and costs of society, it’s going to say this is how much, You get, this is your socialist money, so to speak, that you’re going to get, which is just a stand in.

but also here’s the work you have to do. You have to earn what we’re called in the Chinese context. They had to earn work points in the Soviet union. They had to earn work points instead of earning money. You earn work points, which sounds a lot like going to work and earning money. But the state.

dictates everything. It tells you what work you’re going to do. It tells you how much you’re going to be paid. If you don’t want to do that work, it doesn’t matter. And it tells you what you’re going to get. As a result, you can have this much bread. You can have this much oil. You can have this much, firewood.

You can have whatever. this is what your house can be like. It cannot be like anything else. If it is, we’re going to throw you out and put you in the street. It’s, a, brutal system of control and the religions of socialist thought believe, and I say religions because this is truly magical thinking, like spiritually magical thinking, is that when everybody is fully transformed into the socialist belief, Program, then you won’t need a government to make it happen anymore.

So the state will wither away of its own accord. You don’t need a dictatorship when everybody is on the program. So the goal is to force everybody to be on the program in the meantime. And that’s true for, effectively all of the versions of socialism that have ever been tried because socialism doesn’t work without forcing people to do it.

Rebecca Weber: Excellent. I really appreciate that overview. Now here in the United States, we do see a lot of frustrated people and you’ve been talking lately on those people who embrace cultural Marxism, critical Marxism, identity Marxism, woke Marxism. You call this American Maoism. Can you give us some examples of how we see this playing out in the United States and how this is really a direct threat to individual rights and our values as Americans?

James Lindsay: Yeah, basically almost everything you’ve lived through that you thought really was weird and didn’t like for the last four to five years was probably derived from either cultural Marxism or its descendants, which include, like I said, American Maoism. And I know it’s a lot of terms to get your head around.

Cultural Marxism was a, is, was a turn in the Western world. So Soviet Union is the Eastern world. And then later China is Eastern world and they did communism by force. They took over, did a classic military coup, took over their countries, spread into the Eastern block with, Soviet satellite states and so on.

And then through South Asia, like you would expect also, they made their way. The Soviets made their way down to Cuba and they infiltrated heavily into South America. So this was a huge, issue when the West Western Europe, particularly in the United States and Canada, and then countries like Australia and New Zealand to a degree, Japan after the second world war, South Korea, after the Korean war, these countries had to be infiltrated a different way and they infiltrated culturally.

So they set up the same line of division. Marxism is based off of the hypothesis. That all of history is the movement of class conflict, class antagonism. It’s always two classes that you identify. You heard everybody in and you put them in a conflict. One is framed up to be the rightful winner. And one is framed up to be the rightful loser.

Then you create a dynamic around that. And, It can be class that was classical Marxism, but it could be race. It could be sexuality. It could be sex, like male, female, and it could be a lot of things. And cultural Marxism has taken more of these cultural aspects. Eventually, like I said, this identity politics, and I call it American Maoism because, Mao Zedong really perfected the identity politics tools.

the, in group, out group, the in group being defined as the people who do what the government says and the out group are the people who are blamed for everything going wrong because they aren’t doing what the government says. I call that hate craft and, you cause people to hate. We’re not having the good life because the people who aren’t following the directions are the problem and everything sucks and it’s their fault.

So you hate them. So it generates hate in the population. And, as vibrant as the obvious identity politics, DEI, and all of that Echo all of the whether Soviet or communist China programs that, we could talk about for hours on the show here. If we had time, the most probably tack tactile for people is going to be the COVID policy where Joe Biden came out as president of the United States and said, it’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

So now you have the good people who got the shot, who wore their masks, who socially distanced, who stayed home or whatever it was. And then you have the. Bad guys, the anti maskers, the anti vaxxers who wouldn’t do the thing. And they were meanwhile, shutting down the economy and destroying people’s lives with their government power that they were abusing and saying that they had to because of the people who weren’t wearing their masks and weren’t getting their shots.

And they said, when 70 percent of the population gets their shots, we can do this. And then it was, no, we need 80%. No, we need 90%. And they kept upping the ante. And the fact was that the purpose of that, the purpose of saying, Everybody has to get vaccinated was so they had the pretext to teach the people who did get vaccinated To hate the people who didn’t and create a gigantic pressure campaign And that comes straight out of mao.

That is a maoist tactic to transform a society And so that’s why I call all of this american maoism, but it touches identity politics the covid stuff Just regular Trump derangement syndrome is another example of it, calling people who support Trump deplorables and garbage as we all experienced.

And then also it’s in the climate change. If you’re on the wrong side of that, you’re going to destroy the planet, blah, blah, blah. So we’re experiencing a full spectrum Maoist attack using what amounts to various forms of Marxism placed into various domains of conflict to try to literally destroy and transform and ruin our society.

Rebecca Weber: And this Maoist attack is aimed also at our children with critical race theory, this CRT that we hear so much about in our schools. So that’s another example, I think, right there of exactly what you’re speaking to, how we’re teaching children to first notice the color of their skin and to fall into one of two classes.

You’re either an oppressed person or you’re the oppressor. this stuff is, and more and more Americans are waking up, which is a good thing. I’m so thrilled to have you here with me. Now, you’ve drawn these connections between Marxism and spiritual beliefs. How does Christianity, or faith in general, really serve as a counterforce to Marxist and communist ideologies? they’re so intent on eroding our religious values, it seems those who embrace those, ideologies. Go ahead.

James Lindsay: a lot of people, a lot of people don’t understand Marx’s beliefs about atheism. They say, oh, it’s a godless, atheist philosophy. It’s not, actually.

It’s a very spiritual philosophy that believes man gets to wake up to being his own god, which is, you know a very toxic religious belief. It’s not atheistic. And Marx has a very long discussion that he wrote in 1844 discussing his views about atheism. And his views are that atheism is basically a starting place.

The metaphor I give, Marx does not give this metaphor, but I give this, is that, imagine you have a field or your yard and you want to plant a garden, right? And so you had a grass, You got a bunch of grass and what are you going to do? You have to dig up the sod and you have to till the ground the first time to get the soil prepared.

Then you can plant something else, right? For Marx, atheism is digging up the sod and tilling the ground. It’s just getting the field ready. But what you’re going to plant is a new religion. Think, of the plants growing on the ground is As a religion so the grass is maybe it’s christianity Maybe it’s judaism and it’s keep you couldn’t plant tomatoes in the grass because the grass will choke it out and it won’t grow It’ll stop it from being able to grow So you have to get all of that grass out of the way and replace it with bare soil That’s atheism and then you plant communism into the bare soil so it’ll grow.

So it becomes a competing religion to Christianity or to Judaism or, other faiths. And the thing is that I get asked a lot, what is it about Christianity? And a lot of people are right. Christianity and Judaism share in common the fact that they have an absolute loyalty to a higher power that they will not compromise on.

Die for this belief if they were really put to it, or at least many would. They’re very committed. They have this, a line that they will not cross. the communists need you to cross that line. They absolutely need it. And so that’s why they tortured in Romania, for example, in communist Romanian prisons, they tortured Christians in the Potesti, prison experiments beyond anything you can possibly imagine.

We can’t even talk about how horrific that was. Nothing I think in humanity has ever compared to how bad that was. And it was to try to get. God fearing Christians and Jews to cross a line that they wouldn’t cross because of their faith Just to see what it took to get them to do it and it turns out in many cases The answer was nothing most of the people died never renouncing their faith, but under unbelievably bad conditions But there are two answers beyond that I think are so important to what christianity represents in terms of being a solution And so one of those is that christianity And Judaism really, honestly, in many ways too, but Christianity particularly, if you really dig into the roots of the theology, the core of the theology, these are individualistic.

They recognize the individual, and the whole doctrine of free will that pervades both religions is at the core an individualism philosophy. Why do I say that when obviously churches congregate and the Jews see themselves as a people and all that? What I mean is, In Judaism with the 10 commandments, God could command you, just make you obey, right?

You could just make you obedient, but he doesn’t. He gives you free will. Why? Because he wants his children to pursue righteousness, which has to be an individual choice. You have to choose to follow the law, not be made into a robot that follows the law. And so that is a different thing because that’s the only way the individual can start to choose to grow into righteousness, to it being a good person, right?

And Christianity takes that to another level. Not only do you have that same call on the individual, but it’s also only the individual who can accept that. or refuse grace through Jesus’s sacrifice. This is the core idea of Christianity. Your church can’t accept Jesus for you. You still have to do it, right?

So the individual and the individual’s autonomy and the individual’s ability to make a decision free from coercion, is absolutely core to these religions. that’s the exact opposite of the collectivism of communism and socialism. The Marxists need you to do what the Marxists say all the time, and that’s the opposite of what Christianity and Judaism teach.

Now, further and relatedly, what I notice, what I think is, there are a million things, we don’t have time to talk about all the things churches provide as a healthy and important countermeasure, but the one I’ve noticed is the most striking, is that what churches represent is communities of individuals.

Who are intentionally trying to be better people. They are struggling with their, vices. They’re struggling with their sins. They are working every day as to the best of their ability. So long as they’re involved in active to be better people. And better people means better citizens downstream from that and better citizens are going to be more civically engaged in positive, helpful ways.

They’re going to take an attitude of faithful service when they get into positions of stewardship and authority, and they’re going to raise their kids to have similar values and to understand that the importance of, again, it goes back to pursuing righteousness. And being willing to repent and humble yourself to receive grace.

These are individual decisions and they allow people to form intentional communities that we call churches or synagogues of people pursuing this goodness in themselves with a peer group who’s also pursuing that goodness for themselves, creating a natural support group. And I don’t want to reduce a church obviously to a support group, but there is that, Poison to the socialist program.

It’s absolutely poisoned. They need debased people. They need degenerate people. They need miserable people. Look how unhappy these people are. They need all of that so they can get revolution out of this or so that they can get people to give up and just let the, the power hungry, take the positions of power and Christianity gets right in the way of that.

So they have got to get it. They have got to stop people from being Christian. They’ve got to stop people from being Jews.

Rebecca Weber: Wow. That’s a great explanation. Appreciate that so much. your critique of Paulo Freire in your book, The Marxification of Education, was such a powerful, story. How have these ideas transformed education?

If you could speak to education, what would you say is the single most dangerous outcome of his influence? on modern schooling.

James Lindsay: Okay. So Paulo Freire is one of the most important characters in world history that nobody really knows who he is. He was a Brazilian Marxist, and he came up with a completely new form of education that I’ve referred to as in my book as the Marxification of education, that he made education itself.

In fact, he made knowing a line of Marxist division and conflict. So there are knowers and there are people who are not allowed to be considered knowers, not people who are ignorant, people who’s knowledges are already there, but aren’t valued by the broader society. See how he changes what that is. And so his influence actually is how it is the primary way.

I would say that Marxism made it into our society, not the secondary way. There, there are others, there are lots of ways that they infiltrated our institutions, but I think it’s probably the primary way, because one of the things that, for example, Mao Zedong understood, and of course Lenin and Stalin understood, and when they set up Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

What Mao Zedong understood particularly was that if you want, when you take power, You had better control two things. You had better control the media so that you can do propaganda and you had better control education so that you can get the next generation. So the next generation grows up thinking this is normal.

This is just socialism is just how everybody is. And yeah, there’s some old fuddy duddies who don’t get it, they’re backwards. We’re forwards, they’re backwards. You need education under your control media as well. But. Education has to be under your control. And so now took power in 1949.

And by 1951 had complete control of the schools when he took power again, or re upped his power in 1966. And the cultural revolution, the first thing he did was he shut all the schools down and made sure he had complete control over the schools. And Paulo Freire, actually. This Brazilian Marxist says in his magnum opus, which is called Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he says in a footnote in the first chapter that his entire methodology is based off of what he saw in Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

So he’s copying Mao’s techniques for conquering education. Makes it so damaging is Paulo Freire has this very clever, In an evil way, very clever idea is that academic material, whether it’s a literacy lesson, a math lesson or whatever should be what he calls a mediator to political knowledge. True knowledge is political awareness, which means that’s a euphemism.

What it means is true knowledge is being a Marxist, right? Having awakened to the Marxist understanding of your personal conditions. And Frady made Marxism very personal. The goal was, if you could, not just with a class, but with the individual to sit down and find out exactly what irritates and agitates them about their society.

And then to create what he called as reading lessons, literacy lessons around those issues of agitation. People live in the slum maybe, or that they are peasants. And so you’ll teach them to read the word for slum or peasant first. Then you do so by talking to them about their life and how much they hate their life.

And while you’re teaching them about the, their circumstance, In a Marxist way, the Marxist interpretation for it. Now you throw in, and we’re going to learn to read this word too. And that’s supposed to be a literacy lesson. So what you get is exactly what we have in America. You have an education system when it’s based on Paulo Freire that uses academic material as an excuse to do political conversations.

Now, Jesus says, judge them by their fruits, right? We can, that means we should judge a lot of things, not just people by their fruits. And what would an education system that’s takes. The academic material, not as an excuse to learn academics, but as an excuse to do political radicalization, what would it produce?

What would be the fruits of that? You would have children who cannot read. You have children who cannot do math, who are historically and scientifically illiterate and uninformed you would have. On the other hand, highly emotional, highly radicalized, highly political people ready to go to activism and protest.

What is our schools producing? All you have to do is look at the statistics. We already see the kids are going out and doing protests at every political effort that they can possibly see if it doesn’t go their way. So we know that they’re becoming protesters. We know that they’re being taught to become activists, but what do you see in terms of academics?

Something like 40%. Achievement at grade level. I think on average or something like that across the board and all academic subjects. Our kids are not learning to read. Our kids are not learning to do mathematics. Our kids are not learning history or science. And what they are learning in those subjects is twisted to a political agenda.

So they’re learning kind of it. Backwards. This is exactly what you would see from Paulo Freire. So what is his greatest, what damage has he done to our education system? He stole it. That’s the subtitle of my book about Paulo Freire is includes the words, the theft of education. He stole it. Kids go to school, parents send their kids to school thinking, Oh, they’re going to do a math less, a math lesson.

They’re going to learn math. And you look at their syllabus and it’s math. And you look at the homework problem and it’s math. And then what they do is they use words in. the instructions or words in the assignment or words in the math problem or whatever it happens to be if it’s a word problem as an excuse to start a political conversation.

Hey kids, let’s all talk about, amusement parks because this math problem is about amusement parks. Let’s talk about that. Who’s been to one and who hasn’t? Oh, some of you have and some of you haven’t. Why is that? That’s not fair. So now you get the emotions. Oh, some of you have been and some of you haven’t.

How come? And you get the kids to raise their hands until somebody says, not everybody can afford it. No, you’re right. Not everybody can afford it. How can we make it more fair? So more people could afford to go. More families could afford to go. Then, oh, you can make it free. The government could pay for it.

And then all of a sudden you’re leading the kids to talk about socialism. While you’re sitting there priming them for how unfair it is. So the kids who don’t get to go are like, this sucks. I don’t get to go. That’s not fair. And the kids who do get to go are like, my friends don’t get to go. That’s not fair.

That sucks. I don’t want to be the recipient of unfair privilege and they don’t want to be oppressed and you frame it all out and. There you go. Privilege and oppressed or oppressor versus oppressed. And now you’re putting them in the Marxist frame of mind, giving them a Marxist interpretation for a very natural phenomenon that has nothing to do with Marxism and in place of doing a math problem, which you never actually got around to do.

What would happen? Can’t do math. Lots of political activity, lots of emotional disturbances like anxiety, depression, stress disorders, and so on. It’s exactly what we see.

Rebecca Weber: Exactly. So important that parents, grandparents are looking at their children’s work, paying attention to the books and the material that’s being shared.

Public school system, there’s, we need to see major, change, and I’m so proud of AMAC Action, and other groups like Moms for Liberty. We’re really pushing back against these leftist ideologies in school. So James, as the founder of New Discourses, this is a platform dedicated to unravelling rather and countering the cultural and ideological movements that are shaping our society.

Now you’ve really empowered so many people to better understand these topics like critical race theory, Marxism, identity politics. What would you say is the most important resource or concepts that visitors we’ll, get at new discourses, how can they get at that information, and how then can they apply that information that you share to push back against these divisive ideologies.

James Lindsay: okay, so New Discourses is my platform. I built that platform specifically, and a lot of people don’t know my whole story, and it’s not time to tell that, but, in 2018, I was exposing academia, and I was digging into what was going on in academia, and some of the things that I came across led me to believe that I think our society is going to unravel if somebody doesn’t Say something about this or do something about this or stop this.

And so I went to my wife and I asked if I could quit my job. And she said, I hope you can. she said, can you make money exposing this? And I said, I don’t know. And so I spent the next year and a half trying to figure out how to build a platform where I could just. make a living at the same time as exposing just how do I become a full time think tank into myself to research and expose the woke communist approach that was taking over America DEI and all the rest and so I made it Specifically the way that I did so it would be hard to cancel.

So I’m not caught on the winds of donor attitudes in So it’s been a very interesting experiment, but, it’s at new discourses. com there’s primarily at this point, I do publish some articles, but I primarily publish podcasts in short form and in long form, trying to explain various phenomena that I see.

Going on in the, world or to help people to understand what Marxism is, how communism works, what the United Nations is doing, what the CCP is doing with regard to any of these things. So I produce a lot of materials with regard to that. And I did almost two years where almost everything was education.

So there’s a lot on education too. So there are hundreds of hours of podcasts, some of which are as short as five or 10 minutes. Some of which are as long as four and a half or five hours. And. By the way, if I record a five hour podcast, I understand it’s hard to listen to you. You see the microphone. I sit at this microphone and I record it in one take.

So if I can sit and talk for five hours, you can break it up in pieces and listen for five hours. Yeah. it’s always done in one chunk right here where I’m sitting right now. And, anyway, it’s a new discourses. com. That’s the website. And I would tell people that are just wading into this. I recently, it’s long, I warn you it’s long, but I recently did a podcast.

It’s somewhat near the top or you could type it. It’s called the basics of cultural Marxism. So it’s just a basic introduction to the whole phenomenon of Marxism as it played out here in the West and how it infiltrated, how it developed, who the big thinkers are, what their ideas were. And I meant to make it a basic and short introduction, but unfortunately to cover everything I wanted to cover, I just sat here and talked till I was done.

It took three hours and 15 minutes, but I have heard so much positive feedback about that particular episode being the place to start. And that’s what I made it for. So I’m happy now so people can go there. That’s the place to start. And then there’s a search bar. So you can type in whatever you want, whatever specific subject, is it critical race theory?

Is it queer theory? Is it? the schools, is it education, is it groomers in the schools? You can type groomer schools was a whole podcast series I did. Is it the United Nations? You can type that into the search bar and see a lot of the things. It’s not perfect search function, but it does a pretty good job to find all the different stuff I’ve said about it.

And then you can, explore more from there. And I would start with the basics of cultural Marxism.

Rebecca Weber: Yeah. I’m so glad that you’re doing this. tell us about your most recent book, The Queering of the American Child, how a new school religious cult poisons the minds and bodies of normal kids. That recently came out. Tell us a little bit more about this book. It discusses the harmful effects of queer theory on education and children.

James Lindsay: Yeah, I’ll show you guys the cool cover. I don’t know how perfect that is, but I’ll hold it up here for a second. The queering of the American child. So the coauthor who I’m covering up his name a little bit, Logan Lansing was the primary author on this book.

And I joined him with him. he is a new dad. And so he wanted to find out what was going on in our schools as he started to plan with his wife to have kids. And he was, he knew that this kind of, queer theory agenda, all of the sexualization, the drag Queens, all of this stuff was happening, the gender theory, the gender bred person.

He knew all that stuff was in there and he wanted to dig into it. So he started to read the academic literature. He was following me on Twitter, paying attention to my podcast, getting a basis for understanding, and he wrote this wonderful manuscript that is half the length of the book that I just held up.

And then he and I took the project on together to finish the book. And it is a, he has a talent like nobody else to make. Difficult material, comprehensible, and readable for normal people. So it’s a very easy to read book. it’s, my other books, by the way, are very challenging. This book is not very challenging.

It’s not heavily academic, but it covers the material. So it explains what queer theory is, where queer theory came from, What critical theory in education looks like, in other words, what’s poisoned our education system and stolen it, what I was just talking about. And then it talks about how queer theory got into the education system.

And then at the end, what we can do about it and how we can fight back. Cause that was your original question, by the way, is what can we do? And I never got to that part. All we all are going to have to use the advantage that we now have with the Trump presidency coming, to take action, right?

But we have to take smart action. We have to take informed action. We can’t go running around like a bunch of idiots We can’t do stupid things. We can’t take the bait like january 6th was four years ago We’ve got to take smart action and you cannot take smart action Unless you know what you’re dealing with and how it works and how it thinks and how it plans and how it strategizes You And so these books, these materials are meant to give people the basis of understanding that they need to plan smart action.

And this book is particularly good. I hear from parents all the time, all around the country, that this book has really equipped them to show up at, whether it’s a principal’s office, a teacher meeting, a school board, or even beyond county commission, state legislature, state legislator offices and so on, and sit down and talk to these people and really be able to plan.

Inform them, not sounding like a ranting parent who knows something’s wrong, but doesn’t know how to articulate it, but talking about talking like somebody who really knows what they’re talking about. And it’s opening eyes of, like I said, school board members, superintendents, principals, and maybe more even importantly than that.

State legislators all over the country, and so the, point of, all these materials, whether it’s the podcast, the articles or the books or whatever is to equip normal people with the ability to see what’s going on, to understand it, take smart action, and to get other people to do the same thing in particular, elected representatives and council members.

Rebecca Weber: I tell you, all that you’re doing really gives me such great hope. Another organization that’s doing great work is Do No Harm. I’ll be with Do No Harm next week on the steps of the Supreme Court as we fight for, Americans in Tennessee who are dealing with, with, gender ideology being, crammed down their children’s throats.

We need to step up as a group. We need to do that individually. We need to be educated, as you say. We James, before you run, what gives you hope for America’s cultural future and this ideological future? Do you see signs that the tide is turning?

James Lindsay: I had a whole lot of hope even through the dark years, so to speak.

I, have strongly believed in the American people and the American experiment. And frankly, it’s different form of American exceptional exceptionalism, but a lot of people haven’t. So I’ve really believed in America and I’ve really believed in Americans and I’ve seen them. I first started talking about this and I’ve, my first speech was in 2017.

My first major speech was in 2019 and I’ve had a, like a real following probably since 2018. six years, seven years, five years, depending on where we want to put the, time post in the ground. And I’ve went from being, one of apparently, felt like we were like five or six people talking about it to millions.

Millions of people are informed on this. I routinely meet people within various domains of this, woke phenomenon who know more about that domain specific domain than I do. I meet people in education who know more about what’s going on in education. They understand the Marxism very deeply. And that’s actually fantastic.

And it’s a reason for hope. Obviously the fact that we were able to throw off. The shackles of the Democratic Party in this election is an enormous reason for hope. And I’m not talking about conservatives showing up. I wish I was, but I’ve seen the statistics. Conservatives did not show up particularly well in this election.

Christians did not show up except Catholics particularly well in this election. I saw this, the Megan Basham, showed the data recently at an event where she spoke and Christians, or I’m sorry, Catholics showed up at plus three versus 2020. But evangelicals showed up at minus six compared to 2020. They didn’t turn out, but what did turn out were everyday Americans who are independents, everyday Americans who have been Democrat up until the last five minutes, everyday Americans who are, have been Trump haters for the last Eight years who said, you know what, if it’s holding my nose or whatever else, they’re going to show up.

In other words, what I saw is a broad coalition of Americans who said, no, we want America. They don’t necessarily want conservative this or whatever that they don’t necessarily want MAGA. It’d be fine if they did. And it’s fine for the ones that do what I saw is a broad coalition. Huge coalition of, Americans turn out and say, no more of the insanity.

We want America back. And that’s extremely inspiring for me. and I draw a lot of hope there. I think that, Americans are starting to remember in a sense who we are and starting to, step up. Out of that phase that we’ve been in for the past 30 years of taking America for granted.

Oh, this will just always be so the words you brought up Ronald Reagan And I know that Reagan’s a huge inspiration for you guys the words of Ronald Reagan that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction It’s like americans realized that And I’m very, excited about that.

And I draw a lot of optimism from that right now.

Rebecca Weber: Yes. And it was Reagan who also said, man is not beholden to government, but government is beholden to man. everything we’re talking about here is just a great reminder that, it’s important to get educated. I highly encourage people to go to your website, terrific resources there.

You are a pleasure to listen to. You’re smart on the issue and on the topics, so get your hands on James Lindsay’s books. we’ll put that one down here in the bio, but James, thank you so much for taking the time to share your great insights with us and your perspectives because they really do provide valuable, insight and I appreciate everything that you’re doing, so much.

James Lindsay: thank you so much too.

Rebecca Weber: To all of you out there listening, thank you for joining. Don’t be, don’t forget to tell your friends and family all about AMAC. Be sure to join or renew your AMAC membership today. That’s it for today, folks. Have a blessed day. We’ll see you next time.