The Cult of Woke Is… an Actual Cult

Hi guys, welcome back to The Liz Wheeler Show. So there’s this new popular narrative that you’ll hear from the Left, whether you’re on Twitter, whether you listen to cable news channels, is on MSNBC a lot. Whether you read woke stuff, you’ll hear leftists accuse conservatives or Republicans who use the word woke, they’ll say if a Republican says the word woke, it is a dog whistle that actually means anti-black. 

So for example, if I look at Disney and I say wow, they’re really pushing these woke initiatives, their queer theory stuff, their Critical Race Theory stuff, this is really woke of them, and I am using that phrase as a pejorative because it’s a description of something that’s negative, it’s something that embraces this neo-Marxist, radical leftist ideology. So it is a pejorative, I’m not denying that part but, the Left says whenever someone on the Right uses the word woke as a pejorative, as an insult, a description of something that they intend negatively, that it’s a dog whistle for being anti-black.  

And my initial reaction to this is I think the same reaction that we probably all have, the same reaction you probably have. At first I balk at this. I say wait a second, criticizing Disney or whoever it might be, that’s just the example that I pulled out of the hat, criticizing Disney for propagating Critical Race Theory and queer theory on children, has nothing to do with racism at all. It has nothing to do with, well not racism from me at least, I guess, Critical Race Theory is racialized Marxism, but it has nothing to do with how the conservative using the term woke treats people of another skin color, or whether they are committed to equality, and it really has nothing to do with how you and I understand the word racism, how we understand the word equality.  

But what I want to talk about today is taking that shared, this Universal reaction that conservatives have when leftists tell us that we’re being anti-black, when we use the word woke in a pejorative way, taking that reaction and putting it aside, I want to explore the idea, what if the Left is actually correct when the Left says, when you and I use the word woke that we are propagating anti-blackness? What if they are correct? Now I don’t mean that I’m a racist. I’m not.  

I don’t mean that you’re a racist, you’re not. But what if they mean something entirely different by black and white than you and I mean when we say black and white? This is a continuation from Tuesday’s episode, where we’re talking about the crisis the Democratic Party is facing because the Democratic Party has these incredibly woke, incredibly radical, oftentimes Marxists politicians and activists, but the voter demographic of the Democratic Party, the average Democrat in our country, the average liberal, the average leftist going about their normal lives aren’t radical. They aren’t Marxists.  

There’s this conundrum, this contradiction between what the leaders of the Democratic Party want and what their voters want, even if their voters don’t really know that it’s what they want. They’ve kind of just gone along with what the politicians have said so far, but the Democratic Party, the voters are about done just going along with what the leaders are saying.  

The Democratic Party is reaching a breaking point it’s about to they’re about to reach this crisis point and what I want to talk about with you today is exactly how this breaking point is going to happen how this disintegration of the woke ideology is about to go down because the woke cult that I’m talking about is built like an actual cult, and so it’s very predictable, not only how they operate, but how everything is going to fall apart, so let’s get to it.  

All right, with me now is a man who Wikipedia calls an American author, Helen Lewis over at the Free Press and I believe also in The Atlantic, I’m not sure if it was Helen Lewis in The Atlantic or not, lumps together in an article titled “The Golden Age of Gurus.” I thought he would be a perfect person to talk about this with. He’s also the founder of “New Discourses,” which you have to pronounce exactly correctly or else it sounds like “nudist courses,” and I think actually you have both of those URLs, we’ve talked about this before. It is Dr. James Lindsay. 

 James, good to see you. Hey thanks Liz, that is correct, we do own nudistcourses.com and it will redirect you in case you get lost, and sorry about your disappointment if you were looking for something more exciting. I think it’s a perfect redirection, in fact if someone is looking for something tawdry on the web, they should in fact read about Marxism and how it’s corrupting our culture.  

So what I want to ask you first, before we get into the structure or the cult-like structure of the Left, and I’m talking about the ideological Left right now, I wanna ask you how you would define the word “woke.” As you know, a lot of leftists on Twitter in the comments section are trying to redefine this word, saying whenever Republicans use the word woke as a description, they’re using it as a pejorative, and these leftists are claiming that Republicans who use the word woke actually mean anti-black. How do you define the word woke? 

Okay, so depending on how long we want to spend on this, I can tell you why they’re not exactly lying, but in fact that they’re operating from broken definitions. The word woke means having critical consciousness. It’s not more complicated than that. It actually just means being conscientized, as the Brazilian Critical Marxist by the name of Paulo Freire explained, he said that the point of education in fact was to become conscientized, to be conscientized means understanding the structural reality in which we live. So now you’re seeing the world differently.  

You see in terms of structural forces, dehumanizing forms, he said. So we might have systemic racism, systemic sexism, and transphobia and homophobia shape our reality, our social reality, and thus our lived experience, or our lived realities. Becoming awakened to that is being woke. Freire goes on to explain that conscientization means that you understand that if you aren’t awakened to it, and you just go along with things as they are, or you know truth or education or whatever, knowledge as you think it it is as the society says, it is that you’re engaging in what are called domesticating modes, and so being woke means being aware that people are trying to domesticate you all the time, if you’re one of these activists.  

So then we get back to this point that they say it means being anti-black. First of all, black for them means something different. It means being conscientized into a critical consciousness of what it means to be a black person in the West, and so if you are against the idea of a critical consciousness of race, then you are technically, by their definition, being anti-black. And when you say that being woke is bad, or that having a critical consciousness approach to race or sex or gender or sexuality or any of these other factors, if you think that’s bad, well what you’re actually trying to do is domesticate the activists, so you are engaging in the domesticating modes.  

And so being woke means being awakened to the fact that society is structured this way, that it operates this way, and that we must resist it, using a form of criticism that Freire outlined, which is the critical method. Critical theory is what we’ve probably heard of, but that’s one of denunciation of these domesticating forms and modes and these dehumanizing structures. It’s relentless denunciation of those through a critical perspective in a way that announces the possibility of a better world. I saw a quote that isn’t quite exactly what we think of by woke the other day by Greta Thunberg, saying where she was being interviewed about what they were doing, and she says well, it isn’t our job to provide solutions, it’s our job to demand change.  

And that’s what we’re talking about there. It’s that you can see all the problems in the world, and you can demand that somebody do something about them, and it doesn’t matter if you know what it is you’re supposed to do or not, but that’s what woke means. Woke means having a critical consciousness, having been awoke, awakened, or awokened to a new way of seeing the world in terms of structural power and how it operates, and how it harms people, etc. So that’s interesting because it actually means, when the Left says that those on the Right who use the word woke to describe leftist behavior, and sure it is as a pejorative, right, of course it is. But it’s also just a descriptor. 

If it’s a negative descriptor, it’s more a commentary on the behavior of the Left. Then the intent of the person on the right wing who’s using it, it’s really exposing the fact that they’re not advocating for racial equality, they’re not advocating for justice, that they’re advocating for a Marxist ideology. And that’s their way of telling us.  

I personally like when they show their true colors because it’s a lot more powerful coming from the actual activists themselves, letting us know like Patrice Coolers did and Alicia Garza did at the head of Black Lives Matter when they were like oh, we’re trained Marxists. Well, then I didn’t have to sit here and you didn’t have to sit there and say listen, these people are neo-Marxists, they’re pushing actual communism on us. Nope, Black Lives Matter people said it themselves.  

You don’t have to take our word for it. That’s what you hear when you hear when you hear the Left say using the word woke in a pejorative way means anti-black. Yeah, I mean so what people need to understand, a very simple rule of thumb that you need to understand is that in general, Marxists use the same vocabulary you do, but they use a different dictionary. In other words, they are using terms to have specialist meanings, just like in science. If we use the terminus in a scientific sense, sometimes as a very specialist meaning, and it can’t mean other things.  

They’re using terms in a specialist sense, but rather than using everyday words, rather than using scientific terms or using everyday words with a specialist meaning, so you think anti-black means against black people, and then you get defensive and they can convince people that you might be a racist, but they mean anti-capital B black, or capital B black means having awakened, a critical consciousness of what it means to be black under Critical Race Theory in America and engaging in neo-Marxis activism as a result. And so they aren’t lying. 

They’re intentionally misusing words, and I said intentionally just now, that’s actually not even totally fair because I think after a while, if you swim in this kind of cult water long enough, you adopt that mentality. And you actually start to think that’s what the words really mean. That’s how they present this. I first got into this arguing with gender studies and feminists, who were saying that sexism is systemic, and I said well, why didn’t you call it systemic sexism when you mean systemic sexism and leave other sexism out? And they said because all sexism is systemic.  

So they absorbed the whole meaning of the term, so they’re actually using these terms to mean something different than what people think they mean. And then they can play these rhetorical games and come back when you criticize their stuff. They can say that this is a code or a dog whistle for being anti-black. They can be not lying because of what they mean by the word black. It means that, like Larry Elder wasn’t authentically black, right? 

He’s a white face of black, or black face of white supremacy. Dave Chappelle isn’t black. He made jokes from white privilege. We can go down the list of all of the not-black black people because they don’t have the right attitudes, because they’re conservatives or because they made fun of some woke initiative or whatever. And what it means, then, when you’re being black, is for them it’s with the capital B. As we all often see now is that you have adopted a critical consciousness.  

Now unfortunately, lots of people who participate in this don’t know this, and so you’ll have a lot of black people seeking identity in the capital B black, and they end up in this kind of murky zone, where they’re kind of doing some of it, and they aren’t doing some of it because the activists are using the word intentionally in an ambiguous way to manipulate circumstances in people and institutions. And they’re very successful at it.  

Well, you mentioned Larry Elder and you mentioned Dave Chappelle, but the most recent and probably most egregious example of this is Tyre Nichols, who was beat to death by five black police officers. And the reaction from the Left is to say it doesn’t matter that those police officers were black men themselves. This was an act of white supremacy, regardless of the feelings or any ideology of those individual officers, and a lot of a lot of conservatives were like wait a second, this is really contradictory of how we understand the meaning of words how we understand the meaning of intention. And the Left doubled down on this.  

It wasn’t just an accusation, that these individuals were individually racist, and that they had individual racism as a motivating factor behind their brutal murder of this of this young man, Tyre Nichols. This is a perfect example of it. Do you think that the phrase institutional capture, which is becoming more popular in conservative circles, now that we understand what Fauci did at the NIH and the CDC and the FDA and the Department of Education, teachers unions, we see examples of this, do you think vocabulary capture is an accurate parallel to what the Left has done with a lot of these words and phrases?  

Yeah, linguistic capture, dialectical capture, lexical capture, you could come up with a bunch of different words that capture, these are all accurate on the point of institutional capture. Let me be very clear, the target of this accusation, of white supremacy, in that particular event in Memphis, is not those five black officers, either. They were accused of being vehicles of white supremacy, but the target is the institution of policing, and the argument that they made, which I am proud to say that I made before they did not, that I gave them any ideas, this is the only place they could go with it, is the institution of policing is itself white supremacists in its existence. And so even if a black person enters into that profession and starts to operate within an institution, they’ll be infected by those values, those norms, those expectations, that structural reality surrounding them, because this is what Marx called the inversion of praxis.  

This is what the critical theorists refer to as an interjected consciousness, or our false consciousness. They have had the so-called white supremacy attached to the institution impressed into them. So then they become vehicles that reproduce the white supremacy. So to speak, which of course has its own different meaning, they use a different dictionary, so there’s your vocabulary capture. But the point of doing this has nothing to do with those five men. It has nothing to do with them. What it has to do with is calling the institution of policing racists so that they can control the institution. So in other words, their target isn’t the five people that they’re calling out, so to speak.  

They have another target, and this in this case, it’s the institutional target of policing, which they wish to bring under their control. And so they’re not just irritating with these things, they’re not just strange, they’re not just confused, they’re actually deliberate and strategic, and there’s a purpose behind what they’re doing. And they know what they’re doing and how to do it, and they’re actually good at it.  

Well, they’re very good at it. Look at the cultural institutions, the civil institutions, Gromcy might have called them, in our nation. Now they’re entirely captured by the Left. The cultural hegemony has happened. It’s just a matter of if we’re going to recognize it, the reality of the political enemy we face. And once we recognize that what we’re going to do to fight back. So one of the things, though, that I find interesting is how many people in our country have bought into what we’re talking about, have bought into this linguistic capture, this vocabulary capture, wokeism, right?  

It’s not just corporations that are controlled by ESG, it’s not just Democratic politicians and activists and radical college professors. This is an everyday thing that a lot of people, even if they’re not active in politics, are taking part in, and yet I sit here and I have a very hard time believing that the majority of people in our country are Marxists. I don’t believe they are, right? 

I don’t think that most people, even if they’re doing this virtue signaling, are captured by this ideology. So explain to me the structure, because it is deliberate. This is not an accident that these people are captured without knowing that they’re captured. Yeah, it turns out that cults tend not to be like, if you wanna we’re gonna be in a cult. And I do think that woke is a cult. I also think Marxism is a cult. And just spoiler, I think they’re the same cult, as it turns out, with different mechanisms and emphases that they use to achieve their ends.  

But if you were going to join a cult, who’s going to walk up to like the cult building, the office building, and knock on the door, say hello, I would love to join the cult. That’s not how it works. These people will meet you at a coffee shop or a train station or the airport or whatever, and they’ll start to make, especially if you’re new to a college or new to a new city, and they’ll start to befriend you, and they hit you with things like affirmation and acceptance and try to just become your friend. And they don’t really bring you too deeply into it.  

They just start off, and in this case using words differently and getting you to have a psychological commitment around the way that you’re using those captured terms. So they use the words racism or white supremacy or whatever differently, and you’re trying to make friends and you’re trying to fit in, and you start to mimic their uses of the language, and then you are not in the cult yet, but you’re actually kind of being initiated into its outermost circles, and eventually when you start to become emotionally or psychologically or socially or morally dependent upon that circumstance, when you’ve gained enough desire for unity is, malphrased, to jointo the group, the in-group, to actually become something more formally, a member of the cult, then you enter into what in the cult structure you might call an outer school.  

I’m actually borrowing, by the way, I practice it, this is a little strange diversion, but it’ll make sense in a moment. I actually practice one of these old school Chinese martial arts, and so I’m deriving my terminology actually from the Chinese martial art pedagogical structure model, where they have two different levels of students, which are the “wai-jia” and the “nei-jia,” which refer to outer school and, it literally means outer school, and inner school. The outer school students are allowed to practice the techniques, but they aren’t allowed to “know what they mean.”  

The inner school students learn what the techniques mean, and learn to apply them and practice on a deeper level. And then you have at the highest level, you have an inner circle that you would refer to usually with students as disciples. So you have these people that are initiates, that are getting involved. Then you have these people that are familiar with the doctrine, and learning it through study, as they say. “xue-xi” in Chinese, not from Mao, not from my martial art, as it turns out, they’re learning the doctrine of the cult after they’ve already committed to it psychologically, emotionally, and morally. That’s the inner school.  

So you have an outer school, they do most of the work, they carry most of the water, they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re just trying to fit in. That’s most of your Americans who are woke. Then you have an inner school. That’s the ones who are so-called doing the work. They’re going home and reading, even they’re going home and studying what it means, they’re using people’s pronouns, they’re getting into why are we using people’s pronouns, and those people are going from being initiates into being adepts, and the adept, if they are very, very serious, might go on to get a doctorate in this. ‘ 

They might go on to become an organizer or community organizer or whatever, and then they become disciples, which is a much deeper commitment to this. Those people like Patrice Cooler, is standing on stage, giving it away, know what they’re doing. And so the cult structure always has like layers like an onion, and we don’t have to name any particular cults, but you have an outer school in general, it may have multiple levels.  

What in the Marxist cult is they say is that there that’s characterized by a desire for unity, coupled with criticism to bring you deeper and deeper and deeper into the fold. Then there’s an inner school, and they are studying the doctrine. That’s what it’s characterized by. They actually do read Marcuse, they do read Freire and Fannin, they do read Judith Butler, they do read those scholars to post the people in the outer school have never heard of. They may be in the outer school, you’ve heard of candy in the inner school, you’re reading something much harder like Franz Fannin.  

And then the disciples are the ones who become the organizers and the leading scholars in the field, and they actually know what’s going on. It’s a little weirder than that because there’s still a further inner school that are actually the leaders, which are in this case I don’t even know if they often believe it, but they’re funding it. And believe me, they know why they’re funding it, and it may not be for the purposes of the membership of the cult on any level below them.  

So with that, what you can end up with is, if there is a conspiracy at all, it can be a very small conspiracy of a very inner circle of occult held together, say by blackmail, and then they have disciples who are pushing their stuff and they are paid well and taken care of, well, to keep them committed. And then below them, you have people who actually know the cult doctrine well, and study it and teach it to the people who are in the outer school, who have just kind of absorbed it through culture or they’ve had it depressed on them in a process of desire for unity and criticism, for example, in their Dei training at work or their unconscious bias training at work or their SEL lesson at school. That’s exactly what those tools are made to accomplish in those environments. 

 I wanna be practical here. I want to be concrete. I don’t want to be just abstract. So I want to talk about so this highest level this Inner Circle this leadership you said it might not even be an ideological commitment it could be a monetary commitment. They’re certainly the ones that are funding it. WHO would be an example. In the in the cult of wokeness, WHO is an example of the innermost circle, the leadership, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation all immediately come to mind. If you go read the articles, these are very large organizations with often billions of dollars behind them, if you go and look at their articles they publish, it’s virtually all this.  

It’s either woke or sustainability, which are actually two sides of the same program. And so they definitely have the money. They definitely have the resources. They definitely are the ones that are the agenda-setters. They have the ability to spin off. Like Open Society Foundation is very famous for having possibly hundreds or maybe even more than a thousand subsidiary non-profits working under it. For example, the African-American Policy Forum, which is run by Kimberly Crenshaw, the creator of Critical Race Theory, these are the people who know what they’re doing. 

These are the people who are so, let me instead of these four levels in kind of the abstract. Let me be a little more concrete and go back to Mao. He says that there are people who have decided to be socialists, that’s your outer school. Some of them have studied and become Communists ,that’s your inner school. Some of them are loyal enough to become party members, that’s your inner circle. And then some of those can be party officials, that’s your leadership. 

And those are the layers that we’re seeing here. So what we’re talking about is the leadership, and when you look at the higher level players at the World Economic Forum, probably in some of the established things like the Democratic Party or the very left party, I forgot which one it is in Canada, you’re looking at the people who are probably in the know. But United Nations, unquestionably everything they publish is about this now, everything they publish is about this World Economic Forum, we could get into it more and more, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they’re too well placed, too rich, too well organized, too well connected not to know what they’re doing and not to have purposes behind what they’re doing now.  

Is Bill Gates woke? I don’t know. Is he manipulative? Much more likely. Does he have to be woke in order to use woke to manipulate people? No, not at all. And so you can see how the ideological commitment may not be the main driver. A lot of cults, not to be to crafts, but a lot of cults are like smaller scale cults are driven by somebody who basically is like a weird sex fiend, who just wants people to give their wives over or whatever for their own personal use. And so they create this whole like religious movement, and then we know what it’s really about. Does that guy care about the religious stuff? No, probably not. He has a vehicle to get something that he wants. I’m not saying that’s necessarily what some of these people at the top are doing. I don’t know what they believe. I haven’t spoken to them, I haven’t read enough of them to know. 

But it’s not necessary, it’s kind of the point that I’m making with that leadership circle. But again, it’s party leaders, then party, then communist, then socialists, and everybody else according to Mao isn’t people. In fact, he openly said not to have correct political opinions is like not having a soul, so you become a non-person if you’re outside of the cult structure, and that’s usually a tell. That it’s like you know if you’re this kind of Christian and I’m that kind of Christian, or one of us is a Christian, neither one of us is like, you’re not a person, right?  

But if somebody’s saying if you don’t agree with me your personhood status is in question, you might actually be walking down cult status, and that’s what we’ve seen. I mean, we talk about this political upheaval and racial division that’s been roaring in our country for the last almost two decades, but probably since the Obama Administration to the extreme that it is now, and that’s been the biggest difference, is this lack of humanity that the Left has aimed at the Right whenever the right pushes back  

It’s no longer just a matter of political bickering based on different policies. It’s a matter of the Left claims that you aren’t, that you should be de-platformed, canceled, ostracized, essentially socially put to death if you don’t agree with them, and that’s different. That’s the not something that’s existed in our country. 

So inner circle would be the organizations, World Economic Forum, United Nations, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc. The inner school, which you described before as the disciples, these are the people who understand what they’re doing, the ideology, that they’ve studied it and they’re propagating it. Who’s an example of that? I mean, I don’t know how much she knows about what’s really going on, but I named Kimberly Crenshaw a moment ago, one of the leading theorists of Critical Race Theory. These scholars that you constantly see doing zooms these people that are going out and showing 

(30:12) that are doing the consultation your Dei officer at work those people are the inner school they’re people who have done the work as the phrase goes they have studied as they said in Chinese they’ve learned that is Mao’s words for it with a people’s standpoint the Run meal and chop run I can’t even do it renmin Lee Chong the people’s standpoint they’ve they’ve learned to see from the perspective of the oppressed so to speak they understand the systemic nature of reality they’ve been fully awokened they 

(30:43) aren’t just you know going along to get along so the people who are doing the workplace trainings the Consultants the professors the activists the organizers that’s your inner school those are the people who have bothered to read the stuff and they actually know the stuff and they can advance theory at the higher ends of that if they need to so that’s your adapts actually and your disciples are the ones who have been brought in a little bit further into leadership Kimberly crenshaw’s probably we get 

(31:10) these kind of top Scholars Foundation organizers you’re probably dealing with people who have a foot in disciple world and maybe they’re just high-level ad apps it’s all very vague by the way in woke there are no like I mean if it were like the Masons there are initiation rights between levels there’s no initiation rights in woke you you went to college you got a PhD or whatever okay that kind of counts maybe to the top level of leadership there is one and on Epstein’s island or something but I don’t know about these 

(31:40) things for certain. There’s no blatant initiation rights. There are just you know kind of social processes including struggle sessions and criticism, and then eventually study and then you know certification of your study, the market. But we’re talking about consultants and professors and organizers and activists at the level of the internet, so if you are a professional, if you are a professional and not an amateur, if you’re making money off of this, if you’ve been formally trained in this, then you are part of the inner school 

So Nikole Hannah Jones would be someone else. Mark Lamont Hill might be someone else. Alicia Garza, Patrice Coolers, these people who know what they’re talking about, they’re not simply duped by this. So the outer school, talk to me about this because these are actually the people that I’m most interested in, because the inner circle in the inner school are a threat to our country, and are a threat to the globe. Their ideology is poisonous, evil, toxic, satanic, whatever word you want to use to describe, just the worst of the worst, the most destructive to humanity 

But there actually are few and far between right now. They have a tremendous amount of power because their strategy has worked in this institutional capture in our country, but it wouldn’t work if they had not captured the masses, this outer school, these people who are not informed about the ideology. Talk to me more about who these people are, and how they get so gripped by this ideology even when there are voices saying, hold on wait a second, think about what you’re doing.  

Do they just not believe the opposition? Or talk to me about this because this is a head-scratcher to me. Yeah, so this is actually the linchpin in understanding how this works, and I don’t know if it’s a legitimate statistic so I’m going to quote it anyway because I’m very responsible with information. I saw the other day that somebody had put on Twitter something that looked authoritative as an estimate, and I mean the other day like two weeks ago, no way I’m ever going to find it again, that the number, the proportion of the professional workforce that’s actually activists, actually outright woke, is probably about three percent. 

Okay, so that’s your inner school. So it’s like the top three percent top five percent maybe in terms of Having learned about this stuff that count as that. So what do you do with the rest of the of the woke, which maybe is like you know 50 or 100 million people in our country, for example? What are they? Well, they’re not intellectually committed, they don’t know the intellectual side of it, they don’t know the rationalizations, they’re almost always first morally and then secondly socially committed. The way that the woke manipulations work and the way that they’re captured, first of all, there’s Freire’s aspect, which is that teaching a disposition toward criticism to denounce the dehumanizing forms, to learn to see them and denounce them, this is extraordinarily simple. You can teach anybody this in half an hour. All you have to do is tell them did you know that racism is basically baked into everything, here’s an example of how it works, here’s another example of how it works, here’s why skiing is racist, here’s why being outside is racist, here’s why math is racist. 

You give them a few examples they can go out and repeat this very simply. Oh my gosh, did you know that elementary school and its very concept is racist? Here’s why. And they can say this stuff, but it’s just a moral disposition toward believing that there’s this kind of picture in the world, and so they get rewarded when they have the good one. They get affirmed, they get accepted. 

We hear gender-affirming care, for example, within the sexual aspect of this. And then on the other hand, they get denounced or criticized when they’re wrong. So this moral thing, they want to be right, they want to be good. I don’t want to be a bad person, I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, I don’t want to hurt, I don’t want to be a racist, I don’t want to hurt some poor trans person 

So they got enough going on I want to be a good person, so what do I have to do? Pronouns. Okay, let’s use pronouns. And you just start doing that because you want to be a good person. You want to be kind, you want to be nice, you want to be thoughtful, you want to be ahead, you want to be a little progressive, you don’t want to be conservative because Jon Stewart will make fun of you on television and that would be humiliating and shameful and embarrassing if your friends found out you had a conservative opinion.  

Then you couldn’t go to the party anymore. That kind of mentality. That’s a moral commitment that bleeds into a social commitment. So as your morals twist into the cult, because they’ve misused words and you don’t want to be a racist, so you have good morals that are being subverted into cult morals, and you start doing this to your friends and family, some of your friends start shying away from you. So the cult teaches you to say that they’re racist, or they have internalized homophobia if they’re gay or whatever else 

So they have problems that the cult can diagnose. You have to distance yourself from them. They’re not going to get it. They don’t get it, you got to get away from them. And that moral commitment, not only does it alienate you from your formal former social groups, sometimes tearing apart families, it also commits you to your new, woke social group so that if you decide to go against this and they criticize you, what are you going to do, walk?  

You won’t have any friends, or in the professional world you just yeah, you can still work here, we just can’t do anything with you. We’re going to put you in the basement like Milton Wadhams. You can have a job or maybe you can’t, maybe you cross too far. We’re gonna have to cancel you after you get rid of you. So your social life, your professional life, everything might depend after you’ve committed into this for a while, especially if the institution is committed to it.  

If it’s a workplace, may depend on you at least mouthing this stuff. And so that’s actually how it works. The inner school is directing the doctrine and setting the institutional policies and the social norms around you through these kind of brutal, what they call renormalization and demoralization tactics so that you will morally commit to the call, even though you don’t know what you’re committed to, you just think it’s got some sense. It doesn’t have to be clear, that this is good versus being bad, and then later your social circle starts to depend on it. 

Now you’re socially committed, and after that is when you’re stuck enough to where they can start to pressure you to study, you know what, our friendship would deepen if you’d go bother to read white fragility and we can talk about it. I can’t really have a cross-racial relationship with you until you do that kind of mentality. Now your social thing starts to depend on “xue-xi,” on study, and they’ve taken you into the beginning stages from initiate, which is a moral and social commitment, into an intellectual commitment, where you’re going to learn the rationalizations and eventually become an adept or an inner school member 

So the outer school are people who are either going along to get along because they just don’t want to fuss and it’s just easier and they don’t really necessarily know, or they think it has something to do with what it means to be a good person, or they’ve gone down that road far enough to realize that they’re very cat fighty catty nasty friend group is going to treat them really badly if they don’t go along with this and go along with this more deeply as they go.  

And so you get more and more first morally, then emotionally, then psychologically and socially trapped into the outer school as you spend longer in the cult. Meanwhile, it’s separating you from other influences. C uldn’t be around your family because Uncle Joe is conservative. He might talk about Trump at dinner, can’t go there. They’re basically racist, as a matter of fact, and on and on.  

It goes separating you from family, separating you from friends separating you from people outside of the group conservatives anti-black got to stay away from them. You wouldn’t want to get the racism on you. You don’t want to hear racist opinions, you don’t want to have to deal with that, et cetera. So again, it’s first moral, then social, then that’s outer school. Then the inner school starts taking up intellectual commitment to it, so it’s essentially the same thing on a much larger scale, is the age-old like if you’re the nerd in high school, you do what the cool kids say because you don’t want to get a swirly in the bathroom. 

It’s just bullying, more or less, exccept on a much more serious scale, much more institutional scale than just that individual. But it appeals to the same part of human nature that doesn’t want to be rejected or fears being mocked and wants to be accepted for something larger than themselves. And so with the woke or with Communism in general, they identify, I mean, it’s cultic but they identify, they put your sense of identity and lock it inside of your class identity. And then they give you the tools so that you can only interpret your class identity through class struggle. And so this is like I said, it’s a slow, you know you just want to be a good person, your social group depends on it, to then you’re starting to get locked into your identities defined in terms of it, which is a social and psychological phenomenon a moral phenomenon for you that doesn’t happen until it gets much deeper. 

But then by then you’re stuck and then they start getting you to study and so on so it is it’s a very similar phenomenon it’s it’s weaponizing social ostracism in a very particular and nasty way to get people to join up with the world view and so because of and I go back again to Paulo Freire’s work I spent all last year studying Freire published a book in December about Freire. If somebody wants to get it, it’s called “The Marxification of Education.” 

They can go look it up. So I know a little bit about Freire. Freire was basically the big guru. He’s the big Marxist you’ve never heard of. And he was the guru that came up with the educational method by which you can train people to adopt this disposition that’s what he calls a disposition or an attitude occult, attitude of criticism, without ever having to know why they’re a part of it. What they want to be, they don’t want to be an occult. They want to be change makers. They want to change the world.  

They want to be change agents, change activists, change change change change change. And that’s what it’s all about, they want to denounce like we all do, every normal, healthy good person wants to denounce things like racism and so on. Well, they exploit that virtue, that value of goodness, to turn it into this thing that we’ve called racism, and they trick people into it. But Freire made it so that it’s kind of like you can package it up very simply and deliver it to people and train them 

to do the cult thing, even though they’ve never heard any of the cult literature or doctrine at all. Freire really is the key to this, and people haven’t heard of him and don’t know enough about him to understand why and how it works and how it happens. Yeah, and you mentioned this word change, you’ll note this phrase agents for social change, that’s what the leftists use, and they use it positively. But they’re talking about what you’re talking about.  

I mean, even the word progressive, how the leftists describe themselves, what does progressive mean? It means progress, it means change, changing something from the status quo, and very practical. That’s exactly what he might be. More specific, Mao says that progress means progress toward the social estate. So they’re quite specific, a progress means progress in their direction. There is no progress outside of their direction. Everything outside of the direction is reaction. So in a sense, all of this is quite heavy, but it’s kind of encouraging at the same 

time because if we think about the number of people, you mentioned 50 ,100 million people in our country who are willing, let’s be concrete here, to either turn out in the streets for a Black Lives Matter protest or use someone’s quote-unquote preferred neo-Marxist pronouns, the numbers of those of those two groups are enormous. That’s a lot of people. It sounds discouraging when you think that many people being captured by the ideology.  

But if they’re not actually captured by the ideology, they’ve just been socially and morally manipulated into it, then there’s some hope for reversing this. And not just reversing it individually, but reversing it culturally and politically, how it, I guess putting politics aside for a second, because we could, that’s a whole different show to talk about, how to reverse institutional capture. But when we’re talking about the capture of individual minds, how do we go about reversing that for the people that are just pawns? They’re not ideologues. 

One of the short answer is that we just keep exposing it, and when people see through it they get upset and they get disgusted, or if they see how they’ve been tricked, like imagine that you went to a street magician and you watched the trick and then somehow you didn’t have $20 in your pocket anymore. You’d be pretty upset when you figure out how he stole 20 bucks from you, right? And so this is when people are manipulated. They don’t like it when they see it. So exposure to the average person, actually 

we call it red pilling, they eventually see something that doesn’t square, say for example, five black police officers being branded white supremacists through some tortured argument that takes a paragraph or two, and they say this is nonsense. And in fact the reasons for high hopes.  

I see lots of their articles that they write, both kind of popular press but also academic press, and they write a lot about something called activist fatigue, and they’ve been complaining, actually since early of 2021, that with like BLM protests, he said these people will turn out in the streets well they did for six or eight months then it was like are we really still doing this do we really have to keep doing this and they’re very upset with it if you read Klaus Schwab’s books right the great narrative for a better future his 2022 book great reset book two he calls it he complains that corporations you know they get their sustainable and inclusion agenda so that’s sustainability and woke and he says well a lot of corporations are just woke-washing 

And that’s his word. He says woke-washing and green-washing their operations. They’re not really committing to it, they’re not really that interested. In fact, they’re trying to find workarounds, which means most people who are going along on the outer fringes of the outer school, which is probably the overwhelming bulk, I would guess 90% of the woke phenomenon is already showing signs of being sick and tired of it, and yeah they want to be a good person, but like do I have to go to another march? I have to read another book?  

No no no no, I’m gonna live my life. I’m not going to be racist. Fine, okay, so I got you. But they’re already showing signs of fatigue, which means that the psyops hasn’t locked them into the cult. A lot of them are afraid that for their social circles or whatever, but those things can change. Those things can change. And people will change quickly, so there are lots of reasons for hope. But the ways are that you have to just keep exposing the absurdities of their approach. 

I think that they did a great job of that for themselves, with the drag queen phenomenon all summer and the kink phenomenon into the fall, and it just kept getting more and more grotesque to the point where it it’s now not only gross, but boring, and people are kind of fed up and sick of it, but not in this boiled over rage kind of way. That was very scary for a moment, in my opinion, because their goal is always to provoke a reaction that they can use, and now as people are looking at it and they’re like, really, we’re still doing this? You need to cut it out 

And that kind of an attitude means that the spell is being broken for them. It is not actually a good definition of what it means to be a good person. You are not required to be this way. And the more of us that talk about these things, or that show up and go to conferences and get together and have events or whatever it is, even if it’s just meet and greets or whatever, the more it becomes obvious to normal people looking on that there’s a social life outside of the trap, and that then they can start to step away from that, start to question some of those beliefs. 

They can start to look at them more objectively. So exposing it, explaining it, and showing that there’s another world out there at the social and cultural level is actually a long, patient game that feels like a magic trick, but will eventually work because it will steal away too much of their support from people who are sick and tired of having to jump every time a woke inner school member says jump, and that’s actually the truth as for institutions. 

That’s a little harder, actually it’s much harder and nobody knows the answer to that, and that becomes a challenge that’s fairly unique because they’ve actually conquered the vast majority of our institutions, which normally should be the guard rail against this kind of thing, right? Normally, your kid should see something on television or whatever and it’s inappropriate, and then they open their mouth about it at school and the school doesn’t shuttle them off to some club after school and love bomb them into transitioning. 

They say no, that’s not correct. Let’s talk to your parents. Or you know, something. They, the institutions, are supposed to guardrail society, not throw it off the cliff. And so with their institutions captured, we’re in a very weird moment. I’ve been saying for a few months now that woke is a zombie ideology. It controls the institutions while nobody on the ground really supports or accepts it anymore. I mean, 30 percent of the Left probably is still kind of morally committed to it, and then everybody else is sort of tired of it. 

It’s frustrating to people. I talked to Democrat eople all the time, who are just sick and tired of it. It’s like can we just, I won’t be racist, just let me live my life. And so I think there’s a lot of hope, actually. And I think they know that activist fatigue is setting in, and they don’t know why because they hadn’t committed those people to the cult deeply enough, or they alienated them, or they hurt them. It’s called turn and burn. They churned the activists and burned them out. 

And now the activist,s who aren’t ideologically committed, should be ripe for the picking, meaning they should, their minds should be open enough to the lies that have been perpetuated in the name of wokeness, that maybe they can see through it, and hopefully like you said, I find it encouraging, you say you find hope, there is a way, there is a way to right this ship. Dr. James Lindsay, thank you so much for being on the show. Everyone can go and find his work at newdiscourses.com, or you can go to Amazon. 

He’s written about a hundred billion books on all of this stuff, highly recommend them all. James, thanks for being on the show. My pleasure. Thank you, Liz. If you haven’t already, give this video a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button below, and ring the bell to make sure you never miss a video.