Parents watch out! Evil Cultural Marxists are coming for your children! At least that’s what writer and anti-“woke” crusader James Lindsay is saying.
As the enigmatic far-right newspaper The Epoch Times recently wrote:
Young people in the United States are being subjected to communist-style sexualization, according to author and expert James Lindsay.
The goal is to destabilize society to make it ripe for communists to grab power, Lindsay … recently told EpochTV’s “China Insider” program.
And their plan has been afoot for more than a century.
“Communist-style sexualization,” in case you’re wondering, doesn’t involve reciting quotes from the Little Red Book while doing “the Chairman” with your sexual comrade. No, it’s a salacious way of saying that the left in America and elsewhere would like it if children were exposed to sexual education appropriate to their age — something that “the expert” Lindsay considers to be a fundamental assault on Western civilization.
You may also be wondering what exactly Lindsay is an “expert” in. The Epoch Times repeatedly refers to him as one but never offers specifics. As the Falun-Gong-connected newspaper notes, he’s the author of several books denouncing “Race Marxism” and “woke” academics more generally, so I guess he’s an expert in yelling about academic leftists.
What exactly does he think these alleged sex Marxists are up to? Apparently they hope to fill the heads of children with so much confusing sex ed that they can’t help but turn into junior Bolsheviks. As he told his Epoch Times interlocutors:
This is a deliberate program that Marxists have employed since at least the 1910s, starting in Hungary, to try to sexualize children to cause sexual and gender confusion so that they become political activists on behalf of some other agenda.
That “other agenda?” Communism.
The communists, you see, want to introduce sex ed at a young age in order to confuse youngsters and get them to rebel against their parents and society in general.
And it allegedly started more than a century ago. Back during the brief life of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, Lindsay told the Epoch Times, the Hungarian communists
introduced children to sex ed in elementary school, sexualized the children of Hungary in order to separate them from their family, to separate them from their religion, their nation and their culture, essentially getting children … all into these ideas so that when they go home, they would tell their parents, “you know, things have changed, or the Bible is wrong, or whatever our religion is wrong, our traditions are wrong.”
I’m not quite sure how teaching youngsters where babies come from would turn them into angry little atheists but apparently that’s what it does.
Lindsay continued on, blaming Frankfurt School Marxist Herbert Marcuse for the sexual revolution of the 1960s, then attacking “post-structural feminists” for suggesting that gender could be fluid and sex roles can be destructive.
“They used postmodern theory to break down all boundaries whatsoever—not just the idea of gender being a social construct, but sex and sexuality and everything becoming socially constructed, as well,” he told the Epoch Times. “And those people have basically taken over.”
Have taken over what?
He doesn’t say, but quickly moves on to suggest that young people are being “victimized” by these bad people and their bad ideas, which are being used, he says,
to soften children up to get them to be more accepting of the gender and sexual instruction that’s going on in their schools. … The purpose is actually to weaken and destabilize in the short term, so that power can be seized.
What power and where? The article doesn’t specify.
Indeed, while the article is awash with vague intimations of doom, it’s remarkably free of specifics of any kind. Who exactly is pushing what in the schools? We’re not told. What exactly does the allegedly evil and “destabilizing” sex ed curriculum teach? Lindsay and the Epoch Times don’t offer any clues.
But actual facts don’t matter much in the anti-woke crusade, which is all about accusations and insinuations. The reactionaries claim am army of sexy Marxists is trying to befuddle children into becoming young revolutionaries. But this is simply projection. It’s the right that’s trying to befuddle adults into becoming counter-revolutionaries. That’s the real danger here.
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What turns people into progressives (or, if you’re a fascist, communists) is the fact that the right wing has entirely too much power and too much numbingly stupid, not to mention cruel, propaganda.
The planet cannot afford fascism. It never could — but now the situation is desperate. The fascists know they can’t hold onto power much longer, but they’re determined to make as much money and trouble as they can before they exit the stage.
I mean, I suppose that learning about gay people in sex ed made me recognize that they exist and are people just like me, leading me to accept them as equals and reject fascist/conservative (like there’s any meaningful difference these days) attempts to dehumanize them, so… (shrugs)
@KindaSortaHarmless And that’s what bigots like Lindsay are afraid of — losing power because good people like you learn to see through their bullshit.
So, I’mma go out on a limb and say this guy has never been to Hungary. I think he’d get along well with Hungarian Prime Minister Orban.
Is that the Marcuse who coined the term ‘repressive desublimation’? Talking about how people were encouraged to indulge in commodified sexual expression to distract them from thinking about revolution?
In elementary school they say? That in Hungary covers 1-8 grade ie. up to 14 year olds. TEENS HAVING SEX ED! THE HORROR!
Also what does 1910s has to do with 2020s? I mean what they talk about must be the communist government at the end of WW I which lasted only a couple of months.
(It also contributed to us being saddled with Horthy “I-am-only-a-lowly-regent-because-I-wait-for-the-rightful-king-to-return” Miklós by the winners. Who by the way sold us out to Hitler.)
EDIT: Actual after WWII eastern bloc communism they generally complain about was bloody prudish until around the 80’s or so. It also gave rise to abortion bans in several countries (including Hungary, and Romania).
I didn’t need to be indoctrinated by sex ed to start seeing religion as B.S.
When I was in sixth grade, I asked my mom why ‘us’ Christians didn’t observe the dietary laws my Jewish friends did. She told me that in biblical times, people didn’t know about germs and things like trichinosis, they just knew that pork could make people sick and now we know how to safely cook it, implying that those dietary laws were pretty much vestigial.
It didn’t take much for eleven year old me to extrapolate that to sex/birth control issues.
@ hambeast
Bit of a tangent, but you reminded me of something.
Herod the Great was actually from Edom, and his family had been forcibly converted; but he enthusiastically adopted Judaism for political reasons (not least that whole being King of the Jews thing).
But on one occasion he ordered the deaths of all < 2 year old male children in Syria (which is presumably where the Bible story comes from). That included his own heirs (and that may have been the underlying reason).
But that caused Augustus to quip “It’s safer to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son.”
So, learning the truth about reproduction as a kid turns you into a communist. What is with the right’s constant thinking about children being sexualized or in sexual situations or learning about sex. Its like “I think about this all the time, so others must be too.” Really disturbing.
It’s quite a stretch to call James Lindsay a “writer.” Everything he writes reads like a dumb person bought a thesaurus and is trying way too hard to sound smart.
Ah, yes, the old “Everything I don’t like is communism” thing. It’s really been having a renaissance for the past year or so, though in the last month it’s been drowned out by rightwingers yelling, “Groomer! Groomer!” like the seagulls in Finding Nemo because they’re so excited to have learned a new word from Fox News. So I guess sex-ed is grooming kids for communism?
@Alan Robertshaw:
But on one occasion he ordered the deaths of all < 2 year old male children in Syria (which is presumably where the Bible story comes from). That included his own heirs (and that may have been the underlying reason).
Recalling G.K. Chesterton’s haunting lines, “Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in.”
(And that also may have been part of the underlying motive of John Allan Muhammad, the elder of the Beltway (Washington, D.C.) Snipers: he hid the specific murder of his ex-wife inside a terrorist shooting spree.)
The Epoch Times is the official media organ of the Falun Gong, essentially. It has ample cause for its anti-communist stance, since the Chinese government routinely persecutes the Falun Gong (along with other religious organizations). That’s almost enough to garner some sympathy for the publishers of the Epoch Times, but the paper has aligned itself with some pretty skeezy American right-wingers, including showing wholehearted support for Trump.
I remember when the giant scare wasn’t grooming, but satanic sex rings in basements abusing kids back in the 80s. Turned out that was all manufactured. What is the right’s obsession with this stuff?
@John: Falun Gong are a racist and homophobic organization so there is reason not to sympathize with them even without their allegiance with the worst politicians in the US (and Australia and likely other places).
Edited to add: this is not to say that China is right to do bad things to them, just that this does not justify them being a bad organization.
I’ve written about James Lindsay’s work before, but never about James Lindsey per se. It’s interesting that he has written “books”. I would never read them, but I expect that if I skimmed them I’d find a lot of ranting and little to no coherent argumentation.
I mean, based on other things he’s put out. Lindsay is … rather pathetic, actually. Not that I want anyone here to sympathize with him, but the gap between his goals and his potential, his self-regard and his abilities, is so wide you’d need a solar powered dirigible to cross it.
Ah yes, every time I learn about enthusiastic consent & contraception I’m suddenly filled with the inexplicable and startling urge to overthrow the Tsar and implement a system of Marxist-Leninism to create a Worker’s State. Thank God brave scholars like James Lindsay are getting to the bottom of this!
I call BS, Sex Ed is clearly Maoist, not Marxist-Leninist. Even a Philistine like James Lindsay should know that.
For decades now, the American right wing has been almost pathological in accusing others of what they’re guilty of doing themselves. Most fundamental churches in the US have a huge sexual abuse problem, so obviously everyone else must be doing it too, and worse, since they’re the “good guys” (not enough /s for that; even the air quotes don’t capture the monumental delusion required to believe that right wingers are good under any empirical definition)…
@John:
My understanding of the whole Falun Gong vs. Communist Party conflict is basically as follows:
This all explains why they’ve been aligning so heavily with alt-right groups and the like: they’re perfectly fine with authoritarianism, they just don’t like that the other Chinese authoritarians have locked them out of being the ones in charge.
Yes, I can think of fewer things that are more sexy, more predisposed to make me ready to have good sexy times, than a high school sex ed class. Nothing awkward about that entire course!
Are these the same guys who call feminists anti-sex prudes?
@Johanna Swanson: Lots of things (reactionary desire to control women, reactionary Christian sentiment floating around even when it is expressed in non-secular terms, etc.), but I just keep coming back to a colossal failure of empathy and imagination.
Let’s put aside the number of deeply homophobic men who have their own insecurities about their sexuality, including possibly homosexual feelings, and just think of the average conservative as someone who happens to not have their own gay desires. They’re cisgender and don’t feel like an identity that isn’t organic to them is being forced on them.
They see other people claim to disagree.
People with functioning humanity and prosociality say, “Oh, that makes sense, other people are different from me. And just like I appreciated it when someone helped me understand my own particular sexual feelings, those feelings (or, for some, lack thereof apparently) which learning to cope with are critical to a healthy and self-fulfilled adulthood, I can see that someone who is gay and doesn’t see everyone else wanting to kiss the same gender may find it deeply reassuring to be told that that’s totally normal, even if it’s less common”.
People without that see an agenda. Because, unless someone is part of their folk community, they won’t give them the brain space to think about them as people who may just have authentically different needs and interests. They really think that someone trying to teach that gay people exist is actually really about straight people.
@Jenora: That is essentially my read of Falun Gong as well; there was a tiny period where I was on Wikipedia trying to revert the just constant stream of both pro-FG and anti-FG propaganda because it was all so obviously poorly sourced. A lot of people really can’t get over “The enemy of my enemy is not my friend”, so anti-authoritarian, anti-Chinese and anti-communist sentiment often applauds the Falun Gong for their authentic victimization despite the fact that they’re fucking awful, and anti-cultic and anti-religious people see the threat the FG really do pose just like any other cult and then buy Chinese propaganda about them.
@ full metal ox
Ooh I like that; I’ll be stealing it.
Is he the ghost story chap?
Communists are, of course, famously friendly to LGBTQ people and other non-conformists. Just look at Russia or China.