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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@kamosa
Some of it is projection, as Gaebolga said, and I think a large part is the desire to feel righteous, for Us to feel Better Than Them. But if being Better Than Them required US to alter Our behavior in any way, that would be both work and an admission that until then We had not, in fact, been Better than Them.
The solution, of course, is not just to make Them worse than Us, but for Them to be as bad as we can imagine. They’re not just abusing children, they’re Baby Killers. No, they’re Satanic Baby Killers. Having set the bar so very low, being Better Than Them requires no introspection, no work, and no change.
There is, of course, another benefit that the leaders see. If They are not just Bad, but the Worst Evil Imaginable, then not only are WE automatically righteous, but when We start killing Them We will be even more righteous.
Which is one reason why the Right’s favored “this word means anything we don’t like” word shifting from “socialist,” “woke,” and SJW” to “groomer” is especially scary to me.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Ooh I like that; I’ll be stealing it.
Is he the ghost story chap?
I suspect you may be thinking of either Arthur Machen or M.R. James; G.K. Chesterton was, among myriad and controversial other things, the author of the Father Brown mysteries (although he did write “The Shop of Ghosts”: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8092/8092-h/8092-h.htm#link2H_4_0038)
@ full metal ox
Ah, indeed I was; thank you. Come on memory, what is happening to you! Keep this up and I’ll stop rewarding you with beer and weed.
@Alan Robertshaw:
I think I may see your problem there.
I’ve had my own memory issues. All the more annoying because, as I’ve grumbled about before, my memory used to be good enough that I never actually learned how to study until I hit third year of University, because I was able to just remember most of what I needed for school up until then (and re-work out most of the rest).
Of course, that was over thirty years ago. so I have other excuses now.
Yeah, because the Chinese Communist Party is so heavily involved in comprehensive sex education and acceptance of non-hetero, non-vanilla sex and gender identities.
Meanwhile, I’d like to see some sexy Bolsheviks. I’m thinking “hmmm, left-wing Americans… Bernie Sanders has nice mittens, but I don’t think he was ever hawt. Lenin and Stalin weren’t handsome either.”
The young woman in the header seems to have a bandolier of corn dogs, which is liable to attract some people. I mean, I’d talk to her, but they gotta still be warm or I’m not eating them.
There was a great article on Vox today about how “they” think, and they traced it to some popular Christian fiction from the 1980s; basically Satanic Panic never stopped.
https://www.vox.com/culture/23033782/frank-peretti-this-present-darkness-piercing-the-darkness-cultural-influence-moral-panic
@ jenora
Memory is such a weird thing. I’ve had to make a bit of a (layperson’s) study of it for work. Obviously memory and recall can be topics of cross examination; but a lot of the received wisdom is wrong. For example, a common question (when you don’t like an answer and you were expecting what they said in their witness statement) is “You would agree that your memory of events would have been much clearer closer in time to the incident than it will be now.” And most people say yes. But that’s not true. Memory of events often becomes clearer as time passes; especially after trauma.
But guidance as to how memory works is now part of our Civil Procedure Rules here.
Heh, weird that I can remember stuff like this; but with normal life stuff it’s like I’m in a pub quiz.
But its lovely to see you again. Next open thread I’d love to hear you thoughts on all the new METI projects. Or as I like to call them “Announcing to the universe that the buffet is open.”
The Hungarian Socialist Republic existed for 133 days, mostly during the summer. They must have been pretty busy if they were able to make time to try turning all the kids gay before they were overthrown. Also, it apparently didn’t work.
Grenada is unique in being the only communist dictatorship that still had the Queen as head of state.
@Gaebolga
Lindsay, who’s been yelling that LGBTQ groups are “groomers” to his sizeable twitter audience, recently spent a weekend hanging out with a member of a literal sex trafficking group, so yeah
Communist-style ‘sexualization’ and references to China, too? China and fellow communist nation North Korea seem quite sexually repressed, actually.
@Mish: Yeah, but see, those people look white and straight and In the Group for him, so it doesn’t matter what they do!
> Jenora Feuer
Well, as Li Hongzhi, the funder of Falun Gong, believes that extraterrestrial being have come on Earth, and thus Chinese people must not mix with other “races” because of the risk to be “contaminated” by said ET (yes, he does not like mixed blood people), this is indeed a pretty good comparison.
Russia? Communist? Not even in name in the last 30+ years.
@ GSS ex-noob
I choose to interpret them as carrots, which would be even more annoying to certain types, since they’re vegan and everything.
@ Alan
Thanks for all the memory stuff in legal proceedings and such! I once read an oldish book about what science then said about what things memory tends to distort the most, and it was really interesting. It had bits about how to assess the reliability of witness accounts and how parts can be reliable even if some details are provably false, though I suspect not all of it was still accurate when I read it.
@GSS ex-noob
Not even Young Stalin? https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/young-stalin-1894-1919/
@occasional reader:
I did not know that part.
I was mostly thinking of:
But yes, that makes the connection even stronger.
@Allandrel:
Saw a post (possibly on Reddit?) a few years back by someone who’d finally found a picture of the haircut he wanted, but was worried to show it at the salon in case the barber recognized the guy in the photo as young Stalin. Responses were mostly along the lines of “unless the hairdresser is also a historian, you’re probably safe,” and “at least you don’t want Hitler’s haircut.”
@Full Metal Ox:
Huh. I’ve read a number of vintage mystery novels where somebody did that, but had never heard before of it happening in real life.
@Johanna Swanson, @Lou C. Purr:
Well, Communists do talk about “seizing the means of production.” Maybe somebody’s got it confused with reproduction?
@Moon Custafer:
Well, Communists do talk about “seizing the means of production.” Maybe somebody’s got it confused with reproduction?
Funny you should bring that up…
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2021/01/29/incel-sexual-communists-want-to-seize-the-means-of-reproduction-which-if-youre-a-woman-is-you/
@ moon custafer
Although maybe avoid Trotsky & Co KommieKutz.
“Be with you in a minute sir. Now let’s see, scissors, comb, ice pick…”
@Allandrel
Yeah, they aren’t leaving themselves any offramps. If the scary other is a satanic baby-killer, there can be no compromise, no common ground; it’s an all or nothing war.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Although maybe avoid Trotsky & Co KommieKutz.
“Be with you in a minute sir. Now let’s see, scissors, comb, ice pick…”
You realize that now you’ve unleashed an Earworm That Will Not Die (and this is how I just now learned that Dave Greenfield now resides in Rock And Roll Heaven):
I… never thought I would say Joseph Stalin looked a snack, but… goddamn, comrade, redistribute those means of production all day long.