The Full James Lindsay: Academic Hoaxes, Woke Mind Virus, and the Right’s Flirtation with Karl Marx

Hey, these racist teachers have to go.

Today, we know about the woke insanity on college campuses, but I didn't realize how stupid it was until some academics pulled off a hoax. We rewrote a section of mine as intersectional feminism, and this journal has accepted it. James Lindsay and these two others submitted fake research to academic journals. To their surprise, the journals published the papers, and one that claims that dog humping incidents can be taken as evidence of rape culture has been officially honored as excellent scholarship. Thinking, "Oh my god, we got a paper and and it's probably the craziest thing we wrote."

I've posted two short videos with Lindsay, one on the woke left, more recently one on what he calls the woke right. But Lindsay has much more to say about why capitalism is hated and how normal people sometimes fall for dumb and dangerous ideas. Here's our full interview.

Scamming the journals. Why did you do that?

We saw the problem. We were reading the academic journals. My friend Peter Bagosian and I were reading them. We were keeping track of them. There was an account on social media that was showing the crazy papers that were being published for real. And eventually they published a paper about feminism in the science of studying glaciers, glaciology for feminists. It was the most preposterous and kind of horrifying thing I'd ever read. You know, it suggested feminist art projects be part of the glacier science or else it's sexist. And it sounds like I'm making that up, but I'm not. And so Peter Beosian and I decided, why don't we hoax them if they'll publish this? And that had half a million dollars of National Science Foundation money behind it. By the way, that's taxpayer money for science. If they'll publish that, what else will they publish? So, we decided to write one as a trial balloon. We called it the conceptual penis as a social construct. We said penises are socially constructed. They cause all of our problems, especially climate change. And that led us to um develop the project to uh you know expose by publishing as many papers as we could over the course of 2017 and 18, which turned out we submitted 20. Seven remained under peer review. Six had been rejected, but seven had been accepted for publication. One of them won an award for excellence in scholarship. Several of them made it out into the wild.

Excellent nonsense. Excellence in scholarship.

Yeah, that paper was about uh analyzing rape culture by examining dog sex at the dog park.

I have now closely considered the revisions of your manuscript, Dog Park, and and will recommend its publication in gender, place, and culture. Now it's years later. I assume they have crawled away in shame. But no, they're still in business.

Yeah, they're still doing exactly the same thing. And if anything, I think they're doing more of it. They pretended it didn't happen. The the academics, except for the one guy that you interviewed, more or less pretended it didn't happen. There's almost no commentary about it, and they just continued with business as usual ever since.

And the editor I interviewed was very open and honest. Good for him.

What is the test, right? What is the idea here?

The test is to show that you people are ridiculous.

But you're deceiving people without much of a reason.

He wasn't embarrassed. He should have been embarrassed.

No, they're very proud of it. They think that they have cracked the secret code of society and that they're telling us the forgotten truth about how the world really works. That everything's socially constructed. That it's built around dynamics of in systems of oppression and power that you know allow a privileged group to hold itself in a position and exclude all of the marginalized people from the center of society from its benefits from the access to power to shape it. They're very proud of what they're doing. They think that they're they're changing the world for the better.

The paper refises journal accepted titled going in through the back door claimed you could reduce straight male homo hysteria and transphobia through receptive penetrative sex toy use.

Uh what is the problem with that? I I I don't see a problem. It is again it's a statement that could be could be correct.

That paper still cracks me up to this day. They actually one of the peer reviewers actually not the editor but actually called it an important contribution to knowledge. These guys he couldn't see like the editor couldn't see the problem because they're totally captured. actually think that they've they're uncovering secret truths about humanity, right? So this paper, which we literally called going in through the back door like they liked the joke I guess I don't know they don't even have the capacity to tell that the methodology we proposed, which was random interviews with a very small number of people, five or six of whom didn't even qualify for the parameters of the study, could not possibly support the conclusion. They were so desperate to get that conclusion that they didn't care that the methodology wasn't real and that the paper was, you know, this complete farce going in through the back door. I mean, come on.

Elon Musk calls it a woke mind virus, an information technology weapon to propagate what is essentially a mind virus to the rest of Earth.

And it's kind of like that. It spreads among young people.

No, John, they uh they call it a virus themselves. There's actually a paper that came from Arizona State University called Women's Studies as a virus. And they explain that the virus is their ideal metaphor for what they do. They compare themselves favorably to, and I'm not joking, HIV, Ebola, SARS, and then any virus that causes cancer because cancer represents true transformational change.

So, they're happy with it because it's transformational change. That's the idea to completely transform our society which is classically liberal and capitalist and to transform it into something that's socialist.

We've achieved the most incredible political thing. Look what happened. Is this crazy?

Trump got elected. Kamla didn't. The people have pushed back. I assume this is over.

You would think so, but yet again, the universities have fought Trump at every turn. Harvard has refused to comply with demands to oversee its student admittance and faculty hiring processes.

They have no intention of stopping. Again, these are almost like religious zealots. They feel like they found the secret truth of the universe and everybody's going to find out about it and they have almost like a mandate from heaven to push it. So, they haven't stopped even against Trump.

But you've moved on to pointing out a woke right. Well, it's a complicated story. Between 2018 and now, when we talked last, I spent the last, I guess, six or seven years studying what in the world was this woke? How are these papers constructed? Why are they writing this? And I dove as deep into the literature I could. I read thousands of papers. I read hundreds of books, including, you know, kind of the very fundamental texts from Karl Marx and uh all of the rest. Really diving into trying to figure out what woke is. And then I noticed that there is a radical segment embedded within MAGA on the right wing ostensibly that acts the same way that uses the same tactics that has the same mentality of oppressor versus oppressed that has a whole system of power that wants a kind of familyfriendly socialism to replace capitalism. And I became alarmed so I spoke up about it.

Why is it called woke? I just think of them as right-wing crazies.

Woke and crazy. Are they not? Those are kind of two species of the same.

On the left, woke is we've woken up to how privileged we white people are, right? So the right does it the other way. So this is in parallel to what we saw with the fascists awakening to fight communism in the 1920s and 1930s. The communists came along and said, "Well, there's privileged classes in society, the burgeoisi, and you need to wake up and fight against them as the proletariat, the working class." And then the fascists said, "Hold on. Everything's going bad. So we need to wake up that the liberal society, the free society actually enables the communists and we have to fight back the other way and set up a different kind of tyranny." So they it's it's the same energy but the other direction. A lot of people ask me, you know, what is woke right? And it's actually it's really funny. It's simple and everybody who's not kind of part of it understands it immediately. It's people on the right who act like the woke left, who think like the woke left. So they've adopted critical theory. Marxist analysis, but they engage in the same behaviors. That's, you know, the victimhood mentality, the cancel culture, struggle sessions, they bully people online with swarms. They rewrite history.

I honestly think that Hitler was a good guy based upon my own research, not my public education, indoctrination.

He was trying to like encourage community, encourage, you know, family values.

This entire kind of litany of things that we've come to expect from abusive left-wing behavior over the last 5 years. Just imagine right-wing people doing it for allegedly right-wing causes and you've more or less got it.

You rewrote part of the Communist Manifesto and submitted it to American Reformer and they published it.

Yeah, that's right. So, I wanted to test to see if my guess was right that these guys were leaning into critical theory and Marxist analysis. So, I took six pages of the Communist Manifesto and I just swapped out everywhere it says, you know, the proletariat class. I took out proletari class and put in new Christian right which is one of the things they call themselves and then I took everywhere he talks about the burgeoisi and I threw it out and I put classical liberalism and I mentioned global trade and all this actually marks mentioned global trade and I just kept it in there and worked around it and then I fiddled if he talked about economics I changed it to culture and faith and all of this but it's so close to the original communist manifesto that when they accepted and published it that before I even became aware that had been published a comment commenter that reads their magazine left a comment that said, "You guys know you published the Communist Manifesto, right? It's so identical. It's much more identical than the fake papers we wrote for academia, you know, seven years ago." I was very lazy about how I did it. I just copy pasted and changed some of the words. I left with a very iconic preface almost word for word.

yet they published it and were proud of it.

Yeah. They didn't just publish it. When I came out on on December 3rd last year and said, "Here's what I've done. I did this experiment. They published a piece of the communist manifesto. So we can guess that the logic is the same that that Markx used. They accepted that. They said Marx is all over social media. Markx is a great writer. We need to use critical theory. We are postmodernists." And then on the American Reformer magazine itself, rather than taking the article down in shame or whatever they've should have done responsibly, they switched the author's name to mine because I used a fake name, Marcus Carlson.

Can I on the >> marks and Tucker Carl?

No, Marcus Carlson was the closest name I could think of. That was Carl Marx.

Just is the closest thing I No, Tucker didn't cross my mind. So, they took that name off, put my name on and put a note that said, "Well, we were tricked into publishing this, but this is a reasonable aggregation of some of new right thought." So, they stand by it. They say, "Yes, we are using communist logic." They posted it on Twitter saying this is a powerful article that details how the liberal consensus is failing and the new Christian right is ascendant. That's how they see themselves there that they are rising in the culture especially with the youth has a very strong bent to attract young people. They talk about how the young people are getting it and the old the boomers have boomer mentality and aren't getting it. Just like in uh 2015 or thereabouts when Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton was the big story,

whatever you say.

You had that girl come out dancing on her video she made wearing a Bernie shirt and she's like, "Okay, boomer. Okay, boomer."

Okay, okay, boomer.

It's just that dismissiveness of the older generation, which by the way is the tactical structure that Mao Dong used in the cultural revolution to awaken the red guard against the old culture of China, their parents, their teachers and so on to create that generational split. So this group is doing the same generational split.

We are going to destroy the GOP.

Destroy the GOP. Destroy the GOP. Their goal is to destroy the the Republican party so that they can create a power vacuum and fill it with radical right-wing revolutionaries. So the woke right is kind of like the woke left is this kind of litany of bad ideas, right? You have on the woke left, you have the queer theory, the critical race theory, this race obsession, identity obsession. On the woke right, you have identity obsession. Again, it's all facing the other direction. So now instead of gay, it's straight. Instead of uh, you know, racial minority, it's white. So you have white, what are the worst ideas? You have anti-semitism and outright Jew hate.

The Jews had better start being nice to people like us.

We can separate those. Anti-semitism is a conspiracy theory about how society works. Jew hatred is just hating Jews there. It's in a lot of ways worse. Uh you have outright, you know, racism that even culminates up into white nationalism and white supremacy showing up.

You know what I want? Total Aryan victory. That's all I want.

You have a a weird kind of patriarchal whether it's traditionalist patriarchal imagery from kind of the religious side of this or whether it's this weird literally they call themselves perverts. So perverted masculinity of what used to get called the manosphere.

I will state right now that I am absolutely sexist and I'm absolutely a misogynist.

It's very you know masculinist Andrew Tate men should be in charge. Knock the women down or whatever else. So, you've got these really kind of suite of toxic ideas that uh fall way outside of the kind of ideas that support a healthy mainstream society that's not just countering the excesses of the left. The left said we either can be racist or anti-racist. And there is no middle. There's no no there's no not racist. Right? They I ky explicitly said you're either racist or anti-racist. And there's no such thing as not racist. We're either being racist or anti-racist.

And the woke right says, "Yeah, that's right. That's absolutely right. You can either be racist or anti-racist. And anti-racist is what the left did. So, we're going to be racist."

And who are the bad guys? It's global trade.

Yep.

Jews. They call this thing the post-war liberal consensus that following World War II, whether it's in trade or whether it's in in political ideology, we set up a agreement both internationally and within each uh free nation that we will not go too far to the right as they call it. We will not allow fascism or hyper nationalism or ultraism. these kind of extremes that we saw in Italy and Spain and of course Nazi Germany and

we have anti-free speech laws where you're not allowed to say things about the Holocaust,

right? Which is actually troubling. I think free speech is absolutely necessary and a cornerstone and we should allow people to make arguments and then allow people to refute arguments. Uh this is fundamentally my premise, but they believe there's this consensus that purpose was to craft a false conservatism that ex excludes whether it's racial nationalists or ethnationalists, whether it's hyper or ultra nationalists, whether it's outright fascists from the right-wing mode of thought. Some of them are more um palatable than call themselves paleoconservatives or the Buchanan right following after Pat Buchanan's paleoconservative movement from some decades ago. Some of them are wildly radical and have come up with, you know, elaborate conspiracy theories that it's not just a post-war consensus, but that was all, you know, constructed around the Jews, probably by the Jews, and that the Jews control the world.

The red are the executives that are Jewish at these companies. So that's kind of what I'm talking about. This is this invitation into extremism that is predicating itself off of the excesses of the left. The left came around and called everybody a Nazi. So the logic behind this, if we give it the maximum amount of charity, the logic behind this is that if you're actually fighting for the, you know, restoration of America, then the left will think you're a Nazi or a racist and will call you those things. If you are not being called a Nazi, then you are not pushing against the postwar consensus hard enough.

But the fact is that's at the very least an extraordinarily irresponsible way to think about or talk about this issue. But

at the worst end of the spectrum, it's just an invitation to step into those identities, to embrace those identities, which is what we know people do psychologically. One of the positions that the people that I think are holding woke perspectives have is that much of the reason why our society has gone off the rails is because we have been tolerant and accepting of the LGB, the not necessarily the T and the Q. In fact, they get very upset if you try to separate those. They need the unit together just like the left does. And so again, we have this guy saying, "You need to step into a space where you're saying things. You're transgressing the boundaries so that you will get called maybe legitimately a bigot against gay people. If you're not being called a bigot, then you are probably not frequently and courageously enough speaking about um the horrors and the abomination of sodomy."

That's always the message. you are not if you're if you're not you're not taking a sufficient stand against the poison that they believe has corrupted our society that there's this kind of infiltrated corrupting force that has to be purged out of society and everybody needs to be a radical and the test to see if you're a radical or not is if you're being called bad names which of course adds in that if somebody calls you a bad name you're doing the right thing not necessarily you've misstepped or done something wrong and it is true that the left abused these terms but it's also true that there are real limit There is false racism like when the left said that going on a hike is racist. That was ridiculous. But on the other hand, there is there are true accusations of racism. If you hold hostile intent toward a person of a different race because of their race, you are racist. That is a real thing. And so we all know that there's there's a a distinction there, but not in the radicalizing speech. You are to be a bigot. And if somebody calls you for it, that means you're doing the right thing. I'm bothered by them in that now it was just the woke left that hated capitalism, which is what gives people better lives. But now these so-called right-wingers don't want people to buy and sell freely.

No, not at all. They make the exact same arguments that we've heard for for decades that capitalism has actually, you know, made everything about the dollar. Everything's about GDP. And so you lose everything that really matters like kinship and nation and identity. They're openly saying that they are a socialist on the right-wing. But here's their argument. The Marxist socialism didn't work because it didn't incorporate the ideas of identity and nationalism. So they are a in their own words, I'm not exaggerating, I'm not being salacious, national socialist movement.

So they're French. They're no real threat.

I wish that were the case. Uh I've been watching them since 2021 when I attended a conference to speak and somebody in the crowd not somebody on the stage said to me you know your work James is very useful to us for now so we will use you for the time being but when the time comes we will force convert you or kill you and I thought well I should watch these people I didn't take him too seriously but we should watch what these people are doing and I watched them build infrastructure I watched them so for example the American reformer which is not very big. It's somewhat fringe. It's Christian nationalist. Has a lot of money behind it. It's very well connected. It's connected directly to an organization called the Center for Baptist Leadership, which has its executive director in the White House on the regular. So, it is not actually that fringe. And it's all connected also to the National Conservatism Movement, which is also not that fringe, especially in the White House, although they have slightly different ideologies.

explain how national conservatism is different from regular conservatism.

They're bent on this idea that uh that makes them woke that there is a true conservatism that has been lost and forgotten because we decided that being too nationalist is bad. Therefore, what we're going to do is redefine conservatism in terms of national identity, which includes a religious identity. And I don't think they tend to go into an ethnic identity uh as much, but they're a very um religious identity. So, America should be a Christian nation. Israel should be a Jewish nation quite explicitly, for example. Those are two things that they actually talk about. Um national conservatism is actually run by an Israeli, so they're not particularly anti-Jewish. Um, so their idea is that there's an identity politics around national identity located in the cultural moors of who a people are and that that has been pushed out of conservative politics by an illegitimate hegemony that has to be overthrown. Uh, which is woke.

but this boomer doesn't quite get it. And I don't see them as a threat. They've been banned from public debate for a long time. So now there's a fringe.

I wish that was the case. I believe that they are making a realistic bid to insinuate themselves deeply into the MAGA movement. What will happen as as this ascends to use their word as the woke right ascends what will happen? Uh the first thing what we're going to see is we're going to see a bleeding off this broad coalition of people who voted for Trump for the first time in 2024. That includes Democrats. It includes lots of racial minorities, sexual minorities who weren't sure if they should vote for Trump. And these people who voted for Trump for the first time in 2024 are already starting to bleed off. I get messages literally every day now from people saying they regret voting for Trump, not because of anything Trump is doing, but because of how this uh crowd of radicals on the right is acting now that they have access to power. So, we're going to see a bleeding off of the coalition that built Trump. We're going to see a splitting of MAGA on these fractuous issues. Do we support Israel or are we against Israel? We're going to see a splitting of MAGA across that issue. These people won't see eye to eye. And as the the MAGA movement fragments around these polarizing issues and as the woke right literally becomes all the caricatures that the woke left said conservatives are, you're racists, you're sexists, you're homophobes. Then they the woke right say yes, we are. We are those things. The left is going to be able to point. You have a fractured coalition and the left is going to point and say they're all terrible. Hillary Clinton was right to call them deplorable.

What I call the basket of deplorables

and this isn't American politics. And they're going to be able to sweep back in and dominate and undermine Trump's agenda in 26 and 28 and then beyond.

This happened to the Democrats.

That's that's my point. In 2015, if we'd been talking about the woke kids on college campuses, that's what everybody was saying. Oh, it's just some kids on college campuses.

They're just they're following their heart rather than their brain. It'll come to them. Same thing will happen to the misguided millennials once they start writing the checks.

Once they get out in the real world, it'll all stop. That's not what happened. They got out into the real world and transform the real world. These guys are bent on taking power. They are deeply insinuated into the elite strata of MAGA outside of President Trump. I don't think President Trump agrees with them to the degree that he's even aware of it. but in deeply embedded in their media ecosystem, their conference ecosystem, uh, and also like I said into the White House.

You say they're not fringe on Twitter.

They're definitely not fringe on Twitter. They control Twitter and the again the MAGA media ecosystem, the alt media is significantly controlled by these uh, radicals.

but they don't control Twitter. I mean, I see them on my feed sometimes and roll my eyes, but the previous Twitter controlled it from the left and they wouldn't allow people like you or me on.

No, they literally threw me off for 5 months.

But current Twitter has some of these people and if you're seeing a lot of it, maybe it's cuz you're interested in the algorithms feeding it to you.

Some friends of mine did some experiments with this to find out they made completely novel accounts that have interacted with nothing. They have liked nothing, reposted nothing, posted themselves nothing, zero followers. They have one follow. They followed one person because you have to to open your account. And the top recommendation is Elon Musk. So they followed Elon Musk, which is completely benign, whatever. And their feed, their algorithm from an account that does nothing is mostly this radical right-wing stuff. And if you step out of line, you will get swarmed the same way that the left used to swarm you. You will get your account attacked. I know conservative Christians who have spoken out against this, who have had their identities revealed. They they've been doxed. I've been doxed. Who've had their employers harassed over this, who have had their family members exposed over this. The same kinds of behaviors we saw from the left. But they also can attack your account using the various mechanisms within the Twitter reporting system. still just like the radical left did several years ago to get people like me kicked off and they have shut down some of these people's accounts by getting them accused of being a false or impersonation account or whatever else. And there are mechanisms by which these are happening and it happens in very coordinated fashions. And if you talk about that it's happening in a coordinated fashion, a coordinated attack is virtually certain to land on you. So, if you talk about anything within the realm of right-wing politics regularly at all, maybe that does prime your algorithm, but there's nobody else left. The left all left Twitter for the most part.

Well, not all of them. I get leftist stuff.

It's not like it was. They've got their blue sky and I don't know what's going on over there.

Are you back on Twitter?

Yes. Uh after Elon bought

So, they didn't get you banned. You criticized them.

No, they have not got my account shut down yet. They have done other things. I can't look at my notifications whatsoever. So, I can't use Twitter interactively. It's what uh Joe Rogan refers to as post and ghost is about all I can do. So, you post things and you just don't look at what happens. Uh if I post anything on social media on Twitter right now, it is an absolute guarantee that an avalanche of abuse will come underneath. Some of which is quite graphic, a lot of which is just calling me Jewish, which I'm not Jewish. Uh because somehow Jew has become an insult for these people. Um, and it's a it's it's a again a veritable avalanche of this every time. My experience is so toxic.

That's what you mean by you can't check your notifications?

Well, I can if I want to read, you know, a thousand comments an hour about how fat and ugly and Jewish and sexually dysfunctional and whatever else. But it's not, you know, it's not a really productive use of my time to try to find thoughtful comments back to things that I've said to whether or not I want to interact with those or share those to have to to wade through, you know, literally a sewer. It's not all angry people out there. There are kind of a couple of phenomena that go beyond, you know, James said something stupid online, therefore let's get him, right? One of those phenomena is that there are dedicated servers. I mean, the Gropers, as Nick Fuentes calls his group, have what they call groper chats, which are humongous Discord servers, back channel servers, where they coordinate how they're going to attack on on people. So, you say something, you fall a foul of them. And there are thousands of people who spend time in these chat servers whose job it is to go attack whatever they don't like or like and retweet and bolster and congratulate whatever they do like in order to create a false impression of how uh things are liked and disliked on social media and then also to harass people and then to um give people a lot of support when they take the radical positions. Right? If you put out a post and say something very radical, and you get 40,000 likes, but it happened to come from that, you don't know it came from that. You just think you said something popular. So, you get lured into pushing more radicalism. A second phenomenon is not just these back channel group chats, which can be thousands of people. By the way, it's also bot networks. Some of those are going to be run by domestic actors, but they're also being run by foreign actors. Why wouldn't a foreign government do this? China dedicates 16 billion dollars a year of a military budget to attacking with information warfare into the United States. So there are huge bot networks. So what's going to happen for talking to me, you know, I was surprised you guys even wanted to talk to me. It's not just because I'm broadly cancelled with conservatives and I know you guys are, you know, staunchly American libertarian, but um you're going to get attacked on social media for this. You're going to get swarmed. They're going to make clips of it. They're going to try to take it out of context. They're going to try to make you look bad. They're going to call you all kinds of names because you've associated with me. Guilt by association is another one of those woke left on the woke right tactics. And um you'll get attacked most likely on the stuff you put out by bot networks and these these group swarms. Um, and I hope that doesn't happen to you. It's unpleasant, but weather the storm the best you can.

And I want to think of this as a small fringe movement, but some of them are now in Congress.

We should be Christian nationalists. We have a sickness in America. We we really do have a war of of good versus evil or evil versus good.

Yeah, she's been saying some very radical things uh lately uh in those lines. And um embracing the term Christian nationalist is a little complex and dangerous because it means a variety of things. It could just mean that you believe in a Christian and civic renewal and that you believe in your country America, you know, cross and flag. But it can also mean some very extreme things. Um, for example, that we have a theocracy. Um, there's a book called The Case for Christian Nationalism written by a man named Steven Wolf. It makes that case unambiguously that we should have a Christian prince who is the highest office in the land above president, above Congress, above the judiciary, uh, who is going to be chosen, not elected, and and is going to be the embodiment of Jesus on earth. That's now going to direct the American public. Blasphemers, idolattors, people of the wrong religions, atheists will all be punished so that the uh broad civic religion of whatever denomination of Christianity I guess is in the is in the White House or in the Christian Prince I guess that denomination is going to be upheld and it's not going to be spoiled and if you don't you're going to be punished. He explicitly writes all of this. Now, the interesting part about this book, The Case for Christian Nationalism, is that it is endorsed on its cover by the Israeli Jewish creator of National Conservatism, Yoram Hazone, which this book would have him punished for being a practicing Orthodox Jew, but he's endorsed the book on its cover. There's a very mysterious phenomenon that is very hard to parse uh unless you see it through a lens of operationalizing an attempt to grab power for the movement through some kind of a radical politic. And there are others I mean that are that are close of this same line of thinking. William Wolf who's not related to Steven Wolf is a political operator. He works a lot in DC. He's the executive director of something called the Center for Baptist Leadership, uh, which is directly tied to the American Reformer that I hoaxed. And he pushes similar views, although he's a little shiftier in terms of what he'll commit to. He signals that he agrees with these things when people put them on social media and then later deletes the posts. This is a pretty typical behavior of his. Um, but Marjorie has been pushing a lot of these ideas uh lately. Lauren Boowbert.

maybe we need to have some sort of legislation that requires constitution alive and biblical citizenship training.

right? So, a direct violation of the first amendment and the intention of the founders that freedom of conscience would not be violated. Uh, as a Tennessean, which is a great um opportunity. Now, it is fair. of the Tennessee state constitution does prohibit atheists from holding public office which later got had to be nullified by the first amendment uh requirements of the of the country. But it also explicitly article 1 section three of the Tennessee state constitution explicitly says there will be total freedom of religion and nothing that violates freedom of conscience will be permitted. And therefore uh that we can say that was a 1796 ratification. We can say at the time at the end of the 18th century when the United States was figuring out who and what it was that the mood of liberty which eventually won out with no state religions anywhere by the end of the civil war or thereabouts. Uh that this mood toward liberty of conscience of your ability to believe as you will to worship as you will without state interference um is is a bedrock idea of the American experiment. This is a Christian nation and the Christians in this country demand that we have Christian leaders governing this country. This is a very common line that they that they support that uh what has been excluded unfairly by the evil machinations of religious liberty which they call secularism and conflate with the individual being non-religious is the actual cultural rot that their guidance is going to have to step in and and correct by compelling us to hold religious belief or in the words for example of another guy Charles Haywood um at least to pretend.

When we contacted you to talk about this stuff, you said you're surprised we're talking to you.

I'm surprised anybody's talking to me right now. I've been cancelled like how the left threw me out very unceremoniously after the papers. Much more actually. You think the papers would have really ended me with the left. But no, it was when I said I was going to vote for Donald Trump in 2020 is when they really kicked me out. They flipped out. I was labeled crazy. I was labeled I don't even know if you can say this word, but they called me openly They went all out and I wasn't invited allowed to talk to anybody on the left anymore. That was the end of that. I'm voting for Trump.

Tim P, podcaster who I've praised for going there and seeing what's going on, says

James Lindsay's become so pathetic and desperate that he's destroyed what brand he had cuz I think he's trying desperately to get back in with the left. at some point he decided Trump is going to lose and he doesn't want to be on the wrong side of history.

That's exactly the opposite of all of my intentions. I have no desire to be back on the left. I'm willing to talk to anyone who will talk to me in good faith, but my goal is not to build a new sand castle on the left. I was never to build a sand castle on the right either. My goal was to speak the truth about what I see happening in the world with the greatest amount of clarity that I can. and let the chips fall where they may. And that's always been my goal. I actually do not think Trump is going to lose and I'm trying to get away from it. I think that as we just heard from Mr. Fuentes wanting to destroy the GOP, he famously opposed Trump before the 2024 election uh controversially. We see that if anything in my opposition to these people uh that I actually support President Trump, which I do. I voted for President Trump in 2020. I voted for him again in 2024. I've been very enthusiastic about supporting him here and abroad. And I don't think he's going to lose unless he's undermined on his own side by a radicalism that he can't contain.

So you get trashed by these people on the woke right and by the left, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Lindsay promotes conspiracy theory alleging a communist plot to create totalitarian world government. He's repeatedly attacked the World Economic Forum. I don't think it's even conspiratorial. You just go to their website. There's a thing called Agenda 2030 at the United Nations. It sounds like a conspiracy because it says agenda, but you know, pretty much everything that the United Nations has is completely dressed up in agenda 2030. Garp. I see ads in the airports for agenda 2030. It's in all the schools. There's outright curriculum that has been produced for the sustainable development agenda. Okay, so that's fine. So, what is the World Economic Forum?

But wait a second. What's the What's the 2030 agenda? What's wrong with it? It's 17 goals that they have. The 17th goal is greater global cooperation that is to centralize power around whether it's environmental action or whether it's you know kind of more uh friendly sounding things like ending poverty and ending hunger. Uh they've got all of these different goals that they've laid out but every single one of them requires you to concentrate more and more and more power in a global international organization. When we talk about uh the attempt last year for example with the World Health Organization which is subsidiary to the United Nations as part of the United Nations where Tedros Gabracus had come out and was explicitly trying to put forth a pandemic accord that was going to hand over in any public health emergency all power to dictate its response to the World Health Organization. So the United Nations for example, this kind of move is all to concentrate power in a centralized global location to strip national sovereignty and to strip individual sovereignty for how we're going to deal with whether it's pandemics or whether it's going to be pollution or whatever they choose to declare to be a problem. If we're too rich in the West and somebody in Africa is starving and we have to end hunger, well maybe they're going to have to do something about that and and seize and redistribute assets. So I completely believe that and my thought with this is that that's the engine probably in partnership or at least side by side with the CCP and its agenda for global power holding and they're communist. It's in the name. It's one of the C's and that they work like the engine if you imagine a car and the World Economic Forum is the transmission. If you're going to get the power out to the wheels and make something happen in the world, you have to have a transmission in your car. And the transmission works at the world economic forum by bringing world leaders, NOS's and uh business leaders, many of the largest uh corporations, corporate leaders into the same room in binding them around an agreement. It's an informal agreement as far as I know to uphold this stakeholder economy model. And the stakeholder economy model was going to be the meant to serve this United Nations agenda. So that's the transmission. That's how you get policy makers, nonprofits, and corporate entities exercising their power within the market to operate as a single entity or as a cartel if you want more colorful flat language.

And I would think that the nationalist right who you're criticizing would agree with you about that.

Well, that's because they want to control the power themselves. They do somewhat agree, but they also hold the same stakeholder model. So they want to implement the stakeholder model peace meal rather than in a single global block. So the stakeholder model is in fact the thing that Tucker Carlson and JD Vance were arguing against Ben Shapiro for the the start of that argument in 2018 or 2019 sorry

there were massive costs to the industrial revolution half

but you say you're a fan of capitalism and development we wouldn't have all the cool stuff we have right I mean

maybe yeah of look I'm for capitalism

the start of that argument was that Tucker Carlson did a weird monologue where he said that he would support Elizabeth Warren for president over Trump if she dropped dropped the identity politics because he really liked her economic program.

Many of Warren's policy prescriptions make obvious sense.

Her economic program had come out the previous year.

Yeah, it's pretty astonishing. And you can go back the previous year. Elizabeth Warren had put forth something called the accountable capitalism act which was going to restrain capitalism and restrain uh the way that corporations are able to behave under the brand name of accountability. And this was the thing that he favored and Ben Shapiro opposed. and JD Vance said, "No, we actually do need a more accountable capitalism. We can't have free capitalism."

I think that what we have to recognize is that at some level the American government is going to be doing something in the American economy and we should have a discreet view about what we want that to be and we should be pushing back against the excesses of the left, which it's hard to do if your view is, well, the government shouldn't be doing anything visav the economy, which I'm not saying of course is your view. I don't I don't want to caricature it. But but I I think

that's pretty close actually. I don't I think you're caricatururing it pretty close.

And so this is the stakeholder model. There will be stakeholder representatives who decide what we can and cannot do in business, how big our businesses can be, what actions they can engage in in the name of the stakeholders and this is the model that they are actually proposing. Now, if I tell you, it's going to be very shocking if you find out where the first place this model was ever implemented. The first place the stakeholder model was ever legally implemented was in 1937 in Germany. And it was called the Nazi Shareholder Act. And you can go read the bill yourself if you can find it in English. It's hard. It's in German. But the Nazi shareholder act said that the corporate power had to serve the folk, the people, and therefore the party was going to act as stakeholder representative so that the corporations would have to rely less on shareholder primacy and deflect at least some of their shareholder responsibility into party into the Nazi party. And so the corporate environment was now going to serve the Nazi regime. And of course, we're not talking about Nazis now. It's just the same model, the stakeholder model that we're going to now take out shareholder primacy and replace it with stakeholder primacy where the stakeholders are the people. So, everybody, but everybody can't actually vote in a shareholder or stakeholder meeting. So you're going to have unelected, unaccountable, expert representatives who are going to decide what is in the interests of if you want on the woke left, they say what's in the interest of sustainability and inclusion. And if you want on the woke right, they call it the common good conservatism. In my opinion of that is, who are you to tell me what the common good is?

And Ben Shapiro is woke right.

No, definitely not. Ben Shapiro is certainly not. The woke right are the same kind of radicals. Ben Shapiro is a conservative outside of kind of the what we would consider the, you know, the establishment or whatever in his Daily Wire role, but he still believes in a fundamentally liberal society. Ben Shapiro is in no way woke right. The woke right is a much more radical segment that does not want to continue with the mainstream.

American project and conservative values. They have, in fact, they openly say that they're not conservative, that they are radical right-wing revolutionaries is a quote I hear from them a lot.

"You say that Vice President Vance is in this cult?"

Vice President Vance is close to many of the people who are especially the thinkers behind this. So philosophers like Gladen Papen and Patrick Denin who most people haven't heard of but who have been pushing the post liberty philosophy of Leo Strauss particularly but other thinkers James Bham is another name that they're very frequently citing but we don't have to get into the philosophical weeds and like I said in 2019 he very clearly argued against Ben Shapiro saying that the point of Hillbilly Elegy was that our capitalism had abandoned the national interest.

"While the government shouldn't be controlling the American economy, we should have as a policy consensus a view about what we want the economy to be and to put a little bit of a thumb on the scale to make that possible. That's sort of more where I wish we would go. Maybe protect its nascent industries from foreign competition. They had abandoned the people of America, people like his family, which is what the book was ultimately about. And so that we need to think about a different kind of economic system and Tucker Carlson agreed with him. So there is this element. I don't think that he's obviously, you know, dipping into anti-semitism or white nationalism or any of that. I doubt that he's a fascist. I think he describes himself in a technical term as a distributist. Uh, which is just another way of saying your company got too big so we need to take some of your property and distribute it further down the chain. The means of production are to be distributed more widely. And so he's very against large multinational corporations and the things that they do and wants to limit them specifically around the concept of a national not just interest but a national identity as well rooted in both American whatever heritage identity refers to that's a word that they use but also in terms of a religious identity."

"But reading Hillbilly which I thought was a terrific book and insightful he does praise Toyota for creating jobs for people in West Virginia. International trade."

Very complicated that he explicitly says in 2019 that to answer Ben Shapiro that the reason that what the book is about is that our big multinational corporations are selling out the American national interest and that we need something different.

"And some people do lose jobs because of global trade. Certainly, yeah, was one of the consequences of it. And these are actually real issues. And I think that the Trump administration with either wisely or unwisely is attempting to tackle them. The tariffs experiment is certainly an attempt to tackle that issue. Um, trying to figure out what do we do with the fact that China has become our primary supplier of virtually everything. That Mexico is a major manufacturer of almost everything. That even allied nations like Taiwan are overwhelmingly producing almost all of our semiconductors that we use for chips. These are real difficult questions that it is actually in the American national interest."

"Why is it a difficult question? I think of people in Mexico and Taiwan as our friends and they sell us stuff."

"Do you think of people in China as our friends?"

"Well, the government is not."

"The people of course and the government is is not. And so the government can if if you have most of your manufacturing located in a foreign country that decides to become a hostile interest, you've got a major problem on your hands. If you in whether it's a trade war or whatever it happens to be, if they decide to turn off the tap to something you need like prescription drugs, you're in a very vulnerable position."

"And it puzzles me in that now we know what works. We can look at different countries. See the United States and Hong Kong and Singapore and free markets make people's lives better off and as they continue to lift people out of poverty, they keep getting attacked because it works. And when you have free people who can engage freely with one another in trade or other ways, you actually have a literally a rising of all ships because what you have is a a people who are free to do with their things as they will. And they therefore can implement their stuff, their money, their resources, their talents, whatever they happen to be to solve problems for other people. And when you solve a problem for other people, even if it's a kind of uh, you know, flimsy silly thing like entertaining them with a silly game on their phone, when you solve a problem for other people, they'll give you money for it in exchange. And what happens is you actually generate value because you have two parties. One who's exercising their property and their talent to produce something that they have in excess. That's a surplus. And they're willing to sell some of that surplus to somebody else who's willing to part with their financial resources in order to obtain it. So both parties receive more value in a fair and free exchange which means you've created wealth. That's what wealth is. And that's why capitalism raises us out of poverty and it's why it raises people's standard of living and it's why it actually leads to greater prosperity uh for everybody who gets to participate in it. But the problem is it requires people to be free, John. They have to be free. And you can't control people who are free. And they might do the wrong things. They might make a silly game on their phone. Or they might produce illicit materials that, you know, pornography or whatever else that they don't want sold. And those are questions that every society has to decide. Where's the line between, you know, favorable and illicit materials? But you can't trust people to just do the right thing. So we need to have an government system to tell them to do the right thing in the name of the common good. That's the mentality. Well, who's going to decide that? Well, only the enlightened thinkers who understand the stakes and that are the true representatives of the stakeholders. If poor people can't make good decisions for themselves, they need an elite who will tell them what to do and then they will solve the problem. This is what the woke right subscribes to. They it's elite theory from the Italian school if you want or on down. There are cultural elites who have to set the tone because the plebs and the pearls and the hoy paloy aren't capable of managing their own affairs. And if you need proof that they're not, just look what freedom has got us so far. That's their argument."

"Tucker Carlson you mentioned."

"Is he woke right?"

"I think he is. Yeah."

"Why? First of all, just to say he's in this Pat Buchanan mode that I think that is his objective is to bring Buchanan style paleoconservative they called it politics to be the mainstream current of the American rightwing and the Republican party. So that's I think where he starts. But if you listen to what he does got a very consistent pattern is it's that which we are not supposed to know is more likely to be true. He interviews these conspiracy theorists, but he doesn't totally buy what they say."

"But no, but he gives them softball interviews where he asks them no challenging questions and uh lets them speak at length, which is fine. This is free speech and it's his platform. He's more than welcome to do that. But his justification for why we should believe these things is other things have been withheld from us. We were lied to about a lot during COVID, for example. Therefore, whatever they don't want us to know, you're not allowed to talk about is more likely to be true than not. But it's the woke way of knowing. And the centerpiece, as we've all heard for years now, what's the centerpiece of of of woke knowledge, right? It's other ways of knowing, indigenous ways of knowing, feminist ways of knowing, right? We've heard those terms again and again. We see this in country after country. There's a major struggle in New Zealand right now uh where something called muranga mauy which is Mauy ways of knowing is being considered by the government to be treated as equal to science. We saw the science and roads must fall movements in South Africa that have had disastrous effects. Other ways of knowing indigenous knowledges that's what was in the feminist glacier paper that I objected to feminist ways of knowing and indigenous ways of knowing. So Tucker has a presentation that there are other ways of knowing outside of what they will let us talk about or know and that if it's an other way of knowing, it's more likely to be true. And that's what I say is woke thinking."

"So that includes Winston Churchill was actually evil, not"

"Correct. How would you assess Winston Churchill?"

"I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War."

"That the winners of World War II, so to speak, rewrote the history of World War II. So that we would believe that Hitler was objectively evil and that Churchill and to a degree FDR were objectively good and that there was no crooked dealing with Stalin or that some kind of an alliance that went beyond the war alliance. And so that this was all a hu the belief is this was all a huge lie. So we need to start looking at alternative histories of World War II. Very much like how the New York Times 1619 project said we had to look at alternative histories of how the American Republic was founded in 1619 with slavery or howard Zinn wrote the people's history of the United States and did a complete hatchet job to explain that from Christopher Columbus on forward. It's always been a means of putting the money elite in control of everybody else. It's just a revisionist history that tells the completely opposite story on the basis that the official narrative is very likely or must be corrupt."

"And Howard Zinn's people's history is still what most of the kids learn. And"

"I hear it standing."

"I think, by itself is more powerful than all these woke right people put together. I don't know how many podcasts you listen to, but the average young conservative does, while they may be forced to read Howard Zinn in the classroom, spends a lot of time listening to podcasts from the alt media space. So, we see statistics like that. The younger generations, the younger you go, the more conservative they are. But my point is that after a certain point, they're not getting more conservative. They're getting more radical. Like I said, radical right-wing revolutionaries, um, is is the descriptor that they're using. In a sense, it's great that we're having a conservative revival, and I think it's a necessary corrective in the United States in a lot of ways, including the religious revival that we're seeing. People getting back into church, trying to get civically engaged, trying to think about what it means to have been an American and to conserve that, you know, for future generations and their families and to prioritize. But there's also called falling off of the cliff, right? And going completely bonkers, which I think the right, you said crazy, I say woke, but I think that woke is the mechanism of falling off of that cliff."

"One Tucker Carlson title, it's time to finally tell the truth about 9/11."

"There are likely unanswered questions that the public doesn't know about that situation. So that's a grain of truth, right? And there are a lot of people who speculate, which is a very fertile field. But the conspiracy theory in general serves as a kind of gateway. One conspiracy theory leads to another leads to another leads to another. The the flat earth conspiracy actually has this function. You you will buy into that and you think, 'Wow, they've lied to me about all of these things.' You're more likely to believe they've lied to me about this next thing. So if you're a propagandist, I'm not calling Tucker Carlson a propagandist. I'm speaking in general. If you are a propagandist, you can say, 'Look at A. They lied to you about A. Look at B. They lied to you about B. Now look at C, which is something they want you to believe that's not true.'"

"And they don't want you to think anything."

"That's right. So there is there is a there is a mechanism by which you can lead people into propaganda, miseducation uh about the world that they're in by using grains of truth of things that they've been lied to about in the past. One of the things woke does, it doesn't matter if it's left or right or if it were in in service to some other kind of position, religion or whatever else, is that it marries a truth to a lie. And so what that means is they tell a little bit of truth and then they wrap it in a lie and or the other way around. Maybe they tell a little bit of truth and it's like the the it's like they tell they want to tell a lie and it's like the pill inside of a piece of cheese you give to your dog, right? So the the the truth is the cheese around the pill and so they they marry a truth to a lie. So the left said there are all these racial disparities. Look, equity means that there should be equ if if if all the races are really being treated equally. If we're actually all equal as races, then what we should see is proportionally the same number of people from different races achieving at the same rates. And that's called equity. And we don't see that. So therefore, it's called disparate impact analysis. We must have discrimination hidden somewhere. So, we're going to start fudging the access points in order to overcome the inequity. That's the leftist view, right? But it is true that there are differences and outcomes. It's not true that there's a hidden discrimination that's causing it. There are other forces. James Deore famously got fired from Google for talking about that with why women are less prone to show up in tech and brought data to the table and he got in trouble for that. So, the woke right does the same thing. It is true in my opinion at least I think it's just true that there is a global effort to drag the world into a socialist or communist structure that has suppressed right-wing speech. We all experienced it that has tried to control the populations. There are lots of grains of truth from which they can launch. It is true that the left has been excessive with calling everything in the world racist and sexist and homophobic and it goes on and on. Those are all true, but it doesn't it doesn't mean that it's also true that the correct solution to this is a radical nationalism is throwing out the Constitution uh as a failed document or that we should lean into actual racism and sexism and abuse and bigotry as some kind of a defiant stand. So, they've they've wrapped that little bit of truth with a lie in order to be able to get people to go radical. And this is exactly what the woke left did."

"Back to attacking you from the left. This one more from the Southern Poverty Law Center. You're the leading voice and reactionary anti-student inclusion, anti-LGBTQ."

"Yeah, I hear these things a lot. And this is obviously sol it's it's okay with LGBTQ."

"Yeah, of course. I have no pro. Well, hold on. Let's be correct. LGBT Yes. T very complicated. Mostly know Q absolutely not. Q is a political stance designed in its own definition queer is defined by David Halper and you can look it up. It is defined as whatever is at odds or opposed to the normal, the legitimate and the dominant. I am not okay with a permanent transgressive political philosophy. So the Q, that one's out. But this is the trick, John, and this is how it works. I don't want the Q. I think the T is completely trans is completely misunderstood and it's a tragedy what's happening. I'm completely fine with LGBT. I don't care. That's fine. Live your life. You know, separate adult versus child. Separate public versus private and be happy with whatever your your cards are that if you can do that. Be responsible with it and it's fine. Who cares? So, I have no problem there. But they say James is anti-LLGBTQ as though I'm against all five of those things where I want a clearer understanding. I'm fine with three of them. I want a clear understanding of the T and I am opposed to the political project of the Q."

"I thought the Q queer just meant different. Not the normal hetero homosexual, just different."

"No, it's actually defined very explicitly by David Halper and the book is called St. Fuko. It's on page 62 if anybody wants to look it up. It's very explicitly defined as being unlike gay identity. Uh, it is a positional not he says it is not positive. In other words, it's not real. It is positional. In other words, it's political. It is a political identity that has no essence. He says that is built around opposing the normal and the legitimate and the dominant. And then he goes on to say it is queer is anybody who is or feels feels marginalized as a result of their sexual practices. If they feel marginalized, I'm sympathetic."

"I'm sympathetic to a point. I It depends. I'm not sympathetic to somebody who feels marginalized because they can't walk down the middle of the street in daylight with a child dressed in fetish gear. They are not marginalized. They are imagining that they're marginalized. So them feeling marginalized as a result of this is not adequate."

"You talk about how these ideas spread the woke mind virus."

"Yeah. So, um, the way that this kind of, uh, way of thinking about the world, woke way of thinking spreads is it is sort of viral, but it's not a virus like you go out in the world and catch it from somebody else coughing or whatever. There's no viral particles. It spreads through ideas. Um, it's a mimetic, as you might say, virus, a mind virus, right? And so, the way it spreads is through ideology and people promoting and pushing the ideology. So, people put out these distorted and purposed ideas. That's what the ideology is about, about how the world really works. And they try to convince people to see the world in a new light or to wake up. That's why I call it woke. And so we know that there are um lots of cases where things that people are seeing online lead to them for whatever reasons to pick them up. So, one example that's almost a little silly but is very frightening honestly is when especially I think young girls were watching TikTok videos of of of some somebody with Tourette's having their ticks and whatever else and they started to develop these ticks even though they don't themselves have Tourette's. And then we saw"

"They weren't just making fun of them or"

"No, no, no. It's the phenomenon of social contagion, but that wasn't ideological in this case. This was mimicry. Um, and so we saw this also with the woke left with the trans phenomenon where we saw this rapid onset gender dysphoria as Lisa Litman called it where you had this rapid explosion thousands of percentage points raising of young women in particular, but young men to a degree picking up uh transgender identity and so quickly."

"Young women feeling I'm really a man born the wrong way. Woman feeling I'm I'm actually a boy and the discomfort that I have in my body whether it's due to you know going through puberty whether it's um having been you know grabbed or or traumatized in some way the feelings of insecurity about their body get channeled into this well maybe you're actually a boy you can hide from your girlishness by being a boy and that has exploded as every parent in the country unfortunately knows since just 2015 so this is a social contagion phenomenon And how did it spread? Well, this ideology was being spread in fringe places, I'll add, on Tumblr and then later TikTok and across social media. And eventually it started to work its way into the school curriculum with the so-called genderbread person and the gender unicorn and there's 200 genders and which one are you? Let's all explore it. There's not everybody's the same kind of lesson in plans that fall under a ten. So again, United Nations, it comes from a program called comprehensive sexuality education which was developed at the United Nations in 2003 in partnership with the International Planned Parenthood Federation and has been deployed explicitly in our curriculum across not just the United States but across the world in UN member states. So we saw that there not to get diverted and we see it again with the woke right and their their media ecosystems. You see people posturing very radical ideas. You see them displaying um they call it being based, but what they mean is being transgressive of social norms. Some of which came from the radical left, some of which come from actually being a responsible norm, like not using racial slurs, not blaming everything on the Jews or engaging in anti-semitic conspiracy theories and so on. And to step into those is socially rewarded in this especially youthkeed media ecosystem that's kind of flourishing kind of under the surface where boomers like us even though I'm not a boomer I'm a boomer according to these people wouldn't see it and so they're catching the same idea rather than deciding there are 200 genders and maybe I can be you know a tree in my spare time now instead that they're they're deciding you know, maybe racism is what actually held society together and we should be a little bit more racist. Maybe we really have a superior race in white people. These kinds of things. And they edge further and further into it. They transgress further and further into it. And this is the way that the mind virus spreads. You create a social reward system for participating. The Tourette's kids, their friends give them thumbs up when they make a video with their ticks in it. And then on the other end, somebody says something, you know, a little bit more and more casually racist and their friends give them a thumbs up and it goes viral on social media eventually and they say, 'Well, I should do more of this.' Or they get invited to the cool parties. Uh, big in DC culture right now."

"And just backing up to a part about the kids changing gender. Um, in some cases it's true."

"What is"

"That the woman feels she's in the wrong body. It is actually true that there are people who have a persistent feeling that their sex identity does not match their sex. That is true. The baseline rate of that before this explosion in the past 10 years, the baseline rate of that was a some very small fraction, three out of 10,000 or less suffer it primarily in puberty. 80 some odd percent grow out of it. In other words, puberty is the cure. Uh, you go through puberty, you realize who you are. The hormones calm down in your brain and you you know deal with growing up and the vast majority of them desist from that but it does turn out to be stable and persistent in a small segment of the population that may merit a DSM uh designation I don't know a diagnostic statistical manual psychiatric diagnosis but it's very rare it is actually very rare and so what you actually have are a larger body of people who for social reasons or for uh reasons that overlap with other psychological comorbidities. Borderline personality disorder, autism spectrum disorder are very highly correlated with adopting a trans identity for example in young people. And then you have a ideological and social environment in which that's been encouraged and gets rewarded uh and it actually is discouraged and punished to speak against that. You're not being inclusive, you're transphobic, you get called these shameful names. And so the same dynamic plays out there."

"Thank you, James Lindy."

"Thank you, John Staceel."

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