Calvin Robinson Uses Fears of Left-Wing Indoctrination to Push Private Schools

I know it’s still the Christmas season, but we’re in those days between Christmas proper and New Year when there’s a sort of lull in the festivities. I’m therefore going to post one or two pieces about politics. And one of the issues I want to tackle is a video from GB News’ and the New Culture Forum’s Calvin Robinson, which stated that the way to prevent your children from being politically indoctrinated in schools was to support free school. The thumbnail for the video shows the message, and says that children were told by the teacher to vote Labour.

This comes from an interview Robinson did with a woman, who was suing her local school because of political indoctrination. According to this lady, the school was teaching the gender ideology and Critical Race Theory. One teacher told the class to vote Labour and the children were also encouraged to sing ‘Our prime minister is a racist’. This was presumably back when Johnson was in power. If all this is true, then I think the woman’s quite right to complain and sue. It is political indoctrination. Gender ideology and Critical Race Theory aren’t facts, although a poll cited by various right-wing media channels claimed that 75 per cent or so of those polled said that this had been taught in school, and 68 per cent said it had been presented as fact. There is an organisation set up to combat the teaching of the gender ideology, the Safe Schools Alliance, and there is a similar organisation to fight indoctrination by Critical Race Theory. And while I believe that people should vote Labour and that Johnson is racist, this shouldn’t be taught in school any more than the lie that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite.

There have been fears and scandals over left-wing indoctrination in schools since as far back as the 1980s, when the Scum was running stories about teachers in Brent teaching kids to sing ‘Ba Ba, Green Sheep’ as an anti-racist revision of ‘Ba ba, Black Sheep’. There were also stories in the Scum and Depress about Communists indoctrinating children with the new-fangled subject of Peace Studies, and ‘English’ being renamed ‘Language’. Their solution was to take failing state schools, where all this was going on, out of the control of the Local Education Authorities and transform them into City Academies. These were the Thatcherite precursors of Blair’s academies. They didn’t work, and Thatcher’s education secretary, Norman Fowler, wound them up. Then Blair won the election, took the idea out of the bin, and relaunched them. And the result has been the part-privatisation of our schools for corporate profit, many of which are still failing.

If children are being indoctrinated in schools, then it isn’t just in those schools left under local government management, but also in the academies. One of the other victims of ‘woke’ ideological censorship interviewed by the New Culture Forum’s Peter Whittle was an Anglican chaplain at a private school. He’d been sacked after raising questions in his sermon about some of the LGBT teaching that had been delivered to the school by an outside activist. According to the chaplain, the man had made them out all chant ‘Smash heteronormativity!’ during a meeting in the headmaster’s office beforehand. The clergyman had been alarmed by this, and in a following sermon simply said that students should question this for themselves. Such independent thought wasn’t allowed, and he was censured and sacked. Smashing heteronormativity, the social status of heterosexuality as the norm, goes far beyond teaching tolerance for gays. The EDIJester, a gay critic of the woke ideology, states that heteronormativity should continue, as without straight people breeding there would be no more gays like him. But beyond the specific nature of the radical indoctrination is the fact that this happened in a private school.

This is also going on across the Atlantic. James Lindsay, another fervent critic and opponent of the woke ideology, did a piece on his New Discourses YouTube channel about a paper published in an American education journal by a radical activist about indoctrinating the children in private schools to be woke, anti-capitalist, anti-racist activists. If the goal of privatisation is to stop political indoctrination, then it clearly isn’t working.

I’m very sceptical of these stories about ‘woke’ teachers, at least in Britain. My mother was a teacher, and I did my first degree at a teacher training college. My own experience of teachers is that the vast majority of them aren’t in it to indoctrinate children to be young communists or radical LGBTQ+ and race activists. They’re there simply because they want to stand in front of a whiteboard and teach. If radical doctrines are being taught in schools, then most likely they’re coming from the headmaster, the LEA or the academy chain. The teaching staff may not be aware how radical they are, as these doctrines are presented as just a form of conventional liberal teaching about tolerance to gays and transgender people and anti-racism.

And there is already a solution to the problem of indoctrination in schools. It’s banned by law, introduced by Blair. Teachers may not present political or religious ideas or opinions as fact. If they do tell the class their personal view of a political or religious issue, they have to make it clear that this is only their opinion. A teacher that tells their pupils to vote Labour or any other party is breaking that law.

But Robinson isn’t interested in such legal niceties. He just wants to push right-wing fears of evil, left-wing activist teachers in order to promote the establishment of free schools. This is another right-wing Tory idea. Toby Young was behind an attempt to set up a free college a few years ago. That collapsed, and I don’t doubt that any attempt to set up free schools will go the same way. But it’s all an attempt to privatise education and make it two-tier, with the state-educated poor at the bottom and the rich elite, who are able to pay private school fees, at the top. All under the guise of protecting children from indoctrination.

Privatisation isn’t working. The academies are terrible and free schools are going to be worse. Renationalise schools, give them proper funding and make sure they obey the rule of law when it comes to political or religious indoctrination. That’s the way to improve education.

Oh yes, and don’t listen to Calvin Robinson.

Open Letter by Brown American Professionals Denouncing Robin Di Angelo’s Racism

James Lindsay is, with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, one of the most determined and fiercest critics of the new postmodern doctrines of Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Studies and so on. These promise tolerance and liberation from prejudice, but, in reality, they just create further hate and discrimination. Critical Race Theory does this by defining Whiteness as a bourgeois property that gives White people privilege and automatically makes them oppressors, even if they are personally non-racist. Two years ago, on June 20, 2020, Lindsay posted this on his YouTube channel. It’s an open letter by Brown American professional people criticising Robin di Angelo for her anti-White racism in such books as White Fragility. It attacks her for poisoning people’s, especially children’s, minds by making them obsess about race and thinking about how people are complicit in a racist system. They state that America wasn’t built by White, or any particular people, but by people of all colours and walks of life striving for happiness, community, freedom and a better world. They state that they are not going to shut up while everything their ancestors worked for is torn down by a woman who can’t handle her own racism or by the White children who have been bamboozled by it. They don’t sign their names, but simply say that they are Brown professionals who worked their way up in a free country. They aren’t going to give their names, because of what would happen if they did.

This is one of the peculiar turns of events that has occurred in the controversy over Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. There are now Black intellectuals, activists and YouTubers defending Whites against their demonisation by Critical Race Theory. Many of them are conservatives, like Candace Owens and Amala Ekpunobi. Owen’s posted a video a few days ago claiming that she was thanked when in the southern US by a White woman with tears in her eyes. Others are ordinary Blacks who feel that the anti-White racist rhetoric is not only racist but diverting attention away from the real problems in the Black community caused by Blacks themselves. And these Black activists and commenters complain about the racial hatred and abuse they receive, with people calling them ‘Uncle Toms’ and other slurs I can’t use. And while I suspect that Lindsey is a man of the right, Helen Pluckrose is a woman of the left. She also had a piece published on Linsey’s site stating that the struggle against CRT and the other postmodern ideologies weren’t a case of either left or right but should concern everyone who supports rational argument based on evidence, individuality and freedom of speech, the key values of western civilisation introduced by the Enlightenment.

The letter runs:

‘To Robin DiAngelo:

We address you specifically, not because you act alone, but because you stand now as a figurehead of a movement, a representative of a particular school of thought—one among a few others, to be sure. We want to say we recognize that you are racist, and we’re ready to forgive you for it.

You proudly proclaim your racism in your writings, as so often racists do. We have read your work and can see the racism dripping from every page. We think you might be right, though. Maybe it wasn’t your fault. Maybe you were “socialized” into it. That’s not true of all of us, though, and saying so isn’t fair, and it isn’t right.

We understand the impact your work is having. You would turn us against each other by teaching us to see how we’re all “complicit” in a “system” of racism. You would have our children become obsessed with racism and poisoned with it. You do this so that you will not feel so alone. And for this crime against us and our children, we would like to sit down and have a word with you.

Many of our children have been led astray, taught to obsess over race, to attempt to see it all around them in every interaction and every object around them. This has only happened in recent years under the “educational” direction of “anti-racism” advocates such as yourself. We’re terrified. Those who have fully embraced this poison may be lost, possibly forever. They’re our children, and they’re already turning on us. Imagine for a moment how that must feel for every parent, every sibling experiencing this right now.

We write this in the pale hope of saving them, not to save you, and to stand in true solidarity with one voice—brown, white, and even black—to deliver a very simple message to you.

You are wrong.

The United States of America was not built for white people, and it most certainly was not built by white people, as you, yourself, seem to know so very well. But it was also not built by people of African descent, or Latino, or Asian, or by men, or women. The United States of America, was built by all of us. All of us striving as best we could for a common dream that seemed impossible to achieve, as our founders, whose memories are being trashed for it now under tutelage like yours, fought valiantly to bring about. The United States of America was built so that all people could live free; so that every individual could strive for happiness, community, freedom, and a better world for their own children.

This American journey was built brick by brick, law by law, for hundreds of years in this country, and it was built even over thousands of years long before any such country existed. It is deeply rooted in the history of all peoples, as we made mistakes, survived hardships, and tried to answer the questions of how we could best live. And from this history, these mistakes, these hardships, and these answers, we learned. From this knowledge rose a nation—more importantly an idea. We built this, all of us, together, and we can enjoy it, together. We’ll take the good and the bad, along with that of our ancestors from every corner of this planet, and we’ll keep striving, like Americans, to do better.

So, the message we want to say to you, Robin, is simple. No.

No. We will not sit in our homes in terror as everything our parents and their parents before us worked so hard to build gets torn down. We will not let your racism infect us all and tear us apart. We will rise up and say in one unified voice: NO.

We reject any world that fosters nothing but hate and division and seeks to destroy the legacy which was handed down to us, which our people—all of our people—built and grew into together. We reject your attempts to steal our voices and redefine racism through your white, or now brown, fragility lens. We forgive you for your racism even as we reject your racist language used against us, when we attempt to object. We can see how you treat us, telling our white spouses to hate us and us to resent them, making them suffer, making them believe they are oppressors who oppress us, who they love. We can see the blatant racism in all of this, and your word games can not hide it. We’re not so stupid as you seem to think.

We want you to know, that we see the harm caused by these racist ideas and we say, NO.

We will not shut up; we will not be silenced; we will not be intimidated by white children bamboozled by the insane racist ramblings of a woman who can’t handle her own racism; and we will not accept your racism being projected onto all of us. You may have to live with your racism, but no one else does.

To each of you that hears us, it is up to you to decide what to do now. You are an individual, but we should remember that we are all in this together.

Signed,

A group of professional brown Americans (if you must know) who worked their way up in a free country. We cannot sign our right names because, thanks in some significant part to you, we know what will happen if we do. Those who feel they can, can add theirs in the comments.’

The letter can be read at: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/open-letter-robin-diangelo-anti-racism/

Matt Walsh on the Celebration of Villains like Alfred Kinsey and the Women Warrior Slavers of Dahomey

Yeah, I know, it’s Matt Walsh, one of the major figures in popular Republican propaganda. The great commenters on this blog have warned me about reblogging material from the right, as I shouldn’t let myself become a mouthpiece for them and they never reciprocate. Helen Pluckrose, a left-wing critic of the postmodern ideologies of Queer and Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Studies wrote a piece for James Lindsay’s New Discourses calling for the right to stop demonising the left and recognise that much of the work refuting these highly damaging ideologies was actually being done by leftists. She’s absolutely right. But yes, Walsh is still using it to take swipes at the left. And the Lotus Eaters have put up a piece about how ‘Socialists Are Terrible People’. The thumbnail to the video shows Hasan Piker, who is an obnoxious pratt. There was a clip of him on one of the right-wing channels raving about the ‘glorious Muslim enslavement of Whites’.

But I feel I have to put up videos like this one from Walsh because they are tackling important issues which I don’t see being done from the left. Or at least, not the mainstream British left. In this video Walsh attacks the way traditional western heroes, who were often people with very serious flaws, are being removed and replaced with people who are villains, but suit the ideology now being pushed. He gives two examples. One is the erection of a statue to sexologist Alfred Kinsey at Indiana University, where already a building or a wing has been named after him. The other is the film The Woman King, about a female general in the corps of women warriors, the Amazons, of Dahomey. This soldier, Nasicka, leads the resistance to the French invasion of her homeland.

Walsh points out that Kinsey was paedophile, who paid child rapists as his informants. He was convinced that children and babies were sexual beings. One of the tables in his Report on Sexuality of the Human Male, or whatever it was called, records the sexual responses of children from 5 months to 15 years old. This was based on information supplied to him, and which he paid for, by child rapists. For Walsh, this utterly invalidates everything Kinsey has ever done, and definitely means he should not be celebrated. I find it hard to disagree with the latter statement.

As for the women warriors of Dahomey, Walsh discusses how the critics are raving about the film because it ticks all the boxes – women warriors and Black Africans, who represented as fighting for their freedom against the evil Whites. He invents two quotes from critics supposedly saying that it made them ashamed to be White and having White children as an example of the excesses the critic’s praises nearly reach. In fact, Dahomey was a state geared to war and the enslavement of other Africans. Captured slaves were either put on plantations to grow food for the army, or were sold to outsiders, including Europeans. The Amazons were part of that slavery war machine, but the film grotesquely portrays them as abolitionists. If the slaves weren’t sold, they were killed. Walsh cites the Encyclopaedia Britannica about Dahomey, but the same facts can be found in any number of other, mainstream, standard histories of Africa. He is also right when he says that the British fought a war against Dahomey to stop them slaving. Again, totally true. Uncovered Editions published a collection of the British government papers about the war in 2001 as King Guezo of Dahomey, 1850-52: The Abolition of Slavery in West Africa. And the Dahomeyans did massacre or hold mass human sacrifices of unsold slaves. Sometime in the 19th century they massacred 300 of them, which shocked Europeans, including seasoned explorers like Captain Denham. Denham told a British parliamentary inquiry that the mass murder was especially shocking, given the advances these civilisations had made in most of the arts of civilisation. Which to me shows that Denham, while seeing western civilisation as superior, did not regard west Africans as uncivilised savages.

Walsh mentions that Hollywood frequently takes liberties with history but regards this glamorisation of an African slave state as particularly grotesque. It is as if a film rewrote history to show the Confederacy as the heroes fighting against slavery. Again, true. I can see why the film is being widely praised coming as it does after BLM and the new denunciations of White supremacy, racism and imperialism. I’m very much aware the reality behind many traditional western heroes is far different from the legend. Folk heroes like Dick Turpin and the western gunfighters were brutal thugs. And I’m also aware of the old newspaper maxim about the heroes of the Old West – if there’s a difference between fact and legend, print the legend. But equally, if there are two choices, two causes or individuals equally as bad, you’re quite entitled to choose neither. Just because Hitler was a monster doesn’t mean that you have to support Stalin.

And so just because western imperialism was responsible for some monstrous evils, you don’t have to glamorise and celebrate Black imperialist, slaving monsters.

Helen Pluckrose Explains to Conservatives that the Left Is also Resisting Woke Postmodernism

Helen Pluckrose is one of the trio of academics with Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay who are determined to write about, expose and combat that woke postmodernist theories and ideologies now threatening academia and society. While James Lindsay seems to be a man of the right, with a real hatred of communism, Pluckrose is far more left-wing. She describes her values and beliefs as socialist, but has also said that she now describes herself as a liberal from determination to preserve and uphold liberalism’s essential philosophical values of free speech, logic, reason and individualism. These vital pillars underpinning modern liberal, democratic society are denied and threatened by the new postmodernist disciplines of Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory and so on.

These disciplines reject factual analysis, replacing it instead with language and discourse, and replace logic and reason with assertion and feeling. In her book with James Lindsay, Cynical Theories (Swift Press, 2021) she quotes various postmodernist writers, who make it very clear that they reject facts and logic because that’s not how Blacks and people from ethnic minorities view and interact with the world. Instead, according to these ideologues, non-Whites use instead legend and ‘lived experience’. This irrationalism is shared by White Fascism movements. The Nazis and Italian Fascists also celebrated irrationalism, particularly in the latter’s anti-positivist movement, instead proclaiming that there were certain truths that only members of the nation (Fascists) or Volk (Nazis) could know. Instead of universalism, the Fascists and Nazis also declared that the races had their own set of values, and that modern, democratic civilisation was alien to the Italian and Aryan, Germanic peoples. Despite claiming that they’re fighting racism, the supporters and ideologues responsible for Critical Race Theory repeat some of the same racism as the Fascist right, just from an anti-White quasi-Marxist postmodern perspective.

And I imagine that a number of Blacks and other people of colour are, or would be very annoyed by Critical Race Theory’s assumptions that they are somehow less rational, less capable of using logic, than Whites. This is, after all, the same assumptions White racial theorists made to justify the system of laws keeping Blacks down, in slavery and segregation.

Pluckrose has posted a long essay, ‘A Short Letter to a Misunderstanding Right’ on Lindsay’s New Discourses channel on YouTube. The right frequently claims that the left uniformly supports the postmodern, ‘Critical’ Theories. Matt Walsh does this, as do the Lotus Eaters. In her essay, Pluckrose explains how the Critical Theories have arisen and co-opted parts of standard left-wing ideologies and concerns, but attacks the attitude that the left is solidly behind them. She states that the left is a coalition of different groups, just as the right is. She explains why Communists, Socialists and pro-capitalist liberals also reject the Critical Theories because of their intolerance, their neglect of economics and abandonment of the working class. Gender critical feminists are also strongly opposed to them because they reject the reality of biological sex.

She concludes

‘Nevertheless, while most conservatives are more keenly aware of the problems with Critical Social Justice, they are slow to understand that, like on their own side of the aisle, “the left” is a coalition made up of several factions that do not agree with one another. Just as free-market libertarians cannot reasonably be blamed for the beliefs of anti-capitalist Christian conservatives, who in turn disagree strongly with anti-capitalist conservative Muslims, and center-right classical liberals and center-right social conservatives both also exist and disagree with each other and all the rest of these groups, so too is the left comprised of people with very different ideas who fully understand and consistently oppose each other. We frequently hear much confusion from some conservatives who seem to think Marxism and postmodernism are variations on the same thing and that (in the US) all of them fall into the broader category of “liberal” despite the gallons of ink spilled over the disagreement between all of these factions for decades if not centuries. Very often, we will hear: “The left is all [Critical] Social Justice (Warriors), and if it’s not, why aren’t any of the other lefties opposing them?”

In response, the Marxists, radicals, and most socialists respond with exasperation: with something like, “Are you serious? We were the first to address the issue of postmodernism. We’ve been telling you that postmodernism is a problem for half a century now. Read our critiques of it. Begin with Chomsky vs Foucault in 1971, move on to Fredric Jameson in 1991, and then have a look what the World Socialist Web Site has to say about it right now. Liberal lefties (like me) wonder what more we have to do for you to notice both our existence and our opposition to the irrationalism and illiberalism of postmodernism and Critical Social Justice. I’ve just spent five years criticizing them full-time while advocating liberalism, and yet conservatives who found me precisely because of the criticism (and who often then leave again because of the liberalism) will still ask me why the reasonable left isn’t doing anything, if it even exists. Most of “the left” rejects Critical Social Justice every bit as much as you conservatives do, and it would be both nice and wise if you would start recognizing it and get away from the factionalist power-games mindset yourselves.

So, let’s have a deal. If conservatives can agree not to blame liberals or socialists (or even the radicals, kind of!) for Critical Social Justice, which has co-opted all of our movements and efforts against our will, we on the left can agree not to blame right-leaning libertarians and classical liberals for conspiracy theorists and religiously social conservatives who try to ban teaching of evolution and who want to render homosexuals as second-class citizens again. Your side is a coalition of factions, some of which need cleaning up, and so is ours. Most of us on “the left” are realizing we need to fight those on our Critical Social Justice fringe, and we hope you’ll start to notice.’

It’s a great piece and needs to be read by anyone concerned about the way sections of the right are using these Critical Theories as a weapon to smear and discredit the left.

The essay can be read at: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/03/letter-misunderstanding-right/

James Lindsay on the Queer Marxist Ideology Behind Drag Queen Story Hour

This month, I understand, is the British Pride Month, and either this weekend or last there were a number of Pride marches and events all across the country. Bristol had one in which the local constituency Labour parties marched to show their support, followed by a music festival in the evening. The weather back then was very nice and sunny, rather than today in Bristol, where it’s still hot but overcast. I hope everything went well and that everybody who went had a great time.

Increasing Opposition to Pride and Drag Events

There’s been increasing opposition in America to Pride marches, largely because of concerns over kink and nudity. These events have been promoted as child friendly, but some of the highly sexual displays during these marches really aren’t suitable for children. A number of gays are also put off by them, both in Britain and America. They feel that the concern for promoting trans rights has taken over from the marches’ original focus and purpose of promoting tolerance and acceptance for gays. And the trans focus has also caused concerns about children’s safety. At one of the American marches, the organisers were giving out binders, or stated they were prepared to give out binders, to girls as young as twelve. Binders are extremely tight bands placed around girls’ chests to prevent the breasts developing as part of the attempt to halt puberty in trans identified girls. Apart from the question of whether a pre-adolescent child has the wisdom and maturity to know if they genuinely are trans or not, when they can’t legally buy alcohol or tobacco, there are the health issues of the binders themselves. They’re so tight that they can cause a range of physiological damage, including to the spine and ribs.

There have also been attacks on drag events being promoted to children. This includes drag queen story hour, in which drag performers come into libraries to read or tell stories to young children. This has been explained as an initiative to combat homophobia and instil proper acceptance of gays to children. The right, on the other hand, suspect that it is really a form of grooming. Some of this criticism is is correct, and the performer has put on a display that it very definitely and obviously not suitable for children. Like the drag artiste hired by Reading Library a few months ago, who turned up with a d**do hanging from its crotch and a bare behind, dressed as a monkey. More recently, in the past few weeks there has been outcries as parents have taken children to gay and drag clubs to watch drag queens and trans strippers perform highly sexualised routines, some even stuffing money into their g strings or whatever. These displays have also upset individual members of the gay and drag communities. One drag queen, whose video was widely reposted on conservative YouTube channels, stated that drag shows were not suitable for children because of their highly sexual content. The artiste stated that children shouldn’t be taken to them. If children were going to turn out gay, then they could learn about their sexuality the way the drag queen and other gays had always done, back in their own rooms at home.

British Prime Time Drag Shows of the 70s and the British Music Hall

Now I have to say that I find drag queen story hour a little odd. I think it started in California, in either Los Angeles or San Francisco, cities which have very strong gay communities. I understand the purpose behind them of teaching children to accept gays naturally, as well as encouraging them to read. With the latter, I would have thought it more appropriate to have drag queens as one of a number of different, colourful performers appealing to children, such as clowns that aren’t scary, if there are such things, stage conjurers or puppeteers and so on. And I don’t think there’d be such questions about it if the drag queens were more like the drag acts on TV when I was a child. I was a junior kid in the 1970s, and I remember that Danny La Rue was one of the major hits of week day evening television. La Rue’s act was basically a continuation of the old music hall tradition, complete with songs. La Rue died a few years ago, and there has been nothing scandalous about him that has been published as some kind of revelation of his secret private life. I think it came out that he was gay, which I don’t think surprised or shocked anyone. As for his act, the worst I’ve heard about it is the joke that he wasn’t born, but found ‘on mother Kelly’s doorstep’, referring to one of the Music Hall songs he used to sing. Other drag acts of the ’70s included Hinge and Bracket, two musical ladies of a certain age who mixed songs at the piano with witty repartee. They’re long gone, but their programmes were repeated a few years ago on BBC Radio 4 Extra. As far as I know, no-one objected to their act all. More recently, back in the 90s there was Lily Savage, who was far less genteel than the previous two performers, but nevertheless a comedy favourite on British TV.

Postmodernist Marxism and Drag Queen Story Hour as a Tool of Indoctrination

But there does seem to be a sinister ideological component to drag queen story hour. James Lindsay in one of his videos on his New Discourses YouTube channel read out and critiqued an academic paper written by a drag queen, Lil Miss Hot Mess, and a transwoman called Harper Keenan,” Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood”. Hot Mess is the author of a children’s book, The Drag Performer’s Hips Go Swish-Swish-Swish. The article was published in an education periodical, and takes a postmodernist Marxist view of drag queen story hour. This goes far beyond using such performers as a way getting children used to gay people so as not to regard them as strange or an automatic threat. Rather, as Lindsay shows, the authors of this paper view it as a means of destroying the constraints on children’s minds and identities imposed by conventional society. Lindsay states that it follows the Marxist strategy, now a century old, of sexualising children in order to alienate them from their parents and the more conservative morals in wider society. The goal isn’t to produce psychologically stable and well-adjusted gay young people, who are accepted into society. Rather its goal is to produce unstable personalities so that the indoctrinated children ‘live queerly’ and reject conventional society and its institutions, including the family. This is attacked as a repressive institution, through which children are socialised into being conventional members of society who grow up, settle down and have families of their own, reproducing oppressive capitalist society while doing so. Instead the authority of their parents is to be underlined with the glitter drag queens spread, so that they grow up gay and connect instead with an alternative, real family in the drag culture.

Lindsay is an academic and a very powerful critic of the recent rise of radical postmodern ideologies such as Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory and Post-Colonial Theory, which appear to have ostensibly liberal goals, such as combating racism, homophobia and allowing the historical experience of persecuted ethnic minorities and colonised peoples to be heard. In fact these ideologies have a far more radical agenda of promoting Marxism and creating an intersectional radical milieu ready to rise up against normal, capitalist society. Lindsay compares this with the educational programme pushed through by Mao in Communist China. His video on drag queen story hour is one of a number of videos on ‘groomer schools’, in which he discusses the way some schools, including elite private schools, have adopted these ideologies in order to indoctrinate their students.

This is contentious, provocative stuff, which is why I’ve delayed blogging about it. I really didn’t want to post it on British Pride weekend because it would be too much like a gratuitous insult to ordinary gay people and their friends and supporters. Especially as Lindsay makes it very clear what he thinks about the pair of authors and their ideological Marxist fellows. He calls them groomers and states very clearly several times that they ought to be banged up in jail. And if they are using drag queen story hour to push an extremist political ideology through creating a queer revolutionary consciousness, which Queer Theorists differentiate from ‘gay’, then such people definitely shouldn’t be in schools. This is extremist politics, not a case of promoting gay or trans acceptance or encouraging kids to enjoy reading.

Queer Theory Attitude close to Parodies of Conspiracy Theories and Homophobia

But it’s also highly bizarre. So bizarre, in fact, that it seems like a caricature of some of the bonkers rubbish rags like The Scum were pushing in the early eighties. You know the rubbish – all that stuff about kids in Brent being told to sing ‘Ba Ba Green Sheep’ by anti-racist activists in schools, ’cause Bernie Grant or somebody thought the original lyrics were racist. It sounds like something just one step less ridiculous than the plot of Carry On Spying, in which the Carry On team were pitched against a Bond-type supervillain/villainess. This person was a hermaphrodite, both male and female, and was plotting to turn the world’s population into similar beings like him/herself. It’s also too close to a skit on Alas Smith and Jones, where the pair lampooned such prejudice in a spoof gameshow about finding ‘Bigot of the Year’. One of the rounds was entitled ‘Just A Bigot’, and asked the howlingly bigoted contestants the question ‘They’re evil, sick and shouldn’t be allowed. Who are they?’ The answers barked back included ‘bisexual social workers indoctrinating kids’. The question master then responds with ‘No, they’re all excellent demonstrations of bigotry, but the real answer is ‘Everyone except from me’. If this story was carried by the Heil, Depress, Scum or the Star, I’d honestly think their journalist had finally gone totally bonkers. You could imagine one of their hacks having strange, paranoid suspicions about Danny La Rue or RuPaul being some kind of Marxist criminal masterminds instead of performers. Pretty much like MI 5 when they investigated ‘Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men’ because somebody thought the nonsense language these beloved children’s characters spoke may have been coded Communist messages.

Drag Queens Can’t All be Revolutionary Marxists

But from the evidence of this paper, and Lindsay adds that there are many others, including one that tells readers how to organise a story hour in schools, there really is an extremist ideological programme behind them. This does raise questions about their suitability for young children in schools. But there are also other reasonable questions that can be asked about the supposed ideological dimension to drag queen story hours. First off, we don’t know how widespread this attitude to drag queen story hour is. Most of the people staging them, I should hazard a guess, probably aren’t ideologically committed Marxists or Marxians. They’re probably just ‘woke’ peeps who genuinely believe that they’re helping gay and trans people gain acceptance, rather than have any ulterior motive of creating the queer intersectional revolutionary class called for by Queer Theorists. I also don’t know how many drag performers actually share this ideology. The majority are probably just performers like the old style drag acts, who want to put on a show rather than push any kind of radical political agenda. Some do, like the group who sent their drag monkey to Reading Library, but not all. I did hear that there was a radical section of the gay community who didn’t want gay people to marry, because this was the gay community taking on the family values and morals of bourgeois society. But the number of gay men and women who are tying the knot suggests that this radical part of the gay community were probably no more than an unrepresentative fringe. My guess is that many of the drag queens going into schools to read probably see it as another job or performance without necessarily there being a further dimension beyond it.

And I note the article doesn’t say anything about the motives of the drag queens who first started the story hour across the Pond. We’re not told if they intended it to be part of some covert programme of Marxist indoctrination. The article declares that it is, simply because of what drag performers do during the story hour as part of their performance, answering questions from pupils about sexuality and gender and so on. But that simply could be a case of how they wish to see the drag performances in story hours, rather than what they are or were intended to be.

Criticism of Marxist Attacks on the Marriage and the Family

As for Marxist opposition to the family, this goes all the way back to the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Marx and Engels objected to marriage on feminist grounds, believing that it enslaved women and reduced them to the level of prostitutes. This was at a time when, under German and English law, a woman’s property automatically became that of her husband and women were very definitely social inferiors under the control of their husbands and fathers. I think as late as the ’60s and ’70s married women weren’t able to open bank accounts on their own without their husband’s consent. Lindsay has argued in other videos and podcasts that the radical opposition to the family and reorientation to include the gay community came from Herbert Marcuse, who founded intersectional Marxism in the 1960s. It was also part of a general radical movement for sexual liberation celebrating free love as well as different sexual orientations. But French postmodernist Marxists like Althusser also condemned the family as part of the institutions which supported first feudalism and then capitalism.

Society and the institution of marriage has changed in the past half century. Marriage has become far more egalitarian, and the Marxist historical critique of the development of marriage from the earliest beginnings of human society has been discredited. Engels, in his book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, followed the anthropological ideas of the German author Backhofen in the latter’s book, Das Mutterrecht. Mutterrecht in German means ‘mother right’, and seems to have been the term Backhofen used for matriarchy. He believed that humanity had passed through a period of three stages in the development of the family. One was a period of general promiscuity, followed by a stage of matriarchal, female rule, which was finally superseded by contemporary patriarchy. This has been overturned by contemporary archaeological and palaeoarchaeological research. The pair also believed that marriage was withering away amongst the working class in their time. But this came from a very selective study of a local section of the working class in one of the British cities. In fact, marriage in general remained strong amongst the working class as it did in other ranks of society. And from what I’ve heard and read, the working class Communists in France and England were conventionally married men, who had no time for free love. Well, as the Joan Sim character says in Carry On – Don’t Lose Your Head, ‘I don’t mind the fraternity and equality, but I’m not having any of the liberties!’ The concern with sexual liberation is very much a development of 60s radicalism, though with roots in the calls for gay tolerance by earlier writers like the Edwardian sexologist Havelock Ellis in Britain and Richard Krafft-Ebbing, the author of Psychopathia Sexualis of 1886 in Germany.

Conclusion: Question the Ideology, But Don’t Attack Gay People

I think Lindsay’s right, and this paper should raise important questions regarding the suitability of drag queen story hour, but I believe it should be kept in proportion and should not become part of an all-out attack on the LGBTQ+ community in general. I am particularly aware that there is the danger of trans people being subject to abuse and attack, as described by some of the great commenters on this blog. I am also aware that conservatives like Matt Walsh are using the concerns about Pride and the trans ideology as a stick with which to beat the left. Over here, I found a video by Laurence Fox, the head honcho of Reclaim on how ‘woke’ schools are grooming children. At the end, Fox presents his programme for ending it. I intend to go through it very carefully and critique it at a later date.

In short, I believe Lindsay is right in that very serious questions have to made about the ideology, content and suitability of drag queen story hour. But this may mean no more than reforming it to prevent it being used as a guise for political activists to sneak their message into schools.

And reasonable concerns about the suitability of drag queen story hour shouldn’t be used to demonise gays or trans people.

I’m not posting the video as it’s long at about 2hrs 32 minutes, and I also didn’t want to upset people on here with the strength of Lindsay’s condemnations. If you want to watch it for yourself, it’s at Lindsay’s New Discourses YouTube channel, and is entitled Groomer Schools & Drag Queen Story Hour. The number for it is https://youtube.com/watch?v=aBv19E-fF7w&t=371s.