A Comprehensive Attack on the Decolonisation Movement in British Universities and Education

Doug Stokes, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West (Cambridge: Polity Press 2023)

The murder of George Floyd by a White police officer three years ago sparked a wave of protests across America and then Britain under the banner of the Black Lives Matter organisation. It was loudly trumpeted that western civilisation is institutionally racist and that it was based on ‘Whiteness’, the underlying racist ideology by which Whites maintained the social, economic and educational advantages against Blacks and people of colour. This ‘White privilege’ extended to all Whites, even if they were not personally racist. There have since been demands to dismantle this perceived systemic racism. This has entered the university, where, according to Stokes, it has set off a moral panic. There is supposed to be a gap between the number of Whites and ethnic minorities enrolling at university and the numbers of Whites achieving top grades and Blacks and other people of colour. This is ascribed to personal racism on campus and the content of the university curriculum. This is held to be Eurocentric and too White. Blacks and other ethnic minorities, it is argued, do not enrol in uni because they are marginalised and put off by the overwhelmingly White content and the personal racism they experience, including microaggressions. At the same time, modern science and Enlightenment rationality are attacked as merely western forms of knowledge that are alien to people of colour from outside Europe. This needs to be removed from the centre of European teaching so that proper space can be made for non-White cultures and their ways of knowing.

Decolonisation and the Advancement of Privileged Members of Ethnic Minorities

Stokes is, according to the brief personal bio on the back cover, a director of the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of Exeter, a fellow of the Legatum Institute and a member of the advisory council for the Free Speech Union. He’s also written for a number of right-wing journals like the Times, Torygraph, Spectator and The Critic. Most of the attacks on ‘wokeness’ come from the right, but elements of the left are also turning against it. A few weeks ago the Free Speech Union put up a panel of left-wing writers and academics, who were also very much against it and its malign cancel culture. And there are certainly important points people on the left can take away from this book. Stokes argues that the determination to appoint people to prominent positions in the university and elsewhere is very much a class issue. It allows rich and privileged people of colour like Priyamvada Gopal, a history professor at Cambridge, to present themselves as somehow more marginalised than the Whites underneath. For example, Gopal declared that she was less advantaged because of her colour than the porters at Cambridge. The Beeb’s senior journo is an Asian woman, who declared that she wouldn’t have got her position without the Corporation’s diversity scheme. This is questionable, as her father is billionaire owning one of Britain’s football clubs, and her mother is millionaire in her own right.

The Professional Managerial Class and the Neglect of the Working Class

Stokes also argues that the decolonisation movement is strongly linked with the emergence of the Professional Managerial Class. This is a class of mostly White technocrats, who appeared after the dismantling of the Post-War consensus. As the trade unions were neutered and the welfare state and NHS cut and privatised, the functions of the nation state were increasingly subordinated to the authority of multinational bodies, staffed by ‘anywheres’ – officials with no particular connection to any country, who looked down on the ‘somewheres’ who still retained their loyalty to their particular location or country. And this highly privileged elite particularly despised the White working class. Stokes presents statistics that show, contrary to the image promoted by the intersectional left, it’s the White working class, and particularly boys, who are now marginalised and excluded from the academy, but this is ignored by the university sector. Bristol university set up a bursary worth millions to support 30 more Black students. By contrast, there were only two bursaries set up for people from a generally disadvantaged background. These were only worth £2 million each, compared to the tens given out under the Black bursary scheme. But even one of these two was reserved solely for Blacks. Such schemes proliferate, but only a tiny minority of universities have schemes to support people from a working class background. But Stokes goes through the statistics to show that there are a number of complex factors preventing people from going to uni which have nothing to do with class. The most important is class. Another factor is education. Most Blacks go to state comprehensive schools, which are far less successful at sending their pupils to university than the elite private schools.

Ethnic Racial Oppression Challenged by Statistics

As for the supposed gap between the number of BME pupils going on to university and Whites, the opposite of what is claimed is true: Blacks and ethnic minorities comprise 18 per cent of the population, but 30 per cent of the students enrolling at university. Many ethnic minorities are as successful and some more so than the White population. Indians and other ethnic minorities are as successful as Whites, but people of Chinese origin 30 per cent more. White working class pupils on free school meals are the least successful apart from Travellers.

Stokes cites statistics to show again and again that the Black Lives Matter narrative of racial oppression is wrong, drawn from EU and EHRC reports that claim the opposite. In America, more cops are shot by Blacks than Blacks are shot by Whites. Where there is a statically higher chance of Blacks being shot by the cops than the general population, it’s because Blacks are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes. As for racial offences, while most of these are committed by Whites, 24 per cent of them are so are also committed by Blacks, despite the fact that they only constitute around 13 per cent of the American population.

The stats also show that Britain is a far less racist country than others. 89 per cent of people are comfortable with someone of a different colour being prime minister. Other stats show that most people have no objections with their children marrying people of another colour and with working with people of different ethnicities. The incidence of racist crime is much lower than claimed. Most people from ethnic backgrounds are proud to be British at 65 per cent, slightly higher than Whites, and the police is actually more trusted by Blacks and ethnic minorities than by Whites. As for the university sector, while there are fewer ethnic minority professors than Whites, this is not true of certain subjects. 53 per cent of the students and staff in chemical and electrical engineering departments are Black or Asian. Similarly, the degree attainment gap is closing and for some groups it’s statistically insignificant.

There’s also a gender aspect to this. Increasingly more women are entering university than men. 53 per cent of university students are women, and this proportion is increasing so that it has been predicted that in a few decades’ time women will comprise 73 per cent of all students. They are enrolling in all the professional subjects except the mathematical sciences. This implies that in the coming decades the professions, and particularly medicine, will be female dominated.

Needless to say, these stats attacking the narrative that Britain is racist are not what the intersectional left wants to hear. The book quotes the automatic denunciations of a government report published a year or so ago, which concluded that Britain was not a racist society, by prominent members of the Labour party like Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer and Bell Ribeiro-Addy.

Intellectual Origins

As well as attacking it at the level of statistics, Stokes dissects the history of the movement. It emerged in the early 20th century in the thinking of the Marxist Frankfurt school and the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci. They felt that in order to radicalise the working class it would be necessary to change the culture. This effectively stands Marx on its head, as Marx claimed that the economic substructure created and influenced ideology. This was then taken up in its turn by the American Marxist Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was concerned by the failure of the western working class to adopt revolutionary socialism. Instead, he and other radical decided to appeal to the new marginalised groups, such as gays and the ‘people of the ghetto’ – Blacks. This occurred roughly at the same time that similarly disappointed western radicals adopted the ideology of ‘Third Worldism’. They looked to the new national liberation movements of the colonised peoples around the world as an attack on western capitalism which would eventually result in its destruction. These radicals took over as their texts works like Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. And their attitudes show a mixture of White self-hatred and sheer bloodlust. Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon’s book, declared that if you shot a European, you killed two people: the European and the man he oppressed. Michel Foucault, despite being an openly gay man, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Islamic Revolution in Iran because it was a revolt against ‘western rationalism’. This included the mass purges, including that of homosexuals, by the revolutionary regime.

Foucault and similar thinkers were also responsible for the attack on science and rationality. According to Foucault and the structural and post-structural linguists that preceded him, no objective knowledge about the world is possible due to the all pervasive influence of language. Language structures people’s thinking in binaries – man/woman, Black/White and so on, one of which is always in inferior. Thus language ensures that men enjoy a more privileged position than women, and Blacks and other ethnic minorities are inferior to Whites. At the same time, knowledge is not objective but serves the interest of those in power. It does not advance. Instead, there is merely a change in viewpoint between one historical epoch and another.

Capitalism, Not Science and Rationality, Responsible for Rise of the West

Similarly, the role of the rise of science and the industrial revolution in producing Britain and the West’s global supremacy is also denied. Instead it is argued that a crisis in feudalism in the late Middle Ages led to the rise of capitalism and its institution which created the conditions for European dominance and the enslavement and destruction of indigenous peoples.

Readers of this blog will now that I am particularly concerned about the focus on British and European involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and the way this obscures the existence of slavery across cultures from antiquity onwards. Stokes tackles this issue, exposing its existence in China. Arab merchants to China took with them Black African slaves as their personal servants. This started a craze for African slaves amongst the Chinese, but this has been erased from history. Chinese children are not taught about it in schools, nor is it discussed either officially or in popular culture. At the same time, the slave trade within Africa was very firmly in African hands. The largest collection of documents on the slave trade comes from the Dutch East India Company comprising 100,000 volumes. But these documents hardly anywhere mention the Dutch doing the actual business of capturing slaves. It was done instead by Black Africans, who then sold them on to Europeans. And some Black slavers did extremely well, such as Tippoo Tipp, who enslaved Black Africans to provide labour for his plantations on Zanzibar.

As for the supposed role the slave trade played in enriching Britain, historians have said that in fact it played the same role in stimulating the economy as sugar. The real driver of the industrial revolution and Britain’s wealth was textiles. In fact, it may even have been a disadvantage. One historian has estimated that the country would have been £500,000 better off if we didn’t have the West Indies.

Working Class Whites Did Not Benefit from Slave Trade

He also rebuts the assertion that all Whites somehow benefited from the slave trade. This is again untrue on several levels. Imperialism and colonialism were policies devised by the upper classes. Democracy was only established in 1928 when the vote was granted to all adult men and women without property qualifications. Before then, in the 18th and early 19th century, the franchise was severely restricted to only a tiny percentage of the electorate. And most White people’s lives in 19th century Britain was one of desperate poverty and misery. The average life expectancy in the early 19th century was forty. Child labour was the norm, with small children working down the mines. He gives examples of the long hours one seven or eight year old child worked in total darkness operating the ventilation shutters in the pits, and of a mine disaster where flooding killed both adults and children. But the anti-slavery movement was strong amongst the British people as a whole and particularly among the working class. He also points out that almost all civilisations accepted the existence of slavery, and that the anomaly isn’t British and European slavery, but how the British and the West abolished it.

Geopolitical Dangers

He also argues that the decolonisation movement is dangerous on a geopolitical level. The book presents statistics that show that 47 per cent of Africans believe that colonialism benefited their countries, a higher percentage than westerners. However, slavery and colonialism are used by extremely corrupt African politicians to explain their countries poor performance rather than in the massive greed of the kleptocrats running them. One of these was James Ibori, the governor of one of the Nigerian states, who stole over $100 million but was lauded by his admirers as a great patriot. But other states, such as Russia and China, are weaponising Western guilt as part of their own foreign policies against the West. China has particularly attacked the West as racist and White supremacist for opposing the Great Chinese Dream. This includes further commercial penetration into Africa, which has alarmed some observers as a new form of colonialism.

Nations are bound together by their common histories, and the attack on the West’s history as one of shameful exploitation is designed to stop America and its allies exercising any kind of global dominance. But this retreat from a unipolar world will make international politics much more cut-throat. The state of international relations before the rise of America following the Second World War was one of competing empires which attacked and preyed on the weak. Following the Second World War, America set up a number of international bodies to protect and extend the liberal international order. This included western Europe against the Soviet bloc and Japan in Asia. The result has been that the percentage of the world’s population in desperate poverty has declined from 40 per cent to 10 per cent. He recognises that America’s position as the world’s policeman hasn’t been free from terrible mistakes, but argues that without the security afforded by America international affairs will revert to what they were before as nations compete ruthlessly for resources. He also criticises the various anti-colonialist intellectuals who were all too ready to attack the west, but said nothing about rival empires that were just as brutal or even worse. Like Edward Said, who didn’t criticise Russia, China or the Ottoman Empire, whose Barbary pirates also enslaved White Europeans. Said claimed he didn’t have to. As a Palestinian he was quite comfortable in an eastern milieu, which means that there is a shocking bias and one-sidedness in his critique of imperialism.

Decolonisation Mandatory University Policy

Despite these objections, decolonisation has become a mandatory policy across the university sector. It is demanded and enforced by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, Universities UK and the Race Equality Charter as well as the Universities and Colleges Union. And it’s extremely authoritarian. Students in some universities are required to attend compulsory courses on anti-racism. This is not the kind of anti-racism which most people grew up with in the 1970s, when Dr Luther King called on us to judge men by their character, not their colour. If a student responds to the questions presented to him or her on questionnaires devised by the activists with slogans like ‘I believe in one race – the human race’, she or he will get a lecture on how this is itself racist and people of different races need to be treated differently according to their culture and background. Ditto if you’re a believer in meritocracy, in which the best people for a job should get it regardless of their colour. In fact Thomas Sowell has shown that sheer commercial necessity has frequently acted against institutional racism. Despite legislation in apartheid South Africa banning Blacks from certain jobs, some employers nevertheless sought to circumvent it to employ Black workers, simply because it made commercial sense. The activists are also vindictive and highly authoritarian. These course will also ask their White students how guilty they are and openly encourage such feelings as part of an indoctrination campaign to turn them into ‘allies’ concerned to make a fairer Britain for Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Microaggressions are a part of this programme in some universities. These are gestures or body language that suggest hostility on someone’s part, even if no such hostility is openly expressed. Not sharing a lift with a personal of colour is one such microaggression, as is lifting your eyebrows if a Black person enters the room. These gestures are deemed racist if they are perceived as such by another, regardless of what was meant by whoever performed them. One university department set up a group of seven young spies to monitor and report on students and staff committing such microaggressions. It’s been said before, but this is totalitarian with a distinctly Maoist tinge. You are under authoritarian surveillance with people spying on you, and you must confess your guilt, just as Mao forced ordinary Chinese to do during his wretched struggle sessions.

Stokes has no time for racism, but sees the decolonisation movement as dangerous, not least because it attacks the principles of equality, rationality and the rule of law that have been at the heart of Western society and its success since the Enlightenment. These are values that need to be defended, especially given the global threat of Russia and China. The movement is also causing social division in the West. Polls show that the upper middle classes in America are far more optimistic about the values of diversity than most Blacks, and have an increasing contempt for the White working class. These last are especially the people who voted for Trump in the US and Brexit in Britain, which Stokes denies was primarily racist. They are the people one American politico called ‘semi-fascists’. This attack on the working class also affects Stokes himself, as he states that he grew up in urban poverty in London after his father’s suicide in Canada. But Stokes doubts that the decolonisation movement will get very far outside circles like the BBC and the universities.

Woke Capitalism

As for woke capitalism, the book argues that this is an attempt to prevent criticisms that a corporation is racist or otherwise exploitative, and so a form of virtue signalling and political Danegeld. Even when that corporation is otherwise so, as in the case of those multinational companies that have been accused of using slave labour in China. There is also a political aspect to it. Woke capitalism does not challenge the class structure of society or the nature of capitalism itself. It merely wants better representation of Blacks and people of colour through affirmative action, but does not want to challenge more concrete factors that are holding people from working class backgrounds back. And affirmative action may be a real danger in promoting people because of their colour rather than their ability. If this is done, then it could mean a loss of efficiency and performance in industry, and is actually dangerous in medicine. This aspect of woke capitalism, as something that seems left but actually isn’t, sounds correct. It certainly seems like the reason Starmer has loudly embraced a new set of policies that will supposedly attack British institutional racism and make sure Blacks and Asians get high positions. While not doing anything for the working class as such.

Criticisms

The book’s certainly thorough in its attack on the academic decolonisation movements and its allied campaigns in industry and geopolitics. It’s also going to be controversial. Some may take issue with the reliability of the statistics used, such as the Labour politicos who howled loudly at the last government report. It also has a rosy-eyed view of America as the world’s policeman. America was responsible for some horrific atrocities through supporting genuinely fascist regimes in countries like South America. And the regimes it overthrew as part of its campaign to promote international capitalism were often just left-wing, not Marxist. President Benitez of Guatemala was a democratic socialist, not a commie as he was painted, when he was overthrown in the 1950s. Similarly, the president of Guyana who was also overthrown in an American led coup was a liberal. The Iraq invasion wasn’t launched primarily to give the Iraqi people their freedom from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, but to loot their oil and state industries, as Greg Palast shows in his book Armed Madhouse. And Henry Kissinger, who died a few days ago, was a monster responsible for death, torture and suffering on a global scale.

And while it has to be admitted that capitalism has been successful in raising the world’s people out of poverty, globalisation and neoliberalism have had the opposite effect. Ordinary working people across the world have become poorer as elites have become richer, resulting in social unrest and a destabilisation of international relations.

Conclusion

But this doesn’t alter the fact that Critical Race Theory, the ideology at the heart of the Black Lives Matter and decolonisation movements is a malign, racist, anti-White ideology which ignores the material reasons for poverty and inequality in its pursuit of systemic White racism and has a very skewed, bias view of history. If we are to build a genuinely fair and non-racist society, then it needs to be tackled at every level. Including the universities, where it is actively preventing White working class students from having access to a mechanism that has historically allowed the poor social and economic advancement.

Reading from my Pamphlet against the Work Capability Tests

Hat tip to Mike and Vox Political for the meme on the cover.

These past few days I’ve been putting up videos of myself reading pamphlets I wrote and self-published a few years ago against the privatisation of the NHS and academy schools, which actually don’t perform better than normal state schools but support the corporate chains and the corporatist politicians who run them with an income stream. And they also support the Thatcherites by appearing to confirm their ideological view that private, as opposed to state, is always better.

Trev, one of the great commenters on this blog, left this comment about the destruction of the welfare state and the treatment of those, who are unfit to work, by the authorities and how this is ignored by Labour and the trade unions.

‘I’ve noticed they’re using the same language as the Tories (going right back to Cameron & Osborne), it’s always “working people” and “working families”, or “hard working people”, etc. Never just ‘we’re going to help people and famies’ , or even Working Class people, no, it’s got to be “working people”. Just another way of further marginalising those who aren’t working for whatever reason, the “economically inactive”, i.e.Retired, Unemployed, sick, disabled, carers, but for some reason this definition never includes the idle rich. There is a worrying agenda not being opposed or mentioned by either Labour or the Unions, and that is to force as many people as possible into work, especially targeting the elderly, sick and disabled (hence the mandatory Work and Health Programme). And either Labour nor the Unions are saying anything about the destruction of the Welfare State, including the NHS but particularly also our Social Security system. It is no longer possible to go “on the sick”. The Tories have abolished Sick notes and scrapped Incapacity Benefit, as well as increasing State Pension age. Anyone and everyone now are expected to work and are deemed fit enough to do so regardless of age and infirmity. You can get a ‘Fit note’ that says what you fit to do, and make a claim for LCWRUC (Low Capability fir Work Related Universal Credit) but which means you are still in the DWP SYSTEM, still answerable to a Jobcentre Work Coach and possibly still expected to engage with the world of work to some degree, to do some limited amount of jobsearch and attend jobcentre appointments/interviews as required, or face a WCA (Work Capability Assessment). The Tories are obsessed with getting even the elderly, early Retirees, sick and disabled people into work or hounded to be constantly seeking/applying for work, even though we have a near full employment and those people are not fit to work. And no one is saying anything about it.’

This is true, and getting worse. I’ve noticed the populist right – GB News and the New Culture Forum, for example, lamenting that there are supposedly so many millions claiming sickness or disability and demanding that they be used to supply the necessary labour they can no longer get from migrant workers after Brexit.

A vital part of this system is the Work Capability Tests, brought in by Blair as part of the welfare to work programme. This is a system of tests designed to ascertain whether the claimant is genuinely ill or disabled, or can do some work and so is ineligible for benefit. It was set up on the advice, and following now discredited scientific research of the American private health insurance company, Unum. Which company saw the increased numbers of people thrown off benefits under its system as a huge opportunity to sell them its wares. Blair’s establishment of the Work Capability Tests followed similar legislation, again introduced on the advice of Unum, by John Major’s Tories under Peter Lilley. The system assumes that a certain percentage of claims are always fraudulent, and so this number must always be found fit for work. Even when they blatantly aren’t. There have been cases where terminally ill people have been declared so, and where stupid assessors have asked amputees when they expect their limbs to grow back. And seriously ill and disabled people have died after being thrown off the benefit they need to live on. There have also been a large number of successful appeals.

I wrote the pamphlet when Mike was struggling to get the stats for the number of people who had thus died after being denied benefit. And it was a struggle – the DWP did everything it could not to give Mike the information, although he succeeded in getting some. And the answer of the Tory government to the very many successful appeals has been to introduce legislation to make challenging DWP decisions very difficult, such as denying claimants legal aid.

It’s a profoundly wicked system, but it appeals to the right-wing, tabloid mentality that everyone on sick pay or welfare generally are evil scroungers, as opposed to the ‘hard-working people’ the Tories laud, but never reward. Unfortunately, I have no illusion that Starmer, if he gets in power, will ever reform it.

Not when it was set up by his hero, Tony Blair.

Reading from my Pamphlet against the Academy Schools

This is another series of videos I’ve made of myself reading from yet another pamphlet I composed against a New Labour/ Tory policy. In this case, it’s a short one I did at home using just the computer and printing it out myself and folding it into a pamphlet format. It’s entitled Academies: Failing Schools for Corporate Profits.

The academies were introduced, and then abandoned by Thatcher and her education minister Kenneth Baker. They were supposed to turn around failing inner city schools by handing them over to private industry to run. They were a failure, as big business really didn’t want to run them. Then New Labour came in, the grinning Blair creature pulled them out of the dustbin, and launched them as the new ‘academies’. As studies have shown, they aren’t any better than state schools. Where they are, it’s through the massive amount of funding they receive compared to those in LEA and very selective intake policies. Less able pupils, and those with behavioural difficulties, are rooted out and excluded on some pretext or other. And inner city pupils are frequently overlooked in favour of getting more middle class children from the suburbs.

These schools are being foisted on people whether they want them or not. And many of the schools they replaced were actually rated ‘good’ by Ofsted. Many of the chains have collapsed, and been forced to be taken over by the state. But that didn’t stop thicky Nicky Morgan, the education minister in 2016, wibbling on to Andrew Marr about how a preference for the state system was preventing parents having the choice of sending their sprogs to academies. And the Tories later went on to float the idea of bringing back the grammar schools, only for that to fail with the public. But the academies carry on, enriching their corporate masters, some of whom are abroad and so don’t pay UK tax, while the Labour and Tory parties both got generous donations from them. It’s a failing system, kept going only by industrial-political oligarchy, greed, and the belief that private industry must always be better, even when it’s obviously failing.

All the videos are under 15 minutes long and the last one is just under seven, so they shouldn’t take up too much of your time.

Independent: 700,000 Pupils in Schools Needing Major Repairs

This story was written by Jonathan Bunn, and runs

‘700,000 pupil attending schools requiring major repairs, warns watchdog

The government does not have sufficient information to manage “critical” risks to the safety of pupils and staff arising from a deterioration in the condition of school buildings, the National Audit Office (NAO) has warned.

A report by the public spending watchdog identified that about 700,000 children in England attend schools requiring major repairs following years of underfunding, with poor conditions directly affecting pupil attainment and teacher retention.

NAO head Gareth Davies said that, despite assessing the possibility of building collapse or failure causing death or injury as “critical and very likely” in 2021, “the Department for Education has not been able to reduce this risk”.

Around 24,000 school buildings, or 38 per cent of the total, are currently beyond their estimated design lifespan, the report found.

A major cause of concern is the prevalence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac), which is prone to failure and was regularly used between the 1950s and mid-1990s.

The department has been considering the potential risk posed by Raac since 2018, following a roof collapse at a school in Kent, but potential problems in many schools remain unknown.’

For more information, see: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/700-000-pupil-attending-schools-requiring-major-repairs-warns-watchdog/ar-AA1d8KMn?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=ec16c4c122054265893ed9d494a53cdf&ei=37

I’m not remotely surprised at this. Thatcher’s government didn’t like spending money on state schools. I can remember at my old school buckets being placed in corridors under leaking roofs. This attitude continued into the Blair administration, when the Grinning Warmonger starved those schools still under the control of Local Education Authority of money while lavishing it on the new city academies. And this attitude has carried on under the Tories, who would have dearly liked to have brought back the grammar schools if they could.

Spending on state schools has failed to keep track with inflation while the money given in fees to private schools has soared. Some would argue that this is deliberate, so the privately educated children of the rich can maintain their place at the head of society by citing their superior education.

Striking Teachers Describe Lack of Resources and Underfunding

Last week Britain’s teachers joined the other workers in taking strike action over decades of poor pay and increasingly deteriorating conditions. And naturally, the right-wing media and YouTubers sneered and complained. One berk who phoned up Mike Graham on LBC radio claimed to have been married to a teacher, but that they were actually well-paid with plenty of spare time and holidays. This was pounced on immediately by various left-wing YouTubers, who pointed out that teachers don’t have plenty of spare time, because they’re still required to work after the official end of the school day, on things like sports and so on. Plus they have to take the kids’ schoolwork home for marking. This means that in practice they’re working much longer than their official hours. I know, as my mother was one. Another pratt appeared on GB News or some other right-wing internet news channel to claim that they were being selfish and should put up with low wages like others were doing. But, he said, he would have been prepared to support them if they had been striking over the poor conditions and state of Britain’s schools. Michael Walker of Novara Media pulled that one to shreds, stating that teachers couldn’t actually do that by law. Current British legislation states that workers can only strike over pay and conditions, not over anything else.

But the state of Britain’s schools has always been a major concern to teachers aside from their own personal interests. It was one of the reasons behind the teachers’ strike when Thatcher was in power in the 1980s, and it’s a major cause of their discontent now. I also found a video on YouTube, in which they describe how underfunded schools are and the shortages of necessary teaching equipment and resources this causes. I can’t put it up here, as I’ve since lost it unfortunately, but I hope you’ll accept what I’m saying.

Schools have been underfunded and teachers poorly paid for a very long time, because Thatcherite ideology doesn’t like state education. Hence the transition of schools from the state sector, run by the local authority, to academies, managed by private companies. The companies owning them are often in tax havens, and these schools are frequently no better than the state management they replace. In fact many were so dreadful themselves that the chains running them collapsed and they had to be taken back into state management. But this hasn’t deterred the Tories. A few years ago, mad-eyed Nikki Morgan wanted to bring back grammar schools and but that was quashed. The idea is still out there, however, floating around on the right.

The point here is that teachers aren’t just striking for themselves, but because they are acutely aware of how poorly the state education sector is being treated by decades of Thatcherite mismanagement, cuts and underfunding. They aren’t striking because they want to harm the education of the children they teach by stopping work, but to force the government into treating schools fairly.

There’s also a class element there as well. Private school fees have rocketed while funding of state schools has remained level. This means that the rich are receiving a much more expensive, and presumably better education, than state pupils. This may allow them to position themselves as in a natural position to take up top jobs and social positions than all those pesky state students.

So when you hear the Tories whinge about teachers, remember: they want state schools and their staff to be poor, so that their pupils will always remain, compared to them, at the back of the class in terms of jobs and prospects.

American Teacher Describes Why Teachers Are Leaving En Masse

This video comes from the NHC Educational Justice channel on YouTube, ad has the title ‘Even a Mass Exodus of Teachers Doesn’t Faze our Administration at any Level. They Just Don’t Care’. It’s of a teacher presenting her evidence before the New Hannover County school board, or so I assume. The teacher states that very many of her fellows are leaving the profession so that vacancies are going unfilled. This is not because they hate their jobs or the kids, but because of low pay, the endless testing, the burden of getting the kids through SATS with little support, such as teaching assistants and so on. They are also stigmatised as already overpaid, and heavily criticised when children do not succeed. And as for pay, one woman left because she found that she could earn more as a waitress with the tips.

I’m putting this up because these complaints are exactly the same that teacher over here have repeatedly voiced ever since the days of Maggie Thatcher. There’s also the problem that there are any number of videos on the net by Republicans exposing and talking about radical teachers in the classroom talking about how their indoctrinating their children about Black Lives Matter, White privilege and Queer theory. There’s an awful lot of videos about gay and trans teachers talking on TikTok about how they’ve come out to the children in their class and are trying to support their children’s gay and trans identities. While these are serious issues, I think the far bigger issue is simply that faced by teachers over here as well: poor pay and an excessive workload. Concentrating on extreme left-wing radicals, in my view, presents a distorted image of the profession. Most teachers are in there not to turn children into intersectional Marxist revolutionaries or gay or trans activists. They’re in teaching because they want to stand in front of a class and teach ordinary subjects like reading, writing, maths, science, history or whatever. And I do believe that the far right is weaponising the concern about radical indoctrination in order to destroy the state school system. Right-wing activists like Matt Walsh will show a video of a gay/trans/non-binary teacher talking about their views and how they’re teaching them to their class and then advise their audience to take their children out of school and home school them. There’s a similar attitude over here with the Reclaim party and the New Culture Forum. But underneath it is a deeper hostility to state provision of education.

Instead of being misrepresented as raving Marxist radicals, intent on creating a new generation of young revolutionaries, most teachers are professionals with a serious commitment to teaching. They deserve better pay, support and respect.

And definitely not to be used as propaganda in a radical libertarian attack on state education.

One Third of Teachers Planning to Leave Over Next Five Years

I hope everyone had a great Easter bank holiday weekend. I said I wouldn’t post anything then, partly because a few days earlier I felt too ill but mostly because it was just such a beautiful spring weekend that I didn’t want to spoil it by putting up material that would get me angry and depressed. The weekend has passed, and I’m now ready to tackle the serious issues. But it’s still a beautiful day, or at least it is in Bristol. So if it gets too much, there’s always the sunny spring weather to enjoy for a breather.

One of the headlines I caught a few days ago was that a third of British teachers apparently are planning to leave in the next five years. I’m honestly not surprised. My mother was a junior school teacher and I did my first degree at a teacher training college. And despite what the right-wing press would have us all believe, teachers don’t have it easy.

One of the issues is that both Labour and the Tories have used education as a political football, demanding every more additions to the curriculum and increasing responsibility for teachers while at the same time cutting wages and funding for schools. Teachers don’t just stand in front of whiteboards talking to their pupils about algebra, poetry or whatever the subject is. They also have to mark the students work, as well as run various extracurricular activities like the school sports teams. And the responsibility and the workload seems to have increased during the Covid crisis, as pupils still have to receive an education. And then there’s the appalling fact that, because of the grinding poverty Johnson and the Tories have inflicted on working people, they’ve had to supply free school meals to kids in the summer holidays because otherwise the kids’ families would be able to afford to feed them.

As for the messing around with the curriculum, some of us can still remember when Dave Cameron’s government added so many extra subjects that they couldn’t fit into the school day. Add to this the constant requirement for testing school children and the immense pressure this places on the children as well as the school. I said on this blog a few years ago that there seems to be something in the Tory psyche that wants to crush all the joy out of education. Yes, children should work hard, but they should also be allowed to enjoy school and childhood. The Tory vision of education seems to want to make it just one long round of joyless drudgery. And there are also issues with the league tables the Tories set up to monitor the school performance. Some schools are left near the bottom for no fault of their own. I’m thinking here of those schools serving areas with large immigrant populations, where English isn’t the first language of many of the pupils. These pupils may struggle initially, but then make huge improvements. However, it may still be because of linguistic difficulties and so on that these schools are still below the national average, despite the immense improvement those children may have achieved in the few years they’re there. Improvements that aren’t reflected in the league tables.

And then there’s the problem of pupil behaviour. Depending on the school and the area, this can extremely disruptive and even dangerous. Back in the ’90s, when Private Eye was still worth reading, they did a supplement on teaching reflecting the views and concerns of teachers themselves. Some of them said that they seemed to spend most their lessons simply trying to keep order and they felt they’d achieved something when they actually got around to teaching something. One teacher described meeting parents for a talk about their child coming to school without the proper equipment. The father immediately blamed the mother, who shuddered. Which definitely suggests domestic violence back home. Now there’s the problem of children bringing knives to school and the threat of lethal violence. I remember the case a few years ago when a gang stabbed a headmaster to death outside the school gates after he came to confront them when they turned up looking for one of the pupils. It also seems that female teachers are also at risk from sexist remarks and treatment by pupils. There was a report in the Groan that 70 per cent of teachers had experienced misogyny at work. The feeling among many teachers as reported by the Private Eye article was that they were overworked, harassed and underappreciated. They complained that they received little help for difficult situations with problem pupils from their headmasters. Given all this, I’m not remotely surprised many teachers want to leave.

And if that happens, it’ll take more than trying to turn even more schools into academies or screaming about bringing back grammar schools to restore the education system.

The Republican right in America keep pushing for more state schools to be transformed to charter schools, which I gather is the American equivalent of the academies over here. They also advocated home schooling children. There’s a real, ideological hatred of state education. And the Tories certainly share it, to the point where I’m starting to wonder if the threats of a mass exodus of teachers is all being engineered by them to harm state education over here.

A Black Conservative’s Demand for the Return of Traditional Morality and against the Condescencion of Affirmative Action

Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (New York: HarperCollins 2006).

Shelby Steele is a Black American literature professor. A conservative, the blurb states that he is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford University and contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine as well as a multiple aware winner. This is his view of the failure of the movement for Black uplift, ultimately caused by the loss of traditional, conservative values through their association with White supremacy after the ending of segregation. It’s also an account of his journey from childhood growing up in the south under segregation, to angry student radical, disaffected employee, and finally conservative intellectual. During his time he also worked on the Great Society programmes initiated by Lyndon Johnson in some of the worst Black communities and become increasingly disillusioned with them and succeeding programmes as they failed. This last week we had a mixed-race footballer demanding the inclusion of ethnic minority culture and history in the British school curriculum. But Steele rejects this and another initiatives, arguing that despite the implementation of such policies in America, Blacks are still performing poorly at school and elsewhere. Worse, the American public school system, which he boasts was the greatest in the world, has been destroyed by them. What Black America needs, according to Steele, is a return to the traditional capitalist, bourgeois virtues, such as entrepreneurialism, as well as stable two-parent families and a genuine meritocracy, where people are rewarded according to their talent rather than the colour of their skin. In short, he wants Blacks to stand on their own two feet and argues persuasively this is possible. Black children perform badly at school, despite affirmative action programmes to help them and the lowering of academic standards in their favour. But they excel in sport, music, literature and entertainment, where there are no such programmes and only the best is required of them. Thus, leading Black sportsmen emerge through long, demanding practise on the baseball pitch, for example. Great Black musicians come about through kids practicing long and hard on cheap keyboards in their rooms, demanding the best of themselves. But the Black community has been deprived of this spirit of initiative and excellence when it turned away from the liberalism of rights and personal freedom to demand positive measures by the state through exploiting the guilty feelings and loss of moral authority experienced by Whites as they ended segregation and came to terms with the history of racism and Black oppression.

But this has not just damaged Blacks. It has also damaged general American moral authority. White guilt helped the 60s counterculture to emerge and flourish, as well as the new feminist and environmental movements. He states at various times that the attitude now is that if you fail to be properly environmentally concerned, you must be some kind of racist. He’s fully behind the Iraq invasion, which he genuinely believes was an attempt to liberate the country and create a genuine, liberal, democratic order. But it has been hamstrung through comparisons to past American imperialism and exploitation. He celebrates George W. Bush and the new American conservatives, who at one level seem liberal. Bush is comfortable with ethnic minorities and has appointed a number to positions of power. But they are not encumbered by White guilt, and so can exert the traditional moral authority America needs and used to have when White supremacy was unchallenged. As for the inclusion of Black writers on school syllabuses, he feels that the current policy of promoting them simply because they are Black is damaging. It means that genuinely talented writers are put in the same category as the mediocre and so discredited by association, simply because they’re Black. He also condemns a system that imposes higher standards on poor White university applicants simply because of their colour in favour of children from rich Black families. And throughout the book there is a feeling of outrage at such affirmative action measures because of their patronising attitude and apparent condescension.

He also argues that Black anger and militancy was due to the collapse of White confidence and authority due to the end of segregation. During segregation peaceful protests, intended to show Black moral superiority, such as the civil rights demonstrations led by Martin Luther King were the only way to stand up against it. And in cases where nothing could be done, because that was just the way society was, the only things Blacks could do was move on. Such as when he tried to get a job when he was a youngster for an all-White baseball team as their batboy. He was eventually dropped because he couldn’t travel with them to segregated matches. But, as disappointed as he was, by the next day he had moved on to other things as there was absolutely nothing he could do. This is contrasted with the situation a few years later when he led an angry delegation of Black students into his college principal’s office to make what he now regards as outrageous demands. He showed his own personal disrespect by dropping cigarette ash onto the principal’s carpet. The principal received them graciously and gave in, despite appearing initially shocked an angry. This happened because he had lost his moral authority along with the rest of the traditional American order, tarnished by its link with White supremacy.

There’s a wealth of information on the lives of ordinary Blacks under segregation and how, despite its constraints some of them where able to achieve a modicum of prosperity. His father was caught between the unions and his employer. The unions wouldn’t accept him because of his colour, while he had to keep from his employer the fact that he owned his own house. But his father, clearly a man of great entrepreneurial talent, was able to purchase three houses, which he renovated using slightly worn, but still perfectly serviceable furnishings. His parents also set up a free mother and baby clinic. When it came to their son’s schooling, they moved heaven and earth, practically setting up their own civil rights movement, to get him into an all-White school. Unfortunately the area declined due to ‘ghetto blight’ and his father was glad to sell the last one. He describes how, when Blacks travelled to other towns the first thing they had to do was a find another Black to inform them what hotels and shops they could use. This also gave them a kind of secret knowledge and collective identity against that of White America. Some Blacks miss this sense of community and solidarity, hence the proliferation of all-Black groups, societies and professional associations. He talks about working on the Great Society programmes in a truly horrendous town. One morning he woke up to hear the sound of his neighbour trying to shoot his own son in the stomach. Fortunately the man just grazed him. The bookish, nerdy kid, who should have done well at school, and whose mother attempted to protect him from the horror and violence around him by keeping him heavily involved at church, was shot dead in a drive-by gang shooting. The homecoming king at the local school was arrested as a violent thug. His job was to improve this community with the funding they had, but they had no idea what they were doing. They experimented and made stuff up, like the line that Blacks differ from Whites in learning experientially.

But as the years rolled on he became inwardly more conservative while maintaining an outward appearance of left-wing radicalism. Finally this became too much, and he came out as a conservative at a faculty meeting where they were discussing setting up a course on ‘ethnic literature’. Steele, who had already been teaching a course on Black literature, objected. He asks what the label would mean – would it include Philip Roth as well as V.S. Naipaul? He was also angry at being taken for granted when it came to voting, as the proposer of the motion stated she didn’t need to ask him, because she knew he’d vote with her. But he didn’t. He objected, shed his left-wing mask, and came out as a conservative. He now gets abuse as an ‘uncle Tom’ but says he feels better.

In an interview in the back, Steele talks about what got him interested in literature. At his new, all-White school, the English teacher gave him a copy of Kit Carson and the Indians. He was practical illiterate after the appalling education at his former all-Black school. But he so wanted to read the book he spent the next 9 months teaching himself to read. He then moved on to other children’s books, sports stories before tackling Dickens and Somerset Maugham.

Steele is wrong about American conservatism having abandoned imperialism. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was definitely a piece of imperialist conquest, designed to rob the Iraqi people of their oil and state industries. The only difference was the presentation. It was disguised as a war of liberation. But that ruse is almost as old as civilisation itself. When Alexander the Great took a town, he didn’t exact tribute from its ruler. No, what he demanded was ‘contributions to the army of liberation.’ Because he had liberated them from a tyrant. Steele states that the campaigns against sexism and the environmentalist movement are right, but he does have a point when he states that they were also enabled by a reaction against traditional White authority. Some radical writers and activists I’ve come across do seem to present them as in opposition to the White social and economic order carried to the New World by the first European colonists. And I agree with him about the breakdown of the traditional family that came as a result of the sexual revolution of the 60s. This affects Whites as well as Blacks, but is particularly acute among the latter community. 70 per cent of Black American children are born out of wedlock, 90 per cent in the cities. Studies have shown that children from stable families where both parents live together perform far better at school and work. As for education, one of his ideas for Blacks in areas with failing public schools is to open their own in a church or community centre.

I think he’s right about the value of what can also be termed old-fashioned respectability and bourgeois family life. However individual initiative is inadequate to solve all forms of poverty. State action and welfare programmes are still badly needed. But this needn’t be a choice between two alternatives. It means mixing appropriate state support while encouraging people to develop and use their talents. And his examples of Black excellence in sport, music, literature and entertainment do indicate that Blacks can excel by themselves. I found this particularly reassuring after listening to the claims about supposed Black intellectual inferior made by Simon Webb on History Debunked as his preferred explanation for the lack of Black progress.

The book comes from across the other side of the political aisle, but it’s well worth reading and intensely thought-provoking about the continuing, very pertinent problem of Black failure as a consequence of the general failure of traditional morality post-segregation.

Teachers Scrabble for Cash as Entertainment During American Football Game

Yeah, I know, I said I really shouldn’t be platforming mad right-winger Alex Belfield. But this is another genuinely interesting and concerning video he’s put up. It seems a group of teachers demeaned themselves as half-time entertainment in America during a game of American football. An insurance company donated a pile of cash and during the interval a group of teachers came on to scrabble physically for it, stuffing it down their shirt and jumper fronts, in order to get $10,000 each for their school to buy equipment. As you can see from the comments on his site, people compared it to the Hunger Games and the way the poor was forced to compete in that for food.

It’s a bit like Bumfights, a series of videos that came out over a decade ago, but with middle class educators rather than tramps and hoboes. Bumfights were made by a group of rich kids, and featured the homeless fighting each other or doing something equally demeaning in order to get a burger from the people videoing them. It was exploitation of the poorest and desperate. Someone has said since that the homeless people that appeared on these videos were actually paid much more than a simple burger, but this was left out of the cut. Well, perhaps. But it was still immensely tasteless and demeaning, nonetheless. And so is this.

I go the impression that the state schools in America are in crisis, just as they are over here. Various American governments have been trying to close down ordinary public schools and transform them into charter schools. These are, I believe, the American equivalent of our academies. This is often against the wishes of the local community, including parents, teachers and local clergy. Who are naturally ignored. One of those pushing ahead with this policy was Barack Obama, who has described himself as a moderate Republican rather than a Democrat. There’s also the right-wing push for home schooling to protect children against extreme left-wing indoctrination in schools with Queer and Critical Race Theory. Some of the poverty also comes from the peculiar way American public schools are funded. It comes out of local taxes. If the area’s affluent, then so are the schools. If it’s poor, then the local schools are too, and more likely to be poorly maintained and lacking needed equipment and teaching materials. It isn’t like that over here, but government funding to state schools has been increasingly cut so that it’s far less than many need, while governments from Blair onwards have given massive funding to the academies.

I dare say that the insurance company, who donated the money, and the organisers of this competition thought they were doing something noble. After all, game shows have featured people scrabbling for prizes ever since they were invented. But in their case, this is genuinely for entertainment. There isn’t an economic need motivating them, or not usually. And in the quizzes in which celebrities compete to win money for charity, dignity is preserved. You don’t see the celebs on the Chase physically scrabble for the cash on their hands and knees. But I’m afraid this nasty little piece of squalid entertainment could start a trend, and might come over here.

This is just exploiting people’s poverty. Schools everywhere should be properly funded so that they can afford to give their pupils the best education possible with the equipment and learning materials they need. And teachers should be properly paid as respectable professionals responsible for educating and inspiring the kids in their charge.

James Lindsay Tears Apart Queer Theorist Paper Attacking Childhood Innocence

I hope I’m not boring you with all this, but I thought I should post this video by James Lindsay up as well. It follows his first video attacking Queer Theory and its deliberate grooming of schoolchildren through pornography and grossly inappropriate topics being taught in sex education. Lindsay argued, citing the postmodernists and Marxist writers themselves, that Queen Theory really isn’t about genuinely helping gay, bi and trans children and adults come to terms with their sexuality and find acceptance in society, so that they can lead normal, functioning, happy lives alongside straight people. Rather, it is all about increasing their alienation and making them even more angry and transgressive in order to turn them into a revolutionary mass which will overthrow capitalism instead of the working class. This follows closely Georg Lukacz’s sex education programme in Hungary, which was explicitly designed to use sexual liberation to alienate children from their parents and conventional capitalist society. This was then taken up by the Frankfurt school and played a very strong role in the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s. Lindsay backs up the arguments in his previous video by going through a Queer Theory paper, written by Hanna Dyer, a woman at Carlton University in Canada, that explicitly states this.

Queer Theory’s Rejection of Gay Rights

Early on in the paper, Dyer denounces the recent legislation granting gay people equal rights. Lindsay is not homophobic, even though his attacks on Queer and Critical Theory and calls for those promoting it to be put in gaol make him sound like a very right-wing Conservative. I don’t know what his political views are. He may be a man of the right, but he makes it clear that all parents should come together to combat what is being taught in schools in Social Emotional Learning and Comprehensive Sex Education regardless of politics, race, sexuality and religion. All that should matter is the class ‘parent’. Lindsay states that gay acceptance has been of immense benefit to society. But Dyer attacks it because such liberal legislation will help reconcile gays with the capitalist society they wish to overthrow. This continues throughout her wretched article. Later on she attacks Dan Savage’s video on YouTube, ‘It Gets Better’. Savage is gay, and with another man, produced a video to reassure gay children that even though they’re bullied and have an awful time at school, it gets better when you grow up. People are more accepting. I think this often depends on your particular place in society. Working class culture could be traditionally extremely homophobic, and there is a vicious homophobia prevalent in some parts of Black culture. But in general middle class culture has become very accepting to the point where one YouTuber described how a Conservative friend had completely accepted gay equality. Savage produced his video in response to the high rate of suicide amongst gay kids. He wanted to stop it by showing that ‘It Gets Better’. He released the video on YouTube because he felt schools would resist its message. According to Lindsay, Savage is actually ‘super liberal’. But to Dyer he’s an evil White man – she doesn’t call him a scholar or researcher, just ‘White man’ in order to show how evil he is. Apart from his race, she sees him as a servant of capitalism, trying to stop the revolutionary potential of the gay masses by incorporating them into neoliberalism and promoting upward mobility.

Now I strongly believe that the sooner we dump neoliberalism the better. It is doing immense damage to ordinary working people of whatever, race, creed, sexuality or religion. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to reassure vulnerable gay children that they can still a place as an accepted member of society, who should be able to look forward to the same job opportunities as the rest of us and have the same aspirations to social advancement. And I’d say that attacking a video that genuinely tries to stop gay kids committing suicide is actually evil.

The Attack on Childhood Innocence in order to Promote Radically Alienated Gay Identities

The paper goes on to attack the whole notion of childhood innocence. She hates the idea that children are asexual and proto-heterosexual. Lindsay states that here she comes into conflict with biological fact. Most people across society all over the world are heterosexual. Only a minority are gay. This is aside from any moral considerations that see heterosexuality as more moral than homosexuality. He makes it clear that he supports the teaching that ‘Some people are gay. Get over it’, as Stonewall once said in an advertising programme. Lindsay has said in his previous video that Queer Theorists really don’t like that common sense attitude. Moreover, they see gender and sexuality as identities without essence, social roles people perform rather than are. Therefore they seek to groom children for their role as queer revolutionaries by breaking down barriers and having them sexually experiment. This include the binary oppositions male/female, adult/child. And around the 1hr 14 minute mark, Dyer says this explicitly. Which clearly opens the way to grooming by paedophiles. Lindsay states that children have a very strong belief in these opposition and that he believes them to be biologically innate. He also makes the point that paedophile relationships massively damage the young victims psychologically. A very high number schizoid people have the condition due to childhood abuse. But Dyer seems also to be offended by the biological fact that most people are heterosexual. She wants to changes that, and queer not just gay children, but children as a whole. This is very much how the attacks on heteronormativity have seemed to me, and I’m glad that Lindsay has come to the same conclusion I have.

Later on, she attacks the whole notion of reproductive sex because gay people, who naturally cannot have children through gay sex, cannot achieve the same level of privilege as straight ‘breeders’ in a society that privileges heterosexual reproduction. But this is a revolt against biology, as it is through heterosexual reproductive sex that the human race is perpetuated. Ah, but so too are the mechanisms of capitalist control and repression. Instead the goal should be hedonistic, non-reproductive sex, which she explicitly connects with the death urge through Marcuse and other Marxist thinkers. This is just plain nihilism. Thinking about it, it makes me wonder if Pope John Paul II had a point when he described Enlightenment society as a ‘cult of death’. I think he was wrong about the Enlightenment, but certainly right about these pernicious postmodernist ideologies.

Childhood Innocence Blamed for Racism and Genocide

Naturally, race gets drawn into it in order to produce the broad, intersectional coalition of races and sexualities that postmodernists hope to create as an oppositional front against capitalism. Childhood innocence should be challenged, because it chiefly affects White children. Black children are less innocent, and stereotypically more streetwise. Lindsay says it’s rubbish. Here I think he’s wrong. I think the stereotype is that Black children are tougher, more worldly-wise, and more ‘street’. but that doesn’t mean that their parents don’t want to preserve and guard their innocence just as much as Whites. And apparently childhood innocence is also genocidal. Whites want to preserve their kids more than those of other races, and this is somehow ties in with one of the genuine mass-murderers of the US Indian Wars. This was the general responsible for the Sand Creek massacre, who wanted not only adult indigenous Americans killed, but also to be physically mutilated and their children murdered as well in order ‘to stop lice breeding’. It’s an absolutely horrific attitude and atrocity, but as Lindsay points out, just ’cause someone was an idiot in the past doesn’t mean that everybody who believes in childhood innocence is. She also brings social class into her argument about gay acceptance and queer children, although Lindsay states these are actually non-issues. He also points out that at the centre of all this is are repeated attacks on conventional ideas of childhood development, which stresses that children go through certain stages and that the material they’re given should be age appropriate. Like the books in school libraries that are graded according to suitability for different ages of reader. Dyer talks about getting Queer Theory to influence ideas of childhood pedagogy along with Critical Race Theory. But this isn’t about helping gay children. It’s all about destabilising children’s personalities, to make them angry and disaffected, to make them Marxist revolutionaries determined to destroy western civilisation.

Alex Jones Right about Queer Theory and Transhumanism

At times Lindsay sounds like the mad conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He says at one point that if he goes on reading it, he’ll end up screaming about Satan like the bonkers Texan libertarian. Well, Jones talked a lot of conspiracist nonsense about ‘the globalists’, which is very close to the wretched anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He also falsely accused decent people of being child abusers for the Democrat party, claimed Barack Obama was the antichrist, Hillary Clinton of being possessed by alien demons, a practicing witch and a robot from the waist down, and other nonsense. Like NASA was running a child slave labour based on Mars. Which nobody knew about, least of all NASA, as they took the time to deny it, not least because it would cost $16 billion just to send six people to Mars let alone the legions of kids Jones, or rather, one of his guests, claimed.

But it seems Jones had a point. I’ll admit I had a laugh when Jones ranted about feminism and gay rights being a transhumanist cult to turn us all into sexless cyborgs. But Lindsay says that transhumanism is one offshoot of Critical Theory. The World Economic Forum is made up of transhumanists, who all want to link us to the Net through biological implants so that we will live at least part of the time in Virtual reality. We will own nothing and we will be happy.

This sounds like Star Trek’s Borg to me. In ‘Q Who?’, the Star Trek The Next Generation episode which introduced them, Q transports the Enterprise to system J17, where they encounter and are attacked by a Borg cube that has just finished assimilating a planet. As one of them beams aboard, Q says to Picard, ‘Look at it, Jean-Luc. It’s not a he, it’s not a she… it’s an augmented humanoid.’ But one of the heads of the big American tech corporations is a transwoman and transhumanist, and wrote a paper promoting transhumanism as a feminist project to go beyond gender. And there certainly was a lot of talk about genderless future cyborgs when transhumanism was being discussed back in the ’90s. ‘We are Postmodern Borg. Resistance to Critical Theory is futile. You will be assimilated’.

Destroying State Education Not the Solution

Throughout the video, Lindsay angrily stops his analysis of the text to remind his readers that this is being done by groomers in the sex education now being taught in American schools. This means your children. And this is primarily state schools though some private schools are also involved. He loudly urges people to take their children out of these schools. I see his point. There’s a video by anti-trans ideology activists Kellie-Jay Minshull, in which she goes through some of the material recommended for schools by Stonewall. And it is about sexualising children. One of these is a game in which children put together various body parts and have to guess what sex act may be possible with them. This really is inappropriate. Yes, children should be taught about the changes happening to their bodies and their emerging sexuality in adolescence. And I quite agree that at an appropriate age, children should be taught that some people are gay but should be accepted like anybody else. But this doesn’t do that. It is about breaking down barriers, barriers which are there for a reason. There is an organisation, the Safe Schools Alliance, for parents worried about this form of indoctrination. He also points out that the ideas are very similar to Herbert Marcuse’s proposals for Marxism to take over university education.

But the solution isn’t to pull kids out of state education, as the Conservative right wants. I think the American public school system was founded by Thomas Jefferson, who realised that for America to work as a functioning democracy it needed an educated public. Absolutely. If you destroy public education, you get back to the conditions of 19th century Britain before it was made compulsory. Education was definitely not free, and only the rich could afford to send their children to the public (elite private) and the grammar schools. Working class children could go instead to dame schools, usually run by an elderly woman, hence their name, where educational standards could be very low. Many children couldn’t send their children to school, and so illiteracy rates were much, much higher. Proper state education has made the British public much more educated and informed, though sometimes you wonder.

What needs to be done is for parents instead to fight this indoctrination as hard as they can, so that their children get a proper education and not just indoctrination, whether from the extreme left or the extreme right.