The fight to preserve the Electoral College is heating up—and Trent England is on the front lines. In this episode, Jenny Beth Martin sits down with the Founder and Executive Director of Save Our States to expose the dangerous reality behind the National Popular Vote movement and explain how it threatens the very foundation of our constitutional republic. They also dive into the deceptive nature of Ranked Choice Voting and how it's being used as a political weapon to rig outcomes and disenfranchise voters. If you care about election integrity, federalism, and protecting America’s founding principles, this is a must-listen conversation.
The fight to preserve the Electoral College is heating up—and Trent England is on the front lines. In this episode, Jenny Beth Martin sits down with the Founder and Executive Director of Save Our States to expose the dangerous reality behind the National Popular Vote movement and explain how it threatens the very foundation of our constitutional republic. They also dive into the deceptive nature of Ranked Choice Voting and how it's being used as a political weapon to rig outcomes and disenfranchise voters. If you care about election integrity, federalism, and protecting America’s founding principles, this is a must-listen conversation.
Twitter/X: @trentengland | @SaveOurStates | @jennybethm
Website: https://saveourstates.com/ | https://stoprcv.com/ | Safeguard: An Electoral College Story
James LIndsay (00:00):
Since then I've learned and what we wrote about in the queering of the American childhood, this is trauma bonding. This is a cult recruitment tactic that they're doing. They're traumatizing children, knowingly and on purpose in order to brainwash them into the left wing, anti privilege, anti-capitalist, anti whiteness, whatever you want. Beliefs
Narrator (00:21):
Keeping our republic is on the line and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author of filmmaker and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she's most proud of is Mom to Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:53):
Today we're joined by James Lindsay, who is an author of Cynical Theories and most recently the Queering of the American Child. He also is a social media influencer. He gives speeches and he is a great intellectual. I'm really happy to be joined by you today, James.
James LIndsay (01:10):
Yeah, it's great to see you.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:12):
So talk about how you got involved in this broad space where you're taking intellect and explaining it to normal Americans and how it's messing up all our lives.
James LIndsay (01:22):
Sure, sure. So a long time ago, ending in 2010, I was an academic. I worked at the University of Tennessee. I taught mathematics. I have a PhD in math, and I decided to leave the university system for a variety of reasons. I didn't like the bureaucracy, I didn't like the kind of increasing emphasis on student retention, so grade padding basically to keep kids in school and paying tuition. It felt very off mission for me. I had other things going on with the family and you start weighing out on balance all the things. I left the university that got me looking for an academic outlet. I got a regular job where I worked with my hands, and so I wanted an academic outlet. Math was a bit much. So I actually started to get involved in these online discussion groups about the philosophy of science, philosophy of religion and so on, and grand internet arguments, pages and pages, so much text and these slowly at first and then all at once sort of got colonized by radical feminists who made it rather unpleasant to be there.
James LIndsay (02:27):
And of course if you weren't forwarding feminist ideas, they made your life more or less a living hell online. And so a friend of mine that I'd started to write with through this network of contacts by about 2013, his name's Peter Otin, he and I started to turn our attention to the problem of radical feminism taking over kind of academic and para academic spaces and conferences, like I said, online discussion forums, social media. We were also in parallel watching the output from academic journals kind of skew further and further into the crazy, as we all would call woke now, we were watching the behavior of on college campuses, somebody would come to speak, some conservative would come to speak, they'd have a huge protest, throw fits, throw chairs and furniture, scream whatever else. We're watching this escalate through 20 13, 14, 15 to a fevered pitch. Really in 2015, I think it sort of peaked in many ways in 2015.
James LIndsay (03:32):
And in 2016, they published an academic paper that we thought was so beyond the pale that we were going to do something about it. And we had tried criticizing it. We had tried explaining it, we had tried engaging with it, and we just got rebuffed. You're a straight white man, you have nothing to say. You don't have a PhD in it. You have nothing to say. So Peter and I had this idea that we would write some academic hoaxes, we would write academic journal level papers, something that academics build their career off of, and we would send them to high ranking journals and feminism and gender studies and critical race theory and so on. And so we did. We spent the entirety of 2017 and 18 writing these papers up until October of 2018 when it turns out that Wall Street Journal had kind of caught up with us and figured out what we were doing because the papers were getting published. And so you couldn't hide how we were putting out the craziest things we could think of and you couldn't hide them. They were published.
Jenny Beth Martin (04:26):
What kind of crazy things?
James LIndsay (04:27):
Well, that particular paper, the feminists claim that there's a problem in our society called rape culture that the reason that rape exists at all is because we have a rape supporting culture, particularly among men. And this is obviously nonsense. The facts of rape is that there are a very small number of men who do this. They tend to be rampant repeat offenders, and most men are not just against it, but so vigorously against it that if you're a rapist who goes to prison, not exactly a healthy slice of society, you're in great danger because they really don't like rapists. So we don't actually have this. But anyway, the feminists are obsessed with this idea that there's hidden support for rape throughout the male patriarchy. So we said, well, one way we can find out if this is true is we can go to the dog park and we can watch the dogs, we'll say interacting with one another in a very PG 13 way.
James LIndsay (05:24):
And judging on how people react to what the dogs are doing, we can make inferences about their support for rape. And so we claim that straight men were like, get 'em boy. And that the women and gay men were horrified by this. And so that proves that straight men are favoring rape. And therefore what we should do, since we use dogs as the model to understand it, is that if we were to train men the way we train dogs out of obedience manuals with leashes and things, then we could overcome rape culture. And this paper was accepted and published. That was the paper that got us figured out. A reporter from the Wall Street Journal saw that eventually and thought, there's no way this can be real. Started digging into it and I have
Jenny Beth Martin (06:08):
To, but the academic journals were posting it and treating it seriously
James LIndsay (06:12):
Not only was accepted to the leading academic journal in what's called Feminist Geography, it was given an award for excellence in scholarship in the year 2018 in their 25th, 25th anniversary year of the journal. It's not like this was just some startup. And it turns out it wasn't actually the Wall Street Journal that found us out first, it was a college student, a conservative college student, saw this paper and thought there is absolutely no way. And she doggedly chewed on this not to make a dog reference. She doggedly chased this issue and eventually called in her help from her friend at the Wall Street Journal. And when that all got involved, it all fell apart. So we ended up writing 20 of these papers. Seven of them were actually accepted, four of them were actually published. The one got an award and seven further we're still under peer review when we got caught.
James LIndsay (07:05):
And a sociologist said we would've either got 11 or 12 of those 20 would've in the end been published. So it's pretty alarming what we were able to get. And I can't even talk about some of the papers in a family friendly forum because I mean, we see what's going on in academia. So we went in that direction. They're funny, but they're also very adult in a lot of cases. We rewrote a chapter of Mein Comp Hitler's Manifesto in intersectional feminist language, and that was accepted by a feminist social work journal that got a lot of attention and people were a little alarmed. That Rush Limbaugh's claim of femin Nazis was always correct, and this was a big splash, but it was also very alarming for us. We did this thinking, we'd exposed them, maybe something would change. And it's really funny. And in the middle of it, we wrote one paper for education.
James LIndsay (07:56):
And what we said was that, well, the kids are differently privileged. Some kids have more privilege, some kids have less privilege, and that's not fair. So what we're going to do is we're going to do various exercises, privilege walk and so on as it's called to find out who's who. We're going to put a hierarchy on the class. It's called a progressive stack. We're going to put a progressive stack on the class and if you have lots of oppression, we're going to give you extra benefits and all this the class. And if you come up with lots of privilege, then we're going to increasingly abuse you in class. And we said, but we'll do it with compassion because we thought A, it's funny, and B, there's no way they're going to allow us to say we're going to do child abuse in the classroom as an educational opportunity, which is how we phrased it.
James LIndsay (08:40):
And it turns out the peer review came back and they said, well, your paper's not ready to publish. It needs work, but we like the idea you're on the right track. It overcomes white fragility your right to invoke that. However, you've said that you need to use compassion. And that's wrong because it threatens, they said to recenter the needs of the privileged students over the other students. And they said instead, we should go study a woman named Megan Bowler. She wrote a book in 98 or 99 called Feeling Power. And in the ninth or whatever chapter of that book, it's called the Pedagogy of Discomfort. And so the goal is that you put students of kids into intentional psychological discomfort about the privileged state that they live in and leave them to sit in that discomfort. This is psychological abuse,
Jenny Beth Martin (09:30):
No
James LIndsay (09:31):
Question. In fact, since then I've learned, and what we wrote about in the querying of the American child is, and there's more evidence in their literature that they're doing this that we cite in that book. This is trauma bonding. This is a cult recruitment tactic that they're doing. They're traumatizing children knowingly and on purpose in order to brainwash them into the left wing, anti privilege, anti-capitalist, anti whiteness, whatever you want. Beliefs, antin normative also. And so we were so alarmed by that peer reviewer reply. So these are actual professionals with actual PhDs. I have peer reviewers are anonymous, but I have a very solid guess based on the writing style and having read so much of this, who that was, and if it's who I think it is, it's a very storied academic in the disciplinary, at least at the time, writing a lot of big papers, very well recognized, very prominent in feminist education theory and whiteness studies and education theory.
James LIndsay (10:28):
And so I realized if you're going to have an ideology that's objective is to abuse people out of a state of privilege based on who they happen to be and you're not allowed to include compassion, then there's only one place that can go. If you go down that track far enough, you end up with a genocide. And I stopped laughing. We were writing these papers and we were laughing and I stopped laughing and I actually went to my wife and asked if I could, when we were done writing all the papers, which was sort of all consuming, I said, can I not go back to my regular day-to-day job? Can I quit my job and dedicate all of my time, all of my effort to studying and exposing this because I think it's going to unravel civilization? And she said that she thought maybe I'd lost my mind, but what she said first was, can you make money doing that?
James LIndsay (11:24):
And I said, I don't know. And she graciously gave me 18 months to figure that out. And so I was allowed a runway of 18 months, which in women speak was 15 months in practice of no income to figure out whether or not there was a viable career path to exposing what turns out to be the attempted communist revolution of the United States and and we ended up making that work. So ever since I wrote cynical theories the year after to expose the postmodern elements of the philosophy that we had uncovered, writing these fake papers, I advanced into understanding the critical theory in neo-Marxist and then Marxist roots of that and wrote about those in race Marxism to expose critical race theory in 21. I then turned to education theory and I thought I was going to spend six months there and have been stuck there ever since and wrote the Marx modification of education and then the querying of the American child. And I've continued my research into whatever totalitarian ideologies, communism particularly, but fascism as well are coloring the moment that we find ourselves in.
Jenny Beth Martin (12:25):
Why are these totalitarian philosophies coloring? Why are we falling for this?
James LIndsay (12:36):
Yeah, there's two things happening. One is that there are people doing this, and I don't think that that's as hard to figure out. There are would be tyrants who realize they can rule the world if they do X, y, z. There's a very interesting book. It's I think an important book. Some people think it's a crazy book. It's called Got a Funny name. It's called Political ology. ERO is the Greek word for evil. So it's the study of evil. So this Polish guy, Chesky writes this book Political Ology and says that the essence of all totalitarianism is actually disordered psychological thinking pathology. And he calls the general phenomenon actually a path ocracy rule by pathology. And so what you have is tyrants tend to be people who can't cope with reality as it is, and they wish to make reality be reordered in order to suit whatever's wrong in their head. Stalin was a psychopath, for example. Very clearly Mao was a grandiose narcissist and a psychopath very clearly. And we could just go down the list, whether it's cluster B personality disorders, whether it's essential psychopathy, lots of clinical disorders show up. So they want to rule the world, they want to order everybody else's affairs. It's not super hard to figure out why even without that
Jenny Beth Martin (13:53):
Money,
James LIndsay (13:54):
Power, glory, sex, whatever it is they're after, why do we fall for it? That's a harder question. And I think it's that they whisper not to sound really religious about it. This can be analyzed in a secular way as well. But they're whispering like the serpent in Genesis. And these are very seductive whispers. They are very carefully tailored lies that play on the psychological predispositions of people. And I think particularly resentment and envy, they're very good at finding people who are envious, who are angry, who are frustrated. I mean, I'm on a big rant right now about nationalism. I'm not a big fan of nationalism, which gets me into big trouble. But when I say that, I mean something more specific I think than people realize like, do I love my country? Yes, but I think that's patriotism. Do I think that you should care about your country and its people ahead of the people in other countries?
James LIndsay (14:48):
In some sense, this JD Vance talked recently about the Ordo Amoris, the Order of Love. Yes, I do actually think that is that nationalism, I guess in a vague philosophical way. However, a political project of nationalism I am opposed to, and one of the reasons I'm opposed to it is because the communists have built their entire successful political projects from 1917 forward, and they were never successful before 1917 with Lenin. They've built every single successful political project on flipping over a nationalist regime. It's always that they say, oh yeah, the power says we're one nation, and guess what? You're not succeeding. You're not making it. So let's group you together, get you riled up and get you to cause what we would now call a color revolution.
Jenny Beth Martin (15:37):
So they get upset at the people who love the country.
James LIndsay (15:40):
Yeah. Well, here's some good examples that are undeniably communist Stalin in 1913 wrote a book called Marxism in the national Question. This launched a program that the Soviet Union used from roughly 1921 until 29 or 30. That was called Coratia, which means putting down roots. And what they did was they went around to all the different, this is going to sound familiar by the way. They went around to all the different ethnic minority nations, Estonia, Ukraine, the caucus, the Tatars. They went to those people, Stalin and his emissaries from the Soviets went to these people and said, we believe in self-determination. We don't think you should be impressed upon by the great Russian. The great Russian is a chauvinist, and he uses his great Russian chauvinism to try to force you to be Russian within our federation. And we're against that. We want the Ukrainians to be Ukrainian.
James LIndsay (16:36):
We want the Estonians to be Estonian. And then he said, the problem is is that the Russians are all feudalistic. They have all feudalistic thinking or capitalistic thinking in some cases or bourgeois thinking in one way or another, and you guys have a different way. And so then he would hand pick the ones among the minority ethnic enclaves that were socialists, elevate them to positions of leadership in their nation and take them as commissars into the Russia. And anybody who criticized them was accused of great Russian chauvinism, which sounds an awful lot like white supremacy culture here under the woke DEI apparatus, which is the same program. So what he was doing was going around and saying to these different groups, Ukrainians for example, the reason things aren't going well for you is because Russians are trying to force you to be Russian. And if we just let you be Ukrainian, which by the way means socialist, you're more socialist than the Russians, then you guys can self determine and so on.
James LIndsay (17:32):
But really what he was doing was using it as an excuse to foist Soviet power, and he only would hand pick ideologically aligned communists to run things. Mao did the same thing. It was Han Chauvinism, not Russian chauvinism there. And the nationalist party explicitly in Russia, the Gu Dong ran the show from the 1920s until 1949 when Mao overthrew them in a military coup and established the people's Republic of China that we have to this day. And the Gu dong was trying to unify the 56 races of China, but something like 90% of the people of China are Han Chinese Han race. And so they called the Chinese people Hu Run, which I haven't seen the character, but I think it means flower people, but it was being used to mean Chinese people and the communist, the ccp, Mao taking his orders from Stalin with the Coratia program he explicitly imported.
James LIndsay (18:30):
You can read where he said that it's the Russian program, went around to the 55 minority ethnicities and said, they're forcing you to be Han join the Communist. We aren't going to do that. We like your indigenous. And that's what it was called actually in Russia too, by the way, is indigeneity. Your indigenous ways are what we actually value, where the Han don't or where the great Russian doesn't or the white supremacist culture. And it's the exact same program. So what they are able to do in any nationalist regime is to go around and find the people who aren't winning and say, yeah, there's this great nationalist regime that's supposed to be for all the people of America except it's not working for you. So what does that mean? It means it was constructed not to be for you, and it's a system that was actually an old boys club all along that you're not part of.
James LIndsay (19:23):
And so what I'm saying is that I'm skeptical of the nationalist project as a political entity, a nationalist government specifically because it's so easy, it's communist bread and butter to flip it over and to cause the kind of agitation. And the only answer that the nationalist regime has as was proved in the fascist ideologies of Europe, is to go equally authoritarian and totalitarian to try to force the communists out. So the invitation to start thinking of yourselves in these identity terms that can be manipulated turns out to be a recipe to end up in totalitarianism one way or the other. And the communists win that in the long run every time.
Jenny Beth Martin (20:04):
How do you prevent that?
James LIndsay (20:06):
The United States, this is a controversial statement right now, and this is one JD Vance has been at the center of this debate, so it's up at the highest levels, almost highest trump's a little higher, but the highest levels of our political discourse is the United States, for example, as the example. I think that's resisted it the best and the longest is the United States a so-called propositional nation, are we based on a set of ideals where in essence we actually don't care who you are or where you came from, so long as you actually embrace the ideal, so you assimilate to American culture. It doesn't matter the you can be,
Jenny Beth Martin (20:45):
It doesn't matter how you look or how you were.
James LIndsay (20:47):
That's right. You can be Kash Patel swearing in on the Bhagavan Gita, or you can be an evangelical Christian swearing in on the Bible, or you can be a secularist swearing in with your hand somewhere on no book at all or on the road to serfdom if you wanted right Hayek because it's a book you believe in. And we still understand that the oath that you're taking is to support the Constitution of the United States and that you are swearing by something you truly believe in, and that's good enough. And it doesn't matter where you or your family came from, but it does still, it can and should still matter whether or not you uphold the American ideals. Do you believe in individual property rights, individual life, liberty and property actually being the three inalienable rights? But technically the United States is even broader than that? And this is a hard question.
James LIndsay (21:38):
This is at the heart of what's called the paradox of tolerance because we tolerate people who don't support those ideals. We tolerate post liberals, we have a problem with communists because we didn't smash them in the 1950s and kick them out where maybe we should have been a little, maybe there should have been a little more McCarthyism. I think it might've saved us a lot of trouble. Maybe we should have been a little more serious about KGB infiltration rather than just winning the geopolitical battle against the Soviet Union and the Cold War. But those questions aside, we have this. I think the way that you resist this is by finding other ways to organize your political structure such that you minimize the ability for the communist to come in and say, the reason you're not succeeding is the system. Let's organize against the system. Or if it's fascist, the reason you're not succeeding is the system.
James LIndsay (22:41):
Let's organize against the system. The United States has resisted communism as well, and as long as it has, because the American dream is real, no matter who you are, no matter where you come from, if you work hard, get a good idea, get lucky, get an education, whatever the ingredients happen to be. But if we all have this deep down belief that if I work hard enough with some luck, with some providence, then I can make it. I can elevate from one rung of the social ladder or who knows, I can own the Vanderbilt. This is literally the American dream. And the American dream destroys the ability for the economic agitation that the communists used. And you can read this in the neo-Marxist in the fifties and the sixties writing, max Heimer said this explicitly founder, no, not the founder, he was the first significant director of the Frankfurt School of Institute for Social Research.
James LIndsay (23:35):
There were a couple directors before him, but he was the guy he invented the critical theory. I guess that's his tag is he invented the critical theory in 1937, Herbert Cusa, they write, the advanced capitalism in the West does not eviscerate the worker as Marx predicted. It in fact allows him to build a better life. And when he builds a better life, he becomes stable, he becomes conservative, he becomes in fact counter-revolutionary and the proletariat can no longer be located in the working class. And that's a close paraphrasing of the two of them together writing this. So the American Dream was a socioeconomic and political program that was successful at repelling economic communism such that they had to switch to race, sex, sexuality, and so on to pull at the threads of America. Why? Because they have to figure out who it's not working for. Well, what did they have to do? They introduced black nationalism. One of the leading publications in queer theory, popular publications, not academic, is called L-G-B-T-Q Nation. They started forcing this idea of nationhood or hood into the different identity categories, women as a class, racial, minorities as a class, blacks as a class within that sexual minorities, L-G-B-T-Q as a kind of Frankenstein's monster acronym of identity categories, thinking of itself as a folk. What was the show? Queer as folk.
James LIndsay (25:08):
Folk. Folk. That's the German word for a people like an ethnic group of people or in that sense of the term a nation. And so they've pushed the same exact kind of nationalist sentiment and said, well, there's an American people too in this white supremacy culture and heteronormative and it's trying to force you and your folk to be this way, and they're pulling the exact same stunt Stalin pulled and it worked. It just, you had to get people to start thinking of themselves in terms of their identities as nations. Instead.
Jenny Beth Martin (25:43):
James, take a step back and define for people what is communism and fascism and maybe even socialism, just
Jenny Beth Martin (25:53):
Explain
Jenny Beth Martin (25:54):
What they are because we use those terms sometimes very loosely, but they are each distinct, even though there's similarities.
James LIndsay (26:01):
And I'm unfortunately so comfortable with the terms, I forget that normal people
Jenny Beth Martin (26:06):
That's
James LIndsay (26:06):
Okay, haven't sw in these waters.
Jenny Beth Martin (26:07):
I'm glad that you're very comfortable with
James LIndsay (26:09):
'em. Yeah, so socialism I think is the place to start with these terms. Socialism is a program in which the state is organized to own and operate the means of production of society, and it almost is always a redistributive society. In other words, people are going to pay a very large amount of taxes in pure socialism, effectively a hundred percent tax. And then the government is going, it owns everything, is going to then figure out how to produce and how to distribute so that it's maximally fair. And in the kind of the platonic ideal of socialism, everybody would have equal no ownership at the individual level. All ownership is done by the state as the incorporation of the people. And so socialism, I mean, I guess that's just the best way to put it is that it, it's a state redistribution program that in its ideal is kind of complete.
James LIndsay (27:07):
Communism actually refers to communal ownership of all of the means of production and output of society. So you don't have the state as the incorporation of the people doing it for you anymore. We all just share one big, I mean literally one big happy family. I'm not being cliche that the whole society, Marx compares it to a marriage that in a marriage that the two, he literally was talking about how the two become one flesh. So if you and I were married, what's mine and what's yours? Well, there's not really a line. So just imagine that for everybody. The whole society operates well, what's mine and what's yours? Well, there is no line. It's all of, it's ours. And so it's very difficult to imagine what that would look like, but it's defined therefore as a classless society, there's nobody who's in different classes any longer because everybody shares equally and a stateless society because you don't need a state to manage those affairs.
James LIndsay (28:02):
Marx and Engels and Lenin were very clear that communism is the goal of socialism. So you implement the state management of all resources and means of production such that in the end, people transform spiritually no longer to believe in me and mine, you and yours, just us and ours. So people fundamentally spiritually transformed as Marx had it back into who they were originally, which is this kind of one global tribal family that shares everything without boundaries and the state therefore has nothing to do. So it withers away of its own accord. So Lenin says that the point of the state is to maintain class distinctions, to come in with the law and say, those rich people over there, you can't steal their stuff so you're poor and they're rich. So the point of the state is to maintain class distinctions, the socialist state when it takes over, he says, therefore does not do that.
James LIndsay (29:07):
It is the state acting as the robber to take from the rich and give to the poor. So he says that the socialist state isn't actually a state, it has to act like one because people are still in belief of separation and individuality. But the fact is that it is what he calls a semi-state in the process of its own destruction. And then in the communism, it's a stateless classless society where there is no want, there is no need. The idea is that we would live as though we were a primitive tribe sharing everything except with all the fruits of advanced society that capitalism has brought us. And you can hear what a crackpot idea this is when you put it that way. But that's literally Marx says that if we were to go back to the tribal situation, that's what he calls crude communism and says it always evolves into a mess. And he talks about some really real things and the sexual sharing of wives and how that becomes exploitative to all the women and dangerous, and he's actually not wrong about how it degenerates. What he's wrong about is believing that you can fundamentally transform human nature to accept a stateless classless society where everybody is exactly as equals.
James LIndsay (30:15):
So Marx's theory is a theory, it is a religion of spiritual transformation to accept communism through the application of being forced to accept that condition in proxy by the state. So you adopt socialism in order to brainwash people to become the communists that there's supposed to be. And fascism actually is a reaction to this. Fascism means bundle. It comes from the Italian word fases, which means a bundle of sticks. One of the emblems for fascism is an axe that's not got a single handle, but it's a bunch of sticks tied together. And the idea is that if I have one little stick, like one citizen, easy to break, but if I have a bunch of sticks tied together, it doesn't matter how strong you're, you can't break it. So we're stronger bundled together and fascism arose as a reaction to Marxism. It was a different way to organize the economy where the state and the corporate sector would fuse into one, but there would also be this unfaltering devotion to the nation.
James LIndsay (31:23):
I call fascism idolatry of the state. As a matter of fact, the state actually becomes God the father. There's no self-sacrifice. You could say communism works like the state is God as Christ, that sacrifices himself to the liberation of man in the long run, not in fascism, fascism. There is a rike and the state is God and the state is going to be God forever. Mussolini is abundantly clear on this, and it's a spiritual orientation toward the state being the vehicle by which, and the nation being the vehicle by which all human activity including spiritual activity is to be understood and progress. And so it's literally turning the state into the golden calf, a pure idolatry. But its characteristic is primarily that the state owns everything which is just like in socialism,
James LIndsay (32:19):
But then private interests are allowed to do as they will make as much money as they will, as long as they do so at the pleasure of the state and in the states, at the state's direction and the state's interest. So the modern fancy terminology for this is public-private partnership, which doesn't always have to have a bad meaning, but the way that it gets implemented really does. But fascism is a where it means bundled. I think the right way to think of fascism means being bundled into the state. So if you fall outside of the state's vision or the nation or whatever it happens to be, which often becomes an ethno nation, an ethnostate view, if you fall outside of that, well, you're not people anymore. I'm reading this book right now about Nazis and Nazi Germany and they talk about how there were Nazis and there were people who weren't Nazis and they all had rights and it was all what it was, and it wasn't a big deal unless you were an enemy of the Nazi. If you were a Jew or a declared anti-Nazi or a communist, which were all considered to be anti-Nazi, you weren't people. You had absolutely no rights. You had no, if you were were a German who wasn't a Nazi, you had due process. You had all the things under the Nazi law, but if you were against the Nazi regime or you didn't support the German nation or you were Jewish
Jenny Beth Martin (33:45):
Or you were deemed an enemy like
James LIndsay (33:47):
The Jewish people, if you were deemed an enemy of the Jewish people or of the German people, then you had no rights whatsoever. And that's what Mao did. Also, by the way, in China, so there's this weird amount of my opinion is that the socialist phase of communism is fascism with different goals. They have to go through a fascist phase. I've said that communism is the marketing department for fascism because in implementation, that's what it is, and then if it backfires, fascism is what you get. But fascism is the idea that the state is going to incorporate the people under kind of a complete iron will. It's an authoritarian, or actually in Mussolini's words, it's a totalitarian style of government. So everybody's going to be brainwashed. What I've been trying to tell people lately is that we are now familiar with woke, and we could say critical race theory is like a woke race theory, and queer theory is a woke sexual theory. We have this idea fascism is woke, nationalism, the same mechanisms as woke, the same thought processes as woke, but now the nation is the magical thing instead of some identity
Jenny Beth Martin (34:56):
Category instead of race or gender or whatever else. So when you were talking about, and you said that when you're against nationalism, the things that you do agree with are that you have to look out for your country. So you have a country, putting your country first isn't a bad thing.
James LIndsay (35:19):
Correct? I think it's necessary as a matter
Jenny Beth Martin (35:20):
Of fact, and loving the country voluntarily is
James LIndsay (35:23):
Patriotism. That's right.
Jenny Beth Martin (35:25):
And focusing on the principles that make the country what it is rather than the authoritarian nature of a government. Because governments are much, they are authoritarian. We give the power to them in America, but instead of focusing on the principles that empower the government and protect the rights of people, you're focusing more on the government itself.
James LIndsay (35:54):
Yeah, I think that
Jenny Beth Martin (35:55):
That's where you start to have the
James LIndsay (35:57):
Yeah, I said the American dream was economically what? Repelled communism so long. So the American dream is actually that you, Mr Individual, you can change the course of your life by a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work,
James LIndsay (36:14):
Right? When you focus on individual rights instead of group identification, you completely neuter the communist bids for power because the communist bid for power, which is answered with a fascist reply, if it gets extreme enough, these totalitarian bids for power are saying, Hey, look, you need to incorporate fascism is bundling people together. You need to incorporate because the system, the government or whatever, but more diffuse, more peculiarly. The system is not working for you. It's in fact cheating you. In fact, it's organized against you. Whereas if you have a strong basis in individualism, at the end of the day, you don't get to export your failures onto this weird conspiracy theory about the system. Yeah, okay. So the system is what it is, and I don't like how the system is, and maybe I can change it, but I have to do what I can do
Jenny Beth Martin (37:08):
Still
James LIndsay (37:09):
Becomes the message. It's still on me to make it in this system. It's not for me to find other people who look like me or who think economically like me to go incorporate and basically use bully tactics to take things over. In fact, I need to work my way to the best of my ability. So if you had, for example, the Civil Rights Act working the way that it is written in 1964, not the one later in 91, you have the Civil Rights Act working the way that it's written based off of the 14th Amendment, the way that it is written, which immediately by the way throws out Johnson's executive order that Trump repealed, finally Trump repealed about affirmative action. That was always illegal against the Civil Rights Act. If you have that, the way that the Civil Rights Act is designed is that there are what are called protected classes, and Americans have got this all screwed up, and this was the communist Corina Zaia program applied to us. Black people are not a protected class. Race is a protected classification. So if a white person, a black person, a Hispanic person, an Asian person, it doesn't matter by race is being discriminated against in employment or education, the domains, then they have rights for a civil rights lawsuit. So every race is equally protected. So what that means is if somebody, we will say it's a black person doesn't get the job, kids of
Jenny Beth Martin (38:39):
Their race,
James LIndsay (38:40):
If they don't get the job and it's provable that it is because of their race, they have a lawsuit and can get recompense for that. If on the other hand they don't get the job and they say it was because of the race and there's no evidence of that, it's like, no, tough luck. It was you. And so if the Civil Rights Act is working the way that it was intended, which I would say is what America thought it was passing when it passed in 1964, if the Civil Rights Act was working the way that it was intended based on the 14th Amendment and its clear wording, then what we would have is a situation where it's very difficult to blame some racial system because the institutional racist system had been made illegal. Same with sexist systems, with Title ix, and was it seven? That is the other one in federal employment law. So when you take away that group, we can say, well, it's unfair to this group, so we need social justice. In response, you undercut the communist tool, the totalitarian tool, and what you end up with being the recipe that stops it then is individual responsibility, personal responsibility.
James LIndsay (39:46):
It is your responsibility for your life. And the goal of the system should be as the United States was doing, and as unfortunately the civil rights, the entire thing got hijacked immediately by President Johnson immediately with a great society with affirmative action and so on. By 1971 with the Supreme Court decision called Griggs versus Duke Power, which created and enshrined the disparate impact interpretation of civil rights law, then it became classifications of people who are inequitable in society are protected, whereas others are not. So in other words, if you have an underrepresented group, is the language we often hear today or historically marginalized group, they actually are going to get favored treatment under this because there's a disparate impact against their group. We have to correct for that. Griggs versus Duke power ruled that even if there's no evidence of willful discrimination, the fact of the matter is that if there is a difference in outcomes, say a smaller percentage of black people getting hired than white people and you can find no evidence, say they have to take a test and more white people than black people, pass the test proportionally to the number that take it, then they can just conclude that the test must be racist.
James LIndsay (41:08):
Somehow there's a disparate impact of that test to different groups. Therefore the group that does worse becomes protected. But then they've extended that from actual disparate impact to historical disparate impact, so that now if more black people pass the test than white, they would up to a few years ago anyway, they would've said, well, that doesn't matter because black people are a historically marginalized group, which historically marginalized, no matter how much you change, no matter how much you fix, never changes. They're always historically marginalized because the history is in the past and you can't undo it. So that's a total communist riff. So we've wandered really far down the track the wrong way for 50 years immediately off of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. But if we defended it as worded as we thought we were passing with, yes, it wasn't worded perfectly with some minimal adjustments for what we've learned in the meantime, and we adhered completely to the 14th amendment and what it actually says, then you would undercut the arguments for everything CRT did for everything queer theory is doing for everything feminism is trying to agitate for where we need special programs for women in this and women in that.
James LIndsay (42:21):
It's like, I'm sorry, you also are an individual. And when it comes to life, yeah, men and women are different, and that's up to how people interact. But if you want to get a job, can you do it or can you not? We're not lowering, for example, the requirements for a firefighter because you're a woman. You either can do it, in which case welcome to the force, or you cannot, in which case go do something that you're more suited to. But it's at the individual level that undercuts the group dynamics of communism and fascism.
Jenny Beth Martin (42:54):
James, so much about this. When you go around speaking to groups, what are the things that you're covering and what are your calls to action with the groups?
James LIndsay (43:04):
Oh gosh, I talk about so many different things. That's hard to say because I talk about critical race theory, queer theory. Sometimes people want me to talk about the big picture. Some people want me to come in and talk about American values. Sometimes I talk about free speech. I have to talk about a lot of different
Jenny Beth Martin (43:18):
Things. But never math, even though that's what you used to teach.
James LIndsay (43:20):
No, not so much. People are not as interested and I don't remember it. So I'm grateful if they're not. It's been a while. I mean, I could whip out a proof that there are an infinite number of prime numbers for you if you need one, whether the squi or two is irrational, those are fun, but not so much. The calls to action are always that we can't rely on our political system to save us as much as President Trump may be able to get accomplished. Given that he seems to be far more, I don't think he's perfectly clear-eyed, but he's far more clear-eyed than he was in his first term. As much as he can accomplish, the federal apparatus is merely a tool and a very imperfect tool. And this is all the grassroots action is still where everything's going to happen. Local change is going to be necessary. Personnel is still policy. I try to be very big picture though in most of my talks,
James LIndsay (44:19):
What is this? What are we dealing with? I try to tell people specific ways that they can get involved and try to encourage them. In fact, a lot of the groups I talk to, it's you have no idea how important it is to be the small person. The small people doing things make everything happen. What's the old saying? Lots of small hands make a working, make a light job or something like that. I dunno what's saying, but I'll tell them, for example, out of the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf, I'm not going to go into the whole thing. I explain it so everybody can go look up the Lord of the Rings. But I'll tell him, Gandalf says that the coming of the two hobbits to the forest is like the loosening of two small stones. It starts an avalanche and it's like, don't know, I have a whole little thing.
James LIndsay (44:59):
I did a podcast about this. You don't know who you're talking to or what you're going to say that's going to light a fire in them. It could be something. For example, you work at the Babylon Bee. This is the best example of this possible. You work of the small person having a huge impact. Babylon B was a fairly big comedy outlet, but they have some comedy writer and they sat there and they thought it would be really funny when Admiral Richard Levine was given Woman of the Year by whatever Time magazine or whatever it was, whatever big thing woman of the year, they thought it'd be funny to say it's Babylon Be's Man of the Year. And somebody thought up that joke and they laughed about it and they were like, oh man, we're going to get in trouble. And they published it and then they got kicked off of Twitter, and then Seth Dillon himself had the wherewithal to say, I'm not going to, he almost did. You have to delete the tweet, it's offensive, blah, blah, blah. We'll let you back into your account. But he actually read the text. Right now, Seth's not, I guess a super small person, but whoever made the joke is just
James LIndsay (45:59):
Some guy at the Babylon Beach. It's not that they have a huge, sorry, whoever you are, you're very important to me.
Jenny Beth Martin (46:06):
Well, and you made a huge difference, which
James LIndsay (46:07):
Is the point. That's the stone
Jenny Beth Martin (46:10):
Falling,
James LIndsay (46:11):
Right? So Seth reads this thing and it says, I agree that I had inappropriate speech or whatever, that I committed some sin. And he's like, I don't agree that I said something inappropriate, so I won't sign off on that, which most of us wouldn't do. So this is the Stone Falls, it hits Seth making that decision. Some snow starts to come down the avalanches. Elon Musk is like, what happened? Maybe I'll buy Twitter.
James LIndsay (46:39):
And now Elon buying Twitter, the complete change in the landscape to free speech that resulted in probably resulted very significantly in the electoral outcome we had in 24. Elon Musk then downstream from that, getting directly involved in the, certainly Elon Musk getting involved with President Trump directly last summer had a huge impact in terms of him getting elected unquestionably. And now Elon's in there doing doge, whether people like or hate it one way or the other. This is historical change that's happening as a result of somebody cutting a joke about Admiral Levine being a guy at the Babylon Bee. So I always try to tell people, you think that what you do is small. The Babylon Bee thought they were making a joke is going to go
Jenny Beth Martin (47:27):
Out, be on, they're going
James LIndsay (47:27):
To on the next day a few thousand likes. People would laugh and it would be gone in a day or two. That's a small stone falling that led literally to a world changing event.
Jenny Beth Martin (47:37):
That is very true. And what you said about policy or personal as policy, if you've been involved in politics, especially in DC and watching an administration or congressional staff be filled with people, you hear that phrase all the time. Personnel is policy, but it applies really at school boards. It applies at county commissions in the county that my children went to school in Cherokee County, Georgia, they passed a resolution at the school board level saying they were not going to have critical race theory or maybe DEI don't remember if it was all encompassing for DEI or just critical race theory, but the school superintendent was sending out emails with the kids on the blocks looking over the fence and going, well, we have to make everything equal. We care about equity, not equality. And they still did social emotional learning, which basically is DE, I mean it's a DEI by another name or at the very least, is implementing critical social justice theory. That's what they were doing, whether they were doing critical race theory specifically, they still were implementing critical social justice theory and the school board was all just patting themselves on the back because they had passed this
Jenny Beth Martin (49:03):
Little
Jenny Beth Martin (49:03):
Thing. But in the personnel and the things that were being taught to the kids, still, the socialist, communist Marxist ideas are being taught to our children what you're doing. And it's exposing and teaching these complex political theories. Maybe they aren't so complex, but they take time to study and to understand and to understand the history of it is making a huge difference with parents all across this country trying to make the education system better for our children.
James LIndsay (49:39):
And these are the people that are going to actually make, I mean, thank you President Trump, but these are the people who are going to make the difference already across the country. You're seeing school districts, school boards and principals and teachers just saying, no, we're not going to comply with President Trump's order about DEI or about whatever else we're still going to do. All the woke stuff come and try to stop us. They're doing it all over the
Jenny Beth Martin (50:01):
Country.
James LIndsay (50:02):
They're doubling down. This is happening in a lot of administrative agencies that I'm hearing about within the government. It's happening in a lot of corporations. Some of the stuff they're getting rid of DEI, but they're just really renaming it to something else. Some of the stuff, they're not getting rid of it. I just read yesterday about how a lot of corporations are still doubling down on it because it still matters to their ESG score or whatever. So they're just still going to do it, and it's hard to govern with the stroke of a pen from the White House over a huge country. It's going to come down to getting these people who are now identifying themselves as willfully defiant of the law in some cases, and of the mandate of what Americans want in others. It's going to be coming down to getting them out of positions that they're in because they're abusing them.
James LIndsay (50:50):
And this is going to be a long, slow, difficult process that will involve a lot of lawsuits. It'll involve a lot of trouble, and in some cases it'll go a little more directly. So the personnel's policy on a school board though, imagine you have one radical and six conservatives. Say it's a board of seven. We have one radical and six conservatives, but all six conservatives are cowards or five out of the six are cowards. They don't want to cause a fuss. Conservatives a lot of times don't like to rock the boat. They don't want to cause a fuss. They don't want to make a mess. Oh, it'll maybe next year when things are a little calmer. This attitude of wanting to conserve the peace, which fine, that's admirable. So you have five out of seven on the board or cowards one is a radical. I guarantee you at least a third, if not half of the policy passed by that board will be radical because the radical will phrase it in a way and set up a circumstance where they'll vote along with it because they don't want to cause a fuss.
James LIndsay (51:49):
They don't want to be the one singled out. They don't want the trouble or the heat that they're going to get for standing up. And so even there where the radical is in the extreme minority, the fact that you don't have people willing to take a firm stand for the constitution, for the law, whatever it happens to be, can be tremendously impactful. We're seeing huge scandals about the kinds of people that the government was employing, at least under the Biden administration, and honestly probably before even under Trump and his previous administration, and certainly in the Obama administration before that. And it's horrifying that our government has been employing these people. Well, their personnel is policy and it's just as true all the way down, whether it's in a business, whether it's in a school, whether it's in a board, whether it's in a church, all of these places, if you have a rogue associate pastor at your church, it doesn't matter if they're woke, just imagine that their goal is ultimately to split the church and take half of it with 'em.
James LIndsay (52:50):
Imagine what that's going to be like. So the church is going to get more and more divided, more and more divisive over the course of probably about a year and a half, two years would be the timeline. There's going to be whispering in the pew, eventually there'll be some event and some drama and the guy's going to take off. That could be a woke issue that they do it over. That was very famously, Russell Moore and all of those guys got in a bunch of trouble, and recently it's coming back that Christianity Today was taking U-S-A-I-D money. I don't know if that was making it to Dr. Moore or not. His ERLC was working directly with the Fetzer Institute, which is not just progressive, but downright OC cult organization where social emotional learning came from. In order to write reports on the need for increased civility in American churches as this huge project, this increased civility and American churches meant critical race theory. It meant feminist theory being introduced as famously played out.
Jenny Beth Martin (53:49):
Queer
James LIndsay (53:49):
Theory too in church queer theory too, and this is back in 2019, they were doing that partnership with the Fetzer Institute, and now it's all kind of blown up and people know about this and it's a big problem. But until the people that orchestrated those things into, say the Southern Baptist Convention in that case, although I'm not picking on them in everything, look at the Pope. It's in the Catholic. It's in everything until the people who orchestrated that stuff are actually taken out of positions of authority where they can manipulate the situation. Again, you should just expect it to repeat. So my point being personnel is policy. It plays out in every single domain, not here to pick on the SBC or on Russell Moore or, I mean, Russell probably deserves a little picking on, but at this point, but when you have a bad actor, the bad actor has to be taken out of his position of authority. It's not to say that he has to be taken out of the world or anything like that. The Christian ethic is that you encourage repentance and you offer forgiveness to the degree that we can. Of course, that's God's business primarily, but you don't destroy people. But it doesn't mean you have to leave them as watchmen on the wall or in leadership positions
Jenny Beth Martin (54:57):
Either. Right. I think that the work that you do is so important. I've learned so much from reading your books. They're not light reads. They are not the Babylon bee, but they teach me so much, and every time that I have a conversation with you, I'm just like, I need to take a million notes and then I've got to go back and study and research and memorize and learn because I really learn a lot from you. And it's clear that you have that academic background and that you're used to teaching people, and that's part of why you're able to do those deep dives and then break it down to teach people.
James LIndsay (55:36):
Yeah, I used to teach math and people,
Jenny Beth Martin (55:39):
Well, that's pretty complex
James LIndsay (55:40):
Too. That's the thing is I used to teach math, and in particular, the primary course that I had to teach the most often was the class that people take when they aren't going to do any, that's their only math class that they take in college. And so it was like, how do you teach math survey of math people who really not only don't like math, but don't know any, they're on a third or fourth grade level in college meaningfully. They don't know how to add fractions, for example. How do you teach math? And you have to come up with so many different ways to try to explain and relate the thing. You have to say the thing six different ways, but then find a way to make it cohesive enough to where the two different ones don't confuse them. I ended up getting a lot of practice explaining complicated things to people who, it's not that there's anything wrong with them, but it's not in their domain or in their wheelhouse to understand that at first blush,
Jenny Beth Martin (56:31):
Right? Pardon me? So how can people follow you and keep up with the work that you're doing?
James LIndsay (56:40):
Primarily, I have a website. It's all supporter driven. I don't have patrons, I don't do ads, I don't have sponsorships, nothing. I have no donors. It is all subscriber driven. So the website's called New Discourses. It's that new discourses.com. The podcast is affiliated with that. So it's called the New Discourses podcast. That's my primary publishing means right now. I'm sorry everybody. I'm lazy, but A, it's easier, faster, and B, more people listen than read anyway, so writing takes more work and you get less connection to people out of it. So primarily I'm producing a podcast now occasionally I'm writing, but new discourses.com is where to go if you support the work. I'm very grateful to you. I'm on social media at Conceptual James. I've been described in a public talk. Someone introduced me as a knife fighter on social media. So it's not for the faint of heart. It may not be your cup of tea. I won't take it personally if you don't want to follow me on there. I am brass,
Jenny Beth Martin (57:39):
Rude. They should follow you anyway.
James LIndsay (57:42):
They should anyway. And new discourse. I mean, I actually, I don't come to any of it from a bad place, but I do have kind of a raucous, a little bit blue collar sense of humor. I grew up with a white collar dad and blue collar mom, and I've got a little bit of that. My mom used to ask me when I was a little kid, who the F taught you to talk like that? I'm like, I don't know mom. But she didn't say F, she said the word. So I have that clap back, rough neck edge to me. And if you don't like it, it's not going to be polished professional stuff. I'm having some fun, but I hope you follow me. It'll be fun for both of us.
Jenny Beth Martin (58:22):
Very good. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, James. I'm really glad you did.
James LIndsay (58:26):
Thank you so
Narrator (58:26):
Much. The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Han, and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (58:47):
If you light this episode, let me know by hitting the light button or leaving a comment or a five star review. And if you want to be the first to know every time we drop a new episode, be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for whichever platform you're listening on. If you do these simple things, it will help the podcast grow and I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much.