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AR 29.24 - WOKE MOVEMENT: Antithetical ideology targeting children
In this issue:
WORLDVIEW - Queer Theory and the future of child education
Apologia Report 29:24 (1,665)
June 26, 2024
WORLDVIEW
Communication and learning meet via conceptualization. The process often starts with a simple idea and is then combined with related portions of description until context is developed and summations reveal a growing package of information. This approach is what we believe will be helpful in digesting the mind-numbing horrors brought on by queer theory. Case in point, The Queering of the American Child, <www.tinyurl.com/2s3jzu2f> a book by Logan Lancing with James Lindsay, mentioned in the previous issue of AR.
Since then, we've discovered a good introduction: Jan Jekielek's interview with both authors for The Epoch Times (American Thought Leaders, May 11 '24). We find the material so disturbing and complex that we were moved to employ the approach described above. It is our hope that you find it helpful in facing the challenging process of comprehending the threat behind the Woke movement in general. <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-WOKE>
We begin in a way similar to the topic-and-header introduction format that each issue of Apologia Report uses in its masthead. In this case, sometimes multiple headers follow the same topic. This, in turn, is followed by summary paragraph collection. We hope it helps you get up to speed on this critically important issue.
Childhood Innocence - "this is precisely what is targeted by queer theory and queer pedagogy"
Queer theorists "actually believe that all children are intrinsically queer, and that normal society is socializing them, which is a fancy word for brainwashing them...."
Childhood innocence is "just whatever normal people in society have illegitimately, unjustly and for self-serving purposes defined it to be, so that they can protect children from experiencing the queer that the queer theorists want them to experience...."
Queering Pedagogy - where "praxis" is defined by Marxists as a word for activism.
- "They quite explicitly say that they have to hide it from the parents. They are caught on tape talking about how they have to hide it from the parents."
- "I wish [the 'good' teachers] were a little more vocal and had an organization like Moms for Liberty...."
Activists explain: "We are going to use critical pedagogy as a method, and we're going to make sure kids do not turn out normal." Here: "The goal is to turn out whatever is deviant, abnormal, and perverse, then position that against the norm. They laid that out right from the very beginning. They also added that their goal was to make it explicitly activist in nature, so that there is no room for interpretation. From the very beginning, this was designed to initiate these children into this way of viewing the world."
In Paulo Freire's The Politics of Education, his book <www.tinyurl.com/bp5kntyk> from the 1980s, he writes that "for the revolution to be authentic, it must be perpetual. The new normal soon becomes the new Right-wing, so that new status quo has to be overturned. ...
"The goal is to bring up this topic, tie it into so-called LGBT topics, and then to implant the idea of suicide into fourth graders."
Queer Theory
- "Queer theory is opposed to any limiting principles...."
- Herbert Marcuse is considered "the father of the new Left."
- "The word queer is a term that is used to describe a society that is not queer. Queer is very distinct from being homosexual."
- "[U]nlike gay identity ... queer is not like being gay."
- "[Q]ueer is not necessarily based on any positive truth or stable reality." It "has nothing to do with who you are. ... It's likely true that some people are homosexual as a matter of essence. It's who they are, and we don't necessarily know why.
"Queer is different. It has no essential connection to anything about the person, which [means for] them not queer, where queer is a political stance. ... It is a political orientation that is against the idea of normalcy and legitimacy in the world. This is their fundamental belief."
"One of their activists, Lindz Amer [- who brands himself as "Queer Mr. Rogers" - ], quite famously said on Twitter some years ago, 'All children are queer. We're not after gay kids. We're after all kids because all kids are intrinsically queer.' ... They want to queer that, or in other words, disrupt that as early as possible so that the children can be brought up free of the socializing effects of normalcy. ...
"Queer theory has sold itself in education for the last 30 years as an academic discipline that can be deployed in schools to make them more inclusive and equitable and to build cultures where all students feel like they belong."
Queer theory "is full of mystical teachings. That's the reason for queer confessions of faith, demands for purity, religious rituals, and a collective call for action and activism by children. Fundamentally, it is an unsettling belief of what human nature is and what our purpose in life should be."
Queer theorists see "a conflict at the heart of society, and really at the heart of history, that must be resolved.
"The way queer theory can resolve this is by convincing people that they are queer. ... Anything that can be defined, categorized, and that has a barrier around it, must be dissolved.
"In their view, if they can do that long enough, at the end of history, and all cults have views of the end of history, they will live in a world where they can experience their queerness. ... There are other reasons why it's justified to call it a cult, but if this doesn't sound like a cult doctrine, I don't know what does."
Child Education - "American education writ large is in its grip"
- "Multiple states are not just threatening to, but literally taking away the children of parents who don't go along with this."
- Activists say, "We use tropes of empathy and inclusion to get into schools, but that is just to justify the educational value."
- Unaware teachers "think they're being empathetic and inclusive, because they've been sold a lie."
- "We need to listen to detransitioners. We need to elevate them because they expose the cult dynamics of queer theory. ...
- "[T]he point about detransitioners is beautiful and very important. Detransitioners actually reveal something very important about the entire transgender phenomenon, and the minors in particular."
"When the parents object, they say, "We're just teaching your children to be problem solvers." They're not going to talk too much about solving society's problems as informed by queer theory, like transgender discrimination. They will not talk about the fact that your child may have a gender identity that you don't know about."
"American education, at least at the level of colleges of education, by their own telling, has been in the hands of critical pedagogy since 1992. ... Critical pedagogy is a very different approach to education. ...
"I emphasize the religious and cult undertones of [critical pedagogy], the purpose of education should be conscientization. In other words, to conscientize and wake somebody up to a different view of reality, which they consider to be the true view of reality that's suppressed in the world of education."
The "process of conscientization in education was literally a death and rebirth." [The Marxist Brazilian educational theorist,] Paulo Freire says that "it's dying to who you were, so you can be reborn on the side of the oppressed. He says that this new apprenticeship doesn't count unless you experience your own personal Easter. In fact, he says that the Christian Easter is just another date on the calendar that's dead to its true potential, with no possibility of being resurrected.
"This is an extremely strong indication of cult language. He was into liberation theology, and he developed this so-called method of education. The purpose of this critical pedagogy is actually simple. It is to use educational activity as an excuse to have politically radicalizing conversations with children, to conscientize them, and to wake them up.
"Isaac Gottesman wrote a book, 'The Critical Turn in Education,' that's very important reading if you want to understand what has happened in education. <www.tinyurl.com/46dkxcfw> He was a professor at Iowa State and was a Marxist. In the first sentence of the book, he says that all the 1960s radicals went into education. Within a few paragraphs, he's talking about how by 1992, Paulo Freire's influence had arrived at where it is today. That's what he wrote in 2015 when he published the book, which is to say, his influence is everywhere."
The book's subtitle is, "From Marxist Critique, to Post-Structural Feminism, to Critical Theories of Race."
Gottesman "calls this a prophetic education, so the religious language is not at all ambiguous. His acolyte, Henry Giroux, asks in the foreword to that book, 'How is Paulo Freire prophetic?' Giroux says that he's prophetic because he's calling us to build the kingdom of God here on earth in solidarity with the oppressed through endless activism."
Lancing and Lindsay call it "a deliberate capturing of the American education system through this pipeline that creates all of the curriculum, teachers, administrators, credentialing, licensing, and accreditation—and it's now a 30-year-old project. ...
"Fourth and fifth grade children were given an article that compared marriage equality laws by state with suicide rates by state, ostensibly so the children could read this and then create a math problem that drew a link between the two, which is wholly inappropriate. What the author learned, and she admits this explicitly in the paper, is that the children usually did not finish their math problems because they were emotional wrecks."
In this example of "fourth and fifth graders not being taught a math topic, but instead being given correlations between LGBT policy or suicidality.... The idea is to get something that's engaging not just to their minds, but to their levels of excitement and to their emotions. It's supposed to stimulate their hopes and fears. ...
"Now, they're thinking about suicide where they may not have been thinking about suicide before. Fourth graders do not think about killing themselves, but now this is a topic that's in their world. Their innocence has been stolen from them in this process. ...
"Drag queen story hour is a program that sells itself with a specific paper, 'Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood.' It caught on a couple of years ago and it's the justification for putting drag queens into schools. They say in that paper, 'We use tropes of empathy to sell what we're doing, but we just use that to justify its educational value.' <www.tinyurl.com/ywyvwyhk> That is a direct quote. They come right out and say, 'We're lying about how we're getting this into schools.'"
Lancing explains that "through alternative modes of kinship, children can be taught to live queerly. What it really amounts to is grooming.
"I don't necessarily mean sexual grooming, but certainly at a bare minimum it is cult or worldview grooming. ...
"What is absolutely wicked about this is that in their own literature, they say, 'We use tropes of empathy and inclusion to get into schools, but that is just to justify the educational value.' This is a huge problem."
Teachers have "only been taught to use Paulo Freire's generative methods, which generally are no longer called critical pedagogy. It's usually called culturally relevant pedagogy, which comes out of the same literature. ...
"Most teachers have been taught culturally relevant teaching or pedagogy, because these things are pushed down from the Department of Education itself and its Office of Civil Rights. This queer theory is deeply ingrained into all of these credentialing bodies and into the Department of Education. It's just not called queer theory.
"You may be a parent looking at your child's assignments and asking, 'Is there queer theory in my child's school?' You're not going to find it written on an assignment. But it's certainly happening....
"They think they're being empathetic and inclusive, because they've been sold a lie. ...
"When the parents object, they say, 'We're just teaching your children to be problem solvers.' They're not going to talk too much about solving society's problems as informed by queer theory, like transgender discrimination. They will not talk about the fact that your child may have a gender identity that you don't know about. ...
"What they're admitting though, is that they know this is wrong and they shouldn't be doing it. Their other method is to use the authority of their mandated curriculum from their Department of Education as cover for their queer work. ...
"The teacher said, 'It's mandated. This is my mandated curriculum. We have to do that.'
"Now, of course, she doesn't need to use that book to accomplish her mandates for English language arts education, but that's what she hides behind. ... [Activist teachers] celebrate this as an achievement, because parental resistance has been overcome. ... They use the word palatable. It's a great way to make it palatable for parents who don't want this to happen.
"They explicitly know what they're doing. Many teachers just don't know that they're doing it because it's hidden under a banner of inclusive teaching. Queer theory in schools is almost synonymous with inclusive policies, practices, and procedures. ...
"But the problem is taking place on a lower level of abstraction with a more concrete example, 'I don't want you teaching this specific book to my daughter.' But then they abstract up one level in order to get around parental resistance, so what they're doing is manipulating. ...
"They're modifying which level of abstraction that they're using at any given time, so that they can get away with doing some specific thing you don't want them to do. They hide behind some generality. ... They don't tell you that there are a lot of meanings in what they are saying. ...
"Now, we are two levels down and they say, 'We're just working on problem solving.' When they do that, to steal the word from Marx, they are mystifying."
Still, "there is a small body of people in most school districts, if not all of them, who are activists and know exactly what they're doing. It turns out that it doesn't take that many activists to do this. ...
"Then you have people who understand and are caught by the cult doctrine and are really intellectualized by it. They have rationalized it. ...
"Most of the people that are captured by this are actually socially and emotionally caught up in it. ... Most of your teachers in schools are either going to be repellent to this or they're caught up in it through policy or through values. They are not really meaning to do harm."
For the most part, "in any given setting, there's a very small number who are hardened activists who are driving the agenda. It doesn't take very many of them to be able to push this agenda in enough classrooms to create an inside/outside dynamic. You have this pressure from outside activists who say, 'You need to make the school more inclusive. We need to do this. This is coming down from the government.'
"Then you have an inside dynamic where some proportion of the teachers, and some proportion of the students have been brought into it and start demanding it. They demand accommodation for their queer personalities or their queer identities. Now, you have this thing and they lean on it and say, 'We're just responding to student demand.' ...
"This very small number of people becomes a demand base that creates an inside agitation and combines with an outside pressure. It squeezes the organization into changing and often adopting radical policies and training at extraordinary expense. They do this very rapidly before anybody can even know what's going on. You can couple that with the fact that they're trying to hide from parents that it's even happening at all.
"They quite explicitly say that they have to hide it from the parents. They are caught on tape talking about how they have to hide it from the parents. ...
"I wish [the 'good' teachers] were a little more vocal and had an organization like Moms for Liberty.... It's great we have accounts like Libs of TikTok and others exposing this. But it would be even better if we had actual insiders showing us what's happening in the schools and how it got there and what they're expected to do. ...
"Mr. Jekielek: Marcuse was not a casual side intellectual. He was a rock star.
"Mr. Lindsay: He was the rock star. Yes, he is considered the father of the new Left. ... We Live in Herbert Marcuse's World. He was extraordinarily influential. He called for this infiltration....
"Simultaneously, a lot of conservatives like to say that the HR environment changed radically with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s, but that's not correct. What is correct is that civil rights law was very radically and very rapidly reinterpreted. ...
"In 1971, there was a very important Supreme Court decision called Griggs v. Duke Power Co. ...
"It created a legal doctrine that overwhelmingly strengthened the pressure on institutions to bend toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. It's all based on affirmative action, of course. That was the space in which critical race theory was developed.
"Critical race theory got its name in 1989, and queer theory in 1991. Read their own writings from the 70s and 80s, and these doctrines were developing in that space, leading up to the birth of critical race theory, which over time led to diversity, equity, and inclusion. ...
"Ibram Kendi's bread and butter is that particular trick, which is to set you up to where you don't have any good options. In the parlance, it's called an affordance trap. They afford you too few interpretations for the data. Ibram Kendi says this about testing in his talks, articles, and books all the time. He says, 'If there are disparate outcomes in the test, there's something wrong with the test,' aka it's racist, or, 'You're saying there's something wrong with black people,' aka you're racist. Those are the only two options he affords you. Now, you're in this affordance trap.
"This is precisely the argument that is specifically used in queer theory in schools in regards to gender identity and mental health outcomes. ...
"It's inverting the symptom and the cause. [R]ather than saying that gender identity disorder is a symptom of an underlying mental health or trauma-based disorder, they will say that the gender identity disorder is the cause of the other comorbid mental health disorders.
"But then they're also saying, 'How dare you say that?'
"Lindsay: Exactly. There's something stupid and evil about you if you disagree. ...
"Lancing: This is precisely the logic behind the DSM-5 [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders] in 2013 <www.tinyurl.com/4ynxfa96> reclassifying sex confusion, which is what it really amounts to in children, from being a gender identity disorder, as in a disorder of your identity and internal processes, to one of gender dysphoria, where we are [no] longer trying to help you address and overcome the root causes of your mental health issues or whatever is causing the sex confusion. ...
"In all of psychological medicine, it is the only condition that's treated that way. The reason is very simple. It is because queer theory has captured our schools.
"It has also captured our professional institutions like the American Psychological Association, which promotes this line relentlessly, and the American Psychiatric Association, which is even more strongly devoted to it. The American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society....
"All of these organizations reference each other for their policies and procedures. The policies and procedures aren't actually rooted in objective scientific analysis, because queer theory does not care about science and objective truth. Queer theory doesn't think that objective truth exists, so they just reference each other. ...
"Imagine that WPATH [World Professional Association for Transgender Health] cites the American Medical Association, which has a group of activists that puts something out, then cites the Endocrine Society, then cites the American Academy of Pediatrics, and then cites WPATH. You can get the circle a little bit bigger that way. This is the mechanism of that circular logic exposed by the Cass Review report <www.tinyurl.com/aeduxkay> in particular. It is idea laundering, as Brett Weinstein originally named it some years ago.
"Ultimately, the postmodern philosophers called this legitimation by pyrology, which is a very fancy way of saying manufactured consensus. ...
"The DSM-5 now says that she's experiencing some kind of distress related to her sense of gender. They invert the symptom and the cause in order to justify a treatment. ...
There was recently a paper that came out that said gender affirming care is not compatible with ethics, because it cannot distinguish between pathological and non-pathological. That's the most important thing to remember, that there are many pathological ideologies of gender dysphoria. ... The fact that there are many detransitioners easily demonstrates that it's simply not possible.
"This is witchcraft and witch doctors making decisions based on the sacred science of queer theory about who is veridically trans and who is not. ...
Recently, there was a group of students walking out of their school because furry-identified children were harassing them, pouncing on them, and biting them. This actually happened. This reminds me of queer theory. ...
"When I saw that same report, I researched it online. It took me less than one minute to find a whole suite of furry literature about children adopting 'fursonas.' They are furry persona, and not identifying as human. This is explicitly underwritten by queer theory and its doctrine. There are no brakes on this train. ...
"Queer theory is opposed to any limiting principles, and people need to understand that. To be very blunt about it, will queer theory eventually go into defending pedophiles? Yes, absolutely. Will it eventually go into defending bestiality? Yes. Will it defend any perversion that anybody can possibly think of? Yes, 100 percent."
In other words, "the second somebody thinks of it and claims that it's essential to their identity, nobody is allowed to tell them no and is a bigot for saying that you draw that line there. You can now look at the way that the radical feminists are being destroyed by the trans activists, and it's the exact same progression. ...
"There's a pair of books written by Martine Rothblatt, who is the creator of Sirius XM Radio, is a billionaire, and sits on the board of the Mayo Clinic. The first book, 'The Apartheid of Sex,' <www.tinyurl.com/yfsytk4e> explains that the idea of men and women is identical to the apartheid in South Africa, and is a moral injustice.
"The second book, 'From Transgender to Transhuman,' <www.tinyurl.com/bda5hfze> says, 'If it turns out the body is not relevant to who we are in terms of gender, in other words, transgender ideology, then why does it matter what the body is at all?' Maybe we could be silicone bodies. Maybe we could be digital uploads. Maybe we don't need a body at all, so we can move from transgender to transhuman. The book is very poor, very superficial, properly awful, and insane."
---
The above is an abbreviated overview of the Epoch Times' lengthy transcript <www.tinyurl.com/Queering-USAs-kids> mentioned at the beginning of this issue of AR. (We've cut it down by about 75%.)
We hope you find it a helpful introduction to Lancing and Lindsay's book, The Queering of the American Child, <www.tinyurl.com/2s3jzu2f> Reading it will provide historical background, clear organization, and much more thorough description. To understand where Queer Theory fits into the larger context of Critical Theory and Wokeism in general, search the Apologia Archive using related keywords for more resources. Try starting with this link: <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-James-Lindsay>
This reading won't put you to sleep, but it may help prevent future nightmares. It may also help get you motivated to invest in putting more effort into fighting this ugly agenda now being pushed upon millions of children. It's an antithetical ideology.
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