Understanding the Marxist Underpinnings of Education

How the US moved from a high trust society to needing to verify 'virtually everything'

James Lindsay, founder of the website New Discourses. (Brendon Fallon/The Epoch Times)

“This corruption of scholarship,” says James Lindsay, “creates an entire Lysenkoist artifice that poisons the whole enterprise, the twisted perversion you get when the knowledge generating enterprise gets completely corrupted.”

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek meets with Lindsay, founder of the website New Discourses, to discuss Marxist corruption in education. Lindsay is the author of “The Marxification of Education” and “Race Marxism,” and co-author of “Cynical Theories.”

He also belongs to the group behind the Grievance Studies Affair, or Sokal Squared Hoax, which managed to publish a number of fake papers in critical-theory-based journals. That story is detailed in Mike Nayna’s new documentary “The Reformers.”

Jan Jekielek: We have this new film by Mike Nayna about the Sokal Squared Hoax, which you and two others created some years back. It opened my eyes to a whole crazy reality that I wasn’t fully aware of. You also have a new book, “The Marxification of Education,” about Paulo Freire and why our education system is the way it is.

James Lindsay: 2017 to 2018 is the timeline. Two colleagues of mine—Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose—and I decided that one of the best ways to expose the corruption in academia would be to get a large number of papers published in leading academic journals: feminist theory and philosophy, gender studies, and critical race theory.

We took a year and wrote 20 papers. Seven were accepted for publication, and four of them actually got published. It’s a slow process. All of the seven would have been published. One was given an award for excellence in scholarship. The Wall Street Journal figured out what we were up to, and we came clean. In October 2018, the final scoreboard was seven accepted, seven under peer review, and six that hadn’t succeeded.

We were aiming to show that the scholarship upon which we build our knowledge base, our public policy, and our journalism is suffering from political corruption, to the extent that we could make up fake articles with ridiculous conclusions that were politically fashionable. Some were funny, and some were heinous and disturbing. We got them through the peer-review process, and they were regarded as genuine academic literature.

Mr. Jekielek: You figured out that if you used certain keywords and structured the logic in a certain way, you would get in. Is that the idea?

Mr. Lindsay: Yes. The six that failed—the first that we wrote—showed us there was a learning process. At some point, we got the hang of it by asking, “What are the peer reviewers looking for? What do the journal editors believe about the way the world operates? How do we phrase this?” It’s really about a certain language they speak.

One of the articles was prescient for the moment because it said that we needed—and this is meant to be funny—to be wary of advanced artificial intelligence. Rather than allowing AI to be guided by masculine bias, which might end in a calamity that destroys the world, we need to make an interactional feminist. We argued for a feminist AI.

Mr. Jekielek: Who are they?

Mr. Lindsay: In this case, feminist theorists, gender studies scholars, and critical race theorists. In broader terms, we’re talking about the woke scholars in these domains of identity politics.

They call it constructed knowledge. Then a filmmaker, Mike Nayna, started following us around with cameras trying to learn for himself the same thing that you’re asking, “What in the world is going on here?”

It took him four years due to COVID delays and other issues, plus the industry pushback. He couldn’t get any support whatsoever within the film industry, so he had to figure out a way to organize and distribute it.

Anyway, the Grievance Studies Affair, or the Sokal Squared Hoax— the two names for it—have never been more relevant. It’s one thing that we got a feminist theory journal to believe in feminist AI. But these same kinds of articles are now regularly being published in the New England Journal of Medicine. That’s a very concerning issue. For example, the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], which has now imbibed this same political philosophy, will be informed by the things that are coming out of the New England Journal of Medicine.

I’m not a doctor, and I don’t know three things about medicine, but I could write these kinds of articles for the New England Journal of Medicine starting today. That’s a very concerning problem.

Mr. Jekielek: I remember in 2020 when the virus was raging and the [Black Lives Matter] riots had begun. Everyone was supposed to stay home. Suddenly, 1,200 medical professionals signed a letter stating, “The real health emergency is racism.” People kept saying to me, “This was the moment a light bulb went off in my head, and I realized something terrible was happening.”

Mr. Lindsay: This is exactly what the Grievance Studies Affair was warning about by focusing attention on how absurd these papers were.

For example, the most famous of our papers presented the idea—which is covered in Mike’s film—of training men the way we train dogs. If we use dog obedience manuals and train men like dogs, with leashes and treats, then we can get them to desist from unwanted behaviors regarding women.

This idea just exploded from there. Peter and I were trying to figure out, “How do we structure this?” He goes to the dog park with his dogs every day in Portland. I said, “Just work in some of your stuff from the dog park.” He wrote this draft with just insane stuff about things dogs were doing.

The whole paper became focused on how rape culture is a serious problem in society. You could have an implicit bias test by seeing how people reacted to watching dogs have sex with each other at the dog park, or sexually assault one another.

The peer reviewers were worried about things like, “How did you respect the dogs’ privacy while you’re watching them do this? How do you know if the dogs are male or female?” We said that we inspected their genitals. They said, “How did you respect their privacy when you did that? We don’t want to get the dogs embarrassed. How do you know when a sexual assault with a dog is wanted or not wanted?”

It got a lot of attention, and this is the paper that was given an award. This is so absurd that it’s difficult to sit here and describe to you this paper without thinking, “How on earth did anybody ever think this was real?”

We also famously rewrote a chapter of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” as intersectional feminism. In Chapter 12, Hitler says, “Our movement needs to do this 13-point plan.” He’s talking about the growth of the Nazi party before it becomes the Nazi party. Everywhere that it said “our movement,” we would put in intersectional feminism. We started making the language work, and weaving scholarship in between. We changed a lot of wording without changing the meaning, so it wouldn’t get caught by a plagiarism detector. A feminist social work journal accepted this chapter of “Mein Kampf.”

So it was no surprise to me when people said, “Racism is a real public health threat,” because that’s exactly what the critical race apparatus would say.

This is Lysenkoism. Trofim Lysenko was an agriculturalist in the Soviet Union. He advocated a crackpot Soviet biology that he had more or less invented. It didn’t work, and was based on incorrect theories of genetics and on Soviet ideology in order to displace Western bourgeois ideology.

Lysenko believed that you could convince seeds and plants to be comrades and to share resources and grow better, or to transform from oats to rye. He was famous for remarking that given enough time, he could teach oranges to grow in Siberia.

But Stalin didn’t think he was preposterous, or maybe he did and didn’t care because he was a tool for power. Stalin implemented Lysenkoism in agriculture and starved tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union. Then, Mao comes along and says, “That’s Soviet biology, so that’s what we’ll use,” and he starved tens of millions of people in China.

When we’re dealing with Lysenkoism in the medical field, we have to wonder about this reprioritization of care, the so-called affirming care that’s not actually care. This is a Lysenkoist model; if you disagree with it, you may lose your medical license. If you wanted to prescribe ivermectin during COVID or disagree with the official word about COVID, you might also lose your license.

Mr. Jekielek: What’s the big lesson of the Grievance Studies Affair, or the Sokal Squared Hoax?

Mr. Lindsay: Everybody has the ability to use their senses and their own experiments to say, “This is the scientific or enlightenment ideal.” But if those are locked behind an ideology, a catastrophe is coming. Undoubtedly, the lesson is that those at the highest level of the information and knowledge apparatus of Western civilization are now locked behind a door held by an ideological contingent. They have a clear agenda of transforming the world into what they want it to be, rather than what it is.

Mr. Jekielek: I’ve been reading “The Marxification of Education,” which is helping me put together pieces of disparate knowledge about this bizarre cultural moment we’re in. For example, this idea of lived experience and how it’s central to Paulo Freire’s ideas.

Mr. Lindsay: Yes. Freire thought that the dynamic of this particular species of Marxism is if you live in the world, you already know. You’re already a knower, and your knowledge is the favorite word of the day. We hear this from the woke all the time. They don’t talk about true and false, they say it’s valid. Their knowledge is valid; their emotions and anger are valid.

Mr. Jekielek: They don’t believe in true and false.

Mr. Lindsay: Right. They believe valid and invalid are what counts, and they need to awaken in you what Freire calls a critical consciousness. It’s an extension of class consciousness and the idea that everything in society needs to be criticized because it’s dehumanizing.

When somebody says, “It’s been my lived experience that I have racism,” what they mean is, “I’ve experienced things that I’ve run through a racial consciousness filter, provided largely by critical race theory, that has led me to interpret a system of racism.”

That is lived experience. It’s not of your real experience or knowledge. Lived experience is when it has been politically conscientized, as Freire calls it. That is better than official knowledge, because it’s the knowledge that the powers that be in society don’t want you to know, the knowledge that gets you out of the trap of oppression.

When we look at the woke literature, we immediately see how it’s always whose knowledge is valid versus whose knowledge is invalid—your truth versus my truth. If you don’t understand the power dynamics behind the construction of truth, then you can’t possibly have anything to say.

Everything coming out of this woke movement in the past 10 to 15 years—longer than most people realize—is colored by this elevation of the oppressed.

Mr. Jekielek: You’ve provided a framework for understanding all these other critical theories, or cynical theories, as you call them. It was incredibly valuable to understand why you called your book with Helen Pluckrose “Cynical Theories,” because the worldview is cynical. It imagines that everything is a power play.

Mr. Lindsay: Yes. When they say race and gender are socially constructed, they’re saying that a power dynamic has set up our understanding of that concept, which is imposed on the lower class for the advantage of the upper class. This is a conflict-oriented, stratified kind of thinking, just like Marx adopted.

The goal is to be wholly negative about what you see in the world around you, and as Marx phrased it, “to give ruthless criticism of all that exists.” This is exactly what you see being done today.

Thus, we call it cynical theories instead of critical theories, because their criticism is ruthless and cynical. At the end of the road, it leads to an absolute hatred of the people that you believe are holding you back from the liberation you feel entitled to receive.

Mr. Jekielek: We saw something like this with the unvaccinated being demonized in all sorts of ways. It’s reminiscent of the struggle sessions during the Cultural Revolution in China.

Mr. Lindsay: Yes, virtually identical. Mao used the term “unity on a new basis.” That was the third part of his three-part formula to transform society: unity, criticism, unity. The first unity means inculcating the desire for unity. “Don’t we all want to have a space where we belong? Don’t you want a welcoming and inclusive environment?” That’s the modern parlance.

The second stage is to enter into criticism, which then leads to self-criticism and struggle. This is Mao’s totalitarian formula for how we’re going to purge society of the undesirables and bring everybody into “unity on a new basis,” which he called socialist discipline. Today, we use words like sustainability, equity, and inclusion. But the model is the same. Whether it’s COVID, critical race theory, trans-affirmation, or environmentalism and the Green New Deal, it’s the exact same formula.

Mr. Jekielek: Let’s jump back to Freire. You make a case that there is a Maoist impulse in Freire’s teachings.

Mr. Lindsay: In “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” which is Freire’s magnum opus from 1970, a footnote at the beginning he says his method of education is based on what he has observed in Mao’s revolutionary high schools and colleges in China.

Mr. Jekielek: How important is Freire’s thinking to the current educational system?

Mr. Lindsay: It’s central. In a book written in 2016, “The Critical Turn in Education,” Marxist professor Isaac Gottesman from Iowa State University gives a historical view from the mid-1960s up to 2015. In the first sentence of the book, he says, and I’m paraphrasing, “Where did all the ’60s radicals go? Not to the religious cults, and not to yuppiedom, but to the classroom.”

He then explains that Paulo Freire’s work is pivotal here, that by 1992 our colleges of education were completely enthralled with Freire.

Today, we call it culturally relevant teaching, which says, “We’re going to find out where the kids are culturally, socially, and emotionally.” Social and emotional learning is the big rage now. As Freire says, we will then facilitate them into political knowledge, that whether it’s mathematics, reading, or history, the lesson is a mediator to knowledge, and true knowledge is political knowledge.

Mr. Jekielek: Do you think most teachers understand that their educational method is following this plan?

Mr. Lindsay: I don’t think the vast majority of them have the slightest idea what ideology they’re supporting. But they’re being taught this is the most sophisticated way to create engagement—that’s the buzzword—with students. If we get engagement with students, then they’re going to have learning. This is just the best way to teach kids.

In fact, however, students’ academic achievement scores are so abysmal that it’s shocking when you hear the percentages. Nationally, only 40 percent of American students are achieving at grade level in math or reading. In certain districts like Providence, Rhode Island, as I say in my book, we’re talking about single digits.

Only 6 percent of students are learning mathematics at grade level in Providence, but they are some of the most politically active students in the country. If something happens in Texas, like a school shooting, every kid is out of the Providence schools and onto the State House steps doing a demonstration that afternoon. The teachers there believe that political activism is engaging.

Most teachers are not complicit in this program; they’re just trying to do the best they can to teach. But some are, and it doesn’t take everybody to do this.

Mr. Jekielek: Who would have guessed that our whole education system has these Marxist underpinnings today? There were only hints of it. Any final thoughts?

Mr. Lindsay: The sad truth is that when we have a high-trust society where we feel we can trust the teachers, business people, and others, we think we don’t need to keep our eye on everything. We went to sleep and stopped verifying.

But now we have to start verifying virtually everything. Our business people have been captured by this ideology through ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance], which is an extortion racket. Our teachers have become corrupted by this political ideology because their schools got corrupted. With this whole long march through the institutions, teachers, lawyers, and doctors are increasingly beholden to an ideology.

They have corrupted the center of knowledge production, which brings us back to the film “The Reformers” and the Grievance Studies Affair. Academic scholarship is not particularly relevant to the average person, at least not in a way they can recognize. It trickles out through the mechanisms of advanced societies to affect your life in meaningful ways, but you aren’t thinking about it. Yet this corruption of scholarship creates an entire Lysenkoist artifice that poisons the whole enterprise, the twisted perversion you get when the knowledge-generating enterprise gets completely corrupted.

The Grievance Studies Affair and “The Reformers” expose some of this corruption. And unless and until this corruption goes away, they’ll remain relevant.

This is a story that has happened before. We can point to Lysenko, we can point to Mao, we can point to these characters in the darkest chapters of 20th-century history, and we know where this story goes. We’ve got to start asking hard questions. We can’t simply trust. We have to verify.

 This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.