People who have escaped cults all tell a similar story. That story starts with a desire to belong, coupled with a desire for purpose. Strong familial and social bonds are generally preferable to shaky relationships, isolation, and the feeling of being an outcast. Likewise, feeling like one’s life lacks any meaning or purpose is a recipe for anxiety, depression, or even madness. If you talk to people who have escaped cults, they all tell you that they didn’t set out to join a cult—the cult set out to prey on them, offering to fill the voids that we must all grapple with, to varying degrees, throughout our lives. The cult offers inclusion, affirmation, and a secret cult knowledge of life’s purpose. All one must do is take the leap of faith.
Cults are incredibly effective for a variety of reasons, most of which is their ability to lead initiates deeper into the cult, even when those initiates start to sense that the “inclusion,” “affirmation,” and “purpose” offered to them comes with some very nasty conditions and ultimatums. Cult survivors describe how difficult it is to stop placing one foot in front of the other when the cult has total control of one’s physical, social, and emotional environments. Cults work tirelessly to control all information entering an initiate’s eyes and ears. Cults control the books you can read, the news you can watch, the organizations you can trust, the experts you must listen to, and the people you confide in. The cult environment is one of endless propaganda designed to be so effective that one loses control of their own thoughts; loses control over the voice in their head.
Once an initiate finds themselves in the cult’s totalizing environment (see Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton) the cult lifts the veil of love, affirmation, and inclusion and reveals a cycle of psychological abuse designed to drag the initiate deeper into the cult’s doctrine. This abuse is justified through a language of purity—initiates must let go of all the bad influences and contamination of their former lives, revealing their deepest secrets through ritual confessions. The point is to strip the initiate down, leaving them totally vulnerable and exposed. Only then can the cult rebuild the initiate in the cult’s image.
Cult survivors will tell you that they often didn’t know they were in a cult until someone pierced the cult’s totalizing environment with a message from the outside; a tether to a long-lost reality; an invitation to step back into the real world. The Queering of the American Child is one such tether, and I hope parents nationwide will receive the message loud and clear: Education is in the grip of a religious cult—the Queer Cult.
Now, I don’t mean “queer” as in “gay” or “lesbian” or “bisexual.” I mean “queer” as it is defined in the academic literature of the Queer Cult’s doctrine: Queer Theory.
Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.[1] (Halperin, 1995, p. 62, italics in original)
Our children are “experiencing the queer,” as Queer Educational Activist Kevin Kumashiro explains in his 2009 book, Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice (2nd edition). Specifically, our children are experiencing the “queer” because they have been purposefully placed in a state of psychological crisis. “Crisis,” Kumashiro says, “should be expected in the process of learning, by both the student and the teacher. Like queer activism, queer teaching always works through crisis…the goal is to continue teaching and learning through crisis—to continue experiencing the queer.”[2] (Kumashiro, 2009, p. 55)
The Queer Cult has total control of our national discourse as it relates to sex, “gender,” and sexuality. Our children are fed a steady diet of cult doctrine through mainstream media, social media, popular culture, the psychiatrists they consult, and the doctors their parents trust. Not least of which, our children attend schools that universally push the idea that children can be “born in the wrong body.” America’s children learn that they have “gender identities” that might not match their “sex assigned at birth.” A Medical Industrial Complex waits in the wings with irreversible puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and “gender affirming” surgeries.
The social and emotional pressures to conform to the Queer Cult’s corrupted understanding of reality are hard to bear. Most people know that “radical gender ideology” is insane, but they go along with it because they don’t want to be considered a “bad person,” “on the wrong side of history,” or worst of all, a “conservative.” The cult’s moral extortion racket is designed to drag us deeper into their agenda; deeper into what Queer Activist Michael Warner calls a “queer planet.”[3] However strong the pressure may be, we must remain tethered to reality—not only for ourselves, but especially for our children. As we say in the book,
[Queer Activists] believe they can arrest the steering wheel of History and drive us all off the ledge. Under normal circumstances, all of this nonsense would be cause for endless mockery and laughter. Unfortunately, Queer Activists have proved to be remarkably effective. Today, they already have one hand on the wheel, and our kids are in the car.[4]
In The Queering of the American Child you will learn what Queer Theory is, where it comes from, how it got into schools, and what it’s attempting to do with your children. You will learn that Queer Theory has nothing to do with helping gay kids, and nothing to do with helping troubled children feel “included” in a healthy set of societal norms. Letting the cultists speak for themselves, Dr. James Lindsay and I bring in hundreds of citations to lay bare the Queer Cult’s agenda. Our schools are initiating children into the Queer Cult through psychological manipulation and child abuse. What you read will shock you, and that’s a good thing. Welcome back to reality.
References
[1] Halperin, D. M. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. Oxford University Press. (p. 61) ↑
[2] Kumashiro, K. K. (2009). Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice (2nd ed.). Routledge. (p. 55) ↑
[3] Warner, M. (1991). Introduction: Fear of a queer planet. Social Text, (29), 3–17. ↑
[4] Lancing, L. and Lindsay, J (2024) The Queering of the American Child: How A New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids. New Discourses. (p. 65) ↑
13 comments
After all the death threats, the crybullying, the drunk with power cruelty, the lives vindictively ruined by Trans Inc’s fanatical hatred for anyone who dared question Trans Totalitarian Tyranny, there is finally vindication. It was all a LIE. A monstrous world-wide LIE:
• “After years of gender-critical voices being dismissed or ignored by mainstream media, they can be dismissed and ignored no longer.
• The landmark Cass Review into gender-identity services in England, published today, has laid bare the scandal of the NHS’s treatment of ‘gender confused’ kids. There was never any evidence for subjecting troubled, often gay, often autistic, youngsters to life-altering hormones, drugs and treatments. But clinicians did it anyway, in thrall as they were to gender ideology.
• The review is on the front page of the newspapers today [April 10 2024]. The BBC is platforming trans-sceptical experts… [The] ever-opportunistic Labour Party is saying it agrees with everything in the report. Of course it’s far too early to be declaring victory, and far too late for many of the victims caught up in this to celebrate, but something monumental happened today. The unsayable has become sayable, on gender at least.
• The review, produced by top paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass over four years, is a stunning piece of work: a 400-page triumph of reason over unreason. It doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know, but it tells us in painstaking detail and with undeniable, data-driven authority.
• There is ‘no good evidence’, Cass writes, ‘on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress’. Puberty blockers – now all but banned by the NHS – were brought in ‘based on a single Dutch study’. While these drugs are certainly effective at halting the natural march of puberty, and almost certainly have other punishing, physical side effects, ‘no changes in gender dysphoria or body satisfaction were demonstrated’.
• The claim that ‘trans kids’ must be ‘affirmed’ and put on hormones, lest they commit suicide? This horrendous bit of moral blackmail has been uttered time and again to wary parents in gender clinics across the West. But as many already knew, there’s [nothing] to back this up: ‘The evidence found did not support this conclusion.
• The question now is, how was this ever allowed to happen? The review points to some of the more immediate reasons. Namely, the shoddiness of the evidence base for various treatments combined with the conspiracy of silence around this. Shockingly, Dr Cass says her research was actually ‘thwarted by a lack of cooperation from the adult gender services’. ‘I do think it was coordinated’, she tells the Guardian. ‘It seemed to me to be ideologically driven.’
• This all shows that woke ideology is the water our elites swim in. It shows that, for our supposed betters, virtue-signalling and being on ‘the right side of history’ has replaced genuine virtue and rational thought. Indeed, they preferred to strike poses against some dreamt-up ‘transphobic’ backlash than think for 30 seconds about what it is they were supporting – which turned out to be the reckless sterilisation of kids who, left to their own devices, would have grown up to be gay. They were the real reactionaries all along.”
Tom Slater April 10 2024 spikedonline.com
Cass Review
Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People April 2024
cass.independent-review.uk
So much of this stuff is obvious bullshit once you start to think about it. Take “sex assigned at birth”. I’ve yet to see or hear reports of a newborn’s biology conform the the midwife’s “assignment”, should she “assign” anything but what she sees in front of her.
Observation is not assigment, and by the time of birth the decision is nine months old. So that’s two lies already. And yet, this prattle is widespread in use as some sort of slur against normality, as if looking at a newborn and telling the world what you see is bad somehow. And yet so many people, so much of the systems governing us, are going along with it if not actively supporting it.
I think we need better controls on our institutions, of how we implement democracy and how to keep tabs on bureaucracy. Especially global bureaucracy like the UN and its many special purpose bureaucrat shops.
Game changer: The Child Transing “Wikileaks”.
Journalist Michael Schellenberger has just released insider documents from the world’s leading Child Transing “authority” WPATH that will provide parents, doctors, politicians, legislators, school boards, media, lawyers (for class action law suits) and the public with insider medical and policy information that can end Child Transing:
The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific Surgical And Hormonal Experiments On Children, Adolescents, And Vulnerable Adults
“The report will show that, as is revealed by its own internal communications, WPATH does not meet the standards of evidence-based medicine, and members frequently discuss improvising treatments as they go along. Our report will further show that members are fully aware that children and adolescents cannot comprehend the lifelong consequences of ‘gender-affirming care’, and in some cases, due to poor health literacy, neither can their parents.”
THE WPATH FILES
Michael Shellenberger
“Newly released internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical. American Medical Association, The Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and thousands of doctors worldwide rely on WPATH. It is considered the leading global authority on gender medicine. And yet WPATH’s internal files, which include written discussions and a video [with transcipt], reveal that its members know they are creating victims and not getting ‘informed consent’.
Victims include a 10-year-old girl, a 13-year-old developmentally delayed adolescent, and individuals suffering from schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. The injuries described in the WPATH Files include sterilization, loss of sexual function, liver tumors, and death. WPATH members indicate repeatedly that they know that many children and their parents don’t understand the effects that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will have on their bodies. And yet, they continue to perform and advocate for gender medicine.
The WPATH Files prove that gender medicine is comprised of unregulated and pseudoscientific experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults. It will go down as one of the worst medical scandals in history.”
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files
“The WPATH Files: PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC SURGICAL AND HORMONAL EXPERIMENTS ON CHILDREN, ADOLESCENTS, AND VULNERABLE ADULTS
[Excerpts:]
“WPATH’s SOC8 is not evidence-based, and it is clinically unsafe. The guidelines are based on ‘consensus-based expert opinion,’ but notably only the opinion of experts who advocate for ‘gender-affirming care.’ WPATH inaccurately states that a systematic review of the evidence for ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors is not feasible due to limited evidence; however, Sweden, Finland, England, and the state of Florida have conducted such reviews, finding the evidence ‘insufficient and inconclusive.’ In fact, WPATH itself has also conducted such a review and found the evidence for cross-sex hormone therapy to be ‘low’ and inconclusive…”
“Dianne Berg, child psychologist and co-author of the child chapter of WPATH Standards of Care: ‘We’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet.’”
“Dr Daniel Metzger, Canadian endocrinologist: ‘‘I’ve performed mastectomies without nipples… minimal-depth vaginoplasties (vulvoplasties), phallus-preserving vaginoplasties, and nullification procedures. I’m quite comfortable tailoring my operations to serve the needs of each patient.’”
NY Post Mar 4 2024
“Secret Files Show How International Group Pushes Shocking Experimental Gender Surgery For Minors
According to leaked documents, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health [WPATH] is pushing hormonal and surgical transitions for minors.
Newly leaked files from the world’s leading transgender health-care organization reveal it is pushing hormonal and surgical transitions for minors, including stomach-wrenching experimental procedures designed to create sexless bodies that resemble department-store mannequins.
[WPATH documents demonstrate it’s controlled by gender ideologues who push aside concerns about whether children and adolescents can consent to medical treatments that WPATH members privately acknowledge often have devastating and permanent side effects.
Yet the US government, American doctors and prominent organizations nonetheless rely on WPATH guidelines for advice on treating our youth.
The files — jaw-dropping conversations from a WPATH internal messaging board and a video of an Identity Evolution Workshop panel — were provided to journalist Michael Shellenberger…
Shellenberger’s nonprofit Environmental Progress will release a scathing summary report, comparing the WPATH promotion of ‘the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy genitals in vulnerable people’ to the mid-20th-century use of lobotomies, ‘the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy brains’.”
Why will this forum not let me post replies? I get an error page accusing me of “spam” or fucked up javascript (it’s not).
I got the same message many times — -infuriating I know — I now compose in word then cut and paste and since I dont know if the reply will be below the comment I replied to I also begin my reply with “commenter wrote” and their quoted words in case my reply ends up as the first comment at the top of the thread detached from the comment replied to — no clue why this happens
Queer theory is not a theory. It is not even a hypothesis. It is a fictive construct, a product of imagination fixated upon to the point of vehement delusion and waging war against reality–a war that no one can win. Unfortunately, over many centuries, human beings have conceived of many delusional notions, cloaking them with rituals, pomp and ceremonies, promoting them by indoctrination, enforcing them by laws, and enslaving and slaughtering millions of people to perpetuate them. It offers not affirmation but self-negation, self-disowning, a protracted path to suicide.
I found this list of “10 For-Sure Signs You’re In A Cult” at theodysseyonline but many other site all have similar criteria. Youtube does not like sharing this information
1. A single authoritative person or small group of people create rules to follow.
2. Your group is isolated or encouraged to stay and keep secrets within the in-group.
3. Critical thinking and questioning are met with resistance, deferment, and or punishment.
4. Cults are totalistic.
5. Hostility, sanction, or aggression when leaving the group is brought up.
6. Formal ceremonies and rituals take place to indoctrinate and reaffirm beliefs communally.
7. “Love Bombing” or bipolar behavior.
8. Food, work, and social activity are monitored or controlled.
9. A sense of “community” is extremely valued above the comfort and desire of the individual.
10. Important decisions are influenced or made by the people in charge.
yeah the problem with those kind of generic’ signs you’re in a cult’ is that a good deal of those points would refer to many peoples’ jobs. How about an organisation that literally has the power to make you homeless or unable to pay your medical insurance? How about an organisation that largely defines what kind of people you spend time with and which ideas are considered ‘acceptable’ in polite society. In many cases its peoples’ jobs that shape a significant part of the ‘mental blueprint’.
As one wag put it, the abbreviation of culture is cult.
Frankly a number of things that go on in this New discourses enterprise steer a little close to cult like thinking. There is the positing of a terrible other ‘the queer cult’ the ‘woke mob’ who are painted into an ominous figure that threatens the very fabric of society (i mean in another parallel reality that ‘grievance studies’ paper involved submitting a paper with section of Mein Kampf but replacing the world jew with ‘queer cult’.
In fact this queer woke cult is apparently so pervasive that it has infected huge amounts of society so you can’t really trust the ‘normal world’ of schools and exam boards and companies – because they are all infested with it and only the elite knowledge of ‘counter woke’ is effective against this onslaught. Elite knowledge only possessed by those who have studies critical theory in enough depth to report back to you how awful it is.
And also it is made clear that THIS is the thing that should occupy your attention and concerns – not AI taking over the world, or multi national corporates patenting human genes and developing dynastic levels of wealth that dwarf kings queens and aristocracy of the past…, or development of military technology that is capable of doing.. God knows what… or anything else. No the ‘queer cult’ is the overriding existential concern.
It kind of reminds me when Jordan Peterson used to rail against the ‘bloody postmodern neo marxists’ and cultivated a raft of people on youtube commenting on the evils of ‘post modern neo marxism’ who had never been near a book on Marx,foucault, Freire or Fromm
I suspect an number of people who follow Lindsay et al’s work have also never done that and derive all their opinions about it from what he and his peers tell them to think about it. After all.. time is precious right so it might be effective to outsource your opinions about this to them.
I should know because i used to do pretty much that. Frankly now that i’ve stopped doing it it feels,, at least a little,, like i was in a cult. Not actually but a certain amount of cult like thinking – which it seems the anit-woke movement is by no means exempt from.
commenter wrote: “it is made clear that [Queer and Woke] is the thing that should occupy your attention and concerns – not AI taking over the world, or multi national corporates patenting human genes [or] dynastic wealth…
The reason why Queer and Woke must occupy the attentions and concerns of anyone who is terrified of globalist control weapons such as AI manipulation, corporate genetic exploitation and dynastic wealth (among other socio-political nightmares) is because these top-down impositions on human life are against people’s wishes thus require a submissive population, and Queer and Woke are tools of this submissification: Nothing more and nothing less.
Total power over humans by authoritarians of any kind can only happen by two methods: 1) perpetual violence to gain and maintain control; or 2) subversion into submission via mass propaganda and person-on-person surveillance by the propagandized to enforce individual compliance of the non-compliant (“White Silence is Violence!”). Queer and Woke are tools of this control. AI, Genetic and Wealth-Theft impositions operate at the meta level of whole-society control while Queer and Woke act at the micro personal level to force individuals to submit to the controller without their knowledge via the propagandized Queer and Woke’s new “morality”: “Diversity is our Strength! Transwomen are Women!” Evidence of enforcement of this new “moral” submission is everywhere — unless you choose not to see it.
When events happen that seem inexplicably horrific (AI, lock downs, no borders, etc.), people always ask Why? Why are these things happening? Why are huge men competing with young women in sports while people pretend this is perfectly normal? Why are tens of thousands of white college females marching in the streets of every Western city screaming “Kill the Jews!”? Why are some of your friends and family out of work and losing their homes while millions of hostile illegals pour across the border for instant welfare and free housing?
This is happening because the people are allowing it to happen. Why? Because they’ve been made to believe that these developments are “moral” and “ethical”. How? Via Woke and Queer propaganda that gives the people a new “morality” and “ethics” that replaces any previous morality and ethics — THIS is the actual “Great Reset”. This “Reset Morality” (willing submission to authoritarians) is enforced at the local level by (lackeys of) the same authoritarian elites who are imposing AI Manipulation, Genetic Exploitation and Wealth-Theft as weapons of total control at the global level.
New Discourses and similar educational endeavours are creating a genuine discourse, an educated public discussion, that tries to help people find answers to these Hows and Whys of the incomprehensible societal chaos that’s impacting their own real lives. Such a discourse is only a “cult right-wing conspiracy theory” to someone who has some stake, personal or political, in silencing it. Why are these ideas so threatening? Because they are steps on the path to the counter-revolution against the Great Reset: The Great Refusal!
I’m an old man who lived his entire adult life in the pre-Woke and pre-Queer Left and Gay academic-activist-NGO-artistic urban world in the city where I was born and still reside but now as an apostate sheep-in-wolves’-clothing mentally self-exiled from the Wokeness all around me that I understand so well and despise so much because of that insider knowledge. One thing I do know is that Logan Lancing’s important new book on Queering Children along with all of James Lindsay’s work are the antithesis of “right wing conspiracy”. And that’s precisely why they incite so much rage and fear and scorn in those who claim to look at “both sides”, the “Left” and the “Right”, but really do so with only their “Left” eye open.
The How and the Why continued:
“The Elites Who Want to Change The World”
Victor Davis Hanson
Feb 26, 2024 — 3 minute video on youtube transcript*
“Victor Davis Hanson discusses the global elite who are left-leaning and determined to reshape the world to conform to their ideology.”
[*edited for brevity]
• “All of our big Tech, media, investment, insurance and law are all Democrat-controlled and they have Global markets now. They adapted best to Globalization and they don’t feel any more that democracy gives them the desired result.
• What they wanted was an equality of result mandated. And that’s by nature anti-democratic. Because if somebody opposes you on the road to Utopia, you get rid of them. They’re very dangerous people because they’re also not nationalists. They believe that they belong to an International Elite.
• They don’t believe in democracy because they feel that the businesses they operate are so influential in opinion making or in providing informational services. And they now have so much money that they feel that they’re sort of like Platonic Guardians and they can tell everybody the way the world is going to work at Davos and this is the way it’s going to work. And it’s not going to apply to us [Elites] because we have to be healthy and have jets and estates and compounds and multiple homes [and cattle ranches]. But it’s going to be, ‘We know best for you.’
• And they have nothing but disdain and hatred for the middle class. They think that the middle class lacks the culture and the sophistication and the taste of the wealthy but it also lacks the romance of the distant poor. So they they just hate the middle class. They’re International Globalist, which is fine but they have no empathy for their own countrymen or their own national traditions or their middle classes.”
What other current societal cohort also despises their country, traditions and the middle class? Woke and Queer. Woke and Queer cultists are all themselves middle class. Traitors intent on destroying the prosperity and political power of their own people and all Western middle classes in the name of a worldwide Woke Utopia. Woke and Queer are nothing more than socio-cultural foot soldier grunts (useful idiots) in Globalist Elites’ extermination campaign to confiscate the wealth, thus politically emasculate, Western middle classes whose independence and power in numbers stood in the way of Elites’ total and perpetual world domination. In (Groucho) “Marx-esque” terms, Woke and Queer are the new reactionary bourgeoisie propping up Globalist Elites’ new establishmentarian Aristocracy.
You may have a point on the cult listicles and also the cultlike behavior we all are prone to falling into here on the right. Cults are powerful because they exploit some deep human needs.
Yet your examples fall short. Jordan Peterson was not incorrect in pointing to post modern neo marxists. Sticking quotes around something to boogeymanify it doesnt make it wrong when you can go straight to their own literature to find that the lefty humanities academics in fact love postmodernism and also Marx, yet it is “neo” because they have deviated from Marx’s passive prophecy to a more active Leninist approach.
You arent wrong that many of lindays fans are dumb and dont read for themselves but a great many do. They read marx directly, as well as the others, and also the philosphers of old who criticized them at the time they first emerged. I do.
The gaslighting by liberals is exhausting….that we arent really seeing what we are seeing, that words like “woke” and “critical race theory” and “queer” and “post modern neo marxist” have no meaning outside the fevered imaginations of conservatives. Its simply not true. Those words are lifted straight from their own literature.
Sometimes james lindsay needs to give credit to Karl Popper who pointed all this out shortly after ww2. He too was ostracized but he was right. His epistemology is enduring today whether people want to accept it or not.
I know you are probably posting because you are tired of the superficiality and hyperbole of internet discourse. I am too. But dont throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Crap i forgot to respond to your job comparison.
A cult doesnt apply to a job because you can quit your job. If you believe the company you work for has that much power over you than you need to toughen up a bit and gain some financial literacy.
Some jobs are toxic but it doesnt make them cults.
I can concede one thing….the left seems uniquely prone to cultlike worship of working and career. Left leaning companies can feel very culty and all consuming.
I left that sphere and despite being an atheist i find working for a faith based org to be quite a bit more family friendly and respectful toward work life balance. And to boot they dont shame me for not being a “powerful woman” who out-earns my husband.
The culty stuff may be on the right but only on the fringes. The left has the problem of the culty stuff being throughout the entire lot.
“Outsource your opinions”? Where do you think people get their political views? Do the ghosts of Marx or Mises lecture people in their dreams? Lindsay has read the primary sources and explicated them fairly so we can see for ourselves what, for example, queer theory’s purpose is and how it is working in the schools and elsewhere. Once you read a primary source, or if you read along with him, you can see that Lindsay is sufficiently charitable in his analysis. Also, if you have had any experience in a university or K-12 public school since 1990 or been following the advent of contemporary left politics, you would not be able to sneer at claims of the “pervasiveness” of neo-Marxist critical theory in education.
God forbid anyone arrives at their political outlook exclusively from their public school lessons. Most people’s politics comes from family and peers and is modified or rejected through life experience and, in the best case, much reading.