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Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst addresses relevant political and social issues of our times in a straightforward and honest manner. Taking on anti-logic factions that are growing in society. News and opinions that you can rely on for integrity and depth!
Real Clear
Dr. James Lindsay
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Can radical feminism and Marxist ideologies reshape scientific disciplines? Join us for a compelling conversation with Dr. James Lindsay, an American author and mathematician known for his outspoken criticism of critical race theory. We unpack his unique upbringing in a secular, non-political household, enriched by both Catholic values and cultural influences like "The Simpsons," and how these shaped his perspective on modern ideological movements. Dr. Lindsay's journey from the rural landscapes of Northern New York and East Tennessee to academia, and then unexpectedly to massage therapy, is filled with philosophical explorations that challenge conventional narratives and offer a new lens through which to view societal ideologies.
Dr. Lindsay takes us through the fascinating and controversial grievance study hoaxes, where he and his collaborators critiqued the rise of radical feminism within academia. This chapter of his life underscores the challenges faced when confronting dominant ideologies and the backlash that can ensue. The conversation extends to the broader implications of collectivist ideologies, like Marxism, and their tension with individual rights, showcasing Dr. Lindsay's insights into the seductive nature of utopian ideals and the significant ideological battles facing Western society today. Along the way, we discuss the intersections of mathematics, its abstract complexities, and how precise definitions can dispel common misconceptions about this discipline.
Welcome back to Real Clear everybody. I'm your host, lucas Klein. Today I have the distinct opportunity to speak to Dr James Lindsay. He is an American-born author, mathematician and professional troublemaker. Dr James Lindsay has written six books spanning a range of subjects, including religion, the philosophy of science and postmodern theory. He is a leading expert on critical race theory, which leads him to reject it completely. He is the founder of New Discourses podcast and currently is promoting his new book, cynical Theories how activist scholarship made everything about race, gender and identity and why this harms everybody. This is currently being translated into more than 15 languages. He also wrote the Queering of the American Child, which you can find on newdiscoursescom.
Speaker 1:I wanted to have Dr Lindsay on to try to gain an understanding of his undergirding and most primary animating philosophies and drives. So we'll see if we get there and whether you agree or disagree in various ways with Dr Lindsay. You have to admit this is a very complex thinker, a very interesting person and someone who has a lot to offer the conversations that are currently unfolding in Western civilization. And if you're not already listening to realclearpodcastcom directly and if you're not already listening to RealClearPodcastcom directly, please do so. Join as a member and that'll allow me to dedicate more time to bringing content like this with fascinating guests directly to you, with no middleman.
Speaker 1:So, without further delay, I bring to Dr James Lindsay an American mathematician by training and he also broke into the public spotlight, I believe first through what's called the grievance hoax, or grievance studies with Peter Boghossian, which was a really intriguing and fascinating entree into the public spotlight, which we'll talk about and I'll ask him about.
Speaker 1:He's also prolific and profound. He's written several books, the most recent entitled the Queering of the American Child. He's also written co-authored Cynical Theories with Helen Pluckrose into economic, cultural, historical Marxism and its descendant ideologies which are upon us, and he has made these circuits to the likes of Joe Rogan and others. He is a fascinating person and I'm so pleased that he has agreed to talk to us today. One of our challenges is going to be trying to actually form an overarching understanding as to what Dr Lindsay is up to overall and what his grounding thrust is, what he's aiming for, because he is so widespread and so deep which is an interesting and rare combination that our challenge today may actually be trying to define what it is that overwhelmingly animates his direction and his interest broadly and fundamentally. Dr Lindsay, thank you so much for coming on, Real Clear.
Speaker 2:Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Real clear.
Speaker 1:Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. So let's start from the beginning. Ever the psychoanalyst. I'd like to get a little bit of an understanding as to what someone's origin story is. Can you tell us what was Rogan has young Jamie as his producer, but what was young Jamie like young James, like, uh, growing up and and where did you come?
Speaker 2:from. Well, um, you know, occasionally I get to talk about my childhood. Uh, I think, you know, looking back at my childhood, there's a lot of stories that are really on brand for the adult that I've become. Um, but let's see, I was just a, you know, matters of basic fact. I was born in northern New York. My Wikipedia correctly identifies that I was born in a hospital in Ogdensburg, new York, which very few people have heard of. I've never lived there. It was just a better hospital than Messina General, which I was growing up in Messina, new York, which is on the Canadian border. We used to walk across the border when I was a kid, from the house, we could walk from our house to the border. You know it was not a super long walk, something a four-year-old could handle, but it was long for a four-year-old.
Speaker 2:I was baptized Catholic, raised in the Catholic church. I'm pretty sure my dad was not really religious but was doing it to satisfy his very religious Catholic mother. So we, you know, we would go later in my childhood we would go to church and we'd watch the Simpsons make fun of church on TV when we came home, you know. So it was like this sort of you know very, you know, secular, non-religious, non-political household. I never knew where my parents stood politically. We didn't have a vibrant family faith. I mean, we generally acknowledged and believed in God. We were generically kind of Catholic and that was about it.
Speaker 2:Um, we moved from Northern New York to East Tennessee when I was five, so in 1984, so you can do the math. I was born in the seventies. Uh, just barely, but still, um, so you can do the math and figure out that I'm in my mid forties now, if you need to do that. Uh, so we moved when I was five and I kind of had this split existence until I was 16, where we spent as much time as the school calendar would allow in New York with my mom's family, which is a very rural blue-collar family, and then spent the rest of the year, obviously in Tennessee, going to school and doing whatever else.
Speaker 2:That was Southeastern childhood. Spent most of the time in the woods trying to catch snakes, building bike ramps, you know, racing around the neighborhood on bikes. Lots of hills, so we were running up and down hills, as you know. Feats of strength, lots of time in the swimming pool in the summer, lots of other, in other words, outdoor activity competition with friends playing baseball, trying to figure out how to play football, which we were none of us in the neighborhood happened to be very good at, so we didn't get very far with that one. But baseball we got a lot further with, mostly with plastic wiffle balls and whatever. But so I grew up, you know, I think, a pretty rough and tumble but typical childhood, a lot of outside, grew up with a, with a mother who believed that during daylight hours children should be outside unless it's like horrible rain.
Speaker 2:Video games came onto the scene, though. So I kind of played video games a lot and through my not early childhood but middle childhood and teenage years, and particularly up until I was 25. And then I just had this like epiphany while I was playing world of Warcraft one day, and I was like video games are a waste of time and I've stopped playing. I've never had, if not that I don't play video games like on principle. I think they're boring, like I think they're literally a waste of time. I can't see the intrigue anymore, so I don't, I don't do them. People say, oh, it's storytelling and all this. I can read stories, you know, I have to play them.
Speaker 1:And dexterity, something like that, yeah.
Speaker 2:Justification yeah, I mean, I would love to build. I mean, honestly, I'm intrigued by aviation. I would love to deck out I wouldn't give it enough time to justify the cost I would love to deck out a real flight simulator in my house, like one where you spend, like you know, seven $10,000 on a chair that moves like the whole thing, like a chair that moves like the whole thing, like a little. I'm not ready for this.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to give it the time it deserves to have that expensive of a toy, but I, I mean, I love it. I think I've always been intrigued by aviation, but I'm a little bit like nobody. In the first of all I don't have the eyesight for it, but second of all, nobody needs me flying an airplane where their life is involved. But a flight simulator kills no people, so you know that's okay. So anyway, pretty normal childhood, pretty, um, my sense of humor as a teenager is the on-brand stuff. It was always these kinds of, you know, very sophisticated, uh, almost postmodern pranks.
Speaker 2:Um, I once you know you the old joke, you know you tell somebody gullibles written on the ceiling. So I had done that to my brother, god knows how many times, and he'd all. You know the old joke. You know, you tell somebody gullible is written on the ceiling. So I had done that to my brother, God knows how many times, and he stopped looking and he defiantly refused to look. So I, realizing he would defiantly refuse to look, I wrote gullible on the ceiling with some blue chalk from the pool table. And then I said you know, we're down in my dad's basement. He had a pool table. He put back together and so we had that. And I wrote gullible on the ceiling.
Speaker 2:And I said to my brother you know, gullible is written on the ceiling. And he was like no, it's not, I'm not looking. And he threw this huge fit. And then finally he goes screaming upstairs because I've tormented. No, really, it is, you got to look, you got to look, it's really there. And like this trolling humor. And so you go screaming upstairs. Um, mom, he says gullible's right on the ceiling, you know screaming. And I hear my mom say it effing, better not be. He can come storming down the stairs and I was like, oh, you know. And so here my mom's throttling me like Homer grabbing Bart by the neck on the Simpsons and, um, meanwhile my brother's throwing himself on the floor screaming and crying Cause he's been had.
Speaker 1:And I felt like I had won the day and it was the first uh uh hoax, maybe the prelude to grievance hoax probably.
Speaker 2:I mean, I did stuff that was like this the style of humor it was all this like kind of like slightly psychological humor yeah, then there's something, there's like an interest uh, somewhere there in the in, in cognitive uh somewhere there in the in, in cognitive, uh, elasticity in humans?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think so. Um, I wanted to major in as a. As a junior high and early high school student, I wanted to major in meteorology. I've always been fascinated by the weather, um, still am fascinated by the weather and I can get like, when a hurricane comes through or whatever, I can get totally distracted for days like watching it and uh. So that's been something to have to overcome as an adult, to not get diverted by, like, oh my God, a tornado.
Speaker 2:Um, but uh, I ended up majoring in physics because I fell in love with it when I took it as a junior in high school. And, uh, by the time I was a junior in college, I hated it. So I bailed out on physics, finished the degree cause I'm not a quitter. So I'm giving you all kinds of psychoanalyst tools here. I'm not a quitter. I finished the degree even though I hated it. Thought I would be a business major, thought I'd get an MBA and go do corporate something, make some money. Hated it, hated it, it was so miserable. Um, and then switched over to get a master's in math, which I did in three semesters rather than four, which is not exactly easy, especially since it's not my it wasn't my undergraduate field, and then went on to do a PhD in math at the university of Tennessee, which I finished in 2010. And guess what? By the end of the time that I was at the university of Tennessee, I hated academia, hated it.
Speaker 2:Now, what did you hate about it? Now, I'm not like inspired, like wow, look at campus, look at all these young minds. I'm like what a bureaucratic nightmare. I hate this place. And it's just the buildings feel like government buildings. It's not inspiring, it's not interesting. It's all like tons of paperwork and if you're going to do anything, there's paperwork and you've got to always have, like some you know department secretary that's handling some of the paperwork for you. It's all very bureaucratic and it's anti-inspiring, in my opinion.
Speaker 2:And then, um, the university itself was. The universities, as we know, are very captured ideologically now, but they were captured financially before they were captured ideologically. Uh, a huge arms race, to the best of my ability to understand the situation, for student services and basically student recreation in order to attract students. Once Clinton signed the federal underwriting of student loans and basically opened up infinity money that could be paid into a college, the colleges and universities all started building new rec centers, new movie theaters, bowling alleys, brand new dorms. That were really great. And instead of competing on their academic merits, they started to compete on what extra, like extracurricular services, they could offer the students. Oh, we've got a new $18 million in the center, yeah Right.
Speaker 2:Or we built a bowling alley that you can go bowling with your friend, and so that trapped them financially. And so, being trapped financially, they had to make money. So tuition kept going up and up and up something like eight times If I remember the number that might be wrong Four times, eight times the rate of inflation, college tuitions skyrocketing and the policy within department was anything that's outside of somebody's major, just pass them, it was become. It wasn't that explicit. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it was like don't fail too many students, Don't lose their morale, Don't lose their scholarships, Come up with all the extra credit opportunities. You can just get them through their basic requirements. And I was thinking you know, I don't want to be a part of this. It's just a money machine for the university, it's not about education, it's not about preparing a future generation for being professionals or competent, or educated adults. I don't want to be a part of this.
Speaker 2:So I bailed out, became a massage therapist, for a variety of reasons that require a lot of explanation, that are all reasonable when you know them. I had back pain. Massage fixed it. I mostly did it to myself, so I had techniques. I like working with people. I knew people I could help with this, so I decided to go ahead and just do this while I thought of what I would do next, because I didn't want to go back into teaching and it just I just liked it. So it stuck Right and I had you know family to think about. Am I going to do this postdoc thing even though I don't want to do you know more academia? Do I drag my family all over the country not knowing where anybody's going to be? No, didn't want to do it. Did that academically board.
Speaker 2:Started studying philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, psychology of religion, a lot writing about it with Peter Boghossian, notably by 2013. Working with you know the new atheist movement was kind of my inroad to that Obviously not so much Catholic anymore at that point. And in the spiritual path is this whole other equally topsy turvy story. Um, but started working with Peter Boghossian writing philosophy of science, time magazine, scientific American and so on. We had publications in, uh, philosophers magazine, Um, and I think that whatever the publication of the humanist association, we had something in that too. I get dragged for that one sometimes now. And, um, that got overrun by feminists. I started wondering why and how they think. And uh, so I started to study the feminist academic literature, and that brings us to the hoax. Yes, you know, we can go from there or whatever, but that's the back backstory.
Speaker 1:Well, who knows how the story that you've just uh Well, who knows how the story that you've just constructed will will uh in here upon um what we're about to get into. But it's good to give people a context for the about and read grievance studies, which was perfect because some of it was done in Portland. Can you tell us about the grievance study hoaxes, just concisely, as a prelude to what we'll get into with your deep dives into Marxism?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what happened was that Peter and I were in these circles whether it was the New Atheist Movement or this kind of philosophical philosophy of science and epistemology kind of nerd circles online, mostly like discussion forums somewhat on Twitter. You know, it used to be that there were these blog forums and then they had this platform called Discuss, which was like an add-on for comments. That was like every blog that used Discuss. It had, like, you had your own profile as a Disqus participant, so if I commented on your blog with Disqus and then I went on and commented on Jojo's blog with Disqus, you could actually find and cross, link and reference the different comments across all the blogs. So anyway, we were.
Speaker 2:It's on stuff like that, right, that doesn't, that doesn't matter, but it was on things like that that we were working and we started to notice what we would now call the woke takeover. We didn't use the word woke then it was third wave radical feminism. That's what we all called it back then. Third wave radical feminism is ruining everything, and I started to read their literature and Peter started to look into their literature and this got us following an account on Twitter called Real Peer Review, which actually published the abstracts and short summaries of real papers that had passed peer review, primarily in the humanities. That were these ridiculous woke papers that we would all recognize today as being woke contamination. But we didn't know what was going on there at the time and eventually, you know, we started criticizing this stuff. We're like making fun of it, we're saying this is wrong, this is nonsense, this is bad for the sciences, this is, you know, bad philosophy, and we just got blasted. You know, we were getting canceled. Basically, we couldn't like.
Speaker 2:Peter wouldn't, couldn't go. He was under so much duress he couldn't go to conferences anymore without taking one of his children with him so that he had a shield to protect him from the rampant allegations of rape. It was like the Me Too era came early and so everybody that they didn't like they would accuse of some sexual impropriety. So he'd always take his kids with him to these conferences as a shield. Again, he was like I didn't do anything. I have my 11-year-old with me. What are you talking about, you know? Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:So literally, there were attempts to set him up for allegations.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, oh yeah, they really didn't like him. I actually didn't know that they really didn't like him and of course he was going through it at the university. So I'm friends with him and privy to all the stories of how Portland State keeps bringing him up to the diversity office and all this nonsense, and I was like, ok, something's weird here. So we start trying to criticize these academic papers and they say you can't, you don't have a PhD, you're a white male, whatever.
Speaker 1:You're not an expert.
Speaker 2:You're not an expert and you're not qualified. You don't have the lived experience and you don't have the degree. So I was like, okay, what can we do? Then they published a paper that was on the science of glaciology. I had all this background in the sciences, so kind of like my sacred object in a sense was the sciences. Sciences, so kind of like my sacred object in a sense was the sciences, where if you're going to poke at that, I'm going to think something's really wrong. And they were like the science of glaciology is sexist. It has to adopt feminist art projects and all this other indigenous mythology in order to redeem itself. And I was like what the heck? And Peter was like what is this?
Speaker 2:And then this guy, matt matt ridley. He's a journalist. He still writes. I think he was writing for spiked or something at the time I don't remember what outlet it was, but he wrote an article that said that he and I quote he says I still maintain that this is an elaborate academic hoax, like the alan sokol affair from the 1990s. Then its authors have not fessed up to it yet. That was in late 2016 in 2016.
Speaker 1:In order to impose a semblance of sanity on the circumstance, you had to at least imagine that one possibility was that it was a hoax.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, this was also a paper that was done as part of a larger grant that was just short of half a million dollars of National Science Foundation money to four professors at the University of Oregon and not Portland State, but the university of oregon and go beavers or whatever right. And so, um, peter and I were like there it is, let's hoax them. That's the only thing left. We can't criticize them. We get smeared, we get threatened, we get canceled. We weren't really using the word cancel yet, but whatever the stand-in for it was at the time, because this was, you know, late 16, 2016. It was like let's hoax them. So we wrote this absolute. I thought, okay, why not?
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