On the nihilism of Queer Theory and why schools keep trying to indoctrinate children:
Okay so this is going to be this talk is going to be a bit dark and I apologize ahead of time, but often times we need to traverse the darkness to find the light and to find Grace, so, again I'm sorry we've got to get dark but that's just the state of things today.
5 minutes ago, gender identity did not exist. 5 minutes ago, schools were not socially transitioning children without their parents' knowledge or consent. 5 minutes ago, your sex was observed at birth. It was not assigned. 5 minutes ago, drag queens were not in schools reading wholly inappropriate books to children as young as three, four and five in school classrooms, lunchrooms, libraries and gymnasiums.
This one's dark. Five minutes ago, perfectly healthy 13-year-old girls were not seeking out *elective* double mastectomy procedures as part of a gender affirmative care plan that promises to make them whole, that promises to rectify their sex with their gender identity.
5 minutes ago, none of this was happening.
Really, when you think about it, none of this was happening when you were children. None of it was happening, was when I was in school. So I'm here to ask you, what the hell is going on? What's going on? Who developed these insane theories? Who put them into schools? How did they justify doing so, and what are they attempting to do with our children?
I wrote a piece a few months ago called curiosity is a cult killer, and in that piece I briefly described how I, ended up in this mess, and the long story short was, I was curious. None of this stuff existed 5 minutes ago, now it does. I was curious.
I was preparing to be a new father, I took that responsibility tremendously seriously. I saw these things happening in the school and I was wondering what the hell is going on. And I got sick of reacting. You know, they're they're socially transitioning, socially transitioning? What does that mean? What's that?
Drag queens are in schools now? What's that about?
Teachers and school psychologists are having secretive conversations with young children behind closed doors without their parental knowledge or consent, about sex, in this thing called gender identity. What's that? And sexuality and gender affirming care? That's really weird. What is that, what is going on in our schools. I was curious.
So what do you do when you're curious? You go out and you look for information, and you read. So that's what I did. I read and I read and I read. For years. And I wasn't reading the people who were critical of all of this madness happening in schools because they were all saying the same thing. They were just reacting, it's, you turn on the news or you go on Twitter or Facebook and it's the same thing every day. Wow that's crazy, they're doing that in schools now? The next day, wow that that's crazy, they're doing that in schools now?
But I wasn't getting the answers that I needed so I went directly to the place no one wants to go directly to. The academic literature.
I went and read the people that created these theories. I went and read the teachers that are currently practicing in schools and read what they were bragging about doing in academic journals to all of their colleagues. I went and read the academic literature on their own terms, and I read and read and read, until I found myself in a place that can only be described, as hell.
I ended up in hell. And then I wrote a book about what I found. Co-authored by Dr James Lindsay.
So what did I find?
This thing called radical gender ideology or gender theory or the transgender cult, whatever you call it, the schools call it inclusion, that thing. It has a technical name. And that technical name is Queer Theory.
Queer Theory. What is that? Queer Theory is the doctrine of a religious cult. It is a religious cult doctrine that primarily targets children.
Now I have to get this part out of the way because this is a stumbling block and it can be confusing for people, but Queer Theory has essentially nothing to do with children who may happen to be gay or lesbian. It has nothing to do with children, being concerned for them and including them and making sure they're loved and they're not bullied and helping them develop normally and lead a long healthy prosperous normal life. It has nothing to do with that. Why is that? Because Queer Theory feasts on destabilization. Revolutions require instability and destabilization to work. It's a precondition of Revolution.
So when kids who happen to be gay or lesbian or adults who happen to be gay or lesbian grow up and they fit in in society and they're getting along just as any one of us is getting along, that saps that potential revolutionary energy that political energy that that person might otherwise have. That Queer Theory can take advantage of and feed. It saps a soldier from them in their Revolution. So when you read their literature they couldn't be more clear. Queer Theory is explicitly and rabidly hostile to the idea of someone who happens to be gay or lesbian fitting in and pros, and being prosperous in society and living a happy healthy normal life.
Okay. I had to get that out of the way because that's a stumbling block for a lot of people because Queer Theory hides behind gays and lesbians to push its radical agenda. When you attack Queer Theory they hold gays and lesbians in front of them and say you're attacking them. You're attacking them.
It's a wicked trick. So Queer Theory is not that. It's a religious cult. It seeks to answer fundamental questions about the nature of our reality, the nature of our world, the nature of man, what our nature is, what human nature is. It thinks it has the answer to those questions. And it also thinks it has the answers to what the purpose of our lives must be. Not what we should do with our lives, not what we could do with our lives, but what the purpose of our lives must be.
Queer Theory's central claim, our our nature, the answer it thinks it has, is that we are all Queer. All of us. All of you. You're all Queer for Queer Theory. Now what does that mean?
Queer Theory is defined in their literature by a man called named David Halperin in 1995 in a book called St Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography and in that book Halperin defines Queer in this way. He says, quote, and I can do this verbatim because I've had to say this a million times to show how crazy this all is and what Queer means to them.
He says quote, unlike gay identity, as I was just saying, not about being gay or lesbian, unlike gay identity, Queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. Queer is defined by its oppositional relation to the norm. It is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate and the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers, it is, it is an identity without an essence end quote.
What does that commie gobbledygook mean? It's not about gays and lesbians, but it's also not rooted in any positive truth. Queer Theory has nothing to do with the truth, nothing to do with objective truth. It has no positive vision for the world. It is a theory that is driven by pure critique. It is a purely negative theory. And it's not rooted in any stable reality. It is a destabilizing theory. It's rooted in instability.
So it's not rooted in positive truth, it has nothing to do with capital T, the truth, the objective truth, and it's a completely destabilizing theory. Sounds great, let's box it up and put it in schools and play with it with children, right?
So that's what Queer means and Queer's fundamental argument is you are all Queer. I bet you didn't know that when you woke up this morning, what I just described. I bet you didn't know you were that. But why? Why didn't you know that?
Queer Theory says it's because you are possessed. You are possessed by the Unholy social cultural and political soul of society. It has possessed you, you are under its possession. And under that possession you are convinced that such a thing as the truth is out there and it exists. You're convinced that there's a stable reality. You're convinced that being normal is okay, and that you should lead a legitimate life. It has brainwashed you. It's pulling the strings back here. It's deceiving you and convincing *you* to do things that are considered normal, and legitimate, and truthful, and rooted in a stable reality.
Queen Judith Butler, if any of you are familiar with her, in her latest book, uh which is the last thing I've read in Queer Theory because I spent years reading it and after Dr James Lindsay and I wrote this last book I couldn't read any more of it, I'd seen enough, in that book she calls this Unholy Spirit psychosocial phantasms. There's a technical name for that that you're probably all familiar with, it's called social constructions.
There's these social constructions floating out there. What is a man, what is a woman, what is a male, what is a female? All of it socially constructed and you're possessed by these to desire to be become those things, to identify as a male, to identify as a man. To identify as a female, to identify as a woman. This is what Queer Theory believes. You are under quite literally, you are under demonic, evil possession. It is convincing you to make decisions it wants you to make. It's not grabbing your hand and forcing it to the wardrobe and saying you're a man so you need to wear a suit today. Or forcing your hand into the wardrobe and saying you're a little girl, you need to wear this dress. It's convincing you to do those things yourself. It's like you've got a demon inside you that's possessed you.
So what do we do when we're possessed? We have an exorcism. We need to have an exorcism. We need to cast off this demon, this evil influence that's possessing us and convincing me I've got to have this haircut because I think it's normal, convincing me that I needed to wear this jacket because I'm giving this speech, convincing me of all of these things. We need to have an exorcism. We need to be initiated into the religious doctrine of Queer Theory that has all of the answers about how this is all supposed to work. We need to be initiated into the Mysteries. We need Queer Theory to say: hey, everything is made up and fake and reality is unstable and there's no truth. There's no such thing as normal. There's no such thing as legitimate so don't wear the suit you're wearing, get a wacky haircut, begin to live your life differently.
Cause it's all made up and it's tricking you into presenting yourself as a man or presenting yourself as a woman or raising your kids in a certain way. It's tricking you into all of this. We need to possess this evil spirit doing this. There's a reason they say trans live, trans lives are sacred. There's a reason they say that they are transcending their fallen material form. They're transcending the beast they've become, that they were brainwashed to become. There is no such thing as sex or gender identity or sex. It's all made up and imposed and you're brainwashed into it they're transcending that. That's why they're considered sacred. They're closer to the Divine, which is their Queer nature.
But as any of you who are involved in any sort of activism or politics at all will know, it's not enough for just one person to get involved in this religious doctrine and get initiated and believe it themselves. You have to to believe it too.
If you're religious, it needs to convert you. If you're not religious, it needs to convert you. Because one of us isn't free in their minds until all of us are free. Because I can become trans and cast off everything and, look however I want to look and get away from my, my sex that was assigned at birth and my clothing style and everything, but if my neighbors aren't doing it, if my family's not doing it, if my community is not doing it, the project won't work. Because those people - normal people - are going to keep reproducing society, reproducing norms, reproducing legitimate institutions. They're going to keep reproducing this demon that's going to follow me around forever.
So to destroy the demon and and finally rid myself of possession, everyone has to be, in on the project. This explains precisely why these queer activists are so wicked. For any of you involved in any sort of activism you'll find this out right away. They're absolutely wicked to those that won't go along with the program. They'll get you fired from work, they'll get you canceled from speaking events. They'll target your children, of course. They're wicked because you must believe it too.
Because they believe in the end if they can abolish the idea that anything is considered normal, if they can abolish the idea that there's a truth out there that we can all access, they can abolish the idea that any of your faith means anything at all. If they can abolish everything then they can all be who they really are on the inside. Which is queer. It's whatever they feel they are. Whatever they want to do, there will be no longer be someone to categorize them and define them and box them into a life and convince them to imprison themselves in their body, imprison themselves in a life that is a false fake life.
So everyone's got to go along with this project and join this exorcism process which turns out to be radical activism and going out and queering everything. Which is applying Queer Theory to everything and convincing everyone that there's no such thing as the truth, there's no such thing as normal. Why is everything so abnormal nowadays? Well activists for the last 30 years have been rampaging through our institutions convincing everyone that nothing is normal or legitimate. That's why we are where we are. That's why just a couple of weeks ago we found out, that someone was publishing papers in our Defense Department about queering, nuclear warheads, and weapons.
This problem runs really deep. Really really deep. Okay. That's the bright stuff. Let's get into some of the dark stuff.
Really quickly, I've got to talk about the people who created this I'm going to do it really fast. If you're interested in learning more about the history of its development please pick up a copy of our book. We talk about its development a lot in there.
But there's really three key people you need to be aware of, aside from Karl Marx, uh, which I just don't have time to get into that today. But the first one is Simone de Beauvoir. Simone de Beauvoir the French Marxist feminist who wrote in 1949 a book called The Second Sex. And in that book Beauvoir's most famous line that has inspired feminists everywhere to this day and also a lot of Queer Theory, there's a direct line there, is: one is not born but becomes woman.
Why is that important? Because Beauvoir said sex is real, there's males and there's females and sex, what she says circumscribes you in the pecul-, peculiarities of your nature, meaning if you're born with certain genitalia, people treat you a certain way. But she said sex is real but there's this other thing floating around. And it's called gender. And it's a social construct. The idea of a woman doesn't exist. You can't be a woman. You become a woman. Society creates a box and puts all of the things that it wants women to be in that box, and that unholy spirit that social construction that psychosocial phantasm, then possesses little girls. You're born a female, you need to become a woman and you're punished if you don't follow that path. And and follow that demon, to Womanhood. So Beauvoir's contribution is sex is real but there's this thing called gender and it's a social construct.
Then we get to Michel Foucault, the French communist who escaped allegations of pedophilia only in death. You want some interesting history lessons search Michel Foucault and Tanzania in your browser. Good luck with that. But Foucault did exactly what Beauvoir did but with sexuality. Foucault says: sex, maybe, some aspects, maybe some of them are not, the the jury's out on that one, but gender is a social construct and sexuality is a social construct too. There is no such thing for Foucault as a person who can be homosexual, or a person who can be heterosexual as part of their intrinsic nature. Those are social constructions that were created. So heterosexuals create the idea of "the homosexual" so they can simultaneously erect an idea of "the heterosexual" and possess everyone in society to go on that route and go in that direction and become heterosexuals. Just like Beauvoir. You can't be a woman, you become a woman. You can't be a homosexual, you become a homosexual.
So now we've got gender is a social construct, sexuality is a social construct: they're all fake. Then we get to a name everyone's familiar with: Queen Judith Butler. And Judy has a wild one. Judy says sex, fake, social construct. Gender, fake, social construct. Sexuality, fake, it's all made up. It's all made up to possess you and convince you to imprison yourself in a life, to imprison yourself in a body that alienates you from who you really are in the inside. She convinces everyone that it is all made up, she says it's all an act, it's an act of theater, it's a performance. It's her theory of gender performativity. It's that our actions reflect back on society and they're coded as certain genders. It's a bunch of complex gobbledygook, but what she's saying is it's all made up. There's no such thing as these things. You're just possessed. People in power who want to be, have defined heterosexuality a certain way and males and females and man and woman, they define those things to control you and and convince you to imprison yourself in a life that is not really yours. You're not who you really are on the inside.
So those are the creators of Queer Theory as fast as, as fast as I can do it. The three big names. Then we get to how did it get into to schools? 10 minutes okay. Going to hurry. How did it get into schools?
The long story short is it rode in on the back of the critical turn in education. There's a great book out there called the Critical Turn in Education where a Marxist educational scholar, so it's a, it's a Marxist, a practicing Marxist in education describing how the Marxists took over all of the education schools. Queer Theory came in on the back of that, because by 1992, the education schools nationwide, all across North America actually, Canada too, had been completely captured by Marxists.
Queer Theory got its name in 1991 by a woman named Teresa De Lauretis in a conference in California. 1990 or 1991. And by 1993, just two years later or three years later, the first educators are going wow this looks like a great toy, this Queer Theory thing. How do we put that into schools? How do we practice that with children? That looks right. That answers all of the questions we want to answer. They're in the cult. They follow the religious doctrine. Their names are Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell, they're out of Canada and they write a paper calling called Queer Pedagogy: Praxis Makes Im/Perfect.
Praxis is a Marxist buzz word, it means theory and practice. It's, it's a dead giveaway. But in that paper they say they want to make Queer Theory explicitly activist in nature. They want to do Queer Theory activism in schools. And then they say they're developing a queer pedagogy. Pedagogy is just a fancy word for teaching. How you teach things. And what you teach for content, how you do it. It's your methods for teaching.
They're going to make a queer pedagogy and they define it this way: queer pedagogy is a form of educative praxis. Again, Marxist buzzword. What it means is, the Mar-, Marxist education and educative praxis designed deliberately to interfere with and interfene in the production of normaly in school subjects. More commie gobbledygook. What does it mean? It means deliberately intervening in schools to make sure kids turn out abnormal. To make sure they turn out weird, deviant, depressed, anxious. That's what that means. They're doing this in 1993. That's over 30 years ago. It's in education. You can read their papers where they brag about it. The great thing about the academy is they're all trying to climb the ladder and they publish everything they do so you just have to read what they're telling you.
Within 6 years there is so much Queer Theory in schools that queer activist James T Sears has published Queering Elementary Education. It's an edited volume of teachers and activists in schools, writing about how they're practicing Queer Theory with children. It's an edited volume, dozens of teachers theorizing how to do it better, talking about their successes, talking how to, about how to expand it. This project's been going on for a very long time.
There's a lot more to this story but the big, the big change was in 2011 with the Obama Administration. And in 2011 the Obama Administration put out a Dear Colleague letter where they introduced I think for the first time the term gender identity. And they introduced it in a Dear Colleague letter about sexual violence in schools. And discrimination based on sex. And it was there that gender identity was tied to *sexual* discrimination for the first time in the Department of Education.
So if you discriminate against someone on the basis of their gender identity, you're discriminating them, against them on the basis of their sex in the eyes of the law. It's a civil rights violation. So schools see this and they panic. What's this thing called gender identity? What are we supposed to do with this? What policies do we need to develop? The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is going to come in here and sue us and take our federal funding if we don't do something with this.
And who do they turn to to figure out what they're supposed to do? The very activists who create these terms. The very people practicing Queer Theory. They get the words in there and then the schools have to turn right back around and go: what's this and how do we do it? So the activists immediately have a hand on the steering wheel and get to determine how all of this is done. By 2014 things really take off and this is running rough shod through education. There are thousands of papers. thousands of papers with teachers practicing this with kids. Dozens and dozens and dozens of books. Every day there's some new person graduating uh with a nice new fancy degree in education that's writing about how they're going to do Queer Theory in schools. That's how it gets into schools, the 30,000 foot view.
What's it doing with children? I want to describe before I talk about that, I want to describe trauma bonding. B, Ben brought it up earlier. Trauma bonding is a cycle of abuse that tethers an abuser to their victim. It's a technique abusers use to isolate and destabilize their victim so they can control them. It's an abusive cycle, it comes in two waves. There's two parts to the cycle and the negative side of the cycle, they demean, and traumatize, and psychologically abuse their victim. And then on the positive side of the cycle, they validate them. They affirm them. They love bomb them. And abusers repeat this process over and over and over and over and over again. Until their victim is completely isolated from their friends and their family, their social circles that see what the abuser is doing and try and warn them. They're completely destabilized. They're so destabilized that they rely on their abusers' eyes and ears to make sense of the world for them. They rely on their abuser to find their purpose. Their meaning. They rely on their abuser to validate them. They're in their abusers' complete control because they just want the trauma to stop. They don't know what's coming next: love or trauma, love or trauma, love or trauma. They just want the trauma to stop and they realize if they just do what their abuser says, they get more of the affirmation and validation and sense of purpose. And love bombing.
Now I read a paper that was published in 2002 by a queer activist educator named Kevin Kumashiro. Kevin Kumashiro is not a fringe figure in North American Education. He's the former dean of the education school at the University of San Francisco, he's the current dean of the education school at Hofstra University, he's worked for the NEA for multiple years, he's won dozens of awards. Everything points to him being an excellent, awesome, massive name in education. And in 2002, he wrote a paper called Against Repetition where he described how Queer Theory is practiced on kids, how how you get them involved in Queer Theory. How you stop them from wanting to be normal and wanting to live a legitimate life because again those things are oppressive. How do you break them from that cycle? Because if you don't break them, they're going to have kids and then they're going to raise their kids a certain way that's normal and legitimate, and then they're going to raise their kids, and it's, that wheel's going to keep reproducing itself. So how do you break it?
Kevin Kumashiro says: educators - this is a direct quote, verbatim - educators have a responsibility to draw students into crisis. Educators have a responsibility to draw students into crisis, so that they can manage that crisis productively. That's what Kumashiro is saying in 2002. Does that sound like something we just discussed? That's trauma bonding. He says children need to learn that they're racist. They need to learn that they're sexist, or transphobic. They need to learn they may be have been born in the wrong, wrong body. They need to learn that they were assigned a sex at birth. They need to learn that their gender was chosen for them and they were pushed into it by their parents. They need to be traumatized out of all of that. The demon's got a hold of them. We got to cast the demon off so they can be who they really are in the inside, which is whatever they say they want to be.
So we need to traumatize them out of it. We need to break them out of it, and then we can manage it productively. We can affirm them. Hear that in our schools today? Affirm affirm affirm affirm affirm. We need to validate them. We need to love bomb them. You're a racist, you're a transphobe. Maybe you were born in the wrong body Timmy. Baybe you should be wearing other clothes. Maybe you should be doing these things.
Timmy's completely traumatized. He's completely in crisis. He just wants it to stop. He's so confused. What do you mean I'm born in the wrong body? What does that mean? I look like a boy, how can I be a girl? It's completely destabilizing. And then Timmy learns that he can adopt a new gender identity and new pronouns and when he does so people like Kevin Kumashiro are there to love bomb him and to validate it and affirm it. And you keep doing that over and over and over until you have completely initiated, initiated a child into the religious cult that is Queer Theory. That's how it works, that's what they admit in their own literature. You can read it. If you read our book you'll see that we expose a lot of these educators, we take their words, we've got 200 something citations. I think two of them are from sources that are not educators who support this, from sources that are not people supporting this.
It's absolutely everywhere, it's a wicked practice. It's child abuse. They are trauma bonding to your children. It's something that must stop. I have to end on a positive note and on a positive note. I'm sorry for the darkness. The great thing, like the previous speakers were saying, is we can find the light. You have to understand a situation before you understand a strategy. You can use to break it, to defeat it.
5 years ago essentially no one knew what things like Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory were. Postcolonial Theory. We didn't know much about anything, we just knew that is not normal. What is happening in the schools and now today there are thousands and thousands of people just like yourselves who are working across the country to get a better understanding of what we're dealing with so that we can fight back. And we're connecting and we're creating resources and we're helping one another and the great thing is we have the truth on our side.
Queer Theory is not rooted in any positive truth. It can't by definition ever win. It has to lose it's just when is it going to lose? And the faster we can equip ourselves with the knowledge we need to defeat it the faster we can rip it out of schools kicking and screaming because it's incredibly abusive to our children. It's tearing families apart and we need to put an end to it.
Thank you
