The Queering of the American Child

Hey, everybody. Today on The Charlie Kirk Show, one of my great friends, James Lindsay, sits down for an in-depth and powerful conversation. You're going to love this.

Take notes, listen twice, text it to your friends. We talk about the queering of the American child, his new book. We talk about what they want. Where does this come from?

What is queer theory? It is amazing, this conversation. So make sure you take notes and you listen very carefully. I love this conversation.

I learned so much, and at the end, it really hits a beautiful crescendo. Listen all the way through. Email us freedom at charliekirk.com. Become a member today at members.charliekirk.com. That's members.charliekirk.com.

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Get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

That's why we are here. Not just in politics, just favorite people. He's a good man and ridiculously smart. James Lindsay. Hey, Charlie. James, I think you've come on the show 30, 40, 50 times now. Well, we've got to get the numbers up.

Those are rookie numbers. Yeah, I know. You are an installation here. That's right. So, so much to talk about.

I want to talk about your book, The Queering of the American Mind. Is that right? Child. Child. Is that a play off of the kind of…? Yes. Playing off of, you know, there's a lot of different things, but, you know, the… The Heterodox Academy. No, there's a book that's the something of the American mind. Yeah, no, The Closing of the American Mind. Yeah, I'm playing off of that, but the title is The Queering of the American Child, and it explores queer theory in education primarily.

How it got in it, what it is, how it works, and why it targets children. That's an interesting cover. Yeah, isn't it? I love it. So, it almost looks like there's two bites out of the apple.

Is that right? It's a big bite. I don't know.

We'll have to ask that. So, for those on podcast and on radio, what are we looking at? So, what you're looking at is a picture of the cover of the book. It's a beautiful white cover with the title, but then there's a picture of a apple, right? Dead center. There's a big giant bite, or maybe two.

We can talk about Herbert if you want. Yeah, because there's some imagery there. And inside the apple, instead of it being the white flesh of an apple, is the pride flag.

So, they're taking a bite of the fruit and getting… So, why do you choose that as the cover? I really rely on the metaphor in the book quite a bit, because the way that the book frames it, the first line of the book, is in fact that our schools are in the grip of a religious cult. We don't pull any punches at all in labeling queer theory as the doctrine of religious cult. It's a sex-based cult. It targets children primarily, and then we also clarify that it has very little to do with gay people. But we want people to understand that they are trying to hold out the fruit, to get the kids to bite the fruit, to bring them into a cult through identity crisis. So, can you build out the difference between… what do you mean by difference between queering and gay people? What do you mean by that?

Yeah, okay. So, queer theory is its own doctrine. It developed mostly through the 80s and 90s out of what's called sex-positive radical feminism, with some other influences.

The sexology of Kinsey, some of the weird gender stuff of John Money. But primarily it came out of sex-positive radical feminism, looking for a new way to think about sex, gender, sexuality, primarily. But what it is, it got defined by a guy, David Halperin, in a book called Saint Foucault, trying to canonize Michel Foucault, yeah, the pedophile, the French postmodern philosopher, and the father of queer theory, really, trying to turn him into a saint. And so it gets its first definition, the word queer does, in the technical sense, in that book. And the first three words of the paragraph where it gets defined is, unlike gay identity. And he says, the reason I won't go into the technical language, which I kind of have memorized, but what he says is different, is that whatever, whether it's a choice or whether it's something more innate, and he actually opens the door that it could be either, gay identity is rooted in reality. But queer, he says, is not rooted in any positive truth or any stable reality, and it refers to nothing in particular. He says it's an identity without an essence, not based in truth, not based in reality.

And then he says what it is, is that it takes on its meaning in a political position that is intrinsically opposed to, and he gives three things, the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant. So you can't be queer. You can only act queer. You can only perform queerness. And so gay people who act like normal everyday citizens are not queer, and they're hated by the queer theorists. But James, how dare you use the word normal? That's the problem. Normal is actually considered to be evil.

So let's, for the people in the audience that aren't tracking, what do I mean by that? Normal is a, like, aggressive insult. That's right. Normal is the big, well, normal and legitimate are the two big bads, right, that queer theory is against.

Yes. So truth, that's legitimate, so it's against that. But normal means in accordance with norms, meaning that it's what appears on average, what we consider to be within healthy boundaries, and they want to, the word is, as a verb, to queer those boundaries so that they no longer exist, to take children in particular, but all people outside of them. But as we've talked about before, it's intrinsically, truly, a cult. And how is it intrinsically a cult? They believe that all people, it's a gnostic cult, we've used the word gnostic before. And I want to go through that again. It's so good.

It's so good. And what they believe is that all people are intrinsically queer, but they don't know it because they've had normalcy imposed on them through social production. They've gone to school, they've had parents, they have a sex assigned at birth by a doctor, and everybody has to live according to their sex assigned at birth, they have to live as heterosexuals, they're forced, socialized to be normal in those regards. They're not supposed to be mentally ill. They're supposed to try to keep their emotions under control, these sort of things. And they say, well, all of that is a system of oppression that keeps people from being who they really are. Queer theory is to awaken who they really are, that's a cult identity, and to activate them to go do the activism and practice of the cult. Yeah, so let's take an example. They think that it's okay if somebody really is attracted to children.

Yeah, that's right. In fact, it's not just that they think it's okay. It's an inevitable consequence of queer theory, and it's from the very earliest writings, an intrinsic part of everything queer theory writes. Gail Rubin in 1984 wrote a book, or a paper, I should say, called Thinking Sex, and she has an entire paragraph or two dedicated specifically to the intrinsic oppression of what she calls boy lovers.

And she holds up NAMBLA, which is, what is it, the National Association of Manned Boy Love, really. And she says that this is such a deep oppression that, as written in 84, by 2000 or so, we would all be looking back on it, embarrassed that we were oppressing boy lovers, in her word. And so pedophilia is right there inside. Pedophilia, though, is also opposed to the normal and the legitimate, so it has to be valorized by queer theory. So what you can say is that queer theory has a 100% chance of leading toward pedophilia. It doesn't have to be done by pedophiles, but it has a 100% chance that pedophilia will be valorized by it. And understand this, everybody in the audience, queer theory is not a fringe academic theory.

No, not at all. It's in every school. It's, well, I mean, look at the good Admiral Levine. It's in every institution. It's in our military? It's in our military, it's in our schools, it's in our universities, it's in our workplaces.

We all saw what happened with Bud Light. The reason is because the Human Rights Campaign publishes this number that's important to their ESG index. That number is called their Corporate Equality Index, the CEI. It asks you how queer activist your company is. There's a healthcare equality index. There's a municipal equality index for cities. There's a state equality index where they rate all the states as how welcoming they are. And you see states, including allegedly conservative states like Utah, you know, there's, controversially, 10 years ago it was like the homophobic State of the Union or whatever. Utah is competing to have a good... The governor gives his pronouns.

The governor, Spencer Cox, he, him, that's right. It's a little questionable too, but that's a separate issue. So, for some people they say, but what is the goal of queer theory? To produce queer theorists. It is to create activists out of children primarily because children are a soft target. They're vulnerable. They are impressionable. They haven't, to be more specific, they haven't developed cortically their frontal cortex of their brain. So they'll believe fantasy and reality intermixed. They don't have the ability to fully distinguish. We often bring up that they believe in Santa Claus or that they believe in other fantastic ideas.

And they target children and the goal is to make them queer activists, people who rebel and reject against the normal and the idea that being normal or being healthy, literally healthy is a form of normalcy, is something that's being imposed upon them by an evil society that needs to be torn down. So if we were to make a reference to say Mao Zedong in China where he created the... Yes, who you and I love studying Mao.

We have to because that's what's happening here. And he created out of the youth what he called the Red Guard, which is a very radical vanguard... Six elements, right? Or five or six mantras. Oh, yeah. They had these... Good categories, bad categories. That's right.

That's right. The good and bad categories of people. And so the Red Guard was a high school primarily in college, but also younger children.

Millions, tens of millions of these kids going around destroying property, bullying and sometimes killing their parents, turning their parents into the government, killing their teachers to try to transform China. And it worked from 1966 to 1968. And what queer theory is trying to build is a rainbow guard to dismantle America. Name of the book again? The Queering of the American Child. And you've co-authored this with Logan Lansing, right?

Yeah, that's right. The story real quick is that he sent me a manuscript he had written and said, hey, will you look this over and tell me if there's anything I can add to it? Turns out I was on a flight. I had some spare minutes. So I opened it and I started reading it. I was like, holy cow, this is good.

Not only is it good, it's like I can't write readable stuff, but he can. Okay, so James, here's a question I have. Is queer theory fundamentally nihilist? Yeah, I mean, by definition, it is whatever, and that's his words exactly, David Halperin's words, defining queer the first time. It is whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate and the dominant. So what does that mean? Well, if you're trying to destroy legitimacy, you're nihilistic. That's it.

End of story. So there's not an open question. It exists to spread itself and destroy everything.

That's right. And it actually spreads itself, like most cults do, through trauma. They actually are going around intentionally— So smart. Riff on that. Go deep into that. They intentionally injure children, mostly psychologically, of course. It's not mostly—I'm not saying that they're grabbing or groping. Some are.

Some are, but that's not the primary. So there's a queer educator that actually Logan Lansing introduced me to in this book named Kevin Kumashiro. And he wrote a paper in 2002 called Against Repetition. And in that paper, he actually says that the purpose of queer education is to lead children into an identity crisis, a personal emotional crisis by teaching them about their complicity in oppression, and then to structure the environment around them to lead them to productive resolutions of the emotional crisis. Now, in the cult literature, that's called trauma bonding.

They put them under psychological or emotional or social circumstances. So this is intentional. Oh, yeah, it's not only intentional. There's another couple of theorists. They wrote a paper in 2019. I'm trying to remember the name of the paper.

It has a cute name, but their names are Torres and Ferry. And they wrote that for years and years, we, meaning queer theorists and social justice activists in education, have shied away from the word indoctrination. We get accused that we're indoctrinating students.

We always shy away from it, and we try to play it off. They say it's time for us to own it. This is quote.

That is exactly what we're doing. What do you say to the people that object and say you're just cherry picking the most radical of the academic literature? If I cherry picked the most radical of queer theory, we couldn't say it on air. That's a good answer.

I can't even talk about what's in the book. So what you're doing is you're picking the kind of pioneers of the queer orthodoxy. That's right.

You're not just going to some lunatic. Yeah, Judith Butler, she's not a fringe character in queer theory. Her body of work could be summarized in six words, which is that life is drag and drag is life. In other words, none of us have an intrinsic sex identity, male or female. We're all taught by society to perform our identity. So if you're performing masculinity, you're still performing it. If you're performing trans, then you're still performing it. Everybody's doing drag all the time, but what does that mean in terms of our gnosticism? That means the people who are doing drag on purpose have awakened to what they really are.

Everybody's actually a drag queen. That's not a cherry picker. Kevin Kumashiro's work was actually very influential.

I don't know how influential Taurus and Ferry were particularly, so maybe that one's a little bit fringe. But David Halperin's book, I can't even tell you how grow- he's huge. He defined queer in the same paragraph. I'll use a very benign example because there's some stuff I cannot say on air where he glorifies sexual practices in that same book that I can't even talk about on air. And you know, I'll talk about anything. I can't even talk about it on air.

It's horrible. In the same paragraph, like two sentences down from where he defines queer, he says it can refer to a lot of things. It could refer to, for example, he says, married couples without children. That's queer because they don't have kids, right? And he said, or it could refer to married couples with children.

And then in italics, it actually says, in italics, very naughty children. Everything in queer theory is gross. Gail Rubin's defending boy lovers, intergenerational sexual relationships, she calls it. She's defending kink in the workplace. I mean, these are the core theorists.

You can't make it up. So when they look at the apple as eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And you have that with the rainbow, the queering. So today there is a word that is almost tattooed on my soul that you've used. Yeah.

That bothers me. OK. Not that you said it, but it's the word initiation. Oh, yeah. So we're going to cherry pick again because I'm not cherry. No, no, no.

That's teasing for the record. Yeah, no. So another one of the foundational takes your time on this is very important. Yeah. So one of the other foundational queer theorists is I can only struggle to say the middle name, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick.

So you see the syllables all bang into each other there. But anyway, I mean, that's not anything. That's just her name. But so she wrote a book in 90 ish plus or minus two. I forget the exact year called The Epistemology of the Closet, where she actually argues it's one of the most gnostic texts I've ever read in my life that being in the closet confers a special understanding of the world upon you. So the epistemology of being in the closet. And she talks about epistemology, epistemology is a is a understanding of what we know and how we know it. Thank you.

Continue. Yeah. And so the book is called The Epistemology of the Closet. So being put in the closet forces you into a special kind of knowing. And she starts talking about how queer theory is constructed around all of these binaries, male, female, straight, gay and so on.

Right. And that the binaries are actually constructions of power and the one that stuck out to me when I was reading this list. And there's about 30 of them in her list. And she explores most of them through the text is innocence versus initiation is a binary. So children are innocent. We would say that they're naturally innocent. Queer theories do not believe this. They think that we've constructed society to maintain their innocence so they'll grow up normal and not become queer, not realize that they're queer. John Money and Kinsey said something, you know, I've never seen such a sexual being as an 18 month old. Yeah, that's right. This is what this is how they think. And there's another activist, just a queer activist in education called Linz Amer. You know, whatever. And she actually put on Twitter a couple of years ago.

I think she deleted the tweet later. And I'm using she because I have no idea. And the pronouns. But we don't care about pronouns says precision around.

Oh yeah. I just wanted to bring up the point. And so Linz said that actually they're not after some kids. They're not after just the LGBT kids. They're after all kids because all kids are queer. They're intrinsically queer. They just don't know it. In other words, they're in the closet, but they don't know they're in the closet. So they have to be introduced to the idea or initiated into the idea removed from their innocence and initiated into the idea that they have a queer identity inside.

And then that has to be developed. Yes, to be affirmed. It has to be celebrated.

They have to be made to feel like they're welcome and belong. The reason that word is tattooed is that initiation implies a ceremony and it implies almost a deliberate procedure, not an accident. Yeah, right. That's why that word initiation feels as if like now you're one of us. It is. You cross the bridge.

Right. So let me let me what are some of these initiation rituals that take place? Well, Drag Queen Story Hour is easily the most visible and prominent. You bring a queer activist, the drag queen, into the room. You present them in front of children. And it says specifically they wrote a paper called Drag Pedagogy, which is the educational value of drag in curriculum inquiry in 21. This is the most respected curriculum journal in education, academic journal. Big deal. Written by a drag queen that lives here in the Phoenix area that goes by Lil Miss Hot Mess, ASU or was that not university affiliated so far as I know.

But the ASU has a big drag connection. Well, that's probably part of why, but I don't know for sure. And they very explicitly explained that the point of the drag queen is to turn up the excitement, turn up the color, get the kids excited to teach them that there's queer aspects to themselves. In fact, yet again, with the is it about gay kids, they have this section near the end of this paper titled Listen to these words.

Just I mean, they're big words, but let them sink in. From empathy to embodied kinship. And take out embodied from empathy to kinship, queer kinship.

And I'm not supposed to call these people groomers, of course, as we all know. Right. And they explain in that section, the very first part of the section is they say, well, there's all these ideas of empathy. That the point of queer education is to introduce empathy for LGBT kids and people. They say, well, that's a marketing strategy. That's what we used to get it in the door to justify its value.

But its real value is deeper. Its real value is to introduce kids into ways of living and being queer. And so that's an initiation ritual. The pornographic books in schools. Those are a self-directed initiation ritual. They want the kid to find the book.

They want the kid to go and read the book, to have an exploration, to bring it up with the teacher. Who then says, well, we have a club after school, the GSA, which used to be Gay Straight Alliance. And I think it's the Gender Sexuality Alliance or something like that now. And when you come to this club, you know, maybe it's a pizza party, maybe it's candy.

We're going to celebrate and affirm you. So I want to go through some of these examples here. This is an initiation ceremony. This is a grown man, I believe, dressed as a woman gyrating in front of children.

Play cut 22. OK, so we have hundreds of these pieces of tape. First of all, is this an unusual occurrence? No, they happened all over the country. They have happened all over the country for especially the last couple of years, but it's been going on since 2015.

So it's not a terribly unusual occurrence. What is going on in that clip? Intellectually. So why is that supported by the academy? Well, the academy is completely captured. The medical institutions are completely captured. Those schools are completely captured. The school superintendents association is completely captured. The teachers unions are completely captured.

I do want to get into that. I'm talking about what is the why do they think it's a good idea? Because their logic is, I mean, there's two answers.

So let me be very clear about that. There's the marketing answer that as the drag queen story, our paper points out, there's a marketing answer. And that answer is some of the kids are LGBT and don't know it. And they have to have some representation to awaken the idea in their mind. And then there's the real answer, which is at the end of the same paragraph in the drag queen paper, which is that it's not about empathy or representation. It's about introducing the idea of queerness to every child. And these people are evangelists. That's right. And the goal is to get those kids to see that and say, why is there a man dressed as a woman acting that way?

And then to start the dialogue. I mean, this is and I think you've been really way ahead of the curve, clairvoyant on this, which is these people act as if it's a religion. It is a religion.

It's there. It's it is completely a religion. They say things like trans people are sacred. They say that I saw a tweet a few weeks ago.

I mean, it's just some stupid little account. It's not a big deal, but it said something like, you know, that they had the privilege of touching a trans body today. And so they got to touch a piece of the divine. They literally see this transformational process as a religious aspiration. It's who you truly are. It's who your soul is and meant was meant to be before society encapsulated it in a fallen form.

What is that? I mean, I know the answer because you're perfectly leading up. How does that intersect with Marxism? Marxism has this idea. So Marx, we've got to do this right.

OK, so Marxism is a social and economic re-evaluation of the Gnostic heresies from early Christianity and before. The Gnostic heresies say that the god presented in Genesis is actually the architect of the world, the demiurge. That's from the Greek for builder. And so he built the world, but he's not actually God. God is the perfect spirit.

We are not separate from God because nothing is separate from God. But the demiurge built the world, the material world, which is an illusion state separate from God, and he imprisoned man's souls inside. And so the fruit of the tree in the garden is supposed to confer to man the knowledge that he is what he is, that he's actually pure spirit and inseparable from God. And the demiurge is basically the jailer of man in Eden and doesn't want them to know that.

And so it's actually an evil character. And then when Eve disobeys and Adam follows and they eat from the fruit and then they become to know a little bit of this, all of a sudden, what happens? Well, the character, the demiurge or God in the Bible flips out, throws him into the material world to suffer, to live by the toil of their back, the sweat of their brow, the pain of childbirth and so on, the wages of sin or death. All of this comes in upon man. And what the Gnostics believe is that we are falsely imprisoned in the world by an evil demon posing as God.

What Marx did was said the bourgeois class as a social and economic phenomenon actually imprisons the exploited proletariat class in their social values, in their way of thinking, so that they can become exploitable, alienated workers who will make the capitalists more money. This same idea gets recapitulated that there are people who, like you and me, who went around and said, you know what? You're pretty normal.

I'm pretty normal. We're normal people, but those people are deviants, weirdos, degenerates, perverts or queer in the academic literature. And they don't deserve the full benefits of society unless they conform to our values. Yeah, so we were talking about the kind of Gnostic or religious construction. So just a real quick encapsulation, queer theory should be considered queer Marxism. And because Marxism is sociological Gnosticism, I know I'm using a lot of big words real fast, I'll slow down a little bit, queer theory is really queer Gnosticism, that you, there's a secret knowledge that will set you free, that will liberate you or emancipate you from the imprisonment of normalcy. And when you have that knowledge, which is queer knowledge, when you become queered, which is to learn to reject the normal and the legitimate on principle, to reject those and oppose them everywhere they show up, then you can liberate yourself from the impositions of a society that's got you locked in chains. What Judith Butler, quoting from Michel Foucault, said is that it's not so much that the body imprisons the soul, it's that the soul imprisons the body.

What they mean is that the social environment, because it's a sociological religion, it's not a transcendent religion, what's transcendent is sociology, our interactions, that's what's in the material world, that becomes the new religious spiritual realm, is sociology. And the sociology sets it up so that you believe you have to be a certain way, so then you script that, that's their wording, you write that onto your body, so society tells you you're male so you should be a man, and so you make yourself into a man, which they think is a fiction, and now you're trapped within that form. So they look at them, queer and drag, as a liberating force. That's right, liberating, emancipating, these are the words they use constantly for what they're doing, liberating from the prison of being. So we're in captivity and we want to be free.

That's right. To find out who we really are. And who we really are is queer, without definition, without meaning, free to give ourselves our own definition, our own meaning, no matter what it is, no matter where it comes from, no matter what. So can you build out a little bit more, you and I have fun when we call these people wizards. Yeah, well, we do that in the book too, by the way. So we actually do call them wizards. We describe that the educators, the queer educators in the classrooms work very specifically, they're activists, that are casting spells. We see that they work like sorcerers to put the kids under spells to allegedly open their minds to the queer possibilities around them. And what this actually is, is it's a form of, I guess, cognitive and emotional distortion that they put people in. So the spells that they cast usually do something that's mixing a truth with a lie. They tell the kids, maybe you feel uncomfortable with your body. That might be true. That means maybe you're not the gender you were assigned at birth or whatever. Well, that's false.

That's a lie. And so they mix these things together in order to confuse children, to confuse everybody, frankly, because queer theory makes no sense. And then they want people trapped in this social and emotional spell. Here's one of the biggest spells.

What is a woman? Right. Which I give all the credit to Matt Walsh because he kind of gave us the spell that I've used now. Right, of course. Over 130 million views. And of course, the biggest moment of that was where Senator Marshall Blackburn picked it up in the Senate confirmation hearing. And asked Katanji Brown Jackson. That's right. Which they didn't even like her answer. No, she gave the wrong answer, but the right answer in the wrong way. She gave the right answer in the wrong explanation.

That's right. She said, I don't know, even though she is a woman, she doesn't know what a woman is. I'm not a biologist. Ooh.

Ooh. But what a biologist is a kind of thing and that kind of thing is an expert. And so what you have to ask is an expert. But you wouldn't ask, why is this kind of right and wrong?

Well, you have to ask an expert, but you wouldn't ask a biologist because biologists are actually experts. You have to ask, in fact, a gender theorist or a queer activist. Or a wizard. Who is a wizard instead, who's mystifying the idea of gender. We're not kidding when we say these people are wizards. Yeah, they're casting social and emotional spells, particularly on children, to lead them into what they call living queerly. So James, you know I take my religion very seriously and you respect how people take religion seriously and you love the Bible.

Sure. And you know the Bible well and it's an objectively beautiful piece of literature. I also believe it's the Word of God. It is hard not for me to take the next step, which I know you sympathize with, that this is diabolical and from the pit of hell. Oh, I agree. I mean, I said with you on stage that it opens the pit to hell. You said if there was a hell or something.

Yeah, something. Queer theory would be its premier creation. Yeah, queer theory opens the gates to hell.

Yeah, for sure it does that. Explain what you mean by that. So if we take the Bible, even as a piece of literature, we don't have to take it literally. Who is Satan? He's the accuser and the deceiver.

Which it literally means in Hebrew, prosecutor. That's right. And so what does he do? He deceives, he misleads you, he mixes the truth with a lie. He doesn't just come out and necessarily lie, he mixes truths and lies to deceive.

That's exactly right. And then once the mixed truth and lie deceives you, what does he do? He goes around and accuses. Charlie, you're a transphobe. Accusation.

Wow. And all of a sudden—that's another magic spell, by the way, because now everybody socially, if they don't know what's going on, thinks you're a bad person, and they aren't sure if they should trust you or listen to you anymore. You do their transphobia. And so all of a sudden, they have these two—so if we're going to take the Bible seriously in saying that that, at the level of the Hebrew itself, is what represents the father of lies, then we have to look at their behavior, or as Jesus would say, judge them by their fruits, and see that that's exactly in accordance with how they behave and act.

Yes. What comes—what other fruits are there socially? Torn apart lives, destroyed families, children with wrecked bodies, with wounds that will never heal from attempted transitions, sterilized from chemical treatments, cross-sex hormones, and Lupron is a puberty blocker that destroys their reproductive organs from the inside out, can damage their minds, can damage their bodies, their bones even become very brittle. There's all of these huge health problems, but then there's social problems. Everybody's walking on eggshells all the time, everybody's afraid they're going to hurt somebody's feelings or get accused of something. It causes total calamity everywhere it goes. Well, even I would—because I don't want to screw up—again, I've got enough opposition right now, we're kind of in the hot seat—I don't want to say some sort of like, Queern of the American kid, and all of a sudden I've got a bunch of alphabet mafia types trying to firebomb my office.

Yeah, well, they're not going to be happy about this book calling it a cult. I can tell you that from experience. I spoke for one of your Turning Point chapters last week. You did excellent, by the way.

Yeah, at Pitt. We've got to make it bigger. We've got to get more—I'm dedicated.

We've got to really scale it. Yeah, a few— But you had some trans Taliban come, right? Well, it was not quite as bad as that. They threatened that they were going to, but we had a number of activists show up dressed as clowns, which was, I think, a rather poor choice of their self-representation.

But they actually came in, full clown makeup, full clown—the whole thing, like actual clowns. And they sat there, and this one girl started crying and left and called her mom very early on in, because I came out and I said, I'm here to talk about queer theory. Let me tell you what queer theory is. Here are the bullet points. It's the doctrine of a religious cult. It's a cult that is based on sex.

It primarily targets children, and it's not got much to do with being gay. And now I'm going to spend an hour substantiating this. And we had one of the activists in tears over being delivered that dose of truth. Let's play cut 20 here. National parks are hosting drag queens. This was last June for Pride Month. And this is—there's actually an incredibly, I don't want to say deep, but important point that this freakazoid gives.

Play cut 20. Hello. In case you didn't know, gay people are literally taking over the national park system. I just helped throw pride in Yosemite for the third year in a row, but this isn't a pride for visitors to the valley. This is a pride for the park employees, of which, as you can see, there are literal hundreds of queer Yosemite employees. We danced, we marched, we celebrated, and we got wet. I am so proud of all the community organizers in the park system who are making safe space for queer people all year round. No planet, no pride.

Mother Nature is a lesbian. Goodbye! Your response? That was amazing.

That was an amazing spectacle, wasn't it? At the National Park Service, as a core activity, using the natural park as a vehicle to bring children in, to get them excited, and then to lead them into various, you know, activities. Yet again, it's an initiation ceremony.

My response is as simple as it could be. This is an initiation ceremony meant to get children to believe that maybe I'm this way too, and to start asking the questions, and then when they start asking the questions, they start getting affirmed. Yeah, and this is an important thing, is that, I mean, I'm obviously, I have my problems with drag of all ages, but especially children, and that's the emphasis. Drag is not new. No.

And I think you make this point the best. Growing up there were people that cross-dressed or dragged, that is, it's not some sort of new phenomenon. The focus on the children is a new phenomenon. That's correct. That actually, according to the Drag Queen Story Hour paper at least, started officially, or that program of focusing on children, started specifically in 2015 in San Francisco.

I mean, they can nail it down to like where it started. Oh, with the gay men's choir thing. That's right. Can we get that again? Oh, they tried to sue us over this thing?

Really? Do you want to know a story? They have gone after everyone that airs this.

You know what I'm talking about, Ryan? That we're going to come after your children? Have you seen, they whitewashed the, we have like one of the few files, and they send out, what is it called, DNCA type stuff. Wow.

What is it? They literally sing a song, we'll convert your children. That's right, yeah. They don't, they're not actually hiding it. No, they sing in harmony about it.

They're looking for society's tacit permission. Let's play cut 27. By the way, Blake, I don't want to speak out of term, but I think some of these people that are in this video singing were later in some legal trouble. Am I right about that, Blake? I have some memory of that. Oh, they were in it before.

All right, play cut 27. We'll convert your children. Happens bit by bit, quietly and subtly, and you will barely notice it.

We'll convert your children and make an ally of you yet. James Lindsay, that's, I mean, that's exactly it. What they're doing is that the reason that they come after you is they don't want people to see that and understand what it really is. They're doing it with a wink and a nod because what it looks like is what it really is, but they want to say that they're playing into the trope that's against them to get away from that. But what they're telling you is exactly what they're after, to initiate your children into their cult. Yeah, I think it was the Washington Post when there were a bunch of homosexuals that were marching in the streets last summer, and they said, we're coming after your kids. And the Washington Post said, that's them using the trope to their advantage.

I said, yeah, I'm sorry. That is Orwellian level spinning. They know that they're doing that.

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Start your free course today at charlieforhillsdale.com. So let's put up cut 18. This is the all-star team. This is what the Biden government will be known as. You see here you've got Dylan Mulvaney, Levine, Karine Jean-Pierre, Monkeypoxdude, the stripper, the TikTok person, I don't know who those other, the luggage thief. Luggage thief, yeah. And I don't know who that other person is.

Yeah, I don't know that one. So the queering of the government, what's that all about? I mean, the government being queered is the most shocking, I think, part of this.

Is it the most dangerous? Probably because the government ends up being able to set standards and validate this. For example, in education, and we talk about this in detail in the book, the way that the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has taken on queer theory, and especially with regard to the gender identity, which leads to creating these policies at schools and defending these policies in schools where parents are to be shut out of what's going on in the name of protecting the kids. Of course, we've seen some of these states that are passing these bills that they call it something like trans sanctuary. But in many cases, what they do is they open the door, of course, to sex trafficking, because all you have to do is get a kid across the state lines and call them trans or whatever, and they go into the care of the state where it's easy to fall through the cracks and every other thing.

And so there's major problems with these. But the government has picked this up to the point where schools can have these policies. And if parents fight back, the Department of Education itself is in the Office of Civil Rights. Or Department of Justice. Well, yes, the Department of Justice as well has. They can come down with the full weight of the Office of Civil Rights, maybe the Department of Justice against parents who stand up to protect their kids.

I have to pause here. I mean, without getting into the details of the last month and a half, I've taken some strong stances about the overextension of the Civil Rights Act. Are you saying that the Civil Rights Act is being applied towards queering of American kids?

It is. And that largely began under Obama, where he sent in 2011 what was called the Dear Colleague letter. And that was to extend the application of Title 9. Of course, this same logic got reified, unfortunately, at the part of Gorsuch's decision in Obergefell. Very unfortunately, he indicates that it is actually a form of sex discrimination to do gender discrimination or sexuality discrimination, which is not correct. So can you just build this out so the full force of the federal government can be used the same way it was to end racial segregation, to try to end what?

To try to end. So what you're seeing in schools, for example, is that children will choose a preferred identity. The schools will protect that identity. And often against the parents' wishes, the parents will seek restitution for this. And then what will come back is that the parents will be found in the wrong. And at some points, we're even seeing, you know, in various states, what was the big state that just happened?

It was Indiana. You're seeing parents literally fighting for their kids because Child Protective Services gets involved. And you see schools afraid to take any kind of a stand on the side of the parents.

Because the Office of the Civil Rights, the federal government, the Department of Justice might come crushing them. That's right. And it turns out that it's actually based off of a couple of memos.

There's no actual substance to it, but that's how they work. And then they've got Obergefell backing them up. Is it fair to say that queerness is becoming a new civil rights identity? They're trying to make it one for sure. I don't know that it's there yet.

Yeah. I said back in 2019, and I'm rather proud of this prediction, was that if they ever went fully public with queer theory, that they'd shot themselves in the foot. And it was only a matter of time. Parents would fall for a lot of the racial justice stuff, but they weren't going to fall for the queering of their kids on a total, like a total societal scale. And we haven't. And parents will protect their kids. So they're trying to make it one, but that's going to be a gigantic battleground.

There's no standing that makes any sense to apply sex segregation into gender and sexuality. But they've cooked up legal baloney to make it work that way for the time being. How do we defeat these people? It sounds really dumb, but the first thing that we actually have to do is to continue to expose them, because a lot of this is actually going to get sorted out in the judiciary. This is going to be a result of a lot of litigation.

Yeah. So this is where I'm not as optimistic. The courts have been letting us down with some of this stuff.

This is why that's what I'm saying. We have the left, the queer apparatus, the Human Rights Campaign being one such organization, the ACLU being another such organization. And then they have all of the American Medical Association, American Psychological, Psychiatric, American Academy of Pediatrics. They have all these professional organizations. And so when one of these cases goes to court, it is not technically the judge's job to be expert in literally every subject that comes before his bench.

He has to rule on the law. And so they get blinded by this bevy of fake experts. So what we need is the ability to give expert testimony, expert witness, and to start educating the judiciary that this isn't just that, that this isn't just another civil rights question like we saw, whether it's the gay civil rights or the racial civil rights movements of the past. This is something fundamentally different. And yes. So just to be clear, it was Obergefell that expanded parts of the Civil Rights Act to gender theory. Is that what you're saying? That's right.

And sexuality more specifically. But it opens in both directions. So this is where you start getting the Title 9 questions that people like Riley Gaines had to deal with. So Title 9 literally is one of the shortest things that we all talk about in the Federal Registry. It's extremely simple. It's that you will not discriminate based on sex and anything receiving federal funds within education.

It's not complicated. And what they've done is they've created this crazy argument that if a man shows up dressed as a woman and a woman shows up dressed as a woman and you say, well, the man cannot come in because he's dressed as a woman, but the woman can come in dressed as a woman, then you're discriminating against the man because he's a man. But no, you're not. You're discriminating against somebody who is dressed as the opposite sex or trying to enter into a single sex space. Now, this is important because if you allow a man to enter a woman's space that is no longer a segregated single sex reserved space for women because it admits some men, which means that that space is no longer a sex reserved or sex protected space, which means it's not possible to discriminate on sex because sex doesn't mean anything here anymore. Sex isn't the determiner of the quality of the space. So it's actually a contradiction in how Gorsuch fell for it.

I'm not exactly sure, but it's not good. And that was that there was the Bostock versus Clayton County 2020 decision is what you're referencing with Gorsuch. Oh, that's right. That's right. Sorry. No, there's two.

There's the Obergefell and then there's the Bostick versus Clayton County. No, you're right. You're right. You're right.

The Obergefell was nationalization of marriage. That's right. That's right. That's right. But what Bostick versus Clayton County, Gorsuch fell for this little trick that Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination and therefore based on gender identity. Right.

And so then the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights immediately in practice extended to Title 9 as well. And that's literally how you get Riley Gaines a story. That's literally how the entire experience that she and her fellow swimmers and other athletes are dealing with. I'm not going to involve you into some of my intellectual fights I'm involved in, but my contention is that the Civil Rights Act has grown way beyond the scope of its intent. That's, I think, actually patently obvious. I know, but I get attacked for saying such things.

But, I mean, we can even just look very, very, let's be very narrow about that. Let's just look at one Supreme Court decision, which is very important, the Supreme Court decision that needs to be on everybody's mind that cares about this issue. Whatever you think of the Civil Rights Act itself, in 1971, Griggs versus Duke Power decided that disparate impact, if there's a difference in outcomes, inequity, not inequality, no intention to discriminate, difference in outcomes can be taken as proof of discrimination. 1971. So this is disparate impact.

Yeah. So, and I want to go into the full details of Griggs versus Duke Power, 1971. Everyone should go look it up. And the short version is that they were giving a test to go into management and more white people proportionally were passing the test than black people proportionally. The test had no racism found in it whatsoever, but they decided that because it had a difference in impact that there must be racism hidden in it somewhere.

That's your magical systemic racism. And so ever since civil rights law, which is primarily done by leftists, we have very few conservatives in civil rights law, have jumped on that interpretation to say anywhere there's a disparate impact, then all of a sudden protected categories like race become protected classes like racial minorities. And this changes the intention of civil rights law completely. I'm not going to weigh in because I don't fully know and I'm slightly agnostic as to whether civil rights reform is enough to repair this.

But I know that getting rid of disparate impact analysis itself will turn the Civil Rights Act into the weapon against woke that we can be able to start filing lawsuits and winning lawsuits and beating this out of our institutions. Yeah. And I I think law fair is important. I do.

But remember, judges read The New York Times. That's right. And so you're in this culture where you do a great job.

You have lived through the different versions of Twitter X. Are we in a better spot to win because of Elon and what he's done? Yeah, tremendously so. Having a place where there is free speech is overwhelmingly crucial. We're in a completely different space. They can't voice something on us without the skepticism being voiced somewhere that's got mainstream appeal. It's not just often like the weird corners of the Internet that they can say, you know, white supremacy havens or whatever. It's now on a mainstream.

The biggest, I think, mainstream. For example, you got kicked for saying, OK, groomer. That's right.

For five months. You can say that every day now. I say it a lot. I say it a lot. Not you have to be careful in Canada, though, because calling a drag queen in Canada, a groomer is actually against the law now.

That's probably my fault. You know, I'm not I'm not going to go to Canada anytime soon. I'm OK being a political prisoner at some point if that's what's going to take. But not in Canada.

So and if you read Walter Isaacson's book, the only reason Twitter reformed is because Elon bought it and he just went in and demanded change, like reinstate this account, reinstate this account. That's right. You were on the list, by the way. I was. You were on like Lindsay needs to be back. Right. Peterson needs to be back. You know, pretty remarkable. Final thoughts.

James Lindsay. Every parent and grandparent and really every honest teacher left in this country. And there are a lot of them needs to read the querying of the American child as they need to understand queer theory. I'll brag on Logan because he wrote it in a way that I could not. It's so easy to read.

It's so accessible. You're a great writer, but you have this. Yes, that's right.

This is very easy. Everybody who read it early. It's about 100 people read it early, have all said the same thing. Very easy to read. Let's blow it out.

Let's do a whole bunch of events. And I've I met them. No, he's he's he's just a dad. He's just a quiet dad who loves that. Yeah. And he was he saw queer theory and he said, I have kids. This is coming.

I have to be ready before they get in school. James, you're excellent. God bless you, man. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always. Freedom at Charlie Kirk dot com. Thanks so much for listening. And God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.