
New Discourses
Pursuing the light of objective truth in subjective darkness.
Latest episodes

Dec 27, 2022 • 2h 26min
Surviving a Modern Struggle Session
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 104
One of the most famous and most evil techniques of Maoist Marxism is the "struggle session" (dòuzhēng, 鬥爭; or pīpàn dòuzhēng, 批判鬥爭, “critical struggle”; or sometimes just pīdòu, 批鬥; also called “denunciation” sessions). They were made famous during Mao's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but they were utilized in the Chinese thought-reform (xǐnǎo, 洗脑, lit. "wash brain" or brainwashing) prisons starting in the early 1950s under the CCP. The nature of struggle sessions must be understood clearly in 2022 because Western nations are going through a "Woke" Maoist insurgency now, and the struggle session is all the way back in fashion (and has been for some time). Since being banned and returning to Twitter following Elon Musk's acquisition, host of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay, has been subjected to a rather brutal online struggle session (a "twitter storm" as a harassment campaign) in the attempt to punish him back off the site and to discredit his highly effective popularization of the term "groomer" for Maoist ideological groomers, especially those using Queer Marxism. In this groundbreaking episode of the podcast, James goes through the struggle session he's currently experiencing while tying it to the psychological analysis of that phenomenon as presented in Robert Jay Lifton's book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China (https://amzn.to/3ulwEkf/). Join him to learn about this destructive form of bullying activism and to learn how you can resist it.
Order James Lindsay's new book, The Marxification of Education: https://amzn.to/3RYZ0tY
Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support
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Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames
© 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Dec 19, 2022 • 2h 58min
WTF is SEL?
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 103
What the F is Social-Emotional Learning? It's a serious question. Behind all the flowery language is a history, and that history demands looking at. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and its chief lobbying organization, CASEL (the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning) emerged in the mid-1990s from a place called the Fetzer Institute. What is the Fetzer Institute, though? Created by a twentieth century radio magnate named John Fetzer, the Institute was devoted to Fetzer's devoted pursuit of New Age Spiritualism and occultism. The inspiration for much of his theosophical belief resided in the curious character of Alice A. Bailey, who wrote two dozen books on occultism and theosophy, including Education in the New Age, between 1922 and her death in 1949. Did these occult ideas influence the development of Social-Emotional Learning? In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay digs into this question in unsettling detail, raising more questions than he can answer. Join him, and by the end of this episode, you too will be asking what the f--k is Social-Emotional Learning?!
Order James Lindsay's new book, The Marxification of Education: https://amzn.to/3RYZ0tY
Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support
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Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames
© 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #newdiscourses #jameslindsay #SEL

Dec 9, 2022 • 1h 10min
Introducing The Marxification of Education
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 102
Education has been stolen from our society and from our kids. This should be intolerable. Doing something about it, as we're learning, requires understanding how this robbery has occurred and how it keeps running. Fortunately, that's comprehensible and can be summarized in a single short sentence: our kids go to Paulo Freire's schools. You may not know who Paulo Freire was, but his theory of education (critical pedagogy, as it came to be called) explains a great deal of what has gone wrong in our schools. To make this subject comprehensible and pull back the veil on Marxist praxis in education over the last fifty years, James Lindsay, host of the New Discourses Podcast, has written a new book called The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire's Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education (https://amzn.to/3RYZ0tY/ ), which is available now. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James introduces the book and goes through some selected portions of the text to give you a sense of just how significant this problem is. Join him and grab a copy of the book to learn about how things went so wrong in education!
Order James Lindsay's new book, The Marxification of Education: https://amzn.to/3RYZ0tY
Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support
Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe
Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames
© 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #newdiscourses #jameslindsay

Dec 5, 2022 • 3h 16min
What Radicalized You, James Lindsay?
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 101
James Lindsay, host of the New Discourses Podcast, gets asked all the time about what really got him started in his campaign against Woke Marxism. Invariably, the conversation includes a discussion of the Grievance Studies Affair, but what triggered that? Before the Grievance Studies Affair (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/01/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/ ), there was "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" (https://www.skeptic.com/downloads/conceptual-penis/23311886.2017.1330439.pdf/ ), and before the Conceptual Penis, there was a real academic paper called "Glaciers, Gender, and Science: A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research" (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0309132515623368/ ) by four researchers from the University of Oregon, writing on a significant National Science Foundation grant. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James revisits this paper and shares with you exactly what it says, now understood in great clarity. Join him to hear how he was "radicalized" to start fighting the Woke in a serious manner, in their own words.
Pre-order James Lindsay's new book, The Marxification of Education: https://amzn.to/3RYZ0tY
Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support
Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe
Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames
© 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #newdiscourses #jameslindsay

Nov 28, 2022 • 2h 46min
The Strange Death of the University, Part 4: The Strange Death of Knowledge
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 100
We all know academia is in trouble. In fact, we’re not even sure it can be saved. To put it simply, the university is dying. To be sure, it’s a strange death, however, because the university is in some sense going back to its roots, returning to being theological seminaries, though in a completely new religion. That religion is the transformative religion of Dialectical Leftism, and its materialist watchword in the 21st century is “Sustainability.” In this New Discourses Podcast series, host James Lindsay takes the listener through a 2022 UNESCO book, Knowledge-driven Actions: Transforming Higher Education for Global Sustainability (https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380519/ ), that calls upon all “higher education institutions” to transform themselves so that they align, promote, and help complete the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals as a part of the 2030 Agenda.
In this fourth and final episode of the series, host James Lindsay takes the listener through the third chapter of this manipulative UNESCO document. (Chapters four and five are left as homework!) This chapter features one of the most dangerous and manipulative concepts to come out of the Woke Marxist movement, not least thanks to the work done by Paulo Freire: other ways of knowing. In this chapter, you can hear how the "ways of knowing" in the natural sciences have to be adjusted, modified, and made pluralistic alongside activism, the arts, humanities, and the social sciences, especially feminism and "Indigeneity" in service to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations Agenda 2030. All knowledge must serve the new regime, and all knowing systems have to be redesigned to serve its agendas. This is truly the death of the university in the making, and it is a strange death from within, indeed. Join James to hear about how truth is to be replaced by agenda throughout what used to be deserving of being called universities.
Part 1: https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-part-1-red-thread/
Part 2: https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-part-2-new-sensibility/
Part 3: https://newdiscourses.com/2022/11/the-strange-death-of-the-university-part-3-the-strange-death-of-science/
Pre-order James Lindsay's new book, The Marxification of Education: https://amzn.to/3RYZ0tY
Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support
Subscribe to New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe
Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames
© 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Nov 21, 2022 • 15min
Marxism and Holistic Thinking
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 27
Holistic thinking isn't just a feature of the weird New Age and spiritualists; it's also a centerpiece of Marxist thinking. For Marxists (like all Hegelians), the goal is to understand the parts in terms of the whole in which they are a part, and this is what's meant by "holistic" thinking. What Marx and Hegel mean by this form of dialectical thought is that they understand the whole, like the whole of History itself including its purpose, and you don't. Thus, they deserve all the power. This manifests in pushes for "whole child" education involving the "whole community" backed up by the "whole government" using "holistic methods" that transform "whole schools," for example. If you read their documentation on almost any subject, you'll find this peculiar "holism" all over the place. Join host James Lindsay in this episode of New Discourses Bullets where he pulls back the curtain on this seemingly strange phrasing and the diabolical concept behind it.
Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support
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Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames
© 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Nov 14, 2022 • 2h 28min
The Strange Death of the University, Part 3: The Strange Death of Science
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 99
We all know academia is in trouble. In fact, we’re not even sure it can be saved. To put it simply, the university is dying. To be sure, it’s a strange death, however, because the university is in some sense going back to its roots, returning to being theological seminaries, though in a completely new religion. That religion is the transformative religion of Dialectical Leftism, and its materialist watchword in the 21st century is “Sustainability.” In this New Discourses Podcast series, host James Lindsay takes the listener through a 2022 UNESCO book, Knowledge-driven Actions: Transforming Higher Education for Global Sustainability (https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380519), that calls upon all “higher education institutions” to transform themselves so that they align, promote, and help complete the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals as a part of the 2030 Agenda.
In this third episode of the series, host James Lindsay takes the listener through the second chapter of this manipulative UNESCO document. In this chapter, the concepts of "multidisciplinarity," "interdisciplinarity," and "transdisciplinarity" are forwarded with the clear intention of creating a pretext for bringing activists and activism from the arts, humanities, and social sciences into positions of authority over the natural sciences. Science cannot survive this long-sought-after push by activism into its domain, and it will usher in nothing less than a new era of "sustainable" Lysenkoism. Join James to hear about how universities themselves will be turned into the vehicles that ultimately kill science, at least in the West, and to hear a rousing call to scientists and academics that this, in fact, is their hill to die on.
Part 1: https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-part-1-red-thread/
Part 2: https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-part-2-new-sensibility/
Part 4: https://newdiscourses.com/2022/11/the-strange-death-of-the-university-part-4-the-strange-death-of-knowledge/
Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support
Subscribe to New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe
Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames
© 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Nov 10, 2022 • 1h 52min
Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) | James Lindsay
The Marxification of Education Workshop, Session 4 of 4
The hottest buzzword in education today is Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), but it's not just a buzzword. It's a huge program with almost universal installation (thanks to the Every Student Succeeds Act, ESSA, of 2015) and billions upon billions of dollars behind it. What is it? Where did it come from? Should we trust it? To the last of these questions, there are excellent reasons to believe that we shouldn't. In fact, we shouldn't want it anywhere near our children and should fight vigorously to protect them from it. We should also see there's a huge scam operating within the installation of it and that some very questionable actors are strongly behind it, but for what reasons? Here, New Discourses Founder James Lindsay gives a deep, concerning, and thorough (but mere) introduction to the topic of Social-Emotional Learning in this last of four presentations on the Marxification of Education delivered in late July 2022 in Arlington, Virginia, on location in the now-famous Loudoun County, ground zero for the fight for America's schools.
As a result of the research that produced this lecture series, Lindsay has written a detailed and accessible book on the issue titled The Marxification of Education, which is available for preorder now: https://amzn.to/3RYZ0tY #ad
Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support
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Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames
© 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Nov 9, 2022 • 20min
The Theft of Education
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 26
Education is being stolen from our kids and our society. In fact, for the most part, it has been stolen already. The way it's being and been done is through using something that is known as the "generative themes" approach, which derives from the work of the Marxist educator Paulo Freire. Generative themes are supposed to generate particular kinds of political conversations in the context of presenting some other kind of educational lesson. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay shares (with permission) Jennifer McWilliams's example (https://www.jennifermcwilliamsconsulting.com/) of a seemingly benign and innocuous second-grade word problem in mathematics class to show how a simple subtraction lesson can be turned into any number of political conversations about poverty, race, sex, gender, sexuality, family, parental authority, and environmental issues or climate change by a manipulative teacher-activist using the Freirean generative themes approach. This is what we are up against. This needs to stop.
Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support
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Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames
© 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Nov 7, 2022 • 1h 59min
Can We Trust Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)?
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 98
Schools all across the United States and wider Western world are rapidly incorporating Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) into all aspects of the educational experience and environment. Can we trust it? There are excellent reasons why we shouldn't (https://newdiscourses.com/2022/08/the-dark-truth-about-social-emotional-learning-sel/). Everyone seems to be pushing it, though. Not just our state and federal government, and governments throughout the West and the SEL parent organization, CASEL, but also huge organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF), United Nations (through UNESCO), the OECD and World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and USAID, among others. Why? In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay goes through portions of two documents about Social-Emotional Learning, one from UNESCO (https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000372241) (about its use in overcoming the cognitive dissonance associated with making education be about achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030) and one from USAID (https://www.edu-links.org/sites/default/files/media/file/Equity%2C%20Inclusion%2C%20and%20Social-Emotional%20Learning.pdf) (about the need to implement it to advance equity), and makes a strong case that however much you currently trust SEL, you should trust it less. Whatever is going on with SEL, it seems incredibly suspicious! Join him for an unsettling discussion.
Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support
Subscribe to New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe
Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames
© 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved.