Seeking Truth, Former Liberal James Lindsay Now Fights Critical Race Theory

Commentator and author James Lindsay first came to national attention after he and his colleagues published a series of hoax papers in social science journals to demonstrate the loose academic standards of the journals.

He used to be a liberal, Lindsay says, but became more conservative when he recognized the real threat that ideologies such as critical race theory represent for America.

“My position, though, even when I did identify on the left in the past, has always been: ‘I’m going to hold the beliefs that I believe are the most accurate, and where I fall is where I fall,’” Lindsay explains before adding that he’s on “Team Reality.”

Lindsay, also a mathematician, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss how he moved from being a liberal to a conservative, and how conservatives can help convince reasonable liberals in our lives about the danger of philosophies such as critical race theory.

We also cover these stories:

• President Joe Biden addresses the nation regarding Russia’s unfolding invasion of eastern Ukraine.
• Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, will deliver the GOP’s official response to Biden’s State of the Union address.
• Former President Donald Trump’s new social media app, Truth Social, tops Apple’s chart of free downloads.

Listen to the podcast below or read a lightly edited transcript.

Doug Blair: My guest today is James Lindsay, founder of the website New Discourses, as well as co-author of the book “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everyone.” James, welcome to the show.

James Lindsay: Hey, I’m glad to be here.

Blair: Of course. Let’s talk about woke culture. This is the sort of cause de jour at the moment for the left and it’s incredibly dangerous, but can you explain to our listeners why it is so dangerous?

Lindsay: Because it’s Marxism.

Blair: Done. End the interview.

Lindsay: The end. No, really, that’s the truth, though. So we mentioned “Cynical Theories.” I’ve got a new book out today called “Race Marxism” that tracks how critical race theory is, in fact, just a reinvention, to whatever level of granularity and detail you want to go into, of Marxism using race in place of class. If we switch over to queer theory or gender theory, it’s a reproduction of Marxism using gender, sex, and sexuality in place of class.

And so the reason it’s so dangerous is because, just like every other Marxist theory, it’s an inversion of reality. It’s not going to work. It’s going to lead to calamity, but also, wokeness, if we will, woke Marxism, if you will, is kind of very dangerous in its own unique way. It’s the most corrosive societal acid that I think I’ve ever seen.

Blair: So what is it about Marxism that seems to just not go away? I mean, we were having this conversation back decades ago about how Marxism was a problem. Why is it now resurging again?

Lindsay: Well, we never really got rid of it is the problem. The Marxists of the 20th century realized that infiltration and subversion was a necessary tactic, whereas Marxists before thought that revolution, organizing and revolution, would be the tactic.

So organizing meant getting big groups of people to do labor movements and then to show up and to protest and to form huge unions and do all of this kind of stuff. And then to try to take over the means of production literally through, if you look at whether it’s Lenin, you look at Mao, through violent revolution. Marx himself said that violence is the midwife of revolution.

And so that didn’t work out. It worked in China, it worked in Russia, it worked here and there through Central and South America, but it’s been a trail of blood, a trail of disaster, and it hasn’t been very popular outside of that.

And so what they figured out in the 20th century was that if you wanted Western Marxism, instead of the Eastern model, which worked in Russia and worked in China, if you want Western Marxism, you have to infiltrate and subvert. You have to get inside the institutions and change them from the inside.

So what happened was, with varying degrees of success, they infiltrated—whether it’s religion, whether it’s the government, whether it’s corporations, education is a big one. Medicine now is a big one for our society. They’ve wormed their way into these institutions that make society work, and then they subvert them from the inside.

So when Joseph McCarthy, for example, outing these guys 70 years ago—well, when the pressure got on and there’s this huge focus on how bad red communism is, they kind of went underground and what they actually ended up doing, they figured out through the mid part of the 20th century and into the ’60s, was that they needed to infiltrate education, because if they get inside education, they get inside the future professionals in every other institution as well.

Media professionals come from college, faith leaders come from seminaries, which are forms of college. It doesn’t matter what it happens to be. New lawyers, doctors, they all go to medical school or law school or whatever. They all come out of college. And then most importantly, our future generations are going to be educated by teachers who come out of teaching colleges.

So they figured out that going under the cloak and pretending they weren’t Marxists. So I always say Marxists posing as professors, Marxists posing as doctors, Marxists posing as politicians, was the mechanism that they switched to in the middle of the 20th century.

Blair: So one of the things that I find so fascinating about that description is it always seems like colleges have always sort of had a leftward tilt, but in recent decades, we’ve started to see how that leftward tilt has become a full leftward sprint toward Marxism, progressivism, all of the social justice ideologies that we see today. How exactly did that happen? I can’t imagine it just snapped your fingers and it happened overnight.

Lindsay: No, it didn’t. It was a very slow infiltration and it was kind of deliberate and coordinated. The Marxists have been trying to figure out, even the Soviet Union, the USSR of the Kremlin was trying to figure out how to infiltrate major U.S. institutions starting in the 1920s.

And so it turns out, colleges were not always left. In fact, for a long time, they were quite conservative, especially when they were primarily seminaries. You look at Princeton and it was originally Princeton Theological Seminary. You look at Harvard, it was originally a seminary. They’re actually quite conservative.

But the Marxists figured out that, because of their positioning as theorists, as social theorists and economic theorists, that they could work their way into university faculties. And they actually did very slowly, very slowly until about the 1960s when everything kind of blew up and the academic left kind of took over because they had essentially abandoned the working class.

Marxism was always a champion of the working class. You don’t think of your elbow patch professors as being the working class, because they’re not. In fact, they’re explicitly part of the bourgeoisie that Marx hated. But in the 1960s, they realized advanced capitalism, they said, Max Horkheimer and so called neo-Marxist of the Frankfurt School said explicitly, “Marx was wrong.” He said that Marx believed that capitalism would immiserate the working class, but in fact, it allowed them to build a better life.

And so they switched tact. They abandoned the working class and they shifted their attention to building out inside of these elite institutions, in particular, these colleges and universities.

So they slowly started to colonize the faculty, slowly started to colonize the administration, and under banners like academic freedom and the claim that they’re teaching social theory and the claim that they’re just teaching economic theory, they slowly created conditions where they could press out conservatives and preferentially admit progressives.

And over the course of literally a few academic generations, so 30 years, they were able to massively change the composition of universities from tilting somewhat conservative to tilting, not just slightly, but strongly left. And then that’s an accelerating process. Once you get far enough left, or right for that matter, it becomes self-sustaining and self reinforcing. And then they’re, like you said, in a full sprint into Marxism right now.

Blair: Is there any way for us to reclaim the universities, maybe for not just the right, but maybe the center? Not necessarily so far to the left, just bringing it back to a place that’s kind of more moderate?

Lindsay: Not easily. It’s going to take removing people from positions of power and hanging funding on denouncing or removing these ideologies. I think we would see what amounts to massive purges, which is not a friendly word. We’re going to have to see state legislatures stepping in and saying, “We’re not going to fund this.”

Some states are playing around with curriculum transparency bills that make it so that if, say, critical race theory or gender theory or whatever is going to feature within a course, it has to be on the syllabus. And if you, as a student, show up to that course and it’s on the syllabus, then you’re entitled to be able to drop the course and get your money back and not be penalized academically for it.

We’re going to have to see things that create the ability for people to push back. But primarily, what we’re going to have to see is boards of regents stepping up and starting to swap out administrators for people.

The university should be for everybody. It shouldn’t be a left institution or a right institution. It shouldn’t be a purely religious institution or any other thing. It should be for everybody to go get an education at the higher education level, a broad liberal education, or a specific technical education.

And it’s going to require finding who’s—which is virtually every administrator now and a lot of the faculty—putting an ideological and political bias this strongly into it, and what are we going to do about it? Which is going to amount to removing them.

Marxists don’t stop. You can’t ask them to stop and then they’ll stop. They have to be taken out of positions of power.

Blair: Now, this is an issue that affects conservatives, classical liberals, people on the right, on the left, who are maybe not so absorbed in the wokeism. I guess I’m curious about you. Do you consider yourself a conservative?

Lindsay: No, not really. I do notice that when I talk about conservatives now, I tend to use the pronoun “we.” So maybe on some psychological level, getting down in there, I’ve started to identify, but I don’t know if I mean “we” conservatives or “we” people who are standing up for broadly classically liberal values like the United States was founded upon. Team Reality, if you will. And if that’s conservative, so be it.

My position, though, even when I did identify on the left in the past, has always been, “I’m going to hold the beliefs that I believe are the most accurate and where I fall is where I fall.”

So if other people want to label me conservative, I’m not in the least uncomfortable with that. Doesn’t mean anything to me. But I also don’t want to fall into the trap of taking on a label and then using that label to say, “Oh, well, these ideas I can accept and those ideas I have to go away from, because now I’m a conservative, so I have to believe conservative things.”

I don’t want to fall into that trap either. I genuinely want to be somebody who’s open-minded, who’s looking at things as objectively as I’m able to do, and that can read broadly.

And so I don’t identify as the conservative. Maybe I’m trans conservative, I don’t know. But no, I’m not uncomfortable with being labeled that way. And certainly, most of the people I spend time with and most of the people I find agreement with are conservative.

That said, if we look at staunch conservatives who believe that kind of classically liberal, Thomas Jefferson American values, conservatives are actually also libs. Actual reactionary right—or the actual kind of conservative hard right—I get 10 times as much harassment and virulence from them as I do from the woke left. I get much more attack.

And I don’t know if that is another sign that I’m positioned right of center now so the purity spiral hits me that way rather than the other way. It used to be the other way around. Or if it’s that I’m not as conservative.

Blair: The reason I ask is I identify a lot of the things that you’re saying with a lot of these classical liberals, such as Bill Maher, who, politically speaking, is definitely not a conservative. He’s very much a kind of like big government, social programs that are supported by the state [kind of liberal], but he also completely agrees that wokeism is a problem.

So I guess my question is, there are so many of these people who are coming out of the woodwork in terms of [believing that] free speech needs to be a valuable asset of American society, that I could question, is this a sustainable model for the left? Is an anti-free speech woke agenda going to succeed, or are they moving back from that?

Lindsay: Well, you’ve asked two questions. “Is it sustainable?” and “Will it succeed?” are two different questions. It’s not sustainable. Of course it’s not sustainable. It’s a catastrophe. It’s internally contradictory. It’s utterly nonsense. It’s an inversion of reality. It’s a disaster in the making. It’s not sustainable.

So what it has is a tremendous amount of momentum. And you talk about the political pendulum swinging, it has the goal of breaking the pendulum so it can’t swing back. Can’t go the other way.

And so can it succeed? Well, I don’t mean to sound like a philosopher, but it depends on what you mean by succeed. It can seize power, if that’s what you mean, and institute a reign of, I guess tyranny is the only way to put it, that will be very difficult, if not impossible to get out of given the technological tools they have on their side now.

On the other hand, it won’t be pleasant. So where’s your definition of success? Did the Soviet Union succeed? They say, “Well, communism’s inherently contradictory. It’ll always collapse.” And I like to remind them that the Soviet Union lasted 69 years to the deaths of 30 to 40 million people in the process and the lives lived in that situation weren’t exactly good for most people most of the time. In fact, they were really bad for most people most of the time. And 69 years is a long time.

So the two different questions on the table are, can it succeed at seizing power? Yes, it could. So we must fight it. Will it work? No. Is it sustainable? No. Will it end in calamity? Absolutely, if it’s allowed to run amuck.

So it’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare, but it’s a dangerous nightmare because it can and will, if allowed to, take what institutional power it has and will, ironically enough, capitalize upon that to institute tyranny under its control, which has always been its goal.

Blair: We talked a little bit about racial theory here. We talked about critical race theory, but as well, to me, one of the vanguards of the cultural expression of this type of wokeism is Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter has recently been revealed to basically be a scam in the sense that it kind of scammed a lot of people out of a lot, a lot of money. I think it was $80 million or something along those lines. With revelations like this, that organizations based on wokeism tend to be scams, does that affect the popularity of these types of movements?

Lindsay: Absolutely. I mean, I like the analogy of the wheels coming off the bus. The bus isn’t running, the wheels are flying off, the thing is skidding with sparks flying everywhere at this point and people can see it. And so you wouldn’t jump off of a moving bus, but supposing you could safely, you’d definitely be getting off of the bus. And so people are diving off of the bus right now.

These things are why I’m saying that what they have is a lot of momentum, and if they can cross the finish line into tyranny, then we are in a bad place. That’s what happened with the Bolsheviks. What they were doing, murdering people like crazy, was not popular, but they had enough momentum and insufficient resistance so that they were able to cross the finish line, as it were, and establish a radical dictatorship under Lenin.

We’re in the same kind of situation. But I think it’s losing momentum, partly because it’s so obviously fraudulent, so obviously corrupt. I call it, in fact, the iron law of woke corruption. If you see a woke organization, I guarantee you it’s corrupt. It is an iron law. If you see a woke politician, I bet you they’re doing something corrupt. If you have a woke corporate leader, I can’t name anybody, I’m not accusing anybody, but I bet you there’s an embezzlement scam somewhere going on. I got Enron-level problems going on here. And so the whole thing is a gigantic grift.

And so yes, as people see these things come to light, it turns them off. But it does so doubly in fact, because there are a lot of people who are good mainline liberals, and even some conservatives, who would’ve said, “Well, black lives do matter. We got to care about this,” and they kind of got roped in. And when they figure out that they’ve been betrayed, that they’ve been scammed, they turn all the way against it.

This process is redpilling. It’s like they’re seeing, “I got ripped off. Oh my gosh, this was always a scam. This was never a legitimate organization.” The best things you can say about it are terrible. And so then what do they do? They tell their friends and this spreads very rapidly. And as the evidence mounts, people realizing they got scammed start getting curious. How did the scam work? How did I get sucked into it? Oh, well, it’s this theory underneath it, this critical race theory. Well, that’s probably garbage, too. That’s what enabled the scammers to come out and do the scam.

These things are causing the wheels to—I don’t know how bad we want to beat this metaphor, but the wheels are flying off. More wheels are coming off than were there. It’s like a Grand Theft Auto scene or something, just extra wheels are just flying off. Sparks everywhere.

Blair: Now, something you said really resonated with me because I’ve had this conversation in my life. My mother is, like you’ve said, sort of a good liberal, she believes in human rights and all of that kind of nice, fancy nonsense. But she will say things like, “Why does it matter to you to talk about these types of issues? Just let it be.” Specifically on transgenderism, where I will say, “I’m against this idea that you can identify as whatever you want.” She says, “Who does it hurt?” I feel like these people are reachable. These are very reasonable people, but what do we do? How do we find that common ground to reach these people?

Lindsay: I mean, it’s different. This is a hard question because it really does matter individually. Every different person is going to have the thing that kind of pops their eyes open. Like the question of “Who does it hurt?” with the trans thing. Well, tens of thousands of teenage girls. That’s who it hurts. And who does it enrich? There’s other questions to ask. These weird doctors that are grooming kids into these bad decisions and are going to get them caught on a lifetime of pharmaceuticals. So broadening that perspective becomes something that might open certain eyes.

What I actually formulated very early on after the woke explosion kind of happened. One of the earliest essays I wrote in New Discourses is in the summer of 2020, it was called “The Woke Breaking Point.”

And I had a conversation with a friend. And what it was was the idea was rather than me trying to give you something that if you just say that will reach people, it was to ask them, “What would be too far for you? What would cause you to hang it up and say, ‘Maybe this trans thing is causing harm’?” And let them sit with it and think about it.

What would break your support for this? And where is the line? And maybe you don’t have one. What does that say about you? But if you do have one, what is it? And what you find is a lot of people are actually proceeding in ignorance.

They say, “Well, if I knew that kids were getting groomed into some kind of a weird sex cult or something, using this as a pretext, then I would be alarmed and that would be horrible.” And then turns out there’s evidence for that already. And so you can say, “Well, it turns out that’s actually happening. Have you seen this?”

But if you get that where their curiosity opens up first, you can have a more productive conversation, I think. It’s very difficult, but you never know. You never know what people are going to see.

Like you said, when Black Lives Matter scammed people out of $80 million, that is going to open some eyes. It has no leadership now. Nobody knows who’s in control of literally tens of millions of dollars. That’ll open some eyes.

You see the right picture at the right time of a 13-year-old girl who’s had a double mastectomy because she got groomed by a school counselor. That’ll open some eyes.

You see a book like “Gender Queer” that shows pornographic drawings and has blatantly, I don’t know if you’ve read that book, but some incredibly sexual imagery, both verbal and in the form of drawings, being a graphic novel. People see that and say, “Well, what is this?” And it’s not even just that it’s something in the schools. It’s that they’re fighting like hell to keep it in the schools. That will alarm certain people.

And so I had a talk I gave recently in Kansas, and there’s a black minister there. And he said something about, “How do I convince my people?” And I was like, “Sir, I don’t mean to sound rude, but you’re a minister of the gospel. How do you proclaim the gospel? How do you convince them of the truth of your religion? You just keep doing it. You live it, and you keep saying it and you catch as many people as you can. You try to refine your message. That’s all I can tell you to do.”

Blair: Does it seem like this is working? Does it seem like we’re making progress against the woke tide?

Lindsay: Well, as somebody who’s been speaking up publicly about it at least since 2016—I just said this in another interview recently, too—you ever see that video of the guy with the American flag during that hurricane? And he stands out in the street and he’s like headbanging and he’s got the long hair? And the wind is whipping the flag. And he’s literally challenging the hurricane and he’s got a video. I felt like that guy, standing there holding up the flag, challenging the hurricane. And now it feels like the wind’s at my back.

And so yes, we’re definitely making progress. There are umpteen organizations of parents and mama bears and this and that all over the country standing up for kids in schools. They’re going to turn this around. There’s national attention on the issues from policymakers, whether it’s at the state level, whether it’s at the federal level. You have this being a major campaign issue that flipped Virginia back red in the previous governor election last year.

So we are making tremendous progress. As a matter of fact, not to understate the threat, because the threat is tremendous, but we’ve made so much progress that I feel as though in six to 12 months, we’ve undone most of 70 years of scheming to undermine America. And we’re also seeing in America, you can’t use this phrase because apparently it means something bad also, somebody came up with it, but there’s a renaissance of American values happening right now. So I have to be careful about how I phrase that. People are waking up.

It’s like when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union fell, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” When that happened, so many Americans went to sleep. The Red Scare is over. Cold War’s done. And they’re waking back up.

And those famous words that were uttered somewhere very close, I think it was in Philadelphia—I was going to say very close to here. But when the Constitution was framed in 1789 and Benjamin Franklin came out, and I forget the woman who asked and said, “What kind of government did you give us?” And he said, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” We’re realizing that “if you can keep it” part matters and that this crap we keep hearing about, “We have to defend our democracy,” we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic. And we have to defend that republic.

We’re seeing this renaissance of people caring about the Constitution, reading the Declaration of Independence, going back and looking at the philosophy that led to the greatest experiment in basically human flourishing that’s ever taken place on the planet.

And it’s going to, I think, gain momentum for a long time. “Make America Great Again” is going to look small in comparison to whatever the next iteration of American greatness is going to look like.

Blair: I mean, that kind of implies to me a cyclical nature to this kind of thing. I’m imagining Cthulhu sleeping beneath the tides. The woke mob will come again. He sleeps in the city. But is that what we’re facing here? Is it sort of pushing it back until it comes back again?

Lindsay: I mean, they say that these things happen roughly every three generations because you forget. People forget. But it comes back differently. I think about this a lot. I don’t have an answer for you. It might be. It might be that the nature of keeping a republic is you’re constantly going to have to find the new variation of evil. This Marxist strain of evil, however, and it’s specific form, I don’t know if it’s on its last leg. I mean, wokeism is actually stupid.

Now, you talk about these contradictions, if you will, that reveal to people that something’s wrong. Look at the trucker thing going on in Ottawa. And so you actually have a worker’s movement. You actually have a spontaneous workers movement, almost exactly like Karl Marx predicted. And you have literally the Communist Party of Canada denouncing it.

It’s like they have gone so far off of what people understand them to be. And the identity theories are so noxious and so ridiculous, denying biological sex. So ridiculous that this may be what I would refer to, Marxism in general, is what I refer to as scientific Gnosticism.

It may be that this attempt is the last stand of this particular type of evil, but I also think this type of evil is what’s recorded in Genesis 3 with the snake, which means, if you take that as emblematic of the oldest dramas of humanity, then this is a problem that does keep coming back in different forms throughout time. If it is actually Gnosticism, like I say, Gnosticism had a variety of forms.

There was the huge thing in very early part of this era, first century or something, Irenaeus and Valentinus, where the huge gnostic versus non-gnostic or anti-gnostic kind of religious fights. This same idea that certain people espouse a position of arrogance and the ability to remake the world and society and mankind to their own designs and images doesn’t just go away.

So we will have to be ever on guard for it. But I think we also are in an opportunity to learn more about it and to see how it’s changed forms throughout the past, say, 200, 250 years, and you can get a pretty good sense of predicting what kinds of other forms it might take. And thus setting up a guard for it.

Biggest failure, in my opinion, of the 20th century is that we never installed—we have awesome anti-Nazi education. It’s fabulous. And I’m so glad we have it. And everybody is sensible and decent, and I’m so glad people know all about the Nazis. They know about the horrors of the National Socialist Movement. But we have absolutely abysmal anti-communist education.

Nobody knows what communism is. Nobody [knows] what Marx was really teaching. Nobody knows what Lenin did or Stalin did or Mao did. And if anything comes out of this, supposing we get out of this, and installing, not just as [Donald] Trump had it, a patriotic American education, but an anti-communist education, throughout as much of the world as can be made free, I think then we’ve made a gigantic step toward minimizing the risk of this problem. But if it’s the story that’s in Genesis, it’s a story of humanity. It’s coming back.

Blair: Before we wrap, I wanted to just get your opinion on what we can do. I think there’s this big push for people to just say, “What do I do? How do I counter wokeness in my everyday life?” So how do we do it?

Lindsay: Well, it depends on who you are and what your gifts and talents are. I keep trying to tell people this. Everybody thinks, “Oh, I can’t learn all this complicated stuff.” Well, actually, it’s not as complicated as you think, so you can learn some of it, first of all. But maybe you don’t want to.

I talked to a guy in Wisconsin. I found this guy to be a huge inspiration, just a normal dude. He’s working with this organization. They put on these events. They bring in speakers. They’re doing all kinds of stuff throughout the state, political and otherwise. And I got talking to him about some of the theory stuff and he just stopped me and was like, “Doc, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I was like, “Well, you’re with the guys,” or whatever.

He was like, “Oh, no, no, no. They need somebody who picks people up from the airport. They need somebody who runs the errands. If somebody needs copies, I make copies. I go to the store and pick up the binders so that everybody can have a notebook or whatever. I just run errands for these guys.”

So there’s the people on the one hand who are, if it was like a fight, that they’re on the battlements. They’re shooting the arrows or whatever. Maybe that’s the people that are out studying the theory or that are taking the political moves or whatever it is. Your state lawmakers. People who run for school board and get on a school board. And then you got the people that are handing them water and arrows and stuff from down below, the support staff.

Everybody’s got to figure out what it is they have to offer. Maybe what they have to offer is to help knit the communities back together. All kinds of helpers are going to be needed if some giant homeschool movement is coming along to protect the kids from the public schools until they get straightened out. It’s going to require a lot of support.

It’s crass to say, but it’s also true. There are people who have financial resources that can give to people. That’s like handing people bundles of arrows or whatever. I learned this listening to a pastor speak about two years ago, and he said, “Everybody has to do something, but you have to … pray and find out what your gifts of the spirit are. And that’s what you have to do.”

Maybe you’re a good ear for somebody to talk to. Maybe somebody’s going through some stuff. Maybe you have the ability.

I recently, not anymore, time flies, but not so long ago, I had the opportunity to listen to somebody confess for the first time. A young woman confessed, “I’m done with the pronouns.” And she started crying because she said she didn’t think she could say that to anybody: “I’m done with the pronoun game.” And she didn’t think she could say it to anybody. And she finally had somebody she could say it to. And so maybe it’s just that.

Or on the other hand, maybe you’re the person that’s reading all of the books and getting up and speaking it up. Maybe you’re terrible at Marxist theory, but you’re great at American civics and you’re reading that and you’re going to go proclaim and teach: What was this country founded on? Why do we have life, liberty, and property as intrinsic values? Etc.

So everybody has to figure out what they can bring to the fight. And then they have to do it.

Again, I don’t have a specific recipe for each person. Some people are going to run for school board. Some people are going to help that person run for school board. Some people are just going to be their friend to give them moral support for all the slings and arrows they’re going to get when they run for school board. And somebody’s going to probably do some bake sales to raise money for the run for school board.

All kinds of things, but you’ve got to figure out what you can do. And you got to do it.

Blair: Solid advice. That was James Lindsay, founder of the website New Discourses, as well as author of the book “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.” James, really appreciate having you on.

Lindsay: Yeah. Thank you, man.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.