Dr. James Lindsay argues wokeness mirrors ancient cults like Hermeticism and Marxism, rejecting objective truths—gender binaries, "two plus two equals four," or good/evil—as illusions to enforce dependency on ideological "experts." Canada’s MAID now accounts for 1 in 30 deaths, with doctors allegedly concealing causes, while Nashville’s gun-marching children post-shooting reflect Maoist-style indoctrination. Lindsay ties this to Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged networks and George Soros’ "alchemy," warning of a global push to reshape human identity through redefined rituals, from pronouns to transgender activism, ultimately eroding autonomy under expert-driven narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
A very special one-hour conversation with Dr. James Lindsay.
I'll be honest with you.
I do a lot of brainstorming here.
I throw a lot of ideas in the air and just ask for him to help me sort through them.
I'm trying to figure out why.
Why is wokeness on the march?
Why the push for transgenderism?
What is going on?
I'm trying to make sense of it, and he's the man to help guide through his knowledge of philosophy and history.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
I'm not sure if you will because I think I talked too much, but boy, did he give great answers, and I'm really glad to have access to his smarts.
That's today's show.
Let me invite you, though, to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
And the reason for that is because you get the video, not just the audio, but also because the eight bucks a month, which is what Rebel News Plus costs, that's how we pay our bills here.
That's what we hire our staff and run our company because we don't get any money from Trudeau or from YouTube.
So please go to RebelNewsPlus.com and click subscribe.
All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, is wokeness a cult?
And is the obsession with transgenderism a relapse into pre-civilization morality?
We'll try and figure these and other complicated questions out.
It's April 5th, and you're watching the Astral Avant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
If you saw my interview a couple of weeks ago with Barbara Kay, you'll have heard me try and string together a group of ideas as I was flailing my way to an understanding of why Canada has now jumped in feet first in what they're calling cryptically made, M-A-I-D.
Doctor-Assisted Suicide Controversy00:05:55
medical assistance in dying, which is just another euphemism for doctor-assisted suicide.
And it is happening so quickly in Canada.
One in 30 deaths in this country is by doctor-assisted suicide.
And you can see the attempt to cover that up, guidance by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons that is proposed for MAID says that doctors should report these deaths not as the result of medically assisted suicide, but rather as the result of the underlying condition, depression, cancer, that they should hide what they're doing because they know how abominable it is.
And I started to feel, and I bounce this off, Barbara, that we were reverting to a pre-Christian, pre-Jewish, pre-historic almost moral code of violence, of the culture of death, not the culture of life.
And I felt like we were going back in time to a darker era.
And just today, I thought of that incredible film by Mel Gibson, who makes beautiful movies and unusual movies.
He made a movie that I recommend to you called Apocalypto.
And it's a dead language movie set in Central America right before the conquistadors arrive.
So it could be 1491.
And it was about the human sacrifice on those giant pyramids.
And it was gorgeous and beautiful, and it was an exciting movie of drama and action and love and family love.
And it was wonderful personal stories, all done in dead languages, which was amazing, the costumes, the scenery.
But I think the entire point of the movie was in the final seconds where the two antagonists are chasing each other in the jungle in a brutal battle to the death, and then suddenly the Christian boats arrive with crosses on their sails.
Take a look at this beautiful ending.
I'm sorry to spoil the movie for you, but you really should watch it nonetheless.
a look.
I'm sure that's the reason why Mel Gibson,
who is a deeply Christian, deeply religious, almost evangelical man, made the movie.
I think it was his way of saying, you don't like Christianity, you have a problem with our morality.
Adults Sacrificing Children00:15:07
Well, where do you see what preceded it?
So I'm talking about doctor-assisted suicide.
I'm talking about the culture of death, but it also brings to mind the cult of transgenderism, where for the first time in millennia, adults are sacrificing children.
For millennia, it was the opposite.
Adults would do anything to protect their children.
Now, adults are serving up their children, either to drag queen story hours, sexualizing children of tender years, or even, abominably, putting them on hormones, puberty blockers, and even engaging in body-defiling surgeries, irrevocable steps.
What is going on?
Are these things related?
Are we reverting, as Mel Gibson might say, to a pre-Christian barbarity?
And is it a cult?
Joining us now is one of my favorite thinkers, a true intellectual who is fighting the battle of woke more than perhaps anyone else.
We're so grateful to take up swaths of his time.
I can't believe he comes back every time because we pester him for so many questions.
I really find him illuminating.
I'm talking about Dr. James Lindsay, who you can read more from at newdiscourses.com.
He joins us now via Skype.
Dr. Lindsay, a pleasure to have you back.
I am flailing my way to an understanding here, but I do find some similarity.
The culture of death.
Suicide even for children now, they're proposing it.
Suicide for people who just have some depression.
Suicide for people who want to, suicide for veterans, and then for those who live to be carved up to feast on our children as some pagan demon might do.
What the hell is going on?
Well, I think your understanding you're filing to would be best described under the concept of tacit knowledge.
I don't know if you've heard of this concept, tacit knowledge.
It's a very formal term that roughly means intuition.
So what you're seeing is a set of things that are happening that are creating connections in your mind that are not incorrect, that you don't have a vocabulary to understand or to articulate clearly.
And so it rests in the realm of tacit knowledge.
But I think your hypothesis or your hunch here is uncomfortably correct.
I think that we're seeing, with the woke in particular, a complete rejection of Western culture.
And kind of at the center of Western culture is the Judeo-Christian ethic.
And by having a complete rejection of that, by throwing often its tenets back in its own face in our societies, we're seeing things that do look very much like child sacrifice, that do look very much like pagan even ritual.
And of course, we're seeing that celebrated, you know, whether it was the Oscars or the Grammys or whatever else, we're seeing these kinds of very overt displays of, I guess, a pagan kind of basis underneath this way of thinking.
I don't think you're wrong in that suspicion.
That's incredible.
And you're so right.
I forgot about, was that the Emmys or the Grammys or some award show where they had a full satanic ritual, unironically?
And why?
What's the market for that?
Or is it just those ancient ideas that are reasserting themselves?
You called it tacit knowledge.
Isn't that the truth?
When I was talking to my friend Barbara Kaye, who thinks about these things, I couldn't help but think of some ancient laws, the Ten Commandments.
Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not murder.
There is only one God.
I mean, these are essential pillars of our consciousness, our imagination, our culture.
But obviously, they replaced something before them.
Obviously, they corrected something.
You don't bring in a law for no reason.
You bring in a law to correct something.
So obviously, murder was rife beforehand.
Obviously, people did not honor their mother and father.
Why would you make a law if they were?
Were they killing them in an assisted suicide?
What gods did they have that there needed to be a command to have only one?
The Jews believe in another set of laws, Dr. Lindsay.
I don't know if you know this.
The laws of Noah that the Jews believe apply to all people, not just Jews.
They're basic laws for any human.
One of them that sticks in my mind because it's so unusual is that you're not to eat the flesh of any animal that's not killed.
Like you're not allowed to eat a live animal.
That sounds so unusual, but obviously that law was brought in because people were doing it.
And that level of cruelty, I mean, on the one hand, what do you care if the animal's alive or dead?
You're going to kill it to eat it anyways.
But on the other hand, it speaks to the immorality of the human that you would do something so abusive and cruel.
I think of, I think it was Kipling's the gods of the copybook headings, all these ancient aphorisms.
They're not even Christian.
They're not even religious.
I think they're pre-Christian, but they're just codes of right and wrong.
I think of Jeffrey Epstein and the trafficking of children and how high society covers it up.
I think of Bohemian Grove and Alex Jones stumbling upon bizarre things.
And I have to say, I think my worldview is being shattered.
I think that the world is a lot darker than I ever thought it was.
And I think that the demons are coming out of the dark and manifesting themselves in the light now, whether it's in Disney or the Grammys or in our school curriculums or on the street.
And I'm going to stop rambling now, and I'm going to rely on you to help me figure out what is going on, what you call a tasks of knowledge or an intuition.
Help me put some structure to it.
Help me with the vocabulary.
Help me with naming things because something's going on and it's deeply troubling me.
And I need your help to name what's going on.
Well, if we read the literature, and I always like to turn to the literature to the Marxist literature in particular that has been published, especially the stuff that was published from the Frankfurt School guys in the United States following World War II.
If we read through that, we have, for example, Eros and Civilization being written in 1955 by Herbert Marcuse.
And he's very clear, actually.
As I often do, I remember the page number for a strange reason.
It turns out on page 211, he's explaining, or at least in the kind of standard copy, page 211 of my copy at any rate, he's explaining that he calls it in the Greek, he puts it in the Greek, orthos, pederastine, which I'm sure I mispronounced, but it translates as correct pederasty, is in fact the road to higher culture.
What you see actually is in these kind of pre-Christian cults where you see these laws that were being laid down and you wonder what was going on is what you had was this obsession with obtaining power, the obsession with finding a God who would give you a shortcut to power and might and the ability to rule over others.
And you had the Jewish religion come in and eventually the Christian religion come in and say, no, that's not right.
You're going to be humble before God.
You're not going to rule because God is sovereign.
And you have a completely new ethic come in at that place.
But in these earlier religions, these power-driven religions, what you have is very frequently rituals, and those rituals are supposed to confer power.
And what Herbert Marcuse is writing about in that book is, in fact, that in pre-Socratic Greece, that these rituals were done very much so with kind of a sexual intent.
And the goal is, in fact, to initiate children into sex while simultaneously initiating adults into a cult which more or less can be regulated by blackmail, which I think makes the tie to Jeffrey Epstein and his island very clear, who are the stakeholders in our so-called stakeholder capitalism that we have.
Well, I don't know, but I have a feeling that the way you become one is you go to Jeffrey's Island or the equivalent so that they can blackmail and control you.
The goal of this was supposed to be sexual liberation from Marcuse.
The goal was to release the sexual energy, the libido, in order to become a creative force outside of the productive forces of capitalism or outside the productive forces of the society that we live in.
And so you see this kind of return to those power-driven religions.
You see this return to those to the rituals that are supposed to release the libido, and that requires sexual initiation, especially of young people.
Now, of course, what that does is deranges them.
It's very unhealthy for children to be sexualized, and they develop personality disorders, and then they can be driven to act quite wildly.
And we see this, for example, in Nashville yesterday, there were these marches, thousands of children abandoning the schools allegedly to, I don't remember, they were saying that we have to fight guns.
You know, we have to fight, we have to have gun control because one of the, there was a shooting, of course, with a trans shooter.
And my feeling, of course, is that they're trying to hide the fact that the shooter was trans by talking only about the guns so vigorously and vociferously.
But what you see is this derangement in the young people who are not aware of what's going on in the world, but are willing to go take political action to raise what they call good trouble, which is a communist phrase that means direct action under a communist activism.
And this is happening kind of all over the country yet again.
It happened in 2020.
We were all very aware of that.
And the goal, I think, of these cultic religions is to release that, to pin up that energy in the children, the young people, and release it.
This is what Mao Zedong did in China, not so much necessarily through transgender or anything like this, but through identity politics.
He created identity categories and he worked up the children.
And what do they do?
They went out and they attacked their parents.
They went out and attacked the teachers.
They went out and destroyed the existing society.
And I think we're seeing the exact same thing.
We're tapping into children's desire for power and deranging them with it.
And the Judeo-Christian ethic of the West, whether someone is Christian or Jewish or not, is kind of irrelevant, is a target because it encourages humility.
It encourages turning the other cheek.
It encourages a number of virtues, the meek shall inherit the earth and so on, that are being perverted.
So that I mean, again, I just think that you're not wrong to suspect that this is a turn toward whether you want to call them Babylonian pagan cults or whether you want to call it pre-Christian and point to the South American human sacrifice cults.
I think that woke has this inside of it.
You know, I was just reading your article on newdiscourses.com called Wokeness and the Structure of Cults.
And you ask a great question.
How can so many people be initiates into a cult without even knowing the cult is a cult?
And I think if you were to ask most woke people, I think they would know the word woke and they would say, yes, I'm woke because they think that's a good word and you have to be woke.
And they would say, okay, they would have sort of message tracks.
Like they would have a few lines that they've heard other people say a lot and that maybe they had to do a call and response in some way in school.
I don't think they would have thought deeply about it, but they would have their, okay, someone talked about global warming.
Here's a message track on that.
Someone talked about gender.
I have a message track on that.
On reparations, in Canada, you can see the woke cult working up land acknowledgements.
We are on land stolen from the first people.
Like they have their talking points down, Pat, and they would feel like they're in good company and socially compliant, but they would never say, I'm part of a cult.
They would never say that.
They would always say they came to that conclusion thoughtfully on their own.
I think some of them would say they never heard the other side of the story as well, that they would be truly shocked that anyone didn't believe these things.
It would be like, you know, saying to someone, oh, it's okay to litter.
What?
That's insane.
Everyone knows don't litter.
Like, it's just obvious.
Like, cover your nose when you sneeze.
That's not even political.
We just do it.
How do you answer a cult whose cult members don't even know they're in it?
I mean, you have to show them that what they're participating in is operating in that way.
Unfortunately, with the woke cult, it's actually a bit obvious.
They're rather vicious to people who disagree with the doctrine.
And in fact, maybe the most obvious sign that will reach a lot of people is, in fact, that the level with which it divides even families, not just friends, but families, that's something you don't see anywhere short of religious or cult conviction.
And I think that that's the way that you can get their attention.
We see the way that people get pulled into this cult, though, is through moral and kind of social requirement.
I saw a meme the other day, and it said it was some leftist meme.
And it said, it showed some guy, and it said, is this criticism of Joe Biden a Republican criticism or a cool criticism?
It's kind of indicative of what I'm talking about.
And then, you know, I saw a coloring book that's used there in Ontario.
Somebody sent me today with children.
This coloring book that's paid for by the Canadian government.
And it's, of course, just horrific.
And the last letter, Z or Z, maybe.
I don't know how you guys say it up there, is for Z-ser pronouns with Z-E-Z-E-R or something made up.
And it talks about the importance of initiating people through their pronouns.
And so what you do is you get these children thinking, this is what's socially acceptable to do.
This is what it means to be a good person.
This is, not just children, adults as well.
This is what it means to fit in in kind of this new program.
What It Means to Fit In00:05:39
And when they're morally and socially committed, they have very deep ties, even though they don't know what they're participating in.
They have no idea that they're participating in a kind of very organized program.
But there is an opportunity to show them that they're being brought into a very organized program.
I have a friend quite famous now, especially also in Canada.
He goes by Billboard Chris.
His name's Chris Elston.
And he told me that at one point that he had a run in with Scientology and he started to flirt with Scientology in the 1990s.
And he said, if there was the internet, I never would have got in because I would have been able to see deeper into what it was than what they were telling me as they brought me in.
And so there's an opportunity to show people, and this is kind of what I do: look, this is what the literature says.
This is how they're going to treat you.
Right now, it's all affirmation, but the next step is ruthless criticism of yourself and teaching you to self-criticize.
It's guilt and shame spirals so that you'll become emotionally and morally locked into this.
And that's why I wrote these essays that you're referring to on New Discourses: to try to show people that there's a structure to cults.
There's an outer layer where the people are just kind of committed because they think it's the right thing to do, and an inner layer where they've studied the doctrine and they know it and they push it.
And then there's the inner circle, which is kind of the leaders.
And those are the people who I think have been through these rituals we were discussing previously.
The Jeffrey Epstein story was shocking in that it had always been a conspiracy theory, a rumor, a flight of fancy, a wildness, and a lack of believability.
A couple of things I think really were key moments there when that reporter, in an open mic mistake, said, Oh, yeah, we had the Epstein stuff, but we weren't allowed to run with it.
Here, let me just refresh your memory about that clip.
Take a look at this.
I've had the story for three years.
I've had this interview with Virginia Roberts.
We would not put it on the air.
First of all, I was told, who's Jeffrey Epstein?
No one knows who that is.
This is a stupid story.
Then the palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.
We were so afraid we wouldn't be able to interview Kate that we that also quashed the story.
And then Alan Dershowitz was also implicated in it because of the planes.
She told me everything.
She had pictures.
She had everything.
She was in hiding for 12 years.
We convinced her to come out.
We convinced her to talk to us.
It was unbelievable what we had.
Clinton, we had everything.
I tried for three years to get it on to no avail, and now it's all coming out.
And it's like these new revelations, and I freaking had all of it.
I'm so pissed right now.
Like every day, I get more and more pissed because I'm just like, oh my God, what we had was unreal.
Other women backing it up.
Hey, yep.
Brad Edwards, the attorney, three years ago, saying, there will come a day when we will realize Jeffrey Epstein was the most prolific pedophile this country has ever known.
I had it all three years ago.
That was astonishing.
And then when Melinda Gates, wife of one of the richest, most powerful men in the world, divorced Bill Gates and explicitly said his refusal to stop going to meet Jeffrey Epstein, and credible reports say it was literally dozens of times.
And to publicly say that's why she was divorced.
And you can imagine she would have objected many times before that ultimate move.
Like imagine how many times she said, stop, don't.
And imagine how many times he refused.
Here's a reminder of Melinda Gates describing that.
You know, it was also widely reported that Bill had a friendship or business or some kind of contact with Jeffrey Epstein and that you were not that that was very upsetting to you.
Did that play a role in the divorce at all in this process?
Yeah, as I said, it's not one thing.
It was many things that I did not like that he'd had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, though.
Then you made that clear to him.
I made that clear to him.
I also met Jeffrey Epstein exactly one time.
Did you?
Yes, because I wanted to see who this man was.
And I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door.
He was abhorrent.
He was evil personified.
I had nightmares about it afterwards.
So, you know, my heart breaks for these young women because that's how I felt.
And here I'm an older woman.
My God, I feel terrible for those young women.
It was awful.
You felt that the moment you walked in.
I didn't realize that.
Yeah.
And you shared that with Bill and he still continued to spend time with him?
Any of the questions remaining about what Bill's relationship there was, those are for Bill to answer.
But I made it very clear how I felt about him.
And then, of course, the insanity of him hanging himself, killing himself in jail, and the security cameras weren't working, and the guards were sleeping.
I think right or left, rich or poor, black or white, I think people realized, oh my God, that is a true story, not just the stuff of, you know, Hollywood rumors or the movie Eyes Wide Shut.
Hermetic Principles and Transformation00:11:58
And so let me ask you about these masters of the universe.
I think some people said, well, it was all about extortion and blackmail.
So it was like a CIA or Mossad operation where every powerful person was compromised and then they could be part of an establishment agenda.
That rings true.
But are these people in the center of a cult?
Do they have a quasi-religion or do they have some belief system other than power and blackmail?
Like who would, and again, I'm not looking for conspiracy theories.
I'm just looking to understand who would promote this and who would revive the predation of children?
Who would do that?
Well, that's a difficult question.
And without being too speculative, but what is less difficult is to see that what is going on with this ideology, the woke ideology, for example, or even communism earlier, is actually a revival of these ancient religions that are decried as heresies and evil in the Bible.
These are religions known as Hermeticism and Gnosticism.
And it is very likely that people that have been initiated at the highest levels are very aware that they are being given very powerful tools, allegedly tools of transformation, which is, of course, a word that we see everywhere now, transform this, transform that.
The Sustainable Development Goals are 17 goals to transform our world, kind of see this everywhere.
And the Hermetic religion is actually the easiest way to kind of make sense, honestly, of the trans phenomenon as well.
And so when you see it in that context, who would revive this kind of practice?
Well, the answer might be Hermeticists.
Hermeticism was an ancient alchemical religion.
It's credited to northern Egypt in roughly the same time as Socrates or Plato, but it must be somewhat earlier because Plato refers to it in the Phaedrus quite explicitly.
So it must predate Plato by some years.
And it's allegedly a religion of magic, of magical powers.
And the goal is, in fact, to realize that you are, in fact, a part of God and that God can't actualize himself as the deity until human beings realize that they, in fact, are God and that, in fact, God will come to know himself through them coming to know themselves.
And so it has these principles that seem very familiar to the kind of woke behavior, the principle of polarity.
There are no true opposites.
opposites are the same in kind, but different in degree.
So you see the blurring of boundaries and the mixture of concepts to where they are seen as, I mean, the technical word is the dialectical opposites.
Hegel reinvented this religion for the Western context in the early 1800s.
Marx picked up the tools and ran with them.
And everything, I think, follows from there.
But there's also this desire.
The goal with a hermetic religion is that you are, as a human being, that you are to ascend yourself spiritually and leave your body behind and become a self-begotten being.
In other words, become your own Christ.
And you are to become self-begotten, at which point you will be able to re-merge with the one, the total, the all.
And so we see this kind of, I know it sounds a little bit crazy to say, but with the trans phenomenon, it's very obvious that the goal is, in fact, to realize that you are other than the way that society has told you that you are, and then to make yourself into that image and then make society or the all accept you as you now see yourself.
And that's, in fact, exactly how the trans phenomenon works.
And so there are good reasons to believe that the people who are kind of in the secret halls of power behind this are probably likely aware that they are using kind of hermetic principles.
George Soros talks about the alchemy of finance, the alchemy of this, the alchemy of that.
He says he's an alchemist, but that's hermetic.
He very likely knows what he's talking about.
When we see the trans phenomenon, we see the desire to transcend the body, to leave behind all of its restrictions and to become a self-begetting entity.
Another principle is very infamous or famous.
A lot of Westerners believe it's satanic, which is called the principle of correspondence.
It's as above, so below, and as below, so above.
And this is actually the model of activism throughout all of Marxism.
As below, so above means that if you go do your praxis and you try to transform the world as a person down in the bottom part of society, as below, then you can actually be a historical change agent and transform the society, which is the thing that's above you.
And so that's praxis.
But when the society changes, it will condition everybody and socialize everybody into the new view of the world.
And that's what Marx called the inversion of praxis.
And so you get that cyclical as above, so below, as below, so above principle of correspondence applied through the activity of praxis and inversion of praxis in Marxism.
But this is just being applied to the body within the trans cult.
So I think that it's very likely that the people who've been at the highest levels of initiation in this know that they are organizing a religious cult based on secret knowledge of how to transform reality to be what they want it to be and at least make sense of these otherwise inexplicable sets of behaviors.
You know, I think you're right about destroying reality, remaking reality, transforming reality, the alchemy.
There's this enormous push on right now, and it's almost too hard to believe.
It's straight out of Orwell, by the way.
You know, Orwell would hold up two fingers and say, how many fingers in 1984?
And the answer was two, but you had to say three.
You had to force someone to say three.
And right now in woke education, two plus two equals four is literally being called white supremacist.
Two plus two equals five, and they'll have all sorts of proofs to show that this is true.
You must acknowledge that two plus two equals five, or you are a racist.
And I know a lot of viewers will say I'm making that up, and that's not the case, but it is, and I think it goes if you can dynamite your understanding of physics and biology to say, I don't know what a woman is, a man can be a woman.
If you can say a man can be a woman, of course you can say two plus two equals five.
You probably don't know what two plus two equals five until you're three or four years old.
Whereas even before we can remember or know language, we know what a mother is, we know what a woman is.
If you can say you don't know what a woman is, you can say that two plus two is five.
You can destroy everything.
I mean, remember the old saying, you join the army, they'll break you down and then build you back up into the man they want.
And that's a kind of conformity that you want in the military.
And probably it improves your strength and your discipline and your ability to take orders and your skills.
And we want that in the military.
You want order and you want conformity.
And that's what they're doing here.
They're breaking you down and rebuilding you.
And maybe that's why they have trouble with Christians, because Christians have something that doesn't want to be broken down.
I don't know of any truly Christian people who are woke.
Like, I don't think you're going to be a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew who's really Bible or Quran believing and woke because there's certain essential truths.
If you believe the Torah or the Koran is the perfect word of God, you will not believe that 2 plus 2 equals 5.
You can't.
And you see attempts to alter reality like that as diabolical.
I don't know.
Do you know of any true believing Jew, Christian, or Muslim who's woke?
No, and for the reasons that you have just explained, they have a commitment to something and a humility before that commitment.
And that thing is truth, whether they call it God, whether they call it the Logos, as you see in John chapter 1.
And so what a lot of people have missed about what is a woman is that when the Supreme Court justice that was being vetted by the Senate, Kentaji Brown Jackson, got asked by Marsha Blackburn, Senator Blackburn, who I'm proud to say is my senator, when she was asked what is a woman, and she couldn't answer.
But she said, I don't know, I'm not a biologist.
She picked the wrong kind of expert.
It shouldn't depend on biology.
But the fact of the matter is that what she said is you have to ask an expert.
You have to ask somebody who has access to the complicated secret knowledge.
And that's what they're doing with children.
And that's part and parcel with these kinds of cults.
That's why there's two plus two equals five or three or whatever, as long as it's that we don't admit that it's always four.
And the reason is because that they make it so that you cannot understand reality for yourself.
The only way you can understand reality is through the so-called experts in the cult who will tell you what the answers of reality are.
In other words, these people therefore have complete power over you.
But this is, again, it's the same thing that you would see in this hermetic religion.
I didn't, you know, most people don't know what it is, so it's hard to break into this in just a dialogue in a few minutes.
But the point of the Hermetic religion is, in fact, that all distinctions are illusions.
There are no true distinctions.
And so if you say two plus two equals four, well, that's a distinction.
That's a true statement and not a false statement, as a distinction.
It's two plus two equals four, not five or three or 17 or any other number.
And that's a distinction.
There is man and there is woman, and that's a distinction.
There is good and there is evil, and that's a distinction.
There is man and there is God, and that's a distinction.
And in fact, those are all the kinds of distinctions that they want to obliterate because the belief is that distinctions are an illusion.
So when you have a distinction, that's the principle of polarity I mentioned earlier.
The idea is that the distinction is false.
Things that are opposite are, in fact, the same in kind but different in degree, is the way that it's phrased.
And what you need in order to see how they are the same in kind but different in degree is an expert who tells you, or a cult guru who tells you how the information being brought in by your senses or through evidence or through logic is not correct.
It's not complete, as a matter of fact, because what it does is it establishes distinctions that have to be obliterated.
And so what you're doing is creating a cult-like circumstance where you are conditioning the people, and I reiterate children to not know how to answer questions about the world for themselves, to not be able to apprehend the reality that they live in for themselves, and to have to ask the guru, have to be told what the right answer is, what you're supposed to do in this situation.
Is that a man?
Is that a woman?
And if they can break your mind that way, and this is sort of the point of the scene in 1984 where he's being forced to acquiesce to 2 plus 2 equals 5, then at the end of the book comes true.
The Gods of Copybook Headings00:03:10
You know, it was Winston had conquered himself at the end.
He came to love Big Brother.
And in other words, you can enter into a state of total dependency.
And a state of total dependency has one mind with no distinctions, which is the reactualization of what the Hermetic religion believes is God, one mind with no distinctions.
You know, everything you say makes me have five more questions or observations.
You made me think of the four olds, which was a concept that the Red Guards, the Cultural Revolution Communists, the Maoists in China came up with.
The four olds, old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits had to be thrown out.
And by the way, China, you know, Trudeau once said China is the country he most admires, and then he immediately said for its basic dictatorship that allows it to move quickly on the environment.
That's actually how he ended that quote.
There are many things to admire about China.
It's history, its civilization, its culture, its language.
There's many amazing things, very admirable things.
And those were the four things that Mao wanted to stamp out.
Old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits.
Not all of them were perfect.
There were atrocious things in every country in the world.
But imagine destroying the history of an ancient civilization like China because Mao wanted to raise things down.
He wanted to renumber the years.
In fact, he wanted to give people numbers instead of names.
He wanted to give human beings numbers instead of names.
You made me think of that poem again, The Gods of the Copybook Headings.
And can I read one paragraph to it?
And I did this with Barbara Kay the other day, and I think she was surprised by this.
This is Rudyard Kipling in 1919.
His poem is The Gods of the Copybook Headings, which were the proverbs that children were taught their handwriting.
They would write again and again and again, little proverbs just by rote, just to practice doing their writing, their penmanship.
And you may as well write thoughtful proverbs, you know, to drum it into the mind by repetition.
And so Kipling called those the gods of the copybook headings.
Those were the things at the top.
And I was thinking about two plus two is four.
That's referenced in this poem in 1919.
Let me quote to you.
It's a long poem.
I'm just going to read one paragraph of it.
In the Carboniferous epoch, we were promised abundance for all by robbing selected Peter to pay for Collective Paul.
But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy.
And the gods of the copybook heading said, if you don't work, you die.
But here's the next one.
Listen to this one.
Then the gods of the market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew.
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true.
That all is not gold that glitters.
And two and two make four.
And the gods of the copybook headings limped up to explain it once more.
Seize the Means of Unity00:14:47
And as it will be in the future, it was at the birth of man.
There are only four things certain since social progress began.
I won't read anymore, but even 100 years ago, and this was written right after the Great War, in 1919, when all sorts of eternal truths were smashed, I think the First World War smashed a lot of people's views about what the world was like.
And I think this was Kipling's way of saying, two plus two equals four.
And it's incredible that he said that 104 years ago, because that is the front line today in woke education.
And I don't know.
I think they smash everything just to dislodge us and make us long for some sort of home and some sort of safe place.
They have to smash everything that we believe in to free us up for them to capture.
I think that's why they go after institutions like Christianity and frankly like the NFL, like the military, like everything masculine, everything strong, everything certain.
They have to smash.
That's why that's the whole take-one thing.
They're trying to wokeify everything to unmoor people that they can then recapture and reprogram.
Yeah, well, you mentioned Mao, and I'll point out that Mao made it very clear there was a formula he used to transform the population of China, which he articulated first in 1942.
And that formula was unity, criticism, unity.
So it's a three-stage.
This is at the heart of cults, by the way, unity, criticism, unity.
So he says that the first part, you begin by creating a desire for unity.
And what does that look like in the modern era?
Well, we just want to have an inclusive environment.
We want to make sure it's a place where everybody feels like they belong.
Don't you want unity in our country?
And then when you desire to fit in, then they start to point out why you are the problem.
Well, you've got these bourgeois attitudes.
Your family comes from money.
You have racist beliefs.
You subscribe to this masculine, you know, whether it's the NFL or whatever else.
And this makes other people feel uncomfortable.
So we can't have unity until you stop doing that.
So you have to be criticized for all of the things you like, for your adherence to the old culture, and that has to be destroyed.
And for anything outside of the cult, you have to be criticized.
And then you have to adopt that criticism to the point of self-criticism.
You have to criticize yourself.
You have to feel guilty.
You have to feel shame.
You have to confess.
And when you start that process of guilt and shame and confession, there's all kinds of psychological things that happen to transform your commitments to this cult.
So you start with a desire for unity, and then this criticism cycle that they called struggle, struggle sessions, kicks in.
And then on the other hand, he says, so that we can have unity, the third part of the formula, we can have unity according to a new standard.
So they have to make sure that there's no unity of people in, say, their freedom or their ability to think, but there will be a new standard.
And the new standard he called in China in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, he called it socialist discipline.
We call it inclusion.
We call it sustainability.
There's a new standard.
And if you don't sign up for the standard, you're the problem.
You are the reason that we can't have unity.
We would all be in union if we would all work together.
There would be complete national unity.
There would be unity between people if we could just get rid of these things.
And so we have like racism and sexism and unsustainable practices.
And so if we can just get people to commit to that, if we can just get people to completely abandon their old culture, which is filled with all these points where unity under a new standard is impossible, then we can move forward into a new world.
And that new world will be completely unified, but under socialist discipline managed by what he called democratic centralism, which is a neat way to say stakeholder capitalism, I think.
And so you see that the formula that's being played out is, on the one hand, Maoist.
And on the other hand, if you study Mao, it's very obvious.
It's not actually that controversial that Mao was running a gigantic personality cult around himself.
I've talked to Chinese immigrants who were there under Mao, who are completely committed, some of whom were red guards as children.
And they're now American and they now are freedom-loving.
And they say that when Mao died, they were lost souls for years.
How could God die?
How is that possible?
They were completely brainwashed into a cult of believing in Mao's deity.
And so I think it becomes very clear that what we're dealing with is Western Maoism and that what it's doing is creating, just like we saw in China in the 1940s and 50s and 60s, creating a national cult underneath the woke ideology.
Now, I again remind you that the brand names have changed.
They're different words that they use, unity, belonging.
I mean, Joe Biden pushed for unity after he got elected, and American conservatives were savvy enough to realize that unity only meant what would only be possible under some new standard, and we rejected it.
And now he doesn't talk about that anymore.
So you can push these things back.
But diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, these words, a very welcoming space.
These are the same idea in new clothes for Mao's formula to transform society into a gigantic Maoist cult.
And like I said, I think that the new standard, the socialist discipline, is what Klaus Schwab refers to as a sustainable and inclusive future that he refers to all the time.
I mean, he just said, in fact, that we were, there was an interview I saw that went around on the social media with him just the other day.
And he's there saying that we're going to move away from an economy of production and consumption into one of sharing and caring.
And according to what?
According to sharing according to their socialist discipline standards and caring according to what they say you have to care about under, again, their standards.
So I think it becomes very obvious what's actually occurring when we take a step back and start to think of this as a large international scale at this point cult that's forcing people to feel like horrible people if they don't participate in the cult.
You know, the word mind virus, Elon Musk uses that word a lot.
And I believe in that, by the way.
You know, just like laughing is contagious, yawning is contagious.
You see when someone yawn, you want to yawn.
The whole way laugh tracks work is you hear someone else laughing, you think, oh, it's a funny joke, I'd better laugh along.
There's all these deep things within us, suicide.
It happened in clusters because people say, oh, that's something that my peers contemplate.
There's so many ideas that transmit socially.
I think the real virus during the last few years of the lockdown were mind viruses.
They were assisted by the destruction of the four olds.
All of a sudden, we had to wear masks.
All of a sudden, we couldn't visit our families.
All of a sudden, we couldn't have rituals that involved dinner tables, churches, funerals, weddings.
You know, they were destroying the four olds, ideas.
You can't believe in natural immunity.
You can't culture, customs, habits.
There's so many terrifying and eerie things here.
And the mind virus, the vocabulary, putting words into children's minds and drumming it into their minds a thousand times.
They really are transforming people.
It really is what I think you called magic before.
It is a kind of magic.
There is nothing more powerful than a person.
It's the ultimate resource.
And I think for all the greed of the socialists and the communists, they were greedy, sure, for money, for land, for factories, for bread.
Yes, yes, yes.
But really what they wanted is the hearts and minds of people.
That's what they knew was the most valuable.
And I think they're right on that.
We've had you here for almost an hour, and I feel guilty whenever I keep you so long.
And I feel bad that I do so much talking, but really, I'm just trying to find my way to an answer here.
These are subjects that, frankly, I didn't contemplate in the first half of my life.
I just didn't feel like they were live issues.
I think that I was just thinking about the movie Tootsie, which is the first time I really, it was from the early 80s.
Dustin Hoffman dressed up as a woman.
The joke was, it wasn't a sexual thing.
He was just trying to get a job he couldn't as a male actor.
And that was, I think, the experience for the vast majority of people for what transgender is or trans, like it was a quirky oddity, almost something funny.
But we live in a world where that madness is the norm.
And if you're not trans, you're the absurdity.
We'll have to keep talking about this.
And I hope you don't mind if I call on you from time to time.
I know I should listen more than I talk, but I want to see your reactions to some of my ideas and some of my thoughts.
And it makes me think of things in real time, like the ancient laws and what they were enacted to replace.
I don't think we think about we throw away.
If you throw away our four olds, well, what will fill that void?
And I think the answer is almost always something worse.
Dr. James, let me give you the last word, because if you had to sum up the state of things, what would you say?
Well, I mean, what I would like to actually say at the moment is something very close to what you were just saying a second ago.
And I think people don't understand this well enough.
We don't understand Marxism and Marxist thought well enough.
And this is ultimately, you know, again, the Gnostic and Hermetic ancient religion coming up in the modern era.
But what that is, is when we hear that, you know, we all know with Marx that what he wanted to do was seize the means of production.
That's the saying, right?
We're going to seize the means of production.
And everybody just assumes the surface level answer, the means of production of what?
And we think obviously, well, the factories, somebody with their hammer and somebody with their sickle, so the factories and the farms are going to seize the means of production of steel and grain, as Mao had it right before the Great Leap Forward that killed 55 million people because it was so disastrous.
But no, in fact, this is not correct.
The goal in Marxism was never to seize the means of production of material goods.
Those are merely the proxy.
Marx believed that material goods shape your reality, shape who you are as a human being.
Material production defines who you are, and your access to material goods and your standing in society defines who you are as a human being.
So, what they were actually seeking to seize the means of production of is man.
They wanted to seize the means of the production of man to make man into social man or socialist man.
The Soviets called it new Soviet man.
The goal was always to seize power over the minds and hearts of human beings so that you could transform them in society and the world to conform to Marxist ideology, to Marxist theory, which is a cult religion.
And so, when you realize that this is in a grand-scale eugenics program, if you're talking about controlling for the benefit, the greater good, the benefit of mankind, the production of man, you're talking about a eugenics program.
You can see why it's so horrible.
But you can also understand that what woke is doing is trying to see, it no longer believes that economic conditions are what produces man.
It's cultural conditions produce man.
And so, if you can seize the cultural conditions and the production of culture, then you can actually produce new kinds of human beings.
And this, I think, reifies, it becomes quite physically real, manifest with the transgender phenomenon.
But this goes all the way back to the same hermetic concept: that if you can seize production of humankind, then you can bring humankind back to his spiritual fulfillment.
And I think that this is why this Marxist thought has always been a religion and a cult religion, as a matter of fact.
And that I don't think it's comprehensible unless we understand it this way.
But, you know, as a final thought, since that's what you asked for, I would like people to look around the world at what's happening around them, whether it's with the transition, whether it's with the critical race theory, whether it's Marxism, it doesn't matter, but it's sustainability with the environmental stuff, and ask themselves, in what way does this look like they are seizing the production of man, that they are transforming how human beings understand themselves and their role in the world.
And if we start to think about it that way, it actually starts to make sense in a very perverse and dark way.
And we start to understand that it is these ancient dark religions, which is kind of where we started this conversation.
Where's the state of the world?
It's that human beings in the West are waking up to this very quickly.
I just returned from Brussels.
I was invited to speak at the EU Parliament about this.
Europe is trying to figure out how to stop the woke before it takes over Europe as well.
And so I was invited to speak there.
Americans, they admitted, and I see as well, have woken up very quickly.
Canadians are a bit lost, unfortunately, but at the same time, people are becoming quite aghast with what they're seeing.
They're seeing Chris Elston get assaulted in Vancouver with the police laughing at him while he's literally being punched in the face by a transgender activist.
There are people who still agree with this and think he had it coming, which is horrific.
But at the same time, these are the kinds of things that wake people up.
So I think the state of the world is that we are actually approaching a pivot in the West where people, I don't think, believe these people anymore.
And I think the number of people who don't believe them is increasing very rapidly, which will create a very interesting, to put it mildly, next 12 to 18 months.
I expect that they will, the left will respond by becoming increasingly dangerous and overt.
Because for them, this is religion.
Increasingly Unbelievable00:00:56
This is everything.
The only way to achieve the true and right end of history in which utopia descends upon us, the kingdom of God arrives on earth, is for them to get 100% of their way all the time.
But at the same time, they've lost, they're very rapidly losing the grip over larger and larger numbers of people who are increasingly horrified by what they're seeing happen around them.
Well, I hope you're right.
I don't think I'm as optimistic as you, but maybe that's because I'm in Canada and you're in the United States.
What a pleasure to spend the last hour with you.
Thank you very much, and thanks for listening to me brainstorm in real time.
But it is helping me clarify certain things, and I look forward to our next conversation.