From peer-review scandal to cultural warning: Dr. James Lindsay comes to Freedom Fest

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

James Lindsay voted for Democrats into his thirties. He will tell you that himself, and he’ll tell you exactly why. He knew he disliked George W. Bush. He knew Bush was a Republican. The other side, he figured, must be better.

“That was the depth of my political analysis right there,” Lindsay said.

He means it as a confession, not a punchline.

He was, at the time, a mathematician with a PhD from the University of Tennessee, living in Maryville in the foothills of the Smokies, running a business that fused martial arts and massage therapy. Not exactly the profile of someone who would end up warning the European Parliament about the collapse of Western civilization. But that was before a peer reviewer’s note about a single word in a paper changed the course of his life.

Lindsay speaks at the RMV Freedom Fest on Saturday, June 27, at the Douglas County Fairgrounds in Castle Rock. His session is titled “Exposing Critical Theory in Plain English.” For those who have followed his work, the subject is familiar. For those who haven’t, the story of how he got there is worth knowing.

The paper that started it

Over roughly 10 months spanning 2017 and 2018, Lindsay and two collaborators, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, wrote and submitted fabricated academic papers to peer-reviewed journals in gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, fat studies and related fields. 

Their goal was to find out whether those journals would publish work that was deliberately absurd, so long as it was dressed in the right ideological language.

They wrote 20 papers. Seven were accepted for publication. Four were in print before the project was exposed.

One of those papers advocated what Lindsay described as “lightly abusing” privileged students in the classroom as an educational opportunity to teach them about their own privilege. 

The trio expected rejection. 

Instead, reviewers wrote back enthusiastically, with one revision request. Drop the word “compassion,” they said, because showing compassion toward privileged children puts their needs above the needs of oppressed children.

“And immediately I started to think this is a real problem,” Lindsay told RMV. “I was very upset by that, actually.”

About two weeks after getting that review back, he had made a decision. He quit his job and dedicated what he describes as all of his available resources to studying what he had found and telling people about it as far and wide as he could. That was early 2018.

The project, which became known as the Grievance Studies Affair, broke publicly in October 2018 when the Wall Street Journal broke the story. The trio told their story in detail in Areo Magazine. It made Lindsay a national name almost overnight.

What changed, and what didn’t

Lindsay addresses his political journey head-on, and without the polished conversion story it might invite.

Both things changed, he said. “I feel like I was never woke and the left became more and more and more woke,” he said. “So I figure I was kind of a reasonable 90s Democrat, as people would say.”

“So very much like how Thomas Sowell famously said, what changed him from being a Marxist to a conservative was facts,” Lindsay said. “I also matured in my understanding of reality and politics.”

He was an academic. Politics wasn’t his subject. Then Trump came along, and something cracked open.

“And the biggest surprise, I honestly think, was when Trump started to expose that the media, the government and so many major institutions were lying,” Lindsay said. “The fake news thing that they were actually literally lying to us about the way the world works.”

The body of work

From that starting point, Lindsay built New Discourses and produced a body of work that has reached well beyond the American right. 

His book Cynical Theories, co-authored with Pluckrose, traces the intellectual origins of social justice activism from postmodern theory. Race Marxism followed. Then The Marxification of Education, which traces the ideological roots of what Lindsay argues is a deliberate transformation of American K-12 schooling. His most recent book, The Queering of the American Child, co-authored with Logan Lancing, was published in early 2024.

In March 2023, he delivered a speech at the European Parliament in Brussels that went viral across the conservative world for its plain-language explanation of what he calls the neo-Marxist cultural revolution and its warning to Europe not to follow the path of Anglophone countries.

He has appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, Glenn Beck, Fox News, and NPR. He has spoken at the Oxford Union. 

What he sees in Colorado

Lindsay said he has followed Colorado to a degree, even if the sheer number of states makes it hard to track every detail, and he defers to people on the ground for the bill-by-bill specifics. What he has seen has alarmed him.

“I’m particularly shocked with Colorado,” he said. “But these laws that the legislature’s been trying to push or these bills…where if the parents aren’t affirming a child’s gender identity, the school’s going to encourage, of course, the gender identity thing. And if the parents don’t affirm it, that the state can step in and challenge their parental rights or parental authority. That kind of stuff is, to me, very alarming.”

He named Erin Lee, executive director of Protect Kids Colorado, as someone he looks to for Colorado-specific detail. Lee is also speaking at Freedom Fest on Friday and has three ballot initiatives before Colorado voters this November targeting child trafficking penalties, girls’ sports and surgical restrictions on minors.

For parents trying to understand what is happening in their children’s classrooms, Lindsay points to something most of them will never have heard of: Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist educator. “He is the third most cited scholar in all of the humanities and social science,” Lindsay stated. “The third most important kind of academic name.”

Every college of education in North America, Lindsay said, has been using Freire’s methods under different names, sometimes credited and sometimes not, since roughly the mid-1990s. Most parents will recognize the product without knowing the source.

“A lot of parents will have heard of something called culturally responsive or culturally relevant teaching… And it’s literally just a repackaging of Paulo Freire’s education for liberation into a racial-based model,” he explained. 

The goal of what Lindsay calls critical pedagogy, he said, is explicit in the ideology’s own literature. “And I’m not exaggerating, by the way. This is actually in their own literature about what their goals are. It is to induce in their child an emotional crisis that they can use it to change their children’s value system to make them woke, specifically.”

Not just the left

One thing Lindsay has been writing about that may surprise a Freedom Fest audience is the concept he calls the “Woke Right,” his argument that the same ideological structure driving the left can infect the right as well.

The alt-right never went away, he said. It just operates with the same logic in the opposite direction. Identity politics, victimhood and the belief that power overrides morality are not exclusively left-wing tools.

“Instead of being anti-white, they’re pro-white,” Lindsay explained. “Instead of being anti-man, they’re pro-male. And on down the line, instead of being pro-LGBTQ, they’re anti-LGBTQ. And instead of being anti-Christian, they’ve got Christian nationalist tendencies where they want to have a Christian government. Not in the sense that we have Christians in government, but that we have a church-state fusion.”

He applies the same analysis regardless of which direction the radicalism runs.

What he wants from Saturday

Lindsay has been to Colorado more than a dozen times and said he genuinely enjoys coming out here. 

He wants attendees to leave knowing they are capable of grasping what is happening around them. “And when you understand it, I want them to be able to feel empowered to get involved, whether it’s in an organization like [Erin’s] or one of the other Colorado organizations that’s trying to stand up,” he said.

He is careful to separate his own lean from what he’s asking of others.

“I veer toward the Republicans at the moment because the Democrats are out of control,” Lindsay said. “But I want people to bring normalcy back into politics. Like, let’s ratchet away from this extremism.”

The RMV Freedom Fest runs June 26 and 27 at the Douglas County Fairgrounds in Castle Rock. Lindsay speaks Saturday on the main stage.