By Karla Treadway | Substack.com/@TheSovereignSphere

Interviewing James Lindsay was a full-circle moment for me. I was slow out of the gate to wake up to a lot of what has been happening around us, and the reason for that slowness is not stupidity; it is the simple fact that these things run so deep and are so decades in the making that you cannot just skip straight to the punchline and expect anyone to believe you.

You have to walk people through it bit by bit, the way James does, because the moment you try to shortcut the process, people assume you have lost your mind. I learned that the hard way when I took what I had absorbed from his work straight to my own school board and watched them decide I was a conspiracy theorist rather than someone who had simply done the reading.

Years ago I listened to a podcast of his titled “Groomer Schools 1.”¹ It explained something that rearranged how I understood everything happening in education.

The goal of Marxism, at its core, is disruption. It requires revolution, and you cannot have a revolution if people are content, if families are intact, if children trust their parents more than they trust the institutions raising them. So there are techniques, deliberate and studied techniques, for pulling children away from their families, and one of the most effective is confusing them sexually at as young an age as possible. Once you understand that framework, you understand exactly why schools have filled themselves with bizarre gender ideologies and sexual content that seem to come from nowhere. They do not come from nowhere. They come from a plan that predates most of us by decades, and Groomer Schools, along with the entire New Discourses catalogue, is where I would send anyone who wants to understand the mechanism rather than just react to the symptom.

That podcast was one of many things that cracked me open, and it is part of why I wanted James on this episode. I wanted to talk about Canada and America, about whether the West still includes Canada at all, and about what it actually means to protect something you can no longer clearly define.

What We Break Down

James opened by walking through the Grievance Studies Affair, the project he and Peter Boghossian ran in 2017 that got hoax papers accepted into peer-reviewed academic journals. These were not subtle papers. One argued that dog park behaviour could be used to assess rape culture in men. Another argued that straight men could cure their transphobia through anal penetration with sex toys. Another was a heavily disguised rewrite of the twelfth chapter of Mein Kampf, recast as a battle between competing schools of feminist thought, accepted by a feminist social work journal called Affilia. A paper submitted to the journal Fat Studies argued that bodybuilding itself was fat phobic.

And the one that frightened James most was still under review when they were exposed, a paper arguing that classrooms should rank students by privilege and subject the most privileged among them to what the peer reviewer called experiential reparations, with one reviewer specifically objecting that the proposal used too much compassion and should instead employ what is called the pedagogy of discomfort.

The point of the hoax was never just to embarrass academia. It was to prove that the criticism was accurate, that the ideas being smuggled into gender studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies departments were not fringe but foundational, and that those ideas were already flowing outward into the professional and administrative class that runs both public and private institutions across the West. As James put it, this pipeline fills the entire professional class and administrative bureaucracy of society, and that is why so many people are experiencing what feels like sudden madness even though the process has been running for decades.

From there we went back much further than 2017. James traced a lineage from the League of Nations after World War One, to the United Nations after World War Two, to a philosophy he calls mondialism, the French root of what most people simply call globalism. He explained how Pierre Elliott Trudeau helped launch the Club of Rome in Canada in the late 1960s, an organization built around neo-Malthusian fears of overpopulation and the belief that global coordination was necessary to prevent environmental collapse.

At the same time, in the same decade, a separate current was building inside the Frankfurt School and its successors, a neo-Marxist reworking of old economic materialism into identity politics. James described the relationship between these two currents as symbiotic, with neo-Marxism becoming what he called a parasite on the mondialist movement, using the language of solving the world’s problems together as cover for a project aimed at weakening strong, sovereign nations so they would eventually submit to centralized global authority.

He connected this directly to George Soros and the Open Society Foundation, describing the strategy as understanding that a powerful, independent United States would never willingly submit itself to something like a global European Union unless it was weakened first. And he argued that this same fused ideology, part globalist, part Marxist, has quietly captured the Democratic Party in the United States, the Liberal Party in Canada, and Labour in Britain since the late 1960s, more than fifty years of drift that most people never noticed because it happened gradually enough to feel like business as usual.

The Part That Changed How I See Everything

The section of this conversation I think about the most is when James walked through a Soviet program from 1923 called Korenizatsia. Stalin, working under Lenin, went to the various ethnic minorities across the newly formed Soviet Union and told them that the ethnic Russians were trying to force assimilation on them, and that under Soviet socialism they would instead be allowed to keep their own languages, their own schooling, their own political structures, so long as those structures were more thoroughly socialist than the ones the Russians themselves were using. Anyone who objected to the radicalism of these new policies was accused, in James’s words, of great Russian chauvinism. Within six years the program had produced exactly what you would expect: ethnic infighting, corruption, and a fractured society, at which point Stalin reversed course entirely and reunified everything under Russification.

Mao imported it wholesale into China to dismantle the nationalist party before consolidating everything under one language and one country once he had taken power. And James argues it is the same underlying structure being run today under the language of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), and post-national identity, a temporary emphasis on difference and grievance used to break down existing unity, followed eventually by a new, centrally controlled unity on someone else’s terms. He calls this pattern unity, criticism, unity, borrowing Mao’s own description of how the process works, and once you hear it laid out that plainly, it becomes very difficult to look at modern institutional language the same way again.

For My Canadian Friends

We spent real time on the strange, specific history between our two countries, starting with the fact that George Washington actually tried to bring Quebec into the American Revolution in 1775 as a fourteenth colony, a plan that failed largely because of winter. James was blunt about why no serious American wants Canada as the fifty-first state today, saying that Americans do not want to import forty million people who are, in his words, to the left of California. That comment lands differently once you understand the deeper argument underneath it, which is that Canada absorbed the mondialist project more completely and more quietly than the United States did, in part because Canada never had a founding built around suspicion of centralized authority the way the American Puritans did.

We also talked about Justin Trudeau discouraging displays of the Canadian flag and describing Canada as post-national, followed by Mark Carney suddenly reviving Canadian pride during the Elbows Up moment against Trump. James called this exactly what it looks like: a form of trauma bonding—the same institution that told you your identity was shameful later handing that identity back to you as a reward for aligning against a common enemy.

Why You Need to Know Who You’re Really Fighting

The reason I wanted to bring James on, and the reason I want you to actually watch this rather than just read a summary of it, is that so many people right now are picking fights with the wrong targets because they do not understand the roots of what they are actually up against. People argue about individual politicians, individual policies, individual scandals, without ever connecting those things to a program that has been running consistently since the 1920s and refined repeatedly since.

James said something toward the end of our conversation that I think is the entire point of doing this kind of work. He said that most people have never been taught this history at all, that even he could not properly define the difference between socialism and communism until well into adulthood, and that the entire reason he does what he does is to read primary sources directly to people because most people will never sit down and read Mein Kampf, Stalin’s writings, or the founding documents of critical theory on their own.

This episode covers decades of ground, and it does not offer a quick punchline because there is not one. Understanding this properly takes the same patience it took me to get here myself.

Watch the full episode of The Sovereign Sphere with James Lindsay² to hear all of this in his own words, including his answer to the question I asked him at the end: which tool he believes is the most effective one we have left to fight back with.

1. youtube.com/watch?v=tDEP0JGW3c8

2. youtube.com/watch?v=PeD-Hn1VcM4

 

Originally published at substack.com/@thesovereignsphere