James Lindsay Ties Together all the Conspiracy Theories for School Board Members and the M4L Crowd.

What do David Hogg, Dylan Mulvaney and Public Schools all have in common? If you guessed communism, you are correct. According to James Lindsay, a podcaster, anti-communist consultant to Mom’s For Liberty and recent speaker at the Leadership Institute’s April 2023 “Learn Right Summit,” there is a vast global, “one world order” communist movement and his job was to explain the “Full Story” to the 300 summit attendees there to learn how to fight the “radical indoctrination” happening in our education system.

In April 2023, 300 school board members and conservative education activists from across the country gathered for a Leadership Institute conference in Sarasota. The conference, called “Learn Right,” provided board training for conservative school board members, campaign strategy and media trainings to current and potential school board members with the goal of “flipping” school boards, and it explained an incredibly complex,  communist conspiracy theory which, apparently, drives this current culture war against public education.

I wonder how many attendees used tax payer dollars to attend this event? Senator Sen. Rick Scott, Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez, Congressman Byron Donalds, Republican candidate for president Vivek Ramaswamy, New College of Florida President Richard Corcoran and Florida Department of Education’s Director of the Office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts, Terry Stoops, were all in attendance.

The only media coverage I could find of the event was a piece published by “Florida’s Voice,” a digital news network based in Southwest Florida, which describes itself as “a patriotic news network that you can trust to deliver the truth with no hidden agenda.”

Parts of the Learn Right conference were recorded and Lindsay’s session can be viewed as part of the Leadership Institute’s free, online “School Board Leadership” course. This is how I viewed it. (Another lesson in the course features Senator Ted Cruz explaining how Critical Race Theory, or CRT, has infiltrated our schools, where “children are being taught hatred and discrimination and lies,” and what can be done to “effectively push back against it” – which was, no surprise, elect conservative school board members.)

Lindsay began his presentation with a quiz. He gave the audience a definition and asked them to guess what word he defined. The definition was “An administered political economy in which shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal.” The audience yelled out “communism”. Lindsay said it was the definition of equity.

“But now you know the whole story, the full story. The E in DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, is ironically enough, the same as socialism. And so what’s happening to America? What are you dealing with your children in schools? What you are dealing with your businesses and the corporations? What’s happening? Why do we have Dylan Mulvaney? Why does he exist in a public sense? Why is he being promoted to the degree? Why is all this stuff happening? And the answer is “an administered political economy in which shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal,” which you guys identified as communism, which goes by the new brand name, equity.”

James Lindsay 4/23 Learn Right 

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For the record that is NOT the definition of equity. Equity is not a political economy. Equity is a noun which means “the quality of being fair and impartial” or “fairness.” According to the Cambridge Dictionary, Equity is “the situation in which everyone is treated fairly according to their needs and no group of people is given special treatment.” In the financial world, an equity is also defined as “one of the equal parts, or shares, into which the value of a company is divided.” Could Lindsay be conflating the two meanings or is he intentionally misdefining equity to fit his communist conspiracy narrative? I suspect it is the latter.

When I explain the meaning of equity in education, I use this example: If you have a child in a classroom with poor eyesight, who cannot see the board, you  get eyeglasses for that child. You don’t put glasses on ALL of the children (equality), you get glasses for the children that need them (equity). Equity in the classroom seeks to provide students what they need to be successful. It makes no promises of equal outcomes, instead is ensures “everyone is treated fairly according to their needs.”

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Getting back to Lindsay… Lindsay believes that, just like with Mao’s Cultural Revolution, America is currently undergoing a communist led cultural revolution, which has retrained teachers to indoctrinate students with transgender ideology and to make them hate America, all so the United Nation and the World Economic Forum can advance a global economy focused on Sustainable Development Goals. This, he says, is “the whole story” and it has been going on for decades.

Lyndsay blames communists for:

• Young people going to their state capitol to protest against pending anti-trans legislation.
• Twitter attacks against Mom’s for Liberty when they quote Hitler in their newsletter (which he equates to the “struggle sessions” Mao utilized to publicly humiliate and torture “class enemies.”)
• Using Social Emotional Learning (SEL) initiatives to collect data on children which will later (“when they turn 18, 19, and they decide they want to get a Glock”) be used to deny them a gun purchase.
• David Hogg’s activism – He says Hogg’s “whole purpose” is to make kids want to live in a country without a Second Amendment.
• Similarly, Dylan Mulvaney is apparently part of a global communist plot to make children break their relationships with their parents by getting them “hopped up on their sexuality” in a way that disturbs their parents and breaks their family apart.
• Decriminalizing pedophilia.
• The collection of data, collected in SEL (Social Emotional Learning) and CBE (Competency Based Education) programs, which will ultimately be used to sort the population into desirables and undesirables in the same way Mao sorted the Chinese population. Lindsay believes the data collected will be ultimately used to deny conservatives privileges, like the ability to own a firearm.
• Public-Private partnerships, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Sustainable Investing. 
• UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals – which he says is where the current education model is going and will train kids to think in terms of being global citizens: “And then down the line, they’ll say, Let’s make good on the relationship. Let’s empower the United Nations to make sure that you have privileges and duties.”
• Making kids hate America in order to break their relationship with the country they live in and accept global citizenship. Lindsay claims the proof is that Millennials and Gen. Z have already been indoctrinated to hate the country they live in – and now they are getting elected to office.
• A whole new social contract, ushered in by Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, which will get rid of our economy of production and consumption and move to one of “caring and sharing.”
• Eliminating all air travel and red meat consumption by 2050.
• “Completely radicalizing” millennials, who would rather live in their parents’ basement than work for a corporation that isn’t ESG compliant.
• The attempt to require vaccine passports.
• The Woke Agenda.
• Destroying anything they can’t control.

In his conclusion, Lindsay encouraged the summit audience to “take the time to learn to read doublespeak,” because “Satan manipulates the meanings of words to his advantage.” He urged them to not let the communists have your kids because “It doesn’t work if they don’t have your children.”

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There are people who are going to read this post and say “all of that is true.”

I, personally, believe these are a bunch of conspiracy theories all wrapped together, in part, to justify the current right wing assault on public education and to frighten voters to vote for Republicans. The problem is, it is very difficult to prove that something isn’t happening and now we have elected school board members being trained to believe these conspiracies are, in fact, true and that action needs to be taken, in our public schools, to stop this global communist takeover.

Are school board members listening to these trainings? Last month, Collier County School Board member, Jerry Rutherford, announced his plan to eliminate “Anti-American and anti-God” ideologies from their classrooms, specifically “Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the woke and gay agenda.” Rutherford’s elimination list also included Social Emotional Learning and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

When community members suggested such a discussion would be a waste of time, WINK News reported Rutherford’s response:

“But Rutherford sees it as anything but a waste of time. He said to look up the congressional record for the 1963 Communist agenda.

He said the Communist party “have been almost 100% successful in what they were trying to do.”

Rutherford said 44 of the 45 parts of the agenda have been completed and that 14 of them, he said, are taking place in our local schools.”

https://winknews.com/2023/08/21/collier-county-school-board-members-plan-eliminate-ideologies-from-classroom/

Gee… I wonder if he attended the Leadership Institute’s Learn Right Summit?