What follows is an unrolled Twitter thread from Josh Daws, host of the Great Awokening Podcast, a pod devoted to explaining the various concepts that comprise the tapestry of today’s Western zeitgeist, commonly called Woke Ideology.
I usually try and write my own material, but this thread was so good and helpful that I wanted to share it across platforms, and I thought it made the most sense as a full blog post. Thanks to Josh for such insightful explanations.
To start, Josh alludes to a meme with the bus driver from the Simpsons saying “Don’t make me tap the sign,” which sign contains a tweet that says, “It’s not rocket science guys. They’re just evil and want to diddle kids.” This is obviously referring to the current movement to indoctrinate kids in school with radical gender ideology. Doubtless you’re familiar with the fight in Washington and Florida over this, where the lines have been drawn clearly. The funny meme alluding to the battle might make a interesting point worth considering. But, as Josh explains, it is likely shortsighted and oversimplified.
Here is Josh’s helpful take, unrolled:
“I’m seeing a lot of people on the right share this meme. While it may be a strong satirical response to those who get lost in nuance, it fundamentally fails to recognize why the left wants to talk to your kids about sexuality. Let’s connect some dots:
“The left doesn’t want to diddle kids. They want to create little revolutionaries. To do that they need to sever the bond between students and the parents they believe are raising their children to be hateful bigots.
“In order to sever the bond between parents and their children, the left is using a two-pronged approach. Critical Race Theory and radical gender ideology (properly known as Queer Theory) are not two unrelated sets of ideas. They are two parts of the same strategy.
“CRT is usually the first set of ideas to be introduced. This is often enough to radicalize racial minorities, but it’s merely step one for white (or white adjacent) students.
“CRT instills in these students a negative self-identity as they’re taught to believe they’re recipients of enormous privilege that was stolen from others and that they are complicit in historic and ongoing injustice. In child terms, they’re taught to believe they’re bad.
“Apart from shame and guilt, this also gives them a worldview at odds with the one their parents grew up with and are trying to pass on to their kids. Step one is complete.
“Once CRT is done tearing down these kids and leaving them with a negative self-identity, Queer Theory (QT) is introduce and offers them a wide assortment of positive self-identities to choose from.
“Instead of living with the shame and guilt of being a member of the oppressive dominant culture, these students can be celebrated for coming out as gender nonbinary or pansexual.
“In an instant, these kids can trade their negative self-identity and all the accompanying guilt and shame of being an “oppressor” for a positive self-identity as a much-venerated “oppressed” minority.
“At this point, the left desperately wants this new identity to stay at school so it has time to be cemented before the parents find out. In the guise of helping these students, schools withhold this information about their child’s new identity from mom and dad.
“Once the parents do find out about their child’s new identity it is firmly in place and an adversarial relationship between the child and parents has been manufactured. It takes extraordinarily deft parenting to repair the relationship once it has reached this stage.
“The parents’ tendency will be to overreact and push the child further into the arms of the woke radicals who now have the little revolutionary they wanted from the beginning. The bond between the parents and child has been severed, ending the perpetuation of hate and bigotry.
“The left is determined to replicate this process in as many families as they can, using whatever means at their disposal. It is not about diddling kids. It is about capturing the minds of impressionable children.
“Unfortunately, this creates environments where actual predators can thrive. When young children are isolated from their parents, encouraged to adopt different beliefs, and keep secrets from their parents, they are made easy targets for abusers.”
(You might say, “But my school has Christian teachers and a Christian principal. They couldn’t possibly have this agenda.”)
“Hear me loud and clear on this. Most teachers love the kids in their classrooms and want only the best for them. (But) they have had their empathy for these students weaponized against them by leftist activists promoting educational programs that sound nice and caring.
“Highly empathetic teachers are being used to promote this agenda unaware of its insidious purpose. An example: I recently saw a teacher at a Christian school announce that she would no longer be using the words “mom,” “dad”, or “parents in her classroom. Her reason? She had just read a paper on the importance of making kids from non-traditional families feel included. She suggested replacing “Donuts with Dads” with “Bagels with Buds” or something of the such.
“This sounds like a very considerate thing to do for kids who might feel different because they don’t have a dad or they liv with their grandparents, but its purpose is to subtly chip away at the very idea of the normative nuclear family (a stated goal of the BLM organization.)
“Christians who think that we can embrace the ideas from CRT and reject the radical gender ideology need to realize how the former is used to prepare kids to accept the latter.
“These are your kids we’re talking about. The left wants them. They would love to sever your bond with them. They think your appeals to childhood innocence are an attempt to force heteronormativity on them. Seriously. They write papers on it. It’s not a secret agenda.” (Click here for James Lindsay’s three-part series walking through the whole agenda, looking at primary sources. Click on the channel name, and find the "videos" page to find the other videos in the three-part series; they're all called "Groomer Schools.")
“The meme I opened this thread with” (the “diddling your kids” meme) “is an easy response to the insanity we’re seeing today, but it is not a great explanation. We should take the time to help people see how nice-sounding programs are being used in the classroom to create little activists and put kids in danger.”
Wow. I’ve written in the past about the troubling examples I’ve seen of adults who represent the uber-liberal ideologies of the day, saying explicitly that they want to come after kids and convert them to their ideologies (similar to Hitler telling German parents that their kids already belong to him.) This whole endeavor, whether we’re talking about racial issues or issues of sexual freedom, is not about justice or personal identity. It is about cultural revolution against the God of order (1 Corinthians 14:30) and true justice (Psalm 97:2). They do not want to just be heard or listened to, nor do they want fairness. They want power. They want to break off God’s chords from the world that is His, and in which His gospel has penetrated so far, so that they can live autonomously and continue in rebellion against him, while bringing as many along with them as possible.
Let me be clear: In a fallen world, sexuality struggles will occur, seen in the fact that the New Testament speaks so much about it (see especially Romans 1:18ff.) But Jesus can redeem even from in the midst of such struggles (the point of 1 Cor. 6:9-11). Also, where there is actual injustice being practiced, especially along racial lines, Christians should be the first ones to point it out as wrong. But neither of these things are the aim of the Revolutionaries. They want kids to think that if they have a stray desire (maybe a sexual or gender one), it is legitimate, and only an oppressive religious framework would hinder their exploration; and in order to start this conversation, the Revolutionary has to use CRT to convince the kid that the framework of yesterday, with its traditional gender norms, is wrong and oppressive, so they had better be on the right side of history (hence "progressive" - we have progressed from the Christian past.) It’s a scam; although it is an effective scam. But before anything, it is rebellion against the God before whom we live (Daniel 5:23).
It has been this way since the beginning: “The rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their chords from us,’” David wrote thousands of years ago (Ps. 2:2-3). But what is God’s response? “He who sits in the heavens laughs” (2:4). He laughs. They’re fools, and He’s laughing at them.
Still, be discerning. These are not innocent ideologies, but the maturation of a cultural rejection of the risen Christ. And if you’re not careful, you might be guilted into believing it as well.
May the Lord protect His sheep.
