Is Critical Theory A Conspiracy Theory (Part 1 of 2)?
Critical Theory's totalitarian worldview is unfalsifiable, positing pervasive hidden forces that induce fear, guilt, anger, and shame.
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About the Authors
Julian Adorney is a columnist at Reality's Last Stand and the founder of Heal the West, a substack movement dedicated to preserving liberalism. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.
Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneering Leadership and a facilitator and spiritual men's coach at The Undaunted Man. He has over 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies—he writes at The Undaunted Man’s Substack and Universal Principles.
This is the first of a two-part series examining the extent to which Critical Theory (the overarching theory behind Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Postcolonialism Studies, etc) is a conspiracy theory. Part 1 will lay out the conspiratorial nature of the Critical Theory worldview. Part 2 will show how this worldview may be worsening the mental health of (especially young) people who adopt it.
Before we can determine if Critical Theory qualifies as a conspiracy theory, we must first clarify what we mean by “conspiracy theory.” We certainly don’t mean that the issues Critical Theorists attempt to solve don’t exist. Despite enormous progress over the past several decades, the United States still contends with real challenges such as racism, sexism, anti-gay prejudice, and other prejudices that Critical Theory purports to address. Rather, when we describe Critical Theory as a conspiracy theory, we mean that it exhibits three key traits:
The Critical Theory worldview is totalitarian and sweeping. It posits hidden and powerful forces that control every aspect of society.
This worldview is unfalsifiable. Any countervailing evidence is either dismissed or reinterpreted as part of the conspiracy.
This worldview induces unwarranted fear, guilt, anger, and shame among those who adopt it.
In order to keep this analysis from turning into a book, we will focus on two popular manifestations of Critical Theory: Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory. How, then, does Critical Theory, as embodied in these two subfields, meet the first two criteria outlined above?
1) Critical Theory’s Worldview Is Totalitarian and Sweeping
Critical Theory draws heavily on the concept of “discourse” from the postmodern scholar Michel Foucault. Our societal discourse is the intellectual and cultural waters in which we all swim. It affects what we see and how we think. It affects what we do. In Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, queer theorist Riki Wilchins elucidates this concept:
Discourse is a set of rules for producing knowledge that determines what kinds of intelligible statements can be circulated within a given economy of thought. For example, in the discourse on gender, you can only say meaningful things about two kinds of bodies that will make sense. References to third genders will always sound fanciful, nonsensical, or just ridiculous.
For Critical Theorists, this discourse is extremely powerful. It permeates and shapes every facet of our existence, from our understanding of knowledge versus fiction to the categories by which we interpret the world. Discourse is not merely a background element but a force that molds every aspect of our lives. Some prominent Queer Theorists even suggest that individual selves don’t exist; rather, we are all merely constructs of the prevailing discourse. Wilchins, quoting Foucault, stresses this point: “The individual…is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects.” In this worldview, we are nothing more than the products of the discourse—the intellectual and cultural paradigm—into which we are born.
Just how powerful is discourse? Just in case you think we’re exaggerating, here’s Wilchins on the scope of discourse: the discourse is “pervasive and robust, operating in private just as effectively as in public, producing subjects so uniform in how they look, act, and dress, and even in how they subjectively experience themselves and their own bodies.”
While most conspiracy theories posit a small cabal of shadowy villains pulling the strings, Critical Theory presents a different narrative. For Critical Theorists, we are all pulling the strings. Power is pervasive but also highly democratic. Wilchins elaborates, “This kind of discursive power does not operate from ‘the top down’ but from ‘the bottom up.’ It is not central, but diffuse and capillary. It is not held by authorities and institutions; rather, it is held by no one, but exercised by practically everyone.”
How does this discourse manifest in Critical Race Theory? As the idea that racism* is everywhere. In their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic assert that “racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained.” This perspective was further echoed at the National Race and Pedagogy Conference at Puget Sound University by Heather Bruce, Robin DiAngelo, Gyda Swaney (Salish), and Amie Thurber, who posited one of the fundamental principles of anti-racism: “The question is not Did racism take place? but rather How did racism manifest in that situation?” Or, to put it another way: we can take it as axiomatic that racism occurs in every social situation; the only useful question is how did it manifest?
But what about situations where it really does seem like there’s no racism to observe? For Critical Race Theorists, the answer is straightforward: the racism in question is hidden. As such, we must look harder. According to Delgado and Stefancic, we must scrutinize the “unseen, largely invisible collection of patterns and habits” that Critical Race Theory seeks to uncover. Writing in Hypatia, professor Alison Bailey claims that the Critical Theorist must “make social injustices visible.” That is: it’s not just that racism is omnipresent; it’s also that, in many cases, detecting it requires the specialized insights of a Critical Theorist.
To be fair, there is a kernel of truth to this worldview. Racism may be less common than it once was, yet racist incidents in the United States are still disturbingly frequent. Many people are blind to this prejudice unless they have personally experienced it. Moreover, some communities continue to experience the lingering effects of racist policies such as segregation that were abolished decades ago. Thus, sometimes racism really is obscure and needs to be revealed. However, many Critical Race Theorists take these sound insights to extreme levels.
These theorists see racism in a bewildering array of seemingly innocuous ideas and objects. The copper penny is racist because it’s darker than other coins. The term “master bedroom” is racist because it evokes slavery (we should use the term “primary bedroom” instead). Standardized tests are also racist; Ibram X Kendi famously called standardized tests the “most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.” According to an article in Cell, a peer-reviewed biology journal, “today, Black scientists continue to suffer institutional slavery.” For these commentators, racism is everywhere, with some suggesting it is just as bad now as it was in the 1850s.
For these theorists, racism even shapes the hearts and minds of every white person. They contend that for white people, the racist discourse controls our hearts so thoroughly that it precludes empathy with anyone of a different skin color. This is embodied in the Interest-Convergence Hypothesis, an idea coined by Harvard professor Derrick Bell, one of the founders of Critical Race Theory. Here’s how Delgado and Stefancic describe it: “because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class whites (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it.” As a result, they argue, civil rights gains only occur when white people decide that these gains are to their own benefit: “civil rights gains for communities of color coincide with the dictates of white self-interest.” In other words, white Americans in the 1960s did not join the Civil Rights Movement because their consciences were shocked by videos of black children being sprayed with firehoses and mauled by dogs. Rather, their change of heart was naked self-interest.
One of us (Julian) has covered the Interest-Convergence Hypothesis and its flaws in more depth here, but the fundamental premise rests on the belief that white people are so thoroughly controlled by our racist discourse that our hearts never change. Or, as Bell puts it in And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice, “progress in American race relations is largely a mirage obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously, to do all in their power to ensure their dominion and maintain their control.”
Proponents of this theory believe the racist discourse is so potent that it even dominates the Critical Race Theorists who have (presumably) been working to counteract it for decades. In a recent interview, Robin DiAngelo remarked, “I don’t actually think I’m any less or more racist than anyone else, and that includes Donald Trump.” No white person can ever escape the discourse, even if they’ve spent decades trying.
What, then, of minorities who reject the doom-and-gloom assertion that racism is everywhere? This is where the discourse shows its true power. For prominent Critical Race Theorists, the discourse is so powerful that it colors these minorities’ perceptions of reality, leading them to suffer from what DiAngelo and Sensoy call “internalized oppression.” One symptom of internalized oppression is “Believing that your struggles with social institutions (such as education, employment, health care) are the result of your (or your group’s) inadequacy, rather than the result of unequally distributed resources between dominant and minoritized groups.” That is, if you don’t agree that the racist discourse dominates every aspect of your life, it just confirms that the discourse is still controlling your thoughts.
Queer Theorists propose an even more sweeping and totalitarian discourse. For them, everything is socially constructed (that is, everything is a product of the discourse). This includes the fact that most of us only recognize two genders. Queer Theorists argue that the reason we only see two genders is because we’ve been conditioned to see only two. There could be more, but our discourse has rendered them invisible to us. Or as Wilchins puts it:
It reminds me of the parable of the anthropologist who goes in search of new genders. He sails to a remote, distant island, where the inhabitants recognize six of them. He goes ashore, and finds himself face-to-face with half a dozen statues representing gods all in the different genders. Crestfallen, the anthropologist turns around to continue his search elsewhere because, as he reports back, ‘like everyplace else, they had only two genders.’ That was all he could see.
If something as fundamental as sexual dimorphism is merely the construct of our discourse, then everything is fair game. This includes gender roles. For Queer Theorists, the fact that boys (on average) are more likely to enjoy football and dump trucks and girls (on average) are more likely to enjoy dresses and tea parties is not reflective of any biological differences in gender preferences. Instead, it’s a product of discourse. As Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman put in in their immensely influential paper “Doing Gender”:
Doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological. Once the differences have been constructed, they are used to reinforce the ‘essentialness’ of gender…Being a ‘girl’ or a ‘boy’ then, is not only being more competent than a ‘baby,’ but also being competently female or male, that is, learning to produce behavioral displays of one’s ‘essential’ female or male identity.
Similar to Critical Race Theory, there’s a kernel of truth to this worldview. Some aspects of gender roles are socially constructed, and some are bad. We should be more accepting of people who don’t fit neatly into binary notions of masculinity and femininity. But just like Critical Race Theorists, Queer Theorists take these sound insights to extremes. Many Queer Theorists contend that our societal discourse starts acting on us from the moment we are born, and shapes us into who we become. There is nothing outside of the discourse.
For the Queer Theorist, science itself is merely another construct of discourse. According to this perspective, science doesn’t discover real truths about the universe or about biology. Rather, it is shaped by the discourse and in turn shapes it. Science, therefore, is not a tool of discovery but one of invention and oppression. It invents sex categories, gender differences, knowledge about medicine and diet and nutrition and everything else. This, in turn, is used to oppress anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into these constructed norms. Wilchins, quoting Foucault, says, “Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”
Yet, this perspective raises a question: if the discourse is so powerful, how do Critical Theorists account for their own influence? If the discourse that socializes us all into binary genders is so pervasive, how has it allowed the production and dissemination of massively influential papers like “Doing Gender?” If the discourse on sexual dimorphism is so pervasive, then why was trans activist Riki Wilchins named one of the “100 Civic Innovators for the 21st Century” by Time magazine?
Similarly, if the discourse on racism and white supremacy is as pervasive as claimed, how was Ibram X. Kendi able to raise $55 million for his Center for Antiracist Research? Why do so many major corporations, from Accenture to Johnson & Johnson to Mastercard, embrace diversity and inclusion initiatives? How is this consistent with the cynicism of the Interest-Convergence Hypothesis? One explanation is that these big corporations didn’t really want to help black people, and only did it for the money. But even this claim relies on the reality that the hearts of white folks have changed a lot in the past 60 years. In the 1960s, particularly in the South, a white-owned business advocating for racial diversity risked boycotts and backlash from groups like the White Citizens' Councils—a stark contrast to today’s corporate landscape.
To their credit, Wilchins acknowledges (though does not attempt to resolve) the contradiction between the supposedly all-powerful discourse and theorists’ success in fighting it.
Although postmodernists clearly intend for us to fight back, if discourse is so all-powerful, it’s hard to explain why we should bother. In fact, it’s hard to explain how theorists like Derrida or Foucault were able to escape its clutches and send back their analysis, or how we could ever do likewise.
For many Critical Theorists, then, the discourse is all-pervasive and extremely powerful. They take sensible insights about the prejudice in society and turn the dial up to 11. But the real problem isn’t just that Critical Theorists posit a totalitarian worldview; it’s that they posit a discourse so powerful that any disagreement with them is seen as simply more evidence of the discourse’s power. That is, they make their theory unfalsifiable.
2) Critical Theory’s Worldview Is Unfalsifiable
The key pieces that make Critical Theory’s worldview unfalsifiable have been outlined above. The discourse (e.g. racism) is everywhere and endemic. If you don’t see it, that means it’s hidden and you just need more training in order to unearth it. If a member of the dominant group (e.g. white people) doesn’t see the discourse, then that’s because growing up in the discourse has hidden it from their eyes—you cannot see the water you swim in. If a member of an oppressed group (e.g. black people) doesn’t see the discourse, then that’s because they’re suffering from “internalized oppression”—the discourse is so powerful that it’s affecting what they can see. In every case, disagreement with Critical Theory is simply taken as proof of the discourse’s total dominance.
However, there is another aspect of Critical Theory’s unfalsifiability that’s worth exploring: many theorists do not tolerate disagreement. In White Fragility, DiAngelo argues that all white people are inherently fragile. This fragility manifests through behaviors like “argumentation,” “silence,” and “leaving the stress-inducing situation (that is, the room where the person is being told that they’re fragile).” To put it another way: if you disagree with DiAngelo, you’re providing more evidence that she’s right. Ditto if you are silent, or if you simply stop the conversation. Consequently, the only remaining response—agreement—inevitably supports her hypothesis as well. This creates a closed loop where every reaction is construed as supporting the theory, thereby totally insulating it from critique or refutation.
In her paper, “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes” (quoted above), Bailey takes an even more extreme stance by pathologizing dissent: “Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that dominant groups habitually deploy during conversations that are trying to make social injustices visible.” That is, if Bailey says something and her students disagree, their disagreement stems from a subconscious desire to preserve their own privilege. Such resistance, Bailey argues, should not merely be dismissed but recognized as evidence of the pervasiveness of the discourse that Critical Theory seeks to expose.
Bailey even advises other professors against engaging with disagreement from their students, warning that this could inflict serious harm on minority students in the classroom. “Treating privilege-preserving epistemic pushback as a form of critical engagement validates it and allows it to circulate more freely,” she cautions. “This, as I’ll argue later, can do epistemic violence to oppressed groups.”
For Bailey, the veracity of the students’ disagreements is irrelevant. The pursuit of truth is secondary to the implications of the disagreement itself, which she sees as evidence of the prevailing discourse’s dominance over students’ thinking. She explains, “Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities.”
In essence, Bailey maintains that any disagreement—even those that conclusively demolish her arguments with factual statements—merely proves her point. Her theory is unfalsifiable.
Thus, Critical Theory posits a totalitarian and sweeping worldview in which the forces of oppression are so powerful that anyone who disagrees with Critical Theorists must still be being dominated by these forces and cannot be said to be thinking for themselves. But how does such a worldview affect the mindset of the people who adopt it? That’s the subject to which we turn in Part 2 of this series.
*To be clear, when Critical Race Theorists talk about racism, they generally only mean white-on-other (ex. white-on-black, white-on-Asian) prejudice. As Robin DiAngelo and Özlem Sensoy put it in their book Is Everyone Really Equal?, "oppression" (of which racism is one form) is "The prejudice and discrimination of one social group against another, backed by institutional power." There is an especial focus on white-on-black racism. In one sense, this focus makes sense; white-on-black racism is one of the oldest and most enduring stains on our great nation, dating back to the Founding Fathers. But by focusing only on white-on-other racism, these theorists risk suggesting a view of human nature that is not reflective of reality. The truth is that racism and other forms of prejudice, like jealousy or avarice, are flaws of character that can be found (or not found) in members of every human sub-group. This analysis also dismisses or ignores all of the non-white folks who have risen to power in the United States. In his book How to Be An Antiracist, Ibram X Kendi criticizes the "illusory, concealing, disempowering, and racist idea that Black people can’t be racist because Black people don’t have power." In order to keep our terminology consistent, when talking about the problems that Critical Race Theory sees and seeks to address, we refer to "racism"; but in each case we are referring to the "white-on-other racism" that Critical Race Theory focuses on.
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Reality is the only thing that matters.
Since our government officials and talking heads taut our system as a civilized representative democracy, voting to change government policy is the only means we have to redress our grievances.
Since the Congress and Legislatures openly admit they do not examine the laws they vote on, as they typically vote on one hundred - 2,000 page laws per day, reality dictates that we, The Citizens, must develop a way to evaluate 200 Thousand pages of law speak per day. And we must clarify who gets to vote and how the vote is counted and what specific impact the sacred vote has at the business end of government.
Right now, the first question is:
# 1. Who gets to vote in the: general election?
a. citizens only - Yes No
b. natural born citizens only - Yes No
c. natural born citizens with four natural born grandparents - Yes No
d. naturalized citizens (legal immigrants) - Yes No
e. legal immigrants not yet naturalized - Yes No
f. anyone with a drivers license – Yes - No
# 2.1 Ages of Voter
g. minimum18 years
h. minimum 21 years
i. minimum 25 years
j. minimum 30 years
k. minimum 33 years
l. minimum 35 years
# 2.2 Sex of Voter
a. Male – Yes - No
b. Female – Yes - No
c. Non – Binanry - Yes - No
d. Transgender - Yes - No
# 2.3 Competence of Voter
e. property owners net value over $50,000 - Yes - No
f. property owners net value over $250,000 - Yes - No
g. tax exempt persons – Yes - No
h. those receiving welfare / food stamps – Yes - No
i. those with unpaid child support obligations - Yes - No
j. those receiving WIC – Yes - No
k. those receiving Section 8 – Yes - No
l. those working for government bureaucracies – Yes - No
m. those that will pay a $5000 poll tax - Yes - No
n. those that have paid a minimum of $5000 per year of tax for their combined jurisdictions in excess of any received via SS, Medicare, Medicaid, ATFWDC - Yes - No
# 2.4 Genetic presence of Voter
a. Male without children – Yes - No
b. Male with children – Yes - No
c. Male with children plural vote – Yes - No
d. Female without children – Yes - No
e. Female with children – Yes - No
f. Female with children plural vote – Yes - No
g. Only married males with children, never divorced can vote. – Yes - No
# 3.0 Who should be trusted with the responsibility and power of Public Office?
a. Only those authorized to vote in the general election - Yes No
b. Male without children – Yes - No
c. Male with children – Yes - No
d. Female without children – Yes - No
e. Female with children – Yes - No
f. Only married males with children, never divorced can hold public office – Yes - No
g. Depends on the office - Yes - No
As always Colin, thanks for the good read. Today I was educating the wife of our local DA while at the dog park what’s going on here in Alabama with WPATH and Levine and the court case. Even here no one knows what’s happening and it blows my mind. Thanks for helping keep me abreast of what’s happening.