Challenging 'woke' orthodoxy: must we all be warriors now?
In a guest post, educator Barry Wall makes the case for 'Warrior Teachers' - to challenge 'progressive' ideas and defend free speech - and introduces The Winning Mindset Seminars.
At the Academy of Ideas, we see one of our aims as encouraging experiments in free thinking and encouraging a wide range of diverse initiatives designed to encourage an open-minded approach to ideas. As part of that mission, I regularly speak at other organisations’ events and it is always a joy to discover just how much grassroots intellectual and free speech work is happening throughout the UK.
At the start of October, I spoke at one such event, the national gathering of Warrior Teachers in Manchester, organised by the irrepressible educator Barry Wall. What an intelligent, curious, cliché-free, challenging, well-informed discussion we had on free speech. The group were all ‘students’ of the Winning Mindset Seminars.
As another year of the course beckons, I asked Barry to write a guest Substack to explain why people should sign up. In his own inimitable fashion, Barry tells his story below. Give it a read. I’d encourage anyone keen to arm themselves with the best philosophical and cultural arguments at our disposal to challenge orthodoxies and to consider joining his online course.
After 40 years as an educator, if you had told me a few years back that I would be spending the autumn of my years battling ideas so daft that nobody in their right mind would believe them, I would have been unlikely to have believed you, let alone understood the myriad reasons I would be engaging in such battles.
Though my first scuffle with woke authoritarians occurred because of the Gender and Queer crowd, it was exacerbated by my insistence that Black Lives Matter was a con, which has since been accepted by most, and that BLM saw everything through a ‘trans and queer lens’, a statement explicitly made on their own website that by now has probably been scrubbed from history. The woke like to rewrite history, a familiar practice amongst the authoritarian mindsets of today and yesterday.
I am now, of all things, possessor of an insane Substack and YouTube channel called the Court of the EDIJester, and a Twitter/X account where I spend most of my time calling people ‘Gender Addled Grievance Gerbils’, asking folk what their favourite dessert is and grubbing about in the most pugnacious and linguistically muddled marketplace of ideas that exists.
I must admit that I revel in that, even when so many folk decry the incivility of many of the interactions and the downright raucous scrapping that goes on. I far prefer that to the genteel wittering of the ever-polite, that so far seems to have exacerbated our problems – ‘be kind’ - and blunted the absolute necessity of dealing with loons, fruit loops and assorted nuttery with acerbic put downs, humour and downright shaming, if it is called for.
This occupies most of my day, alongside promoting the one final product in my portfolio as an educator, The Winning Mindset Seminars, in which we create what are termed Warrior Teachers. You do not have to be a teacher to take part, just happy to be involved in a scrappy and grassroots insurgency, sans the bells and whistles (because we can’t afford them) and focused on what we can do, not just talk about.
These seminars came about when I was contacted by Alix Aharon, who runs Gender Mapper, plotting gender clinics around the world and aiding those who had lost their children – firstly, to the psychosocial contagion that is ‘Trans’ and secondly, as is the path, to the wholesale adoption of the cult belief-system of ‘Gender Identity Ideology’.
I will never forget the stories I heard that evening, when we met online and I spoke with a group of mums, all of whom had firsthand experience of the devastation Trans causes wherever it gains a foothold.
These were raw personal stories - of lost hopes and familial abandonment, of medical malpractice and surgical horror - that have sadly become more commonplace today.
It was in discussion that the idea of a learning event once a month was born. It would focus on understanding how this mad ideology had gained such a hold and exploring what we as individuals needed to comprehend and what skills to practise in order to get the message further afield and encourage people to act against these authoritarian ideas.
Extraordinarily, the mums were highly motivated to prevent what happened to them happening to anyone else. This was before the growing public realisation of the scope and eugenic nature of the LGBTQ+ movement, coupled with the actions of rapacious pharma companies and deranged medical professionals. Since the Cass Report, things have moved forward, but not enough to end this once and for all.
Our discussions provided the ideas to move us forward, and I began construction of the seminars themselves, fed by the original mums and their needs and ideas. The rest, as they say, is history.
Bringing us up to date, I have just started construction of Year Three when there was never even meant to be a Year Two. But we had started to learn the project had become more than just that – not just a regularised learning event, but providing a monthly meeting of like minds, a support network and a resource for the work that the warriors carried out. We have become firmly focused on what used to be important - meritocracy, intelligence, talent and excellence, coined MITE for short - and covering tales and stories that can be relayed and utilised to good effect with those who are blinded by ideology, or in stasis through fear.
At the beginning of October 2024, we had our first ever Warrior Teacher conference in Manchester, though there are only just enough of us to call it a conference. Nevertheless, we got together with folk from the UK, Canada, Ireland, USA and Germany. We shared ideas and stories of success about the work they were doing in their communities, social groups and workplaces.
We were lucky enough to have Claire Fox join us and speak eloquently on the important subject of free speech, one of the core values of the Winning Mindset. It is a value close to the hearts of Warrior Teachers in their work of creating and telling stories that evoke critical thinking and the value of evidence, science and reality as keys to a fulfilling life.
It was for me a profound experience and a surreal one. Here I was surrounded by people that had been learning with me for months and for the first time we were more than gawking faces on a screen. The day taught me much, and not least of all what this thing called The Winning Mindset actually was, because up to this point it was still slightly unclear to me.
Was it a coaching course? A hobby group? A training course?
I had hunted high and low to find something else like it, but to no avail, and even when describing it to people and writing about it online it still seemed hard to pin down what exactly was it that we had built. But it was something folk now enjoyed regularly and, from my perspective, with a dropout rate far lower than anything I had seen in 40 years of education.
It seemed at times to be all those things, but my thinking crystallised on the day of the conference, and to me and the folk on the seminars The Winning Mindset is I believe a discipline. It is a way of seeing the world that eschews the structures of traditional education. It covers a multitude of topics - from Education and History to Science, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Art, Media and Psychology.
It helps folk gather their thoughts, in what is becoming an increasingly fractured landscape of mass information, communication and learning. It helps in finding moments of stillness and challenging the odious ideas Critical Social Justice and EDI have brought, not least the vicious assaults upon children, reality, freedom of speech and thought.
We reach back into history and explore the genesis of this pernicious mind virus that is harming children and everyone else, and we learn how to have conversations that are expansive, but also declarative in nature. Moreover, to do so without, as so many warrior teachers have said, ‘vomiting a stream of words’ whenever the subject of gender etc comes up. In short, we attempt to provoke thinking, which seems to have taken a backseat to feeling in 2024.
We explore warnings and lessons from the past through media and film, alongside hints at the present and future. We garner insight from the thinkers of yesterday and today, seeking patterns and developing coherent narratives that disrupt the absolutism of Critical Social Justice and all its wicked offshoots.
And we laugh, a lot, mostly at our own foolishness. This is so important as the encroaching malice of ‘woke’ affects more and more people on an individual level, for if you did not laugh you would cry.
The work will continue as we see the landscape change. From taking on schools, councils, employers and others, the Warrior Teachers are making an impact in any way that they are able. For some, that is organising their own groups and tackling a particular problem, such as indoctrination in schools in one case or the surreptitious placement of heretical stickers where the message will reach and infuriate the woke, who I will kid you not, start hunts to uncover which employee needs disciplining for that act of non-belief.
This motley band of dissidents do what they can where they can, ever vigilant for the chance of a conversation, but aware of maintaining their stability, lest the powers that be remove them from the game or perhaps trap them in endless legal and disciplinary matters where the process is the punishment.
So, who are they, these Warrior Teachers?
For those of us who have been in this for a while, the constant stream of people awakening to the reality of ‘woke’ manifests primarily in three ways.
Firstly, through the announcement by a family member who have decided they are Trans or ‘Non-Binary’ and now embraces the cult of LGBTQ+. Secondly, feeling silenced and frustrated by that silencing. Thirdly, the badgering and in some cases bullying behaviour of workplaces with enforced compliance and/or training on LGBTQ+, ‘being an ally’, microaggressions, whiteness, unconscious bias and other related nonsense that is right up there with the worst of Mao’s China and the USSR.
From concerned grandparents to university lecturers, public-sector workers to business folks, psychologists, nurses, engineers and shop workers, that is who the Warrior Teachers are.
In short, they are just like you.
From understanding different cultures, to exploring belief systems and how woke is affecting other countries, I am a better person for knowing them, and I like to think that in return we are able to provide a way of seeing that allows them to make sense of this complicated landscape, where they can then draw their line in the sand and declare ‘this far, no further’ and be able to justify that position.
This is who they are, and by my reckoning, these amazing folk, who have really stepped up to the plate, have saved me in my darkest hour after my cancellation from society. But more than that, they have enriched my life immensely and they are active, they are doing.
In that doing, we have created something that I believe is unique, an example of what someday we hope may well become the norm, for we are a community, one that practises learning with the same regularity you might spend going to the gym, and why not?
Our intellectual health is something we do not talk about enough and perhaps community warrior teachers will become a thing, because it does not actually matter what you are learning as long as you are. I am struck by the knowledge, talents, passions and ability that so many people have that can be passed on to others. We now have the technology to do it, and be that cake baking, maths, history or the books of Jane Austen, it actually doesn’t matter, the era of learning for learning’s sake is here, and perhaps we are just the beginning.
I do hope so, because the infection of the West with authoritarian wokery is not to be taken lightly, and we must resist. Free speech, the Enlightenment, deep and critical thought, science, reality and the search for truth are all worth fighting for, and the Warrior Teachers are doing just that.
Are you?
Barry Wall is an educator. Read his Substack, The Court of the EDIJester. Find out more about The Winning Mindset Seminars here.