The Failed Cancellation of James Lindsay in Alberta

He’s got a message that people want to hear

Alberta has been a pretty happening place lately when it comes to the fight against gender ideology. We get to claim the fabulous Dr. Linda Blade, who proposed and passed a policy about protecting women’s spaces at the Conservative Party of Canada convention, our two biggest cities, Calgary and Edmonton, both had great turnouts at the #1MillionMarch4Children, and I personally connect with more and more people every day here in Calgary who are taking a stand.

The fight continued this month when James Lindsay came to speak in both Calgary and Edmonton. The event, called “Protect Our Kids” and organized by Take Back Alberta, has not been without its share of controversy.

Dr. James Lindsay is coming to Alberta! He will be speaking directly to the issues of gender ideology in classrooms that affect our kids

Dr. James Lindsay - as seen on the Joe Rogan Experience, Jordan Peterson Podcast & the Host of the New Discourses Podcast - is coming to Alberta for the first time!

Dr. Lindsay will be speaking directly to the dangers of critical theory and it's gender ideology that are pushing their way into our children's classrooms. What's more, he's going to teach us how to fight back against it in the most effective ways possible!

He's the author of the book "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody," which is currently being translated into more than fifteen languages.

I initially purchased my ticket to see Lindsay in Calgary through Eventbrite on September 8. Not two hours later, I got an e-mail that my refund was on the way, accompanied by the following message:

We’re reaching out on behalf of the Eventbrite Trust and Safety Team to notify you that this event listing has been removed from Eventbrite due to a violation of our Community Guidelines.

David Parker, the founder of Take Back Alberta, was provided with a few more details, with Eventbrite informing him:

We have determined that your event is not permitted on the Eventbrite platform as it violates our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service, specifically our policy on Hateful, Dangerous, or Violent Content and Events.

The next day, Parker posted on X that interest in the event had exploded, and Take Back Alberta had started selling tickets directly through its own site. I quickly re-purchased mine.

Then, at the end of September, I received a phone call from Take Back Alberta informing me they were forced to find another venue after pressure from activists resulted in previous cancellations at the Calgary Chinese Cultural Centre, The Glenmore Inn & Convention Centre, and the Deerfoot Inn & Casino. The new venue would remain a secret until hours before the event.

But first, Lindsay was making his stop in Edmonton, where he spoke on the evening of October 2. The event was held at Maharaja Banquet Hall after a cancellation at Life Church. It seems that the event went very well, and Lindsay posted a picture of the packed hall to X.

X/@ConceptualJames

So, the next day, I eagerly waited to find out where the Calgary venue would be. I already knew of 11 other people who were going, and I was excited to see the total turnout as well as any protesters.

Finally, we got the location: Lindsay was going to be speaking at the Astoria Banquet Hall. My friend Neil picked me up and we headed over.

It became clear right away by all of the cars trying to get to the event that the turnout was going to be big, and indeed it was. Organizers have put the total turnout at around 1,000, and that was quickly obvious as the room started filling up.

There were no protesters to be seen, as most were simply keyboard warriors who had harassed venues into canceling Lindsay online and by phone.

Things kicked off with a musical act that was also at the #MillionMarch4Children, and the first speaker was Mahmoud Mourra, the organizer of the March. He told the crowd that he knew indoctrination because he was indoctrinated into hatred as a child, hatred that he learned to leave behind when he came to Canada. He warned that Canadians are quickly losing the freedom that makes this country so special, particularly when it comes to children, who are now being indoctrinated in schools in the same way he was.

David Parker, who also spoke at the March and who is himself a Christian, was next to take the stage. He pointed out how important it is for people of all faiths (and no faith) to come together to fight against the woke virus that is taking over society and targeting children. He specifically thanked the Muslim community for helping to secure a venue for the event and noted that the Sikh community in Edmonton had done the same. Apparently, every Christian church they had approached refused them.

Finally, Parker introduced Lindsay, who came out to a standing ovation. Lindsay was all smiles and jokes when he started talking, quipping that he debated coming out in blackface but that he wasn’t running for Prime Minister.

Neil and I.

But the speech, which lasted for an hour, quickly got serious. The goal of the talk was to paint a picture of who exactly is the “they” that we are fighting against. He began by stating that it doesn’t matter if you call them communists or fascists, that it was the totalitarianism behind both extremes rearing its ugly head in the West again today.

Lindsay then provided a quick overview of Marxism and its central belief that everyone is at their core a socialist man when not deluded by private property. In what I thought was a very clear and elegant way, he traced how this can be extrapolated away from an economic theory into other types of “property,” like, for example, whiteness. Cue the rise of critical theory. He discussed how queer theory does the exact same thing with normalcy.

View from the back of the hall during Lindsay’s talk. X/@Sharpestick

In particular, Lindsay referenced a paper on Drag Queen Story Hour which explicitly states that “DQSH offers a queer relationality with children that breaks from the reproductive futurity of the normative classroom and nuclear family.” As he pointed out, what other word is there for this besides “grooming”?

(For those interested, the paper is “Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood.”)

Packing so much information into such a short amount of time, as Lindsay tends to do, he also delved into the Chinese cultural revolution. I was reminded of a fantastic interview that Benjamin Boyce did with Xi Van Fleet, who grew up during the revolution and discussed many of the same points.

I also found it interesting how Lindsay tied Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) into his speech as one of the ways that children are being targeted. SEL is often sold with pretty-sounding language. The Government of Alberta website, for example, says that it is intended to “Develop students’ knowledge, attitudes and skills to manage emotions, build healthy relationships, set goals and make decisions.”

That seems nice on the surface, but it is implemented in practice according to Marxist theory and doctrine. To use an example that Lindsay used, one of the 5 “competencies” of SEL is self-awareness. Great! We want kids to be self-aware. But what are they being made self-aware of? Well, oftentimes it is going to be about their various privileges and oppressions when it comes to characteristics like race and sex.

Lindsay closed by discussing credentialism and comparing it to China’s dystopic social credit system, warning that we may be headed to a place where we need to be properly credentialed in areas like critical race theory, queer theory, and environmentalism or risk social exclusion (in many ways, we are already there). But the main point of all of that was this: that “parent” is the only credential needed to stand up for and protect your children.

That’s what the night was really about: the children and the ideologues targeting them for use in the revolution. They can’t win, he said, if we manage to protect the children.

The evening ended on a hopeful note, with Lindsay saying he hadn’t expected the kind of energy and enthusiasm he had encountered in Canada. I was also pleasantly surprised at just how many people attended and what a wonderful crowd it was.

Lindsay meeting with people after the event. X/@ezralevant

I have always enjoyed Lindsay’s work, but I would say I was more interested in going that night to get a sense of the atmosphere and attitude in Alberta and see if there was reason to hope that enough people might be waking up to what’s going on.

Well, I was given a renewed sense of hope, and I walked away an even bigger fan of Lindsay to boot. I’m happy he visited our happening province and I feel like this will be seen as an event that helped galvanize even more people against the totalitarianism that has been creeping steadily into our culture.