James takes apart all their old works and cross-references to earlier works and explains how all their stuff ties together. The guy is an academic mathematician so he's precise and his reasoning is refreshingly clear. He even jokes about how most leftists today haven't even read any leftists to even know where their ideas even came from. In these old works they describe how the dumbed down activist techniques work and how to teach them, but people are ignorant of all this stuff or gaslight that it doesn't exist as if it's some organic will of the people rising up all by itself.
I remember the Christian anti-Harry-Potter craze when I was a kid. Preachers would have hour-long television programs about how this, this, and this were in those books. But none of it was. I knew. I had read them.
I have never trusted what others wanted to convinced me a book was 'about' since then.
Education (so far as I see it) should leave one, as best is possible, with an understanding of a body of work. To agree or disagree with that body of work is a separate affair. What those preachers and what people like James Lindsay want, so far as I am concerned, is a so-called understanding that leads to an end other than understanding in and of itself. Quite simply, if someone were to read Lindsey's work and come away thinking that X, Y, or Z in fact had a point, I doubt he would be happy with that outcome.
However, the academic leftist stuff is not fiction. It's totally completely serious endeavor, and that's why it's important to take it seriously and criticize its goals because they intend to foment a revolution and they are deadly serious.
And as for revolution, context is king. To the Southern slave holders, emancipationists were radicals intent on overthrowing the very foundations of civilization itself. The birth myth of the United States is revolution (though I admit we may have been better off eventually going the route that Canada took).
Of course it's serious stuff, people who try to figure out the world generally do take themselves seriously. A bunch of people sit around and try to figure out what the structures that we create are, how they actually operate, and if that is helpful or harmful to the human beings within those structures, serious stuff indeed. Their conclusions may be right or wrong or a mixture of both. Criticism, however, does not properly take the form of 'this idea is produced by an academic leftist, therefore it is bad and wrong'. Where's the marketplace of ideas in that?
Self-avowed conservative intellectuals have been wrong in the past as well. They have no less wanted to produce 'revolutions'. They have no less produced disastrous and failed revolutions.
And if we want to say that things shouldn't change from what they are now, at all, then that might be the most radical proposition of all, because it has never before happened in history, though many have tried it because they too thought their place in history perfect.
FWIW Das Kapital is one of the most cited books in all of economics (and probably all of academia), so I can only assume it is also one of the most read of all academic works. There are also leftist authors such as Howard Zinn with People’s History of the United States and Stephen Jay Gould with Mismeasure of Man. Both best-sellers and the former probably the best selling history book of all time. Even in field of feminism bell hooks has a couple of best sellers that are widely read by the general public.
Seems to me that left-wing academics appeal plenty to the general public and their works get read and understood in record numbers.
I also, however, find these sorts of discussions completely disingenuous, however, in that it is conveniently left unmentioned how many millions might or might not be calculated to have died because of capitalism, cultures that have been destroyed, etc.
No one is actually willing to lay everything on the table for examination.
Whereas deaths due to Marxist ideology or socialist top-down policies are actually undeniably due to them, and they seem to happen pretty much everywhere it's tried.