From what I can gather “wokesters” come in at least five basic categories: ruling class elements seeking to incorporate progressive movements from recent decades into their self-legitimating ideology; professional class ladder-climbers engaged in virtue-signaling; quasi-religious zealots bent on moral purity akin to the Mormons and their “words of […]
This is some important commentary. This is how Chinese or Saudi levels of censorship could make its way to the Western countries. Saagar Enjeti reacts to reports that Democratic members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce wrote to Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and more […]
The SJW version of when the Falwellites were claiming the Teletubbies were turning kids gay.
00:00 Tracing wokeism’s origins to mid-century postmodernism 14:14 Determining the right historical narrative on race 34:38 Do progressives have a problem confronting their own racism? 48:10 What can and can’t be said about the 2020 election 1:02:55 Can the insurrectionists be defended? 1:13:13 Biden vs. Trump on critical […]
A pretty good pro and con discussion on Marcuse.
By Brendan O’Neil, Spiked Online I’m glad sections of the left find the free-speech crisis so funny. Or ‘free-speech crisis’, as they always put it, those sarky quote marks signaling their skepticism towards the idea that there’s a censorship problem on campus and elsewhere in society. ‘Freeze peach!’, […]
But how can that be? Cancel culture doesn’t exist!
This is a great segment. The ruling class has created its own secular church. Saagar Enjeti reacts to the dramatic saga between The New York Times and Substack columnist Scott Alexander.
Journalist Zaid Jilani discusses French officials who are speaking out against American identity politics.
How exactly is this any different from religious indoctrination in parochial schools or Communist indoctrination in former Soviet schools? By George F. Will, Washington Post The worst-governed state — Illinois had triple the population loss of the state with the second-highest out-migration between 2010 and 2020 — is […]
By Keith Preston Between the time that Donald Trump entered the Republican primaries in 2015 to the moment of the January 6, 2021 supposed “coup attempt,” the specter of “fascism” has been raised by critics of Trumpism. Analogies to the failed Weimar liberal-capitalist regime of the pre-Nazi era […]
It seems that right now things could be considered better for the “libertarian-left” than at any point in the past, at least in US history. By “libertarian-left,” I mean that umbrella of philosophies with a generally anti-authoritarian ethos but which also do not deify corporate tycoons as Nietzschean […]
A Firing Line debate from 28 years ago. I wonder if these academics, lawyers, and journalists would have predicted that a quarter-century later there would be violent street fights over this stuff. Episode FLS117, Recorded on December 3, 1993 Guests: Ira Glasser, Robert H. Bork, Catharine R. Stimpson, […]
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 19 Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 3 of 4 In this third part of James Lindsay’s lecture series on Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance,” we see how the essay takes a particularly dark turn. Having set up the framing of the essay […]
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 18 Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 2 of 4 In this second part of his annotated reading of Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance,” James Lindsay reads and explains the portion of the essay where Marcuse defines the “administered society” that he claims […]
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 17 Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 1 of 4 We live in a crazy world today that seems to have gone off the rails. That’s because it is being driven by a broken logic, and, for all the flaws on the […]
I generally agree with Gramsci’s theory of revolution even if I don’t share many of his political views. If you want to understand the present moment, especially how similar Wokeness seems to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, you have to understand the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci wrote a series […]
I recently wrote about how January has been the 20 year anniversary of the founding of Attack the System. It is interesting to reflect on what has happened in the subsequent two decades. In 2001, the US empire was arguably at its apex, firmly in control of a […]
I always figured if the Democrats managed to oust Trump, a purge of the “no longer useful” left would take place. But it’s happening a lot quicker than even I thought it would. By Caitlin Johnstone There has been a purge of left-wing accounts from social media, with socialist […]
Thomas Szasz pointed out decades ago that the medical and psychiatric professions had essentially become a “new priesthood.” They’ve since been joined by most of the professional class generally, particularly the “ideas industries” like journalism, media, and education. By Nick Gillespie, Reason Few journalists are more relentlessly iconoclastic […]
The media, universities, and tech companies are the new church, in the sense of being the institutions that determine, disseminate, and enforce the ideological superstructure of the ruling class and the dominant value paradigm of the wider society. The present “totalitarian humanist” paradigm regards as heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, […]
Arguably, the best discussion of the “cancel culture” element of totalitarian humanism I’ve seen to date. Hats off to these commies. Today we’re joined by Ben Burgis, Jacobin columnist and author of “Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left, to talk about how […]
The term “totalitarian humanism” is the one I use for the self-legitimating ideological superstructure of the ruling classes, states, and power elites of developed (“First World”) countries. Totalitarian humanism’s core features would be the following: -masking imperialism under the guise of “human rights,” “collective security,” “duty to protect,” […]
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 14 We are witnessing the birth of a new national mythology in America, and it is not good news. Imperfect as it was, the old one was better, warts and all, and it needs to be fought for. This new […]
The wannabe monopolists are trying to shut down the little guys and upstarts. Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti react to new calls for social media censorship.
“Wokeness” resembles Leninism in its more extreme form. In its more mainstream form, it’s more like social purity. By Gary Du and Jan Jekielek, Epoch Times Dr. James Lindsay, an American-born author and political commentator, called the “woke” ideology and movement embraced by Black Lives Matter organizations and […]
By Eric Boehm, Reason Shortly after reposting an article that criticized Twitter’s decision to ban President Donald Trump, former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul says he was locked out of his own Facebook page. The page is still active and appears to be functioning normally for other […]
As I have been predicting for 20 years. Big Tech is becoming a dominant faction of the ruling class (along with Big Finance and the always present BLOB). The professional managerial class has become the new clergy with totalitarian humanism as its ideology. Tech industry managers are the […]
By James Lindsay, New Discourses As unlikely as it seems, a highly obscure academic theory known as Critical Race Theory has completely mainstreamed in society, and now everyone is discussing it. While Critical Race Theory has the noble goal of pointing out problems that can be hard to […]
By Matt Taibbi Mark Crispin Miller, author and longtime New York University professor, has unconventional views. Even work he’s done that’s won mainstream praise is unconventional, upon close examination. If you came of political age during the Iraq war years, you probably remember him for The Bush Dyslexicon, […]
By Glenn Greenwald Persecution is not typically doled out to those who recite mainstream pieties, or refrain from posing meaningful threats to those who wield institutional power, or obediently stay within the lines of permissible speech and activism imposed by the ruling class. Those who render themselves acquiescent and […]
Evidence shows that the globalization frenzy of the post-Cold War period is in the process of receding. US hegemony is declining due to 20 years of military defeats in imperial adventures. The percentage of US GDP devoted to military production has declined, along with the volume of US […]
By Fiona Harrigan Public affection operates on a hair trigger. With cancel culture more popular than ever, many celebrities have fallen victim to the internet mob for crimes as simple as benign comments or right-of-center political views. Every week seems to bring a new A-lister under fire. But […]
By Andrew Doyle, Spiked-Online By now most of us will be familiar with ‘gaslighting’, a term which describes the tactic of contradicting observable reality as a means to undermine someone’s security in their own point of view. The word comes from the 1940 movie, Gaslight, in which a […]
By Rod Dreher, The American Conservative Earlier this semester, Mark Crispin Miller, who teaches media studies at New York University, got in trouble because of something he was accused of saying in his class on propaganda. The academic free speech organization FIRE explains: In September, a class session […]
By Meghan Daum, Medium The end of 2019 saw several conflicting reports about the severity — and even legitimacy — of cancel culture. It’s bad. It’s not that bad. It’s real. It isn’t that real. Imposed largely by social-media-based arbiters of up-to-the-minute standards of justice, cancellation in this […]
The heirs of the Mellon banking dynasty, which goes back to the colonial period if not earlier, embrace the latest ruling class self-legitimating ideology. Right on schedule. By George Liebmann and Andrew Balio Not to be outdone by The New York Times‘ 1619 Project, the Mellon Foundation recently […]
I suspect I am part of the reason why Pete has been given grief by the folks he is describing. Many years ago, I started taking a gloves-off, no-holds-barred approach to these what are now called “cancel culture” morons. For me, it’s never been a left/right issue. Back […]
As I have said before, the US is presently undergoing a transition from a historically unconventional middle-class society to a “normal” or traditional model of society. California is the region of the US where this transition is furthest along. The features of a traditional society are an entrenched […]
Some quack makes the case for slavery. By Vicki Robin, Great Transition In Your Money or Your Life, Joe Dominguez and I present an approach to earning, spending, and saving aimed at liberating the mind (spirituality), enabling creativity in need fulfillment (DIY, resourcefulness), and freeing time from paid […]
I’ve always thought the Chinese “social credit” system was merely a test market for what the global power elite wants to impose worldwide. Here it is. By Rhett Jones, Gizmodo With more services than ever collecting your data, it’s easy to start asking why anyone should care about […]
About ten years ago, someone asked me why I was so strident in my opposition to “political correctness,” or what I have often described as “totalitarian humanism,” and which is now more commonly called “wokeness.” My response is that there are three basic reasons: 1) Anarchism is the […]
This is a must-watch. On today’s episode, Joel Kotkin, Executive Director of Urban Reform Institute and author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, discusses how do we confront neo-feudalism today, in conversation with Andrew Keen on the Keen On podcast..
Being an anarchist, I have a natural morbid curiosity about the functioning of statecraft. I follow politics in the same way someone might drive very slowly past the scene of some horrific accident so as not to miss the sight of even one mangled limb. But perhaps even […]
By Rod Dreher, The American Conservative Hello all, I was away at the dentist for much of the day. After a decade of non-dentist-going (because I hate going to the dentist), I finally had to give up my cowardice-related boycott — this after suffering some unpleasantry resulting from […]
The role of Maoism in the development of PC culture is often overlooked. Much of the blame is often laid at the feet of the Frankfurt School, particularly Marcuse’s idea of “repressive tolerance,” along with the “language as power” thesis of the postmodernists. Obviously, those have been influences […]
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson
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