By Robert Stilson, The American Conservative Conservatives are rightly vexed by “woke capitalism,” exasperated at the ways in which big American corporations are increasingly weighing in on sociopolitical issues—invariably, it seems, in favor of the progressive left. Certainly, many businesses are under pressure to do so. Sometimes that […]
By Ben Zeisloft, Campus Reform After a University of Vermont professor criticized the notion of “whiteness,” administrators denounced his comments and students called for his resignation. The professor refuses to resign. In a YouTube video entitled “Racism and the Secular Religion at the University of Vermont,” education professor […]
A pretty good critique of progressive totalitarianism from a conservative/constitutionalist perspective. By William Voegeli, American Mind When it comes to progressive ambitions, nothing is off the table. Editors’ Note The Claremont Institute’s DC Center for the American Way of Life is a new initiative for actively counteracting the […]
By Angelo Codevilla, Independent Institute When Machiavelli wrote, “in order to know Moses’ virtue it was necessary that the people of Israel be slaves in Egypt …,” he was pointing to the truth that knowing what one is up against is a powerful incentive for dealing with it […]
American mathematician, cultural critic, and founder of New Discourses, James Lindsay joins Michael this week for a discussion on critical race theory and its warning signs, the theory’s parallels to Soviet logic, which philosophers were merely rationalizing their own pathologies, how language is often used as code to […]
This is an interesting discussion of the culture wars from a serious left/Marxist perspective. My viewpoint is that the cultural left has been the hands-down winner on most cultural issues (outside of certain narrow geographical, subcultural, institutional, or socioeconomic sectors). But the economic right has been the hands-down […]
It’s interesting that at least some social democrats and other leftists are just now starting to notice this. Even ultra-milquetoasters like Majority Report. Better late than never, I guess. Sam host Denver University Professor of Law Nancy Leong to discuss her new book, Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who […]
Matt Taibbi The celebrated author writes an article in the Guardian opposing censorship, and is stunned by the negative response from political kindred spirits. Writer Thomas Frank published a piece in The Guardian last week called, “Liberals want to blame rightwing ‘misinformation’ for our problems. Get real.” Its […]
I always thought the totalitarian human revolution would be complete when it came to dominate the ideology of the military. The troops go to sensitivity training while the drone attacks continue. The totalitarian humanist revolution is now complete. ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ examines the Pentagon’s war on ‘domestic extremism.’
By Joel Kotkin, American Mind The Biden Administration is on track to stiff our desperate working class. Bill Clinton may have been lionized as the “first black President,” and Barack Obama actually was half African, but no politician in American history owes more to African-American leadership and voters than Joe […]
A social media poster writes: The problem with Keith is he treats idea-sets as if they’re fungible and takes people at their word. He takes the ideological content of things too seriously. Better predictors would be those who said everything will ultimately boil down to biological race. The […]
By Alexander Rubinstein, Mintpress News In order to identify where woke imperialism exists, we have to define it first. So what is it? It’s certainly not the first iteration of hegemonic domination buttressed by moralism. The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was officialized by the United Nations […]
For some time, probably about 25 years, I’ve been predicting the emergence of this kind of weird “rainbow-queer-multicultural-feminist-authoritarian-statist-oligarchic-capitalist-militarist-imperialist” regime. Here it is. Also, Lloyd Austin is Raytheon’s representative in the Biden administration, the same role played by Mark Esper in the Trump administration.
With the honorable exceptions of the “Gods and Radicals” and “Anarchist News” websites, I have yet to see any major figures or groups in the “anti-fascist” or “left-anarchist” milieus disown or even criticize Alexander Reid-Ross. Apparently, “no platform” doesn’t apply to feds, spooks, and cops. Apparently, the progressive […]
By Matthew Walther, The American Conservative More than half a decade ago, I began using the phrase “woke capital” in conversation and occasional social media posts. At the risk of sounding like someone’s father rushing the stage on Jerry Springer, I would like to register a disputed paternity […]
Woke capitalism on the move.
By Rod Dreher, The American Conservative Writing in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Bion Bartning talks about when wokeness invaded his children’s posh New York City private school, Riverdale, which costs $58,000 per year to attend. Last fall, the school began to focus on privilege and white fragility. […]
By Kevin Baldeosingh, Spiked What does it mean to be woke? Those who consider themselves woke, even if they don’t use the label, might see wokeness as an embrace of positive virtues, such as tolerance, fairness and awareness. The Oxford English Dictionary defines woke as meaning ‘alert to […]
What does it mean when Big Tech is funding a guy who advocates literal totalitarianism, comparable to William Pierce’s “Order” or the Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Council of Guardians,” under the cover of a false “anti-racism”? Of all the political and/or commentariat figures out there today, I’m inclined to argue […]
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 […]
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson
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