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James Lindsay, anti-Communist

@ConceptualJames

Jul 3

Fun fact: If you had a time machine and could go back in time to this day in 2019 but couldn't take any physical evidence with you, you could not convince almost anyone to take the Woke Left threat seriously and would get mocked and yelled at for trying, even by friends.

Your left-leaning friends (if you have any) would make fun of you for not getting it. Your right-leaning friends would laugh at you for making a mountain out of a molehill. No one really understood there was a serious problem with the Woke Left until after summer 2020.

The reason I know this is because I was there and doing this full time already by that point in my life.

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James Lindsay, anti-Communist

@ConceptualJames

Jun 26

Introducing to you two of the "intellectual" Woke Right's favorite contemporary thinkers: Patrick Deneen (left) and R.R. Reno. Here, they demonstrate their inability to see what is plainly in front of them—a Marxist insurgency through Leftist elitist capture—because of their preference for theories of cultural rot and decay.

These kinds of theories about why we are where we are aren't just dangerous misdiagnosed; they're also self-flattering humblebrags, saying in effect, "things got bad because everyone went to shit except people like us who are better than that." Typical Woke virtue signaling except in "modest" conservative form.

Yes, they are popular with Woke Right propagandists.

Like fr

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James Lindsay, anti-Communist

@ConceptualJames

Jun 21

It's Saturday, and the world is a mess. Perhaps it's a good time for a little humor with a point. To that end, allow me to reintroduce the "Grievance Studies Affair" to the world. This will be a longer thread (20+ posts) introducing every single paper of the Grievance Studies Affair individually in a new, never-seen-before way.

The Grievance Studies Affair (or, "Sokal Squared") was an academic hoax project done seven years ago by @peterboghossian, @HPluckrose, and I with the help of @MikeNayna, who also produced a documentary (The Reformers, 2023) about what we affectionately named "the project" as we did it.

It involved writing 20+ academic hoax articles and sending them to peer-reviewed journals in the "theoretical humanities," things like gender studies and sexuality studies, to reveal a kind of ideological academic rabies we now refer to as "Woke (Leftism)". In the end 7 of these papers were accepted, 4 were actually published, 1 received recognition for excellence in scholarship in the field of "feminist geography," and 7 more were still under peer review on October 2, 2018, when the Wall Street Journal blew our cover.

What we learned from the project is ultimately that peer review is only as good as the peers. If the peers are corrupted in some way, that corruption will be validated as "knowledge" and passed into the intellectual foundations of society through the existing system. The implications are vast. Of course, while we revealed a form of ideological corruption in academia, there are other forms as well: political, economic, corporate, etc., all of which matter in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons.

While the Grievance Studies Affair itself is now over six and a half years old and thus an article of history, I don't think it has ever been more relevant. To this day, it still has not been reckoned with in the slightest. Our knowledge-producing institutions have ideological rabies and corporatist cancers that will be our undoing. Until we see complete reform or replacement of much of our research, higher-education, and primary and secondary education institutions and apparatuses, we are at risk of complete societal collapse. It really is that serious, and absolutely none of it has been stopped yet.

This thread isn't just a reminder of the Grievance Studies Affair, however. It's also an introduction to a Grievance Studies Portal I have published on @NewDiscourses through much effort of my team. In this thread, each of the 20+ papers will be introduced individually with direct links to their new home on New Discourses so that you can read them and laugh (or cry, or be horrified) and share them with ease. I hope you appreciate them and all the hard work that went into them and their publication here.

For my part, it has been a great opportunity to take a day to reflect and reminisce about one of the most challenging and most fun times of my entire life. I don't think I will ever be blessed with the opportunity to work so hard while laughing my head off ever again, nor will I ever regain the innocence I had going into this project. I thought it was funny when I started. By the middle, I realized it wasn't just serious but a legitimate threat to civilization. I changed my entire life as a result, and not a lot of that has been so funny.

I hope you enjoy this thread. Below, you will find the release video Mike Nayna produced that we put out on October 2, 2018, minutes after the Wall Street Journal outed us. It has been seen millions upon millions of times now and legitimately has changed the world, just not enough. It will serve as your reminder and introduction to the absolute insanity you'll find in the posts below.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter. Like I said from the start, mostly I hope you'll find this at least as hilarious as it is terrifying, and maybe you'll share it with your friends.

The Grievance Studies Affair has never been more relevant.

The New Discourses Grievance Studies Affair portal is located at the link below. In it, you'll find information about each of us, our motivations, our original write-ups and analysis about the project, as well as every single paper and its peer-reviewed commentary, as available (not all papers made it to peer review).

I hope you will find it a useful and sharable resource about the plague of ideological rabies that has taken over our institutions.
newdiscourses.com/grievance-stud…

What became the Grievance Studies Affair began with a trial-balloon paper that @peterboghossian and I wrote in late 2016, hilariously titled "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct." It's one of the funniest things I've ever written, rivaled only by a couple of the later Grievance Studies Papers (YMMV).

It is not housed on the Grievance Studies Affair @NewDiscourses portal, but perhaps it should be, because it wasn't part of the Grievance Studies Affair properly. It might be its second most-famous contribution, however.

In the paper, Peter and I took inspiration from a real paper that had been published in the highest-ranking gender studies journal, Gender & Society, characterizing menstrual blood as a social construct. We argued that penises are not best thought of as male reproductive organs, in part because "pre-operative trans women" also have them (which was effectively repeated in the Supreme Court argumentation this week in the Skrmetti case). Instead, they should be thought of as social constructs that create toxic masculinity and rape culture and cause all the problems in the world, especially climate change.

This paper was ultimately accepted by means of a related but passed-over academic publishing scandal in a (likely) predatory journal called Cogent Social Sciences after a clear sham peer review process after being rejected and transferred from a masculinities journal called NORMA.

Because of the low quality of the journal and the one-off nature of the stunt, it was left ambiguous if Peter and I had proved any point about gender studies and related fields ("Grievance Studies" fields) at all. We were admonished to write more papers, target serious journals, and be more accurate in our claims, and we accepted this challenge happily.

"The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" was published in Cogent Social Sciences on May 19, 2017, and by June 7 Peter and I had resolved to start the Grievance Studies Affair to do the job right.
skeptic.com/content/files/…

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James Lindsay, anti-Communist

@ConceptualJames

Jun 6

Woke Right Lie of the Day

"Marxism is not Woke; Woke is not Marxist."

This is a pretty hilarious Woke Right lie that I've already partially addressed (linked in next post threaded below), but I want to get under the hood of it a little more because it's important (and funny).

First of all, yes it is. Marxism is an opportunistic parasitic ideology* that has only one agenda: to seize the means of production of man and society by any means necessary. It literally defines both truth and ethics in terms of this agenda.

Marxism is an operating system; a worldview; a way of viewing the world and behaving in it (theory and praxis). It is not a set of conclusions, a specific analysis, a set of analytic tools, a set of tactics, or really even just an ideology (see * above). It's a totalizing worldview based intrinsically on the conflict of contending classes as a means of reaching ultimate social, economic, cultural, and political synthesis and "return of man to himself as a social, i.e., human, being" bringing with him the benefits of "all the previous stages of development."

Woke is a manifestation of that parasitic worldview trying to make the leap to infect a new "species" of society, namely free, liberal societies running with individual liberties and free enterprise. Marxism was only successful before Woke at installing itself by force or by subverting feudal systems, not "capitalistic" liberal ones.

Think of it like a real virus like bird flu. Bird flu infects birds. It does not infect humans under normal conditions. It is evolved to attack weaknesses in bird biology and to exploit receptors on bird cells, but these don't readily cross over to other species. Sometimes, there's a trans-species leap from birds to people, and we end up with avian flu or bird flus that can infect humans, and they're usually pretty nasty. In fact, all flus originate from this species-jumping phenomenon, which designates them specifically as a kind of plague (a disease for non-human animals that evolves to infect humans). Plagues are usually really nasty and bad and can be far deadlier than typical human-borne diseases (like common colds).

Marxism is a plague ideology in this specific sense overall, but we're focusing on Woke. Though Marx didn't realize it as he outlined it, thinking he was talking about specific classes in capitalism (workers versus "bourgeois" management), his ideological virus was really only suited to infect feudal societies at scale, which Lenin ultimately discovered and/or proved. It couldn't infect capitalist, liberal, or free societies, to the great consternation of the Marxists.

(Incidentally, a side-effect of partial forced infection by Marxism in such societies was a rampant and psychotically deranged nationalism called Fascism, which was like a deformed hybrid of corporatist capitalism that adopted lots of Marxist RNA, in a sense.)

Marxism had to make a variety of evolutionary leaps to find receptors in free, liberal, capitalistic societies in order to infect it. Cultural Marxists like Antonio Gramsci indicated that infiltrating the cultural institutions and rotting them from within would soften a society up to going Marxist. The Neo-Marxists identified a need to abandon the working class specifically to focus on other more "vital" centers of revolutionary energy, like Marcuse's sexual and racial minorities. It's a lot to explain how Paulo Freire's liberationist ideas influenced things, but they set the stage for any "marginalized" knowing system to be the basis for a mutated Marxist critique, resulting in favoring "other ways of knowing." Postmodernism amplified that.

These developments are like an unsecured ideological biolab in Wuhan with no reasonable safety protections and eventually a lot of Deep State money that shouldn't have been dumped into them. The result was what we called "Woke" (or "Woke Left"). The receptor sites were specifically identity-cultural points that the post-segregation, post-colonial, post-1960s (not post-WWII) generations were particularly soft and susceptible to under a badly twisted and perverted notion of "tolerance" mixed with heavy amounts of deliberately amplified and exploited generational guilt.

"Woke," which is the Intersectional variant of all of this, which is ultimately best characterized as American Maoism, was the result of an evolutionary process by Marxism, for Marxism, to find a way to get its class-conflict-oriented worldview central in the American sociocultural mind. For those playing at home, Mao was a Marxist. Maoism is a set of tactics he developed for mutating the original Marxist virus to be particularly effective on the Chinese people he was trying to force-infect with it.

So yes, Woke is Marxism, and Marxism is Woke. I'm not going over it again. The lie is busted completely.

It raises the important question, though, of why the Woke Right would defend Marxism from accusations of being "Woke" in the first place (in exactly the same way the Marxist and strictly neo-Marxist Left does, by the way).

The reason is because the Woke Right is not interested in stopping Woke. It is interested in stopping the Left, but it is even more interested in destroying classical liberalism. It's happy to use the Left as the cover for its project of destroying classical liberalism, but that's its real project. Why do you think they call themselves the "post-liberal Right"?

Both Woke Right and Woke Left agree that classical liberalism and individual rights (what Marx and Hitler both called "egotism") have to be done away with completely. They disagree over who gets to do it and how society will be organized. The Woke Left is tyrannical in the name of ending oppression. The Woke Right is tyrannical in the name of installing oppression. This is because the "Left" is radically anti-hierarchy while the "Right" is radically pro-hierarchy.

So the real reason the Woke Right tells this lie is to hide what it's really doing. The Woke Right is attacking classical liberalism in the name of "stopping the Left."

(Incidentally, the Woke Left is doing the same thing. It is attacking classical liberalism in the name of "stopping the Right.")

An essential and central argument from the Woke Right that is part of what makes it Woke is that classical liberalism itself necessarily becomes Communism. If they were to admit that Marxism is a parasitic aberration and attack on classical liberalism that finally found a way to exploit its receptor sites (mostly located in views on tolerance), they would have to abandon their central premise and raison d'etre, which is to destroy classical liberalism (a.k.a., America) in the name of posting up against the Left rather than actually fighting the Left.

(Btw, this is also why they want America defined as a "people in a place" (blood and soil): they have to dislocate what America really represents, which is an experiment in genuine classical liberalism, in order to attack it in the name of "saving" it.)

The Woke Left argues, in parallel, that classical liberalism necessarily becomes Fascism. They both say this is the case because of classical liberalism's focus on individualism, which enables the other extreme by negating the group mentality and group-based "rights" that their side believes is an essential and necessary ingredient in society ignored or suppressed by "evil" classical liberalism.

Both are obviously wrong, but what you have when you have two polar opposing views that both fight the same target in the name of fighting each other is a polarized dialectic. Both its Left and Right pole are trying to undermine and destroy classical liberalism, but both claim their real function is to free us from the evil excesses of the other side. The point of the polarized dialectic is to generate both a fake fight and lots of energy to accomplish the shared goal between the poles, which in this case is the destruction of individual liberties. Obviously, being diametrically opposed, they'll fight (forever) over which side gets to hold power and for which vision, but there's no way off the ride once individual liberties are destroyed.

https://x.com/ConceptualJames/status/1930691867139551237

James Lindsay, anti-Communist

@ConceptualJames

May 23

They're going to end up wearing the Woke Right label for one reason and one reason only: it fits, perfectly. Yoram Hazony is probably their most eloquent little Wormtongue, and I invite you to read his thoughts. I might respond. Maybe.
theblaze.com/columns/opinio…

It's key that the play now that the term has stuck is to contain it. The Woke Right will now be working overtime not just to get away from the term but to salvage the "Third Way" false moderates who are still anti-Constitution, anti-liberty by distancing from the wild radicals.

Yoram isn't just a deceitful scoundrel and a massive nerd. He's also dead wrong. By framing out the problems on the "nationalist" Right as "Woke," because they are, the enemy becomes clear rather than polarized. Woke is the enemy, no matter who does it. Liberty is the goal.

Read 19 tweets

James Lindsay, anti-Communist

@ConceptualJames

May 2

Jordan Peterson is absolutely right about the dark tetrad traits and cluster-B personality disorders underlying the Woke phenomena and that they can appear not just in any group but that they'll be particularly attracted like parasites to reservoirs of status, power, and value.

My claim for many years (since 2020 concretely and long before vaguely) has been that the ideological frameworks presented by "Woke" phenomena are in some sense psychosocial extensions of these underlying pathologies, which can "infect" (mind virus) or ensnare vulnerable people.

An important point about these ideological frameworks, viewed as kind of sociocultural games (with psychological components) is that the hierarchies they establish will always be occupied not just by psychopaths but by the most ruthless psychopaths eventually.

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