New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 158 How does society work? That seems like an important question for people who live in societies and are thus tasked, whether they like it or not, with keeping the thing going. The answer is pretty surprising, actually, and it all boils down to how we incentivize people to work in ways that benefit other people even when they don't know or care about those other people. Drawing off Friedrich Hayek's arguments about the "extended society," in this episode of New Disco...
May 11, 2026•26 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 203 Among the peculiar anxieties that fueled the Nazi Experiment in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was the fear that Germany would be relegated to merely economic participation in a broader world order, causing Germans and Germany to subordinate their personalities and race to merely economic concerns. Of course, this anxiety exists again today and motivates the reactive and transformative thinking of the Woke Right, who fears that America is re...
May 08, 2026•1 hr 22 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 157 One of the most contentious issues in the modern world, raging now for at least a century, is the issue of the legality of Jewish settlement and statehood in Israel. There are strong arguments on both sides of this difficult issue, but there's a narrow question involved as well: Did the Jews move to the region legally (or are they illegal settler-colonialists)? In the effort to put some clarifying information about this issue into the world, host James Lindsay use...
May 04, 2026•34 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 202 Underneath the Nazi Experiment lay a mythology. That mythology was called "the Myth of the Blood" by Hitler's chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg recorded this mythology in a very peculiar book called The Myth of the Twentieth Century, originally published in 1930. In it, Rosenberg lays out a complete treatise of what Nazis were supposed to believe about the world and their own roles in it, answering fundamental questions like how t...
May 01, 2026•1 hr 36 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 156 Central to the psychological and social construction of both Fascists and Nazis are the concepts of heroism and honor. These sound good, like sound foundations of society. Then again, from the Marxist Left, so do fairness and justice. In both cases, though, we find a rule of totalitarian systems: the virtues are defined in terms of the totalitarian project itself. Under Fascist and Nazi thinking, heroism and honor are comprehensible only in terms of one's duty to ...
Apr 24, 2026•26 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 201 As we have been exploring, the Nazis had a worldview, and that worldview formed the core of their European experiment in the 1930s and 1940s. Underneath that worldview was a myth: the Myth of the Blood. This myth was concocted by the Nazi's chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, and formalized the race-based thinking of the Third Reich. And myth it is. Rosenberg records these ideas in his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which begins wit...
Apr 20, 2026•2 hr 24 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 155 Underneath the hood of Fascism is a heavy insistence that its program aligns with various aspects of Nature. Generally, the belief that something being "natural" (right or wrong in the assessment) means that it is also good is referred to as the "naturalistic fallacy." That means it is an error. That something is "natural" does not necessarily imply that it is good. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay addresses the weird appeals to Nature...
Apr 13, 2026•16 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 154 Father of Italian Fascism, Benito Mussolini, is famous for having remarked that Fascism can be summarized simply enough as "corporatism." When we hear this, many of us assume it refers to an ideology of the state being fused with its corporations. That's part of the economic program of Fascism, no doubt, but that's not actually what it means. What it means is much more concerning and creepy. The word "corporate" and thus "corporatism" come from the Latin root corp...
Apr 10, 2026•11 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 200 At the end of the day, the magic that makes the American Experiment work is that it is grounded in an astute understanding of human nature and political realism. Almost nowhere is this fact more evident than in Federalist 51 (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0199), written by either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton in early 1788. In this Federalist Paper, addressed to the people of the State of New York, Madison (...
Apr 08, 2026•1 hr 10 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 153 Fascism is generally regarded as a reactionary and right-wing ideology (though that latter characterization is strongly contested for good reasons). The truth is, it is a progressive ideology, though. It would be most appropriate to say that Fascism is progressive by reactionary means, in fact. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay makes the case that we should see Fascism as an ultra-progressive ideology that seeks to unify people in order...
Apr 06, 2026•13 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 152 The usual understanding of the Jewish people is that the Jews are God's "chosen people." What does that mean? Well, it doesn't mean what antisemites and detractors of Jews tend to believe it means, and what it means is actually extremely interesting. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay "goysplains" the idea of Jews being God's "chosen people," aiming to explain what is meant by that claim and what it entails for Jews and others. This epis...
Apr 02, 2026•17 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 198 Early in March 2026, the famous but anonymous X account known as "Insurrection Barbie" (https://x.com/defiyantlyfree) dropped a long article (https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/2029681200189636717) about an Integralist operation to disrupt and hijack the American right-wing (or conservative movement, or Republican Party). The results were tremendous. Her article got over four million views; Senator Ted Cruz shared it as an important read; a...
Mar 30, 2026•2 hr 57 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 151 Being a very effective propagandist doesn't just rely on having a powerful message. It also depends on trust. Thus, the ideal propagandist is, in fact, a "trusted voice." In the realm of "Woke," which is to say with regard to critical theories, that trusted voice tends to take on a particular form. He is a critic, one who calls out the embedded corruption of the system all around him. The mode in which this happens in our world today comes from Antonio Gramcsi's "...
Mar 27, 2026•16 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 198 When we talk about Woke Left and Woke Right, while the essential core of being "Woke" is mostly the same, there are some key differences. These organizational and conceptual differences arise in part because of deeper differences in how each of these projects divides the world, always ultimately into "us versus them." With the Woke Left, it is divided starkly horizontally by classes deemed oppressor and oppressed. With the Woke Right, on the...
Mar 25, 2026•52 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 150 The Nazi Party had a problem through its entire existence, from 1920 to 1945. That problem was Christianity, which was in its way. The Nazi movement, you see, was a totalizing worldview that is in many ways at complete odds with Christianity. In order to get German Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, to accept and move toward Nazi ideology, a concept known as "Positive Christianity" was proposed as the official belief doctrine for the Third Reich, but what w...
Mar 20, 2026•15 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 149 The Long March Through the Institutions is a Marxist strategy for infiltrating the West through its institutions. Realizing by the 1960s that they would not be able to take the United States and Western Civilization from the outside, Marxists started formulating strategies in the "Western Marxist" canon to take it from the inside. That required taking over its institutions and transforming them and their culture. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host Jam...
Mar 18, 2026•25 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 148 A critical theory can be made out of anything. You can have a Critical Race Theory about race, a Critical Gender Theory about sex, even a Critical America Theory about America. And, we have all of these. In universities, Critical America Theory is usually branded as "American Studies," but we have it everywhere. It's not just in schools but in media, entertainment, law, and everything else. It also doesn't just appear in left-wing ways like Howard Zinn's infamous ...
Mar 13, 2026•21 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 197 The Jewish Question, which is "what do we do with the Jews?" rests on the presumption that they aren't wanted here, or maybe anywhere. It is therefore intrinsically antisemitic. Since the catastrophe of World War II, all civilized societies have come to recognize this fact and refuse the Jewish Question except in the dark margins of society (at least, until recently). With the state of Israel on the world stage again, though, the question ha...
Mar 11, 2026•1 hr 26 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 147 The friend-enemy distinction, as it is called, is the underlying organizational principle of the Marxist Left, radical Islam, and the Fascist Reactionary Left (usually mislabeled "Right"). It is spelled out in detail in a 1932 book by Carl Schmitt called The Concept of the Political, (https://amzn.to/4rbQpFN) and in that book Schmitt goes into great detail to explain what is meant by the term "enemies." He gives much less clear attention to the opposing term "frie...
Mar 09, 2026•18 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 196 Today in America, we face a confusing "Christian Nationalist" (https://newdiscourses.com/2023/04/two-wolves-of-christian-nationalism/) movement that is reaching into many legitimate complaints and anxieties of American Christians and turning them to its project. While the term can mean many things, at least some of the meanings of "Christian Nationalism" are undeniably a kind of political movement (https://newdiscourses.com/2024/12/the-hoax-...
Mar 06, 2026•2 hr 20 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 146 The essence of a critical theory is a philosophical stance we can and should call "negative idealism," and this negative idealism explains why "critical" movements like Communism, Fascism, and Woke of all types trend toward violence. Setting the stage against the recent sprees of "transgender" violence as an important backdrop, host James Lindsay explains the psychological destruction of holding a negative idealist worldview in this cutting-edge episode of New Dis...
Mar 04, 2026•19 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 195 When we face the question of what makes us who we are, different people have different answers. Some see ourselves as receptacles of tradition. Others see us as a self to be discovered in the world. Still others see us as blank slates who can become whatever we can dream. In some sense, these dispositions are in all of us, and that's healthy. They also define broad political orientations and movements. Importantly, they can also all go bad. ...
Mar 02, 2026•53 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 145 Carl Schmitt captured the essence of totalitarian politics in his book The Concept of the Political (1932) (https://amzn.to/4sf2Rpk). It is the distinction between friend and enemy. The poison of this kind of thinking is in the ugly fact that the declared enemy must be treated as the declared enemy once a political faction has declared one, and anyone who doesn't go along with that declaration declares himself one of the enemy. That is, it's not just the us-versus...
Feb 27, 2026•21 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 194 James Lindsay's second trip to Israel was very different from his first (https://newdiscourses.com/2025/11/am-yisrael-chai/). On this trip, he got what he calls his "Real Jerusalem Experience," and he did a wide variety of things, not so much a coherent, organized tour. In the process, he was introduced to Israeli and Jewish life in a new way, which has offered him insights on what it means to be American and why America is the way that it i...
Feb 25, 2026•55 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 144 The ever-insightful Michael Malice once explained, "most people do not process information through a true/false filter but through an us/them filter." There are pretty deep and interesting reasons why this is true, and there are also insightful comments to be made about the necessity and value of at least some of us disciplining ourselves to prefer a true/false filter, or at least to defer to the results of one. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host Jame...
Feb 23, 2026•19 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 193 As we encounter both the material in the infamous Epstein Files and revelations from some of Epstein's associates, not to mention the advances in AI and robotics, we're confronted with what seemed like dystopian science fiction just a few years ago: transhumanism. Tech futurists, however, have been predicting it and working toward it for decades, including the curious figure of "Martine" Rothblatt, creator of SiriusXM Radio and board member ...
Feb 20, 2026•1 hr 38 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 143 As normal people who value ideological and logical consistency, we tend to find movements like the Red-Green Alliance (Communists and Islamists) and "Queers for Palestine" confusing. How can people with such different views and goals work together? Obviously, part of the answer is the simple one: they have a common enemy to defeat and can work out their differences after they solve that problem. Nevertheless, the answer to this question, at least from the Communis...
Feb 15, 2026•10 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 192 What makes something valuable? How do we determine value? One hypothesis on value is famously forwarded and relied upon by the Marxists. It is called the "Labor Theory of Value," and it insists that labor is what transforms raw materials into something "humanized" and therefore of value. Therefore, in this theory, labor is what makes something valuable. Of course, this theory has not proved to be adequate for economic purposes, which is just...
Feb 13, 2026•59 min
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 142 What in the world do the Woke mean by "lived experience"? (https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-lived-experience/) As has been discussed here before (https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/lived-experience-explained/), lived experience is a kind of magical combination of what someone actually lives and experiences and a Woke (or "Critical" or Marxist) interpretation of what causes that experience and what it means. That is, it is experience plus Woke interpretation. The thin...
Feb 11, 2026•18 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 191 Central to the idea of Marxist thought, although Marx himself rarely used the term, is the idea of "false consciousness." People, it is alleged, are going through their lives unaware of the realities of the world around them, existing in an ideologically constructed false consciousness that maintains the existing power structures of the world. (Being "Woke" in fact, is adopting an awakened "true" consciousness of the nature of self-replicati...
Feb 09, 2026•1 hr 23 min
