The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 23 Aufheben is a German word that, in Critical Theory, means to "abolish" or to "negate" in the way that Critical Theorists do. It's a somewhat complicated term in that it means both to abolish and to keep or to keep safe, and the Critical Theory use taps into the so-called dialectical process to attempt to use aufheben to tear apart and, as the Marxists translated it, "sublate" whatever cultural artifact they are targeting onto a "higher" l...
Mar 03, 2021•1 hr 42 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 22 Critical Race Theorists like to claim that they have inherited and continue the noble legacy and justice work of the Civil Rights Movement, but this is an abject lie. In this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I take about half an hour to make the case definitively that, while they are content to portray this illusion, it is a grotesque distortion of reality, using their own words. By exploring the book Critic...
Feb 15, 2021•29 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 21 In 1945, even as the Nazis fell from power, Karl Popper told us how to find the line where free, liberal societies are in imminent danger in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, most simply summarizing a crucial part of the argument in a short footnote about "The Paradox of Tolerance." There, Popper lays out a short summary of when a free society should and must not tolerate intolerant movements if it is to survive. It is not only w...
Feb 11, 2021•35 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 20 Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 4 of 4 In this fourth and final part of his four-part lecture series about "Repressive Tolerance," James Lindsay takes the reader from the darkest point of the essay, which was the exciting climax of Part 3, through the end of Marcuse's argument. In this part, Marcuse dedicates the rest of the original 1965 essay to explaining why it is him and people like him (that is, Critical Theorists) who get to deci...
Feb 08, 2021•1 hr 4 min
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 in the first part and explaining the condition of the "administered society" in the second, Marcuse now turns to answering the question of what a Repressive Tolerance should look like, including what it must sup...
Feb 03, 2021•1 hr 9 min
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 we live in. The listener will find striking parallels to today's world, which certainly qualifies as the type of "administered society" far more accurately than the world that Marcuse inhabited in ...
Jan 29, 2021•1 hr 9 min
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 right, that broken logic is centered in the no-longer-tolerant left. The logic of the left today is overwhelmingly rooted in a single essay published in 1965 by the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. That essay is "Repressive Tolerance." The ...
Jan 26, 2021•1 hr 5 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 16 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 of essays and books while imprisoned by the Italian fascists in the 1920s and 1930s that are referred to as his Prison Notebooks. These are the birthplace of Cultural Marxism, which James Lindsay argues has evolved into "Identity Marxism" sinc...
Jan 21, 2021•58 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 15 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 mythology turns the story of America on its head, positioning it not as having been born in the pursuit of freedom and liberty in 1776 but in slavery and evil in 1619. It has mainstreamed itself since the 1960s but especially over the last five year...
Jan 13, 2021•1 hr 13 min
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay - Episode 14 In a recent long-form essay on New Discourses (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/), James Lindsay explained the origins of totalitarianism in a single word: psychopathy. There, he explained that totalitarianism arises from people who cannot cope with reality as it is, and yet who are content to manipulate others, constructing a "pseudo-reality" in service to a vision of the world that serves their need...
Jan 07, 2021•1 hr 14 min
Human beings think in stories. We understand ourselves and the world, societies, social groups, and contexts we live in that way. One type of story is a national story, and in this episode of the New Discourses podcast, James Lindsay makes the case that Americans have, by and large, forgotten the totality of their own story. This has happened by placing too much focus and too much emphasis on one valuable and important part of the American story, which is equality. All men are, in fact, created ...
Nov 30, 2020•55 min
James Lindsay recently said on Twitter that he will vote "unhappily" for Republicans including Trump in these troubled times after seeing an argument that the left should work to abolish the Constitution. Join him on this episode of the New Discourses Podcast for an explanation of his thought process on this issue as it has unfolded over this tumultuous summer of 2020. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC...
Oct 21, 2020•55 min
We live in an era of unprecedented pressure for ideologically based organizational trainings: anti-racist, racial sensitivity, unconscious bias, cultural awareness, and, perhaps most commonly, some combination of "diversity, equity, and inclusion." We're also rapidly waking up to the fact that in this era, the basic terminology describing and informing these training programs cannot be trusted to mean what it seems to on its face. What's needed, then, is clarity around these terms and these idea...
Sep 25, 2020•1 hr 2 min
Follow Peter at twitter.com/peterboghossian Support New Discourses: patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com...
Sep 04, 2020•41 min
We have to talk about 2+2. Unfortunately. Most unfortunately. This is because what looks like a simple and profoundly stupid Twitter fight must be understood in the full context in which it is playing out. This context is, in fact, the most important and least reported part of the origin story of the Great 2+2 War of 2020, and few realize that this ridiculous discourse didn't come out of a vacuum. It arose in reaction to something James Lindsay posted on Twitter, as has been reported, but more s...
Aug 14, 2020•1 hr 39 min
I want to explain Critical Race Theory to you. I just want to help you understand it, so I sat down with my microphone and no real plan except to talk through the claims, history, and thought of Critical Race Theory, highlighting where it came from and why it's a terrible way to think about race and racism, in its own ideas. So, this episode of the New Discourses podcast is a little different. It's just me sitting down with you through my microphone to make a seemingly complicated thing clear. I...
Jul 20, 2020•1 hr 15 min
Helen Pluckrose develops the definition of "Social Justice" as it is used in the academic literature in this tradition, explains its connections to identity politics and the political correctness movement, and then shows the relevance of the original postmodernists to this Theory in some detail. She does this to elegantly describe the progression of these ideas from Theory to activism to the streets by describing how these ideas originated, evolved, and were built upon by successive generations ...
Jun 22, 2020•35 min
Join Lindsay in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast for a little over an hour of common sense in his liberal defense of the so-called "status quo." Support New Discourses: https://patreon.com/newdiscourses Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: https://facebook.com/newdiscourses https://twitter.com/NewDiscourses https://instagram.com/newdiscourses https://pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ https://linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses https://minds.com/newdiscourses https://reddit.com/r/NewDis...
Jun 16, 2020•1 hr 12 min
In my line of work taking on Critical Social Justice and other forms of increasingly dominant societal insanity, I get asked a lot of questions. If there's one question I'm asked more often than any other, it's how don't I go crazy looking at this stuff every day? To be fair, I've flown pretty close to that sun, but I didn't fall in, and so I've reflected quite a bit on it. I thought it might help people to spell out some of the answer. -James Lindsay Support New Discourses: patreon.com/newdisco...
Jun 02, 2020•1 hr 38 min
There is a rhetorical strategy called the “motte and bailey” that is getting increasingly famous lately. This is because it is one of the central tools of the Critical Social Justice movement. In that strategy, named after a kind of castle, a highly defensible “motte” position, like “we just want to treat people more fairly,” is maintained while also pushing a more radical “bailey” position, like “we need to radically remake our school systems so that no one can fail.” Activists advance the bail...
May 07, 2020•1 hr 18 min
On this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, your host James Lindsay explores the concept of political regimes through American history. From Washington, to Lincoln, to Roosevelt, right up through W and Obama, the “US of A” has seen a broad spectrum of political ideals displayed under the common framework known as “Modernity.” But where are we now? Considering the rise of Trump, the media's explicit bias, and the prevalence of critical social justice theory throughout culture, Lindsay suggests...
Apr 13, 2020•59 min
Critical Social Justice operates like a virus. I’ve said it about them; they say it about themselves; we’re all in agreement. It infects liberal institutions and liberal-minded people (philosophically speaking, whether on the left, right, or center), perverts “critical” as in “critical thinking” into “critical” as in “critical theory,” which means something completely different. It then turns those institutions and individuals into woke cells that produce more Critical Social Justice and spread ...
Apr 04, 2020•53 min
James lindsay takes a few minutes to dig deeply into the mindset of Critical Social Justice to explain exactly why its proponents are so reluctant to be seen applying their work in administrative and educational spheres. Support New Discourses: patreon.com/newdiscourses Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: podcasts.a...
Apr 03, 2020•31 min
“Life will never be the same again.” We hear this over and over again with regard to the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic is having on us, even though we’re only weeks into the pandemic. Is that true, though? Won’t most of us “regress to the mean,” as it’s sometimes phrased, as we move forward and get this crisis in our rearview mirror? I think we will, more or less, and I think we need to remember that. Support New Discourses: https://patreon.com/newdiscourses Website: https://newdiscourses.co...
Mar 28, 2020•35 min
New Discourses convened in October of 2019 in the National Liberal Club of London for a day-long conference titled Speaking Truth to Social Justice. There, Portland State University philosophy professor Peter Boghossian gave a rousing talk about the need to “speak truth in the face of danger,” parrhesia, as the Ancient Greeks called it, as this applies to Critical Social Justice. Follow Peter Boghossian: https://twitter.com/peterboghossian Support New Discourses: https://patreon.com/newdiscourse...
Mar 26, 2020•37 min
Dr. James Lindsay in his talk, “The Truth About Critical Methods,” makes very clear that Critical Social Justice is not the same thing as social justice. He argues that the branding of social justice, which is how Critical Social Justice promotes itself, misleads people about the nature of that movement. Support New Discourses: https://patreon.com/newdiscourses Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: https://facebook.com/newdiscourses https://twitter.com/NewDiscourses https://instagram.com/ne...
Mar 19, 2020•51 min
In February, I discovered an article on Twitter about “decolonizing graphic design,” published in the summer of last year. These sorts of articles are incredibly useful for showing exactly what’s going on in the Critical Social Justice mindset once you know how to read them, and this one doesn’t disappoint. After quickly threading about the article on Twitter to show it and explain it to my followers, I grabbed my microphone for an impromptu discussion of what I read. Support New Discourses: htt...
Mar 14, 2020•11 min
In October of 2019, a small group of genuinely liberal-minded people gathered together for a day of speeches, panels, and community in the Gladstone Library in the National Liberal Club of London. The conference had a title that succinctly described its purpose: Speaking Truth to Social Justice. Over the course of the day, even as the Extinction Rebellion protest raged outside just a block away, we gave seven talks and held two panel discussions, all with the intention of recovering and restatin...
Mar 10, 2020•26 min
Peter speaks with Conor about if there's anything he believes but doesn't say because people will think he's a bad person. Then the conversation shifts into whether or not we should stand up for what we believe. https://newdiscourses.com Purchase 'How to Have Impossible Conversations' here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/peter-boghossian/how-to-have-impossible-conversations/9780738285344/ Peter's Twitter: https://twitter.com/peterboghossian
Feb 20, 2020•22 min
