New Discourses

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 58 Critical Education Theory Series, Part 1 Over the last fifty years, a monumental change in the North American education systems has been taking place. The name for that change is "the Critical Turn in Education," which is, in brief, how Critical Theory has crept into education and education theory (pedagogy) and slowly perverted it from wit...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay. Episode 57 What is the University? It's the center of intellectual life in civilizations in the broad era we might call Modernity. And what is the purpose of the University in its essence? If we turn to the 19th century Catholic thinker John Henry Newman and his iconic The Idea of the University, we see that it is to teach all knowledge. The Universit...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 56 The ideology that is most conveniently identified as "Wokeness" is much more accurately described by the phrase Identity Marxism. That is, Wokeness is a Marxian approach to identity politics for similar aims to those Marxism has always touted. In this regard, Critical Race Theory is Race Marxism; Critical Gender Theory is Gender Marxism; Qu...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 55 In the previous episode of the New Discourses Podcast (https://newdiscourses.com/2021/11/groomer-schools-1-long-cultural-marxist-history-sex-education/), James Lindsay revealed the long history of the problem of Groomer Schools, and horrible as it is, it barely communicates just how bad things really are. In this follow-up episode, Lindsay...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 54 Through brand names like "comprehensive sex education" and one of its parent programs, "Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)," our government schools have been turned into Groomer Schools, and parents are beginning to notice. What many will not understand, however, is that this isn't just a fluke of our weird and increasingly degenerate times. I...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 53 Order Counter Wokecraft: https://amzn.to/3r1y0Ak New Discourses is excited to present the first publication in its book imprint, Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond, by Charles Pincourt with James Lindsay. This short, accessible guide presents the idea that Wokeness isn't just a philosophy...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 52 Surely you've noticed that the Woke movement doesn't build anything or accomplish anything productive. There's a reason for that. The only thing they bring to the table is protest, which is to say destruction. Disrupt, dismantle, deconstruct, subvert, and then "reimagine"; that's their whole program. This has been summarized here on the New...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 51 You may have noticed that times are turbulent and that something very nefarious seems to be afoot. You're not wrong, of course. That's exactly what's happening, and it presents a dangerous time for humanity. The question is why it's happening because the answer to that question informs us significantly on our prospects going forward. On the...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 50 Sustainability is going to be the buzzword of the century. Everywhere we turn, we hear about sustainable practices in business and industry, sustainable foods and agriculture, sustainable energy, and so on. Businesses and governments sign on to "Sustainable Development Goals," and so civil responsibility is framed in terms of this seemingly...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 49 Critical Theory evolved out of a pathological hatred. This hatred isn't just what you expect. Yes, the Critical Theorists hated capitalism, like all Marxists, but they hated something new about capitalism compared against their predecessors. They hated that capitalism works. Critical Theory, the tool of neo-Marxism, therefore grew out of th...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 48 Liberation Series, Part 4 of 4 We live in Herbert Marcuse's world. In a previous series on the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay made that clearer than ever by reading through all of Marcuse's 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance" (https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html), which served as a...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 47 Systemic racism is said by Critical Race Theorists "ordinary, not aberrational—'normal science,' the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country." As such, virtually everything is systemically racist, from schools to the SAT to businesses to every policy they can think of to teach...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 46 Liberation Series, Part 3 of 4 The more one reads of Herbert Marcuse, the father of the New Left, the less there is to recommend his ideas and more there is to recommend learning about them. This is because thanks to the New Left that he spawned, we live in Herbert Marcuse's twisted world, which may now be in the early stages of collapse. T...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 45 Critical Theories are almost embarrassingly simple. There's almost nothing to them. A Critical Theory of anything can easily be made by one of two routes. One: Take an existing Critical Theory of something, substitute the domain-specific jargon of some other thing, and then publish. You're a genius revolutionizing (pun intended) your field!...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 44 Liberation Series, Part 2 of 4 Herbert Marcuse is one of the most influential Leftist thinkers of the 1950s and 1960s, and for that reason he is often regarded as the father of the "New Left," which is reaching something of a crescendo in the Woke Movement of today. His goal was straightforward: liberation. In 1969, he wrote an influential...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 43 What's happening in our schools? It's obvious to everyone that Critical Race Theory (and the other Theories of Critical Social Justice) have been incorporated into them at virtually every level and in most subjects all across the nation, but the line is that "Critical Race Theory isn't being taught in our schools." To unpack this lie, we ha...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 42 Many of you will already be very familiar with the fact that the Woke manipulate language, often by meaning more than one thing by a term. One meaning will be quite milquetoast; the other quite radical. Much of Woke activism works by equivocating between these two meanings in a strategic way: boring everyday meanings to gain access and win...

This episode of the OnlySubs Podcast with James Lindsay is available for FREE to everyone! To get access to all past and future episodes, consider becoming a contributor. Learn more by clicking here: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/announcing-new-subscribers-only-podcast-james-lindsay/ Critical Race Theory tries to bill itself as the continuation of the Civil Rights Movement, which was a true ac...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 41 The Critical Theorist and neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse was one of the most influential radical Leftist thinkers of the 20th century, and this fact is evident throughout his writing. The depth of his radicalism can be seen quite clearly in several of his essays, including his 1965 "Repressive Tolerance" (https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/public...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 40 It is not normally appropriate to liken one's ideological opponents to something like a virus, but what should we do when the people who hold that ideology liken themselves to viruses like HIV, Ebola, and SARS? This circumstance may seem strange and unlikely, but it is exactly what we encounter with Critical Social Justice. In 2016, two fem...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 39 One of the more peculiar features of the Theory of Critical Social Justice for many people is why it is acceptable under Theory to be trangender but absolutely forbidden to be transracial. The short answer to this question, which is sometimes given (usually after someone steps on the landmine of thinking they can pull off a transracial argu...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 38 At the heart of the "Woke" (Critical Social Justice) movement is the abuse of language, which is perpetrated in order to abuse power. Therefore, at the heart of the New Discourses project is a Critical Social Justice Encyclopedia, Translations from the Wokish (https://newdiscourses.com/translations-from-the-wokish/), that documents these ab...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 37 Is Critical Race Theory Marxist, as many insist, or is it not? What is the relationship between Marxism, neo-Marxism (Critical Theory), and Wokeness? All three criticize one another, and yet all three have a great deal obviously in common. Is there some common underlying thread between these clearly similar yet obviously different worldview...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 36 Elite overproduction is a concept that was forwarded by the anthropologist Peter Turchin to attempt to explain some part of why we face growing social instability in today's society. This is an insightful concept that deserves serious consideration in our present circumstances. It is characterized by a society engaging in practices, like se...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 35 Not gonna lie, the title of this episode of the New Discourses Podcast is a bit of a bait-and-switch, so I hope it doesn't put you off. The thing is, there is a principled reason to be hesitant on the Covid-19 vaccine, and, far from positioning people as "anti-vaxxers" for holding that position, it is perfectly reasonable and needs articula...