New Discourses

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 26 As most New Discourses fans will know, back in October 2018, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose burst onto the scene with a scandalous expose of Critical Social Justice scholarship within academia. This effort to show the world what was going on in the humanities and (to lesser extent) social sciences research literature w...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 25 In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay continues his abridged reading of Kimberlé Crenshaw's famous (or infamous) paper, "Mapping the Margins," which appeared in the Stanford Law Review in 1991. While not the birthplace of intersectionality, this paper is the first full-throated appeal for its application, not just in...

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 24 "Mapping the Margins," by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is an academic law paper that changed the world (abridged pdf here). It was published in the Stanford Law Review in 1991 and makes the case for putting intersectionality into all cultural analysis. It is also more or less unambiguously the birthplace of Wokeness, as in this paper, Crenshaw indica...

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 t...

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 il...

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...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 publishe...

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...

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...

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 manipulat...

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...

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: payp...

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...

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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....

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'...

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 stree...

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/ ht...

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...

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...

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 expl...

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 thos...