New Discourses

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....

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 m...

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...

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...

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 peopl...

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 tre...

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 sys...

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...

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...

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 insti...

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,...

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 (a...

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 explai...

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 N...

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 psycho...

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....

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...

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,...

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 filt...

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 decad...

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...

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...

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 ca...

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....

New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 141 "Woke" often proceeds by what amounts to social magic spells, and some of the most potent kinds of these spells are certain framings of inevitability or universality. The general gist of the construction would be "everything is already like this, so we should do it consciously (and according to Woke framing)." An alternative is "everything will eventually work this...