James Lindsay's Blog: New Discourses

The Nazi Experiment wasn’t just an idea. It was an idea put into practice. Putting that idea into practice started with a movement, but it required a totalitarian state apparatus to fully implement, to tremendous disaster. What was Adolf Hitler’s real vision for the Nazi State? He makes it plain: the primary, if not sole, purpose of the state is to protect and improve the race. That is, Hitler’s state wasn’t ethnonationalist as a matter of h...

Perhaps the best analyst of the cult of Maoism, from which Woke derives (including Woke Right, as we’ll see), was Robert Jay Lifton, who was in Hong Kong in the early 1950s interviewing and documenting refugees and exiles from the newly formed People’s Republic of China

Lifton wrote books about this including the thorough case-study driven Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (1961). In this book, inter alia, Lifton gives a few vivid descriptions of t...

When it comes to economic organization (not necessarily political organization), we might be tempted to ask why it is that Fascist economies don’t work. It seems like they might, after all, once you understand that they still enable what might be called a “deferred free enterprise” system, allowing for the profit motive after the government gets its own. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay (featuring a post by Logan Lancing) dives into th...

Government can do many things in the world, but one thing it cannot do is produce abundance and prosperity. Why not? Its incentives are all wrong, and over time they tend to get worse. In this probing episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay dives into the intrinsic issues with government when it comes to creating abundance and prosperity, explaining why these are the product of a “problem-solving theory of value” that government is poorly incentivize...

At the center of Woke thinking is critical theory. So, what is it? In short, critical theory is a tool for delegitimizing a real thing for not being some kind of sociopolitical ideal thing that cannot even exist. The way it works is by holding the real thing up to the standards of an imaginary ideal rather than against the contingencies of reality and criticizing it with the aim of breaking people’s faith in it, simply for existing in reality. It’s a wicked tool a...

At the center of the Nazi Experiment is the Jewish Question, undeniably. The Jewish Question amounts to asking “what should we do with the Jews?” in this case, in Europe. Across the entirety of his project, Adolf Hitler had a straightforward answer, though the specifics differed: get rid of them, all of them. In fact, he proudly campaigned for himself on the project of “solving the Jewish Question,” not just on matters of German national pri...

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In this episode of my subscribers-only podcast, James Lindsay OnlySubs, I continue my read of the Bible as the most anti-Woke book in existence. This time, I read Genesis 4 and 5, recording the infamous story of Cain and Abel and then the articulation of the descendents between Adam and Noa...

Over the last few years, much has been said about the “motte and bailey” rhetorical strategy, which is a dishonest way in which postmodernist, Woke, and other manipulative people argue. First described by Nicholas Shackel in a 2005 paper, “On the Vacuity of Postmodern Methodology,” it has become a standard explanation for the Woke era in the last few years. In Counter Wokecraft, James Lindsay and Charles Pincourt outline both offensive and defensive uses of this c...

What does “Woke” mean? James Lindsay, founder of New Discourses, says it is an awakening to a “sociognostic” belief structure. What is that, and how does it manifest in different contexts? In this third talk from the Saving American Liberty learning seminar in Dallas, Texas, hosted by New Discourses on August 22-23, 2025, Lindsay explains the concept in considerable detail. He also applies it to the “20th century” (or, Modernist) mode of thinking to reveal that...

What are “Left” and “Right,” politically? Where does political extremism come from, on both sides? These are crucially important questions in our present era of extreme polarization that only seems to be increasing past any sense of a possible limit. To address these questions in a deep and fresh way, from August 22-23, 2025, in Dallas, Texas, New Discourses was proud to host a learning seminar event called Saving American Liberty, featuring talks from New Disc...