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James Lindsay of the grievance studies fame has been targeting the right for the past few months. The grievance studies was fairly popular when it came out and he even went on JRE and podcasts run by IDW and adjacent people but is now punching right.
His article summarizes his points about getting parts of the communist manifesto published with a healthy bit of editing in a Christian journal but unlike the last time it is not being taken as seriously as of now.
James has termed the actual right "woke right" and routinely gets hammered in his own comments by everyone to the right of trump, including Auron Macintyre who is not even a strict ethno-nationalist. James like the rest of the IDW is in a wierd spot as the temporary thermidor and rollback of censorship on X (formerly twitter) has allowed people to explicitly talk culture war without being de-platformed which for him is "woke". The IDW ran out of ideas a while back, Auron who i mentioned beforehand was anonymous for a while back when he strictly made NRx videos and is now working with the Blaze without any fears of being cancelled. Joe Rogan has slowly aligned with the Trump VC camp and others have just become plain irrelevant.
The criticisms have already started pouring in with one of our own in tracingwoodgrains chiming in too. I don't expect excessive amounts of rigor from the publication involved here and am neither well-versed in Christianity nor Marxism or any philosophy for that matter but this seems kinda worn out at this point. James yearns for this unstable equilibrium of 90s liberalism without realising that political systems are dynamic. The 90s which he misses were always going to be just temporary and were 2020s for plenty of people, not as much as today. Those who are true believers of christ will rightfully call him out for being a bad-faith actor trying to pull stunts on a publication whilst being too afraid to discuss taboo topics.
Members of babylon bee, the satire website agree with James whilst most like Cernovich are trying to point out that Lindsay is conceding ground and the edits he made render the headline "Christian journal publishes the communist manifesto false". Sargon of Akkad aka Carl Benjamin also found this [unappealing] (https://x.com/Sargon_of_Akkad/status/1864247964442538324), Carl is a noted atheist who routinely wanted ethnonationalists and rabid Christians to be taken less seriously so not far off from Lindsay if we start from 2019.
I would be happy to read what he wrote and learn his claims' accuracy. I have little idea about formal logic or epistemology of any kind. Also I'm pleasantly happy to see sargon improve as a political figure, he did streams with nrx people and didn't repeat cuck right talking points about Marx, genuinely nice improvement from his days losing debates to Richard Spencer on warskis show.
I don't know what to feel about Lindsay because his position is insane, but it is insane in a way that is both directionally correct and understandable from my background.
Contrasting him with Carl Benjamin is interesting because they both come out of the same ideological substrate of classical liberalism, but ended up at radically different places through their handling of recent history.
Lindsay is a debate addict twitter shitposter extraordinaire who has read too much deconstructionist litterature and it has fried his brain to such a degree that he can now recognize mythological patterns accurately, but describes them in a way that sounds clinically insane.
Consider his claim that Macintyre and the rest of the ex-NRX right are in a cabal to manifest Archangel Michael into reality.
On the face of it this is fanciful nonsense, but if you understand the mythological implications of it and are ready to look past the evident lies he is telling about the actual people involved, there is a clear degree of truth to this. One that People like Macintyre are equipped to understand and would accept: the Right is slowly constructing a version of Christianity that is ready for violence, and isn't bound and shamed by Liberal memes like a good submissive Anglicanism.
This is unacceptable to Lindsay because he is committed dogmatically to Liberal ideals. He can't contenance that people would truly prefer "illiberal democracy" (as Orban would put it) if Liberalism can only offer the dissolution of one's nation and morals into a grey globalist sludge. And he can't face up to the fact that Liberalism is now a dead doctrine that nobody but him still believes in, because it has failed to retain legitimacy.
Contrast this with Carl, who to this day I believe genuinely attached to the sort of freedoms dear to classical liberals (seen clear in his enthusiastic support for Milei on one side and Bukele on the other). He instead has endeavoured to understand why Liberalism has failed to contain Wokism, and arrived at a set of lengthy post-liberal conclusions: that Liberalism though a fruitful doctrine, is founded on clear lies, and his series of posts on those myths is enlightening to who wants to contruct a new kind of freedom ideology that doesn't have the flaws of Liberalism but doesn't have to fall to, say, Fascism.
Lindsay would characterize this as Carl being brainwashed by the "woke right", and to a degree the claim has teeth: Carl has been moving rightward through his exposure to NRX ideas by way of his friend Parvini and his circle of reactionary analysts.
But what is really the more spirited and righteous approach: to stand on the ground of dogma and refuse any change to Liberalism in a time of strife and infiltration by enemies on all sides, or to accept that it got some things wrong and must turn into something different if its ideals are to survive?
Time will tell, but I think Lindsey is fighting a losing battle because Carl and his friends understand politics as it is, whilst he is only able to understand ideology.
It’s all le based ‘Christ is King’ memes, how many of these angry young men actually believe in Christianity? Most are no less atheist than Richard Dawkins fans in 2010, or the average /pol/ack. It’s not a genuine religious revival.
My wife and I have been having some very deep and thoughtful conversations about becoming practicing Christians, even though we weren't raised with it, and really don't believe in it. Funnily enough, both our sets of parents actively kept us away from religion due to their bonkers Baptist upbringing, which seemed to revolve around what a piece of shit they were and that every single thought they have will send them to hell.
So why would we turn to Christianity in our 40's, after a lifetime of atheism? We are desperately seeking some sort of cultural and institutional protection from liberalism run amok. Or wokeness, or neoliberalism, or whatever you call it. We're willing to traumatize our daughter with stories of burning in hell over her being taught that she can mutilate and sterilize herself to solve all her problems in Kindergarten. It's not a choice we particularly relish, but it feels like a choice forced on us and it's an easy one to make.
But we want to find a sect of Christianity that isn't pussies. We don't want a sect of Christianity that will start inviting drag queens to teach Sunday school because they don't want anyone to feel bad, or they feel like they need to appeal to "modern audiences". This has slowly lead us to maybe trying to find an Orthodox church of some sort? Everything more Western European just feels totally pozzed these days, and we don't trust it.
And I'll be perfectly honest, something about the way Trump survived that assassination attempt just, I can't get over it. It's literally enough to make me wonder if there is a god and he saved him. Turning his head at exactly the right moment, exactly the right way, to get away with nothing but a minor flesh wound is nothing short of miraculous. Has there ever been a failed assassination that failed by such a narrow margin before? I know politicians have been shot and survived before, but not like that.
I guess my point is, what is a genuine religious revival supposed to look like?
In 1912, while giving a speech in Milwaukee, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest. The bullet was slowed by Roosevelt’s steel eyeglass case and by a single-folded paper copy of his speech, such that Roosevelt’s injury was minor enough to allow him to deliver his scheduled speech in full, beginning with the lines, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot — but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” Roosevelt also implored the crowd not to lynch the would-be assassin, and instructed the police to take him into custody without incident. (Roosevelt would carry the bullet in his chest for the remainder of his life.) Trump’s fist-pumping was undeniably badass, but I think Teddy has him beat.
As for your general question, I’ve had a similar thought process about religious conversion. I’ve found the Latter-Day Saints faith particularly appealing, particularly given my strong family connection to the church. Like you, I have no illusions about the fundamental truth claims at the heart of the religion, and I find the Christian foundation of it just as uninspiring as I found it fifteen years ago. However, while I could never credibly promise orthodoxy, I think I could manage Mormon orthopraxy — a commitment to the behavioral constraints demanded by the religion. Quitting coffee would be a massive stumbling block, although as long as they’ve got some workaround allowing me to still consume a comparable amount of caffeine I could manage it. Most of the other commandments are ones I’m already more-or-less observing, whether voluntarily or otherwise.
They seem prepared to weather the pressures of wokeness better than nearly any other Christian (or Christian-adjacent) denomination, and are also far more deeply-rooted in American culture than Orthodoxy is.
Caffeinated soda and energy drink are, as far as I know, not against the official rules.
I mean, I would have to drink a lot of caffeinated soda to match my current caffeine intake from coffee, and I’d be ingesting all of the sugar and corn syrup alongside it. Energy drinks would be a bit better, although still significantly worse for me than black coffee, and with a bunch of additives that make me jittery. Doable, but suboptimal for sure.
Not having any real knowledge of their positions or practices, I just did a search and got a few statements from them on the topic. Seems kinda vague. They don't seem to prohibit ye olde Trumpian diet coke. Frankly, they don't seem to prohibit just literally taking caffeine pills or putting caffeine anhydrous into any regular food/beverage. There are some typical warnings about caffeine addiction being bad (and it is, btw; from the sound of it, purely from a non-religious standpoint, you might want to consider changing your consumption to improve your material life), but it sure seems like one of those issues where if you're mostly quiet about it, they probably won't give you grief or even really tell you that it's going to wreck your spiritual soul or whatever.
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