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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.
I think many of them really do. Sometimes it doesn’t look like it because they grew up in an incredibly worldly secular environment without any doctrinaire religion or teaching in the scriptures, and they are desperately trying to claw back their faith. So it sometimes looks a bit cargo-culty and hypocritical, their twitter posts alternating schizophrenically between synthwave deus vult crusader memes and anime porn.
Even if the environment itself weren’t secular, I think it would still happen for the same reason that Pride parades happen. These people want to be seen, they have a need to reclaim the idea that it’s okay to be a loud and proud Christian and to reject the implication that there’s something shameful about having an actual belief in Christ and Christianity. I don’t even think it’s about them not understanding it, it’s about being in the faces of secular culture and saying that we are Christians and we’re not ashamed of it, and we’re not going anywhere.
The reverse memes are everywhere. Christianity is seen as backwards, bigoted, and something that only uneducated rubes take seriously. You’d rarely, if ever, see the religion itself portrayed positively in media that isn’t explicitly Christian. The best you can hope for is that the media ignores religion, but often there’s a hostility to it. The Cathedral hates believing Christians, most likely because they represent a stronghold they don’t have control over. The school system (unless it’s explicitly a Christian school) teaches secular atheism at every opportunity. TV and movies do the same, with a healthy dollop of “look at how stupid Christianity is, they’re hateful bigots, they’re Christian Nationalists, they’re kind of fascist and want to force everyone to live like them.” This doesn’t happen as much to other religions. Muslims are expected to secularize a bit, but nobody will shame a Muslim for being a Muslim. Jews get a complete pass — wearing a yarmulke doesn’t really bother the Cathedral so much. Buddhists get no pushback, in fact if a white person becomes Buddhist, it’s considered a good thing, and anyway meditation is popular as stress relief.
I find myself wanting to be more loud and proud in such an environment. Maybe not on Twitter, but I find myself wanting to buy and wear Christian clothing just to sort of show that I am one and we exist whether or not the rest of you like it. I’ve return to high church Christianity, and I think I’m getting tired of everything not explicitly made by and for Christians being outright hostile towards Christianity. Is such a thing a version of a Deus Vult edit? I don’t know, but I think it’s where a lot of people are right now.
It's the 10% rule I first learned about in the furry fandom.
10% of people who consistently pick fiction by the advertised presence of anthropomorphic animals talk openly online about it. Only 10% of those would wear a fursuit at a con, let alone in public. And guess which ones the media likes focusing on? That 1%, which is still in the tens of thousands.
I sympathize with your frustration at still being judged for the Lyra plushie 12 years later. On the other hand, it was absolutely hilarious.
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