Ep. 366 Crossover: James Lindsay’s Hoaxes on the Woke Right and Left
Adam Haman joins Bob to discuss the recent feuding among right-wingers about the “Woke Right,” focusing on James Lindsay’s recent hoax in which a Christian Nationalist website published a dressed-up excerpt from the Communist Manifesto.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- The YouTube version of this episode.
- James Lindsay’s recent appearance on Michael Malice’s podcast (which aired after Adam and Bob recorded), discussing the latest hoax. Lindsay’s blog post explaining the recent affair.
- Dave Smith’s recent critique of Lindsay.
- BMS ep 102 (Feb 2020) which analyzed the Grievance Studies hoax.
- The Haman Nature page.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
Couple things on this one..
The Cernovich “red text” post is one of the most dishonest takes on this I’ve seen. He basically colored it red if a single word was swapped – and sometimes even if it wasn’t. I have yet to see anybody make an attempt to justify why the first sentence was colored red, for example.
The other major point is about the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. I think what everybody is missing in this is that “woke” people base this on CLASSES whereas libertarians (at least most of the time) treat oppression as something that one or more individuals do to one or more individuals. Woke is “whites oppress blacks therefore that black man beating a white man to death is not only not a problem, but just more evidence of whites oppressing blacks.” Libertarian thinking would take the time to point out that some individual whites oppressed some individual blacks in the past, but this has little bearing over the black man currently oppressing the white man before our eyes.
When you look at it this way, it seems to be that almost everybody on “the right” is woke. They all behave this way when it comes to their preferred classes. Even James Lindsay does this when he can’t bring himself to accept anarchy as the logical conclusion of his classical liberal ideals.
Dave, JL changed at least two words in the first sentence. The original said “A specter is haunting Europe” and JL’s said “A spirit is haunting America” (or something like that). I could be wrong, but I thought Cernovich was screenshotting James Lindsay’s own posted Word doc. Is that not correct?