New Discourses

New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 186

There's a fundamental difference between mere power and legitimate authority, and that difference needs to be dragged into the center of our political discussions against Woke. Power is the raw capacity to do something, but authority is something more. It's power, which is to say capacity and permission, combined with right, which is justification. Woke movements covet power. They have no genuine authority. In that gap all the difference that matters hides. Our forefathers in the American Founding era understood this and called power without authority "arbitrary power," which they found slavish and absurd, and believed to be their sacred duty as men to resist. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay does a kind of "book club" reading from Timothy Sandefur's new book Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence (https://link.amazon/B079Yg99D), to draw out this distinction and make it clear and relevant. Join him for an important discussion, and get the book (https://link.amazon/B079Yg99D for yourself.

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New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 185

Woke beliefs, including in the potential success of socialism, antiracism, etc., are held on faith. That faith is just like the faith discussed in Hebrews 11 except bogus, a false hope in something they believe is assured but unseen and a confidence in its eventual emergence. This core faith tells us a few important things about Woke, including the idea that the fulfillment of their beliefs lies in the future, not the past or present, and also that the reason they must wait for that fulfillment is primarily the hindrances and opposition of their political enemies. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay breaks this down and offers some suggestions for how to engage in light of this proper understanding of Woke thinking. Join him for clarity and some genuinely practical suggestions.

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New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 184

Why does every totalitarian system enact so many and such brutal purges, even genocides, of its enemies? The reason is the logic of the systems themselves, which guarantee it. That logic proceeds on the idea that if the system is failing, it's because people who oppose or sabotage it must still be out in the world and must be stopped or destroyed. In this chilling episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay dives into the essential logic of the totalitarian mindset and makes this terrifying fact clear. Join him to understand what we're dealing with on a new, even deeper level.

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The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 225

We all know by now that Woke presents an inverted world and then traps people into it. The Woke mind struggles to tell true from false, right from wrong, good from evil, and real from fake. The way this inversion works programmatically is interesting, though, tying together many threads of discussion about woke over the last few years in a neat package. In this valuable episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay turns to the three elements of classical rhetoric, Logos, Ethos, and Pathos, to reveal what Woke is and how it works in a whole new profound way. In short, it inverts logic and ethics and keeps emotions pathological as the glue that holds the whole thing together. If you are against Woke, you won't want to miss this explanation. Join him to hear it.

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New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 183

The price of a Woke society is having a low-trust society. There's a reason for this, and it's not just that Woke is fundamentally a scam (and its programs are frauds). The reason is because Woke is intrinsically subversive in more than one sense, and it advances its agenda by exploiting the societal resource of trust. This fact is made undeniably clear in the 1987 paper "Doing Gender" (https://newdiscourses.com/2026/10/gender-ideology-transgenderism-doing-gender/) by Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, the most cited gender studies paper ever, with over 25,000 citations at present. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay extracts that point from the essay to make it extremely clear and then points out many more examples of how Woke ideology advances itself by trading against societal trust, which then undermines that trust. Join him for the discourse; you won't want to miss it!

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