The Saga Of James Lindsay

At this point, it seems like no right-wing commentator has gotten had a worse experience from the Trump victory than James Lindsay. Ever since the election, Lindsay has been battling with his fellow pundits regarding a concept he has dubbed the “woke right.”

On 12/3/2024, Lindsay published an article for the website New Discourses with the headline “A Communist Manifesto for Christian Nationalists: Testing the Woke Right,” where he discusses an experiment of his that saw him submitting an edited portion of The Communist Manifesto to a publication called American Reformer. This was a throwback to an earlier prank by Lindsay where he submitted intentionally absurd articles to various left-wing academic journals, one of which being a section of Hitler’s famous book Mein Kampf that he rewrote as intersectional feminism.

However, this trickery exposes its own shallowness on the outset, see how James describes what he did:

I started by taking the preamble and then just short of six continuous pages of text from the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto. This chapter is titled “Bourgeoisie and Proletarians” and is the part of the manifesto where Marx and Engels make the case that the bourgeoisie (middle class, owners, management, and wealthy) as a class is abusive of the proletariat (workers) as a class in just about every way you could imagine. I then…