James Lindsay on the Radical Left’s Impact
Author, mathematician, and commentator James Lindsay talks about why a small number of left-wing troublemakers has us all shaking in our boots.
This week I had author, mathematician, and political commentator, James Lindsay on the podcast. James is also the founder of New Discourses, and co-author of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity. During this podcast discussion, Lindsay talks about the “Grievance Studies” hoax he was part of, the intellectual roots of today’s radical left, and whether there’s hope for the future.
Click here to listen to our full conversation.
The following excerpt has been edited for length and clarity:
Matt: Shows like Seinfeld obviously had, you know, Kramer refusing to wear the AIDS ribbon at a marathon or something. You've got the Soup Nazi. So we used to consider that like liberal Hollywood. But now all of these things have gone full circle.
James: Yeah, exactly. Right. It's funny how that sort of switched a little bit where what we normally are referring to as the left has become generally quite intolerant. I even remember it long before this woke thing broke out. I remember talking to a friend of mine who's a Republican, and I was very much Democrat leaning at the time. And I was talking to him when I said, “You know, I don't think you actually agree with any of the Republican platform.” He was like, “No, actually I went through it, and went through both the Democratic and Republican platform and just put check marks by how many of the points I agree with, and I agree with, like, 24% of the Republican platform, and I agree with like, 87% of the Democratic platform.” And I was like the “Why are you so proudly Republican and [posting] conservative memes and everything else all the time?” And he said, “Well, because [Democrats] treat people like crap; I don't want to become one of those people.” And I remember around the same time, there was an article that came out that was talking about how something had gone wrong on the left half of America because, “You can't go to a barbecue without somebody telling you you're eating the wrong kind of hot dog or that you shouldn't eat hot dogs at all.”
Matt: Some people trace this to when Twitter hit college universities in like, 2012. Do you have a sense for when we went from being liberal to being left to being intolerant, and when that transformation happened?
James: It's hard to pin it down, but certainly, social media played some significant role. I think that these kinds of scolding almost nun-like leftists have been with us for a long time. The whole radical feminism thing, the anti-pornography, the sex negative radical feminists in the 80s were an extremely scolding kind of very nun-like characters, as a matter of fact, and in many cases, definitely not the kind of Camille Paglia as a counterpoint-style feminist. And so you had this sort of like scolding thing, and then scolding for some reason worked, and maybe social media had a lot to do with the taking off. We definitely recognize it was somewhere between 2009, and I don't know, maybe ‘12, ‘13 is when it started to really become like, oh, getting bitched out by your friends for making the wrong choices. If you are friends with people on the left is just what's going to happen. Like you eat the wrong food, you drove the wrong car, everything's a crisis, “I can't believe you're like that.” And I mean, I do think that there was a lot to Facebook and Twitter, more Facebook, it was the experience I was having at the time going public. Whereas at first, it was just college campuses. In fact, it was probably just created so Zuckerberg to check out chicks at Harvard.
Matt: Literally, if you've seen the Social Network, that is the, you know, the genesis of—
James: I was on Facebook, really early on. I mean, preposterously early on when I was in grad school. I joined it in like 2003, or 2004, I mean, really early. And at the time, I remember it was like, I could go look up my students or whatever. And there's all of their pictures of them partying, it's like, here's my dorm room number. Here's my phone number, like all of it was just there. And what a horror show, and what a terrible idea. And so, there was something, though, about it going public. In college, I was in a philosophy class, and one of our classroom discussions was about superpowers for some stupid reason, you know, freshman philosophy class, and somebody would you know, ask “What superpower would you have?” And everybody was like, “Oh, I wish I could read minds.” And I was like, “No, you don't know you don't. If you could read minds, you would be angry at everybody all the time.” And then Facebook goes public, and everybody's just going on Facebook, telling everybody stuff they shouldn't be talking about in public. And everybody started to hate each other. And I was like, “I'm vindicated!” You do not want to be able to read minds. And something about that is where a lot of this stuff transformed.
Matt: Definitely one of the weird things is that I think it's still a small percentage of people who are the “nuns” as you're calling them the—
James: Oh yeah, we call them gender, nuns when they’re gender and gender studies. I mean, straight up, I refer to people like this woman, Alison Bailey, or even Robin D'Angelo, they’re gender nuns.
Matt: And yet, they punch above their weight. I mean, we, as a society, are so afraid of pissing them off that we will like fire people—we will do anything. We're very cowardly.
James: I had a CEO, or one step below CEO... so this guy's telling me, “We know who they are these people that caused these problems and our company, [but] we know we can't fire them, because they'll sue us. They'll make a huge stink, they'll unleash a social media campaign on us, or whatever, and it'll be a horrific thing. So they come in and they demand, you know, special treatment or a promotion, and we just give it to them.” And then I said something back to him about, “yeah, it's better if you just identify those people not to hire him.” He's like, “Oh, a lot of times we know who they are before we hire them, and we know that if we don't hire them, they'll raise a stink. So we hire them anyway.”
Matt: And that's like the behavior of an abused person. I mean, this is like some sort of Stockholm Syndrome kind of situation when you're like caving to people that you're paying.
James: Yeah, preemptive, like agreeing to pay money to come in and abuse you. So, I think that there are a couple of features happening if you want to try to understand it. One is when you're looking at corporate people, it's probably just straight risk assessment and liability, and they've had so much stuff about, you know, discrimination lawsuits, and so much stuff about sexual harassment and everything—and not for bad reasons. I'm not saying these are bad things. But they've been so repeatedly informed about these things and the possible risks and liabilities that they can consider it to be less risky, to try to just bring the trouble in and manage it from within than to, you know, keep it out or fire it. And I mean, it kind of makes sense...
Matt: The thing it seems to me like they could discriminate against leftist [troublemakers] because [troublemakers] don't have a color, don't have a gender. I mean, leftists don't have a [sexual] orientation, plus, you could hire a really diverse group of people that would exclude troublemakers.
James: I mean, look at the universities, they didn't get to be overwhelmingly left-wing by accident. There was discrimination in hiring and promotion going on for sure to get to that situation in that's not again, racial or sexual, you don't even actually have to discriminate, though against somebody's political persuasion. My position actually is that I think these people, if you identify who they are at the workplace, they should be fired, because they're just going to cause problems. And people say, “Oh, you're indulging in cancel culture.” And actually, I'm not actually indulging in a culture of “keep your politics out of the workplace.”
Matt: Yeah, let me let me just clarify. I am not saying “don’t hire people who have a liberal or a progressive political worldview.” I wouldn't do that. I don't think that's right. What I am saying is, I mean, there's a saying about like, “don't hire assholes,” or we have a “no asshole policy,” right? That's what I'm saying. Like if someone is going to be intolerant, and they're going to cause trouble, and that's what we want to weed out. Any company should want to weed that out. Think of a football team, you want to have a good culture. And so you get rid of players who might have good skills, but if they don't fit the culture, you don't want them on the bench or on the team.
James: I actually have another friend of mine who’s a coach. And he's just having a fit right now. He's talking about how he spent the last 20 years of his career creating a coaching philosophy and building up a team culture. And so you've got to have something that sustains the team's culture as there's turnover. And he said he spent 20 years building what he considers to be a positive, nourishing, but also game-winning culture, and it's getting just wrecked by these kind of diversity hustlers, who demand special treatment and say, “Oh, well, they, you know, that culture somehow holds them down or targets them differently or something.” So this is touching, you know, real people in real walks of life, in places that matter.