Is the radical right becoming the very thing it hates? Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with Dr. James Lindsay to unpack the rise of the "Woke Right"—a faction of online reactionaries using the same tactics of victimhood, outrage mobs, and cult-like behavior once exclusive to the radical left. Together, they explore how parasitic ideologies hijack belief systems, mimic virtue, and weaponize social media to manipulate the masses. From cluster B psychopathology to Nazi apologetics, from Marx to modern meme culture, this is a deep dive into the psychological and ideological rot infecting both ends of the spectrum.If you've sensed that something is deeply wrong in today’s culture wars—on both sides—this episode puts it into words. Dr. James Lindsay has written eight books spanning a range of subjects including education, postmodern theory, and critical race theory. Dr. Lindsay is the Founder of New Discourses, an organization dedicated to shining the light of objective truth in subjective darkness. Dr. Lindsay is the co-author of “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody” and is the author of “Race Marxism,” as well as his newest book, “The Marxification of Education.” Dr. Lindsay has been a featured guest on Fox News, Glenn Beck, Joe Rogan, and NPR, and he has spoken at the Oxford Union and the EU Parliament. This episode was filmed on April, 29th, 2025. | Links | For Dr. James Lindsay: On X https://x.com/ConceptualJames?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@newdiscourses/videos Read his latest book, “The Queering of the American Child: How a New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids” https://a.co/d/9lpXvGc
Chapter 1: What is the woke right and why is it controversial?
It's troublesome for those with a conservative bent to throw away the idea of institutional legitimacy. The only possible antidote to really unrestrained investigation. The idea seems to be something like the The more radical the revolutionary precept, the more likely something Luciferian is behind it.
So now we're talking at a very abstract, I think metaphysical is the right word, level for what represents woke. This isn't going to be recognizable to your average Joe on the street who's dealing with a pride parade.
Yeah, and they are called pride parades.
They are called pride parades.
And the cardinal sin of Lucifer is pride. Hello, everybody. My guest today is James Lindsay, who's been a commentator on cultural affairs for a good 10 years, I suppose longer than that, but being well-known for that long. He was one of the people, along with Helen Pluckrose and others, who published a sequence of papers in radical journals that were... not genuine, let's put it that way.
And that was very scandalous. It was part of an attempt to expose the pathology that had set into certain aspects of the academic institutions. And it's become much more widespread now. James has got himself in trouble in recent months, once again, for popularizing the phrase woke right by accusing students
or pointing out, depending on your perspective, the fact that various members of the so-called right are engaging in shenanigans that are very much reminiscent of those that characterize the radical left. And so that's what we talk about today, the nature of the woke right.
I discuss the overlap between such behavior and classification of psychopathology with James, the relationship between woke behavior, mobbing, extreme perspectives, self-victimization, protest, gaming the system, and cluster B psychopathology, narcissism, histrionic behavior, borderline, antisocial, and the dark tetrad. And we... We attempted to determine how our views align and how they differ.
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Chapter 2: How does the woke right display similarities to the radical left?
And well, it's a walk through the dark side of ideology. So join us for that. Nice to see you, Dr. Lindsay.
It's good to see you, Dr. Peter.
It's been two years, eh?
It's been two years.
Yeah. So what are you in trouble for now?
The woke, right?
Lay it out, man.
It's a fraught term, right? People see it as paradoxical because you have woke, which they associate with left. You have right, which they associate obviously with the right. And so now you've got a paradox. And so I've caused myself some trouble by calling a radical segment, not the whole right, a radical segment of the right, woke right, which I kind of started doing, I guess,
Last fall, September, I started using it before the term. I didn't invent the term. A lot of people accused me of inventing the term or credit me with it. This term has been in rough circulation floating around in the Internet space for at least since middle of 22. So it's not a brand new term. I just adopted it and went hard about it.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of cluster B personality disorders?
And then if I served my customers well and so forth, I could climb to the top of that new business niche and succeed. This is the parasitical equivalent to that, right? It's to what? To generate a version that does nothing but attract unwarranted attention. That would be the narcissistic spin. And to use any means whatsoever to attract that attention.
While directing blame to the parent structure. I think that's very important. So for example, with Karl Marx, he phrased his vision of communism, wasn't the crude communism that was experimented with by Gracchus Babouf in the French Revolution, it was a transcendent communism. And I use that word because he doesn't call it transcendent communism, he calls it communism.
But what he says, his exact wording for it is it's communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement and thus a complete return of man to his true nature as a human or social being.
Right. We'll be right back, but first, here's a sneak peek at the member-exclusive portion of this episode. What the hell is going on?
I mean, the left is doing what the left does. The issue is never the issue. They're trying to tear apart society, gain advantage, the whole thing. Everything they did with critical race theory, queer theory, you name it, they're doing it now with this new issue. They're saying... Israel is bad and the Jews are a problem. That doesn't play well with mainstream America.
So very plausible that this is coming from foreign adversaries. China's behind it, let's say. Qatar's behind it. 2018, the Wall Street Journal publishes an article, 250 MAGA influencers are on the payroll of Qatar trying to influence Trump's policy. Do you think they stopped?
Well, it's certainly in Iran's interest. The Iranians would sacrifice every single Palestinian in a second. They're just cannon fodder. I mean, it's obvious that Iran is funding Hamas.
Propaganda works. Throwing the dust of moral confusion into the air blinds the eyes. Say you tweet something that they like, doesn't matter that it's you. They can blow it up. They can put tons of bots behind it. They can put lots of positive comments on it so that they can create an artificial environment.
This is such an ugly vision of the future.
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Chapter 4: How does social media influence ideological behaviors?
If I might just interject, if he's the morning star, what do you do in the morning? After the morning star rises, you wake up.
Right, right.
Woke.
Right, right, right. The spirit of enlightenment, right?
Okay, so... Or dark enlightenment, as it were.
Yeah, right, absolutely. Well, that's the question. What's the difference between what's genuine and what's false, let's say? So, in the story of Genesis, God tells Adam and Eve that they can pretty much have free reign... except for one thing. They can't, as far as I can tell what it means, is they can't take the right to define the moral order to themselves.
They have to abide by the moral order, that there's an intrinsic moral order that's grounded below nature, even grounded in the principle of being itself. They have to ally themselves with that. But Eve, interestingly, Eve is tempted by the serpent. Maybe her powers of discrimination are somewhat lacking. Maybe her proclivity to empathy clouds her. And maybe it's a form of feminine pride.
In any case, the serpent tempts her, telling her that if she ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that she would become like God, which is the one thing God forbade, right? So the idea seems to be something like the more radical the revolutionary precept, the more likely something Luciferian is behind it. So it's a serpent in the garden.
So it's clearly something poisonous, but then it gets weirdly associated with the idea of Lucifer, right? Which is a very strange leap. The leap is something like, what's the most poisonous of all possible serpents, right? So then it becomes a meta principle. And it looks to me like it's something like the drive to power.
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Chapter 6: How do historical ideologies connect to modern movements?
OnlyFans is the greatest example of that. That woman in Great Britain who's sleeping with like 100 men a night, or I think she managed 1,000 in a week, something like that. I won't say her name, but she's become very well known for the absolute outrageousness of her behavior. Her mother is her business manager. It's so awful that you just can't believe it. Okay, so you have this...
mother of all prostitutes so that's the central spirit of commoditized female sexuality that's going to happen when the state deteriorates of course female sexuality is going to commoditize when the state loses its protective and integrative function and so she offers this libertine pleasure, right?
So you could think of power, that's a way that power, that's what power offers to those who are willing to use power. It's like, why do you want control over someone? Well, to have your way with them, obviously, and there's gonna be a sexual component to that. That was certainly the case in Marx's own life, for example.
So you can imagine the fantasies that possessed him too would be, well, once we establish this new utopia, and the communists promised free love. It's a common leftist, as if it's love, which it isn't, and as if sex is free, which it never is. What happens at the end of the scarlet beast, whore of Babylon dichotomy, say, interaction is the beast kills the prostitute. So that's perfect, right?
Because so the degenerate, the degenerative patriarchal state breeds the commoditization of female sexuality, but ultimately destroys all pleasure. And I also think that's happening now. I mean, you have radically high rates of virginity, for example, among Japanese and South Koreans and in the West more broadly.
a breakdown, an apparent breakdown of the relationship between men and women, not least politically, right? With the men starting to fly off into the conservative sphere of influence and the women becoming increasingly liberal. So that's another, it shows you the fact that these mythological tropes appear fitting, shows you how deep the malaise is, right?
The culture war is way deeper than the political.
In a vehicle to this is transgression, right? Transgression of the existing order. And transgression, I think, is such a key feature. In fact, I've described recently a cult of transgression that you can easily describe on the woke left, right? And it kind of fits my same energy, different direction, or same energy, opposite direction.
Because you see with both of these two wokes, but also other – these kind of degenerate ideologies and – psychosocial dynamics, you have this cult of transgression where the way, it's like the payment to be in the cult is to transgress a little further. You start with, oh yeah, well, we need LGBT representation. Okay, we've already transgressed because the T is different from the LGB.
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