James Lindsay is the brain behind the push to ascribe Christian Nationalism as the Woke Right. While not the originator, many are taking his talking points and ascribing them to Christians who dare to question anything involving Israel or Jewish influence as woke. Lindsay made his fame through submitting articles trolling liberal outlets by rewriting portions of Mein Kampf and getting them to be published, and so he has repeated his ways, only this time against American Reformer.
The American Reformer functions as an online magazine that specializes in paleoconservative and Christian thought, often adjacent to Christian Nationalism. Generally, they publish good work, but not this time.
The claim of Lindsay is that because he was able to reformulate excerpts from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, that therefore, the woke right does exist and that it is the same as the Left. This is the same thing as “The Left is the Real Nazis” because some random outlet published an excerpt from Hitler. Both examples of Lindsay’s mid-wit trolling involve swapping out the critical context while leaving the structure of the arguments untouched (or so he claims).
Notably, the opening sentence mirrors Marx verbatim:
A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right. Moreover, all the existing powers of the American Regime since the end of the Second World War have aligned themselves against it and its re-emergence from the shadows of American civic life, politics, and religion—the Marxist Left and its neo-Marxist “Woke” descendant, the liberal establishment, the neoconservatives, and their police and intelligence apparatuses.
One might innocently view the opening line as a parody. However, the rest of the paragraph is rather clunky in how it swaps out Marx for Christian Nationalism. The “Second World War” is functionally replacing “old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies” in what is not really a clear 1:1 ratio. Again, the use of Marx’s stylistic prose is not the same as Marxism. As writer Jim Hanson pointed out, Lindsay did a lot more than swap out a few words and lightly edit Marx, but rather changed the majority of the sentences, keeping a similar structure.
Using Elon Musk’s Grok, the following analysis was compiled for Lindsay’s satirical article:
Opening Paragraph: The article begins with a quote that mirrors the famous opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, albeit with modifications to fit a Christian Right narrative. Instead of “communism,” it speaks of a “true Christian Right” haunting America. This section is directly inspired by Marx’s text.
Historical Materialism and Class Struggle: The manifesto’s concept of class struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat is adapted in the article to describe a struggle between a liberal consensus and a New Christian Right. This adaptation includes direct references to the roles and actions of the bourgeoisie, which in the article are likened to the liberal establishment.
Critique of Capitalism and Liberalism: Much of the critique against capitalism in the Communist Manifesto is reframed as a critique against liberalism in the article. For instance, the description of how the bourgeoisie (or in this case, the liberal consensus) has dismantled traditional ties and relations for the sake of self-interest is a direct lift from Marx’s critique.
Call to Action: The manifesto’s call for proletarian revolution is echoed in the article as a call for the New Christian Right to emerge and challenge the existing liberal order, although adapted to fit the Christian nationalist context.
Given this analysis, it’s clear that substantial sections of the article are either direct quotes or heavily inspired by Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, with modifications to fit the narrative of the New Christian Right and their critique of liberalism. This includes the theoretical framework of historical materialism and the call for a revolution against an oppressive ruling class, now reimagined as a cultural and political battle against liberalism.
Certain sections insert added context while others are more stripped-down parodies of Marx. That Liberalism replaces Capitalism is a recurrent theme while the New Christian Right replaces Communism. But it should not be ignored that there were very real problems that Marx was referring to during his day. The Industrial Revolution upended the agrarian societies, deracinating Man from his labor. Instead of working a field that he owned, men now labored at factories in abhorrent conditions for even longer hours than they would on a farm. In America, it was Henry Ford who standardized the 40-hour work week, so prior to Ford, it was not uncommon for factory workers to labor longer hours for meager pay. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle might be propaganda, but there were underlying problems that the book sought to address. Out of these legitimate problems, communism arose as a counterfeit solution.
The article’s use of Marx’s text serves not just as a structural mimicry but also attempts to apply the Marxian analysis of class struggle to contemporary political and cultural debates, substituting economic classes with ideological ones. However, the article’s author, Marcus Carlson (a pseudonym for the hoax’s creator), modifies these sections to critique liberalism instead of capitalism, suggesting a parallel between the historical class struggle and current ideological conflicts.
This is where much of the article is largely an exercise in sophistry. Because the fictional Marcus Carlson used fanciful language and wrote such longwinded prose, they simply published it without question. This is the equivalent of an essay receiving a favorable grade because of its length and diction rather than its substance, as can be seen with this excerpt towards the end:
The more liberals resist this force, the New Christian Right not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels its strength more. Thereupon, the Right begins to band together against the liberals. The liberals work together in order to keep up their power; but the real fruit of the battles lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union and unity of this New Christian Right.
If anything, the Christian Right attributes its rise not to the liberal’s resistance, but the societal implosion, whether via economic collapse, declining birthrates, anarcho-tyranny, or widespread incompetence. Simply stated, liberalism’s implosion gives way to Christian Nationalism, not the liberal resistance. Lindsay’s satirical parody fails to understand the very opponents he is satirizing, and this is a consistent theme throughout the article.
Some excerpts are rather forced and merely interchange the words, losing the meaning and framework original to Marx:
As with industry, so also in intellectual activity. The intellectual creations of individuals in their nations became under liberalism an international sludge of a toxic and vacant academic rightthink. Everything became stupid, Woke. Historical, independent, and communal thought, and especially religious beliefs, became more and more impossible, and from the numerous pieces of authentic human art and literature that once inspired men and set fire in their souls, there arises a globally homogeneous world “literature” that fails to inspire at all.
Liberalism replaces “Common Property.” Lindsay often replaces a noun, like Bourgeoisie, which refers to a group of people, with ideas, like Liberalism to sloppily maintain Marx’s syntactical frame. Just as with nations, he is replacing people with ideas to make fun of Christian Nationalism—a most liberal impulse. In the actual quote, Marx is referring to the globalization of supply chains intertwined with industry which uprooted the previously self-sufficient nations. This is still a problem today that Marx was addressing at the time. Look no further to Boeing’s supply chain issues the fact America receives medical supplies from China, or the fact that industries have been outsourced from the Rust Belt.
When Lindsay inserts “homogenous world ‘literature,’” this mirrors Marx who could be lamenting the eradication of local cultures to a universal culture. Both Liberalism and Communism are universal in nature, or better stated, they are both forms of internationalism. If anything, Christian Nationalism seeks the preservation of individual cultures and their intellectual creations—to use Marx’s phrase.
Ultimately, Lindsay’s parody is not what Christian Nationalism or the New Right actually believe, but merely an interpretation of what he thinks they believe. Lindsay believes he can merely swap out words from Marx and mimic the structure, even several notable phrases, but this does not make the ideas Marxist. In order for this exercise in sophistry to be somewhat coherent, he has to replace people with ideas, which is precisely the problem of the so-called Post-War liberalism.
The problem with Marx was his solutions, not necessarily that he identified tangible problems that existed during his day. Industrialization did lead to a poor quality of life for factory workers. Individualism and Atomization were real problems that arose directly out of liberalism. Plenty of philosophers recognized these trends across various schools of thought, but the similarities in their assessments do not mean their prescriptions are the same. Such a list would include Nietzsche, Spengler, Schmitt, MacIntyre, Chesterton, and Scruton. For example, Karl Marx and Roger Scruton had very similar criticisms of economic liberalism yet their social visions differed drastically. The former attributes liberalism to be exploitative while the latter argues that economic liberalism degraded social cohesion. This does not make Scruton a Marxist. Both Chesterton and Marx would critique concentrated ownership of property, but this does not mean Distributism is Communism. Chesterton was not Woke Right simply because he noticed certain groups and opposed wealth concentration.
The New Christian Right understands the world it finds itself in. People have been artificially changed under the liberal consensus. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the people and nations in themselves, liberalism led people to find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of cheap foreign manufacturing, nourishing international dependence. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have a perverse soup of universal interdependence of nations abroad and multiculturalism at home, if home it even still is.
If anything, this is a poor attempt to turn Marx into Scruton or Spengler, but nothing Lindsay does even refutes the ideas in this article, only that he attempts to employ guilt by association. Because Marx made similar criticisms to liberalism, therefore, liberalism is good and one cannot criticize it without being Marxist. If anything, Marx did not think Liberalism went far enough to protect rights and curtail capitalism, that it would eventually transition into communism.
All this proves is that is James Lindsay a sophist, not a philosopher. Many of the points in his Communist Manifesto parody are legitimate critiques of liberalism, only that he disagrees with them. What sort of vision can he offer that is not mere contrarianism, or does he simply think society must liberalism even harder?
Conclusions
Overall, it is an embarrassment that American Reformer allowed an article, that according to Grok was 60-70% plagiarized, to be published on their site. They should have known better than to allow someone to publish without any verification of who they are. Moreover, the sophistry and prose suggested that they really did not proofread the article and were asleep at the wheel. They handed Lindsay an optical victory, not because it validates the phrase “woke right” but by delegitimizing a Christian platform.
James Lindsay’s goal is to preserve 2015 Liberalism, and he would prefer a progressive government over a New Christian Right government. None of this validates the existence of a “woke right,” but rather that the use of calling everything Marxism is the equivalent of the Left calling everything they hate Fascism. It is oxymoronic for the Right to be both Fascist and Marxist, as they were two juxtaposed ideologies, that while born out of the industrial age, were dissimilar in their respective goals. Like James, it is intellectually lazy, which is why his claim to fame was not any profound philosophy he has ever espoused, but his glorified trolling of the Left and calling everything Marxist.
However, since Lindsay is a part of New Discourse, which is owned by Michael O’Fallon, it must be asked whether this deception was a 9th commandment violation, of which O’Fallon was participatory in. The fact that Christians support O’Fallon is a disservice to the Church, and his relationship with the atheist Lindsay is further dishonoring to the bride of Christ.
