How James Lindsay Became A Meme

This past week has seen amazing developments in the rightwing discourse. Matt Walsh’s dismantling of James Lindsay has been something to watch, specifically, Walsh calling out the tribal hypocrisy of Lindsay. But in an interview with Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay made a statement so egregiously unsubstantiated that he hindered his credibility on a larger scale.

PETERSON

Okay, so I want to talk about this Lucifer idea. So Lucifer is the morning star and he’s the angel of the untrammeled intellect. That’s how he’s portrayed in Milton, right? And he’s allied in some strange way with the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

LINDSAY

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.

PETERSON

Right

LINDSAY

Woke Right.

The fallacies that James Lindsay commits here are pronounced. you’re describing is a form of etymological fallacy, specifically a semantic stretch or false etymological reasoning. It occurs when someone incorrectly assumes that the original or literal meaning of a word (e.g., “woke” as the past tense of “wake”) must still govern its modern, evolved, or metaphorical usage (e.g., “woke” as a term for social awareness).

So when Satan is described as the Morning Star and people wake up in the morning, he is committing this etymological fallacy ignoring how language evolves, and words often take on specialized meanings in different contexts (e.g., political, cultural). This kind of reasoning is often used disingenuously to mock or dismiss concepts by pretending they must adhere to their most basic linguistic roots rather than their actual usage. A related fallacy is equivocation, where a word’s different meanings are deliberately conflated to mislead or oversimplify an argument.

The level of argumentation being ferociously mocked on social media is what Christians have been contending with in the church for over two years.