John Doyle spent Episode 101 of The John Doyle Show doing what Conservative Inc. still refuses to do. He named James Lindsay as a liberal atheist trying to subvert the American right.
The episode is titled “The Liberal Atheist Trying to SUBVERT the American Right.” Doyle did not treat Lindsay as a confused ally who wandered too far. He treated him as a former Democrat, a New Atheist Redditor, and a Hillary voter who washed up on the right after the Grievance Studies stunt and then demanded the right to police it. That is the correct frame.
Doyle’s Case
Doyle’s opening is personal because Lindsay made it personal. Lindsay showed up in the replies, called Doyle a retard, then refused a show invitation with more of the same. Doyle answered by putting the résumé on the table. Mathematics PhD from a low-ranking school. Massage therapist. Obama campaign work. New Atheist books. A 2016 Hillary vote announced with his bisexual daughter. None of that is a side note. It is the man.
The Grievance Studies Affair is how Lindsay bought a ticket into conservative circuits. Doyle’s point is that the ticket was never a conversion. Lindsay did not become conservative. He became a former leftist who expected the right to treat him as a genius and then lost his mind when the right declined to freeze itself at the last liberalism he could still stand.
Doyle’s sharpest line is about gatekeeping. Serious movements keep out subversives so they can become more authentic and more effective. Lindsay wants to gatekeep so the right stops being right. He wants a vehicle for his liberal sensibilities after the Democrats became too dependent on illegal aliens to carry 2015 liberalism for him. He does not believe in Americans. He believes in Americanism, an ism, a proposition that can be taught to anyone. That is why “woke right” exists. The old smears stopped working. Racist, Nazi, and fascist bounced off. Woke still had weight, so Lindsay turned it around and aimed it at anyone who noticed race, rejected secularism, or wanted JD Vance in 2028.
Doyle is right that Lindsay’s moral vocabulary is reserved for the right. Leftists get lectures about being misguided. Christians and America First types get the language of evil. That is not anti-woke work. That is a liberal using leftover left-wing moralizing to purge the people who actually want to win.
The Record Was Already There
Evangelical Dark Web has been saying this for years. James Lindsay has always been a subversive actor, whether on the left or the right. The liberal atheist is 2015-level woke and lectures the right about wokeness, which in practice means whoever he opposes.
The gender file is the tell. In 2023, New Discourses split sex from gender and treated the biblical view, that the terms are interchangeable, as antiquated, sexist, even misogynistic. Lindsay’s synthesis put men and women on overlapping spectra. That is not a bulwark against transgenderism. That is the on-ramp. If gender is a spectrum with overlap, a man who identifies as a woman is just another point on the line Lindsay already conceded. He conserved second-wave feminism, contraception culture, and the Sexual Revolution, then sold the package as anti-woke expertise.
He used Queer Theory tactics against Christians the same year. When believers refused to separate sodomy from the rest of the rainbow, Lindsay reached for “homophobic.” That is the same move Critical Race Theory uses with “racist.” Everything is the slur until the church stops caring about the slur. Lindsay was not exposing Queer Theory. He was practicing it.
The “woke right” campaign was the political version of the same operation. Lindsay rewrote Marx in Christian language, snuck it into American Reformer, and pretended agreement with a critique of liberalism made Christian Nationalists into communists. The smear backfired, as Marx’s work was unrecognizable after the revisions, only the rhetorical flow, something an AI could mimic.
Christopher Rufo, Carl Benjamin, and others dismantled the equivalence. Konstantin Kisin even tried to walk the term back after the dunking. What Lindsay intended as a containment op against Christian Nationalism became public proof that he was running a liberal purge.
He later sat with Jordan Peterson and derived “woke right” from Lucifer as the morning star because people wake up in the morning. That is not analysis. That is a meme with a doctorate. Matt Walsh called the tribal hypocrisy. The church had already been dealing with the same quality of argument for years.
What He Is Conserving
Lindsay’s project is not the defeat of wokeness. It is the conservation of 2015 liberalism.
That year still had gay marriage as settled fact, gender as a polite fiction distinct from sex, mass legal immigration as a moral given, and Christianity as a private hobby that should stay out of public power. The left then sprinted past him into the DSA, third-world race politics, and open celebration of disorder. Lindsay did not repent of liberalism. He changed venues. The right looked like the last institution dumb enough to pay a New Atheist to tell Christians they were the real Marxists.
That is why he panicked when Trump posted the St. Michael prayer. That is why Christian Nationalism is his great Satan. That is why Vance, who talks about making American lives better instead of reciting free-market slogans, gets recoded as a socialist. Doyle caught the neocon and libertarian tell. If using government to serve Americans is socialism, then sovereignty itself is the heresy. Lindsay is not guarding the Constitution. He is guarding a 1990s idyll that never existed, complete with amnesia about Rodney King, O.J., and the LA riots.
A movement that lets this man define wokeness will spend the next decade conserving transgender premises, secular public life, and a proposition-nation that cannot name its own people. Christianity is the only actual bulwark against Cultural Marxism, Queer Theory, and feminism. White Evangelicals held that line when the religiously unaffiliated, Lindsay’s own category, folded on gender. An atheist who still believes sex and gender are distinct is not an ally in that fight. He is the problem with a book deal.
Isolate Him
Doyle blasting Lindsay is good for the movement. The right does not need another former Democrat explaining Hegel to people who already know looters are looting. It does not need a godless liberal deciding which Christians are allowed to notice power, sex, or nationhood. It needs to stop confusing a 2018 academic prank with conversion, and it needs to stop platforming an enemy because he learned the word “dialectic.”
This has to be a Christian movement. Not a coalition that baptizes New Atheists so they can gatekeep the pulpit. Not a Conservative Inc. booking circuit that treats Lindsay as the adult in the room. Doyle put him outside the camp in public, in his own words, with the résumé attached. That isolation should continue. Lindsay can keep the 1990s. The right has a country to keep.
