Hey everyone, it's James Lindsay. Welcome back to the new Discourses podcast. If you've

been listening in cereal, you know we've done a few hard episodes in a row now. So let's

do something a little easier for a few. What I want to give you today is a message, a very

simple message. In fact, it's going to mirror an essay that by the time this is out, it will

have been published on new discourses and hopefully made some rounds bearing the title three

terms, Communists redefined to subvert society. And so as you know, the way that the kind of

woke Marxist agenda proceeds is by redefining words or one of the ways, one of the most important

forms of its activism. And as a matter of fact, what I want to make a case for you in this episode,

and then I'll give you these three terms and discuss them along with a couple of others,

but focusing on these three terms and how they build on one another, which are inclusion,

democracy and citizenship, by the way. What I want to give you is a general principle of what

critique actually is. And to understand when they say critical theory, the thing at the heart of

that is critique, where we go back to Marx, and he says the critique of religion is the beginning

of his entire program, for example, in his critique of Hegel's philosophy of the right that he wrote

in 1844. This critique I want to make the case is a very specific meaning that we could go read

from Alison Bailey. I've done that. In fact, I did a new discourses bullet episode on that. It's

all over the place in my writings. I've quoted it not just at length, but in full multiple pages

out of the journal Hype Asia, where she explains a difference between critical thinking, which is

based on epistemic adequacy. She says, soundness, validity of argument, and so on evidentiary basis.

That's about understanding what's true. And then she compares that to critical theory, which is

something that arises from neo-Marxism, she says, and the Frankfurt School, and is actually about

interrogating power dynamics and power structures. And so critical theory or critical Marxism

...