This remains one of the most shocking things of my entire life.
In early November 2024, I submitted a light rewrite of some of the Communist Manifesto to a “right-wing” Christian Nationalist publication called American Reformer. It was obvious what it was; it just swapped out proletariat for “New Christian Right” and bourgeoisie for “classical liberals” and their “postwar consensus.”
It was so obviously the Communist Manifesto that once it got published, one of their own readers spotted it and commented with proof almost immediately.
I didn’t realize it had been published for 11 days, however, and that comment and the piece remained up the whole time. Not one of their esteemed editors though, “hmm, maybe we should quietly take this down….”
A few days later (December 3, 2024), I told the story, and the reaction was instant and shocking. More or less the entire Right turned viciously on me for a traitor, and I learned about the friend-enemy distinction firsthand.
Cerno[redacted] here was one of the first few out of the gate, as was Tim Pool, to defend a Christian Nationalist publication even though neither of them is Protestant or a Christian Nationalist. Cerno even said “Karl Marx was a great writer,” which is absurd in all regards. Far more absurd things were said in Marx’s defense, too.
American Reformer then kept the piece up (now in my name), claiming it’s a “reasonable aggregation of some New Right thought.” “Right-wing” influencers came out of the woodwork to defend Karl Marx, Marxism, Critical Theory, and Postmodernism for having “the right critiques of liberalism” but the “wrong solutions.”
Meanwhile, I was attacked, vigorously, most of it as absurd as everything else. I was accused of never having understood Woke, of being an infiltrator and a “hoaxer” who can’t be trusted, and subjected to all the old slanders of the Left, just now from the “Right.” I received a lot of physical threats regarding if I dared “show my face” at TPUSA AmericaFest that year (I did, but I was a little paranoid and technically not allowed to speak). It was wild.
My star in the conservative movement–already on shaky ground for calling them “Woke Right” to begin with after they tried to cancel me a couple months earlier, precipitating the whole thing–fell almost immediately. By late December, the right-wing war against me escalated to the point of doxxing, shockingly wicked slander, and nearly complete excommunication, which is still mostly the situation to this day. Cerno[redacted] participated in quite a bit of that, really dirty-style, too.
I’ve never seen anything like it. The American “Right” heel-turned against me over this small exposé of a fringe pet publication (connected to a lot of operational money and players, as it happens), revealing its near-total capture, and it did so robustly defending KARL MARX and his critique of “liberalism.”
I’ve led a life over the last decade or so filled with surprising turns and adventures, like the Grievance Studies Affair, but I have never seen anything like THIS.
James Lindsay, Twitter
