There’s a more straightforward criticism of this tweet by James Lindsay. It unwittingly echoes the standard argument by far-Right anti-Semites that Jews concoct complex Left-wing ideologies to beguile people into acting against their own interests. https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/1356050547749638145

Ever since traditionalists and conservatives figured out that liberal democracy and socialism threatened their ideals, they began to blame the Jews for inventing and ushering in these ideologies of toxic “progress”. This is the premise of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion!

Today’s worst example is the junk scholar Kevin B. McDonald, an evolutionary psychologist who argues that Jews have invented an arsenal of corrosive ideologies—Freudianism, the Frankfort School, radicalism—as an evolutionary strategy against white people. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/kevin-macdonald

MacDonald strives to rise above the vulgar and superstitious tone of his far-Right milieu. But his work is just a dressed-up version of the common claim that Jews are the vector of “Cultural Marxism” eroding the foundations of our civilization and facilitating “white genocide”.

And even on the lettered Right—and I’m going from memory here, so please correct me if I’m wrong—people like John Derbyshire and Paul Gottfried have made subtler versions of this argument—that Jews have use their hyper-intelligence to create elaborate and destructive ideologies.

“Wokeness,” as it is understood by many of its critics, is too easily interchangeable with MacDonald’s idea of the Frankfort School and the far-Right’s murmurs about “Cultural Marxism”. So anyone complaining about Jewish overrepresentation in “Wokeness” is on very thin ice.

But again, I want to be clear that as I wrote in my original thread, I don’t think Lindsay is an anti-Semite. I think he stepped in this shit accidentally, for the reasons I outlined before.

Thanks to my friend @StopBDS_PSFC for reminding me to make this point. https://twitter.com/StopBDS_PSFC/status/1356079279919026178?s=20