Fault lines among the Alt-Elites in the Alt-Sphere
The Case of James Lindsay and the Alt-Feminists
Maybe a year or two ago, one could describe James Lindsay as an up-and-coming rising star in the Alt-Sphere, but in the meantime his notoriety has been increasing such that he is now firmly ensconced in at least the outer periphery of the Alt-Elites—for, recently, he received one of the highest of Alt-Mainstream blessings from one of the upper-tier Alt-Elites of the Alt-Sphere, Jordan Peterson himself, who had a long sit-down discussion with him about a cornucopia of issues radiating out of the welter of what they call “Wokism”—and closely related to that, a favorite topic near to both their hearts: Cultural Marxism and its poly-tentacular subversion of the West. That long discussion, aside from a lot of interesting substance explored by the two of them, was in effect a mutual appreciation session where every time one said (or interjected) something—anything—the other vigorously nodded and massaged it with “Yes! Exactly! Right!” followed by some lubricating amplification (which then occasioned more “Yes! Exactly! Right!” affirmations; etc.).
One subset of the Alt-Sphere has been what could be called Alt-Feminists—basically feminists who have been, in various ways & degrees, recoiling from what mainstream (i.e., Leftist) feminism has morphed into, particularly with its support of the transgender agenda. This subset mirrors other groups of “Leftists Who Left the Left”—including Gays against Groomers as well as many individuals transitioning away from Leftism but not yet “finding a home” (e.g., Jodi Shaw, Jenny Holland, Celia Farber, Benjamin Boyce, Bret Weinstein, and… James “I voted for Obama twice!” Lindsay).
Indeed, as I have snorkeled around the manicolored waters of the Alt-Sphere and gotten to know, at least a little, the coral reefs of its flora & fauna, I have gotten the distinct impression that most of them are either still Leftist, ex-Leftists, or some strange evolutionary intermediate species in between. Far from being a right wing movement (hence the term “Alt-Right”)—though it does have a right-wing contingent—it seems to be by and large a Leftist splinter derived from some “Protestant Reformation”—except that, unlike that seminal comparison, the Alt-Sphere never really had its Martin Luther nor its shattering moment of Nailing His 95 Theses to the Door. It’s been a more amorphous, haphazard developement, it seems.
At any rate, I don’t want to dwell on these details in my preamble any longer—though they are of critical importance—and will get to the point of my substack now.
Two recent kerfuffles on Twitter have occurred in the last few days—between James Lindsay and two rather major figures in the Alt-Feminist subset: Posie Parker and Jennifer Bilek. The punchline to the former is that, after some tentative mutual hostility between James and Posie, he ended up blocking her
.The lead-up to that may be found (not sure how completely) in the link I provided to a substack note earlier with this preface:
https://twitter.com/MMMMeowwwwwww/status/1723846381310284266
More recently, then, we saw a rather forthright dressing down of James by Jennifer Bilek (who has been quite active on the anti-transgender-agenda front):
James retaliated
No doubt in the time it took me to compose and publish this substack (and cook a pork chop for dinner), there have been further developments (perhaps James saw fit to block Jennifer as well).
As far as I know, this is the highest-level in-fighting that has occurred to date in the Alt-Sphere—or at least takes second place to the smattering few who have grown to distrust the Malone crew (though that dissension has been complicated by the No Virus Camp who all along have been something of a fringe outlier in the Alt-Sphere). It seems that James is being a bit reckless here and doesn’t realize what can of worms he has opened as blithely as Popeye squeezing a can of spinach.