James A. Lindsay

In August 2022, Lindsay was permanently suspended from Twitter. His account was reinstated in November 2022 after Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter.

Lindsay has supported Democratic Party candidates, including volunteering for Barack Obama, and was part of the New Atheism movement. He said in 2022 that he originally identified with the left, though he stopped considering himself a liberal. Lindsay stated that he does not "really" consider himself a conservative, but added: "I do notice that when I talk about conservatives now, I tend to use the pronoun "we". So maybe on some psychological level, getting down in there, I’ve started to identify, but I don’t know if I mean "we" conservatives or "we" people who are standing up for broadly classically liberal values like the United States was founded upon. Team Reality, if you will. And if that’s conservative, so be it".

Lindsay has been accused of supporting the white supremacist white genocide conspiracy theory. In 2021, Lindsay wrote on Twitter that "there will be" a genocide of whites if critical race theory "isn't stopped." His statement was met with widespread criticism, including from Quillette founder Claire Lehmann who wrote, "James Lindsay is now peddling White Genocide Theory. Implying that a genocide against whites in the U.S. is imminent has the potential to inspire racist violence. Such comments are extreme, reckless, and irresponsible. They should be denounced.”

Lindsay, along with Peter Boghossian, is the co-author of How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide, a nonfiction book released in 2019 and published by Lifelong Books. In 2020, Lindsay released the nonfiction book Cynical Theories, co-authored with Helen Pluckrose and published by Pitchstone Publishing. The book became a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller upon release. Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker praised the book for exposing "the surprisingly shallow intellectual roots of the movements that appear to be engulfing our culture". Tim Smith-Laing charged it with "leaping from history to hysteria" in a Daily Telegraph review.

In 2017, Lindsay and Boghossian published a hoax paper titled "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct". In writing the paper, Lindsay and Boghossian intended to imitate the style of "poststructuralist discursive gender theory". The paper argued that the penis should be seen "not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity". After the paper was rejected by Norma, they later submitted it to Cogent Social Sciences where it was accepted for publication.

Beginning in August 2017, Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose wrote 20 hoax papers, which they submitted to peer-reviewed journals

Lindsay is a critic of "woke culture", which he analogizes to religious belief. He describes "the Social Justice Movement" as his "ideological enemy". Though he opposed Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election, Lindsay announced his intention to vote for Trump in the 2020 election, arguing that the danger of "wokeness" is much greater than that of a Trump presidency.

James Stephen Lindsay was born in Ogdensburg, New York. He moved to Maryville, Tennessee, at the age of five, later graduating from Maryville High School in 1997. Lindsay attended Tennessee Technological University, where he obtained both his B.S. and M.S. in mathematics; he later earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Tennessee in 2010. His doctoral thesis is titled "Combinatorial Unification of Binomial-Like Arrays", and his advisor was Carl G. Wagner. After completing his degree, Lindsay left academia and returned to his hometown, where he worked as a massage therapist.

James Stephen Lindsay (born June 8, 1979), known professionally as James A. Lindsay, is an American author, cultural critic, mathematician and conspiracy theorist. He is known for submitting deliberate hoaxes to academic publications, and for his involvement in the grievance studies affair with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, with the latter of whom he co-authored the nonfiction book Cynical Theories (2020).