Smart Theory, by AKheon
Imagine the most unscrupulous, the most manipulative, the most intellectually dishonest rhetorical tactics you’ve ever heard from an ostensibly left-wing intellectual trying to sell something. Now make it 10% more absurd and goofy so that you can laugh instead of cry. That’s Smart Theory: basically a lambaste of bad, hypocritical rhetoric. You get dragged into a lecture to listen to a caricature of someone like Robin DiAngelo try to berate, threaten, and otherwise manipulate you into buying a book.
It’s a political commentary of limited scope. No actual policy positions are criticized, only the rhetorical tactics that certain people have used to argue for them. The titular theory itself - the one being promoted by the lecturer - consists of nothing identifiable with any real-world ideology even though the language used to promote it is very clearly a lampoon of things said by leftists.
I do not believe that Smart Theory is intended to stigmatize leftism and its adherents in general, because that would be at odds with the fact that it obviously decries that kind of absolutist, us-versus-them thinking. Indeed, saying anything about leftism as a broad, abstract cultural entity might be against the ethos of the game, which prizes nuance and satirizes political tribalism.
Maybe it is intended as a scathing indictment of everything and everyone left-of-center, but this would make the author wildly hypocritical according to the above points, and I have no reason to believe this is the case.
On the other hand, I have every reason to believe that some portion of the audience can and will interpret it that way, whether to their joy or distress. And I think it is a weakness of the game that it leaves itself vulnerable to such an interpretation. If I am correct in thinking that the goal here is to criticize bad rhetoric rather than any specific policies or ideals for which it is mobilized, then this message would have been bolstered by including some bad right-leaning rhetoric as well.