This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show. In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle talk to James Lindsay, one of the actors involved with the Greivance Study Papers affair in which they got a bunch of peer-reviewed papers published by inserting woke language into stuff they just made up. They talk about the cult of wokeness, its ideology and its tactics, and also about how the landscape of Christianity is kind of like Narnia to an atheist. Lindsay's latest book with Helen Pluckrose is Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody and is available for pre-order. Topics Discussed The State of academia and the workplace White fragility Brown fragility White neurosis and the 'racial cray-cray' Minoritized Building a bullet train to the bad old times Woke-ism as a new or replacement religion and its parallels with cults NewDiscourses.com and James' ever-changing encyclopedia of work terminology Finding identities that unify everyone in religion (supernaturally) or nationally or in humanity (naturally) vs. fracturing over identity groups that must speak "authentically" or else get cancelled Politically black vs racially black? Why does BLM want to eliminate the western nuclear family? The academic origins of intersectionality, critical theory, etc. Traditional theory and critical theory- the normative vision and seeking out problematics Wokeness from false consciousness Atheists and Christians are friends now? The left eating itself- the fracturing of critical theory and trans/queer theory and post-colonial theory- Subscriber Portion Quizzing James Lindsay on woke terms in his encyclopedia Critical theory meets the church i.e. Emerging Church 2.0 (More institutionally powerful and worse) The Ten Questions To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans.
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the Babylon B Interview Show.
Today we're talking to a returning guest, James Lindsay.
That's Kyle Mann, and I'm Ethan Nicole.
Hi.
James Lindsay is, you guys saw him.
If you ever, actually, you didn't see him.
This is back when we were doing peer audio podcasts.
We had him and his associate, Peter Vogozhan.
They're well known for the grievance studies papers where they punked the academic.
I always have a tough time using all the words involved in this because I didn't go to college.
They punked all the academics with these papers that trying to show how bogus it all was.
Punked is the academic word for what happened.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, it could be.
So anyway, James, welcome back to the Babylon B podcast, which is now on video.
So everybody can see it.
Thanks, sir.
Yay.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, we hope you're not disappointing anyone with how you look like they had this image in their heads.
Disappoint people with how I look constantly.
Right there.
Never meet your heroes, folks.
Never meet your heroes.
Are you man spreading right now?
yes under the we can't see it we can't see down there but yeah we just okay Okay, so this is super lame, but the only room in my house that has good lighting is a spare bedroom.
So this is actually all set up on a bed, not a desk.
So I have to man spread when I do my podcasts because to get around the bed post or something.
It's on the side of the bed, like right up against the mattress.
Such male fragility.
This is what happens when you're real and don't have a studio like you guys do.
Yeah, I am man spreading, but that's just good.
Yeah, you guys.
I'm like, well, I mean, it happens.
Well, you were just expressing before we came on a couple things.
One, that you're exhausted right now.
You're getting pounded by just Twitter life.
Well, no, Twitter is hard, but I've stopped mostly paying attention to my notifications, which is a life-changing thing.
It's so much better.
I get a lot of direct messages, like an insane amount.
You're open.
Are your direct messages open?
Or is it pure?
Yes.
Yes, but that's only a fraction of the problem.
And I don't want to like, you know, a lot of people talk regularly on there, but it's people I've already let in.
So even if they weren't open, they're still in.
So I literally am getting probably close to a thousand direct messages a day right now.
My email is worse.
My email is people send me paragraphs or attachments.
It's like somebody sent me this thing earlier and I really wanted to help them out.
And it was like, could you read over this thing and tell me what you think of it?
And it seems like a really important thing because it has to do with some government stuff and it's 116 pages.
And I'm like, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I've only got like seven of those today so far and it's still morning.
Let me jump right on it.
So yeah, I'm getting hammered right now with people wanting me to check stuff out and explain stuff for to them and for them and to decode the woke language that has basically forwarded itself into literally every office, maybe except not yours, in the world.
But if I tell the public that it's not in yours, so you guys should just disclaim me right now, that you'll get canceled and we don't want that.
Yeah, but we have a plan.
We're going to hire Robin D'Angelo to come.
We're going to pay her $15,000.
Whatever they're paying you for.
We'll learn double it to defend the white Christians.
Yeah.
Double your fee.
Seth's pretty rich.
Yeah, I don't know.
There you go.
Yeah, it's going to cost you guys a few cents for that.
Yeah, it costs a lot, yeah.
No, the other thing I was saying, though, before we got started here, was that you guys probably, the Babylon Bee right now kind of seems to me to have its finger on the pulse of what's going on better than just about anybody.
So we'll get, we'll get some more endorsement from me to really screw you guys over.
Thanks.
Going forward.
Put it on your website.
So, okay, a couple questions because first a question I didn't think of.
It's kind of a personal question.
No, no.
And I also, I don't know if I don't know if it's a bad way to say that.
I mean, because you have your email address and stuff right there on your profile on your on Twitter, at least you used to.
I don't know if you still do.
Oh, I still do.
But you keep yourself very open and inviting of people to reach out to you.
That's right.
So what is the personal reason that you why do you want you want that?
So like, what is your mission?
What is your goal?
Okay, so the original thought behind that was actually that if I had a university affiliation, I would have a university email account that would be publicly available.
People would be able to go look it up on my faculty website and find it.
So people say like yourselves who wanted to get in touch with me would have a direct way to do that.
So I thought, well, that's a good idea.
People do want to get in touch with me.
And some of that is important and valuable.
And it has actually worked out quite a lot to my benefit and to other people's benefit.
I also like my street informants.
I mean, I'm drowning in street informants right now, but I do like my street informants.
So I kind of have a pulse, my finger on a pulse of what's going on, you know, in different organizations.
And although right now, the problem is it's like everybody's forwarding me, hey, look what my corporation or look at my university department or look what my school or my kids' school or whatever.
Look what they've implemented.
And it's like word for word, almost the same thing every time, like thousands of times.
So it's all just kind of become one email now with a thousand signatories on it.
It's really kind of crazy.
So I wasn't quite prepared for the country to descend into woke riots and then everybody to realize that I kind of know some stuff about woke and then everybody to reach out to me at once.
But I'm hearing that, you know, like my colleagues like Helen Pluckrose, who did the grievance studies papers with me, has told me that she for a while was spending, you know, more than 10 or 12 hours a day just trying to keep up with and answer emails she was getting.
And of course, she has a public-facing email being editor of Aereo magazine.
So there are a few of us, and I'm hearing it from basically everybody who's been speaking up about the potential pitfalls and dangers of the woke ideology.
I'm hearing it from basically everybody that we're all just getting like hundreds and thousands of emails and requests for help and explanation.
So a lot of people are suddenly aware that something is wrong in the state of Denmark.
Well, this episode is brought to you by Fiverr.
And on Fiverr, you can get her own personal secretary for $5 a week.
They're probably from Russia and they probably won't understand your emails.
But just kidding, it's not my, we're not responsible for that.
Yeah, well, I mean, I hear you.
I actually, you know, it is a thing.
And it's actually the issue with the pressure is that so much of what's coming to me, it's not, there is some frivolous stuff, but most of it's not.
And so I'm really trying to, you know, sort through what is and is not important and trying to give, you know, some answers where it's important.
I mean, a lot's going on very quickly.
Yeah.
Even if all I do is reply with a link to my website, I think that helps.
So yeah, nice.
So what's the coolest story that you've gotten in your email?
What's the craziest story that's just blown your mind?
Oh, geez, man.
I don't even know if I'm allowed to tell it.
It is actually a horror story.
Yeah, the coolest one you're allowed to tell, maybe.
Are we talking about like a positive story then?
These aren't cool, man.
These stories are.
No, we want like what?
Yeah, we just are like stories, but wow, is Mao here?
They're cool like that.
Yeah, the most like mind-blowing.
Yeah, I guess cool is about it.
It's shocking.
Horrifying.
Okay, so horrifying.
I've had a large number of people write to me about their spouses suddenly becoming radicalized, especially if they're in interracial relationships and their marriages are like falling apart.
And they're desperately reaching out to me to ask how to deal with the fact that their partner has gone crazy.
And in specific, they're saying, you know, so I finally asked my wife or I finally asked my husband, do you think I'm a racist?
And they've been together, you know, maybe like 15 years in a lot of these cases, 10, 15 years.
And they say things back like, well, I don't know you well enough to know if you're a racist.
It's like, that's intense.
That's not the craziest.
I don't know if I can tell the craziest one.
I really don't want to get anybody like, I don't want to betray anybody's confidence, but I think it's a story actually worth telling.
So it turns out that it's an individual reached out to me who has a rather strongly marginalized sexual identity and I think gay and trans at the same time.
And so he has his job.
Everything's going well.
He gets along with his colleagues.
They're like work friends, right?
But they're not, you know, like buddies or whatever.
But, you know, it's working out.
Well, then apparently the department figures out that his sexuality or sexual status and decides they need to have a sensitivity trainer come in to the department.
So this is what happens.
I mean, I've heard stories from other people.
This is what happens in like all of these things.
I've had people reach out to me in various racial contexts.
And this is a particular one, though, that was trans.
And so what happened was they had this coordinator come in and sit down and like they put the guy in like a seat in front of the whole room, like in one of those auditorium style rooms, I'm imagining, and explained what it means to be gay and to be trans and like really kind of weirdly clinical, woke language.
And then they went around and they made every person in the room start confessing their homophobia and transphobia as like some kind of an apology.
So this guy like storms out because after like just a few of these, he's listening to his coworkers talk about how they have these deep-seated prejudices and always have against him and hate his entire way of being in the world and like all this crazy stuff.
So then he storms out.
And then after the fact of this sensitivity training, it's like people in the office, like every relationship's now weird and it has to be all about that.
And now they're coming up to him like, and I've heard this from, again, from races, you know, race sensitivity training aftermath as well.
So now it's like people are coming up and saying to him, you know, like, man, I've spent the last three days really reckoning with how much I hate people like you.
And it's just like, this is his office experience all day.
And they start asking him, like trying to be cool or whatever.
So they start trying to ask him like really invasive questions about his sexuality and sex life.
And like that's his entire office experience now.
And they're all crying and apologizing and talking about like my religious beliefs prevent me from accepting people like you, but I'm trying and it's killing me.
And it's like they're looking for absolution from him.
And finally he ends up quitting his job.
He's got chased out of his job by this.
And like I said, I've heard this from several different people in several different contexts.
I've heard it, you know, again, with race where these people are subjected to these sensitivity, cultural responsive trainings or whatever.
And then they have to sit there and listen to all their white and often white adjacent, whatever that means, brown, Asian, Hispanic, whatever.
All their colleagues start talking about how they're secretly anti-black and they've just discovered it.
And all these racist things they've said and done in their lives.
And it's like it's like that just destroys any opportunity that there's going to be a functional working relationship or professional relationship or human relationship going forward.
And it's like, that's what this stuff is.
Like all these companies, companies, schools, universities, like freaking everything is onboarding this stuff like crazy.
And this is what you're subjecting your workers to when you start doing these like confession sessions.
A woman reached out to me, an Indian woman, and she's telling me that they had to have a brown fragility training at their work.
And so they came in and started explaining.
Yeah, it's really even worse than white fragility too.
It's basically the same thing, except you also have to deal with the fact that you're a victim of white supremacy while you're upholding it.
Because brownness has anti-blackness built into it also, apparently now.
And so things are getting crazy.
It's getting dark.
And so anyway, they have these trainings.
Flower bed now.
I can't.
I can't.
You can't say that either.
We have to bleep that.
He's the G-word on a Christian podcast.
Yeah.
Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with thee.
I know what you're supposed to do when you mess up.
I was Catholic.
I know how to deal with this.
I know exactly what to do.
That's right.
No, so this woman, though, she emails me and it's like the other aspect, the other side of it, right?
Instead of having to listen to how racist, you know, you secret, like your coworkers have secretly been against you for years or whatever, according to the doctrine.
There's this other aspect in the brown fragility training where it's like, all right, now you all have to start interrogating your anti-blackness as brown people.
And so they separated all brown people and made them go through this.
And then they're interrogating it.
And then it's like, we need to interrogate your feelings of defensiveness.
Let's go around the room and have all of you admit it.
So imagine you're the person who's like, what is this crap?
You're being forced.
Like, what if you don't have anything to say?
What if you're like, oh, I don't, I don't really have these feelings.
I've never done that.
You know, you're just going to get called out for refusing to interrogate your feelings and you're going to get called defensive in the brown fragility or white fragility if you're white or white adjacent fragility or white passing fragility tornado is going to sweep you up so then you you kind of have to find some Story in your past and like gin it up.
And like, of course, you're going to have at least like three or four people in there who are already crying by this point.
And it's just, what a disaster.
I mean, I keep getting stories told to me about what happens when these things, you know, really come into the workplace.
Not where it's like, oh, my company made us sit through a Zoom thing and I kind of rolled my eyes the whole time.
And I was like, you know, but when it's like these things are like, I don't even know what to call that, but it's, it's not cool.
And I don't see how anybody in their right mind believes that this is going to improve their working environment or educational opportunities or whatever.
It's so, and then of course, what happens if everything becomes more delicate and everybody's afraid everything that these people have been trained now to see is going to be interpreted as more racism.
And so, oh, the department, oh, the organization, oh, the company, oh, the society is even more racist.
It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy of racism and sexism and transphobia and homophobia and ableism and fat phobia and classism.
And I mean, we could just continue with what Judith Butler called that exasperated, et cetera.
Did Robin D'Angelo also write brown fragility?
I don't know that there's a one-I wonder if she's working on a series or not.
Maybe she's trying to do the whole rainbow.
She actually has quite a few books.
Somebody sent me a paper she wrote in 2013 that talks about white neurosis.
That's a formal term that all white people have.
And the racial cray cray.
I'm not making that up.
That's the real word.
Racial cray cray?
Racial cray cray.
And the racial cray cray apparently is what white people have as a result of their racial neurosis and white fragility.
Their white, I'm sorry, neurosis and white fragility.
And so that makes them crazy around the topic of race, but then that craziness gets pushed onto people of minority races.
I'm sorry, minoritized races.
I forgot that they're being forced to be minoritized, which is secretly a way to make sure that even if they're the numerical majority, that they're still victims.
So it's like, I don't know what you do.
I mean, this is mental, but I think brown fragility too.
I just saw it on Twitter a few weeks ago and started hearing it from like immediately.
And now it's in corporate trainings and all of this crazy stuff.
So brown fragility, brown complicity, brown privilege, these things are like the hot thing so that they can basically nuke Asians, Mexicans, and other Hispanics and people from South Asia.
We're just going to go right back.
We're just going backwards.
It's insane.
I mean, this is like they built a bullet train, one of those bullet trains that goes like as fast as an airplane almost, straight into like the bad old days is what this is.
It's like, how do we not only how do we go back to like the very racist past that they're that that they use as the only evidence of their stuff, which was hundreds of years ago, but also like how do we get there literally tomorrow, like as fast as humanly possible.
So it's, it's not a, it's not a cool thing.
And yeah, people are freaking out.
And that's so my email is like sort of a nightmare.
You mentioned in these trainings, it's very common in cults to have a thing where they put someone in the middle and everybody either like praises them or a lot of them, they would shame them or break them down until they're like weeping on the floor.
That's right.
It sounds so cult-like.
And I know that you talk a lot about how wokeism is a religion.
And you make, you actually did a really detailed YouTube video I saw on it.
Figured I'd just steal that and have you just say it again on here and then people watch this video instead of that one.
Yeah, I mean, that's the best way to do it is to recycle my content.
No, actually, I've really been pursuing that idea since like 2013 or 14.
I didn't know it was called woke.
I don't think it was really called wokeism at the time.
Or I knew it was called social justice because I saw that happening within the atheist community.
And they had this project that was like exactly this that was called Atheism Plus.
And if you went to their website and looked it up, what is it?
Plus what?
It was plus social justice.
Sounds like a streaming service where you hear like a new Richard Dawkins video.
Oh, they would not have put Richard Dawkins.
No, it was atheism plus social justice.
And that's why I used to call it religion minus.
As a matter of fact, it was religion minus God is what it was.
And so that was like 2013.
I was already like saying that.
So I've been on this a while and I've written some really deep stuff, you know, so we can talk about how it acts as a religion in terms of like, you know, a sociological Durkheimian understanding of religion.
I can talk about it in terms of like Kolakowski's development of mythology.
And so you have this kind of social entity as Durkheim would describe it that acts like he described religious social entities.
And then you tack onto it a mythological structure is the way that the Polish philosopher Kolakowski laid it out.
And ultimately, I think that I've kind of summarized it much more neatly now is that I think that a religion is kind of, you know, it's a sociological object with a lot of things happening and so on and so forth.
But what its key project is, is to provide moral law, which we would easily distinguish in the world today from secular law.
Secularism is a separation of moral law from state law to the degree that that's possible.
And now you have something that's definitely pushing a very clear moral law and is trying to enforce it within its own precepts, but it's also trying to take state power.
So secularism actually very kind of neatly applies here.
But I mean, most people don't really respond to that abstract stuff.
They want to hear stuff like being woke, you know, awokened, if you will, is being born again.
And they want to hear, they want to hear stuff like that privilege operates in a parallel capacity to the Calvinist concept of depravity or total depravity, which is not sinning, but it's the want to sin.
It's the corrupt nature that makes you want to sin.
So with privilege, you have the corrupt nature to want to maintain your own, in this case, identity-based, so racial or sexual superiority.
And so you have a lot of concepts that run in parallel that way.
You have kind of this vague concept of social justice that acts as kind of the God figure.
And then you have it split into a tripartite diversity, equity, and inclusion that actually spells out D-E-I-Dei, which is Latin for God.
And it's like, that's weird.
That's a bit weird, you know?
Yeah.
So, I mean, you actually, there are a ton, people love to hear these kind of parallels.
How people look at what's going on now and don't see parallels to witch hunts.
It's hard to say.
On Rogan, I went to Rogan last week, and maybe you guys caught that.
I don't know.
But I talked about how there are kind of like up religions and down religions in a sense.
And like an up religion is looking up to God and is aware of sin and is trying to, you know, do right, but their focus is on that harmony, that healing, that redemption, that grace, that forgiveness that comes with looking up to, you know, the perfect almighty creator and trying to live up to that image.
Well, yeah, the skydaddy, as you would, as you would, you know, at least Zeus had lightning bolts.
I don't know what this one's doing, but he's got it all.
Just a skydaddy.
But no, down religions, though, are obsessively looking at like the profane, the sin, the dirt, the demons.
It's sort of like that.
Yeah, sort of like that.
And so this is, you know, you mentioned the word cult.
It's very like idolatrous where now this worldly thing.
I know I get to, I love getting to talk to Christians and getting a little theological with this.
Flex my atheism, cred.
But no, it's like this worldly thing, race, identity, and so on, becomes an idol.
And like you said, they're very cult-like dynamics.
So some of my emails that I've had are from these Jehovah's Witnesses are like, I know this.
I know what's happening here.
The separating you from your group, breaking you down emotionally to try to fill you in, you know, to get you to feel vulnerability, guilt, and shame and so on, and fill in the resolution of that with the doctrine that you then just keep deepening.
That's a cult tactic.
That's not a religious tactic.
Religions, you know, I mean, as far as I understand Christianity, the idea is like, hey, we're here.
We have this truth.
And if you want to partake in that, it's good.
And come on in.
But then you always have those huckster dudes who are like, you know, what do you call somebody who lies a liar?
Which commandment is that?
Do you want to go to hell?
You want to burn in hell for eternity?
You need Jesus Christ.
Yeah, right.
So, I mean, you can even start naming people who are kind of in that vein.
I can't remember who the very famous person was who actually did that.
Like one of those names, it was an infamy, and they probably ended up, you know, getting caught in some pedophilia scam or something like that.
Something bad.
But there's always like this temptation to cults that are manipulating vulnerability and especially guilt and shame and then trying to stuff a doctrine on top of it.
I mean, Calvinism says that humans are fallen, but it also speaks mostly of grace.
And Calvinism is one of the harder core Christian denominations looking at this, right?
So it does admit humans fall in nature, but it also speaks of, you know, grace, at least irresistible grace for the elect, if nothing else.
And then using that as a model, since it's not known who is and who is not elect to any but God.
So therefore, it is a model for everybody to try to aspire to in order to try to, you know, hopefully be led in that direction.
So there's, there's, there's a difference between, you know, a religion and some poisonous cult thing.
And this thing, like, I get people are like, I'm an ex-Scientologist, alarm bells going off.
And then they're like, I was in this weird backwards Christian cult, some lunatic that had his whole thing and alarm bells going off.
I was Jehovah's Witness, alarm bells going off.
I was in communist Romania.
I talked to a guy the other day, a Romanian guy, and he was like, this is bad.
You know, this is a, yeah, this is, this is a thing that's setting off the alarm bells of people who have escaped cults or escaped communist, which is cult circumstances.
And so, yeah, it's a, it's a bad, it's a bad place.
And, you know, people are getting shamed and these weird things we described already in these meetings and what follows after them.
It's just really an awkward, bad, bad thing.
So Robin D'Angelo would be the Joel Osteen of wokeism.
She might be.
And then she's cashing in.
The difference is, I don't know if Joel Osteen believes it.
Like, I don't know, but I think Robin D'Angelo does believe it.
I think that's in fact.
Oh, yeah.
In fact, I don't, it's past sincere.
I know you're not allowed.
I'm not a psychologist, so I can do what I want.
You're not allowed to diagnose people from a distance, but there's actually, I don't know if you guys know this, there's actually a religious form of OCD that's called scrupulosity.
It's very common in Catholics.
It's not too.
Yeah, it does.
It sounds like something like you can download the app.
Yeah, play scrupulosity with me.
That's exactly that's Robin D'Angelo's the whole thing.
You could make like a monopoly board, but put her head in scrupulosity.
But no, the deal is that it's religious OCD where basically you feel like you haven't resolved your own complicity in sin correctly, and therefore you're bound for the hellfire.
Right.
And it's actually super common in Catholics.
It's somewhat common in Mormons.
And you sometimes see it in the stricter variants of Calvinism.
And I don't know, it probably shows up in Islam as well.
I actually just don't know on that.
But it is a form of OCD where you're trying to like out-out damn spot Lady Macbeth yourself for your complicity in sin.
And I think that D'Angelo, whose mother was a elapsed nun who went on to become a leftist social activist, I do think that D'Angelo, it's not even her real last name, has exhibits a rather strong case of scrupulosity.
And to read white fragility is basically 157 or 8 page confession of that and then projection of it onto all white people.
Hold that thought, Kyle and Ethan.
It's us, Kyle and Ethan from a minute ago.
We wanted to mention that today's podcast is being brought to you by faithful counseling.
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And I'll repeat that.
Faithfulcounseling.com/slash Babylon B. Kyle, say it again.
I'll say it again.
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It seems like another way that woke is tends to be like a cult is this control of language.
You know, like I'll read.
I'll click on some thread of progressives that are debating, you know, am I racist?
Are you racist?
And the words they use, the terms that are, you know, redefined or invented terms, it's bizarre.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's why I'm writing the encyclopedia on, I got to do my like little shtick, you know, like, hi, James Lindsay, new discourses.com.
And I've got an encyclopedia there.
Translations from the wokish, social justice encyclopedia, new discourses.com.
That's my commercial.
But no, you can go on there.
And I have since Christmas.
I started at Christmas.
I started writing a social justice encyclopedia because of this problem with the terminology.
And so many terms, there are specialized terms and all of this other stuff, you know, that are just academic terms, but so many terms we're all familiar with everyday language, racist, anti-racist, fascist, anti-fascist, diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, social justice, critical.
All of these terms have like very specialized, different meanings.
So, you know, they say, well, we need to engage critically with this.
You know, so somebody publishes something and they say, well, we need to engage critically with this.
And everybody that's kind of grown up learning critical thinking in schools is like, yeah, critical thinking.
That's very good.
We need to do that.
But what they mean when they say we need to engage critical with this is something different.
What they actually mean is we need to find all the problematics in it and turn it into a woke thing.
We need to burn out all the wokeness.
When they say we need diversity, what they mean is we need diversity of authentic voices, which here we still sound good.
But what they define as an authentic voice is somebody that is authentically representing their oppressed, systemically oppressed identity as described by the critical social justice theory and ideology.
So what they mean is people who have different identity markers, but who can speak the way that they say that you have to speak about having those identity markers.
So diversity means lots of critical theorists of different colors and a minimal number of them who happen to be white allies who they rather intensely excoriate.
So, I mean, the whole thing is this giant rabbit hole of twisty-turvy language.
And then, like you guys said, with the cult thing, right?
So often the mechanism that drags people into cults, it's not how you really do like cult control, but it's that manipulation of vulnerability.
So one of the maneuvers is you say, oh, well, I'm not racist.
You know, I think this and that.
And you get into the whole thing.
And they say, you don't even know what racism means.
So they immediately make you feel stupid, right?
That's what racism used to mean, but we have a much more sophisticated, updated definition now, and you don't even know what it is.
So how are you going to say you're not racist if you don't even know what the definition of racism is?
This is a much more complicated thing.
You don't even understand systemic racism and the systemic nature and structural nature.
And then they're bombarding you with this kind of like gish galloping.
Flowerbed.
I don't know if you can say that in Christian land.
Yeah.
So they are, they're bombarding you with this and they're making you feel inferior and dumb.
And then how are you going to resolve that?
Well, you're going to go find out what the definition means and you have to properly engage with it, which means engage with it the way they tell you to.
And if you don't, then you haven't engaged with it properly.
That's all through their literature.
So it's this weird bullying thing where they're using specialized language, but they're also creating a massive amount of vulnerability around people by trying to make them feel stupid and inferior for not understanding the stuff that they're talking about, which kind of gets updated approximately every like 45 minutes.
So it's kind of hard to keep up with.
Like we were just talking about brown fragility.
Like I've been reading this literature forever.
I don't know that I've run into the term brown fragility until I saw it on Twitter like three weeks ago.
And now people are doing corporate trainings in it.
That's fast.
So absorbing that a white HR type person could be teaching a class called brown fragility.
Well, they would really have to interrogate themselves and do a lot of explaining and probably hand the role, the very expensive, you know, well-paid roll off to a brown person, actually.
Because that's one of the things, right?
Is it's all about like Robin D'Angelo sells herself as a white person who's talking down to other, I mean, talking to other white people.
And here, what you'd have to do.
And so this is really common actually in post-colonial theory.
And in fact, I bet you it's pretty common across the board.
Like you've probably seen like the Quillette expose of Peggy McIntosh, who was the white privileged lady in 1989.
And it's like she was making like $400,000 a year and like living in a gated community or something.
And it's like, hmm, was post-colonial theory, you have these people like Gayatri Spivak who were the kind of cornerstone theorists.
And it's like hilarious.
I looked this up.
So Gayatri Spivak was a Brahmin caste.
And I don't know how much you know about Hindu, Hinduism and the caste system, but Brahmin is priest, it's highest.
They're literally considered to be something close to intermediaries between God and humanity.
And so it's like they're the highest caste people.
They're the least oppressed, most privileged people in India, where you have a caste system that really properly oppresses people as you get down the ladder.
And so she comes and she's now, oh, I'm oppressed.
I'm oppressed.
I'm from India.
Colonialism, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And maybe she has a point.
But then it's like, I found this thing where she's talking about herself and being in, she gets called out for being in the Brahmin caste.
And she's like, yeah, but I was in a particular part of a particular sect within the Brahmin caste that is oppressed among Brahmins.
And it's like, holy.
So what you run into is like this serious, like upper middle class, almost upper class, or in this case, literally upper caste people who are trying to manipulate oppression or claims to oppression that are very like kind of systemic and cooked up to their own advantage so that they can then empower themselves, right?
You're not seeing your average Black Lives Matter black dude on the street of Ferguson all of a sudden becoming empowered here.
You're seeing these black hustlers who have degrees from like Columbia that are like, oh, I'm going to basically become your ruler now.
And if you don't speak the right way, Kanye West, you're no longer black.
That's what Tana Hesse Coates said about him anyway.
And they burned, I mean, DeRay is like one of the most progressive dudes out there.
And he said, well, I don't know about some of this is getting pretty far with the riots or something like that.
And they were like, are you really, you know, I don't know if you're really black, blah, blah, blah.
That's not an authentic black voice.
And burning him down, cancel him.
And so it's like, you have these kind of like super elite, fancy language people that are like pretending they're oppressed and leveraging it in kind of like a bureaucratic career move to control everybody else.
And I mean, I know you're not supposed to have black friends anymore, but one of my black friends I was talking to, he's a Christian, by the way.
He's one of your people.
You probably know him.
We all talk.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like, like I was talking to an Australian the other day and I was like, well, you probably know each other.
You're on an island.
And it turns out they said that the island's very big and I had no idea.
I mean, you look at the map and it's like, I mean, like what?
Like West Virginia.
I'm just kidding.
It's actually almost as, I think it's as big as or bigger than the United States.
It's really close.
It's huge.
It's like, it's Australian?
Yeah.
It's like 80 or something.
No, it's almost as big as the U.S.
It's huge.
It has three full time zones in it.
Just like the United States.
I've literally been there.
All we care about is.
I didn't pay attention to the size of it when I was there.
Well, the thing in Australia is they all live on the coast.
So like 90% of it doesn't even count.
Right.
The point is that they all know each other because they're on an island.
And that's how it works.
And you guys all know each other.
So I'm talking to my Christian black friend, which I know we're not supposed to have those anymore.
We're not white people aren't allowed to have black.
Well, no, no.
Okay.
That's one directional.
I'm okay with Christian friends.
And I keep getting this static from Christians hanging out with like other Christians hanging out with atheists is apparently a problem.
So you guys got to do better.
Do the work.
I mean, I know I've shaved my horns down and everything, but it's cool.
But no, seriously, I'm talking to this guy and he's like, he grew up in like seriously, like the ghetto.
And he's like, it's like this woke thing is forcing us to trade one set of masters for another.
And I was like, bro, I mean, it is.
It is.
You have to speak the way they say you speak.
You have to represent the so-called authentic black experience the way they say it is, or else you don't have your own voice.
And it's like, I mean, that's messed up, period.
That makes for you guys.
Let me flex my theology again.
It makes no sense.
I mean, I read Ephesians.
I know what's in there.
It's like, I think it's Ephesians.
I read that book you guys have.
And it talks about, you know, neither Jew nor Greek and, you know, this whole thing, right?
One in Christ Jesus.
It seems to make sense, you know, that your identity, if you're a Christian, for example, is that you are Christian and that's it, right?
Islam actually does this right.
They think that race is not allowed.
Like race is not okay.
You're either in the faith or you're not.
And Christianity has the same idea that you're all brothers and sisters in Christ.
Of course, the secular world has less of that kind of superordinate identity unification kind of thing.
And this, of course, has been a bit of a problem.
But we could all be American.
We could all be, you know, global citizens.
We could all be lots of things that we could identify.
We could all be human beings.
You know, there are a lot of things that we could still unify under in this fracturing into identity groups who then have to behave authentically or be canceled is it's a very different thing.
And it's being led by elites who can't have time to go to Harvard Law and money and resources, go to Harvard Law and learn all the fancy language and get indoctrinated at Columbia for four, six, eight, 12 years.
And then it's really kind of funny.
It's just, I don't see how it, I can't speak for people, but I can't see how it speaks for people either.
So just to clarify, whenever you say black, are you capitalizing that?
Okay, this guy, no, because he's against woke, right?
So if you're against woke, then you can't, that's lowercase because that's at what Paul Hannah Brown.
You're not, exactly.
She tweeted it.
The 1619 Project lady, she tweeted it.
She said the thing and you're not supposed to say the thing.
And then she deleted the tweet because she found out real fast she wasn't supposed to say the thing that there's a difference between politically black and racially black.
They're different things.
And guess which one is correct?
You have to be politically black.
Even if you are black, it's not good enough.
So, you know, if you're not down with, if you go like the Black Lives Matter homepage and go to about and like what we believe is on there, you should read that thing, man.
It's like, I mean, there's a bunch of videos of black people reading through it and like, what is this?
No.
And it's like, they're like, comrades, we're going to disrupt the newcomer family.
We don't believe in it.
That's how they talk in the street and the real in the real black culture comrade.
Yeah, I know.
I was like, favorite rap song.
Wow.
Yeah, mine too.
The Russian back, you know, the sampling from the Russian, you know, imperial music was the best part of that song.
Yeah, it's that classic album straight out of Russia.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's messed up, man.
It is messed up.
So, no, that's actually core, though, to like critical race theory.
So Kimberly Crenshaw and Bell Hooks.
Krimberly Crenshaw is the creator of intersectionality.
Bell Hooks is the one who really dragged this stuff into education with their book, Teaching to Transgress.
And they had this whole black feminist power thing.
And that's where it actually does come from.
I'm not exaggerating.
It is Black Power.
This whole thing about it that was there is a fundamental difference between the statement, I am black, and I am a person who happens to be black.
And then it's more productive politically.
It's more important for your identity to embrace the identity first, I am capital B black thing.
But that's black power.
That's black liberation politics is what it actually is.
That's what actually came out of the so-called new left.
That's Herbert Marcuse.
Herbert Marcuse wrote repressive tolerance in 1965.
We get race riots in 1967 and 1968 following his arguments.
So there's not a big surprise that this happened.
These are people drawing not off of Martin Luther King, who they kind of claim is being bad now because he's white people's favorite black person.
And then they instead, you know, cite off of Malcolm X and they probably didn't read carefully what happened to him in the end when he decided his own movement was a bit radical.
And we'll just leave that cliffhanger for people who want to Google it.
What happened there?
Yeah, Wikipedia.
And so people are like, oh, but maybe that connection's not real.
Well, working straight underneath Herbert Marcusa with Herbert Marcusa was Angela Davis.
And Angela Davis was one of the people who was instrumental to the instruction of people like Bell Hooks, Kimberly Crenshaw, somewhat Derek Bell.
Ibram Kendi and his book Stamped from the Beginning, which is now rocking all the bestseller lists, and he's the how-to-be anti-racist guy is his other much more rocking it book right now.
He profiles just a handful of black Americans.
And one of the profiles he does is of Angela Davis.
She worked with Marcuse.
This is black power.
And you can actually read that in Kimberly Crenshaw's Mapping the Margins, where she explicitly says that fact.
The same paper that says there's a difference between I am black and I am a person who happens to be black and the identity first model is better for identity politics.
What she actually says in that paper at the beginning, it's called Mapping the Margins.
You say, well, okay, what are the margins?
And you start reading it and it says that, well, you know, it's at the margins of radical feminism and black liberation politics.
And ding-dong, there's your Angela Davis.
Ding-dong, there's your Herbert Marcusa.
There's your link to this extreme radical new left activism.
They turned violent in the late 60s and then decided to stop being violent, go underground and fill in university departments with their activists.
This is actually what they did.
So welcome to now.
The tree has been planted and the fruit are being consumed very widely.
Yeah, that's the wildest thing to me about all this is it's so patently a intellectually non-diverse movement.
They just they pepper it with people of different skin colors, but you have to think exactly like, I mean, it's as anti-diversity as you can get.
I mean, a lot of that's been, that's been repeated.
Because you have to engage critically, which means you have to have a critical consciousness, which means you have to think about the world in the same way.
Does that mean orthodox?
What's our parallel?
I mean, yeah, it would be their version of the word It would be, yeah.
I mean, it would totally be orthodox.
Critical consciousness means that you are able, I mean, it means woke.
It means you are able to see the systems of oppression that prevent liberation and thus feel the need for liberation.
And what is that project, by the way?
I mean, that's an extension.
I don't want to call this Marxist because it's not quite, although it's definitely trying to do that now a little bit.
That's an extension of Marx's idea that the poor proletariat hated their lives and didn't know it and just needed to be awakened to the fact that their lives sucked and then they would have a revolution to overthrow the society.
And what happened was in the 19 early 1900s and going into the 1920s and 30s in particular, the Frankfurt School, these critical theorists came up in the Frankfurt School.
They're also called neo-Marxists.
You're not supposed to call them cultural Marxists, but that's another term for them, started to take those ideas and they said, well, Marx was wrong.
It's not about economic oppression, actually.
That's not the center.
It's about cultural oppression.
The elites are causing the proles to want to have their own oppression, to think it's good.
So they're looking at like the rise of the middle class.
They're looking at the rise of kind of social democracies in the reasonable sense where there's a social safety net, not even like full-blown welfare state, but there's like functional social services all of a sudden.
There's like interesting stuff on television and radio that are entertaining people.
There are sporting events people can go to and enjoy.
People are generally having a happy life.
There's a consumer culture where they can go buy products that actually work, you know, that are mass produced in factories and they always work.
People's food needs are being met so they're all comfortable.
Well, if they're comfortable, they're clearly, you know, 95, 99% of the population is comfortable and happy.
They're not going to try to revolt against the society that they live in and claim to like.
So you have to wake them up.
You have to wake them up and make sure they know how bad their lives are.
And that's called giving them a critical consciousness.
It's called consciousness raising, in fact, and the feminists talked about it.
It's to make them realize how their lives really are and that they have to be, they have to want to overthrow the society that's making their lives bad, even though they don't think their lives are bad, which they call having a false consciousness.
So you can see that as like, it is the separation between the original sin or whatever.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
It's like.
It's an entire way of thinking.
And so when they say diversity, they mean that which promotes that from different social positions, meaning different skin colors, different sexualities, and so on.
When they say inclusion, they mean making sure our spaces are such that nobody ever feels offended or uncomfortable, even if they're making it up and grifting with it in that space if they have one of these identities.
So you can say that white people take up too much space.
So you have to get rid of white people and segregate, even though they, and then they call it desegregating, because they say that the presence of white people automatically segregates it by making black people feel uncomfortable.
I'm not making this up.
It sounds so insane.
And a month ago, if we would have done the podcast like a month ago, before all these riots and things broke out, I would have been saying similar stuff and people would have been like, wow, that guy is like way out on the fringe.
And now it's all happening.
And so people finally see like, oh, this, they really, that stuff they've been writing down for 50 years, they actually mean it.
Wow.
Okay.
So you're making people woke to the wokeness.
That's right.
Actually, it is.
What I'm trying to do.
So let me do some historical context for you.
In 1937, Max Horkheimer wrote a book.
He was in the Frankfurt School.
And he wrote a book called Critical and Traditional Theory.
I might have that backwards.
It might be traditional and critical theory.
I always have to look it up.
It's one or the other.
So it's about the two ideas of traditional theory and critical theory.
And that book spells out the difference between a critical theory, which is explanatory.
It's what we would think of as philosophy or science, reason, logic, evidence.
It's a detailed explanation of how things work and the various circumstances around it and so on.
And a critical theory instead starts with a normative vision, which for them was the neo-Marxist belief that society and culture and ideology control the masses and prevent them from wanting to have a communist revolution and that they need to be liberated from that.
So it starts with a moral vision and then it seeks to find explanations called problematics as time has gone on that reveal the truth about how bad the system is.
So it seeks to just complain about the system and then it requires, it doesn't advocate, it requires that these things be socially, I can't say that word, socially actionable.
So in other words, you have to do activism on its behalf.
So a critical theory has to meet all three of these criteria.
It has to have the liberation versus oppression, liberation from oppression versus domination moral structure.
It has to be able to identify to make problematics visible to people who have false consciousness about how good society is.
And then it has to be actionable by activists.
All three of those things must go into the thing.
So when you hear academic people say, well, we have to worry about praxis, P-R-A-X-I-S, as opposed to practice, which seems like kind of the same word, praxis.
Praxis means that.
It means putting the critical theory into action in specific.
So you have this whole very sophisticated, very old line of thinking.
We used it in our fake papers all the time.
We have to wed theory to praxis.
We wrote that.
I didn't even know what it meant.
I just kept writing it.
Praxis.
Sounds like an alien overlord.
It means is you have to take a social practice.
So you see, like Robin Dingelo out there now uh, and she's like to be an anti-racist, means that you have to take up a lifelong and ongoing commitment to uh, to self-reflection, self-critique and social activism.
You have to be actively anti-racist, according to our program, or it doesn't count.
So the context there is that there's traditional theory, which tries to understand a thing, and there's there's critical theory, which just tries to complain about things and do social activism to cause people to want to have a social revolution.
And i'm trying to create a critical, i'm sorry, i'm trying to create a traditional theory of critical theory.
I'm trying to explain it so that people can understand it.
Um, there are some elements that do involve making its oppressions visible, because although I don't really have to do that now, because they're doing it for me by, you know, putting people up pogroms and tearing down statues and setting targets on fire and saying that's okay because whiteness is property.
I even retweeted somebody today saying that arson is totally legitimate and we shouldn't have laws preventing property destruction.
And i'm almost positive that person would freak the heck out if you set her house on fire.
Right, i'm just going.
I'm not saying don't do it, please don't do it, but i'm just saying that that person might have a slightly different perspective if you set her house on fire.
But maybe not, because we saw that story in the NEW YORK Times, right?
Did you see that from Minneapolis, where the guy gets held up at gunpoint and their two black kids are trying to steal his car and he calls 911?
And then he freaks out that he called 911 and he freaks out and gives them his keys, but he gives them the wrong keys.
He gives him his house keys so they can't get into his car and start it, and so they throw his keys on the ground and they go and they literally carjack somebody else instead.
And then this guy comes back and he writes this thing and it ends up in the NEW YORK Times saying that he's sorry, he called the cops, that he put those people's lives in danger.
He just wanted to help.
If they still want his stuff, he'll be happy to give it to them.
And it's like some what really really strange.
It's the.
I mean, I think honestly I know i'm dominating the conversation a bit, but uh, I think honestly.
Yeah, it is, I am, I am um, you know how we are.
Uh, you know, I know that if you go back 30 minutes, you would mislead people into faith, and I can't have that.
Uh, I wouldn't want people to have something that means something in their lives.
Um, that would be terrible.
But this is actually the point though, is I actually think that people uh, a lot of people, don't know who they are and they don't know how things work anymore.
Like, maybe we were a bit lazy and we haven't learned our civics but, more importantly, we haven't dug in to understand who we are as like, I don't mean who we are as a people, like individually, individually.
Who am I?
What do I stand for?
Why do I stand for it?
What are my principles?
So when like, if somebody calls me a racist, my impulse is okay.
Let me evaluate that, because i'm a fair and honest person who can can take criticism.
Maybe I did say something that crossed the line or do something that crossed the line, but beyond that it doesn't mean anything, right?
So I check with myself and I say self, you're not racist and i'm good To go.
No, it's not quite that simple, but of course, I reflect upon the thing.
You can reflect upon the thing and then actually conclude: no, you know, life is complicated.
You can also conclude: okay, I have maybe done some things in the past that would be, would be racist or racially insensitive.
And I have already learned in many respects to do better about that.
And I don't have to obsess about that and go scrupulosity, full scrupulosity on it.
And so, you know, there's also room for growth and forgiveness, forgiveness of self.
You're not allowed to forgive yourself for your racism if you're white because you're still complicit.
And in fact, that's what Robin D'Angelo says is one of the things that is the worst ways of upholding white supremacy is by thinking that you get it, thinking that you are less racist now, you've grown in terms of racism.
And so it's like, man, I ain't got time.
There are some fakes out there that I would give time for, but ain't nobody got time for this crackpot stuff.
Like my friend in high school used to say, man, he used to say, sell your crazy someplace else.
We're all stocked up here.
And I think that every day seeing this stuff.
I was reading this book on crowds.
It's a classic.
I can't remember the full title, name of the title.
I just started reading it.
But it talks in there about how it doesn't matter the academic level or the intellectual level of the person when they're in a crowd.
You could be a very low IQ person up to like a college professor.
What a crowd, the people in the crowd tend to act on more is their base care.
The thing that would make a person not get engaged in a crowd is where their character is at.
So you can be high academic, low, but if you both, if your character is at that level, that's what's going to come out when you're in a crowd.
And I feel like I see that a lot in this movement.
They're very academic.
But when it comes down to when they get in a crowd, it's all just acting crazy.
That could be the title of an academic paper.
You think I'm joking?
It actually could be.
It probably is.
I mean, because you could then analyze how that's a thing that mocks them and tries from the outside to deintellectualize a movement that's inherently deeply intellectual with a long-standing academic tradition.
And oh my God, I've smelled my farts so many times that I'm so smart and it's so intelligent.
I mean, I've been smelling my farts this morning and I realized that they are very much like watermelon and bubblegum.
It's just, I don't know what people are talking about.
I imbibed some of the stuff that I got a bit dizzy.
Oh, man.
I do think, though, the academics are particularly susceptible to this for a few reasons.
Some of which are structural and some of which are personal.
Academics have a norm of not really criticizing outside of their areas of expertise, which is being exploited here.
I've seen woke people on Twitter reminding academics, remember, don't criticize outside of your discipline.
Don't criticize us.
And it's like they know that the backlash is coming, the academic backlash.
And don't criticize us, though.
And they also, I mean, a lot of academics, and I can't speak for all of them.
It's not true of all of them, but a lot of academics are pretty introverted people.
They spend a lot of time with their work.
They are difficult to relate to.
We used to have math parties when I was in math doing my PhD.
And like a lot of us math people would get together and we'd bring our friends or our spouses or whatever.
And it's like the whole room would just kind of like segregate into math people who could talk about math and then everybody else who'd make fun of us for talking about math.
And it's like, but we never get together.
We never have a chance to just talk about stuff we understand with people.
We spend our entire lives talking with people who don't know what we're talking about.
So we're, in a sense, have to be kind of quiet about our work that we're very excited about.
And so there's a feeling when you're an academic of being difficult to like.
So you become a people pleaser in social settings.
So, you don't want to do things that upset people, right?
And then there's a structural this besides the academic norm, there's actually a structural thing here that there's no incentives to criticize the woke stuff.
If you criticize it, you're going to get called a racist, they're going to threaten to take retract your paper, they're going to threaten your degree, they're going to haul you before a diversity tribunal.
It's going to waste your time.
If you get pulled in front of the diversity board, your co-workers are like, hmm, what'd he do?
You know, it's automatic.
And so, the costs are really high.
And the rewards are even if you can get a paper published in it, it's hard.
It's not in your major field.
It's not going to count a lot toward anything.
So, there are basically no incentives, social, financial, or academic professional to lead people within academia to want to criticize what is literally completely discrediting academia.
You have to go to like a meta-level incentive, which is academia, by the way.
If you haven't noticed academics, I know maybe you're not that, but academics might be listening.
Academia is currently flushing itself down the toilet as fast as it can.
And there's an incentive now to not have your own job completely ruined and discredited and turned into some kind of weird diversity tribunal all the time to stand up against this while you still have a chance.
Because my opinion is actually that the academic sector is fried.
I think it's, I don't, I don't even think it can recover itself at this point.
The road, it's like that Lord of the Rings thing where it's like the quest lies upon the edge of a knife, very, very, but a little to either side, and you fall in the abyss.
Like, that's basically academia right now.
It's bad.
Like, they have financial problems that are gonna prevent them.
They're terrified to be called racist.
They don't have any incentives to criticize this stuff, except in a popular sphere, they can't barely defend them and can't pay them.
So, it's just a bad situation to be caught in.
Um, so academics are pretty much the most gone, and I don't know how they get out of this mess.
Yeah, it's wild.
Things like diversity tribunal sounds like a really bad conservative satire that was written like five years ago, like some crazy fever dream of conservatives.
Maybe you write the uh sequel to, or you could write because you do the grievance studies, so you got to do your sequel now.
Like, maybe you can wear a whole costume and be like the next Robin D'Angelo, but write the next book, like the even more.
What's more than fragile?
Like, if I cut my bangs straight across and dye it like pink-purple and put on some ugly glasses and um, like be really angry a lot, keep my beard and put some lipstick on or something.
Um, geez, I'm gonna get canceled for that.
White bratility, I don't know.
I'm just frangible, is a word apparently.
Bro, fragility, fungible is a word, fungible, yeah.
Yeah, you could actually go to corporations and do training for them as a whole.
And then formal the wig off or whatever, and you're like, I got you all while they're all on their knees, like pleading.
I mean, it's really, I think it might be past the point, though, where like something like the Soko Squared could even have a real impact.
Because I was reading a paper somebody sent me, I was reading it just before I got on the on the show with you guys, and it's about creating um mad activism, M-A-D, capital M, in fact, because same reason as capital B black, it's an identity, and mad meaning crazy.
Like, so it's literally an article.
No, it's M, capital M, lowercase A D. Be like if they'd capitalize like crazy or something, yeah, like capital, capital C crazy, but they're using the word mad instead, and the point of it is to discredit psychology.
The point is to discredit psychiatry as a medical discipline.
That's what the point of, so it's like, how do you make fun of this?
Oh, I'll tell you what I would do if I was going to write fake papers now, though.
I would not write ones that are funny.
It wouldn't be funny.
I would start problematizing their own core concepts so that it starts to fall in on itself.
So they go to civil war with themselves.
That's the kind of satire that turning them on.
Yeah, that's the only, probably only way to defeat them, right?
If you can start turning them on each other and make them all take each other out.
Well, I mean, they're already doing that.
They're really already doing that.
I tweeted about that last night.
I did a thread that they're at each other's throats already where who was it?
I don't remember.
One of these guys tweeted something about it's like he's going after like the queer theory aspects, I think, of the Black Lives Matter thing, which is like our trans comrades and brothers and sisters and all this stuff.
We must have a feminist orientation.
And so he's like saying something about that.
I'm like, man, critical race theory is about to be at war on two fronts at the same time because it's incompatible with queer theory, period.
And the trans activists are just like not going to have this.
So they're like putting the black power fist on the trans flag and then black people are angry.
And then the trans people are calling them transphobes.
So it's already melting down there.
But now they're going after because now, you know, the point of a lot of this is to forward the reparations discussion.
Well, then like, you know, so the former descendants of slaves are like, you know, well, we need reparations.
And this is already a complicated and fraught problem, but whatever, because then the indigenous crowd is like, hang on, let's talk reparations.
And so now those two are like going after each other.
So it's like a critical race theory, post-colonial theory war.
And I don't think critical race theory realizes its peril because the decolonialized movement is like super powerful.
So you've got the indigenous activists, which is not to be mistaken for indigenous scholars because it's critical theorists who use indigeneity as their identity tool is who I refer to here.
So they are now calling black people settlers of color.
And then the critical race thing, like Nicole Hannah-Jones did this, the 1619 Project Lady was like, well, some Native Americans own slaves.
And it's like, oh, snap.
And so, you know, people of color, POC wasn't good enough because it didn't like highlight the extra oppression of black and indigenous.
And I'm kind of like, you know, I don't know about all these acronyms, but okay, you're kind of right a little bit with that.
So they came up with this BIPOC, so Black and Indigenous People of Color.
But now it's like there's a fight over whether it's BIPOC or IBPOC, which one goes first?
And there's a similar fight going on because BIPOC and now there's IBPOC.
I thought that was like Tupac's brother or something.
It's not.
It's way higher up on like the gangster scale.
It has one puck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is a multiple POC.
But yeah, so you got a similar alphabet people fight going on because they're adding in two spirit to the LGBTQ plus IM XYZ hot dog emoji PR, whatever it is.
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
So they are adding in two spirit, which is 2S, and they've stuck it at the front, 2S, LGBTQ plus.
And so, I mean, I don't.
Wait, wait, wait.
I can actually rattle off these two spirit.
So these were Native American people who had, they believed that they were two spirit is a Native American thing where some tribes are very, well, I had a, some tribes had a belief that not everybody is purely male or masculine or feminine, I should say.
There's some people who kind of, you know, basically like tomboys or whatever who are two.
So they were said to have two spirits, a male spirit and a female spirit.
And so, okay, it's a way to describe a phenomenon that I don't think most people in society deny exists, that some people are, you know, tomboys or sometimes some men are a bit effeminate and it's okay to be you, even if that's who it is and we can embrace that difference and it's fine.
But so they've appropriated this Native American concept of two spirit basically to try to prop up that trans and non-binary and gender non-conforming views have deep legitimacy once you get outside of the Western culture that literally gave them full legal equality and status.
It did take some work, but they did.
And so then they said, well, we're going to put that in there and they put it first to kind of fuse with the post-colonial side.
But then it's only a matter of time until the trans are like, wait a minute, why is two spirit first and we have to be last of LGBT?
And so that's going to melt down.
So there's going to be a queer theory because that will.
So the queer theory versus post-colonial theory is coming.
But critical race theory is like going full gangster and they're going to fight both wars at the same time and talk about this stuff melting down.
And then you have like the fat people over here just saying, you know, it's fat phobic, everything.
And then the disabled people saying, well, wait, what about us?
But if you're like a black, gay, trans, then you're three spirit.
You should be able to be three spirit.
They call that multiple consciousness or being aware of an understanding that they call it flat scopes.
It all leads to another academic thing.
They've done it.
They've done it to everything.
I can tell you.
Actually, I don't know what this word means yet.
I ran into, because I collect words to put on my encyclopedia.
I haven't looked this one up yet.
I ran into trigender the other day.
Trigender.
Trigender.
And I'm like, hold on.
What is the third?
Hold on.
I saw bi gender and I'm like, this is going to, that's basically like the hipster equivalent of two spirit.
Okay.
And then I'm like, they feel male and female at the same time.
I get it.
Trigender.
I don't know what the third one is, except if it's neuter.
So you feel masculine, feminine, and neuter at the same time to guess.
And it's just like.
Or it's just a gender that's beyond our.
I'm glad there's video now.
Yeah.
It's a color you've never seen.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
I think that's what it has to be, though.
I think it has like a flag.
I think it's like baby pink and blue and gray.
So that would probably be right.
Is that it?
It's that you're masculine, feminine, and neuter all at the same time.
And you can't figure out which one you feel like more.
And it's beyond, you know, beyond the infinity.
Do people say that?
I'm neuter.
I think some people do.
I think the word is neutros or neutral.
Oh, it's like neutral, right?
I'm not masculine or feminine.
Yeah, I ran into that word too.
I don't know how to pronounce it yet.
What, like Ben Stein or something?
What does that mean?
I'm neither masculine or feminine.
It's N-E-U-T-R-O-I-S.
So that's a thing.
That's a thing.
And it's like, geez, man, just get to know yourself.
Like, just stop, stop constructing your complicated identity matrix on Twitter and Tumblr and get to know yourself, like in a community of real people, not other people on the internet who don't each other.
Yeah, our overlord here, Adam Ford, who created the Babylon B, he was saying the other day that is he an atheist.
Sorry.
He's the opposite.
Yeah, he was.
He came around.
Okay.
Wow.
There you go.
He was saying that the, You know, this whole idea that you keep intersectionalizing everybody down to, you know, first you got like the gay guy, but then this gay guy has one leg, so you got that guy who's got more oppressed, but this one's black, but then this one has slave blood or whatever.
And you just keep going down, down, down until you eventually get to the individual.
Except you don't.
Nope.
You're ready.
You don't.
You ready for that one?
You could, yeah, it took some working out to figure out why there's never the individual in this.
You are, even if you are in intersecting group categories to where there's only one person, one unique individual who fills that role.
Very unfortunate.
You're still the single most oppressed person on the planet.
Or the single most privileged.
But the point is that you still have to be, you still have to be the representative of that set of intersections of identity groups.
So you would still, even if your identity group contained only one person, you still have to think of it in terms of A, it being an identity group that you inhabit.
And B, so a group identity.
It's key.
And then B, that your identity group is unique, but it's also composed of these other factors that have these kind of authentic is a way to not say essential experiences.
So if that person happened, I think would necessarily probably have to be black, they still have, they still can dip into the into and represent the black identity.
And they would be claimed that they just represent the black identity in yet a different way.
So you actually cannot get down to the individual.
And remember, if they disagree with the critical consciousness, they're no longer black.
That's Tanya Hissy Coates.
He's not like a small figure in all of this.
And he said, Kanye, you put that MAGA hat on, you're out.
You're not one of us anymore.
I mean, there's articles that were coming out that were saying that straight black men are the white people of black people.
It's like, what the heck is going on here?
And I'm just like over here, like, welcome, friends.
You do you, man.
Welcome, friends.
Like, you're the white people of black people now.
You sound like my kind of guy.
Let's go.
I got you.
So it's like exasperated.
I was going to say, I just, when we came on with you, you looked exasperated.
Now I realize because this is what's going on in your head all day.
Thanks for joining us, James.
Yeah, you lately played this book with Helen Pluckro's Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity and Why This Harms Everybody.
And that's available maybe now.
We'll find out.
You don't know when it's going to be available.
That's right.
Because of the pandemic, it's now ambiguous when it's coming out.
It may start shipping as soon as the, you know, mid-July.
It's listed as late August on the web, but the first print run is nearly done.
And when it's done and in the distributor's hands, it's going to start moving because it was supposed to come out in June before the pandemic shut down all the printers.
Yeah, pre-order now.
It hit number 34 on the charts the other day.
So that's pretty good.
It's doing well.
Otherwise, you can check out newdiscourses.com, which has some pretty cool stuff on it and some hilarious definitions.
Yeah, whole encyclopedia.
Which are not satire.
Unfortunately, they're not.
All right.
Thanks a lot, James.
Yeah, thanks again.
Yeah, guys.
Good seeing you.
Appreciate you.
Yep.
Take care, guys.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
There's definitely a divide happening in the church.
Oh, yeah.
It seems like that's all it can do.
Yeah.
That's all it can do.
What about apologetics, but with an X at the end?
Coming to a church near you.
This is like Emergent Church 2.0, but like worse and much more specific and institutionally powerful.
Christianity, when you're an atheist, it's sort of like Narnia.
So it's like it's somewhere over there.
And it's like all of your famous people are kind of like on the edge of my imagination.
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