Critical Race Theory, Marxism & The Alt-Right | Wilfred Reilly | One American Podcast #7
Chase Geiser is joined by Wilfred Reilly. Wilfred Reilly is an American political scientist. He is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Southern Illinois University and a law degree from the University of Illinois.
Reilly's research focuses on empirical testing of political claims. He is the author of, "Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War"
EPISODE LINKS:
Wilfred's Twitter: https://twitter.com/wil_da_beast630
Chase's Twitter: https://twitter.com/realchasegeiser
PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://www.patreon.com/IAmOneAmerican
I have three subfields for the political science PhD, which is pretty standard from SIU or U of I. Mine were political theory, just because I was interested in some of the, in my opinion, woke nonsense and also some of the traditional, you know, Greco-Roman thought and so on.
So I actually took a series of courses in that.
But my focal ones were public law and international relations.
And my thesis, to some extent, doesn't necessarily fall within any of those.
Some of my advisors were want to point out, but looks at kind of contemporary American race relations.
And the focus there, this actually became a book with a very small press, but the $50 million question.
But the focus of the thesis is essentially in 1992, a guy named Andrew Hacker gained a great deal of really international attention because he asked a group of white students in New York how much money they'd have to be paid to be black.
And the average answer was like in order for them to be willing to change their race, how much money would you.
Yes, how much would you demand in order to make a racial change were this possible?
And the average answer was $50 million.
And this as shit, I think I'd probably pay about a million.
In all seriousness, well, this actually came up when I did this.
But 92 was different than 2021, you know?
But when I did this as a pretty in-depth piece of social science, actually, for the dissertation, I found some things like that, actually.
Black students would say that sort of thing, but you'd have to pay me to be white.
But the initial conclusion, Hacker, in 1992, was that whites would have to be paid $50 million or some similar massive sum in order to agree to become black.
And that's fascinating.
But as like young social scientists, we might make fun of that.
But the reality is that this is one of the arguments that's used to establish quote unquote white privilege.
Right.
So they recognize their privilege and they have valued it at $50 million.
Yes.
So if you look at all of the initial pieces that set up kind of WPT white privilege theory, like Cheryl Harris, the value of whiteness, they mention that this top-ranked Queens University academic asked these whites how much they'd have to be paid.
The answer is 50 million.
So for my dissertation, I was just interested in this idea.
Like, first of all, is this a serious question at all?
Something people kind of would engage seriously in depth.
And two, does this demonstrate that whites have some unique level of prejudice?
Or might all groups show pretty much the same level of bias?
And does this extend beyond race?
So my dissertation actually was a fairly randomized survey of a few thousand people, I have two or three thousand by the end, where I asked them, one, to the extent you'll engage this question at all, would you consider changing your race, your biological race, to the extent it's biological, this became possible?
And if so, I gave a yes, no option.
If so, how much money would you demand?
And this was in sort of ordinal scale, you know, X amount, zero was one option, and then up in $25 million units.
And I asked the same thing about things other than race, because I was curious about whether race was something unique.
So I asked if you could do this using the same, you know, modular structure we just did.
We changed your sex, sexual orientation.
We even threw religion in there, called it faith tradition.
What I found was really fascinating, actually.
First of all, more than half of people said they wouldn't change any of their core characteristics, i.e., I'm a black male.
I don't hate anyone, but I'm very comfortable being a black male was a common answer I got, or a white male.
So there's, so there's an inverse argument there that if you're a black person, you're not willing to change your race either.
Then is that a denial of white privilege?
Well, actually, that was the next stage.
We found that if you want to use racial valuation as a measure of racism or of privilege, the most racist group, well, the most racist group was old Asian men.
So the older Easterners, if that's still an acceptable term, but the older East Asians in the sample were very explicit in the written portion.
Like, we think we have an older, better society than you Westerners.
You know, I am who I am.
I am not changing.
There were people that even referred to sort of the Buddhist tradition of, you know, going through a cycle of lives, like I am an East Asian man.
So that group was the most racially identified.
Blacks were more racially identified than whites.
So this was really now.
Would you would you say that?
I don't mean to interrupt you, but would you say that being racially identified is equivalent to being racist?
I wouldn't personally, no.
Okay.
But I mean, like, I think that's why I said, if you want to use this as a measure of racism or privilege or something.
And I think you could probably extend this to, as I said, I mean, some people value class or background, American citizenship.
I think there are a ton of things that people view as composing themselves.
So the univariate focus on race, like the idea of white privilege, didn't really pan out.
Like minorities were very aware of privileges that we have, like affirmative action was brought up.
Minorities are also as likely to be racist as whites, frankly.
So, I mean, there were people saying things like, I wouldn't want to be a worse athlete and lover.
And a lot of these, these are college students in an anonymous survey.
So they were having fun.
I mean, like the black stereotypes of whites would be, I suppose that you guys dress poorly.
I'm assuming you're Caucasian, but you know, non-athletic, lack of style.
And there were white stereotypes of blacks.
I mean, people were, like I said, having fun with this, but the basic idea was that most people are reluctant to a very similar degree to change core characteristics.
And if you do associate this with racism, minorities would be a bit more quote unquote racist.
I don't think that association stands up.
But it was just an interesting kind of large end study.
And again, even some of the, when you think of like the secondary paper you're supposed to write as a young academic, there were a lot of weird things that were just there at the margins.
Like about 40% of women in this totally anonymous model where it wasn't my focus question identified as bisexual in at least one of the samples.
I don't think that was across all of them, but it was like 0% of men and 40% of women.
So there's a lot of information about humans that came out of this, although most of it, again, is known to me and a couple of people to have downloaded this from an academic research portal.
But that was the dissertation.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that critical race theory has its roots in legal academia.
Is that true?
Well, this is actually, this is actually an interesting point.
It depends what you mean by critical race theory.
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And I think this is something that both sides need to get a lot more specific about.
So like every so often I'll mute everyone and follow Chicago Bulls or something like that.
But I mean, the actual idea of critical race theory, actually, I do, I do feel pretty competent to talk about this.
Critical race theory in its original form was a theory that came out of the legal academy.
Right.
And the idea is that the thing that they often say is that racism is everyday.
The idea is essentially that what look like the facially neutral systems in society, laws, this was extended into testing pretty early on, incarceration of prisoners.
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Those are in fact designed to oppress minorities and the poor.
By the way, I mean, like there have been, as you probably know, there have been massive revamps of the legal system, mandatory minimums and maximums that date back like most of our civil rights legislation, Civil Rights Academy, about 65 years, 55 years.
Now, are they arguing that those that these institutions were intentionally designed to be racist or that it was a de facto consequence of their inherent bias in favor of a numerically and financially dominant minority?
And they would also say that some things like the drug laws were specifically set up to oppress.
And again, you can argue some things like the crack powder cocaine disparity, although that was actually the Congressional Black Caucus that suggested this in very large part.
But in general, I don't think that's been true of the legal system for some time.
Like we have entire organizations like the Bar Association, they'll sit down and plot out sort of ideal codes of law with very diverse teams of lawyers.
So I think my main, I once said it in a debate that my main critique of CRT is that it's wrong.
And people like laugh, but that is actually my opinion.
I don't think it's logical to say that a legal system that includes affirmative action is by law.
I mean, Civil Rights Act lost in 1964.
I don't think it makes sense to say that's set up entirely to oppress black people or women when you get to the feminists or some such.
Women are less likely to go to prison than men.
But that is CRT.
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Originally came out of the legal academy, but just very quickly, three points.
One is facially neutral systems are set up to oppress.
A corollary from this, if you read through like Delgado or anyone who started this bell hooks, Anzal Dua, a corollary there is that a good, pretty good way to measure discrimination is by looking at disparities between groups, which again, in my opinion, is wrong.
Tom Sol has a whole book about this.
And three, the solution to these problems is what's called equity, which is generally speaking proportional representation.
So that is critical theory in the original legal sense or at most academic or prison reform sense.
So like if 13% of the population is African-American, then 13% of judges should be African-American, that kind of affirmative action.
Is that what that would say?
In general, Ibram Kendi, for example.
So this actually, the second thing I think it's important to say here, CRT has gone well beyond critical legal theory.
Of course.
Yeah, right.
We're seeing it everywhere in our education and everything now.
Yeah, no, but so CRT has gone well beyond the original critical legal theory.
And I think that when people say what you're attacking is not CRT, it's not critical race theory, when they're debating with, for example, Lindsay, that may be true in some technical sense, but that's sort of meaningless.
It's like saying that if you criticize something as being racist, that's an invalid argument unless what you're attacking is actually well put together IQ hereditarianism or something like that.
I think it's perfectly valid to refer to critical theory to some extent is now used by a lot of people to refer to anything containing sort of those three points that I brought up.
Facially neutral systems are set up to oppress.
Disparities indicate discrimination.
We need equity.
So Ibram Kendi is not a writer in the law, but would be considered a critical theorist or critical race theorist by most people.
So would Robin DiAngelo, Bell Hooks, a whole bunch of people, Andrew Hacker, who I originally mentioned, Richard Delgado.
So in practice, CRT means the idea that the USA is an oppressive system based on a framework, something like the one that I just described.
But within that framework.
So let me ask you, does this have any relation to Marxism in the sense that Marxism philosophically and politically, as I understand it, so you're obviously way more of an expert than I am on this.
So I'm just asking questions as an interested layman.
Okay, so Marxism sort of has this balance between there's the oppressed and the oppressor, right?
And is it just sort of a coincidence that we're seeing the same sort of language and mentality in CRT?
Or does Marxist, does academic Marxist thought actually sort of stem into critical race theory in a real way?
Well, I think that the crude way to say this, and again, like Rod Graham or somebody, we have a half hour debate, there is a response, but the crude way to say this is that what CRT does is take Marxist class theory and substitute white people for rich people as the big bad, as the villain in the end.
Right, right.
We're the white people, the new bougie.
This portion of this then.
But yeah, I mean, so like, as you know, and I think this might have been what you're about to say, actually, like the original critical theory was communism, basically.
That's not a right-wing talking point.
Communism, and maybe you could go before that to what Rousseau property was set up as a plot against the poor man and all that.
But the idea of communist or Marxist theory is, again, that what we think of as facially neutral systems are oppressive systems designed by the rich man.
So the rich man is trying to exploit your labor, and that's why the laws mandate that you have to work or restrict vagrancy or something like this.
And to some extent, your labor is alienated.
Your labor is stolen from you.
The rich man pays you less than you produce in terms of the value of every burger you put together during your shift and so on.
So the idea of communist theory is that the rich are screwing everybody.
They're the first people with property.
So they set up the property laws.
They are the people that own the means of production.
So they set up the labor laws.
What critical race theory does, to try to cut off, could be a ramble here.
What critical race theory does is to substitute white people.
And there are like nine of these critical theories.
I mean, the feminist version, I think we've all heard on dates, if nothing else.
You know, now there's critical fat theory and there's queer theory, but it's all the same.
It's like when people say heteronormativity, what they mean is that straight people are the rich.
Like the system is set up to favor the preferences of straights because there are more of them.
They have more power.
Interesting.
But do we run a risk of missing real injustices?
Because it's so easy.
And me is a right-wing thinker, right?
I don't identify as a Republican, but I'm definitely, I definitely think like a right-wing person, okay?
The way I process problems and perceive information.
So do we run a risk of missing real injustices when we sort of throw any argument about oppressor versus oppressed into a Marxist category in order to dismiss it, right?
So you could say like, all right, so feminism is the Marxist version where, you know, the man is the oppressor and the woman is the oppressed or racism, right?
In critical race theory, it's the white person is the oppressor and then all the minorities are the oppressed.
And you can go on and on in sort of every different category, right?
Straight people are oppressing the homosexuality, religious people are oppressing non-religious people, whatever it is.
And then it's easy for us to say, oh, this is just an extension of Marxist thought, but like, what if there's actually a situation where there is someone oppressing someone else in a real way or some group oppressing another group in a real way?
And we miss it because we just think it's Marxist.
That's a great question.
I think that the short answer, and it'll be funny to see if this gets cut out of context when either of us puts this up on YouTube.
I'll try to be totally honest with how I oh, no, no, I'm just saying like my end now.
But like the short answer is Marx wasn't entirely wrong.
I mean, Marx was writing during a period of intense oppression of labor.
If you're talking about 1830s, 1840s, this was the just burgeoning start of the union movement.
There were violent classes that went on to the 1930s, including here in the USA and places like Red Robbins County, between labor and capital.
So, I mean, if you just take the basic Marxist view of a lot of rich people are assholes, they control means of production in an unethical way, and they're paying you less than you're worth.
I mean, I think of, I'm going to sub a name, but Mr. Ava Coppost that I worked for when I was in high school.
Like, yeah, that can happen.
So, similarly, are there some systems of law like southern state patrolmen on the highways during the day in terms of who they would stop that have an element of discrimination to them?
Yeah, like we should take claims of discrimination seriously, but that also involves vetting them with facts.
Right.
Right.
That makes sense.
Okay.
So, where were we before I so rudely interrupted?
Um, no, I mean, we were just talking about we'd actually been on this line for uh for a minute.
So, we were talking about how critical race theory sort of bled from academia and just being sort of an academic perspective on legal systems into how it's sort of bled into other aspects of our culture today, I guess.
Yeah, no, I think that so.
One of the things that's really one of the things that's a very important but almost unnoticed phenomenon in our society is as an academic who likes my colleagues, I don't want to say something like the growth of useless degrees, but the development of things that were not traditionally considered academic pursuits like sales or hospitality,
and also of radical, not entirely unbiased pursuits like women's studies into full-on degree fields.
So, you have a lot of what you could jokingly call the science, T-H-U-H, a science in the world right now.
And I think that a lot of these, especially the second category of fields, like black studies, women's studies, post-colonial studies, peace studies, this is probably like a 20th or a 10th of many institutions by this point, right?
I mean, so the narrative that a lot of these fields adopted, because it seems edgy and honestly, because it's pretty simple, was critical.
So these ideas that the white man is structuring society to oppress, or the males are structuring society to oppress, the rich have never been forgotten.
These have become very prevalent throughout academia.
And you've seen people, and again, this is awokeness is one of the things I oppose as is the alt-right, but it's not necessarily more of a focus of mine than winning the Cold War with China or healthcare or something.
So I don't spend all day obsessing about this, but nonetheless, I do have a model of it in mind that I will now outline briefly.
But I mean, I think that people, I think people come out of these fields and very often go into professions like HR, consulting in the diversity space.
I mean, there are specific companies I know of.
I have some people, there's been people I know casually that work for a company called White Men as Full Partners and Diversity.
You have people that come out of the critical space in academia and go into the critical space in the workplace.
And this is, again, a percent, no more, but it's a sizable chunk of the employment market.
And so these ideas begin to diffuse.
I mean, I think that most people that are certainly a male in secondary education or higher education are going to get a critical training or two.
It's generally pretty standard that you do a week-long diversity training when you're hired for any executive job.
And that's no longer the old dull managing diversity that actually worked.
So when I was in student government in college in 2013, they were putting us through microaggression trainings and shit like that.
What do you guys have to do?
So we had at the time in college, we had a very, what I would consider incompetent and sort of ruthless student affairs department that was very involved in student government.
And I was the president of student government in college.
And we had to do like the summer leadership training that was a week long before the semester started.
Anybody that was in town that was involved in student government for the next term.
And part of that, it wasn't all racially focused, but part of that was that it had like a woman come in and talk about microaggressions and what kind of things you might ask, like how it's racist if you just assume someone who's Asian is good at math and shit like that.
But there was, I remember just having a really uneasy feeling about it at the time because there was an undertone of, hey, if you're white, you're more likely to be guilty of racism.
And I just didn't feel comfortable with that.
It might be true.
I don't know.
But I just inherently, I feel there's something wrong that feels wrong about making a call about my character based on my immutable quality, which is my race.
So I just remember that and just kind of dismissed it, thought nothing of it.
And then 10 years later or eight years later, now I'm seeing, I work for myself now.
So I don't see in the corporate environment firsthand, but seeing it all over Twitter and the media is really interesting that how it's sort of expanded since then, because I thought it was sort of a fluke thing at the time.
Yeah, no, that's a good analysis.
I mean, I think that the paradigm of expansion, if we're taking this seriously as an opponent, would be this began almost legitimately, I mean, with economic critiques or with the legal academy.
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I mean, these are very, very serious fields of enterprise.
And I think that this basic points one, two, three critical paradigm, because it's so easy and because an incredible number of academics are radicals.
I mean, if again, not a talking point from like chubby center-right pundit.
Like if you go to Econ Live and look at their research, 18% of social scientists identify as Marxists, like not as radicals, like just straight up as communists.
So, I mean, I think that this then spread to Black studies, women's studies, qualitative sociology, like big departments.
And from there, it spread into society with diversity training, a lot of HR stuff.
One of the things that you outlined, I'd actually be interested in kind of a younger man's perspective on this, but like one of the things you reminded me of is that there's a lot more in college now than students and teachers.
Like there's student affairs and Greek life and the student government and diversity, equity and inclusion and all this stuff.
And in these government bureaucracies, this is where you really like wheelhouse a lot of these people.
So I mean, like the University of Michigan, I read recently has a diversity and equity office that employs something like 100 people.
I mean, pretty much all at six figure salaries.
So that is the college is kind of a hothouse environment for this stuff to grow and develop, definitely.
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But from there, it really spreads out into society.
And something, something I didn't recognize, kind of really last sentence here because pretty brief, but something I didn't recognize until I became like an intellectual is that these academic debates, whether it's on Twitter or in the journals that seem almost meaningless, really do influence the next level of society down, like what's published in major newspapers or goes on TV.
And the critical stuff being so central in academia means that it's diffused widely outward.
So a lot of people would use these phrases now, like microaggression or male privilege without really thinking about what they mean.
Right.
And I've struggled with this sort of this dynamic internally because I saw I was fortunate enough to see Eric Weinstein speak once.
And I got to do I was one of the guys that got to stand up with a mic and ask a question.
And I asked him if if the students were making the colleges liberal or if the colleges were making students liberal.
And I don't remember all of the details of his response, but the gist was both.
And so I wonder if I wonder if we're giving too much credit to these universities as manipulating or changing or indoctrinating students.
I wonder if what's really going on is the universities are pandering to what the students already kind of think.
Because almost like from a marketing perspective, like, look, these students, they want to go to, if you want to go to Brown University, you are a certain type of kid already.
You know what I mean?
And so you can go in there and they're going to tell you shit that you like think is fascinating that you already kind of agreed with.
But like, like, if I, I would, like, if I would have gone to Brown, I would have just been pissed off and challenged every single day.
It probably would have been a good experience for me to like be in an environment where I disagreed with everything.
I probably would have learned something and got somewhere.
But I wonder if the universities are actually changing the students as much as we think or if it's the students are already like that when they get there.
Yeah.
So first of all, I mean, I think the comment about that being a challenging, good experience is an interesting one.
Like I actually went to high school in the hood because my mom was an inner city school teacher.
I went to East Aurora Senior just outside of Chicago in the 90s and I actually enjoyed the experience.
But I mean, no, like East Aurora is the, so I was born actually, if I recall correctly, on the south side of Chicago.
I grew up mostly on the north side of Chicago pre-gentrification.
So, I mean, I had that, I had that urban youth experience.
Like, just, I considered myself kind of a nerdy kid, if anything, but I mean, was socially well enough liked.
I mean, and this is, this is pre-sort of Giuliani having an effect on other big cities.
If you're talking about like Chicago 94, 95.
So it was very much that one movie, kids.
Like you would get on the train and it would be speedy.
Yeah, it's a pretty accurate.
I mean, obviously the lead character is a piece of crap, but it's, but it's a pretty accurate summary of kind of young urban male life at that time.
Like I actually had a skateboard.
I wasn't all that great with it.
But I mean, you get on the train, like couples would be having sex, like crackheads would be passed out in the chairs and all that.
Yeah.
Aurora is a smaller city than Chicago.
It's a city of about 400,000, but it was actually the murder capital of the Midwest during much of the late 90s.
Black gangs from Chicago were coming out and fighting the local Caucasian Hispanic gangs who are winning, interestingly enough.
But I mean, so there would be, there were 28 people killed all in my age range one year.
But anyway, the point of this is I actually had a pretty good experience because I had to get tougher and, you know, I got to be, I like, I still speak passable Spanish, so on.
So anyway, Brown might have been an upper class version of that in terms of that like every day is gladiator school in every classroom.
You're the only guy that has read a book on classical economics.
Yeah, like you, none of you guys read Atlas Shrugged.
I mean, like when I described myself walking around with a skateboard watching people hook up on trains, I mean, I was an interesting, you know, reasonably edgy urban youth, but I was also an idiot.
So when you say the colleges might do what the students want, they shouldn't.
If you are, I mean, if you are 19 and your goal is to read as much communist philosophy and have as many bisexual threesomes as possible, which is a lot of 19-year-olds.
It's most 19-year-olds, I would assume.
I mean, but like, it's not really the goal of adult leaders to encourage you in that, like to give you, and there's nothing at all wrong with sexuality or with reading the enemy's best writings, but it's not the goal of a professor to teach you courses on masturbation or on how to be a better left-wing protest.
But we have this market economy in academia where 19-year-olds are choosing where they want to go to college and none of them are going to choose to go to where I went to college, which was Belmont University Small Christian School in Nashville.
Like if you're if you're a 19-year-old communist seeking threesomes, like small Christian private school, not for you.
Like Brown.
That actually sounds like one of those antipha hiring ads that people have been making fun of, like 19-year-old communists seeking threesomes.
Did you read this ad for like it?
It was like antipha brothel in Portland seeks seven housemate.
I saw something about that.
Yeah, I saw something, the meme on that.
Coming from like when I talk about coming from another genuine big city and having looked for housing as like a young executive, I actually sent this around to like all of my friends and they were like, Yeah, that sounds like some of these places we were offered in Chicago.
Like one was over like a Chinese restaurant that doubled as a heroin transshipment facility.
But anyway, I mean, I think that's the point, though.
Like in all seriousness, as adult, in both of our cases, male leaders, like although for female ones as well, I'm sure most of this would apply, but you don't necessarily want to encourage people to do this sort of stuff.
I mean, there's very little ultimate right and wrong.
But if your students are 19-year-old, would-be only fan sex workers who have only read one side of the great intellectual debates of our time, as a 35-year-old with a PhD, it's to some extent your job to introduce them to broader, better ideas.
So when you say that the kids are controlling this, this is what we've seen since the 70s, actually.
The interesting thing about the grievance studies fields, whether you're talking about the OG, Black studies, whether you're talking about women's studies, post-colonial studies, peace theory, men's studies, there's quite a lot of this.
Like it's a decent chunk of a good university.
These were student-demanded fields.
So traditionally, the way you've got academic fields is that the faculty of a university, like I'm, I've been on our faculty senate.
It's a fairly impressive body, even at a mid-sized school.
The faculty of a university will sit and vote if you propose a new academic program.
That would be pretty brutal.
I mean, like, what are the number of published articles for the people attempting to set up the program?
Do you know how to do this?
Like, if you're an economist, do you know anything about Econometrics?
If you want to set up that attached department, it's these very smart people yelling at you.
The grievance alternative kind of came because it's what wanted to do, what students wanted to go into.
And same thing with a lot of the online options that are now out there.
And with a lot of the degrees, like I don't mean to bash my colleagues in business who also teach many other things that are require great intelligence, but like a degree in sales strikes me as a waste of time.
Like I was in sales and it basically is focused on asking people questions designed to close product.
Like, are you still with me?
Well, and I'm in sales.
I own an advertising company.
So I do sales for how I actually make money.
And I've never taken a sales course or a business course in my life.
My dad was a small business owner and all my brothers have owned businesses at one point in time.
The point I'm trying to make is, in my opinion, you can train sales and improve people, but you either fucking got it or you don't got it.
The best salespeople aren't academics.
There are exceptions, of course.
And I don't have anything against academics.
I have deep respect.
I minored in philosophy.
I have deep respect for people who have dedicated their life to the mind.
And that's what an academic is at least supposed to do.
So I'm not bashing academics in that sense at all, but you cannot sit in a classroom and teach somebody how to be Jordan Belfort.
Like that motherfucker was always going to sell.
Actually, when I worked for Marcus Evans, which is a pretty well-known, like, not sketchy, but edgy, like Chicago, really sales more than trading floor company.
Like what we sold was the opportunities for different C-level executives and corporations to meet each other.
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But I actually pitched Jordan Belfort about going to one of our summits.
He seems to have rebounded a bit since his time in the can.
And obviously the movie did a lot for him based on his book.
So I hope that he's bounced back and he's seeing some success again because, you know, I could be wrong about it, but he doesn't strike me as somebody who was a bad person.
He just strikes me as a person who got caught up doing bad things.
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You know, I don't really think that morals are real.
But no, I have a strong personal honor code and I would agree with the philosophers who would say that the 12 essentials that we discuss in anthropology don't have sex with your mother, eat people, which are fairly similar to the 10 commandments and the like.
I mean, that's probably true, at least at the human genetic level.
But in all honesty, competing in business or in war, if unfortunately I ever found myself in that role, I don't really think I'd have a lot of ethical questions that I'd repeatedly ask myself.
Well, if you know that you're convincing someone to throw their life savings into a stock that's going to dump, like it's a shitty thing to do, right?
It's just the, it's just the first version of Dogecoin with like smart credit for guys.
Dude, like Doge, everybody knows, though.
It's different.
And Doge, it's like you're telling the guy, listen, this is a scam.
Are you in?
And they're like, fuck yeah, double down.
The Jordan Belfort thing.
So like, I personally, so this actually is something fairly important.
This is one of the few things that I'm kind of left leading on.
So obviously, first of all, I'm like I said, personal honor code, there are a lot of things I wouldn't do.
I also think this is another conversation, maybe there's little or no ultimate right or wrong in the sense that God is personal and will judge you in the next world.
I think they're excellent philosophical proofs for this.
With Jordan Belfort, I think he went over the line with some of the penny stocks because a lot of them are just straight garbage.
But it's worth remembering that a lot of what a lot of business is like this.
Like one of the things when I was in that sales floor slash trading floor space, although I was on the sales side, one of the things that struck me is that stockbrokers aren't like economists.
They're just predatory dudes.
They were mostly college athletes that are hired to make money for the firm.
unidentified
So like it's exactly that environment on every trading floor.
So like if your boss puts a bunch of stuff on your desk, it's like, today we're moving fucking Apple, you know, you're going to get on the phone and tell lies about computers.
I understand, but if you're, if you are doing the IPO for Steve Madden and you are secretly buying millions and millions of dollars of the stock to artificially inflate the price only with the intention of dumping it, that is like market manipulation.
They knew it was against the law.
It's extremely common, though.
That's different.
But if you're selling somebody a shitty pair of shoes and you know it's shitty, that's, that's not like a, I don't, in my opinion, that's not like ethically wrong.
But if you're artificially pumping, like, I don't know, I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong.
So no, I don't, I don't think you're wrong.
I think the point that I'm making, because we've both done this at fairly solid levels, I think that there's a tendency on the right to give a break to business.
Yeah.
And this is, this is something that often strikes me.
Like, not really we, I'm not prudish at all, but like there are all these critiques of, you know, only fans, anything involving sex, you know, cowardice of the next generation, all this stuff.
Well, that comes from, that comes from the evangelical component of the party, I think, of the GOP.
Yeah, but business in general, I guess what I'm saying is that the same antics that are engaged in by like the little guy having fun on a trading floor are very, very common.
I think you know this at the highest levels of business.
I mean, like when you look at the original GameStop AMC thing, that was a response to the constant short selling and bullshit designed to destroy these traditional American companies that go on the street all the time.
And like, you get it.
And you really, sometimes you see the hand behind the glove when it comes to the fact that we have a ruling class.
It's like a medieval thing about yeah, it's it's cool.
It's like the it's like the man behind the curtain, but it's the hand behind the glove.
I like that.
The head inside the velvet glove might be better.
Steel hand, velvet glove.
I think it was the original from Knights Dueling, but in terms of what you can slap guys with.
But at any rate, though, the, I guess what I'm saying is that there are situations that make us realize, and both of us, we have a good year, might be on the lower fringes of this, but we have a real ruling class in this country.
We both went to solid colleges.
There are also people that finish number one in their class at Yale.
And sometimes the ruling class just drops all the democratic bullshit and demonstrates that it exists.
So where I'm mentioning this in the context of GameStop and AMC is that the major stock trading platforms like Robinhood quit trading stock and allegedly, allegedly, made up lies as to why.
Like that's our.
That's the ruling class shit right there.
That is business happens all the time.
So when you're like the little guys on the trading floor, they can tell some lies.
Like, yeah, sure.
But I mean, there are also people that stop us from trading.
But Jordan Belfour would have been the guy calling Robinhood, like, you son of a bitch, you better stop.
The only thing unique about Belfour was that he flooked those kind of sketchy trader boy techniques to a point where he almost made the elite elite and then he got shut down.
It's a fascinating story.
But I mean, my point would just be that.
And I don't mean to bash him.
I like him, actually.
I think he's charming as hell.
But I don't know.
I just thought we had, it was an interesting, it was interesting to explore whether or not he was a good person, you know, because I mentioned like, I don't think he was a bad guy.
I think that most people, the reason that most people, quote unquote, respect the bad guy is that most people know that at some level, only 12 things are actually morally true.
And they know that the goal of life is happiness and sustenance for their family.
And they know at some level that if they were aggressive enough, they would do virtually everything to get happiness and sustenance for their family.
So they respect people that do.
Like, I don't know a single young businessman that wouldn't have a drink with Pablo Escobar.
I mean, like, it was like, it was like when, um, remember when Joe Biden was asked if um, he thought uh Putin was a killer, yeah.
And that was his response, it was controversial.
I think that the correct response to that question is: at this level, everybody's a killer.
Exactly.
Like, that's the truth.
If you're if you make it to the president of the United States, regardless of whether you've ever held political power before or whether you've ever personally taken a life, you're a killer.
You've got the you have the capability to do what's got to be done to either sustain power or push an agenda on a global political level if you make it that far.
Yeah.
And I think again, so there are a few more examples of this.
Like, first, I obviously have no idea whether Biden's ever had anyone killed or something like that.
But well, he's president.
Anytime he's ordered a die, anytime he's authorized to die, a bomb being dropped.
What I was saying, though, is a little more specific.
Also, like Biden has been involved in kind of that Russian oligarch space with his son, um, with companies that allegedly have had rivals disappeared and so on.
I don't, I don't know if Biden's ever made those calls in private life, I doubt it, honestly.
But I mean, everyone that is at a certain level of power has to be aware of that sort of thing.
I mean, you can hire a hitman on the quote-unquote dark net for $10,000.
I'm pretty sure the vice president of the United States knows how to do it.
Well, I mean, in Chicago, if you're actually renting a shooter from one of the gangs, it's like a thousand.
I mean, the thing about that is that it's actually at the low end.
I mean, it's a pretty like when you look at what demand is versus supply, or when you look at how many people can do the job, there are a lot of young, thuggish, or ex-military dudes that would be able to shoot one person.
So, you can't actually charge the sort of unbelievable James Bond fees you see in the movie.
It's a competitive market.
Yeah, no, it's a classic, yeah, very, very high-ceiling, pyramid-ceiling, but very low-entry job.
All you basically need is a gun and some aggression, not even a gun, depending on the level of aggression.
But anyway, the point of this was just that, yes, I think that everyone at a certain level of society is capable of some hyper-predatory behavior, and that includes the elected leaders of countries.
The obvious example of this was Jeff Epstein being almost certainly murdered in his cell, where he is in this suicide-proof prison cell with 12-foot ceilings.
Um, and he hangs himself.
He's a frail 65-year-old investment banker with like a sheet or something.
And when he did this, the cameras outside his cell, and if I recall correctly, and that entire block didn't work, and the guards were all off duty, and they ended up prosecuting the guards for this, but sentencing them to like 10 hours of community service.
And Jeff Epstein had managed to piss off like the Clintons, the Trumps, and the Queen of England.
Nothing will ever be proven.
I think many people suspect he didn't die any version of natural death.
And so he was Robin Hood during GameStop.
You see something like that.
Another example, last one, would be what happened to Parlor.
So, I mean, during the sort of fracas around the 2020 election, the allegation was that Parler had been responsible for the violence at the Capitol.
So, the site was just shut down.
Like, the way they, even though they proved that Facebook was responsible for way more organization for all the January 6th protests, which doesn't surprise me, Facebook has a mostly boomer audience by this point.
But I mean, just like it really was, again, sort of, and I don't know how we've gotten into some of these sidelines, but there is hey, I like Riding These Waves, man.
Don't even worry about it.
But this is not a thesis, it does not have to be tight.
Fair enough.
The thing with the thing with Parler, again, is that that illustrates kind of the hidden power behind the scenes.
Like, it turns out they're only two app stores, like Apple and Google, I guess, and both of them decided to remove Parler as an app.
So, Amazon even removed them so you couldn't access their website because their servers were hosting the website.
Yeah, that was the next level.
That was next level.
They were de-platformed by their like server-level web hosts, so the site didn't exist.
And again, you recognize that there are three or four people who acting together could remove your entire business from the internet.
So, maybe the conversation is ranked social media app before that.
So, that's that's pretty remarkable, man.
So, so maybe the maybe the argument isn't whether or not there's an oppressor or oppressed.
Maybe the argument is: hey, we got it all wrong.
The actual oppression is occurring from sort of conglomeration.
Well, it's that actually is, I mean, so like to the extent that I take these theories seriously, I think that the most accurate critical theory is class-based original critical theory.
Like, yeah, but see, but class-based original critical theory, in my opinion, correct me if I'm misguided in this, but it's different when you talk about classism in China or North Korea or India or 19th century.
Europe and when you talk about classism in a capitalist society, in my opinion, because at least in America, I don't know how true this is today, but there was a time where just because your parents are poor doesn't mean you're going to be poor, right?
So when Marx is bitching about classism in sort of like a post-serfdom society, yeah, maybe it makes sense because if you're, if you're a laborer in a factory, every generation's every generation after you is probably going to be a laborer in a factory if things keep going the way they're going.
But that's not necessarily true in a free society.
I mean, you're in a class, but you're not necessarily locked in it like traditionally people have been the last 2,000 years in various societies.
Yeah, no, that's a good analysis.
I would say my take on that would be, I do actually think that systems in the modern world to some extent, whether or not they're set up this way, do in practice oppress people that are in the not in power classes.
So for example, we've just talked about how the ruling class shut down a top six digital business.
Yeah, but all those guys, all those guys started with nothing.
Yeah, no, that's different in our society right now.
So systems do in practice oppress the non-ruling class.
The issue is that you're not stable in class.
Like you yourself can move from the class you're in to almost any of the other classes.
So the system disadvantages you if you're in one of the lower classes, but very simple things like attending a free public school can in most cases move you out of the lower classes.
So that's something that Marx actually had a lot of issues in his writing.
Like one of them was class mobility, which even in his era in Germany did exist.
Another is the potential.
It did exist problem.
Yeah, it did.
Another would be the petite bourgeois problem, though, that you can, in practice, become your own means of production, quote unquote, by becoming a plumber or a lawyer or a dozen other things.
Communism to me never really handled that well.
That's probably 30% of employed adults.
Well, certainly in a non-manufacturing society, yes.
Yeah.
But I mean, and the final problem with communism is that, or Marxism or whatever, I mean, there are many different versions.
There's Leninism and Maoism.
It's all bullshit.
But the problem with it also is that the solution is absolutely wrong.
So you can say we think that there is some oppression of the lower class in capitalist societies.
That doesn't logically lead you to the solution.
So let's destroy capitalism and see what we can do by taking the heads of the military and the working class and letting them run the roots.
Just because there's injustice in the police force doesn't mean to totally defund the police, for example, right?
It's a similar fallacy.
Yeah, no, I think that that's what's often called the revolutionary mistake, right?
Like, so the revolutionary, I'm an anti-revolutionary by disposition.
So revolutions all involve a pretty complicated gamble, which is once we fight this big war, the predatory leaders of our side are going to be dramatically better than the predatory leaders of the other side were.
And what we find is that that's almost never true.
The American Revolution was successful, but even had it failed, we just would be in Britain, you know, and most other revolutions of the time, France, Haiti, Russia, so on, were violent, disgusting collapses.
So I tend to be anti-revolution.
I tend to, if we want to work.
And the U.S. Revolution was the United States Revolution was much less spontaneous.
I mean, there was the Continental Congress.
These people got together.
They had leadership positions.
They sort of knew what they wanted it to look like when it was over.
Whereas these other revolutions that you see were just like the spontaneous rage, almost like a worker strike.
And then when they burned everything down, it's like, all right, now what?
So you have to kind of begin with the end in mind if you want a revolution to work.
Like you can't just invade Iraq and then leave.
Yeah, no, I mean, that's roughly accurate.
Like the U.S. Revolution, the American Revolution, and you could look at some other past examples, like the transition of Rome from a republic to an empire, the Italian city-states breaking away from the nobility to be wonky.
But like successful revolutions do require, I guess this is one sentence, smart people with an idea of the society beyond the revolution.
So two things, smart people, and by that I mean like high IQ, not some theoretical construct, like high G factor and predatory.
And two, a conception of the future society.
So, this actually, this is the big reason people don't take Antifa and BLM seriously.
Like, we might fight them if they attacked our houses.
They're definitely a social movement and in some ways an effective one.
But I don't think Patrice Collors or like the guy with the wind sock over his face in the Antifa videos.
Like, I don't think these people have a vision of a future society that runs coherently and can produce municipal bonds.
Like, I don't.
They're just burn it down.
That's the, they're just burn it down mentalities.
And you need some of those on the ground, but if you want to win, if you want to, if you want to, if you want a lasting change of a revolution, you have to have an idea and the leverage of what society is supposed to look like afterward.
And I don't really know much.
You probably know more than I do.
You almost certainly know more than I do about the original sort of Chinese revolution and what happened.
But it seems to me that for some reason, China figured out a way, despite all of its genocidal and human rights atrocities, they found a way to create a society that functions to some extent post-revolution in a way that a lot of other communist revolutionary societies weren't able to do.
Well, I think that the reason China made communism work is that they're not communist.
I mean, and this is this is a cliche line from the business world, but I mean, they started saying to get rich is glorious around 1963, if I have that correct.
So they tried, they tried makes sense because the because the great leap forward was 58 to 62.
So they probably wanted to make a little bit of a pivot after that disaster.
Yeah.
I mean, people were cannibalism was reported and so on.
Pure communist.
So first of all, pure, well, this actually is, again, one of these sort of amoral leader comments.
Pure anything usually doesn't work.
I mean, so when you think Lasse faire capitalism would fail?
Of course.
I mean, haven't you been to Somalia?
No, like, I mean, I haven't either, at least in the, but like, yes, when people talk about pure free markets, almost no one wants a pure free market.
Uh, in a pure free market, I agree with you that almost no one wants it, but does that mean does that mean it wouldn't work?
Yeah, yeah, I want to know because you'd be able to buy slaves, you know, like when my body, that's not necessarily true because you got you can have a pure free market and have protection of human of private of rights, then it's not a pure free market.
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I mean, I'm not like, again, almost nothing I say is moral.
It's just the, although I'm a decent enough guy, but I mean, like the in a pure free market, like buddies of mine that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of them went to the northwest frontier provinces of Pakistan.
Um, at least as I understand it, I heard it's really nice this time of year.
Yeah, wonderful.
And buy a buy a wife and bring her home during a pleasant climate.
But no, the northwest frontier provinces of Pakistan are areas of Pakistan, the tribal areas that Pakistan has no control over.
And in the markets there, the Kazbaz, you actually can literally buy pretty much anything.
I think the term is Bakabazi, but there's an entire cadre.
Can't you make the argument that there can be no pure capitalism without a recognition of private property rights?
And by extension, a person has a right to themselves and everything that they produce.
Therefore, slavery is not a result of a pure capitalism, but actually a violation of the principles thereof.
I think that's, I think it's just highfalutin talk.
I mean, in a pure capitalist society, those with the like in a pure capitalist society, no rules regulate the market.
I mean, you could really, you could say almost anything, like you could extend what you just said.
By the way, I'm very critical of philosophy.
Sure.
Sure.
Mostly I'll like run regression models and see what appears to be the case once I come up with an initial theory.
I'm not mocking a great discipline at all, but when people say it strikes me as very logically easy to extend what you said to, for example, the products of the individual's labor or elements of the individual so that selling sex or selling organs would also be verboten.
And I think at this point, we're just engaging in kind of moral discourse.
Like if you define a pure free market as you can sell anything and even beyond the human, like hard drugs, weapons of any kind, like you can buy a flamethrower in the Afghan cosmos.
And that's what the, that's what the libertarians would advocate.
But I think that there's a reasonable argument that's fairly tight that you can have laissez-faire capitalism while having a government that protects individual rights.
So in that case, like, yeah, you could sell sex, but it would have to be your own body.
Like no one else could enslave you and then sell you because that's a violation of your private property rights, right?
Like in capitalism, private property rights are inherently recognized because you're exchanging either products or services via time.
That assumes money, right?
That assumes a bunch of things, like you recognize everybody as human that wouldn't have applied for the large majority of history.
And even now, they would bring up questions like, so to ask some obvious ones, could you sell hard drugs like pure raw opium?
I think in a laissez-faire capitalism, yeah, or in a libertarian type situation, yeah, I think that would be what about actual weapons of war, like the ACAC guns from planes that you can buy in Afghanistan.
You can shoot down an F-15.
Should you be able to buy those?
I don't know.
I don't know the answers to these things.
I don't know.
I'm having fun talking to you about it, but I'm having fun talking to you about it too.
And I'm not trying to be combative or anything.
I just love having this discussion.
In practice, I don't think morals are real, although I think personal honor is very important.
There may be 10 or 12 exceptions.
And so I think that when people get into some of these, these comments, like, obviously have a right to all private property.
I mean, that's, we just sort of decided that.
Like, if some tribal chief decides that only followers of Islam are truly human, this actually was the justification used for slavery.
But the difference is there's actually a logical case made for some of these, for some of these arguments, right?
So I'm sure with your background in political science, you're familiar with Locke and Second Treaties of government.
And you can disagree with Locke all you want.
And there are great arguments against Locke, but at least the dude made a fucking logical case for why private property rights exist.
So he might be totally wrong, but I love the idea of actually having sound principle behind what policy instead of just policy on whim because policy and limbs are incredibly inefficient.
I think that most modern policy that comes out of political science would be based on what works.
I can virtually guarantee that Kazba style markets where you could buy javelin rockets and pounds of heroin and prostitutes for a month would have a lot of negative externalities for society.
And I don't think any of those things I just described would fail even the test you just proposed.
So I mean, I think that pure capitalism in general doesn't work.
You can find like a good example of pure capitalism would be a rave.
Like I think that most people would find that an unfortunate basis for a society.
Pure communisms even works.
So, I mean, pure communism is the idea of the government controlling every theoretical means of production down to agriculture.
That doesn't work either.
I think what most civilized societies do is a pretty consistent form of managed capitalism where people are allowed to fix the economy, it's regulated, but try to have the benefits of the free market to the extent that they're beneficial without the negative consequences.
In Singapore, nobody, nobody commits crime really because they're just so tough on it.
Saudi Arabia has an incredibly low crime rate.
I mean, they're actually one of the things that I've found when I was arguing against both woesters and the alt-right for a period of about two years.
One of the things I did on the inspiration of Thomas Soule was go beyond the USA to the global data.
And it's absolutely fascinating and it completely disproves most alti and social justice claims.
Like, I mean, if IQ would be an interesting example, or if you go around the world, like there's a 12-point IQ difference between Eastern and Western Europe, there's no possible genetic explanation.
The explanation is communism, obviously, in my opinion.
Well, do you think she's malnutrition at birth?
I mean, I just watched that Jordan Peterson interview with that woman that was escaped from North Korea.
It's fascinating about her escape from North Korea and her life growing up there.
And she said that she was eating grasshoppers growing up to get protein.
I mean, that's how that's how malnourished they all were.
And their height, North Korean, are North Koreans are on average much shorter than South Koreans.
I mean, ethnically, they're exactly the same.
But because of the malnutrition, there's all sorts of disparities between them.
I think that that could be one reason.
I think that there are quite a few reasons actually that are fascinating to look at.
I mean, you know, I don't think there's a lot of malnutrition in Serbia, which was about a 90, as I recall correctly.
Albania on the PISA test is an 81.
To put this in context, the most recent score I've seen for U.S. Black Americans, Dickens and Flint 2006, was a 92.
So this is for IQ.
Yeah, for IQ.
I see.
So I'm not a big IQ guy.
Like, I don't really contribute to the psychometrics literature, but I think once you get beyond your country and look around, like if the alti claim is that Caucasian societies are successful because of something inherent about Caucasians, I mean, all you have to do is go to Eastern Europe and just start tossing them out.
Like, what about Afghanistan?
What about Bosnia?
What about Turkmenistan?
All these people are genetically identical, roughly.
So, I mean, I don't think debunking the alt-right is something either you or I needs any help with.
The point is that when you look at crime, crime does vary extraordinarily widely.
And in unexpected places, like Ghana has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
So does Bosnia after the war, interestingly enough.
Now, is there any correlation between diversity and crime?
Like, like, so, like, if there's, if there's less diversity, is there, is there typically less crime?
No, well, it depends what you mean.
So, this again racial diversity.
Yeah, racial diversity has no is the short answer, but like it's worth taking a look at what diversity means in political science.
So, when I, this again is one I've debated with both altis and SJWs, like from the front.
I like how you call them altis.
I've never heard that description before.
No, but I mean, like, so generally, when the alt-right and the social justice left discuss diversity, what they're talking about is race.
And I mean, just being blunt, although some people deny this exists, biogenetic race, like black, which means Bantu, West African, white, Caucasian from part of Europe, so on.
I think these are these are useful terms.
Um, do you believe?
Do you believe that there's a biological argument that race exists?
Yeah, I mean, like this again, so I'll answer that and then the diversity and uh crime, but like it depends what you mean.
The short answer is obviously yes.
Like if you look at people, I mean, I am not a virgin, so I've had sex with other human beings and you notice they have vaginas.
I mean, like, they're human characteristics of sex.
Women have self-lubricating vaginas in most cases and smaller bodies on average and curving hips.
Like, you can tell what a woman is, you can tell what a man is in general.
Similarly, I think if you look at someone who's of Bantu West African descent, unless you're blind, you'll notice that this person has dark brown through black skin, curled hair, a broader nose.
Their stereotypes is good runners, but bad swimmers, which in my experience is a competent athlete, is true, so on down the line.
Like, you notice you're looking at a black guy.
Most of the arguments that this is meaningless rest on kind of word playing, what we were both joking about earlier.
So, like, one is the idea that no group is pure.
So, for example, black and West Africans at the margins blend into North Africans.
There's that whole region, historical Nubia, where you're looking at sort of dark-skinned Arabs.
Okay, I get that.
Um, categories are imprecise in definition.
So, for example, am I black?
Like, all that.
Okay, I get that.
But the basic idea, a good way to look at this would be, do I believe that the 23andMe haplotypical groups are real?
The background goes back a thousand years and all that.
But looking at you, either Gentile or Jewish, Mittel, European, Caucasian.
And I asked you where you're from and you said Germany.
I think that objectively we can tell this stuff.
So yeah, I think race is real in that sense.
The question is whether the categories that 23andMe and so on can struct using segregated genetic variants.
It's actually a pretty sophisticated technique.
They'll tell you about it.
But see, but the problem with it with grouping people by race, it's useful on a macro level, but it's not fair to you for me to assume that your IQ is probably 92 because you're black.
Well, that's like your IQ is obviously above significantly above average.
And I know this, A, by talking to you, but B, by all the statistical correlations between education level and IQ level.
I mean, you're pushing, you're over 120 almost certainly, right?
My IQ is about 150.
I mean, I'm pretty intelligent.
I actually had a running challenge with alt writers and SJWs where I take an IQ test in the winner with the join Mensa.
And I'm, I don't know what my IQ is.
I know that it's, it's somewhere over 120, probably not over 130.
I think I'm in like the 126 range because I was in the gifted program in my school and the minimum requirement was 120.
But I, I, as an 120 IQ type person, I can't really tell the difference between somebody who's got an IQ of 130 versus somebody who's got an IQ of 150, right?
I just, I can just tell if that person's smarter than me somewhere.
You know what I mean?
unidentified
I think you have probably about the same G factor intelligence.
My IQ is actually, I think it was 143 when I last took the test.
And this was the bits of words.
So you're like, you're like Jim Morrison, except with fewer drugs.
But I mean, like, so, but like realistically with all of this, first of all, I don't think the IQ gap between blacks and whites is genetic.
Like, I think that there are races that exist, but I think performance gaps between races could be genetic, could be cultural, it'd be caused by racism.
And when you look at them, they're almost all cultural.
Interesting.
So what's your interpretation of the bell curve?
I mean, it's sort of neutral.
All it did was identify the discrepancy.
It didn't really make many claims.
I think that there's a whole genre of bad research.
Now, Charles Murray is a better and more established researcher in many ways than me.
So I'm not saying that this is crap, but there's a whole genre of bad research on both left and right that like identifies trends and ignores obvious explanations for them, presents the trend and is like, bilow, and then concludes.
And parts of the bell curve fall into that unfortunate pattern.
The another issue is that the bell curves chapter on race is often analyzed alone, which it was not supposed to be.
The bell curve is like a 16-chapter book that does explain most IQ differences.
And then Murray is sort of saying bluntly, almost reluctantly, like, okay, we got to do one chapter on this 14-point difference that exists at the time.
It's now smaller.
You know, so he does that.
It's not meant as a standalone.
He doesn't provide much explanation.
So do you think it's just because if you're black, you're more likely to go to a really shitty school in a really shitty area and that you're going to perform lower on an IQ test?
No, no excuses.
I think it's very, they're very specifically.
I think it was John McWhorter who pointed these out.
It might have been Amy Chuck.
But there are four things that when adjusted for, close the black, white IQ gap, if I recall correctly, but I'm pretty, you know, pretty smart.
That's what probably do.
One is a father in the home.
Two is the grade demanded by specifically your mother.
For Asian kids, this is an A. Like you will be forced at risk of a physical beating very often to study to produce those grades.
A third is the number of hours spent studying per day as versus watching television, specifically.
That's a bipartisan two-part ratio variable.
And then number of books in the home.
And I would also add number of words you hear.
So the simple fact is that Vietnamese kids that go into either poor black, like Oakland, or poor white, like Cajun Louisiana schools, beat both blacks and poor whites who perform pretty similarly, by the way, by about 150 SAT points.
Blacks and whites are obviously two of the three or four major races.
So it's not a genetic problem.
And the Vietnamese kids are doing well in ghetto school.
So it's not a class problem.
Of course, the class doesn't help.
But I mean, the reason for their success is that there are specific, predictable things that those families do.
And the hypothesis that comes out of this is, well, if you take black kids or poor whites and you put them in an environment where they are trained to do the same things, will they get the same scores?
Yeah, that's the thing.
This is testable.
Tom Soule in 2020 wrote Charter Schools and Their Enemies.
And the book is frankly kind of boring.
Like I'm a huge Soul stand, but like the entirety of the book is just like the performances for these different charter schools with his graphs and tables and so on, breaking it down.
But what you see if you're a stats guy and you read through this is that the charter school student population, which is like 95% minority, performs about six points better than the overall public school white population, if I have that correct.
Just generally on grades or on all standardized tests?
On standardized tests.
Like they have the NAPE scores and they're so on down the line.
So you can quibble.
You could say, well, the white kids might still have a 40-point SAT advantage or equivalent because they're not as selected.
But like you're looking at very comparable scores if you do similar shit.
Like if you make the kids come to school, study, even hearing words, this isn't like upper middle class mom talking to their placenta.
But I mean, like, just if you are in a family where words are used, where people are having conversations at dinner, where people are walking around you talking, where like your mom tells you to pick up your toys in like full sentences, not like, goddamn it, Jimmy.
Like either major race in Kentucky, speaking about girls, my buddies have dated or like what.
If you've ever been in a relationship with anyone with a kid, I mean, there is a huge upper middle class, working class difference between like, hey, Jason, pick up those toys now and put them in the bin.
And goddamn it.
You know, and it really is.
You see those patterns all the time.
So I think that explains either most or all of these sort of racial group IQ gaps.
There are a few exceptions.
Like Ashkenazi Jews test at like a 118 on IQ boards after hundreds of years of persecution by and fighting with surrounding Christian communities.
Like, could there be a genetic component to that?
Like, yeah.
But that's a very, very specific group, too.
It's not like a broad swath of a race.
Yeah, but when you look at people from, yeah, like exactly right.
Like when you look at people from like the civilized West African states, Nigeria, which is like what, 400 million people, right?
Which is a billion people.
Like I would expect those two, those two groups to be roughly within like the three or four point margin of error comparable if everything else was.
Like I don't think there's a magical difference that or a genetic difference that would move Hungarians over Nigerians in America.
Like that, no, I personally.
Well, and you see the way this plays out too in the difference in economic success and performance between Native African Americans in the United States versus those who immigrate from Africa, you know, here and like they just moved here.
They do better, right?
Than people who grow up here of the same race.
We've seen that okay.
Now, one thing that's important to realize, and I'm sure you do, is how huge that is as a scientific finding.
So if you have the social justice claim that all gaps between groups are due to racism, and you have the alt-right claim that most, that won't exaggerate, but most gaps between large groups are due to genetics.
And you take a large non-selected, because our immigration policy is not ideal in the USA, black group, and you drop them here, and they do exactly as well as white people.
That disproves both of those claims.
There's not a logical way to counter that.
Like very large, non-selected black group comes in, beats whites by doing basic middle-class stuff.
That shuts down 80%.
So how do you define alt-right?
Because I'm getting the sense that you define alt-right as basically just conservative white supremacists.
No, I think that I would define alt-right as kind of that like far right of Tupperverse.
So I mean, like this, like the Gavin McKinnon's type alt-right.
Would you consider him all right?
I don't think Gavin McGinnis is all right, actually.
I just think he's a tough white dude.
Like he, he just came in at the wrong moment where he was like, what if there was a conservative gang like Antifa and the media was like, tell him, I like Gavin a lot.
I'm not trying to trash him at all.
I'm just trying to get a sense of what you mean by alt-right.
What I mean by alt-right is...
Who would be an example of a legitimate alt-right figure?
I mean, like there, Malinu might qualify, but it would be better just to give some broad categories.
Like everyone that follows Amrin, American Renaissance, V-Dare.
I don't know what that is.
I mean, they're two Alexa top 10,000 websites that have sort of a white, it's like social justice for white people.
Like if I had to really define what the alt-right is, it's like the extremes of the social justice movement.
All these bad ideas are just subbing for one another.
So like social justice is just Marxism with rich people gone and white people in.
The alt-right is social justice with black people gone and white people in to a large extent.
Like, no, we are the genocide victims.
But I mean, like Amrin, V-Dare, the whole Groiper movement.
Like if you're on Twitter, I know you've seen all the frogs and toads and, you know, the that's like every 12th white witty white dude status.
Like the America First thing, what's that kid, Fuentes, who ironically is like apparently Afro-Latino by background.
And I'm, yeah, and I wasn't like apologizing for offense to Fuentes.
I just generally try not to like curse and make too many jokes during interviews, but it's hard not to in that case.
But I mean, just like, and so on down the line, you know, like Amrin, V-Dare, Groupers, the America Firsters, quote unquote.
I mean, there are a whole bunch of like hoteps that now in that kind of Bryson Gray camp probably agree with some of this stuff.
But it's not a small movement.
And I mean, again, there were very large, who's it?
It was Malinu that had the channel focused on IQ with about a million followers.
There are a lot of people that I think accept quite a few of these ideas.
One of the issues has been tech censorship to a remarkable degree.
And I don't know whether this is an issue or not depends on your personal perspective, but I think it's less publicly available than it used to be, like the extreme right counterpoint to the extreme left.
But again, if you go on Gab, Discord, BitChute, Reddit, 4chan, 8koon, like I'm an internet kid.
Like I see this stuff all the time.
And in a typical day arguing on, say, Twitter, I mean, I would get some of these claims and I would get some social justice claims.
And you could say, well, both those groups are under 6% of society.
But I mean, the total percentage of people on Twitter is 20% of the country max.
Well, and the and that 6% is the one doing like 90% of all the tweeting.
That's especially true on the left.
But yeah, I mean, so like very often you'll see these conversations with, you know, Bishop Talib Starks versus a new radical centrism or something that are just in the internet space, but that also have a million views.
So I think that that stuff is the Reality of the internet conversation without really bringing up either one of those two guys as an example of the worst of it is fairly influential on the larger society when you look at the number of potential tastemakers that participate in it.
The fact that most people don't doesn't necessarily matter, like the articles they read the next day in the paper and so forth will be influenced by it.
I mean, like we initially connected on Twitter or some similar platform.
But anyway, I mean, like, I tend to be a culturalist on IQ, just going back to that main thread.
Like, I don't think there's another way to explain like Nigerian performance.
I also don't think that someone who's an IQ hereditarian, not an alt writer, but a scientist, is necessarily evil.
I think you can argue anything in science.
Men and women are very different.
But I don't necessarily think that's the way the evidence points.
So what's the solution to all this shit then?
How do we get through all this SJW alti like CRT bullshit and just come out with good policy?
Just focus on facts.
I actually don't, I think the dispute between communists on the left and quasi-fascists on the right has been going on for what 200 years.
You might correct the Russians, the Germans, the French.
Like, I actually, one of the things that I think is fascism inherently right-wing?
No, that's another fascinating question.
I don't necessarily think a lot of quote-unquote alt writers would be right wing.
Like you, in political science, rather than conceiving of a line from like monarchy to communism, you could conceive of a sphere with different positions.
Like I'm actually very sympathetic to traditional American kind of thrown and altar conservatism, or I guess like no throne and altar once we get rid of the king, but like guns, small government, low taxes.
Norman Rockwell, like, yeah.
Well, I mean, actually, when I described what growing up in Chicago in the 90s, I was like, I have some sympathies for Norman Rockwell.
Like, yeah, yeah.
Raising your kid in a Norman Rockwell painting.
But like all that stuff, that's very different from fascism, which was a German slight left-leaning response to communism.
Do you think that, do you think, do you consider Hitler a right-wing figure?
In European terms, but those are almost meaningless to us.
Yeah.
Because it just bothers me that everyone just, there's, there's a tendency for the left to perceive Hitler as right-wing.
And anybody who, the farther right you go, the more, the more Hitlerian you become.
So definitely order, traditional cultural kind of values.
Yeah, fascism.
Fascism is, if you're talking about real fascism, coordination between powerful corporate entities and a central government that's promoting a sort of national ideology.
So like Google.
Yeah.
So I don't think fascism is inherently right or left.
We actually just define fascism as too smart.
It's a coordination between corporate entities and the government.
The government's promoting a myth.
That could be a left-wing myth or a right-wing myth.
No, we may be about to experiment with left-wing fascism, which is something that I didn't really think I'd ever say.
That actually, of all these things, like the altis and SJWs.
But isn't that what the CCP is?
It's left-wing fascism.
Yeah, excellent.
Yeah, that's correct.
Actually, learn something new every day.
I didn't really think that before this conversation.
Aren't you glad we met?
But no, I mean, that like when people talk about Trump, Trump said a lot of crap that to me, as an adult male leader, was wildly unnecessary.
He would argue with unknowns on Twitter.
He would retweet cat turd.
He would do all this stuff.
But in terms of actual policy, I find Trump a lot less frightening than some of the stuff we're seeing now, where like the CIA is running ads talking about how woke they are.
Like, we'll have an all-trans team of torturers any day now.
You know, I mean, where we are banning oil drilling in entire areas like the Alaskan refuges, and you see the price of gas skyrocketing up toward $3 a gallon, you know, where we are engaging in unprecedented levels of internet censorship, that kind of thing.
So I think when you look at these real policies, not like, is Trump a mean guy?
A lot of them are extremely disturbing.
They do almost get to that left-wing fascist space where like every corporation is promoting this mainstream center left.
unidentified
We need to expand the government and provide equity narrative.
And one of the characteristics of fascism is that if you do not participate in the narrative, you can be either literally or metaphorically deplatformed or unpersoned.
unidentified
I think to some extent, that is now something that is entirely possible.
When you look at like the former president's not on Twitter, like his tweets are not actually.
Even little stuff, like if you tweet a link to an interview with a real doctor that's critical of a vaccine, it's just done, like it's shut down.
And I'm not an anti-vaxxer at all.
And I'm not even opposed to the existing vaccines.
I mean, my wife and I got the JJ vaccine, no problem.
And we're right-wingers, right?
I have no problem with it.
But I also have no problem with a doctor who knows way more about healthcare and virology than I do talking for two hours about why COVID was lab leaked or why we have therapeutics that are more effective or as effective as vaccines, even if he's wrong.
It's like, why can't we allow these conversations to take place?
And the censorship is very scary because the amount of self-righteousness that it takes to, in good conscience, censor, which I think a lot of these corporations are doing out of good conscience.
They think that they're right and they're just like saving the world.
But the amount of self-righteousness that that takes to assume that you're right all the time is incredibly dangerous.
It's the same reason that I'm morally, and I know you don't believe morals are real, but I'm morally or logically opposed to Machiavellianism because, yeah, maybe the end does justify the means, but who are you to say that what your idea of the ideal end is is either practical or correct?
I mean, you have to have like a godlike level of narcissism in order to, in good conscience, adopt any sort of Machiavellianism.
And ultimately, censorship is Machiavellianism in practice.
Yeah.
By the way, did you do the okay sign as a joke when you said I'm right wing?
But I mean, like, the basically, I think that where we are right now with the example of this, for some reason, I don't know what I'm rambling here.
The example of this that was most notable to me came when I posted a link to the official government policy of Sweden, where they were explaining how they weren't going to panic in the face of COVID-19.
And they were encouraging people to stay physically fit, consume vitamin D, like wash your hands, all this stuff.
They didn't focus specifically on masking.
They didn't focus on locking down.
They did slightly better than we did versus COVID.
Not incredible, but neither were we.
And this was flagged as like unreliable, dangerous content within minutes.
So that is the power that exists to some extent.
And it's, I mean, yeah, at more than the margins, it's potentially disturbing.
Like, well, look at the Hunter Biden thing.
Yeah.
They censored it and it's like they were wrong.
So it's listen, if you're going to be wrong, then don't censor.
Just let the market, you know, for not to use laissez-faire language, but if you just let the market decide what's true and what isn't.
Let people debate and have and share these ideas and be offended.
The reason that didn't happen, though, is that the Hunter Biden story was true.
I mean, like that was, that was one of the most fascinating examples I've seen of this, where Trump's team did a pretty standard October surprise.
Right.
And I think it was an effective one.
Like, I'm not going to buy into this, this crap that it doesn't matter that the vice president's son is smoking crack with multiple hookers while closing million-dollar business deals with a potentially enemy country.
I mean, that seems like pretty significant.
It's pretty fucked up.
Like videos of him getting foot jobs on kind of edge media.
Like it's a real thing that happened.
Can you imagine if that was Don Jr.?
Oh, yeah.
I absolutely can imagine if it was Don Jr., the national scandal and the press still beating this drum to this day.
But it wasn't just that the non-New York Post media downplayed this story because, okay, they're on the left.
You'd expect them to a bit.
unidentified
It was that social media acted in coordination to completely censor the story.
It wasn't even Twitter, like you got a penalty for it until like their fact checkers, i.e.
Huffington Post and so on, reviewed it to see whether it was worthy to be posted.
Just like the most incredible blocking of information I've ever seen.
And that came in coordination with this BS about it being from Russia, where all these former intelligence officials, all Democrats signed this letter saying this has the potential hallmarks of Russian espionage, not saying they could prove this, not saying there was any evidence of it, just this sort of broad nonsense claim.
Hunter Biden himself went on TV and said, well, I don't know what happened to my computer.
Like, sure, I could have smoked crack and left it in a repair shop, or the Russians could have done that.
And it was just like, bro, you know, this is Hunter Biden's literally writing a book about scouring the carpet of a hotel room for any remnants of crack.
And meanwhile, the fact checkers of Facebook are like, let's look into whether or not this is plausible.
Crackheads do crackhead shit.
I mean, like the comment that he didn't understand, people arguing that he wouldn't have just left a valuable computer and forgotten.
He's a crackhead.
Yeah, he's a crackhead.
He had a crack problem at the time.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
You wouldn't do that, but if you were addicted to crack, you would.
Anyway, like, and you know, I'm sympathetic toward people that have inner demons and drug issues and so on, but just like, hell yeah, Mike Lindell, Hunter Biden, same guy.
The manipulation of all of this stuff is pretty remarkable.
Like, so I guess just two things.
I was talking with a left-wing friend about this recently.
It was an experience similar to yours, but kind of broader lens, where, by the way, Hunter Biden and who?
Same guy?
Mike Lindell.
I was just fucking kidding.
Oh, they both had a crack problem.
That's pretty funny.
unidentified
Mike Lindell accomplished great things despite that crack problem.
But anyway, so, but no, I mean, like, this went more broadly than this particular example.
Like, they asked me to cite any example of someone that's actually been censored and deplatformed from the internet.
And I went through something like 50 people.
I mean, like, starting with Donald Trump, you could swing left and go with like Minister Farrakhan, Cop Block, you old blacks, trillions, Chapo Trap out, Alex Jones, Alex Jones, and all of InfoWars, Prison Planet, Jared Taylor, my old debate opponent, and the entire original alt-right, Laura Loomer, Miley Annopoulos.
Like, it's not a small number of people.
Yeah, Gavin McKinnon's, Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys, the first Libertarian Party page, just on and on and on.
And their argument at first was that this couldn't be real.
unidentified
And then later that those people deserved it because all of them, apparently, including the black ones, were Nazis.
So it's, there is this intentional lack of information on the part of a lot of people.
And I think the reason that the powers that be kind of encourage this is that many of the narratives promoted by the powers that be are complete BS.
And this, this might be a final line for me, but if you look at the Black Lives Matter narrative on policing, if you look at the mainstream media narrative on interracial crime, if you look at the narrative around systemic racism in the context of Nigerian and Japanese and Chinese and Iranian performances, if you look at the narrative around immigration, if you look at the narrative that sex and something close to race and IQ don't exist at all, I mean, just going on down the line, white privilege, cultural appropriation.
Most of this stuff is complete BS.
So there are many, many people that have a logical vested interest in not letting you hear the alternative to it, which is the truth.
So, I mean, I think that I encourage people to do their own research online, go to the library and look for the actual truth as much as possible.
And that's really the best piece of advice I could get.
Well, I've really, really enjoyed this conversation and I'm really glad that you hopped on, man.
So what I'll do is I think that's a good place for us to wrap it up with that piece of advice.
And I'll shoot you a DM as soon as I have everything copped together and uploaded.
That sounds good, man.
I'll stay in touch and I'll look forward to it.
Absolutely.
unidentified
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing.
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
