The Charlie Kirk Show - 2 Liberal Atheists and the Virus of ‘Wokism’ w/ Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay
Aired: 2020-09-08
Duration: 01:28:41


=== A Special Episode with Lindsay (02:52) ===

[00:00:00]  Thank you for listening to this podcast one production.
[00:00:02]  Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast One, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
[00:00:08]  Hey, everybody.
[00:00:09]  Today's a real special episode.
[00:00:10]  We have two atheist liberals who I have a lot of respect for.
[00:00:14]  It's a super fun conversation.
[00:00:15]  You guys are really going to enjoy it.
[00:00:17]  We explore some very big ideas.
[00:00:19]  You're going to want to listen to the whole thing through.
[00:00:21]  It's Peter Bogogian and James Lindsay, who co-authored a book, Having Impossible Conversations.
[00:00:27]  And James Lindsay also wrote Cynical Race Theory.
[00:00:31]  We talk about that in so much more.
[00:00:32]  We talk about critical race theory, BLM Incorporated.
[00:00:35]  We talk about Christianity.
[00:00:36]  You guys are not going to want to miss it.
[00:00:38]  It's one of my favorite conversations of people that should be disagreeing with each other, but actually have a very mutually respectful conversation.
[00:00:46]  And that gives me hope for our country that these conversations can exist and we need to have more of them.
[00:00:51]  Email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:55]  This episode was actually done on Labor Day.
[00:00:58]  We work on Labor Day to give you the content that I know that you guys want and you need.
[00:01:02]  And it's made possible by those of you that support us at charliekirk.com slash support, charliekirk.com slash support.
[00:01:11]  Peter Bogogian, James Lindsay are here.
[00:01:14]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:01:15]  Here we go.
[00:01:16]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:01:18]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:01:20]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:01:23]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:01:27]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:01:28]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:29]  His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
[00:01:37]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:01:46]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:49]  Hey, everybody.
[00:01:50]  Welcome to this very special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:01:53]  I am honored to be joined today by Peter Bogogian and James Lindsay, who are co-authors of a very interesting book, How to Have Impossible Conversations.
[00:02:03]  And it says a very practical guide.
[00:02:06]  And now, just from the outset, I'm going to say I do not agree with every point of worldview and opinion that these guests today hold.
[00:02:13]  However, I think we can both agree that there is a crisis happening in our country, especially in higher education.
[00:02:20]  So Peter, you and I were talking before the recording started here about how you said, we'll just pick it up right here, the academy might be unsavable.
[00:02:28]  What do you mean by that?
[00:02:29]  I think so.
[00:02:31]  I think that we have extraordinarily serious problems.
[00:02:35]  The engines of knowledge production are compromised.
[00:02:38]  We have third-rate ideologues, to be blunt with you, who we know where some of these problems come from, but the ideological problems, they look at the academy as an indoctrination mill.

=== Critical Race Theory Activism (08:28) ===

[00:02:52]  They have tenure, which means they have a job for life.
[00:02:56]  They control university policies.
[00:02:58]  They've, for example, bias response teams, offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
[00:03:04]  And I can talk about my own school here, who's due to COVID and declining enrollment has hired a chief officer of diversity, equity, inclusion.
[00:03:14]  And I'm quite sure public records show that, don't quote me on this, but I think it's $137,000.
[00:03:20]  Meanwhile, the university has, the president of Portland State University is spending $1.5 million to root out systemic racism at Portland State University.
[00:03:32]  There is no racism at Portland State University.
[00:03:34]  It's the least racist place on earth.
[00:03:36]  But when we get trapped in these ideological mindsets, it's difficult to break free.
[00:03:41]  So basically, we have trained individuals in college to look for grievances, to constantly look for racism everywhere, to interpret the world through a lens that's almost definitely, if not definitely, false.
[00:03:57]  So James, let's pick up right there.
[00:04:00]  I would imagine that you do not subscribe or believe in critical race theory.
[00:04:05]  We've been talking about this quite a lot on our podcast.
[00:04:07]  Can you walk us through what critical race theory is and the danger that it presents to a neoliberal Western society?
[00:04:14]  Yeah, critical race theory is a particular way to think about race and racism that arose out of the context of applying the idea of race as it was being studied in what's known as the black liberationist paradigm to the critical study of law.
[00:04:32]  In other words, we've got two critical theories here that both came out of what's called the Frankfurt School line of thought.
[00:04:37]  The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is what's often called as neo-Marxist thought.
[00:04:43]  So you have this very radical way to think about identity, very radical way to think about law.
[00:04:48]  And it started from this position that it believed that the law was intrinsically racist, that our legal institutions were intrinsically racist throughout all of American history.
[00:04:59]  And even after the passage, so it arose in the 1970s going into the 1980s, even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it arose to say that nothing really changed.
[00:05:10]  Nothing significant changed.
[00:05:12]  And in fact, the changes of the Civil Rights Act didn't solve institutional racism in the United States or even open the door to solving them over the coming decades, but rather just opened up all kinds of new problems to black people.
[00:05:26]  It took on postmodern theory in the 1990s following its second major progenitor, whose name is Kimberly Crenshaw.
[00:05:34]  Kimberly Crenshaw was a student of Derek Bell, both at Harvard Law.
[00:05:37]  Derek Bell was the one who started critical race theory.
[00:05:41]  Ultimately, with our help, Kimberly Crenshaw also introduced intersectionality.
[00:05:45]  And this changed the view rather than focusing on material institutional racism as Derek Bell did, to switching over to this idea of systemic racism.
[00:05:54]  So critical race theory is the view that racism is systemic.
[00:05:57]  That means it pervades everything.
[00:05:59]  It is baked into every aspect of the system from institutions to policy, as Ibram Kendi puts it, to our knowledge systems, to our ways of speaking, to our ways of thinking, to our ways of interacting with one another, that it's pervasive in every aspect of society.
[00:06:14]  So that anywhere you see a racial difference in outcomes, systemic racism is the explanation for how that must have happened.
[00:06:20]  And it's the critical race theorist's job to look for that.
[00:06:24]  It proceeds off a number of basic tenets, the first of which is that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society and that it has a permanence or is permanent, if you follow from Derek Bell.
[00:06:35]  So they believe that racism is the permanent ordinary state of affairs, which leads Robin D'Angelo, the famous author of White Fragility, to say that now the question is not did racism take place, but how did racism manifest in that situation?
[00:06:49]  So it assumes racism is involved in every situation and its goal is to uncover it.
[00:06:55]  It has a bunch of other tenets and details, but that's the big picture story of critical race theory is it is this view that believes racism is at the fundamental root of everything that happens in society and it's their job to find it and call it out and then lead to a revolution to get rid of it.
[00:07:12]  James, I want to compliment you.
[00:07:13]  Your Twitter account is terrific.
[00:07:14]  I've been mentioning newdiscourses.com on a couple other podcasts.
[00:07:18]  I think actually yesterday I mentioned it.
[00:07:20]  This graphic you have on your Twitter is terrific where you said 11 divisive tenets of critical race theory.
[00:07:26]  Racism exists in both traditional and modern forms and it goes through.
[00:07:29]  And the one that is actually most disturbing here, and Peter, I want to get your take on this, is the totalitarian nature of critical race theory, whereas if you do not do something, white silences violence, I think is the way that they put it into a nice rhyming phrase, that you yourself are actually defending an evil institution.
[00:07:48]  And if you do not post a black square, if you did not take a knee very similar to totalitarian movements the last hundred years, and you are the problem.
[00:07:56]  Do you think that this kind of idea has stemmed out of the university?
[00:07:58]  And is that an oversimplification?
[00:08:01]  Just the way I described it, is that accurate?
[00:08:03]  Because I've used that description, and some people in BLM and critical race theory say, no, that's not true.
[00:08:07]  It's not totalitarian.
[00:08:08]  It's actually pluralistic.
[00:08:10]  Is that a true description?
[00:08:11]  Jim, I'll let you take that one.
[00:08:14]  No, so I mean, if you futz around with the words like they like to do, then you can conclude that it's pluralistic by meaning something completely different by pluralism.
[00:08:26]  So, you know, two plus two equals five if you change the meaning of five, apparently.
[00:08:30]  Right.
[00:08:31]  That's what we've seen all summer.
[00:08:32]  But yeah, critical race theory is pluralistic if you change the definition of pluralism.
[00:08:37]  Critical race theory is unrepentantly multicultural.
[00:08:40]  It is not actually pluralistic.
[00:08:41]  There's a distinct difference there.
[00:08:43]  As for whether it came out of the university, 85% yes, 15% no.
[00:08:49]  So it's one of those things where they can dive into that 15% and say, ha ha, you don't know what you're talking about.
[00:08:54]  It came out of the activist movements of the 1960s and 1968, blah, black power.
[00:08:59]  And yeah, well, that actually came out of Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, which came out of Columbia University and then later on UC, I think Davis, or I think he went to UC Davis.
[00:09:11]  He went to one of the University of Californias anyway.
[00:09:14]  So in that book, he explicitly wrote that what they needed to do was to find a fusion of the racial minorities, the outsiders of society, by which he meant literal radical activists like the Weatherman Underground, and then the liberal intelligentsia in the universities and make them into a coalition that would push for these ideas.
[00:09:35]  So critical race theory came out of the activist scene, in a sense, from the 1960s and 1970s, most notably Black power or even Black nationalism, which ultimately had its own roots that were in scholarship and kind of fusing this kind of on-the-ground activism with Herbert Marcuse's ideas.
[00:09:54]  His primary student was Angela Davis.
[00:09:56]  She's obviously a scholar as well as a radical.
[00:09:59]  She's a big name happening right now with BLM.
[00:10:02]  She's very intricate in what's going on there.
[00:10:04]  She also was very integral in teaching the generation of black feminists who went on to form critical race theory and intersectionality.
[00:10:13]  So we could name people like Patricia Collins, we could name Kimberly Crenshaw, Bell Hooks, Patricia Williams.
[00:10:19]  There are a large number, even another Angela, another Angela Harris, or a number of other Black feminists that were inspired in part or heavily by Angela Davis.
[00:10:28]  So you have the same carryover.
[00:10:30]  So the combination that Marcuse talked about in 1960, what was that before, 1964, I think, early 1960s anyway, for One Dimensional Man.
[00:10:42]  The fusion between that liberal intelligentsia and then the radical fringe of leftist fringe.
[00:10:50]  I mean, these are people outright supporting Shea Guevara and stuff like that, and cheering on Castro and Cuba.
[00:10:57]  It's just that's who we're talking about with the outsiders.
[00:11:00]  And then mixing that with aggrieved racial minorities.
[00:11:03]  You can see that there's an activist element in that that had a feedback loop with the scholarship because the scholars were explicitly naming themselves as activist scholars.
[00:11:13]  But the incubator for this was Harvard Law.
[00:11:16]  I mean, you don't get more academia than Harvard Law.
[00:11:19]  Yeah, and Derek Bell's work is key.

=== Class vs Identity Debates (12:42) ===

[00:11:21]  Jim, I think it's, I think there's so much confusion around postmodernism and Marxism and people using those terms interchangeably, which they're just simply not.
[00:11:32]  Perhaps we should spend a moment talking about that before we go on.
[00:11:36]  That would be helpful.
[00:11:37]  I sometimes use them interchangeably and I've been criticized for doing so.
[00:11:40]  And I'm not alone in that.
[00:11:42]  But I would screw this up, man.
[00:11:44]  I'll tell you.
[00:11:45]  Yeah, this is.
[00:11:46]  Well, good.
[00:11:47]  Tell us why we're wrong.
[00:11:50]  Yeah, this is really important.
[00:11:51]  Uh, Helen Pluckrose, oh, sorry, I think there was like Helen Pluckrose, the author of Cynical Theories with Jim, explains this in detail.
[00:12:02]  So, postmodernism is, as Leotard said, a skepticism of metanarratives.
[00:12:09]  A metanarrative is a grand overarching explanation of something.
[00:12:13]  Like Christianity would be a metanarrative, it would be a story, a story of underneath and beneath the stories.
[00:12:21]  So, for postmodernism, there's no God's eye view, there's no view outside the system, there's no way to get an objective view of something because we're all situated individual agents.
[00:12:33]  We're situated in our own individual psychology, we're situated culturally, socially, geopolitically, linguistically, etc.
[00:12:42]  So, Marxism is a metanarrative.
[00:12:48]  Marxism is an explanatory story of working class, comes from Karl Marx, comes from Dusk Capital, is an explanation of classes and consciousness and exploitation, etc.
[00:13:03]  You cannot have both a metanarrative and an incredulity or a hyperskepticism toward those metanarratives.
[00:13:11]  So, Peter, can I ask a question really quick?
[00:13:14]  Because this kind of blender, the fusion of was popularized in recent years by Jordan Peterson, who would argue that postmodernist or postmodernism was a rebrand of Marxist ideology into more cultural framing.
[00:13:30]  Do you take exception with that kind of description, or do you think that sometimes there is an overlap that postmodernists tend to be Marxists and vice versa?
[00:13:40]  I mean, there's some overlap, if I might jump in.
[00:13:42]  Sorry about my lag there for a moment.
[00:13:45]  So, the thing is, is that Marxism proceeded upon a concept that Marx formulated called conflict theory, which sees society as split into stratified groups that have different access to resources, power, opportunity, and so on, and that they are in conflict for that.
[00:14:04]  And so, he saw this as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
[00:14:07]  There's a very economic splitting.
[00:14:08]  The bourgeoisie were people who had economic elite status, and the proletariat were the working class who did not.
[00:14:14]  And he saw them pitted against each other in conflict for status, power, and opportunity in society.
[00:14:21]  What you had happen was his vision didn't work.
[00:14:24]  He believed that you would just have this, you know, the working class would awaken, they have class consciousness, what would happen, and then everybody would revolt, and everything would go from capitalism into socialism into communism, and utopia would be achieved.
[00:14:38]  That's his vision of history with like kind of the capital H.
[00:14:41]  The neo-Marxists came along in the 1920s to try to figure out why that didn't happen.
[00:14:46]  And they were like, oh, he got it all wrong.
[00:14:48]  Let's talk about how culture maintains an ideology within culture maintains the stratification of society.
[00:14:57]  And so, that's where you have the actual shift to culture.
[00:15:00]  But the neo-Gramsci, right?
[00:15:02]  Antonio Gramsci, who piloted it.
[00:15:05]  Gramsci was one of the key philosophers.
[00:15:07]  Georg Lukac was another.
[00:15:10]  Then you pick up Walter Benjamin, Theodore Ardorno, Max Forkheimer.
[00:15:14]  They end up leading into Herbert Marcusa, our friend that we just talked about a moment ago, connecting to Angela Davis and so on.
[00:15:21]  So they were very critical of Marxism, but in a particular way.
[00:15:25]  They were critical by saying that Marx had misread how society works and that it needs to be studied culturally and ideologically rather than economically in order to achieve the same Pathway to the end of history, which would be: we're going to go agitate people, show them how they're being brainwashed by propaganda, by mass media, by popular culture, by enjoying their lives, by having a middle-class existence, and thinking that they're happy when they clearly aren't, because if they were happy, they would be communists.
[00:15:55]  And they're going to try to affect the communist revolution by agitating in multiple dimensions of culture that way.
[00:16:01]  The postmodernists actually were much more pessimistic.
[00:16:05]  The postmodernists, you could say it's a rebranding of communism, but the, you know, you talk about Michelle Foucault, Jacques Derrida.
[00:16:11]  I mean, Jack Derrida wrote a book called The Specter of Marxism, and he's talking about how the thing is dead.
[00:16:16]  And they were super pessimistic.
[00:16:19]  They're not classified as neo-Marxists philosophically.
[00:16:22]  They're classified as post-Marxists.
[00:16:24]  So they were themselves communist in orientation and they were big supporters actually of Mao.
[00:16:30]  And they helped to educate Pol Pot, but they were not themselves all-out Marxist.
[00:16:37]  They had lost faith that Marxism or anything else could work.
[00:16:40]  You could actually kind of see them as existentialists who had gone political or something like that and gave up on everything.
[00:16:48]  But then what happened is on down the road in the 1990s, these ideas, Marxism to some degree, which had infused into feminism, which had infused into the whole Marxist theory of race, then the neo-Marxist school, and then the postmodern school all kind of got cobbled together and cherry-picked together into what we would now call critical social justice or wokeness.
[00:17:11]  And so it has lots of elements of that.
[00:17:13]  And it is somewhat Marxist.
[00:17:16]  It's more focused on identity than class.
[00:17:20]  But depending on the individual that you talk to, I mean, you see like the BLM people come out and say, we're trained Marxists.
[00:17:26]  They don't say neo-Marxists.
[00:17:27]  They don't say postmodernists.
[00:17:28]  They say Marxist.
[00:17:30]  And then you see, you know, Death to Capitalism and all this defensive looting book that just came out and it's talking about how the capitalist system needs to be destroyed.
[00:17:37]  So there's a lot of Marxism still there.
[00:17:39]  And a lot of people who are Marx-ish, I would say, but not Marxist.
[00:17:44]  That's a good way to put it.
[00:17:46]  Are usually kind of fellow travelers with that.
[00:17:48]  But if you find like the actual, Peter and I are now friends to some degree with people at the World Socialist website.
[00:17:55]  And I say website because they put a space between it.
[00:17:57]  I think it's just adorable.
[00:17:59]  So these are these are card-carrying Trotskyites and they hate woke.
[00:18:03]  They hate it.
[00:18:04]  They see it as a theft of the left from the working class.
[00:18:14]  Their thing that they wrote about it all is that it's supposed to be workers of the world unite, not races of the world divide.
[00:18:21]  And they are super not cool about it.
[00:18:24]  It's supposed to be class consciousness transcends racial or other identity factors.
[00:18:28]  And they are quick to point out that people like, say, Nicole Hannah Jones at the New York Times are not exactly working class people.
[00:18:36]  This is a very bourgeois philosophy.
[00:18:39]  Yeah, that's sorry to interject.
[00:18:41]  That's very interesting.
[00:18:41]  I'd love to actually speak to them because I think that the coming divide here, and it's only because of how much they hate President Trump, that actually, I think, actually has united some of these groups that actually have inherent contradictions with each other, where you have the workers of the world unite people that are playing nice with the identity politics people that are playing nice with the corporate billionaire class, all under this kind of unified objective that the current president must be destroyed at all costs when in reality they really should be fighting each other.
[00:19:08]  Sorry, I didn't mean to interject.
[00:19:10]  Can you finish that point?
[00:19:11]  Well, I mean, that's just generally it.
[00:19:13]  The Marxists, like the all-out Marxists, I mean, they were the first ones to drop the big expose on the 1619 project.
[00:19:19]  They're very much against the woke movement.
[00:19:22]  And they don't like President Trump, but they're certainly not carrying water for the woke.
[00:19:28]  I mean, they're going after the woke as hard as they're going after anybody else.
[00:19:31]  And that's a very difficult thing.
[00:19:32]  I just want to unpack a few things that Jim said there.
[00:19:35]  That's an extremely difficult thing to penetrate to be blunt to conservative mind because there's such an identification of these values, these invasive intersectional woke values that have parasitized liberalism that conservatives tend to lump all of these people into one category.
[00:19:54]  And it's simply not true.
[00:19:56]  It's just factually incorrect.
[00:19:59]  To defend conservatives, though, sometimes it's very hard to differentiate, though.
[00:20:02]  Sometimes they'll use the terms interchangeably and not as accurately as they could.
[00:20:08]  For example, the BLM people will say they're trained Marxists.
[00:20:11]  Adding neo-Marxists, you guys will understand that.
[00:20:14]  Most of the country won't understand that distinction.
[00:20:17]  But I think it's a fair point.
[00:20:19]  So the kind of, I think, best way to think of this woke thing would be that normally what you would have in a, say, communist revolution is you'd have the revolution proceeds, the party, meaning the Communist Party, establishes itself, and then very obviously they set themselves up as the crony level elites that run everything for their own benefit.
[00:20:40]  And so they become kind of that new bourgeois class.
[00:20:44]  And that's why they keep saying real communism has never been tried.
[00:20:47]  It's always the party sets itself up.
[00:20:49]  It's the new elites and screws everybody over.
[00:20:51]  Well, what's happened is wokeness is sort of like it's sort of like the thing just happened really soft and the party woke is the party.
[00:21:01]  It's really hard to explain this without saying that basically this is bourgeois people who've stolen Marxist ideas and are trying to pretend that they're not bourgeois, that they're trying to pretend that they're oppressed.
[00:21:11]  This is, I mean, you can't learn their academic jargon without going to college.
[00:21:15]  That's not working class stuff.
[00:21:17]  You can't figure out what the hell they're talking about without.
[00:21:23]  Do you think that the average working class person has time or energy to memorize 400 people's pronouns?
[00:21:29]  Of course they don't.
[00:21:31]  This is something only people who can lay around and spend time flipping through like their school, high school yearbook, like, oh, he, him, she, her, they, them, Z-zer, you know, with each picture.
[00:21:42]  This is something only people with leisure time can possibly do.
[00:21:46]  Yes.
[00:21:46]  And we'll call it luxury beliefs, but it's people who have access to luxury who can learn and engage in this stuff.
[00:21:52]  Yeah.
[00:21:53]  And the crucial link, Charlie, that I want to get people to get from this is that if you want to understand the riots, if you want to understand big sections of the, not exclusively of the BLM movement, if you want to understand much of the ideology ideology that's informing this, it happens in the university.
[00:22:13]  We know the nucleation point.
[00:22:15]  It happens in certain departments.
[00:22:17]  That spreads to other departments in the university.
[00:22:22]  We can call that, for lack of a better word right now, wokeism.
[00:22:25]  People have been learning this.
[00:22:27]  Well, they've been learning this in cynical theories, Jim and Helen talk about.
[00:22:33]  They call it applied postmodernism.
[00:22:36]  This has had decades to develop in the university.
[00:22:39]  People have been indoctrinated into this ideology.
[00:22:42]  They get out of the university.
[00:22:44]  They go into their jobs.
[00:22:45]  They take the same ideology.
[00:22:47]  You know, and then five years ago, it was trigger warning, safe spaces, and microaggressions.
[00:22:53]  Now that's metastasized.
[00:22:55]  And what you're seeing is that people acting upon these moral impulses get their ideas from the university.
[00:23:04]  Right.
[00:23:04]  And I would tell you that if you want to tie it to Marx and Marxism, three things are continuous all the way back to Karl Marx.
[00:23:11]  One is conflict theory, the idea that society split into social groups with different access to resources and they're in conflict with one another.
[00:23:19]  That's continuous.
[00:23:20]  That's still happening.
[00:23:21]  The second is this idea that if they just shake people up and wake them up, make them woke, make them angry at society, that the revolution will proceed and the utopia is on the other side without ever knowing how that's going to happen.
[00:23:33]  That's continuous with Marx also.
[00:23:35]  And third is the underlying envy that drives Marxian thought in general, which is, I mean, what you take the woke, you take old school Marxists, and you scratch the surface, and you find envy.
[00:23:48]  You find them seeing that other people have something that they want that they don't, and it's not their fault.
[00:23:53]  It's not that no matter how hard they worked, they couldn't possibly get it.
[00:23:57]  They couldn't possibly pull themselves up.
[00:23:59]  And so that envy is underlying as well.
[00:24:02]  And that's continuous back to Marx.

=== The Rousseauian Marxist View (04:04) ===

[00:24:04]  And I would add one.
[00:24:06]  I actually love your opinion on this, Peter.
[00:24:08]  You might totally disagree.
[00:24:09]  There's also a state of human beings in nature.
[00:24:11]  It'd be almost Rousseauian Marxist that they actually believe from my interactions with them, human beings are good in a state of nature, and it's society around them that has made them do bad things.
[00:24:21]  Would you agree with that?
[00:24:22]  Is that another add of a direct line?
[00:24:25]  I would agree to that.
[00:24:28]  And I would also say this is what happens when you have biology denialism.
[00:24:33]  This is what happens when you attack evolutionary biology, et cetera.
[00:24:38]  Then, the underpinning, there can be no possible genetic explanation or evolutionary explanation for things.
[00:24:46]  It has to all be social.
[00:24:48]  And I think you see a difference in this in the left and the right.
[00:24:51]  And so the left believes if we just, and I say this as someone who's liberal myself, if we just change our institutions, then we'll be able to change the outcomes.
[00:25:02]  But the fact is, from Steven Pinker's work, The Blank Slate, and Michael Shermer's work, and many, many, many others, the fact is that that's just not true.
[00:25:10]  That the denial of biology, particularly evolutionary biology, is just not born out of any evidence.
[00:25:18]  It's an ideological position that people take.
[00:25:21]  Yeah, that's well put.
[00:25:23]  So, James, can you?
[00:25:25]  I think it'd be helpful actually to take a step back.
[00:25:27]  Can you introduce just your worldview and how would you describe yourself?
[00:25:32]  I actually think it adds more credibility to the prior statements you said.
[00:25:35]  Sure, sure, sure.
[00:25:36]  Especially for our audience.
[00:25:38]  Yeah, and then I'll add to the Rousseauian view there because there's an important point that we should get into.
[00:25:44]  So, my background, I have a PhD in mathematics.
[00:25:47]  I have never in my entire life voted for a Republican for anything.
[00:25:54]  That includes having voted enthusiastically for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
[00:26:00]  I don't identify as terribly interested in politics or even as political.
[00:26:05]  My Twitter bio says that I'm apolitical.
[00:26:08]  But if I take any of those tests, I land pretty far to the left and pretty deep into libertarian territory.
[00:26:13]  So, my libertarian friends out there, I like to tell you, kind of poking in the ribs a little, but more serious.
[00:26:20]  I'm a minarchist who believes in a much bigger min than you do.
[00:26:24]  So, I do believe government should be as small as possible.
[00:26:28]  I just think it has to be fairly large.
[00:26:30]  And so, I'm also an atheist.
[00:26:34]  I do not believe in God, and I have not believed in God in many years.
[00:26:38]  I was raised Catholic, and it's like an atheist joke at this point.
[00:26:42]  You know, raised Catholic, whoops, now I'm an atheist.
[00:26:47]  So, yeah, my position in terms of who I am socio-politically, I'm not conservative.
[00:26:56]  I have a belief, however, that we need both conservatism and liberalism, if you want to call it that, or progressivism, in not only in cooperation, but also in tension with one another to have a functioning society.
[00:27:11]  So, I have a deep respect for conservative thought and just happen to not align with many points within it, although I see it.
[00:27:20]  So it would be an utter error to call me, you know, huge, you know, MAGA guy, or although I do want America to be great, that's true, but I wouldn't put myself down in any of those kinds of camps.
[00:27:35]  So if that's what you were looking for.
[00:27:36]  No, that's very helpful.
[00:27:37]  I think it adds to the credibility of your critique prior.
[00:27:40]  Can you build out the Rousseauian piece that I mentioned, where we talk commonly that Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued for the primitive over the civilized, the infant over the adult?
[00:27:50]  I think that his view of social contract theory and the state of nature, directly at odds with Thomas Hobbes, he thought it was very good and heavenly and utopian where Hobbes would argue it's nasty, brutish, and short.
[00:28:00]  Can you build on that, please?
[00:28:02]  So, you know, it's if you, I wasn't going to go into this part immediately, but since you brought up the infant part, I will.

=== Decolonization and White Society (09:59) ===

[00:28:09]  You know, a few years ago, I noticed, it would have been probably six or seven years ago, I heard somebody say that they had some adulting to do.
[00:28:16]  And they said it kind of in this negative sense.
[00:28:18]  And I turned to my wife and I said, that's bad.
[00:28:22]  That's like civilization ending bad to think of adulting as a thing you have to do rather than something you become and that it's something people want to shy away from.
[00:28:31]  So there's that aspect for sure.
[00:28:34]  I saw the word adultification the other day for the first time in the social justice literature.
[00:28:39]  It was turning people into functional adults as the process of adultification.
[00:28:43]  And that was seen as a problem because they shouldn't have to take on that much responsibility and so on.
[00:28:50]  It's rare that the social justice literature takes me aback now.
[00:28:54]  And I was just kind of, you know, had to stop for five minutes and just shake my head over adultification.
[00:28:59]  But certainly what I wanted to build out is that where you see this manifesting now, the modern language for that is the decolonization movement.
[00:29:07]  Decolonize curriculum, decolonize the society, decolonize STEM, decolonize your mom, decolonize everything.
[00:29:14]  And so what that's actually referring to, the view, and this is very difficult for people to understand.
[00:29:20]  I put a, it's supposed to be funny, but I put a humorous woke creation myth at the very beginning of one on new discourses recently.
[00:29:29]  And it's, you know, to be written in the same style as Genesis, all intentionally over the top.
[00:29:34]  It's meant to be funny.
[00:29:35]  But it really is true that they believe that the Enlightenment and especially the birth of science are like the beginning of time.
[00:29:43]  That's the fall from the garden.
[00:29:45]  So if you take Rousseau's view of primitive, the fall from the garden, the eating of the tree of knowledge, is figuring out science and human rationality and deferring to those.
[00:29:56]  It was Sir Isaac Newton who was the true rebel against that's right.
[00:30:04]  And so when you understand that, they saw that development of rationality, the development of science, the development of enlightenment liberalism as it arose, particularly in the Scottish context, and then connected that,
[00:30:19]  not wholly wrong, not wholly wrongly, to the ability to then go out and colonize on a scale that's never before been possible and to use it to come up with justifications for slavery that were rooted in biology for the first time.
[00:30:35]  There was always slavery, but it was never before rooted in the idea that, oh, traits are heritable from parent to child.
[00:30:42]  That's the main thing.
[00:30:43]  And therefore, there's the inferiority of other races and thus were justified by science to enslave other people.
[00:30:48]  That was novel.
[00:30:49]  And so they connect it to these horrors, these evils.
[00:30:52]  And so the idea of colonizing is taking rational, empirical, reasoned thought, scientific reasoning, and these principles of liberalism.
[00:31:02]  So when you see this thing like that, the African American History Museum with a Smithsonian put out that huge list of things of white culture and it's like showing up on time, valuing precision.
[00:31:14]  You know, it's like, whoa, how racist are you guys?
[00:31:17]  The reason is because they see that as intrinsically part of the colonization of the entire world by white Western European culture, Eurocentric culture, they call it.
[00:31:26]  And so, like when a Chinese people, when a Chinese people start wearing suits or Chinese business firms wearing suits and they start showing up at very strict timetables, they start using scientific reasoning to get to the bottom of their things and debate and all of these other techniques we've used in the Western philosophical and scientific traditions.
[00:31:44]  They would say that at the level of ideas and knowledge, they've been colonized by Western thought.
[00:31:50]  So everything that uses anything to do with the Enlightenment, liberalism, meaning philosophical liberalism, of course, takes people away from that state of nature.
[00:32:00]  And that's colonization.
[00:32:01]  And the goal is to decolonize and remove those influences from everything.
[00:32:07]  I want to speak to that for a second.
[00:32:10]  I'd like to linger on that because I think that that's so important.
[00:32:12]  And so here's what we see happening right now.
[00:32:16]  James's articulation of that was spot on.
[00:32:18]  What we see happening is that the way that you and I or people figure out things is through the tools of science.
[00:32:25]  We figured out through reason, through empiricism, through rationality.
[00:32:29]  So if we want to figure something out, like let's say that we wanted to figure out: are black people pulled over by the police more frequently than white people?
[00:32:40]  Well, that is actually not a complicated question.
[00:32:44]  You would turn the tools of science on that, and especially now we have body cams.
[00:32:48]  Excuse me.
[00:32:50]  What we see happening, however, is remember when I, before Charlie, when I talked about meta-narratives, so reason, rationality, empiricism, those are.
[00:33:01]  This was a huge critique of the Jungian view of historical stories, but yes, continue.
[00:33:08]  Yeah, so those are all metanarratives.
[00:33:10]  Those are all ways to explain, but they're also processes that people use to come to knowledge.
[00:33:18]  And so Jim's correct.
[00:33:19]  When you decolonize, you want to remove those.
[00:33:22]  But what you're doing is you're removing the very tools that allow us to adjudicate competing claims, propositions, ideas, et cetera.
[00:33:30]  And instead, you're substituting another academic theory for that, standpoint theory, or in common parlance, lived experience.
[00:33:38]  So my lived experience, your lived experience, we don't have access to other people's lived experience.
[00:33:44]  So what we do is we just ask Black people, are you pulled over by the police a lot?
[00:33:50]  How does that make you feel, et cetera?
[00:33:52]  But that's not a substitution for knowledge.
[00:33:56]  That's a feeling claim that somebody makes.
[00:34:00]  I can make any feeling claim I want.
[00:34:03]  But again, if you have the idea that you're outside the system trying to look in, you can't use people's feeling claims to adjudicate anything.
[00:34:12]  You feel one way about something, I feel, particularly about empirical phenomena, like what happens in the world.
[00:34:18]  So if you want a more just society, what you need to do is exactly the opposite of decolonization.
[00:34:27]  It's not as Jim and Helen wrote in their book, Cynical Theories.
[00:34:31]  And I think that this is worth mentioning for a moment.
[00:34:34]  Aubrey Lloyd's The Master's Tools Cannot Disable The Master's House.
[00:34:39]  The last time I looked, it was cited like 750 times, 740 times.
[00:34:44]  The idea is the master's tools, reason, rationality, empiricism, cannot dissemble the master's house.
[00:34:50]  And patriarchy, cis heteronormativity, right, white supremacy.
[00:34:58]  You can't use reason, empiricism, rationality, and logic to do that.
[00:35:03]  You have to shift to something else.
[00:35:05]  Jim, did you want to add to that?
[00:35:07]  So, I mean, I mentioned that there's a number of tenets of critical race theory earlier and didn't go into the details, but one of them is using counter storytelling and narrative weaving as a means to challenge the hegemony of that's your Gramsci idea, by the way, hegemony of reason, rationality, and empiricism.
[00:35:26]  So, yeah, this is this is a rather troubling thing.
[00:35:29]  Not only is it, you know, really dangerous to, in fact, a national security threat to try to undermine how we come to knowledge and to claim that, say, storytelling is an equally valid or even superior method of coming to knowledge and understanding truth in the world.
[00:35:47]  But you also have this fundamentally kind of racist separation.
[00:35:54]  It's again very Rousseauian, this kind of very racist by accident view where it's like, oh, showing up on time, that's white people's stuff.
[00:36:03]  And it's like, what are you saying, man?
[00:36:04]  You know, that so there's a lot of this, this kind of like getting it just exactly backwards baked into the theory because they're so desperate to try to blame everything that's not going perfectly correctly on the ways that white society as they frame it.
[00:36:22]  Of course, obviously it's not white society.
[00:36:24]  It's just liberal society and everybody gets to participate.
[00:36:26]  That's a point, quality before the law.
[00:36:29]  But they say that this is white society and that that cheats other people.
[00:36:34]  So they have to use other ways of knowing.
[00:36:36]  The most probably powerful example of that or most clear example of that is not in the American context yet, but was in South Africa where they have this movement that was called Science Must Fall.
[00:36:47]  And they were literally arguing that one of the indigenous witchcrafts of the region should be put on par with science for explaining how lightning works as a specific example.
[00:37:01]  Right.
[00:37:01]  If you wanted a roadmap to take society back to the stone age, that's how you do it.
[00:37:06]  I also want to mention at this point that there are, to bring it back to the academy, there are mechanisms in the academy that prevent people from speaking bluntly and honestly about reason and evidence and the roles they play in people's lives.
[00:37:22]  Excuse me.
[00:37:22]  So while certain ways of knowing are common among indigenous peoples, there's a little thing called a style guide, a language style guide.
[00:37:34]  I'll send you the link later.
[00:37:35]  Progressive style guide.
[00:37:36]  Yeah, progressive style.
[00:37:38]  Thank you.
[00:37:38]  And it talks about what words, what terms you should and should not use.
[00:37:43]  And you should and should not use the words, you shouldn't use the words like witchcraft, spellcasting, even though folks in tribes, cultures like the Dobu, et cetera, use those words themselves.
[00:37:57]  So if you want a backwards roadmap, the way to liberate yourself is through reason and science, the way to bring about your own flourishing.
[00:38:04]  We know what those tools are.
[00:38:06]  We know what they are.
[00:38:07]  It's not a mystery.

=== Faith, Liberalism, and Style Guides (08:07) ===

[00:38:08]  And it's something that everybody participates in those.
[00:38:11]  It's not like, oh, you're black, so you don't have access to, you know, reasoning or empiricism.
[00:38:19]  That's just, that's a grotesque way to look at the world.
[00:38:22]  Well, the only way you could hold that view is if you yourself are harboring deep-seated racism.
[00:38:27]  That's the only way you could square that argument is if you think that only certain people, whiteness, are able to believe in Newtonian physics or force equals mass times acceleration.
[00:38:37]  That's the only way you could come to that conclusion.
[00:38:40]  I kind of want to...
[00:38:40]  I'm going to tell you what I think Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility, I think.
[00:38:44]  That's exactly it's a confession.
[00:38:46]  It's what it is.
[00:38:47]  And so I want to reinforce something that's really interesting.
[00:38:50]  So I'm an evangelical Christian, and I'd love to have you both on to discuss that at a different time because this topic is very interesting and very important.
[00:38:58]  But what's really interesting is that the fear-mongering that existed over the last couple of decades is that it would be Christians and conservatives that would go about and attack science and destroy free speech.
[00:39:08]  When in reality, it's actually more of an alliance that exists between true small L liberals and conservatives or Christians that are actually finding some agreement and differing ideas.
[00:39:17]  Can you guys comment on that?
[00:39:18]  Because I think that's a really interesting point.
[00:39:20]  I mean, I can bring up a very particular thing that when Peter described, you know, how we come to knowledge, the one aspect he left out is in reformed faith.
[00:39:29]  So to speak to an evangelical, the point of reformed faith was, it started, of course, with Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door.
[00:39:38]  And the point was that the church, the Catholic Church, I should say, had taken, you know, had become profoundly corrupt and was controlling the interpretation of the text.
[00:39:49]  And the goal was to bring that interpretation back out and to actually reform the church.
[00:39:53]  That's why it's called the Reformation.
[00:39:55]  And so what that did was it was, okay, we're no longer going to rely on priests and the priest caste to translate the Bible for us.
[00:40:02]  Instead, we're going to create a scholarly endeavor called theology that we're now going to look into the Bible.
[00:40:08]  We're going to study the Bible.
[00:40:09]  We're going to look for, you know, understanding the text.
[00:40:12]  We're going to try to find the original intent of the authors.
[00:40:14]  We're going to try to figure out what this book means by the most objective standards that we can and what the writings around, I say this book, I mean the Bible, but also there are other religious writings around the Bible, other theological books.
[00:40:26]  And the goal became, let's try to understand these in terms of what the authors meant.
[00:40:31]  And if we take the scripture as divinely inspired, then we are actually trying to discern the objective content of the source material, which is a completely different thing than, you know, oh, well, Arrhenius said this, so therefore that's that.
[00:40:45]  And then, you know, Origen said this, so there's that.
[00:40:48]  And Augustine said that, you know, or Aquinas, blah, blah, blah.
[00:40:52]  Or, you know, some corrupt pope was like, yeah, you can, you can buy indulgences from me.
[00:40:57]  Go ahead, do whatever you want, you know, bring the gold, which is, of course, what really set Martin Luther off.
[00:41:03]  So there is this same process.
[00:41:05]  And that's why you're going to find this line of agreement between folks like yourself and us, and then even these hardcore Marxists.
[00:41:13]  What we have in agreement, even though we disagree about the details, is that we believe that there is an objective truth and that if we work using methodologies that are within each school of thought rigorous, that we can come to an understanding of that objective truth.
[00:41:31]  So there are the people who believe in truth, and then there are the people who believe that all truth is subjective and reality is missing the point and that everything comes down to essentially political power rather than what is true about the world, whether the world is discerned through experiment, observation, or whether the world is discerned through studying the scriptures and determining what God's word was supposed to be or something like that.
[00:41:58]  So that's why we find ourselves on similar footing at this point.
[00:42:01]  And certainly, of course, members of any faith will fall off the wagon sometimes and become illiberal, but there is a liberal approach here.
[00:42:12]  What else we have in common is the rules of engagement.
[00:42:15]  Nobody's punching each other.
[00:42:17]  Nobody's, I'm not saying you're a racist or a rapist or you beat your family or any of this stuff, which people have claimed about me repeatedly in weaponized offices of diversity, equity, inclusion, because they don't like my beliefs or they don't like what they perceive to be my beliefs.
[00:42:33]  So the rules of engagement are another thing.
[00:42:34]  And I want to talk about that idea of interpretation of the text too.
[00:42:39]  You know, that has a long pedigree in the history of Western intellectual thought.
[00:42:42]  It started with Schleiermarker and Diltai.
[00:42:44]  It more or less culminated in Gautamer, who's one of my favorite and least talked about thinkers, that there is an objective interpretation of the text or as As philosopher Caputo said, it's all kind of like a radical interpretation of the text.
[00:43:00]  So there's a difference between, and this is where I think it's confusing to people.
[00:43:06]  Almost nobody is saying that there isn't an external world.
[00:43:09]  What people are saying is that what is the relationship between power and speaking in that world?
[00:43:16]  So, for example, many people are upset that Jim and I, in the Impossible Conversations book, how to have impossible conversations.
[00:43:24]  We have friends who are evangelical Christians.
[00:43:26]  We're talking to you.
[00:43:28]  They feel that even this conversation itself is reinforcing hegemonic power structures, is reinforcing a dynamic.
[00:43:36]  And so they'll look at, you know, there's a word called mantles, panels filled with men.
[00:43:41]  And so now we're three white cis hetero men speaking here.
[00:43:46]  And the idea is we don't have access to truth because that's mediated through all these things.
[00:43:50]  And this is somehow some unfair.
[00:43:53]  Now, I personally, I think that's, I'll clean up my language for your show.
[00:43:58]  I think that's utter BS.
[00:44:01]  The idea that you can peg a truth about the world, an empirical claim about the world, to somebody's race or gender or sexual orientation is demonstrably false.
[00:44:14]  It is patently false.
[00:44:16]  And that's why the arguments that Jim has gotten in, for example, on Twitter, when this just hoard of lunatics comes out defending two plus two equals five, I mean, it's so crazy, but yet they need that to destabilize and undermine their ideology.
[00:44:31]  And Jim has a great podcast on New Discourses where he talks about, you know, why is it that they want two plus two to not always equal four?
[00:44:42]  Well, and I think there's a, almost a need for it because I think that if they accept actually the scientific and mathematic method, then all of a sudden they accept all of the West.
[00:44:52]  And here's something I always say about, well, people say, well, Sir Isaac Newton happened to be a white person.
[00:44:58]  He discovered.
[00:44:59]  I said, well, you just said he discovered.
[00:45:00]  He didn't create Newtonian physics.
[00:45:02]  He just happened to stumble backwards into it and be able to articulate his first three laws.
[00:45:07]  And it would have been the same if you would have discovered it in Japan or in South Africa.
[00:45:12]  I mean, the rules apply evenly.
[00:45:14]  And so I just, it's, I think it's such a foolish and argument to discontinue.
[00:45:18]  Here's another thing that I think is I'd like to really punch home.
[00:45:22]  You know what?
[00:45:23]  It's okay if you believe there was a talking snake.
[00:45:27]  That's fine.
[00:45:28]  It's okay if I don't believe that.
[00:45:30]  We can still have a conversation.
[00:45:33]  We have more in common by far than we do not have in common.
[00:45:37]  I'm against plastic in the ocean.
[00:45:39]  You're against plastic.
[00:45:40]  I don't even know you.
[00:45:41]  And I guarantee you're against plastic in the ocean.
[00:45:43]  I happen to love dogs.
[00:45:45]  My dog just passed away.
[00:45:47]  It was an utterly devastating loss for myself and my family.
[00:45:50]  We're going to get another dog.
[00:45:51]  You and I are both against animal cruelty.
[00:45:54]  So we can, there are commonalities that we can speak across divides and we can work to make the world better to solve our problems.
[00:46:04]  But the divisive nastiness of the woke ideology makes these conversations and any kind of collaborative effort almost literally impossible.

=== Anchors for Young People Today (09:33) ===

[00:46:16]  So can I ask you guys a challenging open-ended question?
[00:46:19]  And thank you for being generous with your time, about 10 or 15 minutes more, if that's okay with you guys.
[00:46:23]  I know that we got started late.
[00:46:24]  I'm really enjoying this.
[00:46:26]  Do you think that there is either an inevitability or it is sometimes a little bit more dangerous than not when you do, when you see this pattern of wokeism as an extension of, I hate to use these terms, but just kind of a secular atheist view.
[00:46:44]  Do you think that this is a problem that you guys must do a better job of challenging and preventing it to turn into this?
[00:46:51]  My point is that people are always searching for meaning in some sense.
[00:46:55]  And this has given millions of people a new form of religion, a religion of wokeism.
[00:47:01]  You guys, as more classical liberals and atheists, is this a concern that you guys are continually trying to call out?
[00:47:07]  The same concern that I have as a Christian, that people are not going to try to engage in dominionism or trying to create a theocracy, right?
[00:47:15]  That's kind of my, I try to always say that's not correct and that's not right.
[00:47:19]  I hope the question is communicated clearly.
[00:47:21]  Either you guys can take it as it is.
[00:47:24]  So this is a complicated question because it does strike to something.
[00:47:31]  You are right that people seek meaning-making structures and they seek to find understanding particularly of the world around them, their purpose within it, how they fit within it, and how to make sense of what is good and what is evil, and thus to understand themselves and their neighbors.
[00:47:48]  And so this is actually a core and fundamental psychological drive that pushes people toward being religious.
[00:47:55]  The psychology of religion understands this very clearly.
[00:47:57]  It's one of the core things that religion satisfies for people psychologically.
[00:48:01]  And so when you strip away that religious undergirding, it is plausible that people will search for something that kind of fills the void, that builds community, that has especially the drive to purpose to give life meaning and to understand good and evil.
[00:48:22]  And so it is entirely possible that some of what we're seeing with the rise of wokeism, particularly along the progressive left, I mean, it metastasized for sure and erupted out of the new atheism movement, which it conquered many years before it has sprung out into the wider society.
[00:48:42]  I think by 2011, the death blow had already been struck and it had fallen in its totality by 2015.
[00:48:51]  So there is something there that people will often seek to find meaning-making structures.
[00:48:55]  And there are some that are better than others.
[00:48:57]  Joe Rogan, on his show, I talked about in terms of upward-facing religions and downward-facing religions, ones that are obsessed with God, and ones that are not obsessed, but focused on God, and ones that are obsessed with sin and trying to drive it out, which we would now identify largely as kind of a perverse version of Puritanism.
[00:49:17]  And I think that what we see is actually now with the critical theory and these schools of critical thought, which is not the same as critical thinking, to be clear, that we have identified one that's playing out not in the so-called usual spiritual realm that dualistic Christians would observe, but rather in the material realm through sociology.
[00:49:40]  So they're trying to see good and evil through sociology, and sociology becomes something like the text.
[00:49:46]  Now, that said, there's a split because there are people who are still committed to, just like there are people of faith who are brilliant scientists, for example, and they can separate, which is a principle in a very broad sense of secularism.
[00:50:01]  I don't mean legal specific secularism.
[00:50:03]  I think the principle that you can set your faith aside in order to do your work is something that clearly works.
[00:50:12]  There are many very brilliant, very religious scientists that find no between the two.
[00:50:17]  Yeah, Francis Collins, for example.
[00:50:20]  They find no tension.
[00:50:21]  So it is possible to rest in that rationality with or without faith, is the way that I would put that.
[00:50:29]  And in this case, you do probably have people that are looking for the meaning.
[00:50:33]  They're looking for the purpose.
[00:50:34]  But I would tell you the one aspect, I've talked about meaning, I've talked about purpose, I've talked about control.
[00:50:39]  I'm sorry, I talked about community.
[00:50:40]  I haven't talked about control.
[00:50:42]  The one aspect of religious belief is a sense of control in life.
[00:50:45]  I would say that the main driver of wokeism is A sense of being able to seize control in a world that's out of control, and that's why the Trump derangement, as I will call it, has pushed it so much more vigorously is because they feel like they're completely out of control of the world.
[00:51:02]  The world is not ordered the way that it should be, and it's driven to their minds, and it's driven them literally mad.
[00:51:08]  And critical race theory, for example, filled in the gap and offered the explanation that they were because of all of the basically lies that Trump is a racist that were spread so vigorously in 1516.
[00:51:21]  I think that's well said, Peter, I want to kind of piggyback off to that and thank you for that answer.
[00:51:26]  It was terrific.
[00:51:27]  A concern that I have is in this kind of woke emergence, and I don't think we even have found the right term to describe it.
[00:51:35]  I think it's fine because we all know what we're talking about, which is just constantly pushing into a state of utter confusion and chaos and a destruction of things that all of us consider to be fundamental to a civil society of reason and dialogue and science and math and evidence-based learning.
[00:51:50]  A concern I have is when young people in particular do not have an anchor of either a belief in absolute truth or a belief in shared meaning, I do think that these ideologies are more likely to take root and to grow.
[00:52:06]  And that, and so as an atheist, is this something that concerns you that you think atheists have to do a better job of?
[00:52:12]  Because there's not a lot of, there are some religious people that are engaging in this, but I would say it's more a religious than not.
[00:52:19]  Do you agree with that?
[00:52:21]  I don't know if atheists necessarily have to do a better job of it.
[00:52:24]  It almost never occurs to me that I'm an atheist unless someone explicitly asks me.
[00:52:29]  It's just not part of my personal identity.
[00:52:32]  I think Americans have to do a better job at that.
[00:52:35]  I think our educational system, which has been Lyle Astra, has done some wonderful work about how colleges of education and pre-service teachers of education have been utterly dominated by this ideology.
[00:52:46]  And they get out and they start teaching kids that.
[00:52:49]  So I'd like to see a return to civics education.
[00:52:52]  I'm not a big fan of just blindly standing for the flag and making rules for it.
[00:52:57]  I think people need to understand why liberty is important, why cognitive liberty is important.
[00:53:01]  I think people need to understand what it means to vote and why that's important.
[00:53:07]  And I've seen a lot of things on the right that are just totally false.
[00:53:12]  You know, that they show people utterly rioting and destroying mostly in Portland now.
[00:53:20]  And I hear people say, well, you know, they're Joe Biden voters.
[00:53:25]  No, none of those people.
[00:53:27]  Those people are, you wouldn't, if they voted at all, you're not going to find a single one of those people voting for Joe Biden.
[00:53:36]  These are hardcore anarchists.
[00:53:39]  I doubt they've ever voted at all.
[00:53:41]  But the larger point here is we need to shore up a word we haven't used at all: our epistemology, how we know what we know, and we need to connect that.
[00:53:51]  I personally believe, and maybe this is a conversation for another day.
[00:53:55]  I think that one of the problems with wokeism is that at core, they do not believe their values are rationally derivable.
[00:54:03]  They do not believe you can just sit down and think through and understand, you know, why is it that slavery is wrong?
[00:54:13]  Why is it that fairness is right?
[00:54:15]  And the reason they don't do that is because they're inherently distrustful of reason.
[00:54:19]  And once you understand that, you understand why they don't have a dialogue, discourse.
[00:54:24]  Christians are not like that.
[00:54:26]  Christians have 1 Peter 3:15.
[00:54:28]  Christians have a built-in apology to their faith.
[00:54:30]  Christians are taught to, when people ask you for your faith or your reason for belief, to answer with gentleness and kindness and articulate that.
[00:54:39]  And that one passage in the Bible has been responsible for more civility and the outgrowth of more discourse.
[00:54:49]  Wokeism is exactly the opposite of that.
[00:54:52]  But the real danger, in my opinion, comes when people believe their when people think their beliefs are not rationally drivable.
[00:54:59]  And if someone believes something they don't believe, that they're, as Jim says, an existential threat, they're a moral enemy.
[00:55:07]  So I think Plato's, well, I just finally, in Plato's trashimicus, he talks about if people, if you have a different belief about reality, it could just be that your starting conditions are different than mine, and you don't have a complete picture, or you have a factual something wrong, or I have something wrong.
[00:55:26]  It doesn't mean you're my enemy, it doesn't mean I should wish physical violence upon you.
[00:55:32]  Jim, go ahead.
[00:55:34]  Yeah, I think of this completely differently.
[00:55:36]  And I think it would reorient the question that you're trying to ask, Charlie.
[00:55:42]  I think, and I know this is going to sound horrible, but luckily I get to pull it out of their literature because they have a paper about it.
[00:55:48]  So I'm not doing this to them.

=== Dialogue as a Viral Threat (15:06) ===

[00:55:49]  But I think it's best to think of this particular ideology as a virus.
[00:55:55]  Okay.
[00:55:55]  And so secular liberal society is particularly susceptible.
[00:56:01]  So if you think about a virus, it has, you know, whatever little proteins that attach to the receptors and then they can do whatever the hell it does.
[00:56:10]  This attaches very effectively to liberal and secular entities, institutions, and structures.
[00:56:18]  That's why it attached very successfully to the atheism movement, which was trying to push very hard for secularism.
[00:56:24]  It was naturally progressive by its orientation.
[00:56:28]  It attached extraordinarily effectively there.
[00:56:30]  It injected its DNA very quickly and it poisoned the thing and killed it.
[00:56:34]  And the cell burst open and more viruses rushed out into society to find new things to infect.
[00:56:39]  It, however, can infect other things, whether the virus mutates a little bit.
[00:56:43]  So, for example, my friends in the Southern Baptist Convention are up against this thing, Resolution 9, that has tried to bring critical race theory and intersectionality into the not tried to, it has brought it into the Southern Baptist Convention explicitly as an analytical tool subordinate to scripture.
[00:57:00]  And you see this within the several of the different faiths now.
[00:57:05]  The Presbyterians have it within some of their branches.
[00:57:08]  The Catholics have it within some of the liberation theologists have had it for a long time.
[00:57:12]  Liberation theology is one of the major ways that it grew in especially the global south, which led to it getting, I think that's what led to it getting to Palo Ferrere, which led to it taking over education across the Western world.
[00:57:26]  So certainly it can attach to faith.
[00:57:28]  It's all a matter of figuring out what language.
[00:57:30]  So you can look, for example, and you can see the ways that some of these very woke, just, I mean, absolutely unrepentantly intersectional, say, leaders at Southern Theological, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, I can name some, Matt Hall, Curtis Woods, Jarvis Williams.
[00:57:52]  I mean, they are unrepentantly woke, unrepentantly teaching critical race theory and intersectionality at the largest Southern Baptist Seminary, which is a conservative seminary.
[00:58:02]  And so, and they do it by attaching it to, oh, well, we can't understand Jesus unless we understand the lens of oppression or something like that, because he was, you know, a brown Middle Easterner.
[00:58:11]  He obviously was kind of in a sense the epitome of oppression as he walked on the part of Earth.
[00:58:16]  So if we're going to understand the gospel, we have to understand it through a liturgy of lament and so on and so forth.
[00:58:21]  You get the same thing.
[00:58:23]  So it can attach to anything and pervert it.
[00:58:27]  And it's all a matter of how people find a way to resist it.
[00:58:32]  And meaning is one aspect of it, but I think it's actually, I read Shelby Steele's White Guilt recently.
[00:58:38]  And I think Shelby Steele has the missing ingredient that people aren't latching onto, which is guilt and shame.
[00:58:46]  It's digging into people's guilt and shame for these so-called systems of oppression that were very real 50 or 100 or 200 years ago, but are much less real now.
[00:58:55]  But it's able to manipulate that guilt.
[00:58:57]  And that's sort of the receptors that it is able to get into.
[00:59:02]  And for whatever reason, liberals and progressives, meaning people on the left, are much more susceptible to it.
[00:59:08]  Yeah, I think the way it's willing to stand up for it.
[00:59:11]  And if you want to say that.
[00:59:12]  That's really, really well put.
[00:59:13]  That's my thinking.
[00:59:15]  This is why conservatives, while they're not immune to the woke virus, why they're less susceptible, is because conservatives, I live in the Southeast, so I spend a lot of time with conservatives.
[00:59:24]  Most of my friends are conservatives.
[00:59:27]  Conservatives tend to know who they are better than people on the left.
[00:59:31]  They actually know who they are.
[00:59:33]  They don't feel like they have to signal the right opinions.
[00:59:35]  They don't have to fit in necessarily with the crowd.
[00:59:37]  They get to be who they are and they're more confident in understanding who they are on average, in my observations at least.
[00:59:45]  I want to add to that quickly.
[00:59:47]  I think that the way that I perceive Jim's talking about this, I think the single word summary of that is parestatize.
[00:59:55]  I think that this is, it paresthatizes the liberal mind.
[00:59:59]  I also want to say that if you have someone whose mind has been parestatized by the intersectional virus or who's woke, the response to that is not to be upset with them.
[01:00:10]  I know really, really smart people who have been hoodwinked by this, who've fallen to this.
[01:00:16]  I think it preys upon liberal impulses of justice.
[01:00:20]  It's not just.
[01:00:21]  It's not kind, and it's not fair.
[01:00:23]  But if somebody, if you have a friend or you know somebody who's woke or that happened to them, the way to deal with that is not to be angry at them because they should know better.
[01:00:36]  And I think that's you're seeing a lot.
[01:00:38]  Like I've personally lost three friendships as a result of this.
[01:00:41]  And these are like legitimately smart people.
[01:00:45]  I do think that there's something, Jim has called it in the past, correct me if I'm wrong, Jim, a universal solvent.
[01:00:51]  It just corrodes and destroys everything.
[01:00:54]  It infects, corrodes, and destroys.
[01:00:57]  Once it's in a system like Southern Baptism, boom.
[01:01:00]  And the question is, how do we develop a prophylactic?
[01:01:04]  How do we develop tools to keep our institutions from falling to this?
[01:01:11]  And remember, this is a dangerous, divisive ideology that's predicated upon, it wants to rip things down.
[01:01:19]  And it's not a built-in.
[01:01:21]  It's deconstructionism at its pure.
[01:01:23]  I think that's probably an even better term than Marxism.
[01:01:26]  And you guys would know the academic basis for that better than I would.
[01:01:30]  But deconstructionism is a school, is a line of thought that is taught in many academies now.
[01:01:34]  And it is a perfect harmony to this.
[01:01:37]  I guess, and the other question, we can go one by one.
[01:01:40]  I want to talk a little bit about your book in the couple minutes we have remaining.
[01:01:43]  You guys have the book, How to Have Impossible Conversations.
[01:01:46]  The world is telling us that I should not be talking to you and you should not be talking to me.
[01:01:50]  Correct.
[01:01:51]  We found a point of agreement.
[01:01:52]  I have a lot of respect for both of you.
[01:01:54]  Incredibly smart.
[01:01:55]  I've learned a lot.
[01:01:56]  And our listeners will as well.
[01:01:58]  But the world has told us that speech is actually the problem.
[01:02:01]  And this is something that's been really interesting for me to learn is the idea of Socratic dialogue is actually completely under attack by the critical race theorists or the woke people because they actually don't care as much about the fact that you and I think things that are different.
[01:02:18]  They actually think the process of dialogue and being able to is the problem.
[01:02:22]  It's actually the exercise of it.
[01:02:23]  It's not just the differing ideas.
[01:02:25]  Can you talk about that, Peter and then James, and then why you wrote the book?
[01:02:30]  Okay, so, wow, that's a very insightful thing to say.
[01:02:37]  So, I did my dissertation on in prisons, and I spoke to prison inmates to try to help them to system crime through Socratic techniques.
[01:02:47]  So, I'd find questions from the history of Western intellectual thought.
[01:02:50]  I'd use the Socratic method.
[01:02:52]  Basically, the Socratic method has it starts in wonder.
[01:02:55]  Somebody wonders something about something, and then you put forth a hypothesis, like what is justice, and then someone answers the hypothesis.
[01:03:03]  And the next stage, they say, you know, justice is like Plato's Republic, justice is paying your debts.
[01:03:08]  And then you have the chords, the elinkus, it's the back and forth.
[01:03:12]  It's like the old Lauren order when the police would go and they'd find the detectives, and the detectives would go to the captain, and the captain would argue against them to see if it withstood scrutiny, then it could go to court.
[01:03:24]  If it didn't, it's no good.
[01:03:25]  They either have no case or they have to go back out.
[01:03:28]  And that's the next stage of the Socratic method, which is to revise your hypothesis and then ultimately, which is not in the Socratic method, but it's act accordingly.
[01:03:37]  You'd want to act according to what the reasons, what the dictates of reason showed you.
[01:03:43]  And the way that you do that is not by engaging people who already agree with you, it's by engaging people who don't agree with you.
[01:03:50]  And that's also just parenthetically what we're missing in the academy right now.
[01:03:54]  We need intellectual diversity where people hear all debate, argumentation, et cetera, et cetera, and where we don't have that.
[01:04:02]  So you're absolutely correct.
[01:04:04]  The Socratic method is, in my opinion, my lettered and well-considered opinion at this point, it's the best way to come to moral knowledge.
[01:04:13]  It's not the best way to come to memorize things or come to knowledge about the, you know, the factual situations, how what's the speed of light in a vacuum, or how 9.8 meters per second squared is how something falls, how fast something falls.
[01:04:28]  But if you want to clarify your ideas and work out tricky moral concepts, okay, but you can't have a Socratic method, you can't have a dialectic, you can't have an elinkus under woke ideology because the purpose is not to find the truth because they believe they already have the truth.
[01:04:45]  If you already have the truth, then anybody who wants to question or challenge that is a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:04:53]  And I think that way of conceptualizing or understanding the problem, dialogue and discourse itself, particularly between people who, at this point, I'm hated so much it doesn't make any difference anyway.
[01:05:06]  But I'm sure you are too.
[01:05:07]  And I know for a fact that Jim is.
[01:05:12]  So dialogue, discourse, reason, rationality, and finding common points of agreement, that's what we should be focused on.
[01:05:21]  But that's the other reason that they need to undermine any kind of Socratic discourse.
[01:05:25]  They can't have that.
[01:05:26]  Jim, do you want to add to that?
[01:05:29]  I mean, it's very important to understand that, as you said, Charlie, the ideology we're speaking about, the woke ideology, does not value dialogue and discourse because it sees them as part of the hegemonic power structure.
[01:05:43]  They say fallow logocentrism.
[01:05:45]  They also look at it.
[01:05:48]  Yeah, that's dare enough.
[01:05:50]  So they think of this idea that we're going to sit down and have a debate.
[01:05:55]  They would see that through a lens that said, oh, well, historically, they didn't even let black people sit at the table.
[01:06:00]  Peter brought up mantles earlier.
[01:06:02]  There's not enough women at these things.
[01:06:04]  So enough identity factors haven't been historically and often aren't, I guess, represented to have all viewpoints being brought to the table because they believe that identity and viewpoint is the same thing.
[01:06:17]  But they take that further and actually believe that this process is a, the Peters just described, is a product of the Western culture, and that because it's a product of the Western culture, it disadvantages people who don't subscribe to it that they won't do as well.
[01:06:36]  So, you could imagine, you know, if you wanted to pull a very kind of stereotypical picture, is that you have somebody that, you know, you pull up, you have a distinguished professor, and then you're like, oh, well, he's going to have to learn about the black perspective or whatever.
[01:06:48]  And they put, you know, some guy from the hood or whatever up there.
[01:06:52]  And it's like, well, he hasn't learned all the correct ways to say things.
[01:06:55]  And he doesn't speak academic ways.
[01:06:57]  And he doesn't cross his legs and stroke his beard the right way.
[01:07:00]  He doesn't have all the right signs and he doesn't look and sound as intelligent.
[01:07:03]  You know, you have tons of films, in fact, that speak to this exact concept that the underappreciated intellect still knows lots and lots of things.
[01:07:14]  But they believe that the system, like when Pete says, oh, we're going to have a dialectic, they would say that the dialectic was itself constructed in a way that favors white people and men to do better and other people to do worse, who obviously apparently have to not use the same, they can't like learn it.
[01:07:31]  I don't know what their racist thinking is.
[01:07:34]  So they don't actually value the mechanism.
[01:07:40]  So they are unwilling to want to participate.
[01:07:42]  But more, even more importantly than that, they believe, like when you and I are talking, this is what I'm going to hear for the next, whenever you drop this, and I bet you'll hear it too to some degree, but for the next, however many weeks after this, and probably two years from now at some point, somebody will still throw it at me like, James says he's not a conservative and he talked to Charlie Kirk, ah, turning point, ah, you know, and that's what's going to happen.
[01:08:04]  And you're going to be like, what are you doing talking to a liberal atheist?
[01:08:07]  I know this because I talk to these Southern Baptist guys I'm friends with, and they're like, you put an atheist on there.
[01:08:11]  Ah, you know, they freak out.
[01:08:13]  And so what they believe is that when people communicate with one another with differing views, whoever has more power in that situation is using the person with less power.
[01:08:25]  And the dominant ideology is being promoted.
[01:08:30]  And say, let's say it's you that has a dominant perspective.
[01:08:33]  Now I've become a tool for Charlie Kirk.
[01:08:36]  I'm lending power to Charlie Kirk's terrible ideology or whatever it is.
[01:08:40]  And therefore, I'm giving my endorsement to your worldview.
[01:08:44]  Whereas I could literally say every third sentence in this whole thing, I disagree with you about everything.
[01:08:49]  And it would still be the case that I'm now lending my status to your brand and thus helping you prepare put out those dialogues.
[01:09:00]  So when we saw when we saw Christina Hoff Summers try to have the debates with Roxanne Gay, so they're both feminists.
[01:09:09]  Christina Hoff Summers, at the time, maybe she still works for AEI.
[01:09:14]  She's a registered, or was at least a registered Democrat.
[01:09:17]  It's not like she's like some crazy out there Republican or whatever, but she's got a different perspective than the radical feminist perspective that Roxanne Gay has.
[01:09:24]  And you just saw Roxanne Gay almost, if you watch the video back, it's a total mess.
[01:09:30]  She just almost refuses to participate because for her to participate in that would be her being involved in those discourses.
[01:09:37]  And they refuse to be involved in the wrong discourses.
[01:09:40]  Platforming.
[01:09:41]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:09:42]  It's the validation of the platform is somehow elevating the power structure in their favor.
[01:09:47]  Right.
[01:09:47]  And what they believe that is because discourses themselves are the conveyors of power.
[01:09:52]  That's the relevant postmodern idea.
[01:09:54]  So the discourses, the ways that we think and talk about things are the conveyors of power.
[01:09:59]  So their objective, the woke view of the world, is that we have to purge the discourses of all things that shouldn't be said and all ways of thinking that shouldn't be thought.
[01:10:09]  And thus, all people who think that way can't be given a platform, can't be given space, and can't be given social status or social capital with which they can put out their views and maintain the discourses.
[01:10:21]  So this is the view.
[01:10:23]  You know, we talk about social engineering.
[01:10:24]  This is discourse engineering.
[01:10:26]  They're trying to rearrange how we speak so that we rearrange how we think, so that we rearrange how the society is produced.
[01:10:32]  And collaboration across difference does not engender moral purity.
[01:10:38]  It's in fact requires communication and thus, as they would see it, moral contamination that's unjustifiable.
[01:10:47]  And in case anybody is not wholly biting this ideology and they're teetering on the brink, I'm going to give you something.

=== Discourse Engineering Risks (12:02) ===

[01:10:55]  I'm going to give it to you.
[01:10:57]  Without any question, Jim's already laughing.
[01:11:01]  Without any question at all, they have been correct historically.
[01:11:05]  In the symposium, Socrates threw the women and the slaves out of the room.
[01:11:09]  There is no question about it that there have been historical injustices where people have been disallowed from participating in dialogues, disallowed from public debates.
[01:11:20]  No question about it.
[01:11:22]  The solution to that, however, is not no debate for anybody.
[01:11:27]  It's not no conversation across divides.
[01:11:30]  The solution is, as Jim and Helen say in Cynical Theories, it's to include more people in the public conversation.
[01:11:36]  It's to make the democracy more robust.
[01:11:38]  It's to have those conversations across divides.
[01:11:42]  The problem, however, is that particularly in education, we're teaching, what's it called, Jim, Judith Butler's parody disruption.
[01:11:53]  The politics of parody.
[01:11:55]  Yeah, politics of parody.
[01:11:56]  Thanks.
[01:11:57]  The problem is we've seen disrupting these events come down as a virtue.
[01:12:02]  You know, I'll do events at Portland State, for example, the James DeMore event or with Christine.
[01:12:06]  Jim just mentioned Christina Hoff Summers.
[01:12:08]  I did one with Brett and Heather and Christine Hoff Summers at PSU.
[01:12:12]  And a tenured professor stands up and starts freaking out at me, starts screaming in the middle of our panel discussion and saying, I'm part of this discussion.
[01:12:21]  No, you are not part of this discussion.
[01:12:25]  So I'll give it to them.
[01:12:27]  Yes, there have been historical injustices.
[01:12:29]  Yes, people have been marginalized and it was horrific thing to do.
[01:12:34]  Yes, those people have not been allowed, you know, gentry, for example, where you had to own property.
[01:12:40]  The solution is more discourse and more dialogue.
[01:12:43]  And we have to teach people how to do that.
[01:12:46]  Well, if you want your campus really to blow up, invite me and you and I can have a civil conversation.
[01:12:50]  That would really be something.
[01:12:51]  So, but no, the question, the operative question should be, how did things get better?
[01:12:55]  And it got better through more speech and more dialogue.
[01:12:58]  And I'm afraid, and I've seen this happen when I visit universities.
[01:13:01]  If you remove speech and you remove differing ideas, or if you remove cross-examination, I think we as human beings are a lot more basic and we give ourselves credit for it.
[01:13:11]  Force will come next.
[01:13:12]  And that's the problem.
[01:13:13]  Is that it?
[01:13:14]  Absolutely.
[01:13:15]  There's not that much in between speaking and force.
[01:13:19]  In fact, no, wait, you're wrong.
[01:13:21]  Not only has it, will it not, it's already here.
[01:13:24]  There is no.
[01:13:25]  Well, that's.
[01:13:26]  Yeah, and you're right.
[01:13:27]  I just, I think that it's only going to be more pervasive and more dramatic.
[01:13:32]  And that's, that's my fear is that if human beings are not allowed to discuss ideas and be foolishly wrong, be foolishly wrong at times and be brought back into a vein of normalcy or reasonability, people will go pick up a stick.
[01:13:45]  And I don't support that.
[01:13:46]  That's just the way that I think that we're hardworking.
[01:13:48]  And the main punch home that I want to make on that comment is if someone has a different belief than you do, let friends be wrong.
[01:13:58]  In fact, and if all of your friends think exactly what you do, and if you only invite people on who believe exactly what you do, man, and I question your podcast, right?
[01:14:09]  I question those people who only have friends who believe exactly what they do.
[01:14:13]  And if someone believes something that's a little different, they have such demands for ideological purity, perhaps because they have insecurities about their own belief systems, that they just discard those people as friends.
[01:14:25]  That's a huge, that's a very, that problem has become acute in this age in which we're living.
[01:14:32]  What you guys have articulated is a very interesting alliance that I think is going to be probably the most important to defend civil society as we know it, which is those people that believe in dialogue and difference of opinion and different ideas, and those people that don't, that just think that's just an instrument of power and oppression.
[01:14:49]  And I think that your point about Martin Luther is very interesting because Protestant Christianity and reason-based enlightenment, I don't want to say secularism, but let's just say reason-based enlightenment thinking is actually their perfect partners in this fight.
[01:15:03]  Yes, I'd like to.
[01:15:05]  I published a piece called The Great Realignment, Culture War 2.0, and I talk about how divergent forces, like one of the this is talk about a mind blow.
[01:15:16]  This is the most bizarre thing.
[01:15:17]  It's less bizarre to me now because I understand the mechanism behind it.
[01:15:20]  But some of my most ardent supporters are evangelical Christians.
[01:15:25]  That's the great realignment.
[01:15:27]  Yeah, and I love your guys's website.
[01:15:29]  I read newdiscourses.com all the time.
[01:15:32]  And right after I get done with my Bible reading, go figure that one out.
[01:15:35]  So it's kind of so.
[01:15:38]  So the book is called How to Have Impossible Conversations.
[01:15:42]  Any closing thoughts, guys?
[01:15:43]  And thank you again for taking the time and being so generous.
[01:15:46]  I know people are really going to benefit from this.
[01:15:48]  So first, James, and then Peter, any other closing thoughts?
[01:15:50]  I would, I mean, probably the people listening to your podcast are already aware, but a lot of people are not aware.
[01:15:56]  I keep kind of running into this, kind of keep running into this.
[01:16:00]  This problem is much more significant than I think people, a lot of people realize.
[01:16:06]  And I'm not saying that we have to go out and like scaremonger or fearmonger or get people worked up, but we are actually seeing in real time an ideology installing itself, you know, as everybody's now aware, thanks to the president, even throughout the federal government.
[01:16:26]  It's throughout all of our education system.
[01:16:28]  It's throughout all higher education.
[01:16:30]  It's in almost all of our corporations.
[01:16:32]  And this is an ideology that is holding, you think of the old Weezer song, you know, it's holding the end of that string of the sweater.
[01:16:39]  This could unravel the fabric of society.
[01:16:42]  And I'm not saying that we're at the brink of the edge or of the end or whatever, or that, oh my God, the Marxists are going to take over.
[01:16:48]  It's not necessarily like that.
[01:16:50]  But this is actually that grade of threat.
[01:16:54]  And so opening up the dialogue, and thanks to the president for taking a step that will definitely open a huge dialogue about things like critical race theory, becoming somewhat informed about these ideas and becoming at least conversant in what they actually believe, not forcing like, oh, well, that would be ridiculous if they believe that.
[01:17:15]  So I'll reinterpret it into this softer thing.
[01:17:17]  But no, read their primary texts.
[01:17:20]  If you want to go to new discourses or you want to read cynical theories, go read those, get to build a bridge to them.
[01:17:26]  But read their primary texts and get to know what they actually think about the world because it's had the luxury of spending 50 years under the radar festering.
[01:17:37]  And sunlight is a very powerful and very necessary disinfectant.
[01:17:42]  And we need to apply that.
[01:17:46]  So I encourage people to spend, as they say, do the work.
[01:17:51]  It's not my job to educate you.
[01:17:53]  Actually, it is my job to educate you.
[01:17:55]  So I want you to go study some of this stuff.
[01:17:58]  I want people to understand that this is a serious thing.
[01:18:00]  This isn't just some fringe academic thing happening in Narnia.
[01:18:04]  The president had to drop an order to get it out of the federal government.
[01:18:07]  This is not just happening in the academy.
[01:18:10]  This isn't just some college kids.
[01:18:11]  This is happening in our nuclear weapons facilities.
[01:18:16]  So that's very serious.
[01:18:18]  The lesson, if I were to say, from the series, Chernobyl, that lots of people saw that told the story of Chernobyl, was that it was the inability to speak up about something going wrong when they saw it that led to a catastrophe of, you know, just unbelievable scale that we're still talking about as like a paradigm of catastrophe.
[01:18:40]  That's what you're going to have under widespread critical race theory as well.
[01:18:45]  Something that's going wrong that would possibly be able to be declared as white supremacists to call it out is not going to get called out.
[01:18:53]  And so you're going to have these same very dangerous dynamics within the United States federal government, within our education, with it, you name it.
[01:19:01]  And if some companies decide they want to take this on and screw themselves over and collapse, hey, that's capitalism, baby.
[01:19:08]  If our federal government does, however, or our state governments or our local governments do, that's another matter.
[01:19:13]  Those are accountable to the people who are spending our money to do it.
[01:19:17]  And it's very important to realize that that's a very dangerous threat.
[01:19:21]  It's not just kids on college campus.
[01:19:23]  And the only way to stop it is to start learning enough about it to know what it is and say, wait a minute, this isn't okay.
[01:19:31]  We need to stand up to this.
[01:19:32]  We need to get lawyers involved even and sue.
[01:19:36]  And we need to have policies like what the president has just done to try to safeguard American values of equality before the law, for example, throughout all of the levels of our institutions.
[01:19:51]  Yeah, I want to take from low res to high res one thing Jim said, which is we published a piece in the Wall Street Journal a while ago.
[01:19:59]  You really need to believe these people when they say things.
[01:20:03]  I don't mean you need to believe that it's true.
[01:20:06]  I mean you need to believe that they believe it.
[01:20:08]  And I think one of the problems confronting us right now is that the things that they believe are not only just demonstrably false, they're so absurd that people will think, well, they don't actually believe that.
[01:20:24]  Well, they actually do believe that.
[01:20:27]  I hear this all the time from decent people.
[01:20:29]  They say, oh, no, they're just blowing smoke.
[01:20:31]  They don't actually believe in only blowing smoke out of like a fire they set in the mayor's lobby.
[01:20:39]  I mean, they're literally blowing smoke.
[01:20:43]  They're just all the time.
[01:20:43]  It's incredible.
[01:20:44]  Please continue.
[01:20:46]  So I think that's the first thing is that when they say this stuff, you need to believe them and you need to listen.
[01:20:52]  And we have a crisis in listening right now.
[01:20:54]  So if you do nothing else, just position yourself as a listener and say, wow, and to try to understand what they believe.
[01:21:01]  That's the first order of business.
[01:21:02]  Let me jump in real quick because something they need, your listeners need to tell their liberal friends, because I don't think a lot of liberals are listening to you.
[01:21:09]  I'm sorry.
[01:21:11]  That when they say liberals get the bullet too, you should probably believe them.
[01:21:16]  They mean it.
[01:21:18]  Yep.
[01:21:19]  And that's the thing is I want a return of liberalism.
[01:21:23]  I grew up in America where I was told to agree to disagree.
[01:21:27]  I went to a public high school in the northwest suburbs of Chicago is 53% English is a second language, so majority Hispanic school.
[01:21:34]  And we did not look at each other based on skin color.
[01:21:36]  I know that sounds weird, but the black kids didn't meet with the black kids in the cafeteria, like that nonsensical pile of garbage, that book that is being distributed.
[01:21:44]  It's actually, we just looked at each other as other human beings in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade.
[01:21:49]  And now eight years later, I'm looking back at the very same high school I went to with BLM flags.
[01:21:53]  They're teaching critical race theory.
[01:21:55]  The white kids have to atone for something they didn't do.
[01:21:57]  I said, this is a regression, the likes of which that most people cannot comprehend.
[01:22:02]  And human beings are not wired for this kind of accelerated change this quickly.
[01:22:06]  And the person with the most clenched fist and the loudest voice, unfortunately, is going to win in this dialogue because most decent people are not equipped.
[01:22:13]  Because as soon as you say racist, people run away.
[01:22:15]  Oh, you're racist if you dare disagree.
[01:22:18]  They don't have the capacity for that kind of disagreement.
[01:22:20]  And so that's correct.
[01:22:22]  Yeah, that's correct.
[01:22:24]  So, one, believe them.
[01:22:27]  Two, I think one of the reasons that this ideology has been so successful is because they've changed the meanings of basic words.
[01:22:37]  Antifa, anti-fascist.
[01:22:39]  I just saw Linda Sassur's tweet.
[01:22:40]  You know, it's just that simple.
[01:22:42]  Anti-fascist.
[01:22:43]  If you're against Antifa, you're a fascist.
[01:22:46]  So it's really, they've spent decades now perfecting this.
[01:22:51]  They've spent decades, I don't want to say hoodwinking people.
[01:22:57]  It's Orwellian is what it is.

=== Moving Parts in Modern Dialogue (04:24) ===

[01:22:58]  Yeah, changing the meanings of words.
[01:23:00]  And the best example of that is equity, inclusion.
[01:23:04]  And Jim and I did an event in London where we talked about this.
[01:23:08]  It's on the discourses page.
[01:23:09]  So you need to learn what these words mean and how they're using these words.
[01:23:14]  And you also need to learn when they use these words.
[01:23:18]  And this isn't academic.
[01:23:20]  This isn't pedantic.
[01:23:21]  I'm not doing this to be some kind of hedgemon to tell people how to use words, but it's absolutely essential when you hear the word equity, particularly in an educational context, what do they mean?
[01:23:33]  Most people think it just, oh, because it has a positive emotional valence.
[01:23:38]  Oh, equity.
[01:23:39]  That feels great.
[01:23:39]  I feel good about equity.
[01:23:41]  I feel good about inclusion.
[01:23:42]  Inclusion doesn't mean what you think it means.
[01:23:44]  It means restricted speech, ultimately.
[01:23:46]  So for that, New Discourses has some great stuff.
[01:23:49]  Jim's done the translations from the Wokish, where this isn't his opinion.
[01:23:55]  It's not my opinion.
[01:23:56]  It's not your opinion.
[01:23:57]  He has taken their literature and he clearly articulates it and then gives a commentary on it.
[01:24:04]  So that's one thing.
[01:24:06]  Or that's thing too.
[01:24:08]  I think the next thing is we need to start talking to each other again.
[01:24:12]  We need to start talking across divides.
[01:24:15]  And I hope you do have us back on to your show.
[01:24:19]  We'll talk about God, beliefs, and faith.
[01:24:22]  And the fourth thing is, if anyone is listening to this, they're like, how on earth am I going to figure out?
[01:24:28]  This is so insanely complicated.
[01:24:31]  First, you're right.
[01:24:32]  It is insanely complicated.
[01:24:34]  There are a lot of moving parts.
[01:24:35]  There are a lot of variables.
[01:24:37]  But if you want to do one single thing to figure this out, it would be to read Jim and Helen's book, Helen Pluckrose from England, called Cynical Theories.
[01:24:46]  In Cynical Theories, it is a master's degree crash course in all of this stuff.
[01:24:52]  And I don't know, am I allowed to say, Jim, about the NYT, the New York Times thing?
[01:24:57]  I mean, you can say whatever you want.
[01:25:01]  It hasn't, I mean, time hasn't ended, but you can say whatever you want about it.
[01:25:06]  Are you meaning that they did not put us on the bestseller?
[01:25:09]  Is that because they can edit this out?
[01:25:11]  I love to say that.
[01:25:12]  You can say whatever you want.
[01:25:13]  Why not?
[01:25:14]  It's not on there.
[01:25:14]  Last week, the bestseller list came out for Cynical Theories in its first week.
[01:25:19]  It's on like every single bestseller list.
[01:25:22]  It was on USA Today's.
[01:25:24]  It was on the Wall Street Journal's, which is apparently very hard to get on.
[01:25:27]  I googled the name of the book last night and I'm like, I wonder what anybody said about it.
[01:25:32]  And it's just like page after page after page after page of newspapers.
[01:25:36]  It's like, oh, it's on all these bestseller lists.
[01:25:38]  I can't even find if there's a review that I haven't read yet.
[01:25:40]  Wow.
[01:25:41]  And so it's on all of them, but not the New York Times.
[01:25:44]  It should have, by the raw numbers, landed at number eight on the New York Times.
[01:25:48]  And it sold in this first week three times as many as the last two on its list.
[01:25:52]  But no, it's not there.
[01:25:54]  They said, because we emailed and asked, they said they're still watching it.
[01:25:58]  Hopefully, I've been there, done that.
[01:26:02]  I have landed on the New York Times list, but only through, and they totally, it should have been much higher than it was, but they play incredible games over there.
[01:26:11]  But they wouldn't want to platform you because that is actually giving credence to your book.
[01:26:16]  So they think that math and numbers are just a construct of Western civilization.
[01:26:21]  So the numbers don't mean anything for them.
[01:26:23]  It's just an instrument of their conversation.
[01:26:25]  It's two equals three for my book and two plus two equals five for their books.
[01:26:29]  Yeah, right.
[01:26:30]  So just on that note, I really do believe if people are saying, oh my gosh, I'm trying to understand the riots.
[01:26:37]  Why are they doing this in society?
[01:26:39]  Why is everybody all of a sudden not wanting to treat people equally regardless of the color of their skin?
[01:26:46]  Why is the meritocracy under attack?
[01:26:48]  Why is democracy a white construct?
[01:26:50]  Why are they trying to decolonize?
[01:26:52]  You know, you're not supposed to teach white men or men.
[01:26:55]  Okay, if you want to know why, cynical theories is your crash course for that.
[01:26:59]  So you have to educate yourself on where this stuff came from, what the meanings of the words are.
[01:27:04]  You have to believe them when they say what they actually claim to believe.
[01:27:09]  And then once you get that, you need to start thinking about how to have constructive conversations with people across the box.
[01:27:16]  I have a really good friend who just read your book, Cynical Theories, and just raved about it.
[01:27:20]  So I look forward to going through it as well.

=== Constructive Conversations Across Divides (01:18) ===

[01:27:22]  Well, thank you guys so much.
[01:27:23]  We'll have to have you back on about the existence of God and, you know, other less important.
[01:27:29]  I'm totally kidding.
[01:27:30]  I'm saying this just happened to be very pressing, but I'd love to have you guys back on.
[01:27:33]  It's been a real thrill and I love discussing big ideas.
[01:27:37]  And I think that we need to have more conversations with people where you don't specifically align on every single issue, but we certainly align on this one.
[01:27:44]  And I think this exercise in dialogue is actually evidence of that.
[01:27:48]  So thank you guys so much.
[01:27:49]  And again, it is how to have impossible conversations and also cynical theories, which should be on the New York Times list.
[01:27:56]  Everyone go pick up a copy.
[01:27:57]  And thank you, James.
[01:27:58]  And thank you, Peter.
[01:27:59]  Thank you.
[01:28:00]  Appreciate it.
[01:28:00]  Thanks, guys.
[01:28:01]  See you soon.
[01:28:04]  Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
[01:28:06]  Please email me your thoughts on this episode and also our sister episode, Corporations vs. America, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[01:28:13]  We're going to give away some signed copies of the New York Times bestseller, the MAGA Doctrine.
[01:28:17]  So type in Charlie Kirk Show to your podcast provider, hit subscribe, give us a five-star review, screenshot it, and email us, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[01:28:27]  If you guys want to get involved with Turning PointUSA, go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com.
[01:28:33]  Thank you guys so much for listening.
[01:28:35]  God bless you.
[01:28:36]  Hope to see you soon.
[01:28:37]  Make sure to listen to our sister episode, Corporations vs. America.
[01:28:40]  Thanks so much.