Special Episode: Interview with Daniel Harper on the Far Right & IDW Criticism
In this episode we have an engaging discussion with Daniel Harper host of the anti-fascist podcast 'I Don't Speak German' about his experience covering the Far Right and what constitutes responsible engagement/coverage of various online figures.We cover the role of political perspectives when examining online figures, the use of social media by far right figures, and the use and abuse of political categories. We also cover some potential criticisms with the DTG approach and in so doing answer an eternal question of the ages: 'Are we the baddies?'Join us for a fun discussion while accepting our apologies for the self-indulgence of an episode that, to some extent, involves us talking about... ourselves. We will be back with a full Guru episode very soon!LinksI Don't Speak German PodcastEpisode 88 of IDSG Podcast: The Long Shadow of New Atheism, with Eiynah Mohammed-Smith
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist can listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try best to understand what they're talking about.
Matt Brown and with me is Chris Kavanagh.
Chris, would you say that we are literally defending Western civilization via long-format podcasts and dismantling structural whiteness?
Both true and also without us.
The whole thing goes down.
That's it, Matt.
The society hinges on this podcast.
So we're just doing our duty.
We're just doing our part.
We've had a slew of interviews recently, and they've been great.
And so we thought, let's do another one.
And we've got with us today Daniel Harper, who is the co-host of I Don't Speak German podcast.
And Daniel does something...
Somewhat similar to what we do in focusing on characters and particular personalities, but I guess is looking more at the political spectrum and also, of course, the extreme right-hand side of that spectrum.
How else would you describe Daniel?
And I don't speak German, Chris.
Yeah, so Daniel looks into the darker side of the web and I think also has a explicitly Anti-fascist angle to their work.
All right.
Well, the man is here.
Welcome, Daniel.
Thanks for having me.
Hopefully, this will be entertaining and enlightening for everybody.
I like to think that I Don't Speak German is literally the darkest podcast in existence.
It really is.
People kind of come from like, yeah, I had to quit that and go back to my true crime addiction.
That's the level of listening to the accounts of serial killers is better than listening to you.
Tell jokes about the terrible things that Chris Cantwell did.
Even in doing a quick read of some of the people that you cover, and I'm seeing that there are satanic Nazi groups, which just seems...
Totally over the top.
Just one of those things which seems pretty wild.
Satanic.
But, you know, the satanic groups are generally, they're all right.
Like, it feels that they're being unfairly lumped in with the Nazi category.
There's the perfectly reasonable form of Satanism, which is kind of the, like, we're kind of, like, anti-Christian, you know, when we try to kind of engage with, you know, a very healthy and rational form of that.
And they do some good work in terms of, like, civil liberties.
And then there's...
You missed the lead there.
These are the Charles Manson worshipping big Tannic Nazi cult members.
Okay, you may have a point.
So let's add one more thing on top of that, you know, who directly inspired a bunch of mass shooters in 2019 in the United States.
And the Christchurch massacre was only the most prominent of those.
So, yeah.
Yeah, like I'm a...
As like in my scholarship related to religious traditions, I'm always quite interested in syncretism, like the mixing of traditions.
So you'll get crossovers where Taoist traditions will claim that the Buddha was actually Lao Tzu, who went to the West and became the Buddha, or so on and so forth.
So they all claim their deities or say that the other people are a version of their teaching.
But I feel like that's the enjoyable...
Version of crossovers, whereas like what I tend to see more often now is even amongst the people that we are looking at that, you know, Brett Weinstein is retweeting Scott Adams, who is being clipped by Dr. Roller Gator.
It's not this.
Beautiful crossover I'd hoped for.
The various shades of baby shit all mixing together, but maintaining their distinct odor.
Yeah, there's little parts of Twitter and, you know, I'm not...
Equating them to the worst group of Nazis that you would look at.
But it's fair to say there's a lot of niches on Twitter that are just horrible spaces.
You go into them and there's like a little ecosystem that you were unaware of and you're kind of like, I don't know, my life is better for knowing that this exists.
You must get that a lot more than me and Matt.
Yeah, my Twitter, it's mostly not on Twitter these days.
I mean, they've kind of moved on to other platforms.
And we can talk about that if you're interested.
Because there is this kind of, like, the way that these groups kind of move around and the way that they kind of combat technology and the way that social media fuels this is a big part of, like...
Without even realizing it when I started the podcast, that becomes kind of the theme of the show.
It's as much about kind of the way that technology enables it, the way that these sub-communities have always used technology, kind of going back.
We did a two-part episode about a guy named Tom Metzger, who, if you've seen the documentary, Louis and the Nazis, Louis Thoreau's documentary, we talk a lot about that in both.
Parts one and part two, because we use Metzger as a lens in terms of talking about the way that documentary works and the way that people have covered this stuff in the past.
Sorry, I'm off on my own little tangent here.
But, you know, if you understand Tom Metzger, he was one of the original people who was using the internet before there was an internet.
He was one of the first individual users to be actually setting up a bulletin board service, like an actual BBS.
In 1983 or 1984, these kind of far-right figures have always used whatever the new emerging technology is in order to kind of spread their ideas.
And that also connects to The Order, which is the...
It's a terror group in 83 and 84 who ended up murdering the radio host Alan Berg.
So there are very clear material connections between outright violence and these kind of more quote-unquote intellectual figures who are just kind of spreading propaganda and spreading ideas.
So we try to cover all of that and try to explore it and explain it as best we can in what is hopefully a funny and entertaining format.
Sometimes there's only something you can do, right?
I wanted to say, Daniel, that I think one of your taglines is that you listen to what they're talking about when they think no one else is listening, right?
And I thought that's an interesting...
Approach, because in one sense, it does humanize them, right?
To look at what are they doing?
What's the actual communities and what are their little feuds and so on that they get involved in?
But on the other hand...
You also get an insight into what they are actually about, not what they're publicly presenting, but what they're saying to other people who are on board with their ideology.
I'm not saying that by doing so you launder their image, but rather you don't characterize them as that they're inhuman monsters.
It's more that they are humans and what they believe is monstrous.
And they say so openly, right, when they're talking amongst themselves.
Thank you, because that's kind of the point.
I mean, I think very seriously about how to talk about individuals in this movement and to do it responsibly.
And I feel like any person dealing with this kind of material, even the kind of the IDW guru type figures, I feel like there is a conversation.
We need to be having these thoughts about what are we putting out in the world?
How are we actually exploring this?
And are we engaging with this material in a way that sort of sends people closer to them?
What I try to do is to humanize them, not because I want you to empathize with them, but because I want, A, I want to be honest.
I think that's an important quality to have regardless.
I think it's important to note these are human figures who have human foibles who sometimes act nobly in various situations.
And I think that's just basic kind of...
Integrity, on my part.
But also, there is this stereotype that the Nazi always comes in like the darkest possible guise.
That they will be easily recognizable because they have a swastika emblazoned on their hat or whatever.
It turns out that that's not so simple, that it really is.
You really do have to understand not just what they're saying, but what they're not saying, and what the things they're saying are going to inevitably lead to, you know, and who they tend to associate with.
And so trying to tease out the kind of differences between individuals and different segments of the movement is often about just not to defend any of them or not to say, oh, this person is fine because they disavowed this thing, but to say...
These people are all terrible.
They're all part of a terrible movement.
And they argue amongst themselves mostly for kind of optics reasons and for, you know, reasons of getting their ideas out there.
And I think we'll touch back on that here in the second half, I think.
So, Daniel, you mentioned how the internet technology facilitates organizing and communication.
Among these far-right groups, and that's something I think pretty much everyone is aware of these days.
It obviously makes it a lot easier to find like-minded individuals and organise without having to book a hall and make yourself a parent on the street.
But I think most people would assume that...
Full-on, far-right neo-Nazis are a thing, but are a small thing.
So I guess, what would be your perspective in terms of, is this a problem that is bigger than people realize?
Is it growing?
Taking the long view of 50 years or so, what are the trends you see?
I mean, it's definitely growing, and I say that with no desire to...
Self-aggrandize or to get you to go and give me money on my Patreon or anything like that.
That's not the point here.
But we're seeing increasing far-right nationalist governments all around the world.
You've got Orban.
You've got Bolsonaro.
Trump is out of office now.
But the end of Trump is now.
You've got a half a dozen mini-Trumps kind of waiting in the wings.
And you're seeing a lot of these kind of anti-trans bills.
You're seeing the anti-critical race theory stuff.
They've learned how to build movements.
And how to build reactionary, like far-right reactionary shit into just the mechanism of our government.
And I focus on America because, frankly, when I first started this project, I knew that I could not possibly.
I know there are other people working around the world, but we do see this kind of increasing movement towards these things.
And even if it's not coming in the form of electoral politics, it's coming in the form of just the way our online discourse goes.
I've been seeing more and more, even in just the last few days, people using the term anti-white as if anti-whiteness is a thing that exists within the Anglosphere, within the English-speaking world.
Anti-white is a literal It was created by this guy, Robert Whitaker.
He created Whitaker's mantra.
Robert Whitaker worked for the Reagan White House, but was too far right for the Reagan White House, which should tell you something about that.
But, like, created this thing called Whitaker's Mantra, and there are a couple different versions of it.
But, like, the central thing is anti-racist is code for anti-white.
And so when people tell you, oh, no, I'm just being anti-racist, it's like, no, you're being anti-white.
And they feed this as a, like, kind of a meme.
Like, before that term even existed, they were feeding it into discourse.
And that became...
In the wake of the alt-right, particularly starting around 2014, 2015, it starts to become something that suddenly we're just using that term as if it doesn't have this direct meaning.
We're using it as if it is a thing, which it isn't.
That's just kind of one minor example of where the conversation has changed.
Look under any YouTube video about the Holocaust and you will find Holocaust denial all through that thing.
It was there in 2014, but not nearly the same way it is now.
And this is because we have literal neo-Nazis targeting 13-year-old children, feeding these ideas into their head.
And then a few years later, they reap the benefits because then suddenly they become content creators.
They're going out there.
Larger cultural problem that isn't something that is solved by going after a handful of people who actually turn violent.
It is a large-scale cultural issue.
And I don't think it's going to look like 1933 Germany tomorrow in the United States, but we are seeing the very clear science of something that's really awful and dangerous.
And that's why I do the work I do, frankly.
I would much rather go back to talking about Doctor Who, frankly.
I can't join you on that, but I can on the notion of the very concerning rise of populist far-right movements across the globe.
One point I want to ask about, though, I think I read the thing that you linked to on Twitter when you made this point that when people invoke the issue of anti-whiteness as a I'm convinced that definitely happens.
In the episode that we looked at with James Lindsay, whether or not he knows that he's voicing things that Bill Cooper talked about is kind of immaterial because he is.
And there's a lot of connective tissue there, regardless of awareness of it.
I do want to ask, I think you and Jack as well would be people that are critical of the kind of neoliberal, anti-racist training focused, like, you know, Starbucks sending employees on IAT implicit.
Like the implicit racism training and regarding that as like, okay, so that's how we deal with the problem.
So if somebody wants to like criticize stuff related to the focus on individual level issues or implicit racism as the model, you know, what kind of those middle class or upper class white, well-to-do women.
Going to dinner parties to be lambasted for it.
Right, right.
The people who are doing the, you know, we're going to lambast you for how white and wealthy you are and you're going to pay us for the privilege.
And isn't that terrible?
And I agree.
That's terrible.
Yeah.
My question there is, because there seems to be legitimate criticisms of that, I've heard you and Jack make as well.
So how do we carve out that you commit those criticisms, but without that you are enabling the connections that you're drawing to the way the far right could use those criticisms?
Like, is there a way to do both that is responsible?
The far right is just going to fundamentally lie about it to begin with.
They're going to use it in their way regardless.
But I think there are ways of resisting that and there are ways of having kind of a more adult conversation.
And that is, I think it's worth, for the members of your audience who don't know me already, Jack and I do an explicitly, not just anti-fascist, but an explicitly anti-capitalist podcast.
So we are socialists.
I don't know exactly what Jack calls himself a Marxist.
Most people who hear the word Marxist have the...
Most people who call this Marxists don't actually know anything about Marx, so just...
Put a pin in that.
This is a giant, complicated conversation that I don't necessarily want to get into, but we are, by the standards of anyone who has been on this podcast before, extremely, extremely far left, just to be clear here.
And so when I hear about the problems of corporate diversity trainings, it's like, well, yeah, that's because the capitalist enterprise is fundamentally doing things and further its own goals.
Look, corporate diversity trainings, regardless of how well-meaning the HR representative who designed it are, Corporate diversity trainings exist because there are liability laws.
If some middle manager starts saying some racist or sexist shit, the company needs to be able to defend themselves from a civil suit.
And by doing these kind of corporate trainings, they can absolve themselves of legal liability or at least tie it up in the courts until it doesn't matter anymore.
So that's the reason that these things exist.
It's not to legitimately...
Try to build on some kind of anti-racist foundation.
What's his name?
Chris Peterson, the guy at Sandia National Labs, who did a big thing about how critical race theory is being taught in, and he didn't really like that at all and kind of went on a big tear about it.
It's like, well, if Sandia National Labs was actually going to embrace critical race theory, they would...
No longer make nuclear weapons.
It wouldn't be like, we need a better diversity hire to run the drone program to install the missiles or whatever.
It would be like, no, we need to fundamentally end the military industrial complex within the United States.
That's sort of the answer there, right?
So it's not like this stuff is actually being implemented.
It's all kind of like a surface level thing.
And so that's how I think we should be criticizing this stuff.
If you're a white person and you feel I think white people do have an implicit racist bias.
Again, we can argue with that if you'd like to, but I think that's just empirically true.
And I think any six-year-old could understand that when it's explained properly.
And the reason it's not explained properly is because there are massive people with megaphones who get to speak very loudly and prevent that from being expressed in the way that it should be.
But if you went to a diversity training and you felt insulted or you felt slighted about that, I don't think that's such a huge deal.
There are bigger things in the world to worry about.
It was an hour out of your life.
I'll buy you a cookie.
It's fine.
Being slightly miffed at being told that all white people are racist is probably less bad than the African-American person or the Black person or the Indigenous person in that same training who had to deal with a lifetime of suffering under a racist and white supremacist Western imperialist system.
So think of it on that level.
And I think that there are things that we should do to combat these trainings.
And I think there are things that we should do to talk about that.
But I think the answer isn't, oh, Robin DiAngelo is personally...
Yeah, I think people should appreciate that organizations Even bureaucratic ones like universities are fundamentally extremely pragmatic
organisations and they are very good at public relations and human resources and various types of signalling, which is free, essentially.
It doesn't cost them anything.
And they will quite often use hyperbolic or buzzwordy and strong language because it makes them look good.
And it is just a very pragmatic thing to do.
So, you know, even putting aside political social justice stuff, you can just look at the corporate buzzwordy language about empowering people to, you know, maximize their potential and, you know, all of this language.
It's the more female drone pilots problem.
Yeah, exactly.
It's fine if we drone strike Iraq so long as it's a black trans woman sitting at the controls.
Yeah, it's feeling empowered while they do it.
They had explicit racist use.
mean, just to put a pin on this here, explicit racist, like actual full-on Nazis that I listen to will use that like the CIA ads, I don't know if you guys saw these, but there were ads from the CIA that were like, I came to empower myself by working for the CIA.
They will use that to justify their belief that the CIA is fundamentally woke or fundamentally anti-white or fundamentally anti-racist.
And like, no, this is a gloss of
Yes, I agreed.
And just to sort of draw a line under that, I think people would perhaps not overreact so much to some particular bit of language that gets used which uses the buzzwords and so on if they recognise that yeah they don't really One,
they don't really mean it.
And two, it's largely spin and PR.
So you mentioned about organisations being focused on actually reducing liability rather than actually making some change.
I mean, that's even true in universities.
If you look at how an ethics review department works at a university, the first priority is to ensure that the university is not liable for some activity.
There's nothing inherently...
Wrong with that.
Well, within the system in which we live, I mean, you know, A, the modern university is absolutely a capitalist enterprise, you know, and I am not an academic, but I don't think that you can...
Honestly disagree with me on that.
We can talk about kind of an idealized version, but there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and that includes the production of knowledge.
So yeah, you would expect your university to act exactly the same way that Google or Standard Oil does, or Sandia National Labs.
I probably don't necessarily agree that there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, but we definitely do agree on something.
Daniel, I think maybe it's a bit...
A little bit more pushback on one of the points there.
So in the way that you outline that there, you're explicitly linking in your perspective to an anti-capitalist one.
I think you and Jack are admirably upfront about the political element to your perspective.
As you know, your position on the left-right spectrum, I think I've heard you describe it as Bernie Sanders is not in your spectrum of appropriately left.
Bernie Sanders would be a vaguely center-left politician.
And I don't know if you've been to the United States.
Have you spent any time here at all?
I have, but not very long, but I've been there.
I would think...
Completely the point about, you know, we have to take into context that we're talking about a country that has a barely functioning welfare state and like an inherent objection to most of the things that in like Western Europe are taken for granted and not regarded as these socialist ills,
just basic social safety net.
So I completely take that point.
And even Bernie Sanders, I don't know exactly, but I think his view on guns would be considered in Europe to be...
Fairly to the right.
Actually, I'm fine.
As a lot of far leftists are, I'm actually pretty much fine on the gun thing.
Ian, we can talk about kind of complicated things.
I think, just to clarify for your audience and to respond to that pushback, I kind of say I'm far, far to the left.
I'm the furthest left person, mostly as a way of signaling that to your audience.
You know, we could talk about kind of the labor theory of value and kind of modes of, you know, capitalist production or modes of economic production.
We could spend a lot of time on that, but I don't think that's the best use of our time here today.
You know, ultimately, you know, I think that, like, my own politics are beyond the kind of electoral realities that are kind of existent within modern day capitalism.
And so the issue is not, you know, Bernie Sanders is right wing.
Like, I'm...
Further to the left than Bernie Sanders.
So that anyone within this kind of like electoral system is fundamentally kind of like they can do great good.
And I supported Bernie Sanders strongly during both the 2016 and 2020 primaries.
I have played audio of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the podcast because I think she has Good messaging.
I love Ilhan Omar.
I almost want to move to Minneapolis just so I can vote for Ilhan Omar.
That's how much I love Ilhan Omar.
But, you know, the point is that that kind of politics is just fundamentally not going to bring about the requisite change, in my kind of political opinion.
And so, again, we have to look beyond the current electoral realities.
If I lived in a nice, happy social democracy with 70 Bernie Sanders and AOCs in the Senate and a majority in the House and a president, and suddenly we had something like universal healthcare, that's a better world, but it's not fundamentally a transformed world.
And I think that's the kind of thing that I'm kind of working for in my politics.
So, again, just to clarify that.
I think it's helpful to clarify, and I agree that we should, you know, go off the politics point and on to the...
Intellectual dark web critiques after this.
But the one thing I wanted to ask, and it's a legitimate, genuine question, is given your stance and your connection with the criticisms that you have to an anti-capitalist perspective, do you want moderate left people to be part...
Do you see them as fundamentally on the same...
Or that they are just weaker versions of the thing that you're critiquing.
So you may have already answered this by saying, you know, your politics is not the same thing as the criticism of the Nazis and far-right figures that you cover.
But I guess I'm just asking for clarification on that.
Like, moderate liberals, like, say, Biden types or Obama types, are they within...
What you consider, like, the broad house of the left?
Or are they also the kind of target of criticism for the podcast, if not for your politics specifically?
Or maybe they are the two inseparable.
I guess that's my issue.
I think, yeah, I get what you're saying.
And I don't, like, the thing that I get accused of sometimes is we're gatekeeping on the left and we're, like, neglecting, you know, that people can have moderate positions.
You can have whatever political position you want.
I don't have any ability to affect that.
But I have the ability to criticize that.
And that's what I do.
I thought we're supposed to live in a marketplace of ideas in which everything gets discussed.
And nobody with my politics gets invited on cable news shows.
And gee, imagine how that works.
Let's go check out Nolan Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent over there.
We could pull out some choice paragraphs, I'm sure.
Look, I think I'm very pragmatic in these things.
I kind of take your politics are kind of more based on like what you do versus what you believe, right?
It's what do you spend your time on?
What do you spend your life doing is really kind of the key because there are people who are very moderate liberals who do really dangerous anti-fascist work for free for no fanfare because they consider it necessary.
And I would much rather work with those people.
Than to work with people who call themselves on the left who mostly just go and whine on Twitter all day.
People even monitoring their local city council meetings and doing just that kind of in-person grunt work of trying to inform citizens.
That's much more powerful than...
I don't care how many books of theory you've read.
I've not read that many books of theory.
Jack is the big brain on that.
He's way beyond anywhere I'll ever be on that.
But it's about what do you spend your time doing?
What do you spend your life on?
And what are you actually doing in the material world?
And I think that's the true leftist perspective in terms of what material impact are you having and how do you allocate?
Your time.
And if all you're doing is reading through theory just to have pointless debates with people, if you find that fun, that's fine, but don't pretend that's actually doing something meaningful.
And that's kind of where I land on that.
So I'm not trying to gatekeep based on ideology, but the people who are really doing solid work that means something, those are the people that I'm going to respect way more than Twitter drama.
So I would completely sign on to that.
Look what people do, not what they say.
It's a valid way to judge things.
But one comment and one question before we go to the IDW stuff.
I want to get it before we go off the far right.
So the first comment is just that in the same way where you are upfront about where you are politically.
Since our first episode on Decoding the Gurus, we've tried to do the same.
Like we flag up where we stand politically.
We do try to argue that's not the emphasis.
We make no illusions about where we stand politically.
And I think that's an important thing for people to do, just to make clear.
So that was a comment.
And the far right question that I had was, it's a bit left field, but so you talked about the far right and their ability to use these technologies and to get their message out there in a way which is, in some ways, quite impressive how they're able to be early adopters to new technology and so on.
I see that.
And I also see like Christopher Cantwell's testimony that you've covered brilliantly on the podcast.
And I see so many of the figures in the alt and far right who are just like morons.
Like to put it mildly, they seem to fundamentally be idiotic people.
And I can't entirely square together the, you know.
That they are manipulative geniuses, but yet they're also so demonstrably stupid.
So can you square that?
Sure.
No, no, no.
It turns out that this also feeds into the race and IQ thing.
There are multiple intelligences, and people can be very good at one thing and very good at another and very bad at another.
But you talk about someone like Chris Cantwell, and he's...
He's fundamentally broken as a human being in terms of his interpersonal relations.
I think he's got severe personality defects, which anyone who spends any time at all learning anything at all about what he does...
This is the crying Nazi, by the way, who was arrested after...
I know exactly who Chris Cantwell is.
I've spent literally hundreds of hours listening to this man talk into a microphone to the public, and I have delved deeper into his pathologies than...
Most people, not anyone.
There are people who have gone deeper than I have, but I've spent many hours on him.
Just to clarify, he's the crying Nazi.
You saw him in the Vice Charlottesville documentary.
Yeah, he's a fool.
His politics are broken.
His personality is broken.
He spent way, way too much money on his podcasting setup.
I can tell you that for sure.
He was not as good with guns as he thought he was, or at least pretended to be.
But he was a very capable.
Radio host.
And he was very capable at pushing out a very particular political message.
And I think it's worth disambiguating these things.
You become a Nazi because you're broken in some way.
That's almost universal.
But that doesn't mean that you can't be effective at spreading that message.
And also, and this is something, again, As a leftist, I'm always going to look for the structural issue.
Social media and YouTube and kind of various of the platforms make these kinds of kind of heterodox ideas, make this kind of illicit content more popular than it otherwise would be through kind of algorithmic engagement.
And we know that there are other figures, not necessarily Cantwell, but certainly Andrew Anglin, who does the Daily Starmer, Mike Sternevich, and several other figures deliberately engaged with like kind of media apparatus in terms of being able to spread their message
more widely.
And many of the figures in the 2014, 2015 far-right space that became the alt-right literally were trained by this group called the Leadership Institute, which is a far-right political organization
I think you're putting your finger on something really important, but I think that's what we try to do around this week.
I think this stuff does become pretty clear.
That's great.
Thanks, Daniel.
Okay, so turning maybe to I Don't Speak German episode 88, where you criticised some of the more liberal or centrist or moderate critics of the IDW.
So you can clarify, obviously, but just to briefly describe what those criticisms were, I think it was that those sorts of critics can be a gateway or re-radicalise people, don't really do a deep criticism.
of the political issues involved or appreciate those issues.
And taking that kind of rationalist sort of steel manning approach, bending over backwards to be a bit charitable perhaps and concede good ideas or whatever, can act to essentially launder harmful ideas.
I think that's fair.
I think that's a fair summary of what we said in '88.
I could probably nuance that a little bit.
Like, it's fine.
Yeah, no, I would stand behind that, sure.
And I want to be clear, just for the audience, I'm not naming particular people.
The goal was not to start a podcast feud or anything like that.
The goal was to...
It was almost more of a mission statement, because we got to 88, and 88 is a special number in Nazi spaces.
And we talked a lot about what to do for episode 88. And it just came up, let's just talk about this.
Let's not do a particular Nazi figure.
Let's not give them that attention to be episode 88. Let's do something else.
And also, after we recorded it, we realized it's a bit of a mission statement for, I don't speak German.
So it's not, I don't think it should be taken as criticism, kind of like a personal attack.
It should be taken as, we do this thing that we do, and we have reasons for doing it, and this is kind of why.
I got my start in, like, anti-creationist forums.
Like, I was on Talk Origins in 2003.
Like, I've seen these cycles for a while, you know?
And the criticism kind of comes down to, like, when I see people, for instance, kind of playing the game of, like, well, Kathy Young.
You know, rejected James Lindsay.
And suddenly, like, Kathy Young gets, like, credit for that, right?
Well, Kathy Young is just as bad.
I mean, she's just as bad as James Lindsay.
Possibly even worse.
Like, she has a longer history, if nothing else.
I can go and find you really terrible things that Kathy Young has said.
She will reject James Lindsay when James Lindsay...
Starts talking too much about the Jews.
And then suddenly she gets credit for not being a part of that.
If you don't want to talk about Kathy Young, you can talk about Helen Pluckrose, who rejected James Lindsay.
Over the same thing, because James Lindsay is an asshole.
I don't particularly care that James Lindsay is an asshole.
I care that James Lindsay is actively pushing far-right reactionary talking points that are actively harming the world.
And the fact that Helen Pluckrose, up until 20 minutes ago, was deeply invested in that project, who published a book with James Lindsay.
And I don't know, there's apparently a kid's version of Cynical Theories coming out.
So I don't know if Helen Pluckrose is going to get credited on that or whatever.
But the idea that I was...
I feel like the issue becomes there is a concerted far-right political project in the United States.
This is well-funded.
They have giant megaphones.
James Lindsay didn't get to sit in front of like House leadership in various states and spread anti-critical race theory talking points because he's a genius, right?
And to criticize him only on kind of the basis of his ideas, and I'm not saying that you guys are doing this, but to criticize him And say, you're talking about critical race theory, but that's not critical race theory.
Critical race theory is this other thing.
And not to go, well, and also you're a part of a far-right propaganda network that includes all these other people and all this kind of money sloshing around, et cetera, et cetera, feels like what Jack called the low-hanging fruit on that episode.
It's finding, yes, this is the easy thing to criticize, but not the...
It's just, what are you doing?
What's the point of that?
It is, of course, important to point out that James Leslie isn't talking about anything like what...
Critical race theory is.
But you use that as a starting point and then move on from there to discuss the kind of larger political project.
And if there is kind of a one thing of like, well, I don't want to get political about this.
If that's kind of your perspective, it's like, I don't want to kind of dig into these cultural war issues.
Well, they're fighting on these cultural war issues.
And so if you're going to cover James Lindsay or Brett Weinstein, and if you're going to cover Brett Weinstein and not talk about the fact that they're just openly anti-trans bigots at this point, you're not.
Really covering them in a way that I think is full.
And that's fair if you don't want to cover that.
Like, I'm here to cover that.
But I'm also going to kind of say, you know, please talk about that.
Okay.
So I think the first point would be that I completely agree.
And like, in most cases, I completely take the point, Daniel, that the episode was talking, you know, I think.
Quite clearly, there's an implied criticism in some respects of us, right?
But that is not the scope of the episode.
It was broader than that, talking about, you know, other critics and other issues that maybe we don't fall into.
If you put in an episode saying, like, these crazy lefties who think you have to be far left, then I would also say, yeah, that's clearly pointed at us.
And so, like, it's not like, I think we can have a healthy...
I'm responding here as far as the point applied to us, but I want to...
I also address a bunch of the points where we agree.
So, like, the first thing for me is that 100%, I think, if you feel to consider the political elements and the role that the ecosystems that the guru people that we look at are involved in, you feel the capture of really important elements,
like understanding, looking at Scott Adams.
Yes, he's a manipulative snake.
But he is repeating a whole bunch of election fraud conspiracies.
And the people that he's referencing are all right wing figures.
Eric Weinstein, if you take like more centrist, he's laundering the reputation of James O 'Keefe.
He's telling people Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux were right about Hillary Clinton in the 26th cycle.
And he's not doing the same thing for far left voices.
So I agree.
And I think our episode on Michael O 'Fallon.
It was a very good episode.
I quite liked that one, yeah.
Yeah, and you know, part of the credit that goes to Aaron, but I think we usually, with most of the gurus, especially the ones on the right or the IDW spheres, we usually have a folder which says, like, standard right-wing nonsense.
And they're all there.
Douglas Murray presented as a centrist when he's quite clearly, at the very least, He is a complete mainstream conservative.
And that's only saying that now it's mainstream and conservatism to be strongly anti-immigrant and so on.
So all of that, I think I'd happily concede that people who think that you are only addressing the ideas that the people say If you focus on whatever theoretical model that they say they're talking about and don't look at the people that they interact with, don't look at the networks that they get into,
that is an impoverished approach.
And I think one we generally try to avoid.
But the other point about when it comes to like Kathy Young and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
So I'm on board with you that like the amount of credit that someone like Helen gets for distancing herself from James when he's become Openly far right and is talking about billions of people being killed and so on.
And still, the level of criticism is very muted.
You get some credit because you're not appearing on talking tours with them, but it's a very low hurdle to not endorse someone when they're promoting like really out there, far right.
And he does that, and he doesn't get criticism for it.
Whatever their personal relationship is, I get that there's interpersonal dynamics, but there comes a point when what the person's putting out is harmful.
So we voiced that criticism of Helen on, I think, the episode with Aaron.
But I agree that you shouldn't be extending massive amount of credit.
But probably a point where I disagree is that...
Figures like, you could include Sam Harris and Kathy Young in that, that they are more harmful than figures like James Lindsay or the far-right people that you look at.
I'm no fan of the Weinsteins.
I think they're doing a lot of harm.
At present, Brett is probably responsible for getting people killed because of his stance on ivermectin and so on.
In my worldview, I see somebody like James Lindsay or Scott Adams or those figures which are really tightly knit into that network or Mike Cernovich types.
I'm not saying that they're wildly apart on the spectrum because I see the connections there.
But I think acknowledging the distinction is still, it's not invalid to do because Lindsay will endorse.
That there's a there's a plan from the reset to kill billions of people and he'll retweet stuff from Infowars and endorse it.
And you won't see that from like Sam Harris.
So if people say it's just the same, then I think it opens the door for People say, well, no, look, I can look at his feed.
I can see that he's not doing the same thing as James Lindsay.
So if you don't acknowledge this distinction, it feels like you're giving room for people to dismiss your view as too extreme.
Yeah, I hear that.
And I take this as a sign that I have not communicated clearly.
The point that I'm making is not, you shouldn't acknowledge it.
And this maybe kind of reads more in terms of Twitter interactions that I've seen, as opposed to, like, because obviously in a podcast you can expound on, you can, there's a lot more nuance capable in a podcast than on, in 280 characters.
What I see is kind of a, oh, isn't it nice that Helen Pluckrose distanced herself from James Lindsay?
And then full stop.
Oh, and also Helen Pluckrose is still fucking awful because counterweight is a bunch of bullshit, etc.
It's almost like a wording question.
Isn't it nice that Helen Pluckrose, yada, yada, yada, versus...
Even the completely terrible Helen Pluck Rose is distancing herself from James Lindsay.
Let's not let her do that because ultimately we acknowledge they are part of the same kind of overall political project.
And like maybe that's, you know, you can see there's a nitpicking or whatever, but I think it's also pretty essential to understand them as part of that same project.
I understand the desire to dunk on James Lindsay, but I also understand like...
We have to think about how that message is being received and what we're actually materially putting out there in the world.
I literally praised Richard Spencer on a couple of episodes of I Don't Speak German because...
Even he saw how stupid one of the new political parties that's sprouting up is.
I played audio of Richard Spencer and laughed at how he's absolutely correct to criticize these people for this thing.
Richard Spencer is a terrible person.
You know what I did right after I played that audio?
I went, also, Richard Spencer is a very likely spousal abuser who is an absolutely terrible person who has terrible ideas.
It's a tone issue as much as it is a factual question kind of issue.
I'm not perfect on this.
Everybody has dunked on the bad person on Twitter.
Everybody has bad tweets.
It's about, we need to be thinking about it on that level because our enemies, and by our enemies, I mean literal Nazis are absolutely using This material for horrible purposes.
Because I'm just trying to think of how we see some things the same and we see some things differently, right?
And I'm just thinking about why that might be.
And it's an obvious point, but one reason has got to be just like where we sit on the political spectrum, right?
So something that will strike you as...
Abhorrent, say, or just really objectionable.
It doesn't strike us as terribly bad simply because of the difference in political opinions.
That's one thing.
So I think we have to attribute some of it to simply where we're coming from in terms of political perspective.
The other point of difference, I guess, is we do try to steer clear of politics, even though it's impossible to completely.
Certain of these gurus that we've talked about are just these political animals whose appeal is based.
On those issues, and we have to acknowledge that.
But for some of the people we cover and the things we're interested in, I don't think the political dimension is the most salient dimension.
So to give an example of this, I'll mention Brett Weinstein, right?
Of all the people that we cover, we think he's one of the most harmful with the anti-vax road that he's gone down.
But if I try to conceptualise where he is, I would say that the main issue is The self-aggrandizing narcissism and the conspiracy theorizing and just leading people to a fundamentally deluded view of the world that isn't based on empirical evidence and doing scientism,
essentially, pretending to be doing science or not.
Now, there is absolutely a political lens to this guy as well.
But where I'm coming from is that's not always the main thing.
For me, the main thing is sometimes something else.
And, you know, it's got to do with our interests.
Like you obviously focus on far right, on Nazis and so on.
So you naturally will be drawn to that.
Chris and I have a research background in things like health beliefs and spirituality and religiosity.
So we just have different interests as well.
I think there's some points, Matt, where you and I might be...
Slightly divergent as well, because I also sign on that our focus is not on the political aspect.
We're interested in looking at people across the spectrum, including some of the people that are not really primarily interested in the political sphere.
I think that where somebody that is the salient feature about them, like Douglas Murray, for example, that a good part of our analysis ends up being about The kind of their disguising of their political views in specific kinds of rhetoric or the way that they use this particular kind of delivery to promote it as a specific kind of politics.
So I guess I'm just nuancing the point that it isn't that we seek to push out any political content.
It's that in the selecting the people that we cover, the main thing isn't do we agree or disagree with our politics.
And the other point that you...
Me, Ed.
I'm not disagreeing with this.
I'm seconding it.
Whereas, take Eric or Brett, whichever you want, from those brothers, there's an absolute reasonable point to look at the influence of Teal Capital and to look into the people that they're promoting and various aspects about the political side of where they are and where the IDW lies as well.
But I think you guys as well, Daniel, when you covered them, you are also acknowledging that Eric is, he has this whole thing that he invented the theory of physics.
This is what he goes and talks on Rogan about.
And yes, he's talking about like culture war stuff endlessly as well.
But it doesn't feel to me that's a...
Superficial element of his story is like his view that he's a misunderstood genius or Brett's view that he discovered this thing.
So digging into those Parts and the various pseudoscience stuff that they promote.
It doesn't have, to me, an unnecessary political angle because they could be advocating a completely different type of politics and still meet the same stakes.
And it would be important to highlight to people that this is why you can't trust people who do that wherever you find them on the political spectrum.
Sure.
A, I kind of broadly agree, but I'm going to push back on some issues.
And I think the first thing in this, we said this, I said this on episode 88 and something that I fully agree with is that to say it's not political, like we're not talking about kind of a political thing when we talk about this, the status quo gets a sort of pass for
just being a thing that exists and therefore kind of non-political or apolitical.
I'm not criticizing you guys specifically for that, but We have to understand that being anti-vax is political in the sense of who is going to be harmed by being anti-vax,
and this is going to differentially affect various populations and all this sort of thing.
It's not to say you have to be obsessed with the political angles on this, but that I just reject the premise that you can just ignore the politics.
And I don't think that's what you're saying, but I just want to highlight that first, is that for people who have far-left politics...
Never find our perspective really gets a say within mainstream discourse.
And yet, if you're a socialist, you get thrown the 100 million people died under communism every day.
And it's like, okay, how many people are dying now under the capitalist system?
But that doesn't get counted.
You don't get to just ignore the political just because.
We happen to live under a system that privileges you.
It privileges me.
I'm a white guy.
I have a nice, comfy existence.
I have a decent job.
I am much luckier than many other people.
And if I had been born in India or China or in Sub-Saharan Africa, I would not get to do any of these things that I get to do with my life.
I did want to say, Daniel, just before I forget, that I think the point about acknowledging the privilege positions that people are in and what it makes salient to people is an important thing.
But I'm also aware that, like, Matt and I aren't from America.
I grew up in Belfast in the 80s and 90s, which was like a conflict area.
There does sometimes feel like a flattening assumption.
Despite Matt's little cheeky smile, I generally don't talk about growing up in Belfast.
And I'm not arguing for, like...
The necessity of taking a standpoint epistemology approach to it, but more that it does inform the way that I regard when people are talking about relative levels of threat and whatnot and what they've experienced.
I'm not claiming that there's all this stuff that, you know, makes it that...
What people are experiencing in the US at the moment, it's nothing.
But in the same respect, I am sympathetic, I think, sometimes to points about catastrophizing on whichever side of the political spectrum that it arises from.
And it possibly does relate to growing up somewhere like Belfast.
From a point of view about the status quo being the assumptive norm, like where I grew up, the police were over 95% Protestant.
I'm from a Catholic background, my family and community.
We're fundamentally, like, don't trust the police and regard them as an enemy.
So it isn't that those viewpoints are alien to me or that kind of thing.
And I'm not meaning to drag things into that direction.
I just wanted to, like, flag that up.
And again, I'm not trying to, like, kind of, we're not pointing fingers at individuals here.
I mean, I could talk about, like, particular, like, kind of points of disagreement in your previous episodes.
And I don't know, maybe that would be helpful.
If you'd like to kind of get into that, I accept some of those criticisms.
I would be happy to kind of discuss them point by point at another time.
But maybe I can just kind of highlight a couple of things that you've done on the podcast that I think maybe were less than helpful.
Perfect.
Let's do that.
Let's move to that.
But with that, like Belfast waffle.
The point I wanted to make, which was actually related to the point that you were making, is like, I agree with you that there's a political valiance to defending the status quo or whatever is categorized as the moderate left.
It's not the default position.
Or maybe it is assumed to be, but it isn't a neutral position.
That's a perfectly valid point.
But one point in response to that is that On the far left, in the IDW, and I don't know about far right, but I would assume so, one overlap that I see is a fundamental disparagement of institutions and mainstream bodies like academia or with political institutions.
And if I have a concern to push back...
Towards the far left, there's definitely elements there that are very concerned about tankies or Assad apologists, but even setting them aside, if we're concerned about legitimizing the critiques that emerge from like the IDW sphere and the far right,
the view that institutions should be fundamentally regarded with suspicion or things that we should perhaps dismantle, it seems to me that Your side is in more fundamental agreement with Eric Weinstein and co.
than my side.
That might be unfair.
Should we pick an example?
I feel like it's worthwhile to pick an example, say abolish the police or prison abolition or something like that.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think your perspective and certainly the Brett and Heather perspective and the Eric Weinstein perspective is...
The police protect us from the terrible actors in society.
There are people who are coming out.
There are always going to be serial killers and rapists and thieves, etc., etc.
And the police exist to make sure that they are protecting us, the reasonable people in society, from that.
And that, like, fundamentally, any call to abolish that or to abolish the prison system is to let those people out and to where they're going to threaten us.
Do you think that's a fair representation of defending the institution kind of position on this?
No, that's fair.
And also I think that you're right.
That's a good position to highlight where there would be more.
Overlap a little, like, I'm aware of where Brett and Heller go with their...
I've been trying to highlight that more and more.
This is something that I care deeply about, and I have long considered myself a prison abolitionist, and I believe that, like, the current policing system, certainly in the United States, is fundamentally, you know, just, it's broken beyond repair.
Just the current criminal justice system in general.
And so, what I kind of point to is, A, there's, you can abolish the police or abolish prisons is a, it's a slogan.
That reflects a century or so of work by activists and academics, et cetera, et cetera.
There's a long conversation.
There's a giant body of work that just gets flattened into that as a kind of political slogan.
And then people can say, well, what are you going to do about all the rapists?
Even progressive, liberal, very centrist-y kind of people are going to tell you, about 4% of the work that police do in terms of the actual hours they spend is spent doing anything like what We think police should do, right?
In terms of like actually going after kind of major offenders.
Also, we spend many times the value of any kind of replacement value of the property that is stolen by kind of individuals like robbing somebody's house by putting them in prison for five years.
The US prison industrial complex is, it's a travesty on the world.
We imprison like 25% of the world's prisoners.
A greater percentage of people are imprisoned in the United States than at any time other than the highest years of the Soviet gulag system as a percentage of population.
This is just...
True.
And yet we don't think of it that way.
We just think of, oh, it's law and order, et cetera, et cetera.
And so what we have to do in terms of thinking about that, like maybe there's a need for a prison for the hardest of the hardcore serial killers.
Maybe there's a reason for isolating these people from society for the safety of others, but it doesn't look anything like the current system.
And when you look at kind of the realities of the current criminal justice system, it's fundamentally broken in ways that like are not reformable under the current system.
Like you can't apply A good DA here and there and suddenly solve this system.
It needs to be fundamentally rethought and destroyed, ultimately, in my opinion.
And so when I say that my position is political, but like the position that like, what are we going to do about all the rapists?
It's like an apolitical position.
That's kind of where I land on that.
Yeah, and militarized policing in the US, I think both Matt and me are not fans.
And I would concur that your position on that is very far divergent from what you would see with the Weinsteins.
But I guess where I would see more the overlap would be, say, the criticism directed towards the DNC.
Eric, for example, will...
And I'm not saying I definitely don't think that you or Jack do this, that you make equivalences between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, right?
Like Eric Weinstein's kind of approach to that.
But the fundamental view they have about the Democratic Party and so on is that it's indistinguishable from the Republican.
They're just different flavors of the same system, which doesn't allow for change.
I can just cut this off.
I don't believe that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are indistinguishable.
I fully support it.
I didn't fully support it.
I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
I have very real problems with Hillary Clinton.
And I think there's a kind of like Twitter, kind of anarcho-kitty kind of version of this.
And then there's a more nuanced take.
Because I think my own perspective is someone who has been following American politics for 20-something years at this point.
My belief is that there are very real...
Things that the Democrats and Republicans have in common, and in particular, in terms of the U.S. military-industrial complex, in terms of more money for prisons, in terms of the neoliberal response to austerity, in terms of destroying people's lives.
Joe Biden bought and paid for by the credit card industry in Delaware.
I can point you to...
Tons of documentation on this.
He's in the pocket of the credit card industry.
Why does Joe Biden want to do massive reform in terms of people's student loan debt?
Because he's paid not to.
And that's the system in which we live.
And if you follow these politics long enough, and if you follow the ins and outs of Democratic and Republican Party, yes, the Democrat is...
Almost always going to be the better choice than the Republican, bar none.
I will vote for Democrats every time, but to think they're going to really make fundamental change based on just the history of the last 20 years, it's a fallacy.
And to defend the Democrats so they didn't have enough votes or they didn't have the thing or they weren't able to do this because of that, that's the thing that I...
What I really want people to do is just break out of that and say, go do something else and to care about what the Democrats are doing.
Go and vote.
I think you should go and vote.
There's more going on than that.
And I think that a lot of the stuff that gets flattened into, they're basically the same thing, is just that frustration, is that we don't see real change.
Whereas the Republicans absolutely push through really terrible things every time they get into power.
And sometimes that does get resisted.
And I think there's a lot that we can learn from the Trump era in terms of the limits of that.
I think there's a real conversation to have there.
Criticizing the DNC from the left is a very different thing than criticizing it from the right.
And saying, Eric Weinstein saying, like, the Republicans and Democrats are the same because they're fundamentally corrupt and they're just kind of like, well, yeah, but...
The DNC is better because they're further to the left, and the RNC is worse because they're further to the right.
And the RNC is actively trying to destroy the world, and the DNC is just being in the ineffectual opposition to them destroying the world.
I understand where you're coming from, is that on a surface level, it kind of feels like, oh, it's the same comment, but it's not.
And I think that any kind of principle of charity in terms of saying, any sense of a principle of charity in terms of allowing for more than 280 characters of conversation about this.
I think that the point you're making is important, and it might be the same point that I would make to defend some other points where you might say, oh, if you make a point which is similar, you know, gives credit to something that Jordan Peterson has said,
in a way you're making for your audience him seem palatable.
And I would push back at that, that it's more the case that The nuance that you're talking about is important that, you know, Jordan Peterson can make a reasonable point about something.
The stuff that he smuggles in alongside that are why you should oppose him.
But in acknowledging that if he makes some reasonable point, it doesn't entail that all the rest gets dragged in.
Well, my criticism would not be like you acknowledging that Jordan Peterson makes a reasonable point.
Jordan Peterson came to public prominence.
Specifically based on being an anti-trans bigot.
He was lying about the C-16 bill in Canada.
Otherwise, he'd be an obscure psychology professor.
He wrote a weird book.
That's who he was.
He does kind of do the self-help stuff for young men.
And I don't study Jordan Peterson closely, but if he has been helpful to people, I think that's probably fine.
But he also smuggles in a whole lot of not just reactionary bullshit, but full-on Manisferian stuff about women shouldn't wear makeup in workplaces because the fuller cheeks involved in wearing makeup calls.
I mean, he's just kind of straight up like, you know.
Just vicious misogyny, right?
And that's not to say you can't say, well, Jordan Peterson made a good point here.
I actually learned quite a bit from your initial Jordan Peterson episode because I find him word salad when he kind of gets into his weirdo spaces.
I just don't have the language to even begin to understand him.
And so I appreciate that you can kind of dig in and kind of understand him.
But to not see him as a...
Fundamentally, a figure who has been brought to the forefront based on this far-right reactionary politics and that this is his goal.
That's what he's trying to do.
It does feel like sometimes you don't have to hand it to him.
Sometimes you just got to go.
Again, I'm not trying to necessarily criticize you on Jordan Peterson in that way because I think your coverage has been pretty good, but to not also highlight that other stuff does give him a little bit of a pass.
More directly, if I can give the criticism, it's the Sam Harris, the kind of meditation episode that you guys did.
Where he was kind of talking, he was selling his app.
And I feel like there was a very kind of clear, you know, well, Sam Harris is kind of a reasonable figure.
I agree with him on a lot of things.
Sam Harris has been like supporting the military industrial complex in the United States for a long time.
He sits along and like...
He goes along with Douglas Murray, where Douglas Murray is saying, these Islamic countries, they don't care about trans people.
They don't care about those kinds of issues.
And that's a serious civilization, and we need to be serious like that.
Again, this gets back to the, like, I care about what you do and not what you say or what you believe.
Sam Harris just thought, you know, he doesn't spend a lot of time talking about, like, how do we solve poverty by talking about mixed land use or something like that.
He's not, like, putting out there and, like, exploring these kind of ideas.
It's either kind of, like, scientific, you know, kind of, like, big pictures or life in the universe or, like, joking around with Ricky Gervais, which is a thing that he's doing now, apparently, or it's almost always kind of reactionary garbage.
It doesn't matter to me if he hypothetically votes for Joe Biden.
It matters to me what work he does in the world.
And by that standard, I think Sam Harris can be fairly considered.
A pretty far-right figure in terms of the things he actually puts his energy into.
There was a piece by Nestor Dubwen at Marion West, A Better Way to Understand the Intellectual Dark Web, and I would like to recommend that to people.
So with Sam Harris, a couple of points.
One is that episode was not a normal episode on Sam Harris.
It was just a special episode because of a particularly bad...
The thing that he dropped, which hit these specific features of kind of an interesting new wrinkle in the guru dynamics.
He's presenting himself as a secular figure, but he's arguing that his politics is endorsed by introspective practices and so on.
So there was an interesting wrinkle, which is why I wanted to address that.
And it's a limitation in some respect of our...
Which is that we focus on a set piece of content.
And so for Jordan Peterson, his piece was heavily focused on religion and, you know, to some extent philosophy, but mostly religion and not culture war issues.
So in that respect, the content that we covered for him in the first episode, less so with the Brett and him crossover because they got into politics, but it was more geared toward metaphorical Christian apologetics.
Aspect, rather than, say, his anti-trans positions or so on.
And I take that point, and I think Matt and me have always flagged that up as something of a limitation.
We try to take work that's somewhat representative, but we're always going to have a relatively skewed perspective.
Right, and as I indicated, I think there's value in doing the work that you're doing, focusing on that.
It's an issue, which you acknowledge and which I'm...
Definitely, yeah.
But...
Here's a part about probably where I think, like, in some ways, I agree because when we do an episode on Sam Harris, which we've discussed during a proper one, I think any fair treatment of him has to deal with the kind of points that you're talking about,
like his wallowing in the culture war.
You know, I've considered doing the episode with Kathleen.
Blue?
Blue?
Oh, yeah.
Because...
Believe me, I know that one very well.
On white supremacy, because I think that is an episode that's very clear about, like, where Sam's...
Where limitations, blind spots, sympathies are, and where they can lead to really dark places, right?
Like arguing that the Christchurch shooter is just a shit poster.
We don't know what his ideology is.
What?
There's an 80-page document about...
Oh, no, but it was filled with jokes.
You don't understand, Chris.
How could you possibly interpret this?
Like, this is just a bunch of garbage.
I would also highlight the Ezra Klein.
If you were going to do one, that's the one I'd love to...
I would...
Happily come on for six hours and talk about that.
I've spent so much time on that interview.
I have pages of notes.
Trust me.
I think the Ezra Klein is also a watershed moment in some respect.
For fans of Sam Harris, it led to a split between people who saw...
Okay, Sam does very badly in that interview.
And other people within Sam's audience who thought Ezra came across really badly.
And I definitely in the former rather than the latter camp.
But so like...
I agree that if you did an episode on Sam Harris and you were, like, saying, okay, we want to talk about this figure and why is he controversial, whatever, and you chose an episode that was like him talking with Paul Bloom and didn't mention anything about Charles Murray or any of the, you know, the fringe of the fringe white supremacy,
that you would do the topic an injustice.
But on the same respect, I think there is a reason that Sam Harris is regarded...
As, like, a more reasonable figure than many of the others in that space, and why people are still willing to appear with him, including people who do research on far-right or out-right groups, Andrew Marantz and so on.
But the...
I...
So I think that element of Sam Harris, which is perhaps...
Captured in a bit by the mind science element, the episode that we covered, although we were harsh there.
It also has to be addressed.
This isn't so much your critique, Daniel.
I think it might be more Ina, who, you know, is a well-known critic of Sam Harris and quite.
Detailed and documents the points that she wants to make.
But when she or now, when you say that it's more reasonable to put Sam into like a quite far right space, to some respect, that to me means that there's a failure to acknowledge that somebody could be a liberal,
they could be relatively in favor of welfare states and vote for Democrats and so on, and also have these bad Reactionary views or enable reasscience and so on.
But it doesn't like if we just automatically are putting them to that's the right.
It feels to me like you are fundamentally saying that anybody on the left can't be endorsing like reasscience and stuff.
And that doesn't strike true to me because I think there's people that are on the left who are Who do endorse those things and that the criticism can be of them and their views without it being that they're necessarily on the right.
And there's a wrinkle there because, as you say, Sam Harris is very close to Douglas Murray.
On a lot of points.
And he's made use of, you know, bat yours statistics.
He's engaged in, like, the Islamophobic stuff about the Muslims coming in and taking over Europe.
So I don't want to just limit it to this point applied to Sam Harris, because you could take issue with that.
But in general, how do you respond to that point about somebody is, like, automatically on the right?
Ultimately, I think the thing that we're leaning against is how do we want to talk about far-right, far-left, centrists, etc., etc.
If you sit and graph people's opinions on various issues, ultimately left-right is a broken dynamic because it is one axis.
Where I would land on this in a sentence is, again, Where does he spend his time?
And if he was going to spend his time talking about urban planning advocates, talking to, you know, people who are reducing poverty, if he wanted to spend a bunch of time on that, then I think we could fairly say, yeah, he's a mixed bag politically, but he's got one of the biggest podcasts in the world,
and what does he choose to do with it?
Like, in a more general sense, can people have a variety of beliefs?
Can there be, like, racists on the left?
Absolutely.
Like, yeah.
But we're talking about major figures with big platforms who have chosen to do a certain thing with that.
And Joe Rogan is a mixed bag.
I mean, you know, thank God we could talk forever about Joe Rogan if you want to talk about Joe Rogan.
I just mean that people that present Joe as the centrum that's hard to classify.
It's really not.
It's really not, because we know what he does.
Now, Cornel West has been an invited guest on Joe Rogan's program on a number of occasions, and Cornel West is definitely on the left of the mainstream American political perspective.
I'm not going to just grant him that.
Yeah, no, Cornel West.
I quite like Cornel West.
He's great.
And he gets to come out there and express his political views.
And Joe Rogan does the, yeah, man, that's really wild.
Yeah.
Jamie, pull that up.
Let me see this genetic coefficient graph or whatever.
Like, he does the same thing.
But what does Joe Rogan choose to, like, who is, who are you tuning into if you tune into a date to a weekend?
Joe Rogan.
Sam Harris is the same way.
And so, yeah.
Did they vote for Joe Biden?
Whatever.
Yes.
But that's not really the thing we're talking about, right?
And that's where I kind of land on that.
And so this does strike differently in terms of kind of talking about ordinary people, just kind of regular people kind of going out there and who do have very complicated political identities.
And I'm happy to have that conversation with people about what they think is good and bad and what they think is right and wrong and kind of the varieties of that.
But again, that's not who we're talking about here.
Daniel, I appreciate it.
I'm not somebody that's in favour of the civility porn thing, but I think this discussion is perfectly fine and we can have disagreements and there's plenty of reasonable points that you've raised and that I think are important.
So just to say there is absolutely no hard feelings on this side and we'd be happy to discuss Fowler.
Yeah, and I know that there was some consternation in certain circles around the contents of episode 87 and 88. Nothing was intended.
To be aimed at any particular, you know, kind of content creator.
If I wanted to go on and trash people, I have that ability.
Believe it or not, I can do that.
And, like, if I wanted to just grow the podcast really big, I would go troll James Lindsay and get him to retweet me to his, you know, 200,000 followers.
But, like, the point would not be, thank you for having me on, obviously, and I do appreciate it.
Like, it's not about, like, there are ways of growing the audience that are not like, oh, let's go have a, let's go pick a fight.
You know, good for you is a dirty.
Word because of what they've done to what, you know, various people have done to that word.
But I think that using it in the way that it's actually intended, I think good thief criticism is welcome.
And I've no issue with that.
Well, I kind of get it.
I've listened to every main episode.
Some of the bonus content I have not listened to.
But I mean, I really liked the Gwyneth Paltrow one.
I want you guys to do more like that.
I was telling Chris he should do some of the YouTube live streamers.
I'd love to see some stuff about...
I think that there's the parasocial relationships that live streamers have with their audience.
And that kind of stuff.
I would really love to see you guys' style of analysis towards that kind of stuff, honestly.
I think that could be really fascinating.
I'm not telling you what kind of content to produce, but I would personally just really appreciate that.
Look, I haven't said much in this episode.
I think I'm probably less invested in many of the topics we've been talking about, perhaps.
But also, I've pretty much signed on to a lot of what Chris has said.
A couple of points that you've made that I've pulled out, there's obviously very strong areas of agreement where we just see things exactly the same.
And that's interesting to note.
There's other points where we see things a little bit differently, but that's also interesting too.
So thanks for coming on and thanks for making those points, those criticisms even, because, yeah, like, you know, I don't know, sorry, to return to something you guys were talking about, which was Sam Harris.
Like, I don't know Sam Harris anywhere near as well as you guys do, right?
So I've got like a normies type of outsider, casual viewers.
Yeah, and, you know, One of the interesting questions is, you know, what is somebody really?
Like, what are they fundamentally really about?
And, you know, you can take a character like Sam Harris, and I just pulled up his podcast website, and seeing there's an episode on Are We Alone in the Universe with Neil, that's the first one, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
In fact, a whole bunch of stuff on space.
Yes, some culture war stuff.
He talks with Jesse Single.
But also stuff about brains and all kinds of things, you know.
So I'm aware, mainly secondhand, of his, you know, To put it, extremely charitably naive endorsement of certain things, but you don't have to be super charitable, yeah?
You can say that there's a pattern there.
So, yeah, I don't know.
Like, I don't have an answer to that question, you know what I mean?
I think it's hard to know what somebody is really about, what their fundamental...
Are they just being naive?
Do they have an agenda?
All that stuff, you know?
Well, can I respond to that briefly?
Sure, sure.
Just, sorry, I did interrupt.
I apologise.
But, you know, like...
I think my fundamental point is it's not our job to peer into the eternal verities of someone's soul.
And this is where, again, that kind of materialist conception of I care about what you do and what you say and what the content that you put out is.
And I agree with you that Sam Harris puts out a ton of content that has nothing to do with these kinds of things.
I wish he would just stop dealing with this stuff.
But even if you look at some of the people that he's brought in, To talk about some of these things, he did a recent episode about, like, it was essentially an advertisement for a, like, a kind of vegetarian meat substitute.
There was a company that's kind of producing this stuff, and, you know, hey, I don't like corporations, et cetera, et cetera, you know, like, so, you know, but aside from that criticism, you find out the guy that he, like, brought in was formerly worked for Y Combinator, and Y Combinator is one of the, like,
kind of sub-projects of this guy, Mencius Moldbug, a.k.a.
Curtis Yarvin, who was one of the fathers of the neo-reactionary movement, right?
And so, he's had people from that organization on a couple of times.
And so, you can dig into this and find those kinds of influences, even in some of his more non-political or apolitical episodes.
And even when he brought on, I forget the guy's name, but he's an Indian biologist, a cancer biologist.
And A, he starts talking about Charles Murray and Race and IQ in the middle of it.
But he also does kind of a soft support for eugenics right there in the middle.
And so often this content is buried in there, even if it's topically not, if it's not kind of right there on the surface.
And I think that's kind of, I know that that's a detail of, you just kind of listen to the same Harris that you don't get from just looking at the website.
But I think that that's kind of why I think it's important to kind of highlight these things sometimes, right?
Yeah.
Now, look, I think that's a fair point.
Like, in checking out Stéphane, well, no, not deeply, but, you know, I could easily find these very long YouTube series, which was ostensibly about the Roman Empire or something, you know, and it would be 90%.
About the Roman Empire.
And how it was destroyed by the immigrant hordes, by the way.
That was just taking the Roman Empire.
Almost as if the rest of the content exists to spread a certain kind of political message.
Almost.
Yeah, that's right.
Sorry, again, that's best for being snarky.
I'm not, you know...
I'm an asshole.
Everybody knows I'm an asshole.
But before you move on, I'm sorry.
I'm very sorry that both me and Daniel are interrupting you.
But with Stephen Molineux, I think that's a good example because I think, Daniel, you would see a lot of the stuff that he's done highlighting the connections to the right-wing ideologies and whatnot.
But for me...
While that's definitely true, and discounting the white ethno-nationalist component of Stefan Molyneux would be a huge mistake, the fact that he ran a predatory psychology cult is also a huge part.
And the fact that he's this narcissistic figure who's adopted a whole bunch of different political ideologies which are essentially about making himself the central grand cult figure, he's a good example of the perspective that we might take.
Looking at his manipulative techniques would be a valid prism to look at things, but it wouldn't be that, you know, the white nationalist ethno stuff that he is in is therefore irrelevant, but just that you could look with both lenses and find out a lot about him.
I agree.
And we did an episode on Stefan Molyneux, and I don't think we covered that aspect, the cult aspect, as much as maybe we could have because our focus is where our focus is.
And it would be absolutely valid to look at Stefan Molyneux through that lens.
And I mean, even through your recent episode about the geometric unity stuff with Eric Weinstein, perfectly valuable, valid content.
That's not the argument I'm making here.
It's absolutely worthwhile to talk about Eric Weinstein and the geometric unity paper and how...
It's a bunch of bullshit that doesn't make any sense and it's him self-aggrandizing.
That's 100% valid and useful content to produce, so long as you're not also ignoring the other side of it is kind of where I would land on that.
So if you talk about Stefan Molyneux and you do four episodes about the cult leader stuff and then also don't go, yeah, and he was one of the major figures that led to the alt-right radicalization in 2015 and 2016.
You're kind of doing a disservice both to Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, sounds good.
And in the spirit of sort of wrapping up in that, one final sort of comment, which is that, like, one thing I learned from having Aaron Rabinowitz on to talk through the O 'Fallon episode was that even though,
as we flagged up at the beginning, he's much more woke than us, right?
But what I learned from that episode is that with that content, frankly, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter whether you're a milquetoast liberal like us or whether you're super woke or a communist or whatever.
You will fundamentally agree.
The only people who would disagree with our premises are people that are, frankly, far right.
So I think in many cases, it's important to take into account those political things.
I think there can be that narcissism of differences.
Not saying there's small differences.
I would like someone who's a Republican voting Trump supporter to be able to listen to something that we did on the anti-vax stuff of Brett Weinstein and go, that's anti-scientific, anti-vax nonsense.
They may not have changed their mind about Trump or whatever, but hey, that's still good, you know, to get vaccinated, I think.
Like, that's not the level of analysis that I was...
Aiming for necessarily.
And again, I like the podcast.
I am a Patreon supporter to all of you.
This is how you get on the podcast is you just pledge enough.
That's right.
Pay us money and criticize us.
That's how you get on.
So look, just to repeat, Daniel is a co-host of I Don't Speak German.
If you want to learn about the truly scary stuff that's happening on the far right, then you really couldn't go to a better place, I think.
I didn't talk much, but I enjoyed listening, guys.
And yeah, thank you for coming on, Daniel.
It was good fun.
See, listeners, Matt admitted that we didn't stop him from talking.
He wanted to listen.
It was his choice.
He has the agenda.
I agree.
I get a lot out of I don't speak German.
I would have some criticisms of the podcast, just because of a different perspective that I have.
But I will say that I usually get a lot out of listening to the episodes and your guys'perspective,
I would encourage anyone to listen.
And you've done a lot of episodes recently on IDW stuff, which has a lot of good research in it.
So, you know, again, I just want to clarify, this is not meant to be a like contention
Contentious battle or whatever.
This is good faith, reasonable conversation.
The stuff we're doing is actually important.
If it wasn't important, I would...
Quit tomorrow.
Like talking about these things actually has, again, material impacts on the real world.
And so talking about how best to do that and like really kind of sharing that back and forth, I think is an important conversation to have.
