James Lindsay & Michael O'Fallon: Eating bugs for Feminist Glaciology
This is an important episode. 2022 you needs to realise what 2020 you could not and what 2030 you is ready to tell you. Confused? You will be.On this episode we tackle two gurus that we have treated separately: James Lindsay of New Discourses (episode 2) and Michael O'Fallon of Sovereign Nations (episode 13). O'Fallon hasn't changed much from our episode analysing him, aside from starting a conspiracy laden daily news show. But James... well... judge for yourself.On this episode you will learn many amazing facts, including how feminist glaciology is at the core of the Great Reset, that the NFL is now the Critical Race Football league, and how what 'it' is really all about is making people into pets who are driven by AI cars and eat bugs.For this excursion, Chris and Matt are joined for the second time by Aaron Rabinowtiz, host of Embrace the Void (@ETVPod) and Philosophers in Space podcasts, PhD student, and lecturer at Rutgers University. This means we have now had two back to back episodes with philosophers... and we really can't apologise enough.LinksBen Garrison's cartoon featuring Scott AdamsSovereign Nations' Public Occurrences | Episode 7 | Woke NFLSovereign Nations' Public Occurrences | Episode 10 | Obedience TrainingClimate Justice | James Lindsay & Michael O'Fallon | Changing Tides Ep. 1A Critical Reset | James Lindsay & Michael O'Fallon | Changing Tides Ep. 2New Discourses | Groomer Schools 2: Queer Futurity and the Sexual Abuse of Your ChildrenNew Discourses | Groomer Schools 3: The Creation of an American Red GuardThat Immune book by Philipp Dettmer from Gurzgesagt
Hi everyone, just a short programming note to mention that this episode was recorded several weeks before the events in Ukraine, so that's why there's no reference of any of that in the discussion.
Just wanted to mention that.
Okay, enjoy.
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer.
We try our best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown.
With me is my partner in crime, the yin to my yang, Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh.
Good afternoon, Chris.
Good afternoon, Matthew.
You're looking startlingly beautiful today.
I'm looking sunny and light.
You're looking dark and moody with your hoodie.
Yeah, well, I'm glad you mentioned this hoodie because I'll just say, Matt, that I'm sure people will know this.
I think it exists around the world now.
You know the brand Uniqlo?
I do.
Yes, my wife is a big fan.
Yeah, they're kind of like the Gap of Japan, right?
But the thing is they're better than the Gap because they have this type of clothes called heat tech clothing.
I'm sure you've...
Seeing like vests.
Well, I guess you don't need those, but like in other parts of the world.
We want the opposite of what's heat.
Yeah, not what's heat, but yeah, I know Australians know what heat is.
So in other parts of the world, Matt, it gets cold and we have to wear clothing to keep us warm.
And Uniqlo has...
Not just to hide your shame, like we...
Both, both.
And it usually has these undershirts and stuff or long johns, various things that make you warm.
And they're branded under this thing, Heat Tech.
This hoodie, Matt, is a Heat Tech hoodie and it's so comfortable.
It's so good.
I've been wearing it like nonstop for three days and I don't think I can...
I don't wear any other clothes anymore.
I'm going to have to buy different colours just so people are unaware.
It looks like I have different items of clothing.
The only downside is that you look like a monk.
Well...
You look like you've been closeted in a monastery for 20 years and you're having a deep...
No, no, no.
There's a huge amount of sexual tension between you and a younger monk.
But...
This is just the silhouetted light from this camera.
Actually, I look like a cool snowboarder dude out on the slopes catching some powder.
Yeah, like ripping some...
Some radical snow waves.
Alright, fair enough.
I'm out of touch.
I don't know what the kids are into, so I'll have to take your word for it.
Clearly.
Clearly.
Bodacious, Matt.
I'm using...
I don't think snowboarders say bodacious.
Maybe they do.
Maybe it's gone through the irony.
It's gone so far that it's come back as an ironic thing that people say now seriously.
It might have.
They're the surfers of the mountains, Matt.
The snowboarders.
So they use the same lingo.
Yeah, that's fair.
That's fair.
The culture's the same.
With that useful piece of information out of the way, have you got anything...
We try to be sunny in 2022.
Yes, we have to talk about anti-vaxxers and Joe Rogan endlessly.
But do you have anything good, Matt?
Any good news?
Anything to recommend that you've come across in the wild, interweb or otherwise?
I had a strange dream.
I had a dream that we were decoding...
My wife.
My wife was the content of the episode.
And you were like, "Okay, Ma, here's the thing that your wife said, and you're about to play something."
But the funny thing was, it got real meta real quick, because in the dream, literally in the dream, I thought, "That's not something Chris would say.
I'm not doing a good script for my own dream."
And I became critical of the dream.
I thought you were noticing how bad that your attempt to imitate me was.
He doesn't say ma, he says ma.
You tried a little bit harder just then, didn't you?
No, I did not.
That's how I always pronounce it.
And that's why the transcription software always gets it correct.
But yeah, that's interesting.
We need to get Jordan Peterson or some Freudian or Jungian psychologist on this post.
Start to interpret what this means.
It's an odd recommendation for you to recommend a type of dream.
I'm here for it.
I'm here for it.
I remember thinking, oh no, it's occurring with my wife.
I'm going to get into trouble.
This is not going to end well.
That would not end well.
Yeah, I'm not sure how you've...
Find out about my secret clips folder, but I'll just have to scrap that project.
It's been rumbled.
How did you get those clips?
No, I mean, the only nice thing that I came across today was the book that you held up to me before, the Kerserges Act, how the immune system works.
It's like a great book.
Yeah, this beautiful book, which nobody can see what I'm holding up for the camera.
I ordered Immune, a journey into the mysterious system that keeps you alive, which I intended...
To read with my young son, because he likes the Kurzgesagt.
I'm sorry, I haven't learned how to do it yet, but that thing.
It's a little video series on YouTube for anybody who's tuning in for the first time that gives, like, science explainers.
And it's beautiful, illustrated very nicely, but it's not a book for kids.
It's extremely dense.
And, like, it would take him five years to get through it.
So it's...
Now, I have a...
A nicely illustrated book about my immune system.
You just read it in your free time.
Yeah, I will.
That's right.
So it'll only take me 10 years to get there as well.
The other nice thing was that I saw the Dune movie yesterday, as you know.
Finally, like I'm really late to the party.
I know that everyone else has seen it, except for you.
You haven't seen it.
I haven't.
But I've read those books like three times.
I've read the whole series.
It lives in my head.
I know it word for word.
So really for me, it was just a visualization.
Of what was in my head, you know?
And look, I like the original David Lynch Dune.
It was, it was good too, but- Sting is in it.
Sting is in it.
Yeah.
And he's, he's good.
I liked it.
I liked it.
There are lots of nice little touches.
Like they made the big spaceships, the big navigator guild spaceships look like worms.
Just a bit, just a bit like worms.
My knowledge of Dune is I've never read it.
I've never seen any of the movies, but I have read Wikipedia summaries of the plot and I've looked up pictures of what the big worm emperor looks like.
That's the extent of my Dune knowledge.
I've probably taken all the enjoyment out of the series such that I know everything that will happen and I'm just fixated on the most, what seems on the face of it, as the most stupid.
Part of the story is the part that gripped me.
Like, he turned into a what?
That's in a later book.
That'll be in installment number seven.
But I think it's the makings of a great franchise.
It's a rich, rich world.
Yeah, that director, Denis Villeneuve.
His films look good.
And are good.
And are good.
And Paul Atreides, Timothy Chamelet, I think his name is?
Young man.
Young man.
And he plays that archetypal.
It's like, what's that Shakespeare play?
The famous one.
Macbeth?
The other one.
King Lear?
No, about the grumpy teenager.
He's an angsty teenager.
The Grapes of Wrath?
No, it's alright.
My brain's not working.
As you like it?
Yeah.
Everyone listening will be going absolutely mental because we're literally the only two people in the universe who don't know that.
You know I'm torturing you on purpose, right?
I don't know which one you know, but I know it's none of those.
That's my thing.
Well, I know that you know The Crapes of Raph.
It's not it.
But anyway, the point was is that Timothee Chameleon, he was in another good movie called The King, where, and I think it's a historical, I think it's based on raps like about King Henry and succession and stuff.
And, oh gee, it's good too.
And he plays exactly the same role.
Exactly the same role.
Sort of young guy, he's got to become the new big boss man.
King worm.
King worm.
But he's too skinny and doesn't have enough muscles.
He needs to eat enough food and become bigger worm-like guy.
I know how you're doing works, man.
Now you mentioned, you know what both those movies were missing?
They were missing the sort of...
Worms?
No, you know, in the boxing movies where they have the video montage of training and...
Oh, yeah.
Eye of the Tiger or something playing, it could have benefited from that.
I'm not an expert at these things.
You're not a director, but, you know, people might have fought it from...
The detail that you provided there with your reviews.
Surprisingly insightful review of the Dune movie and other films which that young guy has appeared in.
So, very on brand, very related.
So, you know, people complain because I don't talk very much or don't talk enough, but this is what happens when I talk more.
Yeah.
Where was that energy in the Sam Harris interview?
Well, I've seen Spider-Man.
I like that.
But I won't bore people with the details of my review.
I just like that, you know, multiverse stuff.
I've seen it with my son.
But I did have something that I wanted to mention because I know it upset you recently.
So you've been very pro Scott Adams recently and it...
Big fan.
Turns out that...
His pro-vaccine stance is getting him in trouble, so I don't know if you've seen it or not, but he was parodied by the Ben Garrison cartoonist, the right-wing reactionary cartoonist who paints these very subtle caricature images,
and Scott Adams featured in it.
I did see that.
I know, and then I saw Scott was giving some bad takes, so I just wanted to pass on my condolences because I know how much of a fan You are of him.
So just wanted to flag that up for people.
I don't know.
He was just having bad takes.
And given how much you've endorsed him lately, I thought this reflected badly on you.
So that's that.
And this week, Matt, we have a slightly different format.
We've had guest hosts before with David Pizarro for a special Weinstein World episode.
And we also had Aaron Rabinowitz, a philosopher of some description.
He's a moral philosopher.
He's from Rutgers, isn't he?
I think it's Rutgers, yes.
And he has a veritable bounty of podcasts which he hosts.
He hosts Embrace the Void, a philosophy-themed culture war kind of podcast that we have both appeared on.
And he hosts Philosophers in Space.
Which is a podcast about space movies and fantasy movies and philosophers talking about it.
No, and books.
And books, Chris.
Oh, and books.
Yes, that's right.
Science fiction and fantasy books and philosophers.
And I've been on it and you haven't because you don't read any of them.
That's right.
I'm trying to convince them to do an anime.
He said there's not enough philosophical depth to it.
Well, who's he to judge?
But yeah, so Aaron is joining us this week because we're going to look at James Lindsay and Michael O 'Fallon again, for fuck's sake, because we haven't looked at enough terrible people lately.
We have two previous episodes with them individually.
James Lindsay.
And Michael O 'Fallon.
So you might want to go back and look at them if you haven't.
The James Lindsay one was our second ever episode and the Michael O 'Fallon one, I don't remember, but a bit farther in.
And they kind of track the trajectory that James Lindsay has taken in his unrelenting pursuit of going as deep into the toilet as he can.
This episode was planned quite a while ago.
Various delays with recording and whatnot.
So the content is actually now about half a year old.
It actually still is before his most dramatic turn in the MAGA land where he is now.
But I think it's a good documenting of his Spiral.
And it's a crossover episode with O 'Fallon and Lindsay together.
Yeah, it's an interesting point in Lindsay's trajectory.
As you said, we meant to record this.
Some time ago, almost like a sequel to our previous one on Fallon, where Lindsay was there too, because the content we're covering is part of this Changing Tides series.
And it is interesting, because at the time, it was noticeable the degree to which James had taken this swerve towards Christian nationalism and the kinds of conspiracy theories that are associated with it.
And we revisit some of that content here.
But comparing that Lindsay then to Lindsay now, where he's straight up talking about the Great Replacement, the Great Reset, you know, he's quite frankly talking about cultural chauvinism and things like that.
Yeah, it's just an interesting point on his trajectory, but it is worth noting, this is from six months ago, and James is much worse now.
Or much more, much more upfront.
Yeah.
So let's get in there.
Take it away, Matt, Chris, and Aaron.
So we've already introduced our lovely guest to the listeners with a comprehensive explanation of his background and credentials and why he is.
So what remains to be done is to say, welcome, Aaron, and thank you for joining us.
The first, second guest on the podcast.
All right.
I appreciate that.
Thank you for having me back on.
I'm glad that we finally get to get together and have this conversation where you can acknowledge that pretty much all of your work and success is derivative of my work and that realistically, I deserve all the credit and arguably all the patronage that it seems like y 'all have accrued as a result of this.
But no, I'm glad to be here.
I'm glad to be back in your house of fun accents.
We've designated it for this episode.
You will be adopting the Ugandan accent.
And you can start whenever you're ready.
We'll just edit out that.
This is going to be a hate crime.
So we're here to talk about two gurus that we've covered in the past.
One with your assistance and the other with your inspiration, I think is fair to say.
So they are the wonderful duo of Michael O 'Fallon of Sovereign Nations fame.
And James Lindsay of internet batshit nonsense fame.
They've been collaborators for a good number of years now.
And we had originally planned our two standalone episodes where we would introduce both of the characters, then look at their crossover material that they were producing.
And there's a lost episode where we did that.
But Matt and I...
It's now lost in the sands of time.
So we're going to redo it.
But this means we're going back in time to James Lindsay as he existed.
When was this recorded?
Like a year ago, I think?
Yeah, at this point.
They've been continuing to release in this series and other similarly ridiculous conspiracy series on the Sovereign Nation's website.
So this is like an ongoing spiral.
But I do think you get to see a lot of really good, like...
You can very clearly see where this is going stuff in this content.
It is funny that like we recorded that episode and then Chris was like, hey, let's do a bet.
Let's put this on ice and wait a few months and see if every single prediction turns out to be absurdly like undershooting how bad it was going to get.
So now we're just here to most, I guess, to a victory lap or something.
I think we're doing James Lindsay a favor because this is him on his radicalization path, but not yet like full MAGA, full life.
Mask on still, power level fairly well hidden in certain parts.
So we might need to maybe even circle back and look at Lindsay like where he's ended up at some point.
But I mean, everybody who pays attention online knows that.
James Lindsay is pretty far gone, right?
Like he's not just focused on this anymore, his opposition to critical theories.
He is hardcore right-wing conspiracist.
We'll see it in this content, but I just want to flag up that this content is not representative of his current content, but the DNA is there.
So like the conspiracism that you're about to hear He's much more beyond this now.
So, that's all I'm saying.
If you want to know his current state, Google Michael O 'Fallon and James Lindsay at Mar-a-Lago with Mike Lindell, Pillow Man.
They were a bunch of pictures of them hanging out with a bunch of QAnoners at this point.
So, I think it's fair to say that he's, if not already actively interacting and being part of QAnon, then he's headed in that direction as well.
Yeah, and notably, he feuded relatively recently with the...
Holocaust memorial site.
It's kind of hard to imagine a more discrediting thing that somebody would choose to do, but I'm sure he'll top that tomorrow.
So this is like a snapshot back in a time when he was trying a little bit harder in his role as being some kind of intellectual, some kind of decoder of wokeism and leftism.
The philosophical roots of it.
Yeah, like a lot of the anti-woke folks will still use a lot of these arguments and pretend that they are divorced from this anti-globalist conspiracism that is clearly sort of stringing all of this.
There's a clip that I want to play for you both.
So I feel we have to do this because James Lindsay recently appeared on Dr. Phil, right?
He was invited as an expert on Critical Race Theory.
So this is current time period, James Lindsay.
Let me just play the clip.
It's a little bit long, but I feel that we would be doing our listeners a disservice if they haven't heard this.
Please welcome co-author of the book, Cynical Theories, James Lindsay.
James, thank you so much for being on.
Thanks, Dr. Phil.
Can you say this should be an artifact?
We should just put this behind us?
I do not believe the critical race theory tenant that says that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in our society and if we don't dredge up a race consciousness that we can't get over it.
I think this is actually a lie.
It's very annoying to me to listen to the back and forth here.
In fact, I'm glad to be here to bring some knowledge.
I take a lot of umbrage with the idea that we're going to talk about should we have critical race theories for that because it's talking about racism in history when the fact of the matter is it's not.
Are we?
It's how are we?
And I am shocked and appalled to hear the defensive side for critical race theory misrepresent it this way.
They don't explain, for example, why the first paper called Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education by Gloria Ladson Billings was published in 1995.
They don't explain why Richard Delgado's 2001 book explains on page 5, for example, that it rapidly spread from law to other disciplines, especially education.
They don't explain...
Also, in the exact same situation, the Gloria Ladson-Billings is one of the chief authors of an equity in Virginia that's bringing critical race theory into all of the state schools of Virginia right now.
You must breathe through your ears.
I have read the vast majority of the major works in critical race theory that were published since 1970 to the most recent things, including, for example, in 2017, we have Alison Bailey writing a paper for Hypatia, an education paper, and she says that there's a critical thinking tradition,
but what we're doing in critical pedagogy, which critical race theory is an integral, integrated part of.
It's from a different set of tradition called critical theory, which is neo-Marxism, which is interested in studying the relationships of power rather than epistemic adequacy.
You can look the paper up.
It's called Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Critical Race and Feminist Philosophy Classrooms.
That's not being caught in K-12 schools.
Sorry.
Okay.
Yeah.
First thing I want to note, The problem with Lindsay there is not that he's talking too fast.
He's saying things that are trivially true, but he thinks they're big gotchas for, like, silly reasons.
So, unfortunately, part of the CRT debate has been a confusion about what's being taught in schools.
And I think a lot of folks who defend critical race theory just didn't know that there is a branch of critical race theory, you know, critical pedagogy that is in Educational theory, at least, that this is a part of that tradition.
And so when they were saying things like, this isn't in schools, they genuinely believed that this isn't in schools.
And for the most part, they're right.
It's not being taught directly in schools, and it's probably not even influencing that much pedagogy.
If we're being really honest here, it's probably being taught in education departments.
And then for the most part, teachers are not being hugely supported in actually implementing it.
You probably aren't seeing a ton of this stuff actually trickling down to K-12 students.
The annoying part of Lindsey that we'll see throughout all of this is that rather than just disentangling that confusion and getting on with the argument, he wants to treat all of this like a massive conspiracy to queer your children and make them hate themselves because they're white and stuff.
Yeah.
Part of the thing for me is that...
He's doing so many things at once there, and it will come up in these interviews as well, without the manic energy that he demonstrated there.
But if you look at his face, he's so proud of himself to be citing page numbers and stuff.
And I can't help but think the people that he's supposed to hate, the people that he's supposed to oppose, are the kind of people who would try to talk to a normal person and would use tons of academic jargon.
Cite obscure theorists and page numbers and reference.
But he does that.
Constantly.
He says we have to stop people being critical theorists.
But on page 12 of the 97 journal that was published in Hypatia, you'll see that they reference.
And this goes back to Marcuse, who, of course, was influenced by the Marxists.
And it's like, what are you complaining about again?
The people...
I know that he's trying to say he became this, he views himself as a critical race theory Batman, right?
Like, I adopted the darkness to show you.
But I think, like many of those anti-heroes, he's been consumed by the very things that he hates.
Now, he seems to me an unhinged critical theorist who sees it as really important that everybody knows all these connections about who Bell Hook studied under.
Who she cited in the first page of her dissertation.
And he doesn't even know things that well, as we'll see.
But yeah, what about you, Matt?
Yeah, that's the same thing that jumped out at me.
First of all, that's right what Aaron said.
I mean, I don't know what gets taught or doesn't get taught in American schools.
I have no idea.
I could assume it's something like in Australia where certainly critical theory has some sort of influence in education teaching departments.
The idea that some article that was written in Hypatia in 1979 is all part of some orchestrated thing and it's not plausible.
My brother's a teacher and, you know, they don't care about that stuff.
They're just trying to deal with grumpy parents and get the marking done and get the kids to do their homework, you know?
Yeah, and you're totally right about his accuracy when he actually does cite these things as somebody who's read Ladston Billings and Marcuse and all these folks.
There are two categories of James' statements about critical race theory.
Things that are true and unobjectionable, but he says them in a way that he tries to make it sound objectionable anyway.
And then things that are just outright false.
But he knows that people aren't going to check him a lot of the time, or it's not going to matter.
And he can always just jump to the next claim or something like that, to the next version of neo-Hegelian Marxist whatever theory he wants to then claim is going on here.
But you're totally also just right about the larger point.
I come from a philosophy background, and all of my job is trying to make really complicated things sound simple enough to understand.
And that's a great job.
It's one of the best jobs in the world, and I love my job.
And he just does the exact opposite.
He takes these things where they are somewhat fairly comprehensible and just mystifies the fuck out of them.
Yeah.
So, these episodes that we're looking at, it's primarily the first two episodes in the...
What's the name of the series, Aaron?
It's called Changing Tides, which is...
Changing Tides.
Yeah.
They all have hilarious names.
The original series was the Trojan Horse, and they have one, I think, called, like, Encroaching Darkness and shit like that.
And the production values are hilariously pretentious.
The most recent time that I was watching back through these, I realized what was bugging me about the setting, because these ones are all set in these villa-looking places overlooking the water, and they're hanging out in the back patio area.
It's prosperity gospel.
That's what's going on in these videos.
Yeah, the setting to paint the picture to people is like, there's an earlier series with James O 'Fallon and Peter Vergrossian, and they're up in the...
Skyscrapers are outdoor in some building and they're discussing the horrors that are wokeness and critically experienced stuff.
And this one is James and O 'Fallon beside a beach.
They chose to focus at least the initial discussions around climate change, or sorry, climate justice, as we'll see.
And then they spin out from there into a fairly predictable claim that it's all about the Marxist conspiracy too.
Transform the world into a communist utopia through the UN.
And you know, all the standard things that you expect to happen.
The Great Reset is the topic of the second one.
Right.
And while we're talking design issues, it's important to note...
These videos are not put out in the right order.
Like, for all their production values, they choose a very silly, strange order where they start with what should be their conclusions, the stuff about climate justice and the critical reset, and then...
Talk about Hegel and like the Mott and Bailey fallacy.
And you just get the vibe of they used all their A material in the first two videos.
And then every subsequent video in the series, they're like scrounging for a subject, essentially.
They should have hired you as a consultant for this series.
This is the thing.
There is absolutely no one who's going to listen to those four things.
In the order that you subscribe.
But I just think you're optimistic if you think anyone else will listen to the originals.
I'm just an expert on James-eology.
I've just, you know, spent 16 hours a day on this material so people cannot listen and society can collapse.
And if that happens, that's fine.
I'm just here to Cassandra my way through this.
Matt, just wait till when Aaron is saying, on page 7 of Cynical Theories, if you look, you'll see the thing indoors.
I do have direct quotes from Warkusa in my notes, so screw you, Chris.
Let's get on to some of the clips to allow them to speak for themselves.
So this is a fairly standard guru trope, which I think is a nice introduction to how they see what they're up to in these videos.
And you and I spoke directly about critical race theory.
Right.
Um, I think we tried to warn people at that time.
Yeah.
Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
That reminds me of.
What is that, Matt?
You've never mentioned it before.
You don't gloat every time you get ahead with this.
So what is it, Matt?
This is my favorite one, because this is the one that I stuck in there.
You know, it was pretty well developed.
We had like eight dimensions.
I went, this one has to go in.
We have to have this one.
And you forced us to get the ten by adding the ninth one.
That could have been it.
Yeah, we just went around now.
But yeah, the Cassandra Complex.
The warning of this impending doom.
This terrible crisis that's about to happen or is unfolding that no one's listening to them.
So, good clip.
Ping on the grometer.
And I love that y 'all emphasize that sort of hipsterism element of it.
There's always this vibe of I was into this anti-globalist conspiracy before it was cool kind of thing.
And, you know, I'll be fair to their credit.
Lindsay is, in my opinion, the progenitor of the Critical Race Theory Moral Panic more than Chris Rufo.
And for our suitably non-online listeners, Chris Rufo is a kind of conservative activist who worked for the Discovery Institute of Intelligent Design fame.
Also made some documentaries, but has kind of rode into prominence by primarily opposition to Critical Race Theory and highlighting PowerPoint presentations that he doesn't like.
Usually there are valid things to criticize in the material that he highlights, but the question is how far that actually has any influence or is it just a random presentation from a, you know, some training thing?
Rufo popularizes it.
Rufo has better connections in terms of the political arm of all of it, getting it into the White House, getting on Fox News and stuff.
Partly I think because...
Rufo's a better messenger than what we just heard from Lindsay there, obviously.
Which, very, very low bar, I understand.
But if you look at the timeline, Rufo does probably come to it somewhat separately, but I think you immediately see the two of them joining forces on this issue.
And also, it's worth noting, because one of the questions as we watch O 'Fallon and Lindsay do this dance is, who's really controlling who here?
And in my opinion, Lindsay is absolutely being played, and O 'Fallon is getting everything that he wants, in a sense.
And I mentioned this in relation to Rufo because the reality, in my opinion, is that Rufo doesn't care about what's being taught in public schools.
What he cares about is siphoning off as much resources to private charter schools and religious schools as possible.
Yeah, it was fun to jump this a bit later, but I think maybe it's a good point to cover at the start.
We talked about it before, like Emperor and Darth Vader, or if you prefer, Krang and...
Baxter.
So the influence, like you say, of O 'Fallon as the subtle puppet master, because we made this point back in the episode that we covered with James and discussed with O 'Fallon as well.
O 'Fallon's worldview hasn't changed.
James's has.
He went from pro-science, atheist, secularism is good, and pro-internationalism, I guess, that kind of standard.
Neoliberal guy to his modern incarnation of MAGA, nationalist, isolationist, anti-science in many ways when it comes to COVID and all that kind of stuff.
And I think a lot of this comes from O 'Fallon.
And there's two clips I have where you can see O 'Fallon.
He just needs to pull the strings a little bit and James dances merrily to his tune.
So here's the first one.
See if you can notice what I did.
And I think...
Most of the unit to immigration and climate justice.
And then these things are always referred to as global challenges that need global solutions.
Right.
And I would make this point, too, is that whenever we're talking about things about social justice, climate justice, critical race theory, any of these things, is there's always a accompanied aspect of anti-nationism.
Yeah, everybody has to get on the same page.
It's all going to be supernatural.
All the countries have to participate together because it's a global problem.
Meanwhile, the Western nations, because they've created more of the problem, they've benefited more of the problem, and they have the greatest means, which I actually agree with that part.
Of course you do, because it makes sense.
It is a shared responsibility and some of the burden is greater for others.
No, Aaron, I think you got that slightly wrong.
And I understand why, because worry puts it in.
What James is agreeing with, he's agreeing with that the West has the greatest means to resolve this.
So I thought that as well.
I was like, oh, he's saying, you know, we need to be fair.
But no, he's not.
He's saying he agrees that the West has the greatest minds and the greatest kind of scientific know-how.
So don't give him that credit.
That's not what he was saying.
But Matt, did you pick up the little influence of O 'Fallon worldview coming in there?
Yeah, it's palpable, isn't it?
Like, O 'Fallon, he's clearly really big in his training, James, on the anti-globalist agenda.
These supranational organizations that are taking sovereignty away from nation states and stuff like...
That real bugbear of the sort of xenophobic Christian right.
And to be fair to James, that wasn't originally on his bingo card, right?
But he's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I can see how that's...
I can fit that into my anti-woke thing.
Yeah.
I mean, back at the beginning when I was first warning about this horrible catastrophe that we're all now going to suffer from...
I pointed out in the Trojan Horse videos that this very much feels like conspiracy laundering.
New discourses, everything that Lindsay's doing to me is in many ways just a front for these kinds of conspiracies, but it gives this allure, this impression of...
Not coming from your, you know, like if it's just Michael O 'Fallon saying it, nobody cares because of course this right-wing conservative Christian believes it, but James Lindsay, right?
He was this formerly liberal or something, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they do it a couple of times in these videos where they'll cite new discourses and they won't point out that Michael O 'Fallon paid for and built new discourses for James Lindsay and has been Well,
there's another example that comes towards the end of the climate justice episode, and I think it kind of supplements.
So we've got O 'Fallon focusing on, you know, that's anti-nationalism, right, isn't it?
And it's really globalist, right?
The globalists are the true enemy.
And here's another Enemy that gets introduced and James picks it up and runs with it.
The way the system changes is achieved is by just putting these people in power.
Don't worry, they'll have a new system for you.
Don't ask too many questions because that would be racist.
Put us in power.
Rule by the technocrats as opposed to a democratic solution where we say, someone makes the case to us and says, look, these are real problems.
This is a real issue.
And it's been tested, and we've had our arguments, we've had our open debates about this.
What are we going to do?
That's what it's going to go to, too, is rule by technocrats.
What's the difference between, what is a technocrat?
Rule by experts.
And I put experts in quotes for a reason.
Because, like, with COVID, right, Tony Fauci is the expert.
But you listen to the guy who invented the, what's it called, the PCR test before he died.
He had this whole spiel he did about Fauci, about how he's more of a bureaucrat.
He's playing the game, the public figure game.
I'm not saying he doesn't have scientific credentials, but he's no Francis Collins.
He's not a huge, successful scientist expert.
And the way that his narrative shifts in the wind and all of this stuff, he's more of a politician.
So we got some of the COVID in there.
When James started with the Circle Squared thing with Pluckrose and Bogossian, it was much more specific, wasn't it?
They had a problem with this brand of academic scholarship and they had quite specific criticisms they wanted to make with that.
And that broadened out.
To this more general anti-woke sort of thing.
But then the anti-woke thing itself has broadened out, so other things are included in that too.
So it's climate change, that's included.
COVID, Fauci.
Climate justice.
Let's be clear, climate justice.
Climate justice.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're playing with us.
You're playing with us, Aaron.
Nobody ever takes me seriously.
I hope that's clear, right?
Sorry.
And experts.
Experts generally, these technocratic experts, they're the problem.
So, you know, it's hard to disagree with Aaron.
These are just functioning now as like a front for basically this reactionary populist worldview.
It's the same attitude that when Brexit was happening and the right-wing conservative populist politicians were saying, we've had enough of the experts.
And that's been a consistent theme on the right for decades.
We don't trust these scientists and experts, climate change.
And James is kind of like in this liminal state here, because now he's basically a climate change sceptic.
He's very much in the mold of Jordan Peterson, of constantly casting doubt that the crisis is as bad as people say.
A soft sceptic or something like that, right?
He would deny that he's a hard sceptic, but yes.
But then here in this lecture...
He wants to argue that his target is the climate justice people, who he will see in some of the other clips.
He wants to say, these are not real scientists.
These aren't the ones doing the ice core drilling.
They're not the people taking the measurements.
They're not at the IPCC making the reports or that kind of thing.
But then this bit at the end is like him saying, well, but those guys, you can't trust them either because they're all like the UN, the WHO.
It's all run by politicians.
They're all like technocrats.
So who are these, the trusted experts?
It turns out to be just whoever the MAGA chuds happen to have glommed onto that will say climate change isn't the problem.
It would be Robert Malone and Peter McCulloch, who I've seen him share content of online.
This is the way they resolve it.
I mean, there's Scott Adams who said that he trusts science, but he doesn't trust scientists, right?
And so, for someone like Lindsay, or most of the people we cover, they'll never go as far to say that they're anti-science.
Like, you can't be anti-science these days.
That's a losing proposition.
But they square that circle, don't they, by making out that all of the scientific institutions are hopelessly corrupted.
And I didn't catch, when I was first watching through these videos, that Fauci reference.
I feel like he wasn't quite as much of a central villain at this point.
So I do think they were a little bit on the cutting edge of demonizing Fauci as well.
This, Aaron, was right when Fauci was disagreeing with Trump.
Right.
So it was like starting to become a thing.
And I feel like they jumped on that right at the moment that it was happening, essentially.
And it just, it didn't register to me.
What I think is even funnier here is that in this same video when they are decrying technocrats, their solution to climate change is the most technocratic bullshit you've ever possibly heard.
It's 100% technology is going to save us from this problem and America is going to invent that technology because we're the best.
around and nothing's ever going to keep us down.
And they flip and flop back and forth on that.
And I'm sure that like, they would parse that in some way by like saying, you know, they're for the science and the technology, but they're not for something, something, the people applying it in the wrong ways or something like that.
It's not a coherent argument.
I think part of the reason it's not coherent is because O 'Fallon is doing that subliminal slipping in of the real problem is actually the globalists.
James was saying there was like, he's not a respected scientist like Francis Collins, for example.
You know, Francis Collins was saying the things Fauci was, we'd have to take that serious.
I just had a quick Google.
Of course, James Lindsay has tweeted out about Francis Collins, because Francis Collins has said COVID is a problem, get vaccinated.
So now he has, like, links, six scandals the media won't tell you about Francis Collins.
And, you know, Francis Collins.
Shocked, I say.
Inventing lies and all this stuff.
So that's it, right?
They don't respect science.
The credentials only matter until the people fall foul of that they are seen as disagreeing with Trump or they're saying something, you know, that isn't right.
And then suddenly they're a problematic scientist, right?
That was some real good level fact checking there, Chris.
I'm impressed.
You don't hear me.
But look, I've got another clip for you, which...
Shows how all these topics tie in together.
So this is still about technocrats, but it's going to move on a bit to some of his other hobby horses.
What you end up with is actually rule by people.
Every scientist who ends up getting power fails usually to realize how corruptive power becomes and staying in that spotlight and having that power and influence.
And that's the thing that technocracy runs on.
Technocracy runs on corrupted scientists, or corrupted experts, not actual experts.
Ones who could grift their way in.
Ones who, you make a more griftable system like this justice nonsense.
Oh, well, we have to bring in an equity expert who has an MBA, but no technical degrees.
The ethnomathematics, the main researcher in the ethnomathematics, Rochelle Gutierrez, she has no degrees in mathematics, but she's going to redesign mathematics from the ground up.
If you turned and squinted, the argument he's making there is like a climate justice argument, right?
It's like all of this advancement and stuff that we've done, thankfully because of science, wasn't connected to ethics.
And so we have climate change, we have this externalizing of harms onto marginalized groups because when scientists get in power, whatever the hell that means, right, that technology becomes co-opted for capitalist purposes.
But he hates that when it's coming from his opponents, and he hates the fact that his opponents are the people who've been brought in to try to address these problems.
He thinks it's a huge gotcha to say that climate justice experts aren't scientists.
Of course they're not, James.
They're philosophers.
They're people whose job it is not to do the science, but to do the ethical theorizing around the science that is not necessarily the scientist's actual job.
But for some reason, he thinks that The scientists can simultaneously do the ethics, do the science, and do the government, but also he hates it whenever anyone actually does that.
So it's just never ever clear what he actually wants at the end of the day.
No.
And one issue for me is just that his critiques, they just range between targets, right?
And then there he mentions Rochelle Gutierrez.
Gutierrez, yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
He mentions her.
And she is this figure who is, you know, there's these topics which are just always so popular on this.
And this is somebody who, you know, has made some statements about mathematics being Western chauvinism or whatever.
And we need to introduce other ways.
It's kind of another ways of knowing argument.
But this is not the head of the White House issuing the curriculum for all the schools in America.
This is like...
A person with an opinion who makes some arguments in some school district or something, but for James and stuff and Fox News, even though she probably longs to have the influence that they imagine that people like her have,
when in actual fact, like what they're going to be achieving in a lot of cases, and I'm sorry, Aaron, as a supporter of activists, I know this will be hard for you to accept, but is having conferences Presentations where they talk about these ideas of what they want to do and maybe they'll get some guidelines issued and have a class dedicated to something or some official thing which says we should respect or be aware of other alternative frameworks
and stuff.
That's it.
It isn't that you're no longer going to be taught multiplication or times tables or these kind of things.
I think the two ends here play off.
Against each other in an interesting way.
Because anyone like you guys would have experience in working in an academic bureaucracy, and I know it's exactly the same in government, is that the sort of highfalutin policies and ideas have this really big, strong language attuned to it,
right?
And certainly, you know, activists or academic types, they'll do their presentation, all these bullet points, and they'll be phrased in terms of, we need to totally restructure this and to deconstruct that.
Overhaul everything like this and make everything in line with whatever.
And then the reality is, it's more like what Chris said, right?
And kind of everyone knows that that's how it's going to work.
But that definitely plays into the kind of fear-mongering that Fallon and Lindsay are doing here because they find some material like that and then they present that as this is the gospel, these are the ironclad rules for everything.
You know who's really, really good at leveling devastating critiques at how performative wokeness gets watered down into, like, nothing actually happening?
The fucking Marxists.
Like, my boys the Marxists are really good at showing up and commenting on how this stuff doesn't actually bring about substantive change.
I think I've seen some of those, yeah.
This is the fucking, I mean...
You know, maybe we should be careful about the way that we phrase this, about people parasiting on other people's content.
But in any case, the James Lindsay's podcast has this thing, right?
I occasionally listen to them, subscribe to his feed, and sometimes I'm just like, do I want to feel pain today?
How much do I deserve?
My Catholic guilt, you know?
There's a two-hour thing with James talking about groomer schools.
It's a three-part series.
Well, I said that the handshake between the pedophiles and the communists is basically the same.
All the pedophiles, so-called minor attracted to P as for pedophiles, not person, but pedophile.
All of these people that they're trying to now normalize, very fast-track normalizing of the pedophiles under the umbrella of queer theory, they have a handshake agreement.
With the communists, you destabilize the children, create sexual abuse, whatever it is.
You help us win, you can have your pick of the kids.
And that's basically what we're seeing here.
Pretty important to realize how gross this is, but I think you're going to come away realizing just how deep and dangerous and insidious this is and how desperately important it then therefore is to get all of this garbage with critical race theory and queer theory out of the schools.
Yeah.
Too much, too much.
So I listened to this one and it was, it was right.
That's what it was.
I'm not, I'm not making this up.
It was James reading the introduction to an edited volume about.
Critical education theory, right?
So an edited academic volume about critical education theory.
I don't know the terminology, but...
So we read the introduction, and in that introduction, the scholars were pointing out that there's a problem that basically all that critical education theory has mostly produced is...
Academic articles and conferences on critical education.
They were saying, you know, we are supposed to be about revolutionary action, but we mainly just seem content to talk to other academics and produce conferences.
And the guy was complaining about it, right?
And James was like, look at this.
They're pointing out their real goal is societal revolution.
And I was like, yeah, but they're also pointing out that it doesn't happen.
It doesn't work.
That they haven't achieved it.
And the thing was, I was listening to him thinking, he thinks it's a gotcha that he's pointing out, look, they're peeling back the curtain, but they're openly stating that in the introduction.
And I'm just like, it's not hard to see.
And lots and lots of people, including lots of people that James hangs around with, have activist goals, political activist goals, or cultural goals.
And he's fine with it, as long as it's activism in the variety that he wants.
We'll get all his complaints about the woke left and these people, they're intolerant.
But he's the same, right?
He doesn't want these people to be able to advocate for the things that they want.
I don't see how you could do it at the same time and not see the contradictions.
He's quickly straight into, like, the Alex Jones territory of if you take this genuinely seriously, what you're saying, and he does at some point call for, like, the imprisonment of people who disagree with him, not just the firing, like, not just the deplatforming of these texts.
And, like, to his credit, that is what you should believe if you believe that people are grooming your children to be, like, trans, queer, self-hating white people or something like that.
This is why I said, one of the reasons that I said, there are more reasons that I said that I...
Fully understand why Alex Jones gets so pissed off because when you start thinking about what this really is and what's really going on, I'm sorry about what this episode is going to do to people.
It's going to make you so fucking mad when it connects with you, what's actually happening, why it's happening, and that it's intentional.
And this is why our schools have to be absolutely purged.
What can you do?
You must form a parents' coalition.
You must set aside all your differences as parents and fight for your children.
They're grooming your children and sexually abusing them.
Psychologically abusing them so they can sexually abuse them.
So that they can destabilize them, so that they can have a Red Guard, so that they can have a cultural revolution, so they can achieve whatever program they have as some other kind of revolution because it's a Marxist theory.
We're going to get to how this is all really just masterminded by queer black feminists.
But B, I have to take this on a slight detour.
It's a play in about 20 parts.
But I really have to document this because I hear about this So much.
So much.
And if you listen to any of Lindsay's content, any talk from like five years ago or, well, yeah, about five years ago up to the present day, his next talk, I'd put money that this topic will come up.
So let's see if you've heard about this before.
So it's the way to think the experience of the world and tell a story about it.
But there's no reason to privilege the story of science, of glaciology, of climatology, of meteorology.
Of atmospheric chemistry, there's no reason to privilege those stories, or of carbon chemistry in general, no reason to privilege those stories over the indigenous relationship to a glacier.
Right, where you got started down this path.
Yes, or feminist art projects about glaciers, literally art projects, or interpretive dance, or, you know, narratives about how you feel about the changing climate and how awful it might be and how you feel like you're...
You're responsible for taking part in or complicit in some horrible evil.
It's anti-science because it sees all approaches to knowledge, postmodernism in general, so also postmodern climate justice, sees all approaches to knowledge as being kind of on a level.
Have you heard?
I teach climate justice.
I teach an environmental ethics course, and I have a book right here next to me with its climate justice section in it and stuff like that.
Nowhere in there does it say all knowledge is of a part, right?
All forms or sources of knowledge are equally valid or something like that.
There are really interesting conversations about alternative ways of knowing, and I am, despite being woke, on probably the more skeptical end of some of the language about.
Alternative ways of knowing.
But he's just not even describing climate justice, right?
He thinks because climate justice is based in ecofeminism in some ways that it's necessarily this glaciology paper where the majority of climate justice stuff is like, hey, we sort of noticed that like...
All of the benefits of industrialization, not all of them, like, large amounts of the benefits of industrialization have accrued to, like, one specific group of people and, like, a bunch of the costs have accrued to another specific group of people.
Maybe we should take that issue seriously.
And it's also, I think, interesting because James hasn't fully developed his critical justice schtick in this video yet.
He will later go on to highlight, basically to make the kind of white genocide arguments that climate justice is The
main thing for me is, like, This feminist theosiology paper, it has a lot the answer for.
It's gotten a lot of citations if you count all of the times it's been referenced by the anti-woke.
It has.
I read that paper back and people have talked about it.
I've read it twice now.
It's unbelievable.
You sound so bad about it.
You sound Joe Rogan mad about it.
No, the thing is, I'm not mad with the paper for existing because it's...
It would just be an obscure paper.
It's as if he imagines.
The way that they talk about it, you would think that the whole field about climate science is overtaken by these papers about feminist glaciology.
And that's what the whole field is about.
It's an obscure paper.
I don't agree with it.
I think there's some stupid stuff in it.
But I also think, yeah, there's some bits that are okay about it.
But I don't need to devote any time.
They're thinking about all of the random papers that are published each week in various subfields, making various arguments.
Like, who gives a flying F, right?
Like, the glaciologists, they can talk about it, but I don't hear any glaciologists discussing this.
I only hear the anti-Wolf Lindsayites endlessly cite this paper, but can't they?
If it's so common.
Why aren't there more papers that they reference than this one?
Right.
And this is, I think, in this section, you get a clear example of how that kind of glaciology quoting thing is part of the classic conservative approach to just, like, hand-waving at a bunch of scary stuff.
So maybe you have the quote where he basically says, being vibrantly queer in public is postmodernism, and I think it's absolutely one of the funniest things in this whole video.
It's coming right now and you might be surprised to hear the feminist glaciology is attached to that.
This is straight out of the same playbook.
It's the same playbook because it's the same model and that model is a combination of postmodern elements and critical theory elements.
It's the same model that you said that I got started in all this.
That was from the feminist glaciology paper.
Same model that was in a much more academic sense behind that ridiculous And so, yeah, the relationships between Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, not all of gay pride,
but the queer, the vibrantly queer, and meaning queer theory, activism within it, that all has the same set of playbooks.
Those guys that you saw with Black Lives Matter, in fact, and the police would come out and some guy would go out in rainbow shorts and...
Mm-hmm.
That's the exact same thing.
It's the same introduction of performance art.
It's all the same thing.
It's all just the same.
And, you know, if you ask him, what do you mean it's all the same?
He's going to say it's all based in Marcuse, which is all based in Hegel.
And the same, what he means is this is all just about deconstructing society.
Their big argument, if you actually try to listen to that Hegel episode, is what the left is trying to do is take every I think it's also important to note,
I'm pretty confident that queer theory is going to be the next stop on the moral panic train.
So separating the young generation from everything before it to create a completely kind of societal blank slate that's going to have a new ideology becomes the objective of this Maoist or sorry, communist really, but Maoist sure move.
And this is one of the reasons that they're bringing the queer theory and the gender theory, etc.
into the schools and the sex stuff so vigorously.
The goal is to make it so children are depressed and anxious, etc.
But we'll get to that.
But also, it's to give them identity categories, sexual identity categories that alienate them from their parents.
Again, a reminder, this is what they're doing to your children.
This is what they're doing to your children in government schools that you pay for with your tax dollars in violation of your trust that you get to put in a state institution that has no business doing any of this.
And it's a 100 year long Marxist program to destabilize the parent-child relationship in the child's own sense of identity.
I think that it's the only thing besides critical race theory that can genuinely frighten white conservatives as much.
And I think the fact that he's pivoted towards calling everybody in the world a groomer is indicative of this new strategy.
You don't see how horrible it is.
This is what they are doing to your children in government schools under brand names like social emotional learning.
Get that out of schools.
Put people in prison who bring this crap in.
This is unbelievable child abuse.
Unbelievable grooming.
We even see the invitation to pedophiles right there.
We're going to complicate the difference between adults and children.
Yeah, why?
So that...
Gross grooming adults can have sex with children, to sexualize them, to bring them into a queer identity that they didn't know was latent by abusing them sexually.
It's freaking unbelievable that we've allowed this to take place because we're not willing to do the work to understand what these freaks are writing in their complicated critical theory language.
That this is really just a broad spectrum attack on any non-traditional, non-conservative thing is that shift towards grooming and also sex education in schools.
A more recent thing, which that's not a, like, sex education in schools is not a woke thing.
Sorry, you didn't get to own that one, Aaron.
In America, it's absolutely a woke thing.
Is it really?
When I was a kid, we had drug education, that kind of thing.
As you say, they point to all these disconnected things, say that they're all the same thing, they're all working from the same playbook.
It's all part of this strategy, and this strategy has its roots in this article that McCuse wrote and Hegel.
What are you going to do with that?
How do you criticize that?
He doesn't demonstrate that any of that stuff is true at all.
I'm also going to say that for the listeners, not for us now, because I don't have it queued up, I'm just going to show, Aaron, you said how this all ties in and where it goes.
So James didn't have the queer part entirely worked out, but where it eventually goes is that the critical theorists are teaming up with the pedophiles.
Yep, yep, yep.
Via queer theory in schools.
And they're kind of sacrificing, they're going to give the children to the pedophiles.
The Marxist pedophiles.
It's very important you understand that they're Marxist pedophiles.
No, no, because he actually, he's got another thing where eventually the critical fears are going to kill the pedophiles afterwards when they're done with them, when they get the revolution.
I haven't gotten to that part yet.
And if this kind of programming in the schools continues, it will accelerate because that's the purpose of this grooming in schools.
It's not just to have the handshake deal with the pedophiles.
Pedophiles are just a useful tool to the communists.
You have to understand that.
They're getting used too.
And on the other side, they'll probably get shot.
Just like the criminals they let out of jail, so they'll go disrupt cities and communities and make everything unstable and make people wish for a police state that'll settle the crime problems and cause problems for all these people, accelerate the contradictions just like Lenin.
Okay, so that was that clip.
You guys can't respond because you didn't hear it, but trust me.
The magic of podcasting.
But what I'm going to play for you, Dai, is just another example, really.
And it's, again, I don't mean to be harping on the same topic, but if I have to hear it endlessly, so will you.
It's same, same, same, same, same.
Right.
Whether it's about wealth, therefore communism, whether it's about this, whatever it is with racial justice, ethno communism, really reparations of some kind, whether it's with, uh, one country versus another.
So therefore like immigration or national, uh, right national origin or status, uh, justice, whether it's across gender.
And I mean, we saw the other video that we talked about the feminist glaciology.
We watched the feminist.
Glacier TED Talk video as well.
And in that video, she also points out, you know, oh, well, the women, you know, women most affected.
So the gender aspect is baked in.
Same, same, same, same.
Same, same.
He's listening to TED Talks about feminist physiology.
Jesus, man.
It's not healthy.
He must be the biggest fan of this scholar, whoever it is.
Note that paper.
They should go out for lunch one time and just...
Geek out over all her material because it's such mileage.
But there you had the whole thing.
You saw all the things being linked in, right?
Immigration, ethnocommunism, racial justice is really about communism and gender.
It's just a grab bag, right?
Yeah, and I just want to note, he cites that glaciology paper, what, 10 or 20 times in this video.
He also...
He doesn't cite anything that's actual climate justice stuff.
He, like, references some books or something, but he doesn't say what they were.
And they don't put it in the show notes.
People get this illusion that he knows what he's talking about and he's citing things, but I don't even know what he's referencing half the time.
And when pushed on it, he will fall back every time on this glaciology bullshit.
Oh, Aaron, that's not fair.
I mean, he wanted to talk about...
Who's running things at the UN and Greta Thunberg.
He wouldn't bring up feminist physiology.
I know it's a bit tangential to the heist thing in the global, but being run by people who aren't qualified to do it.
Correct.
It is a way to, it's also a grift.
It is a way to empower people to talk about an issue like climate change with global significance, to put them on gigantic stages with massive levers of power who have No business talking about this because they think, for example, coming out of the feminist glaciology paper,
they think, for example, this is a real example in the paper.
They talk about, oh, you know, you have the satellite photos of glaciers and you see the retreat in advance of the glaciers over time during the seasons and everything else.
And are they getting bigger?
Are they getting smaller?
You have actual satellite data and they say, glaciologists study this.
Well, there's a feminist who's a painter and she paints pictures that look like that.
And they don't include the pictures that she paints.
Along with the satellite data.
That's in the feminist glaciology paper.
That person doesn't get a seat at the table.
Fine.
I don't think anybody's arguing about that, honestly, for the most part.
It's all fun and games, except they genuinely believe that all people who disagree with them do so because they have bought into this anti-scientific approach.
the point where they blame the fact that Congo can't successfully help with climate change on them having Congolese in epistemology.
Do you have that quote?
Do you want to throw that one out there?
This is amongst the most hilarious things to hear from somebody who's spent a year and a half hating on post-colonialism.
Like, read a single fucking book, James.
The Western nations, because they've created more of the problem, they've benefited more of the problem, and they have the greatest means, which I actually agree with that part, should bear.
The brunt of solving the problem.
Okay.
And I don't, I have to be more nuanced about that.
Because this is, on the one hand, people who can, like, if we have to take expensive action to do something about something like the climate, if we have to, it's obvious that the centers of innovation and technology and the richest nations are going to be the ones that are going to be able to run,
say, a climate Manhattan project that develops the technology that might save the world.
I mean, it's, it's, I don't mean to put any country down, but you don't really expect that Congo is going to come up with the advanced carbon technology that stops the problem, right?
But what through their knowledges though?
Well, I mean, that's it.
Yeah.
So you just have to say that their knowledges are not correct.
I am.
So this is what I mean, right?
If you were going to come up with a list of the top five places in the world that have been fucked over by white colonialism, Congo would be a strong contender for that list, right?
Read something like Leopold's Ghost and just be absolutely horrified.
But in these guys' worldview, the reason that America is where it is versus the Congo is that the Congolese didn't adopt the right kinds of epistemology or something, and so they don't have science.
And it's not...
Decades of exploitation and colonial oppression and things that are driving this behavior.
And it's just like, at the end of the day, it's just racist bullshit.
I don't think we have to pretend that this is a serious argument and not them just doing white exceptionalism or white supremacy without actually saying those exact words.
Yeah, I think James is an interesting spot because he's open to the idea, at least, that something might have to be done about climate change.
And I think that's where O 'Fallon...
I don't think our family is involved with that at all.
I think they shift the topic back to a more comfortable place as quickly as possible.
It is funny listening to James try to say in there, you know, maybe something needs to happen without actually saying it, right?
You can hear him trying to waffle as he's trying to give credit and then just immediately backs away from doing so.
Yeah, the point you made down about the kind of casual...
Racism about the Congo have their knowledges as if their approach is going to be banging drums to try and stop climate change rather than the developing nations do have a seat at the table and they do have an important part to play in all of the stuff about climate change,
right?
Because it's a global thing.
But for James's worldview, and this is partly why he's so comfortable with O 'Fallon.
They disparage technocrats, but what they want, you know, their worldview is very techno-utopian, right?
It's like that the solution to all of these things will be great men like Elon Musk, this kind of figure, who will invent a way out of it.
And so we don't need to be concerned about things like carbon taxes or about restrictions on the output of greenhouse gases and that kind of thing.
Because that just slows down progress.
So any discussion of that is not a part of the solution.
And the answer is these great men of history who, as it will just happen, like Charles Murray will tell you, they're just unevenly distributed amongst white people and white societies.
So it isn't the overt...
I mean, it's not exactly very covert either, but it's 100% Western chauvinism.
This view of science, which is just, it's really tied in with Western exceptionalism.
So, yeah.
I don't think you have to be woke to get that.
And let me give an example of an alternative ways of knowing climate justice argument that, ironically, these guys would actually like if they took 10 seconds and listened to it, right?
So, big issue in climate justice is the tragedy of the commons problem.
There's a classic paper by an overt white supremacist, a guy named...
Hardin, where he basically, you know, lays out the tragedy of the commons, popularizes it for modern audiences.
For those who are not familiar, it's the, like, you know, you have a field and everybody overgrazes it and so the, like, the commons collapses and then nobody can have livestock anymore or something, right?
It's a classic example of collective action problems where if everybody acts rationally, the system collapses.
A decent model for discussing climate change, in my opinion.
There's a lot of debates about it.
Hardin concludes we should stop feeding countries that can't feed themselves and stuff.
He comes to very conservative, libertarian, eugenics-y kinds of solutions.
In response, you have writing by folks like Ostrom who...
Argue that solutions to the tragedy of the commons might be better found amongst communities that have coexisted for long periods of time with these resources.
So when they talk about alternative ways of knowing, what they often mean is, let's get away from technocratic solutions and look at the way that these communities have comfortably coexisted for long periods of time.
Can we learn something from that?
And what their solutions are often, let's take power away from the globalists and hand it back to the fucking communities.
So they're arguing for exactly what O'Fallon and Lindsay are arguing for, but they just don't know that because they don't actually read anything.
And not only that, Aaron, but the problem there is that they're arguing that targeting Norm Western.
Right, right.
I'm serious about the Western chauvinism, right?
That clip that we played, right, where they start talking about the Climate Manhattan Project.
This is where this leads after that.
So you just have to say that their knowledges are not correct.
I am.
So I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess that it's going to be a major Western democracy that's going to come up with these technologies and that's going to end up funding them.
And that's fine, but that's a means to pay, right?
We have that capability.
We see that there's action needed.
It's another thing entirely to take that argument and leverage it into a redistribution scheme and say, oh, well, the West owes the rest of the world money.
The West owes the rest of the world open borders so that people can now be refugees from their poor country or their climate-changing country, which is going to be a really vague...
It's one thing if you're accepting refugees from a war.
It's pretty clear when...
I mean, it's not perfectly clear, but it's fairly clear when...
You know, those criteria are going to be met.
The annoying thing about that is that it ignores the fact that it was Western countries that put the carbon into the atmosphere over the last 300 years or so and benefited greatly from it in terms of industrialization and so on.
All modern economies are based on that and countries that industrialize growth have gone through that period until we invent fusion power or something like that.
That's an unfortunate.
Okay, so the argument for climate justice is not some redistributive thing where people just give stuff away to other people who don't deserve it.
It's simply that you're causing a problem for everybody.
You've become very rich as a result of causing that problem.
You've got the means to pay for it, and also you caused it.
It's a pretty rock-solid argument.
It doesn't require any complicated...
Excuse me, Aaron, philosophical reasoning.
Am I right or am I?
I mean, the thing that annoys me too is that, like, I'm older than you guys, and global warming was a big deal when I was a very young man.
It was a very big deal, way before anyone had heard of wokeness.
We'd heard of social justice or whatever, right?
And straight-up scientists, straight-up scientific authorities were signing memorandums.
Waving the evidence under people's noses and the riot in Australia and elsewhere just led the charge in just flat out ignoring what was right in front of their face.
And the fact that it's still going on now in this new, it's got this new framing, it's annoying because it's been going on for my entire life.
So there is one thing I'd want to say though, is that James does know that argument.
This is a part of him summarizing at the start of this episode, that kind of point.
They say that certain countries in the world have polluted a great deal through the industrialization process and being in that advanced economy stage like the United States would be.
We have cars, we have jets, we produce lots of energy, often using fossil fuels to heat our homes, etc.
And to provide electricity.
And they would say, well, these rich countries have enriched themselves and given themselves a lot of power and a lot of resources and a lot of wealth, whereas poorer countries have not had access to that and simultaneously have not polluted as much.
But climate change affects everybody.
So, for example, you may have, if the climate's changing, you may have low-lying islands in the Pacific that will go underwater if the ice caps melt.
You may have beaches.
You know, or river deltas or whatever that'll be destroyed as their ocean changes or whatever else, or as weather patterns change, you may have something like the Horn of Africa become very much desert, uh, instead of being able to support crops and populations.
And their argument would be, well, those people didn't make the pollution that's causing the problem.
Well done, James.
Good on you.
He then goes on to say, but the American South is also going to get hit bad, so this whole argument is fake or something like that.
I just wanted to give a shout out, just real quick, to my friend Olufemi Otaiwo, who actually just literally released a book called Reconsidering Reparations, which is about the argument for global reparations.
And it's a really great book, and it makes the case that they're making fun of in a really effective kind of way.
And it's pretty hard to deny, especially when they get to the parts about...
Offshore accounts and the stashing of massive amounts of wealth to not sort of be in favor of what they're arguing for there.
And it's also, I think, worth noting, climate refugees is going to be a real problem.
It's already a problem in our lifetime.
It's going to continue to, I think, be a worse problem.
And it's going to be horrible, I think, to have to watch the way that conservatives are just going to lock the doors and prevent anybody from coming into countries where they can live comfortably.
Yeah, I see it as very much just kind of being connected in the way that James talks about it there.
You can see the seeds for his paleo-conservative turn.
Because he's just like, and this climate stuff is all going to be linked.
Immigrants coming in and claiming that it's climate justice and they need this and they're going to be pouring over the borders.
It's presented as if the West...
has been convinced that all its borders should be completely open and that they are giving the money away to the Global South.
They've been tricked and that this is what they're up to now.
And like, whatever you think about that argument, it does not reflect the reality of what happens in the world or the economic situation, right?
It is not the case that the Global South is just, you know, being treated really nice now by the Western powers.
We have been guilted into it by critical theorists.
The economic exploitation of the third world, or the developing countries, sorry, the developing countries continues pretty much unabated.
Right, the exploitation continues.
And his argument that because the American South might also become uninhabitable, which he like...
He kind of gets into the skepticism there.
You get the sound of him being like, I don't actually believe all of these predictions because if they were taking them seriously, they'd be inconsistent with their own arguments.
But it just ignores that in America, if you're in the South and it becomes uninhabitable, you can just move to the North.
They're not going to lock down state borders anytime soon.
Whereas if you're not in America and your country becomes uninhabitable, there's no going some other place or something like that.
So he really undercuts that.
But also, I think you're right to highlight the kind of conspiratorial nature of this being a big trick.
He doesn't just think that climate folks are just earnest and misunderstanding the reality.
He thinks that they are out to destroy the West, that they are part of the tip of the spear of a Chinese effort.
And he talks about the destruction of American energy dominance, basically, that if you take away our ability to burn coal, the next step is going to be China invades us or something.
He has this big build-up, surprisingly acknowledging the entire argument for climate justice.
And then segues to talking about, well, you know, bad things could happen to Florida too, so whatever.
But hang on, that doesn't, like, it didn't seem to address anything at all.
It's like, so what?
Florida, well, maybe Hurricane Katrina maybe partly disproves that, but America will take care of Americans.
And just because bad things might happen to some parts in the West, that doesn't invalidate any of the argument that he set out quite fairly.
So it was just weird.
makes sense to me he's not very good at play the clip he's not he's not good at rhetoric i think no yeah well i don't know he's pretty he's he's i think that's the one thing he has done pat is like endless rhetoric but in any case here's him summarizing
that point that you two have highlighted where he goes from the the issue about climate justice and redistribution and
Here.
Well, you got to think about this.
One fact of history, and this is, you know, students of history understand this.
Very few people think about history this way.
What is it that has made, if you look at, and I know you're not even allowed to say these nasty dirty words, but if you look at the big empires of history, what is it that they had that made them the empires?
Who were the, like the Dutch suddenly became an empire for a while.
How?
How did they become one of the most powerful European empires for a while?
Turned out they had the most efficient.
Access and to produce energy from wood when wood was the most efficient energy source.
That's right, James.
Then what?
Coal.
Right.
And then all of a sudden, the coal-bearing places became the industrial, the smokestacks that we all think of how dirty everything was.
That was people burning coal.
And energy dominance leads to the ability to grow and prosper with externalities, of course, with costs.
Well, if you're going to now say, aha.
All you big Western nations, 100% renewables.
Meanwhile, developing nations like China and India, which are by no means small, both have nuclear weapons, you can keep burning fossil fuels until you get up to scratch.
Including smaller nations, such as those in South America, Central America, in Africa, now their dependence upon fossil fuels and so forth can be greater.
So, just two quick points I want to make there.
One was...
I liked, you know, if you listen, you heard O 'Fallon say, that's right, James.
Yes, James.
It's like the fucking Emperor going, good, good.
Your hatred will be too strong.
Energy dominance.
Yeah, energy dominance of the technocrats.
Good.
But that point, first of all, just again, Western chauvinism.
Oh, we're not allowed to say that colonial empires were good at some things.
There's no mystery that the technical dominance about some of the Western powers that allowed them to exploit other countries.
People know that.
There's books written about guns and steel and stuff, right?
Furthermore, the critical theorists spend literally all of their time talking about the rise of empires and what caused it.
But it wasn't ever always about energy.
It's a lot more things than energy, right?
I'm just objecting to the cartoonish kind of thing.
He's figured out the puzzle, how every empire, the whole history of empires...
Matt, Dutch trees.
It was all about the Dutch trees.
Literally the only thing that mattered in history was the type of trees in Netherlands.
I hope you've blocked this out, but before this, he talks about how the Navy have worked out a technology that is like a closed loop, right?
Where they...
What is it?
They pool calcium carbonate out of salt water in order to create jet fuel.
And this is a completely closed loop, so there's no production of excess external stuff.
And first of all, like James's description, I don't buy it.
Sounds a little perpetual motion, doesn't it?
It does slightly, but the second thing is...
He mentions, when he's doing that description, he's like, yes, it's extremely expensive and it requires nuclear energy or something to do, but...
And then O 'Fallon tries to help him and is like, yes, but of course, you know, the costs could be brought down and then that would be...
But no, nobody's allowed to talk about that or nuclear.
And they keep talking about nuclear, right?
And I understand that some elements of the environmentalist left have an issue with...
Nuclear.
And it's against the science.
But they act as if this is a thing that will never be spoken in the halls of power.
I hear that constantly.
I hear people talking about it constantly.
And it's not just Republican sources.
I see environmentalist people, influential environmentalist people saying the opposition to nuclear fuels was a mistake, right?
It isn't this secret thing that you cannot say on the left that nuclear...
It might actually be good.
Look, I'm on the left.
I can say it now.
Nuclear fuel is part of the solution to the dominance of carbon.
Everyone knows that.
But your main point is that nuclear power is unpopular.
It's not kept secret or something like that.
It's broadly unpopular because it's icky.
People are scared of the idea of nuclear fallout and accidents and nuclear contamination and nuclear waste.
It has a public relations problem for very obvious reasons.
With a large proportion of the population.
Aaron, just one thing I have to insert here.
It's very important.
I have to get this in every episode.
Kurzgesagt.
I'm sorry.
They did an episode about nuclear energy, right?
This is like a science communication thing.
And they're very clear about the relative damage.
They compare carbon to renewables to nuclear energy.
And they highlight it with lovely little graphics and everything.
And they make it clear that nuclear is a very overall, very safe and very efficient energy.
But it's like, these guys are like, no, you can't say that.
Nobody can say that.
So like, Kurzgesagt managed to say it without endorsing a friggin' Neo Paleolithic.
You're not just trying to pronounce Zizek, are you?
It's not just a secret Marxist thing as well, is it?
Somebody even emailed me the pronunciation guide.
It's two words, Matt.
It means concise and explanation or something.
So it's like Kurz.
But anyway, I'm doing it wrong, so I'm sorry to the German person that sent me the pronunciation guide.
And just to beat y 'all's dead horse here just a little bit more, my co-host from Philosophers in Space and a big woke lefty, Thomas Smith, frequently does, like, episodes or talks about being pro-nuclear energy.
Y 'all might recognize Thomas Smith as one of the earliest people who called James Lindsay out on his bullshit.
So, like, there's very clearly people who strongly disagree with Lindsay about all of this woke stuff who are still I recognize all those risks and concerns that Matt was talking about, and I think there's a legitimate ethical debate to be had about creating waste that you might not have a solution to yet.
I also think there's something to the idea that it is part of this transition.
But as you were pointing out, their solutions are an unproven, like an unaccessible non-public technology that's like 10 to 15 years, they think, from being accessible, which probably means like 30 years, as opposed to actual renewable energy,
where the technology, the cost of it has dropped.
Substantially recently.
So like that technology is already viable right now.
And they're like grasping after these other even more technocratic BS solutions just because they don't like that stuff the way that it's been politically aligned.
Yeah.
So there's this bit about the distinction between climate justice and climate science, right?
And they go on about this at some length.
So I feel...
Two clips related to this are quite important to play because I...
Yeah, anyway, let's hear the clips first and then we can talk about what they claim.
So here's the first one about defining climate justice.
There's a tangential project called Climate Justice.
A tangential field of research called Climate Justice that looks at it from the same kind of perspective where you hear the word justice.
You know, shoehorned in.
Otherwise, you know, social justice, racial justice, gender justice, whatever it happens to be.
Okay, so that's an initial definition.
Now, just to set up what the problem he has here is.
You think climate change, you think, oh, science.
Scientists are weighing in on us.
Scientists are looking to see if the climate is changing.
Scientists are trying to answer the question.
Scientists and engineers are trying to figure out what is it we should do.
About the nature of Earth's climate and how it is changing in different ways, maybe catastrophically.
What could be done?
And everybody's thinking, oh, this is a scientific issue, scientific issue.
Climate justice is done by sociologists.
It is not a scientific issue.
It is done by humanities majors.
It's done by critical theorists.
It's done by postmodernists.
done by humanities faculty and universities and activists affiliated with that who like to say the word science, but seem not to have anything like scientific chops behind them.
Yeah, and then if you read those papers, though, what you'll immediately notice is that, of course, when these individuals are trying to prove that climate change is disproportionately affecting already marginalized communities, shockingly, they don't cite the glaciology paper.
They cite statistics about droughts and stuff, right?
They cite useful scientific evidence that supports their claims because they're fucking academics.
They're not like goofballs.
This is just such bullshit.
Read things like the myth of catching up.
You can disagree with their science.
You can think that they're not quite getting it right or something.
But the idea that this climate justice stuff is happening completely divorced from the science as compared to what's going on in these videos is fucking laughable.
So you're going to go on record here and say that the climate justice isn't based on interpretive dance as a methodology.
Jesus Christ, I mean...
They're right that it's about power.
They're right that it's about Marxism and feminism and stuff like that.
They're wrong about the rigorous nature of it because they're out to paint a straw man, right?
This is that classic conspiracism stuff.
Similar to what we were saying earlier, where they're tying together all of this stuff back through history, which we know is a classic conspiracism trope.
They're also never actually conveying the depth of the work that's being presented by their opponents.
Because that's hard.
That's challenging.
And then at the end of the day, 90...
To 95% of James' shtick is argument from sneering at whatever he just said.
That's his entire method of debate.
Yeah.
James acts like he's discovered something amazing that climate justice people are not climate scientists.
And everyone's confused in this point.
And I'm like, I was never confused about that.
I'm well aware.
And so are they.
They're like...
They're talking about topics that are interrelated.
And James, in various parts of this thing, he offers these caveats where he's like, and the West have polluted, and maybe because they've benefited, they owe a bit more.
And maybe there's something to that, right?
And he does that quite a lot where he's like, well, they might have some point.
But anyway, they're really about inducing communism.
It's like he imagines the IPCC.
I don't want to give them fuel, but the IPCC report, which is a document that tries to reflect the science, is also a political document, right?
Because they all have to sign off on it.
And it usually downplays things as a result, but still gets tarnished as unacceptable.
But setting that aside, it's like he imagines there's a report where there's engineers and climate scientists sitting around.
Talking about the recent data that come in.
And then a fucking climate justice sociologist dressed out in tribal garb, interpretive dances their way into the room, twerks in front of them all saying, you know, we got to give all the money to the African countries because of whiteness.
In James fantasy world, that's what's happening, right?
That's what's happening at the UN and stuff.
It's cartoonish.
And the underlying correct point that all scientific sci-com stuff is political, the irony there is that's a postmodern argument, right?
They even actively at one point cite Foucault, and they're like, one good thing about Foucault is that he talks about biopower and stuff.
I think Matt McManus has been doing a lot of really good work recently on this and the issue of Conservative postmodernism that like there's this very interesting flop and as much as I despise Ross Douthat most of the time, I think he also recently had an article out about the Foucauldian turn in conservatism where it's like they've adopted all of these postmodern ideas because they like critiquing elites and technocrats and power relations and stuff like that.
They just hate that it's also the arguments that are being used on the other side to critique their views.
Yeah, I have that clip for you, Aaron, the Foucault.
And it's interesting as well, because you can see that O'Fallon is a little bit uncomfortable with praising Foucault.
Right, how dare you cite this person.
So listen to this.
This is the kind of thing that we have to start saying no to because that's technocracy and that's where we're screwed.
By the way, I have to, you know, you'll find this maybe a little surprising.
What Foucault and Lyotard The postmodernists were warning about was technocrats.
Foucault's criticism isn't about science.
That's where it went wrong.
That's why he's useful for some things, but not for others.
That's right.
But he is.
He has the best criticism of technocracy in print, of biopower, he called it.
And so what we have to do is we're going to have to draw from that, but we're also going to have to, like I said, you just have to say no more of this.
This is nonsense.
And it's not helpful.
It's not useful.
It's not the relevant material.
I think he's actually, he's so confused that he's also like a huge fan of it.
And it's exactly what you pointed out, Aaron, that they're like, yeah, that's what we say.
Obviously, what we're saying is different, but it's like, is it?
I mean, O 'Fallon talking in that clip is basically like Obi-Wan Kenobi saying, you know, the dark side has some uses.
A little force choke every once in a while goes a long way.
You look at the entire thing, he's got this elaborate theory of power.
Relations and these mechanisms and groups and these great historic trends and how these little things are represented, you know, reflect this underlying reality that sort of is below the surface for what the everyday appearances of everything.
You know, he may not like it, but yeah, Lindsay's got a critical theory of power going on.
It's doubly funny because they constantly cite this, what he calls the iron law of woke projection, which is just his way of saying people who disagree with me are projecting, which is ironic because I do think so much of the time Lindsay is genuinely Projecting.
But, you know, he gives this impression that the woke are the real conspiracy theorists, right?
And he'll talk about folks like Derrick Bell and say all of these claims about white supremacy are actually conspiracism when, like, he's using the same arguments.
Like, either you're both conspiracists or neither of you are, James.
Like, you can't have this both ways here.
I personally think that there's a reading of postmodernism that, like, the correct reading of postmodernism is anti-conspiracy theorist because it's saying...
All of these things can happen without there being any genuine active control or conspiracy.
The real critique of power in stuff like Foucault is that it's decentralized.
This illusion of these elites sitting in a shadowy room somewhere controlling everything is not right.
What's really actually going on is there's a bunch of forces pushing on other forces and it creates these really weird, perverse systems, but they can't go that far down the deconstructive world, so they just end up Thinking that they're seeing the same conspiracism in these people that they have in their own world.
I think we've talked about this on the podcast before, but I've become a somewhat recent total convert to postmodernism because, I mean, you cannot be on...
Get woke, Matt.
Get on it!
Stop, Matt!
I'm over here like, yes, yes.
I'm talking about...
Say more!
This is as a diagnosis, not a recommendation.
You cannot look at social media and see how this boundary between people being authentic and sort of performing and how everything's drenched in these layers of irony and this disconnect between the real world.
Simulacrums, Matt.
I've been convinced.
I should say I've only got the shallowest understanding of postmodernism.
There's going to be our...
Writing culture moment or postmodern turn because I've noticed as well is I feel like I didn't like most of the postmodern scholarship.
I think I still don't as far as I've read it, like the little I've read.
I'm not a fan.
No, I don't like it either.
I mean, I'm very reluctant.
I'm not a postmodernist either.
This is going to be the next thing, isn't it?
They were so good until they got woke-pilled by Aaron, and now they're so terrible.
Look, Matt, you're a postmodernist.
That's fine.
That's alright.
I'll accept that as a co-host.
But I do think that a lot of the things they talked about, endless, multiple approaches to the same events and about people, the kind of endless regression of the observer, commenting on commenting on commenting and looking at things and constructing your own realities.
A lot of that is really prescient about the way the internet and social media and the modern right.
That's the thing.
Not just the left.
The fucking MAGA right are more postmodern than the far left.
While we're in the philosophical world a little bit, do you want to talk a bit about the Mercuse stuff that he keeps citing?
Because I actually think it's philosophically illuminating to just understand what he's actually talking about and how he's getting it really wrong.
I do want to swerve to that.
Before that, though, there's one thing to cap off the climate change discussion, which I think is neat.
I just want to say, before we get off the record, that I read the article, I read the McCuse article.
Repressive tolerance?
I didn't understand it, but I read.
Okay, fair enough.
That's very good, Matt.
You did your homework.
I did my homework.
Good little STEM boy I'm proud of.
That's right.
Good, Matt.
Good.
But before we get there, before we get there, still, at this point, James and O 'Fallon are getting on the same page, but James is still holding on to this identity as a liberal pro-science guy.
But there's these two clips that I want to play.
And one is like saying that really there's no opposition to climate change or discussion or anything like that.
I think most people agree that we should prudence at least, right?
Like, yeah, let's take a look and let's be at least prudent.
Even, you know, the people that are like denialists.
No, I've never heard anybody.
Denounce prudence.
Right.
Actual research.
Actual research.
I've never heard anybody actually denounce, let's take steps to a cleaner planet, except for young guys who are just being stupid or whatever.
They're minimizing the young guys that are just being stupid, right?
Those young climate deniers like Jordan Peterson, yeah.
No, I mean, this is a classic, this is a 100% conservative talking point whenever you criticize people of minimalizing around climate change.
There's even, in that environmental ethics book that I was talking about, the whole argument about how...
Climate denial has pivoted from it's not happening to what we call mode and tempo.
Why is it happening and to what extent is it happening?
So they'll all now say, well, yeah, we think that it's happening, but we think humans aren't as big an impact or it's not as widespread or it's not as severe as people think it's going to be.
It's just the same thing.
They've just moved to, you know, like these guys love their Mott and Baileys, right?
They've just moved to their Mott on that one.
Yeah.
You know, it totally reminds me of the anti-vax stuff.
Yeah.
It's like there's no anti-vaxxers, just like there's no climate change denialists.
Just wakefields arranged vax-wise.
You know, they have these issues with the science that they think it's too much, too soon, whatever.
I've been hearing this for 30 freaking years, you know.
It was always the same.
They had questions about the science.
They had questions about whether it was really happening, whether we should do something about it.
Oh, okay, maybe it is really happening, but it's too expensive.
We don't have any way to do anything about it.
Oh, okay, we really could do it.
It's bullshit.
It's so bullshit.
So the last clip I wanted to play, though, this comes a bit later.
O 'Fallon highlights that they have differences, right?
And watch how quickly they pivot away from any discussion of the possible differences in worldviews that they might have around, you know, climate science and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
And so what is our answer to this?
I mean, you and I, we have some differences, you know, in terms of how we view.
The subject of climate and climate change.
But that's not relevant because you and I believe that we can find objective answers.
Exactly.
The kryptonite of all of these justice movements is the demand for evidence.
Right.
What's your proof for that?
Exactly.
Show the receipts.
Show the receipts.
What does the science say?
Can it withstand the scrutiny?
Can it withstand the scrutiny?
And then...
You know, it's also, you have to take into it, and I hate to dip into complexity and say it's complicated.
I love this one because it's a classic example of something that you all highlight a lot between these heterodox folks, where they're always performatively claiming that they can disagree without ever actually disagreeing.
Like, it's always a point of honor that we don't agree about anything and we could argue about that stuff.
But the arguments always happen offscreen, right?
Like, there's never an onscreen actual debate between any of these people.
It's just, let's set aside all our actual disagreements and come together and agree that, like, China is trying to destroy us with climate justice.
It's really rich.
Because they clap each other on the back so much for coming together and agreeing so hard on the things that they genuinely care about and sweeping all that other stuff under the rug.
No, you shouldn't be clapping yourselves on the back for that.
That previous clip where, like, James is, you know, I've never met anyone that is properly in denial about climate change or against prudent measures.
And it's like, how much of a rube are you, man?
A single measure against climate change has been fought tooth and nail by the guys that you're now cozying up to.
And there's tons in your MAGA-Chud movement who will just, via all things that they have available to them, Turning Point USA, they're not for prudent steps to restrict.
They're for more coal mines, bring back the jobs.
That's what Trump was fucking talking about, right?
And it's not true to say that if you just bring them the evidence, show them the receipts, Then they'll agree.
Right.
That's not true.
This is also funny to me because we hear them say that they disagree on climate change.
I don't think we ever actually find out what O 'Fallon's actual views on climate change are.
We hear a lot of James saying that mode and tempo kind of stuff that I was talking about, but we don't even know what they actually disagree about on climate change.
As far as we know, O 'Fallon's like a thoroughgoing denialist himself, right?
What is their disagreement?
Like, is there disagreement that James thinks that we're only going to get to 1.5, whereas, like, O 'Fallon thinks they're going to get to 2?
Probably not.
Like, it's probably not a fine-grained distinction about that something.
It'd have to be.
It'd have to be a straight-up denialist, or they wouldn't even mention it.
Right.
I think that his views, you know, like, based on, I've consumed some of his material, he now does.
I think it's daily, or at least it's, you know, every other couple of days.
He has a series called, I don't even want to remember the name, but it's hugely conspiratorial.
This is not neo-conservatism.
It's like hardcore, one step down from Alex Jones and not that much of a step down.
So the notion that he has a technically nuanced opinion about climate change issues, I'll go out and nittle him.
Sneering denunciation of that.
Okay, so a while back, Aaron, you mentioned Marcuse is a name that keeps popping up in these clips, and we haven't really dwelled on it.
And I think if you just meet James on the street, he might talk to you about Marcuse.
But how did he find out about Marcuse?
I have another clip which I titled Emperor Influence No.
2. So let's see who introduced James to Marcuse.
If you recall, I think it was in 2019 in December, we were together in Orlando.
And, you know, I've done a lot of deep diving on Karl Popper and was trying to show a lot of folks that his understanding of the paradox of tolerance is that that's not something that's being followed by today by those that would claim to want to forward the concept of open society.
And that's I shared with you the work by Herbert Marcuse, the repressive tolerance, and that this is really what's in action.
And you absolutely devoured that, and you've been spending a tremendous amount of time on that, on your podcasts and your articles.
And maybe share with everybody, what is it that you've pulled out of that, and what is it that you see?
Just I have to say, as a teacher, this sounds so familiar, right?
Like, you know, I gave you that, and you read it, and now what did you tell the class?
What did you pick out as important from that?
And little puppy James, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
Yeah, and I know y 'all shtick on the show, but I do think there is some value, given that he argues that Marcuse is the linchpin of modern wokeness and that he takes Hegel and turns it into this functional, applicable system.
So I think I actually pulled, I don't know if you have other quotes on the Marcuse that you want to reference, but I pulled a couple of quotes from, very short quotes, from the repressive tolerance paper to address what he's claiming Is being said in this paper.
And I think even somebody like Matt, who like, dear sweet STEM boy over there, you know, can actually read this article.
Like, you can still understand what's going on here.
I got the gist.
I got the gist.
You did great.
You did great.
Historical materialism.
Chris, maybe we should hear his claims in a nutshell.
Do you have quotes for that?
Yeah, we've got many of them.
So let's see this.
I think this is him talking about the kind of thesis statement.
From repressive tolerance?
It is the logic of the left.
The thesis sentence of repressive tolerance appears actually pretty close to the bottom, and he literally says that it's that we absolutely must tolerate movements from the left, and we must not tolerate movements from the right.
Right.
That's a simple, he makes it that simple.
Left good, right bad.
That's pretty simple.
That doesn't sound complicated.
Aaron, I don't know what you're talking about.
No, not at all, right?
So here's the actual quote, and understandably, if you weren't reading carefully, as I don't think they were, you would misunderstand this.
The quote is, liberating tolerance then would mean intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left.
Now, if you miss that word "then" in that sentence, and don't understand that it's a reference to a very specific historic context that he's discussing in the paper, you could misread that as just saying, "All right-wing is bad, all left-wing is good."
But if you look at where this quote appears in the actual context of the paper, he's specifically talking about in what he sees as the fascist industrial period, essentially.
Okay, so he's saying repressive tolerance "then".
In this period, right?
And, you know, arguably he still thinks we're in that period because, again, this is written in 1965, right?
The Civil Rights Act is 1964.
He's literally in the midst of watching violent crackdowns against attempts at improved...
Civil rights by the right wing.
So like in his view, in this context, the right means the violent authoritarian right.
But they characterize it as if he's saying anything that I think to the left of Mao is the way they put it, has to be cracked down on.
When instead what he's arguing is in this particular...
Cultural and historic moment, the views that are aligned with the right in this context are fascist in nature.
And as the paradox of tolerance points out, fascist violence will prevent actual liberalism, which is the goal as he lays it out in this paper.
It's very difficult to imagine something more totalitarian than this, an Orwellian, which it's funny because he also says, you know, that the other, the right is Orwellian.
Of course he does.
He's literally advocating not just for censoring speech from people perceived by his movement to be on the right, because that includes a lot of people who are actually not on the right, as we've also seen.
Everybody, you know, vaguely right of, I don't know, Mao or something is alt right now.
And like, look, you could make an argument that you're concerned about any acclaim like this because you think that the wrong people will get called fascist eventually.
That's why it's a paradox, right?
That's why it's called the paradox of tolerance, not the solved problem of tolerance.
And what I think you see from people like James is they use this argumentative strategy where they present a paradox, and then they just sort of saddle their opponents with half the paradox and ignore...
That the people are wrestling with the same problem and make it look like those people are, you know, like idiots or haven't taken the issue seriously.
But that's just like a cheap trick for these sorts of situations.
So I have a question though, Aaron, because I did do a fact check, a simple fact check on this claim as well.
And I saw that James is not alone in his interpretation that Marcuse was advocating basically what he said, that right wing Activism is inherently repressive, whereas quite far left activism is inherently noble.
And he was somebody who wanted the revolution to overthrow the liberal order.
So I'm kind of curious, since there are other people who seem to have taken that perspective, is that a misrepresentation of Marcuse or is it an unfair I mean,
I think this is a fair question, and I want to say I'm not an expert on this, and so experts should jump in if they feel like they have a more robust, because that's a pretty advanced kind of interpretive question, I think.
What I would argue is that a plain reading of this text suggests that what he's saying is a sort of standard Moderator left-wing line which says, in this particular context, these particular ideas are violently oppressing certain people and preventing the spread of the kind of liberalism that we value.
And it's important to note...
He cites John Stuart Mill in this paper, like he's in favor of the kind of liberalism that folks like Lindsay also claim to be in favor of.
He simply takes the position that that liberalism is prevented from occurring by these right-wing fascists who show up and kick over the marketplace of ideas.
Let me just read another quick quote from the actual paper.
This quote starts out by essentially saying, Again, in reference to Mill, we don't always have a sense of what the truth is or is not, and so this necessitates tolerance to some extent.
And he says, however, this tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed.
It cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation.
Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debate, in conversation, in academic discussion.
It is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion, but society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacific
of existence where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake.
Here, certain things cannot be said.
Certain ideas cannot be expressed.
Certain policies cannot be proposed.
Certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument of the continuation
He's basically just saying you can't have Holocaust deniers running around talking about how the Jews are trying to kill everybody and stuff like that, right?
You can debate that in academia, right?
It made me think of the current stuff around COVID and anti-vax as a case in point.
There are some free speech absolutists.
But, you know, most people agree that even though free speech is really, really good and you want as much of it as possible, there are some limits to it.
And when you're lying to people about vaccines and you're telling people it's all a plot and vaccines will kill you, then that is something where tolerating that kind of speech is a bad idea.
I think most people can understand that.
So, I mean, I could be wrong, but I don't think the premise of at least the paradox of tolerance is not really that.
It's not really that complicated.
I feel that I'm directing this at the wrong person because I don't want to be fair to James Lindsay because I know where he goes.
We're going to play some clips where he's talking about the communists taking over and all of this.
So I'm not arguing this to defend what he will link this to.
But I would say that I think that there could be legitimate criticisms of people like Marcuse.
That they were used and maybe in certain respects were in favor of revolutionary violence as long as it's directed at the right targets, which is something of an ongoing debate in fowler ends of both sides of politics.
But even on the point of censorship and free speech, I think, and I think we're probably pretty much on a similar page with this, that I don't have a problem with the anti-vaxxers existing and having their right to Speak and to publish their books or do whatever they want.
What I don't think they deserve is unlimited access to every platform and the biggest possible microphone and news organizations need to cover them.
If some group wants to make like a fascist political group, my particular leaning is towards a pluralistic democracy.
You have to accept them, but call them what they are.
Fascists, and you don't invite them up to, like, there's a whole counter-strategy, which rarely gets mentioned in these debates, that, Aaron, you probably have the name of the guy to hand, but the, like, pro-fascist guy in America, who explicitly said that he was using the tolerance of liberal institutions in order to promote fascism,
right?
And he would kind of present that he's softened the message and lowered down the tone.
In order to attract people to a much more extreme ideology.
And I think that you have to have standards to respond to that.
So I guess I'm just saying there are different positions that you could take which might have some sympathy towards Lindsay's side, but you don't have to endorse all of the things which he will then go on to link it to.
Absolutely.
And I'm not here to defend everything that is being said in this particular article.
It's complicated because it's not easy to say these are the political positions that can't be expressed.
There are, I think, really complicated questions there.
And I think there are fair critiques of this particular answer to the question, just like I think there are fair critiques of the opposite answer that point out that the unfettered approach leads to more abuse of marginalized people.
There's a whole rich debate.
What I'm against is James Lindsay's two-dimensional portrayal of what's being written here.
Like, that quote that I just referenced to, where he specifically says this kind of indiscriminate tolerance is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, is completely at odds with the picture that James is portraying here of people who are going to silence all scientific evidence that might contradict the left-wing narrative or something.
What he's really narrowly talking about here is In our social environment, we can't have people going around saying the Jews are trying to kill everyone with mass depopulation conspiracy theories, because that will get people killed.
The final quote I wanted to reference, just because James loves to say over and over again that Marcuse is the foundation of modern, you know, wokeness, right?
And as I think y 'all are probably familiar, he also likes to say that the woke are bad because they reject objective truth.
They are postmodernists.
There is no objective truth, right?
Here's one of my favorite quotes from this particular paper.
He says, Tolerance of free speech is the way of improvement, of progress in liberation, not because there is no objective truth, and improvement must necessarily be a compromise between a variety of opinions, but because there is an objective truth which can be discovered.
Ascertained only in learning and comprehending that which is and that which can be and ought to be and done for the sake of improving the lot of mankind, right?
Like, Marcuse very strongly seems to believe there are objective truths and he wants to defend those things and, like, he thinks that tolerance of free speech is a key part of doing that.
Yeah.
So, connecting those kind of threads aren't to work.
James goes on to weave it.
If we looked at this stuff now, it would be much more extreme, right?
But you can already see the kind of DNA in some of the things that he links in here.
And this is him talking about the liberals desiring a race war.
So here we go.
Or the critical theorists, I guess I should say.
What is this going to lead to?
Are they going to try to start a race war?
Are we going to face...
An attempted revolution.
By fall of 2019, we were saying that repeatedly.
In London.
In London, yeah.
The goal is to have a complete social and cultural revolution.
There's another clip that follows on from that, which I think builds on that and links into the conspiratorial worldview.
So I'll play that.
It is guaranteed that eventually what is going to happen is you're going to have what I've been referring to as a precipitating event.
You're going to have a moment where something happens like George Floyd dying in Minneapolis.
And then the next thing you know, it's like the ideology goes into action and the entire society, the entire organization, the entire company, the entire church, whatever it is, has to polarize around that issue.
My problem with the way Lindsay frames all of this is that it's all connected.
That this McCuse paper is not just a paper.
It's a secret manual that the entire movement is referring to.
That this revolutionary movement is just kind of waiting for these inciting events and then seizes upon it to launch this thing.
I mean, it was clearly a, like most riots in the United States that are around race issues or whatever, including white riots back in the day, they're spontaneous events, right?
I mean, say what you like about them.
They're motivated by grassroots resentment, sentiments, whatever you want to call it.
So implicit in his entire narrative is all of this is organized and part of a plan.
And that's where I think he just puts everything into this conspiratorial light.
Yeah, I agree.
I think the conspiracism is really dangerous.
I mean, it's a little tricky because we're in the midst of ongoing revelations about how the January 6th thing, people are being charged with sedition for stockpiling weapons and stuff.
That stuff doesn't never happen, which is a complicated problem when we're trying to teach and talk about conspiracism.
But I think you're right that we see so many red flags here of conspiracism.
So the tying it all together, this inciting incident talk, and this is problematic because you see inciting incident talk amongst a lot of different activist communities.
And there's some truth to the idea that inciting incidents do provoke changes in various kinds of ways, but he's really using it as a synonym for the false flag kind of idea that folks like Alex Jones talk about.
These people are going to orchestrate an inciting incident of some sort, like a race riot.
I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, Matt, about like the content doesn't matter.
And like, why even bother debunking the Mark Hughes?
He's just going to move on to another thing and shit like that.
But I also do have a sympathy for the idea that content can matter.
And in the particular case here, the implication that Jewish backed.
Yeah.
And, like, I think it's worth noting, right, as I think this is precursor stuff, you know, Rogan and Lindsay, their new episode, I think, just dropped, and I think we were listening to the first little bit of it before we talked, and they open with false flag talk.
Like, they open with suggesting that, like, the FBI were involved in inciting violence on January 6th.
So, like, that's where all this ends up.
That's where this goes.
Yeah, no, I picked up that, too.
The narrative is really clear when you listen to the whole thing, which is that there's this, you know, cabal of intellectuals.
That have this generations-long international plan to foment this awful kind of dystopian revolution.
And they're using Black people of the United States as the kind of dumb muscle.
This is the conspiracy theory, right?
It's that simple and it's like...
I even remember it from the Seinfeld episode.
Remember when George gets trapped in the...
There's the episode with the Nazis and he's reading the speech and it's like, you know, the Jew will then use the black man.
It's like that cartoonish.
I don't think they actually cite the Turner Diaries in that one, but that's the classic text that is literally explaining this idea.
I think that a kind of common theme that you see in this is like...
There's a hypersensitivity and extrapolation from anything to do with the left, right?
That it's all connected.
It's all connected to these ancient critical theorists and early 20th century Marxists.
Jacobins.
A subsequent denial that there's any influence on the right from modern conspiracy movements like the Turner Diaries or false flag conspiracies.
And you even heard in that clip we played earlier, James is saying, oh, that's just like young guys getting a bit too animated about things.
Or the alt-right is anybody to the right of Mao, right?
Like, it's a constant downplay of there being any problem with anything on the right.
And the left is only comprised of either these hardcore revolutionaries that are destroying society or effeminate, ineffective liberals who are holding their water.
And don't have the balls to stand up like people like James do.
So, and Aaron, we discussed this.
I think there's a clip that we should play where the masterminds of the conspiracy, so like Marcuse and the Frankfurt School is one, right?
And it does tie back to Jewish intellectuals.
But this is another more proximate cause that he identifies.
You'll hear it in this clip who the masterminds are.
those two things on each other.
And because these people are all living in problematized everything land, it went viral in their community.
created lots of solidarity.
But what it is is mafia solidarity.
It all kicks up, as we now see, to the people pushing, and it's not, again, identity.
It's the people pushing queer black feminism.
The people who are more and more and more queer black feminist have more and more and more of the power.
And they finally revealed themselves over the summer by...
Basically taking these other minority groups that they've had hold or carry water for them for three decades and say, guess what?
You're anti-black too.
You have to check your privilege, your brown privilege, your Asian privilege, your yellow privilege.
You've got to check those things.
It's the notion that these black queer feminists from the 70s, they've been planning...
You know, in the shadows for decades, manipulating the Browns and the Asians and they waited till the George Floyd event to spring their trap.
And now their intersectional takeover is coming to fruition.
They've got Kamala Harris in the White House.
She's one heartbeat away from the doors and they're going to take over.
It's nonsense, right?
Well, and it's even weirder than that because he's like, their big reveal trap spring, as far as I can tell from that quote, is they then turn on other allies on the left and accuse them of not being woke enough as a hierarchy of oppression power move.
The number of steps between that and any kind of substantial takeover of anything are gigantic.
Their big reveal is that they piss off some other people who used to be their friends.
That's not...
That's not something to be frightened about.
It's comical.
It's literally like a Monty Python pit.
It's like the first thing they do is they splitter, right?
They're just a bunch of splitters is what he's saying.
It is that because like you say, that's not a winning move that leads you into the gates of power.
Except in James' world.
And this is obviously a common reoccurring theme, not just in conspiracism, but especially when discussing the woke.
They are simultaneously the most unlikable and self-isolating pricks in the universe and also appear to have a vice-like grip on everything, even though they alienate everyone and are terrible at community organizing and building up political clout or something like that.
So there's a distinction, Aaron, that I think is good to highlight before we...
We head to wrapping up with some of the other content, but you've noted previously about this kind of treating critical theorists as if they're in a separate class, right?
And the critical anything, right?
Like, or anything that he links to that is different because it has a normative goal.
The answer is that a critical theory must have a normative vision for the world.
Moral vision for the world.
It has this picture of a perfect world or a better world, at least, but usually a perfected world.
We're in sustainable development goals.
That's in climate justice, right?
Sustainable.
Sustainable is the normative vision here.
Matt and I have been critical about what we see is like when Activism is overtaking objectivity as a value in scholarship, right?
And there's different opinions on that, but in our perspective about social science, we can see issues there.
But what that doesn't lead me to believe is that there are no normative values attached to my political neoliberal centrist beliefs, or that pretty much the way that James and O 'Fallon Constantly frame things.
It's not an appeal to utopian vision of the future where we have enlightened capitalists that are solving climate change and that nations are free to set their laws without the influence of technocrats.
They have a utopian vision as well.
And I mean, fucking Trump, MAGA, make American great again.
It's like there's one rule.
For their enemies where they're hearkening to like a mystical future that will never be realized.
But they just completely feel the grapple that their God Emperor, Trump, they completely claim the same thing.
Society was destroyed.
He had those speeches he gave when he was inaugurated, right?
About the inner cities being crime ridden.
We need to just go back to everything, you know, remake society.
They are doing it.
It's in their slogan.
So, I just find this very hypocritical.
That's the thing.
Yeah, I mean, if you take their account seriously, the joke would be, by this view, Immanuel Kant is a famous critical theorist.
We can't make that joke anymore because thanks to the impact of Stephen Hicks, who's their philosophical guru, who we haven't even talked about here, these people actually do believe that Kant is a critical theorist, which is fucking absurd.
Yeah, on their view, you know, every normative theory, like Peter Singer is a critical theorist, but that's just a bad definition of critical theory.
I'll give you a better definition, right?
Critical theory is philosophy with a focus on power, okay?
It's about philosophical conversations where the emphasis is on power, power relations, the role of power in various things.
Insofar as you might feel that focusing on power too much is a bad thing, that can be a critique of critical theory, but that's really all it boils down to is like a bunch of different analyses of different kinds of power relations, some of which are more or less effective than others,
and some of which are functionally indistinguishable from analytic ethical philosophy, if I'm being honest.
Yep, that's it.
So, I expected Vat to say something but he didn't.
So, I think that a good point.
There's some clips I have from O 'Fallon's standalone episodes on this, like, daily politics thing which he released.
I think it was supposed to be, you know, like, a kind of, like, Infowars light or whatever, but he doesn't have the ability to produce, like, four hours of content or whatever.
Infowars pumps out a day, so it's, like, a 30-minute thing.
And there's some, there's absolute madness in it.
But it connects.
With these sentiments that they get to towards the end of the talks, where they're talking about, you know, this dystopian world that's going to be ushered in.
Here's, I think this is James talking about tyrants.
You have to avoid the tyrant.
You have to avoid the tyrant.
It's so important to avoid the tyrant because you say for five minutes, you say, wait a minute.
If we all...
We're forced to participate in this.
And we all did it right.
Maybe we could succeed.
But the problem is, as we just said it, power corrupts.
And so when you hand over that power, you hand over the keys to your life.
You're not getting it back.
Your freedom is going.
And the more you give away, the harder it is to get back.
Those tinkly keys.
I love it.
What about Trump?
What am I Trump?
I know.
That's the immediate response, right?
These people hang out at Mar-a-Lago and they're complaining about tyrants and it's just like, come the fuck on.
Listen to stuff like this, it always makes me think of another topic I don't understand, but it's philosophy that, you know, the logical positivism and the non-verifiable statements, you know, these...
These kinds of assertions and statements that are...
You know, you can just invite Liam onto the show.
I know, I know.
I seriously find the concept useful to appreciate statements like what he's saying there with the music swelling and stuff, because they're not statements that are meant to be...
Analyzed or checked.
They're meant to be evocative, right?
They're meant to inspire you to action and initiate an intuitive gut-level reaction.
So what was he saying?
Talking about the tyrant.
Stop the tyrant.
Don't let the tyrant happen.
It's like, well, who's the tyrant?
What's the tyrant?
What do you even mean?
And you can't analyze it because it's propaganda slash poetry.
So I forget about it.
It's like what I was saying about the paradox of tolerance, right?
If you just shout no tyrant in response to the paradox of tolerance, that's not an answer.
It's comforting, right?
It feels good, but it doesn't address any of the real problems.
But that's basically the depth of their analysis here.
And I do think this is at least psychologically illuminating.
I think it's important to understand that, weirdly enough, A group that also seems to be very pro-authoritarian has simultaneously managed to develop a deep-seated aversion to what they see as authoritarianism, and there's just this wild inconsistency going on about the application of that concern,
and there's no clear way to address that.
But I do think that he's not faking it.
I don't think they're lying about their fear of the tyrant.
In this kind of way, or that the people who follow them are, you know, like, not genuinely afraid of the tyrant.
It's just, like, so weird to hear them say that and then, like, trot off to Mar-a-Lago to hang out with QAnoners.
Like, you're just, yeah.
Let me try and present the counterpoint to that, Aaron.
Let's take a pause from our present chaos here in the summer of 2021.
And let's remember back to how your life was in March of 2017.
Just a few months into the Trump administration.
Things were improving.
Remember that?
Hope was high.
For most in our nation.
For most of us, we felt like we had another chance.
We had a chance to get back on track.
To take our nation back.
Did you consider that, Aaron?
That reaction?
I mean, look, there's some data that suggests that, especially in America, when a party wins the presidency, the people in that party just think things are better now, even if the economic stuff doesn't reflect that.
There's no evidence, for example, that after Biden got in that there was any recognition of the economic improvement or something like that.
So one way to read this, it's just a textbook example of him just admitting that His views about whether things are going right direction, wrong direction, are solely tied to whether he feels like his authoritarian leader is the one in charge.
I just think it's good to keep in mind what O 'Fallon wants, right?
And not what Lindsay wants, right?
Lindsay's a MAGA, Chud knows.
It's the same, and I'll play a kind of unrelated, it's not unrelated, but it should be unrelated, about how O 'Fallon takes some issue.
With people being concerned about concussions with the NFL.
But don't worry.
He links it into critical theory and woke people.
So if you wanted to change something, that's how you did it.
Top down, bottom up, and the middle.
Church, religion, education, media, arts, and entertainment, and major league sports.
Those national pastimes.
That held everything together.
But everybody had to be in on it.
There couldn't be any major sector of American cultural life that was not part of this giant ideological reset.
But early on, the NFL pushed back.
So, if you'll notice in the years between 2014 to 2015, all of the sudden, after pretty much everybody knew the risks of playing football, we're all aware of it, all of the sudden, Concussions,
sustained in the NFL and football, became the big news.
It was everywhere.
You couldn't escape it.
I'm sorry, I forgot about O 'Fallon's delivery when he's on his own.
It's so good.
It's so different from when he's with James, too.
It's so clearly like Palpatine.
So that was the introduction.
That's the shot.
Here's the chaser.
You see, the NFL doesn't care about you, not one bit.
Now, the NFL, they're here for the revolution.
The NFL too?
They are now the Critical Race Football League, the CRFL.
You might want to remember that and repeat it.
The Critical Race Football League.
And now they're forcing every member of every team to get vaccinated.
Even when vaccines are being shown to be ineffective in preventing the spread of COVID-19.
That's known now.
And by watching the NFL and buying tickets to the NFL games, by buying NFL merchandise, by playing woke fantasy football, we're supporting the NFL.
It's time to stop.
If you are really concerned about stopping the spread of the cancer known as critical race theory in our society, stop watching the NFL.
Oh my God, he's such a...
The NFL, oh God.
When the race ball league is just right there on the table, you can just pick it up and throw it.
You're going to try to make an extra word happen?
No.
Did I black out there?
Did he swerve into anti-vaxxerism in the middle of the time of the critical race thing?
Yeah, yeah.
He slipped that in.
Just synonyms in his mind, right?
Like, there's nothing to fucking do with each other.
Even in my ridiculous cosmos where everything is connected, those things have very little to do with each other.
Critical race theory, the NFL, and vaccines.
Like, they're free.
Wait, wait, you missed concussions.
It started with concussions.
Let me ask you a question.
Why don't they ever fucking talk about cigarettes, right?
Am I wrong?
Every argument they make about things like concussions also applies to cigarettes, right?
Cigarettes are cool, and we all understood the cost of cigarettes.
And if we want to choose to smoke cigarettes, then why is the government trying to cut down people smoking and banning and, you know, like all this sort of...
But they don't ever make those arguments about cigarettes.
Why is that?
Has it just been abandoned because it doesn't pull as well as football or something?
Well, but do people want concussions?
I know people want cigarettes because they like nicotine.
But you see what I'm saying, right?
It's the same kind of safetyism that they're hating on here as proof of the emasculation of the West or something like that, right?
Oh, why don't they promote cigarettes?
Yeah, why aren't these guys, like, you know, don't let the liberals tell, you know, the cucks tell you not to smoke your cigarettes.
I think, no, but they are.
Like, Joe Rogan smokes his cigars.
Joe Rogan certainly, yeah.
Eats his meat and smokes his cigars into his meat.
You know about smoked meat, Matt.
You're a rebel.
I know about smoked meat.
I've smoked a meat or two.
I mean, like, it's all consistent, though, isn't it?
Like, I think if you...
If you press them, that'd be totally laissez-faire on cigarettes.
So people should be able to do whatever they want.
The government should get out of your business with cigarettes, just like in everything else.
Like the safetyism thing, again, where does it end?
I mean, what level of...
Abolishing the FDA is where it ends.
Yeah, I think you could be right.
EPA, FDA, all that stuff.
But it's clear where the philosophy is grounded, right?
And they're the kind of people that would...
Just easily embrace like a proto-fascistic kind of political thing without even noticing.
But I think what drives them is that know-nothing anti-government, little house on the prairie, little communities with the pastor and the floral dresses and the boys playing the rough sports in the backyard where everything,
everyone knows what their natural role is, right?
And everybody, and the things that people do, like going to church and wearing the nice dresses and playing roughhousing and so on, men being men, women being women, all the rest, right?
Like, that's the natural state of man, right?
This is mankind being natural and non-artificial.
And I think that's how God and society works for them.
That sounds to me like your opposition to that is pet talk.
Pet talk.
Do you think that all of this stops at the latest vaccine?
Are you that naive?
Have you not been listening to me over the past four years on the causes of things?
I have not.
And all the speeches that we've given?
This will soon go digital and trackable.
And it won't be just about your vaccine status.
No.
Because you have to obey.
This is obedience training.
And of course they will tell you that you must take the vaccine after vaccine and accept all this traceable and trackable technology so you won't cause any harm to anyone around you.
You must obey.
Because you are all now pets.
They should be required to prove that they are not vaccinated, in my opinion.
Right?
Like, if you're going to accuse people who get vaccinated of being pets, you would better not actually be vaccinated.
And I know for a fact that these guys are organizing conferences for James Lindsay down in Florida, so I would like to know what level of vaccination they are bringing to their particular events.
But like, yeah, it's such dangerous talk.
I don't think you really get it.
It's not just that pets are obedient, that they're taking vaccines.
They've got all their problems.
What will you do when they tell you that you can't drive your car anymore, that you have to use the automated and satellite-controlled vehicles, that avoid all wrecks in the future, when they explain that for you to keep on driving means that you are the danger?
You are the threat.
Because those of you who don't just sit and let AI, artificial intelligence, do the driving for you, are a threat to other people.
Like a bad dog that got outside of his fence.
That's you.
You must obey because you're a pet now.
You know, this is all coming.
These are good clips, Chris.
These are good clips, because I think they actually illustrate a lot.
They're making a lot of good points.
There's a lot of good points in there.
They're making me very angry, and I have several comments, but yes, go ahead, Matt.
No, I mean, like, the sheer absurdity of them is the secret here, I reckon.
Like, what, helmets for the NFL, you know, vaccines, like self-driving cars.
Like, it's literally anything.
Like, anything new.
It is so strange.
It is so weird.
It's just a deeply fundamentalist, conspiratorial worldview.
Opportunistically, trying to use any of those levers, hoping that one of those scattergun kind of things will gel with some listener.
Like, oh yeah, I don't feel right about self-driving cars.
I should be able to drive my own car.
Maybe that's going to pick up a few.
But really the idea is get on board, reject modernity, let's go.
Let's go back to the little house on the prairie.
That's my take.
Yeah, I have like five things wrong with this.
So like, I mean, the reason I brought up cigarettes initially is because I think the reason they don't talk about cigarettes is because they're a success story for this kind of safetyism that they hate so much.
Like in America, especially, smoking has gone down fairly substantially because of anti-smoking campaigns.
Their arguments are identical to like, don't let the government tell you that you can't drive after having just one drink or something.
Don't let the government tell you that you can't drive without a seatbelt or give you a ticket because like, it's all the same classic.
How dare they suggest that, like, you don't have the freedom to act in ways that might, like, severely endanger yourself or others.
And then, like, on top of that is this very, very silly layer of anti-technocratic bullshit.
Despite the fact that they love people like Elon Musk, who are building the AI cars, right?
The AI cars aren't coming.
I've been talking about this for a long time, doing AI ethics and stuff, and I've long felt that we are grossly overestimating the speed at which AI cars could be rolled out in the world.
One of the few ways they could be rolled out would be if, as they describe, they ban all non-drivers and only require AI drivers.
But that's never, ever, ever, ever going to happen.
There's no universe in which this is going to happen.
People still resisted.
Like, manual transmissions.
You think they're going to hand over their ability to drive freely to a robot?
Like, it's just not going to fucking happen.
So, like, they're afraid of a tyrant that will never, ever exist.
They've also got this thing about the UN making everyone eat bugs, which is, again, it's similar.
It's like, it's this thing, which all...
Annie mentioned about the fact that some people on the planet eat insects.
And that is taken as they're gonna fucking steal all your meat and shove locusts down your face and they're serious about it, right?
Like, and that's the thing, that's an example of just how, and James and O 'Fallon talk about that, talk about bugs and eating bugs and how this is Cloud Shroud, whatever his name is, like the UN villain guy.
Like, it's all the Great Reset plan is heavily around getting people to eat bugs.
So we introduced this by saying, you know, this is them before they get more extreme, at least in James' case, right?
Like, this is him on this radicalization pathway.
And they recognize that too.
So let me just play this clip which highlights that.
But let's say for just a second that who you are today in the chaos of 2021.
And what you know today in 2021 could travel back in time to 2017 to speak to 2017 you.
Would your 2017 you Believe 2021 you if you told 2017 you what would be coming in 2020 and 2021.
I think we all have a pretty strong feeling that your 2017 self would have said that 2021 you was absolutely crazy.
That 2021 you was spending too much time reading conspiracy theories.
2017 you would have told 2021 you that You know what, 2021 you?
You really need to trust the Lord with some of your concerns.
So before you comment, we've got two characters there, right?
2017 you and 20, I don't know if you picked them up, but 2021 you.
That's not all.
We've got a looper situation going.
You, just yet.
You are still stuck in the fog.
Of cognitive dissonance somewhere between 2017 you and early 2020 you.
And ladies and gentlemen, it is time to snap out of it.
You've probably figured out that I have been 2021 me publicly for about seven years now.
Going way back.
2021 has been my marker.
It's when I knew that things would drastically change.
I knew that 2020 would lead up to it, but I knew that 2021 was the target.
Privately, to specific leaders and friends, I have been 2030 me for at least five to six years.
That is why Dr. James White is saying the things that he is saying right now, especially on Twitter and on his podcast.
We've got the kind of inception, I don't know, back to the future level problem.
You like science fiction.
I do.
Oh, Fallen is this.
He's been 20-30 him for five years, but he was 20-20 him for seven years.
He's, which, what are you jizzy?
I know.
It's been publicly 20-31 him, but what has it been privately?
This is the rise of non-linear storytelling, I swear.
He's 20-21 him publicly, but he's...
No.
Yeah, publicly he's 20-21 him, but privately he's 20-30 him.
Oh, wow.
I mean, this is like classic cult stuff, right?
Like telling your cultists, remember who you were before you came here?
What would that person think about you now?
They wouldn't recognize you and you wouldn't recognize them.
And like, isn't that wild and fascinating and stuff?
And like, it's just proof that you spiraled, buddy.
It's not a good thing.
All you're saying is the person who you were seven years ago would not have believed that you would have gotten to the point of thinking that Klaus Schwab is going to murder several billion people and then, like, force-feed the rest of them crickets or something.
It's not a good trajectory.
This is another version of the Cassandra complex thing that I know Matt likes to get as many points for as possible.
And like, it reminds me of another thing in the background here is the AI technocratic stuff.
These guys are also into this idea, I think, to some extent of the microchipping thing a little bit.
And that gets into that Alex Jones stuff.
And you see in sort of Joe Rogan's discussions of Alex Jones, where he's like, Alex saw it coming ahead of time.
But that's all just nonsense.
These people just throw out a bunch of ridiculous DARPA-based predictions and then claim credit for having successfully predicted the scientific dystopia that we're going to live in, when the reality is most of us can barely get access to testing, much less microchips.
I mean, my takeaway from this is just, one, he's just not very good at this, right?
That was the most labored.
Analogy, metaphor, whatever, that you could possibly imagine as a piece of rhetoric.
And, you know, yeah, like you said, eating bugs and artificial intelligences and the woke NFL or whatever, it's just scattergun batshit crazy, right?
So the nice classical music at the beginning, the serious Centorian tone of voice, it's all window dressing for what is Alex Jones-level nonsense.
I refuse to decode it.
It's below the standard.
That's it.
Goodbye.
This is a good thing to finish with because it shows that if you listen to some of those clips earlier and you were thinking, aren't they making relevant points here or that?
They're just concerned about excesses, about critical theory and wanting social revolution.
No!
This is the bedrock.
Oh, Fallon is the master, right?
He's the one that's giving James the books about Marcuse and saying, you know, maybe read this essay, it'll blow your mind.
There's two clips to play where he outlines his vision of the future, like what's coming, right?
And I think that's a good thing to listen to to end on.
I'm sorry, Matt, I'm going to force you to decode two more before you get to stop hearing from him.
So here's number one.
People ask me all the time, they say, you know, what's the end goal of critical race theory?
What's the end goal of critical theory or whatever?
It doesn't look like this will work.
It doesn't look like any of it would work.
They tell me that all the time, and they're like, you don't understand.
Yeah, it's not meant to.
The point is to break what is.
That which exists now, to break it.
And they say, well, why would they want to do that?
Because they know that they're going to be able to mop up, or they believe at least they're going to be able to mop up.
Yeah, out of the rut.
Get their own upside-down hierarchy.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, they're going to be able to empower themselves, and they're going to order the world.
And we're not going to have any longer a nation or world based on ideas, which is what the Enlightenment and the liberal revolutions of, I guess, the 18th century really led to.
We're not going to have certain inalienable rights anymore.
So, they did like that.
I figure you swear, well, because it wasn't O 'Fallon, right?
They didn't pick up.
There was a slight change of cadence, but that's James, right?
And it's the same.
The same conspiratorial nonsense.
Yeah, and he wraps that up by saying they want to be the kings of the rubble pile, right?
Like, that's his view of what the critical parents are doing.
Hold on.
Oh, sorry.
Let James speak for himself.
We're now going to have a party that understands the subject of truth correctly, whereas everybody else doesn't understand the subject of truth.
Your claim to objectivity is just the wrong subjective tip.
It's just another story, they say.
And, you know, science is just one story among many.
And we have a better story now because we have the power.
And their goal is to break everything and then make themselves king of the rubble pile.
That was seriously funny.
That was the best material from James for the big epic wrap-up with the music coming.
Because that was just one.
Oh, and they're going to be kings of the rubble pile and everything's just going to be a story and we're not going to have our rights or our freedoms and there's going to be no nation under God.
That was so weak.
It helps if you play swelling music.
To the back.
Yeah, that's right.
I think they thought that would help it, but man, it did not.
They're not good at this.
They're not good at it.
There are accelerationists in the world, and there are probably some woke accelerationists who think that the goal is to destroy the current state of things, to bring about a new state of things.
It's a little ridiculous to suggest that the next thing they want to bring about is not what they think of as their utopia, rather than just a bunch of dystopian broken castles or something like that.
And the worst part is...
This is a non-visual medium, so you can't see, but if you watch these videos, the last shot of this is like a castle being destroyed by the waves.
It could not be more heavy-handed in its symbolism.
I have an issue that there's these conflicting views of the dystopia.
Are we bug-eating, half-cyborg pet creatures of the technocrats?
Being driven around in robot cars.
Either of course, right?
Or are we Mad Max world survivors that have to fight off queer black feminists in their enclaves of intersectionality?
And it's very similar.
Brett Weinstein and Heller Hayne outlined the same thing about the liberal cities will collapse, there will be...
Roaming bands of woke mobs, kind of like, I guess, you know, themed gangs in the wastelands in between conservative bastions of stability and civilization.
But like, it's all so stupid.
It's a cartoonish...
I kind of think they get off on imagining it, but like at least have a consistent dystopia that they're aiming for.
Is it a rubble pile or is it like a technocratic fascism?
Because those are two different...
Things, right?
Get consistency with your canon.
It's no parable of the talents, to be sure.
It is much more in the Turner Diaries vein in terms of consistency of what's happening in the world.
And you could make a coherent world-building kind of game out of this, right?
Where it's like, what happens to the cities when they're overtaken by the woke?
What happens to the rural areas when they resist the woke who come and start raiding them for food?
You could do that whole thing if you wanted to update the Turner Diaries.
But again, Why?
Why would you?
Look, look, look.
I think we've got really far afield from what the core point, the core message that they're both trying to offer is.
So before we get to the final thoughts, I just want to bring it back to the thing which this is really all about, that we need to keep at the front of our minds.
I love art.
And if that looks, if it looks like something somebody wants, it doesn't have to look good.
That's to some level subjective.
Great.
But it's not glaciology.
You have no seat at the glacier table because you painted a picture of a glacier.
You have no seat there.
And that whole paper is designed around the idea that glaciology only favors one type of story.
They only favor the white Western scientific story that's rooted in masculinism and in scientific reasoning and objective beliefs that objective truth is accessible or relevant.
And we should be Incorporating the subjective, the story, the narrative.
Right.
So you start creating subjective narratives that include teenage girls that have no knowledge on the subject at all, that are just emotional and script reading and so forth.
I've been, I mean, to summarize, you know, I've been convinced that this is something that I have to be extraordinarily emotional about.
Here's me wailing into a TikTok that, I guess, gave me a Nobel Prize in chemistry or something.
Put you on the cover of Time magazine.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
That is what James has been convinced of, what he was just complaining about.
But I can't say it better than him.
The thing is, it's feminist glaciology.
That's what it's all about.
I'm sorry, gentlemen.
And I don't really have anything to say except, fuck that paper.
If I ever have to hear James talk about it again, I'm going to blow my brains out.
Like, Marcuse, he should be banned from talking about Marcuse and feminist glaciology.
I don't mean them.
I mean the people who wrote the paper.
You know, they're fine.
Write a paper about feminist glyceology.
But if I have to spend one more minute talking about that paper, I'm going to become a glyceoer.
That's my wrap-up.
What's your wrap-up?
Aaron, you go first.
Sure.
Good thing.
You have to add the good thing.
That's our rule.
You have to say one good thing.
I have to say one good thing.
I think it's good that this was all out in the open now, because for the first year or so that I was covering James Lindsay, everybody pretended like none of this was real and it was all guilt by association and it had nothing to do with his spiral or anything like that.
And now nobody does that.
Nobody defends him in my mentions.
Nobody's like, we should actually still take him seriously or something like that.
So in that sense, I really appreciate that they have I don't know that he's no longer a factor because I think he's going to influence Republican politics in various ways, but I really genuinely appreciate that he successfully isolated himself into the MAGA world and away from as many other human beings as possible.
So cheers for that.
Yeah, he just recently appeared on our friend Joseph Rogan's show, so I think his influence, at least in the MAGA right-wing sphere, continues.
Matt?
Okay, so that wasn't really a good thing though, Aaron.
I mean, it was like a backhanded...
It was good for me.
Yeah, no, because I can't think of a good thing.
I'll be trying to think of one.
I just can't.
I really can't.
I've got one.
I think, you know, it's very important that...
We don't let obscure papers from critical theorists go unnoticed and undiscussed.
It's important, you know, because they've got important things to say.
And so if it wasn't for James, we would never hear about many of these papers or the arguments or the NFL.
That's a concern, becoming pets, eating bugs.
These are all...
Now, are they likely?
No.
You know, I'm glad somebody's flagging up these things.
I don't feel as much backhanded than my particular version of this.
What can we say?
A very earnest artistic designer made some money making these videos, right?
Like, somebody got to buy a fancy drone and fly it out over some sand dunes.
That person had a good time, and like...
It's hard to make a living doing that kind of creative work, so I think it's good that they are, you know, job creators in that kind of way.
I noticed on one of those sets on the beach, when they're sitting at the table, they had three coconuts arranged like so, and like a basket of seashells just scattered across the table.
Very nice.
This makes me think that Alex Jones did this thing where he put a chessboard and various items on his table, and then he was talking to his audience and he was like, "You might be wondering what these items represent."
And he was like, that's actually the point, just to make you think and, you know, free his thoughts.
It's like, he just was saying, you know, I put a brand of a sort of metal vinyl.
I'm just fucking with you with these dynums.
I kind of hope that the coconut on the left represents candy.
The coconut on the right is Marcuse.
And this middle one is the NFL.
I hope there was symbology to the coconut.
Good call out, Matt.
I will say, for me personally, my favorite part of all of this is that, true story, when I first reached out to James when I was early in ETV and he was doing the first penis hoax, right?
And I offered to have him come on and talk about ethics and stuff because it was related to the issues.
He made it clear in no uncertain terms that he thought that philosophy was the greatest waste of time.
Like, possibly in all of academia, right?
And now, he gets to spend all of his time explaining philosophy that he hates and doesn't understand to people who don't care and won't understand it either.
He has selected for himself a very, very special kind of hell to live in, and I… I guess I'm happy about that, like, because I think he does a lot of horrible things, and I think I don't have to feel bad being amused that he spends all his time that he's not on Twitter torturing himself,
reading things that he hates.
My wrap-up of him and O Fallon is, like, it used to be, maybe it was a little bit more difficult to spot, and James has spiraled.
He's went more extreme.
But if you go back to our second episode, we covered James.
And a lot of the kind of core features to his worldview, it was there, right, that this was a possible trajectory for him.
You can see the figure who may have helped him along that trajectory and material that we covered.
And if some of this sounded extreme, this is child's play to where James is now.
He's much more beyond this.
That Dr. Phil appearance.
It's much more closer to like what he's like now and what he's like on Twitter.
So, you know, he is a conspiracy theorist and a right wing partisan.
And if anybody in our audience is unable to recognize that at this point, oh, my God, I'm just very sorry.
You bring up that talk.
It's important to note there's a reason they're connected to these things is because that was an event organized by Sovereign Nations, by Michael O 'Fallon.
The talk you were referring to is the one that he gave, I believe, in London at their event that was the beginning of their ongoing business relationship.
And he's very clearly in that talk catering to that O 'Fallon-style sort of more right-wing audience.
Like, you can see him test-driving what is going to be his shtick for the rest of his spiral.
Aaron, you did a very good episode covering Lindsay at the time, but I also want to highlight that at the time, I made a thread and other people made similar comments saying, isn't this a problem that there's a potential influence of this kind of worldview when you're supposed to be like secular,
atheist, promoting science?
And at the time, there was a lot of pushback about, oh, come on!
Oh, come on.
There's no sign.
There's no indication of it.
They're just speaking at a conference organized by evangelicals.
Are you anti-religion?
Is that what it is?
And this was like, you know, Helen Pluckrose's response.
And again, I'm not, am I taking the victory lap?
Am I?
I don't know.
I'm just saying, who was right, Helen?
Who was right?
Yeah.
And everybody wants to hand me the victory of saying that James has converted to Christianity.
I don't think he actually has yet.
I do think it's still a likely possibility.
But we can certainly say that he is all in on the catering to Christian grift.
And you can see it more and more as he gets involved in these Twitter fights with actual Christians where he claims that they are promoting the devil's vaccines and stuff like that, right?
Like, he's clearly...
He's definitely all in on the grift at this point.
I remember back at, you know, back when I first became aware of him, and it was just the so-called squared hoax papers.
Now, I remember being something of a fan of the original so-called paper, because I thought it was a great send-up of a certain kind of ultra-dense social philosophizing...
Fashionable nonsense.
Fashionable nonsense, that's right.
Great sight-up, made a good point.
And then when those ones came out, again, I didn't have a problem with it.
A lot of people rang their hands about, oh, they didn't get ethical clearance or violated good faith or whatever.
But I'm all for it.
If you can trick a psychology journal into publishing some bullshit, then I'm all for it.
It can be mean, it can be unfair or whatever.
But where James took that, and to some degree all of them, is first of all very much into A kind of social and political activism.
It wasn't an academic thing anymore.
Very quickly became not an academic thing.
Became a political and social thing.
And this is true of all of them.
They took this sort of fine reading critique of these fundamentals of...
Critical theory and philosophy and the Frankfurt School or whatever it is, is like a social critique of political correctness and wokeness and leftism and gone too far and all that kind of stuff, which is completely wrong because those things are so far apart.
They're far apart in terms of the general population and sort of very highfalutin abstract academia, and they're far apart in terms of being like, what is it, 70 years, 80 years distant?
So completely disconnected.
And then...
James in particular has taken it even one step further.
And now his whole thing, all of this reading of Foucault and Marcus and all that stuff, it's serving as nothing more as a bookend.
They're eating bugs or, you know, making you robot drive you around in your car.
It's serving as just another one of those little bullet points on what is paleo fundamentalist.
Christianity.
So, yeah, well done, mate.
Nice trajectory.
Good on you.
Conservatism.
Well, Aaron, we've consumed quite a lot of your patience and time, but we do greatly appreciate you coming on.
There's very few philosophers that we can tolerate to be in the presence of for multiple hours.
Except you, Liam.
Any time, man.
Deeply fair.
So just to say, you know, for a philosopher, that was really good.
So thank you for coming on and helping decode O 'Fallon and Lindsay.
And I do think you're due your victory laps because you called a lot of this many moons ago.
I do too.
So heed Aaron.
I appreciate that.
For an Irishman, you did quite well here too.
Thank you all for having me on.
How dare you.
All right, I'm stopping now.
So bye, Aaron.
So Matt, that was a decoding par excellence.
We did our duty.
We took them apart.
We found out how important glaciers are to everything, really.
And here we are.
Did you enjoy that?
No, I didn't really enjoy that one, Chris.
Yeah, it'll be good for us to get a little bit out of the Culture Wars, which we're planning to do.
Continue our trek, our long march out of the Culture Wars.
And who were you thinking we might cover next?
Well, there's a man called Jérôme Larnier.
Lanier?
Lanier?
We'll have to find that out.
His middle name is Zeppel, as it happens.
And he is a computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, composer of contemporary classical music, etc., etc.
He is a man with dreadlocks and a tendency to play various musical instruments before he gets into his lectures and walk around barefoot.
He's an interesting technologist for us to look at, and he's basically warning about the dangers of social media and technology.
A tangential figure to culture war, malarkey, except, of course, every time we say this, we end up going into a right-wing death spiral.
So we'll probably be out marching at the next Trump rally in a couple of months' time.
Watch out, Lanny.
The being covered by Decoded the Gurus is the kiss of death.
Like JPCs, for instance.
I remember back when we covered JPCs, you know, we almost didn't cover him because he seemed like just this kind of...
Insubstantial piece of fluff.
Yeah.
And, you know, records, you know, mediocre, somewhat funny, back then, videos on YouTube.
And, you know, he's one of these guest speakers at this big anti-vax march up there with Matt.
Matt, remember, it's about mandates.
All those anti-vaxxers have been there.
That's, you know, they just have a variety of interests.
So, yeah, it's not anti-vax, it's anti-mandi.
It's very separate issues.
Very separate.
Oh, dear.
Yeah, so, but yeah, I recognize Lenny, like I...
I don't know him well, but I remember some of the stuff he did, like 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now.
I remember some kind of pretty strong, if not hyperbolic, concern-raising regarding social media.
I'll hold my tongue, Matt.
Maybe I'll really agree with everything he said.
That's why I'm picky, though.
I will say that he appeared on Barry Weiss's podcast recently.
That was a pretty good introduction to his worldview.
So if you want the recent piece of content to consume of his that you can find on Barry Weiss's podcast, whatever it is, unheard, uncensored, honestly, the truth, can't speak lies, podcast.com.
So Matt, time to take it to our audience to give them the Proverbial, metaphorical fist that they deserve as we look at their reviews and respond to their reading of us by reading their reviews with our review of reviews.
Everybody's favorite section.
And you found one good one and one bad one.
That's good, because you're having trouble sometimes finding some bad ones.
Oh, don't worry.
Since we reviewed popular right-wing figures, we have regained our negative feedback quotient.
So, would you like to offset those?
Please feel free to do so.
But let's hear some of them.
So this one, I can't actually attribute this one to right-wingery because it could just be a fair critique.
It's by Onomatopeo7654321.
And the title is Pointless.
One out of five stars.
And it says, there is no point to this podcast.
It is a big waste of time.
Pointless.
One out of five.
That's it.
That's it.
They got the message out.
I reckon that was written by a 13-year-old.
I reckon that person is 13 years old.
With the brain of a newborn pigeon.
Just because it's short.
Yeah.
I mean, they're 13 unless until proven otherwise.
And there was nothing they wrote that demonstrated that they weren't 13. That's right.
They didn't.
And that's probably the attention span of a 13 year old.
So they're all nihilistic at that age anyway.
That's why it's all pointless, isn't it?
That's right.
What's the point anyway?
That's right.
That's right.
Keep your angsty teenage.
Keep it to yourself, mate.
We don't need to hear it on our podcast.
And the next one.
I'm not sure, Matt, but I detect a tinge of, you know, there might be some right-wing leaning.
I can't tell, but let's see if you can detect that.
It's very subtle.
This is John Burselton.
Oh, and the title is, Who is the expert?
Listening to a psychologist and anthropologist try to discredit the most cited doctor in his field in history seems a little silly, doesn't it?
It should probably be noted.
Peter McCulloch has treated thousands of COVID patients with phenomenal outcomes and shared what works on a worldwide scale.
In an altruistic world, we would see him on the nightly news, sharing what works to save lives.
I'm not trying to slander him.
It's up to us to bring that altruistic world to fruition.
Wow.
Well, that's clearly Brett Weinstein.
No, there was not enough obscure analogies thrown in.
It's not even obscure analogies.
He didn't mention Harry Potter, Transformers.
Every cultural reference was not shoehorned in, so it can't be Bret Weinstein.
That's true.
It wasn't pretentious enough.
Yeah, well, yeah, that's good.
I mean, we're probably going to attract the attention of anti-vaxxers, let's face it.
Yeah, that's...
Well, in fairness, it could be a left-wing anti-vaxxer.
It could just be...
A fan of a notoriously right-wing doctor.
And he doesn't like that part of his output.
He likes his anti-vaxx stuff because that's what he talked about.
So, yeah.
And I like the way that he just wanted to clarify.
He's not nagging Peter McCulloch for not being on the nightly news.
Just in case McCulloch read it and thought this was a dig that, you know, he could be working harder.
It's up to us.
Us, the people reading the reviews of Decoding the Courage.
To get him on the nightly news.
So try harder, everyone.
And we might be able to get him there.
Yeah.
Well, we're not going to make all the people happy all the time.
And we'll definitely not be making anti-vaxxers happy.
Sorry, John Bursselton.
And what kind of a name is that, really?
But, Matt, apart from those eejits, there are people with sensible, well-thought-out opinions.
And, you know...
I don't like to put these positive reviews in, but I have to do it for balance.
So, yes, there's no way around it.
Pensible, well-thought-out, five-star opinions.
Yeah, I just have to put them in.
There's no way around it.
That's what the format demands.
We decided on the format at the beginning.
We're not in control.
We just follow what the script says.
So, this is by Kitty McTacco.
See?
A good name as well.
And the title is People, The Length is Necessary.
Already I like him.
Or her, Kitty.
Sorry.
But a Kitty could be a man.
There are meal cats as well.
I see some folks complaining about the episodes being too long.
There's not that many of them.
We just highlight them.
Put it on 1.5 speed if it's really that much of an issue for you.
The ungodly amount of hours of disinfo being spewed by these gurus constantly requires thorough debunking coverage if you expect anyone to A, be equipped with all the necessary information to help in the battle of fighting disinformation or B,
to cover all aspects of what about That's a convoluted argument, but I think I'm on board with it.
Yeah, it was a difficult one to read, but I think I did it.
And then it finishes with, great work, guys.
You're providing a great service to society, which is what I keep telling all my critics.
So I'm glad someone else has...
The bravery to say it, Matt.
Yeah.
Kitty Tarko is definitely brave.
Yeah.
Brave to say such hard-hitting, honest truths.
And there we have it.
Not from our minds.
Someone else said it.
And I hadn't, you know, that was just the one I rested my finger on randomly when scrolling through.
So yeah, that's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Two negatives, Matt, and one positive this week, the, you know, balance, just to keep it a little bit skewed towards negative.
So there we go.
That's it.
More reviews like Kitty McTaco, less like John Fursell Button.
That's right.
That's right.
We'll get depressed.
We'll get unhappy.
We'll just, we'll, we'll go into a funk and we'll cancel it.
Just like the portal was canceled because the fans were misbehaving.
That's right.
That could happen to you.
That could happen.
If you guys don't step it up, if you don't step up to the plate and start counteracting all these negative reviews, I don't know.
I don't know.
I just might have to withdraw and cancel all these exciting episodes we have planned.
Note you're online, yeah.
That's right.
I get nagged on social media all the time and there's no fans jumping in.
Yeah.
Where are they, Matt?
Yeah.
Where are they?
They need to sacrifice themselves.
Like, you get in there.
Argue with the reply guys.
Come on!
What are we doing this for?
I remember one time, was it Brett or Eric?
But somebody clearly was, like, in their minds.
It was Eric.
It was Eric.
Seeking their army of fans on.
Yes, he tagged us.
He tagged us.
And various people.
Nothing happened.
It was great.
Yeah, yeah.
Just some people DM'd us saying, oh, you did it.
Thanks for Eric down the peg or two.
But yeah, so, well, I think our appeals will have a similar effect.
But should you be inclined to write a five-star review, we'll be open to that.
And now, Matt, the real five-star fans.
Of the podcast.
The people who make it all possible.
The shining stars of the Guru Night Sky.
The Patreons of Decoding the Gurus.
And actually, there's a bit of a surprise this week.
Because I fucked up the Patreon document that I currently have, I'm trying to sort it out, and I'm coming up with a new system, so we're going to get caught up with our Patreon delays.
But I am going to be referencing Recent Patreons.
Because I don't want to mess up the ones that have already shouted out.
Just trust me.
It'll be easier for me to give shoutouts to recent Patreons.
So if you're a very recent Patreon, you may be about to get a shoutout.
How exciting!
So for today, we'll start with the conspiracy hypothesizers.
We have John Brugner, Jason Etheridge, Xiao Xiao Li, David...
nope.
Kathy Cox, John Gao, Adam Scherr, and Joe.
Maybe Joe Rogan, could be Joe Rogan.
It's Joe.
Anyway, these are our conspiracy hypothesizers, Matt.
Hmm.
Thank you, thank you.
Nice combination of names.
I just realized something with the format here, is that there's no ranking.
Like, everyone, doesn't matter what tier of patron you are.
No, it does.
We shout out a batch from every tier.
So there's no jumping to the head of the shout-out queue just by donating more money.
You see what I'm saying?
Matt, are you essentially pointing out to the patrons that they get no benefit?
From paying more money for higher tiers in terms of shoutouts?
Is that what you're doing right now?
I think people are just admiring our egalitarian principles here.
Luxury, spears, communism, and action.
Yes, you are right.
In shoutout terms, it's all the same.
You are a unified whole to us.
But in other things, like getting access to the monthly livestream.
You're not the same.
I'm sorry.
There are perks that are only available to the highest paying tiers of the massive sum of $10.
Don't blame us.
This is how neoliberalism works.
This is the system we live in, people.
We told you in the first episode.
We warned you.
So, that's only yourself to blame.
So, thank you!
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Thank you, Brett Weinstein.
So now, revolutionary geniuses, Matt.
Here we have David Ferguson, Matthias Bolton, Gary Gutt.
Jerry!
Now, what the hell am I saying, Gary?
Who has a name called Gary?
Jerry Gutt.
Jerry Gutt.
God, it's not your fault.
It's my fault for getting that name wrong.
Jargar and John McKay.
All revolutionary geniuses.
Fantastic.
Middle tier, I like it.
Not showing off, not falling behind with the rest of the rabble.
You know, just in the middle.
It's like centrism, but for Patreons.
That's right.
Gary.
What?
He's called Gary.
No one's called Gary.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
Indeed you are.
And now I'm at the final tier, the most equal of all equal tiers, the galaxy brain gurus.
I've already made the joke.
I won't read it.
I won't repeat it.
These guys are the pigs at Animal Farm, you know?
Exactly.
And a little bit more equal than the rest.
Yep.
Yes, yes, that's the way.
That's the nice image for them.
So, William Crawley and Jay Jones.
Also, Tim Rossiter and Go-Kart Mozart.
Go-Kart Mozart.
I like that one.
That's a good one.
Go-Kart Mozart.
That's good.
Well, that's great.
I mean, look, we definitely appreciate the elite tier patrons, but...
The best thinkers.
The best thinkers.
But it also...
You know, you have to wonder whether that $10 might be better if you use preserving habitat for gorillas or something.
I mean, it's slightly problematic, isn't it?
Is it a luxury thing?
I mean, it's mainly problematic because of your deep admiration for Scott Adams.
It's almost like they're funding him directly by supporting you.
But outside of that, I think their conscience can remain free.
But yeah, maybe reconsider lowering your pledge after this month.
Or Matt will give you further abuse.
But I will thank you.
So thank you all.
Especially go-kart Mozart.
Yes.
Mozart.
Mozart.
It's spelled with a Z, isn't it?
That's what I said.
Yeah, Mozart.
Silent Z. Mozart.
It's like Matt.
Yes.
Silent T's.
Here we go.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard.
And you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute, am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
He's an expert, like we're an expert, and able to evaluate these pretend virologists.
This is directed at that negative review before.
That really got there, didn't it?
Don't worry, don't worry.
He's just an internet rando.
Find people on both sides, Chris.
Find people.
Agreed, agreed.
So, that's it.
Next, we'll be away from these culture war-pilled mad brains for a little while, getting to a technologist.
And yeah, I look forward to it.
So, Matt, thank you for all you've done today and all you continue to do in the world.
Enjoy the rest of your afternoon.
Thank you.
Oh, and gravel at the feet of your muscle master.
Already did it.
I did it before breakfast, but I'll do it again just to go on the safe side.
Okay.
Okay.
Ciao!
Bye. Bye.
Bye. you you
Matt, I've got another secret piece of Northern Irish lingo for you.
Oh, okay.
For behind the music.
Oh, yeah, for behind the music.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, what is it?
So, for people that are getting over their skis, they're, you know, they're sticking their heads above the parapet and getting a bit too big for their boots, we have an expression that says, wind your neck in.
Oh, I know that one.
I know that one.
You know that one?
Is that non-Norban Irish?
It exists outside?
I feel like that's a UK thing.
Yeah.
Is it?
See, this is the thing.
No, they probably took it from us.
They took it from us.
Just like everything else, am I right, Chris?
They did, they did.
All right, I'll give you another one then that I know they don't use.
So, if someone's being annoying, right, you can call them an idiot, which is the Irish word for idiot.
Well, not the Irish word, it's just a...
It's an English word that Irish people invented that means idiot.
But then the other one, Matt, if they're a bit more than an idiot, they're a bit more annoying, you can call them a gobshite.
Oh, yeah.
That one's pretty good.
You might have heard it through Follow Ted.
Yeah, I've heard it through Follow Ted.
You're right, actually.
But there's a thing with gobshite that you can do, which is reserved for when somebody is the ultimate gobshite, like when they're really, really annoying.
And then you can call them a gobshite of the highest order.
That's true.
I like that.
Yeah, first among gobshite.
Truly unparalleled in the gobshite-iness.
Yeah, I like it.
My dad said that many times to me.
Yeah, there we go.
That's your Northern Irish lesson for today.
Now, are these things that are just old people say or young people are on board with all this?
