"Mini" Decoding of Konstantin Kisin's Oxford Union speech
Recently the Oxford Union (based in Oxford but distinct from the university) hosted a debate on "whether woke culture has gone too far". A very fresh question, and it's been good to see people finally discussing this important issue. Former guest, comedian, and host of the Triggernometry podcast Konstantin Kisin argued for the proposition, and his 10 minute speech has gone viral, garnering over 20 million views (and counting). Kisin has received lavish praise for his compelling talk from across the interwebs for what has been broadly described as a masterful demolition of woke culture, leading to broadcast television appearances with Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson.Well, a video of the speech crossed our path on Twitter, and it seemed to us to be an interesting case-study on the effective use of rhetoric, so here is our decoding. As is our want, we are slightly more critical in our assessment than Piers Morgan Tucker Carlson, but we are able to identify points of concordance as well. Enjoy!LinksThe original speechKonstantin Kisin | This House Believes Woke Culture Has Gone Too Far - 7/8 | Oxford UnionCoverageKonstantin Kisin’s Important Message LIVE on Tucker CarlsonKonstantin Kisin and Piers Morgan Discuss The Problems With Woke CultureBackgroundGlobal Concern about Climate Change, Broad Support for Limiting Emissions
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, and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown.
With me is Chris Kavanagh.
So, Chris, what's new, pussycat?
How's your afternoon going?
Yeah, it's going okay.
Your introduction today was relatively upbeat, so that's nice.
That's always a good sign.
I've been on holiday for the best part of a month, so I should be feeling upbeat.
No excuse.
Yeah.
So we're here today not for a standard Guru decoding episode.
We're going to look at a short piece of content, one that is just around nine minutes long and is currently kind of the talk of the internet time to some extent in some sectors.
Why we are going to look at this content is that when we started the podcast, one of the goals that we had was to look at rhetorical techniques, right?
Not just to focus on things that we disagree with, but hopefully stuff that we might be more sympathetic to also look and highlight rhetorical techniques and whatnot.
You have seen previously when we looked at some content that Sam Harris produced about the value of introspection that actually neither Matt or I are hostile to emphasizing the value of introspection,
but we thought that that video had a bunch of rhetorical content in it.
And in the same respect, the video that we're going to talk about today is Constantine Kissin's speech.
Which he gave recently at the Oxford Union Debate Club.
In favour of the motion, this house believes woke culture has gone too far.
So there's a bunch of speakers and they have like a short amount of time to give arguments in favour or against a given proposition.
Yeah, and it's fair to say that that speech was very well received.
It was a hit.
Definitely received a huge round of applause at the Oxford Club where this debate was happening and widely shared around the internet.
Everyone, at least in the anti-woke crowd, which was the topic of the debate, seemed to love it.
Yeah, so I think Constantine was hosting either by it.
You know, it was shared across anti-woke heterodox fear with a kind of this, a strong, compelling argument against wokeness.
And now, before we go into the content, I just want to make one thing crystal clear.
Where Matt and I are coming from, if you haven't picked up on the subtle hints that we've laced throughout the podcast, including in the first episode, is that we are moderate left-wing people.
We're the kind of milquetoast people that would vote for Biden or don't hate Keir Starmer in the UK context.
So actually, neither of us is massively fond of the strong, hardcore progressive left take, generally referred to as wokeism.
We're not advocates for that.
And if you want to see where we differ in some respects, you could look.
At the episode, recent episode with D 'Angelo.
So the reason I mention this is just because we are not arguing against the motion that Constantine wants to put here.
You know, wokeness has gone too far or whatever.
Our argument here is that this is a bad, a bad rhetoric-heavy talk which is arguing against wokeness.
So whether you're in favor of...
Progressive or wokeness, whatever way you want to phrase it, or whether you're against it, you should still be able to recognize when people make good or bad arguments in favor or against the proposition.
And as we will show, we think that this particular talk is very, very heavy on rhetoric.
Yes, Chris.
At least somewhat sympathetic to the general premise of having a problem with wokeness, given the opportunity to either beat my head against a wall or read an article on problematic racism in J.I.R.
Tolkien's novels or why walkable neighbourhoods are ableist.
I'd probably go for the beat my head against the wall option.
So we're not a totally unsympathetic audience to the proposal here.
No.
So we could be part of the target audience for the message that Constantine wants to deliver.
However, it is also the case that, you know, there are various people online who will denounce me as woke or that kind of thing.
But it's because their political compass is incredibly secured.
And people who actually are progressive quite readily pick up in the differences between our perspectives.
So, yeah.
Just flagging up where we sit politically before we go into the content.
Okay, very good.
So let's listen to it and see what we think.
Okay.
Oh, and the context here, as I say, is this is at the Oxford Union, so everybody is in black tie, you know, with bow ties and formal suits, and the hall is decked out in, you know, wooden mahogany kind of stuff.
In case you didn't know, Matt, I went to.
I was aware of the Oxford Union, but the Oxford Union isn't actually a part of the university.
It's like a separate organization, which very much trades on image of Oxford University, but is technically a completely independent organization.
And it has a history of inviting controversial figures, inviting people to debate topics which are going to garner.
So Michaela Peterson has spoken there, Johnny Depp, previously Nick Griffin of the BNP in the UK.
So they invite a wide variety of people to speak about a wider range of things, but often it's controversial topics.
Okay, good context.
Okay, so here we are.
This is one of the opening salvos.
I find that the reason, the main reason now that I have left to be in support of the motion is that I am so tired of talking about woke culture.
That's why it's gone too far, more than anything else.
And I thank the other speakers for making the points for me because it means I don't have to reiterate the point that no, no, free speech is not some right-wing reframing of whatever.
It's the foundation of Western civilization.
Okay, so this is Constantine saying that he's actually fed up.
You know, he was thanking his other presenters for covering most of the main points that he might have made.
You know, he's not going to address various arguments which are straightforward, one of which is that free speech is not a right-wing dog whistle.
Yeah, he's got the podcast trigonometry, right?
Their basic thing is to...
Yeah, there is the fact that Constantine's career, to a large extent, is based around opposition to wokeism.
I mean, the title of his podcast makes that rather explicit.
It's actually interesting, Chris, that gambit of that I'm so tired of talking about.
It's actually something that you see in woke discourse as well.
And yeah, given Konstantin's job, probably more of a rhetorical ploy rather than a factual statement.
Yeah, although who knows?
Maybe he is very tired of touching the subject often.
I'm tired of gurus.
Yeah, so some people pointed out parallels with, well, isn't the guru's part just the same?
I think one of the differences here is like our whole premise is that we are looking at Guru's content and examining it critically.
And if we didn't enjoy doing that, we wouldn't be doing it as the topic of the podcast now.
It doesn't mean that we always enjoy every piece of content that we look at, but...
Scott Adams.
Yeah, actually...
Scott Adams.
Scott Adams and the upcoming Dave Rubin and Bill Maher.
But yeah, so...
Yes.
Do I want to listen to another eight hours of James Lindsay talk about the Chinese critical race takeover?
No, but I'm not tired, Matt.
I'm all right.
So woke people, Constantine, they're tired.
I still got the vim to keep going.
Okay, but the more substantive point he made is that free speech is crucial.
I'll allow that point.
I think you could say that general freedom of speech is something that we associate with liberal democracies and is a good thing in capital letters.
And he's kind of right that there is a free mean where any reference to free speech is treated with suspicion.
But in part that is because free speech has become a kind of shibboleth on the right that does not actually peg itself to Actual free speech, right?
Like, it's very selective concerns with free speech.
Kind of like, you might be concerned about who's getting banned on Twitter, but you're not going to object to certain books being taken out of circulation in Florida because they're considered part of critical race theory.
That kind of double standard.
That's why people, I think, in some part, complain.
Sure.
Okay.
So anyway, I actually appreciate this use of rhetoric whereby he's listing a bunch of things which he wants the audience to pay attention to, but he's saying, you know, I'm not going to bother arguing with them.
So he continues on.
So one of them was that free speech is a right wing ploy also.
I don't have to make the point that has been made by far better people in the past that the only way to deal with the problem of racism is to treat people on the content of their character and nothing else.
And the fact that woke culture seeks to overturn that is a new form of racism that we must all oppose.
It means also I will not use this opportunity to say I told you so as someone who spent the last five years warning people in the West that if we continue to erode our culture, if we continue to undermine our confidence in Western values, that our enemies, enemies like Vladimir Putin,
will seek to capitalize on it.
I will not make any of those points tonight.
At all.
Very good.
Fine, fine.
I think me and Konstantin Kisant disagree on quite a few things.
This is a bit of an aside, Chris.
But I think his stance on Vladimir Putin is very correct.
And he's actually done some good work in translating some Russian speeches and things like that in a journalistic kind of way.
We have some differences regarding approaches to COVID and climate change, of course, but we're going to hear about that soon.
Yeah.
So I do like this delivery, actually, this part of...
You know, framing things as you're not going to mention them and then listing them.
And I think that the majority of objections that he raises there in their more reasonable form are also things that we have objected to, like in the content with D 'Angelo or so on.
So, yeah, fine.
Okay.
A funny rhetorical gambit at the start, but, you know, a nice neat summary of some objections that people legitimately could have to woke overreach.
Yep.
Yeah.
Okay, moving on.
I'm not going to talk to those of you who already agree with me, which I imagine is most of you.
I'm not going to talk to you because I imagine after everything you've heard tonight, you're going to vote for the proposition.
I'm going to confess I will take your vote for granted.
Tonight, I am the Labour Party and you are the Red Wall.
Now, I want to talk to those of you who are woke and who are open to rational argument.
A small minority, I accept.
Because one of the tenets of wokeness is, of course, that your feelings matter more than the truth.
But I believe in you.
I believe there are those of you here who are woke, who are open to rational arguments.
So, there's a bunch there, but one of the things I want to highlight is, there's red meat in this.
I don't know if you get the reference to the red wall, Labour and assuming the votes.
So that's a UK dig at the Labour Party because they took votes for granted from Scotland and working class areas that then swung to the Conservatives or the SNP.
It's a ding on the Labour Party, right?
Some of you are reasonable or whatever.
It's all dinging to the one side.
And Constantine presents himself, as we know from discussing him, a centrist position.
But as you'll see in pretty much all of his content, it's just constant dings to the left and to Labour.
I don't see him making the same kind of dings on the Conservative Party or UKIP.
So that's just to note.
Yeah, sure.
And I guess, look, most of that was rhetorical flair.
About, you know, things like, oh, there's hardly any reasonable people who are woke, but I assume there's a few of you.
I'm going to talk to you.
I mean, you know, these are all rhetorical flourishes.
Perfectly fine in a debate, but not much more of substance was said there, except for the key point, I think, that a key tenet of wokeness is that your feelings matter more than the truth.
Right.
And this is shades of facts don't care about your feelings, a common refrain amongst the anti-woke.
What do you think about that, Chris?
So, yeah, that is something which many people say on behalf of the advocates for wokeism, and I don't hear as many of them arguing that.
I have seen various things where people have dismissed scientific findings by talking to other ways of knowing and stuff, but by and large, most of the people that I interact with who are towards the progressive wokeism,
They actually tend to argue that the facts support their perspective, that when you look at details of the incarceration system and so on, this is what adds the support for their case.
So whether you agree with them or not is a different issue.
A majority of them are claiming the facts support them.
So that is like a rhetorical branding of them as people who don't care about facts, but they claim they do.
Exactly, yeah.
I mean, agree or disagree whether or not, I don't know, the United States is a patriarchal, cis-normative, racist society or not, the woke would claim that that is factually true, not simply that people should agree with me so that you don't hurt my feelings.
And they certainly have no problem with hurting other people's feelings if you don't agree with them.
So yeah, that really is more of a slogan.
It's just not factually true.
Yeah, yeah.
So the point that I wanted to make about the digging of the left, it's just that, so the framing of this is that Constantine wants to speak to the open-minded, woke sympathetic in the audience.
But I think that what this talk is, is much more of how it was received online, which is a clarion call to the anti-woke.
Or the heterodox or that kind of thing.
It isn't attempting to speak across the aisle.
It's just reinforcing.
And you can see it, by the way, that all of the digs and all of the framing, they all accept as the premise already that the anti-woke position is demonstrated to be correct.
Absolutely.
Okay, let's hear some more.
Okay, so the talk focuses really around the issue of climate change.
And this is how it's introduced.
We are told that your generation cares more than any other about one issue in particular, and that issue is climate change.
We're told that many of you suffer from climate anxiety.
You wish to save the planet.
And for tonight, and tonight only, I will join you.
I will join you in worshipping at the feet of St. Greta of climate change.
Let us all accept right here, right now, that we are living through a climate emergency and our stocks of polar bears are running extremely low.
I join you in this view.
I truly do.
Now, what are we to do about this huge problem facing humanity?
What can we in Britain do?
We can only do one thing.
Okay, we'll hear what that one thing is.
But again, Matt, the framing, I just...
You know, the St. Greta of climate change or whatever the way you refer to it, like mocking Greta Thunberg, then referencing polar bears, stocks running.
It is the kind of arguments that you just readily see on conservative media, right?
An obsession, obsession with Greta Thunberg.
And, you know, it's just the charismatic megafauna that are, you know, at risk.
Yeah, it was at this point that I began to get a little bit irritated.
I mean, I'm old enough to remember way before Greta Thunberg was born, I think.
And it wasn't a cultural issue.
It wasn't this divisive left-right thing.
It was basically scientists telling people that carbon dioxide admitted into the atmosphere was making the Earth...
And we would have to do something about that.
And then we saw 20, 30, 40 years of complete roadblocking, denialism and obstruction from the right.
And I didn't necessarily agree with the decision by many on the left to sort of rebadge it as climate justice and things like that, because I thought that was playing into the hands of making it a divisive culture war issue.
But the way he frames it is that it is nothing but the discourse.
It is nothing but worshipping at the feet of St. Greta.
It is nothing but angsting and having climate anxiety and things like that.
And yes, those concepts exist.
But although Konstantin says that for the sake of argument, he is going to speak as though he acknowledges climate change is a genuine concern we should be addressing, and emphasises that he truly agrees with you,
I think in fact he doesn't.
I think, in fact, he doesn't.
And so it's not very honest, I think, the pose that he's taking.
No, and the issue like you noted about, okay, let's accept that it's a problem.
That's not a big concession, really.
It shouldn't be on right or left at this point in time because it initially started out that...
The position was, it's not happening.
Then that position morphed to, it's not caused by people.
Now the position is, it's happening, it's caused by people, but it's not going to be so bad, right?
And every step of the way, there's been people arguing that those emphasizing it are either manufacturing data, exaggerating the claims, and so on.
And over time, the strength of the rebuttal has fallen, but it still exists.
So it's just, there is a history of denialism.
Around the subject.
And for you mean it in this way, Konstantin is setting it up with the alarmists, climate alarmism versus our responsible discussion of it.
But that isn't the beat and it hasn't been for such a long time.
So anyway, let's see what the actual argument that he raises then is.
You know why?
This country is responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions, which means that if Britain was to sink into the sea right now, it would make absolutely no difference to the issue of climate change.
You know why?
Because the future of the climate is going to be decided in Asia and in Latin America by poor people who couldn't give a shit about saving the planet.
This is the core of the argument.
This is the core of the argument.
That's true.
So should we talk about it now or give him some more time to speak?
Well, I think just even here, there's already like a bunch of rhetorical gambits in play.
Like one is that, okay, people in Britain, if Britain was to sink into the ocean, that this would only make a 2% impact on climate, right?
I'm curious where the figure for this comes from, but let's assume that it's like Britain's...
Contribution to annual carbon dioxide output or something like this.
But that doesn't account for the fact that British politicians and developed countries making political agreements and spearheading efforts to combat climate change don't rely entirely on their population's contribution,
So it might be the case that you need the developing countries to adhere in order to
Make a substantial dent on carbon dioxide emissions, but there's plenty of British companies, there's plenty of political power, which has an impact on the rest of the world.
So this kind of myopic focus on each country as an island and it's just the emissions, that already is a rhetorical gambit.
This is a rhetorical gambit I remember hearing on Conservative Talkback Radio 20 years ago.
That, oh, it doesn't matter what Australia does.
We only contribute a small percentage of the world emissions, so there's no point us doing anything.
Well, the fact is there's 200-plus countries in the world, right?
Every one of them contributes, except maybe for the really heavy hitters like China or the United States, contributes a small percentage of total club.
And that's why the emphasis has been on multilateral global agreements in order to get a coordinated effort.
And that's exactly the kind of thing that the skeptics and the denialists have been advocating against.
This is not a clever point that's being made.
It's very much a furphy.
And there are all kinds of ways in which countries that buy things from manufactured items or steal, for instance, from a place like China.
I think it's a very poor rhetorical point that's being made regarding, oh, a small country, there's no point doing anything because the world's a big place and we're too small.
That's just silly and easily dismissed.
I also want to say, Chris, it was odd.
Were you surprised when he made this swerve?
He went from facts don't care about your feelings, the problem of woke people being against free speech.
Just swerving into climate change.
Climate change to me is not the top of my list when I think of woke excess.
Yeah, but it wasn't that surprising because I remember we covered this series with James Lindsay and Michael O 'Fallon where they dedicated quite a substantial focus on climate change as an apparently Woke issue.
And they were very skeptical about the very existence of climate change.
You know, Michael Fallon to a stronger extent than James Lindsay.
But then they just referenced various hypothetical technological solutions that would solve it all anyway, without any need for people restricting things or trying to reduce carbon emissions or that kind of thing.
So there was an echo of that here.
And at the very end of this clip, you also heard Constantine Emphasize that the poor people don't give a shit about the climate, right?
I think we need to return to that point, but let's hear him elaborate it a bit more.
You know why?
Because they're poor.
Because they're poor.
I come from Russia, which is not a poor country.
It's a middle-income country.
20% of households in Russia do not have an indoor toilet.
What they have is an outdoor toilet.
And I don't mean one of those nice port-a-loos that we get here.
I don't even mean a Glastonbury port-a-loo.
I mean a wooden shack with a hole in the ground that holds a collected, fermented memory of the last 10,000 visits.
How many of you are going to go home tonight and say, let's rip out our bathroom and erect a Siberian shithouse in the back garden?
And if you're not, why should they?
120 million people in China do not have enough food.
I don't mean that they don't get dessert.
I mean they suffer from malnutrition.
That means that their immune system is breaking down because they don't have enough food.
You're not going to get them to stay poor.
Any issues with that argument?
Okay.
So, firstly, it sets up the idea that having a sewage system is incompatible with doing something about climate change.
That's clearly not the case.
It is an irrevocable choice for somebody in a developing country to prioritise having a basic standard of living with reducing carbon emissions.
There are all kinds of places in between.
Yes, to some degree, obviously, there is going to be a compromise, perhaps, between prioritising economic growth and managing the environment, but it certainly doesn't involve the poorest of the poor.
I happen to go to the toilet in our houses.
That is tangential entirely to the question of warming.
The per capita emissions in developed countries are vastly larger than in developing countries.
And that difference in per capita emissions is not because of the sewage system.
It's because of a whole bunch of other stuff, mainly power generation, of course.
That's one thing.
Chris, do you have other things?
Yeah, so there's the false dichotomy of be in fever of development and the improvement of sewage and living standards versus care about the environment.
And there isn't much effort spent on Konstantin's part to outline why those two things necessarily are a zero-sum trade-off.
But the other part that got to me is like, as far as I've done research on the topic, overwhelmingly, the countries that are going to have the biggest impact from global warming, the negative impact,
is low-income countries.
The ones that cannot mitigate it because they don't have very strong economies and well-developed infrastructure and so on.
So the notion that like...
The poorest people in the world don't give a shit about climate change.
One, it's completely not true because there's lots of low-income countries that suffer from droughts or just happen to be low-lying, right?
And in those cases, they face genuine existential risks.
It just struck me as completely ignored that anybody in a developing country on a low income...
We give a shit about their environment.
And that's not true.
There's so many of them that have protested about environmental destruction from the government, from corporations.
In China, there were mass protests about the government allowing industries to pump waste into rivers and stuff that people have to live on.
But Constantine frames it as if those people would give a shit about environmental pollution.
No, they would because they suffer from it.
So, yeah, again, just a false dichotomy and also a complete disregard of all of the statistics I've seen, the people that are worst affected by the impacts of climate change.
Yeah, exactly.
People that are suffering from floods in Pakistan or whose South Pacific island is about to be submerged might have some.
You know, concerns about climate change.
Yeah.
So anyway, not a great point, but he spent an awful lot of time talking about this apparent contradiction between indoor plumbing and climate action.
Well, one of the things that I think he wants to emphasize there is like, you haven't experienced hardship, you folks in this room here at the Oxford Union.
You woke elites.
I'm from a background in a middle-income country, and I know what's like proper hardship.
That's not even real hardship, right?
Real hardship is developing countries.
And I tell you that those people there don't care about that issue.
And one thing I did, which I don't think Constantine will have done, is I went and looked at the statistics from various cross-cultural polls about concerns.
And counter to what Constantine suggests, environmental destruction and climate change and stuff.
Is a major concern.
And it's more so the more that you go to countries that are like badly affected by climate change.
So there are countries where it's less of a concern.
But the notion that just basically there's no one talking about this except people in the first world elite.
That's like a talking point from the 1990s or something.
Like it's not true.
Yeah, the rhetorical force of the argument comes from the idea that in order to do something about climate change, we will have to reduce our tangible living standards to pre-industrial levels.
And none of the most aggressive plans for addressing climate change imply anything like that.
At most, they involve some...
Moderate restriction on economic growth.
It is horrendously expensive to recalibrate our entire power generation system, to focus on renewables and all of those things.
But it's not the kind of thing that means you have to give up your indoor plumbing.
It really isn't.
And there's even the options to focus on nuclear.
This could be an argument that you would advance that I think would be a stronger one.
If you wanted to say that the cutting edge of progressivism has been Hostile towards nuclear energy generation.
And the statistics do not support that stance.
That would be a better argument, but that's not what he's doing.
So, okay.
Anyway, and the only other thing that I'd say about this section is that point about you wouldn't be willing to rip out your toilet and just a hole in the floor.
So you shouldn't expect others to do that.
Again, it's like, who is arguing that?
That's part of why he spent so much time describing, you know, the filthy conditions of the toilet, because he wants to create an emotional response and then saying, well, you're hypocrites for forcing that on people.
But who, again, it's a non sequitur, but it's emotionally and rhetorically powerful.
So it works in that context.
But logically, it's shit.
It is.
All right, let's hear some more.
Imagine you're Xi Jinping, the leader of China.
When you were 10 years old, there was a revolution, a cultural revolution in your country.
And people came and they put your father in prison.
Your mother had to denounce him.
Your sister killed herself.
And you, no longer enjoying the protection of your formerly powerful father, were sent to a village where you lived in a cave house.
And here you are, decades later.
You have clawed your way.
Of the bloody and greasy pole of Chinese politics, to be the undisputed supreme leader of the very Communist Party that destroyed your family.
And you know that the main thing you have to do to survive and to stay in power is to deliver the one thing that the people of China want: prosperity, economic growth.
Where do you think climate change ranks on Xi Jinping's list of priorities?
Now, Chris, I can't speak for the internal state of mind of Xi Jinping, but once again, we'll note that he's spending a fair bit of time to deal with his emotionally laden imagery, right?
The Cultural Revolution, families getting murdered and destroyed.
Again, extremely tangential to the argument that he's trying to make, which is, and let's retrace, wokeness.
And a focus on that your feelings are more important than facts is leading to this irrational desire to do something about the environment, which he's accepting for argument's sake is something that should be done.
It's actually impossible because, one, poor people in places like Russia are always going to want to have indoor plumbing and they're going to prioritize that.
And also in places like China, they're going to be prioritizing economic growth.
Yeah, and I was surprised to see Xi Jinping being cited here in a way like accepting his rhetoric, because Xi Jinping, as he describes, he climbed up over the bodies of rivals and internal power structures,
which eventually result in people being exiled or executed or wherever the case might be.
He is now the undisputed ruler with no term limits in China.
He's an authoritarian ruler.
And part of the Communist Party's rhetoric is that it's just looking after the concerns of the ordinary rural people.
It's against the elites or the crony capitalists and so on.
But any assessment of China reveals that to be complete rhetoric, right?
China is extremely capitalistic and the Communist Party is heavily involved.
With industry and the level of corruption that is found across the industry is quite legendary.
So presenting him that Xi Jinping is primarily focused on delivering better life to the rural peasants.
Well, that's nice.
I didn't know that Trigonometry and Constantine were so enamored with the Communist Party's rhetoric.
But the second thing is that again presents it like There isn't a homegrown movement in China at all about environmental issues.
And actually, there was a whole bunch of protests, in particular about the quality of air, about a decade or so ago, which led to the government introducing a whole bunch of stated restrictions about pollution and so on,
and targeting various party members that they said were corruptly Undermining the party by accepting bribes and not enforcing environmental quality things and so on.
But China cracked down on the ability for people, journalists and ordinary people to protest against their government.
So they can't.
They have to do it in a very roundabout way to protest.
So one is you're not allowed to go on these big screeds and do mass protests about government policies in China.
And the second thing is the notion, again, that no one in China really cares about this issue.
It beggars belief because, of course, if you lived in somewhere where the environment was being destroyed and you are suffering from it rather than benefiting from it, you won't like that.
And the people who are benefiting mostly from it will be the people who own factories.
And that kind of thing.
So it isn't to say poverty reduction isn't occurring in China because of, you know, growth in the economy.
But Konstantin's story is so simplistic.
It's just like poor people don't give a shit about anything to do with the environment.
And Xi Jinping, that's why he doesn't care about the environment.
China also has signed on to a whole bunch of climate goals for 2030.
Yeah, China is the leading investor and producer and consumer of solar panels.
Now, I'm not a pride China person, but I haven't seen any evidence that China is just like a brick wall in terms of climate change.
Like, oh no, we're not going to have anything to do with addressing this at all.
Not at all.
China is absolutely integrated, despite all the political issues that we have with them.
Absolutely integrated with the world economic system and are definitely amenable to negotiation, even if they were dragging their heels on it, which, to be honest, I'm not seeing relative to, say, the United States or Australia.
I'm not sure that that's really true.
So, like you said, it's a nice piece of rhetorical imagery that the peasants don't care about climate change.
Xi Jinping's totally beholden to whatever the peasants want.
And therefore, they have all the autonomy.
China is responsible for a large proportion of the world's CO2 emissions, but that's because a lot of the stuff that's consumed in the West is made in China.
It's simply not true that the West has no agency, even if it was true, to concede in his argument that China is the problem, right?
China's the one dragging their heels.
His argument is there's no point us doing anything because China has all the agency.
We have none.
At every step of the way, none of the logic in that argument hangs together.
Yeah.
And again, just to reiterate the notion that Xi Jinping, because of his experiences grown up, that he's fundamentally opposed to the communist system.
When he's the undisputed and unquestionable supreme leader of the Communist Party, it's remarkable because...
I usually hear the anti-woke denouncing the Chinese as having these secret plans to hobble the West or introduce CRT to take over and so on.
So it's impressive how flexible they are on those kind of points when it suits.
Anyway, we move on from there.
That segment about climate then shifts to a more personal issue, but still related to climate.
But here's how it's introduced.
A third of all children who live in extreme poverty in the world live in India.
That means they are starving and dying of preventable disease.
Now, about 15 months ago, my wife got pregnant.
Not me, because we're old school.
LAUGHTER APPLAUSE Thank you.
And for nine months, we talked about what a boy would look like.
What he might do when he grows up.
We looked at baby scans and videos on YouTube about what the fetus looks like at 9 months and 12 months and 20 months.
And eventually he was born.
And he is this cute little bundle of joy.
He's cuter than about 80% of puppies, right?
Okay.
I mean, it's a good phrase.
My kid's cuter than 80% of puppies.
I mean, yeah, so more emotionally.
There were some nice little digs there.
Again, it's all fine.
This is a debate.
You're going to make rhetorical flourishes.
The joke about having the wife give birth, being old school, is just a throwaway line.
But again, just to highlight, it's the kind of throwaway line that you see constantly in right-wing commentary.
So there is no parody in the things.
And it's understandable because Constantine is arguing against the woke position.
I don't think Constantine has a large repertoire of jokes at the expense of the Reich.
So, you know, there's just not a parody there for an enlightened centrist.
I think what you can say is that, yeah, he makes some good little digs there against woke culture to say that we're having a baby rather than my wife is having a baby, whatever.
But it's entirely tangential to any kind of argument.
That he's putting together here, which, as we've already seen, hasn't really gone anywhere yet.
Right.
So he has a cute baby.
Now, how's he going to link this in?
If you said to me that I had a choice, either my son had a serious risk of starving or dying from a preventable disease in the next year, or I could press a button and he would live.
He would go to school.
He would bring his first girlfriend home.
You'd go to university and graduate and become a woke idiot.
And then he'd get a job and get married and have children and become a man.
But all I have to do is press this button.
And for every day of my son's life, a giant plume of CO2 is going to get released into the atmosphere.
Now, you're all very young, and most of you are not parents.
Let me tell you something.
There is not a parent in the world.
Who would not smash that button so hard their hand bled.
Yeah, so there you go.
Another long hypothetical, personal, emotive little anecdote there, Chris.
Well, it's not even...
What is it?
It's a false dichotomy, right?
Because what he's setting up is your infant child lives.
You push a button, which ejects carbon dioxide every day in the atmosphere.
Yes, it's a very obvious thing which he's trying to say, but again, that's not the choice, right?
Like, why is the only option available to people in Constantine's fantasy world that, like, all development requires immense pollution?
He lives in, like, a fucking bizarro Captain Planet world.
Like, the only way that a family could improve their living standards or education.
It's by expelling gas.
Like, what's the fucking machine procedure for that?
So it's almost the definition of a false dichotomy.
And saying parents will choose their child's life over if they have to pollute.
Yes!
Of course, if you say your child's going to die, like, yeah, astonishing.
I think you'll also find that would be the choice.
If you said, you know, push this button and socialist governments are going to get an extra vote every time you push the button, they'll push the button every time.
So does that mean that actually people don't mind if there's a communist socialist government or whatever, or kill one person by pushing the button and your child gets to survive?
I know.
We shouldn't have to belabor the point why it's so obviously.
An emotion-laden false dichotomy, but it works on a rhetorical level because he did the labor at that point so much.
And who doesn't love their child?
And who wouldn't lift heaven and earth to preserve them from sickness, etc.?
I mean, I've got another rather silly hypothetical example, which is far more applicable, which is imagine you're a medieval peasant and you've got a common ground upon which you and your neighbors graze your cattle.
But if you all graze your cattle on the commons, then the soil will be degraded and whatever.
But if you're a medieval peasant, Chris, and you had to choose between giving your child milk throughout the winter, wouldn't you always choose that rather than some abstract idea about saving that commons?
You wouldn't.
And so it's absolutely impossible.
You mean you would?
In your setup there, you mean that you would?
You wouldn't care about the commons, right.
Right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't care.
But also, medieval peasants famously did cooperate and to do things.
And around the world today, people do do things where it may not be in your absolute immediate imperative interest.
Today, you can actually use your brain and communicate with other people and make long-term decisions that are optimal for everybody.
So people make sacrifices for the collective good.
We live in a society, as George Quintanza said.
I deliberately made that little anecdote because it's a silly one, but it's a lot less silly than Konstantin's false dichotomy there.
Yeah.
So there's that.
Oh, and just a point I want to mention.
So one of the features of this kind of format is that there's two sides and...
People present the case, you know, there's a kind of argument for the proposition, an argument against the proposition and exchanging terms.
And people can make points of order, right?
They can interrupt you to usually to say something, you know, the point of order here.
But when they do so, the thing is that it's understood to be like a short interjection.
So usually it gives you the chance to then...
Explain why they're wrong, right?
So they don't get to dominate your speech.
But there's two points during it where somebody tries to interject to Constantine, and this is his response.
No, thank you.
No, thank you.
Okay, so first point of information.
No, thank you.
No, thank you.
And then again towards the end.
No, thank you.
I want everyone to get home on time today, which is not going to happen.
So, you're allowed to do this, right?
You don't have to accept the point of information.
But I just, you know, again, just a slight contradiction about the openness to hear challenging perspectives or whatever.
And these objections were raised whenever Constantine said something like, nobody in the...
Global South cares about climate change.
Point of information.
No, thank you.
No, thank you.
Please don't stand in the way of my lovely rhetorical steamroller.
Constantine is not the only person who would do this, right?
It could happen on any side, but I just flagging up that kind of free speech warrior, you know, like...
No, he knows he's building a rhetorical argument, and it would derail it to have to deal with somebody saying, actually, statistics show that blah, blah, blah, or whatever the case might be.
So that's one thing.
But that's the problems, right?
Look, we've got issues.
But Konstantin said at the start that he agreed that climate change is a problem, right?
For the sake of argument, Chris.
For the sake of argument.
Yeah, this whole thing.
He's accepted that premise, as you can tell from all the previous clips.
If we cannot take individual actions, the people in the global south or developing countries, they don't care.
They're just concerned with their immediate subsistence interests and having better toileting.
And the people in the global north or developed countries, they make so little contribution, it doesn't matter.
Whatever they want to do is inconsequential.
So what do we do then?
Well...
You are not going to get these people to stay poor.
You're not even going to get them to not want to be richer.
And so, I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, there is only one thing we can do in this country to stop climate change, and that is to make scientific and technological breakthroughs that will create the clean energy that is not only clean, but also cheap.
Somebody's trying to
I had a point of information there, but it'll get passed.
So it's technology, Mark.
What's wrong with that?
There's nothing wrong with that.
And so this is the point where there's certainly some common ground between someone like me and someone like Konstantin.
Obviously, new technology is absolutely fantastic.
We want as much development as possible.
You know, people that care about climate change have been super keen on developing technologies to reduce the pain of the energy transition.
If we had no other options apart from coal, Fired power.
And there was no kinds of energy efficiencies of any kind that could be created.
And our standard of living completely depended on however many kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of standard of living, then it might be something like the zero-sum trade-off that he's talking about.
But of course, nobody thinks that.
That's another false dichotomy here.
Everyone who is in favour of doing something about climate change is also in favour of investing in their technologies as much as possible.
But I think Konstantin's, I mean, it's kind of implicit, I suppose, which is that, one, that'll just get taken care of by the free market and people won't change.
And you shouldn't ask people to change from, say, a coal-fired power station to a nuclear power station or solar panels with batteries or whatever, if those solar panels or...
The nuclear power plant increases your energy costs by, whatever, 20%.
No, no, you've got to wait until it's cheaper than coal.
Like, that's just silly.
But how will it get there?
And it also ignores that subsidies exist in many countries for energy production, right?
Governments can create incentives for different types of energy so that it's profitable for companies to invest in new technology.
This is the entire premise of the carbon tax, which was to incentivise, because you don't get the technological development unless there's an industry there that can use the technology that you're developing, because it costs billions of dollars to develop the technology.
So, you know, the carbon tax in Australia was proposed.
It was rolled back very quickly by exactly the same kind of right-wing radio shock jocks and the Liberal Party.
So it's very frustrating to hear the same arguments and the same kinds of roadblocking when they're actually against the very mechanisms and methods that would achieve the technological magic fixes that they pretend to want.
Because people will point to Elon, but if they do so, they have to take note of the amount of subsidies, government subsidies, that his companies benefit from.
Yes, there's a role for people being innovative and pushing.
Investment in new technologies.
But very much so, those companies are reliant on government support.
The idea that you always have to choose a technology which is like the lowest dollar cost per unit of production or consumer standard of living.
I mean, by that argument, you wouldn't have any environmental protections at all.
If you had some technology that involved throwing glowing used nuclear rods.
Into the street, then that would be cheaper, right?
Than bury them in concrete things.
But we wouldn't do that, obviously, because people will always choose the absolute cheapest means anyway.
It doesn't make sense, except on a purely rhetorical level.
Yeah, it reminds me that this is what Jordan Peterson and like James Lindsay and Cole will reference is, you know, in the future, there'll be a technological solution.
We'll get the science, we'll resolve it.
And I think you and I as well would have optimism that A lot of the solutions will come from technology, but they don't just magically appear.
And in most cases, when people who are more towards the climate skeptic side reference this, it's like a kind of panacea that they throw in at the end.
So they will oppose all efforts by governments or all transnational attempts to create standards that might incentivize.
That movement towards, you know, new technologies.
But in theory, they agree with them.
And this reminds me that like the Bjorn Lomborg guy, like, so I did a very cursory examination of his organization because he was saying all of our finances are public, right?
You can go and look them up.
And I did that.
And I noticed that for his think tank about climate.
And how to do it responsibly.
You might imagine if he was a technology-focused person, that they would invest a large amount in promoting workshops or conferences, focusing on new technology, supporting scholars, investing in new technologies.
No, the vast majority of the budget is Bjorn Lomborg's salary to go around conservative podcasts and say that climate change is not really a big issue and that we'll have technological solutions for it.
The thing, like, the people are not denying it anymore.
Now they just point at technology and kind of weave in that direction.
I know.
That's right.
People that are pro-climate action perceive these arguments for what they are, like this sort of magical technological fix.
It actually just serves as a delaying technique.
Everyone's in favor of technological fixes, right?
If we get a good enough technology, if we invent fusion, then we don't have to suffer any, there's no trade-offs.
Great.
Everyone would love that.
But the fact is, is that there is a need for investment and there may be a need for some kind of moderate trade-offs.
But you see the rhetorical move here, which is that, no, no, don't do any of that.
Don't worry.
Technology will come along like a magical arrow and sort this out at some point in the future.
And the whole thing is like a woke kind of angst.
Greta Thunberg, emotional thing anyway.
Poor people will never care about it, so don't.
You know, there's a big criticism of like the utopian vision, the desire to perfect society on the left amongst the woke people.
But this is a version of it.
This is a utopian vision where there's like a techno utopia that will resolve all the problems.
Unclear how we get there, but you know, we will because we have Peter Thiel and Elon Musk at the helm.
So anyway, the last clip, which kind of makes this more explicit, is talking about the kind of contrast between The woke worldview and what Constantine has outlined.
And the only thing that wokeness has to offer in exchange is to brainwash bright young minds like you to believe that you are victims, to believe that you have no agency, to believe that what you must do to improve the world is to complain,
is to protest, is to throw soup on paintings.
And we on this side of the house are not on this side of the house because we do not wish to improve the world.
We sit on this side of the house because we know that the way to improve the world is to work, is to create, it is to build.
And the problem with woke culture is that it's trained too many young minds like yours to forget about that.
So Chris, I'm almost glad that he actually returned to the purported topic.
Yeah, yeah.
But it almost hurts your neck how quickly this has swerved from climate action is a waste of time to wokeness is victimhood culture.
All woke people want to do is complain and protest and people that aren't woke understand about hard work.
It's a non-secretur.
What's the connection?
The connection that he's drawing there is that...
People that are in poverty and stuff, they know the value of a hard day's work.
And that's why they're not focused on their victimness.
They're not the ones wringing their hands over climate change because they're surviving and they're building.
You guys are in the lap of luxury and you're complaining about the society that sustains you.
But first thing for me is like, again, just this complete...
Contrast between, on this side, we build.
We care.
We are the engines of progress.
And, you know, all moral goodness is on our side.
Like, whenever anybody postulates themselves as standing in that, that's one of the things that Constantine and Co are supposed to criticize the Wook for doing.
But he does it, right?
And it's set up by the kind of rhetorical nature of the debate.
But that's part of why I find this such an appalling.
Way to debate things because you're just, you're setting up, okay, everything on our side is great and the opposing side has nothing of value.
You know, purportedly, the facts and reason, enlightened centrists, liberal crowd, to which I am adjacent to, should be just dealing in an impassionate kind of way with the arguments for and against various things.
What they accuse woke people of doing is being divisive and attacking character.
And saying that these are the bad people here, whatever.
They could be white male.
They're not sincere.
White male privileged people, whatever.
That's right.
They are always attacking the person rather than playing the ball.
But as you said, I mean, what is in what he said except for that?
According to his statements, it's just that, well, wokeness is bad because woke people are privileged, lazy.
They're pampered.
They're out of touch with reality.
They don't want to work hard.
All I want to do is complain and protest.
Whereas we, of course, are the opposite, right?
We are the good people.
It's fine to do that kind of thing in a debate, I suppose, but it doesn't have any...
There is no substance to it apart from insults, essentially.
Yeah, and you can see it from the kind of ability to...
Gien laughs at just slight digs at woke idiots or throwing paint at people.
Again, I don't think this is a tough crowd for that kind of digs to land.
But the other aspect of it is that complaining about the woke people and how they luxuriate in grievance and they rely on personal anecdotes and emotional appeals.
That's what this whole book has been.
It's a walk down grievance lane peppered with emotional appeals and false dichotomies about evil idiots.
So it's just that constant inability to apply the standards consistently.
And you can criticize wokeism on lots of grounds.
But if you then do all of the things that you are criticizing them for, that is called...
Hypocrisy!
That's funny.
I mean, listeners, as you've heard, Christian and I have gotten a bit head up in criticism of this talk.
And I just want to emphasize, the bit about it that is supremely irritating to me is not that it's attacking wokeness.
I don't like wokeness very much.
Not very much at all.
It's not even that it's attacking climate action, something I do care about quite a bit.
That's not the thing that's making me upset.
It's just how terrible, absolutely terrible the arguments put together are, how the absolute non-secretors, how things are not connected.
And yet people seem to be applauding this and sharing this around the internet.
Everyone thinks it's just a tour de force.
Not everyone.
Not everyone.
It's like, again, I want to emphasize, like this clip was shown on Tucker.
It will be promoted on Rubin.
It was, you know, endorsed as great by, like, Michael Shermer and Gad Saad.
There's a particularly receptive audience to this, and it looks a lot like Jordan Peterson.
And that's okay in the sense that I just want people to acknowledge that, right?
That this, it was not meant for the woke audience to convert them.
It was red meat for the anti-woke to feel Justified.
And that's what it is.
So it's not a piece of argumentative, you know, it's not this great, convincing, philosophical piece.
It's just self-satisfied rhetoric to cheer on people who already agree.
Yeah.
The exact opposite of what it said it was.
Yeah.
I wish Constantine Kissin every success in his endeavors, even his anti-woke endeavors.
But it's kind of sad to see that this kind of material, which has been...
But received 5 million views or something like that.
He's very pleased.
20 million.
20 million now.
It's definitely increased his profile a huge amount.
I'll just say that I wish it was something better that was delivering that kind of exposure to him.
Well, yes.
And now, look, what will happen, Matt, this is just my prediction, because Kyle Constantine and various people in this sphere, they don't respond particularly well to people doing detailed...
No, no, Chris, you're completely wrong.
These guys are robust.
They love the rough and tumble of ideas.
They don't have thin skins.
What are you talking about?
This is true.
Maybe I'm slightly off here, but I suspect what will be pointed out is you guys spent an hour on a nine-minute speech.
The response that I will make in advance of that is this is the asymmetric burden.
You can pour out rhetoric.
In very condensed periods of time, that is very effective.
You can make emotional appeals, which get a strong response.
If you want to explain what people are doing rhetorically, you have to break things down, take time, and explain the arguments.
And as a result, it does take much longer.
Of course, we're long-winded academics as well, which doesn't help.
I have my own rejoinder, Chris.
That was a good sort of preemptive strike against criticism.
But my response would be, It's our podcast to do what I want.
Well, there's that too.
There's that too.
But you know, that's fine.
So anyway, it was just this particular video.
It felt relevant to our interest because of the density of rhetoric.
Like the only thing that I've seen which comes close is Eric Weinstein's introductory articles in the portal.
Like his little monologues that he used to give.
They were...
Condensed rhetoric.
And they had more conspiracies on them than this particular one.
This is just like kind of, you know, a rhetoric-dense, partisan kind of screed.
The final thing I'll say, Chris, is that, yeah, look, I just hope the takeaway here, it doesn't matter whether you're woke or anti-woke.
It doesn't matter if you're in favor of aggressive climate change amelioration or not.
I mean, what we wanted to do with this is just encourage people to pay attention.
To a piece of rhetorical material like this, rhetoric is okay, right?
Everyone does rhetoric from time to time.
This is certainly like a debate, this Oxford Club debate.
It's a place for rhetoric.
It's fine.
It's all fine.
But just pay attention to it, see it for what it is, and ask yourself whether you're finding it convincing and appealing because of the evidence and the logical coherence of it, or whether it's because it's speaking to your prejudices and making emotional appeals.
That's my final word on the subject.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's a good final word.
So our little condensed mini episode is finished.
We welcome feedback from all at Sundry and yes.
And, you know, just take this in the spirit of critical feedback, those that listen.
