All Episodes
Previous Next
June 23, 2020 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:01:38
E25 - The Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | Kafka Traps; White Fragility and #BLM | DarkHorse Podcast

The 25th livestream from Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying in their continuing discussion surrounding the novel coronavirus. Link to the Q&A portion of this episode: https://youtu.be/QDxhs0I6_MYSupport the Show.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
This is, I believe, our 1,312th livestream, is that correct?
That is right.
That was what I came up with.
All right, well, we are back.
That's what happens when you do back of the envelope math.
Yeah, the envelope was wet, so it was a little difficult to do.
Number 25.
Number 25, actually.
Okay, good.
So I thought, actually, In light of the way things are going, instead of opening with some kind of a light anecdote or a story or a joke, that we would instead try five seconds of violence just to get us in sync.
One, two, three, four, five.
Here we go.
All right, we've gotten that out of the way.
That was internalized violence?
Is that what that was?
Oh, no.
Silence is violence, pure and simple.
There's no internalized at all.
How did I miss it?
How did you miss it?
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
But anyway, now we're pumped.
Impressive.
We're ready to go.
Yeah.
We're going to talk about all the things that have taken place since our last livestream.
We skipped one because we had other material arising.
I mean, we skipped talking about the modern moment as much because you had been on Rogan, and we talked a bit about the story that you alluded to but did not talk about.
Did not talk about to Joe, yes.
Yes.
So, we have lots of stuff that's built up in the hopper, as it were.
Yeah, so much.
So much more than we will get to, of course.
Can I start by saying that I listened to your conversation, the first conversation that you've had with John McWhorter, that's up on the Dark Horse Podcast and on this YouTube channel.
It is extraordinary.
I mean, I hardly know him, but I of course have the deepest respect for both of you.
Watching two people engage in good faith around complex issues about which you don't exactly see the same thing, It's truly remarkable.
I didn't actually watch it, I listened to it as a podcast in the car, but I imagine watching even added a little bit more nuance.
One thing that came up for me, you know, I have found McWhorter's contention that this is a religious movement and that this is not really metaphor even, that this is akin to religion, that this is like religion.
A very compelling argument for years now, and I think it was a 2018 article that he wrote that really put it into sharp relief for me.
And I was wondering though whether, and you know maybe this is something you can ask him when you're on with him next, whether he would call the cultural revolution and Maoist doctrine a religion as well.
What do you think?
Do you have any opinions on that?
Yeah, my guess would be that he will think that there is a lot of overlap.
And I guess the question I would have is, given your and my perspective about what religion is and how it came about, that it is an evolutionary phenomenon, that this may actually be an empirical question, right?
There may actually be circuitry that is called into play when one goes into a religious modality, and so it may, you know, It may be a matter of a brain scan could reveal whether somebody is in that mindset or not.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess I tend to think of religious belief and, you know, the tenets that have stood the test of time emerging slowly and becoming dominant over time.
And so the thing that has seemed so dangerous about this current movement that has been, you know, ongoing for decades actually, but is at fever pitch right now, and similarly about Maoism.
was that it was this top-down, authoritarian, extraordinarily quick thing.
And actually, if I could just read a very brief paragraph.
This is one of the books on the culture revolution that I've been reading.
I don't know how to pronounce the guy's name.
He's excellent.
Frank de Coulter, Dutch.
The third in a trilogy, The Cultural Revolution, A People's History, 1962-1976.
1962 to 1976, he has on page 168 a quotation from an office worker who's remembering 1968, sort of early Cultural Revolution.
Every morning, he says, we would stand in front of this with our little red books and read aloud a few passages.
Then, waving the little red book, we would say three times, Great Leader, Teacher, Helmsman Chairman Mao, May You Live 10,000 Years, and Good Health Forever to Vice Chairman Lin Bao.
It struck me as absurd, almost like a religion.
Most of us felt that way as I was to discover after the Cultural Revolution.
At the time, however, no one in their right mind would dare say so openly, let alone discuss it.
That seems so much like what we're seeing now.
The culture of fear that is spreading, and as I have said to you in the last couple days, and I actually just tweeted just before we went on, I think there is a close analogy to be made between Mao's Little Red Book and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility.
These books are being passed around, they're being waved as badges of true believership, and also as ways to basically bludgeon those who don't fall into line.
Yeah, I remember, you know, and again our audience will be somewhat tired of hearing how much of this just echoes rather exactly what we went through at Evergreen in a sort of miniature version, but I remember the first time I heard the term white fragility,
Where I had made what I thought was a very careful argument about what I thought was and was not present at Evergreen and why it was important that we not upend the sciences, for example, in the process of, you know, hunting a non-existent enemy.
And an American Indian colleague of ours challenged me and just simply asserted that I was evidencing white fragility.
And I thought, Wait a minute, there's no way to make an argument in this realm, because either I agree with you, but if I disagree with you, then it is inherently evidence that I don't get it yet.
And so, you know, it's... If she floats, she's a witch.
Right.
Heads I win, tails you lose.
It's all of these things.
It is rigged.
It is completely rigged against anyone who wants to engage the questions with substance.
Yes, and it is not rigged subtly, it is rigged transparently, and the basic point at some level is, okay, you can try to wriggle out, but we have enough power to force you to this ultimately.
So as you wriggle, you will find yourself more and more punished, and at some point, you'll wise up and you'll say, ah, now I get it.
And, you know, it's...
As if falling into place as an ally is actually a safe position.
Because there is no safety here.
There is no safe position.
No, it's like cannon fodder.
You're going to be part of the infantry and it's going to be a short ride.
That's right.
That's right.
So, I know we've got a lot to talk about here, but I wondered if I could show a few photographs that I took just today during a short walk around a quaint Portland, southwest Portland neighborhood.
It's a pretty white neighborhood, as Portland is.
Pretty gentrified, I think.
It's a little commercial area.
It's Multnomah Village.
And within about a five block area, I took 20 photographs.
And some of these are not high quality.
I'm going to show 14 or so here.
14, I think, here.
And I'd love us to just talk about them.
And then at the end, it's a good segue to talk about Black Lives Matter.
So, Zach, if you want to show.
So, these are, again, these are posters that I saw in a, in about five block radius in southwest Portland today on June 23rd, 2020.
And for those who are, who will be listening and not seeing, this one says, Black Lives Matter.
Hands up, don't shoot.
Color is not a crime.
Okay, that makes sense.
And you've got people drawn, it's, you know, the artwork is good, it's interesting, and people in masks behind it.
So that looks like an honorable representation of what Black Lives Matter is claiming to be.
It's a warm image of this protest.
Absolutely.
Let's see, next one.
So sorry about the lighting here, it's super bright and hot out here in Portland today.
Um, a few simple truths that I believe.
This one says, no one should live in fear, murder is wrong no matter what uniform you wear, and justice shouldn't be something we have to demand.
I'll be done marching when I see a change.
This too, I find completely honorable.
And it was actually, it was, this was in the window of a, of a metal arts shop, and I thought it was actually going to be like a book art shop printmaking, and maybe they have letterpress in there, but this looks like a handmade letterpress sign with completely honorable sentiments.
You know, all of these things.
Anyone who can't get behind, no one should live in fear, or murder is wrong no matter what uniform you wear, that actually indicates a problem in the head of that person if they think people should be living in fear.
Now we are moving into slightly more ideological, already memed sentiments.
No justice, no peace, which is one of the things you'll hear chanted.
Black Lives Matter, and this is folded, so it is actually spelled correctly there, with the now familiar Black Lives Fist, but also, you know, the hands reaching up.
I can imagine this, you know, people reaching for justice and trying to do right.
So can I just point out, no telling what was on the artist's mind, but that fist and those hands are not a match.
Those hands are comparatively dainty, and that fist is robust.
I wonder if there's not a subtle message about what they wrongly call allyship here.
That's interesting.
Yeah, so the anthropological term would be sort of gracile versus robust forms in which the gracile forms are the allies and the robust which is say the stronger and physically more dominant forms are the powerful ones.
Yeah.
And of course one of the things about being a human is that we have moved farther away from might making right in general.
We have been able to do that through our complex sociality and frankly through our laws and our morals.
Yes.
Alliances make strong, but then that raises all sorts of questions about these alliances, which are created through this process that we talked about at the beginning, where the only right answer is, yes, I agree.
And then once you agree, you'll get your orders.
That's right.
OK.
Next one.
We cannot allow their voices to go unheard anymore.
This is a handwritten sign.
Hashtag justice for all.
Hashtag BLM.
Hashtag silence is violence.
Illusion.
To what you were suggesting earlier, and then up at the top, hashtag amplify melanated voices, which that's not a thing, and that's dehumanizing again, right?
This brown and black bodies trope that is emerging is dehumanizing, as is the idea of melanated voices.
On the other hand, we cannot allow their voices to go unheard anymore, You know, I object to the any more the same way I object to the second A in MAGA, actually.
It's exactly the same thing.
Make America great, let's do it.
Make America great for everyone, because it wasn't great for everyone at any point in the past, and this is a point you have made repeatedly.
We cannot allow their voices to go unheard, for sure.
Everyone needs to be able to have a voice in a democracy, but anymore, look at the history in this country since the Civil Rights Movement, and ask yourself who actually is being disappeared by the mainstream media.
And the idea that there are whole demographics whose voices aren't heard, and that this is the moment that we must change that, is not reflective of what The reality we've been living.
It's not, it's really not reflective and I like your point about the analogy here to MAGA.
There's something psychological about the statement in which you are already rooting for the statement at the point you get to the twist at the end that forces you to agree to something that isn't true.
Exactly.
And it's really, I think, you have to read through the whole thing before you say anything about what you think about it.
But we all do this thing that I'm doing right now, nodding along.
I'm going to nod along to you, because if you end up saying something crazy, A, you don't tend to, you know, in my estimation.
But also, I can then be like, you know what, actually, no.
But, you know, we're being asked to sign on to these things.
Yes, we cannot allow their voices to go unheard, period.
Yes, make America great, period.
Yeah.
And it, you know, the risk of alienating many, many people.
I have been paying attention to Tucker Carlson's little essays that he puts on nightly of late.
And I must say there's something 25% of each one that feels like it's pandering to a particular constituency.
There's a good 75% of them that is right on target, and strikes me as quite patriotic and open-minded.
And, you know, he pointed out the other night, we have elected a black president, right?
And we can try to parse that any way we want, but at some level, the idea that black voices are unheard is just simply inconsistent with The history that we all know.
And the same thing was true at Evergreen.
White supremacy is alive and well at Evergreen.
It's everywhere.
We had a black president for how long?
Of the college.
Of the college, right.
And so, in any case, the point is that… For the entire duration of the black president of the United States, Les Burruss was president of the college and for a time before and after that as well.
Right.
And, you know, this claim erupted full force at the place where we were dedicating a building to that president and, you know, he was there to speak and he was interrupted in order to challenge White supremacy, it's just, it's preposterous.
The juxtaposition is really stark, but at the point that you say something like, well, I can't sign on to that statement.
It's like, aha, knew it.
White fragility.
Right.
You know?
Exactly.
All right, next sign.
Racism and police violence happen here, it says.
In the past month alone, italics, George Floyd, Ahmaud, oh boy, I'm going to butcher these names, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade have been brutally murdered by police officers.
This could happen any day in our community.
We cannot remain silent.
So how can I help?
Donate your money and time.
Two, contact your local reps and demand accountability.
Three, talk sense into racist family members and friends.
Again, some of the sentiments here.
Alright, this could happen in our community.
Maybe.
Racism and police violence happen here.
What is the here?
This is in a neighborhood, in a city, where there has been a killing of a black man at the hands of the police officers in the last couple of years, which is quite contentious with regard to what the specifics were, and it seems pretty clear to everyone that there was confusion and perhaps intent on the part of the young man who was killed.
These things didn't all happen here.
So here we have the gaming of the language and the flyers where you get an immediate emotional response.
Racism and police violence happen here.
Right.
Here are the names of the people.
Right.
Those aren't here.
And that's not to say that we aren't all living in a society that does have racism and police violence, but this is beginning to melt into actual lies, I think.
So, and it also dovetails with some things that we've talked about earlier.
The strangeness of the protests at Yale, where Nicholas Christakis, you know, one of the most decent people that we've ever encountered, is challenged as if he is vile by people who are claiming oppression, who are highly privileged, right?
The whole thing just cannot be made to add up if you take it at face value.
We are seeing protests spread from the U.S.
to other places.
We've started to get contacts from our friends in Britain who are watching a protest that doesn't make any sense because the relationship between black Europeans and white Europeans is not an exact mirror for what goes on in the U.S.
They're quite different.
This is palpable to us when we have traveled there and yet The internet is causing this wave of sentiment, I guess, maybe I put it this way, because the mechanism of transmission is contagion, right?
It's not persuasion, it's contagion.
And because it's contagious, because it's built to be contagious, the point is, well, what's to stop it from being contagious across an ocean if we are as close as our screens to what's taking place over there?
So the little traps that, you know, cause us to, you know, chase our tails here in North America are also causing people who happen to speak the same language to be chasing their tails in the British Isles, even if it doesn't apply.
And so this is a huge danger.
And at some point I think we need to talk about People have a, an old model of what to fear.
And because you would imagine that revolution would grow from a central point in some way, but in fact, what it's done is it's made a demographic transition where a lot of nonsense was fed into a lot of kids heads in college.
And those people then went into institutions.
It's like, Oh, guess what?
Sleeper cell inside of every institution of a certain size and a certain size is like above 20 people.
And the nonsense was not just fed into kids' heads in college, it's in the K-12 schools and it has been for a while, because the schools of ed have been captured for at least a decade or more.
There's a good essay by a friend of ours on this, which rather than butcher the title I will find it and speak to directly another time.
Yeah, even worse that children, not just college students who are children in many regards yet, but actual children are being indoctrinated.
Children who inherently, by the nature of children, have no mechanism to protect against what they're being told is the truth, right?
We're supposed to protect them from dangerous falsehoods at that age, so they're open to things that adults will tell them, and we are now, our schools of eds are now feeding this mind virus into these young heads with no defense mechanism, and it only gets worse from there.
That's right.
Okay, next poster.
Bad apples spoil the bunch.
Demand that the Multnomah County Commissioner divest money from racist policing initiatives and jails and redirect funds for housing, mental health services, schools, and more.
So let me just show the next two as well because they're all in this sort of defund the police bit.
Okay, I want to come back to the apples though.
Okay, well, let me show the next two and then I'll, um, $245,169,804 for policing, it says?
No, thank you.
We'd rather have accessible food programs.
Care Not Cops PDX.
Okay, and the next one, in the same vein, $245,169,804 for policing?
No, thank you.
We'd rather have free public transportation.
At Care Not Cops PDX.
Okay, and the next one in the same vein, $245,169,804 for policing?
No, thank you.
We'd rather have free public transportation.
At CareNotCopsPDX.
Okay, go for it.
Yeah.
Well, I'm just thinking, you know, $30 for a family dinner.
We'd rather have an Xbox.
You know, it's like swapping these things in here.
A, do you know what that amount is?
Are you in a position to evaluate how reasonable that amount is?
And also just the idea of we'd rather have this than that.
And my point would be, You want to talk about the problem with policing fully up for an adult conversation about even throwing out the entire model and replacing it with something that works better.
But you want to tell me you want to start by removing the police?
You're telling me you don't understand the first thing about what civilization is and how it runs.
And you imagine Somehow that whatever was before civilization you can return to and you haven't stopped to think about the density that we live at.
You don't understand why you may be decrying violence that shouldn't be there, and it shouldn't be there.
But you have no idea how much violence would be there if you pulled out the thing that stops it.
Even corrupt, terrible cops prevent violence by virtue of the fact that when violence happens, cops get called.
And even the terrible ones are, you know, maybe the most frightening ones.
That's right.
And once again here we have an emotional ploy.
You don't think we should defund the police?
What are you, against public transportation?
You don't think we should defund the police?
What are you, against accessible food programs?
How dare you?
You don't think people should eat?
You don't think people should be able to get to their jobs and their families if they can't pay for it?
How dare you, sir?
It's an attack on your values, and it is enough to drive a systems thinker insane, because these things aren't hooked up.
It's not like a blue Lego you can swap out for a red one.
It's something totally different.
So yeah, the Apple point.
I do want to go back and say… Bad apples spoil the bunch.
Bad apples spoil the bunch.
That is actually the original sentiment.
Now, almost every time I hear bad apples invoked, it is invoked in a way that is incoherent, right?
To say, well, it's not that the police are bad, it's a few bad apples suggest that those apples haven't tainted anything else.
Here, at least they've got that right, right?
The whole idea is, well, if you think the bunch is okay, you don't understand the nature of bad apples.
They turn the whole thing bad.
Does that apply to things like policing?
And it's an interesting question.
I think it would be impossible for there not to be some effect of having a corrupt policeman in your midst, even if the rest of the police are not corrupt.
That corruption does have an insidious spreading effect.
Yeah, well and let's just say one of the things that we're learning relatively late in our understanding of what human beings are and how they function is how many things are contagious, including things like happiness.
You know, you walk into a room with a dour look on your face and it actually spreads.
You walk into a room with a Smile on your face, it spreads, and it actually changes the circuitry.
It changes your understanding of your own mental state, which is why guys on The Make are so fond of telling women they should smile more.
Because the point is, if you can get a woman to smile, even by tricking her into doing it, she'll think she likes you better than she actually does.
So, anyway, all of the... Great.
Dating advice from Brett Weinstein.
Sorry.
No, I mean, this is a point that we should come back to and devote some more time to, but absolutely.
But just the number of things that are contagious, that are now contagious over the internet, across an ocean, that make for a completely incoherent narrative where suddenly, you know, police violence happens here in a place where police violence may be exceedingly rare by virtue of the fact that here seems like it encompasses everybody who has a conversation in a language you can understand.
So, back to our earlier point about losing our minds.
Yeah, right.
Okay, let's see.
This is a little hard to read, sorry.
It may take a while to comprehend your role in racist problems, but keep in mind that people are dying while they wait for you.
And then it attributes this quote to someone named Jan Winston of Black Lives Matter.
This is a claim that is now simply being trotted out, a la the claims in White Fragility in the book, that is untestable.
Because your role in racist systems is so vague, you know, what systems are racist, what makes them racist, and what is your role, that it is untestable.
And so we are told, and I think actually No.
One of these, maybe I didn't include it because the picture was bad, advises that you can't just be not racist, you must be anti-racist, and this speaks exactly to some of what you and John McWhorter were talking about.
It is the quote-unquote anti-racist movement that is the religious movement, and it shows that they're good at PR, right?
Antifa.
If you're anti-fascist, well then.
If you're anti-anti-fascist, you must be pro-fascist.
If you're anti-anti-racist, you must be pro-racist.
And of course that's not actually true, that disagreeing with these movements makes you the thing that they claim to be fighting against, because it's really easy to claim to be fighting against something.
Well, I think we need to start engaging the idea that these are not terms and claims.
They are moves.
Just moves.
Yeah, they are moves.
This is a system, and if you try to navigate by intuition, you will find yourself its pawn.
There's no escaping it.
So I remember actually the first time I heard the term anti-racist.
It was totally positive, okay?
First time I heard it was in the four o'clock meeting at Evergreen, where violence nearly broke out several times and several... On the first day of the protests that were turning into riots.
Yeah, they were calling for my head.
I decided to go to the meeting.
They complained about the fact that I was there because would a guy who thought he was in danger come to a meeting like this?
Now, of course, I hadn't felt that I was in danger until that meeting.
But in any case, I was there and several extremely courageous students stood up to defend me, including several students of color.
Your students.
My students who knew you.
Who knew me, who felt it imperative that they speak on my behalf, which I still am honored by their willingness to confront a very angry mob when, in fact, they would be targeted for doing so.
Including, you know, a couple of like small-bodied women of color, right?
Like, you know, people who could easily have been at physical risk even if other people weren't.
And one such woman stood up in that meeting, the tape exists, you can look at Benjamin Boyce's documentation of that meeting and you can see her defending me.
And she says, not only is he not racist, he's anti-racist.
And I heard her say that and I thought, I'd never thought to use that term, never heard it, but what a lovely thing for someone to say about you, right?
And now I feel about it exactly as I feel about feminism.
There was a time when I would have said I was a feminist because I thought what feminism meant was equal opportunity for women, and of course I'm for that.
But obviously feminism... And frankly, the National Organization for Women thought enough of you to give you an award to that effect.
They did.
Back when you were fighting both racism and misogyny on the campus of Penn, the first college that you went to.
Yep.
But, you know, you sign up for these things.
I'm not even sure when feminism became a term that I couldn't get behind, but at some point it was like, no way, right?
That's not me.
Third wave went off the rails in the 90s.
Again, a topic for many other conversations.
Right.
But my point is, there's no, you can't even just There's no basis to navigate other than, I want you to write down the definition.
I'm not signing on to any word you can't define.
And I want a stable definition that I can refer back to so that you can't just say, oh no, that's not what we ever meant.
Okay, here we go.
This is what I call a don't hurt me wall.
This is a business that's put up as many of these as they possibly can, hoping presumably that they don't get vandalized.
Now this is in a part of Portland that hasn't been vandalized yet, but one never knows.
And just a close-up on one of these.
Is if you are a person who believes in love, justice, integrity, and equity for all people, then you know that this work is non-negotiable, says Leila F. Saad.
Again, Black Lives Matter.
So once again, we are being told, and we, gosh, did we hear this at Evergreen as well, Yeah.
If you do not sign on not only to our conclusion but also our methods and everything about what we are doing and how we are intending to accomplish it, then, in this case, you do not believe in love, justice, integrity, equity for all.
Those cannot be values that you hold if you do not follow us in lockstep.
And the bodies in that one are buried under the word this.
This work.
This work, exactly.
You have signed on to this work.
Yes, exactly.
Okay, so here we're nearing the end of these.
Commit to being anti-racist.
And there's a QR code.
And I'm going to show you what happens when you link on that QR code when we get to the very end of these, which is just a couple more.
Commit to being anti-racist.
Another one.
Donate.
Put your money where your mouth is.
Same QR code.
It goes the same place.
And before I show you where that goes, which is basically it's going to show you how you can put your money where your mouth is, you know, $30 for a family meal?
How dare you?
Why don't you put your money to these?
Now I'm exaggerating, but to your point earlier, One final image that I took on the streets of Multnomah Village in Portland today.
Stonewall was a riot started by Black and Latinx trans women.
Bang, bang, bang.
That seems like an outlier.
What the heck is that doing there?
Yeah, what is that doing there?
So, Zach, if you could take down my screen for a minute while I find what happens when we click through on that QR code.
Here we are.
Okay, so Zach, let's pull this back up.
It's a compiled list of donation resources that are supposedly, you know, they include providing bail money, among other things, for people who have been taken in.
And, you know, otherwise, these all kind of sound right, except my LGBTQ specific organization, what does that have to do with Black Lives Matter?
Well, let's just scroll down a little bit.
And we very quickly find, okay, so Black Lives Matter, good, Black Trans Travel Fund.
What is that?
And then a mutual aid project developed in order to help provide black transgender women with the financial resources needed to be able to self-determine safer alternatives to travel.
So this isn't about black people.
It's about black transgender people.
And it's not even about black transgender people.
It's about black trans women.
So this is a point that I'm sure we will return to because this is becoming really a little terrifying about the connection here.
But let me just, that's not, that's hardly the only trans thing on this list.
And I say this, you know, as someone, as I've made really clear so many times, We have trans friends.
We had trans students.
Trans is real.
Trans is rare.
This is being politicized and is tearing down a lot of the important protections in society.
So we have the Trans Women of Color Collective, the Trans Justice Funding Project, and there are a couple more up there that I... Oh, and then, you know, this once-honorable organization, the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has become quite captured.
So you can take that down now, Zach.
I do want just one more thing maybe as long as we're here before.
Yeah.
To say that Black Lives Matter, which is what this movement is supposedly about, should be an honorable movement.
And so, Zach, I guess if you want to put up the screen one more time, here's their actual website.
This is the What We Believe page of the Black Lives Matter website.
And let me scroll down a little bit.
And basically they've got...
I have to find it.
Sorry, here we are.
This, near the top.
We are unapologetically black in our positioning.
In affirming that black lives matter, we need not qualify our position.
To love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a prerequisite for wanting the same for others.
I'm on board with that.
That seems acceptable to me, especially the first sentence.
We are unapologetically black in our positioning.
It's Black Lives Matter, as it should be.
But they're lying.
This isn't what they then do.
Look down this list and find that we have Oh, goodness.
No, it's up here.
We make space right below this, close to the top of the list.
We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.
We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift black trans folks, especially black trans women.
Again.
And then the next one, oh, we build a space that affirms black women.
Final, in a list of three, when women make up half of the population and actual trans people make up a tiny, tiny fraction of 1%.
And then finally, we make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children.
Awesome.
Oops.
We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work double shifts so they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.
Okay, I don't, I'm not sure exactly what that's referring to, but the very next one is we disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and villages.
Wait, wait, keep going.
They collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
Mothers, parents, and children.
A phrase a number of people have pointed out is carefully constructed to exclude fathers.
They could be included under parents, but they are not specifically labeled there for a reason.
And the idea that dismantling the nuclear family is in any way centering black lives, when it's so clearly destructive of all lives, but actually historically and right now specifically destructive of black lives in America, shows that this is not what it seems.
Yeah.
You can take it off.
It's not what it seems.
So, uh, there is a lot to the question of what trans is doing here and why trans, uh, black trans women is playing the specific role that it is.
So, conspicuously, Evergreen was not a especially diverse campus racially.
Racially.
Right.
It had only 4,000 students total.
The protest was... involved a couple hundred people who were very actively involved.
Three leaders, maybe the three leaders... Of maybe eight leaders, right?
Maybe.
Maybe.
I would say... There weren't a couple hundred leaders.
I would say the three leaders who showed up again and again were black trans women.
You know, the term that at least two of them use for themselves are Black Trans Femmes.
Black Trans Femmes.
So anyway, there's just something demographically conspicuous about that, right?
There's something about people who are born male who transition to female and are black who Are somehow at the very forefront of this movement despite their tiny, tiny numbers.
This is to the exclusion, even to the extent that there's all of this very positive sounding language about supporting these trans people.
This is also to the exclusion of trans people who aren't black, and it is to the exclusion of trans men who are born female and transition male.
So, in some sense, one of the things that's going on here is that there's a trick of the mind, right?
To say we are protecting black trans women.
Women is a protected class because women have a built-in disadvantage, at least strength-wise and also historically power-wise.
So people who are born into that advantage and then move into a protected class are a phenomenon we have to talk about, right?
What is the proper mental reaction to this, right?
Is it to take the protections that we ordinarily reserve for women and to give them to anyone born male who simply says, you know what, I'm female?
And if so, do you expect anybody to take advantage of that opportunity who is not doing so on the basis that they are internally of this mindset?
Of course there will be people who take advantage.
And of course if there is no hurdle to be jumped beyond claiming, now I'm a woman.
Of course there will be people who claim that and we have seen it.
Yep.
I would also point out that there was a gigantic rally in New York.
I can't remember if I showed it on the podcast.
I don't think you did.
But there was a gigantic rally in New York.
And basically, as far as I can tell, second to the hashtag Black Lives Matter in terms of the protest priorities was Black Trans Lives Matter was the hashtag.
And so why?
If the idea is that this is all people who face oppression, why would you limit that to black trans lives?
Why wouldn't it just be trans lives matter as a fellow traveler?
And honestly, if we were to take them at their word and say that this is an objection to police brutality and the continuing injustices In the courts and certainly historically racially unjust laws, which demographic within black people has suffered the most?
It's young black men, right?
It's young black women, like all black people have suffered at the hands of racist ideologies in certainly historical and to some extent modern US.
But who has suffered the most within black people?
It's black men.
Why then?
Why then are we talking?
Why then are they focused on a demographic that is so tiny and so new that actually has a history with policing and the courts that can't probably extend back into even into the 20th century?
So at some level it has something to do with the fact that, you know, this mentality, this intersectional mentality creates an unassailability, right?
The unassailability appends to the number of categories that you can add together that you can say are having an emergent effect.
There's, you know, we were talking earlier about the the fact that these words don't function like normal words, that they actually function like mechanisms that force you into acknowledgement that the whole slate of claims is right.
And, you know, this is another set.
Like, how do you wade into these waters about transness?
I mean, we're watching, you know, J.K.
Rowling get Into very hot water for saying very reasonable things about the need to continue to protect women and that transness does not invalidate that need.
So anyway, the waters are so fraught that nobody can figure out how to navigate them, which is creating a juggernaut.
Well, it doesn't strike me as any sort of a concerted conspiracy, but the ability for people to make the claim that they were trans absent intention or actual follow-through with regard to hormonal or surgical modification and obvious gender dysphoria, body gender dysphoria,
And having most of the liberal intelligentsia and mainstream media and academia say, oh, of course, if you say so, yes.
was even if not part originally of the movement that became Black Lives Matter, certainly it is clear that Black Lives Matter observed that and said, ah, that worked.
What is it that we can do that can get people to roll over and accept these things that sound like if you don't agree with them, you must be a nasty human being?
That's how it's being done right now, because although until 10 years ago no one had ever heard of transphobia, and in fact transphobia is not what it sounds like, but no one wants to be called a racist, no one wants to be called a misogynist, no one wants to be called a transphobe, except transphobe is so clearly not what it means.
It doesn't have the historical manifestation that racism does, and so people at first are like, oh, I am?
Gosh, that's terrible!
You know, I have compassion for trans people and of course what transphobia, at the point that you're accused of transphobia, often what it means is that you are making the, you know, apparently outrageous but actually biologically real and foundational claim that sex is real and that we have an uninterrupted history of sexual dimorphism and sexual reproduction for 500 million years.
You know, that's what I mean when I say sex is real and that is the moment when I have been called a transphobe.
Well, transphobe is a tripwire.
It's not a word, it's a tripwire.
And there are several of them.
Transphobe is anything that suggests any kind of skepticism about any claim made within a half a mile of transness of any kind.
You've got TERF, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, which is the claim that you are in fact some kind of, you are pushing some kind of aggressive ideology to have any doubt at all that all protection is normally awarded to women.
Um, should be necessarily awarded to, um, to men who transition to female.
Which includes, you know, not just, um, you know, if a fully transitioned trans woman, what is her situation with regard to public bathrooms?
Um, and I say fully transitioned in contrast to someone who's put on a dress and declared that because they like the color pink they're a woman, because no they're not.
But all the way over here to, ah, if you've declared yourself a woman, you get to compete against women in sport.
Which, frankly, that is the reversal of the honest and wonderful part of Title IX.
Title IX happened in order to allow women to compete in sport and to get some funds to do so.
And allowing men who declared themselves women, even if they've been on hormones, if they went through development as men, they should not be competing against women in sport.
They shouldn't be.
It's not fair.
Yeah.
And it is the backdoor uninvention of legal structures designed to protect a class.
It's the unprotection of a class of people who were protected for, in this case, physical reasons.
Now, you just said to me yesterday about the intentional unprotection of the unhooking of some legal structures in California.
What was this?
Oh, geez, it was... Now, I don't know how serious this effort is, but there was a... or there is a ballot proposition to remove the prohibition against discrimination based on race, sex... Sex, gender, identity.
Um, so that obviously opens a frightening door.
But before we leave the trans questions, so you've got transphobe, kind of all-purpose.
You've got TERF.
You've got transmedicalist and trans-scum, which as far as I can tell are synonymous.
I don't know why they haven't settled.
Those two are transmedicalist and trans-scum.
Well, it's like Chop and Chaz.
It's like Chop and Chaz, there's an inability to resolve even the label on these things meaningfully.
But what that one means is that if you are a person who believes that true transness requires dysphoria, then you are also of some sort of radical belief system and that really there is no threshold that would define the difference between true trans and anything else.
The real point is, look, you could make all these arguments, but what's really being said is you are not, under any circumstances, allowed to make any counter-argument or express any skepticism.
And this is going to be a hallmark of this entire movement.
Which actually, if I can, can we put up the... Not yet.
What are you looking for?
I wanted to put up the... One of these pictures?
No.
No?
No.
Yeah, it's a link to the story about the UChicago professor... Okay, so here, University of Chicago econ professor, career torn apart after criticizing defund the police.
And the basic premise here is that this professor in good standing tweeted that he did not think defunding the police was such a hot idea.
And he was investigated and to the credit of the University of Chicago, they decided there was nothing racist about what he had said.
But here would be my point.
A, this is the University of Chicago.
This is the last stand, right?
This is the college that has done the best at protecting freedom of expression.
It's not like they laughed off... Its principles have been the beacon of hope for higher ed.
If there's a gold standard, this is the gold standard.
Yes.
But they didn't laugh off the claim that he was racist for believing that defunding the police was a bad idea and said so.
Publicly, they looked into it, right?
So that's where we are.
For a tweet, which Zach, can you just put it up one more time?
Right at the bottom of what's on the screen here, it shows the egregious, perhaps firing-worthy tweet.
Can you scroll up a little bit?
Or can you show it to us on the main screen because we can't see that.
Right at the bottom, too bad, he wrote.
Too bad, but hashtag Black Lives Matter, per its core organization at Black Lives Matter, just torpedoed itself with its full-fledged support of defund the police.
So, yeah, it's jaw-dropping because... That's it.
So, defund the police, right?
It's obviously an ambiguous hashtag, but I would argue deliberately so, and many people will tell you, oh, we really do mean completely defund the police, end the police.
I would say, if you are advocating anything like ending the police without creating the society in which the police are no longer necessary, then... In advance.
Right.
You are, let's give you a thousand stupid points, right?
You're a thousand stupid if you think that's a good idea, right?
Now, let's take it one step farther.
Not only do you believe that defunding the police completely in advance of fixing society is a good idea, but you think that anybody who is skeptical of that idea is inherently racist.
Okay.
Now, are you a hundred thousand stupid if you believe that?
I mean, it seems to me it's- This is not how you normally talk.
No, it's not how I normally talk, but this idea is so bad.
I mean, as we are now discovering in the Chop Chaz, right?
Yeah.
The Chop Chaz now has- The Chaz Chop Chop.
Three shootings, one of them- Three now.
Fatal.
Yes, it has three shootings.
I mean, completely predictable.
This is in a six-square-block declared nation-state of its own that's, what, a week and a half old?
Three shootings already.
Right, three shootings already.
And, you know, we see A, the people organizing this zone, Having a freaking clue how things work so there's one piece of video in which they are begging Paramedics to come deal with one of the shooting victims, but there's another piece of video in which they're actually ushering the cops out and driving them off of the same incident and you know the fact is a You're not autonomous.
You're not providing your own medical services and police services.
You're doing some other thing.
Then you're demanding services, which yes, I do believe that somebody who's been shot deserves to have, you know, they're still in Seattle.
The zone is a fiction.
But I don't expect the paramedics to go in.
The autonomy of the zone is a fiction.
Yes.
Presumably they're not growing their own food.
I mean, I understand there's probably gardens at the moment, but they're using city water.
They're getting food from outside.
They're getting medical services from outside.
They're nowhere close to autonomous.
More power to a group that would actually try to do this, but they clearly have no idea what it actually takes and what number of systems they are relying on.
Right.
What number of systems they are relying on.
And of course, at the moment that you need the paramedics, there's not even a thought in their minds like, oh, wait, we're autonomous.
You know, it's like, well, we're going to drive the police out, you know, berate the paramedics for not coming in and not put two and two together.
Right.
That's perfectly absurd.
And then we on the outside, who exist in a world of linguistic traps in which we are all trying to assure everyone that we harbor, you know, no wrong think, are suffering from a totally insane presentation.
It really depends what channel you listen to.
If you're watching, you know, the sort of CNN half of the universe, you're getting a picture of the... I can barely say chop with a straight face, given that it doesn't even linguistically add up.
Occupied protest?
It's an occupation and a protest maybe, but you don't occupy a protest.
But in any case, if you're paying attention to the sort of left-leaning mainstream press, or nominally left-leaning mainstream press, you get this picture of it's a festival, it's like a party, it's a barbecue, it's, you know, the next version of Burning Man, it's all hunky-dory.
If you pay attention to the right-leaning side, you get a completely opposite picture.
It's like people are being shot.
There's all kinds of skullduggery and shakedowns and all of this.
It's partisan hackery.
It is.
It's partisan hackery.
It's partisan hackery.
And here's actually, unless you were going to, this will just take a minute.
Yeah, go for it.
Here's an example, Zach, if you want to show this.
Um, this is from a few days a while back now.
On June 12th, Time Magazine tweeted, Physicians have joined protests in cities across the country and an open letter signed by 1,200 health professionals says protests should not be shut down over fears of COVID-19 transmission.
A day later, and, you know, 34 hours later, Time Magazine tweets, Hundreds of far-right protesters defy COVID-19 restrictions to demonstrate in London.
I'm sorry, but the coronavirus doesn't care what your political ideology is.
Yeah.
This is partisan hackery, and how is it that they expect to have anyone take them seriously if they are going to put – you know, this is from, you know, hat tip to Rita Panahi for having put this together.
You know, she's, as I understand, a conservative.
You know, we don't share politics with her, but people across the aisle are seeing this nonsense and saying, what the hell?
Who can we trust?
So I do want to get back to this.
I don't know how much more time we have, but people are beginning to get it.
Now, it's not everybody, but people are beginning to get just how dangerous the situation we're in is.
And I'm starting to get very interesting phone calls in large measure around the Dark Horse Duo proposal that I unleashed in full form or nearly full form on the Joe Rogan podcast.
And what is, I think, interesting is that a great many people are concluding that there just isn't any solution to the catastrophe that is unfolding short of something like that.
So I would have expected it to be widely dismissed just on the basis that any novel electoral plan Uh, would be unlikely to work.
But a great many people are just simply understanding that if we play any of the normal cards in this situation, we're effectively cooked.
Because, for one thing, this movement has understood correctly just how much power it has.
And it is structured to be infused into everything already.
So it doesn't have to work to get there because it's already there ready to be activated.
So, you know, could the street part of the protest calm down?
Of course.
But it's not going to back off once it's realized that it has a mechanism to extract well-being and transfer it to itself.
So it's going to keep going.
And then there's the next part of the puzzle, which is perfectly clear.
Which is that there are a great many people who have now been placed on notice that it is their well-being that is going to be transferred to those in the movement.
Those people have every right to be terrified.
And that group tends to be right-leaning.
They tend to be armed.
They tend to be rural.
And those people have not yet weighed in.
So we are headed for a disaster.
We're headed for a disaster in an election year.
One of the things Tucker Carlson said on his program that really struck me was he made a plea to vote for Republicans, right?
And I thought, okay, standard stuff.
And his plea was like, don't vote for them because they're all right.
They're not.
His point was, it's the only choice.
It's the only choice because they are the only ones who oppose this thing, right?
Now, I don't believe that this is the right logic, but his point, you know, he could have Given a rah-rah speech about Republicans, and it was very much the opposite.
And in fact, he took the president very specifically to task.
The president apparently said that the reason that he had not taken some aggressive action to halt the destruction of cities at the hands of the protest was that actually for the moment he's enjoying watching this occur, right?
Trump said that?
Trump said that.
Well, of course he did.
And Tucker Carlson, of course, was like, that's deeply unpatriotic.
You're the president of all of these people.
You owe it to them.
So here you've got somebody saying, the Republicans aren't up to the challenge, but what choice do we have?
Because they're the only people who oppose this thing.
The president is essentially derelict of duty or worse.
On this front.
This is a remarkable thing to be hearing on Fox News.
It fits with where Tucker Carlson has been.
He's one of the few voices who talks in an intelligent way about class warfare, right?
He's been on this beat a long time.
So, anyway, we're watching... He understands the value of having an intact loyal opposition.
Right.
He knows that the left needs to be intact and not entirely batshit crazy, or else the right will go insane in its own way.
He seems to.
He seems to.
Which, you know, I think I mean, I think he demonstrated respect for you and your, you know, strongly left-leaning proclivities when he had you on back during the Evergreen Madness.
He did.
So he was sort of tickled that you weren't a, you know, Democratic Party hack, right?
Yeah, that I wasn't a Hillary supporter.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, he has not gotten... You were a Bernie supporter.
Right, I was a Bernie supporter and that was touching in some way.
He thinks you're wrong, you think he's wrong, but in terms of how can we go forward as patriots to make the country as strong and resilient and frankly a country as anti-fragile as possible, I don't think he's mostly got wrong ideas.
Yeah.
So, A, he deserves his due.
A lot of people gave him a hard time over campus craziness, but the point is all the people who are calling us and saying, uh, we blew it.
You guys were right.
This is every bit as dangerous as you said, and it's now, you know, taking over the country, if not the world.
Um, to the extent that he was, uh, letting people look in on college campuses and saying, Hey, this is not a small matter, right?
He was correct.
But anyway, back to the original point.
There is a great deal of concern that we have been left with no lever that correctly either takes the energy of the protests and points it in the direction of something productive and not massively dangerous.
And so therefore people are open to things that under ordinary circumstance.
They're not open to that is to say Plays that are of an unusual sort so the point of view of dark horse podcast viewers and listeners I would say This is actually going to fall to you.
The thing that makes it possible for us to do something unusual and to make it work is momentum, which will be generated grassroots.
So if you are thinking, yes, it would be great if something were to put us back on track, Then the answer is, you need to add energy to the system, and we need to start moving very quickly.
We do not have a lot of time.
So with regard to moving very quickly, you're talking specifically about Dark Horse Duo.
Is this right?
Yep.
The Dark Horse Duo plan, and the Dark Horse Duo plan is carefully constructed to eliminate the usual objections to what would be called a third party run.
In this case, you've got two parties that have effectively Abdicated responsibility for attempting to govern at the presidential level and that opens the door to some alternative plan and the dark horse duo plan is Centrist in the sense that it would take somebody from the left and somebody from the right and get consensus from them It is not inherently about centrist in fact I have no patience for centrists.
The fact is the center is where we meet, right?
Those of us who have a position on what ought to happen meet in the center to discuss it.
And this is that kind of plan.
The idea is that at the moment, saving the republic is the only priority that should be on our minds.
And that is that's the direction we have to go if we're to avoid an absolute calamity in the run up to this election.
Okay.
Well, I think we've reached a good pausing point.
We have a couple of announcements and then we will be back for Q&A in about 15 minutes.
Yeah, so we've set up this what we're calling a Dark Horse Membership at my Patreon, so go to Heather Hine Patreon, and we'll be doing a private Q&A once a month.
The first one will be the last Sunday of this month, this upcoming Sunday.
Uh, there's a poll up there, uh, that I will probably, I'll re-up it for what time actually is preferred, but it'll be sometime middle of the day Pacific time.
So if you are interested in that, go to my Patreon and sign up at the $5 level if you want to have your questions prioritized as ones that we answer.
$11 or up.
You also have a Patreon, Brett, and you do these private conversations with people once a month at higher levels.
Yep, two different conversations.
One of them focused on evolutionary thinking, the other focused on what to do about the breakdown of civilization.
Yep, and if you're enjoying this, share it, like it, subscribe to the channel.
What else?
I think that's it.
Oh, I guess for those listening who are only listening to the podcast, we do have a Q&A that we don't put on the podcast after, and you can ask questions in the super chat if you were listening, if you were watching YouTube during the first live stream, and we prioritize those based on money amount, and then for the second half of the Q&A, We prioritize those on the basis of when they come in, so we try to get through as many as possible and never get through all of them, but that's how you can get questions to us for the second half.
So if you're listening on audio, go check it out on YouTube, the Q&A.
▲
Export Selection