E26 - The Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | Sleeper Cells and the Capture of Everything | DarkHorse Podcast
In this 26th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world though an evolutionary lens. Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com). Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon. Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, follow us on t...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
I am here with Dr. Heather Hying.
This is our 26th live stream, I believe.
And the first time that you've had a new haircut.
Yes, this is my first post-COVID haircut, and my barber seems to have not weathered the economic storm.
So I don't know for sure that they've failed, but they may have.
So I was forced to go through the rather traumatic experience of establishing a relationship with a new hair person, which is always fraught for me because I have such troubling hair that there's always room for a major mistake.
Your hair is not troubling.
Other people are troubled by your Other people.
Well, yes, point taken.
In any case, I went in and I had the same interaction that I always have, which is I try to warn them.
I say, I have very, very difficult hair.
And the person becomes effusive and they say, no, you have marvelous hair.
And I know they're lying.
And here's how I know.
Because at the end, if you hang around after you've paid, they sweep it off the floor and they just throw it away.
Yeah, no, that's definitely about you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't do that to anyone else.
I guess I put them in an awkward position by raising the issue.
But yeah, they don't tell you the truth.
No, I just don't suppose they do.
Nope.
All right.
Well, things keep happening.
Have you noticed that?
I have.
Yeah, it's quite a world out there.
So we're going to try to unpack what is taking place.
Yep.
You have a place you want to start?
Oh, we can start by talking a little bit about schools of education, which is something I alluded to either last time or the time before, as you like.
I thought that would be in the middle, but okay.
You want to start there?
Yeah.
Okay, so I had alluded to a friend of ours, Lyle Asher, who is a professor, associate professor, full professor, I don't remember which, of English at Lewis and Clark College, which is right here in Portland.
wrote an article in 2018, I think it was, for the Chronicle of Higher Education, which is really the original and preeminent, what are you doing?
Okay.
Which is the original and preeminent chronicle journal for people in higher ed, mostly for administrators, but many of us who have been academics have been reading it.
And he later, because it was behind a paywall, did publish this in Quillette as well.
So it's available without a paywall.
Let me just walk us through a little bit of what his argument is, and then we're going to show a clip that was sent to us by another friend of ours, Mike Nena, who is doing extraordinary work in this regard, too.
too.
So one of what his basic argument is schools of higher education, schools of education, which are training, have historically trained teachers of K-12 students, K-12 students, have no history of
They're famously not excellent every moment that people have gone looking, but that more recently they've begun to train not just teachers of children, but also administrators of colleges and universities, and not just administrators of schools of Ed themselves, but administrators across the board.
So, one of the foundational papers in the so-called scholarship in this realm that has become really foundational for many in schools of education is on microaggressions.
And this paper is so rife with sleights of hand and so void of critical thinking, it's remarkable.
It was written by seven academics at various schools of education, or maybe it was all at one, And here's just a quote from this paper that Asher takes to pieces.
They say, again this is the foundation, this is sort of the introduction of the concept of microaggressions from, if memory serves, maybe a 2014 paper.
Microaggressive acts can usually be explained away by seemingly non-biased and valid reasons.
For the recipient of a microaggression, however, there is always the nagging question of whether it really happened.
It is difficult to identify a microaggression, especially when other explanations seem plausible.
Many people of color describe a vague feeling that they have been attacked and that they have been disrespected or that something is not right.
Microaggressions operate to create psychological dilemmas for both the white perpetrator and the person of color.
So Asher quotes this from this paper and says, why is everyone falling for this kind of thinking?
Which explicitly pits villains against victims.
It creates, it creates exactly the dynamic that is pretending to be fighting against.
And he says, why are people not pushing back against this garbage?
So just one quote here from him.
He says, because doing so, you know, why not?
Why not?
tear apart such clearly divisive pseudo-scholarly thinking, he says, because doing so would derail a deep nostalgia.
Not, of course, for the overt brutality and dehumanization inflicted by Jim Crow and the likes of Bull Connor, but for the moral certainty those evils retrospectively allow for.
In some respects, people of color may find an overt and obvious racist act easier to handle.
The essay that he's talking about obligingly develops a crude alchemy for transmuting the ambiguous into the obvious.
This alchemy is little more than a way of behaving that masquerades as a way of knowing.
Act as if ambiguities were certainties, and as if vague feelings were reliable registers of fact.
Act, in other words, as if complex interracial encounters, which admit of both mistakes and misunderstandings, are conscious or unconscious acts of racism exercised by a, quote, white perpetrator.
That will indeed make things easier to handle, Asher says.
One more from Asher.
But such ease of handling is the product of presumption and simplification.
It would be as if a marriage counselor approached every new couple, having decided in advance that the complaints or suspicions of the shorter partner, or the male partner, or the minority partner, were necessarily legitimate, and that the other spouse's objections, prejudged as defensive, were evidence of guilt.
Moreover, because these objections would, in the author's pseudo-technical jargon, invalidate the experiential reality of the other partner, that is, offer a different point of view, they would constitute yet another offense.
Would anyone expect marital relations to improve under such a counselor supervision?
Would anyone even hire such a counselor?
You'd be crazy to.
You'd be crazy to.
And so really, I cannot recommend this essay highly enough.
It's so good.
And I don't know if we want to go right into this little piece of video or you want to say some things about what you just heard.
Well, I would agree with you.
Lyle has been on this case for quite some time and reading his work is very sobering because he just cuts right to the heart of it.
Those quotes are excellent and really point to it.
But what I'm hoping people will do is they will start to think about What the architecture that is built up around these claims becomes and what it looks like going forward.
Because, of course, the thing that you've been saying for quite some time is that as this moves into the schools of Ed, it obviously moves into the children and it moves into the children and therefore cannot help but pervade society.
Because where do the children go?
Absolutely everywhere.
Right.
So anyway, that's sure to be a theme of much of our discussion today.
But let's look at that clip.
Yeah, so before you put the clip up, Zach, when I mentioned this essay a couple of episodes ago, Mike Nena, who many of you will recognize the name as the director and producer of the excellent three-part documentary on the Evergreen fiasco, it's N-A-Y-N-A, you can find him on YouTube here,
Uh, sent me the following clip and it is from, let me see, it is a clip from an organization called ESSI CREATES, which is an acronym, CREATES is an acronym that stands for Culturally Responsive Environments Attaining Transformative Equitable Solutions.
Let's just watch this minute or so long clip.
ESI Creates has been an amazing opportunity for our school to have time dedicated to come together to talk about how do we create anti-racist schools.
I see teaching as a very political act.
When we are engaging with our students, whether it's on social justice issues or multicultural issues or culturally relevant teaching, I see that as foundational to all learning.
We're learning a lot about, like, different issues in this world and, like, what's happening around, like, we're mostly thinking about, like, racial and culture in my class and how we can change the future.
We have all of these different people that are activists.
We have gay people, we have transgender people, and we have people that are taking action.
And we're learning how to take action in social studies now.
We've seen our students become empowered.
We've seen them see that even at the age of four that they can take an active role and be activists.
And so it's through this work that we realize that education without this conversation isn't gonna make a difference for our children. - Even four year olds, Brett, even four year olds could be activists.
Yes, and so what's so disturbing as an educator, and of course I never taught young kids, but as an educator I know, and from being a parent I know, kids have to have They have to be trusting in order for education to be effective, because they don't have the tools to be discerning and to choose between the truth and lies.
If they have a teacher that's spouting both of them, they can't detect which is which.
Anyway, you would expect evolution to have built children to be trusting and that it is the obligation of the adults around them to protect them from untruths.
And when the adults around them start spouting untruths, feeding them fictions in an effort to turn them into soldiers in some battle that they will ultimately join, it's just an incredible betrayal of their natural role as educators and mentors.
The natural betrayal by the teachers.
By the teachers, yes.
And the administrators, and coming down from on high from the schools of ed.
And, you know, it misunderstands so much about what humans are, and about what children are, right?
One thing that most people who are professional educators in K-12 schools, and probably in higher ed as well, don't know, and probably would tell you the exact opposite if you were to ask them, is that school not only isn't a thing that exists outside of humans, but it's not a human universal by any means.
Learning is.
And every social organism out there, be they human or not, does some learning.
But the idea of school, in which you have an authority who hands down information, as opposed to the young interactively learning by observing and doing, is really not just a modern, but specifically a weird, a pretty weird, that is to say, you know, Western educated Industrialized, rich, democratic society.
Weird, that acronym.
And surely there are non-weird countries that have school, but it's a bit of a bastardization of the honest and necessary thing that we need as children, which is to be actively observing, engaging, doing, learning.
And to have that software hijacked by activist educators is an abomination.
The software is hijacked for indoctrination purposes.
So what I think is probably true, see if you agree, is that mentoring is absolutely ubiquitous in humans.
That schooling is an alternative to mentoring, and it opens the door to indoctrination, right?
Mentoring is inherently, I believe, free of it, because at some level, if you're showing somebody how to do something, they will immediately detect that you are telling them nonsense, because what you're demonstrating how to do won't work as well as it does when you don't do whatever the nonsense was.
So, we've opened the door to this with formal schooling, and then we see this thing migrate into the schools of ed.
I am sure that most of our viewers will be in the same boat that I was in until recently, having thought almost nothing whatsoever about schools of education.
Right?
What even is a school of education?
What does it cover?
So, in some sense, we are all living downstream of a phenomenon that touches all of these Teachers who then reach all of these kids who then show up in our college classrooms and we have no idea the kids themselves have no idea where a lot of the Structure in their belief system even came from in this case.
It's like it's a kind of Developmental gatekeeping and the I think the effect that it is having on the present is that people are misunderstanding where we are in history.
That they are watching what is taking place in the street.
And almost always when I talk to people about it, I have the sense that they are too calm because they think we are much earlier in the process than we actually are.
And what's going on Is that they are modeling the idea of revolution based on what I would call a vertical revolution.
You know, so Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and a small band of people team up and they reside in the hills and they come down and they make dramatic strikes and they win over the population and ultimately they topple the governmental structure.
That's not the kind of revolution we're facing at the moment.
What we are facing is a horizontal resolution where ideas have been inserted into so many minds that exist in every organization that what we're going to see is instance after instance in which suddenly the thing awakens almost like a sleeper cell inside of every
Journalistic body inside every business, inside every, you know, it's already been spotted in universities.
But the point is, where isn't it in a position to take over?
Frankly, I think it's even in a position to take the presidency in two moves, right?
I think that's coming.
Do you want to speak to what those two moves are?
Well, sure.
I mean, maybe it has to be a little deeper down in our discussion of what's going on, but if you imagine that you've got this wrong-headed belief system, unfalsifiable wrong-headed belief system.
So this is like a new religion.
It's a religion, but it doesn't even have the claim on being valid by virtue of having stood the test of time.
This is brand new.
So it's mythology that's marching through every institution where When it becomes activated, those who operate it are in a position to dictate terms to anybody who might resist, and so each institution topples.
So that horizontal revolution is taking place, because every individual is going to be faced with the same puzzle, which is, I am personally in jeopardy, I'm in no position to do anything that will Effectively repel this onslaught but I am in a position to silence it and its accusations against me for the moment by delivering some apology or offering it something that it's demanding.
You know it will succeed in capturing more and more people.
Well, but even before that comes, you have people who have legitimate grievances, because as we've talked about in many previous episodes, the beginning, yes, we as Gen Xers also inherited a moment when the economy was not booming particularly, but millennials inherited a worst moment by far.
And they're in debt and have low chance of getting real estate and of, you know, having good health care and all of these things.
And so they have real grievances, despite what some would say, they actually have real grievances.
And they have been handed a pro forma explanation for what is at the base of those grievances.
Even when the pro-form explanation actually would seem to do nothing to address any of the actual grievances that are out there, but it feels righteous and honorable and finally a cause that they can get behind and feel good and like their lives have meaning for standing up for something.
And all of those things, it's sort of a perfect storm that gets people out on the streets, especially after being in lockdown for months, right?
And then once they've done it, once they've stood up and held a placard and shouted and marched, it's very much harder to say, hmm, I'm not Sure, that's actually what I meant, or I'm not sure that it is what it said it meant, and therefore I'm not sure that I should have stood up for that thing, right?
It's much harder once you have stood with a movement to distance yourself from that movement.
Of course, this is a long-known psychological trick that is utilized by the most effective regimes.
The thing that wishes you ill does not tend to come down with a hammer and beat you up in front of your loved ones.
That's not how it's done.
It does so by incrementally changing what it is that you say that you believe, such that incrementally you change what you do actually believe.
Yeah.
It gets harder and harder to deprogram.
I mean, it's actually very much a cult phenomenon, right?
Once you've gotten in on the ground floor, it's very hard to get out.
And you see this.
I mean, this is why, you know, in the last episode, we were showing those pictures that I had taken in Southwest Portland and, you know, the business that had its windows plastered, you know, that I called the Don't Hurt Me Wall.
Well, every probably fifth window in an area with apartment buildings and anything, you know, anything beyond just retail on the ground floor, every fifth window or so has a Black Lives Matter poster in it.
And if you say something about that to any random person on the street, they are going to immediately conflate any critique of that suggesting groupthink with a critique of the very idea that lowercase, lowercase, lowercase, Black Lives Matter.
Of course they do.
Yeah.
Yeah, we saw the same thing at Evergreen with the flyer gate scenario where the campus found itself actually publishing flyers that claimed white supremacy was widespread at Evergreen, which it simply wasn't.
But everybody was putting them up doing, you know, advertising.
We are your friend.
And the point is, that is actually evidence of how much power is gained very quickly by this horizontal revolution.
So here's the part that I think people don't get yet.
Why is the Democratic Party playing ball?
All right, it would seem that the Democratic Party ought to be attempting to establish some sort of reason and to calm the situation when in fact what it's doing is signing on to this very dangerous set of beliefs.
So, before you go on, why does it seem that the Democratic Party should be trying to calm the situation?
Yes.
Why would you?
Well, if you thought the Democratic... I mean, you just asserted that.
Yeah.
And some people in our audience will say, yeah, like, they should be, obviously.
And some people will say, well, of course, they've never done it.
Why would they?
So, why does it seem that they should be doing something that they're not before we get on to why they're doing the thing that they are?
Well, it seems that they should be, because a large part of their natural constituency are white people who aren't actually guilty of racism and therefore need a defense.
And even if the Democratic Party was being cynical, you would think they would defend a large number of people in need of a defense and, you know, be trying to hold their coalition together, which involves lots of people of color and lots of white people and just trying not to let that thing fray.
But here's what people don't get.
First of all, as I've said elsewhere, these two parties are deeply corrupt.
They are both involved in intense influence peddling, so policy does not mirror the needs of the population almost ever anymore.
In general, it is serving some other interest, and it is dressed up to look like it is for the people, and therefore the people begin to detect that they are frozen out of well-being.
They get angry, they spill into the streets.
Now here's the problem.
The elites, the economic elites who are represented by these two parties, do not wish to share the well-being and opportunity that they are hoarding, right?
They have hoarded these things, that was the purpose of their investing in these corrupt entities, and they don't want to share.
So what can they do?
Wait, the corrupt entities that you're referring to?
The parties?
Well, no.
The parties have invested in the corrupt entities, I thought you said.
Nope.
The parties have a racket.
The racket is to gain power by appealing to voters enough to get elected, and then to peddle the influence that they win at the ballot box to their actual constituents, which are powerful elites that keep the entities afloat.
So they don't want to share power.
They now have something that looks a lot like the French Revolution in the streets.
And although various people at the New York Times may think that's cool, those of us who know anything about the French Revolution know how dangerous this is.
So what are they going to do?
Well, they're not going to share what they've hoarded.
And the street isn't in a mindset to wait any longer, right?
It's boiled over.
Enough is enough.
So what's happened is the blue corrupt entity has decided Not the police, the Democrats.
Yes, the Democratic Party.
Sorry, blue versus red.
The blue corrupt entity has come up with a plan which is they are going to divert the resentment that naturally should go to them for hoarding the opportunity in the first place.
They are going to redirect that resentment at people who superficially can be demonized.
If you imagine that racism is in every white head and there's nothing that can be done about it.
Pervades the thoughts of white people and is therefore in every interaction and every decision and all of those things Then you might say yeah, it is That's the reason that we're we're not succeeding is that those people are always having racist thoughts that they never voice But nonetheless it's it's the reason that we can't get anywhere rather than somebody took all of the opportunity and frankly the whole population of normal people is suffering from the reduction in available opportunity and
But by redirecting the anger of people who can identify that they're actually on the list of people who's going to get something Right they can the elites can stave off the French Revolution coming for them in other words They're going to redirect the French Revolution at somebody else somebody who can't defend themselves, and that's White people of regular means.
So that thing is yet one more ploy to prevent the actual reckoning that comes from hoarding all of the opportunity.
But what it means in this case, the two-step plan to take the White House, we've got... Not your plan, their plan.
Oh no, their plan.
Their plan is going to involve This old codger that they have set up for nomination. - Decrepit clown Biden. - The decrepit clown Joe Biden is of course going to nominate Kamala Harris as VP because of course it's that moment when certain demographic parameters have to be met.
Kamala Harris is like the living, breathing DNC That's what she is.
And then... DNC being the Democratic National Committee.
Democratic National Committee, which is different than the party.
Many of us are still members of the party, but anybody with half a brain has no tolerance for what the DNC has done to the party.
But Kamala Harris ends up on the ticket.
Maybe Joe Biden wins because people are so fed up with Trump, which they are.
And then Joe Biden steps down at some point, right?
Kamala Harris then would be president by virtue of having been brought on the ticket for symbolic, largely symbolic reasons.
It's not like people are wildly in favor of her.
And then there it is.
Then the intersectional madness has made a deal with somebody who would inhabit the role of the president.
Now, of course, there is another way this could all go down, which is that the white folks who understand that they have been targeted in a way that would traditionally have been pointed at Jews maybe, but in this case it's going to be white folks writ large,
They may decide not to let this happen and my biggest fear as I've been saying I went back and found a video on my channel that I'd put out in 2019 saying look they're gonna conjure exactly the white supremacist demon that they claim to be fighting right now by backing white people against the wall and getting them to identify as some sort of natural entity
At the very least, it's going to push more such people into voting for Trump in November, and that demographic shift will be observed in the voting polls, presumably.
And that will be trotted out as evidence that the only reason to vote for Trump in the first place was because you were a racist all along.
So they are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy without any reference to whether or not there was truth there to begin with.
Yeah, and it's clear to me that what needs to happen is voices of reason who get the nuance here.
It's not that the resentment isn't real, and it's not that the gripe isn't well-founded.
It is well-founded, but it is not well-articulated, and the proposals that are being suggested are insane.
I mean, it's hard to give them more credit than that.
They're just literally insane proposals that nobody who had ever run anything of any size could possibly imagine were going to make things better.
Society evaporating is going to be a disaster for all of us, so somebody needs to step in and speak to the movement about what it is that has them angry and what actual remedies might look like, which does involve taking a good look at the elites who have hoarded the opportunity and figuring which does involve taking a good look at the elites who have hoarded the opportunity and figuring out what to Mm-hmm.
So you said that, um, I'm actually, I'm not sure how to pronounce her name.
I thought it was Kamala Harris.
Um, but you, you said that, uh, she is the living breathing embodiment of the DNC, I think.
And I'm wondering what, That surprises me a little bit because she strikes me as sort of half the living breathing embodiment of the DNC, but I admit that I have probably a very shaky understanding of exactly what that is.
I feel like it changed during the Clinton era quite substantially in the Clinton one era in the 90s.
But that she's equally, and you know, these are coming to converge on one another, but that she is equally embedded in woke intersectional ideology.
And I think the DNC has come to adopt that as one of its foundational planks, but it wasn't the platform, at least until recently.
This is exactly what I'm saying.
I don't believe that this is... I mean, who's to even say?
You can't detect the difference between genuine intersectional misunderstanding and cynical embrace of intersectionalism because it advances your ball.
But what she is is the... it's the chimera, right?
You have... the DNC serves to... it is the center of the influence peddling operation.
And that... For the blue half of the aisle.
Right.
The blue racket.
Yeah.
So the blue racket is run through the DNC.
The DNC therefore has to figure out some sort of, you know, is there enough symbolism that we can hand people that will keep them voting for us so that we have influence that we can peddle?
That's the game, right?
Well, oh, the symbolism thing has now run out on them.
We're going to have to give them something real.
We're going to have to give them something that tastes like food and well-being.
Where are we going to get that if we're not willing to share what we have and what our constituents have hoarded?
We're going to have to look at somebody else who can't defend theirs and feed that to them.
And so this is... And this, I mean, this is actually back to Asher's point about...
The entire ideology one of creating an us versus them dynamic of creating victims and victimizers oppressed and oppressors that this is this is an easy way to rile people up and to get people motivated out on the streets out to the polls.
You know, you're on the right side of history.
You know, they're not you have to get rid of those people because they are evil.
Well, there are two things here.
Yes, that's the sense, right?
That's the more honorable sense.
But the real... No, I think there's nothing honorable about that at all.
It's not.
It's not honorable.
But it's the more honorable version.
So, my point would be, the reason I invoke Jews here is that because of the nature of the Jewish diaspora, because you have a small population that does well but tends to live amongst people to whom it is less well-related than Jews are to each other.
You can always, when things go wrong, point to the Jews and you can say, they are the problem.
Now, are the Jews really the problem?
No.
But that doesn't matter, because if you're really willing to steal what they have and hand it to somebody else, it's a classic transfer frontier, to use our language, right?
It's a source for something that feels like growth, that you can hand to somebody else to placate them.
And my point is, that's always cynical garbage.
In this case, there's a twist, which is that you have an intersectional coalition.
This is not a natural coalition.
It is a synthetic coalition that is going to be fed the well-being of a natural entity, right?
European Americans.
The point is that actually, from the point of view of solving the problem that the influence peddling rackets face, if you try to put yourself in their mindset, right?
How do we keep this going for another electoral cycle?
Right?
This is a plan, and it's a disastrous plan.
We've already said it is the uninvention of America, but would it work to keep The blue racket going?
It might, and that's a very frightening prospect.
You know, this strikes me, what you just said about what the Democratic Party is becoming, this sort of assortment of loosely associated interest groups, is exactly what we used to say about the Republican Party when we were coming of age in the 80s and 90s, that it didn't appear to be
Or an organic grouping of people of like mind or particularly like values, but rather you had, you know, the pro-life people and the two-way rights people, you know, the amendment two-way rights people and, you know, these very evangelical Christians that didn't particularly cohere.
And it sounds to me like what we're seeing in part, and I think, you know, we saw this decline, we saw this decline beginning again in the 90s for Democrats, again with Clinton with Bill Clinton a decohering of meaning Within the Democratic Party and instead a sort of pandering for interest group votes, right?
So if I can put some flesh on those bones, there's no real reason that the party of business should also be the party of Gun rights, right?
That's that's not natural.
There's no reason that the party of business should be a Suspicious of Darwinism, right?
This is a coalition of convenience, a political coalition.
And what you're saying, which I totally agree with, is that there once upon a time was a basic thread that explained the Democratic Party.
It was the interest of working people.
Yeah.
People who were suspicious from the beginning of the Democrats could say, well, what are the unions doing there?
Well, nope, working people.
What is environmental rights doing there?
Well, it's about a commonality of good and purpose that we all need if we are going to be able to live some standard Yeah.
And maybe you could tear that apart, but it seemed to have a thread through it that made good sense.
And it was about working people.
Yeah.
It never made great sense, but the point was there was always such a big core.
Working people do have interests, right?
They're constantly being screwed by entities that want to freeze them out of stuff.
Having some political party that represents their interests makes sense.
And then you can say, well, what are their other interests, right?
And that created a natural coalition, which did evaporate when the Democratic Party took up influence peddling full time.
And part of what happened, frankly, is that when these schools of ed, these self-styled scholars, who really don't appear to be able to do any kind of analysis that's worth the word, analysis, moved in and started training the generation's teachers, moved in and started training the generation's teachers,
What they in part did with this embrace of postmodernist and even pseudo-postmodernist thought was elevate the idea of white-collar work, much of which is meaningless and pointless and doesn't need to be done, and threw out the value of and the idea that there was virtue and honor in blue-collar work.
And in so doing, they guaranteed that a lot of people who had been voting Democratic were not going to anymore.
If people working the trades are no longer valued because this post-modernist garbage coming out of schools of ed is now in the Democratic Party as well, which it clearly is, some number of people are going to say, well, screw that, I'm going to the other party.
But it also reminds us once again of something that I and we have been saying for a long time, which is that for people who literally do not do anything that is physical in the world, and therefore have no thing that they do from which they can get feedback, which cannot be gamed, those people have an easier time fooling themselves and the rest of the world about what their true intentions are and whether or not their supposed solutions will work.
I actually don't really want to hear from someone who's got proposed solutions if they can't demonstrate to me that they can do something in the physical world successfully.
I was walking around Oregon City a week ago or so, waiting while our younger son was having an orthodontist appointment.
And I passed by a statue outside the local courthouse.
I've forgotten the guy's name, but he was some important figure in Oregon City.
Maybe one of the first judges, an important lawyer, and the bust of him had all of those things.
But the very first thing that it had on the statue in terms of what he did was welder.
And I hope I have this right.
I hope I have which trade it was, which all these other things were.
But I commented to Toby, our son, whose appointment I was waiting on, After I said, you know, isn't that amazing and wonderful that they chose to point out first, and maybe it was Blacksmith, I can't remember, you know, that they chose first and foremost to identify the trade that he was skilled in before pointing out the things that he did that are why his bust is here.
You know, if he had just been a blacksmith or a welder, whatever it was that he was doing, he wouldn't have a statue in front of the courthouse, right?
Yeah.
But I would argue that had he not had that background in the trade that he did, he also wouldn't have his bust in front of that courthouse because he wouldn't have the sense and the wisdom that those skills gave him in order to do good in the world later.
Yeah, an incredible amount of what's true is also counterintuitive to one level or another.
And the way you discover that is through some system in which what is counterintuitive, you are forced to it by the fact that the system isn't listening to clever arguments.
It just works or it doesn't.
And so, yes, you and I both have this sense that it is Fundamentally important before you start deciding what should happen that you have experience with some system that is completely impervious to your cleverness of speech and only responds to your depth of insight.
So, um, can we talk a little bit about the downstream consequences of this, um, flow of bad ideas from schools of ed and other places into various, uh, important roles in society?
Let's do it.
So, uh, Zach, will you bring up the, uh, New York Times book section, um, article that I gave you?
So let me set this up.
I don't see it.
All right.
So I will just recap it then.
There is... I don't know.
This is the first I'm hearing about it.
I don't remember what the article is called.
It was about the woman who shot Andy Warhol.
And there is a fawning piece in the New York Times book section.
Here it is.
Hold on.
Okay, Zach, it's on my screen now if you want to put that up.
So, the premise of this piece is that this... Oh, it's an obit.
She died.
Is that the idea?
She's gone.
Okay.
But that's why we're hearing about her?
The premise of the piece is that her work has been overshadowed by the fact that she shot Andy Warhol.
Now, I should say, she shot Andy Warhol multiple times.
Premeditated murder.
Or would have been attempted murder.
He survived but was desperately injured.
Now the work that this author at the New York Times is claiming is overshadowed is a work in which he advocates the killing of all men.
Now many people took this to be ironic apparently.
She insisted it was literal.
So my point is it is impossible for this woman who attempted to murder Andy Warhol to have her high quality work overshadowed if the point of that work is actually perfectly consistent with the murder that she attempted.
But from the point of view of this author, And by author I mean the author of this... The obituary.
The obituary.
I actually don't think it's an obituary.
I think she's been gone some time.
This is a... It's in obituaries.
Oh, this is I think an obituary of... It's an obituary of somebody who died long ago and the New York Times didn't cover that.
So anyway, this woman's manifesto called SCUM advocates the destruction of... It's apparently an acronym that stands for... Wait, where was it?
I don't... The Society for Cutting Up Men.
Right.
Society for Cutting Up Men.
The author of the article describes the fact that the scum manifesto is apparently alive and well in some women and gender studies classes and departments at American universities today.
Can I say something?
I'm only seeing this for the first time.
Here's a sentence in the early part of this obit.
The manifesto, self-published in 1967, reads as satire, though Solanus defended it as serious.
This sounds exactly like, we don't really mean defund the police.
Well, and in fact, this is exactly what Ezra Klein and Sam Harris were fighting about, was that Ezra Klein swore that when the New York Times published Kill All Men, that that was meant to be taken ironically.
And the point is, was it?
Yeah, partially.
It's meant to be taken ironically if you're going to be a stickler about how ugly a thought that is, and then if you're not going to say anything, then maybe it's not to be taken ironically.
Do you think that in Jonathan Swift's era, people, anyone thought that he was serious?
I mean, in order to count as satire, don't the vast majority of people who read the thing have to recognize it as satire?
Actually, there should be some standard like that.
We have lost the ability and I have, as my followers on Twitter know, had to hard code a solution to this problem because there's nothing I can say that's so insane that people will understand me not to be speaking seriously.
So I use the emoji to do that.
But yeah, there should be some standard about either your satire is a complete failure or it isn't satire if some fraction of the population takes it as serious on first read.
Well, it also, I mean, it's just, it's totally illegitimate if the author themselves says it's serious and other people are saying, no, no, no, she doesn't really mean it.
It's satire.
Well, then, well, then no.
Right.
Then no.
And in this case, it turns out at the very last line of the piece, you'll find out that maybe it was satire, but that the person, the, um, the author of the scum manifesto, uh, Acknowledge that maybe it was satire that instead of actually killing all men which he wanted to do.
I think males should be neutered or castrated so they can't mess up any more women's lives.
Right.
So the point here is not really about the author of the Scum Manifesto or even of the author of this late obituary.
It is about the fact that the New York Times this apparently passes for journalism and it reports that these ideas are not just something wrong headed in the mind of one author at the New York Times that they are apparently now in gender studies classes in American universities.
With no apparent irony.
So that's where we are.
That's the horizontalness.
This idea has obviously begun to take over universities.
And the same people who are saying white supremacy is everywhere are also taking seriously the idea that we should be thinking about castrating men or killing them.
I guess the only thing I take issue with there is the idea that it's begun to take over universities.
You and I were seeing this in the early 90s.
We were seeing nonsense, not at this level, you know, not scum manifesto level explicitly, but really batshit loony, undefensible, unscholarly, unanalytical nonsense being trotted out as if it made sense.
And this was before the advent of Phil and the X studies departments, right?
Those fields didn't even exist yet.
They started to proliferate in the sort of the mid and late 90s.
So, I mean, this is the thing that people have been saying to us since Evergreen blew up and before.
Even when we were having conversations with people before Evergreen blew up and before it was public, it was like, yeah, but it's isolated.
It won't spread.
It's not a big deal.
And of course, it was already spreading because those people graduate and they don't stay on college campuses forever.
Well, and some of them do.
And so, as you've pointed out for years now, The people that we were encountering in the 90s had a generation of students that are now the professors of today and so anyway, the thing is matured and developed because we've given it a Hibernaculum or I don't know some place to to to wait out those years in part I mean academics are so insular and so, you know always feeling so overworked and you know It's it's easy to laugh at but you know If you really are trying to do good deep work
Constantly having demands on you for governance and sit on this meeting and that committee is burdensome and so scientists in particular and I think artists also, but really all good academics do tend to as much as possible ignore the stuff going on at the university that doesn't seem to Apply directly to them unless they're absolutely forced to by the demands of their job.
You know, you have to spend 25% of your time on governance.
So you have to attend these eight meetings a year and they do that and then they're done and they just check it off and they don't think more about it.
And so the sort of ostrich head in the sand thing.
is in part because when someone pops their head up once in a while and goes, wait, what is happening now in terms of administrative bloat and changes in policy with regard to who gets graded how and what kinds of departments are being created?
Oh boy, I don't even know.
I'm just going to go back to my research.
And, you know, that is part.
And then, especially in the sciences, that's allowed by the old-fashioned administrators, because scientists are paying for the universities largely through the grants that they're getting, right?
The 40 to 80% in overhead that every NSF grant and NIH grant that comes in goes directly to the university.
Well, let's not hassle those nice lab scientists who need lots of expensive machines and so need lots of expensive grants.
And just let them do what they do, and don't bother them with the fact that the university is being taken over by a bunch of loons.
Yes, that was six weeks ago.
Now, so, three years ago, this matured early at Evergreen, and we didn't have departments, but we had the equivalent of the various theory and studies departments, and they began dictating terms to the sciences, that is people like you and me.
You and I stood up, and the rest is history on that front.
But the point is, that thing has now come to every other university, and those departments are now dictating terms to the sciences.
They have the administrators on board, because I don't know that administrators actually have thoughts, but to the extent that they have something like them, these people are simply looking out for their own well-being, and so they'll feed anybody to the wolves that they have to, including now the sciences.
But it was happening before.
Well, it was beginning to.
But my point about the horizontalness of this revolution is it's like you had some group of people that gathered until some point and spoke to each other in some way that was recognizable.
And then suddenly, on some day, the recognition dawns.
We actually now have the power that we can take this body over.
And so actually, can we, um, maybe before we do this, can you find a, it was too late to get Zach a link, but there's a new piece in the Atlantic, a short piece by Yasha Monk that Sam Harris tweeted out.
Anyway, this piece is quite good.
I highly recommend it.
And what it details, uh, yeah, that's it.
The top one, stop firing the instant.
Okay, not yet, Zach.
So this piece details three cases in which people have recently been terminated from their employment.
These are not people who are in a good position to construct something else to take care of their needs.
Three people who were fired who on inspection of their story there's nothing to it and some corporate entity just decided to do the expedient thing and kowtow to some mob that was claiming they were guilty of something in one case.
The guy who apparently is three quarters not white had his hand hanging out the window of his car and it appeared to someone who later admitted that he probably overreacted that the guy was making an OK symbol, which of course OK symbol.
Are you kidding?
You gotta read this article.
Oh my god!
Yeah, it's quite frightening.
But the point is, okay, these three make the Atlantic.
The Atlantic, which, you know, has become… Yeah, well, Yasha Monk is a voice of reason.
He is.
For sure.
But the Atlantic sometimes is a voice of reason and sometimes isn't, as all these places are.
So will the Atlantic topple and articles like this stop showing up?
I would guess it will, just as the New York Times looks about ready to topple completely into this madness.
Okay, so actually, Zach, I want to now say we've got a problem in journalism that we are aware of.
Matt Taibbi has done a brilliant job covering what's going on in journalism, and he's detailed, I think, six cases in which an effective coup is underway in very important places, right?
You know, the New York Times, the Intercept, it's happening all over the place.
But my point is this horizontal thing is going to be anywhere you look.
So I came across something this week.
Can you put up the link I gave you that says something like, we see you?
Well your analogy, I don't think it is an analogy.
Your calling this sleeper cells is apt.
That whether or not it was the conscious intention of schools of ed to train teachers to indoctrinate children, and in some cases it clearly was conscious and in some cases maybe it wasn't, Those children have grown up, often drugged, often helicoptered, unable to do anything real in the world, and they're being handed a prefab revolution, and of course they're on board.
Of course they're on board.
For one thing, a lot of the rhetoric sounds pretty good if you don't look at it too closely, and maybe they're slated to get an upgrade in lifestyle because they're on the intersectional side that's going to reap the benefits.
So, what I have here is something from apparently the theatre community in Atlanta.
And here, Dear White American Theatre, we come together as a community of black, indigenous, and people of color, so BIPOC, that's the new acronym, theatre makers in the legacy of August Wilson's The Ground on Which I Stand, to let you know exactly what ground we stand on in the wake of the nation's civic unrest.
So this goes on to say... So there is no entity called White American Theatre.
They are addressing everyone who is white who is in American theatre.
Is that the idea?
Yes, I believe so.
You know, I can't imagine that there would be anything called White American Theatre.
That would be extraordinarily archaic and likely offensive.
And so in some sense, this is the description of a boogeyman.
And the boogeyman is one in which theater has been oppressing black people in some transparent way on every stage at all times.
And this is the claim that it has been seen, which is effectively very close to an empirical claim, right?
This is not an allegation.
This is a description.
It's an eyewitness account of something that can't possibly be happening.
But anyway, my point here isn't about theater, and it's not about Atlanta.
It's about the fact that you wouldn't know this was happening, except that if you tune in to this little world of Atlanta theater, you discover, oh my goodness, the coup is happening, right?
We heard from a lot of people in theater after Evergreen blew up.
Your inbox blew up.
Thousands and thousands of emails, and I went through many of them.
And there are a tremendous number of people writing in from theater.
Now, what are the chances that people who go into theater are particularly racist or bigoted or unwilling to investigate other narratives about what might be going on?
Right.
No.
Like, this is what art is.
This is what art is for.
Precisely about engaging with different perspectives, different ways of living, different historical periods, different places, different ideologies, different demographics, all of this.
This is what we need narrative for, and theater is a particularly wonderful way of engaging it.
I mean, you and I both enjoy live theater quite a lot.
We've been taking our children to live theater multiple times a year for years now, and we've been hearing a little bit from people we actually know in a couple of these theater companies, but much more so from a number of anonymous people who we don't know, but who came to us with their stories.
Theater troops seem particularly prone to prostrate themselves before this ridiculous false set of accusations and gods when they are actually doing some of the most forward-thinking, God, I can't use the word anti-racist anymore, but like actually anti-racist work.
Narrative work, and therefore the presentation of narrative work, is one of the places that we work out the difficult nuances.
That's the whole point of the exercise.
And so to have something behind the scenes taking place that erases all nuance and creates totally phony narratives, right, is toxic.
And we've seen this week a number of cases in which, you know, in some animated series, some white actor was voicing a character of color and they've now stepped down.
So in those cases, we can say, whatever, these are celebrities.
They've got plenty of resources.
Maybe it shouldn't have been a white person all along.
But my point is, this is now a threat.
The point is, this is a threat going forward, right?
Everybody, Every time you have a job opening, you have to bend over backwards to make sure that the accusation that you've done anything other than prioritize the voices of people that, you know, have demographic markers that you can spot, You have to make every effort to do that.
So the point is, yes, this is a coup, and some of the people paying the price are celebrities, and maybe that's not all that awful, right?
I don't like it, but the point is, if you're a celebrity, you've probably got resources.
But this is going to fall down on the heads of thousands and thousands of people Who are depending on, you know, theater is a difficult line of work and if you are suddenly now unable to get a job because your demographic markers don't slate you for one, that's a disaster.
Furthermore, it threatens all narrative.
It threatens all of our ability to hear stories that don't sound like what we expect.
The idea, I mean, this isn't, I don't have an example from this week, but over the last few years, we've heard these many stories of, okay, so I think it was Janine Cummings is her name, who wrote American Dirt.
She has maybe a Puerto Rican grandmother.
I may be getting some of the descriptions wrong.
I didn't know we were going to be talking about this.
But her book tour was canceled, her book almost canceled, on the basis that how dare she write a book about a middle-class Mexican woman and her son running from the narcos through Mexico and ultimately escaping to the U.S.
Because she is not herself Mexican-American, nor has she herself escaped from the narcos.
She had no right to write this.
That publisher was obliged, apparently, to find instead someone who wished to write a novel who already lived that life.
Well, this is misunderstanding, you know.
Everything, but what is fiction, for one thing.
But also, if we are really in this landscape where you cannot write from the perspective of someone else, we are being asked to forgo all that is best about humanity.
I am not allowed to imagine myself into your brain because, let's see, you're male, and you're Jewish, and so many other things that make you different from me.
If we take that to its most obvious extreme, None of us can possibly imagine the experience of anyone else, and therefore we are forbidden from writing fiction, full stop.
It is the death of fiction, it is the death of narrative.
We can only write from, and this is what they say with regard to lived experience.
The best form of knowledge, the only legitimate form of knowledge I've even heard, is lived experience.
And that's the end of science.
That's the end of hypothetical deductionism.
That's the end of analysis.
But it's also, we've said that many times, it's also the end of fiction and narrative.
We're just doomed across the board.
It's the end of empathy.
And I would point out an example that just pops to mind.
And if I'd known we were headed here, I would have looked up the actor's name.
But the movie, Life is Beautiful, I think was its name, about a Jewish father who tries to make life for his son bearable in, I believe it's Auschwitz.
And And the actor who plays the main role was Roberto Benigni.
Roberto Benigni.
Yeah, that's right.
So you it's hard for me even to imagine an outcry about the fact that, you know, this this heartbreaking story acted so beautifully by this actor that he didn't happen to be Jewish is irrelevant.
And maybe it's even a triumph in some sense, because he you know, he really evokes it.
And Isn't this what we want?
Isn't this exactly what we want for other people to be able to understand not only our joys, but our pain?
This is what we are looking for.
This is the connection that is what is human.
And we are being told, how dare you try to understand me?
You cannot.
You shall not.
You will not.
We will threaten you.
You want me to try to find it?
all in the line with all of these other things, but do not dare try to imagine that you can report on what it is to be me.
Okay.
Now add a dash of Orwell.
Okay.
Hey, Zach, can you bring up the other theater...
Boy, I've forgotten what I called the link that I sent you.
You want me to try to find it?
What is it?
No.
I have a bunch of links.
I don't know which one.
Go through them.
Okay.
Okay.
Hold on.
Yep.
Great.
Yep.
Town Hall for Racial Reckoning.
This looks like the Atlanta one.
Can you enlarge this a little bit?
Yes.
I can read it okay if you want me to read it out loud.
Yeah.
You want to start reading?
Yeah.
Town Hall for Racial Reckoning.
Our community is experiencing a reckoning.
The global effects of the pandemic and now the civil unrest in our communities are highlighting the disparities between white lives and the lives of people of color, especially black people.
A seismic shifting of the status quo is threatening to rock the foundation upon which so many theaters in this community have built their legacies.
When we are able to make theater again, we cannot return to, quote, business as usual, end quote.
We cannot return to theater companies that will not acknowledge and respect the voices of the BIPOC community.
In an effort to make sure those voices are heard, the Coalition for Racial Equity in Atlanta Theatre, CREAT, and Inclusion Diversity Equity in the Arts Atlanta, IDEA Atlanta, have partnered to host a three-night virtual town hall.
Okay, so can you scroll up?
Okay, you can sign up to attend.
Here's a list of the theaters that are going to participate.
So, go down and, uh, can you click Rules of Engagement?
Yeah, on the left.
No, other one.
Left.
That was press release.
There we go.
Rules of Engagement.
Now the basic idea in these rules of engagement, I will spare you all of the detail, but the basic rules are certain people are empowered to speak about the horrors in the Atlanta theater community.
Scroll up just a little bit, Zack.
So stop.
We ask that all speakers speak only to their own personal experience.
It may cause further trauma to speak of someone else's experience if they are not yet ready.
The administrators are told they will not be given an opportunity to speak and they are instructed that they must maintain, they must have their cameras on at all times.
Okay?
They are not allowed to turn off their cameras.
So they are going to sit and they are going to listen to Stories of lived experience, they will not be empowered to respond in any way and they must do so with the cameras on so that their expressions will be constantly available.
Uh, for all who attend as witnesses, a witness is a BIPOC or ALI theater make or ally, sorry, theater maker who wishes to be present in support.
We ask that you remain respectful throughout the evening.
Fair enough.
Please try and limit extraneous movement during the process, e.g.
driving or washing, driving or washing dishes.
Can you scroll up and find where cameras will be on?
Stop.
There it is.
The very bottom.
OK.
No, that's all attendees.
There's also the administrators are being specifically instructed that they must have their cameras on at all time.
And I can't, I don't see where it is.
But anyway, this is absolutely Orwellian.
It is a twist on Struggle Sessions.
It is Struggle Sessions in theater.
All of the dangers that you and I were just talking about flow from this rather directly.
But again, the point really isn't about theater.
The point is, we've seen this up close and personal in colleges and universities.
We've seen it in schools of ed.
We've seen it in journalism, and it is spreading at a rapid rate.
We're seeing the Democratic Party play ball with this thing at the highest possible levels.
And what is the natural remedy?
So my point would be, look, you've got natural remedies.
This is completely insane.
People are being fired for things that they never did.
They're being fired for completely symbolic reasons.
That's not actually legally acceptable, right?
But you would have to go to a court to establish that you had been harmed.
This is also going to be in every single court, right?
So it is getting harder to imagine That a white plaintiff could prevail in such a case if the juries and judges are sensitive to the fact that they may be next to be portrayed as somehow white supremacist.
So this is an Orwellian nightmare.
All of the natural remedies.
If the court fails, what's supposed to protect you?
Well, journalism.
The fact of the court having failed might be reported, and people might say, oh my goodness, what's going on in the court system?
How did it get so broken?
Well, that's going to be gone too.
There's no remedy left.
And that is a truly frightening fact.
We are watching a horizontal revolution, and frankly, I don't know where it isn't.
I don't know where it isn't either.
I think it's harder to have outposts now, in part because social media gets everywhere.
Those who are self-employed need probably to fall in line, lest they not get business.
It looks to me like those people who actually do physical things are more immune, but those businesses too will be targeted.
It looks to me, you know, if I just take, say, you know, within a supermarket, the people cutting up meat, the butchers seem the least woke and the most immune to this nonsense of all of the grocery workers that I see.
But again, I think that those people who are so-called blue-collar workers are less likely to succumb to the mind virus itself, but that doesn't save them from the organization they work for feeling like it has to succumb lest it be cancelled.
So, to make sure that we do not get carried away here.
Chloe Valderi took me to task on Twitter, gently, as she always does.
But she said, we should be careful, there are multiple movements.
And I responded to her, that I don't see multiple movements.
I see factions, but I don't see multiple movements.
I see a coalition.
But anyway, the question here is this.
I would love to think that there are multiple movements that are actually vying for narrative here because actually were a movement that made sense to emerge from this by virtue of those who had superior understanding and capacity to reason were to triumph, that would be great.
I see no possibility of it happening because The mechanism by which the movement figures out what it stands for barely exists.
Even Black Lives Matter has a central organization, but anytime you point to that central organization, people say, oh, but that's not Black Lives Matter.
That's one entity.
There are other manifestations.
And so without leadership that is recognized by the movement, There's no one to negotiate with, there's no one to reason with, there's no one to rein in the abuses.
And because of that, it is certain to be a disaster, and it is certain to cause the backlash on the other side, which will be every bit as ugly.
Yeah, no, I think that's right.
And I don't know, it's hard to know exactly what movements versus factions means in terms of the distinction.
But to return very briefly to a point that we spent a fair bit of time on last time with regard to What is trans ideology and trans rights activists doing so prominently in the Black Lives Matter movement when that would seem to be antithetical to their main principle?
So I've just got three images to show, not quite Zach, that suggest that at both the top of social media and in politics, we are already seeing a change in messaging from Black Lives Matter.
to Black Trans Lives Matter.
So here, Zach, if you put up my screen, here's the official Twitter account, as of yesterday, has changed its bio to read Black Queer Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter.
Oh, by the way, third hashtag, Black Lives Matter.
So wait, let's just stop and process that.
That is the official Twitter account?
That is the official Twitter account.
That is the bio of the official Twitter account.
Okay, the official Twitter account also tweeted this, and this is on a billboard, um, so they retweeted, um, quote tweeted I guess, Black Trans Lives Matter, that's all, that's the tweet.
Okay.
And then the mayor of Seattle, who's doing such a brilliant job with chap-chahs, chahs, chahs, chahs, I can never pronounce it right, had, who I guess I have not looked into her, but I guess she may be a lesbian herself even, not that that matters at all, except check this out.
She tweeted, this pride, we can celebrate how far we've come, but we must recognize how far we have to go.
We cannot rest until our trans community, Particularly trans women of color have full freedoms and you don't have to fear hate, violence, or persecution.
Hashtag pride.
Particularly trans women of color.
Particularly trans women of color.
This pride, let's focus on natal men.
Let's do that.
Put aside the racial thing.
I mean, none of us are supposed to be allowed to do that right now.
But I kind of don't even want to go there, right?
Why is everyone feeling not just empowered, but forced to focus on men who have declared themselves women Often without any other evidence to support the idea that they are.
And saying that that is the new face of progressivism and enlightenment.
You can take it down.
So let's do this another way.
Because undoubtedly there are black trans women, which is to say people born male who have transitioned to female.
Undoubtedly that's a demographic.
However, The category includes any, presumably any black man who wants to say that he is now a woman.
So that is a loophole.
If this is the pinnacle of what we must be fighting for, then any black man can opt into it, which is a frightening prospect.
And again, I don't think we know the full meaning.
Of what's going on, but it is conspicuous that Evergreen's meltdown was led by three black trans women, which is to say people born male transitioned to female who led the collapse of our college and the attack on us.
So, something is going on here.
The fact that there was a major demonstration in New York, that the George Floyd rallies were continuing apace, and then black transness was the focus of the second eruption of rallies.
Why is this our second priority?
At most, it's a tiny demographic.
I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what the concerns are, what it is like to be in that category, but nonetheless there is something conspicuous about the fact that this is like the flagship identity of this movement.
So to Chloe's point, Chloe Valdary's point, there is something going on largely behind the scenes that is one, to your point, maybe one faction within this larger movement or maybe a wholly distinct movement that is cloaking itself in the mainstream Black Lives Matter movement and pretending to be that same thing and thus getting in.
That is very explicitly about this hyper niche demographic that is growing such that it's got to be the fairly rare person at least living on the coast at this point and probably in any city who has not run into the idea of trans lives mattering in the last few weeks.
And this is not a demographic that warrants such remarkable attention otherwise.
So maybe we should stop that for now and return to this another time, because there's a lot more to say.
Yeah, there's a lot to be said, but I think the fact that at some level the intersectional logic, which was never coherent to begin with, nonetheless effectively specifies that the If this movement is really about, and the last shall be first and the first shall be last, then the top of the pyramid will be black trans women.
By virtue of the fact that they have opted into two categories, that is to say, that these are people who have opted into the protected category trans and the protected category woman, which is a remarkable feat.
Yeah, if you can opt in to the top of the new oppressors, lots of people will.
Lots of people will.
depending on what life you're living, maybe that's a sweet deal.
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
All right.
Perhaps it is time for us to take a break and then to come back and answer your super chat questions in the second live stream.
The link will be in the description.
So we will start by answering Super Chat questions that came in on this live stream, prioritizing by monetary value.
We had almost 100 questions last time, and we got to maybe a quarter of them.
We appreciate the support very much and the questions, and there are many that are good that we don't get to, but we of course cannot get to them all.
To that point, we will be doing our first private Q&A tomorrow at 11, which you will get a link to if you join our Dark Horse membership over at my Patreon at the $5 level or up.
We've already got so many questions from people who signed up at the higher tier that we probably can't take any more questions for tomorrow.
We've already got more than we can handle, but anyone who signs up for that before 11 tomorrow, we'll have access to the link if they want to join us for another Q&A tomorrow.
Alright.
So, please like, subscribe, comment, and maybe most importantly, share if you think others should see it, and we will be back in 15 or so minutes.
