In this 42nd 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, foll...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 42.
You heard that correctly.
Number 42, with all of the meaning implied therein.
We are here in Portland trying to keep track of everything that is taking place.
And I must tell you, it is pushing me to my limit and beyond.
Are you feeling the same?
Absolutely.
I kind of can't believe it.
It's a little hard to believe.
Yes, there's so much going on that you and I haven't even had a chance to check in with each other in advance of the live stream here.
Oh my goodness, we're under attack by felons.
All right, so how shall we begin?
Well, I guess I wanted to remind people that you can ask questions via Super Chat on YouTube, so if you're listening to this later, that's no longer an option, and that we'll be having a private Q&A tomorrow at 11am Pacific that you access through my Patreon, through the Dark Horse membership tier at my Patreon.
Those two things are on the table.
And you, before we embark on a lot of Oregon-specific evidence of some of the madness that is taking over so much of the world right now, you wanted to start with a Unity update.
Yes, I do want to start with a Unity update.
The problem is, it's very hard to know exactly what to say.
Amazing things are up in the land of Unity.
We have a vote coming tomorrow where we will prune down our six nominees to a ticket of two.
We will draft and... You're not supposed to say that yet.
Am I not supposed to say that yet?
Okay, well, if I could ask a favor of those who are fans of the Dark Horse Podcast, could we keep this between you and us?
All right.
Maybe the cat's out of the bag.
In fact, I think I saw him back there.
Yeah, he was in the sink.
Yeah.
All right.
All right, now that I've let the cat out of the bag, on to other news in the Land of Unity.
Twitter shut down our Articles of Unity official Twitter account.
It was not initially clear exactly what it was that they thought we had done.
We now have more clarity on it, apparently.
They believe we have been registering large numbers of phony accounts for the purpose of trending.
We are in the midst of an internal audit to figure out if there's anything we need to know.
Now I should say, Unity 2020 is an all-volunteer organization.
Everyone, including me, is a volunteer, and it is a vast organization.
So is it possible somebody has engaged in some behavior deep down in the depths of Unity 2020?
I can't say.
But we are checking to see if there's anything that we don't know.
But we believe we stand accused of things that we did not do.
And I will say that irrespective of what has happened, the behavior on the part of Twitter is egregious in the sense That not only did they suspend our official account, but they have also instituted a policy where if you attempt to tweet a link to our official website, your tweet does not go through and you are given one of many errors.
It's a very remarkable behavior.
Now it is possible that that behavior has been reversed, but for a long period of time Anyone who tried it from anywhere discovered exactly the same thing, which was that it was not allowed to tweet links to our website.
So, things are afoot.
Where this actually comes from is very difficult to say, and I will say that after we know what has taken place inside the organization, we will do a deeper dive on this topic and figure out what the implications are.
But for the moment, I have the sense that we may have caught the attention of Goliath, and Goliath may be fighting back.
It's never a safe place to be.
No, no.
On the other hand, I wouldn't bet on Goliath.
I hope not.
Let's all bet against Goliath.
All right.
There are four broad topics that I'd like us to talk about today.
Many of them focused on the scene in our hometown and home state now, but they speak to truths that are happening elsewhere.
The topics as I have sort of soundbited them are, and you know I don't usually use language like this, but the mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler.
Wheeler's being a dumbass.
Okay, so that's one.
That's where we're going to start.
Lewis and Clark College, which is a private liberal arts college in southwest Portland, is going full woke.
OHSU, Oregon Health and Sciences University, which has a world-class hospital associated with it, has shut down a COVID study for not being appropriately inclusive.
And we're going to talk a little bit about why looting is so awesome.
Yeah.
So let's start with Wheeler.
All right.
He proudly publicized a letter refusing help from federal officers to address the violence in Portland.
Zach, if you would show my screen here.
This is his tweet.
He says, today I sent, this is from 23 hours ago, so from yesterday.
Today, I sent this letter via email to Real Donald Trump, declining his recurring offer to aid Portland by sending federal enforcement to the city.
And the letter reads, uh, begins, Dear President Trump, Yet again, you said you offered to aid Portland by sending in federal law enforcement to our city.
On behalf of the City of Portland, no thanks.
We don't need your politics of division and demagoguery, Portlanders are onto you, etc, etc, etc.
So, as one commenter noted in response to this, this is Zaid Jilani, it's like Wheeler is a double agent for Trump.
He's certainly acting as if to promote the likelihood that Trump will get re-elected, given what actually those of us who are here know to be true, which is in part, and we've talked about this many times already on the podcast.
Portland is being used as a bludgeon on both sides by the mainstream media.
To a large extent, it's either not being covered at all by the mainstream media on the left, or when it is, it's at those moments when there is a far-right presence in the streets as well, and then they can truthfully claim that extremists on both sides had it out, as happened a week ago.
Today, I think it was.
And, of course, on the right, the mainstream media, insofar as it exists outside of Fox, but Fox included, talks about the exact opposite.
It only talks about the violence and never discusses any possible legitimacy to the protests.
That we're seeing, but the fact is, downtown Portland is, during the day, looks like a former city.
I don't like the term war zone because I think that that evokes something very particular that I'm not sure I know enough about all of the intricacies of to say a lot about, but At the end of May, just as many businesses downtown were preparing to open up after months of COVID lockdowns, the protests started.
The violence began at a regular moment every night shortly thereafter, and those riots have happened every single night uninterrupted for I think it's more than 90 days now.
I believe there has been one interruption.
There's been one interruption.
There has been one interruption.
After the feds were pulled, after Governor Brown negotiated Two nights ago, there was one night and there was speculation about what it might be, and it turns out that what we're going to talk about soon here may have something to do with the actual reasoning, but I'm not sure we know.
Okay.
As regular viewers of this podcast will be well aware, stories are vandalized.
Many have been boarded up and closed since then.
There's been nightly violence.
Homeless encampments are spreading even further than they were previously.
I mean, all of the West Coast cities have had a problem with homelessness for a very long time.
There's garbage in the streets, there's increasingly human feces in the streets, and not just that being thrown by idiot rioters, but actually it's just literally becoming a cesspool.
And it makes a person wonder how anyone who calls himself a leader could possibly let this happen to his city.
This is a beautiful city.
It's been beautiful, open to everyone, replete with culinary and cultural and nature experiences, and this is just a disaster.
So, we see in the Oregonian on August 26th, business owners reporting being ever more frustrated.
On August 27th, we see, I guess you could put this up very briefly, we see a report that 70, the Portland Business Alliance and 70 other business and civic leaders were on the phone with Mayor Wheeler on Thursday morning to discuss his plan to revive downtown.
Um, in which one of the things in this piece is, Wheeler also said Wednesday, let's see, Wheeler also said Wednesday that ending nightly violence and getting our community back on its feet would be a major priority for the city and something he believed was a necessary prerequisite to the economic recovery of downtown.
Well, them's easy words.
There's no evidence that he's doing anything, anything to that end.
Well, in fact, he is doing exactly the opposite.
He is treating the nightly riots as if they have some legitimacy.
And you said earlier the protests might have some legitimacy.
I want to be very careful.
The anger that fuels the protests comes from a legitimate place.
I don't think these protests have any legitimacy anymore.
They have lost any legitimacy they might once have had by not doing anything to stem the violence that arises from them.
The violence is predictable and that means that everybody who signs up, even the people who aren't being violent, are signing up for something that leads to violence.
The responsibility is on them.
People are flocking there in part because it's an excuse for a street party.
There's no other place to do it.
But Mayor Wheeler's behavior, I'm just guessing here, I've been very busy with Unity stuff.
Am I right that his behavior has made the protesters enthusiastic about Mayor Wheeler himself, that they are very pleased with his behavior?
They love him.
He's completely on their side.
Wait, no?
Let's see, where have we seen this before?
Like every time this happens, yes at Evergreen, yes every place else, when you have a weak leader who pretends to be on the side of the protesters They still aren't going to love you.
They still don't, they're never going to love you Ted, so how about stand up to them and stop this.
So Zach, show my screen here.
We have, oops, you don't have to, I don't think you need to.
This is just, you know, this is video of protesters going into the lobby of Wheeler's condo.
Presumably it says apartment.
I doubt he's a renter, but if he's lucky, maybe he is.
in which they demand that he resign, abolish the police by 2022 with no tech or private replacement, and allot saved resources to BIPOC communities and city services.
So, you know, another classic move from the playbook of, I'm sorry, but just witless protesters – You can't have both of those things.
You can't both resign and abolish the police by 2022.
And finally they're saying it.
They're actually saying it.
Abolish, not defund, abolish the police by 2022 with no tech or private replacement.
Yeah.
Wow.
You know what he should say in response to this?
No.
Yeah.
Thank you, but no.
Get out of my building.
Yeah, it's totally predictable.
And yes, I am sending in reinforcements and no, we are not going to be violent with you unless you force our hand Yeah, it's I mean, it's totally predictable and the fact is here's here's what Wheeler is clearly missing he Has a vast population of people who now have every right to fear that this is going to come into their neighborhoods and do who knows what to
They've been harassing people, shining bright lights into their windows, cursing at them, demanding that they come out into the streets.
Now they're in Wheeler's own building, right?
So Portlanders have a very real reason to fear that this nightly riot phenomenon will come directly to them at home, right?
That means there will be an awful large fraction of the population of Portland that would be grateful to have this reigned in finally.
It has no legitimacy, it is announcing the fact that it is Vile and irresponsible.
Literally we have people throwing feces at police officers.
So there would clearly be a great deal of support if he would just behave like a mayor.
Now, will they say that he's part of a fascist crackdown if he actually has the police do their job and arrest lawbreakers?
Of course they will.
Of course they will.
Totally predictable.
On the other hand, will a large fraction of the population of Portland breathe a sigh of relief that finally governance is doing what it is supposed to do, what society depends on it doing?
Of course there would be.
And because he only hears the vocal part, right?
The vocal part is the tantrum, right?
This is a tantrum, and he is responding to it because the adults are being quiet waiting for him to do his job.
And the fact is, do your job and the adults will support it.
It's guaranteed.
Yeah, so he's supposed to be the adult.
When you elect a mayor, you're electing an adult in part to act.
And you know, this isn't a perfect analogy.
A mayor isn't a parent.
But what everyone probably has seen, the screaming toddler in the supermarket who is having a meltdown because they can't get the thing that they want.
And most people have probably also seen the parent say no, no you can't, no you can't, and finally cave.
What does that do?
It results in the screaming toddler very, very briefly being quiet.
But what that toddler has learned is that tantrums work.
That is what is happening here.
That is bad parenting, that is bad mayorship, that is bad leading in every regard.
You don't cave to tantrums.
You just don't do it.
And it's not that anyone will be perfect in this regard.
And there are some situations where, oh my god, this is exactly the wrong moment.
Okay, you little brat, you little rioters, whatever it is, I'm going to have to give you this thing right now, but you can be damn sure that once we get to a place where I can enforce good behavior I am going to do so fairly and justly and you are going to learn that this does not pay.
Why are we letting rioting and looting and violence pay?
Why would you do that if you actually care about the city, if you actually care about society, if you actually care about democracy?
You don't.
You're either not thinking it through in any way, and frankly he's had plenty of time, or you actually don't care about the city or society or democracy.
So which is it?
Yeah, well, okay, I guess we'll stay tuned and see whether the sit-in continues until Mayor Wheeler finally abolishes the police in the hope that that will finally satisfy the rioters, which of course it wouldn't.
I know I'll feel safer.
Alright, so, we have also to talk about...
Lewis and Clark College, which is a private liberal arts college in southwest Portland, across the river from Reed.
So, you know, we've got a couple of these elite private colleges in Portland, in which right now, as we are speaking to you live, there is mandatory training for all new students taking place.
Here is the description in the schedule.
Zach, if you would just pop on and off my screen a little bit.
Right now we have 12.15pm to 4pm today.
Why is Oregon so white, they ask?
And then they say, welcome to Portland!
Well, that seems like a sort of a mixed message.
That from the group Race Talks, which is organizing this, which has been invited presumably by Lewis and Clark to organize this mandatory training.
So if you click on the link at the top of that last page, you will find this.
Engage for Racial Justice, a Lewis and Clark New Student Orientation Workshop.
They say that they are going to concentrate on historical and contemporary issues of race and racism in Portland, centering Black, Indigenous, and people of color's voices to allow groups that are traditionally overlooked in academic and business settings to feel seen.
Bottom paragraph here.
Additionally, we want to center further marginalized voices who may include but are not limited to.
You ready for this?
Oh, I am.
Yeah.
People with darker complexions or skin tone, queer identified, Non-binary and non-gender conforming.
Disabled.
Persons with accents or from other countries.
Ethnic minority.
Sick.
People who physically express their religious identity.
And more.
Wow.
Wow.
All right.
Yeah.
I mean, I know they missed some, but this is simultaneously an attempt to pretend to be as inclusive as possible and to actually make sure that you can shut down dissent by claiming that people don't have enough points in that so-called progressive stack of historic oppression, and therefore you have no ground to stand on because you yourself don't know oppression.
Okay.
The organization, Race Talks PDX, which has been presumably hired, I know it has no formal affiliation with Lewis and Clark, so presumably hired by Lewis and Clark College to run these trainings, has this helpful quiz for you to find out what your Race Talks IQ is.
Zach, if you could not show my screen please, could click on that link and show it so that I can read off my screen.
Oh, actually, if you can't find it, I can just read off my paper notes.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I'm going to have you, yeah, there it is.
So, this is a quiz.
This is a helpful quiz that they have to find out your race talk's IQ.
Here's my very helpful summary, I think, of their quiz.
So, number one is, are you BIPOC?
What does BIPOC stand for?
Biracial Indigenous Person of Color, maybe?
I'm not sure that B stands for biracial.
Black Indigenous People of Color, yes.
Okay, so are you a BIPOC?
Well, this question then reveals that you actually get more race IQ points for being born a certain way.
That's both original sin and, you know, that's actually racism right there.
Okay.
Number two, do you actively live or socialize with BIPOC communities?
Three, have you experienced being the only person of your ethnicity in the room on a dozen or more occasions?
Now, these actually make sense to me.
These actually seem to me like decent metrics of whether or not you have an ability to have some sense of what it might be like.
to be an actual minority in a society, in a classroom, in a business.
And while they certainly aren't going to be the end all and be all in terms of, you know, how you can never know, you know, as we have, living and doing research in Madagascar, for instance, where very often we were the only Vaza, the only white people I'm having none of this.
None of it.
None of it at all.
or that people had ever seen.
That does change your way of understanding what it is to be in the world.
But the fact is that our white skin was still a privilege and was still protective.
I'm having none of this, none of it, none of it at all.
Because the idea that your IQ, something that they're analogizing to IQ about racial issues is going to be synonymized with some fact of your experience rules out the possibility of somebody who's very insightful, having discovered what you might learn from being the only person of your ethnicity in having discovered what you might learn from being the only person of your ethnicity in the room through literature And I'm not saying, I mean, I get- So, I mean, we are getting there.
I know, but I get your point that yes, it is useful to have had that experience.
But the thing is, I mean, the reason I think I'm emotionally responding to this is- So this is your first time seeing it.
If you synonymize smarts with, well, have you taken this class and did you do well?
Have you taken that class and did you do well?
Then the answer is all of those of us for whom school didn't work are just sort of stupid by definition.
And my feeling is, no, some of us did not end up stupid by definition.
And that tells you a lot about school and its non-essential nature.
So my point would be, look, I want people to understand what it means to be the only person of your ethnicity in the room.
And if you haven't had the experience, Then you need to spend some time imagining it.
But I don't want to be told that if you haven't had that experience, you couldn't possibly know.
That's garbage.
I agree.
And, you know, I think if I'm trying to steel man this movement, and it's really hard to steel man this quiz, and really the only two points on this that I think are stated well at all are that number two and three, then I will say that this is a feature of being
Of potentially being able to have some insight into what it is to have been, you know, born black, born of an ethnicity that has not only been a minority and oppressed throughout the history of the West, But frankly, even when we go, for instance, to Madagascar, the fact that we may be the only white people that people have ever seen doesn't change the fact that we a come and we can at any moment leave.
So we can leave our minority status.
But we are also, because in the case of Madagascar is the French who came in and colonized.
We are still wearing this sort of mask of power.
I'm trying to steel man the part of this that actually makes sense.
The rest of these, let's just move on here, Zach.
I'd love for you to continue to show this.
Four and five are, let's see, my cat's sitting on my notes now.
Have you read more than 10 African American authors?
Have you read more than 10 authors from the African diaspora?
So, these numbers, you know, 10.
Who cares about 10?
And, you know, wouldn't reading four books by Toni Morrison be, you know, pretty powerful?
Actually, she's extraordinary.
I read a ton of her work in high school, actually, and was really deeply affected by it.
And does that only count as one point here?
You know, so this is this kind of like pseudo-enumerate garbage, And, you know, why is it so important that you both read a lot of African-American and a lot of authors from the African diaspora?
You know, put that aside.
There is some value, and you alluded to this, right, in your emotional response.
Like, actually, there are a lot of ways to gain knowledge of what it is to be living in someone else's skin, right?
Let's move on now to six and seven.
6.
Can you discuss the relationship between affirmative action, BIPOC, non-binary, stacking order, and white centering?
7.
Do you understand the intersectionality between BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S?
First, I don't know what IA2S stand for.
Q apparently means both queer and questioning, and those last two are not only a bunch of gobbledygook, you know, postmodern garbage language,
But they also are pointing out this tie, again, between this movement that says it's about race and says it's about focusing, centering black people so that everyone can understand what that lived experience is and what the history of oppression has been and making sure it doesn't move into the future.
With trans issues.
And that frankly has no place here, but we've pointed out again and again and again that it's on the Black Lives Matter webpage, it's all over the rhetoric of this movement, which should make those people who think that this movement is what it says it is, think again.
Finally, 8.
Have you joined a social justice organization for black people or advocated openly for black people at work, socially, or with a governmental agency?
Suggesting that if you are not an activist in the way that we say you need to be, you have low race IQ.
So this is exactly the same thing that they are doing on the streets and in classrooms and everywhere else.
And we see again and again that people who would End up with a high score on that quiz if they arrive at a conclusion that is different from this movement, have their perspectives dismissed.
That's right.
And if you don't prioritize race in your daily life in the same way that we do, you're not a good person.
You have low race IQ.
You need to be schooled.
You need to be shamed.
Right, and so anyway, I just, that exercise is designed to flatter the people who created it and those who think like them.
And it is designed to allow the exclusion of everybody else, right?
Are we to understand, you know, for one thing, Suppose you, because you were disadvantaged, didn't acquire literacy, right?
Now we're gonna decide that you're race stupid because you didn't read books.
Maybe you acquired that information somewhere else.
Maybe, you know, who knows what the possibilities are.
But the idea that, A, this is something that is formulaic and that your, you know, your empathic capacity isn't An essential component in your ability to infer from the literature you've read from the experiences you've had what they actually mean about somebody else's Situation is missing from that.
So anyway, I find the entire thing.
It's like one of these little You know, tests that a grade schooler would set up in order to define who gets to be in their club, right?
And the test is designed so that only people that they want in the club will actually pass it.
And it's like, okay, I'm not playing that goddamn game.
Yeah, it actually, that's, I think, very apt.
It is like a grade school test of are you in or are you out?
And it also reminds me of the kinds of quizzes that show up in magazines for teen girls.
And, you know, the fact that Teen Vogue has, like, who even knew that Teen Vogue existed?
But, like, somehow it's been captured and is being weaponized as part of this woke movement.
And, you know, encouraging not just fealty to Black Lives Matter, but actually things like sex work for girls.
Like, it's disgusting and reprehensible the way that it's gone.
But these kinds of quizzes that have long been used to basically
um create lack of confidence and in in teenage girls and make them wonder if they're good enough or pretty enough or are gonna be liked enough by boys um this is this is exactly that sort of thing like are you do you belong are you with us or are you against us it's more this us versus them there's good people there's bad people it's this it's you know it's the comic bookification of the u.s but it's also like the teen magazine occasion if you will of of the u.s yeah
Yeah, and it's, if you think about it, I mean, push-pull.
A push-pull is a pull that its purpose is not actually to get any information, the purpose is to manipulate your belief system on the basis of the questions that you're being asked, which shift what you think is actually the case.
In this case, the fact that, you know, You, of course, want a high race IQ, don't you?
Yeah.
And so, you know, geez, have I read 10 black authors?
You're counting on your fingers.
Maybe I don't quite get there.
I almost went and looked at my bookshelf.
Honestly, I almost went and looked at my bookshelf.
This is pushing you.
And the thing is, anybody who comes up feeling a little bit insecure about their race IQ, Is going to end up feeling like, well, I certainly have to behave as if I have a high race IQ so that I don't get discovered to have a low one.
Anyway, this is just pure childish manipulative garbage.
And the fact is, meet people, talk to them, listen to what they have to say.
Your superficial prejudices will evaporate.
You'll discover That, you know, people are complex.
And once you have done that, you will have some basis to understand all of the things that we're forced to grapple with.
But if you're going to, you know, pat yourself on the back for passing some stupid quiz or start behaving in, you know, geez, how can I raise my race IQ?
I guess I'm supposed to go find a person of color that I can advocate for at work, you know, and then you're going to find Potentially somebody who's playing the victim, and you'll just advocate for them so you can boost your little score and go back and take the test again.
So at best, even if you found someone who's honorable, it's going to promote tokenism, which no one wants to be a token of any movement.
No good faith person wants to be a token of any movement.
And with regard to, oh, I've got to be able to prove that I actually read Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and all of these people.
Isn't that going to encourage exactly the kind of academic gaming that we already have?
It's going to promote CliffsNotes versions of these books so that you can have exactly the quote that you need in order to demonstrate that you're really well familiar with the oeuvre of these African-American authors.
No, that's not the point.
This is the part of lived experience that does make sense, right?
What is it to live like other people?
This is why travel is so valuable, this is why literature is so valuable, and other narrative.
And it's not to be able to get a good poll quote that makes you look like you've actually experienced something.
No, there's no cheating this, really.
If you really are trying to understand what it's like to be like other people, you need to, as you just said, Brett, talk to them.
Live with them.
Go be in the places where they are.
Eat their food.
Listen to their music.
Engage with other cultures honorably and with respect and with the understanding that we are all actually individual human beings with faults and with some glory, some of which is hidden, some of which isn't.
And if you will take the time to try to discover it, you can do so.
I would say generosity of spirit and openness of mind are the tools you need and everything else is a matter of exposure.
Yeah.
And I'm going to get over my...
reaction to this gamification of this whole thing.
The whole thing has become a game.
Yes.
It has become a game and we are going to tear civilization apart over that game and it's going to be the most spectacular and needless loss in human history.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay, let's switch for the moment to talking about this shutdown by Oregon Health Sciences University, OHSU, of a big COVID-19 study.
So this Here.
Zach, you can show this just very briefly.
This is again in the Oregonian on August 27th.
OHSU ends massive coronavirus study because it underrepresented minorities, university says.
This is about a key to Oregon study, which had been projected to cost $24 million every year, was to track 100,000 people's coronavirus symptoms.
And when it was announced in May, Governor Kate Brown called the program a game changer.
Sounds great.
Quote, one of its original goals was to make sure people of color signed up to participate, but that did not happen.
Follow the link in that article and find this from OHSU.
This is no longer the Oregonian, this is OHSU's actual news release from August 27th as well.
OHSU Ends COVID-19 Study Supports Ongoing Conversations Between Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, Decolonizing Research and Data Council, and Governor's Office to Better Understand Disproportionate Impacts of the Virus Within Communities of Color and Urban-Based Indians and Tribes.
Fairfax here didn't like that last bit.
The claim is, and it's a claim, and this is the point here, the claim is that there are disproportionate impacts of the virus.
Paragraph three of this...
Paragraph three of this news release from OHSU reads, specifically COVID-19 has intensified the profound and disproportionately adverse public health impacts that have long harmed black, indigenous and people of color, as well as other historically disadvantaged populations, including but not limited to Latinx and Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islanders.
It is critical that the state improve its understanding of COVID-19 prevalence by centering research on the communities most affected.
Okay.
This is why they have shut down this major study that appeared to actually be doing some good.
Because, they say, they did not manage to attract enough BIPOC, people of color, black indigenous people, to the study and therefore they were not able to keep track of those.
Once again, the claims are Sorry, I'm looking.
The claims are that those people suffer disproportionate impacts and that they are the communities most affected.
Those are direct quotations from the OHSU news release.
We find, again, in that first article I showed you, quote, the program's failure is a major hit to Oregon's effort to monitor, study, and ultimately curb the pandemic.
The pandemic has affected Black people, American Indians, and Pacific Islanders particularly hard, with case rates many times higher than those for whites.
Okay, let's follow the link that they are giving to support the claim they just made.
Okay, so this is a fairly long and long report and here I gotta move you kitty cat.
And it's pretty good.
It's published again August 26th, so the day before this gets shut down.
There's a whole lot here, a whole lot of numbers, and at first you just got to wonder where is the evidence?
What are they talking about?
Where is the evidence?
So tick me off this for a moment, Zach, so I can just, I don't make people dizzy by scrolling down to get to table three.
Nope, that's age group.
Table three is the only thing that I can see from this that actually shows That actually seems to address the point that is made that this is being linked to.
So this is table three for those just listening.
Severity and rates of COVID-19 by race.
So if you look at the fourth column, cases per thousand, you see that in fact black American Indian and Alaska Native and Pacific Islander populations indeed have a higher case rate of over 1,000, or in the case of Pacific Islander, almost 3,000.
Cases per 100,000.
Sorry, per 100,000 for those demographics, whereas white and Asian people have cases per 100,000 of 281 and 393, respectively.
Okay, so that is certainly one measure of the effect of how much people are being affected by this virus, right?
And we know, of course, that focusing on severe symptoms now and deaths is a thin metric and we've been pushing against focusing on case fatality rate, for instance, and just deaths for a while now because we know that there are lingering health effects for people who've had COVID-19 and we can therefore suspect, we are predicting that there may be very long-term effects from this disease.
So I do not in any way mean to minimize people who have had cases that weren't severe.
However, let us look at the two other measures on the screen.
Zach, if you would show that again, please.
On this table, of the effects of COVID.
Percent hospitalized and case fatality rate.
Percent hospitalized for whites, blacks, Asians, American Indians, etc.
is all basically the same.
They aren't giving us raw numbers or maybe we could even do a chi-square with this.
But those numbers look all pretty similar, right?
I mean, you know, blacks are hospitalized at slightly lower rates than whites and Asians and American Indians, but I really don't think, and Pacific Islanders, but I really doubt that that's in any way significant.
So those numbers basically look the same.
And so by that metric, if you're looking at percent hospitalized, you would say actually none of the demographics, if we're looking at demographics by race, are more or less affected, which is a direct I should point out here, there's one potential confound which I think you're about to rule out in your final category here.
But one thing, hospitalization rates could have something to do with access to services.
True.
It could be that if blacks were disproportionately affected, they didn't show up in the hospitalization rate because for whatever reason they didn't go to the hospital.
And maybe because we know there's a correlation with class, and so people who are poorer Whether or not it's because they are also more likely to be black or less likely to go to the hospital even when they need it, we would then predict that the case fatality rate would be higher again, that the cases per 100,000 and the case fatality rate would be comparable, even if hospitalization rate wasn't.
But what in fact we see in this final column of exactly the table that is linked to as evidence that black American Indian Pacific Islanders in Oregon are being disproportionately affected by COVID-19 is that the case fatality rate for whites and Asians is two to three times higher than it is for blacks and for American Indians and for Pacific Islanders.
It's more than double.
So how is it that they can claim with a straight face and literally cancel a study, a long-term study that actually was maybe going to do some good on the basis that it was not successfully encouraging enough people of color to come and be participants in it because those people are inherently the most affected by this crisis?
Their very data show that they had to pick and choose.
They had to cherry-pick the metric that they used in order to make that point.
They had to cherry-pick.
This is not how a university with health and science in its name.
This is OHSU.
This is the biggest, most premier hospital and health and university by many metrics in the state of Oregon.
What are they doing?
This doesn't look like science.
This doesn't look like math.
This doesn't look like health care.
It looks like bad science.
It looks like verification of science.
And so that's the thing.
Cherry picking is the method for verification.
And we saw this across the board in the evergreen fiasco where a vast amount of data existed and it was cherry picked in order to suggest a very particular narrative about People of color being left behind by Evergreen when the data actually frequently reflected exactly the opposite.
Exactly the opposite.
That the college was doing well by its students of color.
So anyway, cherry picking is the hallmark of verificationism, which is the hallmark of a dishonest attempt to advance a narrative above the facts.
Yeah.
And in this case, the thing that I find most striking about it is that it's not as if the study was accidentally constructed to exclude, you know, in the way many medical studies have excluded women, you know, because men are a convenient study group.
Maybe there's bias that goes into choosing men, but the point is, you know, you can have studies like this that are non-representative for some reason.
But in this case, they specifically went out of their way to recruit They apparently failed to attract sufficient numbers for the group that is claiming they didn't attract sufficient numbers.
Right, which doesn't suggest that the study discriminated against these people, it suggests that these people discriminated against the study, and the idea that you should not collect data Right?
Because people who you tried to include didn't end up included, for whatever reason, is preposterous.
Because, you know, the fact is… That's shutdown STEM right there.
That's successful shutdown STEM.
They win.
It's successful shutdown STEM.
And you know who loses?
Everyone.
Everybody.
They think they win, but they lose too, and so do all the rest of us.
Right, so the fact is, the thing that's hard to wrap your mind around here is people are actually going to die for lack of data, right?
People are actually going to contract this disease and they're going to die because the data is not going to properly inform them about the symptoms that arise in this, which you know, frankly the symptoms if you're following something that tells you what these symptoms are like are frightening enough to spook you into being very careful about this disease.
Knowing what those symptoms are is going to be key to protecting yourself and how they unfold.
You know, you and I have been advocating now for more than 40 live streams for the collection of large-scale data on the progression of the disease so that we understand something about how it works.
So yes, this is shut down stem and the result is going to be humans are going to die.
That's right.
That's what happens when you shut down STEM.
We need better STEM.
We need hypothesis-driven research to once again become the thing that people are doing when they say they're doing science.
But shut down STEM, people will die.
That's what will happen.
People will die.
And you won't know their names, which is going to make it easy to ignore, right?
You won't know which people died because of the lack of this data.
That's right.
Such is the nature of complex systems.
Absolutely.
So just one more thing from this document before we go into talking about why looting is so awesome and everyone should engage in it.
Table one, which is just two tables up from the one I just showed you, is severity and rates of COVID-19 by sex.
Oh, because we're in, yeah, okay.
So severity and rates of COVID-19 by sex.
This is not a point that is being made particularly in the media at this point, although we talked about it early on in our first 17 or 18 live streams when we were talking a lot about COVID.
Which is that men are disproportionately more likely to die from COVID.
And here we have, again, actually women having slightly more cases per 100,000.
Again, I suspect that that's not a statistically significant difference.
558, 559 for men versus 607 for women.
Could be, but, and you know, curious, interesting that that's the case.
But then you have a hospitalization rate of almost 9% for men, 7.3% for women, and a case fatality rate of 2% for men and 1.4% for women.
But that's not what we're supposed to talk about because no one is allowed to be talking about disproportionate effects on men right now.
And oh, by the way, non-binary, unless these people are actually intersex, I'm sorry, you're messing with data and science and you're not allowed to do that.
Intersex is real, but non-binary because you don't really feel like a man or a woman?
No, you shouldn't be allowed to do that.
I don't know why they let those descriptions in here.
There's no reason to break that data out here other than to virtue signal.
Right.
No, that's right.
Yeah.
So, interesting that at a moment when the study is being shut down for a reason that has been cherry-picked with regard to racial outcomes, there's also exactly no mention of the clear trend that this disease impacts men more severely than women.
So there's that.
All right.
So I have one... Oh, go ahead.
Yeah, I'm just, I'm eager to talk about looting.
Yes, well, before we do that, I wanted to, I only briefly perused this, I had a very scary moment.
Zach, could you put up the beach?
So I saw a headline that stopped me in my tracks indicating, let's see, Oregon epidemiologist beat up party may be linked to more than 300 cases of COVID-19 and I saw that and I thought, oh my god!
And now in fact if this were true... You know what, actually that connects to this.
So you go on.
Well, what I was going to say is the idea that a beach party caused a large number of cases was very frightening because you and I have been telling people for a long time.
We've been telling them two things.
One, apparently outdoors is very, very safe, especially during the day.
We've also been telling them we predict if we are not careful outdoors that that will change because The virus apparently doesn't know how to get transmitted outdoors, but it would be an advantage if it could, and so we need to be very vigilant outside, and we need to wait for the possibility of the virus changing, and I thought maybe it's here.
Okay, but, I mean, if you read just the first sentence in this article, which I hadn't seen before now, and I can I can barely see because of where it's oriented.
It says this summer, 20 friends rented a beach house on the Oregon coast for a three-day celebration.
Exactly.
So these aren't people hanging out on the beach.
Apparently four of them showed up sick, right?
And the 300 number is downstream cases as they fanned out from their beach gathering.
But my point is, A, The broadcasting of ideas like, oh, a bunch of people got sick at a beach party is destructive because it means that they can't do exactly the thing that they should do, which is while the sun is still shining in the northern hemisphere, they should go out and take advantage of it.
They should not be reckless, but they should drink in the sun as much as they can, drink in the feeling of normalcy that you get, and we've been doing a better and better job of this of late.
But if we tell them, oh, my God, you're going to get sick at a beach party, then people are going to, you know, withdraw indoors and winter is going to be even worse.
So I just wanted to call attention to that, that spectacular failure of And the sloppy nature of the thinking which we still see outdoors as people are hyper-vigilant where they don't need to be, where they frown on those who are taking advantage of the safety of the environment, etc.
I will say that since, you know, we've been out on the river exploring paddle sports the last several days and that feels like normalcy.
You don't, you know, people outside enjoying being in the water, it almost looks like a normal year and it feels like it.
Certain places, and well worth it.
It may not be the water.
You may not have access to water like this.
We're lucky in Portland that we do.
The Willamette's a beautiful, beautiful river.
But something in your area may look like this, where people have figured out how to carve out a patch of normalcy in all of the strangeness.
And just simply going someplace where you can forget for five minutes that COVID's even going on, Is probably just important to feeling like, you know, this isn't just some nightmare that never ends.
Absolutely.
Let me just before we talk about looting, which I know we're both eager to do.
Actually, so I showed you Table 3 and I showed you Table 1.
Here's Table 2 from the same document.
Severity and rates of COVID-19 by age group.
So we showed you race and we showed you sex.
Here's age group.
Interesting, because let's start over at the right-hand column.
Case fatality rate for people through the age of 39 is literally showing up as zero, and it's not zero deaths, but it's such a low percentage that it's showing up as zero.
Climbs to 0.2% for 40 to 49.8 for the next decade, 3.4, 8.9% CFR, case fatality rate for 70, 79.
And then for 80 plus, it's 23%.
So that's totally in keeping with what we've been hearing from the beginning.
Actually, that's one of the few things about this disease that has not changed, right?
Early on, it was thought that young people couldn't get it.
And, you know, basically, if you were really young, you really couldn't get it at all.
And that the effects were null.
We now know that both of those things are not true.
And we don't know what all the effects might be.
But very telling in light of your Beach House contagion headline that you just showed, Brett, that we have over in cases per 100,000, the highest, the age group with the highest number of cases per 100,000 is 20-year-olds.
And then it's the next highest is 30 to 39-year-olds.
And so to me, what that says is This pandemic has been really hard on everyone.
Lockdowns are rough, and that some number of people in Oregon, which is in the northern hemisphere, and so summer is happening, and some number of people are just saying, no way, I'm not going to do it.
I am going to socialize.
And sure enough, they're getting sick at a higher level.
And that's a hypothesis, but it's a hypothesis that's consistent with what you just showed about the beach house.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, if we were clear and consistent, we could say it, you know.
Socialize.
Outdoors.
Do it at a distance.
Don't spend five minutes talking face to face with somebody.
Keep your, you know, either be far apart, and if you have to talk close up, make it brief.
Wear a mask, you know, as you start a conversation with somebody, pull a mask up.
There's lots of ways to do it.
And if you want to get away together, try camping.
Yeah.
Yeah, don't, try not sharing an HVAC system with a bunch of people, some of whom may be sick already.
Totally.
Yeah, it's really important that we figure out how to thread the needle and, you know, bad data and rotten testing aren't helping.
No, they're not.
They're really quite a disaster.
But I would also say, if you can go back to that chart, strongly implied by that distribution of data is something that is also consistent with the pattern that you will discover if you look at the, you know, for example, the subreddit of infected, COVID infected people.
And what they call long haulers, people who've had it for months and it doesn't... And are still experiencing symptoms.
Yeah, they're cured but it doesn't... the symptoms keep recurring on them or they think they're cured.
But this is having a destructive effect on the body.
The closer you are to death by virtue of your age, the more likely it is to push you over that line, right?
And so yeah, you get very low case fatality rates for young people.
That does not mean no damage.
What it means is you probably had 10 years knocked off the end of your life, which you won't realize until you begin to get old enough that those maladies show up earlier than they should or earlier than they would.
That's right.
And so we ought to be behaving like there's a menace out there that can, if you are careless about it, knock 10 or 20 years off your life, right?
If you behaved that way, then you would be properly encoding this.
If you think, well, I'm young if I get it I'll probably get better so I'm gonna roll the dice because there's a lot going on and I don't like being locked down a you're gonna give it to people who are Old enough that it may kill them.
And B, you are going to rob yourself in the future.
And if you get hit by a bus, maybe you get away with it.
But if you don't get hit by a bus, you're probably going to be paying the cost down the line.
And you may even be paying the cost six months down the line, a year down the line.
You know, brain fog, circulatory damage, all of these things.
This is nothing to mess around with.
Yeah, it's not.
All right.
On to looting.
We're not going to do any looting.
Oh, I'm not going to promise that.
I mean, once you hear about how awesome it is and important it is, I think you may change your mind.
I'm not going to do any looting.
Okay, fair enough.
I really, I actually seriously wish that people couldn't make this stuff up because, you know, it's really, it's cliche to say you can't make this stuff up, but that's what people are doing.
People are making shit up and publishing it and then they're getting interviewed by NPR.
And NPR and other outlets are taking this seriously and it's becoming mainstream and it's not nonsense, it's not garbage, it is destructive.
I don't even have the words.
I don't even know what it is.
It's just destructive, awful.
This border is on evil and that's not a word I use very much.
So here we have, just a minute Zach before you show it, an NPR interview.
with an author of a recently published book called, I kid you not, In Defense of Looting.
So here we go.
I'm just going to read a couple of these we'll talk about, and then I want to finish with what she begins with.
So it's this author, I'll get to her, Vicky Osterweil, probably mispronouncing her name, Can you talk about looting as a tactic?
What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy?
is the question.
Oh, sorry, I'm looking for it.
I should have had you pull this up, Zach.
Here we go.
Can you talk about rioting as a tactic?
What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy?
So she's not just advocating looting, she's advocating for rioting as well.
She says, "It does a number of important things, It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage, which during COVID times is widely unreliable or, particularly in these communities, is often not available or comes at great risk.
That's looting's most basic tactical power as a political mode of action.
It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed, It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions.
It points to the way in which that's unjust, and for the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories.
So you get to the heart of that property relation and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.
Are we being punked?
I did it, I did it without laughing until I got to the end!
You did, but now you are laughing.
Oh.
My.
God.
Yeah.
It attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head... I even find the most idiotic stuff in here.
It's unbelievable.
We can just have things for free if we get rid of the police and state oppression.
Because how dare you want to buy something that was made by someone somewhere else?
I just want it for free.
Wait, how does that thing come to… Right.
What process produces that thing and why?
It is so incoherent in every regard.
You had some things to say.
I mean, I have some more idiocy.
Oh, there's no end of things to say.
I just feel like we are being punked.
Yes.
And whatever advanced civilization is punching us, I wish they would stop.
I mean, maybe they have a lesson to teach us, and they're going to come down in their ships, and they're going to let us know what that lesson is, and we're all going to have a big laugh, and then we're going to go to actually governing the planet properly.
Do you remember, actually, during the Evergreen debacle, one of the chief instigators, really turns out to have been a truly bad actor, but someone who I had known beforehand to be quite smart, Naima Lowe.
Who, one of her things was performance art.
And I said to you at some point, early on, I said, is it at all possible that Naima is going to show up on some stage and take a bow And say, I have now shown you what is possible.
I have shown you how I can get a whole bunch of people to witlessly follow an insane movement.
And now you know, and now you too should wake up to the sheep that you are and actually try to do some good in the world rather than spouting off rhetoric.
Now, of course, she didn't do that.
Instead, she took the college for a bunch of money and went off to do whatever the hell she is doing now.
So, you know, alas, she was not playing a giant performance art hoax on us.
But wouldn't that be wonderful?
Wouldn't that be wonderful if we were being punked here and they were about to reveal it?
Could be the next Stanley Milgram.
Yeah, exactly.
It would have been so powerful, actually.
Yeah, but I mean, I don't even like hearing you say this because the role she played was so toxic and having to maintain, even just as a formal possibility, that maybe she was actually on the right side all along because... Oh, it's clear that she wasn't at this point.
But, you know, in the early days, even after she decided that I was a racist and all the other white women needed to come and collect my ass and all of this, I thought, it's possible?
Maybe?
I hope?
No.
Yeah.
No, that was wishful thinking of the highest order.
Yeah.
Okay, so let's see.
Another thing from here.
So this, show my screen again, Zach, if you would.
During recent riots, the interviewer from NPR says, a sentiment I heard a lot was that looters in cities like Minneapolis were hurting their own cause by destroying small businesses in their own neighborhoods, stores owned by immigrants and people of color.
What would you say to people who make that argument?
The answer is, in part, it's long so I'm just going to read part of it.
Looters and rioters don't attack private homes.
They don't attack community centers.
In Minneapolis there was a small independent bookstore that was untouched.
All the blocks of edit were basically looted or even leveled, burned down, and that store just remained untouched through weeks of rioting.
To say you're attacking your own community is to say to rioters you don't know what you're doing.
But I disagree.
I think people know.
They might have worked in those shops.
They might have shopped and been followed around by security guards by the owner.
And it goes on and on and on.
So verificationist and actually giving agency to the people that many of us would like to say, gosh, I hope when you grow up in a few years, you see what damage, what harm you caused.
And she's saying, no, no, no, they know and they're doing the right thing.
She's giving them ammunition.
Oh, well, no.
First of all, this has no or very little implication for the people actually engaged in this behavior, because the people actually engaged in this behavior are motivated by things other than analysis.
This is true.
Right?
I mean, looting in particular is, you know, the system that normally keeps you from walking out of the store with the TV is not functioning, so you walk out of the store with the TV.
That's what motivates the looting.
But a lot of people listen to NPR.
Well, that's the thing is it's not the people.
This is not targeted at looters and rioters.
This is targeted at people looking for an excuse.
People who have found themselves confronted with this isn't a movement about making the lives of black people better.
Look at the looting and rioting, right?
Look at all those white kids attacking the federal building in downtown Portland, you know?
What do you say to somebody who says that?
And the answer is, well, you don't say anything because, frankly, it doesn't add up as part of a movement that's trying to make the lives of black people better.
It adds up as something else.
In Portland, it's anarchism is what it adds up to.
So, you just need to hand them an argument, and the fact is it doesn't have to be a true argument.
It doesn't have to be a credible argument.
It just has to be something that allows NPR listeners to wave a book at people and say, you know what?
You're wrong about looting.
Right?
And the fact is, like most books, it's not going to get read, and so the idea that somebody has come up with an argument, and you haven't read it, therefore until you do, looting is back on the menu of honorable things, you know, okay, I get it.
So we need a name for this category.
So if this book, whatever it's called, In Defense of Looting, is in this category that you just described of to be used by ammunition to shut down the people who have an argument against you, Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility is certainly in that category, as is Ibram Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist.
And it would be great if we had a clever name for that category that we could invoke whenever we see more books, more whatevers, that belong in that category.
Because while certainly White Fragility and How to Be an Anti-Racist also serve significant other functions, that they are actually indoctrination tools, I think this book is less likely to be that, and more likely just to be something that these Yeah, the purpose of the book is the cover.
listen to NPR can say, oh, but don't you see that if you object to rioting and looting, you're actually part of the problem and you're probably a white supremacist.
Right?
Yeah.
The purpose of the book is the cover.
Yeah.
Right.
The argument is the cover, the sum total of it.
Yeah.
Now, I don't know, because I haven't read Lindsay and Pluckrose.
Yeah, I've begun it.
But I'm wondering if this is not central to their argument, because it seems to be implied on the cover of their book.
And I know their book is full of content, because they're both fastidious about these things.
Yes.
So careful.
Such good thinkers.
Yeah.
But anyway, I'll be curious whether or not they do have a name for it, and what that name might be.
Yeah.
Okay, so just two more little bits from this before we end for today.
What would you say to people who are concerned about essential places like grocery stores or pharmacies being attacked in those communities?
Zach, you probably want to show this, thank you.
And the author says, when it comes to small business, family-owned business or locally-owned business, they are no more likely to provide worker protections.
They are no more likely to have to provide good stuff for the community than big businesses.
It's actually a Republican myth that has, over the last 20 years, really crawled into even leftist discourse.
That the small business owner must be respected.
That the small business owner creates jobs and is part of the community.
That's actually a right-wing myth.
Now wait a second.
Didn't the argument above suggest you don't have to worry about the small business owners because they're going to be left alone?
Yes.
And then here the answer is, oh, they don't need to be left.
I guess you win either way.
You win either way.
That's the thing with these arguments and the people who make them is that they make sure to cover all their bases completely by doing end runs around their own arguments and hoping that you aren't paying attention even from one paragraph to the next.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
I must say when I went down into downtown Portland after the rioting broke out here, one of the first places I encountered Was an artist cooperative that had had its window busted in and people had gone inside and didn't look to me.
I mean, the reason I was struck by it was that it didn't look like it looked completely indiscriminate that you would attack an artist cooperative in Portland at the same time you're attacking the Apple Store.
Yeah, no, it's there's no there's no rhyme or reason and they will keep on telling us that we aren't looking hard enough for the rhyme or the reason.
But no, we are and it's just not there.
One more place to end on.
The very first question in this interview is, for people who haven't read your book, how do you define looting?
Her definition isn't that interesting, but the second paragraph of her answer is, Looting is a highly racialized word from its very inception in the English language.
It's taken from Hindi, loot, which means goods or spoils, and it appears in an English colonial officer's handbook on Indian vocabulary in the 19th century.
Okay.
So, Zach, may I have my screen back?
Thank you.
What does that even mean?
The claim, as far as I understand it, is that English having a word from another language means that that word is racialized.
That's the claim.
That's the claim.
Even when the word is actually still being used in its original meaning, which I looked it up, of course.
It is.
Lute.
Lute.
So, I went ahead and did some additional work for Vicky, the author of this book, and the author of this truly remarkable thought that loot is a racialized word in English language because it is, in fact, borrowed from the Hindi word loot, meaning basically the same thing.
Meaning loot.
Meaning loot, yes.
So I did some work for her, free of charge.
I found a bunch of other highly racialized words in English, all from Hindi or Urdu, closely related languages in India.
That provided English so many important words.
I mean, racist tropes.
This took me a long time though.
I want actually full props for my ability to Google this phrase, list of Hindi or Urdu words in English, and for clicking on the Wikipedia article that popped up at the top of the list.
So here we go.
Here are some other words that must be highly racialized given her analysis of why loot is highly racialized.
So that's, sorry guys, those like frankly the vast vast vast majority of words in English are now racialized and you should be really careful using them.
They're all racist.
We don't have to stop there, of course.
I think we have to abandon all words that aren't Indo-European or maybe Germanic in origin.
Algebra, certainly, that's from the Arabic.
In fact, man, English has a lot of words from the Arabic.
Let's just take a few that begin with C. Just C. Candy, caravan, chemistry, cipher, from which decipher comes, coffee, cotton, crimson.
They're all racialized.
All of them.
All right.
Now, I think I know where this goes, right?
The words are racialized.
That's bad.
So bad.
We shouldn't use words.
Right.
Which would leave us in silence, which is violence, which is good because rioting is good because it redistributes goods in a fair way.
Did I get it?
Yes.
If she floats, she's a witch.
Yes.
I'm wondering if my, if my, uh, race IQ has been amply demonstrated by that bit of bending over backwards.
You saw the quiz, man.
You didn't do anything to amplify your race IQ with that little bit of rhetoric.
No way.
No.
All right.
Well, I'm going to go read some books that will raise it somehow.
Yeah.
I recommend how to be an anti-racist.
Alright, I will start with Ibram Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist, and I will come back to you, I can't say non-racist, because that's not even possible.
I guess I will just be less racist.
That's what we're all aspiring to in this world.
I think that's what I've got for today.
Alright, well, on that ironic note.
Let's see, I guess we have some announcements and then we'll take our pause.
Yeah, so we'll take 15 minutes as we do and answer, when we come back, answer your questions on Super Chat from this hour and then from the next hour.
Tomorrow, we will have our private Q&A at 11am, which is accessible on my Patreon.
You can access the private Discord server at either of our Patreons, and the Dark Horse Podcast Clips channel is live as well.
Anything else?
There's another campfire?
I believe it's tomorrow.
I am being careful since I have begun announcing things that are not yet ready to be announced.
I'm going to be vague and say campfires will continue into the future.
Oh, do sign up at articlesofunity.org given that our Twitter account has been suspended.
The way to find out what's going on is to Sign up with your email there.
I guess you can also follow me on Twitter, and I will try to fill in for that account until they reinstate it, which I certainly assume that they will.
