James Lindsay exposes woke ideology’s cult-like grip, tracing its roots to 1980s academic infiltration via critical race theory and queer studies, now enforced by DEI policies tied to Supreme Court rulings. He highlights absurd papers—like "canine rape culture" in dog parks—winning awards, while institutions silence dissent with accusations of racism or bigotry, even banning serious critiques. Lindsay argues the movement weaponizes language (e.g., redefining punctuality as "white supremacy") and legal challenges (Harvard’s Asian discrimination case) reveal its self-destructive contradictions, prioritizing performative outrage over real solutions like economic reforms. Ultimately, he warns that this ideological rigidity stifles progress, turning education into credentialism without practical value while corporations exploit it for profit. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, you know, there's two ways we could talk about it.
We could talk about the psychological side of it, which is like this moral purity thing that's going bonkers.
Or we could talk about it in terms of the idea is the theory that's fueling this.
And that's all about that has this idea that comes from French philosophy that words and ideas and thoughts and patterns have traces that don't ever really go away.
And so if something, you know, used to be associated with something bad and we still use the word, or even if you pretend that it was the case and you still use the word, then it carries this negative trace.
So the moral panic and the psychology side of it's fueled by this kind of like stupid idea that words always have to mean kind of what they meant in the first place.
Like there's this with so you know, we're generally talking about this whatever woke thing that's happening, right?
And so you got to think of woke kind of like kind of like a church, right?
Like you got, I grew up Catholic, so it's like you got cultural Catholics, like they kind of go to church and maybe they go to confession sometimes and they don't really do they do it, but they don't really do it.
And then you have like the hardcore, like I had a friend in high school that like took notes at church.
So I'm thinking, I've thought this for a number of years, is that a lot of this stuff where you get these like woke activists doing their blogs or these scholars writing this stuff down is that they're looking at their own lives.
So you have these people that are like, they're walking down the street, you know, maybe whatever.
They walk into the hotel, they walk into the restaurant, and they're like, I saw a black guy.
And then it's like, I'm not supposed to notice that.
And then they start having like this thing in their head, and then they go write an angry blog about how terrible racism is because they're wrestling with it themselves.
It's like Sigmund Freud, right?
He had that whole idea that everybody wants to have sex with their mothers.
And like your psychology is all how you resolve that problem.
And it's like, maybe you just wanted to have sex with your mother, Sigmund Freud, you know, and then now it's everybody's a racist is kind of the vibe of the new thing.
And there's like this weird religious kind of thing happening around it.
That's really the thing that gets me is how similar this is to religious or religious, not just religious ideology, like how rigid it is, but also indoctrination, like religious cults, how they indoctrinate people.
And one of my friends, Kurt Metzger, really funny guy who was a Jehovah's Witness when he was younger.
And so he's really, really, really sensitive to this stuff.
He's like, I know where this is going.
Like, this is the same thing that I got when I was in the Jehovah's Witness.
This is cult shit.
It's these rigid ideologies that cannot be challenged.
So, for example, one of my favorite examples of these kind of like setups, right?
Historically in the book, I talk about historically, you know, the black feminists came along and they're like, oh, feminism's too white.
Feminism isn't paying attention to black feminist issues or black women's issues.
And so then these feminists were like, oh, we have to fix that.
And they start writing about black issues to the best of their ability.
And then three years later, the lady writes a paper saying, oh, you're just sticking black things in and it's fake and you're tokenizing it and you're fetishizing it.
And it's like, so you can't do it right.
That is cult, the indoctrination stuff.
So it's like you and I could be, you know, talking about something like this and you could say something.
And I'm like, don't you think it's a little bit racist?
And then the next step is like, what are you going to say?
You're going to say yes or no.
If you say yes, now you've owned it, right?
So now you're like racist.
And so I'm like, well, do you interrogate your racism?
Like, do you spend time working on that?
And you see, you're dragging people into it.
And if you say no, I can say, well, one of the symptoms of participation in systemic racism is an inability to see it if you're white and it's invisible to you.
And when you start to panic, when you start to stress out, they're like, literally, this lady emailed me the other day, this Indian woman.
I get a lot of, I get an insane number of emails about India?
No, no, from Canada.
An insane number of emails from people who are in different, different levels of stress with different things that are happening in their lives around this woke explosion that's happened in the last month or so.
So this lady's like, I had to go through a brown fragility training at work.
You know, like the Edwards guy, whatever that guy's name was, had that show.
And so it's like they cold read and they wait for somebody to start looking like they're getting the sweat or something happening.
And then they say, now what we need to do, now that we've introduced this idea of your brown fragility, is we need to, your anti-blackness, is we need to interrogate the feelings that came up.
And so they go one by one through the room and made every single one of them confess their feelings.
Like, who's not going to participate?
And here's that double bind because it gets to you, right?
And so what do you say?
You say, well, I don't really know what you're talking about.
Well, they're going to say you're ignoring it.
Exactly.
And then if you confess to it, then you're falling in.
And so it's like, I still do think that we have certain impulses underneath that lead people to build religious structures around themselves and have religious, you know, thoughts and feelings and want to have spiritual development and all of this.
And so religions can kind of do one of two things.
You know, I used to be kind of hard ass about religion and like tough, you know, angry atheist kind of picture, but I thought about it more, which you're not allowed to think about things and change your mind now, but I did.
And what I realized is that some religions look up.
They're like looking at God and they're afraid of sin, but they're paying attention to God.
They're thinking about renewal.
They're thinking about redemption.
They're thinking about forgiveness.
And then some religions look down.
And all they do is look at the sin and they focus on the sin.
And that's where the witch hunts came from.
That was when the Calvinists got like, you know, fire and brimstone, Jonathan Edwards screaming, you know, sinners in the hands of an angry God.
You're hanging on a spider's thread above the fires of hell and God should knock you into it because everybody's full of sin.
Next thing you know, they're killing witches.
So it's like you start focusing, if you look up, you know, then religion can be great.
It can actually lead people, you know, if they spiritual development, community, so on.
But if you're looking down, you're going to start obsessing about everybody.
If you're obsessing about sin, you're going to start obsessing about everybody else's sin too.
Yes.
Because you're going to want to like, there's this feeling with, again, reading Robin D'Angelo's white fragility, there's this feeling like that she doesn't want to feel alone.
Like she has these struggles and she doesn't want to be alone.
Yeah, $12,000 for two hours and teaches, she goes and tells white people that they're racists and then like interrogates their feelings when they get defensive about it.
Watching the fights were brutal and not skill-wise either.
It was just raw strain.
If you had someone who was taking steroids for 30 years and then they got off steroids for two, you would absolutely think that person had a massive advantage for being on steroids all those years.
Yeah, but it was one of those things where I was like, okay, this is one of the rare places where I really, if I go down on this one, like this is not, this is not, I can't see trans women just dominating in women's MMA.
The Fallon Fox issue was she had fought twice as a woman without letting anyone know that she used to be a man for 30 years.
And I was like, you're crazy.
You can't just do that.
If someone wants to fight a trans woman and they're cool with it, like there's a woman who fought in the UFC, her name is Ashley Evans Smith, and she wound up actually beating Fallon Fox and made her way to the UFC.
That's why she was able, like, if I had to choose between Fallon Fox fought Amanda Nunez, who's like the greatest woman of all time, Amanda Nunes would kill her.
So, like, if we look at psychological profiles, for example, sometimes there are, you know, the data are always hard to parse with things like this, but there are very slight differences in the two, you know, the male distribution and the female distribution of all the people.
What does it look like?
They overlap really close.
And there's little variations.
When you look at upper body strength and you look at grip strength, they almost don't overlap.
Like, there are very, very, the very top strongest women just barely cross over the weakest men in terms of grip strength and raw upper body strength.
Woman is a broader category, and it therefore confuses the situation.
And I think that there's almost like a lot of manufactured drama, not just in that issue, but in all of this, where these definitions are getting blurred out.
So, I mean, that's what I do all the time now, the last year.
It's like all I've been doing is researching how they misuse words and writing in, not trans people specifically, but this whole woke ideology or the social justice scholarship.
And I've been writing an encyclopedia on my website about that.
And it's just like, I've been writing my own encyclopedia, and it's a monumental task, but it actually is really helping.
People are emailing me every day and say, you know, I can't make sense of this until I read your stuff.
Oh, wow.
And so it's like I have, I called it translations from the wokish, like going off of Tolkien.
He's got, you know, Elvish.
Elvish, yeah.
And so I call it translations from the wokish.
It's on my website, New Discourses.
And it's got like a hundred and something done now, hundred and something terms.
There's also this issue that if a culture has been maligned, right, if they are marginalized, like trans people, then people who are not trans people are automatically thought of as in some way negative or bigoted or if you're a straight white male, for instance, like you're automatically a piece of shit.
Like, that's kind of what this book is about, is that I've traced that for like, it goes back to actually, I don't want to mislead people and say, oh, this is Marxism.
You know, you have to whisper Marxism.
But it is Marx who took the idea and he cooked up this idea called conflict theory.
He actually took it from other German philosophers and made this, you can't even say what he changed.
He changed Hegel's idea of what's called, you can't even say this anymore, the master-slave dialectic, because those master and slave have traces.
Even though that's what it was called, you can't talk about it.
So Marx took the idea of the master-slave dialectic, which was that people who have, Hegel wrote that people have power, and then there are people who don't have power.
The person that's being oppressed by the power understands the oppression, whereas the person who's doing the oppression can't, right?
Simple enough.
Marx cooked this up into this idea called conflict theory that says, oh, different groups in society, and he mostly meant rich people versus poor people, are completely separate from one another, and there's no idea that they help each other.
Like that the rich building like Amazon.com and making a super successful business that makes it easier to move products and to generates more income for the society.
There's no positive sum story, according to Marx.
It's all conflict.
And so what Marx's idea was is that the oppressor class is always the enemy of the underclass.
And this has actually traced down through history.
It was economics then and then this philosophical school started in Germany at first, moved to Columbia University during the World War II.
It's called the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
And they moved it into ideology and culture.
And so the dominant culture, whoever has the most status and power, the elites, which at the time was genuinely white, straight men for the most part.
Those people basically brainwash the underclass into not realizing that they should rise up against.
So you have this whole dynamic of conflict where the oppressor class doesn't realize what it's like to be oppressed.
The oppressed class constantly can't get away from it.
That's where you see this phrase now, people are being killed in the street every day, which isn't even true, but it doesn't matter because it's a matter of feeling.
And then the underclass always has to be at war to try to overturn the power above them, which is called hegemony, which comes from this guy, Antonio Gramsci, who is an Italian philosopher who came up with this idea of the long march through the institutions, which I think we're now seeing for sure happening, like take over the institutions from within with this stuff.
So this stuff all has like, I mean, we don't have to be dorks, but I mean, I can do that on my own.
But this is a very long history.
This isn't like, it didn't just pop up in 2014 when Michael Brown got shot.
Do you think when things happen like the George Floyd murder, that it just opens up a door and this stuff comes through and then the vibration changes, like it moves to a higher frequency because it's more common.
But what we have now is this culture where video goes viral, right?
And this is a striking thing.
So it's really more prominent in, I mean, it's pretty clear you could see the video with George Floyd, but if you back up to Michael Brown, it's more complicated in Ferguson.
Because, you know, the short video that went viral in the first place was a few, not very many seconds clip of this black guy getting shot by, unarmed black guy getting shot by a cop, but it doesn't tell the preceding story, which has now come to light that involved, you know, him trying to take the cop's gun and like wrestling with him and charging at him.
I'm going to skip tracks to a different video because I want to make a point that we live in a we live in a mediated world now, right?
A mediated epistemology is what I would call it.
The media itself, social media, so all of us participating are able to spin narratives around like a 30-second video.
So the other day, this guy sends me a video on Twitter and I watch it and it's some black guy with a microphone and a radio studio and he's like going.
He's like, you know, these white people ain't going to take it no more.
They ain't going to take it.
And he's like yelling.
He's like, oh, they're going to rise up.
And it's obvious what you're watching.
You're like, man, this guy's like, these riots are out of control.
And so I wanted to share it, but it was sent to me on Twitter and I couldn't figure out how.
So I looked it up on YouTube.
And so I had like a 40-second clip sent to me and I'm like, you know, about these riots.
And I wanted to show it to somebody.
And so I go and I find it on YouTube and I watch it and it's the same thing in the 40 seconds and it ends.
But the video that I watched is several minutes.
And then the next thing the guy says is this president is divisive.
This president is the problem.
It's so divisive.
He's causing all this division.
And it's like, holy shit, he's actually talking about Trump.
And then I kept watching and he's like, President Obama has got to go at the end.
And so it depends on which part of that clip you see.
The story changes completely.
I watched the 40 seconds and I was like, holy shit, this is the riots.
And then, oh my God, it's about Trump.
And then boom, now it's this dude railing about Obama several years ago.
And the video was sent to me because it was going crazy with the implication that it was about the riots.
So we live in this situation now where the, I don't want to say the media, like it's this entity, because actually in a sense, we are all participating.
These clips, you know, that people are loading up on Twitter.
That whole context isn't there.
And you said, you know, does it just jack everything up to a higher frequency?
And absolutely it does because everybody can take that clip and then just upload their story of what they want to have to be true into that clip.
And it becomes like, it's like, I mean, we're already talking about religion.
It's like a miracle.
Like, you know, back in 2000, 3,000 years ago, you know, something weird happened.
And then, you know, people, one person tells another and another and another.
And then it's like, and I swear, you know, an angel came down from the sky and touched him and he was healed and he could walk again.
You know, so it's like a miracle story, but mediated through partially informative video.
It's almost like, you know, everybody's scared that deep fake is coming, where they can basically put your face on whatever porn star or saying some horrible thing that you never said or whatever.
So that same clip I saw, I don't know that it would be a good example, but you could take it as the riots and get one, that black guy's sick of the riots.
And so the right wing's all over it.
Like, look at this guy, you know.
And then, boom, this president's so divisive.
And now it's the left's story.
And you cut it right there.
And the next thing you know, it's President Obama, you know.
And all of a sudden, it switches sides again.
And it's also history.
And then even the thing I watched that was longer was four and a half minutes.
And then the whole thing is like an hour.
So what really, what was really the whole guy, the guy's whole point.
And so we're getting away from being able to understand because our attention spans are so short.
You live in Twitter.
It's like you have the attention span of like a goldfish, man.
You can't pay attention to anything.
We're marinating in dopamine all the time.
Brain doesn't work right.
So you don't have time to like parse anything together.
You see this thing, you're pissed off, you don't retweet, you know, snarky comment.
And so this, I actually called Twitter a deconstruction machine, which is straight out of this, again, the same critical postmodern philosophy stuff that I kind of keep circling around.
Deconstruction is the idea that it's the same thing as the mediated ideas, that we're going to take a thing apart, make it look absurd, or we're going to show it in a particular light, and then pull it apart until you don't really trust its validity anymore.
And that's specifically its purpose is to make it so that you don't trust the validity of the thing anymore.
And so anything you put on Twitter, once you get an account of a certain size at least, anything.
Like I have an account that's big enough now, so I experience this regularly.
It's a 100% chance that some jackass is going to say something that just messes with your head.
Or somebody's going to take it out of context, or they're going to tell you what they thought you mean, and now that's the thing you mean.
Or they're going to screenshot it and it's going to go around.
And they're going to, like, it's like, I mean, you're famous enough where it obviously happens to you all the time, I'm sure.
It's like they take something that you say, you know, on a podcast or you put on Twitter or your shows or whatever, and they clip it up.
And then there's like, you know who Joe Rogan is, but then there's like this new Joe Rogan that they created that's out in the universe.
Right.
So they take you apart.
They deconstruct you, the real Joe Rogan and your real intentions and your real meaning.
And then they put it out into the world and there's this new Joe Rogan that did this horrible thing or this new Joe Rogan maybe that's a saint.
But I think part of the problem is they can't talk about it.
No, they have to tweet about it.
So because they're not in the room and they don't have your attention.
So then they get angry.
And that's part of the problem with podcasts as well is like, right, right now, you and I are having a conversation, but millions of people are listening to this conversation.
And there's a lot of them that wish they could chime in.
They don't get to.
So what they do is they get angry and they put some stuff on Twitter.
I understand the motivation.
I understand the thought process behind it.
I really do.
But I personally can't engage because it's just too unhealthy.
All I know is that when Zuckerberg sits down and he opens his laptop, you see he's got his little camera covered up, and I'm like, what's up with this?
You have to realize that it actually doesn't matter.
That, you know, it's kind of like I made the analogy actually a while back that it's like doing, I mean, I've never done a stage show, so don't, I've given talks, but I haven't done like a stage show.
But you get a heckler in the audience, but really you have like 70,000 of them.
And when you're doing the show, you know, as a comedian, you either interact with the heckler a little bit or you try to flip it on him or whatever, or you, you know, try to ignore it as long as it's like not too obtrusive.
People who were socially awkward, who, if they went out with their friends, it didn't really work out great a lot of times.
They said awkward stuff.
It got shut down.
It wasn't fun for them.
So it gave them a social outlet where they could fit in.
And I think that this actually has contributed.
Internet social media culture is so strongly built by people, A, who are that way now, and B, by people who were that way when these things were getting set up, that it's all kind of built around maybe people with personality disorders, people who are just socially awkward, people who don't want to interact with human beings in the normal way.
But just the whole structure of it, though, even if you're a normally like a personable human, when you're typing things out and just sending it out there, and you got an egg for an avatar, and someone reads it, you're completely anonymous.
And it's just a bizarre way to interact with people.
As a comic, you'll get it because there are different kinds of comedy, right?
There's like narrative comedy and you're telling a story and it's a funny story and it works.
But then you have the kind of, and you can do this good and bad, right?
There's a good way and a bad way, but you can get on stage and you can be that guy who just kind of like you're trying to blow people's mind, but you're just kind of like criticizing something.
I don't want to put down Jerry Seinfeld because I think he's brilliant.
He's one of my favorites of all time.
But, you know, what's the deal with, you know, something?
He just says something kind of stupid afterwards.
Or, you know, Gallagher was big with that with like the stupid words.
You know, it's like, how?
Now?
Bo.
You know, English is stupid.
You know, that's actually critical theory.
You don't actually have to know what made the thing work, but you can just tell this kind of like dunking joke on it that kind of gets yucks or whatever.
And then in comedy, fine.
You know, we know a good comic from a bad comic.
We laugh.
That's the point is to make something funny and everybody bombs.
But when you start doing that with like people's lives and social philosophy and calling them things like racist and sexist that can ruin their lives, it's a totally different ballgame, right?
So it's like looking for that place to just be critical becomes a problem.
Don't you think it's also just because it can be done?
Like if you gave people a keyboard and if you told them, look, every time you press that Q button, a rocket's going to fly out of the sky and slam into a part of the planet.
There would be people like if they just knew and they don't even have to be there when it hits.
Because you're essentially like, if you say something mean to someone online and it really gets them, especially if you're anonymous, you're sending an emotional bomb their way.
And I mean, I know a lot of 15-year-old guys, because I hung out with several of them, and at times I probably was one who would basically have like two little like xylophone hammers that's like on the key the whole time.
And so that's kind of how we ended up here in the long run.
Again, I go back to that Frankfurt school to kind of root this in deep philosophy and history.
They came up with this idea, critical theory that we've talked about now.
And they had this other idea, traditional theory.
And they said, you're supposed to use them together.
Critical theory was how you complain that things aren't Marxist enough, more or less.
And then People will bomb me for saying that, but it is actually generally true.
Traditional theory was understanding things.
It's philosophy.
It's science.
It's figuring out how to make airplanes work and figure out how to get the air traffic control so they don't crash into each other, the whole complicated mess.
And one of these things, you're supposed to use them together, but one of these things is a lot easier, right?
So what happens when you start kind of getting a lot of half-ass PhDs in the academic world who need something to do?
You think they're going to do the hard thing versus the easy thing?
Everybody who did, I mean, I majored in math.
I'm going to be my little elitist, you know, dorky thing here.
Everybody who majored in something hard watched people bounce off of their hard major into the easier majors so they could still just get a degree.
So you start like, they call this overproduction, cultural overproduction or cultural elite overproduction.
You start putting too many people into degree programs that they're not going to graduate with an engineering degree.
It's freaking hard.
And so what they end up doing is they get these degrees and things that are easy.
Well, complaining is easy.
Tearing down is easy.
Building up is hard.
So there's this bias that's happened over the last hundred years in academia toward this easier thing, criticism, and away from the harder thing, which is understanding and developing, you know, fundamental research and so on.
And it's basically taken over academia now.
And that's how we, I think that's actually a lot of how we got here.
The easy thing is the easy thing, and complaining is cheap.
Is there anything that about whether or not these people initially started in difficult studies and then move their way into like these soft social media?
It's sort of really, I mean, well, that just happens.
I mean, my best friend in college was, you know, he was going to be a mechanical engineer, and then calculus just took care of that.
He was not going to be a mechanical engineer anymore because he couldn't pass calculus.
So that, I mean, but he did graduate college with another degree.
So there is this kind of chopping down to easier degrees.
Right.
But as far as like this anti-intellectualism trend that I was describing, this actually did, it was recognized along the way.
So there's this, one of the guys in the Frankfurt School's name was Herbert Marcusa.
This is the guy who laid out the idea of repressive tolerance, that you have to violently fight against ideas that might cause intolerance to rise up.
He did that in 1965.
What happened in 1967 and 1968?
You know, riots following his ideas exactly.
And so Marcuso was on TV in like 77, right before he died.
He died, I think, in the early 80s or late 70s.
And he complained about his own movement that he started that had got completely anti-intellectual.
They weren't doing the hard work.
They weren't doing the right stuff.
They were just doing the easy stuff.
And he actually complained on TV that this had happened, that there had been a sliding away from the serious work and toward the easier complaining stuff.
And so, yeah, I think that it's historically justifiable that that's exactly what happened.
And of course, you know, I was here before, and we talked about those fake papers that Peter and Helen.
I'm going to tell everybody what those are just because it's an amazing source of enjoyment and entertainment for folks that are looking for something to read.
So the dog park store, dog park paper was actually, I think, kind of the masterpiece of the thing.
So we wrote this paper where we claim that we were a feminist researcher who spent a thousand hours in Portland, Oregon dog parks over the course of one year, never in the heavy rain.
We put that in the paper, never in the heavy rain, like that's some relevant detail or something.
So a thousand hours over a year is already ridiculous.
Queer performativity in urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon.
Rape culture and queer performativity.
That's what it was.
Rape culture.
Yeah.
So we had the, we said that she watched these dog fights and dog rapes and all this stuff.
And we put this crazy stuff in there.
Like sometimes they try to break up a dog fight by doing jumping jacks by the dog or singing songs.
It's just ridiculous.
And the dogs were pooping on each other.
We put that in the paper.
And then we said when there was a dog humping, that she would go up and she would inspect the dog's genitals and she inspected 10,000 dogs' genitals and then interrogated the owners about their sexual orientations.
And what she wanted to find out was if straight men would discourage gay dog humping versus straight dog humping, and it was different for women and gay men.
And then we said we're going to pass that data through black feminist criminology, which makes no sense.
And then we said that the conclusion was that dog parks are Petri dishes of canine rape culture and that they are rape condoning spaces just like human nightclubs.
So human nightclubs are automatically now rape condoning spaces.
And so the conclusion was that we now have to train men the way that we train dogs with like leashes and shot collars and things in order to get rape culture to go away.
And they give this an award.
And so it's like this, the bullshit level is just insane.
And those air quotes disciplines are now being like mainlined into like every university, every school, every corporate boardroom.
How did that happen?
I mean, we were talking about the raising the frequency thing when these events happen, but mostly they took over our colleges of education about 1980.
And so they've been slowly turning teachers to the project.
And then in 2002 and 3, there were a couple of Supreme Court cases that were talking about affirmative action.
And they said that if you want to do affirmative action, you can do it if it increases diversity and equity and inclusion.
So they started to build these offices in the university.
And those university offices started to dictate what you could and couldn't say.
You could get in trouble or brought up to hearings.
Even if you don't, even if the hearing finds you innocent, you still had to waste your time going through this humiliating hearing.
And they're bringing up stuff and all your, you know, how do you imagine you're like in a department, right?
And you get hauled before the diversity office.
What are all your colleagues thinking about you now?
I mean, that's the thing is they think this stuff's all real.
Like, it's like they've kind of gone into this mass delusion where everything's power dynamics and the power dynamics define how everybody experiences life.
Do you remember when Jordan Peterson was on television on the CBC and he was talking to some professor, I think may or may not have been transgender, who was saying that there is no such thing as biological sex.
And I can unpack that for you if you'd like.
And then keeps going as if it's just like you made a statement that there's no such thing as biological sex.
I had an argument with a professor about it on the show.
It was like, there's no difference.
I go, so there's no difference between males and females.
I go, so if you buy a male puppy and they give you a female, do you complain?
What happened to that?
It was a he.
He didn't know what to say.
He was just, you could tell when he was saying the things he was saying that he was knowing that he was going to get support from the people that he works with.
It's just this thing that you do where you've indoctrinated yourself into this world or you've been indoctrinated and now you have to sort of keep up that nonsense.
Douglas Murray put something up on his Twitter because someone was describing a gay person as a cis-gendered non-heteronormative, like something really crazy.
And he said, I think there's another word for that.
And so there's something like kind of totalitarian about making people do things like that that are difficult, like jumping through these little hoops and then holding them to massive account.
And of course, I mean, it's so complicated because if somebody asked me, they said, okay, do you support Black Lives Matter?
James, do you support Black Lives Matter?
And of course they're going to try to catch me on this.
And it's like, which one?
There's at least five.
I support one of them and I think the other four are nuts.
Right?
So there's Black Lives Matter.
All lowercase letters is a sentence.
You can't disagree with it because it's obvious that Black Lives Actually Matter.
And you shouldn't be forced to say obvious things.
But what is that?
That's a call, right?
They're saying, hey, look, white people, people of other races, we have a different experience of this society, and it's bad.
And we need you to hear us.
And we want you to care.
And we want there to be action taken that we can work on together to figure out.
And who couldn't support that movement?
I think everybody in the world supports that movement.
But then you have the official one.
And their website's full of literally neo-Marxist stuff.
And they're like weird, like queer feminist something or another.
Like, seriously, it's all on their about page on the Black Lives Matter website.
And it's like, that's a lot of baggage, man.
I don't know if I'm for that.
And then you have like the training video comes out with one saying, yeah, we're trained Marxists.
And they are.
They're trained activists.
You don't actually have to go along with all of that to agree with the sentence.
Then you have this thing with white people.
There's like a Black Lives Matter movement that's white people that are like washing black people's feet and like calling them and apologizing and like freaking them out.
Could you imagine what it's like being like somebody calls you, like all your white friends start calling you and they're like, by the way, I've always kind of been racist.
Like you had a relationship with that person and now it's so awkward.
Oh, this one woman, we wrote a paper about masculinity at Hooters.
And we said that the only reason guys go there is, I mean, besides the obvious wanting to ogle chicks, but the main reason was so that they could order, like double meaning on the word order, right?
Order their food.
They could order pretty young women around that have to do what they say.
And, you know, they can patriarchally order taking their orders is a pun.
And this one woman wrote like this long review of it, and she was like, this paper, it was, remember, it was submitted to a journal called Men and Masculinities.
It was a paper that was supposed to study the masculinity.
And she wrote back, this paper talks about men instead of women.
And it victim blames and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, oh, you can go to hell.
You know, basically, I'm like, come on.
I mean, it was aggravated also because my paper didn't get in because of that.
It's like, it's like, why would a paper about men and masculinity have to be about the women?
Oh, because feminism.
That's why.
Of course.
And it's like, it's so annoying that so that aggravated me.
Most of them, the rest of them were actually like really nice people.
There's also this thing that's going on, particularly with people in their cars when they have marches that they just decide to start smashing people's cars and doing things to people's cars, whether it's because the people don't agree with what they're saying or they choose someone or they don't like the look of that person, but they feel justified in violently attacking them and their car because they are there to do a good thing.
Whenever somebody's going to punish people and think it's the moral thing to do, that's where you've got some danger going on.
And the reason they do that, by the way, is because they think everything happening is violence.
Like, why does Antifa, by the way, that's the fourth Black Lives Matter movement, is these anti-fa agitators starting the riots.
Why do they feel justified in throwing a brick through a Starbucks?
Why do they feel justified in starting or yelling about targets?
Why does this keep happening?
And the reason, this is going to sound absolutely insane, but it's actually true, is that they believe that something like Starbucks is a big corporation.
And when it comes into a neighborhood, it starts taking resources, capitalist resources, money, from that neighborhood and then dumping it into a corporation.
And they see that as a form of violence against the neighborhood.
So they're justified in using violence to disrupt that by throwing a brick through the window, even though it's probably some franchise owner who's just trying to make a buck, trying to have a job that runs it.
They talk about the collection of capital, Any kind of racist or sexist or whatever language as they want to determine it being a form of violence.
They call these things like epistemic violence.
And in some of the literature, they call it discursive violence in some of the literature.
Sometimes they just call it violence.
In queer theory, calling somebody saying you're a man or a woman is called a violence of categorization.
So there's all these different types of violence.
They're sort of marinating in this idea that these things that are happening, the way people talk, micro-assault is a violence.
And I mean, I even saw a thing somebody sent me today from some university, Indiana, maybe, where the person's saying that, you know, we're tearing down these physical monuments, but maybe we need to think about discursive, so verbal monuments.
And then in the middle of this, which is otherwise cracked, but not violent, he actually says something to the effect of that we really need to be prepared to do violence against this violence.
And so they're marinating in these kinds of thoughts.
So you get these like, like with Antifa, what are these dudes?
These dudes are like hopped up, mostly young men trying to put out, I mean, there's some women in there too, of course, but there's a lot of young men who are like doing their young male rage and they're pissed off at society and they've read all these books saying how America sucks and how it hurts all these poor people, it hurts minorities and so on.
A lot of people are feeling the sting, frankly, because whatever the Republican policies since Reagan have really kind of like put some squeeze on people.
And so it's, okay, I'm not, let me start right, and this is already bad, but I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
I don't actually buy into conspiracies.
But we are in a situation because of a lot of political currents for the last 50 years where there's a lot of billionaire philanthropist groups, right, that generate a lot of money.
They run a lot of think tanks.
They run a lot of policy forums and organizations and 501c3s and so on and so forth to study things and do these things.
The rapidity with which the materials, like the Instagram-ready tracks that you could read and the little videos, the speed in the educational curricula and the guides for here's a bunch of resources for how to remake your business.
This stuff came out fast.
So what I think is actually going on is, I mean, political operative types wait for, I mean, the saying is never let a good crisis go to waste, right?
So they wait for a precipitating event, and then they've been making easy digest materials for a long time and paying people like, you know, hey, come work for our forum.
What we really need to do is look at how we can get books for like anti-racist toddler books, you know, anti-racist kids.
And so they get people writing these books, and they think they're doing, it's not like some, you know, boardroom nasty stuff.
And then these materials are just ready to go out fast.
And so this, we had, as you said, a perfect storm.
It's like impossible to watch any of this and not be just pissed off.
I have to be careful because I actually start to get frustrated and emotional about it.
The amount of being lied to that's just so obvious, you know, through a lot of the news right now with these protests, especially in riots, is just galling.
Well, the article that I showed you that shows that the COVID kickup, the uptick in cases had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter, but probably had to do with people staying inside.
Like, they're still going to those, like, my friends are still going to the hospital because they don't quite know what's wrong with them after having had it.
But he's just so nice that he wanted to say it because it's a thing that people like to say and he wanted those people to like him and to come after him.
They have this whole thing that you can't associate obesity and health at all.
It's not allowed.
It's considered a medicalizing narrative.
And if we were to come up with, let's say, that like you invented Tomorrow Joe Rogan's, you know, you're getting a supplement company and Joe Rogan's weight loss pill, but not like some bullshit.
Imagine it really worked, right?
So everybody who takes this pill within the course of a month would get to their ideal body weight.
They actually say that in disability studies about people who are deaf.
If they invented surgery or whatever that fixed deafness or an implant that could fix deafness for everybody, they say it's a deaf genocide because there'd be no deaf people left.
If you can't smell, for me, my experience was that if I couldn't smell or taste something and I just kept forcing myself to have it, before long I could.
But anything that I avoided, so when would I ever drink spoiled milk?
When would I experience spoiled milk?
So all of a sudden I came home from a trip like last year and I'm like, you know, I busted open the cream for my coffee and I've like poured it in and I'm tasting like this is a sour coffee.
Like it was like a new coffee, so I thought it was maybe just like really acidic.
I was like, this is really kind of gross.
And I walked by my wife and she's like, what is it?
Actually, somebody emailed me and said that that's what they're afraid of in Minneapolis with all these riots that they broke out is that they were about to, they were pretty sure some of the fires were going to hit the gas lines.
And it would have been like in Boston a couple years ago when the gas line was leaking and 50 houses.
I know a Boston firefighter who told me what it was like to be a firefighter in that mess.
He's driving to a call and then, you know, people run out in the street and stop.
You know, stop the fire truck.
And they're like, you know, they're yelling and there's a fire.
We can't stop.
And they're like, there's a fire here.
And they're like, oh, crap.
And you start trying to do something about the fire there.
And then the house over there is, boom, you know, flames everywhere.
Walls blow down and stuff.
And it was just like, at that point, they were like, is this the terrorist attack?
What's going on?
People are freaking out.
But that's what people in Minneapolis just lived through, apparently, too.
It's like, there's almost like this weird belief that everything just happens by magic or something.
Like you can just go fire everybody who knows what they're doing and replace them with people who don't know what they're doing and want to be just diversity.
And I'm not even going to say they're not competent, but they do want to focus on diversity or whatever the issue of the day is.
So you're going to fire like this super competent guy and then replace him with somebody who at least is going to dedicate some of their time to diversity initiatives.
What's going to happen is eventually stuff becomes less competitive, stuff becomes less efficient.
I really feel it when I fly, man.
And it's not the thing you think.
I don't think, oh, the planes are going to start dropping out of the sky.
I start thinking about the air traffic control.
Like, that's complicated, man.
And if you don't have people that are at the top of their game programming that stuff in those towers, looking at that stuff, but it's everything.
We actually have a society.
When you have an advanced society like we have, you actually have to have people who know what's going on and who are focusing on the job to get it done, to build things.
And it can't all be focused.
I mean, of course, we have to pay attention to the human resources issue.
But this stuff's all about turning everything into the human resources issue.
And then with scholarship, I don't even know what to say because they're saying we need to do research justice.
And so that means take you cite more black scholars and women scholars and indigenous scholars.
And so you don't cite white people or men.
So you can even out their citation scores so they get more promotions.
And then you have to take academic departments and you have to start hiring more of, and I don't mean you have to hire identities.
You have to hire people who think that way because otherwise they don't qualify.
And then you start getting rid of the people who don't think that way.
So you're actually concentrating even in like, I mean, somebody just sent me something about chemistry.
The field of chemistry is like going like full woke.
And it's like, what the hell does that have to do with chemistry?
But the truth is that they, the woke theory actually believes this.
It actually believes that science, reason, so on, evidence, civility, meeting schedules, that's all manifestations of one way of knowing things about the world that happens to be made by white people who are Westerners and men, and that it encodes white supremacy, and that we have to open up to other ways of knowing.
I read an article, I'm a mathematician, and I read an article recently about how that has to happen in math.
So math, we have to get away from it, says the idea that math is objective, that it tells you something objective about the world.
And we have to start opening our minds up to other types of mathematics that maybe see things differently, and that we should teach that.
There's another one that's very similar that's by a Chinese scholar, Tianan or An Tian.
I get it backwards sometimes.
That came out in January or something that was saying the same thing.
We need to start questioning whether there's objectivity in math.
We need to question what math's about.
And then I see this curriculum last fall.
It was put into the Seattle schools.
And you can look that up on Seattle's government education website.
And they're like, we need to question, we need to look at how we need to make math class be like asking kids, how have you seen math be used to uphold oppression?
How have you seen math be used to break down oppression?
And then how can we turn math to a more collectivist endeavor instead of individual endeavor?
And it's like, this is what they're teaching in schools at this point.
Their belief is that objectivity, like actual knowledge is not possible, and that every culture has its own access to it.
And those cultures, like we talked about, conflict theory, are in conflict with one another.
So science is something that was cooked up by white Western men, and it doesn't let other ways of knowing, they call it, in, specifically so that white Western men can keep the power of getting to define what's scientifically true and what's not.
I mean, there's been a bunch of people who did that, of course.
You know, Aldous Huxley talked about it in Brave New World, but very famously now people are getting aware of, was it Kurt Vonnegut that they wrote Harrison Bergeron?
So this is a perfect equity society.
So people who were smarter had to like have headphones and that played annoying sounds.
They couldn't think as good.
And if they were pretty, they had to wear like a mask so that they wouldn't be as attractive.
It's only for high-status jobs, especially ones that work in cultural production, right?
So you have faith, you have education, you have journalism, you have media in general.
And scientists and so on, people who get to control knowledge, ideas, and so on.
Because again, they live in this world where they believe that if they can engineer how people think by what ideas are valid and invalid, then they can make their utopia.
So it's, I mean, like the idea of inclusion, right?
So inclusion, like that's good.
We want to include people.
We don't want people to feel like left out.
We don't want people to feel uncomfortable or like they can't be there.
But when you cook the books and decide that anything that disagrees with you makes you feel unwelcome, now all of a sudden nobody's allowed to disagree with you.
And then when you have this idea, you see this in these videos for these universities where you'll have some little student stand up and say, well, this center has too many white people in it taking up space, and that makes us feel uncomfortable because we're used to, you know, having our space taken up and we have no space of our own.
You know, in like the most egalitarian, there's a whole campus.
You can be anywhere you want.
But they need like the, so it even justifies segregation.
You can't have white people around black people too much because that makes them feel unsafe.
And then the galling part is, you know what they call that?
Well, that's one of the problems with some ideas that promote air quotes feminism is that they treat women as if they can't see things the way that men do, so they need extra attention, extra help or extra assistance.
We were doing some talks, and I was actually explaining, I had one video I did where I didn't even realize it, and I was man spreading like out of control.
I feel like I read this, and I don't know if I did or not, that men, their natural, the way their legs sit in their hips, it's natural for their legs to splay out.
The overall width of the pelvis is relatively greater in females, and the angle of the femoral neck is more acute.
That's right.
These factors could play a role in making a position of sitting with the knees close together less comfortable in men.
Aha, you fucks.
I suspect most men would suggest the reason for adopting the more spread posture in sitting would be the avoidance of testicular compression from the thigh muscles.
The pelvic rotation goes some way to improve compression in both aspects.
But when you have big legs, man, it's like – It's like, you know, if I know I'm going to have to walk a long distance, I have to wear the right underwear.
And fat studies would say that that is a problem of body blueprinting, and it's actually a sign that fat phobic society hasn't designed all clothing around that problem.
They didn't design clothing with fat women in mind.
To galvanize a body positivity movement which celebrates the influence of our multiple intersecting identities to provide the critical thought, inspiring vision, and practical strategies you need to celebrate.
But the thing about body positivity is I want people to feel good.
I do want them to feel good, but I also want them to be actually aware of what the consequences of eating bad food is.
If you care about someone, you want them to know what the consequence of their actions.
It's one of the weird addictions, food addictions, one of the weird addictions where you're supposed to not judge the person by it, and you're also supposed to not offer up any suggestions on how they can fix that because then you are not just judging that person, you're condemning them and their choices.
Like right here, she actually says, once I started to get into the territory of diagnosis, once I started playing around with the problem of diagnostic thinking, when it is only left to trained diagnosticians, that allowed me to challenge how all of us must contend with thinking diagnostically.
And so it says right before that, in fact, I don't believe in giving power to the medical industrial complex and its monopoly over getting to define and determine who counts and who does not count as autistic.
When a person with autism engages in self-stimulatory behaviors such as rocking, pacing, aligning, or spinning objects, or hand flapping, people around him or her, you asshole, may be confused, offended, or even frightened, also known as stimming.
These behaviors are often characterized by rigid, repetitive movements and or vocal sounds.
So Lydia X. Y Brown writes, I, as an autistic person who doesn't instinctually or innately flap my hands or arms, it was never a stem that I developed independently, will deliberately and frequently choose to flap, especially in public, in order to call attention to myself so that other people, whether autistic or not, might identify me as autistic.
It's like this stuff is, that's a scholar.
I mean, we should actually talk about freaking autoethnography, man.
It's like it's a diary entry that pretends to be sociology.
I mean, I'm pretty good at figuring out what theory would do if somebody genuinely did have Tourette's and then part of their tick worked out to be that they said racial slurs.
Through what you and Peter and Helen have done through these hoax studies, you've at least highlighted to many people that not only is this a real problem, but it's really hilarious how far they're willing to go and accept what kind of nonsense you guys are pushing.
I don't know societally, but I actually wrote an article I put on New Discourses the other day that I said that we people need to be having conversations right now because I'm like kind of getting disowned by friends and family a little bit.
And the question that I think people need to be asking is where's the line?
Like, because the way people reason is that they'll let themselves slide and then justify it.
They call that post-hoc rationalization.
That's John Heidz's term.
And they'll let themselves slide and then justify it.
But if they state their principles up front, because I don't think a lot of people have actually done that and say, you know, okay, I've already defended riots, but let's say that they fire, you know, all of the department heads or whatever at a university or they fire this or they, you know, burn that down or whatever it is.
Everybody should have a line that says, okay, wait, this is too far.
And I think individuals need to start figuring out what theirs were so they can tell the story if they've already had it.
Like you and I have already had that.
And then other people who haven't, like, we need to be talking to our friends and say, you know, I get that you think the woke movement's important and that it's doing good things.
And, you know, there's some crazy stuff going on and I'm stressed about it.
Where do you feel like the line is?
Where do you draw the line and say it's gone too far?
And you don't even, it's not about getting the answer.
It's actually about getting them to think about it.
So why are you so compelled to follow the narrative that if you say something that's obviously true, instead of following the narrative, you get fired.
So because of that, People are willfully self-censoring and they're changing their perspective on things because they don't want to be canceled and they want to be fired.
There's some psychological stuff that's floating around out there that says that being completely ostracized from your group and being unable to feel like a good person in your society is so psychologically damaging that it might actually be worse worse than death.
And so that's what people are faced with, and they're so afraid of it, which is so bad because it's just so transparently bogus and it can't defend itself.
All it does is call names.
So it's hard to say where it'll go.
I actually think it will, my prognosis is that it will break itself.
It will just the backlash to it, which can be reasonable and liberal, people are going to wake up and they're going to have peak woke and they're not going to have more woke.
And it will chew itself up from the inside with these fights between us.
Here's an example of a fight.
Here's an example fight.
1619 Project from the New York Times, Nicole Hannah-Jones writes this kind of fake history of the United States saying that we're all about slavery.
Slavery is everything to do with the United States in every regard from the beginning and still.
And then what are they doing now, right?
So there's this huge intense fight between the black population and the indigenous population for most racially oppressed.
And they both have a pretty good claim on it, right?
So that genocide thing was pretty big.
And then slavery was pretty big.
And it's complicated.
So they're fighting for status.
So you've had the indigenous side of that assert that black people in North America are settlers of color, which is a problem.
And then you've had Nicole Hannah-Jones try to point out that lots of Native Americans held black slaves, which so they were slave owners, which is a problem.
So they're fighting over that infighting for status, for the ultimate victim status.
And then they've got like that trans things coming.
I saw a video of some black woman the other day yelling about what is this black power fist on the trans flag about?
That's not, you know, that's not what this is supposed to be.
Black people's not supposed to be.
White people, trans white people putting their stuff.
I mean, the number of people right now that are saying they want deferrals partly because of the COVID and online classes, they don't want to go back to college.
And then this stuff's blown out, and every college president's like, we're going to be a full anti-racist thing.
The other thing nobody's factoring in yet is the other backlash, which is going to be law.
Okay.
Niagara Falls of lawsuits is coming because a bunch of people are – so here's – like imagine you run a business.
You do run a business.
So all of a sudden, you know, this event happens.
Everybody's supposed to have their statement.
There's tons of social pressure to make your statement.
If you don't make a statement, it's compelled, you know, say, oh, your business didn't say something about Black Lives Matter, so you have to say something one way or the other.
So everybody's making a statement.
Everybody's trying to do the thing, and they don't know what to do.
So I hear from a lot of people that email me about at their job, they talk to their boss, and the boss is like, well, we have to do something, and there's this.
You know, there's this program, this anti-racism program.
So we have to do something, and that's the thing.
And we'll just take it up.
And a lot of people are successfully pushing back on that and saying, look, there are other ways.
We can actually do other diversity programs than this one.
And when they realize that, you know, a lot of bosses are saying, oh, yeah, maybe we should think a little harder about this.
So everybody's acting really fast.
And there's a clear moral panic going on.
So people are making bad decisions.
And they're opening themselves up to a lot of future litigation.
Like, if you're actually having an official statement or policy of your company that says something like that you believe that all white people are complicit in racism or are racists, then you've now called all your white employees racist.
Some yes and some no, and that's there's a point to that.
But on the other hand, for example, if you look at the Title IX cases where those mostly boys, but it wasn't always boys, got totally railroaded in kangaroo courts.
They got accused of sexual misconduct.
The university ends up expelling them or whatever, you know, the girl with a mattress or whatever that happened.
And then they're suing in civil court and they're almost all winning.
You can't film your girlfriend or whatever, and then you break up and then you put her on the internet to put her on blast or embarrass her or whatever.
It's against the law now.
We made laws about that.
I mean, this doxing stuff or these videos where they're filming people and accusing them of being a racist and it blows up their lives, there may have to be legislation built around that.
So the question becomes, will the political will be there?
And that depends on the people and it depends on the politicians.
I know your lovely state here of California, just the state legislature just voted to take the anti-discrimination language out of the state constitution, which I think is a bold move.
I think the people get to decide on that in the end in maybe November.
If you listen to this guy that's blasting all over, Ibram Kendi, the how to be anti-racist, he even has a sentence in the book where he says that you have to evaluate everything according to whether it has racist or anti-racist outcomes.
So if you have discrimination policy that says you cannot discriminate, and then that makes it so you don't have equity, then that's actually a racist policy.
They just say it all the time is that if it's if you don't have equal outcomes, then the system must be.
I mean, you can see how this is like putting like, you know, wallpaper over a hole in your wall.
If the system has unequal outcomes, it must be discrimination.
So you're just going to change the policies to make up for it.
And they say it explicitly.
And you see this, there's been actually there's a lawsuit, at least one lawsuit, one in New York City, where they were openly discriminating against Asian students.
Like they were discriminating against Asians to make it because they're academically kicking all the ass.
I mean, all of these kind of hustlers that are getting all famous are pushing for it.
But then, again, as your state legislature actually voted amongst themselves to put it up to a vote, all the more reason to move to Texas or something.
There's no like, if we do this, then, you know, we're going to have this kind of success in the future because, you know, we'll discriminate to the point where we reach some sort of homeostasis.
The politically motivated lawsuit brought by Edward Blum and the organization he created, Students for the Fair Admissions, wants to remove the consideration of race in college and university admissions.
What's at stake?
The ability of colleges and universities across the country to create the diverse communities essential to their educational missions and the success of their students.
So the problem was that so many of these Asian kids were doing so well that they had a disproportionate number of Asian students and they wanted to balance it out better.
If Harvard really wanted to make things equal, they would try to figure out why they're not based on if they have only X amount of white people and X amount of Asian people.
Why are there less of this race or nationality than the other?
Exactly.
Let's put some study into what can be done and use all these brilliant minds to figure out what can be done to make this better.
So that's the difference between critical theory and traditional theory.
So you're saying we should use traditional theory, which every reasonable person in the world now knows and they don't want to.
Let me give you an idea.
Like this systemic thing makes that impossible.
So imagine – I'll give you an analogy that helps you understand what systemic – say racism or systemic, what this idea really means.
So imagine like you and I go out for a walk down the sidewalk, right?
And for whatever reason, you step on the back end of a broken bottle and you trip and you bump into me and you knock me into the road when you trip and I happen to get hit by a car and I die.
OK.
So whose fault was that?
Obviously, usually we would probably say it's like no fault or whatever.
But if you start looking at it the way that these scholars do – and this is actually tracking the same argument that's in the book, Being White, Being Good by Barbara Applebaum about white complicity.
What happens is you could say, well, it's your fault for tripping and it's my fault for deciding to walk on the street side versus the inside and walking right next to you instead of sitting in front of you.
It's the person who drove the car's fault for – maybe they were speeding.
Maybe they happened to have chose to go at that time.
Maybe the doctor called and they had to run out of the house.
So the doctor's now got some complicity in the situation.
The kid who broke the bottle last night after he had a couple of beers, well, it's his fault.
So he's complicit.
But then if you go all the way to this systemic understanding where you're just looking at the back end, the wallpaper over the hole in the wall, it would be saying, well, we live in a culture where people drive cars and drink beer.
We live in a culture that supports cars and beer.
Everybody that supports car culture, everybody who supports the economy that allows people to afford cars, everybody who supports the culture that would allow beer to exist is also somehow complicit.
That's actually the same argument that the white complicity and racism book makes.
Everybody, car culture is to blame for me getting hit by that car.
And so you can see it makes it impossible to figure out where moral responsibility actually lies because it puts it on everybody.
And it makes it impossible to see what the actual causes are.
Another story I had from similar to this was from University of Michigan.
There's this program called Stride, and it's supposed to fix for these disparities.
And so I'm talking to somebody, and he's talking about hiring, academic hiring.
And he says, OK, the way the Stride program looks at it, for whatever reason, men have twice as many of this as women, whatever the thing is.
And so Stride says, OK, so if a woman applies, you count the number – if a man and a woman apply, you count the number the man has, you double the number the women have.
And I said, hang on a second.
Wait a minute.
Do you know why that number is different?
And he said, no.
Nobody knows why it's different.
It just is.
So we're just going to double it.
And I said, but some of that might be discrimination and some of it might not.
And I would agree with you that we should consider making up for the part that is discrimination.
So maybe it's half of that is discrimination.
So you add something, but you don't double it because some of it might be something different and you don't know.
And he was like, well, what else could it be?
Right?
So, this systemic thinking prevents you from being able to start thinking of what the real causes, the real problems are.
So, it's again, it's fixing your hole in your wall by just like, let's just put up some wallpaper, you know.
I mean, this comes back to if we look at the book, Michelle Foucault's philosophy, power and politics work through everybody constantly by the way that we speak about things, by the way that we think about things.
So you have this kind of like vague mystical sense of how society works, is that it's operating through everybody and everybody's complicit and tied into it.
You know what some things, and so I'm going to point out, this is actually from a legislative body, sorry, an administrative body set up by the state legislature of Washington in January called the Equity Task Force.
And you know what they said was white supremacy coming through their mouths as they said it?
Keeping a meeting agenda, staying on a schedule.
There's a 2017 paper by Allison Bailey that talks about those specific things.
So there's actually something that I read a year or so ago because of the schedule thing that wearing a wristwatch, because that means you care about time and being on time, is white supremacy.
White supremacy is believing that the society that white people created, which means science, reason, logic, civility, rule of law, democracy, that that's good.
That's their definition of white supremacy.
So if somebody calls me a white supremacist, once you know that.
So this Allison Bailey woman has this paper where she literally, the point of the paper is to say anything that disagrees is a man, or anything that disagrees is somebody just trying to keep their privilege.
She calls it privilege preserving epistemic pushback.
That's a real term.
And so in the paper, though, she says that the master's tools in philosophy, which are that's slavery, right?
That's white supremacy.
The master's tools that maintain white supremacy are like philosophical soundness, epistemic adequacy, which means knowing what you're talking about, science, reason.
Like, that's what they think white supremacy is.
Science is white supremacy.
That's why you have to now have to redo chemistry and make chemistry woke.
So here's Helen's example of a perfect double blind, but it's race, it's not sex, but it could work exactly the same.
She says, imagine that you have a store and a shopkeeper's there, and a black customer and a white customer are both in the store at the same time, and the shopkeeper goes up to help one person first.
So if they go, and this is what critical race theory, this is how it would analyze what happens.
So if the shopkeeper goes to the white person first, it would say that's clear racism, white favoritism, and make the black person wait.
But if it went to the black person first, it would say it's clear racism because you wanted to get the black person out of the store faster.
I can do it because I actually know what I'm talking about.
So when they come back at me, I quote their own literature at them, and usually they don't know their literature as well as I do because I've read all this crap.
That grifter term gets used really inappropriately all the time.
Anybody who doesn't disagree with someone is a grifter, particularly if you disagree with someone who has a right-wing philosophy, or excuse me, a left-wing philosophy.
You don't even have to make money to be a grifter.
I made $0 for the vast majority of the time.
I make a little on Patreon now, so I can't say it anymore, but I made zero dollars for the majority of the time that I've done this, and people are calling me a grifter because I was getting Twitter followers.
Like, Twitter followers are somehow like value or something.
I used to say that philosophers need, I used to work a lot in my garden and I would say that I suck at gardening, by the way.
But philosophers need to get their hands in the soil because you can't lie about it.
You feel it, you smell it, it's heavy.
I'm from Tennessee, so it's like sticky clay.
You can't get it off you.
And it's like, and that earth smell is there, and it's like wet and it's like it's real and you're sweating and it's like, you know, you can't, reality won't lie to you.
And that's where this is so, like, my answer to this problem is we need to remember that objective principles work and that we need to defer to reality not lying to us because we can lie to ourselves all day.
We can lie to ourselves and say that Fallon Fox is exactly the same as the people whose heads she literally beat in and then went on Twitter and bragged about how it was fun to crack that person's skull.
Just thinking and then also expanding, expounding upon those thoughts in front of other people that are also just thinking and you're all doing it together.
You need some sort of a tangible physical discipline to go along with that sort of tempers you.
Because it, I mean, you know, I've had matches before where I went on and I was all hot shot or whatever back when I used to do sport karate and some dude just kicked me in the side of the head and I was like unconscious and that's just the end of that.
You know, and it's like you got to reassess your cockiness real fast.
I even said this on Twitter this morning is I think we need to have an ethic in the like our culture needs to start remembering an ethic that your education, whether it's, you know, school or whether it's, you know, training or whatever it is, is worth what you can build with it.
It's not worth anything more than what you can build.
So if you go to like trade school and you end up building some great business empire, your education was good.
And if you go to university and get a PhD and do a couple postdocs and all you can do is whine and complain and you can't do anything productive, your education wasn't good.
And it doesn't, see, you immediately remove like these weird elite credentialing things from that.
It's what can you do with it that proves whether or not it was good in the world.
And I think we need to kind of remember, it's like a pragmatic thing, right?
And that becomes a problem because then you're so indoctrinated in the system and you're just sort of perpetuating the same shit that got you to where you are and just keep making it more and more significant, more and more important in terms of the way you describe it to people.
I mean, I am actually naively optimistic generally.
I don't really, you know, it's more like this.
It's not even that.
No.
I don't have time for people who are pessimistic whiners.
Even if this is the fucking end of the world, I'm not going to act like it is.
I'm not giving up.
If these people guillotine me in the end, then fine.
But I'm not, I see no value in saying, oh, it's hopeless.
Right?
So I'm an atheist.
We talked about that.
And I would have actually said that last year, if I was writing my memoir, it was finding faith.
I don't have faith in God.
It didn't happen.
Sorry, Christian friends.
It just didn't happen.
But there is the ability to have faith in that if you do the work and that if you get yourself organized and you put your effort in on a program that can actually achieve a result that you can.
Again, like jiu-jitsu is a really great example.
I mean, everybody who trains jiu-jitsu gets humbled, humbled.
But the deal is, if you go to a qualified jiu-jitsu instructor, whether it's a Gracie, whether it's, you know, one of these other, there's lots of them now.
They're really good.
They have a program that you can have faith in because it reliably produces black belts who can basically kill everybody.
Right?
And so you can have faith.
Like, you're going to go, and for years, you're going to suck.
You're going to get choked out.
You're going to get your, you know, you're going to get beat by, you're going to be a purple belt and get choked by a white belt who got a good move on you at some point and you're going to have a bad day afterwards.
It's going to come up sometimes or some tricky kid that knows some wrestling is going to throw you and you're like, how did this happen?
It's going to happen.
But if you have faith in that system, then you can also get there.
So that qualified faith is there.
And so I actually think that the principles we've laid down, for example, in our country, work.
This, let's defer to the evidence.
Let's defer to a rule of law, knowing that we have a democratic process where we can remake the law as we need to, hopefully incrementally and not through some stupid revolution.
And that that can work.
So I have to be hopeful because I know the thing can work if we're willing to kind of stand up for it and remember it.
I'm hoping that with all this looting and the chaos and the smashing things and the riots and the people like we were talking earlier before the show about this guy who was at a he was at a protest in Provo, Utah, and he was just trying to honk his horn and get through and they shot into his car.
Like if that's being, like for me, so much, I mean, I was already past peak woke, but like a real moment of wake-up call, like this, you know, there have been moments where this stuff has flared up in the past and you're like, oh, it's going to die down.
The moment not this time.
And what it was was watching the media lie, watching the media defend stuff that's just not defensible, right?
And it's like, okay, so this is a thing.
I don't actually expect your average citizen to like, I don't expect people to know a damn thing.
It's hard.
Life's hard.
You go work your ass off.
You come home.
You don't have time to learn everything in the universe.
But if you have a job in like media or if you're in the government or you're like a college, I expect something out of you, you know?
And I think we all have a right to expect something out of you.
So when you have some guy on the media yelling that, where does it say anywhere for protests to have to be peaceful?
It's in the First Amendment.
You actually should probably know that.
I expect something out of you.
So we've got to, there's actually a crisis.
We could call it of expertise if you want.
But there's a crisis of being able to recognize that people are being held to an expectation of quality.
And I think the internet has facilitated it.
I think the incentives around hot takes go viral, whereas nuanced analysis doesn't go viral.
Tell that he was just saying it for the reaction, saying it for the fact that at this time, people are, there's a lot of people that are interested in stirring shit up and getting real change, and they think that through these violent protests, as long as it's not affecting them personally, through these violent protests, some good will result.
And I mean, I hear, I mean, I remember, you know, Martin Luther King wrote the thing and he said that the riots are the voice of the utterly voiceless, of the frustrated person of the unheard.
But, you know, he also said that you, I don't know, I want to, I don't want to misquote him, so we should probably get the exact quote, but there's more to that quote.
And I understand, like, with the COVID, the whole thing, I understand that massive frustration, and I understand, but I expect my journalists, I expect my politicians, I expect my university presidents to be able to make clear statements that side with civil society.
The anger that they will experience from people that disagree with them is so much stronger than the support that they were experiencing from people that do agree with them.
See, I'm a master at hoaxes of woke people, as you will know.
The story actually is an allegory for Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X. So King T'Challa is Martin Luther King, and Eric, the bad guy, the fake Black Panther, is Malcolm X. And he gets in power and he starts changing all the rules.
And he's, you know, there will not be the fight anymore.
And then what happens is they have the big epic fight at the end and the Martin Luther King side wins and then there's the morality tale at the end that tells why.
So I actually think it was a movie that's an allegory that repudiates radicalism in favor of Martin Luther King's message.
But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.
And what is it that America has failed to hear?
It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor, I'm not even allowed to say that in this context, has worsened over the last few years.
It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met.
It has failed to hear that large segments of the white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity.
And so in a real sense, our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay.
And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.
Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
One of the things I've been saying is for all along is that I'm actually against the social justice movement, the woke social justice movement, which is formerly in the literature called critical social justice.
And so you have to understand, like, what are the actual things contributing to these problems, creating these problems?
I don't know what the answers are.
I don't know what's causing them.
And maybe some of it is prejudice, some of it's discrimination, some of it's cultural discrimination, like not valuing each culture, the cultural values the same way or whatever.
Well, even more recently, you know, they're not wrong to bring up things like redlining and white flight and all these things that economically dispossessed.
So the wealth – when they make the argument about accumulated wealth, what the average accumulated wealth of a white family versus the average accumulated wealth of a black family, there's something there, right?
And we should expect that there's something there.
And we should be trying to understand that and then trying to figure out actual solutions to those problems, right?
But like when you take the analysis, say, of the guy who started critical race theory, his name is Derek Bell, first African-American tenured professor at Harvard, Harvard Law.
Real pessimistic guy.
He actually said that the point of, he said that Brown versus Board of Education, which desegregated schools, was done so that white people could feel better about themselves and then to open up black people to new problems like having to face discrimination in schools.
Like real pessimistic.
But in 1992, okay, get your head on 1992.
1992, he wrote a book called Faces at the Bottom of the Well.
And what he said is that black society is the face at the bottom of the well.
And white, even the, he says right in the first page, even the poorest, most downtrodden, awful situation white person always knows that they can have status by looking down at the face at the bottom of the well.
Okay, I was in 1992.
I had like, I was impoverishing my parents with Michael Jordan gear, right?
I'm not looking down to Michael Jordan.
In 1992, Oprah Winfrey, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, these were like the things, right?
Dave Chappelle was even doing a like Oprah Winfrey had something.
I have to take, after reading this stuff for so many years, I have to take them at their word.
And the game that they play is to play off of your, they can't really mean that instinct.
Derek Bell held the position that desegregating the schools was bad because it just allowed racism to maintain in another direction.
Derek Bell introduced a concept called interest convergence that says that any time white, anytime black people get more rights, it was because it was also in the interest of white people.
So it was actually an act of racism.
So if you become anti-racist, this is literal.
If you become anti-racist, there's books about this.
If you become anti-racist according to their demands for you to become anti-racist, that was in your best interest.
It turns you into a good white, a good white progressive, or a good white liberal.
There are entire books.
There's a book by Shannon Sullivan, a major scholar called Good White People that just rails on this.
Robin D'Angelo says that she thinks that white progressives and white liberals are the worst form of holding white supremacy, the worst form, because they, and then she, because they don't believe that they're as racist as they actually are.
She says, in fact, that she defines a white progressive as somebody who thinks they're less racist or not racist.
And then because of this interest convergence thesis of Derek Bell, which is at the core of critical race theory to this day, anything a white person does, according to the theory, I don't agree with this, anything a white person does to help a black person also raises their own moral standing and is therefore in their own interest and was therefore a racist act.
The way that they believe that white supremacy and whiteness can be taken out of society is to completely in a full-on revolution remake society from the bottom up.
That's in their literature all over the place.
You can't get rid of whiteness until you get rid of all vestiges of white society.
And that level of revolution is what's inspiring these freaking riots.
What I think it is, okay, so I've described it before pretty publicly as a Trojan horse.
So you know the story of the Trojan horse.
So they wheel up the horse and what's inside is assassins.
So they bring it in and they open up from the inside, come out, kill the guards, open the gate, and then the army can come through.
This is a Trojan horse full of bureaucrats.
So what they do is they go fill in administrations and then they fill in HR departments and then they start making policy changes at those levels so that everybody's stuck playing by their rules.
And a lot of cases, there aren't necessarily that many of them.
And you actually can kind of push them out.
It's not that many.
You could actually, in a lot of organizations, you will get sued.
They will bring a suit and they'll fire you.
I get these emails from guys who run businesses.
I don't know if they're guys actually always.
Some of them aren't.
But they're CEOs in particular.
And they say, well, a lot of times they're just people in the office and you know how they are.
And so they come in and they ask for a promotion and you know they're going to make trouble if you don't give it to them.
So it's just easier to give it to them and kind of let them do the thing.
And it's like we really need to stop getting bullied.
Do you think that part of this, the movement, why it's so like with Antifa in particular and the looting and all the craziness and the streets, because people aren't working?
So it's like there are so many more people that have the time to.
Now, I will tell you, I am friends with people from all over the spectrum, right?
Except Woke.
They've now all written me off.
And I have some pretty far right-wing friends.
They are not racists by any normal definition of the word.
But of course, under Woke, they have to be because everybody is.
They are saying things like the word racist doesn't mean anything to me anymore, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be racist.
I'm going to just keep acting the way that I was acting, which is not racist.
But I'm not going to, if somebody calls me a racist, it doesn't mean anything to me anymore.
I'm just going to keep acting the way I was acting.
I already wasn't racist.
I'm just going to keep going.
And they're basically going to try to just step out of the language game.
I don't think most people will do that, but there will be a contingent, and this is where your fears are valid, where that's going to happen.
But some of them are going to grab onto that identity and they're going to latch onto it.
And of course, what does the theory say?
Critical race theory says that everybody's a racist and is just hiding it under a mask.
And so if they start acting racist, oh, they were racist all along.
And they do this to people in their jobs.
I know people who disagree with Woke stuff who have applied for jobs.
And there's these professional forums, and then people set it up, and they say, we're going to, you know, he's associated with this or associated with that, so we can't hire him, make sure he's not going to get an academic job.
And I've actually seen screenshots people have sent me of the texts where the point is that we make sure he can't get an academic job, so he has to take a job with some right-wing outlet.
The liberals, not left, like left and right Democrat, Republican, but like the people who believe in like what the Constitution and I'm not saying that.
think there are actually a lot of them and they're being silenced there's a i think there's a very is the right word right they are being silenced yeah uh They're afraid to speak up.
And I know because they email me and tell me things like, I have a fake account that I follow you on Twitter, or I come and look at your Twitter, but I can't follow you.
I can't like your stuff.
I get offers to write things sometimes, and then they get taken back because I'm too controversial or something.
So now we've found my fourth and fifth Black Lives Matter, right?
So I said there are five.
Number four is the anti-fug guys.
Number five is the woke.
Woke Black Lives Matter.
Sorry, corporate Black Lives Matter.
Corporate Black Lives Matter is, I mean, capitalism always wins.
But they're going to go where they see the least liability and where they see the most likelihood to generate profit.
And I can't, I mean, I'm not going to say that I don't support capitalism in general, but I don't support the exploitation of a movement based in pain and fear to sell t-shirts or shoes or whatever else.
I don't think it's going to end our careers because I think one of the things that is very important for people like you and people like me now is to be that person who points things out that are logical and reasonable.
And when you hear your words, you know, well, you're not a bigot.
You're not a racist.
You're not a sexist.
You're not homophobic.
You're not transphobic.
You're just a person using logic and you're standing up to this ideology that seems to avoid any and all criticism.