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July 9, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor

01:19:19

Media Hegemony

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	Hello everyone, it is this week's Left, Right, and White.
	I am Chris Roberts, joined of course by... Gregory Hood.
	I've been looking forward to this one.
	Yeah, so we are doing Noam Chomsky today.
	Now I want to, uh...
	I'm going to give a brief intro to this because I think out of all of the thinkers that we have covered, at least so far, we are going to get the most blowback for doing an entire episode on Noam Chomsky.
	And something I really want to convince our older listeners of is that for anybody who's Gen X or younger, You really grow up in Chomsky's world.
	Every used bookstore has dozens of copies of Noam Chomsky's books.
	Even corporate bookstores like Barnes & Noble will have at least half a dozen.
	It's taught in every college.
	It's taught in not a few high schools.
	When you listen to punk music, they talk about Noam Chomsky.
	Even when they don't explicitly mention Chomsky, it's clear that that influence is there.
	When you're drunk at a house party and you're talking to some cute lefty girl, so much of the nonsense that she is just spouting is just directly coming from Chomsky.
	There's no getting away from Noam Chomsky.
	So much so that, although Chomsky is not the thinker who has most influenced Greg and I, Chomsky is the most influential intellectual we have covered on this show thus far.
	Most cited in the world, right?
	That's the thing they always throw around.
	Yeah, most cited scholar.
	He regularly beats Karl Marx and William Shakespeare, the Constitution, John Locke.
	It's just there.
	It's just constantly there, which makes Chomsky fundamentally worth talking about.
	We were going over a little bit before we started recording what we wanted to talk about.
	Not only do we want to talk about Chomsky's ideas and to which extent they are correct and incorrect, but also just the general cultural influence of Chomsky and how that's shaped our world regardless of, again, that influence is really relevant regardless of how correct or incorrect Chomsky is.
	There's just no escaping Chomsky.
	I mean, I was trying to think of When was the first time I heard of Chomsky?
	When was the first time I learned about Noam Chomsky?
	And honestly, I have no idea.
	Chomsky was just always around.
	There was never... Middle school was well before Huntington or anybody.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Sam, I certainly learned about Noam Chomsky seven, eight years before Sam Francis or Paul Gottfried or anything like that.
	And this is sort of the thing is he is about as establishment as you can get.
	I mean, it's sort of...
	the product of a culture where they say, now here's like the dangerous intellectual you're
	not supposed to know about and it's like you're learning about it in public schools.
	It's the sort of thing where, you know, lies my teacher told me is like a textbook in your school.
	I'm like, actually, this is different. It's like, is it? I mean, this is, this is as elite as it
	gets. This is as establishment as it gets. I mean, the very fact that he exists, the very fact that
	he's so influential, the very fact that we've all heard of him and he gets pushed by all these
	institutions basically disproves everything he actually says, but we'll be back to that.
	Yeah. Bear with us on that meta level analysis, but the pop, the very popularity of Chomsky and
	the fact that he's taught at MIT for coming up on, I want to say five decades, about half a
	century, he has been a distinguished professor at one of the Ivy leagues.
	It's like, well, if that's dissent, I mean, it must not threaten a whole lot of power.
	Well, I want to jump on that right away.
	He's been asked about this repeatedly, and there are two ways that people have come at him with this.
	One is this idea that, this comes from the left, where they'll say, well, shouldn't you divest yourself from these repressive institutions?
	Because MIT, of course, gets a lot of funding from the American military, researches weapons, things like that.
	And he says, well no, because I've never understood this mode of thought.
	That's like saying Karl Marx shouldn't have studied at the British Museum because it benefited from imperialism and everything else.
	It's actually better for radicals to use the resources of these institutions to accomplish their own ends.
	Maybe that's true or not, but you know, isn't that convenient?
	But the second and I think more interesting thing is, and he's talking about this, he's giving a lecture at MIT and he's talking about the reliance of corporate America on the military and he's talking about the interplay between corporate America and the military and how Big business and military industrial complex are essentially conjoined.
	I mean, you know, the internet developed by the military and things like that.
	Right.
	And again, I agree with him.
	All of it, all of it.
	We'll get into a lot of the stuff we agree with him on.
	And he's saying, well, you know, and this is a more or less exact quote, barring one word here or there, and he says, I've been doing this activism at MIT, I was facing a serious Prison sentence for opposing the Vietnam War and he got no pushback from the military itself.
	The military essentially said, well, you're trying to overthrow the system.
	We don't so much care about that.
	That's your own business.
	Do whatever you want.
	But what we're really interested in is shaping the next stage of the American high tech economy.
	And I just want to like pause for a second there and say, OK.
	Military says, oh, you're going against the war.
	That's fine.
	You're saying we need to overthrow the government and have an anarcho-syndicalist or whatever he decides he feels like today.
	That's fine.
	Do what you want.
	We don't really care.
	Hands off.
	Compare that to what happened to, say, James Watson, who's actually speaking about a field that he actually knows something about.
	Let's back up here.
	I mean, Chomsky's specialty is linguistics.
	And his theories about linguistics, I'm not going to boil it down to just one because it's obviously changed over decades, but one of his essential premises is that there's sort of a pre-existing structure to a lot of these ideas.
	That was his big idea when it came to linguistics.
	And this has gotten challenged and there's been a lot of pushback and forth and everything else.
	But when he talks about these things, like, that's what he's a scholar for.
	Yes.
	I mean, in terms of pure credentialism, in terms of international relations, like, I have more credentials than he does.
	I suppose that's literally true.
	Yeah, and they're like, there's no particular reason why we need to listen to this guy, and he has a very annoying habit of, because, you know, he talks like this, and it's very comforting, and you could actually fall asleep listening to a Chomsky lecture.
	I've done that many times, actually.
	It's very soothing, but he'll say things in passing that aren't actually true, like, well, we all know that American foreign policy in Central America was part of a plot to exterminate the native population.
	You know, he'll say, not that, but he'll say something like that, and you're like, whoa, back up, that's not true at all.
	But he just says it as if it's something we all know, and it's like, no, that's not true, and in fact, you're doing what you accuse the corporate media of doing all the time, which is just setting boundaries for debate arbitrarily.
	And he gets away with doing these things because he doesn't really threaten the power structure.
	He doesn't threaten it in the same way that even just some lowly undergrad who picks up the color of crime and mentions in class, like, well, maybe white privilege isn't true because here are some crime statistics from the FBI.
	You better believe, like if some private in the military says that, the generals are really going to care about that.
	They're going to care a lot more than some professor who's saying overthrow the government.
	I was thinking recently about, we're hearing so much about the military investigating its own ranks for extremism, by which they mean people who read American Renaissance or Revolver News.
	Now it includes like Sons of Confederate Veterans and everything else.
	Sure.
	And what we don't mean When we say the military is investigating radicalism in its own ranks is if it's if it's privates are reading Noam Chomsky that would not be viewed as a big deal even though Noam Chomsky is probably most famous for his critiques of American foreign policy by which which means just as like
	Hardcore opposition to all American interventions, anywhere, always.
	And what he distinguishes, his critiques, we'll get into the media, which of course is the most important thing in a second, but one of the things that really distinguished him is he said that the way most people talked about the Vietnam War was it was a mistake.
	Or it was done the wrong way, and he was saying, no, we need to be very clear about the moral stakes involved here.
	That this was a crime, that there was violence on a massive scale, perpetuated against innocent people, that we need to have this sense of moral outrage about what's being done in our name.
	We need to be very judgmental and clear about this.
	He's actually, there's that famous debate he had with Foucault.
	I mean, he's very, he is not relative when it comes to morality, as so many leftists are.
	I mean, he's very objective.
	Yes, he's a very clear moral compass, no doubt about it.
	I think that's actually a huge part of his appeal, is he comes off as very morally righteous, very indignant, and very clear-minded, and I think that is actually an enormous part of why people like him.
	And it also distinguishes him from a lot of other leftist professors who Even the people who use it, I mean, you can detect how self-serving it is, where it's, oh, I've created this complicated vocabulary that benefits my own interests, when someone's like, well, wait a minute, like, you're just redefining words to be whatever you want them to be.
	Whereas Chomsky, at least, is saying...
	I'm trying to communicate clearly here. Yeah Chomsky and in part probably because he studied linguistics
	Chomsky does write and speak in this very clear very direct manner
	He uses language and vocabulary that absolutely everybody can understand
	Which makes him so different from theodora dorno or judith butler
	Or or any of these, you know cultural theorists the cultural marxists the gender theorists cate borenstein
	Etc. And again, that's that's a big part of his appeals It's so it's so accessible where it's it's always in this
	very accessible language combined With this moral righteousness that I think so many people
	find attractive And that is something that ties, that's something Chomsky has in common with the last two leftists we covered in this podcast.
	that's true of George Orwell also wrote in this very straight up direct not academic
	language, and Chris Hedges as well. And in fact, Orwell, Hedges, and Chomsky, all three
	of them have written about the problem of how so many leftists use this just bizarre
	jargon.
	Incomprehensible jargon, yeah.
	It makes no sense. I've actually, I meant, yeah, when we did our podcast on Orwell, I
	meant to read some selections from Orwell's essay, Politics in the English Language, where
	he, where Orwell really gets into this issue, and which actually, Jared Taylor strongly
	recommends reading that essay before you write anything and submit it to American Renaissance.
	Yeah, for anyone who wants to send something in, read that first.
	And Chomsky, I found this great interview with Chomsky that I've got with me here.
	He talks about the postmodernists, and it's actually Extremely funny, and was a reminder.
	Revisiting a lot of Chomsky's stuff for this podcast made me really angry with him, but he does have these great, great moments.
	So this interviewer asks Chomsky, Since the 1970s, postmodernism has had a great deal of influence on at least Part of the left in this country.
	It has been characterized, among other things, as quite critical of science and the Enlightenment tradition.
	I wonder if you could talk about your view of postmodernism and whether you think its influence is waning.
	Noam Chomsky replies, I have to say that a lot of postmodern work I just don't understand, so I can't comment on it.
	It seems to me to be some exercise by intellectuals who are talking to each other in very obscure ways and I can't follow it and I don't know if anyone can.
	Postmodern views of science, by and large, have been pretty embarrassing.
	There is some interesting work on this.
	There's a book by two physicists, Jean Brickmont and Alan Sokal, both of them happened to be political radicals, just running through, mostly Paris postmodernists.
	But what postmodern commenters have said about science, and it's really embarrassing, to the extent that you can understand it.
	Yeah.
	And I do.
	Chomsky has these great moments like that.
	Chomsky's also one of the original, kind of, YouTube stars, where if you search Noam Chomsky on YouTube, you'll find hundreds, if not thousands, of his speeches, and greatest of clips, and zingers.
	Everything from three hour lectures to ten minutes, here's manufacturing consent, one easy lesson, you know.
	And you've got these little you know, drop, oh he drops a bomb here, we're saying
	education is a system of imposed ignorance and all this type of stuff. Sure, but in in the Q&As to a
	lot of these Chomsky videos, he will be talking with these lefty college kids who were
	way more influenced by the post-modernists than Chomsky ever was.
	And those are actually some of the bombs Chomsky drops.
	There's this great one where this non-white girl asks Chomsky about what privileged people can do to help the oppressed and how she's of two minds about it
	because although it would be good for educated people to go into working-class neighborhoods and
	set up say free schools or something to educate them although that's good it's also
	kind of colonization which is bad and Chomsky straight up is just like no that wouldn't that
	wouldn't be colonization That would be a good thing if people did that.
	I don't see why that would be colonization.
	Right.
	And this chick, this like 20 year old chick, is like, oh come on, at least on some level it's colonization.
	And Chomsky is just like, no, it's not.
	Yeah, there's also some highly amusing ones where he says, he talks about free speech a lot, like Hitchens, he's a free speech absolutist, and he'll say something like, well look, you know, If you support free speech, that means free speech for ideas you don't agree with, even ideas you hate.
	If you disagree with that, you don't support free speech.
	And you'll have all these leftists who'll come, well, according to the system of privilege, this isn't actually free speech and everything else.
	And he'll just say something blunt like, well, you know, Goebbels supported speech that he agreed with and Stalin supported speech that he agreed with.
	So, I mean, you're not saying anything really Different than that.
	And they don't... I mean, with conservatives, there's always this kind of apologetic... There was that old Simpsons joke where they had the Democratic National Convention, and there's a banner that's overhead that says, we hate life and ourselves.
	And I think that's true of a lot of American conservatives now, where They're trying to argue but they come off as so like cringing and like oh we accept your premise we just want to be left alone and like can't we can't we debate freely and everything else and they don't have
	Absolutely do that.
	to just be like, no, like all your premises are just wrong and everything you're saying is complete nonsense.
	Yeah.
	Whereas Chomsky will actually just say something like that because he, you know, who is, who are these like 20 year
	olds to him?
	Yeah. And, and they, you can see their souls just like kind of drain away from their body. Now,
	they probably haven't learned anything from the experience and they're just gonna write him off as a privileged white
	guy a day later.
	But, at the time...
	Well, the same thing happens in some of these Q&As.
	You find these really, really radical people, like literal Maoists, or people associated with Bob Avakian, trying to troll him during the Q&A.
	To try and get him to like, try and like prove like, well, you are actually a reactionary because X, Y, and Z. And again, Chomsky with just this beautiful, just like casually delivered moral clarity is just like, no, that's not true.
	You are wrong.
	This is just, this is a silly conversation.
	Right.
	Come on.
	I mean, the thing that he gets away with, I mean, he is slippery, as I said before, in that he'll, He'll say things that aren't really true or at least not totally established and he'll just state them as a fact and just move on.
	But he'll do it so casually that people won't catch it.
	And so it comes off as just sort of this devastating takedown even when it's not.
	But when he's debating leftists it actually is because they either A. share his premises and just aren't as well read as he is or they actually don't really have an argument. They're just like using their
	little words that have made people back down and cringe before.
	Yeah, it's just this linguistic jujitsu.
	Right, and he's just, you know, this works on some college Republican who doesn't want to get expelled,
	but for him it's just like, no, this is all nonsense.
	Yeah.
	So you kind of alluded to this earlier.
	There are more or less three Chomsky's when we're talking politics.
	There's his critiques of media, which are very interesting.
	There's his critiques of foreign policy, which are decidedly less interesting.
	And then there's his own philosophy, which is anarcho-syndicalism, which is bizarre.
	For whatever reason, Chomsky... I got a certain sympathy for him.
	Chomsky doesn't actually write or even talk that much about anarcho-syndicalism, which is annoying, and I think lets him get away with more than he otherwise would, because anarcho-syndicalism is really pretty ridiculous.
	If everybody knew that his ideal world was just decentralized worker councils and no government, I think people would take his moral authority on a lot of other matters less seriously, and I think he would be perceived... he wouldn't be perceived as such a genius the way he is.
	Again, this is from the same interview I read from earlier.
	It's one of the few interviews I found with Chomsky where they actually do Ask him a lot about anarcho-syndicalism and the ridiculousness of it really does shine.
	I'm gonna read from this at length.
	So the interviewer asks, You've identified from a young age as an anarchist and during your lifetime the popularity of anarchism has fallen and risen.
	Has your core philosophy, your anarchism, evolved or changed during the course of your life?
	Chomsky replies, It's not what it was when I was 10 years old.
	Fundamentally, it has not changed.
	That's because the core philosophy just seems like common sense.
	I don't see how anybody cannot accept it.
	The core principles, as far as I understand it, anarchism covers a wide range, you can't encapsulate it in formulas, but there seems to be a thread that runs all the way through it.
	It's basically a skepticism about any form of authority or domination or submission.
	The basic idea is that domination and hierarchy are not self-justifying.
	They have to justify themselves, and the burden of proof is theirs to bear.
	And if they can't justify themselves, then they should be dismantled.
	And that covers everything from personal relations to international affairs.
	Then, out of that comes various varieties of anarchism, depending on what you're looking for in the future.
	What are the alternatives to authority, and so on.
	But almost everything decent in human life seems to fall under that.
	So no, that hasn't changed.
	The interviewer follows up, The tendency of anarchism that you subscribe to, anarcho-syndicalism,
	overlaps fairly closely with council communism, with the notion of worker councils.
	For the public at large, the assumption is that an anarchist society is one where people
	run amok, where chaos reigns.
	Chomsky, that's the propaganda that people are exposed to.
	Actually anarchist views were mostly of highly organized societies.
	So at the risk of just pointing and sputtering, this is just nuts.
	So at the risk of just pointing and sputtering, this is just nuts.
	Like, I mean, I think this is just totally crazy.
	I think if you were trying to break down what are some examples of what this would look like, I mean, you can point to some things during the Spanish Civil War, you can point to, I mean, again, coming from like the libertarian... The things that lasted just a few months?
	Well, I mean, also coming from the libertarian tradition, I mean, this is where you get into the market anarchism.
	This is where, when we talked about Hoppe, I mean, ironically, this is where a lot of these things overlap.
	I think the key problem here is not so much this idea of challenging authority or creating systems from the ground up.
	Like I said, I have a certain sympathy for that.
	I mean, when leftists talk about things like mutual aid or talk about things like workaround factories and things like that, My critique of them is not so much that these are bad ideas, it's just that they like talking about it as opposed to doing it.
	And when it comes to what they actually want to do, it's generally whine to the media and get other people's stuff to subsidize these things.
	It's not actually like doing any of the stuff they talk about.
	Sure.
	They're relying on their... The bigger problems I see it is where he says, Hierarchy and social relations needs to be justified, and it's just like, no.
	Yeah.
	I mean, like, I'm just, I'm just gonna lay this down as a fundamental premise of human existence.
	Hierarchy is a constant and always exists.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, if you want to, like, if you're as a parent, I can tell you very quickly...
	Yeah like hierarchy is a thing and right off the bat and if you just say well actually we're all equal and we can have an egalitarian social system like no you can't and if you get into any kind of social gathering with self-described anarchists you see how quickly this turns into a dog chasing its own tail Where they're constantly going nuts about who's going to be in charge and how we're going to have a progressive stack and how we have to prevent cults of leadership and everything else.
	But again, going back to Pareto, going back to Burnham, going back to the whole Machiavellian tradition, there is going to be an elite that governs.
	And it doesn't matter what you call it.
	Even Aristotle.
	Aristotle noted that the state organization is just innate to human existence.
	I mean, I've got to just basically invert Chomsky here.
	I don't know, you know, he says, Anarchism is just common sense.
	It's the opposite.
	The state is common sense.
	You can find this so ridiculous, the idea that you're going to eliminate hierarchies just completely, that everything's just going to be councils.
	And again, if you look at the evidence, on some level this is a factual matter, if you look at hunter-gatherer tribes, those societies are so violent and so horrific.
	You know, those are societies that have run amok.
	I mean, these are not idyllic paradises by any means.
	Organized societies is much more peaceful and pleasant, it would appear.
	And also the hierarchy is a lot more fluid than it is in the hunter-gatherer,
	where you essentially, each man is sort of an absolute monarch when he's got a small...
	And those hierarchies are worse, because since there's no real social structure, hierarchy is just always violence.
	It's just always who can win in a fight, who can kill somebody else.
	Right.
	When you have states and complex civilizations, you have much less extreme hierarchies, which strike me as a better deal.
	Yeah, and if you have a tribe, a mutual aid organization, a worker-governed enterprise factory or something like that, I mean, all these things are essentially just proto-states.
	And if they develop sufficiently, they're just going to become the state.
	Again, we went through this with Hoppy where it's like, well, if we have all these things and we don't call them states, and it's like, but they're states.
	I mean, I don't care what you call them.
	I don't care if you call it an insurance company.
	I don't care if you call it an anarchist collective.
	I don't care if you call it an egalitarian commune, it's a state.
	Because at the end of the day, somebody has a monopoly on violence, and when that's in question, and people are fighting over it, that just means that you've got a period of warring states, and at some point, somebody's going to win.
	Or, a more effectively governed state from the outside is going to come in and take over.
	Yep.
	So, anyway, that's kind of all I really want to say on his anti-syndicalism.
	Yeah, we can get more into That and leftist critiques of his actual position.
	But again, as you point out, I mean, I think a lot of the ones that are really easy to sleep to are when he's talking about what he actually wants and it just kind of rambles on in directions that don't actually go anywhere and an hour has gone by and you find yourself, you know, snoozing peacefully because he's just in Dreamworld.
	I was watching one of his lectures a few days ago in preparation for this podcast and I did literally fall asleep.
	Yeah.
	His voice is just so grandfatherly.
	I know.
	That lets him get away with a lot.
	It really does.
	It reminds me of how the Manosphere talks about keeping a solid frame.
	Yeah, frame control.
	Frame control.
	Chomsky is actually a master of frame control because it's all so pleasant, it's all so confident, and it's all so accessible that it really is Dare I say propagandistic, which is what we should talk about next.
	His best known book is Manufacturing Consent.
	Right, which was also co-written by Edward Herman.
	And I think that this is key to, this is where we actually get value from, and it develops a propaganda model for mass media.
	And what this means, essentially, is that the purpose of media is not to inform, It's to be a system that allows for the conditioning of people and basically the real governance of society.
	And this kind of bleeds into what I've been talking about in other podcasts, which is that the media and journalists as such are the people who are actually sovereign.
	I mean, I would actually take what he talks about in the propaganda model and go a step further, which is that it's not a state-run media or even a state-influenced media, it's a media-run state.
	And that the people who run the media are really the people who control power.
	There was a poll, I apologize for not having the exact figure in front of me, but it was a very small minority of people in the United States now.
	Who believe that Joe Biden is actually in charge and this includes Joe Biden supporters.
	I think this idea is actually something that a lot of us take for granted now where we all kind of know that the guy who's the president or the Speaker of the House or whatever else isn't the people who actually have their hand on the lever.
	It's somebody else.
	Now, let me just quote real quick from it.
	He says, Mass media service a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace is their function to amuse entertain and forum.
	To inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviors that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.
	In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.
	No arguments there.
	None whatsoever.
	And he also talks about, in terms of foreign policy, the way Certain victims are held up as, you know, a moral outrage, whereas other victims are ignored.
	I mean, he would say that during the Vietnam War, for example, if American troops wiped out a village, this was not really of notice.
	But, I don't know, if some anti-communist Catholic priest in Poland or somewhere was shot in the back of the head, it became like a great moral crusade.
	The propaganda system will consistently portray people abused by enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy.
	If you look at the debate between Chomsky and William F. Buckley on Vietnam, which you can find easily enough on YouTube, The Firing Line Interview, a lot of the back and forth goes with, surrounds this.
	Basically, who's the real victim here?
	Whereas Buckley will say, well, what about the communists who did this, that, and the other thing?
	And Chomsky will say, well, what about, you know, it kind of gets tiresome, this what about-ism.
	But he'll say, actually, you know, there was real existing democracy in these communist controlled areas, whereas there weren't in these French or American controlled areas.
	I'm rolling my eyes.
	Yeah.
	And this kind of gets to the essential point, which is that when it comes to describing how the system functions, I think he's right.
	If you say, what is the purpose of the media?
	He's right.
	How does it function in a democracy?
	What does democracy even mean when you have powerful institutions?
	Very few powerful institutions, as he points out.
	I mean, it's really like four or five companies, and it's probably even more concentrated now, that are imposing these ideas.
	You know, what does democracy even mean?
	He's right.
	Keep in mind, this is also before social media.
	Yeah, this is before the internet and everything.
	Create values in people's money.
	Yeah, I mean it goes even beyond, I mean I would say it even goes beyond, and he gets into this a little bit when he talks about advertising and the idea of corporations generating demand for things that we wouldn't otherwise want.
	I saw something the other day where Coors was actually doing an experiment where if you watched like a video before bed it would basically almost be like an advertisement in your dreams to try to get people into this stuff.
	And so, you know, you're not just manipulating political opinion, but you're manipulating consumer choice.
	If you say capitalism is about serving people's values and their demands, well, if you're creating values and demands, I mean, that's a level of power beyond what even Marx talked about.
	All this is true.
	I agree with him 100% on all of this.
	Except...
	Who actually controls these institutions?
	Like, oh, the corporations are... Okay.
	Who runs these corporations?
	What values are they actually putting forward?
	What people are allowed to have access to a platform?
	What things do the media focus attention on?
	And what things do they ignore?
	Right.
	Once you start asking these questions, everything he's saying instantly falls apart, because if it actually functioned the way that he says it does, I mean at least in terms of serving the interest that he talks about, why am I watching him on YouTube where we can't even have a PayPal?
	Yeah, Chomsky is right about the model, but he applies the model incorrectly, and he just chronically applies it incorrectly.
	You want to talk about, you know, this game of Who's the real victim and which victims the media pays attention to?
	You know, consider that in terms of whenever any trans student, you know, can't use the bathroom that they really want to at a college, boy do we hear about that.
	It's a national story!
	You know, that gets up on Salon, it gets up on Vox, you know, it used to be, you know, they used to do like three blogs about it every day on ThinkProgress when that was still a thing.
	But you know, you really, really have to dig to find stories about white victims of black crime, of just horrific crimes.
	It's only reported by local small media outlets.
	And the thing is, it almost puts us in a weird position because we're the only ones talking about it and it almost comes off as sort of morbid, but you have stories that are so horrific that they almost sound invented.
	So for example, you know, Canon Hinnant, where you have a black guy like execute a five-year-old in the driveway in front of the family.
	You know, that's a day story, maybe, locally, and dare you draw any implications for that or suggest, you know, maybe like the media constantly telling blacks that all whites have been holding them back and, you know, police are murdering them in the streets for no reason.
	Maybe that's, you know, contributing to a climate of hatred against whites.
	To even suggest that is completely out of the question.
	Right.
	If we have a situation where a college student claims that a piece of rope that they found somewhere is actually a noose, even though we all know three weeks from now how this is going to fall apart.
	It becomes a national story, and then even when it falls apart, nobody learns anything from the experience.
	There aren't retractions.
	They don't publish these big stories following up being like, oh, yeah, I guess that was wrong.
	They just stop talking about it entirely.
	Shout the lie, whisper the retraction.
	If even, whisper it.
	Exactly.
	I've got another passage, which is also an excerpt from Manufacturing Consent.
	Chomsky writes, The elite media set a framework within which others operate.
	If you are watching the Associated Press, who grind out a constant flow of news, in the mid-afternoon it breaks and there is something that comes along every day that says, Notice to editors, tomorrow's New York Times is going to have the following stories on the front page.
	The point of that is, if you're an editor of a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio, and you don't have the resources to figure out what the news is, or you don't want to think about it anyway, this tells you what the news is.
	These are the stories for the quarter page that you're going to devote to something other than local affairs or diverting your audience.
	These are the stories that you put there because that's what the New York Times tells us is what we're supposed to care about tomorrow.
	Read that sentence again because it's really, really key.
	These are the stories that you put there because that's what the New York Times tells us is what you're supposed to care about tomorrow.
	If you are an editor in Dayton, Ohio, you would sort of have to do that because you don't have much else in the way of resources.
	If you get offline and if you're producing stories that the big press doesn't like, you'll hear about it pretty soon.
	So again, that model is Perfectly correct.
	And what this passage actually reminds me most of is the Southern Poverty Law Center, where because they've got a lot of money and they've got this website that looks very fancy and very academic and researchy, everything they put out just gets Unquestioningly regurgitated by everybody else.
	You can even find puff pieces in local newspapers where it'll be like, oh, did you know that here in our home state of Pennsylvania there are 40 active hate groups?
	And it's just a rewrite of stuff that this editor found on the Southern Poverty Law Center website.
	And it's just easy for them to regurgitate it.
	They don't have a whole lot of resources to do You know, long-form investigative pieces, so it's easier to just take something that's at least nominally respected and just sort of repackage it and just pass it and it just goes down the food chain.
	And Chomsky is so right about this, but Chomsky himself would never in a million years accept that what he wrote there, what I just read, somehow applies to the Southern Poverty Law Center and how the SPLC influences our media ecosystem at large.
	Or the ADL report that I saw.
	Right.
	So Taylor and I, I mean, I remember reading that and it was just like, I can't believe they're getting away with this, where they had this report and they're called, I think it was like extremist linked hatred or something like that.
	So you had cases where it was like a member of a white prison gang would like get shot by his wife or something
	like that Somehow that becomes politically motivated white. That's a
	hate-based murder, right?
	You had one where it was like a white guy and a black guy rob a house together
	But somehow that became like a racist hate crime, even though it was just like a criminal do you doing criminal
	things?
	There's some yes with a swastika tattoo knocks over a liquor store shoots somebody right? Well, that was a hate-based,
	you know Yeah, you had one you had some guy who I guess was like an
	atom waffen converts to Islam shoots his two roommates in the name of like Allah and
	And somehow that also becomes, like, a hate crime committed by... And if you took this standard, if you took, like, how loosely these things are applied, it's like, okay, well, every single black gang in the country usually has some sort of racial mystical element in its symbolism or in the way its rituals, the way it organizes itself.
	I mean, you could basically say every single black crime in the country would be a hate-based crime if this is the game we're going to play.
	Yeah, if you're going to define it that loosely.
	And even if it's against other blacks, because apparently that's okay too.
	I mean, as far as white-on-white crime goes, if you've just got like, oh, here's a guy with a tattoo, he did something, therefore it's committed, it's a hate-based crime.
	The black versus Somali violence that happens in the Midwest never seems to get the hate label, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that Somalis and American blacks do just hate each other, and it is like a racial ethnic Well, we have also seen the way black crime against Asians in major cities, somehow this gets blamed on Donald Trump vaguely noting that maybe the coronavirus came out of a Chinese lab, which was hate-based incitement, but now apparently it's okay.
	After everyone's been kicked off who might have said this once, now it's changed.
	A lot of what Chomsky talks about, and he breaks it down, so for example, he's going into, he has a big emphasis on what he called the working class press and how this was broken.
	And he says this was a big thing in 19th century America and 19th century Great Britain.
	And again, this is another example of one of his little examples of doublethink where he'll appeal to this past where things were better, where there were, oh, there were working class institutions, or oh, even Adam Smith said that these things were okay.
	And sort of suggest that now things are worse.
	than ever.
	But at the same time, he'll also say, well, these institutions were all also set up to suppress democracy and therefore they're flawed from the beginning and everything else.
	But he's talking about, in this case, a working class press in Great Britain.
	And I quote, This alternative press was effective in reinforcing class consciousness.
	It unified the workers because it fostered an alternative value system and framework for looking at the world.
	And because it, quote, promoted a greater collective confidence by repeatedly emphasizing the potential power This was deemed a major threat by the ruling elites.
	One MP asserted that working class newspapers quote inflamed passions and awakened their selfishness, contrasting their current condition with what they contend to be their future condition, a condition incompatible with human nature and those immutable laws which Providence has established for the regulation of civil society, unquote.
	The result was an attempt to squelch the working class media by libel laws and prosecutions, by requiring an expensive security bond as a condition for publication, and by imposing various taxes designed to drive out radical media by raising their costs.
	These coercive efforts were not effective, and by mid-century they had been abandoned in favor of the liberal view that the market would enforce responsibility.
	Curran and Seton show that the market did successfully accomplish what state intervention failed to do.
	Following the repeal of the punitive taxes on newspapers between 1853 and 1869, a new daily local press came into existence, but not one new working class daily was established for the rest of the 19th century.
	You can get into like how exactly this working-class press was driven out and everything else.
	He's talking about this as a bad thing, but of course, what does this sound like today?
	Where you essentially have an alternative media space, broadly called the alt-right, but really even preceding that.
	Where the whole point of the internet was that you would have a marketplace of ideas, that you would have debate, that an ordinary person could discuss these things, that everybody could essentially be a journalist, that everybody could be their own reporter, that we wouldn't even really need reporters because we could send people with video cameras to capture what was actually going on.
	And what have we seen over the last few years?
	We've seen a massive effort by corporate media to de-platform people they don't like.
	I would argue that this is their, I mean I'll go further than I think even Mr. Taylor would say, I would argue that this is their only function.
	This is the only thing they exist to do.
	If you look at, I mean I had the misfortune of being in an airport and looking at CNN for like half an hour.
	There was not one story that actually informed anyone about anything.
	It was just people complaining about Fox News and like, why are they allowed to exist?
	Yeah, well, and for all of Chomsky's posturing about this, you know, oh, I want independent, people-based presses.
	I don't want the big corporate press.
	The dirty secret of this is the corporate press better reflects Chomsky's values than what independent presses would and often do.
	If you really don't want to talk about black-on-white crime because you think that's bad for race relations, well then the corporate media is your absolute best friend.
	Right.
	Same with if you don't want to talk about Islamic terrorism in Europe or the United States because you think that will inflame Islamophobia or something.
	Well, then again, the mainstream press talks about all those things considerably less than Breitbart or Front Page Mag or any of these things.
	The corporate press does not give Chomsky everything he wants, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
	I will grant him that.
	The mainstream corporate press is way more pro-war than Chomsky is.
	I'll grant him part of that.
	But on domestic issues, What would he do differently?
	Like, oh, more emphasis on unionization efforts or something like that, maybe?
	Yeah, which I guess we could grant him that as well, but in terms of the mainstream media
	just constantly freaking out about Russia or fascism or radicalism or these evil Republicans.
	And let's be clear, Chomsky is on record as saying right now, right now, the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization that has ever existed.
	And poses a threat to human existence.
	Right, so if you feel that way, what's the big problem with MSNBC?
	They think the same thing.
	Right.
	I mean, if you actually believe that some Republican party head who says, you know, maybe climate change could be caused by natural causes, or maybe we need to, like, look at something about this.
	If you really believe that the human species will end because of people like that, why wouldn't you want those people shut up?
	Yeah, and what's wrong with CNN?
	This gets into the, uh...
	That passage from Chris Hedges we read last week, where Hedges is talking about how the white working class is legitimately aggrieved and they have every right in the world to be angry, but also what they really want is fascism.
	But if you believe what they actually want is fascism, then what's so bad about these corporatist liberals keeping them oppressed?
	Wouldn't that be a good thing, then?
	That's one of the things I always wonder about the whole premise of anti-fascism.
	Now, of course, the way they define fascism is You know, everything.
	But, you know, it's something along the lines of, well, we can't let this have even, like, a tiny hearing, because if it does, like, it'll immediately sweep the country and everyone will agree with it.
	It's like, well, shouldn't that maybe rethink, like, some of your beliefs?
	The only way we can restrain this is a never-ending campaign of terror.
	Like, maybe your beliefs are stupid.
	Yeah, that's right.
	I mean, because that's the thing, is if we actually had anything close to Not even even, but just like some pretense of a marketplace of ideas, we win.
	And if you want to talk about dominant ideas, now he talks a lot about anti-communism, and keep in mind this is Manufacturing Consent, the edition I'm looking at was from 1988.
	So Reagan and, you know, first Bush, he's saying that this is essentially a way of disqualifying certain people who are talking about stuff.
	So you can say, oh, this person is a communist stooge.
	This person is speaking out for a communist regime.
	We don't really need to be paying attention to what this person is saying.
	Now of course what we have today is somebody will say something and they'll say well that's actually a tool for Russian interests or now of course this person said this but actually this is insurrection and disinformation and a threat to the state.
	And more than either of those is just discrediting people by calling them racist.
	Well yeah and this is also where they talk about what is the dominant idea where we just take for granted this idea that the only possible explanation For why there are socioeconomic differences among races is white racism.
	And Chomsky will get questions about this and he'll just, you know, in that little, well, this is all just, you know, reminiscent of the Nazis.
	Your imitation of him is just great.
	Reminiscent of the Nazis and everything else.
	And it's just, you just want somebody to get up and during all those things and just say, sir, like, I know you're a professor and everything else, but are you really that stupid?
	I mean, like, here's the data, like, no, no theories about your working class press, not like, oh, You know, an anarcho-syndicalism like a factory would send hot air balloons with goods to wherever they want to go or whatever stupid idea, but this is a reality.
	And this reality exists independent of what you or I think about it.
	And we could give you anything you want.
	You could have 20 trillion dollars in reparations.
	It doesn't matter.
	We're gonna have the exact same model in 10 years in terms of like how this is gonna play out.
	What do you think about that?
	And at the end of the day, it always comes back to The same thing that the corporate media wants, which is repression, we need to ignore these people, we need to say, oh, white working class people have these grievances that we need to pay attention to, but at the same time, we can't let them actually have what they want, because what they really want is unlimited comic book evil.
	Right.
	Unlimited comic book evil.
	Yeah, that's a great summary.
	And again, his model when he talks about how, at least according to him, during the Cold War you could just delegitimize anybody by calling them a communist or a communist fellow traveler.
	That model of media analysis is...
	Is legitimate, but it applies so much more to issues that he doesn't want to talk about and that he would never touch.
	Like, well how about, you know, why is it that you can just call people racist and then it doesn't matter if they're factually correct about things?
	Yeah.
	Like how's, you know, how's that for media hegemony?
	We will just delegitimize everything we don't like by calling it racist, which is considered this huge moral evil and that's not a That's an underlying assumption that we never examine.
	It's exactly what Chomsky talks about and writes about with great eloquence and insight.
	He's just insistent on applying his own theories, his own models, his own algorithms incorrectly, which is so weird.
	It's just the same thing.
	It's one thing that I've kind of been hammering on really my entire life, which is basically
	like college did what it was supposed to do when it came to me, which is, you know, it
	taught me to deconstruct things.
	It taught me to analyze everything as these are manifestations of power inequalities and
	this is all about power relations and this is the way you should look at what the messages
	you are getting from people in authority and what interests are being served and everything
	else.
	But it's just very hard to look at the world as it is and say, and therefore right wing
	nationalists run everything.
	Yeah.
	When it's just like, well, some tenured professor who gets paid $300,000 a year to talk about how oppressed she is, is claiming that there's an entire system set up against her, and it's like, no, you're not just privileged, you're among the most privileged creatures to ever exist in the history of mankind.
	What is it that you do other than exist?
	Well, and Chomsky, I think Chomsky may have been the left-winger who invented this just superficial and silly rejoinder of when you point out something like, well, corporations have given literally billions of dollars to Black Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter adjacent things, Chomsky and all of his intellectual heirs will say, well, they don't mean that.
	I mean, that's just window dressing.
	They're just trying to look good.
	They don't actually support BLM.
	And it's like, okay, well, A, why is it that they feel the need to pretend?
	Like, doesn't that suggest something about the cultural priorities of the United States?
	If you, as an enormous corporation, feel compelled to make everybody believe that you support BLM, that says a lot about the culture.
	That says a lot about hegemony.
	And then, moreover, it's like, okay, so if they give Billions and that's that's and they don't actually mean it.
	That's just like hush money or something Well, how much would they have to give for you to believe that they actually support BLM?
	It's like they do a lot to support BLM just the way, you know, all of these companies, you know Strongly support affirmative action and stuff and and Chomsky can come to be like, well, they don't really mean that they're they're just saying Yeah, it's like every time there's a referendum on something like affirmative action.
	You always get every All the institutions that a classical leftist model would assure you would be on the conservative side are always on the other side.
	Right.
	All of the churches.
	With the exception of like one or two, you know, oh, like some independent congregation.
	But in terms of like organized national church bodies, they're always in the East Orthodox Church.
	Yeah.
	That's the puppet master behind everything.
	But the churches The corporations, the chambers of commerce, the unions.
	I mean, you get this, I mean, what was the last election?
	Forget, you know, oh, what happened in this state or that state, but this whole idea of fortifying democracy, right?
	Where they said like, oh, like all the, all the unions and all the chambers of commerce and all these other things formed an unlikely alliance.
	It's like, it's not an unlikely alliance.
	It's the same thing we have every day.
	And this, you know, we don't need to do a lot of digging about, well, who are the hidden interests that he's describing in this propaganda model?
	It's like, well, they, Tell us!
	Right here!
	And the people who don't seem to see it are the people who specialize in studying media and power relations.
	And that's because they're a part of the system.
	They're not critics of the system.
	Yeah, so actually that's perfect.
	I've got another great quote here from Chomsky.
	Let's see.
	Alright.
	Take the New York Times.
	It's a corporation, and sells a product.
	The product is audiences.
	They don't make money when you buy the newspaper.
	They're happy to put it on the World Wide Web for free.
	They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper.
	But the audience is the product.
	The product is privileged people, just like the people who are writing the newspapers.
	You know, top-level, decision-making people in society.
	You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers.
	That is, other businesses.
	I love how there's just this little whisper right there about the managerial elite that Burnham, Gottfried, and Francis all talk about.
	Corporations in the case of elite media. It's big business.
	I love how there's just this there's just this little Whisper right there about the managerial elite that yeah
	Burnham Gottfried and Francis all talk about Let's see he goes into it a little bit more as well
	He's talking about the public relations industry Which he describes as the main business the main business
	propaganda industry So what are the leaders of the PR industry saying?
	Second place, to look at- to look- ah.
	To- ah.
	Sorry.
	Second place to look is at what are called public intellectuals, big thinkers, people who write the op-eds and that sort of thing.
	What do they say?
	The people who write impressive books about the nature of democracy and that sort of business.
	The third thing you look at is the academic stream, particularly that part of political
	science which is concerned with communications and information and the stuff which has been
	a branch of political science for the last 70 or 80 years.
	He's talking about like A, the part of selling audiences is incredible that he wrote that
	before social media.
	There's that adage of if you're using a website and you don't know what the product is, the
	product is you.
	This concept of selling audiences back and forth.
	And he also talks about how in the case of elite media, the audience is the people at
	He uses the annoying left-wing word, privileged, but he is talking about something real.
	He's talking about, you know, journalists, he writes, top-level decision-making people in society.
	So professors, executives, managers, etc.
	And how because that's the audience of all of these elite media institutions, the elite ends up being On the same page about a lot of stuff, because that's how they're talking to one another.
	And these institutions are self-reinforcing.
	That's also the function of the education system, which is part of this whole system of manufacturing consent.
	The purpose of education is to create a united governing class that shares the same assumptions.
	Now, again, he's right, but what are those assumptions?
	Exactly.
	And he also will say, oh, well, because of their services, continuous contact on the beat, mutual dependency, the powerful can use personal relationships, threats, and wars to further influence and coerce the media.
	The media may feel obligated to carry extremely dubious stories and mute criticism in order not to offend their sources and disturb a close relationship.
	Furthermore, sometimes the authorities and brand name experts were successful in monopolizing access by coercive threats, in terms of, this is an explicit reference to deplatforming people and making sure people can't get on.
	Well, again, what are the Adobea stories?
	Who are the people who aren't allowed on?
	He talks a great deal about how advertisers are ultimately the ones who These media companies need to be worried about.
	Okay, well, what has been the number one tactic of deplatforming, not guys like us, but, you know, some random person on Fox News, somebody who used to have, like, a pretty big platform, they'll go after the advertisers.
	And the advertisers will say, well, we could have access to a mass audience, but we would upset these powerful people.
	So therefore, it is better for us not to offend these powerful people than to get our message in front of tens of millions of people.
	I mean, CNN has these stories over and over again about how the only thing keeping Tucker Carlson going is Mr. Pillow.
	The MyPillow guy.
	MyPillow, right.
	Mr. Pillow, MyPillow, whatever.
	I mean, this kind of proves the point, does it not?
	If we look at who is actually wielding this power, his theory proves us right.
	That's right.
	But of course he's never going to apply that analysis to himself because to do so would destroy I don't know, his entire self-image and career.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Yeah, if he were to apply all of this to himself, he would end up in a sad and gloomy place.
	Yeah, I mean, I think, and occasionally you'll see this, and I mean, he's not, I mean, I'm not dunking on him because he's elderly, I mean, obviously, we get old, but he's an elderly man at this point, and so when you see these webcam interviews, of course, where you don't have, like, the makeup and everything else that doesn't come off as too Too great.
	It's like one of those memes, like, if only you knew how bad things really are, type things.
	And he'll be talking to some, you know, left-wing lunatic who figured out, you know, a new gender category that morning and has purple hair and whatever else.
	And he's still, you know, playing the same old song, talking about this stuff.
	And he's getting responses filled with all this jargon and all this postmodern stuff that he basically has spent his career warring against.
	And I think at some level he has to know that these guys have sort of lost the plot and that they're off following this sort of elite agenda of identity politics that where he's trying to bring it back to class and he's trying to bring it back to questions of power and everything else.
	He has to know that at some level but fundamentally he he was never really on target either.
	I mean the idea that the military is the institution That's determining so much of American culture.
	It's like, okay, well, what social agenda is the military pursuing today?
	Yeah, I've never... Chomsky is really emblematic of that, of this left-wing myth that the military is setting the agenda in regards to everything.
	Or the CIA for that matter.
	And I will grant, I mean, there are certain little ways in which this is true.
	He's right that the military-industrial complex does fund a lot of the research, like wings of large universities.
	Yeah, DARPA and things like that.
	And that does inform the research that they do.
	The military also will Like, let Hollywood borrow their trucks and guns and stuff if it's a pro-war movie, but they won't do it if it's an anti-war movie, so it's way cheaper to make a good pro-war movie than it is to make a bad anti-war movie.
	Right.
	You know, there are little whispers of this being true in regards to that, but on the whole, it's just not true.
	I mean, like, one of the huge cultural zeitgeists of our time is the transgenderism. It's like, well, that didn't come
	from the military at all.
	You know, the military sure clicked its heels and fell on the line when the order came down.
	Exactly. And so it's like, if the military can't hold the line on just like, you know, trans madness.
	How powerful is it, really, culturally?
	And also, you can't say that this is coming from the masses.
	I mean, if you look at a lot of these, even basic elementary stuff like, should we salute the flag?
	You know, is flag burning okay?
	Should we have a constitutional amendment to ban it, the American flag?
	Should Juneteenth be like a holiday?
	I think it was, what, 6% of Republican primary voters thought this was a good idea, but it still happened with barely any dissent.
	And so, who's driving this stuff?
	Well, largely because of Chomsky's theories of, oh, well all of this stuff, like this Juneteenth holiday and all this trans stuff, is talked about constantly in these elite media organs that are just designed for the elites to communicate amongst themselves.
	Yeah, and you see a narrative emerge in real time where you can actually point to it and say, okay, it was first mentioned here, then these guys picked it up, then this started becoming a thing.
	Now a while back there was, you know, this whole scandal, the journalist scandal, this was like a decade ago or something like that, where basically they had some email server and it was just journalists like coordinating with each other for coverage and everything else and this became like a thing.
	Well, I don't understand how that's a scandal.
	I mean, if you don't think that that's happening, you're insane.
	But furthermore, I don't even think it needs to happen consciously.
	I mean, Joe Soberan talked about the hive.
	I mean, this is, it's not so much a question of deliberate planning, although I think there is a lot of that.
	But it's also a shared cultural viewpoint that is perpetuated through elite institutions, including the media, including the education system, which Chomsky described expertly.
	It just doesn't tell you what those things are.
	Also, in terms of creating a deliberate issue, Let's not forget with the New York Times, there was a deliberate call by the editorial board where they said, well, our Russia plan to get Trump failed.
	So now we're pivoting over to the 1619 project and all this race stuff.
	That's our new get Trump thing.
	So like this was a deliberate thing where somebody in power said, yes, we're doing this.
	And then all these articles come out of nowhere.
	And suddenly somebody who had never heard of this stuff a month ago, you know, is broadcasting their emotional breakdown on TikTok because they Downstream from all this stuff.
	Yeah, they learned about some bad things.
	Right, and this warped their psyche to the point that they, you know, hate their family or whatever else.
	Okay, so that's a good bridge for something I want to talk about now that we're coming up on the end of the show.
	I'm going to give as an example of Chomsky's influence and what that influence is like for a lot of people who are not part of elite media institutions or the educational system or something.
	There used to be this very popular pop-punk band called NoFX that was big in the 90s.
	I know all of our younger listeners know what I'm talking about.
	And they have this song called Franco Un-American.
	I'm not going to bother trying to sing it because I'm a terrible singer, but I'll just read about the first half of the lyrics of this song.
	I never thought about the universe, it made me feel small.
	Never thought about the problems of this planet at all.
	Global warming, radioactive sites, imperialistic wrongs and animal rights, no.
	Why think of all the bad things when life is so good?
	Why help with an am when there's always a could?
	Let the whales worry about the poisons in the sea.
	Outside of California, it's foreign policy.
	I don't want changes.
	I have no reactions.
	Your dilemmas are my distractions.
	That's no way to go, Franco Un-American.
	no way to go Franco un-American, no way to go Franco un-Ameri- Franco un-American, no way to go Franco- Franco un-American.
	I never looked around, never second-guessed.
	Then I read some Howard Zinn.
	Now I'm always depressed.
	And now I can't sleep from years of apathy, all because I read A Little Gnome Chomsky.
	I'm eating vegetarian because of Fast Food Nation.
	I'm wearing uncomfortable shoes because of globalization.
	I'm watching Michael Moore expose the awful truth.
	I'm listening to Public Enemy and Reagan Youth.
	I don't think it would be a copyright violation to read the entirety of the song.
	I think this is so emblematic of when you're sort of at the bottom.
	I spent too much of my teens and early 20s just messing around and not going to school and working crappy jobs and partying a lot.
	And when you're in that scene, you listen to a lot of punk music and you drink a lot and you meet all of these really depressed, really unhappy, very directionless people.
	And this song captures that so well.
	There's this weird dichotomy of they're all doing just nothing with their lives.
	They're stocking shelves at Target and whenever they have a day off they go to a house party and get drunk and you listen to the latest band that's trying to make it in somebody's basement of this rented out disgusting house.
	Conjoining that nihilism is this weird, obsessive morality that's entirely informed by people like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, where there's all of this white guilt and there's all of this anti-Americanism.
	But at the same time, what are they doing about it?
	Like, oh, just nothing.
	They just use all of this as just kind of a rhetorical cudgel to feel superior to Republican
	voters in the suburbs and people who go to church every week and stuff.
	Yeah, there's a weird combination of self-aggrandizement and self-hatred, where if you look at hard
	left activists, and, you know, again, I don't spend much time with this aside from when
	I'm putting together like a Twitter roundup, right?
	I mean, I have no reason to talk to these people or deal with them on any level, but I have to read their Twitter feeds because part of the job is putting together like what these people are saying.
	You know, half of it is, here's a guy stocking shelves at a Dollar General who had like a Trump sticker, we need to get him fired and go nuts, help, help, media help, all elite institutions help me, help me.
	And then the other one is them complaining about how terrible their lives are, how everyone else, this is everyone else's fault, how it's capitalism's fault, how they can't do anything.
	And this is sort of the, I mean, at the broadest level, if you look at the right, if I can use that term, Well, you can use the term.
	It's in the title of our podcast.
	That's right.
	Feel free to use the term right.
	When we get into, I don't know, Evelyn maybe we'll talk about left and right and what they
	really mean today.
	But if you look at that, our side, broadly speaking, it's all about self-improvement.
	It's all about, you know, here's, you know, market affiliates, and here's how you make money, and here's how you get stronger, and here's how you reform your diet, and these are the books you read, and this is how you should do this.
	Even if the stuff that is sort of, like, cringe in retrospect, where if you look at, like, game in 2015 and everything else, it was usually something along the lines of, stop, you know, being alone and sitting in your room and feeling sorry for yourself.
	Snap out of it and get out there and start dressing better and learning skills and doing these things.
	Whereas the other side, it's all about you're always going to be miserable and unhappy, except maybe if we create this future that we can't really describe how it works.
	Yeah.
	But you can also get the satisfaction of destroying the life of some other person who has no power.
	Well, again, I think part of the reason, this is not the entire reason that Noam Chomsky is popular, but I think a big part of the reason why he is is so much of his writing is about foreign policy, which lets people who want to feel guilty and feel bad and hate America, it gives you a lot of ammunition for that, but simultaneously It doesn't really ask anything of you, because the amount that a normal person can do to affect American foreign policy is basically zilch.
	But if you talk about poverty or the environment or education, there's actually lots of volunteering opportunities or charities or non-profits you can get involved with, and that's not really true.
	If the thing you care most about is like Palestinians in the Gaza Strip or indigenous Peruvians
	deep in the jungle, what you're going to be able to do about that as a 23-year-old is
	not much.
	What a lot of these people seem to be looking for psychologically is kind of a justification
	for their own misery.
	And looking at foreign policy is perfect for that because it lets you off the hook in terms
	of action.
	If you really want to help a poor, it's like, well, then you can go volunteer at a soup
	Well, I don't want to do that.
	You know, if you want to increase literacy, you know, you can help out at the local library and stuff.
	Do you want to help Palestinians?
	Well, if you look at the New Left, the way it started, SDS and things like that, I mean, their first initial grand foray was they went into these ghettos and said, like, oh, we're going to organize these people and have rent strikes and we're going to do all this stuff.
	And of course, it just instantly collapses because you're dealing with people who, like, have no interest in what a bunch of rich White people have to say.
	Yeah.
	And also you're dealing with social dysfunction that, guess what, isn't rooted in capitalism.
	It's rooted in just human nature and the way certain people work.
	And I'm not even just dunking on like, oh, the poor here.
	I mean, this just comes with having a utopian vision of humanity.
	Yeah.
	I mean, you deal with any group of people of any race of any economic level, you're going to deal with certain problems.
	But if your whole ideology is that, well, these things are explained because of a class structure, I mean, you have no response in terms of how to deal with these problems except to double down.
	So, what ended up happening?
	They all retreated and then went back into their academic fortresses and started complaining about Vietnam.
	Which is much safer.
	It lets you off the hook.
	You can just go to some fun protests and stuff.
	Right, and of course the people who weren't at risk for getting drafted were the ones who were behind There's an element to opposing American foreign policy, whatever it may be, there's an element to that that's kind of a boutique intellectual good.
	I'm not trying to say that there's nothing to it and that a genuine empathy A genuine moral vision plays some role in some of this opposition, but it's also really easy, because it lets you feel so much better than the power structure, because you're not the one selling bombs to Saudi Arabia, which are then used in Yemen.
	And you also really can't do much about that, but you can talk about it a lot, and you can feel really, really morally righteous.
	I might even get a job talking about it!
	It gives you this moral edge that people that a lot of people really just desperately want and Chomsky
	will just give you a whole lot of ammo for that if you just want if you just want your heart
	to bleed for Guatemalans you know which again you can't really do anything about it's like well hey
	this is this is going to be a really useful you know Chomsky's written a lot of books that are
	going to be really useful for you to read one last thing the name the song I just read from also name
	drops Howard Zinn Howard Zinn is actually kind of the same deal, because Howard Zinn was a historian, so it's like, you can just read about, you know, how miserable some Cherokees were, and well, you can do even less for the Cherokees in the 1800s than you can do for Palestinians today.
	And it's also the faux rebellion, because like, you get to feel so morally Superior, and nothing is asked of you.
	And I think that does have a lot to do with Chomsky's popularity and with Zinn's popularity.
	Well, Zinn, too.
	You have... If you actually get into, like, well, what did he actually support?
	And again, it's all this, like, oh, dissident leftist stuff that has no real, you know... Point to an example in history where it actually, like, happened.
	And it's like, oh, well, there was this revolutionary period of two days when this happened.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Typical.
	But also this idea that, oh, they're rebels.
	Howard Zinn gets taught in schools.
	I mean, I'm not young anymore, but I mean, I was dealing with it in the classrooms way back when.
	This is being taught in state institutions.
	People freaking out about critical race theory in some ways are like 20 years behind what's going on.
	Everything Chomsky tells us says that state institutions should be training people in nationalism and patriotism and service to the state and everything else.
	It's like, no!
	They're not doing that.
	I did not go to like radical schools, but like the only things that I learned in history class were Japanese internment camps, the Holocaust in America, and the Trail of Tears.
	Like, that's it.
	And that's, if you want to read the classics, if you want to get acquainted with the Western tradition, as Jonathan Bowden said, reading about your own history is a revolutionary act.
	You're going to have to do it on your own.
	Yeah.
	Because if you go to college, you're basically just going to get yourself $50,000 in debt to be taught by morons.
	And unfortunately, I mean, I don't think Chomsky is a moron, but I think he's very selective when it comes to where he deploys that intellect.
	That said, he does have moments where there's a certain awareness.
	There's that famous quote where he's talking about whether capitalism is inherently racist.
	Right.
	You've cited that quote in a number of your essays.
	Well, I think it kind of gives the game away in a lot of ways, where he says essentially that capitalism—and I think he's right about this, and this is why I don't think capitalism can be really—capitalism always has to be seen as a tool, as opposed to the basis of a worldview.
	Capitalism and that's also such a broad thing.
	Capitalism or the developing economic resources or whatever else, I mean this is just a means of doing things and it will change depending on what conditions are laid down.
	We're seeing this right now where Nike, for example, has no problem backing athletes that will turn their back on the flag, who will take a knee, You know, sponsorship for Colin Kaepernick, backing that sprinter who just got disqualified from the Olympics for failing drug tests and everything else.
	But then when it comes to China, where you have a serious government and serious elites saying, no, like we're gonna actually run our country and try to make it better and stronger.
	Nike then comes out and says it's the company by and for China.
	So it's not a question of Corporations will promote certain social agendas.
	It's that they will ultimately do what they have to in order to make money.
	You've got the quote on it.
	Here's the quote, which is really, really great.
	And again, for our younger listeners, I highly recommend you using this quote to troll your teachers and to troll your professors.
	You can have a lot of fun with this one.
	With luck, you'll get an emotional breakdown on TikTok.
	Because it's from Chomsky.
	So the quote is, See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist.
	It can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn't built into it.
	Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional.
	I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super-exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous.
	Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist, just because it is anti-human, and race is in fact a human characteristic.
	There's no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic.
	So therefore, identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that's produced.
	That's their ultimate function and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant
	and usually a nuisance.
	10 out of 10.
	Just 10 out of 10.
	Absolutely just gold.
	Just gold.
	I mean it's that kind of insight which is why we wanted to do a podcast on it.
	It's just...
	I mean and you're not going to get that from any London contemporary today.
	Especially not from the postmodernists.
	Well also the idea that race is a human characteristic and not a social construct.
	Because the whole point if you get... and Ms. Taylor just did a video on this.
	Bye.
	The whole narrative now, and again, let's be kind of more precise in our terms when we say, like, what is a narrative?
	That's a term that Mr. Taylor doesn't like us using, but it's a term we've got to use here.
	A narrative is basically a story created by institutions to advance a certain political, social, and I would say economic agenda.
	And that's how I would define it.
	And the narrative surrounding race now is that it was, quote unquote, invented by people.
	I think they usually say the Enlightenment, although that changes sometimes depending on what they're trying to do.
	And the idea is that it was invented to justify slavery and systems of exploitation and prevent, you know, working class people from joining forces across races and overthrowing the power structure or something like that.
	But the problem, of course, is the mountains of evidence that people throughout history have always recognized human differences.
	Again, you can go back to Aristotle on this as well.
	Well, you can also go back to what the Arabs were talking about, the Africans and everything else.
	And furthermore, if you want to say, well, that's different because race was the pseudo-scientific category and everything else.
	Well, A, there's pseudo-scientific, which is something that's based on false information, and there's incomplete science, which is, these guys are doing the best with the information they had at the time.
	Right.
	I mean, it's kind of unfair to dunk on somebody 500 years ago because, like, haha, they didn't know enough about, like, atoms like we do.
	Right, right.
	If you look at race now, the science is on our side, and the more that we learn, the more we learn that human differences are inherent.
	And that who we are is not just some self-determined thing.
	That human groups do exist, that there are differences between them, that evolution doesn't mysteriously not apply to humans, even though it applies to everyone else.
	I think the only people who can credibly claim to be completely anti-racist in the sense of It's not even a thing, and we shouldn't even think about it, and we should attack the concept at all points are creationists.
	And in fact, those are the only people who I've seen be totally consistent about it.
	Yeah, you said that... Well, when I worked at WND, it was always like the evangelicals who would say, you know, Darwin was the brute of Nazism because this, that, and the other thing.
	And they're not basing it on total... It's incomplete, of course, but it's not like total Nonsense, I mean like if you accept evolution.
	Yeah, if you don't believe in evolution That's yeah, it makes a lot more sense to be colorblind.
	Right.
	I mean the current situation now is We believe in evolution.
	We believe in science, but we also believe in the equality of all human groups because magic or something and you know very quickly you just fall back into mysticism when in fact Race and identity, I mean, these are fundamental parts of the human psyche.
	Intersectionality, for all its nonsense, does speak to something that is essentially true, which is that this is part of who we are.
	That you're not just some free-floating individual, that you are part of something greater, whether you like it or not.
	Sure, but you don't need intersectionality to understand that.
	No, no, no, that's a way of, like, you know, understanding power relations that could be right or wrong.
	When conservatives push back against it by saying, well actually, we're not anything.
	We're all just individuals.
	Or they'll say, we're just individuals, but we're also American somehow.
	And to be American means to just have shared legal rights.
	I think Chomsky, what he said there, cuts through all that nonsense.
	This is part of what it is to be human.
	It doesn't mean it has to be what defines you totally.
	If you talked about nothing but race all day, you'd be a very boring person.
	And it doesn't mean you have to be driven by hate or anything else, but I mean, again, you have to ask yourself, who are the haters?
	Who are the people who are obsessed with white people?
	Who are the people who can't get through the day without having a psychological breakdown because somebody said good morning to them and that's like a manifestation of white privilege somehow?
	And who are the people who blame whites for all their failures and all their social and individual problems?
	It's not us.
	Yeah.
	Well, I think that might be a wrap.
	Yeah, I think the takeaway here is, look, read Chomsky, but apply his model to himself.
	Read Chomsky on media.
	Yeah.
	Read Chomsky on media.
	I really wouldn't waste your time with all of the foreign policy stuff.
	Well, even the foreign, one thing I just wanted to, even the foreign policy stuff, I mean, and this is something we'll have to get into later, but the idea that foreign policy is inherently on the right, American foreign policy is inherently on the right, just because it was anti-communist, No, it was anti-Soviet if you looked like who they were still backing and also even after I remember when September 11th happened and that of course now is being retconned as like this moment of you know extreme nationalism and xenophobia and everything else.
	I mean, even at the time, they were warning us, like, oh, don't show the videos, because that'll get Americans mad.
	I mean, I think the real thing when it comes to American foreign policy, when they oppose it, is they're not really opposing American foreign policy.
	They're opposing the possible feelings of nationalism, nationalism and identity.
	They're just opposing America.
	Well, they want, what they're afraid of is not whatever thing the government is trying to do.
	What they're afraid of is that white Americans might start taking it to their heads to fight
	for their own interests.
	That's what they oppose above all.
	Now, if you all want to read interesting foreign policy takes, especially if you lean towards
	an isolationist worldview, you should read the American conservative or John Mearsheimer,
	not this just like obsessive guilt-ridden lefty stuff, which is just ... Well, and I
	mean, especially again for our younger listeners, you're going to have to read Chomsky when
	you go to college anyway, so don't bother reading it in your spare time.
	Just use that quote to hopefully force a psychological breakdown in your teachers and call it a day.
	Yeah, and yeah, I think that's it.
	Close it on that.
	Thanks for joining us guys.

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