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May 19, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor

01:33:33

The Influence of Error

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	Hey guys, welcome to Left, White, and Right.
	I'm Gregory Hood.
	I'm here with my co-host Chris Roberts, and today we're going to be talking about some of the things that got us on our current track, specifically the propaganda that not only didn't work, but had the opposite effect of what was intended.
	Because, let's face it, we're all brought up under the system, but it doesn't work the way it's supposed to on some of us.
	Yeah, the tentative title for this podcast is The Influence of Error I know for Greg and I, there are these very key moments of just hearing something and knowing immediately that it's not true, or looking it up and finding that it's not true, and being like, wait a minute, I'm being lied to.
	I'm not getting accurate information about important matters.
	It's important, too, because you've got to know you're not alone.
	Because sometimes these situations happen, whether it's in a class, whether it's in a workplace or something like that, where you think to yourself, am I the only one who sees there's something wrong here?
	It's like a horror movie or a Twilight Zone episode or something.
	But then you catch the eye of somebody else and they're like, no, we're actually right.
	It's everybody else who's wrong in this direction.
	It's like the old joke where they say, the guy's driving along the road, In the wrong direction, all the cars are coming.
	It's like, oh man, these people, he gets a phone call and he says, uh, his wife says, Oh, you gotta be careful.
	There's somebody driving the wrong way on the highway.
	And he's like, yeah, tell me about it.
	Every single car is going in the wrong direction.
	And that's like, well, it's like for so many people, but the thing is, it's not just you.
	In fact, I'd say, I mean, Chris go after me if I'm wrong here, but I think one of the kind of premises that we all hold is that.
	A lot more people agree with us than are willing to say.
	And maybe that's a conceit.
	Maybe that's a bit of a cope.
	But the problem is there are so many people I can think of.
	Professors, heads of non-profits, people who still have careers in politics, elected officials, all these people who will say things like, I agree with you, but I can't possibly say it.
	And I know Jared Taylor says the same thing.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I do not think this is a cope in the slightest.
	All my life I've heard friends, colleagues, family members, etc.
	start a conversation with me along the lines of, well, I feel like I can say this to you.
	Like, you know, like almost word for word that kind of thing.
	And I don't expect that to ever stop.
	I actually recently ran into an old friend who I hadn't seen In about nine years, we were really good friends in high school, and he opened with that, actually.
	He's like, man, I've been thinking about this thing, and I feel like I can tell you about it.
	And for him, it was in regards to why blacks didn't really vote for Bernie Sanders almost ever.
	And he was like, I feel like you might understand this, man.
	Sometimes I think, like, a lot of black people don't really like Jews.
	Like, do you think, do you think that might be true?
	It's like, yeah, I think, uh-huh, I think there might be something to that, bro.
	Everyone's looking up the, uh, that's right meme on the internet with the black Hebrews screaming at people in New York City.
	Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right.
	Literally, literally, that's right, that meme.
	So no, it's it's not a it's not a curve at all.
	There's some polling data to back this up, too.
	I remember when the British National Party was a bit of a force.
	I mean, this was some time ago, but they had a poll where they would tell people what the actual policies were.
	And so the things you would expect immigration restriction, obviously, but also the BNP at the time had kind of a left populist line on economics.
	And they would put through these policies and you would be getting majority support or at least some very substantial support.
	From all these planks.
	And then the pollster would tell them, well, who is actually putting these things forward?
	And you instantly would see the support drop.
	And these are the pollsters.
	So already it's not like you're talking to the police or a reporter or something like that, but already people feel uncomfortable confessing things.
	Or there's the other side has been effective in saying, well, you may agree with this thing.
	But the only people who are on your side are these people we've demonized.
	Therefore, you're just going to have to reconcile yourself to things not going your way.
	I kind of think that's what happened with the French election, the last two French presidential elections, really, where nobody was really happy.
	And if you look at the polls, how many people voted simply to keep Le Pen out?
	They're not happy about the direction the country's going in, but they just figured, well, we're not allowed to do this other thing.
	Right.
	And for a lot of us, it's just, well, We are allowed to do this other thing.
	We actually don't have to listen to these prohibitions on acting a certain way, or supporting certain people, or saying certain things, because the truth is the truth, regardless of what people think about it.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Alright, so give us a good anecdote here, Greg.
	What do you want to open with?
	When I was in, I mean, for a lot of people, I think, and I think this is pretty typical, it was in college.
	And I'm old enough that college wasn't quite as insane as it is now.
	So I actually can't tell you any stories about being persecuted or getting an F because, you know, I took the wrong line of paper.
	I took a lot of classes on black history.
	I had good relationships with all my professors.
	Did fine in all the classes.
	I remember I turned in, like, a master's thesis on Rhodesia to a black professor who was the daughter of Shinoa Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, which is, like, the one post-colonial African novel I think most Americans have probably read.
	Whoa.
	You took a class taught by his daughter?
	Mm-hmm.
	Oh, wow.
	No, she was a good professor.
	I got nothing but kind things to say, although there were some interesting Things I learned about identity, because she said, you know, I, about how being an Igbo, that ethnic identity was more important than being Nigerian.
	I hope I'm not misquoting it.
	It's been a long time, but there were some interesting things in that class because a lot of the, the lines that you take, and these are arguments you hear all the time, don't actually fit With what we're told about multiculturalism or multiracialism.
	So, for example, when you're taking pre-European colonialism, history of Africa, you're learning about all these different groups and all the wars they fought and everything else.
	And then you get into when the Europeans arrive on the scene.
	And of course, you know, the Africans are not passive actors in this.
	I mean, you still have new empires and new states being created, some of them aligning with the Europeans.
	And then after independence, you get the line, and you've all heard this, where they say, well, These countries don't work because the borders were drawn by these Europeans and they divided all these different ethnic groups.
	And so you had all these different groups that had nothing in common all lumped together and trying to make a common identity when there was nothing there.
	And I remember somebody who just didn't quite grasp what she was saying at the time, saying, well, wouldn't that make them more effective?
	Because if you've got diverse groups, wouldn't that make you a stronger country?
	And me and like the two other conservatives in the class sitting in the back kind of like look at each other and there's just sort of this awkward silence that reigns over the whole classroom because I mean that's obviously true but it's just one of these things that you can't say that diversity is not a strength and we recognize this in every other context.
	Ordinary people, liberals, understand this in every other context other than when it comes to our own country.
	Because then we have to pretend that something that is obviously false, and which we know to be false, is not just true, but the bedrock of our civic religion.
	Right.
	Well, there's a good example of Joe Biden.
	He used to talk about potentially dividing Iraq into three countries, one for each major demographic group, one Kurdish country, one Sunni country, and one Shiite country, because everybody was quite aware that multiculturalism is not a strength there.
	And that's, you know, obviously that's forgotten because we all like to pretend that the Iraq War didn't happen.
	Yeah, it was pretty funny the other day when former President George W. Bush was speaking and he denounced the unjustified invasion of Iraq before correcting himself and then saying Ukraine.
	Yeah, it's truly amazing.
	People, as an aside, I mean, this is, if anyone has the right to say something on this, I'm going to poll rank and say it, given that I was writing about the alt-right under my own name.
	That's right.
	when it was first getting started. The original iteration of the alt-right, when that term first
	started getting thrown around, yeah, immigration was there and race was there, but that was not
	the primary thing. It was opposition to the war in Iraq. It was opposition to the neoconservatives.
	That's what it was. That's what gave birth to the movement.
	Another thing from that, from college, and I think why college is so important.
	It's probably much more important to people now.
	I was in that, that brief time when you, before it completely turned.
	So I went to William and Mary and when I was there, they still had a plaque in the main building, the red building that said, that was dedicated to the professors and students who died defending their college and their country, the Confederate States of America.
	Cause of course the Yankees like burned it to the ground.
	And I think that's gone now.
	There were a few other things named after Confederate officers and everything else.
	That's all gone now.
	But it was how you begin to sense how artificial a lot of the outrage was.
	So the thing that really brought home race to me as something that I should even think about, because like most people, nobody's brought up thinking about this stuff, you know, with very few exceptions, you, The authors of white privilege and critical race theory are right in the sense that you sort of accept being white as normative and therefore you're raced blind where they're wrong as they say that's a sign of strength that's actually a sign of weakness because you just sort of assume everybody else operates the same way and that's not true and what was really brought home to me with that was uh when a campus group it wasn't me that I actually had nothing to do with it um I was
	Basically just an observer.
	Campus Group did one of those affirmative action bake sales, which was a very common tactic for college Republicans back then.
	I think some still do now.
	Say what that is.
	I mean, I don't know if people are still doing it.
	I think they still do.
	Affirmative action bake sales, basically you have a bake sale, but you charge different amounts based on the ethnic group.
	So if you're a Black woman, you pay a quarter.
	If you're an Asian male, you pay $2.
	And this is pretty standard college Republican young Americans for freedom stuff, at least around the 2000s.
	So it was a very original form of campus trolling.
	Yeah.
	And leftists have been doing this somewhat too.
	They try to do it with the gender gap and other things where they'll say, and I've even seen them try to do it with white privilege, but it doesn't quite work.
	But I remember there was obviously an outrage directed at these kids who had done it, who were all just normal Republicans, really didn't know what they were getting themselves into.
	Neither did I, for that matter, if I had been involved.
	And I remember there was a meeting that the Black Student Union, there weren't that many African-Americans at William & Mary, but they were all in this room and they were all just kind of berating these kids who Didn't really know how to respond because they lacked the vocabulary to kind of push back against it in collective terms, because you had these blacks arguing in collective racial terms about why this was an offense to them as a people.
	And if you're.
	A normal individualist Republican who really has no sense of white identity because we just don't think about these sorts of things.
	You really don't know how to respond.
	And I remember just kind of sitting back and listening to that.
	And then I walked back to the fraternity and thinking to myself, like about a 20 minute walk.
	And it was probably one of the formative moments of my life.
	Where for the first time ever, I really thought was aware of myself as a white person and thought to myself, you know, it really doesn't matter what I think about race.
	It doesn't matter whether I think this is all nonsense.
	It doesn't matter whether I think we can all just be individuals and everything else.
	Nobody else is going along with this.
	And when you're confronting huge groups in a democracy who are operating based on collective interest, And they are telling you to your face that you owe them something or that they are coming for you to take your stuff to take to displace you that that everything you have is illegitimate.
	You either have to respond in a collective way or submit and there is no third option.
	And for a long time.
	Unfortunately, even now, the conservative movement and even the worst of libertarians keep pretending there is a third option.
	Yeah, that we can that never ending quest.
	Right.
	Well, they're trying to basically turn blacks into middle class whites, which is racist in its own way when you think about it.
	And I think that was really the first time I I mean, I'd thought about it before.
	And, you know, obviously you always have some sense of being white.
	when you interact with other groups when you're growing up and everything else, but
	it's not really important. It's a detail. I mean, it's about a significant, it's less
	significant in many ways than like what sports team you root for or something like that.
	But that was the first time I really thought to myself, like, I'm white, and this is actually
	something really important. And I have to think about this and figure out what it means and what
	I'm supposed to do about it. Huh. It's interesting.
	OK, so we definitely grew up in pretty different environments and I had a sense of my own whiteness at a very young age because of growing up in the city and going to public schools and riding the public bus and stuff.
	But what was hard for me to reconcile for a very long time Was I had this sort of sense of race realism just in that like, you know, starting at the age of even nine or ten, I was recognizing these certain patterns of behavior and observing group differences.
	And it seemed really obvious to me, but I knew that it was like evil to say out loud.
	And simultaneously, while I was noticing all of this stuff, I was growing up in a very liberal environment during the culture wars of the aughts and the George W. Bush presidency.
	And I felt that I was very much on the left on all of those issues at the time of the Iraq war and gay marriage and privatizing social security and these sorts of things.
	And I couldn't make any sense of why it of why when it came to like race I seemed to be siding with these like extreme fringe right-wingers but on almost every topic not regarding race I seemed kind of left of center and it took me really like a long time to figure out what that really like what I should call myself or what I should consider myself because I would agree with
	With liberals on so many things, I didn't want to have anything to do with this kind of hybrid of like evangelicalism and neoconservatism.
	But then, you know, I would hear something like Pat Buchanan would say, and I would really agree with it, even though I was like pro-gay marriage.
	And kind of like an important part of sort of sorting that out Uh, was on the one hand discovering right-wingers such as, such as Pat Buchanan who were against these, these silly wars and, and simultaneously discovering that just like a lot, a lot of even really kind of basic left-wing talking points were just really, really wrong and were just like a big, a big part of the problem.
	Um, I know, um, One thing that really impressed me was in high school, I started to read Naomi Klein's famous book Shock Doctrine, which is this very big critique of neoliberal economics, especially in regards to how they were implemented in the third world.
	And I read this, sorry I can't tell a short story to save my life, but In my senior year of high school, I went to a small charter school called Avalon, which is obsessed with project-based learning.
	So you didn't really take classes, you just had independent studies, which were like, you know, overseen and kind of administered by one or two teachers.
	And in your senior year, you had to do what was called a senior project, which was a, you know, an independent study that took all year to do.
	And it was like a huge, huge part of your GPA.
	And, you know, I knew I was interested in politics, so my senior project was really just, I mean, it was very high school in that it was very unfocused.
	It was just kind of like, I'm going to read a bunch of political books and sort of figure out what I think, and I'm going to try and make up my mind about a number of different issues.
	And on top of that, this might come as a surprise for some fans of American Renaissance But I'm actually Hispanic.
	My father is from Chile and my mother is American.
	So the Shock Doctrine, which talks a lot about Pinochet and the economic reforms he implemented after Salvador Allende's Marxist government, that made the Shock Doctrine all the more interesting to me.
	So I wanted to learn more about that.
	And at least in the Anglosphere, I mean, when you're talking about English language books, The Shock Doctrine is probably the most influential book on the left about Pinochet and sort of the neoliberal reforms he implemented.
	So I was really interested in reading it.
	And one of the things that became apparent really, really quickly, as I was reading The Shock Doctrine, was that this author, Naomi Klein, Just didn't know anything about Latin America like she just had no like she just didn't didn't know a lot of just really really basic facts about the region and
	The errors were just mounting and mounting, and for the record, I'm not a Pinochet apologist.
	I don't think he was this hero who did nothing wrong.
	I mean, he did plenty of bad things, although the coup itself was definitely justified.
	But I remember talking to my teacher, who was overseeing this project, about about all of these errors, and she was just so annoyed that I wasn't into this book.
	She's a very left-wing lady, and I remember telling her, listen, half my family is from Chile.
	I grew up speaking Spanglish.
	I've been to Chile many times.
	I know a lot about Chile, and this lady just is wrong about some of the most basic She just has these enormous misunderstandings.
	You should have told this white lady to stop challenging your lived experience with a person of color.
	So I'm glad you bring this up.
	Reading the Shock Doctrine and talking to my teachers about it, it was actually the first time I realized that liberals would kind of revoke my Hispanic status, depending upon my political opinion.
	Well, that's actually, I mean, we've seen that a lot.
	I mean, that's a conversation in itself, but we always see that with the right.
	It really does.
	It really does happen.
	This is not made up.
	In plain black, as Biden would say.
	Right, right, right, right.
	And it was really strange just as, like, an 18 year old who is just like, and it's like, listen,
	like my Chilean grandparents are academics, like it's a very, it's a very nerdy family. Like I grew up
	in a household that talked, that talked a lot about politics and like my Chilean
	grandparents lived in Chile under Allende and then they lived in Chile under Pinochet.
	Like, they had a lot of first-hand knowledge of both governments.
	And I grew up hearing stories about both, which is part of the reason I'm not a huge Pinochet fan, although I'm a big coup fan.
	It's a subtle but very important difference.
	And remember, we'll just dive into the weeds here, since Left, Right, and White is the super nerdy podcast.
	In the 1970s and the 1980s, as I think everybody knows, there were a lot of coups and counter-coups and revolutions and counter-revolutions and civil wars all across Latin America, and all of them were, you know, just Cold War related, were communists versus various varieties of non-communists.
	And one of the things that Naomi Klein posits is that For a while, there was overlap in that Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil all had non-democratic, anti-communist governments.
	And her point, like her sort of, I mean, one of her many, many theses, is that all of these governments were in absolute cahoots with one another because they were all just like puppets of the CIA and you know had all been brainwashed by by Milton Friedman and that this was just like and that this the all these countries represented like this really this really powerful anti-communist bloc and she she talks about how they they worked together because like
	There were lots of left-wing terrorist groups at this time.
	So, like, left-wing terrorists in Chile would, like, you know, blow something up in Santiago and then hop the border into Argentina, you know, to try and not suffer consequences.
	And then, like, the Chilean government would talk to the Argentine government and be like, hey, we need your help, you know, tracking these people down.
	And Naomi Klein trotted this out as sort of proof as, like, this was all of these governments were practically just one government.
	And it was like, so first off, you know, that's the whole Operation Condor thing.
	Yeah, that's right.
	She's talking about Operation Condor.
	And it's like, OK, well, first off, all kinds of governments work with one another, just like extradite criminals.
	Two countries don't have to be best friends to help each other out with this kind of thing.
	This is really, really quite common.
	And second off, it was clear that Klein I had no understanding of just the history of just kind of like sort of John Mearsheimer style geopolitics in Latin America, where you might, y'all might want to pull up a political map of Latin America right now, but there's everybody in Latin, all nations in Latin America are constantly sort of seeking counterweights against their rivals.
	Because Chile and Argentina have a rivalry, and Argentina and Brazil have a rivalry, Chile and Brazil have always been allies because they don't share a border, and both has always seen the other as a potential friend in any kind of conflict with Argentina that might arise.
	And there were some pretty insane wars in the 19th century, which you generally don't hear about in history class.
	It's the kind of thing you have to seek out for yourself.
	Absolutely.
	So then, on that note, Chile has fought territorial wars with Bolivia and Peru, and Paraguay has fought territorial wars with Bolivia, and Chile and Paraguay do not share a border, but they both border Bolivia as such.
	Chile and Paraguay are generally on good terms because both see the other as a potential ally in any sort of conflict with Bolivia and they see each other as a potential ally in any kind of conflict with Argentina.
	Actually by the same token Argentina tries to always be friendly with Paraguay because if Chile and Argentina were ever to fight a war whoever Paraguay would side with would be the victor like that would really tip the scales.
	So Naomi Klein sort of posits that because that it's like only for Cold War reasons and only in the name of anti-communism that Chile, Paraguay and Brazil were working closely together.
	But that's that's always true.
	It just as a consequence of just like borders and the history of conflict in Latin America.
	And she also It acts as if during this time, especially in the 1980s when both Chile and Argentina had right-wing military governments, that they were like the best of friends.
	And that's not true.
	Chile and Argentina almost fought a catastrophic territorial war that would have broken out in 1982 or 1983.
	It was actually very narrowly awarded because they brought their—I brought this up on a prior episode—but they brought their territorial dispute to the Pope and the Pope Uh, like, looked into the matter, I don't know, he found some Catholic cartographers or something, and then the Pope declared who, you know, who rightfully, who is in the right in their territorial claim, and the Pope, being a wise man, sided with Chile, and then the conflict was averted for that reason.
	But there's no mention of this whatsoever in Naomi Klein's shock doctrine, because it would give lie to this idea that all of these governments were just best friends, and it's just, it's just so Sloppy that she was just ignoring all of this that she was just sort of blinded by You know the Cold War dichotomy of communist versus anti-communist This is bringing up all of this stuff.
	And again, the main teacher who oversaw this project of mine
	brought up the fact that the shock doctrine was the first time in my project
	I was reading a book by a woman and I didn't like it.
	And she was very, very annoyed by this.
	I mean, it was very pointed.
	She was like, you realize this is the first book with a female author that you're reading
	and you're probably not gonna finish it because you think it's so bad.
	And it was like, listen.
	Should have challenged her for assuming the author's gender.
	It's not, it's like, listen, it's not my fault.
	That she's a woman and she's wrong.
	I mean, this is genuinely a coincidence.
	I mean, I'm sure there are all kinds of women who have written intelligently about Latin America.
	I mean, I don't think it's like an either or thing.
	And that really made no impression on her whatsoever.
	And then, actually fast forward, two years later, I was at a private liberal arts college, right when the Great Awakening was really taking off.
	Something that might interest y'all is that when non-Hispanic liberal Americans learn that my dad is from Chile, it's very common for them to just immediately start talking about Allende, and it's not uncommon for Americans to apologize to me for America's role in the 1973 coup.
	Which is very strange.
	I often ask people, like, oh, did you play a role in that?
	Were you involved?
	Were you working with the CIA at the time?
	And it's like, no, oh, you weren't.
	You were born in 1988.
	That's interesting.
	Okay, well, there's really no need to apologize.
	And also, the coup wasn't bad.
	Like, it's great that the coup happened.
	The coup should have happened much, much earlier.
	It would have been Way, way smoother if we'd sort of nipped the ayin-nashim in the bud and it's like all, basically all of my immediate Chilean family members supported the coup.
	So that's always super awkward.
	But yeah, I was in college and there was this classmate of mine named Ben.
	He was a very left-wing guy and he was doing that left-wing thing where he learned that my dad is from Chile and that I speak Spanish.
	Really wanted to talk about, you know, 1970s politics in Latin America and the United States, like culpability and various atrocities or whatever.
	These are generally very boring conversations that have this real tone of condescension.
	And so Ben's talking to me about all of this stuff and it becomes really, really clear, really quickly.
	that Ben has read the Shock Doctrine and assumed that it's right about everything.
	So I stop him and I'm like, listen, Ben, it's really clear that you've read this Naomi Klein book.
	And let me tell you, as somebody who grew up listening to stories told to me in Spanish about what it was like to live under Allende and what it was like to live under Pinochet, that Naomi Klein just has no idea what she's talking about.
	And Ben, in actually like an attempt to sort of seed some ground to me, like he was trying to be conciliatory.
	He said, yeah, I mean, it's definitely just a white lady book.
	And it was like, what is that?
	What does that mean?
	And I actually, I didn't ask him, and I still don't know if his disparaging remark was in reference to the fact that a white woman wrote it, or if it was a disparaging remark in the sense that white women, like this white woman teacher I'd had, like it.
	I don't actually know which, if he was trying to denigrate the fans or the author, I remember telling him, listen, that also has nothing to do with anything.
	The fact that this book is bad has nothing to do with the fact that the author is a white woman or that white women like it.
	Either way, it's just really irrelevant.
	The issue with the book is various factual claims and implications that are just outrageously incorrect.
	And he really, he did, he did that woke person thing where he just, he just kind of didn't react to what I, to what I said.
	Like it didn't, it was, you know, I mean that sort of blank stare was like he didn't, he couldn't really hear me.
	And it's just, it was just very strange.
	But that also, That contrast between my teacher in high school, Nora, who was so annoyed that I wasn't going to finish this book because it was one of the only female authors, and then later, Ben, who was like, yeah, the book's probably not that good because it's a white lady book.
	It was this big moment for me of, I was like, oh man, there is...
	No rigor whatsoever to, like, liberalism.
	I mean, we didn't have the word for it back then, but I mean, you know, Nora was super woke, and this classmate of mine, Ben, was super woke.
	And it was just like, man, this is just kind of whatever you people want.
	It's like, if you like the shock doctrine, then critics of it are sexist.
	And if you don't like it, part of the reason you don't like it is that it's a white lady book.
	There's no, there's no consistency, and there's no way to sort of universally apply these kind of, this sort of like woke analysis.
	This is just absolutely whatever you guys, whatever you guys feel like.
	And actually, it reminds me of, there's often a lot of discussion about the notorious libertarian to alt-right pipeline.
	And something that's almost never discussed when that pipeline is written about is the fact that For a lot of people, especially for a lot of young white guys, libertarians are like the first political people they encounter who approach political questions with with rigor and with data and with like consistent analysis.
	Because when you grow up, you have, you know, you have this sort of woke garbage on one side and then on the other side, at least for me, it felt like the other side was just Michelle Bachmann.
	It's just like, It's sort of weird evangelical neoconservatism, which is also not in any way intellectually stimulating or rigorous or investigative.
	They don't sort of approach political questions with a great deal of curiosity and openness.
	And for a lot of people, the libertarians that you meet are the libertarians that you find online.
	They're like the first ones you ever bump into who are like, we looked at the numbers, and like, the numbers make us conclude this.
	Which is not to say libertarians are right about everything they analyze, or that they always have their numbers, you know, lined up correctly, but they really are, at least for me, they were the first people I ever encountered.
	Who just seemed so interested in research, you know?
	And that was just so refreshing, because I knew I didn't like Michelle Bachmann, and The Shock Doctrine was a bad book for factual reasons, not for any reasons relating to sex or gender or whiteness or anything like that.
	So anyway, long story.
	No, but that's an important point, that libertarians are generally the only ones who You first encounter who approached this stuff with rigor, with data, and the bankruptcy of liberalism.
	And this is something that has obviously gotten a lot worse in the years since we were in higher education.
	We're now, and you're seeing this even in the public debate on social media and everything else, where it's just, we say this, and if you hear something other than that, it's disinformation or misinformation, or it's a foreign actor.
	Or it's bots.
	They've become the people who deconstructed a lot of what we would consider to be like core Western tenants in the 60s and 70s.
	The new left said what you will about them, but.
	At least they were able to engage with some of these things.
	I'm not that impressed with Marcuse, but.
	I mean, you can at least imagine having still so much better than like Tim Wise or Robin to Angela or something.
	Yeah, I mean, this is something that.
	Maybe this is arrogance, maybe this is something that's just a character flaw, but it's not that I even get angry at a Tim Wise or Robin DiAngelo or whatever.
	There's nothing to talk to.
	There's no argument there.
	It's like arguing with a trash can or a sewer.
	There's nothing there.
	It's an inanimate thing.
	And the argument that's being presented is self-contained it's it's unfalsifiable because it just makes a declaration and then if you point out wait a minute what you just said is wrong the counter is haha well that's proof of white fragility yeah well if whatever i say is just confirms your thesis then there's really no reason for us to be talking to begin with
	Well, and that's why my conversations with Nora were so influential, because that was the first time I really encountered that.
	I was Nora's student, and Nora was smart.
	I mean, at least at the time, I had a lot of respect for her.
	And it was like, listen, Nora, this book is wrong.
	And her response was like, boy, not a lot of ladies on your reading list.
	I wonder if that's a coincidence.
	It's just like, oh, come on.
	But yeah, another very revealing moment is, so again, at the school, Avalon, for my senior
	project, you had to have what was called a community expert to also serve on the board of your project.
	So this person had to be somebody who didn't work for the school, but who knew a lot about your topic.
	So Nora actually introduced me to a friend of hers a gentleman named Larry Wise, who's been extremely active in progressive Minnesota politics for decades.
	He helped get Keith Ellison elected back in the day, actually, and he was at the forefront of Minnesota opposition to NAFTA and all kinds of stuff.
	And again, I was like 17, 18, I was very impressed with Larry Wise's Resume and he was he's clearly a bright guy so he and I used to meet up periodically and talk about politics and talk about the books I was reading and all of this stuff and Remember again Listeners do do bear with me and remember that I was kind of like a confused teenager Remember one time I asked Larry.
	I was like, you know, there was so much energy in the 1960s There was like all of this you know rebellion and there were these riots and you know there were these like Marxist terrorist groups and there was like all of this stuff and like in lots of other parts of the world you know like across across the third world there you know there were coups and there were revolutions and there were civil wars and like even in in France there were the famous there was the famous May of 1968 sort of riots and demonstrations which were a big deal and we're asking Larry is like why why didn't that happen
	in America.
	Like, why did all of that radical energy and all of that violence of the 1960s and the early 1970s just kind of dissipate without anything, like, super big happening?
	You know?
	Like, what?
	Why was that?
	And Larry told me that it mostly didn't happen because of violent government suppression of radical groups.
	And I asked him for an example, and he told me about how At some point in, like, the 1950s or the 1960s, there was this group of black World War II vets in Chicago who launched this, like, armed uprising in the South Side that was, like, super revolutionary and it was, like, on the scale of, like, May of 1968 in Paris.
	And the American Air Force just bombed it into submission.
	They just bombed this black neighborhood of Chicago because of these black radicals who were World War II vets, so they had weapons and they knew how to use them.
	And I was just, like, blown away by this.
	I could not believe that this had happened and that I had never heard about it.
	This was just, like, So mind-blowing.
	So immediately I got home and I googled it because I wanted to learn more about this incredible event.
	And I couldn't find anything about it.
	It just didn't seem like this had really happened.
	And the closest thing I could find was actually that riot in Tulsa.
	You know more about this than I do, Greg.
	What was it, 1919?
	Yeah, the big thing I wrote about.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	And that there's an article about it on the American Renaissance website, which I wrote about.
	Basically, what they're doing is they're trying to find events from the past that they can use as rationales for reparations in the present.
	And the so-called Tulsa Massacre, where they have these lurid fantasies of Black Wall Street being bombed from the air and all this stuff.
	Fits the bill, but if you actually look into the real story, it's a bit more complicated, as it always is.
	And it's the same with this incident, and also don't forget a move in Philadelphia.
	Hold on, hold on, hold on.
	Okay, so I'm googling around to try and find out about this Chicago thing, and I find the Tulsa riot, which I'd never heard of before, and that was like the closest thing I could find to the story Larry had told me about this Chicago uprising.
	So I emailed Larry the Wikipedia page or something of the Tulsa Riot, and I was like, hey Larry, I had a really interesting conversation with you, but I've been Googling around about this Chicago thing, and I just can't seem to find anything about it.
	The closest thing I could find is this Tulsa thing, which is pretty different.
	I remember Larry replied to that email, and he was like, oh yeah, that's what I was talking about.
	I guess I was just kind of hazy on the details.
	It's a pretty big thing to get wrong.
	Wait, what?
	The two things could not be more different.
	What happened in Tulsa was just a race riot.
	It wasn't an armed uprising.
	It happened after World War I.
	Not after World War II.
	And the Air Force didn't exist back then.
	The American military didn't bomb an armed uprising of black radicals into submission.
	That's not even close to what happened.
	And Tulsa didn't answer my question, which is what I had posed to Larry, which was like, Why wasn't there like a revolution or a coup or some kind of radical civil war in the 1960s?
	It's like, what happened in Tulsa had no bearing on that question.
	And that's still how he answered it.
	But he just changed it so, so dramatically.
	And I remember I was just, I was really shocked that Larry, who is undeniably bright, was just so nonplussed by, you know, these details that he had gotten wrong.
	It was just crazy.
	It was like, wait a minute, so that means that you walk around thinking that this big thing happened in Chicago, which didn't.
	His answer to me as to why there hadn't been some kind of Marxist revolution in America was because maybe the one time it could have happened was in Chicago with these armed black vets and they got bombed by the Air Force.
	It's like, well, but that's not real, that nothing even remotely like that ever happened.
	That's not unique.
	When you catch a big fundamental error of something like that kind, it's always amazing how little impact it has.
	It's a cliche to say that these liberals don't care about the facts, but it's a cliche for a reason.
	Stereotypes are based in truth.
	Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine, like, I would, you know, I mean, I write for American Renaissance all the time, and, like, if I ever, like, if I, like, wrote an article, you know, that, like, you know, that was, like, somehow, like, analogous to, like, the level of error of what Larry told me about versus what happened, I mean, like, I would resign.
	Like, it's just so, it's just so crazy.
	But still, it was just, it seems to just make no, No impact on him.
	I was just totally shocked.
	I just thought it was crazy.
	I still do.
	I would bet $500 that if I tracked down Larry today and brought all of this up to him that he would have no recollection of this conversation or my follow-up email and would still maintain, like, oh yeah, it's fuzzy on some of the details.
	You know, I'm getting old.
	I think that the way we need to approach the left, and this is something I know
	I've had a lot of conflicts with others about, not conflicts and the kinds of
	personal stuff, just because I'm an old man, I don't have the patience for the.
	You don't have time for beefs.
	Yeah, I mean, I just don't have the attention span for beefs, honestly.
	But the intellectual stuff has always been much more interesting to me, and in trying to understand the left, because I mean, I was Basically a center left Democrat when I first became politically aware, uh, as a young and just because you, I think that's kind of the default and what changed it.
	And I just remember certain experiences that didn't fundamentally change what I believed about race back then, just because you just sort of blocked it off.
	You had a sort of mental awareness that this was just a direction you don't go down.
	And I think that's how most people get through the day.
	So, for example, I mean, this is a petty childhood story, but it's just something that sticks with me.
	I remember they were busing these kids from Irvington or one of these pretty bad cities, Newark, Jersey, at a school where my school was going to do basketball practice.
	And for some reason, These black kids started throwing rocks and stuff at the bus, nothing like crazy or anything like that.
	And we're just screaming racial insults and all this stuff.
	And we'd never like seen these people before.
	I mean, there was no reason for any, any of this.
	And there was an instinctive feeling of us and them, but not to say that there weren't black kids on our team.
	There were, but you know, these, these other guys didn't seem to care.
	It was, there was a lot going on in terms of rap, in terms of race, in terms of Class in terms of how you could deconstruct this and break apart what's really going on.
	But as.
	Young man kind of observing this, you say, well, this this is interesting and I see what's happening here.
	But I'm not going to think about it.
	I remember like very consciously saying, well, I'm just not going to go down this path because if I start thinking about these things, it's going to lead to bad situations.
	And it's sort of the same thing with college where.
	What I went through is very different from what you went through and is far, far different from what people are going through now, where I think the explicit objective of indoctrination and censorship, the idea that we're going to, you have to believe these things and we're going to enforce it through overt repression.
	That is different than what even existed 10, 15 years ago.
	The question for us, and I think the question that really the whole movement may depend on, is how many, and I don't know the answer yet, I mean frankly we don't really have the data, although what we have now it doesn't look that promising, the question is how many people are going to be fed these things and revolt against it because the arguments just aren't there anymore.
	I think it was John Derbyshire, I'm hoping I'm not misquoting him, but he was saying about the civil rights movement that everyone, absolutely everyone, and I think this is close to a quote, Believed that once these restrictions were lifted on blacks that they would instantly become.
	White Americans essentially that they would be equal on every front because this was not.
	The only reason they were in this position was because of state repression.
	And.
	Now that it's been a half century more.
	What we're dealing with this and the problems are not only.
	They're not getting better.
	They're getting worse.
	And racial relations are getting worse.
	And the American people are less united than they were then.
	You start questioning the things that really are not supposed to be questioned, because when you think of what America is today, what it represents, what all of its institutions are dedicated to defending, the civil rights movement is far, far more important than the Revolutionary War.
	Yeah.
	of the other things that we would consider. I mean, what is George Washington to an American today?
	Yeah. I mean, you could do whatever you want. People would be like, whatever. You know,
	you could desecrate his grave. You could burn the flag. You could have a protest at Mount Vernon.
	You could burn Mount Vernon to the ground. No one would care. But if you, I mean, if somebody did
	the slightest thing to the MLK monument, which I think was made in China appropriately enough,
	somebody would be the end of the world. And you see it with the selective law enforcement,
	you see with crime, you see with everything else. But what needs to be taken away from all this is
	that you are dealing with a.
	Faith, I think Stephen Jay Gould said You know the famous author the mismeasure of man, which supposedly was the book that debunked racial differences Of course, it was filled with errors and even the New York Times Basically admitted that he forged his research.
	Yeah, she said something to the effect of before breakfast every morning you have to recite that all people are equal and it's like well, this is a catechism of faith and The only way you can believe in human equality is if you take it on faith.
	But we're in an age where, frankly, much more elevating and serious faiths have been deconstructed and disgraced, so I don't understand why I have to accept this one.
	In college, I remember with African American history, I was taking a class, civil rights movement, all this kind of stuff, and it was fairly objective, although You know, just because now I don't even know if they would let you do this.
	But even back then, you would get some of the arguments from the Southerners who were writing against what was happening in terms of integration and everything else.
	And just hearing these arguments for the first time.
	Oh, wait, they actually had reasons for this.
	It wasn't just hate, all capital letters.
	There was there was something that they were trying to defend here.
	And I remember at the end, the professor sort of let the mask off, basically for the first time in the class, and was showing us all this stuff, and he said, you know, if you don't rebel against this, if you don't immediately rally to this side, there's something wrong with you.
	That was an exact quote.
	And I remember thinking to myself, well, either he's wrong or I'm wrong, because even though I didn't think much about race at the time, All of the so-called battlegrounds of the civil rights movement, your Montgomery's, your Birmingham's, your Selma, it's very hard to argue that these cities are better off now than they were then.
	Yeah.
	Once the demonstrators and the reporters left, I mean, these essentially, these are wastelands.
	And you think of cities, I can think of cities in North Jersey, I can think of cities in Virginia where You read about these places that have been settled for centuries and you read about how important they were, even, even in things like the revolution.
	And you wouldn't dream of going to them now.
	I mean, you wouldn't, the idea of, of even being in the city for a day is something akin to terror.
	It's sort of like in Tom Wolfe's book where you'd one wrong, wrong turn.
	Sorry, Bonfire of the Vanities, where one wrong turn takes you essentially into an entirely different world.
	Yeah.
	And that world just keeps growing and growing and growing.
	And now it's all around us.
	And so the question becomes, how many people are going to see this and have the vocabulary to speak against it?
	But how many people are going to double down and say, OK, we have to hold to this faith even tighter?
	It's almost like a religious test.
	Like all these racial problems are a kind of test of faith.
	And if we cling ever more tightly to egalitarianism, this will somehow prove our virtue.
	In regards to what you were talking about with Chile, too, I remember again, studying third world developmental economics, and they were talking about how they would try to use tariffs to build up the domestic economy, but then things would usually fall apart because you would build these industries that couldn't compete on the world level once you lowered tariffs.
	This has been a problem for a lot of Latin American nations.
	Argentina, of course, was a first world country.
	There's an article on American Renaissance about the racial decline of Argentina, but there were also just some bad policy choices.
	But in regard to what you said about Chile, I remember the professor just, as an offhand comment, said whatever one might say about Chile after Pinochet.
	You could expect ordinary things to work, things like automatic doors or mass transit, the sort of things that in a developed country you take for granted.
	Whereas in Argentina, there was always something was always breaking down.
	Something was always the things that you rely on to work just wouldn't work.
	You walk into an automatic door because it doesn't open for you, that kind of thing.
	Yeah, I've got a great story on that, actually.
	I've spent a lot of time in Chile.
	Oh, that's good.
	This is just one professor's memory, but I'd like to hear your story on that.
	At one point when I was living in Chile, You know, the Argentine economy was doing another, you know, horrific backflip for whatever freaking reason.
	And in this particular season, Argentines were just coming to Chile en masse to buy stuff because, and I'm not an economist, I have no idea how this happened, but it, like, somehow became cheaper to, like, for Argentines to go to Chile, buy a washing machine, and, like, ship it back to Argentina than to just buy a washing machine in Argentina.
	So there were a few months where you'd go to shopping malls and there'd just be these huge gaggles of Argentines buy-in.
	And I mean, I'm not just talking about clothes or shoes, but washing machines and refrigerators and enormous television sets and all of this stuff.
	And I was outside in the parking lot, I must have been smoking a cigarette or something, and this group of Argentines have this shopping cart loaded up with stuff.
	And they're in the parking lot and they try and leave the parking lot with the shopping cart.
	They must have been parked on the street or something.
	And the wheels seize up, you know?
	And they're like, what?
	What is going on?
	And they're like flipping out.
	They can't figure out why the wheels on this thing have just magically stopped working.
	I can tell that they're confused and they don't know what to do.
	So I explained to them.
	I'm like, oh, listen, it's, you know, to prevent the theft of the carts, you know, the wheels seize up when you leave the area.
	And they're like, what?
	I was like, yeah, I mean, come on, everybody knows.
	Everybody knows this.
	They're like, how does that even work?
	And I was like, oh, geez, I don't know.
	I think there's something to do with magnets.
	But like, Jim, I'm not an engineer.
	Like, I don't actually know how it works.
	But they'd never encountered anything.
	Anything like that in Argentina.
	And these, I mean, these were adults too, and they were just blown away that some random shopping mall in Chile, this wasn't even in Santiago, the capital, you know, had the technology and the resources to have like a magnetic anti-cart theft system in place.
	They were really quite befuddled.
	It was a really illuminating moment.
	I think what a lot of Americans are confronting now We had this civilization that was given to us, and we were never really told what it took to build.
	Even my generation wasn't really told.
	We were just kind of given it.
	It was taken as an assumption.
	And maybe to take the white fragility critique and put a different spin on it, the idea of whiteness as being normative, part of that Whiteness as being normative means that you expect certain things to just exist.
	You expect the bureaucracy, even though it may be annoying, not to be completely incompetent or corrupt.
	You expect things generally to work as they should.
	You expect power to be on.
	You expect food to be at the grocery store.
	You expect public places not to be completely annihilated by trash and crime.
	And you expect people to obey traffic laws, things like that.
	When you travel abroad, of course, you very quickly realize that this is not the norm.
	That, in fact, this is a very, very small part of the world where you can expect these kinds of things.
	And now, for the first time, you have this sense of a sort of gathering darkness around the first world where things that we could take for granted, we no longer can.
	And it's even hitting the things that You know, for the first time, all the dystopian doomsayers are starting to sound a little prescient.
	Like the idea that you go to the grocery store and they just don't have certain kinds of food anymore.
	Right.
	That's just happening now.
	And that never used to happen.
	And I know COVID and China and supply chain disruptions and Russia's invasion of Ukraine and all these other things.
	But you get the sense that this is just like this problem is just never going to be solved.
	You have the same thing with California when they keep talking about the power grid.
	Same thing with Texas.
	There are all sorts of really basic problems that the ruling class just doesn't.
	It's not that they don't have answers to.
	It's just sort of a impatience with you for noticing the problem.
	I think the White House that somebody asked him about the problem of baby formula now.
	I mean, I and I don't say this lightly.
	If women can't breastfeed, that's very bad.
	But I would say, you know, don't use formula unless you've got to.
	But for some people, there's no other choice.
	And they said, well, people are hoarding it.
	And it's like, well, once and they're passing laws saying, oh, we're going to make sure that people aren't using exploitative fuel prices.
	And it's once you have governments talking in the language of the problem is hoarders, the problem are people hiking up prices and taking advantage.
	You're starting to slip into this language of, well, our plan is right.
	It's just the wreckers.
	It's the spies.
	It's the saboteurs who are making everything wrong.
	And this has been.
	The default for race for a very long time where they implemented these policies.
	And now we're beginning to see that a lot of the intellectual support for these policies just doesn't exist.
	So, for example, if you look at Brown v. Board, which people a lot of people are very.
	Worried about because they think of row can be repealed These generic Republicans secretly deep down hate school
	integration right liberal fantasy but
	You look at the actual arguments that were advanced in this case
	Again, there's a article on American Renaissance called the true story of Brown v. Ward and things like the doll studies that they used where the black kids would pick the white dolls.
	And this was taken as important, significant evidence that they had a deep seated self-esteem problem that was caused by segregation.
	And then of course, duplicate the experiment after it, and it doesn't, you know, you get the same results.
	A lot of the evidence provided and a lot of the assumptions that were made just aren't true.
	There's nothing there.
	And, but instead of readjusting to the new evidence, we are so, we in, in terms of the entire Western world and those who rule us are so committed to this path that I am convinced that there is nothing, literally nothing that can happen.
	Which will force them to change course.
	And this idea of liberal befuddlement goes back to the very beginning.
	I mean, Lyndon Johnson famously complained that blacks were rioting when they should be grateful to him for all that he had done for them.
	But of course, anyone who had any basic understanding with race would understand that, look, if you're raising expectations to a certain level and then it's not immediately delivered, And also the fact that if you are undermining the foundations of the social order and essentially giving people license to commit crimes, property destruction, you're going to get more of it.
	And if you've essentially taken away the moral foundation for why the United States should exist and why the law should be enforced and why we do have things like private property and why these things are okay, when you remove all those things, you're not going to be able to defend them anymore.
	You're not going to be able to defend them intellectually, and ultimately you're not going to be able to defend them physically.
	The thing that, when you reference Pat Buchanan, of course, I can't help but think to his famous speech at the Republican National Convention, where he talked about the Marines confronting the mob at the L.A.
	riots.
	Right, this is in 92, yeah, shortly after the Rodney King riots.
	The great line was, the mob screamed and the mob cursed, but it had found the only thing that could stop it, which was force.
	Rooted in justice and rooted in justice and backed by moral courage and moral courage.
	What that really means is not.
	The kind of moral courage where you are defying.
	Those in power where you're you're making a challenge just to be get media attention or something like moral courage is not saying like oh, society is unjust because everybody says stuff like that.
	Moral courage is saying.
	The framework that you are pushing on us, this entire system of morality that you are pushing on us is wrong.
	And not only am I not going to accept it, I am going to act against it.
	And I'm going to keep telling you you're wrong because all you have to offer are essentially declarations of empty faith that aren't backed by anything.
	Unfortunately, if you look at polls now, when it comes to college students, The meme of the based Generation Z that is going to come and save us is not true.
	I mean, the data is just not there.
	However, I will say that those who turn to the right in this time are going to be more mature and more grounded than those who were conservative in a previous age because they have so much more to overcome just to get to where they are.
	And I also think they have a kind of Cynicism, which is desperately needed now, where when the college dean or the professor or their diversity inclusion and equity officer gives you the speech, you know, they're lying.
	You know, they're just reciting a script that has no facts behind it.
	And that kind of cynicism is what you need combined with a kind of almost insane idealism that a different kind of world is possible.
	I mean, how many?
	I think everybody's journey to this kind of thing.
	Very few, maybe our boss would be an exception, but I think very few read certain books and then changed their mind about stuff.
	It's generally you have certain experiences that lead you to those books and then you start to connect the dots.
	But you got to have that certain questioning in your mind about, wait a minute, things aren't quite adding up.
	The system doesn't work the way they're telling us.
	And for a lot of people, I think that's going to happen in college just because what college and not it wasn't like this when I was there, but it's certainly like that now.
	It's just all about race and white guilt.
	And so anyone who even questions that somewhat is going to be led down a path of, you know, what our opponents would call radicalization, but what I would call militant common sense.
	Yeah, well, you know, something you're sort of dancing around here is that liberalism has no predictive power.
	Like, if you have all of these liberal presuppositions about stuff, you can't actually use those axioms to accurately predict what will happen in five years or ten years.
	And you can, of course, make no impression on liberals.
	You can ask liberals stuff like, you know, how long will we need affirmative action for until, you know, blacks are on parity with whites in terms of income or something.
	Or you can ask them, you know, it's like, how long before, like, Sub-Saharan Africa is like as wealthy as say Eastern Europe and they I mean and in
	both cases they're just like oh you know impossible to say who knows you know there's there's no
	there's no way of determining that question like there's no there's there's no way of figuring
	out what the answer would be because again like liberalism isn't really rigorous when it
	comes to when it comes to data and such and and meanwhile you know race realists are really good at
	predicting how things are gonna go Yeah, we're like, um...
	American Renaissance actually wrote a lot about No Child Left Behind when it was passed.
	They would say, yeah, this just can't work.
	You can't just use a carrot and a stick to just increase you know, test scores or grades or anything like that. Like,
	there's just no way that this can happen. You know, and same with, you know, all sorts of
	like crime and stuff of like, you know, some liberals will maintain that like, you know,
	the cops are the cause of the violence, or like the prisons are the cause of the violence. It's
	like, you know, if you take away cops and if you let people out of prison earlier, like everybody will
	be happier and as, and since they are happy, they will commit less crime. And it's like,
	well, it doesn't seem to be really working. Like, I'll...
	All the data that we have seems to suggest that that is not the issue.
	And again, it just doesn't interest them.
	That's a very core point.
	It goes as far as to say if anyone takes anything away from this, the idea that liberalism has no predictive power.
	Yeah, and that's something I was really interested in, just as a nerd reading science fiction stuff.
	What is coming?
	And like, how do we know what will or what will not come next?
	And realizing that there's like, no, liberals just never have.
	They just can't really predict anything.
	Well, they have to.
	I hope I'm not reading too much into it.
	And Mr. Taylor, and I think the lesson may be finally taking as I'm becoming respectable in my middle age about not Not assuming the motives of our opponents, taking them at their word, at least in terms of argument, and not trying to read their minds, essentially, because you can't do that.
	That said, we have to seriously consider, is it even possible that you could present evidence that would change their minds, even when it comes to something like a public policy decision?
	Because right now the federal government keeps doing things and funding things that it's not just that we know it won't work.
	It's not just that we know that it'll go on forever.
	It's that we know it actually makes things worse.
	Like there's no, there's no argument to be had.
	The data is all there.
	And yet, despite this, we're just going to keep doing it and doing it and doing it.
	And occasionally you'll see some.
	Liberal kind of poke his head up, but he's trying to stay, you know, within the line, so to speak.
	And I'll say something like, well, since 2020, most of the violence that's been unleashed has been in black communities, but it just kind of falls flat because it has no moral significance.
	And I think one of the biggest problems that we're dealing with is that, especially if you're talking about race realism, as opposed to white advocacy or whatever other term you want to call it.
	You can't fight a faith with numbers.
	And essentially what we're fighting is a faith.
	We're fighting something that is blind to everything but itself.
	And so whatever happens, whatever, if you advance an argument, the response is not going to be, oh, let me reconsider my assumptions about the world.
	The response is going to be, how can we prevent this argument from circulating?
	Which is what leftists Mostly do now.
	I mean, that seems to be the function, the function of the American press deliberately at this point seems to be to keep people as ignorant as possible.
	And yet, like you are not allowed to hear certain things and you are not allowed to hear these things, not because they are false, but because they are true.
	And it could get in the way of what we're trying to do.
	But if you build up enough of these lies, Eventually things really do start breaking down and we are starting to see, well not starting to, we've been seeing it for a long time in terms of criminal justice, in terms of public infrastructure, in terms of just the inability of this country to do things that it could do a half century ago with far less advanced technology.
	I think the big problem is assuming that people are going to spontaneously react to this, which is really how we started this episode.
	If you are confronted with lies and if you're confronted with things that upon reflection, you know, did not that are untrue because you see them, you have evidence and you have data on your side.
	Unfortunately, you're probably still in a minority because most people just don't think that way.
	One last thing to indulge in terms of like college and everything else.
	When I picked up a postgrad degree at American University, I remember there was I had to do classes on all sorts of stuff for my master's, but there was some one credit class on these things called the United Nations Special Rapporteurs.
	And if you don't know what these guys are, basically the human, of course, has no real power, but it has a lot of taxpayer money because for what, even though the Republicans are forever vowing to defund it, they keep sending it more money.
	And what these guys do is they just kind of travel around.
	And accumulate evidence of so-called human rights violations and what the government needs to do to prevent it.
	And I remember I had to write a paper on something proving that there was a human rights violations in some Latin American countries.
	So all I did was I looked at Nicaragua and the status of Afro Nicaraguans and amazing.
	You won't believe it that they tend to be at the bottom when it comes to.
	Earnings and crime and all the other Things of socioeconomic status that we see over and over again with different racial groups, and all I did was write something about how this inherently proves that there's an human rights violation, and this justifies international action to change it, until Afro-Nicaraguans were at the same socioeconomic level as everybody else.
	And I got my A, and that was it.
	This is complete nonsense, but like, you know, it was written, it was like written at the time I was doing YWC, so like, Like, I knew this was nonsense, even as I was doing it, but I also knew that it would be instantly accepted and unquestioned.
	And if the premise of liberalism, and don't give me any distinctions about classical or modern, whatever, it all leads to the same place.
	Ideas get taken to the logical conclusion.
	If the idea is that all groups are equal and can only be unequal because of government oppression, and leaving aside the question of If this is now an Asian supremacist society, if we believe that.
	Leaving that aside.
	There is no chance that.
	Even with all the programs we have now that we're going to have racial equality as expressed in statistics in five years and 10 years and 50 years.
	And so what's going to happen?
	It's not going to force people to challenge their assumptions because challenging their assumptions at this point is like challenging their basic identity.
	What it means to be good or evil.
	I think what a person thinks about race is far more important to most people than what they think about God.
	And I'd include most clergymen in that too.
	But they, they're just going to come up, they're just going to move the goalposts.
	They're just going to say this is an argument for even more government intervention.
	This is just an argument for more social experimentation.
	And once you say that egalitarianism is a given, That this is something we have to accept on faith.
	It basically opens the door for unlimited government.
	And we're starting to see at least a few trickles of awareness among this and the conservative movement.
	We had the age of entitlement, which essentially argued that civil rights act and the regulatory state basically displaced the constitution as far as how this country is actually governed.
	I think that's true, but.
	Ultimately, you have to go a little bit farther, and you have to challenge the essential premise of egalitarianism.
	And I think for a lot of people, it's gonna come sort of the same way it came to us, where you're put in these environments.
	You didn't ask for this.
	You may not be interested in a race.
	You may not care about any of this, but this is increasingly what our society is obsessed by.
	And at a certain point, I think you do Make a choice like a switch in your head where you say I am going to live according to these lies and keep my head down.
	Or I am going to defy this either silently or actively.
	I don't know how many people are going to take that latter option, but basically the fate of Western civilization depends on the answer because they're not letting you.
	You're not allowed to be neutral anymore, and they've taken that option.
	Wait, you could be neutral like.
	When I was in school.
	I mean, you didn't have to do any of this stuff.
	I really didn't do any of this stuff.
	I didn't do a heck of a lot in terms of activism when I was in college.
	I didn't think very much about race at all.
	I mean, I was a libertarian, but now, I mean, this is all politics is becoming more and more of a racial headcount.
	And I think the big problem too, for conservatives, maybe you want to speak on this in terms of how you think people understand it.
	I think the conservative response is.
	Tucker Carlson was saying this in his response to the Buffalo shooting and everything else that race-based politics of any kind is bad, and essentially we should fall back on our common identity as Americans.
	But that just begs the question, what does it mean to be an American?
	Who started America?
	Who defined its institutions?
	What was America supposed to be?
	Who is America for?
	Because American seems like much more of a fuzzy category than race does at this point.
	Yeah, I mean, the lines are certainly much clearer with race.
	I mean, I guess I'm not totally certain what exactly your question is, but I mean, very few people within the United States... Basically, can we fall back on an American identity or is that gone now?
	No, no, there's no... that's not gonna happen.
	What I was gonna say is very few Americans Very few people living within the United States would put American as their number one identity.
	Only the Scots-Irish, technically.
	Okay, yeah, so there you go.
	But I mean, it's not even necessarily that somebody will care more about their race than their nationality, but it's a whole heap of other stuff, too.
	I mean, I'm sure there are tons of Tons of people who are in some way sexually deviant, who care way more about being gay than American, or who care way more about being trans than American.
	And there are also, I mean, people, people's, you know, partisan affiliation is also a huge deal to them.
	I mean, they're definitely, I'm not even sure if they would necessarily admit this, but it's, it's really easy to just, like, encounter people, like, on Twitter and in real life.
	You know, all over the place, who care a lot more about being a Democrat or a Republican than they care about being an American.
	Like, they're sort of a Democrat first, or kind of a GOP first.
	They have that sort of attitude.
	Like, that's what they talk about.
	Yeah.
	Well, there was a study that showed, and this is pretty interesting, that opposition to marrying somebody of a different party is far greater than somebody of a different race.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's not like, and the thing that's interesting, and obviously there's the studying question, there's some work on this, where basically, insofar as you can empirically read someone's mind, Both parties have created a racialized outline of what the other party looks like.
	So for Republicans, it is sort of assumed that the Democrats are the party of non-whites, whereas for the Democrats, it is assumed that the GOP is the party of whites, even when the Democrats are themselves white.
	And this study basically found that Even though race is clearly one of the driving motivations behind all this, even though it's the undercurrent of a lot of these debates we're having, in terms of how it actually manifests, it really does come down to partisan identity.
	And this is also one of the problems, too, where people say, oh, well, national divorce, and we're going to break it up and everything else.
	Well, the Republican-Democrat distinction doesn't really break down into States.
	Even the red state, blue state thing is very simplistic.
	Yeah, it's rural-urban.
	You can go with rural-urban divide.
	You can look at a bunch of other things, but it's scattered all over the place.
	There's not like a certain block.
	I mean, you can point to maybe a few blocks, but I think even with those things, it's a function of being isolated from some of the The conduits that give the left this power, you know, having universities in the area, having government employees in the area, having big corporations that center in that area, and then people of a certain class are attracted to that and start changing it and everything else.
	I mean, these there's not really a way out here.
	Except to overcome the essential lie.
	I mean, you actually do have to take back the universe.
	You either have to take back the universities and the media or make them completely irrelevant.
	Create an alternative to them.
	Maybe that can be done with corporate America because at this point.
	I mean, if you were hiring somebody with a college degree, that's almost a guarantee that they're going to be bad for you.
	I mean, what do they even know how to do other than like think of new ways to sue you for being racist?
	Well, and education polarization is kind of like the new, a budding trend, I guess, in American politics, where increasingly it's the Democrat Party is college educated and the Republican Party is non-college educated.
	And they say that that's actually part of the reason why Hispanics are drifting to the GOP, but blacks are not.
	Hispanics are actually the least educated race In America, because blacks have all of these NGOs and charities and affirmative action and the historically black colleges.
	They actually go to college quite a bit.
	Well, you know, Hispanics have, you know, don't have this kind of NGO infrastructure to get them into higher ed.
	But amusingly enough, Hispanics still on average earn more than blacks, even though they're less educated.
	Because the schools that blacks go to are bad, or they get into schools that they shouldn't have, that they underperform at, because they were just, you know, catapulted into it via quotas and affirmative action.
	Yeah, if you look at what happens to blacks after they get their degrees, it generally doesn't go very well, particularly once you go to elite law schools and something like that, and then you look at the performance.
	Yeah, it's pretty rough.
	I can't quite recall how we How we got on this subject?
	Well, it all comes down to the essential conflict between ideals and reality.
	And unfortunately, you know, one of the things that gets thrown around social media now is the side that wants to rule will always triumph over the side that just wants to be left alone.
	The side that is basing its arguments That bases itself on data and reason is always going to lose to the side that bases itself on faith.
	And what we're essentially confronting is a faith.
	And you have these incidents in your life where you see through it.
	You see that what you are being taught is not true.
	You see with every rational faculty you have that this is leading to disaster.
	You see that this entire program that has been set up.
	Is not delivering the results it's promised.
	In fact, it's making things worse.
	But the alternative to it is to essentially join the one thing in this society that you were not allowed to do, because I think Jonathan Bowden said it was basically peace be upon him.
	Basically that.
	Far right quote unquote politics and religious fundamentalism, at least Christian.
	Are the two things that liberalism could not subsume into itself.
	I mean, we've seen how opposition to capitalism can itself be turned into a product and sold back to you.
	But they can't do that with identitarianism, with white identitarianism, certainly.
	And to some extent, they can't do that with at least some brands of Christian religious identity, although they've done a pretty good job as far as taking over the mainline churches.
	And so you're left with a pretty terrible choice, which is basically.
	You either keep going along on the path of lies or you align with the one group that is essentially cast out of.
	Western society and which, ironically, is the only force that could preserve the West in any meaningful way.
	I mean, this is really gets to the heart of the problem is that I think the maybe this is the source for hope, though.
	Anyone who's coming into this now, anyone who's coming through the way schools are now, who goes through critical race theory in elementary school, who deals with high school, who deals with college, and gets filled with all this nonsense, and who knows it's a lie, you're going to come out understanding that the people who run things don't like you, and you're going to have a sense of your white identity, even as a negative, just because it's been kind of Pumped into you and then that can at least turn.
	I mean you if you have a negative white identity, but you at least are conscious of it that can be turned into something productive in the future.
	Whereas I think a lot of older Americans they are still living in this time where America was 90% white where every problem we had just required a bit of technocratic tinkering and maybe where they're living now in retirement communities or anything else still reflect those demographics and so They can afford to live in that past, whereas the rest of us can't.
	There was a study, I believe, that just about every person's core ideals are formed by the time they're 25 years old.
	Mr. Taylor would be an exception to that, I guess, but most people... Yes, I think he kind of started changing his mind about this stuff when he was about 40, I believe.
	I think it was in his 30s, but still certainly after well after 25.
	Yeah, but most people, I mean, once you once you're turned out of university, that's the way you are.
	And once you get to a certain age, you think about that.
	I mean, it makes sense.
	I mean, when you were 22, you really didn't know what you were doing.
	I mean, you were just kind of saying stuff and reacting.
	You don't really have a core worldview until you've been through some stuff and think about things for yourself.
	And right now we're we're sort of throwing I hope your hope is correct.
	into this system that is teaching them shame and guilt and hatred and it's
	going to break a lot of people but pressure creates diamonds so I do think
	that there is some room for hope on that front. I hope your hope is correct.
	I'm known for being the pessimist but I actually am optimistic just
	because while I don't think that there will ever come to a point where the
	system collapses quote-unquote The system, we're on the wrong track, and as you pointed out, there's the conflict between reality and the ideal is now so great that things that we used to be able to take for granted are now breaking down.
	And it can break down to the point where it's self-sabotaging.
	And it's not just that things may, I don't think it's going to collapse in some sort of a Mad Max type way, but I think it's going to collapse in terms of there will no longer be a functional society that we can really talk about.
	And so people will be able to build alternatives.
	So it's not a question of striking up the system or anything like that.
	It's just sort of a question of building, becoming what you want to see in the world and doing it that way.
	And just sort of stepping back and letting this insane machine tear itself apart.
	And on a personal level, of course, it's getting so much harder to remain within the social elite as a member of good standing without going along with obviously insane ideas.
	I mean, you have to you have to be willing to say things like men can get pregnant and get.
	and give birth. You have to be willing to say things like, yeah, the schools of East
	Yeah.
	St. Louis would be performing just as well as the schools in whatever white community
	if we just tripled the funding. And then say the same thing a year later after you've tripled
	the funding and nothing happened. You have to be willing to say things that if we abolished
	the police, crime would go down. You know, all evidence of the last couple of years to
	Well, liberalism, a big part of liberalism is also never having to say you're sorry.
	You know, like liberals never admit to having been wrong about about anything.
	Yeah, that's one of their that's one of their strengths in terms of holding power.
	But I think the system now is more effective than it's ever been.
	Terrifying, really.
	And its ability to maintain power within the society.
	And to fend off any challenges, as we saw with the response to what was getting going after President Trump was elected and some of the movements that were rising then, and how the system just very quickly threw out things that we thought we could take for granted forever, like the norm of freedom of speech.
	How quickly, how quickly that's gone from defining American ideal that everyone can agree on to far right thing that only lunatics support.
	There is a cost to doing that, and the cost is that it can no longer solve technical problems.
	And unfortunately, they're going to look for more scapegoats to try to explain these problems, but at a certain point, you have to question whether blaming, I don't know, white supremacists and hoarders for the reason why prices are going through the roof and why anyone who's under 30 will never own a home, that's going to start to fall flat.
	Now, maybe we'll see a return to the radical left, but that'll probably just exasperate problems even further.
	Yeah, we'll see. You know, you were Earlier you said you're known for being a pessimist.
	I like to think that I'm known for not making predictions unless I'm really, really confident about them.
	I don't know.
	It's very difficult to predict when and if blowback will happen.
	Yeah, and even if there is, if there is blowback, uh, just end it.
	Blowback can happen.
	Blowback does happen, but how and when is just very, very hard to guess.
	I mean, I'm not, I'm not as confident as many others are that the Republicans are going to like sweep into power in the next election, but even if they do, so what?
	Like we send 60 billion to Ukraine instead of 40 billion and we get more performative stuff with them.
	I mean, that's not challenging the system.
	That's not doing anything that people are actually responding to.
	I mean, look at Virginia, where you had ordinary parents who were disgusted with what their kids were learning in school, basically deliver victory to the Republican candidate.
	But did that change the process?
	I mean, did that get CRT out of these schools?
	Seems a little early to be optimistic about those sorts of things.
	It's too early to be sure.
	It's not too early to be optimistic.
	I think it's just too early to know with great confidence.
	Come on.
	Yeah.
	Well, as Lennon said, there are decades in which nothing happens, and then there are weeks when everything happens.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	Yeah, yeah.
	That's my prediction, is that that's true.
	I do think that we are in for interesting times one way or another, and I do think that I used to even on this podcast, even a couple months ago, we were talking about this, whether the ultimate fear is that the end of history will be triumphant.
	And I'm not as sure about that as I once was.
	And that's a good thing.
	So.
	Cool.
	All right, we should really wrap this up.
	But thanks everyone, and Greg will definitely have a show for you next week, and maybe I will, unless I get busy with other stuff, which is the case for the last two weeks, sorry.
	We got a lot of big projects that we are working on right now, and we appreciate the feedback from everyone.
	And again, when people see these sorts of conflicts between what you're told and what the reality is, we want to hear about them.
	Yeah, definitely.
	All right, stay safe out there, guys.

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