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May 16, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
01:21:45
Why Nothing Satisfies The Woke Culture | Wokal Distance

Wokal Distance joins the show to discuss everything from pornography to Caitlyn Jenner and the epidemic of reality never being good enough. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's pretty tough to make sense of our world today.
We've got the former decathlete, the guy on the Wheaties box, may very well become the first female governor of California.
We are told that we need to get race entirely out of our politics, but we're told this by people who view politics primarily as a matter of race.
We are told that we need to be very scientific by people who deny objective truth.
I don't know how to make heads or tails.
I guess they've already succeeded.
One guy who really, I think, is so perceptive about these sorts of things, you may have heard of him, you may well not have heard of him, though, is Wokal Distance.
A great Twitter follow.
You can follow him at Wokal, W-O-K-A-L underscore distance.
You can probably spell that one out.
You can find him on YouTube, but more importantly, you can find him right here today.
Wokal.
First of all, thank you for coming on.
Thank you for having me.
Second of all, I'm trying to reconcile the myriad contradictions that are being foisted upon me by the dominant culture.
And I'm not talking about some radicals in the streets, though I guess they're part of it.
I'm talking about by everything.
By the corporations, by the administrative government, by entertainment, by the whole kit and caboodle.
How am I to make sense of this sort of thing?
Well, I think...
To put it simply, we are living in the postmodern era.
We have moved through modernism and we are now living in postmodernism.
Let's take a nice little way to think about this.
Let's make two points about this.
First off, I don't think postmodernism is good.
I think we should get through it as quickly as we possibly can.
And then I think the second point is to make us a little bit of an understanding of what postmodernism is.
And so I think a good place to start with that is there was a postmodern philosopher named Jean Baudrillard.
And Jean Baudrillard said that we are living in a simulation, in the world of simulacra and simulation.
He wrote a book in, I believe it was 1980, called Simulacra and Simulation.
It's a very difficult read, so...
It can be tough to get your head around.
He said we're living in a hyper-reality where everything is inauthentic.
And I think here's a good way to get your head around it.
Pretend that you and I are living in ancient Rome and you and I are walking along the road and we find some wild strawberries and we go and we pick them and we eat them.
Those strawberries are real.
Now, fast forward to the 1960s, and you and I are still alive because we've discovered the Fountain of Youth.
Yeah, we're like Dr.
Fauci.
You know, the ages come and go, but we seem to remain.
Yeah, we are immortal.
And we're walking along, and we go to the supermarket, and we buy strawberries.
Now, those strawberries are grown in a factory setting, and only the biggest, most beautiful, juiciest, ripest strawberries get picked and given to us.
And they're They only plant the nicest strawberries, the nicest seeds.
So they're real strawberries still, but they're selectively grown strawberries.
They're the pinnacle of what a strawberry could be.
So then you and I sit around and think, and we have all of our knowledge that we had from ancient Rome until 1960, and we say, hey, let's make a strawberry candy.
We're going to distill that flavor of the strawberry, and we're going to put it into a little candy.
So we make the strawberry candy.
Fast forward to the 1970s, you and I think, maybe we could sell more of these candies if we make them a little sweeter.
So we distill the flavor and make it even more powerful than a strawberry is.
We make it ten times as powerful as a strawberry and we add sugar.
Well, fast forward to the 1990s, and the Jolly Rancher company comes along and says, you know, using real strawberries and sugar is expensive.
We're going to use a synthetic strawberry flavor and high-fructose corn syrup.
And they make the Jolly Rancher.
But then the soft drink company comes along and says, we're going to make a soda pop of the strawberry flavored Jolly Rancher.
And then 7-Eleven comes along and 7-Eleven or some other company comes along and says, we're going to make a Slurpee that is flavored like the soda that is flavored like the Jolly Rancher, which is flavored like the candy, which is flavored like the original candy, which is flavored like the genetically modified strawberry, which is flavored like the wild strawberry.
So we're starting with the wild strawberries, and then we move to the perfectly selectively grown strawberry.
Then we go to the candy.
Then we go to the Jolly Rancher.
Then we move to the soda pop.
Then we move to the Slurpee.
And by the time we get to the Slurpee, we're dealing with something that is vaguely like a strawberry, that tastes maybe a little like a strawberry, but isn't really anything like a strawberry.
So my son could go along.
And he picks up the Slurpee and he starts drinking the Strawberry Slurpee.
And as he's walking along the road, he sees these funny kind of red-shaped things in the background, kind of over there.
And he goes and he picks one and he goes, this kind of looks like the little logo on my drink here.
And he takes it and goes, it kind of maybe tastes vaguely like this Slurpee thing, but it's not nearly as good.
I'll drink the Slurpee.
Uh-huh.
That's an example of a simulacrum, of a thing that is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.
And what Baudrillard thought was that everything is kind of like that.
We're dealing with copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of things.
Now, Baudrillard pushes this idea, and he thinks that, for example, we could talk about, I don't know, women.
Back in Rome, there's women and they're just walking around.
Fast forward to the 1960s, and there's women, but we've invented makeup.
So fast forward to the 1970s, and we've invented makeup, and we've invented birth control.
And then fast forward to the 80s, and we have makeup, and we have birth control, and we have breast implants.
Then you go forward to the 1990s, and then you add the Photoshop.
Then you fast forward to Instagram, and you have a woman who is wearing makeup and has a wig on, and she's on birth control, and she has breast implants, and she's got I've got 14 layers of makeup on and she's been photoshopped and on top of that she has a wonderful little filter on and all of a sudden you're so far away from what a regular person looks like that it's more real than real.
It's a woman that nobody could ever aspire to look like.
You could never have the skin tone of a filter.
That doesn't exist.
It's not real.
But it's pointed through to you.
And Baudrillard thinks we're stuck here.
And he thinks we can't ever get back to reality.
And I would like to say that we can.
I think I see where you're going with this.
I was trying to figure out how does the Jolly Rancher relate to Caitlyn Jenner?
But...
You've just explained how the Jolly Rancher relates to Caitlyn Jenner.
Caitlyn Jenner is a hyper-real woman.
She's more woman than a woman.
He is now this appearance of this woman in such an exaggerated and caricatured way.
But Whereas I might think that this is a very strange turn of events, that Bruce Jenner now looks like this kind of exaggerated woman.
What you're suggesting, perhaps, is that we're living in this hyper-real world, so of course we're going to get a Caitlyn Jenner.
Yeah, I would say it kind of works like this.
The movement of the transgenderist movement or the transgender movement, the gender ideological movement, whatever you want to call it, has basically latched on to the symbols of femininity, the symbols of womanhood, and have abstracted those away from the women who actually wore them and have abstracted those away from the women who actually wore them and have turned that into the thing that is So they would say that being a woman is a purely social role.
It's entirely a socially constructed thing, kind of like the presidency or the job of being a lawyer or being a mailman.
So talking to them about a biological woman would be a little bit like trying to talk about a biological mailman.
They would say no.
They would say a woman isn't this biological entity.
A woman is a social role of a person who follows particular norms in a particular society.
So they would say that they've taken all the things that women have added to their arsenal of social signification.
They've taken all the things that women have brought onto themselves – makeup, wearing dresses, using the color pink, having eyeliner – The thing that constitutes the woman is all the symbols and the social role that they play.
It's got nothing to do with the underlying biological reality.
Okay, I'd like to mix metaphors for a second about metaphor.
So what you're saying is, in a sense, we've put the cart before the horse, and to be a little more precise here, we've confused the symbol for the symbolized, for the thing that the symbol is referring to.
Yes.
Baudrillard explicitly states...
anything is the symbols.
The symbols are the whole world.
That's it.
So the underlying reality, he says, rots away.
He says, you can't ever get to the reality because the only thing that you're operating on is the level of symbols.
Every time you look at something, when I look at you, Michael Knowles, I don't see a man or a person.
I see the wedding ring, and that's a symbol of being married.
And I see the jacket, that's a symbol of being at work.
And I see the leftist tears, and that's a symbol of intelligence.
And I see the Michael Knowles show, and that's the symbol of the show.
The underlying person is completely removed.
I can't get to that.
The only thing I have access to is the symbols.
Yes, right.
Okay, this makes sense.
I've wrapped my head around this.
I agree with your observation.
I would say with Baudrillard's observation, but you should take credit for it.
I take credit for all sorts of ideas that I just read in some book somewhere.
Now, we agree that this is what's going on.
Okay, fine.
I want to know, first, how did we get here?
And then, second, and more importantly, how do we get out of it?
Okay, so there's a couple of things that have happened.
In 1993, there was a book written by a man named Stanley Grenz called A Primer on Postmodernism, and he argues in that book that we have moved into the postmodern epoch or the postmodern age.
He says it's as significant to shift as moving from, say, the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.
He thinks we've now moved from the Enlightenment into the postmodern age.
And so...
Baudrillard in 1980 is writing about this.
Now, you have to think he's writing about this in 1980.
And in the 80s, when we have landline phones and network TV, he thinks you are awash in symbols and information to the point where you can't see the real world.
You'd have to wonder what he'd think looking around now, right?
He'd look around now and be like, what?
Right.
So the way that the postmodern person views the world is to say that the thing that we have access to is the signs and the symbols.
Right.
That's what we're walking around in, that everything is socially constructed, including your methods of knowing.
Right?
Science is a particular to them, it is a way of knowing, right?
That's culturally validated, right?
And that there could be other culturally adequate ways of knowing and all that you have is ways of knowing and constructing ideas and constructing knowledge, right?
So they would say that it's, that what we call, for example, science is a sort of Here's a technical term which I'll unpack.
Legitimation by plurality.
And what that would mean is that things are true because there's enough social momentum in society for the society to consider those things to be true.
Pardon my interruption.
But let's say that there's enough momentum in society for society to consider something to be true.
Last time I checked, truth is not based on consensus, right?
I mean, truth is based on objective reality.
Correct.
So they have a different conception of truth.
And a good way to get at that, if you want to really undercut them, here's a nice way to think about it.
It was, I believe, in the 80s or 90s, there was a building built on the campus of Ohio State University called the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts.
And it was a postmodern building.
And so it runs at different angles to itself, so it's not a clean grid.
But You can see bits of the foundation and bits of the infrastructure and the scaffolding poking out at various parts that have doors that lead to nowhere.
And the idea was that all of the architectural norms and patterns and things that we use to understand architecture are random and arbitrary, so why can't we just break all those?
And the nice way to get at how to undercut that's their view, right?
That if it's all arbitrary and socially constructed, we can do that.
And so the question that you might want to ask those people is, Okay, so you made all the lines and the windows and the doors, you put them in arbitrary places, used arbitrary shapes and arbitrary directions.
Okay, did you do that with the foundation?
And the answer is going to be no.
Because much like your ideas about the world, the foundation is the place where the building connects to the world.
And if the place where you connect to the world isn't set on a good foundation, the whole thing's going to collapse.
Right?
Right.
So that's kind of where we're at right now, is that we are beginning – we are in a postmodern world where we're getting – where people are getting away from the reality, where they're in isolated bubbles of information, where – The social pressure is dictating the belief set, nothing to go on with the real world.
And that's the situation we're living in.
This reminds me, I once asked, speaking of the grievance studies sorts of experiments that we were talking about a bit earlier, Peter Boghossian, who is one of the people behind that, once explained to me that intersectionality posits that the only thing that I can know with certainty once explained to me that intersectionality posits that the only thing that I can And I thought this was an interesting key into intersectionality.
And I see there, okay, you need some connection to the world.
You need some connection to reality here.
And so for these woke people in the grievance studies, it can be my resentment or my suffering or my whatever.
But there has to be some link.
Okay, so then...
Right, there's some link here.
You're right.
They won't mess with the foundation of the building, but they're destroying everything else.
People saw this coming in the 1980s.
Very few people, but at least this one guy, saw it coming in the 1980s.
It had been building for a while before that.
But how did you even get to that point in the 80s?
How did you even get to the point where people could see this happening?
Well, I think there's a few things that were going on.
I think Baudrillard was very pessimistic about this.
And as he moves on through his career, he actually wrote a book in 1991 called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
And his whole thing is he thinks, look, the thing that you saw on TV didn't happen.
Something happened, but we don't know what it is, right?
He thinks that it was a show that was put on, right?
He says the United States wants to play the role of the good guy.
And so they're casting Saddam Hussein in the role of the bad guy.
And here we go.
We're going to have a fake war.
That's kind of how Baudrillard sees it.
Now, the thing with Baudrillard that we want to avoid at all costs is Baudrillard accepts the premise that reality is gone, that we can't get to it.
And what we would want to do is we want to look at Baudrillard and say, okay, Baudrillard, you've made some interesting observations about how social abstractions can get away from reality, but that doesn't mean the reality is gone.
It's still here.
Not even Baudrillard is going to step in front of a bus, right?
Right.
If you rewind a little bit, there's some philosophy that's going on in the 60s, 70s, and 80s that really kind of pushes this.
And it comes from a couple of guys, Jacques Derda and Michel Foucault.
And I can't explain those guys in just a few minutes.
But suffice to say that...
How do I put this?
As complicated as their ideas were, what was taken out from their ideas and from their philosophy...
What was abstracted out was the idea that there is no central or correct perspective, that there is no inherent fixed and stable meaning in language, and there is no stable, correct You know, I love the distinction you've made here because you say you can't sum up these radical theorists like Foucault or Derrida in three minutes.
Frankly, I don't think we could sum them up in three years or 30 years.
And frankly, I don't even know if they could sum themselves up in certain things that they said.
But regardless, who cares?
Frankly, I don't even care.
I mean, I'm interested as an intellectual matter what Foucault or Derrida thought, but what I care more about is the effect that they had, what was taken out of their philosophy.
There's a line that people love to quote from Derrida, which is variously translated as, there is nothing outside of the text.
But then Derrida's defenders come in and they say, no, actually, he said, there is no outer text.
And then they're trying to find all these semantic distinctions.
Well...
Pardon my bluntness, who cares?
If the effect of it is that people interpret the man to mean there's nothing outside the text, that really everything is just constructed, everything is a matter of language and we can control language and control the world, then that's what matters to me because that is what engineered my politics.
Yeah, so what happened is these theorists had some kind of interesting ideas, but their ideas were harvested through by activists and were turned against themselves.
When Derrida said there is no outside text, one of the problems that Derrida runs into, and this was pointed out by John Searle in 1983 when he was doing a review of a book called On Deconstruction.
Yeah.
And Searle, he says, look, Derrida's...
One of the Derrida's things is to say that there's nothing that is central.
There's no essence to anything.
There's no inheritance.
There is no...
He attacks logocentrism.
The idea that there's a logos, that's gone.
A logos, meaning the sort of divine logic of the universe.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, right?
In the beginning was the logos, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Right.
And so Derrida says all of these things that we've been talking about, Plato with the forms, essence, God, all of that, he says, is this logocentrism, which he wants to deconstruct.
There's a nice term for it and do away with it.
And he says, and Derrida comes to the conclusion that because there is no central point, all interpretations are endlessly open for reinterpreting and reprocessing.
And Searle...
The analytic philosopher John Searle came along and clocked him and said, look, when you get rid of metaphysics, Derrida, you're buying into the same thing that you're attacking because you want to get rid of metaphysics because you think metaphysics is necessary for us to have truth, for us to have reality.
And what Searle says, and we could nitpick him about this if we wanted to keep some metaphysics around, but he said the classical metaphysics of guys like Plato, of Aristotle, he said, that's not necessary for us to talk about truth.
I hereby declare metaphysics is gone.
Building didn't fall down.
And I still see things around.
You and I can still talk.
Reality is the thing that grants us the objectivity, right?
And while I am a subject, I am causally connected to the world.
So reality is the thing that grants us objectivity.
Derda can attack metaphysics all he wants, but his...
What he thinks that follows from that, and what he was taken as meaning, that there's nothing outside the text, that there's nothing outside of interpretation, that there's nothing outside of context, that everything is purely contextual and defined by its context.
Searle's going to say that's wrong.
And I would toss out also, Derda, if you think things are only differ because of context, differ in virtue of what?
Of the properties that they have?
Of the thing that actually makes them up?
Of the reality, Derda?
Is that what you mean?
So, Searle points out that Derda's whole philosophy is rickety.
It's on stilts.
His blinding insight isn't actually all that insightful.
And what he was taken to mean?
That everything is merely interpretation?
That turns out to be entirely wrong.
Besides which, we could ask a very simple question, which is, if everything is entirely interpretable, why should we accept the interpretation that everything is entirely interpretable?
Right, right, right.
Why should I accept your interpretation?
This reminds me of every freshman philosopher who rips the bong a little too hard and says, you know, man, there is no truth.
And you say, okay, well, with what authority are you convincing me that you're Statement is objectively true, namely that there is no truth.
You remind me too of this line from C.S. Lewis, which I love where he says, I'm paraphrasing, he writes better than I talk, but he says that the atheist can no more blot out God than the lunatic can blot out the sun by writing the word darkness on the walls of his padded cell.
And I love that image.
So Derrida says, no, the subjective reality, it's gone.
And you say, well...
I don't know.
Sun's still shining.
Everything building still standing.
It looks real to me.
Yeah.
So they've taken Dara.
Dara wasn't enough to do it, though.
They needed somebody else.
They needed Michael Foucault.
And as much of people have tried to nuance him and say he wasn't really saying the things that they said he was saying, I kind of think he was.
And what Foucault was arguing was that what is considered to be truth is Truth is a status that we bestow on ideas, socially.
It's a social status, like saying, you know, president is something that we bestow on Joe Biden by virtue of an election, or prime minister is something we bestow on Justin Trudeau by virtue of an election.
Truth is something that we bestow on ideas by virtue of our social institutions, right?
And so he's...
That idea that truth is a product of discourses and power, that truth is a social entity that is created using power via discourse, the way we talk and discuss things, that idea took hold.
And so all of a sudden, you have these people on the one hand who say, everything is just context.
We can reinterpret things endlessly.
And then you have another people call on and say, all of the ideas that we have are really just a product of discourse and of power.
And now you can do two things.
One is you can, every time someone says, you know, I think that, I don't know, lower taxes are good.
They're going to come along and say, that's a power move.
You're saying that.
Yeah, yeah.
And everything is viewed through the lens of power.
But not only is everything viewed through the lens of power, it's also endlessly reinterpretable.
Yeah.
Right?
So when everything can be endlessly reinterpreted and everything is seen as a mask for power, all of a sudden you can see the problems that crop up.
And you can see this tying it back to the Caitlyn Jenner thing.
When someone says, look, I don't think the trans women who are biologically male should be allowed to compete in women's sports.
What they'll tell you is, the Foucauldian answer is, you don't really care about women's sports.
You don't watch the NBA. This is about controlling women's bodies.
So that's the power thing.
And then they'll say, now here is the reinterpretation of the symbols, is to say, look, The idea of what a woman is is we can pick what words mean, we can decide what things mean, and we can reinterpret the idea of a woman to refer to the social role.
You do both of those things at once, and all of a sudden women's sports goes from people with a particular biology being able to compete with each other on a fair playing field to people who are in a particular social role.
Playing against each other regardless of their biology.
And you can see this.
Sarah Silverman did an interesting little thing about it just recently.
She said, well, what about tall women?
What about some women are bigger than other women?
And what she's doing is she's calling on the type of deconstruction that went on in the 70s where they would say...
It's all just context, right?
That's why they say that, who was it recently that said that testosterone, Samantha Bee, on Full Frontal, Samantha Bee said testosterone isn't the thing that makes someone a better athlete.
And what she's doing is she's saying, look, by itself, if I just inject a bunch of testosterone into me, I won't become a great athlete.
Therefore, testosterone isn't the thing that does it.
This is the univariate fallacy, right?
Where you say, because I changed that one, because the one thing by itself isn't enough, that means that you can't make any judgments based upon that.
So saying that testosterone by itself isn't the deciding factor is a little bit like saying bullets have never killed anybody.
They haven't.
They haven't.
They're just you see them sitting there on the table.
You need some metal that's formed into a gun.
You need a barrel.
You need You need aim.
You need oxygen.
You need energy.
Why are you going around spreading this fallacy that bullets are killing people?
You need organs to be ripped up.
I mean, you know, though, I have to say, to give Sarah Silverman and Michelle Foucault some credit here, when we're imagining Foucault to say this, and when we actually heard Sarah Silverman say this verbatim, she says, this isn't about women's sports.
You don't care about women's sports.
The fact is, I don't.
I don't care about women's sports.
I've never watched women's sports.
I guess in the gymnastics of the Olympics or curling or something.
I don't know.
Occasionally if it happens to be on.
Otherwise, I just don't follow it and it doesn't interest me.
Regular sports, you know, like real sports with guys, that doesn't really interest me either.
But what does interest me What does interest me is the conception of truth as eternal and grounded in reality, and the conception of truth as just something socially constructed.
And to your point, you've just made me think of it.
The traditional understanding of truth in our culture, in Christendom, is that Christ is the truth.
And he is standing there before Pontius Pilate saying, I come to give testimony to the truth.
And Pilate, who's not the good guy in the story, right?
You've got the bad guy there.
He cynically asks, what is truth?
As though he were Derrida or Foucault or any of these postmodernists that we see.
And the idea that truth is just this sort of label that we use for popular ideas that the society has come to embrace.
Well, what happens to Christ in the passion narrative?
Christ is scorned, he's abandoned, he is scourged, and he's crucified.
Doesn't sound very popular to me, does it?
Even by his closest friends.
So you've got that conception of truth, which is the one that I go to, and then now you've got this postmodern idea that you've described that No, man.
It's just, you know, whatever we all think is popular and it's about power dynamics.
So I totally see your point that we have transformed.
We have gotten here.
There were particular thinkers going back at least to the 60s that have brought us here.
But it didn't just start in the 60s either.
I know we could be here all day if I keep asking you to go further and further back, but it didn't just start in the 60s.
There were writers in the 30s and 40s and the 1920s and the 1890s.
I hate to ask you to trace centuries of intellectual history in about five minutes, but how did we even get to Derrida?
Well, Derrida was brilliant.
Picking up on Ferdinand de Saussure's idea of structuralism, right?
That's where he comes from, where Ferdinand de Saussure was the first one to say words get their meaning from other words, and those words get their meaning from other words.
Words are just endlessly defined by other words, and the meaning is found in the structure.
And Derrida comes along and says, okay, what structure?
Right?
There's no structure.
It's just words endlessly referring to other words.
And so I think...
Because we could go back forever, I mean, even Nietzsche talks about in The Death of God, he says, who has wiped away the horizon, right?
And he's talking about the demarcations of reality, right?
I think the thing that we need to do right now is we need to get back to the idea of truth as corresponding to reality, that it's not endlessly interpretable and deconstructable.
Even with what you did with Sarah Silverman, there's something you said, well, I don't care about women's sports.
No, but you do care about fairness, right?
Right.
Well, exactly.
I care about fairness and justice and truth and reality.
And what is she doing when she does that?
What she's doing is she's saying, you don't care about women's sports, and that's meant to be interpreted as your care about here isn't an intrinsic concern for the WNBA. Your concern is about power.
No, my concern is about fairness.
I think we're good to go.
I'm going to have whatever testosterone levels I want and he's on steroids.
There's no end point for it.
So I think we have to get back to the idea of truth that it corresponds to the world and corresponds to reality.
We'll get there first.
That's the first thing we've got to do is bring back the objectivity.
If your foundation doesn't have any objectivity to it, when your building meets the world, it's going to collapse.
Well, if your way of thinking has no objectivity in its foundation, when your ideas meet the world, they'll collapse too, right?
So I think that's the first thing to do.
I totally agree.
And the reason I suppose I've asked about this further back intellectual history of where this all comes from is because the problem seems so deeply embedded.
Going back, you know, just to give a very sort of broad sketch, you've got the new left rises in the 60s, right?
Guys like Herbert Marcuse, the father of the new left.
Where does he come from?
He comes from the Frankfurt School and critical theory, which we're now seeing a lot of the emanations of critical theory.
Where does the critical theory come from?
Well, it ultimately goes back to Marx.
What does Marx say he wants to engage on?
the ruthless criticism of all that exists, tearing down everything.
An early discussion of deconstruction, to use the popular word.
And frankly, I think it goes back further than Marx.
So now you're saying we need to ground our sense of the world in reality again.
Well, how do we do that after centuries of this gradual poisoning of our world view?
So if you want to go back, we can talk about Hegel if we have to go back there.
Although, I don't want to talk about Hegel.
I'm not a Hegel fan.
So the way I like to think about this, because people point at what we call critical social justice, which is the term I use, the woke movement, if you will.
They point at it and say, this is updated Marxism.
And I go, kind of not the correct way to think about it.
The kind of way to think about it is Marx kicked Marxism off rolling down a hill.
And as the snowball went, it picked up all kinds of things, right?
What we're seeing right now is a mutated stew of Marxist conflict theory, the critical theory of the 1930s, the new left that kicked off with Marcuse in the 60s.
Derda's and Foucault's postmodern analysis, the way that that postmodern analysis was laundered through queer theory in the 90s via Judith Butler and through post-colonial theory, Edward Said, Homie Baba, Gachari Spivak, all the way up.
And now that thing got toxified and then memefied.
Right?
And it trickled down through tumblers.
So if you think about it like this, here's another nice way to think about it.
Pretend I have a bright light, and the further I get away from the bright light, the dimmer the light gets.
Okay?
I think of if the light is the truth, we're getting away dimmer, but the truth still shines bright.
Okay?
The critical theorists, the post-modernism, is like a rotting chicken.
Okay?
And the more, the further, it just rots and decomposes.
That's all it does.
There was no better thing.
Well, someone will nitpick my analogy and say, well, what about the real chicken?
Give me a break.
Imagine you started with a rotten chicken and then you just let it ferment and keep fermenting and keep fermenting.
It's toxic and toxic and toxic, right?
It's not like the sweet grapes of truth that are fermented into the wine of the modern world.
It's like the rotting chicken of Foucault and Derda that is just degrading into Tumblr-level activism, right?
This is what we're dealing with here, right?
So those ideas got all picked up and were used explicitly for political reasons, and it gets laundered through and dumbed down as it goes.
So there's a sense in which some of these people try to hide and they'll say, "Well, you know, that's not real critical theory." No, but the toxicness of critical theory, when you go back and you read Marcuse's essays on, say, repressive tolerance, it's just as bad then.
It's just more academic, and it's steel-man by really powerful intellect, so it looks like it's a lot better, right?
But it's still rotten right to its core and right to its bones.
So I think what we need to do is that stuff has been allowed to sit and ferment in various areas of Yeah.
Yeah.
in, I mean, it's not even, it's not really even popular in France where it got kicked off.
It really got a hold in English literature departments.
Yeah.
Because when you can reinterpret anything endlessly, boy, that's useful in art.
Right.
All of a sudden I can decontextualize one piece of art with another piece of art and I can put them beside each other and juxtapose them and create a new piece of art.
So reinterpreting things endlessly in the artistic world has some utility and some use.
It allows us to create new meaning.
I want people to do that with art.
I don't want them to do that with the cure for cancer.
I don't want some postmodern person to pull up the ingredient list for HIV drugs and say, we're going to reinterpret this and then market it.
That's bad.
Don't do that.
That's not a good thing.
In the realm of science you saw during the BLM riots and the COVID lockdowns, there was a letter signed by 1,200 public health experts.
They had very fancy degrees.
They had wonderful, really impressive training.
And they said it's bad when conservatives go to church or when they go protest their civil liberties being taken away.
But it is good when BLM goes out and steals Nike sneakers and riots because white supremacy is a lethal public health threat that predates and exacerbates COVID-19.
So you see this language seeping into the science, but it doesn't sound very scientific to me.
They're taking the credibility from their work in, say, immunology.
And they're using that to launder through the BLM activist vision of the world, right?
Yeah.
And and all of the political ideas that are contained within the BLM organization, such as the deconstruction of the family, the abolishing of the police and buying Patricia Guller's five houses.
Right.
These are all the things that are are are part of that.
And I mean, we can we have a little fun with it.
Point is that these these people are in very real ways doing deep damage to to the credibility of science as an institution because they're using it to bolster their credibility in other in other areas.
And this is not appropriate.
This was never what this was was was designed to do.
What I wrote back then was medical experts said COVID-19 meant we have to close businesses, cancel weddings, cancel church, miss funerals and stay at home.
Most of us through tears and broken hearts listened.
And I.
Have and do and did advocate for lockdowns where they were appropriate, where they were necessary.
I think that they were needed in some places.
I think that lockdowns, particularly in the early part of the pandemic when we didn't know what we were dealing with, were entirely justified.
But in that early part of the pandemic, when they were doing that, and downtown Los Angeles filled up with 35,000 people saying, Black lives matter.
And I believe that the life of every black person is important.
I believe that we need to be fair and equally treating everyone.
What a controversial opinion.
Such an unpopular opinion.
But when you have a Black Lives Matter rally and they say, well, this is okay, people are looking around saying, well, wait a second.
You're deciding what spreads and what doesn't based upon what suits your political ideology.
You've politicized your field and now we no longer trust you.
And the cynical sort of attitude of the postmodern theorists has been, yeah, but it was always already political.
That's what they think.
They think everything was political.
So my thing is I have been Very vocally pro-lockdown.
Very, very pro-vaccine.
And when that letter came out, I just looked at this and I said, you people have sold your inheritance of credibility and trust for the mess of pottage of a single rally in LA. And I cannot believe that you did it.
You sold...
Your credibility for nothing.
Well, on the point of the lockdowns and the vaccine, it's funny now to look at it because I think that the state absolutely has a right to certain emergency police powers during a pandemic or something like that.
I think that vaccines have a long history and there are various ways that the state has coerced vaccines and that has perfect standing in American politics.
But the issue is...
That these people who are signing these letters and the Dr.
Fauci's of the world who go on TV and lie to you and say, the masks don't work.
And then five seconds later they say, you need to wear the masks.
I only lied so that my nurses got more masks.
And I'm only slightly paraphrasing him there.
When they squander that credibility, then I say that every time they open their mouths, I become 15% less likely to abide by their lockdown orders or to get the vaccine or use the passport or whatever.
Yeah.
The professor of epidemiology, Seth Prince, S underscore J underscore Prince, P-R-I-N-S, said that public health officials needed to, quote, pick a side.
Can you imagine telling people that we've picked a side?
Yeah.
All of a sudden, people who are like, well, I'm on the other side and I need health care.
Why would I trust you?
Right.
Why on earth?
Right.
take advice from a public health official again.
These people have used their platforms to pick aside and say it should be the goal of public health to abolish the police.
That's from Epielli.
She quoted a graphic that she had originally made for protesters and for police, and she changed it and said, as one of the original creators of this revised graphic, disarm, defund, and abolish.
That's what she said.
All of a sudden, if it's a public health sudden, if you're a police officer and the professor of immunology says, I no longer believe that police should be allowed out and I want to defund, disarm and abolish them.
If you're a police officer or a police chief in a major area and you need information for how to keep your police officers safe, are you going to go to that professor of immunology?
Is that what you're going to do?
No.
So these people have, by deciding to use the platform that they got for healthcare to launder through their political ideas is breaking the credibility of everybody.
And the point here is I think it can't be overstated.
The politicization of everything I'd like to stand up for it.
Sure.
No, I see that point and I think I agree broadly.
But to stand up for these insane leftists for a second, or, you know, I guess it was expressed most concisely by the second wave feminists when they say that the personal is the political, right?
This is where this idea kind of breaks out into the mainstream.
When they say that, they make a real point, which is that My personal life, the way that I interact with my husband as a housewife of the 1970s, the way I interact with my society, the way that I interact with schooling or go to work, that has a political basis to it.
That it rests on certain political premises, rests on a very, you know, political arrangement of society.
It rests on a religious foundation, too.
And I, as a feminist, I'm going to question all of that.
And I'm going to say, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
And I'm going to say, as Simone de Beauvoir said, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre's strumpet and a very famous feminist herself, she said, women should not be allowed to stay at home with the children.
This is a political matter.
If we let women stay at home, the politics will never change.
So we've got to change their personal decisions, coerce their personal decisions, and then we'll have a better polity than we currently have.
I think, just in the most modest way, aren't they making an important point that our private decisions exist in a political context because we're all living in society together?
So, I think...
How do I say this?
There are two ways in which to handle that sentence.
First off, people say, you know, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
Um...
Imagine if we went to, I don't know, found an endangered species like the panda and someone said, we need more pandas.
And I said, the female pandas need a male panda the way the fish needs a bicycle.
This is how the human species repopulates and keeps going.
So I think it's absurd.
If you take it at its best, it could say, well, socially or my value or whatever else, but it really just turns out to...
The idea is sort of an atomistic view of life where I am complete unto myself, disconnected from anything.
And so what they have, the critical social justice has taken a high-low coalition where at the level of the individual, my choices should be absolutely unencumbered.
At the level of society, society has to be adjusted entirely so that— To accommodate me.
To accommodate all of—to accommodate—well, they would say, to be fair, to accommodate everybody living how they—the life which they have constructed for themselves according to their way of knowing, right?
They would say this is liberatory, right?
They think that they are liberating themselves from the clutches of enlightenment liberalism and its demands for objective truth, which is really just a prison, right?
Foucault was once quoted as saying, Someone said, do you want to go to heaven?
And he said, I don't know.
Am I allowed to leave?
Because if I can't leave, it's just a prison.
The self, a gentle automation unchecked by anything is what matters.
So they would say that for everyone.
So they would say they want to liberate us from having responsibilities.
This is why they hate Jordan Peterson so much because they're saying we want to liberate ourselves from having the responsibilities of everyone else and people encumbering on themselves.
And Jordan Peterson comes along and says, "Take on as much responsibility as you can." Right.
But you mentioned here Enlightenment liberalism as sort of that objective standard that they're rebelling against.
But could one not also point to Enlightenment liberalism and say, ah, therein lies the problem.
Because out of Enlightenment liberalism, we get a whole lot of treatises about tolerance.
We get a whole lot of tracts about pluralism.
We get a sort of cracking up, perhaps, of the...
The certainty of the truth.
I mean, this is what Hamlet is about, right?
Hamlet is basically about Martin Luther, as far as I can tell.
It's about the crack up of this monopoly on truth in the West.
And so could one, I'm not saying that I'm saying this, but I suppose I am saying this, that one could look back at this moment and say, rather than the vindication of objective truth, there began this descent into you do you.
I would say two things about that.
As someone who has defended Enlightenment liberalism fairly robustly, I say we have a version of Enlightenment liberalism, which I'm seeking, is one which suffices as a conflict resolution strategy.
The Enlightenment liberal is going to say that when there's a conflict in society, we have particular methods of doing so.
Democracy, the rule of law, applying equally fundamental human rights, and truth, right?
Bye.
Enlightenment liberalism cannot provide your life with the meaning that undergirds it.
It was never meant to do that.
That's not its goal.
Enlightenment liberalism says that there's Muslims and Jews and Christians and atheists and feminists, and these people all need to be able to somehow get along and work with each other.
And the postmodernist comes along and says, aha, why should we follow Enlightenment liberalism?
We can deconstruct all of that.
And then once they've deconstructed everything, all of those conflict resolution strategies are now gone.
I think this is a very good point, but it does require one answer here, which is John Locke, father of liberalism, John Locke, writes the great letter concerning toleration.
And he says, we got to tolerate everybody, you know, because that's how we're all going to, that's how we're going to resolve conflicts and get along in society.
And we're going to tolerate everybody except for atheists.
Atheists have no claim on toleration.
Actually, they cannot be tolerated or the society is going to fall apart.
Today, of course, nobody quotes that part of John Locke, but it seems what he's getting at here is we need to have some common ground.
We need to be standing on some common ground here with regard to morality, ethics, the way we view ourselves in the universe, because if we don't, you couldn't even have that conflict resolution.
Right, and this is kind of part of the problem where we're at with postmodernism, is that the postmodernists are standing on an entirely different thing.
I think part of the problem is that postmodernism only ever spits itself back in redefined and bastardized versions of the concepts that we use, which is why when they say, racism, sexism, and homophobia, we're against those things, and we say… I'm against those things, too.
They have an entirely different set of definitions for what those things mean, right?
So when you say, I'm against, you know, I would say I'm against transphobia.
I don't think that Caitlyn Jenner should be beaten up on the way to buy eggs and cheese and get groceries and do other things that Caitlyn Jenner wants to do.
I think that's not a problem.
By the way, good luck beating up Caitlyn Jenner.
Caitlyn Jenner is the greatest athlete that's ever lived, you know?
I mean, good luck.
You're not going to beat that guy up, you know?
But they would say that transphobia extends even to your thoughts.
There was a paper that was written by, I believe it was Robin, I want to say Robin Nembroff from Yale, who argued that if to avoid using a trans person's chosen pronouns, you use their name, so if I say Caitlyn Jenner instead of she, that that's still a subtle form of transphobia because I haven't used the opportunity Because I've used the opportunity where I would have normally used a pronoun to sub it out,
and in doing so, I have failed to affirm Caitlyn Jenner's female identity, right?
The Enlightenment liberal would tell you to toss off with that and get out of here.
But the postmodernist would say no.
And so you're right.
The core assumptions of the postmodernist are inherently radical social constructivism of absolutely everything, right?
Yeah.
And so that is really the core of the problem that we're seeing because that's the thing that filters down and uploads so easily into a world of Photoshop, right?
That everything is just socially constructed, just uploads just so wonderfully and simply onto the internet.
That kind of nitpicky kind of 2016-era Tumblr activism uploads really easy when you just want to reinterpret everything and say, well, this really means this, and this really means this.
Yeah.
And that's where it kind of can take off in a way that slow, careful rigor doesn't really take off, right?
Like, I can take a meme of...
So somebody said...
Oh, I can't remember who it was, but if you know what a diminutive is, like when I say my cat, like, who's a good boy?
That's a diminutive.
Yeah, yeah, migaluccio.
That's my Italian diminutive.
Hey, migaluccio.
It's a little like...
Yeah.
Cute little migalo.
So the postmodernist person comes along and says...
I deconstruct gender binary all the time, but I always talk to my kid, good boy, good boy, good boy, because gender is just a diminutive linguistic construct.
That's it to them.
And they've reinterpreted the whole thing, and you go look at that and you say, I see how you did that.
It's complete nonsense, but I see how that works.
I see what you're doing there.
It's just endless, endless reinterpretation of the signs and symbols because that's the entire world.
The discourse in which they live in, right?
So everything is just discourse.
So when the Enlightenment liberal says, I believe that there are facts about the world that are indubitable, that are true, that are correct, that there's something that we can contact with, immediately you're already stepping away because what the postmodernist is going to say is going to say, no, no, no, no, no.
You're filled with so much bias and you're filled with so much A longing for power and nothing that you say can be taken at face value and you're badly motivated and so we have to deconstruct your motives and you've been socialized in.
And so by the time they're done, there's no stable, correct, true or absolute sentences because every sentence that you say could have been reinterpreted anyway.
The world is constructed in systems of power.
Science is just a system of power.
Now, you might want to tip a hat to Foucault a little bit and say, some of the people who are urging for some of the COVID legislation to stick around permanently...
Foucault might have a look at that and say, see, I told you so.
The problem is that Foucault thinks that's the whole world, right?
There is a way in which Derda has a point about some stuff in which you could say, yeah, things can be reinterpreted.
We can take something old and use it for something new.
I can juxtapose these two different paintings to create a new piece of art.
That's okay.
And there's something about Foucault where you could say, yeah, you know what?
There are certain times when someone's credibility in one particular area of the academic world becomes To use a term from the economic world, fungible, and then extend them to other areas where they use their,
say, credibility and, I don't know, mathematics to opine on all kinds of different things, which is why we might ask Michael Jordan or LeBron James or Tom Cruise about moral issues because it extends their credibility.
And their social credibility extends out.
And we might say, Foucault has a point about some of this stuff.
The problem is not that, sure, sometimes power gets abused by people.
And sure, sometimes people take this stuff out and go in wrong directions with it.
And sure, sometimes institutions who have credibility and we trust to do the rigorous work of providing us truth use that trust to launder through political ideology.
That can happen.
show, and that's everything always everywhere, is just wrong.
And so what I would want to do is I would want to say is that the ideology that's been constructed out of their ideas needs to be...
I mean, I would say that you and I are acting somewhat deconstructively on a metanarrative here.
Go on.
Deconstruct that.
Unpack that, please.
You might be acting in a deconstructive way on some other metanarratives.
And we might be wanting to point out to them that part of their tactics rely entirely on creating social asymmetries where they're allowed to deconstruct you, but you can't deconstruct them back.
And that's the point about intersectionality, by the way.
That's the thing that Crenshaw thinks that she can put her linchpin on.
The universal solvent of postmodernism sits in the jar of personal experience, which can't be deconstructed, right?
Right.
That's what she thinks.
You can't deconstruct my experience of living as a woman, as a black woman, and she couldn't deconstruct my experience of living as a Jewish white male who's converted to Christianity in Canada.
Or deconstruct your experience of being… Worthiness in podcasting in Tennessee.
Waltus' hair.
Yeah.
She would say you can't deconstruct those things, right?
And then they have the standpoint epistemology which says that the person at the Everyone can see the dominant view because it's dominant, and this bottom view under here, that's the view that nobody sees or understands.
And one might want to ask them, Given that you show the same views as Coca-Cola, who's the dominant view in society at the moment?
Coca-Cola and the administrative state and big tech.
So, now, we've obviously run way over time in the interview, but I don't care.
My producers want to go to lunch?
Too bad.
In our remaining minutes here, I need to ask this.
I'm too depressed by everything you've told me.
I need to know the answer.
People have proposed many different answers to this problem of the wokeness and the kind of postmodern gel, the jelly that we're all living in where nothing makes any sense and we can't really seem to move.
Some people have said we ought to go back to enlightenment liberalism.
Just restore the, go back in time to the values of enlightenment liberalism and that'll be great.
Some people have said we need to go back a little further still.
Maybe those Catholics had a point to, Maybe we need to be a little firmer in our declaration of truth.
Some people have said that we need to, you know, I think of the identitarian types, that we need to basically, if the left is going to be racist, we need to be racist.
You know, we need to have a hyper-focus on race.
If there are going to be atheists, you know, we're going to be atheists too, but we're going to...
Choose to perform certain religious rituals just because they're good or something.
But it doesn't matter if they're true.
But anyway, they're conducive to society.
And people have all these different ideas.
What's your idea?
I want to see nothing less than the return of the Logos to prominence in Western civilization.
Sounds great.
Yeah.
And I can think of quite a few philosophers who might want to have that with me.
might construe it differently.
They might construe, some would construe the Logos as Christ, other people are going to construe the Logos as truth.
Other people are going to construe the Logos as wisdom and understanding reality, but the Logos needs to come back.
Searle, when he, in his view, says that we could take Derrida's deconstruction and we can deconstruct it right back and show him to be a classical metaphysician, right?
The acid of postmodernism eats everything including itself.
It doesn't leave anything left, right?
Before you go on, I want to make sure nobody missed that point, that you can use Derrida to undermine Derrida.
You can use the sort of postmodernism to undermine the postmodernism and turn it into whatever you want.
We can turn Derrida into Pope Gregory the Great if we want to, right?
It's just words, words, words.
Well, to be fair with Derrida, he would say it's endlessly open to interpretation.
It's always endlessly open.
He wouldn't say you can interpret it just any way you want, but I would turn that around and say, well, Derrida, I guess what you're saying is open.
And since you buy the death of the author, and the author doesn't get to decide what the work means after it leaves his pen, I guess you don't get to decide what your work means after it leaves yours.
The way—I mean, this goes back to the foundation.
Would you do that with the foundation, right?
All of the postmodern stuff is operating as our friend—I wish he was my friend—our colloquial friend John Searle points out, is that all of their therefores and as a result and in light of and all the inferences that they claim from their claims are based on the very rationality that they're trying to get rid of, right?
They're using— Rationality to try and get rid of rationality.
The point is that if you ever succeeded in doing that, you'd have undermined rationality, which means that your whole critique would have been undermined from the get-go.
So what I would say is, to put it simply, when someone says to you, there is no truth, the response of, is that true, should tie them up in knots.
And typically the way that they've done is to kind of live with a sort of detached irony, right?
Because nothing matters.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the way that we go out of this is that we can't go back.
We have to go through.
That's the only way out of this is through.
We can't undo it.
There's no unweaving the rainbow.
To steal a phrase from Richard Dawkins, right?
We can't undo it.
There's no way back.
There's no stepping out.
We have to go through it.
So I think the first thing that we want to do or something that we need to make sure that we're doing when we're attacking this stuff is to get clear about the constellation of concepts and We want to get really clear about how all of these things relate to each other so that we can see the endless circularity that they use to try and make their stuff go.
We want to understand their power moves and social pressure tactics that they use and why they, when we get into an argument about truth, they instantly switch to moral shaming because they're not interested in having a debate about what the facts are.
They're interested in gaining social power.
We need to understand that.
We need to move through.
And then I think we return.
We don't return.
We bring through with us.
Before you go on, I just have to clarify here.
When you say, you know, they're using these ad hominems and they're just moral shaming and whatever, they're attacking you.
And you say, we have to not try to avoid that, but go through it.
What do you mean, go through it?
Like, just take it?
Oh.
Oh, no.
I mean that having the wherewithal—for example, white fragility.
When someone says you have white—you say I'm not a racist, they say you have white fragility.
You have to immediately expose that as a Kafka trap.
You have to immediately oppose that and say, look, what you're saying is that if I say I'm not racist, I have white fragility.
And that white fragility is proof that I have racist.
And you know that I'm a racist because I have white fragility, which proves that I'm a racist.
You immediately have to call the bluff on it.
Their whole game is to attack the assumptions that you make.
The response is to say, all the games that you're playing is relying on my assumptions too.
A nice way to do this, if you're going back to the Caitlyn Jenner thing, when they say, This person is wearing a dress.
This person is wearing makeup.
This person has got a wig on.
This person identifies as female.
Why is that not enough?
And you say, can men wear dresses?
Well, yeah.
Okay.
Can men wear makeup?
Yeah.
Okay.
So then what does that have to do with anything with being a woman?
You have to demonstrate the absurdity of it.
You have to show that their own assumptions exist.
Are that the whole to be trans, to go from male to female relies on the existence of a gender binary.
You couldn't go from male to female unless there was a male and a female to go from and to go to.
Of course, yeah.
Right?
So, if someone has gender dysphoria and says, this is the only way that I can live, we can have a discussion about that and I would probably be okay with that.
If someone says, but you have to actually believe now that I am this thing that I claim to be, I can say, No, there's a biological reality here that undergirds this, right?
So when someone moves with you on an ad hominem, to immediately expose the tactic for what it is is of absolute paramount importance.
Expose the Kafka trap.
Expose the circular reasoning.
Expose the argument via insinuation.
Expose the unjustified inferences at all times, everywhere, always.
When they say you're misinterpreting me and they want to say, well, you have to read this 4,000-page book, you immediately say, if you're demanding charitability from me reading you, then you must give me the same charitability in the way you read me.
And if you don't, then I'm justified.
All these social and argumentative asymmetries need to be called out immediately.
You go through them.
You can't go around them.
You can't avoid them.
You have to rip them apart.
Great point.
This is a very Dantean point.
I like the only way out is through, that Dante, you know, to give us the vision of heaven, he doesn't get to just jump right up and go to heaven.
He has to go down through the very bowels of hell and crawl across Satan up to purgatory and up to heaven.
Yeah.
So then the second thing that you do is you have to take the things about what social justice is pointing at, which give it its plausibility.
You have to be able to show how those don't justify the philosophy and the social ontology, their social philosophy that they've created out of this.
Their critical social justice doesn't hold together.
You have to drive that apart.
Then I think that you have to – there is a very strong tradition I think most people hold to it.
They're kind of ducking and covering right now because all of the cultural megaphones are owned by woke people.
And we need people – I mean John McHorder went I think yesterday or the day before on Bill Maher's show and just lit wokeness on fire and it was absolutely beautiful.
We need more of that.
So I think going through it means that we have to come through on the other side with a version of Enlightenment liberalism, which says this is a conflict resolution strategy built around democracy, human rights, property rights, freedom, the power, utility, and strength of science.
The usefulness of markets, and then say, we're going to keep that through, but we're going to adopt an understanding of that which allows us to filter out the postmodern view of the world, that inoculates us from that, right?
That's what we want to do.
If, I mean, the...
The Wuhan lab of wokeness have unleashed the virus, and we need the vaccine now, right?
So what we're going to do is inoculate ourselves from it by understanding how this Kafka trap works.
We're going to bring back the logos.
We're going to bring back reason and objectivity.
We're going to bring back an understanding of the – well, though I myself may not be able to be fully objective, we can create universities and systems of peer review which, rather than functioning as ideal laundering factories for woke activism, can actually – Suffice to be places where people can criticize and within that criticism we can hammer out and we can polish off all of this subjectivity and get to truth.
And then I think the Enlightenment liberals need to understand that human beings crave meaning and that the Enlightenment liberal framework is to create conflict resolution within society and Within science, within truth, and within politics.
But it does not create meaning.
So how do we create meaning?
That's all I'm interested in.
This is why I kind of am being somewhat derisive of the Enlightenment liberal thing.
I want the meaning, darn it!
Give me a system with meaning!
I mean, if we just want to talk about meaning, that's a quick five-minute thing.
The meaning of life is found in the drinking of woke tears.
I don't know.
No, I actually think that a lot of people who've been swept up in wokeness have been swept up because they've been drinking it out of the culture.
I'll make an even more controversial claim, and you can edit this out if you have to.
Bring it on, please.
I want it.
Donald Trump is the first postmodern president.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
Well, the only way I'll disagree or push back even slightly is Obama may have anticipated that.
I see your point on Trump, and I'd like you to go into it a little bit more, but I think many of the...
The eccentricities of Trump I think you see prefigured a little bit in Obama.
But I'd like to hear more about your point on Trump.
I think that Obama would have been...
There was a wonderful essay written by James Lindsay talking about this exact thing, about different...
Eras.
So you have the initial era, then you have the reconstruction era, then you have, for example, the liberal era, or sorry, FDR, that era.
Then you have the neoconservative era starting with, say, Ronald Reagan and moving all the way up.
And now Obama could have been a new liberal era, but that movement, Obama, I think, was a liberal.
But Obama started getting attacked and criticized.
As being not far enough by the up-and-coming millennial class of journalists, creators, and all the rest of it.
And that...
The postmodernism was coming.
I think Obama may have seen it and was trying to operate within it and figure out what to do with it.
Especially after getting shellacked in 2010.
I think he tried to figure it out.
I think Trump just intuited it.
There's a little video where Trump says, I could be presidential.
I could be presidential.
Do you remember this video?
But that would be boring.
There's another video where he's talking on camera and then he kind of stops from and says, And then goes right back to it.
I think Trump intuited and understood.
I don't think Trump's ever read Judith Butler.
I don't think he's read Gender Trouble.
I don't think that he's ever read Orientalism by Edward Said or of Grammatology by Jacques Derda.
Yeah, that lucky guy.
I think he sat for 11 years doing The Apprentice and saw how the media ecosystem worked.
And then I'll make another claim.
So we're going to do this real brief.
If we're talking about Q... QAnon is postmodernism on the right.
QAnon is postmodernism, and it's also, you could describe it as an oral tradition, right?
Because it always gets banned everywhere, so it's just in the retelling of the story that it recreates itself, and the whole story of it only exists in the ruins of dead forms that are ossifying and decaying away in internet archives in various places, right?
But 1980, Ed Rollins...
Puts everything on the table and fights hard to get Ronald Reagan elected.
Yeah, yeah.
Then, who did Ed Rollins bring on?
He brought in who?
Lee Atwater.
And Lee Atwater is the one who ran the Willie Horton ad to get George H.W. Bush, right?
So you have...
We're getting Reagan elected, and from Reagan we degrade a little bit to Bush, right?
But we're still...
Maybe the most qualified man to ever be president is George H.W. Bush.
He's got a great resume, that guy.
And a good man.
But the operative around him is Lee Atwater.
Now you fast forward to the Bush era, and it's Karl Rove.
And who was Lee Atwater's chief disciple?
It's Rick Wilson.
Really?
I actually didn't know that.
Rick Wilson was taught by Lee Atwater.
Rick Wilson ran the ad against Max Cleland in 2002 to get Saxby Chambliss elected.
So Ed Rollins sold his soul to get Ronald Reagan elected.
Rick Wilson sold his soul for Saxby Chambliss, right?
But hold on.
Go a little further.
That ad has – Rick Wilson actually defended this.
I will afterwards if you want.
I can send you the screenshots of this because Rick left them on the timeline and I can dig.
And he defends that ad and says, I didn't say anything false.
No, what you did is you had a picture of Max Cleland juxtaposed or turning into Osama bin Laden.
I can't remember whether they juxtaposed or had him turned into and said that he didn't have the courage to lead.
Max Cleland is a triple amputee from Vietnam who opposed what George W. Bush was doing in 2002 with the Iraq war on the basis of the costs to the future and not wanting to give him a blank check.
And Rick Wilson basically came out and said, you are Osama Bin Laden.
Okay.
You want to know why Trump gets off attacking a gold star mom, Rick?
You set the paradigm.
Right.
Wow.
What an amazing tidbit.
I actually had no idea about Rick Wilson's role in that.
I'll do you even one better than that.
You step forward.
People are saying, well, the populism of the GOP, the racism, the racist populism of the racist populism, it goes back to Sarah Palin.
Who picked Sarah Palin?
Bill Kristol.
Steve Schmidt was the one who was in the campaign.
Steve Schmidt and John Weaver.
You know, it wasn't just Schmidt, though.
Bill Kristol and I think Charlie Sykes, too, but certainly Bill, discovered her, was advocating for her, and then, yeah, you get Steve Schmidt and guys like Weaver, and somehow you get Sarah Palin.
The entire Lincoln project has on its hands the fingerprints of all the bad parts of the Trump presidency.
Right?
Right?
All of those guys are absolutely responsible for all of this.
If we look at the men who the people picked, Reagan, how many men was George H.W. Bush married to?
One.
How many women was George H.W. Bush married to?
One.
How many women was George Bush married to?
One.
Those are the men that we're bringing in, right?
Mitt Romney, the straightest shooter you could possibly imagine, was picked by the people.
Who are the consultants?
the Rick Wilsons, the Steve Schmitz, the John Weavers, the rot in the GOP can be entirely traced back to the people who for years, for absolutely for years, in the name of a certain kind of economic program in the name of a certain kind of economic program and in a certain form of foreign policy, adds blatantly attacking people like Max Cleveland to the point where even John McCain said,
That he refused to campaign with Saxby Chambers because of that ad.
And now, when Donald Trump attacks a gold star mom, which was bad, it was terrible, these guys are incandescent with rage.
I'm sorry, Max Cleveland would like to have a word, sir.
These people have been salting the ground for this for years.
I should point out for the fact checkers, I should point out that Reagan was remarried, but in his defense, his wife left him.
He did not want to get remarried.
He was actually very, very against it.
Yeah.
Yes, certainly he lived a very upright life.
Bush, you know, of course Bush, that's one of the great love stories ever in politics, Bush Sr.
And yeah, you do see a sort of decay.
And then ironically, these hypocrite GOP consultants who created the modern GOP, now they turn on it as though their hands are totally clean.
It's totally ridiculous.
And it's all the bad stuff too.
Like you trace everything bad that Trump did Is there any attack ad that Trump ever ran that's anywhere close to what Rick Wilson did to Max Cleland?
And he defended it by saying, what in the ad did I say was false?
That Max Cleland lacks courage?
I mean, this is a triple amputee.
And they cropped the photo so you could only see his head and shoulders so that part gets left out.
Oh, my gosh.
Where do we see the ripping out of context and the juxtaposition?
That sounds like postmodernism.
Sounds like there is a kind of postmodern conservatism.
In fact, we could say that we're living in, I don't know, hugely tremendous times, you might say.
Right?
These guys are all upset about it, but let's look at the history of Charlie Sykes.
Who did Charlie Sykes bring on board?
Who did Bill Kristol bring on board?
All of these guys mainlined the very people.
And we're left now with a group of people in the GOP.
I'm thinking of Kinzinger and Cheney and some of these other people who have mistaken Bush-era platitudes and talking points.
For eternal truth.
Yeah, that's right.
They thought that the ossified talking points of the Bush administration were the bones of eternal truth, and they're not.
This is not correct.
So this is absurd.
And so to me, I look at the Lincoln Project, and I think if you want to know grift, don't come at me.
Don't come at you or Ben.
Let's have a conversation about Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, Stuart Stevens.
All of these guys who wanted to go blood and guts, attacking war veterans, bashing people's patriotism.
If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.
All of that stuff for years.
Then Trump comes along and says, you are fake news, and they're just like, well, this is the enemy of the people.
We need to start the Lincoln Project.
You can donate here!
Yeah, right.
And they'll run ads on Morning Joe in Washington, D.C. They'll run their ads in places that would never have any effect on the election, but that will milk Democrat donors out of a lot of dollars.
Right.
I mean, it's the utter insincerity of this.
And so there is a point.
And I mean, there's some good and there's some bad.
The good people who are still within, I would say, a Bush-ish kind of conservative paradigm.
I mean, people I might respect.
I think I would still respect David French.
I think David French is honest.
But unlike some of those other guys, David French went to war.
Yeah.
He's a veteran.
You know, I really like David personally.
He and I have always had a great personal relationship.
Some of the things he's written recently, I find it difficult to take a charitable read on.
But yeah, he's a nice guy.
I, you know, but you can read David French and say, I disagree.
But I don't think that David French is running an entirely cynical operation.
But I think that some of the other guys are being entirely cynical.
I mean, you know, I was getting made fun of by Jon Stewart when I wrote liberal fascism years ago.
What have you done?
And it's like, I'm sorry.
That was the interview where I first realized, Mr.
Goldberg, Mr.
Jonah Goldberg, I'll say your name because you deserve it.
That was the first interview where I realized that there are conservative charlatans because Jon Stewart exposed you for what you were back in 2009.
It's a joke.
It's absurd.
And so when they say that the conservative movement has been intellectually hollowed out, we might want to ask who did that.
Who's in charge for the last 30 years?
You know, I love this point, too.
I guess this sort of ties it in together, which I'm sure my producers will be happy about so they can go to lunch.
I'm so sorry.
you know, what you're saying is so important for understanding, you know, the broader culture and we can knock the left and how the left brought us here, but also understanding what that means for our side, how our side has indulged this, how we represent this now.
And for those who say the awful Trump era people, they have, they have betrayed true conservatism, capital T, capital C, trademark over the E of, you know, 2006 or whatever.
You think, well, how did we get here?
It didn't, this didn't just spring out of the air one day, you know, alone in a forest.
This is a consequence of other ideas and other actions and a certain ideology, you know, that perhaps has reached the end of the line.
And I think there's a group of conservative people, and you touched on this a little bit, who've said, hey, if the left is doing this and it's working, we should indulge it too.
And this is going to be part of the book I'm writing, which I am writing, on the tactics, which I explain how this works.
And that's not going to work because if you step onto the postmodern ground with the people who are postmodern, they're native to it.
This is like having a battle of play on words with a speaker of a native language and you just learned it yesterday.
If I learned Spanish tomorrow and I tried to get into a poetry contest with a native-speaking Spaniard, that's going to not go real well unless we're doing free verse.
But this isn't going to go well for me.
Maybe if we're doing a haiku and I only need eight words or something, but I'm going to lose.
If I learn how to play hockey yesterday and I'm going to step on the ice against Conor McDavid, this is not going to go well for me.
So for us to adopt those tactics is bad.
The thing that we ought to be doing is adopting the tactics of the Enlightenment liberal.
And when I say the tactics of the Enlightenment, sorry, the principles of the Enlightenment liberals.
Yeah, I prefer the tactics of the Spanish Inquisition, but I agree.
Some of the principles in the Enlightenment are fine.
We need to bring the Enlightenment principles in, and then we need to have tactics that pull them onto that ground.
Because once you pull them onto the ground of objectivity, their houses crumble.
Yeah, that's true.
And I suppose then we can pull them back even further to the glories of Europe, Christian unity, the high church.
But we'll have to save that topic for another time.
Vocal Distance.
Everyone, go follow Vocal.
I'm sure they've already followed you after your very illuminating thoughts, but you can follow them at W-O-K-A-L underscore distance.
At Wocal Distance.
And stay tuned for that book, With Words.
And having written a book with words and a book without words, it is a much tougher undertaking to do one with words, so I commend you for that.
Wocal, where else can people find you?
So right now it's just the Twitter page.
That's my Twitter handle.
That's where you'll find me.
I occasionally do interviews on Benjamin Boyce's podcast on YouTube.
So if you search for Benjamin Boyce on YouTube, he's got a lot of wonderful interviews.
He interviews some really great people.
Yeah, that's where you can find me.
I appreciate you having me on.
Absolutely.
We're going to have you back.
It was fabulous.
I'm so glad you came on.
You're extremely intelligent.
I try not to ever compliment Canadians.
It just goes against my nature to say nice things about America's hat.
But I will in your case.
Well, as a Canadian, being polite, it would be untoward of me to accept it.
Fair point.
Local, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you.
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