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Aug. 23, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show
02:06:43
20210823_wesley-yang-on-weaponized-fragility-policing-debat
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show 00:03:03
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Today, Wesley Yang.
If you don't know him, you're going to love him in about two minutes.
And I hope you spend the entire time listening to what for us was a longer interview.
It was almost two hours.
But pick, choose any part of it, listen to all of it.
You will love it and you will love him because this is the guy.
At the end of our interview, I called him the Dr. House of wokeism.
He's the guy who can diagnose it, he's the guy who will explain to you how we got here.
He He says he's not an activist.
So he's not the guy who's actually going to fight it or show us how.
He's not, as he says, a Chris Ruffo.
But he's the guy who shows us how they seized these institutions, how they've shamed the majority, which includes black people, brown people, white people.
There's very few people who are on board with this crazy woke ideology, how they've shamed all those other groups into silence.
It was a fascinating discussion.
I said to my husband, Doug, last night, I'm like, you know, the thing about Wesley Yang is when he talks, you can never accurately anticipate the end of his sentence.
There's very few people you can say that about.
He's just got different ideas.
He goes to different places.
He's done so much research.
He can take you to all different kinds of examples that support the point he's making.
And I learned so much.
I said to my team when we just wrapped the interview, I don't remember an interview in which I said less, which is a great sign, right?
It's a great sign because the guest is just on a roll.
You know, he was wonderful to listen to.
You're going to love him.
He's coming up in one minute.
He is the author of the best selling book, The Souls of Yellow Folk.
Grew up in New Jersey, went to Rutgers, wound up becoming a very successful writer, both with this book and work for publications like New York Magazine, Tablet, Esquire.
Now he's got a very successful Substack series called Year Zero, and you've got to support him.
And just a quick note before we start the show you know, we've been putting out four shows a week this summer, which has been great.
We've been doing really well, and we appreciate you guys listening to it and also upping our YouTube presence.
So if you want to see any of these clips from some of our, right now it's just clips, soon it will be the whole show, but Go to youtube.com forward slash Megan Kelly.
But this week, in advance of our big launch on Sirius, which happens on September 7th, we're going to cut back to just two episodes a week two episodes this week and two episodes next week because my team is overwhelmed with tons of work getting ready.
We got to do dress rehearsals and all this stuff.
So I'm going to take a little bit of not a break, but we're going to be focused on other stuff so that we don't totally fuck up the Sirius launch.
Okay.
Anyway, just want to give you that heads up.
Quick ad and then Wesley Yang.
I am an admirer of yours.
Immigrant Stories and Family Bonds 00:02:53
I feel like every once in a while you get sort of these people with an extra dose of wisdom and they get sprinkled throughout society.
When you stumble on one of them, you hold on to it like a newfound jewel.
And you are one of those people.
And just in getting ready for this interview, I was like, what is it in Wesley's background that made him able to see and understand in such a profound way what's happening in our society?
I think I get it on a gut level, but I could never have articulated it the way that you do.
Do you know what the answer to that is?
What is it about your background that made you so capable of seeing what's going on right now?
Well, so, you know, I am the child of immigrants.
Both of my parents came here in the 1950s.
My mother was, you could call, she was a refugee and she was leaving, you know, sort of fleeing the Korean War, which had, you know, destroyed her, you know, destroyed her family.
You know, she saw her brother killed by what was called family fire, sort of, and, By friendly fire, American forces confused him for the enemy.
And they bombed out both of their houses.
And so she was reduced from, you know, prosperity relative to that time in Korea to pauperdom and working in an orphanage.
And her ability to come to the United States was something of a fluke because back then, the policy of the country, as it had been for nearly 100 years, had been.
Almost entire, you know, you could not really legally immigrate from Asia, you know, until 1965.
And, you know, she taught the orphans in the school how to sing and dance.
And a visiting, you know, group of American dignitaries, including an American general, were so moved by what they saw that they wanted to know who had done this.
And it turned out to be my mother, who was 15 or 16 at the time.
And various arrangements were made.
The general first wanted to adopt her.
That wasn't possible administratively, but there were a couple of women who were working in a civilian capacity.
And they managed to sponsor her and bring her over to the United States.
So I'm a first generation immigrant.
My parents were born in the 1930s in a Korea that had been annexed by Japan.
And I grew up a pretty unremarkable sort of suburban American adolescence.
New Republic Ideas Emerge 00:08:07
And the American suburbs were the product of something that, when people talk about this thing called structural and systemic racism, they mean something like the suburbs, right?
They mean like areas that were built under the pressure of integration.
And which was a two sided thing.
It also involved enormous spikes in crime that happened in the cities.
But they're talking about areas that were built largely to produce a certain racialized outcome.
And I grew up sort of in the midst of that, on the one hand.
On the other hand, there was.
Consciousness of the civil rights movement, but there was little consciousness of how recently America had changed.
So, you know, I grew up sort of in college, encountering, you know, and grappling with in a very serious way many of the ideas that took a couple of decades to come to fruition, to turn into activist movements, and then to go mainstream.
And so I'm deeply familiar with the ideas.
And I'm also deeply familiar, if you look at the essays that are collected in my book, with the sort of Complex of emotions that are driving this thing that some refer to as wokeism, that I call the successor ideology, because they have to do with.
People's feelings and their emotions, and the sense of being outsiders and not included within the mainstream of American life.
And it's that sort of sense that results in the kind of widespread acceptance among some of certain ideas and certain remedies and certain ways to go about fixing society.
And a lot of that kind of vibrates through some of my earlier work.
And there is a moment where.
Those ideas, which I had grappled with in the 90s, sort of came to prominence within the media sphere.
They took over the culture industry and they've become increasingly influential within the Democratic Party under the Trump years.
They radicalized at the same time as they became mainstream.
And because of my very familiarity with those things, it put me in a position to be able to critically examine them and to come up with.
What I'm still kind of working out is the right response to them.
But the response that I arrive at is that we have to kind of understand what's driving it and we have to acknowledge that there are problems that we are attempting to solve by an adoption of a political program that calls for the gerrymandering of various outcomes by race.
And having done that, we then have to be able to exercise judgment and say whether this vision for the country is the right vision for the country.
And I come to the conclusion that the answer is no.
But I tried to bring some of my past experiences as a writer and a person and as a non white person living in this country and grown in this country to bear on the manner in which I addressed those questions.
So, would you say that when you were younger and you were grappling with this, because I've read you felt yourself like a bit of a misfit?
Like you didn't belong.
So, would the younger you, the 1990s you, have been attracted to wokeism?
I don't think I would have been.
There's just something a little contrary in my nature where, when you have people repeating slogans and so on, it would have turned me off then as it does now.
And I definitely remember sort of encountering, you know, reading Susan Sontag's essay where she wrote the famous line, you know, that because all of this has.
A long pedigree, it just became mainstream very recently.
Of you know, the white race is the cancer of human history, and thinking, you know, wondering if I thought that was right.
And thinking, no, actually, no, I don't think that's right.
And yet I understood the underlying idea behind it, right?
I mean, there was a civilization that expanded, that did so through the force of violence, and that tended to disrupt traditional ways of being as their own, as the Sort of European ways of being had themselves been disrupted, and that this entailed physical violence.
It also entailed a kind of conceptual violence.
And I understood all of that, and yet the kind of turning that into a dogma and turning that into a dogma that would be a basis of a politics, I didn't, you know, I rejected it even then.
And there were, you know, A lot of the press at the time, the serious intellectual press like Harper's and the New Republic, grappled with these questions and they grappled with them in ways that I found to be persuasive.
And so there's an essay from 1996 that ran in the New Republic by a guy called Jeffrey Rosen, who sort of looked at the O.J. Simpson trial and he argued that this trial is actually an instantiation of the basic ideas underlying this newfangled intellectual trend within the academy called critical race theory.
Right.
And very recently, you know, sort of the New Republic came into new ownership and there was an essay by that they ran in their very first issue, sort of repudiating the old New Republic as a You know, kind of like racist, white supremacist, patriarchal publication that specifically singled that essay out as a kind of example of how wrong the old new republic was.
And I went back to the essay and I looked back at it, and it is very interesting and very intelligent.
It suggested that this idea of differential justice, that there are no longer impartial standards that can be applied, you know, was actually very well done and actually seemed.
You know, quite convincing to me that if this doctrine were to be embedded, you know, as the basis of public law or as the basis of governance, right, we would be departing from, you know, from the hard won, you know, legacy of what, you know, took hundreds of years, beginning with the Magna Carta, right, for us to construct.
And so, So I was persuaded at the time it was an intellectual movement that seemed to be on the margins of academia, not part of the mainstream of either, even the left itself, because there was a concerted movement among leftists at the time to hold it at bay.
It seemed to go kind of in abeyance in terms of public conversation.
The arts were consumed with the war on terror, then the financial crisis, and then we had the Obama presidency.
And toward the end of that presidency, activist movements suddenly emerged that kind of brought these ideas that had been percolating slowly through various institutions, through the educational system, especially the education schools, which teachers and administrators are educated.
Nation State Blind Spots 00:14:59
And the ideas that one had encountered in the 1990s and rejected ultimately as the wrong path.
Suddenly, then emerged all at once as the kind of new ruling orthodoxies within the cultural industries and increasingly within the sort of functionaries of the federal government and in all other sort of nonprofit entities that share in what is increasingly a single sensibility, a single consciousness.
There's a new language that is being spoken, including, as we know, the sort of House of Representatives recently issued.
A directive saying that we're going to remove gender specific language, such as mother and father, when we talk about families.
But that was presaged by struggle sessions throughout the nonprofit sector, such as whether Planned Parenthood was going to be a heavily politicized movement, A, and whether it was going to think of itself as an institution that was in the service of women, as opposed to.
People who menstruate, pregnant people, other forms, right, other forms of language suggesting that it is, or sort of enacting the dogma that it is politically incorrect to say that it is women who get pregnant, right?
Because sort of, you know, Right.
And so there's this new language that is, I think it's perplexing to most people that encounter it.
And it's also, it has a coercive edge to it, right?
So it's perplexing to them, but it also comes with the voice of authority because it is organs that have been invested with authority that speak with it.
And there is danger.
And so as a result, we have polls showing that 62% of the American public.
You know, doesn't, you know, hides their true public opinions for fear of, and so this is a way of going about producing cultural change and a way of going about producing political change that ultimately the last decade we've seen the results of it, we've seen the power of it, and we've also seen the tremendous backlash that it can produce.
And we see how rapidly you can polarize a society in just a few years through.
Through a certain kind of heavily moralized and politicized approach to thinking about things.
And so, what begins very simply so, I want to give you a simple example.
Like in 2015, the University of Maryland's diversity office so, sort of mid level minor functionaries within the diversity bureaucracy that has been created in just a few years ago you know, decreed that the correct term to refer to people residing within the United States.
States who are not citizens and who do not have a legal status as permanent residents or otherwise is undocumented citizens, right?
And so in language.
Undocumented citizens?
Yes, right.
So that's a paradox, right?
But it's a paradox that has a purpose and that enacts in the medium of language an opening of our borders, right?
Simply by policing that term and saying this is the correct term.
And using a different term is a kind of microaggression or something for which you can be reported or scrutinized.
They have already initiated a whole political project that lies behind it.
And now there are some cities in California and other sort of progressive cities that are talking about extending voting rights to the undocumented.
And so this is an approach, this is a moralized administrative bureaucratic approach.
Way of saying, we're not going to have the debate, we're going to police the debate out of existence, even before any of you know that a debate exists.
Oh, I like that.
I want to remember that.
We're not going to have the debate, we're going to police the debate out of existence before you even know it's on the table.
That's so well said.
That's exactly what's happening.
Right.
And so the answer is supplied to you, and then consequences, real or imagined, and in many cases all too real, are there for those who take the contrary opinion.
Everybody else remembers.
Oh, you know, I am a citizen of a sovereign entity, and that entity, by virtue of being a nation state, right, has the right to let in or keep out whom it chooses, right?
That was the most people think that that's right.
That has always been the case until very recently.
We have enacted a kind of opening of our border in thought, and then we make it so that nobody who wants to be a part of the conversation.
Is able to take a contrary position, they are immediately seen as suspects, right?
And so no one within the political class represents that position.
And if it turns out, As often to be the case, though, it's actually like a fairly popular position that, like, we can have a border and we can, you know, we can keep out some people if we want to, and we can let in some people if we want to.
Like, it's part of the legitimate function of a nation state to define the difference between a citizen and a non citizen.
And in fact, that is what makes a nation state a nation state.
If nobody in the political class or the chattering class is willing to represent that position, but there's 30 to 45% of the country that believes that to be true, or even more of the country that believes that to be true, then that creates an opening for someone from outside of the political or chattering classes to emerge and represent this thing that is unrepresented.
So it's this problem of what's called preference falsification, right?
You create these systems.
Preference falsification, right?
So there's this theory, right, that like you, in repressive systems that impose consequences on people who take the wrong positions.
Only the quote unquote right positions are going to be represented by people in suits, you know, who are authoritative figures within political parties and on the media.
These other things go unrepresented, but there's a false consensus that we see represented is a false consensus.
And that creates an opening for a demagogue, right, to come along and be like, oh, I'm going to represent this thing that other people are not willing to represent.
And in many cases, That position may actually be the correct position, right?
Like, if we were to have that debate, we might decide, oh, yeah, you know, we're a nation state, we have borders, it's okay to police those borders, right?
And not only might that thing prevail politically, it might be the correct position, right?
But we have ruled out the possibility of deliberation and debate.
And so the impossibility of us to have a real deliberation or debate is one of the reasons, as a serious intellectual who wants to.
Get to the root of things that I oppose this kind of politics.
Up next, how things have gotten so nuts that we took a system called blind auditions in the orchestra world and decided that they were racist.
Heather McDonald mentioned this.
Wesley's got some more on it, and we'll get into that and Kendi in one minute.
I talk about successor ideology to give you an example.
Something happens in the 80s and 90s.
Orchestras, all right, we're talking about like.
You know, orchestras that play classical music.
They had a diversity problem.
They were too white, they were too male.
And so, what we're going to do is we're going to have blind additions, right?
And we're not going to allow our biases based upon knowing the identity of the player to affect our judgment.
We're only going to hear the way they play.
And on the basis of what we hear and not what we see of who the player is, are we going to.
Arrive at our decision.
And moving to blind editions was a boon to women.
It turned out to be the case that unconscious bias based upon seeing a woman versus a man may have been affecting the way people were making choices.
And, but there was recently a piece in the New York Times arguing that we have to end blind editions because while it did help women, it actually didn't help other underrepresented minorities.
You got to get everything.
And so we have to stop being impartial and only listening to the music.
And we have to move, we have to see who it is so we can know who to favor specifically on the basis of their race.
Right.
And that's the difference.
On the one hand, we're saying, well, let's get rid of discrimination and bias.
The other hand, we're saying this very move that we made to get rid of discrimination and bias, right, has to be reversed.
And we have to go back to looking at the color of people's skin in order to.
Equalize outcomes through a political process.
And this is Kendi, right?
The only remedy of past discrimination is present discrimination.
Like if the numbers of Black and Brown people aren't on par with the numbers of white people, it's a racist system and you have to discriminate in order to remedy it.
Right.
And so that's an example.
That's a clear example of one where we're going to try to be more impartial.
We're going to remove.
Information about people, you're going to judge them only on the quality of their playing.
Versus, we're going to make sure to know who you are so that we can give preferences to people so that we can see them, so that we can discriminate in their favor.
Can I just add, I want you to continue, but can I just add, it's one thing to see it in an orchestra where maybe the music won't be quite as well played if you don't just go for the most quality players.
It's another when you look at a field like medicine.
Right?
Or science, like I don't, or pilots, as we're now seeing at Delta.
I just want the most qualified surgeon operating on me.
I don't care about skin color or lady parts.
I care about quality, skill, devotion, training, right?
So, like, this has real life implications as we're seeing across disciplines right now.
Right.
So, there's this deeper underlying question that it was like, well, you know, let's work on the underlying capacity of the group.
Also, their interests and the choices that they make.
So, there was a very funny photo that was announcing the fact that the US Math Olympiad team defeated China for the first time in several years, right?
And it was a photo of four, I mean, the US, the photo of the US Math Olympiad team was a photo of four Chinese guys, right?
I think there was also a white guy in the picture.
But so that photo represents Actually, what it means for diversity to be our strengths, right?
Like, we have to be able to see that, you know, cultures, by virtue of making different choices about what people, you know, pursue and are interested in, not just cultures as a whole, as sort of large entities, but specific immigrant cohorts that come here for specific reasons, right?
Which happen to be, you know, people are coming from, STEM motivated cultures in the first place, but also people that seek opportunity here that happen, a self selecting cohort that are also interested in the STEM fields, they're going to result in heavily racially disproportionate outcomes.
And this is the problem with the Kendian framework, which says that there will always be a distribution that represents the same distribution as the overall US population as a whole in every sector and every corporation.
But there should be 13% Black membership on that team.
And this, of course, is nonsense because throughout Silicon Valley, you have all of these companies putting out these diversity reports saying, like, oh, we have, you know, we've made no progress or we've gone backwards on diversity.
And all of them show that, you know, Asian Americans are represented at those companies by at a factor five or six times the representation of Asian Americans in the population.
Now, why is that?
Right, like is that are Asians being favored?
Are they a privileged caste that is disproportionately represented at such high numbers at these desirable jobs because of some invidious pro Asian bias?
Of course, that is not the case, right?
Like, Asians are represented there relative to the rate at which these people focus on STEM education, prepare themselves with the specific skill sets that are most relevant to these corporations, having to do with.
You know, I'm not going to say, I'm not going to posit an absolute inferiority or superiority of the culture.
It's just what they happen to be into, man.
Right.
And so Victor Davis Hansen has been making this point about American professional basketball teams, which are not 13% black.
And so, under the Kendi rule, do we have to switch it up so that we have more white players?
I mean, different people focus on different things, develop different skills.
It is in part cultural, it's not all race based or, you know, just because of the cis.
Gender, heteronormative, whatever it is, you've got the term down, but the new sort of what is it, successor ideologists just refuse to see it that way.
Right.
So they have a dogmatic approach to things.
And so the aphorism that really captures it best is the statement by a woman named Kimberly Cranshaw, who is, you know, she's a law professor and she coined the term intersectionality.
Cultural Concerns Over Race 00:09:48
And she said, the question is not whether racism functioned here, but whether about how did racism function here.
So we begin from the assumption.
That racism is there.
And it's an overall worldview that proceeds from this idea that we are all, every one of us, subject to a vast socialization process that instills the biases of race and biases of gender within us.
And that society is a matrix of these interlocking oppressions that work together to favor some and not favor others.
We have these clear examples from the worlds where.
That deviate from this pattern, especially with the example of the Asian Americans, but not just with the Asian Americans.
This kind of whiteness critique of American society began in the 80s and 90s in academia.
It took decades for it to make its march through various institutions and become dominant at precisely the moment where it is provably not true.
So, the top 10 earning ethnicities in the country, eight out of nine of them are non white.
Ethnicities.
So, and so, you know, we have this claim that, you know, meritocracy is a myth.
Meritocracy is, and I'm not saying that we should take a, you know, a simplistic approach to meritocracy.
There are many factors, right, other than merit that determine people's outcomes in life.
And some of those have to do with like where one comes from, which also is correlated with race and so on and so forth.
But the reality is that, Is that the group whose income grew the fastest in America between the years 2014 and 2019 were Hispanic Americans?
And the group whose income that grew the second fastest in those years from a higher base were Asian Americans.
And so America's non white, non black diversity is the group that is actually most invested in a continuation of systems that are generally meritocratic, that generally have to do with the status quo, that generally predate.
The equity agenda.
These are the groups that are drawn here by the promise of the system as it exists.
And these are the groups that have flourished here as a result of the system.
As it exists.
Okay, but you tell me, because now what we hear from the wokes is they're white adjacent.
Once they develop any sort of power, thanks to hard work, thanks to elbow grease, Asians, Hispanics, they're trying to grab these groups into their coalition of aggrieved minorities, saying, you know, you belong on our side.
And if you disagree, that's because you're white adjacent and you sort of sold out to the man.
So, I mean, this is the whole thing, right?
So, the whiteness approach to American history says that, like, groups that were not really white, the Germans, the Irish, the Eastern Europeans, you know, follow that were not, you know, America was at first a white Anglo Saxon Protestant country.
It did not think of itself as otherwise.
But, like, you know, by the 1840s, right, there were as many Catholics as there were Protestants in this country.
And so there were successive waves of immigrants that were not a part of the mainstream of American culture.
The sort of theory is that they integrated into this thing called whiteness, and they integrated, and in the process, they did that by sort of walking over the heads of American black people.
And to some degree, there is something to this, you know, sort of as a historical matter.
And so, the great fear of this movement, who see this dimension in American history, is that Hispanics and Asians will intermarry, that they will join the white majority as a kind of coalition of the ascendant over.
Over Blacks.
And so the whole purpose of ethnic studies and the whole purpose of this successor coalition is to disrupt that, right, and to hold on to these groups and create a new governing American majority.
Part of that governing American majority was also the expansion of kind of the civil rights protected classes, right, to first of all to LGBTQ, and then the expansion of that, so that more and more young people have pathways out of.
The kind of Eurocentric cishetopatriarchal system into new forms of identification.
And there's plenty of evidence culturally, because now the percentage of sort of Gen Z who declare themselves some form of queer is up to like 15, 20%.
This is how we got demisexual.
I heard you and Andrew Sullivan talk about this.
It's like you get some weird new term that's not really a thing, you glom onto it so that you sound special or like a minority.
And now suddenly you're part of the new coalition, even though you're white as white bread can come.
So, so, demisexual was coined, I believe, in 2006 on a blog, right?
Like a live journal.
Some random person was like, Yeah, you know, I have to be emotionally attached to a person, uh, to be sexually aroused by them, right?
Like, I'm not interested in one night stands.
And so, basically, I heard Andrew say in your discussion, You mean you're a chick, right?
No, so, you know, we took sort of like being a normal chick, and in order to valorize it within the new system, we had to reclaim.
Classified as a form of queerness, right?
Because queerness now has the sort of mandate of heaven within the system of the successor ideology.
That's right.
And so it's like, you know, why is it that people who are concerned with the question of police brutality, mostly affecting, you know, sort of young black men still ensconced in the inner cities, why do they have to say, our movement, you know, no one is free unless the black trans woman is free?
You know, like, why do they have to sit?
Like, is that really what?
20 year olds, black men living in their city, really think?
Is that a concern of theirs?
No, it is not a concern of theirs.
But it is a concern of this overall cultural formation, this overall fantasy of oppression and of the unity of oppression.
And so there's this idea that kind of, you know, Ibram X. Kendi was like, you know, unless you're supporting, you know, black trans lives, you're not truly anti racist, right?
Like you cannot, and if you are, and you know, you can't be anti racist without, and of course, none of this is true.
This is all shown, you know, in the data that, you know, the group in the Democratic coalition who is, you know, who is most skeptical of trans ideology, you know, are black Americans.
Right.
There's no actual basis for any of this, but it exists as this kind of galvanizing fantasy that has a constituency behind it that has power within the actual levers of the Democratic Party.
Like the young activists who are attracted to these ideas and who base their identity upon it are the ones who staff Democratic Party campaigns.
There was this moment when Elizabeth Warren started to tweet about.
Birthing people and people who menstruate and so on.
And of course, everybody who uses the term Latinks.
And it was so surprising to me.
And it's like, well, how did this happen?
How is a person who's seeking a broad based appeal to the American electorate such that they can win the presidency would think that this is the way to do it?
And the answer is they live within an echo chamber and an intellectual bubble that is created by their actual staffers, and that is then in turn.
Sustained by media that is increasingly staffed by those who accept all of this as axiomatic.
So, not so long ago, there was a news piece published at CNN where they said, There's no commonly agreed upon way to determine the sex, not the gender, the sex of a child at birth.
This was not an op ed piece.
This was not by some gender studies professor.
This was by one of their young reporters stating as fact that there was no agreed upon way to determine the sex of someone at birth.
And that represents the echo chamber sensibility that has now been created among a certain cohort of young people, and then the kind of capture of that echo chamber sensibility by organs of the media, which in turn represents the capture of that echo chamber sensibility, capturing the Democratic Party at large.
And now we have this conversation.
That's so interesting because I was going to ask you who's in control, right?
Like, who's running central command?
And it's dispersed, I think, is what you're saying.
It's young people throughout the Democratic coalition, the universities, the media.
It's not like there's one guy behind the curtain saying, and now we will go by, by the way, I didn't know it was Latinx.
I thought it was Latinx.
But there's not one guy doing that.
It's more dispersed, and they're coming up through academia and taking care of it.
It's various moral entrepreneurs who are paid salaries by state universities to imagine terms like undocumented.
And, uh, and documented citizens, undocumented citizens, right?
Publishing Standards Under Scrutiny 00:14:34
And whose job is to create an ever more elaborate picture of ways that we can fight oppression.
And so, you know, the theory is that the oppression is present at the level of prisons and policing and of murder and brutality, but it's also present in the, you know, the color of the eyeshade at the market, you know, at the makeup counter.
You know, the color of a band aid.
And so, that was that whole kind of project of critiquing every aspect of daily life to find all of the hidden kind of racist messaging that is there consciously or unconsciously.
Embedded in the world around us that inevitably disadvantages some and helps others, a kind of invisible force that elevates some to power and keeps others down.
It's a powerful intellectual framework, but it is above all really productive of discourse, right?
And it's a way to like fill content.
And so, you know, online news outlets that in the early 10s needed to.
You know, faced the kind of problem with the kind of failure of the original clickbait media model, you know, needed to hire people for cheap.
And so they would take on, you know, young staffers who were full of these ideas.
They'd pay them very little, but they would pay them in the kind of moral prestige that came with this.
And so it was originally like salon.com and a couple of other publications that started to do this and it became a business model.
All of those companies failed, right?
Because there was a gigantic glut of these kinds of takes where we, this thing is problematic, that thing is problematic, white.
Supremacy in knitting, white supremacy in pottery, white supremacy in the outdoors.
Like that became a kind of content generation machine that generated lots of engagement, not just in the form of like people who were into it, but also through online culture wars, which then like generated this cohort of ironic, but also, you know, pretty messed up young, you know, trolls, which, you know, and alt writers.
And that kind of discourse that rose up in response to this, and they sort of grew in proportion to one another.
And then eventually, Steve Bannon and the Trump campaign to some degree encouraged or tapped into support from this cohort.
All of it then turned into a kind of narrative of literal fascists in the White House, and then the identification of policies at the border, and so on, that there's this kind of confirmation bias.
Trump would say something about, he would call MS 13 animals in the context of a specific very grisly murder that they had committed.
But that would be truncated, and then he would be shown to be referring to all of those immigrants as animals.
And so, literal Nazi in the White House.
And so, this whole process of what was online beefing, what those of us who had Witnessed this online, not just on Twitter, but like the predecessor, going all the way back to the news groups.
There was a certain kind of style of online beefing that then Trump kind of tapped into and then brought into the mainstream and brought into the Oval Office.
And then in response, there was this sense that there was a state of exception that we were under, that the promise of democracy had failed with the election of the demagogue and the sort of usual standard and practices of the media.
Would only be a form of colluding with him, and they had to kind of line up in the war against him.
And there was a moral imperative to do all of this, and they needed a kind of underlying explanation.
And there were a couple of different underlying explanations.
One of those underlying explanations had to do with well, let's talk about what the housing crisis and what the policy of opening our economy to China did to the deindustrialized.
Parts of the country.
That was one left leaning, but it also had kind of a right populist tint to it.
Both people would talk about this.
And then there was this other idea that, like, deep underneath it, Trump was one manifestation of white supremacy that was.
At the very foundation of all the systems of this country.
And so there's this great conversation that was leaked between the New York Times's editor, Dean Beckett, in 2019, where a staffer then says, We're having these conversations about what it is and isn't racist, but I feel like racism is in everything.
When we report on science, when we report on culture, when we do our national reporting, we have to be looking at the ways that this is at the foundation.
Of all the systems of our society.
That was the alternative to the more class based reckoning with what the Trump phenomenon meant.
And the sort of the great and the good in this society went with option B.
And it was at that moment, right, that you see Dan Beckett comes from a previous idea, he's the black editor of the New York Times, and he comes from a previous idea of what the role and the vocation of the journalist was.
You could see that he's a little wary.
His response, he tries to kind of hold at bay, but he also reassures her and he's like, Look, one of the things we did the whole Mueller thing, many people here believed that that was what was going to remove him.
Um, now we're shifting towards looking at the racial dimension and that shift, which Beckett attempted to kind of describe in a relatively moderate or neutral way, despite you know, sort of openly declaring that his.
That one of the purposes of the Times is to try to undermine the president through an agenda based focus on race.
He still was wary of saying, like, every story has to be a meditation on race, right?
But such is the underlying momentum of these ideas that when they moved in that direction, they moved there fully.
Because there was this kind of ready to hand toolkit that they weren't necessarily intending to take up.
But that, like, immediately the kind of people who make their living by inventing new ways to construe ourselves as oppressed and oppressing, uh, were just there to supply them an endless amount of stuff.
And there was actually outrage and threats of somebody's position and so on.
I mean, I'll just give you one other example.
I mean, there's a million, but this one I found interesting and right in line with what you're saying, where the young people drive the change inside the organization.
This one's from publishing.
A good friend of mine is with a very well known publishing company and told me this story.
And it's somebody our viewers would know who told me this story.
Somebody had pitched a book or had written a book about a woman in, I think it was the 1920s, 1930s, who wanted to be a surgeon in America and felt she had to go as a man.
She had to portray herself as trans, right?
Nobody knew that she was actually a woman.
She wasn't trans.
She just had to pretend she was a man because you couldn't get into medical school back then as a woman.
So she did.
She cross dressed as a man and she passed as a man and she had a very successful career.
It's a career novel based upon an actual purse.
It's a historical purse.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's not really a novel.
It's nonfiction.
I think it was either nonfiction or it was a novel based on real life.
Right.
And so she had a very successful career posing as a man, as a surgeon.
And then when she died, it came out, right?
And now this was a look at this woman's life.
So the editor at the publishing house said, This is a great story.
And we definitely want to publish this book and ran it by a couple.
You know, the young editors at this publishing house, and they were deeply offended because the woman didn't own being trans.
She was basically a poser trans.
She wasn't a real trans person.
She was a fake trans person and they found it very deeply offensive to actual trans people, and so so the editor said, maybe i'm just dealing with two lunatics here.
I'm going to open this up to a wider group of people and had a greater group of young editors read it, and their response was to get him in trouble for forcing him to read, forcing them to read such an openly bigoted manuscript.
Needless to say, the book did not make it and I don't know what ultimately happened with it, but that's the situation these More reasonable, older school people are in right now.
You don't know what landmines you're about to step on.
So that's the second aspect of what I call successor ideology.
First of it is we have to know your identity so that we can discriminate against or for you.
Second is against or for you.
I like that.
Right.
The basis of censorship is this idea of emotional harm and trauma.
Right.
And this is something where.
They got him in trouble on the basis of employment law that has to do with harassment, right?
And so you have this existing legal toolkit, and you use it, you code your claims to say that, like, this makes me feel unsafe.
You know, there's specific legal language that you use when you make these claims.
But that legal language that is kind of, in many cases, like, used as a weapon.
Also penetrates people's souls and makes it so that they really are vulnerable at this level, right?
And so, like, you were taught to read things as if your emotional well being is on the line at all times, in part because if you get offended, you can then use this as a weapon to destroy your enemies.
But, like, that habit of reading actually penetrates your emotions so that you actually are emotionally traumatized and harmed.
So, it seems like there is this kind of law of conservation of oppression, right?
Like, as we become, as like, people have less and less.
To actually be less and less likely to encounter sort of overt expressions of prejudice as these things become utterly taboo and the basis of social death, there is this increased sensitivity to the microaggression, right?
And those who sort of experienced actual legalized systemic discrimination simply were not in a position where they could feel, right, the sting of the microaggression.
And so you have all these reports, right, in the New York Times.
Where they go on hunts for oppression and they report them breathlessly.
And in order to do their reporting, they interview a lot of people and they come up with the best thing they can come up with, right?
Like they print the most damning thing that is fit to print, right?
And so after the great sort of racial reckoning at Condé Nast, there was an example where there was an editor, I think, of Bon Appetit, right?
And he, what did he do?
In 2004, he wore a Costume that was seen as making reference to Latino identity, Latink's identity, right?
And that was seen as like an act of.
And of course, like you don't lose your job simply because somebody has something, you lose it because like other people dislike you, have agendas against you, and you know you can't marshal a coalition on your behalf.
Oh, tell me about it.
They did a wider piece about all the problematic things that happen.
And the example that they show was an editor at another magazine had a, you know, had a black.
Assistant, and he gave her a copy of the book, The Element of Style, right, by E.B. White, which is like the standard.
We all have to read it.
Standard guide.
She was offended by it and took it to mean as a racial microaggression, suggesting.
Right, that like she needed to improve her work, which A, it doesn't necessarily mean that B, your editor, right, his job is to get you to be better at your work, right?
Like that is within his area of competency.
And there's really no reason to think that it is a microaggression of any kind, racial or otherwise.
What's revealing about it is that it made the cut, right?
Because if they had anything better, right, like it would have included a better thing.
There's actually nothing there.
A person who has been schooled to take offense, to believe that nothing has changed, to believe that this thing that happened to her is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow, and that the same degree of umbrage is merited.
And above all, that like there will be people within the culture who's going to just take it at face value, right?
There will be people in the culture who present that to you and expect you to nod your head sagely and piously and be like, oh my God, like what was done to this person?
And so it's, you know, going back to this thing, like, you know, I wrote an essay, you know, sort of about sort of Asian American male rage, right?
And it has to do with the kind of like emasculation of the Asian American male, which is a trope within Asian American study, but it's also like a part of the experiences of Asian Americans.
There was a study that was done by, you know, the freakonomics guy, Stephen Dubner, I guess.
And, you know, he looked at online dating and he reached the conclusion that an Asian American male, in order to be on parity, With his otherwise similar white counterpart in terms of the amount of responses that he would get, he would need to make $367,000 more a year, right?
To be seen as unpaid.
This is like the SAT.
You know, I read that you did an article about this, right?
The Asians are dying.
Weaponized Fragility Explained 00:10:13
They're similar.
Score higher in order to get in.
They score 300 points higher.
300 points higher than the otherwise equivalent white candidate, and then 420 points higher than the otherwise equivalent black candidate.
Right.
And so, or 127% of the women.
And the same is true in online dating.
The Asian men really have a lot of very high hoops to jump through to get the same results.
Well, and so it's like, look, we have this statistics based account of systemic problems.
Right.
And like, I don't look that that study, I'm sure you can kind of poke methodological holes in it and so on.
But I don't think any Asian American man who's been on an online dating app will dispute that like it's documenting to some degree something that is real.
Right.
And can I just ask, even if the women on there are Asian, are Asian women putting in this position as well?
OKCupid actually found that there was a stronger white male bias among Asian American women who are on the site.
So that's a self selecting group, but those who are using online dating.
So this is all a part of the same thing.
We have all this kind of data based and race based information where we're able to look at disparities between people that document what people feel to be real.
Right, disparities that aren't captured by and that you can't legislate out of existence, right?
Like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 said you, but like there are all of these things that exist in people's minds that you can't legislate out of existence.
My only response though is like the right answer is not the one that we have chosen, which is to kind of make it so that an accusation as dumb as giving me the elements of style is a racial microaggression, right?
And that's inevitably what happens when you.
Kind of remove any idea of like proportionality, you know, and you sort of put ideas of due process into, and then you just create this kind of.
Fantasy world, as you know, right, where you can be punished for saying something is true and you can be punished for denying something that is false, right?
Like, this is not the answer, right?
Like, and above all, sort of like, how is it that the Asian man is in a position?
And sort of, I've kind of made the sort of argument that the Asian man is actually like in a position to restore reason and sanity on these issues precisely because he knows something about like the structural analysis of kind of racial inequality that appears in ways that like.
You know, that don't, that laws are powerless against on the one hand, right?
But like he also is on the other side, right?
Of this, he also is on the other side of this attack on racially disproportionate things in tech and other areas of life.
And he also gets no succor from the successor coalition on the issues that trouble him, right?
Because, sort of, if you criticize those online dating figures, what you're criticizing is the preferences of women.
Right.
And so the Asian male who does that finds himself, you know, the obviously the most, you know, the most despised and at the bottom of the system.
So it reveals a kind of hypocrisy within it, which is not to say that even if it were the case that like this, the system were on my side, I would be on its side, but it makes it easier, right?
Like to both be able to say, like, oh, we want to be able to talk about like both dimensions of this, right?
Like we like culturally, you know, we should be able to, as a cultural project, you know, like microaggressions are real.
It can be annoying to have to.
Constantly, you know, whatever, deal with, you know, people who want to know like where you're really from or whatever.
Not that like it's only happened to me a few times and it never offended me in any way, but there are those who now say that like, oh, there's an insinuation or an implication here that like we're not real Americans.
And, you know, there is actual history behind that.
There is a reason to feel that way.
But like it's actually kind of unhealthy to encourage people to feel that way.
Up next, weaponized fragility.
That's a good book name.
That's what we should.
Oh, I wish I had thought of that.
Well, Wesley's got to write that book, but that's a great book named Weaponized Fragility.
And we'll get into, well, you know what it is, but he's going to put some meat on those bones.
And then a great discussion on what we do about this and where it's going next.
Our good friend is black.
He has such an amazing attitude about himself, even when we've seen him be the victim of a discriminatory attitude.
Remark or what seems to be people who are looking at him differently for no good reason.
His instincts are always, I'm amazing.
It's definitely not about me or my skin color.
And his life reflects that attitude.
His success reflects that attitude.
And no matter what your color, creed, whatever it is, I believe the opposite is true.
The more you lean into victimhood, perceived or actual, the more you're going to get negative results in your life.
And that's what we're creating right now with young people.
So there's this divergence between the optimal approach for systemic.
And structural approaches, right?
So, like, the optimal individual approach is to let stuff roll off you, right?
Um, and and and just kind of and and the but but that sort of leaves intact the structural dimension, right?
And so, it's like, well, I think we should be able to talk about the structural dimension, but like the actual remedy in practice where like everybody is automatically guilty and so on, and is also is like much worse, right?
Like, you can divide and you destroy.
A polity, right?
Like through, you know, by taking these approaches too seriously and, you know, which We're going to see what's going to happen, but certainly there is like dangerous potential as these things emerge.
And moreover, it's like, moreover, on the whole, it's like, how do you strike that balance?
It's hard to do, but certainly the approach that we have right now is like, makes it impossible to strike that balance.
If you posit the existence of people who are, you know, so fragile that anything that touches them immediately is caused for emotional harm, and you get to call the HR department and so on, that does a couple of things, right?
Like, it, it, But one of the things that it does is that it actually molds people who feel this way.
It changes their structure, their feeling, it makes them more fragile, and it makes all of society more fragile.
And the continuation of that, as it increasingly gets expressed in a politics of a kind of weaponized fragility, I have no problem even knowing the things that I know that I just described and talked about.
It's 100% the wrong path, and one and all reasonable people must stand in opposition to it.
Weaponized fragility.
I like that too.
There is a push in every area, it seems, right now to sort of lean into one's fragility and sort of capitalize on the joy of believing it's not your fault.
Whatever's gone wrong in your life is not your fault.
You have an escape route here where you can blame society, you can blame skin color, you can blame just generally others.
And there was an article in Persuasion in August, August 13th, when therapists become activists and talking about how there's now trouble in training of therapists who are being told more and more to encourage their patients to understand their problems are because of an oppressive society.
And here's a quote from it, which is just extraordinary to me.
One colleague of mine who works in a prominent psychiatry department told me that during a group discussion of the growing problems of stress and suicide in Black youth, Her colleagues were unwilling to discuss explanations that pointed to factors coming from within beleaguered communities.
Thus, participants who pointed to fear of police, aggression, and societal discrimination were greeted with nods.
But when she suggested aggression, or when she suggested that they also consider bullying by classmates, chaos in the home, or neighborhood violence, she was ignored.
Anyone who has taught in one of those schools knows that, you know, at a minimum, there is a mix of factors at work here.
Right, like you have a lot of traumatized kids that have absent parents or non functional parents, and it manifests in the classroom.
And the kids who have these emotional problems that come in prevent other kids from, you know, from.
And so, a fix that says, oh, we're just going to look at these figures, we're going to conclude that, on the basis of racial disparities in student discipline and suspension, that there must be racism at work, and we're going to issue a mandate that is going to prevent.
Teachers at the classroom level, right, from being able to discipline their kids, right, is to make that problem worse for everyone else, like who are not the discipline problems themselves, who then, as this school becomes increasingly dysfunctional, may join the ranks of those, you know, who have emotional problems that make things worse, right?
And now when they go to their therapist, they're going to be told it's not your fault.
It's not your fault.
You know, and Britt Hume always used to say, and I love the expression, I've stolen it winners take responsibility, losers blame others.
And what we're doing now is telling everyone nothing's their fault.
You need to take no responsibility.
And that leads me to the big question, Wesley, which is.
Something I discussed with my husband and our friend Hayden the other day, which is where does this go?
The Grift of No Fault 00:05:40
What do all these systems get replaced with?
When you get rid of, as Andrew was summarizing his discussion with you, which I highly recommend on his Substack, if you get rid of due process, rejection of even an attempt, I'm quoting him now, at objectivity, a belief in active race and sex discrimination in the name of, quote, equity to counter the legacy of the past, the purging of ideological diversity, And the replacement of liberal education with left indoctrination.
If we do that as part of the successor ideology, then what?
What do we replace it with?
Well, it's a kind of like bloodless inner Sovietization of our society, right?
And the thing that is of interest is that, you know, Marx always said that it was going to be in the advanced industrial economies that will be, you know, that will be ripe for a transition to, you know, the final stage of history.
You know, in reality, it ended up being, you know, partially industrialized societies like Russia and China that ended up going through communist revolutions.
And the revolutions were so violent because you had to make up so much, like, because the class structure and the developmental structure of the economy were in such rudimentary phases that you had to use violence, right, in order to lash people into that final stage, right?
But Marx's original idea, right, was that.
That it would happen.
It would happen naturally, as as as um, as as society.
You know as wealthy uh, societies that had a surplus um, you know they would move, they would move through democratic means toward um toward uh, you know, the the post class society.
And so what I see happening is, you know there's, there's this kind of privatized entrepreneur, like moral entrepreneurs, who act as kind of political commissars right, and so you, you have, And what you have is you have a season of protests, and they have a set of demands.
And the demands are more mental health faculty that are trained in trauma informed approaches and more diversity czars and more people in the ethnic studies department and the gender studies department.
And so, in order to placate that, to get the protests to go away, they bring in, they hire all of these people.
Right.
And then those people act as a constituency on behalf of hiring more such people because, and those people are always redefining the problem such that the problem never goes away.
Right.
They, they, and it's true.
Can I just tell you, just I, I'm loving this, but I just want to tell you there was just an article about Harvard Westlake out in California.
And they had, I think it was five diversity czars or officers inside of the school.
And guess what they determined when they took a hard look at how Harvard Westlake was doing?
They needed another diversity czar.
They brought in a sixth.
And it's all from the same group.
It's self fulfilling.
It's completely back scratching of oneself in one's own pocket.
But it's corrupt and it's dishonest.
Well, I mean, the kind of consultant grift that is endemic in the Defense Department and other bureaucratic agencies, they've just turned it toward themselves, right?
But okay, so there's this ongoing grift, and they inculcate their ideas in young people so that they reflexively see the world in a certain way, right?
And so one of the struggle sessions at the New York Times that has Exerted a pall over the whole newsroom is the firing of Don McNeil, who, you know, he's this older white guy, a veteran of the paper.
He was the COVID reporter.
The COVID reporter, and he actually, you know, he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of the team for their coverage.
So that the paper both forced his resignation on the one hand, while they were telling the Pulitzer team, oh, well, we disciplined him, which they did.
They already disciplined him without firing him, right?
For using the N word in a conversation where he was just repeating the term, talking about, because there was an instance where the students that he was on a trip to Mexico City.
Squiring them around, you know, they have some program at the Times where they get the reporters to do this.
Squiring around these young people, most of whom were, you know, not graduates, but they were, you know, they were enrolled at places like Dalton and so on.
And so, you know, you have these like privileged white kids, they were all white kids, and who were debating him about some classmate of theirs who was punished, canceled, whatever, for using the n word.
And so he repeated the word in order to say, well, he used that word, but like, What was the context and why was he canceled, right?
And he used the word in order to identify it, right?
And in the conversation, he was not deploying it against a person or applying it to any right entity.
And so the Times, initially, they said, like, intent does not matter when you use words like that.
Later on, a few days later, they had to backtrack and say, like, oh, actually, of course intent matters, despite the fact that we just publicly declared that it doesn't.
But, like, so what happened there, right?
Like, Don McNeil ran up against people who, Accepted as axiomatic, right?
Like all of these dogmas that were taught to them by the people of color conference, by the whole sort of nonprofit industrial grift.
Voting Purpose Within Society 00:15:42
All right, so like it's a grift for some people, but like it becomes the actual worldview of many of the people that are exposed to it, not everyone.
And there's that preference falsification problem where not that many people believe it.
But if it used to be the case, like in the class of 2013, that emerged into journalism and other professional entities.
Transform those places overnight.
You know, I talk to people from those graduating cohorts and I'm like, what percentage really buy this stuff?
And they're like, 10% are really passionate about it.
Like, 5% have the stones to actually be publicly opposed to it.
30% are kind of friendly toward it.
And the rest are just kind of keeping their heads down and surviving day to day in the midst of what they know is insanity, but like, that they know they can't do anything about.
Right.
They can't safely do anything about it.
So that, like, you know, 10% of those cohorts.
So, oh, but now we're going to start at K through 12.
Well, what percent of those cohorts are going to buy into it?
Not all of them, but let's say we increase that 10% to 30%.
Right.
Now we see the change in this country and its institutions that have happened in five years with 10% of a few, right, like graduating cohorts of a handful of colleges.
And the change is quite stark.
Right.
And so, so the dramatic.
So, what happens when the cohorts are 30% true believers and 70% who have been trained from kindergarten to know that, like, there are terrible consequences that come from standing in opposition to these ideas?
Well, we know that, like, that's going to be enough to transform things by orders of magnitude more than has already happened.
And so, you know, like, is it going to result in total failure?
There's this book called Disabling America, which is about.
The various ways the expansion of the civil rights movement beyond its original purpose, right?
Because the Civil Rights Act and the government apparatus that was built around it was designed to get rid of Jim Crow.
And that was a good purpose.
It was a necessary purpose.
But then, now, it, but nobody anticipated it in 1964 that a judge would be determining what bathroom a high school in Fairfax, Virginia, you know, like that's a degree of intervention that no one had anticipated, but that like emerged smoothly from the matrix of the way bureaucratic creep, legal mission creep, right?
And just like, Empowering through the force of law a set of legal and moral entrepreneurs who have this paranoid, echo chambered vision of the world, and then who occupy certain choke points of various institutions of society, what they could do.
And they can conjure from out of nowhere a new identity that nobody has heard of, that everyone has to.
Tiptoe around has to treat piously, or terrible consequences will be imposed on them either by you know online uh activists or by the force of law, right?
And and so they grow the goal eventually is to like embed themselves within the law.
You know, the American Bar Association is now considering a um you know a uh a measure sort of that would mandate all accredited law schools to uh to um.
Teach higher, you know, the DEI consultants and teach people anti racist training.
And so increasingly, they're trying to make it so that if you want to participate in certain desirable portions of society, you must say the words and your silence is violence, right?
And so there's this at the kind of highest level of abstraction, you know, the successor ideology says that we need a radically less disciplinary society of the street.
So, that we're going to abolish police and prisons in order to have a totalizing solution to racial disparities in law enforcement.
What happens to crime?
I mean, truly, this is what I'm confused about.
So, okay, let's get rid of the police.
Let's get rid of the prisons.
And a radically more disciplinary society of the workplace, bedroom, and boardroom, because the real problems in our society are Eurocentrics, et cetera, patriarchy, right?
And so, a kind of redefinition of where the evil is and a redefinition of what has to be done.
And what has to be done, of course, insofar as one of the premises of the movement is that we all went through this vast socialization process that made us the racist, sexist bigots that we are, there needs to be a vast re socialization process starting at infancy, right?
Anti racist baby, right?
Starting at the very beginning, and in order to produce new people who are cleansed of the problems of the past.
And so, what we've done is, We've taken the energy behind civil rights and abolition and the kind of righteous moral energy behind it, and we've applied it to what we've classified as a new set of problems that we claim are as bad as the old sets of problems.
And those problems are the existence of police, the existence of prisons, the existence of standardized tests, the existence of borders, the existence of binary differences in gender.
So we've taken all of these.
So we've taken all of these.
Institutions without which a modern society can't function, right?
Or police and prisons, or these practices without which you can't run a functional, you can't run.
Corporations functionally, the meritocracy, and so on.
We've declared them to be part of an overall vast system of white supremacist and cisgender patriarchal violence.
And we've said that the purpose of the American state and the purpose of American corporations is to fight against these things.
And yet we've somehow sold all those corporations on the idea that they're involved in this fight too.
Obviously, in the process of making that transition, the original kind of like ultimate radicalism of these movements is not going to be expressed, but it's going to take a different form.
And that's what I mean when I say kind of soft, bloodless inner Sovietization.
Like, there's just going to be, we're going to have a more administrative society where if sometime in the past, you know, you had to pledge allegiance or whatever, and to some people that was an oppressive imposition.
Now we will have to say various words.
People are already doing that.
And the point is that the goal is to close the space in which people can manifest resistance, in which people can speak resistance, in which people can think.
And it's presented in such a way where, oh, this is just benign.
This is just being a good person.
This is not being a shitty person.
Like, why do you want to exclude trans people and non binary people by insisting on a distinction?
Can it be stopped?
Okay, because let's take white men out of it, even though we shouldn't.
White men should be able to voice their opinion on this as well.
But let's take all of us oppressed groups, right?
You're Asian.
I'm a woman.
We have at least a couple of points on the oppressed scale.
Andrew's gay.
All these things used to matter.
I don't know.
We're sort of less and less.
You have to have the intersectionality now.
You have to have at least two at a.
I don't know if one puts you on the scale anymore, unless it's skin color.
You surely have felt that consequences visited on you may have.
You know, been determined in part by gender, right?
Definitely.
Who knows?
I mean, I just feel like, okay, so if the coalition that they mean to protect, right, if people in the LGBTQ community, people of color, minorities, women, whatever, more and more start saying, we don't believe in this, we don't support you.
And as you point out earlier, most black people are not bored with this stuff.
The moment you do that, you become adjacent, you become an enabler, you lose all legitimacy.
Okay, because you look at like the Hispanics who voted for Trump, right?
So here's the thing, right?
So back in 1996, California was already, they had made the demographic tip, right?
They were less than 50% white, right?
But their electorate, because of the lag in registration and so on, was still majority white.
And so they voted to deny benefits to legal immigrants, which was immediately overturned by a judge.
But they also voted to forbid affirmative action in hiring or government contracting or other areas where racial Preferences were in place, right?
But the idea was okay, we already have this demographic shift.
We're going to wait a couple of generations and then we'll come back, take a second bite at the apple, and we'll bring back a racially gerrymandered society by law.
And so in 2020, they issued a referendum for a state constitutional amendment that would overturn the previous referendum that forbade affirmative action.
And the idea was.
And allow people to discriminate on the basis of race.
Yeah, well, now we have this like more diverse coalition electorate, and they're going to support it.
And of course, all the great and good of California.
Society, all its corporations lined up in support of it.
The spending of those who supported this measure to bring it back outspent those who opposed it by a factor of nine to one.
But by an even greater supermajority than had initially forbid affirmative action, they shot down this attempt to bring it back.
And the supermajority, the Hispanics and Asians, voted against it in even greater numbers than.
Than what Americans did.
So, this is one of the few times a policy, this policy, which is mostly entirely the purview of CEOs and college presidents.
And so, it's not subject to democratic control.
But whenever they do subject it to democratic control, everybody always proceeds from the basic moral intuition that, eh, we don't really support a society gerrymandered by race.
And it turned out to be the case that the new Non white immigrants, non white black immigrants to the country are even more supportive of that than white Americans, right?
Like, even more likely to reject that framing.
And I'm not saying I necessarily oppose affirmative action.
I take a kind of pragmatic view of things and I say, well, you know, at the margins, you know, we want to ensure diversity where we can to some degree.
We should be able to practice it.
But it turns out to be the case, right, that like when you actually ask people and give them a chance to manifest their preferences, including Asian Americans and Hispanics, You know, they, for the most part, prefer a society where you get where you are on the basis of the sweat of your brow rather than one where a political entity discriminates in your favor for or against you on the basis of your immutable identity.
For the most part, that intuition still exists, right?
Like within society.
And of course, like when you poll black people on whether you support affirmative action, they're split 50 50 for the most part.
And so there's a lot more dissent within that community, right?
Then there is else than one would.
So, who's in the now 10%, you know, in the future, soon to be 30% of successor ideologists?
At this point, mostly people who directly, right, like make their living through the activist, nonprofit, federal government, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Infrastructure that's ever growing.
Instructors.
So, we have a lot of like women college graduates who there's an ongoing national jobs program on their behalf, right?
And so, like, much of this.
Just really comes down to that, right?
Are they so well organized and so powerful that they've managed to cow all of media, all of corporate America, all of sports?
I mean, these are amazing women.
I mean, you got to tip your hat to them.
The answer is yes, because they wield the kryptonite of the racism accusation, right?
And that kryptonite is in this context, especially the context that was radicalized by Trump.
And Trump was a necessary, I think, condition for the total takeover because he.
Presented a plausible picture to many liberal normies who would not otherwise have gone for this stuff, right?
Like he was the person that they could frame as the kind of fulfillment of all of their prophecies, right?
That in fact, the country remains at its core.
There's this thing at our core that we haven't purged.
He or the caricature of him.
I mean, it's not to excuse anything and everything Trump ever did or said, but as you point out earlier, They also made a caricature of him.
And then, on top of everything, we haven't even mentioned the name George Floyd, which really just.
I mean, that.
So I don't.
I remember somebody asking me shortly after George Floyd, do you think that this is going to stay, you know, this craziness we're going through right now?
And I was like, I don't think so.
Dumb, wrong answer.
I mean, George Floyd was just the last light on the fire that, and it continues to glow, that fire.
It's burning now.
So the University of California Regents, they told their, they told, they set up a commission of their faculty to study whether or not the SAT was.
Racist or whether they should keep it right.
And they, in like March of 2020, they that faculty committee issued their recommendation, which was to keep the SAT right.
Like they studied it, they're experts, and they concluded it's not racist.
It actually helps underrepresented minorities of promise be discovered.
It doesn't, you know, it is useful.
It actually tells us important information that we need and evaluate our candidates.
Ergo, We should keep the test, right?
That was their recommendation.
And that recommendation was likely going to be acted upon because they had been empowered with that purpose to provide the decisive, relevant analysis.
March 2020, right?
And then, like a few months later, the country explodes into several months of chaos, and the thing is out the window, right?
Defunding Primary Effects 00:04:09
And so you have all of these other effects.
Ultimately, the defund thing, there have been some experiments with it, but it's overwhelmingly unpopular, including with Black people, right?
So, like they did it, Reuters did a poll and they found that 80% of Black respondents wanted the same amount of police protection or more, right?
So, it doesn't have support anywhere within the society.
And it doesn't have support among the relevant Demographic on whose ostensible behalf this proposal is being made by a handful of radical activists in their midst to pretend to represent them without actually being representative of their views at all.
Right.
And so that the Democratic Party is bowing to those poll numbers.
And now they're saying, oh, it's Trump that defunded the police or whatever, Republican, because they, you know, and so like they, they are refunding the police in all of these cities, which is hopeful.
Right.
It's like, okay, let's put these strategies to the test.
Let's do what these crazy people want.
It's failing.
And it makes, but, but, When you have so many institutions being controlled by the messaging of these people, you know, I have three kids in K 12 education right now.
It's terrifying what they're teaching these kids.
I just don't know where it's going.
And I wonder whether each of these organizations will suffer a backlash like Defund the Police did.
I'm just curious.
How are your kids and the other students that they're friends with?
How are they like, are they buying it?
Are they like, what?
No, I mean, my kids roll their eyes because they have me and my husband.
You know, and so we counter program at home.
And we don't, we're careful not to be too ideologically hard the other way because we don't want, when they get to their teenage years, rebellious teens to say, Guess what?
I'm suddenly trans and I'm joining BLM and I believe in birthing people.
You know, we don't want to create a situation where just to irritate us, they do that.
But we talk to them about both sides and the reasoning and the way things used to be and what's happening right now.
And they're smart and they get it.
And we don't let them spend hours and hours on YouTube where they get indoctrinated and so on.
And they tell us what they're hearing in class, which Wesley is one of the It is the reason we pulled our kids out of these New York City private schools.
I mean, we just pulled them.
We're moving them now.
When we were pretty open in seeking new schools with the administrators that we did not want.
Were you able to find non taken over alternatives?
Well, I mean, we're just getting started, so we'll see.
But right now, I'm hopeful about where we're going because we.
We sort of did a cards on the table with the administrators of the new school saying, just want to look, we're fine with people who are progressive.
We're not okay with indoctrinating ideology being shoved down the throats of our children.
That's not the school's job.
And I think our schools that we're going to agree with that.
But I just, we're in the minority now, right?
Like you see the news every day.
So I just, I wonder if it's reversible when it comes to media, corporate America, sports, Hollywood, the universities, K through 12, like, I don't think in 10, 15 years, where are we on this?
I'm not sure if it's reversible, but like, look, there was an inflection point, right?
Where in comedy, comedy hit it earlier, right?
Where you're not allowed to like anyone who's funny.
And literally the only person you're allowed to like is this like lesbian haranguing you about abuse, right?
And, and, and, but like everybody, everybody who's funny still has huge audiences.
And anytime they do anything, you know, like Chappelle with Netflix and so on, like it's a massive success.
Right.
And then, and so you have this kind of like rotten tomatoes phenomenon where like the critics all panned him, but like, you know, it's like 100% from the populace.
And so this goes with the affirmative action thing that I was talking about previously, you know, that like there's this solid consensus among those who deem themselves the elite.
And then, and then you put it to a vote.
And of course, the people put it to a vote, but then the UC system, they got rid of the SAT.
And so they're going to annul the vote, right?
Like in practice.
And they're just going to go ahead and do whatever they want.
And so this is what I mean.
Cancel Culture and Trans Women 00:09:31
Like, Successor ideology, we have to understand, is not about winning elections.
Like a bunch of Democratic candidates in the primary in 2020 made the mistake of thinking that they could run an election by, like, being like, oh, I'm Kristen Gillibrand.
I'm a white woman.
I can help white women understand.
My pronouns are she, her.
Right.
Yeah.
All that stuff.
Right.
And all of them, many of whom were seen as like serious candidates at the start, like, you know, dropped out very early on when their polling was in the low 2% to 3%.
So what does that mean?
That means that, like, even the Democratic Party.
Primary electorate, its most dedicated partisans have no more taste for this than anybody else does.
Right.
So, like, even though this fails at the electoral booth, why do they then exercise so much power?
It's because it is a system that's based upon seizing choke points in various bureaucracies, right?
Like the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, right?
The staff of the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, right?
And yes.
So it isn't about seeking, it's a category mistake to think that this thing is going to have their president, which is why sort of Kamala, which is why everybody's not freaking out about Kamala Harris, in addition to her just like, you know, by all accounts, just being like a horrible person, you know, from all of her staffers.
30 people do not go on the record, you know, do not talk to reporters to say that you're a horrible person if you aren't.
And when you are the hope of the, you know, when you are the hope, you know, when you are the sort of designated next nominee, It's one of the reasons why people know that she's like a serious liability because she doesn't have any record other than her identity based appeal, right?
And so they know that she's a problem, but it doesn't matter because ultimately the system, like these moral entrepreneurs, don't thrive by winning elections.
They thrive by capturing the person who runs the Office of Civil Rights, right, within the education department and so on.
All of their power is concentrated when a Democrat wins, usually by other appeals.
And so they use a guy like Biden, who clearly does.
Is seen as not being identified with the successor coalition, but they're part of his coalition.
And so when a kind comes time to give out the job, when a kind comes time to give out the job, like the sex, they tried to cancel him with their, Kamala tried to cancel him, right?
With his record, which indeed actually is quite problematic, right?
Like the great irony of this great awakening was that it resulted in the installment into office of the man who is.
As responsible as Bill Clinton, as any other single person, for the 1994 crime bill that is held to be the basis of mass incarceration, as we understand it.
So you have all of these ironies.
They don't win elections, but the march through institution keeps going through.
What can happen?
What actually stops that?
That's the question that you're asking.
And the only thing that I can think of, if one were to actually want to reverse this, would be like, You know, it would be the right would have to become as radically illiberal as the left has, and they would have to win power and they would have to purge the people who are purging everybody else.
Like, that's actually the answer.
Cancel the cancellors?
I don't know.
Like, people who don't believe in the idea of free speech and discussion, right?
Like, there has to be a criteria, a litmus test.
But, like, we're not going to take you on because if we do, you're going to dominate everybody else and you're going to cancel everyone and replace them because this is the pattern.
Right, and so how does one coexist in a liberal society with deeply illiberal ideologies and those who support it?
Popular support of the kind that I've described has some role, and the fact that, like, oh, people are not really actually into this, including people of color, including black people, right?
Like, they don't actually buy this unity of all oppression narrative because it is simply not true, right?
You know, that means something.
But it actually means less than you would think.
That's what we've learned because it's all about like specific incentives.
It's like, how did that publisher, why did that publisher who wanted to publish this thing that clearly was fine and was not offensive, why did that book get killed?
I don't know if he faced consequences.
Maybe he did or didn't.
But certainly the mere fact of being reporting is a kind of punishment itself, like the process is a punishment and sends a message to him and to everybody else about what they're allowed to do and not do.
And so, but I just feel like.
Social Darwinism will win out in the end, you know, that the fittest will ultimately prevail here.
The people who are mentally tough, the people who fight for these ideals over time, they just have, like, the kids are going to have to see what nonsense this is and how they don't want to live in this non free world.
It's not in their DNA as Americans that the kids are going to fight back.
The kids are going to see that this is bullshit and start fighting.
And it's not cool to be woke at some point.
That's going to happen.
And Like, we can't just have surrendered to this nonsense wokeism in every institution, and then that's the norm forever in America.
I just, it doesn't sound like us.
There's certain green shoots that people point to, right?
There's polling that shows that Gen Z, for example, are more concerned about or more opposed to cancel culture than any other generational cohort.
This is often because young Gen Z people will often have like five or six friends who have been canceled, right?
But at the same time, they're opposed to cancel culture, but they just ask the question are you opposed to cancel culture?
They don't define what it means.
So, for many of them, the baseline, like many of the hyper progressive views, are their baseline.
And so, they define cancel culture as maybe the excessively punitive or vindictive approach.
But they definitely all just believe that Trump's a racist and all these deplorables who supported him are terrible.
Well, even more than that, they believe that trans women are women.
And you are a bigot if you dissent from that.
And so, like, you know, famously, you know, the author of the book, the African author of the book, Chimim Manda Adiche, who, you know, she was a.
I saw this Twitter world.
Yeah, yeah, she was a celebrity of the previous.
She was a celebrity of the circa 2017 Successor Coalition as the author of the book, We Should All Be Feminists.
But, you know, she made the public statement, you know, trans women are trans women.
That was her statement.
She was saying, trans women are fine, and I'm going to treat them as they want to be treated.
And.
They're actually entitled to that treatment, but they're not women.
They're something other than women.
They are another category of thing that I'm going to recognize.
I'm going to give rights to them.
I'm going to be kind to them.
But they're not this other thing, right?
This other thing actually has a meaning.
Like that's what she was saying.
And of course, she, you know, she, her prior celebrity within the Successor Coalition means nothing, right?
That doesn't give her the ability to carry anyone along with her.
The author of The Handmaid's Tale, right?
Wrote a piece called Am I a Bad Feminist? because she defended the due process rights of a professor who is accused of rape.
And you know, you have to get into details of these things, but she reached the conclusion based upon you know, close scrutiny of the determination that was made by the university that found him to be not culpable of what he was accused of.
Right?
Like, she made the determination that, oh, this person is determined to a process, this is what the process found, we should accept that the process.
Was probably accurate.
And I think her own judgment was that, like, if you look at the process, like, it pretty much seems like he was wrongly accused of something that he did not do.
But in any case, she was like, you know, we live in a society of laws, there are processes, and this person was found to be guilty.
Like, that actually matters, right?
And of course, on the basis of that, the authors of The Handmaid's Tale, right?
Like, is this problematic figure from the previous generation?
So, like, What is like, you know, will is normalcy going to return?
So, like, look, we went through that crossover that I described in comedy and in other areas, right?
And so, like, and so, like, we have people on Substack who are kind of, you know, who are not part of, including myself, Wesleyang.substack.com, who are not really part of this and who are scrutinizing it and who are resisting it, right?
Elite Politics and Correctness 00:15:10
And the people at the top of that leaderboard, you know, they make a million a year, right?
Like, they make 10 times what.
The kind of journalists that Busty make.
And so, what does this show?
This shows that there is popular demand for this, right?
And this popular demand encompasses audiences that are possibly multiples the size, right, of what manages to deem itself mainstream and that still has control over disciplinary society.
And so, the question is is there a way to detach that small and shrinking, but still quite large audience, right?
There was a poll recently that found that, like, 65% of the public doesn't really buy mainstream media, but that 35% encompasses, you know, we know that the 35% encompasses all the great and good of the Society, right?
And all those who aspire to graduate from Ivy League colleges and become the.
And so the question is is there a preference cascade?
Because there are inflection points and there are moments where someone takes a stand and people feel safe.
There's a structure where people are safe and they feel, you know, the example of just within the private schools, I think, is instructive, right?
It's like one would think that.
You could go on TV, you could say the insane things that are being taught there, and then people would be empowered and they would awaken and they would alter the dynamics.
But we see that there are institutional factors that prevent that from happening, right?
And that we see that all of the movement within those institutions are such that it's about entrenching the powers.
And so ultimately, the answer will have to be alternative structures of legitimacy.
And of course, part of the intensification of the moralization around this.
The reason so they become like more powerful, they become more brittle, they be but they become more susceptible to building alternatives.
But like, I don't really see much in terms of like building alternatives.
I see people talking about Bitcoin and stuff like that.
And, you know, I don't know if there's an answer there.
I'm not adept enough in that world to see it.
I know that people who are Bitcoin rich see themselves as kind of like they live in our society, but not among us, and that they're going to be the basis of the next revolution.
I'm skeptical, but just because like I don't really know enough about it.
No, but if you look at our history, Wes, if you look at a country that's Did have the Jim Crow South, right?
That, I mean, for God's sake, at one point did have slavery.
If we can change from being those people, right, to having civil rights law, to having equality in the country, not perfect, but pretty damn good, then we can change from this nonsense back to, if not what we had before with due process and free speech and respect for others and ideological diversity and debate, something close to it.
I mean, I just don't believe that we as a society are going to settle on this absurdity.
As our new reality, and let the Upper West Side women in their Lululemon, doormen protected buildings, succeed with taking away the police and pushing racial diversity on people who are actually thinking more about merit and hard work.
The police thing is basically gone.
There will be some more experiments around it, but 2020 saw our murder rate go above 20,000 in the country, reaching a level that it never had.
That idea failed.
That it had not been at since, like, you know, the late 90s.
And so, on the other hand, like progressive prosecutors who are, you know, those guys are going on strong.
You know, the percentage of people who actually hold office.
For now, for now, but it's going to come back to them, too.
I mean, if you're light on crime and you're in a city where the crime rate is up, you know, 20, 30%, like it is in most of our major towns, you're going to get bounced out of there.
I mean, that's just, that's why I'm talking about like social Darwinism.
Eventually, people are going to say, I don't want that.
And they're going to say, And by the way, I'm allowed to have whatever the hell opinion I want.
This is America.
Well, so, and, you know, Eric Adams, of course, you know, ran, was the sole candidate running on a strong sort of anti crime.
He'd be our new mayor.
And so, you know, he is cited by many as an example.
However, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, which saw like 20, 30% rises in the murder rate and other crimes, and who was one of the part of the vanguard of, you know, he was up for election and he won by even more than he did before.
And the reason behind this is that.
Such a small percentage of the electorate actually pays attention or votes in these prosecutor elections that successor ideologists had shown that they can game the system.
They have much more energy behind them and they can win these races.
And this is what happened in San Francisco.
Nobody pays attention to the school board elections until you suddenly find yourself right with a vice president of the school board that like gets rid of merit based admissions at Lowell High School that votes to cover over a painting because it was supposedly emotionally triggering because it included a picture of a slave and an Indian on it.
Like suddenly you find yourself, you know, at the mercy of all this, but like the overall kind of background progressivism.
Of the city is such that, like, oh, it turns out like people are willing to like keep voting in crazy people, even if they don't necessarily support them.
Now, it is true that, like, you know, we have parents that are, and I'm going to be reporting on this in my sub stack, who are, you know, they're seeking the recall of the DA and seeking a recall of the school board.
And so ultimately, in response to your question, people have to become as Passionate about their own values as their opponents are passionate about theirs.
So, we have this problem where you have like 80% of the people believe something, but they believe it kind of passively because it has never been challenged, right?
And so, they're not used to articulating a defense of due process.
Like, we are a country that gives people due process, right?
And you're a little taken aback.
There's like an aggressor's advantage to those who are saying, well, actually, you know, that makes you like pro rape or whatever.
And you are taken aback and you are not ready.
To kind of like defend the principle, because, and then it turns out that like you're the one getting fired, not the other person, right?
And so, you know, in support of your idea, like people have to become as passionate and defensive ideas such as like, oh, the ability to kind of like share cultural practices.
They're getting the tools though.
Look, just look at the past year in critical race theory because reading you is interesting because I would have thought a lot of this was just thrown at us after George Floyd.
The more you read Wesley Yang, the more you realize and listen to him, even here.
This has been coming for a while.
And prior to the past year, we didn't even understand, I think, we sort of people who are not in the academic world, what is critical race theory?
And yes, it's being used as a bucket to encompass a lot right now that's happening in the schools because there's not a better short form to just capture all the craziness and racial division.
But most people in America probably know what that is now or have a general idea and didn't a year ago.
So it's happening, right?
There are warriors.
On the side of reason, who are trying to give people the tools to fight back, whether it's Robert George's group inside of Princeton for academic freedom, trying to help students and professors who are being muzzled or forced to accept these crazy ideologies, or FAIR, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which is trying to help parents and schools learn the language and understand how to fight back against this discrimination and so on.
It's happening.
It's just, it's the birth of it right now because the problem has never become so in our faces during COVID and so on.
It's happening, and the Democratic Party knows that it's an electoral problem.
And so there is this problem where they know it's an electoral problem, but their response is going to be, as with Biden, right?
Like to get some acceptable figurehead who then will be in a position to install their people within the administration.
And so it's really that that is the issue.
It's a matter of inter elite politics.
And the question is whether inter elite politics are totally lost.
Right.
And it feels kind of like they are.
On the other hand, like, look, if you know the inside of academia and legal academia and so on, you know that there still is a super majority of people who are, who don't really buy this stuff, but who are afraid to.
Stand in opposition to it.
So it's the same as if they supported it.
But like, people don't actually buy it.
Okay.
Like, you go to the UC Berkeley sociology department, a super majority of the people there don't buy it.
And of course, and there was a poll about political correctness, you know, and it found that like, you know, like 75% of black people responding to the question, you know, do you think political correctness has gone too far, agree that it has.
Okay.
And like Hispanics, 82% of Hispanics agree with that.
And like 89% of Native Americans agree with it.
In fact, Native Americans were the group that agreed most strongly with the idea that political correctness has gone too far.
So, more than white people, these other forms of non white diversity are opposed to what political correctness has turned into.
Because it's not just about politeness and so on.
It's about saying the words and compelling speech and belief.
And no one likes it.
So, the fact that it's politically a liability, and the fact that the Democratic Party knows that it's a political liability.
And the fact that everyone who is able to muster the kind of cojones to endure social death and then emerge on the other side, hugely profits, right?
Like everyone that manages to do those things.
All of this is in favor of the fact that we have the raw material of real preference guest aid.
My only proviso is that no, this is actually about like.
Elite politics in very restricted settings that manages to go on remote control.
And if you sort of look at the politics of the West Wing, that was the politics that presaged what successor ideology became.
And sort of as the country became more integrated, more diverse, less bigoted, and it actually turns out to be the case that conservatives and Republicans are more likely to be in racially mixed families than.
Than liberals are.
Like, as it became all of this, yes, yes, there's some finding to this effect.
And so, like, all of the data always upends the conventional wisdom.
So, you know, we discover 3% of Hispanics use the term the tinks, 97% do not.
You know, we find, you know, and we find that there was another amazing finding that.
Essentially, it was a content analysis that showed that liberals reduced the complexity of their speech when they talked to minorities and conservatives did not.
Basically, like liberals proceed from the implicit assumption that they have to dumb themselves down when they talk to people of color and in a way that conservatives do not.
And so, all of the data, and then the kind of 80% of blacks want as much or as more policing, all of the data always shows.
Always, it's always a bloodbath, right?
Like, when it comes to these questions, and yet, my point is that the nature of this policy is that it is counter-majoritarian, it is counter-democratic at principle and in practice.
And so, it calls for not just like people figuring out what they believe, it calls for like taking effectual action at the level of education schools, at the level like it calls for it calls for like cleaning the stables and and.
I am not, you know, I'm not an activist.
I'm not Chris Ruffo.
I'm not one of the people that is like seeking this war or this fight.
I am an intellectual who's.
Who stands at some degree and tries to produce understanding of these things?
But my understanding is oh, if you actually want to rid yourself of these things, it's not enough to win elections.
It's like when you win elections, you have to know what you have to do with your power.
Trump had absolutely no idea what to do with his power.
He found out about critical race theory watching Fox News, right?
Like watching Chris Russo on Fox News on Tucker, like two months before he left office.
And then suddenly, whatever, like tried to make an issue out of it and did some stuff around it.
You know, threw together some hasty stuff about it.
It's like the next, and I think like, There are certain candidates who are very conscious of this, right?
Like people like JD Vance and so on.
And I don't know to what degree they are contenders, but like they're coming in with a plan where like they're going to enter government knowing how it works and knowing how to clean the stables.
And like that actually is what it would have to take.
You actually have to remove the source of the power from where it emerges.
And the source of that power is.
It's the media on the one hand, it's the legal system on the other hand, and it's this kind of interest group that I've described that includes kind of ideological hitmen of various stripes.
Don't leave me now.
We got more coming up in 60 seconds.
The media is being hobbled bit by bit.
I mean, we see that daily.
And I mean, the numbers on cable news right now are dreadful.
If I got anything that I'm seeing over on MSNBC or CNN, On any night I was on the Kelly Five, they would have fired my ass.
I would have been so fired.
I never came close to these dismal numbers that you're seeing in the primetime CNN and MSNBC.
It was horrible.
So the people are having their say and moving to different platforms.
Fox is still hanging in there, but they have a monopoly on the entire right wing, right?
So it's like, of course they're going to do well, but though less well than they were under Trump.
But people like the podcast world, you've got the Ben Shapiro's of the world.
I'm out there.
You've got Candace Owens.
You've got a lot of people in the podcast world who are doing, not to mention Joe Rogan.
Sort of the god of podcasting, who's got huge numbers, Substack for writers.
These alternate lanes are developing and becoming incredibly popular, and soon it's going to be more popular.
Harvard Asian Lawsuit Impact 00:06:41
And then in the legal world, yes, we have more and more judges who are being told in law school these days that they have to, you know, racism's got to be the prison through which they see everything and so on, even though that's not allowed.
I mean, there's pushback on that too.
The push you just talked about with the Bar Association, the ABA is trying to, you know, mandate anti racism and affirmative training.
And already you're seeing schools like Yale Law push back and say, Not appropriate.
And that's a liberal organization.
So there's promise.
But the point I'm trying to make is the Supreme Court is conservative.
The Supreme Court has six conservatives on it right now.
And they're, for the most part, pretty young, other than Seabones, Clarence Thomas.
I know him.
And that's what we call him.
Anyway, my point is they're still the ultimate authority on what the law is.
And so, as many young justices as may or judges who may be coming into the system leaning left, they're not in control right now.
Right.
So we have this funny moment where the successor ideologists within government are willing to act in defiance of previous limitations on the scope of affirmative action.
So they gave out vaccines by race in Vermont.
The federal government gave out bank loan forgiveness programs only for Black people.
And the courts put a place in injunction on that.
But the point is, there's this willingness in the government to push further, but it's happening at the same moment where the Harvard Asian American lawsuit is going to come up in the next couple of years.
And then we're going to see what the court is willing to do.
Right.
So, like Fisher versus Texas, which many people saw, you know, this was a previous challenge in 2015.
It came up in the summer of 2015 at the very height of the Black Lives Matter stuff.
And, you know, Anthony Kennedy, who had never written an opinion in support of affirmative action, was the fifth vote or the fourth vote on a 4 2 decision.
Scalia died in the midst of the deliberation, and Kennedy made his switch, which happened, right, like at the height of protests in the street.
So, What's going to be happening, right, when the Harvard Asian American lawsuit, which is calling for a prohibition on affirmative action?
The last in 2003, Sandra Day O'Connor wrote a previous decision on affirmative action, sort of giving it a green light and another lease on life at the time, the University of Michigan case, challenging it.
And she said, this policy, we're going to look at sunsetting it around 2028.
And now it's 18 years after that, and we're closing in on 2028.
The Harvard Asian American lawsuit is coming to a 6 3 conservative court that has Clarence Thomas sitting on it.
And of course, his entire purpose of his career was to get a chance to do this.
And so we'll see if he can do it.
And even Chief Justice Roberts, who's been a little squishier, not on some issues that are near and dear to conservatives, not on this issue.
I mean, I sat in the high court when they heard that case.
And he said, shortly after he ascended to the bench, he said, you know, the answer to discrimination is not more discrimination.
The way you stop discrimination is not to keep discriminating.
And he's not going to have a tolerance for this.
So at the top, the legal system is still balanced in favor of a more conservative, federalist society worldview.
And that gives me comfort.
So in 1980, in the early 80s, critical race theory started its march through institutions, right?
At the same time, the Federalist Society started its kind of attempt to recapture the court for conservatives.
And in 2019, right around the time Kavanaugh was put in office, both of those things, though, both of those marches through the institutions pretty much attained their goals, right?
Like, conservatives finally won control of the courts.
Liberals finally, or not liberals, or, you know, sort of progressive successor ideologists, took control of.
The educational system, because that was the moment when New York City started with this culturally sustaining education, one of the many sort of new terms that we use to describe critical race theory derivatives, basically like race obsessed focused education.
And in Seattle at that time, started introducing ethno mathematics, right?
So, sort of saying that we're going to move beyond kind of traditional.
Western approaches to mathematics, and we're going to focus on the self esteem of various learners.
So, like, all of this stuff happened at the same moment, just like whiteness became the focus at the same moment when, like, the kind of ethnic succession of this country is such that, like, eight of the nine highest earning income groups were non white, right?
Like, ethnic groups in America were non white.
So, like, and the sort of the willingness to go beyond to Drastically increased the scope of affirmative action, even beyond what the courts had allowed through various decisions over the decades.
That happened at the same moment where the Harvard Asian American lawsuit is arriving at a 6 3 court.
So we have different entities that have.
Different amounts of power over different institutions.
And we're going to test the relative power of those entities as they come into confrontation with it.
Because if the unrepresentative, because we already have talk, right, about packing the court and so on for other reasons.
If this court, right, like outlaws affirmative action, God knows what happens next.
So there's not any packing the court.
There's just no way that that's there is, I predict there's zero chance they pack the court.
The more reasonable people in the Senate, I just don't see Joe Manchin ever doing that.
But the threat of that, because they didn't pack the court under FDR, but the threat of it, you know, it's like resulted in this switch in time, right?
So I just don't see it.
There's less support now for that than there was back then.
And that was after, you know, FDR was beloved and had way more, way larger majorities in the House and the Senate than he has now, than Biden has now.
So anyway, that's a big moment also.
Intellectual Diagnosis Behind Stories 00:04:03
So, but it's like, oh, here's what I want to say.
You have to go to the bases.
Yeah.
Here's how I see it.
Okay.
So you're, You say you're not an activist.
I see that.
You're a diagnostician.
You're like Dr. House.
And you can see the patient that's very complex and that everybody else can identify, like, well, they've got pancreatitis and they've got a lung infection and they seem to have this compromised immune system.
And you're the guy who can see all of it together and say, here's what's happening with this patient.
And then you've got Chris Ruffo, who's working on a new form of chemotherapy and other people who are coming up with new treatments that will cure this patient.
And that's people, you can't be a Chris Ruffo without a Wesley Yang.
You need the Wesley Yangs of the world to tell us what is wrong.
And here is how you frame what's happening.
And that's your gift.
That is why people do need to follow you on Substack.
And let me just give you the chance to say it again so that they actually understand how to support you and how to keep up to date on this information.
Because I love how you're calling it year zero of the successor ideology.
It's sort of creepy and otherworldly.
And that's how this feels.
How do they find you?
Well, so I have a substack called wesleyang.subtac.com.
The title of it is Year Zero.
It's actually a reference to the Khmer Rouge when they came to power.
They declared a year zero and said that all of our institutions in our society are corrupted by oppression, and we're going to have a fresh start.
And so that's actually the premise of the successor ideology.
It exists obviously in a real world, in a real world that is, you know, has made Kendi a millionaire many times over.
And so, and where they obviously depend upon, you know, existing institutions, you know, including, you know, the great fortunes, you know, like Twitter gave him $10 million.
So, year zero is a kind of cultural formation and aspiration, you know.
It isn't really the totalitarian nightmare that we're seeing, but it is a kind of bloodless inter-Sevitization where we have these new ideological commissars.
And to me, it's a fascinating subject.
And in addition to people who are kind of fighting it, I'm treating it as a real sort of intellectual and sociological entity.
And it's aimed at those who want to see this thing.
Um, you know, get to the root of it intellectually, uh, diagnose it, uh, think about it, but also tell the stories behind it because every one of these stories and all of its details is fascinating, right?
Because, as you know, Megan, you can be fired for saying something that is true.
And when you are in a situation like that, there's so many underlying, there's such a series of phantasms, right, that have possessed various people in positions of authority to make that possible.
And those, eventually, I'm going to put it in a book form, but now I'm doing reporting on it.
First, I'm kind of laying some theoretical groundwork to it.
And you know, Substack allows people to subscribe to individual writers and allows people to be, you know, sort of micro patrons, right?
In the way that kind of like you know, great monarchs of 17th century Europe, you know, everybody can have their share in this.
With the internet, this infrastructure allows everybody to have their share in keeping ideas and you know, space for someone at very minimum just to say, you know, it's the other people that are crazy, it's not you that are crazy.
Monetizing Credible Voices 00:01:42
And there's actually like that's right, monetary.
There's monetary value in that.
And there's a need for there to be credible voices to fill that role.
And that's the role that I seek to fulfill.
Very, very grateful you've decided to do it.
Wesley Yang, what a pleasure.
Absolute pleasure.
Thanks so much.
Do not miss Thursday's show.
The next time we're posting is on Thursday this week because we're going to take on artificial intelligence.
artificial intelligence and whether the bots are going to be taking over the world soon.
This is a disturbing but must-listen episode.
We'll see you then.
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
The Megyn Kelly Show is a devil-may-care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.
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