Keith Knight and James Division dismantle three social justice lies, arguing that statistical disparities in wealth or crime often reflect cultural choices rather than systemic oppression. They critique the Stop and Frisk policy's focus on racial ratios over actual injustice, cite Roland Fryer's research to challenge claims of police bias, and expose how narratives like "mansplaining" create false divides. The discussion further debunks the Pulse Nightclub motive as political rather than homophobic, asserting that government coercion, not identity politics, drives true division. Ultimately, they conclude that inherent inequality is natural, urging listeners to prioritize individual rights and objective data over divisive state-enforced narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
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Stop and Frisk Anecdotes00:14:51
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What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
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Welcome to the show.
Returning to the show today is the great Keith Knight.
He is the host of the Don't Tread on Anyone podcast.
He is the managing.
What is your title over at the Libertarian Institute?
It's the managing editor.
The managing editor at the Libertarian Institute, which is a phenomenal organization.
And he is also the author of the voluntaryist handbook.
Welcome back to the show.
Keith, how are you, sir?
I appreciate you having me, Dave.
Doing fine.
Thank you.
Well, it's always a pleasure talking to you.
So you just put out a video last week about social justice.
It was, what was the title of it?
Three lies of social justice?
Three social justice lies, racism, sexism, and homophobia.
Ooh, it was quite a juicy video.
I really enjoyed it and I wanted to talk to you more about it.
That social justice or wokeism or critical theory or whatever you want to call it, it's all kind of within the same ballpark is seems to be, whether we like it or not, one of the big issues of our day.
And it's also one of the issues that I think a lot of libertarians fail on.
That it's very easy to say, well, hey, yeah, I mean, we believe in freedom.
We believe in justice, right?
So wouldn't we believe in social justice?
How is that that much different than justice, you know?
And so I thought your video did a great job kind of taking this thing on.
Let's start here before we get into things more specific.
I don't know if you saw, there was this one clip of a, man, I can't remember this woman's name, but some journalist lady, and she was railing against wokeism.
And someone asked her for a definition of what is wokeism.
And she kind of struggled to give a definition.
And then everyone was like, aha, we gotcha, you know, which fair enough, it doesn't look good if you're railing against something and then they say define it and you can't.
But there is a thing where defining wokeism or social justice can be a little bit tricky.
And yet we all know what we're talking about when we bring it up.
So why don't you loosely, as you did in the beginning of this video, if you could, what is social justice?
What is a social justice warrior?
What is wokeism?
However you can define it.
There's both the definition of the term and the implication of the words that the person's using.
So when you're talking about social justice, they generally mean justice in terms of the distribution of wealth opportunities and privileges within a given society.
That alone, there's nothing terrible about.
The problem is there are two massive implications when someone who identifies as woke is advocating this ideology.
One is that all disparities between groups are proof of discrimination.
And two, this discrimination can be rectified by one group, the government, coercively intervening itself in society.
So those are the two problems.
Much like we might agree with Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham when they say terrorism is bad.
Yes, terrorism is bad, but you know the implication is what they mean is when other countries engage in terrorism, it's bad.
Hiroshima, totally okay.
Dresden, totally fine.
Bombing of Baghdad, perfectly fine.
So it's about not just grasping the definition, but also the implications of the words that the person's using.
Yeah.
You know, so on one of the topics that you touch on in the video, and by the way, we'll put the link to your video in the episode description.
But it reminded me of, so I remember when, you know, when was stop and frisk really big in New York?
I guess it was like the end of Giuliani and through the Bloomberg administration.
And I was living in New York City at the time.
And I was, you know, very opposed to stop and frisk for obvious reasons, because I believe in liberty.
And, you know, the idea that cops could just say, oh, this guy looks a little suspicious.
I'm going to stop him and pat him up and down seemed to be like a grotesque violation of basic individual liberty and just, you know, like a humiliation of regular, you know, citizens.
And the left was very opposed to this.
And I kind of liked that.
I was like, yes, okay, they're on the right side of this.
They're against stop and frisk.
At least on this issue, I agree with these guys.
And what they would always bring up was the racial disparities.
And they would always bring up the fact that like, well, you know, whatever the numbers were, 80% of the people who are stopped and frisked are, you know, African-American or Latino.
And that was always their big complaint about it.
And at first, it kind of seemed to me like, well, whatever.
They're against the policy I'm against.
And yeah, that is messed up that it's mostly happening to this community.
So sure, what's the issue there?
And even though I knew like my baby brother was stopped and frisked by the cops, and I knew other people who were not black or brown who had been stopped and frisked.
And I was against all of that.
And it was almost like as the like social justice warrior thing started to be weaponized more and more, I realized that there was a real, there was a fatal conceit to borrow a phrase from a famous libertarian.
There was a fatal conceit in accepting that the issue was the disproportionality in racial groups.
Because as you kind of point out in this video, if that's really the issue, well, then wouldn't the solution be to just frisk more or stop and frisk more white people?
And if you did enough of that to the point that you balanced it out to be, you know, proportional to their, you know, the population, well, then it wouldn't be an issue anymore, right?
So in fact, there's, there's a real flaw in this way of thinking that in fact, you could like, if you oppose an injustice, but you oppose it on the grounds that it disproportionately targets one racial group, well, then two things could be a solution.
The correct answer that we would fight for, which would be to get rid of the injustice.
But if you oppose it on the ground of it being disproportional, then another solution could also be to increase the injustice to make it proportional.
And now you recognize there's a real problem there, isn't there?
Exactly.
And the other demographic that was discriminated against, allegedly, if you're taking disparities as proof of discrimination, is men.
When you look at police killings, 95% of those killed by police are men, even though men are roughly 50% of the population.
So this, by the social justice metric, is proof of institutional systemic sexism against men.
And even more so, they're even ageist, not just sexist, because the average death is a man between ages 20 and 40.
They're less likely to kill men ages 0 to 19 and 41 to 75.
The reason this is, is because levels of testosterone and men behave differently than women and are more likely to engage in violence.
So that's exactly what we would expect to see.
So when their metric is, well, we just look at the result of something and that's how we can determine whether or not a racial injustice has occurred.
You can, one, look at the individual examples.
They will give George Floyd, Eric Garner, or even Trayvon Martin, though he wasn't killed by an officer.
That's an example they use.
But there are also white examples.
Tony Tempa in 2016 was killed by the Dallas police after he called the cops, thinking that because he missed his schizophrenia medication, he was going to go into a seizure.
And the cops, in order to detain him, had their knee on his neck for about 14 minutes until he suffocated and died.
You can see this all on video.
He's screaming, saying, help me, help me.
You're going to kill me.
And they end up killing him.
And those officers didn't go to jail.
We have the killing of Kelly Thomas on security camera and those officers didn't go to jail.
Ashley Babbitt was killed by a black officer on January 6th.
She was unarmed.
A guy named Mohamed Noor in Minnesota killed unarmed woman, Justine Damon.
So there's anecdotes on both sides.
So what you can do is learn the great lesson from Tony Fauci and go to the science and look at what the experts say.
Turns out the most in-depth research was done at Harvard University.
A PhD Roland Fryer in July of 2017 did research on 18 different cities in America.
The paper was titled An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.
And he found that there was no discrimination when it comes to police use of force with regard to police actually engaged in killing the victim.
If you account for the fact that black men, while 6% of the population commit roughly 52% of the homicides, 26% of the rate of the rapes in America, and once you adjust for the actual factors, there's no actual proof of discrimination, whether it's against men or blacks or whites, which is a good thing.
But yes, just as you said, even when we take a perfect example of discrimination, the Selective Service Act in America explicitly says men can be forced to perform labor against their will, assuming it's for the greater good of the nation, which is equally as bigoted as all blacks should be forced to perform forced labor in agricultural conditions if there's ever a food shortage, you know, just in case the nation needs help.
It's equally as bigoted.
And the social justice solution would be to enslave women as well.
This is completely unjust.
So at the Libertarian Institute, we're trying to get people to get rid of the sexism, racism, fake divide and embrace a voluntarism-violence divide.
That is the general message that I'm trying to get to here.
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You mentioned in your video, but you didn't mention in the names you were just rattling off there.
But what was his first name?
Shaver, Daniel Shaver, was the guy out in Arizona.
I don't know if any of you guys have seen this video, but the guy was on his knees.
Basically, him and his wife, I think, had had a few drinks and they had like a BB gun or something like that.
And they saw it through like some people saw it through the window and reported them.
And the cops come in and they've got their guns pointed at them.
And he's on his knees crying, walking toward the cops, and the cops execute him.
And if you haven't seen that video, you know, well, there's probably a reason why you haven't seen it, but if you are familiar with it, you could look at that.
It's the most horrific police killing video I've ever seen.
And you know that if that had been a black guy, there easily could have been riots over it.
People would have made it a race thing.
But it wasn't.
It was a white guy.
And so that doesn't happen.
But I think the bigger lesson there is that aren't we kind of missing the point if we focus on the fact of what color skin the cop had versus the victim had?
It just seems like if you're really against what's going on here, which is like, oh, oh my God, police having this kind of like monopoly on violence, not getting punished when they should be punished, the whole race issue seems to be a giant distraction.
And with the George Floyd situation, and I've watched that whole, the whole video is up.
You can watch it, the police camera video.
And from the very beginning, clearly the guy is, he's very clearly on drugs and he's very clearly having a horrific panic attack through his entire encounter with the cops.
And I think it's absolutely inexcusable that the cops throw him on the ground and handcuff him and that guy Chauvin keeps his knee on his neck the whole time while he's handcuffed.
But there's not one indication throughout the whole thing that race had anything to do with it.
Income Disparity Narratives00:15:07
Like there's not at one point where they call him a racially derogatory name or anything like that.
And yet that was the entire angle that was taken.
And I think you start to see where, you know, if you really care about justice, this whole social justice angle seems to be a complete distraction from what we should actually be focused on, which is the power dynamic between police who supposedly are there to serve their community and members of the community who are absolutely helpless against the police when they're violating their rights.
Then like, what I don't see what good it does to obsess over a racial issue when there's no evidence that there even is a racial issue involved here and then kind of, you know, disregard all of the cases where there's not a clear racial narrative.
That doesn't seem to move us in the right direction.
Exactly.
And progressives are always telling us, you know, monopolies are really bad because it's hard to hold people accountable when, you know, they have such high amounts of power.
You'll probably get higher prices than you otherwise would under competition.
You'll probably get lower quality because they're not sort of on their toes trying to please customers.
Well, police are the ultimate monopoly.
They give you an order.
And if you disobey them, they have a unique right to use violence against you.
Imagine if Amazon just started doing that to people or Walmart or the Red Cross, even organizations with generally good names.
People would still say, well, that's kind of screwed up.
Even, you know, I like the Catholic Church, but the Pope now has the right to make edicts and the Jesuit officers violently impose it on everyone else.
I wonder if there's a disparity in who they end up arresting.
Of course, this is the ultimate inequality.
So for people so obsessed with inequality, they are actually advocating the greatest inequality in society.
Some people have the right to give orders and others have a legal obligation to obey them.
And you can't even opt out of funding them.
It's not like, well, you know, if I really don't like this restaurant, I could ask them to change.
I could write bad Yelp reviews.
I could protest outside.
I could tell everyone on my friends list to stop going there.
And at some point, if they don't change their behavior, then I can go somewhere else.
Not the case with schools or with police or with the court system.
So the progressive looks at the fact that they force you to fund something and they have a legal right to coerce you into doing things that no other person or organization can.
And their approach is, well, I wonder if this has anything to do with skin color.
I think that's got to be the central issue here.
So it's completely unproductive, even when you look at other metrics to judge whether or not the society is racist.
You can look at the National Victimization Crime Survey of 2018, and you'll see roughly 60,000 incidences of whites using violence against blacks, whether it's rape, murder, or assault.
And this is just absolutely terrible.
This is why the non-aggression principle is so important.
But the other side of that is there were about 547,000 violent incidences where blacks were initiating violence against whites.
So according to Dr. Wilfred Riley at Kentucky State University, he gathered all this info.
Turns out when blacks and whites are in a violent encounter, 80% of the time, blacks are initiating the violence.
I don't want to make this a racial thing.
But when it comes to looking at the disparities and who's in prison, it's important to know that this is the result of people who are more likely to engage in criminal activity.
Now, you can say, well, this is actually biological or it's the result of previous discrimination.
A much more plausible explanation is brought to us by Thomas Sowell in his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, where we see these high rates of violence among poor Southern whites and among a lot of blacks, 90% of whom grew up in the South during the antebellum time.
So over time, they sort of embraced this culture of having a very high time preference, have very similar ways of talking, lack of educational attainment, lack of economic initiative.
Those are just trends that we more or less see.
And that is a much more plausible explanation.
The reason is because if you compare black immigrants to America to Native Black Americans, you actually see a 30% disparity in income.
How on earth can the racism conspiracy theory account for black immigrants getting 30% higher pay than blacks who are born in America?
Because if they're just black and it has nothing to do with ambition, it has nothing to do with your skill set, we shouldn't see any disparity.
But of course, we do.
And when it comes to Asian and white disparities and incomes, we also see that.
And that never gets mentioned.
I think whites, according to the 2018 U.S. Census, whites are like 11th on the list after Indian Americans, Japanese Americans, Filipino Americans, Chinese Americans when it comes to income.
So all these disparities that they say are proof of discrimination between blacks and whites also exist between Asians and whites.
It's just ridiculous.
Well, you know, one of the things that's really interesting about the fact that Black Americans who are not born here have having a 30% higher, you know, income than Black Americans who were born here is that it blows up a few narratives.
It blows up the racism narrative.
It also blows up the kind of like racist genetic narrative.
Because obviously, right?
Then the answer can't be either of those two things.
The answer has to be some cultural component.
It has to be something other than either of those two things.
And I think that, you know, it's important because it's like people, statistics can be kind of tricky for the layman.
And so even if you look at something like, and of course, the statistic you mentioned is completely right, that black men are something six and change percentage of the population commit something like 50 something percent of the violent crime.
But also, even accepting that, you can also go, but the vast majority of black people have nothing to do with that.
The vast majority of black people are not violent criminals.
And so it's very easy to like get into these kind of weird collectivist narratives, whether it's the collectivist narrative of, oh my God, we live in a racist society and black people are completely up against it, or it's the, you know, kind of like far right wing racist narrative of like, well, these black people are just savages or something like that.
And the truth is when you actually peel apart the data, you're like, it actually destroys both of those.
Neither of that is true.
It's not clear at all.
There's no evidence that we live in a racist society.
There's also no evidence at all that this is some like genetic component of black people that they're more violent.
Because look, the majority of black people in America are not violent criminals.
And black people who were not born in America who come here are not suffering with these same problems.
They're actually doing quite well.
They're succeeding.
And so it seems like there's a whole different answer here, which is that the black people who are immigrants in this country, I think are happy to be here.
They worked very hard to get here and they're trying to succeed.
And then those black people in America who are contributing to the disproportionate crime statistics are usually not, you know, they're not coming from good families with good values.
And that's what's contributing to their downfall, not some boogeyman of systemic racism.
Does that sound like a fair, doesn't that seem like the only reasonable explanation here?
Exactly.
Niall Ferguson published a book titled Civilization, the West and the Rest.
And he goes over the fact that the 1900s ran a series of experiments in Germany, the Korean Peninsula, and with regard to China.
So in Germany, you had a very similar race of people, both in the East and the West, and we saw very different economic results.
So if culture or institutions and ideas have nothing to do with the outcomes of how groups perform, we should see East Germany and West Germany, people fighting to get on both sides of the Berlin Wall.
But that, of course, is not at all what we see.
When it comes to the example of South Korea versus North Korea, we have an identically racial population with people in the South much wealthier than people in the North.
And the Chinese example he uses is Chinese people inside and outside the People's Republic.
So if it was the Chinese are poor just because the Chinese are racially inferior, and the evidence we have is we look at China and see that they are pretty poor.
Well, that doesn't account for Chinese people who have escaped the People's Republic, whether it was under Mao or Den Xiaoping or even Xi Jinping today.
You see that they have much higher incomes than all the other majorities in the countries that they end up moving to.
Even when the country embraces much more free market reforms, as they did under Den Xiaoping in the late 70s, even though he did support the one-child policy, they saw a significant increase in the overall amount of wealth with regard to the average standard of living.
In India, in 1991, they had a series of free market reforms and people in India increased in their overall standard of living.
So yes, race and biology do not explain all of those disparities.
Of course, you can look at the histories of countries like Japan and Scotland, which constantly lagged behind for very long amounts of time until they embraced things like free trade and private property and were much more affluent as a causal result of those things.
Yeah, right, exactly.
And it just goes to show you that like when you actually look into this data and you actually look at the evidence that we do have, there is a I'm not saying that like genetics mean nothing, but that it's very easy for people to kind of like pin things on that when it doesn't actually add up.
And at the same time, these grand narratives about how persecution in the past, you know, like explaining away everything that is why any minority group is falling behind is because 200 years ago, something very bad was happening to that group also doesn't make sense.
And another, you know, example of that is, you know, look, I mean, you have like Asian Americans who come over here, Jewish Americans who come over here who are incredibly successful.
And, you know, a couple generations ago were going through things far more horrific than what any of these supposedly oppressed minorities in America are going through.
It's just, it kind of blows those narratives out of the water when you actually look into the details.
And the example that is frequently cited is Japanese Americans were interned in America.
Executive Order 9066, Roosevelt just had them all round up and kidnapped up to, I think, 120,000.
And a lot of them came over and spoke broken English at the time.
Yet by 1959, they had an income that was equal to whites.
And by 1969, they had incomes that were roughly 30% higher than the median income in America.
So the social justice ideology sort of tells you there's nothing you can do until, you know, Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell get together and then they change society.
So anytime they point to a disparity, any problem in the world, whether it's Putin, whether it's racism, whether it's the climate, whether it's a cold that has a survival rate of 99.9%, the solution is always give the mass murdering government more money and more power.
It's such an obvious scam.
Like at this point, we should just see these things like Nigerian email scams.
Click here and win a million dollars by tomorrow.
It is just so much of a scam that they've tried again and again and again.
It's unfortunate that people are falling for it.
But voices like you are out there and hopefully changing the narrative and people are seeing through it more, more and more.
Unfortunately, Larry Elder did not make the Republican presidential debates, but he's certainly someone out there.
Guys like Thomas Sowell have tons of views on YouTube, even though he doesn't have a YouTube account.
He just has fan accounts.
So the ideas are definitely getting out there.
And slowly but surely, this myth, I think, is getting close to coming to an end.
Yeah, I hope you're right about that.
And of course, Thomas Sowell is a little bit before the time of the internet, but there's still a million videos of his online that are just so great where he's tearing this stuff apart.
Okay, so let's that's we've dealt with a little bit of the racism stuff.
That's a major component of the social justice, wokeism, critical theory worldview.
One more thing before we make this.
One of the great lessons that I learned from Thomas Soule is, what is your start date and why?
This is also something that Scott Horton taught me, you know, when people say history started on September 11th, 2001.
Why is that your start date?
I mean, I guess you have to pick a start date, but why is that one?
So what Seoul does in a book titled Civil Rights Rhetoric or Reality published in 1986 is he goes, you know, we have to give it to the progressives.
After the passage of Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act of the 1960s, we did see a significant increase in black incomes after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
What this ignores is that this was a pattern that was already occurring 35 years prior, where we saw each year blacks were generally increasing in their income at a rate of 4%.
So the scam that they use, people like Paul Krugman do this all the time, is they will look at a segment of say the bottom 20% and look at the bottom 20% in 1980 and then the bottom 20% in the year 2000, as opposed to looking at actual individuals who do have income mobility and experience it over time.
So this is the equivalent of saying that, you know, the average freshman at college, you know, in the year 2000 was 18 years old.
And in 2020, the average age of a freshman in college is still 18 years old.
Stamps.com Postage Sponsorship00:03:33
So people in college aren't aging at all.
No, what's actually happening is that is a demographic of people in which actual human beings move in and out of this general column.
So yes, people have extremely low incomes.
And then as they get older, they acquire more skills, become more competitive, and can demand a higher wage.
So this is another example, the attempt to pick a fake start date and then pin the thanks on state action.
We see it with Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
We got OSHA and workplace deaths went down.
Thank you, federal government.
They were decreasing at a faster rate before the implementation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration because there were fewer regulations and there were more employers.
So people had more variety to choose from.
And the employers were competing on safety in the workplace because that's how they made money and attracted the best employees.
So that is a great lesson from Seoul and his response to the civil rights narrative.
Yeah, completely.
And also with the OSHA thing, it's like just that technology improved and it got safer.
It got safer to work at a lot of these jobs.
Yeah.
I remember John Stossel had a line.
I might mess this up a little bit where he was like, he was like, government sees a parade and then jumps in front of it and then pretends they were leading the parade.
Where you're like, wait, but workplace deaths had been going down and down and down.
And then they go, we created OSHA and workplace deaths started going down.
You're like, but they had been going down from way before that.
It has nothing to do with this organization.
You guys are just justifying your existence, you know?
And there's so much of that.
So much of what we see is that exact trend.
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Another big component of social justice is sexism.
Sexism vs Racism Evidence00:05:38
I have heard many times that we live in a sexist society, and it seems like the evidence for that is very similar to the evidence that we live in a racist society, which is that there are disparate outcomes.
Men and women end up in different places.
And so that seems to be the strongest evidence.
Well, women make this much money and men make this much money.
And so what is your response to that?
And I'm sure there are some similar arguments to the race narrative.
So what they will frequently say, the primary source for this is that women make about 80 cents on the dollar for everything that a man makes.
This was really rehashed by Barack Obama.
He came out and said women earn only three fourths of what a man earns.
How would men like it if they only got three fourths of a vote?
Well, then 2020 comes around and we find out how the votes are actually counted.
But we'd be thrilled to have three fourths of a vote.
So Obama really brought this back into popularity.
And it's funny because Walter Block actually refutes this in a book titled Defending the Undefendable, published, I think, in 1974.
So what this does not account for, this is actually, this is similar to saying, I found the documents in Forbes magazine.
The average 20-year-old earns about $35,000 annually and the average 45-year-old earns about $55,000 annually.
So clearly we have a disparity and we should have an equal pay for age legislation.
But immediately you see, well, this is probably the result of people at different ages having different jobs.
The gender pay gap doesn't account for number of hours worked, what types of jobs they have, the number of risks that exist on the job.
Men are like 98% of workplace deaths, according to OSHA, in the year 2018.
So of course they're going to take more risks.
We even see disparities in incomes between the states.
Maryland has an average, this according to world population view.
Maryland, I think, has a median income of around $87,000 a year, whereas Mississippi has an average median income of around $47,000 annually.
We see these disparities all the time between groups.
And the fact that the wage gap doesn't account for the number of hours worked or the type of job you have, it also doesn't account for the amount of value created.
If LeBron James and I both play basketball and we do the same work, we're going to have different incomes.
Oh, because he's black?
No, because we're actually creating different value.
If Kristen Bell starts in OnlyFans and I start in OnlyFans and we both work three hours a day on our OnlyFans, we're going to have different revenue.
We're therefore going to be...
You're going to crush that chick, dude.
Exactly.
She doesn't stand a chance.
Come on, Keith.
You're going to fucking rock that check.
The point is, is that even if you do the same work, you're not creating the same value.
And there's nothing wrong with that at all.
If you give a speech or I give a speech, we could probably demand different wages.
We both spoke at the LPMC event.
But the point is, is that people doing the same labor, even if you grant them all of the caveats, working the same amount of time, same amount of effort, whatever, it still doesn't mean the state has a right to coerce people to pay two different parties the same exact amount.
So there's nothing to back up this gender wage disparity.
And look at how divisive it is.
Are you familiar with the term mansplaining?
I've heard it a time or two.
I didn't know if it was just something that idiots said to me.
This gets like 20 million results when you put it into Google.
I guess when men overexplain things in a very belittling way to women, Jimmy Kimmel had this funny bit with Hillary Clinton, whatever.
When I was in school and, you know, I was there for five days a week, six hours a day, whatever, and 89% of elementary school teachers are female.
And most of the topics range from completely evil to completely trivial.
It never occurred to me to refer to this as woman splaining because we're not a bunch of psychos who are hell-bent on dividing the genders arbitrarily.
But for some reason, it occurred to the social justice advocates to divide people based on gender.
So yeah, maybe there are some men who do this, but the vast majority happens to be done by women in government schools.
But I still would never consider using that term in a serious manner because there's tons of women I love who I would never want to negatively generalize.
But this is what they do.
They give themselves the license of I'm not racist.
And this allows them to explicitly advocate that people should be hired based on their race under the guise of affirmative action.
I'm not sexist.
And here's why men are terrible.
I'm not xenophobic.
And here's why I'm glad those Russians are dying in Ukraine.
They give themselves a license and become the very, very thing that they think they're opposing.
Okay.
So this, um, I remember this is back in maybe 2013, I want to say, something around that time period.
I may have told this story on the podcast back in the day.
Lawyer Contract Empathy Failure00:03:37
But so there was this, uh, this chick who was a, I don't know what to say.
She was, she was trying to do comedy for a bit.
And she that didn't work out.
Anyway, I won't, I won't mention her name, but she was a, she, her thing was that she was like a sex worker.
And that was her like angle in comedy that she used to be a sex worker.
Now she had done comedy.
I'll be honest, she left, she stopped doing stand-up comedy.
I'm not sure she ever actually was a sex worker.
This is just kind of what her thing was, but I knew her well enough.
She had like hung out in circles that I was in.
And we were at a comedy club one time and we're in the green room.
And she started, it was just me and her in the green room.
And she started opening up to me about how she had this script that her and another girl had written.
And it was it was getting picked up by this network, but that they had to have a lawyer look over the contract.
And it was going to cost her like something like $8,000 to pay the lawyer.
And she didn't have the money to pay him to look over the contract.
And she was like, I'm getting kicked out of my apartment.
And she started crying as she's talking to me.
And she goes, I'm going to have to go back into sex work.
It's the only way I can make this money.
And she's like, very, she's crying.
And she's saying, I'm going to have to go back into like prostitution in order to make money to pay this lawyer and pay for my apartment and blah, blah, blah.
I only have the money for the lawyer.
I don't have the money for my apartment.
And I remember I sat next to her and I put my arm around her and I went, hey, listen, just calm down for a second.
Okay.
Relax.
Everything is going to be fine.
And I went, look, take the money you have for this lawyer, pay your rent.
That's the most important thing.
Don't get kicked out of your apartment.
You don't need to pay $8,000 for a lawyer to look over a contract.
I know lawyers who will look over a contract for you for a few hundred bucks.
This doesn't make any sense at all that you need to pay this much money.
You've got the money you need.
Pay for your.
And she goes at one point as I was saying this and she goes, she goes, you know, I was just kind of opening up to you.
I wasn't really looking for you to mansplain to me my problems.
And I remember in this moment, I literally just removed my arm from her as if I just realized that I was touching something toxic.
Like I was like, whoa.
And I go, oh, was I mansplaining?
And she goes, yeah, I was looking more for empathy than for mansplaining.
And I was like, oh, I thought the part where I put my arm around you and said, hey, everything's going to be okay.
I thought that was the empathy.
Like I thought that was me being a nice guy.
And then after that, I was just going, hey, this problem doesn't make any sense.
This does not, it does, you know what I mean?
Like, and it doesn't.
I knew the industry at the time.
I knew what she was talking about.
It doesn't make any sense that you'd have to pay eight grand for a lawyer to look over a contract.
But it was like this ideology, you know, talking about the technical flaws or whatever, it was just an example of like the real world impact that it has on like young women where it's like, yo, you're, it's making you, you're a shitty person right now.
I was being a good person to you and you're being a shitty person in response, all because you're possessed by this ideology that tells you I'm mansplaining.
Iron Law of Oligarchy00:08:43
Meanwhile, all I'm doing, I think, is being a decent person.
You know what I mean?
And that you, and, and this is something you see all over the place throughout our culture.
I also, I think this is, you know, you mentioned Andrew Tate earlier.
This is part of the reason why all of that kind of manosphere content is taking off so much, because this ideology has made a lot of women.
And it's really tragic to see, because it ends up like totally screwing them over.
They don't end up like benefiting from this at all, but it's made them these kind of like they're they're very much quick.
to make enemies out of men who are just trying to be decent to them.
And it's horrible.
I think all young men know this.
Exactly.
And because it's based on a false divide.
They go the divide is men versus women.
So the second a person is born, you know whether they're in the good group or the bad group.
And we saw this after 9-11, where people would always use 9-11 as the justification for how the U.S. government can go around the world and do absolutely anything they wanted.
And as evil as it was to other people, it was also bad for the people themselves who actually bought into the absolute nonsense because it gave them a false version of reality and didn't allow them to see, like in your example, an actual solution to a problem that they are up against.
They're so busy trying to find this villain.
And the reason that they're so busy trying to find him is because there's actually so few.
There's so little evidence of the sexism and racism conspiracy theory that they have, that every single thing has to count.
And then, and the best is when they just threw the Hail Mary and they said, Donald Trump, the president of America, said Nazis and Klansmen are fine people.
That's a real thing that just happened.
And of course, if you read the transcript, he didn't say anything like that.
He said, he said that the white supremacists should be condemned totally.
And the people he was referring to are those protesting the taking down of the Robert E. Lee statue.
But people are so desperate to find examples that anytime they will go out of their way to try and find this needle in the haystack because it is just so hard to find.
It's so divisive among people of goodwill.
And this is why it's funny when Barack Obama defines government as the thing that sort of unites us all and really brings us together.
To the contrary, it is the most divisive organization in society.
Yeah.
And outside of government, outside of politics, we're so much more united.
Like all this, you know, just imagine if you went into like, say, like a sports bar and you had people of, as regularly you would, you have people of different races and different ages and different, you know, walks of life and everyone's just there.
We'd all right away be talking about the game and what's going on.
And oh, I'm on this team and you're on this team.
Even when we're on different teams, it's kind of like a thing like, you know, if it's like the Jets versus the Chargers, we're kind of like, ah, you guys are going down.
And they're like, nah, you guys, screw you guys.
But we're all kind of like loving each other, even though we're on different sides.
But imagine then it just goes, hey, who are you voting for in this election?
Well, now it's going to be like, it's going to tear everyone apart.
It's so obvious.
And I think one of the things that for people like me and you who believe in liberty, I think one of the through lines throughout this whole thing is that, as the great Murray Rothbard once said, that egalitarianism is a revolt against nature.
And that as Thomas Sowell put it, I believe this was Thomas Sowell's point, where he said, look, even if through some miracle and through some, you know, government force, you could make everyone equal tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, we wouldn't be equal.
You know, if you have any degree of freedom, you're immediately going to be different.
And different doesn't necessarily mean better or worse.
In some cases, it can.
But the truth is that people, the idea, the expectation that we would ever have a completely equal, proportionate result in any industry makes no sense.
It makes no sense.
Like if, you know, if black people are 13% of the population or whatever, and you look at the NBA.
Would you expect them to be 13?
Would you really expect that in the NBA, in the NFL, in the, you know, the MLB, that black people should be 13% of each group?
In corporate CEOs, they should be 13%.
They should be 13% in everything.
That makes no sense.
That's never how it works.
And that's not even a comment on like ability.
I mean, and maybe in the NBA, it is a comment on ability, but Irish people are disproportionately firefighters.
That has nothing to do with like, I don't think, Irish people's ability to fight fires versus Asians' abilities to fight fires.
It's just tradition, you know, like tradition plays a role.
That's, that's traditionally what Irish people went into.
And they kind of go into what their father went into.
That, that's all.
And like, there's, there's a bunch of different reasons that can result in disproportionate outcomes.
But the idea that if there's disparate outcomes, we just assume that that means that there's this inherent prejudice in the system is not only wrong, but it's also just so toxic.
And particularly as we were talking about with men and women, it's particularly toxic because men and women, as I'm sure you know, are not in a battle against each other.
We are yin and yang.
We help each other.
We make each other better.
Every man knows that a good woman makes him better.
Every woman knows that a good man makes them better.
And the idea that we have to pretend that we're the same or that if one is helping the other, that's somehow, you know, an act of something wrong is just so damaging, a horrible ideology.
You see this inequality all throughout everywhere since the beginning of time.
Like what percentage of Greeks were equal to Aristotle or Plato?
Or what percentage of people under the rule of Alexander the Great were equal to him?
What percentage of Chinese are equal in power to Xi Jinping?
Very few.
We see this inequality everywhere.
How about the comedy scene?
Question.
What percentage of comedians are as funny as Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock?
Very little.
Scroll through the Netflix comedy section, very bravely called comedy on Netflix.
A microscopic percentage.
The number of musicians who could sell out Wembley Stadium is microscopic, not just in comparison to the population at large, but even just looking at musicians, very few can do that.
Kevin Hart sold out a football stadium for his comedy special.
We have open mic night some places and it's like half full because of the person there.
We're always seeing this inequality.
So what they do is they take this constant that exists all throughout human nature and they say, this is uniquely bad about capitalism.
And this is the justification for state involvement.
Forget the fact that people like AOC have more institutional power than 99% of her followers ever will or 99% of Bernie's followers or the followers of Vladimir Lenin or Hugo Chavez or anyone else who's ever existed on the planet, whether they're socialists, communists, or fascists.
We always see this inequality.
It's referred to as the iron law of oligarchy.
They're not bringing anything new to the table and it's terribly divisive, as you mentioned.
Yeah.
And like I was saying, this is the reason why there's this kind of war of the sexes and all this popular content about, you know, like whatever, the role of men and women, where it's like, look, just the thing that everybody should accept is that, you know, there's a reason why men and women have different roles and that there's, you know, a lot of that kind of makes sense and actually makes both sexes happier to recognize that.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Buy Optimizers.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, let's move on to the third one.
Homophobia and Pulse Nightclub00:12:24
Homophobia was the other topic in your video.
So this word actually means a few different things depending on who you're talking to.
It would actually mean phobia or fear of homosexuals.
What the average person using the word means is hatred of homosexuals, usually.
Now, what they will use are examples of, well, this atrocity occurred against this person.
This person was gay.
Therefore, it occurred as a causal result of them being gay.
As if terrible crimes don't happen to straight people.
The point is, what you can actually do is look at the amount of gay on straight violence when it comes to the act of rape.
When you look at Time magazine in 2019, it says between 1944 and 2016, at least 7,800 suspected Assalians sexually assaulted 12,252 boys in the Boy Scouts.
NBC News 2019, 1,700 priests and clergy accused of sex abuses have gone unsupervised, according to Associated Press, PBS, New York Times, thousands of these examples of gay on straight violence.
Now, if you have the social justice mindset, you might say, well, this is proof of gay on straight violence.
And we straights need to have a Straight Lives Matter campaign and need to start throwing bricks into the windows of buildings that have took decades to erect and become pillars of a community and just destroy them because these other people did terrible things.
Or you can actually embrace the voluntarism versus violence dichotomy, much more efficient.
So the ultimate example that they had used, at least in my generation, was the Pulse Nightclub massacre.
This was June 12th of 2016 in Orlando, Florida.
Omar Mateen entered the Pulse Nightclub.
He murdered 49 people, injured 53, held the survivors hostage, and he called 911.
Now, the event was summarized by both Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
I want to read their exact words.
So Barack Obama, four days after the Pulse Nightclub massacre, said, this was an attack on the LGBT community.
Americans were targeted because we're a country that has learned to welcome everyone, no matter who you are or who you love.
And hatred towards people because of sexual orientation, regardless of where it comes from, is a betrayal of what's best in us.
Didn't cite his source on that one as to why he thought it.
I mean, just because they are gay doesn't mean it was because they are gay.
They tended to be young people.
Maybe the guy has something against young people.
They were in Florida.
Maybe he hates Floridians.
But it turns out Donald Trump the day after said almost the same thing.
Trump said, this is a very dark moment in America's history.
A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub, not only because he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens because of their sexual orientation.
It's a strike at the heart and soul of who we are as a nation.
It's an assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want, and express their identity.
Well, it turns out you can actually look for proof when it comes to this claim that this was about hatred of homosexuals.
And you can look at the words of the terrorists themselves, not because it's important to listen to murderers, but because the goal of terrorism is to amplify a message as opposed to conceal it.
So the FBI actually did release the 911 call.
See if you can detect the motive in this 911 call.
Here are the words of Omar Mateen.
You have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq.
They are killing a lot of innocent people.
What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there?
You need to stop the U.S. airstrikes.
Tell the U.S. government to stop the bombing.
They are killing too many children.
They are killing too many women.
Okay.
I feel the pain of people getting killed in Syria and Iraq.
They need to stop bombing Syria and Iraq.
The U.S. is collaborating with Russia and they are killing innocent women and children.
Okay.
The airstrike that killed Abu Wahid a few weeks ago, that's what triggered it.
They should not have bombed and killed Abu Waheed.
The airstrikes need to stop and stop collaborating with Russia.
Okay.
The fucking, the airstrikes need to stop.
Now you feel, now you feel how it is.
Now you feel how it is.
So when we actually had an example of blowback and actual the greatest form of oppression, one living person ends the life of an innocent other person.
They made it about sexism.
Both the top Republican and the top Democrat embrace the social justice mindset.
Far from him just being a lunatic, the Council on Foreign Relations actually published the number of bombs dropped in the year 2016, the year this took place on Syria, Council on Foreign Relations.
12,192,000 bombs dropped on Syria by the U.S. government in Iraq.
12,095 bombs dropped on Iraq by the U.S. government, Afghanistan, 1,337, 496 bombs dropped on Libya, 35 on Yemen, 14 in Somalia, and three in Pakistan.
They see some people murdering others and they make it about gender and race and sexual orientation.
This is how evil it is because it actually distracts from the actual problem.
They even do it with slavery.
They think slavery is about skin color, even though it existed going back to the code of Hammurabi 2,000 years before Jesus Christ walked the earth.
They don't understand or they don't care enough to understand the principle that forced labor and the claim of ownership of other people is actually at the heart of the issue.
And because they don't understand that, because they're so race-obsessed, they can admire a guy like Vladimir Zelensky, who's engaged in mass male enslavement of all men ages 18 to 65 in Ukraine.
Yes, Putin's doing the same thing, but they admire Zelensky.
They don't admire Putin.
But this is what actually happens.
You don't get to the root of the issue and modern injustices go unnoticed.
And it's much harder to change something when you are unable to address it on principle.
So the homophobia myth, there's very little evidence with regard to statistics or narrative to say that America's a systemically homophobic country.
Yeah, well, it's like with the Pulse Nightclub thing.
It's like, you know, they hate us because we're free.
And then they go, they hate us because we're gay.
That's, you know, but no one ever wants to get to like what's actually going on here.
And I think your point that it's a distraction is exactly right.
And I, one of the things I used to say during 2020, during all those crazy riots, was that again, like if they had, let's say, let's say the George Floyd story had been a national story, but then also right by it was the Shaver story.
You know, if you had both of them as national stories, then it would have been very hard to make it a racial issue.
And then you would have looked at it and you would have been like, no, it's not a racial issue.
It's a cop versus citizen issue.
It's a government versus people issue.
And then it kind of focuses you onto what matters.
And the problem is that with all of these things, I think this is the through line.
And I think this is for people who care about liberty.
This is the thing to kind of pay attention to, is when you distract from the actual issue, which is that somebody's rights are being violated, somebody's being victimized.
And instead, you make the issue racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia or whatever you want to call it.
It just distracts.
And look, again, like I said, if Dylan Shaver and George Floyd were both national stories, we'd all focus on the cops versus people, the state versus people.
Now we're focused on statism, not racism, you know?
But when you're just focused on racism, what ends up happening is that it's very easy for people to go, okay, we're going to do something about this.
We're going to ban Aunt Jemima.
And we're going to tear down racist statues.
And we're going to do all.
And you do all of these things that don't in any way address what the actual problem is.
What the actual problem is, is that human beings, individuals' rights are being violated.
That it's so easy.
And this is why the powers that be love playing on all of these isms, because it's easy to pit people against each other and never focus on them.
And I think that was kind of like the moral of the video that you made, that you're like, don't fall for these tricks and focus on what's actually the issue here.
Yeah.
So one lesson is don't focus on the headlines, focus on the trend lines, look at actual statistics.
But because that's so boring and 1% of the population is ever going to do that, looking at the fake divide is so much more important because it's amazing.
I was only five when 9-11 happened, but to see the drastic switch for 20 years, I could have sworn there were a billion Muslims who wanted to cut my head off because of my freedom.
And now they don't get like any attention.
Not to mention we sided with al-Qaeda against Bashar al-Assad in Syria, sided with them with the Libyan Islamic fighting group in Libya and against the Houthi regime in Yemen.
So now they've completely just said that it's actually just Vladimir Putin who wants your freedom now, soon to be Xi Jinping.
So because they're so easily able to just grab and switch this thing, like the Indiana Jones, just that immediate switch and then everything actually changes.
It doesn't, it really doesn't get to the heart of the issue.
And because it's so divisive, it's terrible.
I love the example.
You would use this.
Gosh, I don't remember when, but you use the example of how divisive the implications of religious beliefs are.
It's like you're sitting at a table with someone who thinks not just you might get hurt or you're doing something that's not beneficial.
You're going to burn in a fiery pit for all of eternity.
And you think the other person is just delusional and like believes in ghosts and watches ghostbusters and is, you know, genuinely scared of the, you know, a fictitious like movie.
But these people are able to get along because not every four years are they able to vote and violently impose their religious dogmas on you.
And they don't force your kids through compulsory education laws to attend their church sermons.
And they don't threaten to cage you if you don't chip in 3% of your property value every year to their churches.
So government is the source of division.
Coercion is the source of division.
And that is what makes government a unique actor in society.
So that is the general message to erase the arbitrary divides and embrace a actual principle divide of seeing things through the voluntarism violence lens based off things like consent, which immediately outlaws all the great evils, differentiates work from slavery, theft versus trade, kidnapping versus going over to someone's house, rape versus lovemaking.
So it really is the root of morality.
Yeah, listen, man, I couldn't agree with you more.
And it's unbelievable how much throughout so many of our day-to-day interactions, just our everyday life, that non-aggression principle is this kind of unspoken, even subconscious at some point, just agreement that we all have with each other.
You know, like we may, we're mostly friendly to people we encounter.
Maybe sometimes we have a little bit of a nasty encounter, but in general, we all kind of agree that it's like, well, your property is your property.
I'm not going to initiate violence against you.
I might be like, hey, you jerk.
Why'd you cut me off there?
But I'm also not going to like, you know, just take your car as if it's mine.
It's so within, it's the essence of what civilization is.
And all this other stuff is just a distraction.
All right.
Keith, man, I always enjoy these conversations.
Thank you so much for coming on.
We're going to do this again real soon.
Future Lies and Propaganda00:01:19
Where can people find your work?
You can find it at libertarianinstitute.org.
We recently published a book titled Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times.
This is Laurie Calhoun's analysis of the COVID-19 hysteria.
We have a COVID follow-up book that is going to be published by Tom Woods called Diary of a Psychosis.
You can check out the work of Scott Horton analyzing each war in the Middle East in his book.
Oh my gosh, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism.
One of the best ways to see through future lies is to understand the previous lies and propaganda.
So you will learn a great deal in that book.
Once you see through the Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan lies, then you're much more able to see whoever the new boogeyman is going to be.
North Korea, Iran, China, Russia.
So a lot of productive materials there at Libertarian Institute.org.
Our general goal is to create a free educational archive.
So you can come to the Institute and use our search engine to type in minimum wage, Winston Churchill, agricultural subsidies, Vladimir Zelensky, any topic, and get the freedom position on those issues.
All right, great.
Well, Keith Knight, thank you very much for coming on.
Thank you, everybody, for listening, and we'll catch you next time.