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July 10, 2021 - QAA
01:06:15
Episode 150: Critical Race Theory feat Arif Hasan

Complex field of study or right-wing boogeyman? Why not both! We explore Critical Race theory with guest Arif Hasan. ↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓ www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Follow Arif Hasan: twitter.com/arifhasanNFL QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: qanonanonymous.com Episode music by Max Mulder (doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com)

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What's up QAA listeners?
The fun games have begun.
I found a way to connect to the internet.
I'm sorry boy.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 150 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Critical Race Theory episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Liv Agar, Julian Field, and Travis View.
In the past few months, American conservative lawmakers and their fans have taken up the calls for a crusade against critical race theory and its supposed pernicious influence on every facet of America's legal and political institutions.
Critical race theory is an intellectual movement that grew out of critical legal studies, and it was designed to critique the racist character of the American legal institutions beyond the civil rights era.
You'll notice that everything I just described has very little to do with the conservative outrage we've been seeing as of late.
How did a relatively obscure intellectual anti-racist movement develop into white conservative America's primary boogeyman?
And what the fuck is critical race theory anyways?
We'll be finding out with Liv and we've got a great guest, Arif Hasan.
Welcome to the show, Arif.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
But before all that, QAnon News.
For my first story, QAnon promoters given press credentials at Florida Trump rally.
I'm so proud of my boys.
They've come so far.
They're coming up in the world.
So perhaps you remember QAnon podcaster In The Matrix, a.k.a.
Jeffrey Pedersen, and his trusty companion Shady Groove.
Now, he was one of the QAnon promoters I spoke to at the QAnon conference in Arizona last year.
Well, I mean, it appears he's given some real mainstream recognition because last week Trump held a rally in Florida And as first reported by Alex Kaplan at Media Matters, both In The Matrix and Shady Groove got press passes to that event.
See, you can see the pictures of them.
They're holding up their green.
They're very, very happy.
There was a mini-controversy, not really a controversy, about The Gun Girl.
Oh, yes!
Not getting a press pass.
Yes.
Fortunately, yeah, it seems like her reputation got ahead of her because, yeah, she was denied press credentials at this event.
And this picture, Travis, that you included looks like two kids on Christmas, an older brother and his younger sibling, and they just unwrapped their Xbox Live gift certificates.
And they're holding it up for, you know, so mom and dad can take a picture.
And, you know, they can download some Fortnite bucks.
In the Matrix posted a video of himself in the press pin at Trump's rally calling reporters the fake news media and showed himself wearing wristbands with QAnon's Where We Go One, We Go All slogan on them.
In the Matrix also posted a video of himself leading a chant of Where We Go One, We Go All.
Alright guys, you know the saying yet?
Where we go one?
We go all!
Where we go one?
*outro* Even after everything, Trump isn't the president, they're still just having a great time.
A grand old time.
It really is the friends they made along the way.
So this isn't the first time a QAnon influencer got media credentials for a Trump rally.
Back in 2019, a co-host with the QAnon livestream Patriot Soapbox was photographed with Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale at an Ohio Trump rally.
Like you mentioned, they also gave press credentials to Gateway Pundit.
They met Bill Mitchell in the White House for the social media summit.
So really, nothing about this is surprising.
Trump, obviously, he wants to elevate outlets that are sympathetic to him.
I feel like I should also mention that Michael R. Warren of CNN reported that the Trump team was trying to distance themselves from In the Matrix afterwards, and they claimed that they would start instituting a more rigorous vetting process for press.
But man, we are so far beyond giving them the benefit of the doubt and saying that this was a mistake that slipped through the cracks when they do this shit over and over and over again for years.
I have to think some of this is also, like, they know that these types of people will fuck with, like, CNN, mainstream media, and that's, like, funny.
Yeah.
For my next story, Jason Miller launches an alternate social media network, Getter.
So for many years, right-wing figures have tried to launch alternate social media networks to varying degrees of success.
There's Gab, and there's Parler, and there's Clout Hub, and there's Bitshoot, and there's MeWe, and there's Rumble, and there's lots of other smaller social media sites.
Well, Trump advisor Jason Miller recently made his effort to get to the social media game by launching Getter that is spelled G-E-T-T-R.
That is spelled G-R-I-N-D-R.
That sounds like a large group of people chasing a woman would scream.
Despite the fact that lots of big names in the Trump universe joined the new site, it was off to a rocky start.
On the official launch day, which is July 4th, a hacker compromised the site and altered several accounts, including the accounts of Mike Pompeo, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Harlan Hill.
The hacker changed the profiles to read, Yes.
Yes.
This is... Every time this happens, they just have awful security.
And you get all of your information stolen by some hacker.
Yes, it was actually just recently reported, just this morning, that 90,000 accounts were compromised, including email addresses, and all that data was dumped on a particular hacking site.
So, you know, already doing terrible.
Oh yeah, the hacker was able to send a reporter all of their personal data that they had extracted from the website, and it was all the same exact stuff he had input into the fields to sign up.
Incredible.
This is a lesson that when you're joining these sites to gawk at the right-wing people, do not enter your actual information because it will be stolen.
Anonymize everything.
Just use the word, the name's Travis View.
The site was also unsurprisingly quickly flooded with trolls.
They used the QAnon hashtag to share lots and lots of images of hentai, furry porn, and leftist Sonic memes.
Sometimes there's overlap between those, by the way.
Definitely some hentai Sonic.
Leftist hentai Sonic memes?
Yes, that's exactly what I mean.
Now, this was remarked on by QAnon promoter Jordan Sather, who said this.
Shills are already hitting the hashtag QAnon hashtag on Getter hard.
I won't repost what I'm finding.
Titties and bad words and stuff.
Said like an eight-year-old.
In a way, Jordan Sather, by covering Q and having the mental acuity he has, is kind of human trafficking himself.
Jordan Sather could be one of the boys on the Brigantine Albatross from this week's premium White Squall.
Also, that's his porn name, White Squall.
The Critical Race Theory Movement is a collection of scholars that reimagined and developed new understandings about the relationships between race, racism, and power.
In the first part of this episode, we will go over some of the basic elements of what they actually meant, to be radically contrasted in the second part with how they are represented by conservatives.
These scholars, beginning generally in the 70s, worked to question and
overturn the traditional, generally liberal, often colorblind understanding of race. This is
particularly as a reaction to the stalling of progress made towards racial justice following the Civil
Rights era, with some of the progress gained in that period even being rolled back by a
legislative wave of reaction.
A crucial problem that early critical race scholars, such as Richard Delgado, Derek Bell,
and Alan Freeman analyzed was the potential shortcomings of earlier analyses of racism
that were less equipped to conceptualize this stalling of progress.
Following the civil rights era, the social character of racism was also importantly altered, which required a reimagining of how racism functioned to conceptualize the subtler, Yet still deeply entrenched forms of racism that people of color continue to experience.
It is also important to emphasize that many of these authors disagree on some particular and important issues that we'll be talking about and may not even concern themselves with some of the quote-unquote major themes of the movement that I will go over.
This often makes it difficult to discuss what critical race theory truly means in a short period of time due to the overlapping yet unique heterogeneous set of complex fascinating works that encompass the movement.
We also, of course, have a guest this week, my friend Harif Hassan, who certainly knows more about theory than I do.
And before we get into critical race theory, we should probably talk about critical legal studies, a very crucial element of the foundation of the movement.
Harif, can you help break down to us what, in general, critical legal studies is attempting to critique in, say, impartial, liberal understandings of the law?
Yeah, Critical Legal Studies puts forth the idea that the law has generally been represented as an objective tool, particularly in the liberal order, and more that it's a series of guidelines mediated by social agents, so police officers, lawyers, prosecutors, judges, etc., who all exercise varying degrees of power through their interpretations of law.
That law is never objective, but subjective and responsive to the social structure And historically, that's a natural evolution of legal realism, which emerged in the 40s, which is a recognition of the fact that the legal system has become so abstracted from its functions that new types of law need to be imagined in order for it to really confront social outcomes.
So, for example, a person getting hurt in a grocery store because of an unclean spill is a practical reality, but it gets abstracted in law in terms of torts, plaintiffs, defendants, and so on, and that a case like this surrounds precedent and legal framework, and it can hinge on, like, semicolons and definitions that were parsed a century ago instead of practical ethics.
Legal realism is really semiotics defined through law, while critical legal studies is an attempt to trace the connective tissue between all of this semiosis and language So you're talking about a guy slipping in a store, and then how does that then translate into law and what is the critique of the law that results from that incident?
So in that particular instance, right, we would be talking about the facts of the case, you know, whether or not it is an obligation for, say, this grocery store in this particular jurisdiction based off of city ordinance, whether or not it is their obligation to clean up a spill
in a timely manner, what has been defined as a timely manner based off of precedent, based
off of the types of services that a grocery store offers, the amount of traffic.
And you'll go into legal dictionaries like Black's Law Dictionary, which has been around
for centuries, literally centuries, that look at legal precedence cases and you would end
up looking at definitions of the word liability, the fourth definition of the word liability
spelled out in the third district court or something like that.
Where you would get so removed from the particulars or the facts of the case that you end up discussing these legal abstractions that you can't even conceive that this was originally a case about somebody slipping on some water or something like that or, you know,
some unfrozen food or whatever, right?
That is kind of the environment that legal realism evolved in,
and critical legal studies is an extension of that.
So legal realists will recognize that at the end of the day, judges would rule on a case and they'd begin ruling on a
case less on that precedent and more on the fact that the judges were in the room and
they can kind of determine what is fair based off of their own interpretation because
there are so many interpretations and precedents at this point that you can rule in either
direction based off of what you were feeling.
And so that's kind of where the realism of legal realism comes from.
Legal realists would actually often embrace that fact, that law can be practiced socially, that judges will quote-unquote make policy.
And so legal realists want judges to make better policy, whereas critical legal studies authors would rather interrogate the social system behind the law's execution.
So the relationships between the grocery store and the judge's election campaign, or the subtle pressure that policymakers might put on the legal system to keep a corporate grocery store chain in town, right?
And so that's something that a critical legal theorist would spend a little bit more time breaking down in its execution of the law, while a legal realist wants to make sure that you've got kind of the right judge picking the right precedents and so forth.
That's the environment that critical legal studies kind of emerges from.
And then from there, like you said, live in the 70s, where you've got people like Alan Friedman and Richard Delgado and Derrick Bell talking about the findings of critical legal studies within the particulars of race and gender.
They actually talk a lot about gender in critical race theory.
That group borrowed the idea of legal indeterminacy, which again, a lot of that is from legal realism, but the idea that not every legal case has one correct outcome.
Instead, one can decide most cases either way by emphasizing one line of authority over another or interpreting one fact differently.
And this is from Delgado and Stefancic's excellent reader on the introduction of critical race theory.
They also incorporated skepticism about legal victories.
So, Brand versus Board of Education shows up all the time in early discussions for critical race theory
and how these precedents can erode over time based off of narrower interpretations and so on.
And so, class blind and race blind and gender blind laws are not indications of a legal structure
that mediates these axes of oppression fairly, right?
They're not indications that the legal system itself is executed in a way that is even neutral to race, whether or not that's even desirable in the first place, but rather that they are exercised or instanced in a way that exacerbate the social pressure.
So one really good example, I think, is actually Really early in the history of policing so a history of policing in the northern United States less so in the southern United States So the first public presence of police officers in the north Really had to do with enforcing these new speeding laws that were passed because of the invention of the car And so they were asked to enforce speeding laws, and they quickly determined that they couldn't or wouldn't enforce speeding laws uniformly so instead they would pick and choose between
How they would enforce speeding laws because when they began enforcing these laws, it turns out a lot of really wealthy people were speeding, right?
And they did not want to be inconvenienced by being informed that they were breaking the law.
And so then kind of instruction came down to police officers that you need to quote unquote exercise discretion, right?
You need to pick and choose how you would enforce those speeding laws.
And so this largely resulted in wealthy elites avoiding traffic enforcement or earning warnings before getting ticketed.
There was no law in the books telling police officers to reduce punishment for wealthy drivers or city law ordinances that demanded warnings over tickets in other neighborhoods.
Police officers as social agents responded to social pressures by using their tools in ways that reinforced social structures.
Every instance of law enforcement and one really common contemporary example is wage theft, right?
That's punished less often and less harshly than petty theft.
Sometimes that pressure can be very explicit and sometimes that pressure can be, you know, very implicit and sometimes it can be, I wouldn't say unconscious, but, you know, impossible to trace.
So, for example, putting police officers in high-crime neighborhoods to patrol.
Right.
Well, what is a high crime neighborhood, etc.
Right.
And that discussion has been talked about a lot about how that kind of reinforces itself when you put police officers in quote unquote high crime areas.
They tend to find more crime because that's where they are.
And now that gets locked in the crime statistics.
So when you do your end of the year evaluation of where you need to put officers, you take a look at the crime statistics you gather and it turns out The police officers found crime in the areas where they were, and so you're putting them back in those same areas.
This goes back to kind of a theory we haven't talked about.
I don't see a bunch of discussion about that crime is socially defined, right?
So I'm stealing this from Dave McKenna on Twitter, but he had a really great thread a while back.
So if you steal $100 from your employer, you'll get arrested.
If you call the police because your paycheck is $100 light, they'll tell you to file a complaint with the attorney
general and the attorney general will settle the case for between $50
and $200 if they take your case at all.
And recourse for wage theft is done in the United States through the civil system instead of the criminal system.
So if an attorney general declines to take the case, which might define it as criminal, you then go through the
civil system which defines what is criminal not through the base act,
right, which is theft here, but by who committed and how they
commit it.
And another really instructive example from the same Twitter thread, poison a person, go to jail, and they call you a felon for life.
Poison a city, resulting in dozens of deaths and thousands with brain damage.
get a teaching fellowship at Harvard and they call you ex-governor of Michigan Rick Snyder, right?
So the law is constructed in such a way where liberals can point to it and argue that it is
objective, that it's universal and that it's fair. But at the same time, and here's one of
the central contradictions that CLS scholars point out about liberal thinking about law,
is that it has flexibility so that a reasonable person would do this or that there are reasonable
person standards and that judicial interpretation give you flexibility and the ability to correct
mistakes. And And the most extreme version of this is in police accountability for police brutality.
One really contemporary example that we've talked a lot about that fits pretty neatly into the framework that's being discussed by critical study scholars is the concept of qualified immunity.
And for people that are unfamiliar, the idea is basically this, that a police officer can commit an act of police brutality, and everyone will agree that it violates the Eighth Amendment or violates some sort of common core principle that's embedded in the law.
But the problem is, because The way that that officer violated your rights or the Eighth Amendment is unique.
It's different in some way.
later on, the way that that officer violated your rights or violated the Eighth Amendment is unique.
It's different in some way. The facts of the case are different. And so we can't punish the officer.
We can't, you know, engage in any sort of legal recourse because they couldn't have known that this was against the law because it wasn't set in stone.
It's not precedent.
So we're making a new ruling that this new instance of police brutality is, and this is true on and on and on and on, where every instance of police, because every time You know, an instance happens, the facts of the case are different.
You know, you were on a trench on the side of the road instead of on the side of the road.
You were driving a truck, not a car.
You were on an asphalt road instead of a dirt road.
Like every type of fact that can possibly be changed in terms of a historical precedent can be changed and therefore an officer didn't commit an act that had been previously ruled in that jurisdiction to be illegal.
Yeah, every time someone commits theft or murder, like, you know, we're gonna put it under that label and just make, and that's what you're labeled with until the end of your life.
But for cops, it's like a snowflake.
Every moment is precious.
Every detail counts.
Let's not, let's not color this with a black and white brush.
Yeah, and that's exactly it, is that the uniformity can be useful in some instances and exercised in some instances, and the flexibility is useful in some instances and exercised in other instances.
And this contradiction kind of lives in the legal formalism doctrine that kind of embraces the usefulness of legal institutions as a means of providing justice or executing social order.
It takes formalism and the fundamental assertions of it in which to critique them?
Yeah, and that's a lot of what CLS does is that it critiques legal formalism and it critiques a lot of aspects of it, right?
Like it brings up this contradiction.
It has a critique of the way that we talk about rights and rights discourse.
It has a critique of the way we think about how society should be organized because we kind of subjugate our political identities to the existence of a state, for
example, that exists within critical legal studies literature, and so on and so forth.
But the idea of legal formalism
is kind of at the base of its critiques, you know, whether or not the law can be
executed, well, it can't be executed objectively, but rather pointing
out what that means and what the implications of that fact are.
Right.
What seems like a really interesting way to see all of these cases that exposes more of the context, that gives you an idea of why the system comes to these results.
This grows into critical race theory.
How does that happen?
Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the tension between a lot of the people that would end up becoming part of the critical race theory movement and a lot of the people that kind of were foundational to CLS or critical legal studies and how very often critical legal studies would not have very much in the way in terms of discussion about race and gender.
And so there were criticisms that, you know, CLS ultimately bent towards a conservative angle because It itself existed in the very abstractions it critiqued.
And so, for example, you're talking about abuses of law, but you're not really talking about abuses of law.
You're not having a discussion about how that gets exercised or providing concrete examples.
Nor are you implicating the fact that these legal structures get executed through race or through racialized identities.
in any particular serious way.
And so if you take a look at modern CLS and modern CRT, there's not that much in terms of the differences
between the way that they talk about these things.
But if you take a look at the scholarship from the 1970s, you see that there are critiques of civil rights
as a concept from CLS, right?
And then there's critiques of the way that civil rights is used as a mechanism to deny social progress in the area of race in CRT.
And that explicit discussion about race is very present and obvious, obviously, in CRT.
And it was nearly absent in CLS.
And so what CRT tried to do was not only bring these foundational concepts into a discussion about how it interacts with race, but also kind of continue to explore now that race is in the discussion, how does that impact things?
And so they continue to underscore that.
There's not always a bunch of criticisms from CRT scholars that necessarily dismiss CLS so much as the approach that many have towards CLS, but there are some.
One example is probably Charles Mills is maybe the most common example of somebody who's vocal in the criticism of the traditional approaches of CLS.
His argument is essentially that the defining cleavage in American politics and in modern politics in general is race, more than it is gender or class.
And race permeates law and politics, but CLS does not provide the broad shape or the breakdown of politics.
So race is kind of How the geography of our political landscape evolved, right?
Like if you took a snapshot of what the political landscape is, the most significant thing that you would look at, Charles Mills argues, is race.
And so if we don't have a race-centered focus for the way that we evaluate legal systems, we're doing ourselves a disservice in, you know, a million different ways.
It's not like necessarily like race first because it doesn't deny the insight that you find from you know
Intersectional scholars like Kimberly Crenshaw, but it is race centered, right?
And I think that there is a difference between race first and race centered
And it is a question about how race and racism permeates these institutions instead of saying, you know
the first thing or the only thing that we can look at is race and
And so that's kind of one significant difference between one branch or school of thought within CRT and CLS.
But another one is kind of more aggressive critiques of like enlightenment rationality in the way that it is influenced law, which is not to say that there haven't been like a million different critiques of enlightenment rationality From, you know, continental philosophers and Western scholars and stuff like that.
Every French guy in the 20th century was like, I'm going to critique Enlightenment rationality.
I am the anti-Enlightenment.
Yeah.
But, you know, there are much more direct criticisms of equality theory, a lot more criticisms of the idea of constitutional law.
So, like, for example, I think Delgado and definitely Mills would argue that the Constitution as a document is irreparably racist.
And so we cannot use it as a basis for determining, you know, kind of our agency within a society.
You're talking about a breakaway group from a breakaway group from like a law, like basically a debate surrounding law in academia.
How the fuck does this end up on Fox News?
Yeah, so like as an aside, like when I first heard this as a criticism from conservatives, I think I first saw like a clip on Twitter from Tucker Carlson.
I was flabbergasted because I hadn't encountered the term critical race theory outside of when I was literally doing academic debate, like when I was in college and I was on the debate circuit.
Because like you said, critical race theory as a concept, like its concepts have spread, you know, I think that's a good thing.
its concepts have spread to some degree in a couple of different areas.
But critical race theory itself emerges from law school and the reason debaters talk about
it so much is because debate coaches come from law school and that's the literature
they have the access to.
So I was floored, right?
And I couldn't begin to explain, you know, why this is but I, you know, I can have theories
and I think one of the things is it's just another way to complain about people talking
about white supremacy or to even just, not even white supremacy, just like structural
racism in general, right?
It's just a way to complain about people talking about racism Without saying the words I'm complaining about people talking about racism Finding a phrase in the literature that seems sufficiently scary and and deploying that The fact that we're having discussions about like sensitivity training and calling that critical race theory is mind-blowing.
It's one of the very things that critical race theory critiques, right?
It's like, they hate sensitivity training, right?
So you're saying the CRT people would not be fans of white fragility?
I think the concept they are fine with.
I think the book by Robin DiAngelo is something that they would... Maybe they wouldn't say they would burn the book, but I don't think that they would, you know, save it from a fire if they saw it.
Yeah, so this idea that the left is all lying behind this secret theology that came from Marxism seems kind of...
Bogus?
I mean, could you clarify that?
Yeah, I mean, it shouldn't be shocking, right?
But yeah, like, there's no strain of uniform thought that can coherently connect, you know, white fragility and CRT and, you know, the discussions of colonialism and settler politics.
You know, like, I saw a list of, like, 20 things.
There was, like, a PowerPoint slide, like, what is CRT?
It's this, and it's a list of 20 things.
These are things that you should be watching for at your next school board meeting.
I was looking at it and I was just like, this is literally just racism.
It's just talking about racism.
In ways that some CRT authors would be apoplectic about.
Focusing on individual acts of racism.
Alan Freeman, one of the three authors we mentioned as a CRT guy, wrote in 1978, like it could have been written honestly today, it's an amazing piece, it's one of those seminal pieces about how anti-discrimination law is used to further racism.
And the very first section of that piece in the University of Minnesota Law Review, the very first section of that piece is a discussion about how we conceive of discrimination and how the concept of discrimination in law is taken from a perpetrator perspective instead of a victim perspective and what he means by that is that discrimination is experienced by victims of discrimination as a change in their material conditions about whether or not they've got the ability to get a job, whether or not they've got the ability to seek health care when they need it, whether or not they have the ability to be housed, right?
Very like basic material things that impact your life from day to day like and stuff like microaggressions like those things have a psychological and those matter, right?
But they are less material to the living conditions.
And so discrimination from a victim perspective is about those conditions,
the condition about a lack of jobs, money, and housing.
It's like harm reduction, right?
Right.
And from a legal perspective, it's from a perpetrator viewpoint
where the way that discrimination is viewed from the dominant narrative
and from the legal perspective is about individual acts of discrimination
by a bad actor who is individually racist, right?
And his critique, which eventually emerged as part of the CRT scholarship,
is of the way that formal liberal principles of anti-discrimination are propped up
as a means of explaining that racism is over, that we passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Racism is over.
And discrimination is illegal.
You can't do that now.
And so there is no discrimination because when it happens, you can go through the civil litigation system and say, that guy said the racism word.
to me and now I don't have a job and that proves that that guy was a bad faith racist actor
instead of interrogating the social conditions that produce the fact that for example
you know the the average net worth of a black household is like twenty thousand
dollars and the average net worth of a white household is a hundred and seventy thousand dollars like
that is never interrogated right Instead, we're having a discussion about, you know, whether or not an employer was provably racist in a hiring process.
Never mind that that employer over a hundred interviews has only called back, let's say, five black people despite getting an equal number of black applicants and white applicants.
And never mind that that employer in those five interviews hired one of them versus hiring, you know, 20 different white people with similar qualifications.
Rather, you have to prove in those other four interviews where he didn't hire a black person that they did something demonstrably racist.
That's a piece written in 1978 and that's a discussion we're still having today about the way that we think about racism and racist structures.
It's a really remarkable piece that kind of breaks that down.
Actually, this is a really interesting example of how we can openly acknowledge that the law isn't neutral.
Yet, act as if it is in the exact same discussion about the exact same court case.
Because that's what the court case was about, right?
Because those laws were written neutrally.
Separate but equal was an idea of neutrality, right?
And so it explicitly recognized that a law written in a colorblind way can explicitly reinforce racism.
And you think about kind of historical laws that do the exact same thing.
Literacy tests and poll taxes.
They aren't racist in their textual essence, right?
But they're racist in nature and they can reinforce racism in a couple of ways through the agents that are meant to enforce the law.
So literacy tests are actually a really good example of this because I don't think we really talk about this anymore in a way that's really illuminating like we should.
So like people know that like literacy tests before voting, a literacy test that you were required to take before you were allowed to vote.
People know that those were racist.
They were implemented.
To enforce racism, but a lot of people haven't really been told that different people were given different tests and that the tests were graded in different ways.
They just think, oh, it seems really suspicious that we're talking about literacy tests and racism and we're saying black people can't read.
No, that's not the argument.
You could take a literacy test right now, or there's a bunch of videos on YouTube of college students and Ivy League students or whatever.
law school students taking the literacy tests that black people were required to take in the South.
And they can't do it.
The tests were, not only were they given a tight time limit that had long questions that were written
to be intentionally confusing and ambiguous in a way that allowed the people grading the test
to mark an answer wrong regardless, but even when they weren't ambiguously worded,
even when they weren't written in a way that allowed you to say it was wrong regardless,
they were just confusing.
And so if you take a look at those YouTube videos of people trying to take those literacy tests,
it's really illuminating, and I think that that's weird that that's, well, I shouldn't say it's weird,
but it should be part of the way that we educate people about literacy tests.
So that's one way that the law can be racist, is through those social agents
acting in explicitly racist ways.
But also the other way is recognizing what material conditions exist for a group
and exploiting the facts of those material conditions.
So poll taxes are a great example of that.
In the instances when poll taxes were implemented uniformly, they obviously created a bigger burden on those without the means to pay them than those with the means to pay them.
Right, and so obviously the people that don't have any, you know, kind of net worth or don't have any access to income or whatever, they can't pay a poll tax and don't have any money.
We know of tons of modern-day examples of uniformly written, colorblind laws or legal proposals that are racist.
Marijuana criminalization, voter ID laws, like those are racist laws that are, when you read the text of the law, there's no mention of race, obviously, right?
And this goes through every facet of legal interpretation, like even, we don't even have to talk about criminal laws, right?
Like you can, food stamps, the universal rule that prevents SNAP benefits, which in the United States that's what food stamps are, SNAP, SNAP benefits from being, you can't use them to buy hot foods or prepared foods. So when I was on food stamps,
I could buy like produce that could be used to cook things and I could buy like it was easier for
me to buy a prime rib using food stamps than it was for me to buy a 99 cent burger at McDonald's,
right? Like you cannot buy and I couldn't buy the rotisserie chicken at the grocery store
because that was a prepared prepared food, but I could buy a whole chicken if I had the
time to cook it at home myself, right?
What the fuck's the idea there?
Like, oh, you know, you're lazy, so, you know, this is the only, like, good and virtuous
way to eat.
Well, it's, well, kinda, yeah.
So like, part of it is it traces back to the history, the Reagan history of, like, welfare
queens, right?
Using food stamps to, uh, buy exorbitant goods or using food stamps to buy- It's like, a lot of times it's sold as, well, we don't want people to use food stamps to buy Coke or Coca-Cola, right?
We don't want people to use food stamps, um, to buy cheeseburgers.
You know, they should be using food stamps to- to buy healthy foods for their kids and stuff.
I can't believe- we shouldn't let them do that.
So, like, you look at that food stamp rule and- and- and you say, well, that doesn't have- like, it doesn't say black people aren't allowed to buy prepared foods.
It says nobody on food stamps.
Can can buy prepared foods, but how does that harm people who live in food deserts?
versus people that live like right next to a farmer's market right and like because a lot of farmers markets now except food stamps are just like great, but like If you can't access a farmer's market like that whoops There's nothing you know all you have is that gas station and their produce is two weeks old and And also, there are 10 items of produce that they have, and the rest are prepared foods, so that's what you can buy with food stamps.
So, yeah, I mean, those are examples of laws that are written in a colorblind way, right, that are uniform, and are either exercised through the material facts of the way they interact with the society that they legislate on to reinforce racism and the social order of racism, or can be exercised in ways like speeding laws or literacy
tests, exercised in ways through social agents to explicitly be
racist.
It's essentially, the thesis statement is essentially, if laws are written within a flawed framework,
they will reproduce flawed problems.
And that even, there's, you mentioned like the idea of essence,
and there's a big irony because you've seen quite a bit of like anti-critical race theory stuff.
They talk about how essentializing critical race theory is, and they say that you are born white, and it's essentially because of your skin, which is obviously incredibly ironic, given the very specifically anti-essential position on race that critical race theorists take up.
Yeah, I mean, Tucker Carlson quoted the one Martin Luther King line that all the racists know, right?
When he was like, yeah, Martin Luther King would hate critical race theory, despite the fact that it was developed shortly after.
It's not like that divorce from each other, right?
You know He was like, yeah
Critical race theory judges white people as morally bad and and Martin Luther King would hate that because he said
judge me by the content of my character and it's like
the the essential thesis right if we're talking about essentialism the thesis of critical race these or one of
the I shouldn't say thesis one of the essential premises of
Critical race theory is that race is a social construct that has material outcomes that it is grounded in a
material reality But that it emerges because of arbitrary I shouldn't say
arbitrary decisions but decisions that can be made along arbitrary lines that
Thank you for coming on, Arif.
Arif, plug some stuff!
You know a lot of Marxist critical race theorists would say that that race was a convenient
marker for labor and that you can identify labor by the color of someone's skin
How convenient would that be for a capitalist and take advantage of that and create kind of racialized systems?
Thank you for coming on Arif. Arif, plug some stuff.
Absolutely Sure
So I don't know if this came across in any of this episode, but I primarily write about the NFL and football.
So if you want to learn about the Minnesota Vikings, Subscribe to me at The Athletic.
TheAthletic.com/author/arif-hasan.
But I also occasionally do a political podcast.
We last recorded like seven months ago.
This is very occasional.
But it's called The Wide Left Podcast, which is like a Minnesota Vikings in-joke.
There we have a lot of the discussions that are actually pretty similar to the discussion
that we had today.
So that's me and my co-host Ben Natan.
You can also follow me on Twitter @arifhasanNFL.
Yeah, thanks again.
Critical Race Theory.
The Black History Month.
I hope it's easy to understand how obvious it is that critical race theory is too advanced
to be taught in primary or secondary schools.
I bring this up, of course, given the recent push by many local and state-level Republicans to ban critical race theory from being taught in public schools.
Now, of course, they weren't being taught in public schools.
So what exactly are these bills doing?
Republican lawmakers have been using the term critical race theory as a catch-all term for anything that attempts to even talk about the history of racism and its legacy up to today.
A sponsor for a failed anti-CRT bill in the Rhode Island State Legislature from last week said about his bill that This act would prohibit the teaching of divisive concepts and prohibit making any individual feel discomfort, guilty, anguish, or any distress on account of their race or sex.
While usually, those who are attempting to get these types of legislation passed aren't as explicit as this, this seems to be a perfect summary of the raison d'etre of the recent push to get Critical Race Theory banned.
White upper class Trump supporters are essentially very fond of this idea that something like Critical Race Theory is infiltrating their schools to attack their way of life because they've always been incredibly paranoid about some vague racialized other coming to do something like this.
One can think about the single caravan of migrants during the 2018 midterms that was eventually turned away at the border that became the primary reason upper-class white conservatives thought they were going to die and have all of their valuable things stolen from them.
But why attack specifically critical race theory?
It seems as if their faux concerns are entirely unaligned with the actual literature.
Even though its use has intensified in the past few months, critical race theory has
been used at some level as a poorly constructed boogeyman by some white conservatives for
the past few decades.
An example, even in 1994, when the OJC was in power.
Simpson verdict was announced, Jeffrey Rosen, a legal affairs writer for the New Republic, said that Johnny Cochran's defense of his famous client was a case of, quote, applied critical race theory.
Mmm.
Yeah.
Incredible.
Critical race theory is when a black man gets off on a trial.
And so far, yeah, like, it appears that this is all just safe space legislation.
Like, we don't want to hear the words that hurt our feelings.
Yes, the essential through line is that white people feel uncomfortable sometimes, and anything that makes them uncomfortable is critical race theory.
The more uncomfortable you get, the more critical it is.
Another example of a somewhat intensified use of critical race theory as a boogeyman was during the 2012 presidential election when Breitbart discovered a grainy video of a younger Obama praising and embracing Derrick Bell, a leading figure in critical race theory.
It produced some think pieces by conservatives about Obama's connection to this movement.
Here's David French in the National Review talking about his experience and Obama's with critical race theory.
Thank you so much for bringing David French to the podcast.
I don't hate you for this.
this.
Real David French hours, you up?
#FrenchHive.
I arrived at Harvard Law School in August of 1991, just a couple months after Barack
Obama graduated.
This was an era of proud political correctness, including booing, hissing, and shouting down
dissenting voices in class, combined with the vocal ascendance of the quote-unquote
crits.
Critical legal theorists rejected American legal system's root and branch, decrying them as the products of an irretrievably broken racist patriarchy.
Conservatives navigating this environment had to watch themselves.
I can remember seeing cut-and-paste pictures of gay porn on the walls of the Harkness Commons with the faces of Federalist society leaders superimposed on the nude figures of gay quote-unquote actors.
I was shouted down in class and verbally attacked by teachers.
If it weren't for the courageous free speech advocacy of professors like Alan Dershowitz, the atmosphere would undoubtedly have been even worse.
Even here we can see that, like, while it's still relatively obscure and also more tied to critical legal theory, that the main conservative quote-unquote critique is that, well, it made me feel uncomfortable.
But the only people who were uncomfortable as a result of it were those who were at Harvard in, you know, the 90s.
But these examples are relatively few and far between compared to the last few months.
To understand why, we have to start in July of 2020, when an employee of the City of Seattle recorded and sent an anti-bias training session to a journalist named Christopher Ruffo, who used it to
spark what I can reasonably call one of the biggest journalistic rifts of the decade. Ruffo
had initially been a documentary filmmaker, making tourist projects overseas, such as one
called "Diamond in the Dunes,"
about a half Uyghur, half Han Chinese baseball team set in Xinjiang.
In 2017, he would set his sights on something grander than this, working for a conservative think tank in Seattle to do reporting on houselessness, developing quite a large degree of antinomy between him and activist groups Attempting to end houselessness.
Rufo would then FOIA request the city of Seattle to find that many of its departments were dividing up their employees for race-based implicit bias training.
He would note of slides for presentations that said things like internalized racial superiority for white people.
Overall, it appears like their greatest crime was potentially making some white people uncomfortable.
And when looking at general conservative comments about what Critical Race Theory is, you will notice this concern pop up quite a lot.
Rufo would take these findings public, and publish an article for the Manhattan Institute called, Under the Banner of Anti-Racism, Seattle's Office of Civil Rights is Now Explicitly Endorsing Principles of Segregationism, Group-Based Guilt, and Race Essentialism, Ugly Concepts That Should Have Been Left Behind a Century Ago.
Rufo's quest to find some coherent political ideology to pin this supposedly terrible phenomena on continued, with him reading the footnotes to these presentations that often, according to him, cited Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.
A look into their footnotes led to critical race theorists like Kimberly Crenshaw and Derrick Bell.
But Rufo's footnote digging wasn't finished just yet.
He noticed how Angela Davis, a philosopher who works in conversation with and is tangentially related to critical race theory, had been the doctoral student of Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School, who is a Marxist.
He would then use this to essentially connect the Marxist Frankfurt School with both critical
race theory as well as the government anti-bias training that he at FOIA requested from the
city of Seattle.
This is all of course absurd.
To build your understanding of the world like this, by finding common sources and footnotes
and noting that the existence of these common sources imply a conspiracy, is a lot like
viewing the world through the lens of numerology.
You can make essentially whatever you want out of most academic citations.
I also want to mention that that Seattle think tank that you mentioned that Chris Rufa worked
for is the Discovery Institute.
I have some personal animosity towards the Discovery Institute because that is the organization
that tried for many years and failed to push intelligent design creationism in public schools,
pushing their particular ideas in public schools even though it's not really accepted by actual
academics who study the matter.
Apparently it's a strategy of this organization.
And so now they're accusing other people of doing it.
Pretty cool.
An example of how absurd what Ruffo is doing is, that I like to think of, is of Nietzsche, a seminal 19th century European philosopher.
Nietzsche essentially looked at Europe in the late 19th century and attempted to develop a philosophy to counter the growing influence of a multitude of egalitarian democratic movements.
Regardless, you can find the influence of Nietzsche in quite a few places that you might not expect based on this description.
In queer theory, feminist theory, standpoint epistemology, even within this episode in critical race theory, with perspectivism being an idea that is essentially originally Nietzschean, in numerous crucial left-wing philosophers and thinkers of the 20th century, Foucault, Sartre, Trouvoir, Fanon, etc., you can find a very strong Nietzschean influence.
Does that make these thinkers and the movements associated with them anti-democratic or anti-egalitarian?
Of course not.
But one could easily make this argument if they wish to follow the footnotes in a way that Rufo does, who links anti-racism seminars to Robin DiAngelo, to Angela Davis, to Herbert Marcuse, to Karl Marx.
This incredibly tenuous connection between critical race theory and Marxism became the foundation of Ruffo's developing mythology surrounding it.
He could connect conservative fears of anti-racist activism, quote-unquote cancel culture, and political correctness with the anti-Semitic Cold War era dog whistle of cultural Marxism.
The Cultural Marxist Conspiracy Theory deserves its own episode, but it is essentially the notion that a group of powerful Marxist elites influenced by the Frankfurt School, a majority of whom are also importantly Jewish, are subverting Western civilization and traditional conservative values.
This is an equally as absurd notion as the mythology Rufo was building about critical race theory.
And Rufo's attempt to connect this new mythology he was constructing with the Frankfurt School is an indication that the critical race theory boogeyman is essentially an alteration of the cultural Marxist dog whistle, but attuned to be specifically anti-black as opposed to anti-semitic.
The group of elites who are attempting to infiltrate the government and destroy American culture are still influenced by Marx and the Frankfurt School, but they are also anti-racist and connected to the movements for racial justice.
But don't take it from me.
Rufo literally admitted this is what he was doing.
On a tweet that is still up from his verified Twitter account, he says, We have successfully frozen the brand Critical Race Theory into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions.
We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think Critical Race Theory.
We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
I mean, he's like, he's like, he's like monologuing like a villain.
Like, he can't help himself.
Well, Mr. Bond, I'll tell you exactly what I'm going to do.
Yeah.
Damn it.
And he defends this.
People, people point that out.
Like, this is the guy that people are taking as the primary source in Critical Race Theory.
And he's like, yeah, I don't see a problem with this.
We're using it like a cudgel.
Get it?
The primary thrust of Rufo's claims about critical race theory seemed to be, as I mentioned before, about how uncomfortable these anti-racist seminars, that were somehow connected to Marxism and critical race theory, made the white people who participated in them.
This aspect of critical race theory, that is claimed to be a central tenet by Rufo, is something that has stuck for the broader movement of conservative white people So, tonight we've asked Chris Ruffo to walk us through some of what is happening here.
You should know the details.
Ruffo is a research fellow at the Discovery Institute as well as a contributing editor at City Journal, and he joins us now.
Chris Ruffo, thanks so much for coming on.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks so much.
You know, Tucker, this is something I've been investigating for the last six months, and it's absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government.
And what I've discovered is that critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.
I'd like to share three investigations that I've unleashed that show the kind of depth of this critical race theory, cult indoctrination, and the danger and destruction it can wreak.
First, the Treasury Department.
I broke the story on the Treasury Department, which held a seminar earlier this year from a man named Howard Ross, a diversity trainer who has billed the federal government more than $5 million over the past 15 years, conducting seminars on critical race theory.
And he told Treasury employees essentially that America was a fundamentally white supremacist country, and I quote, virtually all white people uphold the system of racism and white superiority, and was essentially denouncing the country and asking white employees at the Treasury Department and affiliated organizations to accept their white privilege, accept their white racial superiority, Uh, and accept, uh, essentially, uh, all of the, uh, baggage that comes, uh, with this reducible essence of whiteness.
Uh, second, uh, this is not by any means limited to the Treasury Department.
Critical race theory has actually, uh, now infiltrated, uh, our criminal justice system.
Uh, just this week I released a story that the FBI is now holding weekly seminars on intersectionality, uh, which is a hard left academic theory.
That reduces people to a network of racial, gender and sexual orientation identities that intersect in complex ways and determine whether you are an oppressor or oppressed.
Obviously, with the white straight male, such as FBI Director Christopher Wray, being at the top of this pyramid of evil.
And third, this is a major story.
Critical race theory is now infiltrating into our scientific establishment.
A few weeks ago, I released a story that critical race theorists at the Sandia National Laboratories, which creates our nuclear weapons arsenal, sent their white male executives on a three-day re-education camp to deconstruct their white male culture and actually force them to write letters of apology to women and people of color.
One of the ironies there is also, of course, that there are many critical race theorists that don't think that something like those seminars is actually the way to move forward in terms of anti-racism.
We've gotten to a point in which it's literally so far detached from the actual content, but of course that doesn't matter, as we saw from Rufo's tweet earlier on.
And a lot of the people who run these seminars, and I'd say White Fragility itself, These are highly contested methods, like you said.
I mean, there is a great critique to be made of them.
I mean, that is not the critique we'll be making today, but, you know, the right relies on the fact that they portray this as some sort of effort that defines the left, or that everyone on the left agrees with it, that there's no debate, that it's just like, let's use this, which really actually describes critical race theory as a cudgel much better.
Yeah.
The large degree of, like, heterogeneity is never really understood here.
Even within critical race theory itself, but without it and things that are being attached to it.
Like, the idea that D'Angelo is in any way associated with, like, anarchists in Portland.
Sure.
You know, white fragilities.
It's like, you know, of course it's absurd, but it's what the conservatives like.
Tucker has been quite a crucial ally for Ruffo and has had him on to talk about the influence of critical race theory in different facets of society multiple times.
And of course, you know, Tucker is an incredibly largely watched show, so this is one of the most essential points of sort of influence for the theory.
That segment we watched was also importantly seen by none other than President Trump, who was president at the time.
And soon after this segment aired, critical race theory would be enshrined in the culture war after Trump issued an executive order to prohibit all contractors from providing employee training regarding subjects cited within the executive order tied to race and sex relations.
This began the passing of symbolic bills to quote-unquote ban critical race theory from government institutions.
An important recent development of the anti-CRT scare relates to education.
This was after Rufo had found some evidence that third graders in California were being asked to discuss their privilege in schools.
Note again that the idea of privilege is not an essentially critical race theory notion.
And there were dozens of protests by angry white parents showing up to talk about how they don't want divisive anti-racist ideology that say their kids are inherently racist being taught in schools.
An overflow crowd.
Parents giving Forsyth County School Board members an earful.
If you have materials that you're providing where it says if you were born a white male, you were born an oppressor, you are abusing our children.
One speaker after another accused board members of introducing so-called critical race theory about whites, blacks, and U.S.
history into the classrooms.
Parents saying that CRT is now indoctrinating students disguised in the school system's initiatives on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.
The DEI program is a Trojan horse that will bring in a slippery slope.
A slippery slope that will ultimately end in critical race theory, white repentance, and the McDonaldization of America's students.
Please get back to just teaching our children math, science, factual history, equity of opportunity, and teaching them how to think and not what to think.
But other parents and some students said that's not what's going on in the classrooms at all.
They urged the board members to expand the DEI policies.
This isn't critical race theory, this is diversity inclusion.
This is the golden rule, do unto others.
What could be the motivation for going against diversity and inclusion?
We should make sure every child feels included.
I don't know how or why this would be debated.
You see, this plan does not yell, you are different.
It yells, you are no different.
A board spokesman says it's a nationwide controversy.
People mistaking diversity, equity, and inclusion policies for critical race theory.
A theory, she insists, the board has no intention of being part of the curriculum.
When he says facts, we know what he means.
He means the old American history books where they literally just didn't talk about the genocide of Native Americans in any depth.
That didn't talk about how slavery, you know, what the everyday reality of slavery actually was.
But yeah.
Yeah, and the thing is, kids are a lot smarter than their fucking parents give them credit for.
Like, when we were taught good things about Christopher Columbus, and I came home with my, you know, my handprint turkey, and my, you know, my construction paper projects, and I was like, Columbus is a hero!
And my mom pulled me aside and was like, no, Cenk, Columbus was a rapist?
A murderer?
And when I heard that, I didn't go, oh, I'm bad.
I'm bad and I must have done that.
I just went like, oh, well, they did bad things and that shouldn't have been done to those people.
The idea that children are unable to learn about horrific atrocities that their ancestors,
you know, whether they were related to them or not, committed to other people and not take that,
you know, and feel personally responsible is ridiculous.
But also like that's how critical thinking exists.
In that moment, you realize, oh, my mom is telling me something, and my teachers are telling me something else, and they both have their reasons to do so, and that's an actual understanding of history.
It's not just reading facts off a page.
My mom will be so happy that I included this.
I hope you're listening.
Hope you're doing well.
Love you.
Bye.
Jesus.
One of the crucial reasons that the critical race theory panic became so intensified recently is that any conservative boomer can show up to a town hall meeting So long as a modicum of content about how racism exists and is bad is being taught to their children and yell at the teachers for corrupting them with critical race theory.
Again, none of this is actually about critical race theory or what it represents.
Even Rufo's initial connection between government anti-racist seminars and critical race theory was relatively tenuous.
This is especially because many critical race theorists would not conceptualize a solution to racism as being something like a seminar that teaches white people about their privilege.
But even at this point, I will concede that these seminars are taking suggestions from people like D'Angelo and Kendi who are in conversation with Critical Race Theory.
But after this point in the outrage cycle, we get to a position in which nothing being taught or protested against particularly resembles something being inspired by Critical Race Theory.
Anything that remotely talks about racism and its continued existence, the privilege that white people or, let's say, you know, men have, Or that remotely makes white people uncomfortable is labeled as critical race theory.
And if you teach it at an American school, you are sure to have a boardroom full of angry white parents.
There is also a certain degree to which highlighting this point, that none of these schools or governments are actually teaching critical race theory, is sort of useless.
And what I mean by that is that the people angry about it don't care about the intellectual specificity of what they're mad about.
They don't want to be uncomfortable, and they don't want their children being taught about racism and its continued existence.
And the critical race theory grift that Rufo and other conservative journalists have spread only enables them to do that more.
If you can't see history as a series of stories written by the people who went through it, who all had their own stake in different things, then you really can't understand history, and you're not teaching kids anything.
You're just making them, like, okay, here's the history part of your brain, just store this set of words, that's, those are facts, done.
It's a denial of reality.
These schools want sort of traditional narratives about history that have been generally accepted within like especially upper class white society to continue to not be challenged even though those narratives essentially can only exist if you do not consider the perspectives of marginalized and racialized people.
Which is, you know, an articulation that comes from critical race theory.
And they want that to continue.
I mean, I guess, I don't know, maybe this isn't an irony, but like, you can use quite a bit of critical race theory and the scholars in it to conceptualize what's going on here.
You know, it's nothing new.
It's in a lot of ways the same old story for white America.
A good portion of people pushing for this secretly think that white people naturally have higher IQs and are essentially the superior race, but they don't say that.
They just want it couched.
They go, well, no, I just don't want this other thing to be taught.
And it's like, well, okay, I know there's a portion of them that are just furious because they misunderstand the whole thing, but another good portion of them are actually just protecting the interests of this narrative.
They're like, oh, you're avoiding IQ, you're avoiding the FBI crime statistics, that's what you're, you know, you're covering stuff up, and the real thing they want you to get to is actually the white people deserve what they have.
They have it because they deserve it.
They have it because they're smarter and superior.
Yeah, and when you don't believe that, it's much easier to accept that you were born into a system that was founded on racism, a country, excuse me, that was founded on racism, founded on genocide, And that because of that, the system in which you currently operate has poisoned your brain.
You know, we're all a little bit racist, or a lot of bit racist.
And that's okay to admit that.
You're not a bad person by understanding the racism that is kind of inherently in your own white culture.
I mean, I'm Jewish, so none of this applies to me, obviously.
No, Jewish people are not racist at all.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
Can't be.
They just want to manage your music.
You know what I'm saying?
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Please go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
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I also have a solo podcast where I go over more sort of theoretical stuff.
I'm currently doing an episode on the Hyperborea myth and the origins of this concept in ancient Greece and how it expanded and is used by Nazis and then modern-day neo-Nazis and the similarities.
Check it out.
Excellent.
Yeah, go check that out.
For everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
What do you make?
I mean, this is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff making a comment like this.
What do you make of that?
Incredible.
This poison, Critical Race Theory, this cancer, is affecting all of our institutions.
The schools, the universities, the military, all over.
And it's based on The fundamental proposition that all white people are racist, whether they are inherently that or not, their background makes them racist.
Right.
Original sin, really.
Yeah.
And that all white people got what they got by exploiting blacks.
I have a unique thought about that, though.
What does this do to children?
What does this do to a kid?
A quarter of all black marriages are intermarriages, racially.
Wow.
So what does that do to a black boy?
A black and white kid?
Whose mother is a white and whose father, whose mother is black and whose father is white.
What does he think?
My father exploited my mother and that's how he got successful?
And if the couple breaks up, does this dad have to choose one over the other?
Does it reinforce the Oedipal notion all kids have?
Wanting to kill their father and marry their mother?
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