Feb. 12, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:10:57
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| For those of you keeping score at home, last week was one for the Rubin Report record books. | ||
| Our week started off by interviewing Senator John McCain, a war hero, one of the longest serving members of Congress, and a Republican nominee for President of the United States. | ||
| Senator McCain and I had a frank discussion on this year's election, money in politics, and foreign policy. | ||
| What struck me more than anything while talking to the Senator was whether you agree or disagree with his political opinions, it's clear that he's really trying to bridge the ideological divide and do what he feels is right for the country. | ||
| The entire time I was talking to him, I kept thinking what a better candidate Senator McCain would be than any of the current contenders in the GOP rat race. | ||
| Immediately after interviewing Senator McCain, I had the chance to interview Lubna Ahmed. | ||
| Lubna is a 23-year-old engineering student and an atheist fighting for secular values in her homeland of Iraq. | ||
| Simply by talking to me about secularism from the confines of her closed society, she instantly became braver than pretty much every person that I know. | ||
| I'm honored that she chose me as the first public person to talk to, and I'll always be an ally for her whether she's in Iraq or wherever life takes her. | ||
| While I was in awe of her during the interview, the most impactful part to me was when we talked about some of the people that we both admire, including Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. | ||
| This portion of our chat illuminated exactly what this show is about, ideas. | ||
| The same ideas that Sam and Richard sparked in me, a 39-year-old guy born in Brooklyn living in Los Angeles, also were sparked in Lubna, a 23-year-old atheist in Iraq. | ||
| This shows you the true power of ideas. | ||
| Good or bad, ideas can transcend nationality, race, or religion. | ||
| My final interview last week was with the former leader of the English Defense League and now outspoken anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson. | ||
| As I mentioned at the top of the show last week, I was hesitant to even talk to Tommy because people might call me a bigot or a racist. | ||
| Not only am I glad that we did the interview, but I'm really proud of your reaction to it. | ||
| Whether on YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook, you guys all kept the conversation going after Tommy and I put it down. | ||
| It was complete and total confirmation of last week's direct message. | ||
| Being afraid to talk can no longer be part of the equation. | ||
| I have no doubt there is a real movement happening right now. | ||
| People are absolutely sick of being divided. | ||
| Conversation is the key to bringing us together, and that's why in one week I talked to a man who is almost the leader of the free world, a woman who puts her life on the line to say what she believes, and another man who's on a crusade of his own. | ||
| It's totally irrelevant whether I agree with everything my guests say. | ||
| The important thing is to not be afraid to hear them. | ||
| As the internet brings us all closer together, we find ourselves connected with people in a way that we could have only dreamt of a couple years ago. | ||
| Despite that connection, I still get messages from viewers explaining that sometimes you guys are afraid to say certain things to your friends in real life, or to post certain articles on Facebook for all to see. | ||
| If Lubna, a 23-year-old in Iraq, isn't afraid to speak up, then you guys can't be either. | ||
| There's no time for silence anymore. | ||
| Yeah, there are genuinely bad people in the world, and sometimes talking to them won't get you the results you want. | ||
| However, you have to be brave enough to have the conversation in the first place. | ||
| Don't let louder voices with worse intentions drown you out. | ||
| All right, according to Wikipedia, my guest this week is either the former king of Mesopotamia or a YouTuber not afraid to speak his mind on controversial topics. | ||
| That's right, I have Carl Benjamin, better known as Sargon of Akkad, on the show. | ||
| Carl, Sargon, what do I call you? | ||
| Whichever you want. | ||
| I get called both all day long, so whichever one you're comfortable with, honestly. | ||
| Sargon has sort of overtaken Carl. | ||
| There's sort of a Batman-Bruce Wayne situation here, right? | ||
| You know, there kind of is, actually, yeah. | ||
| The name Sargon has definitely traveled before me in many places where progressives tend to congregate. | ||
| You said progressives. | ||
| I'm shocked that you didn't say regressives, but we'll get to that momentarily. | ||
| So, before we get into all the deep stuff and the topics and the meat of this, I want people to get to know you a little bit, because I think it's sort of just recently that you're showing your face more, you're out there more, your name's getting out there a little bit more. | ||
| So, how did Carl Benjamin become Sargon of God? | ||
| That's an interesting story. | ||
| It's not actually that interesting at all, now that I say that. | ||
| Well, just make it interesting. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| I'll try and fabricate something. | ||
| Basically, about two and a half years ago, you know when you're on the internet, you end up just choosing a moniker that you sign into places with. | ||
| And I just happened to like the historical figure of Sargon of Cairn. | ||
| He was an interesting figure. | ||
| I like the sound of the name and, you know, so I was just using that. | ||
| And I had signed up to YouTube in 2010 just to upload some videos of myself with an ancient sling, you know, the sort of... I, you know, made one according to historical sort of documents and I tested it out and it's... you can see why they're a dangerous weapon sort of thing. | ||
| And then a few years later, I was basically getting really, really worried about the The sort of political climate in the left, I was starting to see more and more often just my own principles being completely violated. | ||
| And it was really, really, really worrying. | ||
| And it was the sort of thing that was genuinely starting to gnaw at me because, I mean, I would see people arguing against people's freedom of speech, or they would be arguing against a meritocratic system, or something like that. | ||
| And everyone would seem to be going along with it. | ||
| You know, there were so many people going, yeah, that's exactly how we should do things. | ||
| And I was starting to panic, thinking, Christ, I totally disagree. | ||
| In fact, I disagree on such a fundamental level, I have to say something. | ||
| And so I found myself just motivated to sort of write just like, I don't know, five minute scripts or something, and then read them with a very, very bad microphone. | ||
| It's all about the mic. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's a magician's trick almost. | ||
| I had just the cheapo microphone. | ||
| It was really, really terrible quality. | ||
| And I'd read these ideas and they started gaining some views and people started subscribing to my channel and stuff. | ||
| And looking back now, I'm thinking, God, there was a lot of forbearance there about my technical skill and what I was saying. | ||
| But I guess some people agreed with what I was saying because now I've just passed a quarter of a million subscribers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And yeah, and now I do this full-time, and it's a wonderful thing to be doing. | ||
| It's fighting for my principles. | ||
| Professionally. | ||
| So I love that. | ||
| I love that because, as I say on the show every week, what I'm trying to do here is make this about ideas. | ||
| And that's really what you were talking about. | ||
| You were hearing bad ideas, and then you wanted to beat them with better ideas. | ||
| And clearly it's working, because you got over 250,000 subscribers. | ||
| And when I had my personal Awakening, because everyone knows at this point, you know, I've always considered myself liberal. | ||
| Then I was in the progressive world, which I now see as some sort of mental disorder. | ||
| But when I was having my awakening out of that, everyone online said to me, you've got to talk to Sargon. | ||
| So my first question to you, before we get into the heavy stuff, is did you study politics? | ||
| What brought you into the political realm? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| It was just watching the news, I guess. | ||
| And just watching, you know, popular... I mean, I used to be a big fan of the Young Turks. | ||
| I used to consider myself progressive until I met progressives. | ||
| And like you said, I couldn't believe the things they were saying. | ||
| It really struck me as some sort of mental disorder. | ||
| Why would they start saying things like this? | ||
| And then I found myself sort of floundering on my own because, you know, I'm not a conservative. | ||
| I can't bring myself to subscribe to conservative ideals. | ||
| They don't work for me. | ||
| I don't believe in them. | ||
| And so I was basically on my own. | ||
| Everyone I knew who was a liberal was quite happy to ignore the foundational principles of liberalism in order to In order to push progressivism further, and the more I've learned about progressivism, the more I realize it's really used liberalism as a Trojan horse. | ||
| They've said, oh, we're liberals, we're progressives. | ||
| And I mean, on the surface of it, they're not necessarily arguing for different things. | ||
| It's really the methods that are the problem. | ||
| It's not necessarily the goals. | ||
| But yeah, they happily use the terms interchangeably, and they are not interchangeable at all. | ||
| Yeah, so let's unpack that a little bit. | ||
| So I've heard you say that you refer to yourself as a classic liberal. | ||
| And the more that I've been doing this, I mean, that's really where I feel at home too. | ||
| I think now I have some really strong libertarian leanings also. | ||
| But there's some play there. | ||
| There's some common ground there. | ||
| But what does classic liberalism mean to you? | ||
| Well, it's just the basic Enlightenment values that came out of the Enlightenment. | ||
| Civil liberties, political freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of association, economic freedom, representative democracy, the rule of law. | ||
| There is no argument against these ideas. | ||
| These are great ideas. | ||
| They're universal ideas. | ||
| You know, everyone is protected under these ideas, unlike with progressivism, where the first thing they will do is demarcate a group. | ||
| They will say, right, women, black people, gay people, these people need special treatment. | ||
| And that special treatment will involve the infringement of your personal rights. | ||
| And that is where I have a problem, because if we all ascribe to the same rights, A, we're all being treated as equals. | ||
| B, nobody ends up losing their rights. | ||
| And I don't have a point C, but I wish I did. | ||
| I think I'm coming at all the reasons. | ||
| Yeah, that was pretty good. | ||
| So this is sort of an example of the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? | ||
| Because this is where I've seen, I know a lot of progressives, a lot of them won't talk to me anymore, people that were my good friends only six, eight months ago, that won't talk to me anymore. | ||
| But I believe that for the most part, and we're gonna get into some of the really dangerous ones, but I think for the most part, people that consider themselves progressive, most of the people that are going to Bernie Sanders rallies, I think they're good people. | ||
| I think their intentions are correct. | ||
| So we're really talking about the methodology here, right? | ||
| Yeah, there are a few. | ||
| The problem is you have a bunch of motivating factors that kind of coalesce. | ||
| And mixed in with that, you have the more sort of pernicious aspects of people who can see Where this is going, because a lot of it involves giving the benefit of the doubt to people who you would otherwise necessarily be sceptical to. | ||
| People making, I mean, for example, rape laws. | ||
| One of the big progressive pushes is to have it so that the "victim" is believed and therefore | ||
| the burden of proof becomes laid on the person who's being accused rather than on the accuser. | ||
| And they do this via the use of statistics. | ||
| They say, "Oh well, I can't remember what the number is, but something like 5% of accused | ||
| rapists go to jail" or something like that. | ||
| Therefore, they assume that there is a massive problem with the system, that 95% of accused | ||
| rapists are also actual rapists and therefore are just being let off through a bad system. | ||
| But the thing is, A) we don't know that. | ||
| We have no idea how many of the people who are accused are actually illegitimate rapists and deserve to be condemned for it and convicted for it. | ||
| But secondly, what we're doing there is reversing the system, because at the moment what we have is a system that isn't perfect. | ||
| But can deliver justice in a reliable way. | ||
| We can be quite sure that the people going to jail probably aren't innocent. | ||
| We've been through a rigorous trial, the burden of proof is on the accuser, they've managed to prove beyond reasonable doubt, and that's fine because that way you're going to get The minimum number of people who didn't do anything wrong being punished as if they did something wrong. | ||
| Whereas to flip the script on that would mean that you now have a system that is inherently unjust that might be able to deliver justice on occasion. | ||
| The occasion being the person being accused is on camera somewhere else at the time that they're supposed to have been doing the rape or something like that, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| It's that sort of thing. | ||
| It would be incidental justice. | ||
| You know, you couldn't rely on it because you don't presume the innocence of the people being accused. | ||
| The guilt is being presumed. | ||
| And it's being done, like you say, out of good motives. | ||
| The idea that, you know, we don't want to call the victims liars. | ||
| And it's like, no, I don't want to call the victim a liar either. | ||
| But it's one of those points where you're on the horns of a dilemma and you have no choice but to take a responsible course of action for the safety of someone who hasn't done anything wrong. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So there's a lot there that I want to know. | ||
| I've been preparing for this. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, you're jumping. | ||
| I knew that that's how this conversation was going to go because there's so much to talk about. | ||
| And these things are always inextricably linked. | ||
| That's what I've found whenever I'm talking about anything related to sort of regressive ideology. | ||
| And then when you start talking about feminism and Islamism and all these things, they're all so inextricably linked. | ||
| So, let's jump into Gamergate for a second, and then we'll get back to some of that stuff. | ||
| Because Gamergate, I think, is one of the things that really sort of put you on the map. | ||
| And even by saying the word Gamergate, I've made people crazy. | ||
| We know this. | ||
| Now, I've discussed it with a couple people. | ||
| I've had Milo Yiannopoulos on. | ||
| I've talked about it with Christina Hoff Summers. | ||
| But you, yourself, you are a true gamer, correct? | ||
| Yes, I am indeed a true gamer. | ||
| What are you playing these days? | ||
| I play a game called Ark Survival Evolved most. | ||
| I actually have my own server where I pay for a server where I get to run around killing virtual dinosaurs. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, thank you for taking a moment from slaying dinosaurs to join me here. | ||
| But yeah, you've really been in the Gamergate thing and I think you're considered sort of an expert on it. | ||
| So can you give me like a two, three minute explanation of what Gamergate is? | ||
| And I know that's almost impossible because it seems like it's something different to everybody. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I can give you my version of what it is. | ||
| But like you say, it is different for everybody. | ||
| And you're going to get people who are going to say, that's not what Game of Gates is and whatnot. | ||
| So for me, it's a very definite reaction to regressives, Infiltrating the video game media. | ||
| Now, this is something that we saw happening over the course of about five years, where they would just increment, just larger and larger numbers of them would be hired at various gaming publications, and then they would start writing articles like, are these video games sexist? | ||
| Why are these video games misogynist? | ||
| There are no trans people in these video games. | ||
| This is racist. | ||
| This is, you know, the standard regressive lines. | ||
| Yeah, 101. | ||
| Yeah, and they would be promoting very famous feminists like Anita Sarkeesian or Zoe Quinn. | ||
| People with, and I don't want to sound mean, but very few real credentials in the video game industry. | ||
| I mean like Zoe Quinn, the Franz Ferdinand of Gamergate. | ||
| She made a free, did you ever have those Choose Your Own Adventure books? | ||
| I love Choose Your Own Adventure. | ||
| I probably had every one of them. | ||
| Yeah, basically that's what she had made. | ||
| She had made a digital choose-your-own-adventure book. | ||
| It was all text, nothing else in it. | ||
| It can't have taken very long, but it was about learning to deal with depression. | ||
| And I've never had depression, so I can't judge the game on that merit. | ||
| So on that, I'm sure it's very good. | ||
| But to your average gamer, this wasn't really a game. | ||
| There wasn't a fail state. | ||
| There wasn't really anything you could play. | ||
| It was more like an interactive novel, which is, again, in itself is fine. | ||
| But the gaming press, because she was a prominent feminist and regressive, she got unbelievable amounts of coverage. | ||
| And I mean, when I say unbelievable amounts, I mean any amount of coverage for this is more than you would expect. | ||
| And so people kind of, they were getting sick of the agenda being pushed on them. | ||
| And it's the same with Anita Sarkeesian. | ||
| When Anita Sarkeesian did her Kickstarter, it was everywhere. | ||
| Everyone knew about it. | ||
| And yet, Everyone also knew that the arguments she was presenting were half-truths. | ||
| They were cherry-picked. | ||
| She was finding individual examples that didn't really represent the gaming industry, or any even subsections of the gaming industry, and presenting them as if they were a categoric statement on the condition of the entire gaming industry. | ||
| And so everyone was really kind of annoyed by this point, especially as The way that these people work is by riling up your emotions, so almost everything they say is fundamentally accusatory. | ||
| They would say things like, you're a sexist, you're a racist, if you like these games, there aren't enough black people in this game, there aren't enough women in this game, there aren't enough gay people, all this sort of thing, and if you're enjoying it, you're a bad person. | ||
| Whereas most people are thinking, well, just hell, just make the games you want to make, right? | ||
| But no, that's not what these people are interested in whatsoever. | ||
| And so it got to the point where Zoe Quinn was caught having an affair with her boss, who was involved in video games, and also a journalist called Nathan Grayson. | ||
| The video game industry's press has always been corrupt. | ||
| I mean, it's always been corrupt. | ||
| It's come out of a hobby press. | ||
| It's always been really, really bad. | ||
| So when you say corrupt, just to pause for one sec, when you say corrupt, I mean things like, you know, people paying off the magazine writers so that they'd get better reviews on the game, so they'd sell more games. | ||
| I mean, real corrupt stuff, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and a lot of it's in your face as well, because you go to a video game online magazine, and the backdrop would be the advertisement for a game, that then would be reviewed in the centre column, you know? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's not, you know, it's not even, they're not even trying to hide it, but for the most part nobody really cared because they weren't being preachy about it, you know, they were trying to sell you video games, and that's what people were there for, so therefore nobody was really that bothered. | ||
| But then the regressives turned up and started being corrupt in a whole different way. | ||
| Instead of being motivated by money, which I suppose is to their credit, they were motivated by ideology. | ||
| And so now they would hire people into positions and promote things that were All based on cronyism. | ||
| It was all their friends and family members and whatnot. | ||
| They would push everything to do with their agenda, and people... Realistically, people had just been really, really sick of it. | ||
| They were tired of this faux-moralism, tired of being told that they were bad people, even though you didn't... Obviously, none of these people are actually bad people. | ||
| You know, nobody knows who all of these people are, and yet they're being prejudged before anything happens. | ||
| And it got to the point where people were like, look, no, enough. | ||
| You know, this has got to stop, and... | ||
| That's what, that was basically, it was called the conspiracy to start with. | ||
| And then the video game press, instead of turning around and saying something like, okay, fair enough, we haven't been doing our due diligence, you know, we, a lot of them are professional trained journalists, like Steven Titillo from Kotaku. | ||
| He has a master's degree in journalism. | ||
| And he's there saying, well, do we have to be objective? | ||
| What's the need for objective journalism? | ||
| And so you can instantly see the problems that were inherent in the video game industry. | ||
| Yeah, and I know we can really go down the rabbit hole with this. | ||
| We could spend three hours with this, but I think that's a nice little beginning piece of it. | ||
| But what I really find fascinating about it and why I've brought it up several times is because the same things that you're talking about, how the regressives sort of infiltrated this and turned something that had nothing to do with sexism or racism or any of these things, they made it about that. | ||
| And I think when I was on your show, I was saying how, you know, I used to be a huge gamer. | ||
| I'm not that much anymore, but I like the community, and I do play some games here and there. | ||
| But like, you know, I played Grand Theft Auto, and yeah, you could steal a car and punch a hooker, and people would say, well, that's against women, but you could also punch a man. | ||
| So should they only have it that you'd only punch men? | ||
| I mean, even the logic behind it doesn't really stand to critique. | ||
| And there's no winning either. | ||
| This is the point. | ||
| It's all what's called a Kafka trap. | ||
| It's either you are this thing or you're this thing and you don't even realise it. | ||
| And there's no falsifiability to any of their hypotheses. | ||
| But the main problem, if you think about it like with Grand Theft Auto, so what are the options? | ||
| Not include women in the game. | ||
| No way. | ||
| They'd freak out if you couldn't put women in the game. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or you can have the women not being able to be treated like men. | ||
| Again, they'd be freaking out. | ||
| That's not equal at all. | ||
| So what are you going to have? | ||
| Are you going to have women so that they just can't be damaged? | ||
| They will not allow you to treat women like men. | ||
| You can't beat up women, but you can beat up men. | ||
| And so you're in this position where you've got no win. | ||
| There's no good answer. | ||
| And that's how they want it. | ||
| They want you dancing to their tune. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's what's so fascinating about this and why I think it's so related to the political situation with the regressives. | ||
| And I also think that's why Gamergate blew up the way it did because gamers generally are going to skew a little younger than the people that are solely interested in politics. | ||
| So because of that, I think it was this group of people who had never been used to being attacked or silenced before. | ||
| And they were young and they were online and they were ready to coalesce around something. | ||
| And I think that's what Made it so magical or something. | ||
| You know, gamers have actually long been the demon in the bedroom. | ||
| No, no, for the American Christians in the late 90s, early 2000s, Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman actually brought legislation to try and censor video games. | ||
| So this is another reason I would never vote for Hillary. | ||
| I mean, I don't think anyone ever should. | ||
| She's a corporate shill. | ||
| Don't vote for Hillary. | ||
| But I mean, there are so many reasons not to, basically. | ||
| We can get into that too. | ||
| Gamers are actually quite familiar with being attacked politically because of their hobby, even though there hasn't been a single study that's ever really conclusively proven anything about video games. | ||
| In fact, there are dozens that say, well, there's no connection between video games | ||
| and anything. | ||
| You know, and if you look at the statistics, the rise of video games has coincided with | ||
| the descent of violence. | ||
| So I mean, I'm not saying they're connected, but it's one of those things that there is | ||
| literally nothing to show that video games are doing anything wrong. | ||
| In fact, there's quite a lot to show they're doing a lot of things wrong. | ||
| Yeah, well, I remember that. | ||
| I think maybe it was around 91 or 92 when Joe Lieberman was leading that fight against video games. | ||
| I think it was because of Mortal Kombat. | ||
| I was playing it on Sega Genesis at the time, and I would come home from school and play that for hours with my friends. | ||
| I never ripped anyone's skull out with their spine attached to it, you know what I mean? | ||
| Not once! | ||
| Not once. | ||
| I tried once, but yeah, I never successfully did it. | ||
| So that says something. | ||
| Actually, I think you can prove that it probably helps people in a more healthy way vent some of their anger and frustration, don't you think? | ||
| I think they're multiplayer games, aren't they? | ||
| They get groups of guys to hang out and do something that's not dangerous or violent. | ||
| When I was a kid, if we weren't playing video games, we were on the streets. | ||
| It was better for us to be at home playing video games than to not be playing video games. | ||
| So I honestly can't see where the objections come from. | ||
| It's the same with anything, like Dungeons and Dragons in the 80s, or music in the 70s, you know, video games in the 90s and the 2000s. | ||
| There is always something that the, you know, pearl-clutching moral majority, or so they would like to position themselves as, has got to rail against something. | ||
| And ironically, that was always the religious right. | ||
| You know, that was always the highly religious, authoritarian right. | ||
| Now, it is the highly regressive, Authoritarian left. | ||
| Yeah, and this is the horseshoe theory that we talk about all the time, that the extremes on both sides come together. | ||
| All right, so last thought on Gamergate. | ||
| You know, the other thing that I think is really nice about the community is that people who are gamers, it doesn't matter what race you are. | ||
| It doesn't matter what religion you are, what sex or sexuality, any of the little dividing boxes that the left wants to put us in. | ||
| It doesn't matter what you are. | ||
| And that's why the community is so strong. | ||
| So then when these people that are writing these articles say, well, gamers are sexist or gamers are racist, it literally has no meaning because it's as diverse a community as you could possibly put out there, right? | ||
| I mean, you literally can't tell by playing a video game what race or gender the people you're playing with are, because everyone gets to choose their own avatar. | ||
| They get to customize their name. | ||
| The only way you'd know is by voice chat. | ||
| So for the vast majority of people, Playing video games is not tied to identity politics. | ||
| And the, you know, what's interesting is the regressive academics actually did, they spent a lot of time sort of planning their assault on video games, and they spent a lot of time doing research. | ||
| And there was an academic, a feminist academic called Adrian Shaw, who did a series of studies, | ||
| not based on particularly large sample sizes, but large enough, I would say, to at least give you | ||
| the impression that they're going in the wrong direction, because her conclusions, and she was someone looking | ||
| for a way to sort of crack open the video game industry with a good reason to attack it. | ||
| She found that basically, video games didn't need diversity. | ||
| Video games had diversity, which meant that, you know, and that in itself, where does a regressive | ||
| begin their plan of attack, you know, if they think that their attacking is already diverse, | ||
| And so basically, it led to her reframing the study she had already conducted in a different way. | ||
| And the language is very Opaque. | ||
| But basically, she was not happy that there was a plurality of markets. | ||
| Now, I personally think a plurality of markets is a wonderful thing. | ||
| I think, you know, if you want video games about, I don't know, Japanese hentai, great. | ||
| That's your business. | ||
| I'm not interested in that. | ||
| I want video games about killing dinosaurs. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| That's my niche. | ||
| Everyone gets their own niche. | ||
| You know, whereas the problem that they had is that they wanted hegemony over that. | ||
| They didn't want a plurality of markets, because then you could have diverse markets, you could have markets that aren't diverse. | ||
| They wanted every market to be controlled effectively by their ideology. | ||
| Thankfully, it's not going to happen. | ||
| Right, so just to be clear about that, so there are people that are probably playing Mario Kart that have nothing to do with the people that are playing the games you're playing, so it doesn't make sense even to lump all those people together. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, you know, there will obviously be some crossover in every game genre, but by and large you get people who have different preferences and they play different things. | ||
| It's like, one of the things they were saying, one of the things they, the big stat they pull out is, oh, almost half of people playing video games are women. | ||
| It's like, okay, great. | ||
| But what are they playing? | ||
| They're not playing Call of Duty. | ||
| They're not sat there on their Xboxes with their headphones in, running around calling each other gay. | ||
| They're playing Candy Crush and Farmville, which are all perfectly valid forms of entertainment and more power to them. | ||
| I want them to play the games they want to play. | ||
| But by this fact, it doesn't justify changing anything about the games I play because of the games they play. | ||
| And vice versa is true. | ||
| I don't want their games being changed to suit me either. | ||
| That would be the last thing I would want to impose on them. | ||
| And so, basically one of the things the regressive left will always do is use statistics in the most slippery way possible. | ||
| Lies, damn lies and statistics really does apply here. | ||
| I mean, they will use statistics to justify anything, so be careful about the use of statistics with the regressive left. | ||
| All right, so you've given me a perfect lane through GamerGate to talk about probably your other favorite thing to talk about, or at least maybe your most controversial thing to talk about, which is feminism. | ||
| So let's go there. | ||
| Let's talk a little feminism. | ||
| I'm going to give you this in the most broad sense. | ||
| Basically, you don't like what the feminist movement has become. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One of the dangers of talking about feminism is that it's very often conflated with women. | ||
| You hate women! | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You're a misogynist. | ||
| That's the first thing you'll hear if ever you have any complaint about feminism. | ||
| However, I mean, this is just obviously, logically, it's not It's nonsense. | ||
| Feminism itself is an ideology, and you get male and female feminists, and you get people who are male and female opposed to modern feminism, so the idea that feminism is inherently the same as women is ridiculous. | ||
| And the thing is, even fewer and fewer women every year are identifying as feminists. | ||
| At the moment, in America, only about 18% of women identify as feminists, and I think it's only about 9% Of men. | ||
| Whereas in, say, the 70s, it was somewhere as high as 40%. | ||
| So the feminist movement is... Honestly, I don't think it's doing itself any favors. | ||
| I think it's gone full regressive. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| You know, I would have no problem calling myself a feminist if we were in the era of, say, second wave feminism. | ||
| We had, you know, it was sort of equity feminism that Christine Hoff Summers or Camille Paley would be espousing. | ||
| You know, this sort of equal rights, equal pay, all this sort of All the sort of things that you, as any egalitarian, would be completely on board with and would find absolutely no objection to, I find no objection to. | ||
| But my problem is when we start getting into the realms of, well, I mean, shaming language for a start. | ||
| You're a misogynist, you're this, you're that, you're the other. | ||
| When you have any objection and quotas or anything like this, you know. | ||
| And then you get into the sort of conspiracy theories, patriarchy theory, you know. | ||
| And then it becomes intersectional. | ||
| So now it involves race and transsexuals and homosexuals. | ||
| And now it's a kiriarchy. | ||
| This is an interlinking series of oppressions and privileges. | ||
| And really, you realise that what you're regurgitating is Marxist rhetoric. | ||
| It's all... I mean, if you read the Communist Manifesto, you understand modern feminism. | ||
| You know, you were talking about the male bourgeoisie and the female proletariat. | ||
| And it's the same with black and white, straight and gay, and all these sort of things. | ||
| And I just don't ascribe to that, because it implies a shared experience that we know men and women don't have, you know. | ||
| I mean, and not just men and women, like black people in here. | ||
| Trayvon Martin did not have the same life experiences as Barack Obama. | ||
| You know, and so to say that being black is some sort of inherent shared oppression that they have is ridiculous. | ||
| You know, it just, it doesn't work. | ||
| And my main problem really is that it's become anti-individualistic. | ||
| I mean, you get famous feminists like Anita Sarkeesian who will literally say things like, Individual women's choices don't count. | ||
| What matters is feminism, or something for the greater good of feminism, something like that. | ||
| I can't remember exactly how the quote goes, but it was just one of those things where it's just like, okay, I am so totally against this that I think I would be prepared to fight a civil war against you. | ||
| These are so anti-liberal principles, I can't stand them. | ||
| Right, so in a way it's evolved to where it's no longer, first off women aren't a minority, I think there's something like 51 or 52 percent of the population, but where you should be for the minority in a minority, what you're saying is that they're fighting, they're eliminating the minority in the minority. | ||
| I think an example of that we could use from the American political space would be someone like Sarah Palin. | ||
| Now I don't like the views that Sarah Palin espouses at all. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Can you believe that? | ||
| Yeah, I'm not a big fan of Sarah Palin. | ||
| That being said, she's obviously a very influential and powerful and self-motivated woman. | ||
| So in a certain sense, she's the ultimate goal of what a feminist should be. | ||
| But feminists hate her, right? | ||
| Absolutely, because she thinks wrong. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| She doesn't espouse regressive ideology. | ||
| I mean, if she called herself a feminist, Fundamentally, she wouldn't be invoking Marxist ideas. | ||
| She would be invoking libertarian ideas, the strength of the individual, hard work. | ||
| Honestly, I think they're not bad ideas at all, but she wouldn't be in the same camp as, say, Gloria Steinem or Bell Hooks or someone like that. | ||
| It's weird talking about Marxism. | ||
| It's really weird because I mean, almost nobody really understands it these days. | ||
| And the only people who understand it are the academics in universities who teach it. | ||
| And it is... The Communist Manifesto is the third most prescribed book in universities in America. | ||
| Just so you know. | ||
| The Communist Manifesto. | ||
| Communism died everywhere but in the West. | ||
| It's so bizarre. | ||
| Well, we fetishize these things, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| People who live under communism hate communism. | ||
| They think it's a terrible idea. | ||
| They know. | ||
| I mean, they had to queue at three in the morning for milk and eggs, you know. | ||
| They think it's a terrible idea. | ||
| But the people in the West have never lived through it being put into practice. | ||
| And so they don't understand. | ||
| They don't really viscerally understand the real true nature of it, I guess. | ||
| And so You know, when you're sat in a comfortable house that's been built under a capitalistic system and you've got lots of money and you're doing very well for yourself, you're thinking, well, maybe we should. | ||
| You know, maybe it's not such a bad idea. | ||
| And it's crazy, you know. | ||
| But it's these principles that inform almost everything about third wave feminism. | ||
| It's all about power dynamics. | ||
| Privileged and oppressed. | ||
| Privileged and oppressed. | ||
| Which is why I was watching The Young Turks the other day, in fact, and Jimmy Dore, I think it was, he actually had this tongue in his mouth and he was saying that He was for the oppressed in every situation. | ||
| So he took the example of Israel. | ||
| So Israel oppresses a Palestinian man. | ||
| He's in favor of the Palestinian man. | ||
| And then if the Palestinian man oppresses his wife, he's in favor of the wife. | ||
| And it's just like, yeah, but You've just said you are and are not in favour of the Palestinian man there, Jimmy. | ||
| You can't be in favour of the man and the wife at the same time. | ||
| Which one are you in favour of? | ||
| It's got this inherent contradiction to it and they don't seem to want to acknowledge that. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why, as we've said for a while now, this regressive ideology, it's always putting narrative over fact. | ||
| That's really the most, when you whittle it down to what it really is, it has to be narrative over fact, so you just pick the most oppressed, and then you get everybody on the ladder, and then that's how you judge everybody, which is the reverse of judging a minority within a minority, and those are the people that we should be for. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely, and the crazy thing about it as well is that these things are inherently racist and sexist and, you know, any other ist you want to... but the problem is that normally when people think, oh, you're being a racist, you think you're being a racist to the, I guess, the oppressed, if that's what you want to call them, you know, the minority who have suffered from racial discrimination in the past, you know, well, black people or, you know, you're oppressing women or something like that, but Racism and sexism, despite what the regressives will tell you, are not structures or systems of power. | ||
| They are principles. | ||
| They are ideas. | ||
| They are ways of viewing the world. | ||
| And so you can be racist to white people, you can be sexist to men, and vice versa. | ||
| It's this kind of, like I say, it's the narrative. | ||
| They've gone out of their way to redefine a bunch of words, and then they have cherry-picked data points to arrive at a nice location where they can say, you as a white man are not now allowed to speak. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because you're a white man. | ||
| And they will literally turn around and tell you that that is not racist and sexist. | ||
| I think it's amazing you give them enough credit to say they've picked these data points, because I think in most cases they haven't even gone that far. | ||
| You're giving them the benefit of the doubt that I can no longer give them. | ||
| But we started here on feminism, so let's not go too far. | ||
| But that's the interesting thing, that every time I'm talking about all this stuff, we realize how there's this interlinked theme between Gamergate, between feminism, all of this stuff. | ||
| As far as feminism, I saw an interesting video that you did where you took the three types of what you said were the three types of male feminists. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And I thought it was really interesting because I defend women. | ||
| I believe women should be equal. | ||
| And that's pretty much it. | ||
| So anyone can define me however they want. | ||
| But I thought the way you broke these three type of men down was pretty interesting. | ||
| Can you do that for us? | ||
| Oh, God, it was a while ago. | ||
| I did that video. | ||
| I can't remember it now. | ||
| Okay, so yeah, it's basically about self-interest, I think. | ||
| I mean, you get men who are... | ||
| They want to be rewarded for doing something heroic and protective. | ||
| And I think that Cenk might fall into this category, where he's a big guy. | ||
| This chap doesn't have any particular fears for his own physical security, and so he thinks, I'm going to use my physical presence to protect women, because that would be a laudable thing to do. | ||
| And it would be Except that they're doing it for their own self-interest. | ||
| They're doing it for their own personal feelings. | ||
| So at the end of the day, this is a guy who basically wants to get laid. | ||
| I mean, in a lot of respects. | ||
| I don't want to put it that way, but yeah, it kind of is. | ||
| And the thing is, it's not necessarily getting laid either. | ||
| A lot of it is just for the sort of emotional reward, you know, because... Like a social cred. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, and just... | ||
| Just to get the pat on the head, you know? | ||
| It's that kind of... to feel good about themselves, but requires permission from someone else, in this case being a woman. | ||
| And the thing is, you end up getting really unhealthy dynamics, because you'll find women who are looking for men to do things for them, and you will find men who are looking to do things for women, and you will get this kind of... | ||
| Feedback loop where they'll reinforce each other you know you this this this guy stands up for this woman who is using him to fight her battles and so this guy ends up fighting battles that aren't his battles but are being reinforced constantly by and again this is not like all women in fact most women are not like this but you will you know women are humans too and you get bad women as well as good women and you find that This is basically one of the problems with the progressives. | ||
| Because like we were saying earlier, and I hate to come back to progressives, but feminism is just one branch under the umbrella of the progressive sort of tree, I guess. | ||
| It all ties together. | ||
| But like I said, you get most people and they think they're doing it for the right reasons. | ||
| They think, well, I'm a good person, I need to be helping women and minorities and gays and trans and whatever. | ||
| But the... | ||
| The problem is that they have this kind of toolbox of rhetoric that Virtue signals to other regressives. | ||
| It shows them saying, hey, look, I'm using this kind of language. | ||
| Therefore, I'm on your team. | ||
| You can come and support me on Twitter or wherever, you know. | ||
| And so you will get people who think, OK, great, I'm going to do that because I want to be an activist. | ||
| I want to do something good. | ||
| And then you'll get the other kind of person who is the more malicious person who will think, great, I can use this to my own advantage. | ||
| And they are the people you've got to be really worried about. | ||
| I mean, in Gamergate there was a woman called Randy Harper. | ||
| She wasn't actually part of Gamergate, she was part of the problem. | ||
| But I've never seen it more starkly represented than in her example. | ||
| I think it was 2011, 2012. | ||
| She was on a BSD, which is a programming language, podcast, and she was literally saying, well, I'm a woman in tech and I don't have a problem with this. | ||
| You know, I think the feminists are way overblowing this problem with misogyny in the tech industry and all this sort of stuff. | ||
| I'm a woman in tech. | ||
| I have no problem. | ||
| Everything's great. | ||
| And lo and behold, two years later, when it's shown to be a profitable business model, she is literally on Twitter saying, I'm an oppressed woman in tech, I need your money, you know, give me money every month through Patreon. | ||
| And also, and it just the complete polar opposite of what she was saying before. | ||
| And it's like, really, so either the industry has become massively sexist overnight, right? | ||
| You found a way to profit, you know, and so So this is sort of something we could find with any movement. | ||
| So I don't think, I don't think you're saying this, but that this isn't specific to feminism. | ||
| Any movement's going to have its people who are doing it with the right intentions. | ||
| It's going to have the people that are being guilted into it. | ||
| It's going to have the people that are being tricked into it. | ||
| It's going to have the people that can profit from it or every single movement. | ||
| And you're just using feminism as one example. | ||
| I don't want people to say, well, you see, he's, he's trying to muck up what feminism is or something to that effect. | ||
| Yeah, no, no, no. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And again, it's not necessarily feminism, because feminism is just a subsection of the social justice movement. | ||
| They call it intersectionalism. | ||
| Bell Hooks describes it as the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. | ||
| And that's a surprising... | ||
| You are a supporter of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, Dave. | ||
| In fact, I actively propagate it. | ||
| I'm a terrible person. | ||
| But basically what this encompasses is the dynamics between black people and white people and white supremacy. | ||
| The capitalism is the poor and the rich, and the patriarchy being men and women. | ||
| I think they probably have terms for gay and straight and trans and cis, but I'm not familiar with them off the top of my head. | ||
| But this is the point. | ||
| They have this toolbox of terms, and they have a big academic backing. | ||
| All of this comes from academia. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| You know, this has all been... And people think, oh, this is coming from Tumblr. | ||
| It's like, no. | ||
| Tumblr is the outgrowth of this cancer, you know? | ||
| This is it coming to the surface in popular culture. | ||
| This all comes from, sort of, you know, the brightly lit halls of academia, where they start with a premise, they confirm their biases, they peer review their own papers between feminists, And then they carry on building from that until they've got to the point where they will... Like I said, the redefinition of things... The reason regressives are so dangerous is, of course, as you said, with every movement you're going to get people who are profiteering, you're going to get people doing it for their own selfish reasons. | ||
| But I can't think of any movement that legitimately has an excuse to be malevolent to people for any good reason. | ||
| You know, almost every single one. | ||
| You know, like the Christians, love your neighbors as yourself. | ||
| You know, and like, for individualists to see, you know, individual rights and representative democracy. | ||
| Everyone gets to be treated in a universal manner. | ||
| You know, the Brotherhood of Man, all that sort of thing. | ||
| Whereas these people have something different. | ||
| They actually have And I can't remember which feminist it is that I'm quoting when they say this. | ||
| I think it's Andrea Dworkin when they say that women have the right to hate their oppressors. | ||
| Now this is, for me, a particularly scary aspect of it. | ||
| And it goes entirely for the Black Lives Matter movement, who all subscribe to this kind of ideology. | ||
| It's the It's the way of legitimising hatred for people based on what is perceived to be social advantages. | ||
| So if they say, well, you're a white man, therefore you have social advantages, therefore it's not bad for me to hate you. | ||
| You know, I can say all sorts of things to you, and it's okay because you have privilege. | ||
| I'm oppressed, you're privileged, therefore no matter what I say to you, It doesn't matter, even though in an interpersonal interaction, if you say some horrible thing to me, I'm hurt by it. | ||
| You know, I'm a regular person. | ||
| My white privilege isn't actually a shield from horrible words. | ||
| And also it takes the distinction away from someone, from a male who is doing everything he can to fight for women's rights, inequality, and a man who is against those things. | ||
| If you just say it's white men Or it's just men. | ||
| And we saw this, a great example of this, I think, is a couple weeks ago with those cologne attacks. | ||
| And I saw all these feminists writing articles and tweeting, saying things are, this is, it's not a, this isn't a migrant problem. | ||
| This isn't a religion problem. | ||
| They were doing everything to get it away from the identity of the specific people who did this and trying, well, this is a male problem. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| This is actually crazy. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| What happened in Cologne was something called Taharush Gamir, which is just Arabic for group assault or sexual assault. | ||
| And it's something that happens, I think the first instance of it was, I think it was originally recorded in the 50s, but I guess it kind of wasn't something that really came to the surface until about 2011 in the Egyptian Arab Spring, where a, excuse me, I think it was a CNN journalist was Basically surrounded by a group of guys in Cairo and then molested and, you know, forcibly molested by gangs of men. | ||
| And this happened on New Year's Eve all across Europe. | ||
| It happened in Stockholm, Helsinki, or it attempted to in multiple German cities. | ||
| And it was, you know, the police chief Literally said, nothing like this has ever happened before. | ||
| And so when feminists say, well, this is just men, we know that's wrong. | ||
| You know, we know that's wrong. | ||
| We know that it is probably tied to retrograde attitudes towards women coming from the Islamic world. | ||
| You know, I'm not saying every Muslim or anything like that, but, you know, you can't go to the Islamic world and look around and see how things are and say that women are treated the same there as they are here. | ||
| Right, so that's a perfect segue to this feminist and Islamist video that you had mirrored. | ||
| Who was the guy that originally created the video? | ||
| Right, the video was originally done by a small YouTube called Saiten Atheist. | ||
| Okay, so he created this cartoon video, and it's a song, and it's basically a feminist and an Islamist singing together about why they sort of see the world in the same way. | ||
| That was the thrust of it. | ||
| And I saw the video, and before all hell broke loose about it, before Richard Dawkins retweeted it, I saw it, and I thought it was pretty brilliant. | ||
| It's a great satirical takedown of this regressive nonsense. | ||
| Now, I didn't realize at the time that apparently the female character playing the piano, apparently that was actually based off a real person, right? | ||
| I didn't know that at the time. | ||
| So is the Islamist. | ||
| The Islamist is a YouTuber called Dawa Man, who he runs around proclaiming Islamism, you know, saying that everyone should bow to Islam and all that sort of thing. | ||
| So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't victimizing anyone in particular. | ||
| These are parodies of individuals, but they're individuals who have become famous because of their terrible ideas and attitudes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean, I would love to say that I wrote it or something, but I didn't. | ||
| I literally emailed the guy and said, look, I really like your channel. | ||
| I want to help promote you. | ||
| Do me a piece of unique content that I can put on my channel and link back to you. | ||
| And so he sent me this video, and so I put it up. | ||
| And yeah, and all hell broke loose when Richard Dawkins retweeted it. | ||
| So basically, all Dawkins did was retweet this, and suddenly his Twitter feed blew up, and he was deplatformed from a speaking event at the NECSS, I think it's the Northeast Conference of Secular... Skeptics? | ||
| Skeptics and Secularism? | ||
| Something close to that. | ||
| He was deplatformed from it, and they deplatformed him without even telling him. | ||
| There wasn't even a phone call, they didn't ask for an explanation. | ||
| He then made a public statement to Virtue Signal. That's the important thing. They were telling other | ||
| regressives, look, you know, we're deplatforming him because he has done something transgressive | ||
| to us, you know, and we won't show everyone else. We're on, we're at the front saying, look, you | ||
| know, this is a terrible thing. The irony being Richard Dawkins was probably a big draw for that | ||
| place, you know, I mean, of course, you know, he, they might get three, 400 people there. | ||
| Richard Dawkins has millions of followers, you know. | ||
| He's doing them a favour, so they've kind of shot themselves in the foot, and they've just made themselves look really intolerant, because his original tweet was, obviously, as a feminist myself, this doesn't apply to all feminists, but there is definitely a pernicious minority, and lo and behold, the pernicious minority rose up and, you know, got in his face, and it's like, okay, well, you're just proving the point of the video. | ||
| Right, so you're literally proving the point of the video. | ||
| You're literally proving that these two groups, for all the wrong reasons, have become partners. | ||
| That there's one ideology that feminists, unfortunately, or some degree of feminists, seem to be okay with, and it's the same ideology that would do the worst to women. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's hard to believe that we're even as I'm saying it, I'm thinking this is completely bonkers. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It absolutely is bonkers. | ||
| And without intersectionalism, it doesn't make any sense at all. | ||
| You know, but when again, you've got to think intersectionally. | ||
| So you think, right, white person, brown person, then man, woman, you know, and it's OK. | ||
| The question is, what is the most oppressive thing? | ||
| So a man oppressing a woman, that's quite bad. | ||
| But a white person oppressing a brown person, that's much worse. | ||
| And therefore now we're talking about a bunch of brown people being oppressed by a bunch of white people. | ||
| And so the fact that men and women are oppressing each other, brown men are oppressing white women, that's not so important. | ||
| The important bit is the skin colour above the sex, which I'm genuinely surprised at. | ||
| I thought feminists would go the other way. | ||
| I thought that they would be more concerned about men oppressing women than brown people being oppressed by white people, but apparently they're not. | ||
| Yeah, apparently they're not. | ||
| So in your estimation then, knowing the way the feminist movement has evolved, and obviously I've had Christina Hoff Sommers on the show and I've talked to her about some of this stuff, what would you say is the best, if you just want true equality for the sexes, you're married to a woman, you like women, You know what I mean? | ||
| You're a heterosexual guy that likes women, right? | ||
| What would you say is the best way for men and for women, for anyone that cares about the ideas of feminism, to go out and act on those ideas? | ||
| I mean, honestly, I think one of the problems that feminism has now, modern feminism has, is it's run out of dragons to slay. | ||
| You know, I mean, men and women have complete legal equality. | ||
| I can't think of a... Whenever a feminist is challenging you to say, oh, you know, that men are oppressing women, ask them what legal rights men have over women. | ||
| They can't name one. | ||
| There just aren't any. | ||
| And so we're at the point now where, I mean, I don't know what more needs to be done. | ||
| We seem to be living in quite stable liberal democracies where Merit matters. | ||
| I mean, obviously, in everything, a lot of what it is is who you know rather than what you know, but merit still matters. | ||
| You know, you can't just hire someone for their arbitrary characteristics if they can't do the job. | ||
| I mean, no one thinks that. | ||
| So, I mean... | ||
| Personally I just think don't don't make judgments based on race or gender or you know or transgenderism or you know or heterosexuality or anything like that. | ||
| These characteristics that generally aren't very useful to judge people on I mean you know you're being a white man doesn't In any way, inform how good an interviewer you are. | ||
| I'm not watching you because you're a white man. | ||
| I'm watching you because I like the guests you have on. | ||
| I like the questions you ask. | ||
| I like the answers you get out of them. | ||
| None of that has anything to do with you being white or male or straight or gay or anything like this. | ||
| They're completely pointless and arbitrary characteristics that don't really apply. | ||
| Right, so really all we have to do is just keep hammering the point home, right? | ||
| If we're, for people that want to remove this identity politics stuff, we just have to keep hammering that until it becomes so obvious. | ||
| And I do think that's where, and this is where we can sort of pivot to a little more of the regressive tactics, this is where we can really beat them. | ||
| They're tough to beat because we know they're gonna lie. | ||
| We know they're gonna cheat and misinform people and all of those things. | ||
| But what we can keep hammering them with is we want equality for everybody regardless of borders and nationality and religion and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, the fundamental principles of liberalism are universal. | ||
| That was the great gift of English liberalism, is individual rights and universal principles. | ||
| And don't get me wrong, we've not always applied these evenly or anything like this. | ||
| And, you know, initially they were exclusively for white heterosexual men at the very top of the pyramid. | ||
| But the point is that the principles obviously lend themselves to cascading downwards. | ||
| Because as soon as you have some people who are espousing these principles, there is no good reason not to extend the franchise to everyone. | ||
| Which is why we now have universal suffrage. | ||
| You know, you can't... there's no justification to not. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And all of the justifications given were all obviously faulty, which is why we're now at the point where we are. | ||
| So yeah, just basically stay true to your own principles. | ||
| If you think it's wrong to judge by race, don't judge people by race. | ||
| It doesn't matter what race they are. | ||
| If you think it's wrong to judge people by sex, don't judge people by sex. | ||
| All I can say is that these are timeless principles that will always be relevant. | ||
| There will never be a time where someone says, you know what, actually it is because I'm black that I should be judged. | ||
| Or it is because I'm a woman that I should be judged. | ||
| It's only because these people have, they've got a lot of good and very slippery language and techniques to persuade people that in fact, you know, given this context, it's right to do this. | ||
| Whereas I'm of the opinion that there is no context in which it's right to judge people based on characteristics they have no control over. | ||
| You know, if you didn't get to choose it, it's not a part of your character. | ||
| It doesn't describe you as a person. | ||
| It just describes your body or your, you know, your physical characteristics. | ||
| It doesn't describe what you are like in your character. | ||
| So does this, do you think this also goes to the feeling part of this? | ||
| Because that's sort of what I'm thinking as you're saying this, that there's, there's a feeling that I think this regressive ideology is attached to. | ||
| So for example, I can't give you a, as you just said, I can't give you an example of where systemically in the United States that women are oppressed, meaning that, you know, there are now laws protecting, you know, equal opportunity laws and things like that. | ||
| Now that doesn't mean That women don't have a harder time related to certain things. | ||
| If business deals, for example, are being done on golf courses and less women play golf, well then they're going to be excluded. | ||
| And you could probably think of many, many examples like that. | ||
| But what that is really more about is a feeling, not sort of a systemic legal issue. | ||
| And I think that's where people struggle to separate these things. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| What's the company that does the sex toys? | ||
| Ann Summers. | ||
| Ann Summers is a British company, I think. | ||
| It sells sex toys. | ||
| It was created by a woman and a large portion of the company is run by women. | ||
| They probably don't do their business deals on golf courses. | ||
| You know, they probably have, I don't know, massage parlours or nail salons or something like that. | ||
| You know, I know it sounds stereotypical, but they don't go to golf courses. | ||
| So I would have to change my position and perspective and I would have to go to where the power is in that situation. | ||
| And don't get me wrong, you're right. | ||
| You know, there are going to be cases where you have You know, powerful CEOs who go golfing, and the way to get into their good graces would be to go golfing as well. | ||
| You know, sometimes you've got to make sacrifices, don't you? | ||
| I personally hate golfing, but if I wanted to be the CEO of this company, or I wanted to work my way up the ladder, I would take up golfing. | ||
| It doesn't matter about your gender, it matters about how well you golf. | ||
| Like I said, it's not a perfect system either, but it's better than the alternative because one thing that people always forget about quotas is as soon as you start discriminating in favour of someone because of skin colour, sex, ethnicity, whatever, you are also discriminating against people on those very same categories. | ||
| If you say, right, we've got a position here and we need to hire a black woman, then you are excluding people on the basis of their race and sex. | ||
| So I can't agree with that. | ||
| I think that's wrong. | ||
| I'm sure there are plenty of incredibly talented black women out there, therefore we don't need to make artificial adjustments, surely. | ||
| And at the end of the day, if we go down this road, then Where does it end? | ||
| Where is the eventual logical goal? | ||
| Eventually you come to a planned economy where you can't just have, oh no, well, you were going to hire by merit, but now you've got 10 different categories you've got to go through. | ||
| How many trans people do you have? | ||
| How many queer people do you have? | ||
| How many black, white, Hispanic? | ||
| And so now you're not talking about how good they are at their jobs. | ||
| Now you're talking about the just arbitrary characteristics of these people. | ||
| And what happens when, like, if three people leave, what do you do? | ||
| If three black people leave your company and all you have applying for jobs are white people, what do you do? | ||
| You know? | ||
| You're in a position where it's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, it's really crazy. | ||
| It's almost like the quest for equality is being played sort of on an unequal playing field and that just makes everybody kind of nuts. | ||
| Well, I think Nietzsche really did have it right when he was saying that, you know, be careful when you're battling monsters, because when you stare long into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you, you know? | ||
| And if you stare long into the sort of regressive mindset of the world is terribly uneven, it's unequal, there are no opportunities for anyone... There's no end! | ||
| We need to do anything we can to help them, then everything becomes justified, you know? | ||
| It doesn't matter whose rights you trample on, you're doing it for the greater good, and that's what really... | ||
| So that's actually a great segue to, I want to talk about a little bit about their tactics. | ||
| So I think in the 45 minutes or so that we've been talking, we've talked a lot about their ideas, and obviously we're not fans of their ideas, but I think there's something more pernicious going on here with some of the tactics, because I don't think it's a coincidence that many of the main players in this regressive left movement have been exposed to be liars, to be plagiarists, to be frauds, Purposely manipulate people's words to create memes that are knowingly misquoted. | ||
| All of these things. | ||
| I don't think that's a coincidence. | ||
| Now, you may disagree with what Sargon of Akkad says or what Dave Rubin says, but I don't think you would find instances where we maliciously misrepresented people. | ||
| And I suppose their argument, if you really got them alone, if you could really get an honest moment out of them, which I don't know you could get, but I suppose their argument would be, well, the ends justify the means. | ||
| And that's just the reverse of how I view the world. | ||
| Yeah, no, that is... Honestly, that's exactly what it is, right? | ||
| It's about... There's a lot to unpack here, actually. | ||
| There's These people are being primed in universities to be activists, and part of the priming is to give them a good feeling about doing this activism. | ||
| It's to make them think that they can emotionally reward themselves by saying, yeah, I argued with a misogynist on Twitter, you know, therefore... | ||
| Oh no, I'm not kidding though. | ||
| That genuinely is. | ||
| I've seen feminist, I've seen, you know, pictures of feminist courses where on the wall they have a big, Twitter activism is feminism and stuff like this. | ||
| And it's just like, really? | ||
| That's, you know, but this is the thing. | ||
| They're encouraged to be activists. | ||
| They're encouraged to emotionally reward themselves for being activists. | ||
| And so- Do you know my theory about never argue with the Twitter egg? | ||
| That's what I'm going to put on my tombstone one day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I haven't heard that actually, but that's a good one, because I care about ideas and not, like, people or numbers, so I care... When someone with, like, five followers says, you're wrong on this, I've got to argue the case. | ||
| I've got to stop it, I've got to stop it. | ||
| Wow, I might be a little more evolved than you, that's pretty good. | ||
| What was I saying? | ||
| That at the schools there's an intellectual incentive, or there's a feeling incentive, really. | ||
| Yeah, there's an emotional incentive. | ||
| And basically they've got to the point where they've convinced themselves that progressivism or regressivism is the only morally legitimate position to hold. | ||
| And so anyone not holding this position must be a bad person. | ||
| And that's everything about progressivism in a nutshell right there. | ||
| If you aren't a regressive, you are a bad person. | ||
| If you aren't sacrificing other people's rights for the rights of a group that you don't know, you've got no connection to, but you have been emotionally primed to fight for, Then you're a bad person, and so it's okay for me to call you all these terrible labels. | ||
| I mean, you would have to be pretty damn racist for me to call you a racist, you know? | ||
| It's a bad label. | ||
| It's a label with a lot of weight, and yet these people throw it around as if it means nothing. | ||
| You know, I always say that, I think I said this to you when I was on your show, that My Awakening had a lot to do with that whole Ben Affleck, Sam Harris thing on Real Time. | ||
| And part of what the craziness of was with that was that Ben threw out racists so quickly that I agree with you, it would take a lot. | ||
| It would take a lot. | ||
| There are obvious racists out there and they should be called out. | ||
| But if you were arguing with someone, it would take a real special person for them to illuminate that they were racist within 30 seconds. | ||
| I mean, yeah, I mean, I can only imagine that they came straight out of the gate with it or something, you know? | ||
| They were like, yeah, okay, black people should be, I don't know, shipped off to cotton plantations or something. | ||
| I'd be like, okay, well, you're a racist then, aren't you? | ||
| And they'd be like, well, I wouldn't call myself that, whatever. | ||
| But, um, you know, yeah, these things normally hold a lot of weight and they... | ||
| And that's the reason they use them. | ||
| They use labels as weapons. | ||
| And they do it for a reason. | ||
| For a couple of reasons, actually. | ||
| The first one, obviously, is to put you on the back foot. | ||
| As soon as you're called a racist or a homophobe or a bigot or whatever, then you're defending yourself. | ||
| You're not defending your ideas. | ||
| You're not attacking their ideas. | ||
| You're defending yourself as a person. | ||
| And that's, in itself, a logical fallacy called an ad hominem. | ||
| You know, to attack the person rather than the ideas. | ||
| And you will find that they do this a lot. | ||
| So, basically, right, the answer to this is to just say, in your opinion, At the end of it. | ||
| So they'll say, you're a racist. | ||
| And you say, well, in your opinion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because they'll say, you know, you're a racist, you're a sexist, you're a bigot. | ||
| I say, well, in your opinion. | ||
| You know, I'm not, and I know I'm not, and nothing that I've said would make any reasonable person think that. | ||
| But you are not a reasonable person, and therefore you're going to label me as a racist or a bigot or whatever. | ||
| And honestly, what you've just given me is your opinion. | ||
| It's not an objective statement of fact. | ||
| It's like when they use the word problematic. | ||
| They'll say, oh, that's problematic. | ||
| It's like, well, can you explain to me what problematic means? | ||
| Does it mean immoral? | ||
| Does it mean wrong? | ||
| Does it mean illegal? | ||
| No, it means transgressive to progressivism or feminism. | ||
| And it's basically the same as sinful in the Catholic Church, or it's the same as haram in Islam. | ||
| You know, it's the, this is transgressive to my ideology. | ||
| It's not there's something wrong and it's not an objective statement of fact. | ||
| It's, I don't like what you've done. | ||
| Right, so I love that, because it goes to show that they want a certain intellectual or ideological purity. | ||
| And that's what the church would want out of you, or any sort of authoritarian view would want an intellectual and ideological purity. | ||
| Not intellectual! | ||
| Purely ideological purity. | ||
| It's usually not that intellectual, right? | ||
| No, absolutely. | ||
| They want an ideological purity out of you. | ||
| And what that does, you know, I'm seeing this right now in our Democratic debate last week between Bernie and Hillary. | ||
| They were arguing over who's the bigger progressive and it's like, Guys, that's not what the fight should be about. | ||
| It should be about, if you're on the left, it should be about who is standing up for liberal principles more. | ||
| Not who fits this narrow definition, because guess what? | ||
| Then all you do, as we've said a zillion times, is you hand the debate over to the right and you get Donald Trump. | ||
| They're stewing in their own juices there as well. | ||
| He's like, no, I'm the bigger progressive. | ||
| I said, look, you don't need to worry about convincing people about who's the bigger progressive. | ||
| Progressives are going to vote for you. | ||
| Liberals are going to vote for you. | ||
| The people you want to convince are the swing voters who aren't dyed-in-the-wool progressives. | ||
| They're the people who are concerned about issues, who are concerned about policies, who are concerned about what you're actually going to do rather than ideological brownie points. | ||
| And so yeah, it's just this little circle joke where they've stewed in their own ideology for so long, they don't understand how they're being viewed from the outside. | ||
| And like you said, it's driving people to the right, you know? | ||
| It's absolutely driving people to the right. | ||
| So then what do we do? | ||
| Because that is not us, right? | ||
| We're the ones that are trying to defend classical liberalism. | ||
| I'm sure you get tons of emails and tweets and all that stuff that I get all the time about, I see this split. | ||
| This has happened. | ||
| I get people telling me they're afraid and embarrassed to call themselves on the left. | ||
| I get other people saying they won't post things on Facebook because they don't want to get called a racist. | ||
| So all these things. | ||
| So if there's this growing group of people, which there absolutely is, I have no doubt about it. | ||
| What what do we do to keep this message going? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So the great thing about what's happening is that the It's interesting because, I mean, like I said, you had Milo Yiannopoulos on your show. | ||
| He was the only journalist who was prepared to cover Gamergate initially. | ||
| And I've grown to become friends with him. | ||
| And people find it really odd because he's a conservative and I'm a liberal. | ||
| And I just tried to explain to them, look, right, we've come to the point where It's not really about political affiliation to left and right. | ||
| It's about whether we can agree on reality. | ||
| You know, we can interpret this reality and have our own opinions in any way. | ||
| I'm sure that he's got a lot of opinions that I disagree with. | ||
| But we can agree that the numbers are such that the events are as follows. | ||
| You know, whereas the progressive left will lie to you. | ||
| They will lie to themselves. | ||
| Like we said, they will cherry pick their narrative. | ||
| They'll choose several data points, leave out the ones that contradict what they've said, and then if you don't agree with their narrative, they consider you persona non grata. | ||
| You may as well be, you know, Bill O'Reilly or something like that in their mind. | ||
| And just to be very clear, you're not just saying something for the sake of saying it. | ||
| I mean, I have literally seen this happen to me. | ||
| Just to be very clear. | ||
| I mean, this is exactly what's happened to me, which I now wear as a badge of pride, by the way. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Well, this is one of the things, when you first introduce people to this and they don't know anything about it, I honestly think there is a lot of... they protect themselves with audacity. | ||
| And, I mean, I'm a big fan of military history and audacity is one of those things that wins many wars because it's so unexpected. | ||
| And I really think that the things they do are so audacious that it's hard to persuade people they're genuinely doing them. | ||
| Because people hear it and think, I would never do that. | ||
| No one would do that. | ||
| I wouldn't do it. | ||
| I can't imagine anyone doing it. | ||
| That's not happening. | ||
| You're a liar. | ||
| And they think that the person relating the information is the one telling the lie. | ||
| And so the progressives, I think, they really take up on this and say, well, that's because he's racist, he's sexist, and all these things. | ||
| And then the person has to experience them acting as they act. | ||
| And I've had so many people come back to me and go, man, I thought you were full of nonsense when I first saw you talk, but that was exactly how they are. | ||
| Do you sometimes think that maybe the best way to beat them at this point is just to ignore them? | ||
| harm no foul sort of thing, it happens to everyone. | ||
| Because at first when you first hear it, it sounds like nonsense. | ||
| You know, you can't believe anyone would act this way and yet they do. | ||
| Do you sometimes think that maybe the best way to beat them at this point is just to ignore them? | ||
| Because I think over the last six months between what we do here, what you do, | ||
| what many other people are doing, especially in the digital space now, | ||
| and what Bill Maher's done a little bit more in the mainstream, there's been, they've been exposed. | ||
| And I think because, as you said, they're stewing in their juices now, part of me is just like, eh, let's just ignore them. | ||
| And then, you know, then there's another piece of me that says we have to keep on the attack. | ||
| Which do you think would be a better mode? | ||
| I think ignoring them is a very dangerous tactic. | ||
| The problem with that is that you hand the initiative to them, and you say, you know, I'm not going to pay attention, excuse me, to what you're doing. | ||
| And therefore, whatever it is they do, A, you're not really aware of, and suddenly something will come at you that you're not prepared for. | ||
| And also, it gives them the ground to continue propagating their ideological position. | ||
| It gets them, you know, there's no resistance. | ||
| And so, I mean, it's... On Twitter, yeah, sure, you know, maybe there's a lot of resistance, but, like, if you get a group, a little delegation of regressives who come to a workplace and they say, oh, we'd like to talk to you about women's equality, you think, go on then, you know, and so your boss might, like, You know, he's just a good guy. | ||
| He doesn't know. | ||
| He's just like, all right, OK, well, I'll do whatever I can, you know. | ||
| And suddenly, these people are now advising the upper echelons of this company, and then they start enforcing ideological conformity. | ||
| And then suddenly, you're in this position where, I mean, this happened to major game studios. | ||
| It's happened to, like, Games Workshop. | ||
| There are lots of people who have fallen prey to the velvet glove of Social justice that contains within it the iron fist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's just really well hidden. | ||
| So no, I don't think we can just... I think we have to fight them. | ||
| And we have to show people there is a better alternative. | ||
| That's the eternal point. | ||
| You've got to provide a better alternative. | ||
| And universal liberal principles, in my opinion, are the highest alternative. | ||
| There isn't anything better. | ||
| You can't get anything more fair than normal liberal principles. | ||
| I honestly think just pushing these, you know, showing people these are the best way to do things and that this not only encourages equal treatment of people under the law in any kind of social situation, but also it also pushes people to be the best that they can be. | ||
| It doesn't encourage them to be victims. | ||
| It doesn't encourage them to get, you know, to be depressed and to milk it. | ||
| You know, there's no room for frauds when you come to these sorts of meritocratic principles. | ||
| People have to work. | ||
| They have to push themselves and become better. | ||
| And it's about raising the human condition rather than dragging it down, which is everything about regressives. | ||
| Yeah, well, naturally, I believe in what you're saying, and that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. | ||
| So I really, more than anything else, I should thank you because, you know, there were a couple key people that helped my awakening. | ||
| And when I had that conversation with you on your channel, it was one of the first times that I really started talking about this stuff. | ||
| So you were definitely a key piece in that. | ||
| So I appreciate that. | ||
| And I appreciate all the work you do, and everyone can find out more of Sargon's take on Gamergate, feminism, regressives, and plenty more over on his YouTube channel, which is youtube.com slash Sargon of Akkad 100. | ||
| And Sargon, Carl, or do you have any other names that I need to know about? | ||
| No, I think that's just the two. | ||
| Those are the big two? | ||
|
unidentified
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Alright. |
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