Dec. 12, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:04:13
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unidentified
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(dramatic music) | |
| Joining me today is a writer, an activist, and the founder of theoryofenchantment.com, | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| I'm very happy to have you here because you are one of, I don't know, I'd say 12 people online that don't make me completely insane. | ||
| Like, I look at your Twitter feed and I'm like, oh, there's someone with a brain that's actually not completely insane. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Yeah, that's the highest compliment I can give anybody. | ||
| I try. | ||
| So actually, we met a couple months ago in September at a Jordan Peterson event. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Would you say that was the best white supremacist event you were ever at? | ||
| Oh, excellent, excellent. | ||
| I mean, just, yeah, I was terrified. | ||
| Before we get into your history and everything else, and you're doing truly so much great work, what do you make of the Peterson phenomenon? | ||
| Because so many of my guests, I'm finding, are coming to shows, and it's pretty cool. | ||
| I understand Jordan Peterson, like fundamentally. | ||
| I understand what he's doing. | ||
| I think that he is compelling to many people because In many cases, he's a storyteller. | ||
| He's a great storyteller. | ||
| And what he can do is he can distill lessons from stories. | ||
| Stories found in pop culture, stories that are history and derive lessons that you can apply to your life. | ||
| And I think that anyone who can do that will be compelling because they can actually better your life. | ||
| And I think that's the secret as to why he's so popular. | ||
| And also I've noticed that he's becoming more mainstream. | ||
| He's becoming more acceptable in mainstream society. | ||
| Positive trend, like seeing him being interviewed on Dr. Oz, for example, was like a moment, I think, of him inching closer and closer to the mainstream. | ||
| What's that phrase, first they ignore you, then they mock you, then they want to be you, something like that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| So he may be in that version of it. | ||
| I think he's in that, yeah. | ||
| Alright, well, speaking of stories, tell me a little bit about your story. | ||
| Who the hell are you? | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| I am Chloe. | ||
| I'm from New Orleans originally, born and raised. | ||
| My story, I guess, is an interesting one. | ||
| I was born and raised in a very atypical Christian family. | ||
| Atypical in the sense that I grew up as a Christian observing Shabbat. | ||
| Yeah, so what is that? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| So the way I like to tell it is, you know, have you heard of seven-day Adventists? | ||
| I have. | ||
| So it's like seven-day Adventists, but on steroids. | ||
| Essentially, that's how I grew up. | ||
| So seven-day Adventists, to my understanding, they keep Shabbat. | ||
| That's why they call them the seventh day. | ||
| So they go to church on Saturday instead of Sunday. | ||
| So we did that also. | ||
| But we also did things like we observed Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah and all the Jewish holy days. | ||
| And we also kept kosher style. | ||
| So I don't eat pork or shellfish. | ||
| And that was an interesting upbringing. | ||
| I have two funny stories to tell you. | ||
| The first is about Yom Kippur. | ||
| So, as I'm sure you know, in the Jewish tradition... I've done it once or twice. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So, can you tell me what age one begins fasting for Yom Kippur? | ||
| Well, there's an obvious answer here that obviously can't be the right answer, but I would assume 13. | ||
| No, that's the right answer! | ||
| Though you're pulling a little trickery on me. | ||
| No, no, no, that's the right answer. | ||
| Well, my parents didn't have the rabbinical text to advise them on what age they should make their kids start fasting. | ||
| And so for some reason they decided that five years old would be a good time. | ||
| So I've been fasting for Yom Kippur since I was five. | ||
| Oh, man! | ||
| So you're an old pro now. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| So that's like one quick story of how I grew up and then my father introduced me to the writings of Leon Uris when I was 15 years old. | ||
| So he was a really famous Jewish author who wrote a lot about the re-establishment of the State of Israel. | ||
| He wrote books like Exodus and QV7 and Millet 18. | ||
| And I read all these books throughout high school and was part of the Hebrew Culture Club in high school, went to a very egalitarian high school in New Orleans. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is sort of my introduction to the world of Jewish culture, but also Israel in a contemporary sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then I attended the University of New Orleans, where I initially majored in film, but then switched majors to international studies in 2012. | ||
| Graduated magna cum laude? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But the reason why I switched majors was because anti-Semitism was resurfacing in Europe, in France in particular. | ||
| So this is about, what, seven, eight years ago? | ||
| This is 2012. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| And I wanted to get involved in the Israel space, so that's why I switched majors and I started a student pro-Israel organization on campus. | ||
| Did Israel advocacy for three and a half years. | ||
| Realized that we didn't know what we were doing, but I learned a lot from that experience. | ||
| And that was my college experience. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so we're gonna get to, obviously, a lot of the advocacy work that you do | ||
| and some of the things that you've written and all that, but just a little bit more on the growing up part, | ||
| 'cause there's something really fascinating there. | ||
| It's like it's sort of for you. | ||
| It's like, oh, well, this is how I grew up It kind of is what it sounds for other people. | ||
| It's like wait a minute So she's Christian but was celebrating all these Jewish holidays Like how how was that explained to you as a child or is it was it explained? | ||
| Yeah, I mean it was like it was like the explanation was this is how Jesus and the disciples observed So we're gonna observe in this way. | ||
| That was like the basic explanation and then like I Just growing up, you know, you're conditioned to do these things, and so it just becomes rote and becomes, like, basic. | ||
| But like you were saying, it doesn't make sense to a lot of people looking from the outside in, so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so college you started realizing that the things that you had grown up around, that something was sort of under assault, sort of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, I think, yeah, and I think that because You know, anti-Semitism is fundamentally like dehumanization of Jews and because I had grown up with such a, not just like a love for the Jewish people, but an awareness of Jewish culture, like to a certain extent my identity was defined by Jewish culture or adjacent to Jewish culture, so I think in that sense it did feel like something, a part of me was under attack, so that was probably a huge catalyst for getting involved. | ||
| What did your Jewish friends think about this girl that doesn't stereotypically look Jewish, which is a ridiculous thing to say, of course, because there are black Jews and Latino Jews and Chinese Jews and everything else. | ||
| Did your friends think, like, what is this thing? | ||
| In college, you mean? | ||
|
unidentified
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College, growing up, whatever it is. | |
| I don't know if they thought any different. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I just remember that the Jewish kids and myself were not in school during Rosh Hashanah. | ||
| We were just absent at the same time. | ||
| And college, I just made all my friends. | ||
| Pretty good if you want a couple extra days off. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| I mean, I didn't even talk about Suikod. | ||
| That's a whole other story. | ||
| But in college, I just made my friends join my club. | ||
| There was no, like, oh, this is... It was just who I was and a part of my life. | ||
| Yeah, so it seems to me that right now, I guess campus antisemitism is sort of running rampant. | ||
| I think it has a lot to do with BDS, and we can talk about that and more, but what were you actually seeing back then that were the markers? | ||
| Yeah, I mean back then, so there wasn't a lot of, there wasn't like systemic antisemitism at the University of New Orleans, or for example at Tulane, where I did a lot of pro-Israel stuff also. | ||
| But actually what I discovered was... | ||
| Though there was anti-semitism on certain campuses, certain hotbed campuses like Columbia and UC Irvine, and we've heard about all these different campuses where there are problems, the larger issue was that we in the community were confusing two different things. | ||
| We were confusing two very important questions with each other. | ||
| The first question was, how do you combat anti-semitism, which is a noble question, a good question, a question that got me involved, with the question of how do you actually get people to fall in love with Israelis? | ||
| And we were confusing those two questions. | ||
| And, as a result, we were shaping the basis of our advocacy around the wrong assumptions. | ||
| So, like, the first question, how do you fight anti-Semitism, is essentially a question of how do you get people to stop hating. | ||
| But the second question, how do you get people to fall in love with Israelis or Israeli society, is a question of how do you get people to start loving, which is a totally different question. | ||
| And we, and I say, like, collectively, we, the parishal community in America, hadn't figured that out. | ||
| And so, as a result, we were doing All right, so let's do both of those. | ||
| were putting together projects within the realm of pro-Israel advocacy | ||
| that didn't make sense. | ||
| And that was the larger trend that I observed, that I witnessed when I was in college. | ||
| All right, so let's do both of those. | ||
| So first, how do you deal with disassembling antisemitism or just hatred in general? | ||
| Well, so I think they're interconnected on some level. | ||
| I think it's not just enough to continue to tell people to stop hating, obviously that's important, but you also have to create a framework and create sort of like a collection of lessons, if you will, on how to start loving, on how to love, if you will. | ||
| I think that that actually ends up combating anti-Semitism and combating all forms of hatred if you actually build out a framework or try to teach people how to love. | ||
| Do you think there's something unique about hating Jews that's a little bit different than hating other people, like sort of partly a historical reason, because it goes back forever, basically. | ||
| But also that I find right now, I mean, most of the people that hate me are on the left, let's say. | ||
| So I get a relentless amount of hate from them, and I don't get a lot of hate from the right, but every now and again when I get a hatred from the right, it's, ah, you Jew, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing. | ||
| In my case, it's very disproportionate on one side, and that probably has more to do with my politics than anything else. | ||
| But I do think it's interesting that it's sort of, it is that horseshoe theory, where the people on the fringes both end up hating you for identity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's a good question, but I think anti-Semitism is uniquely a problem, or uniquely different. | ||
| I mean, if you were to look at intersectionality, for example, which is this... I was hoping we'd get to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My favorite topic. | ||
| Yeah, let's do it. | ||
| Can you explain, let's steel man intersectionality. | ||
| Can you give me what the person out there that's the believer in intersectionality, what would they tell you intersectionality is before we knock it down? | ||
| Right, I think I can steel man it. | ||
| I'd say that intersectionality makes three claims, one of which is true. | ||
| The first claim that it makes is that you can You can experience intersecting forms of oppression. | ||
| So I, as both a woman and a person of color, can experience forms of oppression by virtues of those categories to which I belong, and they can intersect and interact with each other in new ways. | ||
| And I think that's a... For the record, I've been conducting this interview as if you were a white man. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| I just want to be clear because I'm trying not to... Thank you so much. | ||
| That's a relief. | ||
| Okay, but you've got these two immutable characteristics, basically, that could intertwine based in their outsider characteristics, I'd say. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So, like, a man could be sexist toward me, or a white person could be racist toward me, right? | ||
| And then both of those types of discriminations or prejudices can interact in different ways, which I think is a basically true statement, right? | ||
| So, that is the extent to which I can still manage intersectionality. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, now give me the not. | |
| The not so true, and actually I would say dangerously false, claims of intersectionality. | ||
| One is that the primary motivator behind all human interaction is power. | ||
| And by power, they mean, like, the power in order to oppress. | ||
| So I could be having a disagreement, a political disagreement with you in good faith, but according to the intersectionalists, it doesn't matter because you have white skin and I have brown skin, and so you, by virtue of the category that you exist in, you are trying to oppress me. | ||
| Right, and in this case, my gayness would fall below the importance of, say, my white skin, and on the scale of intersectionality, Jewishness is completely sort of thrown out, which I think is related to the Israel thing, which we'll obviously talk about. | ||
| Yeah, definitely, like hierarchies of virtues and stuff like that, or lack thereof in your case. | ||
| I'm just me. | ||
| What can I tell you? | ||
| So that's the first dangerous claim that it makes, and then the second conclusion, I guess you would say, to which it comes is a conclusion of racial essentialism. | ||
| So what that means is you could take any basic human behavior, let's say feeling entitled, right? | ||
| So my friend could have a new iPhone X, and for some reason Like, I don't have the money to buy the iPhone X, but I want the iPhone X. Whatever. | ||
| I'm coveting, right, this iPhone X, if you will. | ||
| So I feel a sense of entitlement to it. | ||
| So any human being can feel a sense of entitlement, right? | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| But the intersectionalists will claim that entitlement, like, A priori is the white man's thing. | ||
| So they will refer to entitlement as white male entitlement. | ||
| As if the only type of human being that can feel or express a behavior of entitlement is a white male. | ||
| And so in doing that, they are racially essentializing people. | ||
| They are taking human behaviors and turning them into essential characteristics of people that belong to one category. | ||
| So as somebody that comes from a unique religious perspective, what do you make of the religious nature of the people that buy into this ideology? | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| Like many religions, it is all-encompassing. | ||
| Like many, well certainly like certain, I would say, mainstream forms of Christianity, it sort of preaches this born-again type mentality where you become woke, right? | ||
| Which is just another word for enlightened, right? | ||
| That's what they mean by that. | ||
| I thought you were going to say annoying, but okay. | ||
| No, but like the parallels are like you've become, well you've become born again, you've become... | ||
| The problem, well one of the many problems, is that there's no salvation. | ||
| There's no redemption in this religion. | ||
| You get brownie points or virtue points if you are, if you belong to certain categories, like if you're a person of color, if you're a woman, etc. | ||
| And you get less points if you're white, if you're male, if you're straight, etc, etc. | ||
| And what this does is it has a caricaturing effect on human beings, where people are reduced to caricatures. | ||
| It creates this effect where the people who are intersectionalists and who believe in this theory are sort of incapable of dealing with nuance and dealing with depth and human complexity, which is sad, not just for the people that they're attacking, but for themselves. | ||
| Do you think it's an overstep to call it the new type of racism? | ||
| Because I'm really coming around to that. | ||
| You're like edging very close. | ||
| Yeah, like I'm like right there on that. | ||
| I've said it once or twice. | ||
| I don't really like saying it because I don't I don't want to start using the tactics which I hate so much, right? | ||
| Of course, I don't want to do that. | ||
| But I don't know if you saw my Episode with her in August. | ||
| I had Katherine Burble sing who's a wonderful teacher at Michaela school in the UK and She flat-out and she's of brown skin and you know the whole thing But she doesn't buy into any of this nonsense and she was adamant in saying this is the new racism and we must call it that and I agree with the heart of the sentiment and I just adore her and I was I spoke at school a couple weeks ago, but but I'm a little leery of Because I don't want to fall into the same trap that they've come in, where every time I hear one of their arguments, the idea would be that I could just turn to them and be like, well, you're the new racist. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right, and shut it down. | ||
| It's so easy and lazy and the rest of it. | ||
| So I don't want to do that. | ||
| If I see the way the world is now, where I see true racism coming from, it's almost exclusively coming from these people. | ||
| I'm not saying that there aren't some white nationalists. | ||
| There are some, they have no power, nobody cares about them, they're mocked, and they're actually propped up by the media to make it seem like they're running the world. | ||
| But where I see true racism coming from these days, and a true hatred based on immutable characteristics, is this set of intersectional woke people. | ||
| I just don't want to be that. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That's a very good and deep question. | ||
| I think that, for my purposes, I don't just want to... I want to criticize in a meaningful way. | ||
| So I would have to ask the question, will I get people who believe in intersectionalist theory to change, or convince them to change, simply by calling them racist? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| And right, it's not when they call all these people on the right, they call basic conservatives or libertarians racist. | ||
| It's not like they're coming around. | ||
| It's not like they're like, oh yes, you're right, I should just be an intersectionalist. | ||
| I am woke. | ||
| I am now born again. | ||
| No, that doesn't work though. | ||
| So I think I would rather challenge people who believe in this theory on their own terms. | ||
| Do you get a unique cred to do that? | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| So how does that work? | ||
| That you can almost use their own crappy thing against them in a bizarre way, even though you don't believe in it. | ||
| There's a unique power there, I suppose. | ||
| But I think what I do is I convey depth. | ||
| Meaning, I think I am an example of human complexity. | ||
| So, on a surface level, I am using their own A hierarchy of virtuous people or virtuous types against them, but at the same time I think I'm showing them that human complexity actually exists, because I disagree with them. | ||
| So it's like a cognitive dissonance thing that they have to figure out. | ||
| But I'm more interested in trying to challenge people who believe in this, especially young people, let's say, because it's on the college campuses and such, to become better people. | ||
| And I have to, in order to do that, I have to criticize them in a way that actually speaks to their potential to be better people. | ||
| I mean, like I said, I'm not going to accomplish that by calling them racist, but what I can do is try to, I can try to, for example, point them to, I think, authors and people in literature, for example, who they highly esteem, whose work they don't quite yet realize is not intersectional. | ||
| So who might that be? | ||
| Maya Angelou, for example. | ||
| I think that there's a very stark contrast between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Maya Angelou. | ||
| The very first poet I was forced to memorize as a child was Maya Angelou. | ||
| And so I feel like I carry her spirit with me, and the way she talks about human complexity, and the way she talks about How nobling the human spirit is, is in many ways a contrast to intersectionalist theory. | ||
| She famously one time said that Shakespeare must have been a black woman, because one of his sonnets she felt so closely and intimately connected to in the struggles that she was going through as a child, and her point was that All of this literature, even if it comes from, let's say, the dead white male, was written for all of you, for each of you, and you can see yourself in the stories that these great | ||
| writers created and that's the point that's what makes them great writers is the fact that you can see yourself in them so I would point people toward especially her work because they typically and generally esteem her and they consider her to be an icon and I think she was an icon but then I can use that to actually teach them well here's an alternative way of thinking actually and what you're learning in your post-structuralist class about like human life and human affairs isn't necessarily true and it isn't it isn't the only thing out there What do you make of the fact that it seems like so many young people are going to college so ill-prepared to deal with the world as it is that they become so religious in nature when it comes to this stuff? | ||
| Like if they had been given better tools, perhaps some of the things that Jordan Peterson's talking about, that they could go into school and be challenged and be okay with it as opposed to going in and converting seemingly. | ||
| I guess that's a parent problem on some level. | ||
| It's a parent and a parent, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think it's a question of upbringing, obviously, but I also think that maybe it signifies that students are searching for meaning. | ||
| I mean, students are searching for meaning. | ||
| I was searching for meaning in college, you know. | ||
| We're searching for meaning all of our lives, right? | ||
| And then, what does it say that That the only thing that's seemingly out there that's giving them meaning, at least within the college context, is intersectionalist theory. | ||
| I mean, surely we as a society can do better than that. | ||
| But I think that Jordan Peterson represents this contrast, because he is getting a lot of fame and popularity. | ||
| He is considered to be popular among some people, many people in college probably. | ||
| I think that in that sense, maybe they're not being as converted as much as it seems they are, and maybe there is a battle of ideas in the hearts and minds of these students, so that's a good thing. | ||
| Well, I mean, there's definitely statistical evidence that that's true, right? | ||
| There was that study that came out a couple months ago that basically only 8% of young people actually are these hysterical, shrieking intersectionalists, but because they're so loud, they're just silencing the majority. | ||
| So that's encouraging. | ||
| Well, so that means it's our fault, because... Right. | ||
| Well, that's what I always say. | ||
| People at every event I go to... The limits are not being loud enough, really. | ||
| Well, that's the funny thing. | ||
| It's like literally every event I go to, from the Peterson event that you were at in Long Island to when I do stand-up gigs, whatever it is, people come up to me after and they go, what can I do? | ||
| What can I do? | ||
| And the only thing that I can come up with that has any meaning whatsoever is, start speaking. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, you live in the freest society in the history of the world, and you're afraid to say what you think. | ||
| How would you be in one of the bad places? | ||
| Also, with social media, we all have our own media companies now. | ||
| Anything is possible. | ||
| I think we need to start speaking more, but I also think we need to, like I said earlier, we need to emphasize it's not enough to tell people how to stop hating, we also have to teach them how to start loving, and I think that's something that needs to be developed further also. | ||
| Alright, so let's put the start loving part on hold for a minute, because that seems like a good ending point for me, so let's put that to the end, okay? | ||
| I've noticed you've been pretty critical about what's going on in the Women's March, and I think we're starting to see, which I think is positive, that this intersectional sort of hierarchy, or monster, I think is a better word, that it can't hold very long, and I think we're seeing the evidence of that now. | ||
| Can you explain a little bit of why that is? | ||
| About the Women's March? | ||
|
unidentified
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I've had a crazy couple days here, so, yeah. | |
| So, all this time, you know, we had this suspicion that the leaders in the Women's March, including Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, and Carmen Perez, were sort of, like, pretty anti-Semitic, like, hub-nubbing with Farrakhan and posting very positive remarks about Farrakhan on their social media platforms. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When you say we, you mean like us and the other... Sorry, yes, I should clarify. | ||
| Whatever you want to call that subset of people, not what mainstream portrays them to be. | ||
| Sure, but I'd say that this has been a concern in the Jewish community by and large for a very long time. | ||
| Like the majority of Jews in this country are pro-Israel, right? | ||
| And so collectively the pro-Israel community has had a creeping suspicion about these women's intentions when they came to allowing Jews to march, or telling Jews to have a safe place to march, or even a space to march in the Women's March. | ||
| And I'm actually part of an organization called Zioness, which tries to give a space to progressive Jewish women to march in these Women's Marches, even though Linda Sarsour is shouting at them, there's no room for you here. | ||
| So the idea is like, oh, you're not going to give us a table, we'll build our own table. | ||
| But what's interesting is that yesterday this bombshell report came out in Telemagazine. | ||
| And our worst suspicions were confirmed. | ||
| I did see a little bit, actually, about the security and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, so go ahead. | ||
| So, apparently, I'll say allegedly, allegedly, at the very first meeting with these women who were being added to, I guess, as co-chairs to the Women's March, there were anti-Semitic statements made about Jews. | ||
| And consistently throughout their time as co-chairs. | ||
| They have allegedly been hiring folks from the Nation of Islam, Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. | ||
| For those of you who may be watching who don't know, Farrakhan has famously, or infamously, referred to Jews as termites. | ||
| I mean, he's a notorious anti-Semite. | ||
| He's on Twitter, no problem. | ||
| Yeah, you can check him out. | ||
| We'll link to his Twitter right down below. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So these women have been hiring security guards from Nation of Islam to do their security detail at the Women's March. | ||
| And so it's a really bombshell report. | ||
| I encourage your viewers to read it, but... Yeah, we actually will link to that down below. | ||
| Not to Farrakhan's Twitter, but we will put a link to the article down below. | ||
| And it is like a... | ||
| It's a crazy moment. | ||
| So does this seem obvious to you in a way? | ||
| It sort of seems obvious to me that two, three years ago there were a bunch of us, I think, sort of old school, decent liberals that were like, this thing, this marriage in hell between the Women's March and Sarsour, this thing can't hold. | ||
| Of course this is going to happen. | ||
| So, like, I think there's a little bit of, like, I told you so here for some of us, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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There definitely is. | |
| I mean, I posted this on my Facebook yesterday and I definitely got some of that, so... But that doesn't make it feel any better, right? | ||
| No, it's not like you're like, ah, ha ha, see, I'm Nostradamus over here. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I mean, I guess one just hopes that... | ||
| People who are leaders would have the integrity and responsibility and introspection to not do this. | ||
| So what do you think has to happen then for the Women's March to move forward with whatever the goodness of that is? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think, well, we, for example, I decided I'm not marching in the Women's March. | ||
| In any march affiliated with the Women's March, Inc., which is the organization that those women sit on the board of. | ||
| And there are other marches, there are other individual marches that have actually cut ties with Women's March, Inc., that people can still march with if they feel so inclined. | ||
| But as far as that particular organization is concerned, I'm not marching with them anymore. | ||
| So is the inherent problem of sort of just collectivism as an ideology that to say a woman's march is inherently sort of ridiculous? | ||
| Because everyone's for women. | ||
| It's a very, as Jordan would say, it's a low-resolution argument. | ||
| Everyone would say that you're for women, right? | ||
| Like no one's not for women or for women to be equal. | ||
| Not nobody, but By and large, any sane member of society is not for women to be equal, in a Western society at least. | ||
| But when you say you're for women, what you're always going to do is exclude the minority women. | ||
| So in this case, forget skin color even, although this is a minority skin color I suppose. | ||
| The Women's March organizers, they're not for Nikki Haley. | ||
| They're not for a strong, conservative woman who happens to have brown skin, but even forgetting her skin color. | ||
| They're not for Sarah Huckabee Sanders. | ||
| They're not for any woman that doesn't believe in the ideology. | ||
| So you're saying you're for women. | ||
| You mean that women who behave. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's an interesting retort. | ||
| I think I slightly disagree with the, if you specify the demographics that you are marching on behalf, then you are necessarily Not including other people in that category. | ||
| It happens to be the case. | ||
| Well, I would say maybe it's de facto and maybe not intended. | ||
| The function of it, ultimately. | ||
| I don't think there's anything wrong with outlining on whose behalf you're marching. | ||
| I do take your point. | ||
| But I think that this has been true of women's marches, if you will, throughout throughout the like since the suffrage movement like even within the women's suffrage movement there was there was a lot of there were a lot of tensions because for example who's the most famous one? | ||
| Susan B. Anthony. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, so there was a dispute between Susan B. Anthony and another woman whose name, of course, I forget at this moment. | ||
| on this one. | ||
| There's a dispute between-- | ||
| Oh, don't worry. | ||
| This is YouTube. | ||
| They'll fact check ya. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| There's a dispute between Susan B. Anthony and another woman whose name, of course, | ||
| I forget at this moment. | ||
| And the reason was that Susan B. Anthony was actually willing to hobnob with people who are racist | ||
| in order to get the vote passed. | ||
| And this other woman who was one of the founders of the suffragist movement had this falling out with her | ||
| because she was like, you cannot. | ||
| associate with these people who are trying to undermine another demographic in the country. | ||
| And so I say all that to say that I think that there will always be these tensions within | ||
| these mass movements, especially if you read this article that came out in the Taube magazine, | ||
| especially if you are rooted in an intersectionalist framework. | ||
| I think that that's the issue. | ||
| I think that you might be able to see Nikki Haley and some of the other women you mentioned if it wasn't actually rooted in intersectionality. | ||
| On the other hand, the Women's March is a progressive, is a self-proclaimed progressive Right, so I guess that's it. | ||
| So that's what it is, I think, because I would argue that being for progressivism as it stands in 2018 is not being for women, so I guess it's a little bit of the... That's fair, and so I think that if you were to come across a progressive march, Like a decade ago. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| It looked very different from how it looks now. | ||
| So that's actually a perfect segue. | ||
| How is this all connected to whatever is going on with feminism right now, do you think? | ||
| Do you consider yourself a feminist? | ||
| I know it's a label that people are sort of scared of now. | ||
| They either embrace it and they're not sure why or they're very scared of it. | ||
| Yeah, I don't really have this like knee-jerk Viscerally self-discussed toward the term feminism. | ||
| I feel like many people, certainly on the right, are increasingly having that reaction. | ||
| I understand why. | ||
| If third-wave feminism is rooted in intersectionality, I believe in feminism as a basic idea. | ||
| I love the work of Camille Paglia. | ||
| So to that extent, I'm definitely a feminist. | ||
| She's been fighting this for a long time. | ||
| But I think basic, if you believe in equality for women and basic egalitarianism, to the extent that that is feminism, I am a feminist. | ||
| I don't need to adopt all the other frameworks that Third Way Feminism is adopting now to consider myself feminist, I'd say. | ||
| Yeah, so let's just back up slightly to what you were saying about these competing sort of methods and how people do things. | ||
| So Susan B. Anthony was willing to talk to some people. | ||
| This other woman wasn't. | ||
| I mean, we've seen this in all sorts of movements. | ||
| Martin Luther King behaved a certain way, talked to certain people. | ||
| Malcolm X had a different view of it. | ||
| So you view that as sort of a necessary sort of push and pull on how a movement is built? | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, I think that Whether I believe in it or not, that is how movements are built. | ||
| I think, especially if you look at the Martin Luther King vs. Malcolm X dichotomy, it's much more interesting because... I was actually just talking to a friend about this. | ||
| I don't think people realize how difficult it was in the 60s to buy into and practice Dr. King's philosophy. | ||
| Like, we take it for granted in 2018. | ||
| Even though a lot of people don't do it now, in a weird way, right? | ||
| Yes, but I think that makes sense because we're ironically privileged. | ||
|
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That's a good title for a book. | |
| Ironically privileged. | ||
| But people don't realize that these guys were training themselves not to fight back when they were having condiments poured on them in diners. | ||
| That's hard. | ||
| To root your belief in the idea that I'm not going to fight back because these white people were made in the image of God is a profoundly crazy belief. | ||
| And by crazy I mean Groundbreaking, incredibly difficult to actually put into practice, right? | ||
| Noble, beautiful. | ||
| And so I think that has to be understood when we contrast, or juxtapose, Malcolm X with Dr. King. | ||
| I think that if you were to read Malcolm X's autobiography and what happened to him, and this is important because people need to understand why the Nation of Islam has, to a certain extent, to a certain degree, a hold in the black community. | ||
| The Nation of Islam at the time that Malcolm X was alive was literally taking young black men who at this point, | ||
| for example, in Harlem, were addicts, were junkies, and turning them into men of upstanding society. | ||
| And so in order to counter the toxic and deleterious effects | ||
| of the Nation of Islam, we have to reckon and we have to be willing to accept | ||
| acknowledge that fact, right? | ||
| The problem is that that process of empowerment was also deeply rooted in a very toxic ideology. | ||
| Namely, hating white people. | ||
| And by hating white people, let me be very clear, because I feel like people don't know the extent to which the Nation of Islam is crazy when it comes to this issue. | ||
| The Nation of Islam believes that white people are actually, like, not fully evolved. | ||
| Like, that they are actually And that during the time-- | ||
| Hey, you're talking to a termite over here. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| But like actually. | ||
| And that during the time of the, I don't know, what would you call it, messianic age, | ||
| that like white people will be destroyed and people of color will take their proper place | ||
| in the hierarchy of, I don't know, the great circle of life. | ||
| So it's not some like, it's not just simply, oh, you were very, like people who were white | ||
| were historically very harmful toward black people No, no, no, no. | ||
| It's an entire, like, like, ideology rooted in Um, literally thinking why people are subhuman. | ||
| And it's interesting because people will, on the one hand, at the same time, people will praise Malcolm X and praise the Nation of Islam, without even recognizing that Malcolm X was killed by the Nation of Islam, had disavowed the Nation of Islam by the time he went to Mecca and came back, and they're not willing to wrestle with the nuances of that particular movement seriously. | ||
| But I say all that to say- But you recognize the power of that, obviously, right? | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| The power of sort of just an easy answer that just- Yes, that's what it is. | ||
| It's easy, it's certain, right? | ||
| And it's very difficult for people to live with uncertainty, which I think is something that the right needs to recognize and needs to grapple with when it is rightfully criticizing things like intersectionality, right? | ||
| There is an attraction in being certain, right? | ||
| Because if you have to deal with uncertainty, No. | ||
| If you have to accept uncertainty as a factor of life, it's very difficult. | ||
| We have like fight or flight brains, right? | ||
| We're not evolved to deal with uncertainty on some level or to be comfortable with uncertainty. | ||
| And yet it's almost the only certainty, right? | ||
| Paradoxically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| But that is, that I think also speaks to why intersectionality is so attractive. | ||
| Because it gives people a way to anchor their insecurities into something that is steadfast. | ||
| So when you see people using some of the language that The intersectionalists or the woke crew buy into. | ||
| So, for example, a couple weeks ago, Jamel Hill, formerly of ESPN, now of The Atlantic, she tweeted out that Jordan Peterson's a white supremacist and a misogynist. | ||
| And you know it gets 20,000 retweets or something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Wasn't he just speaking to the Seattle Seahawks? | ||
| Okay, this is what I meant, by the way, when I said mainstream. | ||
| Like, that's awesome. | ||
| Okay, continue. | ||
| I'm glad you brought that up, because that was the genesis of the tweet, because it was about that Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seahawks, had let white supremacist and misogynist Jordan Peterson talk to the team, then another ESPN guy picks it up, then she tweets it out. | ||
| So, of course, I just invited her. | ||
| I said, you know what, I'm on tour with the guy. | ||
| I saw that! | ||
| I didn't even say you wanted to bait him, nothing. | ||
| I just said, I would love to have you as a guest to the show. | ||
| And of course, she doesn't respond to anything. | ||
| But what do you make of the fact that they can lay those claims so easily and they're rewarded for it? | ||
| So in other words, if you were to do this on the other side, if someone on the right was to say something, like if you call someone that's not a white supremacist a white supremacist, that's almost as damaging socially and politically and every other way as possible. | ||
| But if you were someone on the right and you said something that sounded off slightly racially, you get called a racist, you get fired, and that's it. | ||
| But Jemele Hill, you know, she works it at the Atlantic, no problem, under David Frum, who sat in that very chair, and I think Jeffrey Goldberg's the other guy, and it's like, you can say whatever you want. | ||
| Now, again, you know my policy on free speech, so I'm not denying her ability to say it. | ||
| I'm just saying that the social, yeah, exactly. | ||
| So what do I make of the social capital? | ||
| The way that we can use it, depending on these characteristics. | ||
| So I get what you're saying. | ||
| I think it's true, but only to a certain extent. | ||
| And I think that the fame and rise of Jordan Peterson proves that it's only true to a certain extent. | ||
| Meaning, sure, from a social perspective, she has the freedom to make statements which are not completely thought out, which are pejorative in a way, and disparaging in a way. | ||
| toward a person, and she can do so without... I mean, she obviously gets criticism, but she can do so without consequence, basically, on a certain level. | ||
| But I would say that Jordan Peterson has a greater reach than she does. | ||
| Jordan Peterson has a greater I would say growing fan base than she does. | ||
| And so I would question who has the more social capital. | ||
| But is his social capital or it's the capital of ideas? | ||
| It's the capital of good ideas. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| Yeah, but I think that's the same thing. | ||
| I think that his social capital is accruing greater interest, to continue with his metaphor, than hers is. | ||
| Can you do an impression? | ||
| Yes, the stocks are increasing. | ||
| And I think that that will continue to Play out and I think that that actually speaks to the fact that the right is partially wrong when it talks about At least within the context of Jordan Peterson when it talks about the left social capital because Jordan Peterson is Pumping up the Seattle Seahawks, right? | ||
| That's I don't think that's... I mean, I don't know if he would consider himself to be right-wing, but I don't know if that's happened on the right in a very long time. | ||
| Yeah, I don't even... I've been traveling with the guy for the last year, like, a hundred shows. | ||
| I don't even know that he considers himself part of the right. | ||
| I think he's vaguely... He's not, though. | ||
| Right, because he's vaguely conservative, but I would say he's really an old-school liberal that's been smacked around by reality. | ||
| But in a way, no, he... But in all seriousness, he also transcends these labels, and I think that that's his power, and that's his social power. | ||
| And that's what I meant when I said earlier, I get what he's doing, because he is distilling things down to their essence. | ||
| And regardless of how seemingly compelling the rhetoric of, I don't like this guy Jordan Peterson so I'm going to call him a white nationalist, goes far on Twitter, His distillation and breakdown of ideas and transforming those ideas into lessons to live your life by will almost inevitably always go farther. | ||
| So I would disagree with the premise. | ||
| Yeah, all right, I'll take that. | ||
| I like a little silver lining, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like that, I will gladly take that. | ||
| All right, so let's spend a little time on where you're doing most of your work now, which is advocacy for Israel. | ||
| Now, one of the things that as a guy that voted Democrat my whole life, I can't really say I'm part of the left anymore, but a lefty my whole life until these last couple of years, I would say one of the things I'm most disappointed by by the modern left is the just sort of unabandoned hatred of Israel. | ||
| This six mile wide, absurdly tiny country with no natural resources, in the toughest neighborhood on earth, that's just trying to survive basically. | ||
| But it makes sense within the prism of everything else you've said here related to intersectionality. | ||
| They sort of don't like success. | ||
| And Jews, so they like minorities, but they like minorities when they're oppressed. | ||
| Jews are now thought of as no longer oppressed, so you automatically put them in the oppressor category. | ||
| Now you've got a country of these people that have survived, and not only survived, but actually thrived. | ||
| Although there's Arab Muslim members of the Supreme Court and everything else, but no, they don't really care about that. | ||
| So I don't even know what my question is, other than, like, what is that? | ||
| Because it all, in some way, it all just boils down to that. | ||
| They just hate this tiny little place that dares survive. | ||
| Like, I sort of view it that way. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I think whenever you combine the two processes of caricaturing things and... I had another one. | ||
| It's like when you caricature things, when you turn things into a caricature, and when you... Well, we'll just go with that. | ||
| If your fundamental philosophy, which, and I think intersectionality is this, esteems caricaturing things, then inevitably... Oh, this is the other thing. | ||
| Caricaturing and conspiracy theories. | ||
| You put that together, you'll get anti-Semitism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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And intersectionality... I've seen the memes. | |
| Yes, and intersectionality is a bit of a conspiracy theory. | ||
| And it also caricatures people, and it caricatures communities, and it caricatures societies. | ||
| And once you buy into that, I think that you will see, of course, Israel as this white, colonialist oppressor, and Palestinians as this brown oppressed, right? | ||
| Which is both a caricaturing and a conspiracy theory. | ||
| And in conspiracy theories, you caricature people, right? | ||
| Like that's sort of the process of how conspiracy theories work. | ||
| You can't deal with depth, or nuance, or complexity. | ||
| And so once this is your blueprint for understanding society, then you will gravitate toward anti-Semitism. | ||
| Someone needs to tell my brown Israeli brother-in-law that he's white. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, this is the great irony. | ||
| When you don't understand history and you also see everything through the prism of your own misunderstood When you understand everything or you see everything through the prism of your very small American lens, meaning these people grew up in America and they know that America's problems have historically been between black and white people, for example, until they think that everywhere else in the world all of the conflicts that are going on are obviously also something to be divided along those racial lines. | ||
| It's ironically jingoistic on some level or imperialistic, to use their terms, to see everything through the lens and through the vantage point of your own reality or historic reality, which is what they're projecting onto their understanding of Israel, Israeli society, not knowing, for example, that the majority of Jews in Israel are people of color, not knowing, just to really get down to details, that | ||
| Likud party, which is Bibi's party, rose to power because of its taking on the challenges and the interests of the Mizrahi community in Israel, the Jews from North Africa, right? | ||
| There is no understanding of this reality because this reality cannot possibly exist within an intersectionalist view of society. | ||
| Yeah, so in that way, it becomes the perfect test case for their, I would say, basic struggle for what reality is, in a way, or something like that. | ||
| Well, struggle for reality, inability, again, to deal with depth. | ||
| Like, I think that that's what this boils down to, ultimately. | ||
| An inability to deal with nuance, an inability to deal with human complexity. | ||
| The very complexity that they themselves have and possess. | ||
| And that's a skill set to be able to do that, right? | ||
| That's a virtue, I think, to be able to do that. | ||
| And so it's not just the fact that these, to go back to students, are promoting something which is toxic and bad. | ||
| It's also bad for them, right? | ||
| Like, they're not going to have a healthy, holistic life if they are... | ||
| Unable to deal with depth and human complexity. | ||
| Do you think it is also something, I'm not totally sure about this, but something to do with just the geographic size of Israel, like the absurdly tiny nature of the borders, that you could literally drive both ways, up north, south, east, west, easily in a day. | ||
| You could drive all the way north, all the way south, I'm sure in one day. | ||
| I think it's about a six-hour drive up north, down south. | ||
| This way you could drive like, I don't know, 15 times in a day or something like that. | ||
| But that it's so small that their focus on that can become like even more of a laser, even though they make it seem like it's just this monstrous, ever-growing blob or something like that. | ||
| I mean, I don't know, honestly. | ||
| I haven't quite figured out the geographical piece to this. | ||
| I don't know if it's relevant in their level of analysis. | ||
| Right, that's probably a little too high level or something. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think that really crosses their mind. | ||
| I think that just once you see the world through caricature, and once you see yourself as living in this space where everyone's against you, then it's easy to fall into this trap of Either anti-Semitism or coming very early close to anti-Semitism. | ||
| So what are some of the things that people say about you as you have fought this battle? | ||
| Because, you know, look, I can look at some of my other friends and former guests that are black, that have taken unpopular positions related to the way black people are supposed to think, which is, of course, inherently racist. | ||
| Spiritual centralism, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So the things that get said about Larry Elder, let's say, or Thomas Sowell for the last 50 years, or my friend David Webb, or plenty of other people, I know you get a certain percentage of that, because when I was doing a little Googling, people say not nice things about you. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it could be that I just turned off my Twitter mentions, and so I don't... Oh! | ||
| You figured out the meaning of life! | ||
| So I don't really, like, come into contact with... I mean, honestly, I, if it is happening, I, I think I have a filter, and it is happening, right? | ||
| But I think I have a filter, I have filters put into place and turned on that limit my seeing them. | ||
| I, I hate to sound like callous, but I just don't care. | ||
| Meaning, I think, I think that, I mean, you spotted me, like, in college, like, someone was very pejorative toward me, someone was very racist toward me because of my, my, like, calling me, like, a slave and all these various things. | ||
| And there have been other, like I had a death threat in college. | ||
| I suspect this was a tolerant lefty saying that, because of your views, right? | ||
| You know what? | ||
|
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I don't want to caricature Dave, according to... But I'm talking about this specific person. | |
| I think I'm right. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I'm just saying, I don't want to caricature the left as this sort of, like, monstrous... I know, that was just a pretty, that's what we call an educated guess. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| Yes, he himself, particularly, happened to belong to, yes. | ||
| But, but, what was I going to say? | ||
| Oh, I had a death threat also in college, which was, it wasn't funny, but I don't know, it's kind of funny. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| That someone would take such time to like focus his energy on me, which is a little weird. | ||
| But, beside that, I just spend my time and my energy Just trying to put out good things into the world, and I think that because I focus on that more than what the haters, so to speak, are saying, I just don't notice them anymore, and I'm just trying to put good energy out into the world. | ||
| To that end, you wrote your first piece in the New York Times. | ||
| How long ago? | ||
| About five, six months ago? | ||
| Something like that? | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Something like that, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think in July or something. | |
| Why I refuse to hate white people? | ||
| I want to get this right. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Why I refuse to avoid white people. | ||
| I'm glad you remembered. | ||
| I'm pretty sure you're supposed to remember the title. | ||
| I didn't pick the title. | ||
| Oh, right, they get the title. | ||
| Well, what do you make of that title, then? | ||
| Let's start that way, because a lot of people don't know that, that often you can write an op-ed for a major paper and that you don't pick the title. | ||
| Because often people don't get past the title. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I mean, I don't have a problem with it. | ||
| I think it was true to the essence of what I was saying. | ||
| So what was happening that, I suspect it has a lot to do with everything we've talked about here, but what was going on that you thought that you had to write this? | ||
| I mean, this should be pretty obvious stuff. | ||
| Right, I think there were actual pieces in the New York Times where other people of color were saying, like, I'm not gonna have my child speak to white people. | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| There was one. | ||
| I mean, you're not making this up. | ||
| There was one just a little bit before that that literally was saying that. | ||
| Yeah, literally said that. | ||
| And I think that I was also having this, intellectual fight within myself against Ta-Nehisi Coates and sort of everything he stands for and I have a very strong reaction to that and I think that this piece was a product of all of those things and a response to all of those things. | ||
| And the gist of it was just that I grew up around all types of people. | ||
| White people, black people, Muslims, Asians. | ||
| I went to a very egalitarian high school. | ||
| Extremely egalitarian. | ||
| So the process by which people, again, caricature, caricature each other and caricature white people is something that is a very foreign thing to me. | ||
| Like I don't, I can't quite wrap my head around that sort of language that's used by people who believe in intersectionality and quite frankly by people who probably have good intent. | ||
| Like I'm sure the guy who wrote that piece about having his child avoid white people was coming from a place of a genuine and a sincere place of concern. | ||
| So I don't wanna like disparage him in any way, but I just don't think that-- | ||
| You would say his answers are confused. | ||
| His answers are confused. - That his intent, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| But perhaps I would say that his fear was probably real. | ||
| And so I think that there's just a better way and a more healthier way of going about these things. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| What do you think Martin Luther King would think about our society right now? | ||
| There's a good one for you. | ||
| Did you read my tweet yesterday? | ||
| Do you know what I said? | ||
| I saw your tweet. | ||
| Tell the good people your tweet. | ||
| I said I was preparing for taping, and I was doing so by watching Dr. King's speeches. | ||
| That's so funny. | ||
| You're good at your job. | ||
| You know, I'm all right, I'm all right. | ||
| Well, what do you think he would think of things these days? | ||
| The state of the way we talk about race, the people that I think think they're his natural allies are often using arguments that are, what I would say, are 180 degrees the reverse of what his arguments were. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dr. King, I know this is almost an impossible question at some level. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, Dr. King wrote a book called Strength to Love, which is a collection of his sermons. | ||
| And I think in one of the first or second, like, sermons slash essays, he talks about, like, why he rooted his nonviolent movement in this belief in the concept of love, or gape love, love for love's sake, essentially. | ||
| And I think that, given the fact that he wrote that, I think that he would definitely eschew this new impulse within society to reduce each other to immutable characteristics. | ||
| I mean, this is what he was fighting against, right? | ||
| But, or I should say and, right, he would also have devised a rhetoric that was strong enough and compelling enough to inspire people to aspire to loving each other. | ||
| And I think that's actually what's missing. | ||
| Aside from a few different commentators here and there who sort of exist in, I think, the TED Talk circuit, I don't think that there's this movement within America trying to teach people how to love. | ||
| And I think that that's something we've lost. | ||
| And that was something that was very central to Dr. King's writings and Dr. King's work. | ||
| Again, as I said earlier, to devise a blueprint where you say, I am not going to fight back against this white person, not just because nonviolence is a very strategic tactic, but because this man was made in the image of God. | ||
| Like, that is existential. | ||
| And there is no profoundly existential movement rooted in love. | ||
| in the same way that it was when he devised it in the '60s. | ||
| Is that partly because we've just made everything political? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Yes, I mean, it's become like our identity, right? | ||
| Which is, by the way, why I'm just like, when you say, like, the left and the right, like, I don't know, these categories have, to a certain extent, lost meaning for me. | ||
| And I say that all the time, and I think you can even, when I'm saying them, there's a certain exhaustion with them, because sometimes you just have to frame, we just need words, you know, it's funny, you said, we've sort of lost the language to talk about some of this stuff. | ||
| Sometimes you just need some labels, loosely, to talk about these things, otherwise... The people who... | ||
| can handle complexity and the people who cannot handle complexity. | ||
| I'll go with that, but can you give me something snappier? | ||
| Can we get words to make that a little snappier? | ||
| Can you get that in one bumper sticker? | ||
| But that really is what it is. | ||
| I mean, that also explains the explosion of these conversations online. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because we're not getting them through mainstream media. | ||
| You know what I would say? | ||
| I would say friends and potential friends. | ||
| I told you we were going to end this with love. | ||
| Do you have anything else in the love department? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think you nailed it there, and then I want to talk about your website real quick. | ||
| Oh, I was going to talk about that. | ||
| Alright, so then let's roll them together right into that. | ||
| Okay, so one of the reasons why there are negative conversations being had about various topics, various political topics, on college campuses and even in our political discourse in general, is because of the framework in which that conversation is had. | ||
| That framework we've talked about is intersectionality to a certain extent. | ||
| Intersectionality essentially encourages people to make assumptions about each other. | ||
| Whether it's assumptions based upon skin color, based upon financial status or lack thereof, based upon gender, etc. | ||
| So in order to challenge the conversation or change the conversation, you have to challenge the framework. | ||
| And the framework that challenges intersectionality is the theory of enchantment. | ||
| And somebody here has a website called periodofenchantment.com. | ||
| What the hell is going on over there? | ||
| So a little bit of context. | ||
| I was at the Wall Street Journal for a year. | ||
| In 2015, I was mentored by Bret Stephens. | ||
| And part of my assignment was to develop a paper. | ||
| And in this paper, I was essentially trying to figure out what the psychology of connection was. | ||
| Why do people gravitate toward what they gravitate toward? | ||
| And if I can figure out the psychology of connection or the science of connection, then | ||
| can I use that science of connection to heal disconnection? | ||
| And that is what ended up being the theory of enchantment. | ||
| And the theory of enchantment drives or depends heavily upon pop culture, studying pop culture, because pop culture shows us what we gravitate toward. | ||
| So I began to ask myself questions during the course of writing this research paper, like, why do we gravitate toward companies like Nike? | ||
| You love Nike. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| Love Nike. | ||
| But, like, for some people, Nike is a religion. | ||
| Like, it's, like, on that level. | ||
| And, like, why do we gravitate towards singer-songwriters and influencers like Beyonce? | ||
| And people would say, well, it's Beyonce. | ||
| It's very obvious, Chloe. | ||
| It's Beyonce. | ||
| But I'm like, no, it's not. | ||
| It's not obvious. | ||
| There's something happening there. | ||
| And it turns out that all these influencers and all these companies, etc., are doing one simple thing. | ||
| They're creating content where their audience sees themselves and their potential reflected in the content. | ||
| And that's how they're generating connections. | ||
| So you wear that Nike shoe, because you think to yourself, if I wear this Nike shoe, I'll be able to just do it, right? | ||
| As the slogan goes. | ||
| When Beyonce says, who run the world, girls, women see themselves and their potential reflected in that song, which is why they gravitate toward her. | ||
| So, how do we use that basic idea to bring together people who have been disconnected? | ||
| So, the Theory of Enchantment has three rules, three principles of trying to bring connection in previously polarized spaces. | ||
| And this can be used in interpersonal conflict or conflicts of other natures. | ||
| So, the first rule is to remember that we are human beings and not political abstractions. | ||
| Because the first thing that happens in these spaces is we abstract about each other. | ||
| We think that we're talking to political objects or entities and not a full person. | ||
| And what I will do in a presentation is that I will point to a pop culture reference that illustrates this. | ||
| And I usually point to Kendrick Lamar. | ||
| Because Kendrick Lamar has a song called DNA. | ||
| And he says in this song, I got power, poison, pain, and joy inside my DNA. | ||
| And what he's doing when he says that is he is articulating and illustrating what it means to be a human being. | ||
| We have all of these things within us. | ||
| We have the capacity to do good, we have the capacity to destroy. | ||
| We have the capacity to build up, right? | ||
| And we have the capacity to tear down. | ||
| And just as this impulse exists within the person who I disagree with, who I'm having a problem with, it also exists within me, right? | ||
| And realizing this is sort of the beginning, I think, for empathy and mutual understanding. | ||
| So that's the first rule. | ||
| Remember, we are human beings, not political abstractions, and as a corollary, we will not dehumanize or stereotype or objectify any of the human beings or any of the communities involved in this conflict, whatever that conflict is. | ||
| The second principle is, if you want to criticize, criticize in order to uplift and empower, never to tear down, never to destroy. | ||
| So if that person who believes in intersectionality is being very mean to me and aggressive to me, I could criticize him by cursing him out, right? | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| By, you know, speaking down to him. | ||
| Or I can criticize him in a way that makes it very clear that I actually believe in his potential. | ||
| And I actually believe that he's better than the content or the rhetoric, the empty rhetoric that he's putting out. | ||
| And by speaking in the manner that suggests that, I'm more likely to change him. | ||
| So quick story, Maya Angelou told this story about how she was on set with Tupac at a movie set and Tupac was in the corner somewhere cursing out this guy. | ||
| Uh, who he didn't like, and they were like about to get into a fight. | ||
| And then Maya Angelou says, come here, come here, let me talk to you. | ||
| And he's Tupac, so he's like, he's like still mumbling under his breath. | ||
| And then she says, come over here, let me talk to you! | ||
| And then she tells him, don't you know that we're counting on you? | ||
| Don't you know that you are the next generation? | ||
| And that we're looking toward you to pave the way for us. | ||
| Don't you know that you have been loved? | ||
| And we're looking toward you as the next person to uphold us. | ||
| And so the story goes that in that moment, Tupac starts crying because she had rooted her criticism in her fundamental belief in him, you know? | ||
| And then the next day he's like, he's sort of like kind of still being aggressive toward that guy and then Maya passes and he goes, He like straightens up. | ||
| He goes, good morning Miss Angela. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So he changes, he modifies his behavior in front of someone because she believes in him. | ||
| So that's the second. | ||
| And then the third principle, the third and final principle is everything we do, we try to root in love and compassion. | ||
| Which sounds, which sounds very like, you know, fake. | ||
| But what it means is if someone is being aggressive towards you or mean towards you or whatever, You call that out as inappropriate, you say, you know, I don't know you're from Adam, I don't know why you're prejudging me, which is the definition of prejudice, right? | ||
| But what I'm not going to do is I'm not going to prejudge you, even though you have prejudged me. | ||
| Instead, if you want, let's go to this coffee shop and let's actually talk. | ||
| about this topic, topic X, topic Y, whatever we're having a disagreement over. | ||
| Because what's happening in that moment is they're probably seeing you as a political abstraction, not as a full human being. | ||
| You have to re-humanize that space. | ||
| And the purpose, by the way, is not to get that person to agree with every single viewpoint you have. | ||
| The purpose of that is to bring back compassion and empathy, even in the midst of profound disagreement, which is something we are not doing so well here. | ||
| In America. | ||
| So, that's the Theory of Enchantment. | ||
| This has been a pleasure. | ||
| Can you run for president or something? | ||
| No, absolutely not. | ||
| That would not work with any of those three pillars. | ||
| No, no, no, it would. | ||
| I just prefer pop culture to political culture. | ||
| That's the honest truth. | ||
| But I appreciate that. | ||
| Alright, well I'm so glad we finally did this and we will do it again for sure. |
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