May 14, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
38:06
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unidentified
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(dramatic music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and we've got another Friday panel extravaganza for you. | ||
| Today, we're gonna be discussing a brand new series launching on Locals this summer called The Woke Reformation. | ||
| And joining me are the filmmaker, Travis Brown, and two of the series contributors, friends, and former guests of The Rubin Report, bestselling author, Douglas Murray, and associate professor of philosophy at Portland State University, Peter Boghossian. | ||
| Guys, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
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unidentified
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Very good to be with you. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| So my audience, of course, knows Douglas and Pete. | ||
| So Travis, I'm gonna let you introduce yourself first. | ||
| So first, if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this project. | ||
| This was sort of your baby. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, I am an independent filmmaker in the woke capital of the world, also known as Portland, Oregon. | ||
| I'm in bed with my dog, Nora, because I have debilitating back pain and it keeps me at about 90% horizontal, which is difficult. | ||
| But I have a really fantastic team, many of whom I can't name for fear of backlash, which is unfortunate. | ||
| But I have a fantastic team, including Evan Gandy as my cinematographer, which is why the film looks so good. | ||
| But I got into it because I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home. | ||
| that was really, really challenging, and I was indoctrinated into this belief system, and I slowly, slowly left it behind, and then I moved to Portland. | ||
| Well, I actually moved to Seattle and then Portland, two of the most liberal, progressive cities around. | ||
| And I thought I would agree more with these people, but it turns out I don't. | ||
| It turns out that there are very similar dogmas and religious-like belief systems that people participate in. | ||
| And that really concerned me. | ||
| It mirrored my childhood. | ||
| And I see people constantly being indoctrinated into this woke religion. | ||
| And so that's what I want to help people understand this problem. | ||
| In particular, liberals and progressives. | ||
| I want them to be aware of where the ideology came from and know that it's divisive and harmful. | ||
| Pete, since you're in Portland, how did you get involved in all this? | ||
| Did you guys just bump into each other on the street and realize, oh my God, there's someone else sane here? | ||
| No, I've known Travis for quite a while. | ||
| He's filmed many, many of my events. | ||
| And one of the things that's been fascinating to me, Dave, is he approached me about the series precisely because he had an experience that neither Douglas nor I have had. | ||
| of having grown up in a Christian-like cult. | ||
| I'll let Travis speak to the details of that, but the parallels just seem so ominous to him. | ||
| And again, I have a different view, and I think Douglas has a different way of looking at the problem. | ||
| But from someone who's been indoctrinated in a religious cult, to see the parallels and the similarities, and he just said, I have to do something about this. | ||
| It's a kind of poison that's killing everybody. | ||
| And we started talking about what those parallels were, and then he dedicated himself, he devoted himself to making the series. | ||
| Yeah, Douglas, I wanna let you jump in, and then we're gonna throw quickly to the two-minute trailer, which is really fantastic. | ||
| How'd you get involved in this project? | ||
| Oh, well, you know, some people, summer in the south of France, or spring in Italy, and I was autumning in Portland. | ||
| That's how these guys got me roped in, and I have to say it was a great pleasure. | ||
| I was disaster tourism-ing in the state of Oregon ahead of the election, around the time of the election. | ||
| It's easy to joke about it, but as everyone here knows, we're dealing with, as Travis said, fundamentalists here. | ||
| People who have been indoctrinated into a fundamentalist mindset. | ||
| We're quite good in this era of identifying when people are falling into Scientology or some other crazy sect. | ||
| And yet the biggest growing sect of our time has been going on, growing underneath us without being identified. | ||
| So anyone who does identify that and wants to push back against that and take that sect apart, deconstruct the deconstructionists as I think of it, I'm on board. | ||
| And I have to say from everything I've seen so far, it looks just terrific. | ||
| All right, well, you cued me up perfectly. | ||
| so let's throw to the trailer for the woke reformation. | ||
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unidentified
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(soft music) | |
| I don't care how white passing I am. | ||
| I am mixed and I am fucking proud! | ||
| You know better than me, I wish you would, white lady, I wish you would! | ||
| Unfortunately, a large number of people believing they're acting in the name of justice seem to think that you can play groups of people against other groups in order to win. | ||
| This isn't a solution for justice, it's a solution for endless ongoing division. | ||
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unidentified
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It's not just that it's just spontaneously or arbitrarily pops up. | |
| There's a system in place that manufactures these ideas, they look at the universities as their own particular ideology mill, and they indoctrinate people into intersectionality. | ||
| So a whole generation of people are now believing things that are totally untethered to reality. | ||
| These are people who are teaching very dangerous ideas. | ||
| What makes those ideas dangerous is that they're divisive. | ||
| We start looking at each other in terms of race. | ||
| This does not advance civil rights causes. | ||
| It's exactly the opposite. | ||
| I have actually been fired. | ||
| I've been replaced for not towing the line. | ||
| If you show up as an authentic individual in any way, shape or form, where the woke ideology holds sway, well, We will take away your ability to support yourself. | ||
| We'll take away your ability to eat. | ||
| We'll take away your ability to own anything. | ||
| It's deeply dystopian. | ||
| It's lazy to just, like, set somebody off and say, I don't care about their life anymore and I don't want this person to have any way back ever. | ||
| If that's the modus operandi you're going to live by, you better be careful. | ||
| Because absolutely, this will come for you. | ||
| And this is being driven by people who believe they are doing this and acting in this way in order to make us all freer. | ||
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unidentified
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And they're not. | |
| They're tying everyone down. | ||
| They're tying us up. | ||
| They're holding everybody back. | ||
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| So Travis, what do you want the film to accomplish? | ||
| Is this really just about waking up those progressives and liberals, as you're saying, or are you trying to really start a movement here? | ||
| I mean, I know that these guys have really been in on that for a long time. | ||
| Yeah, that's a great question. | ||
| I mean, I want the series to appeal to everyone, conservatives, liberals, moderates, progressives, whoever. | ||
| There's a certain, as Douglas said, sect will be very angry with me for making this, but those people are unfortunately lost altogether. | ||
| My goal is to help people, one, understand the origins of this stuff, so I was lucky enough to get Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay at the beginning of the series, and then lucky enough to obviously get Douglas and Pete and Nancy Rommelman and my friend Corey Drayton, who happens to be a black filmmaker here in Portland, to speak out against this stuff. | ||
| So the goal is to help people understand the origins, to help them know how divisive it is and how people are using racism and sexism as political shields for political power and social clout. | ||
| A lot of people still don't understand that. | ||
| These are just proxies and I think people need to know that. | ||
| And then I also hope at the end of the series, I offer two or three episodes that are solutions. | ||
| What can people do if they see CRT being taught in the school or they see this racist bullshit in their workplace. | ||
| What can they do? | ||
| Douglas offered a lot of really great examples of what people can do and so did Nancy. | ||
| And Azran Omani actually got in the series too. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Douglas, are you shocked, I should say? | ||
| Are you shocked that so much of this has leaked across the pond and is now in the UK and really is pretty much everywhere in the West at this point? | ||
| It's not just in Portland where these two guys are. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| It has leaked way beyond the borders of where one might have thought it could have stopped. | ||
| But there are good signs that people are opposing it. | ||
| Just in recent weeks, we've seen an increasing pushback against it from France. | ||
| It's quite uncommon to hear somebody with my accent praising the French, but here we go. | ||
| Emmanuel Macron and academics across France have been saying no. | ||
| This is anti-academic, anti-thought. | ||
| You know, I mean, France is, of course, partly responsible for this, because a sort of form of French thought went across to America, was picked up by maniacs, and now they're trying to export it everywhere else. | ||
| But actually, as I say, it's a source of some hope that in France, at any rate, from the top government to, you know, very significant figures in French thought, they're saying, you know, this doesn't cut it. | ||
| This isn't what you pretend it is. | ||
| It isn't academia. | ||
| It isn't thought. | ||
| It isn't philosophy. | ||
| It's dogmatic politics that attempts, of course, to bully everyone by presenting itself | ||
| as incredibly intelligent and intimidating people. | ||
| But I think the more people see other people not being intimidated by it, | ||
| the more they won't be intimidated by it themselves. | ||
| And Travis and Peter and you, Dave, I mean, we all know examples of that. | ||
| Many, many people who at first just don't know what has happened when this juggernaut comes at them. | ||
| And of course, for many people, it comes at them at their own dinner table | ||
| in their own household. | ||
| With kids they've sent away to college and they've come back stupider. | ||
| And they don't know what to do when this juggernaut comes at them at first. | ||
| But by now, and with Travis's film and Peter's work and the work of many other people as well, people do now know. | ||
| They can now know what it is and they can know how to dodge this juggernaut and even maybe turn it round. | ||
| Pete, I was just watching the alien movies. | ||
| I watched four of the alien movies this weekend. | ||
| There's a moment in the original alien movie where the science officer, who ends up being an android, but he basically is talking about the elegance and how much he admires the alien because it just takes over the host and it's merciless and it knows what it's doing and it doesn't have remorse or a conscience or anything else. | ||
| And as I'm watching it, I'm thinking, oh, that sounds kind of similar to something going on right now. | ||
| Do you sort of admire the way this thing has spread, not because you respect it, but because it's been so effective in doing what it's tried to set out to accomplish? | ||
| I would suppose I'd admire it in the way I'd admire any ghastly, grotesque spectacle that is so deranged that it really separates itself from the norms of human rationality and morality. | ||
| So in that sense, yeah, I guess I do. | ||
| I remember that scene. | ||
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unidentified
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I love the alien films. | |
| One of the things that strikes me about this, and I think it's very important to know, is like the alien, this destroys everything it touches. | ||
| Anything it contacts, forget it. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| And you have to have a zero-tolerance policy. | ||
| It is a universal solvent that There is no institution, no matter how venerable, that will not be destroyed. | ||
| There is no individual, once it seeps into their cognitions. | ||
| And Douglas and I talked in Travis's film about how that takes place, through the words, through equity, diversity, inclusion. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes, it is a universal solvent. | |
| I guess I admire it. | ||
| They've had 40 years to work on it. | ||
| And like Douglas said, Helen Pluckrose is a wonderful piece in Ariel magazine, A-R-E-O. | ||
| I think the title is How French Intellectuals Ruin the West. | ||
| So they've had many, many decades of working on the language of, really, I think one of the ways to think about it, again, back to the alien parallel, we think of evolution As a biological process, but as Dawkins says, it's also a memetic process. | ||
| Ideas evolved and this particular idea has a kind of recalcitrance to it that it's almost like, it's like a little bee alien. | ||
| You stomp them out and they come, keep coming back like cockroaches. | ||
| So, so the key thing is to just not let, not let social justice in any form into the organization have zero tolerance for it. | ||
| And we've seen case after case after case of the ACLU, the SPLC, the university systems, and on and on and on, advertising corporations, marketing. | ||
| Once it happens, it's over. | ||
| Travis, to that point, when you were interviewing people and going to some of these events, and obviously in the trailer you see a lot of the sort of hysteria around this, I mean, were you shocked at the way that just seemingly sane 18-year-olds are suddenly screaming about things that they basically know nothing about? | ||
| I don't know if shocked is the right word, given my developmental experience. | ||
| It isn't actually surprising, to be honest. | ||
| You know, this is something Jordan Peterson talks a lot about, this desire for meaning and for community. | ||
| And unfortunately, as Pete says, it's it's ghastly and it's grotesque, but it does offer that, right? | ||
| It does offer meaning. | ||
| It does offer a grand narrative, a purpose. | ||
| And so I think that's incredibly important. | ||
| And that's something that we're largely missing. | ||
| And Douglas has talked about this as well. | ||
| But no, it's not that surprising to me. | ||
| I mean, people will do anything to hold on to whatever sense of meaning and purpose that they have. | ||
| Yeah, Douglas, do you think that's why, you know, we've discussed this a couple of times, you know, I've come to the conclusion that the conservatives, generally speaking, have a better defense mechanism because there is more structure around their sense of meaning that the liberals don't necessarily have. | ||
| So I guess, partly, do you agree with that, even though I know we've discussed it a couple of times, and do you think that offers a better defense? | ||
| Well, there are lots of defenses against it. | ||
| One, which sounds like a critique of conservatism but isn't, is that conservatives are naturally more suspicious of ideas than leftists. | ||
| It's a strange paradox in political thought. | ||
| Those of us who are more to the right often have to juggle with this paradox. | ||
| But the suspicion of ideas on the ideological right comes about for very good reason. | ||
| It comes about, I mean, we read it in Edmund Burke, most famously, a fear of where ideas lead in politics. | ||
| And this is very, of course, this is hard, particularly for younger people to resist, because if somebody comes at you with an all-explaining idea and says, this is the great revolution of your time, The young are disproportionately likely to want to jump in | ||
| on that because who doesn't want to have a bit of that action? | ||
| It's only when you're older, Parfen Dinger, more experienced, that you can see, well, | ||
| that action includes a lot of blood, a lot of crushed skulls, a lot of wrecked lives | ||
| and ruined opportunities, and it's not so cute when you look at it in the rearview mirror. | ||
| So that sort of age and youth experience I also think is reflected in the political debate on the left and right. | ||
| That there is a suspicion of ideas, and you see that even in the everyday dialogue in the media and elsewhere. | ||
| The right tends to say, or at its best says, we don't want any of that nonsense and combat it away. | ||
| But parts of the left, certainly, too much of it, as Peter well knows, sort of fall into the discussion. | ||
| It's what Peter said about the importance of the zero tolerance strategy towards this. | ||
| They take a bit of it. | ||
| You know, people start talking about equity. | ||
| and social justice and people slip even into the language. | ||
| When they talk about social justice, they're not talking about social justice. | ||
| Most of the time they just mean revenge. | ||
| When they talk about racism and anti-racism, they don't mean anti-racism. | ||
| They mean revenge racism by a different group of people. | ||
| And just more and more people have to realize that even the language has been totally polluted. | ||
| So I'm with Peter. | ||
| You just can't take on bits of the language. | ||
| You can't concede bits of it. | ||
| This is a deeply ugly ideology. | ||
| It aspires to be totalitarian. | ||
| Wherever it gets a grip, as in parts of Portland, it wrecks everything that it has in its purview. | ||
| I hope more and more people realize that. | ||
| And I think they are realizing it. | ||
| By the way, Douglas, real quickly, one of the reasons that I loved Douglas's last book, Madness of Crowds, is because he makes a point of separating the T, the trans, from the gay rights movement, because they combine all of these things, and then suddenly no one actually knows what they're fighting for or what they're fighting against anymore. | ||
| Pete, go ahead. | ||
| I don't remember what I was gonna say. | ||
| I started thinking of the Madness of Crowds, and if you haven't read it, it's a mandatory read. | ||
| So Pete, I sort of feel like you were kind of born to be in this fight because you're a philosophy professor in Portland. | ||
| You wrote a book called A Manual for Creating Atheists. | ||
| I mean, you try to deprogram people from bad ideas. | ||
| But do you think you saw all this early just by the nature of that, that you were in the city at a college, like the city that's the craziest, at a college that's one of the craziest? | ||
| The very thing that you study and care about is so deeply connected to all this. | ||
| Yeah, I think that was part of it. | ||
| I came from the New Atheist Movement, or even before that, I came from basic epistemology, which is how you know what you think you know. | ||
| And some of the same tools were so striking to me, the same manifestations, the illiberalism, the irrationality, the lack of cognitive liberty. | ||
| People want you to think a certain way. | ||
| But let's be clear about something. | ||
| I'm done playing. | ||
| I think Douglas is done playing. | ||
| I'm waging full-scale ideological warfare against the enemies of Western civilization. | ||
| I am taking no prisoners. | ||
| I have very large-scale projects coming for the enemies of reason and science and rationality. | ||
| These people are divisive, neo-racist, hate-mongers, and there's simply no—we must broker absolutely Zero tolerance with this ideology, and the only way forward at this point is full-scale ideological war, and I will take no prisoners, and that's what I'm devoting my life to. | ||
| I seek the complete eradication and extirpation of the ideology from every facet of life. | ||
| Likewise. | ||
| But Pete, tell me how you really feel. | ||
| Travis, I think you must love hearing that, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, Pete and I are in battle together for sure, and we have many projects planned. | ||
| I want to be explicitly clear about something, and Pete framed it nicely, but these are ideas that are the problem. | ||
| Obviously, certain people are bad actors, but most people, like most religious people, are genuinely good. | ||
| They want to do good, but it's the ideology that's the problem, and that's what we're fighting. | ||
| Used to just mean being awakened to injustice. | ||
| You know, that's not what it means anymore, at least for most people. | ||
| I'm using it in the series as a catch-all term for this umbrella ideology of, you know, whether it's transgender ideology or, you know, anti-racism ideology, critical race theory. | ||
| I'm using it as an umbrella term, and I do think we should all be awakened to injustice, but that's not what these people are doing. | ||
| That's not what this ideology accomplishes. | ||
| Yeah, Douglas, what's been the best defense that you've seen against this? | ||
| Well, I think there have been quite a few. | ||
| I mean, individuals have cropped up in recent years from a very interesting collection of backgrounds and an interesting collection of disciplines. | ||
| It's fascinating, actually, now you can almost sort of chart the people who've popped up across the globe who have tried to point out the flaws in this ideology. | ||
| Quite often it's because the ideology has come for them. | ||
| But the thing I observe that's the most heartening really, and I think I said this to Travis and Peter when we were filming, is that one thing I found most heartening is that there are weird people, I think like all of us, there are weird people who hold on to concepts like truth and put a high premium on them. | ||
| And not going along with lies they're told to go along with. | ||
| This throws up really curious people. | ||
| It throws up some very religious people. | ||
| They just don't want to repeat lies they're told. | ||
| It throws up atheists. | ||
| There's no clear sweep on that one. | ||
| It throws up people on the ideological left and people on the ideological right. | ||
| People who are fascinated by politics and people who never really gave a damn about politics until this came along. | ||
| What strikes me is by now there's a very interesting coterie of people around the world of every | ||
| imaginable background who just don't like being told to lie and will not go along with | ||
| the lie. | ||
| And sometimes they're teachers, they crop up around the world. | ||
| And this is the interesting thing. | ||
| We saw it recently with the Manhattan school teacher. | ||
| If you don't go along with it, the short term you pay an extraordinary price, but you know | ||
| you're on to something because of the extraordinary interest that comes around you when you start | ||
| saying that you don't believe this. | ||
| You see, if one teacher in a school says, "Hang on, we're being segregated | ||
| "along racial lines in the school," | ||
| and I don't think that's a good thing, you will immediately be in serious trouble | ||
| as the Manhattan school teacher was with your boss, and you might even lose your job in the short term. | ||
| Paul Rossi, you might even lose your job in the short term as he did, although I gather he's got a job now, | ||
| but, and any child would be very, very lucky to be taught by him. | ||
| But the point is, is that you immediately attract all this attention because of the number of people | ||
| who don't yet have the guts to do it. | ||
| But this suggests that the people who are doing it are on to something. | ||
| The movement is only going to grow. | ||
| I'm not at all surprised at this stage that the Kendi's and the D'Angelo's and all the other Hucksters and Fordsters of the age are talking a higher and higher rhetoric and talking more | ||
| and more angrily. | ||
| Why are they doing it? | ||
| Because they're starting to notice that they're not being regarded as the self-appointed sheriffs | ||
| that they think they are. | ||
| They came into town and literally announced themselves sheriff of the entire moral landscape. | ||
| And then these irritating people, a Boghossian there, a Travis Brown there, a Dave Revere, | ||
| They start to pop up and say, "I don't respect your credentials." | ||
| You don't have the right to be sheriff. | ||
| And more and more people are doing it. | ||
| They're losing their power. | ||
| It's going to be ugly as they get out, but they're going to get out. | ||
| You know, it's funny, Douglas, I usually don't come to you for the Pollyannish response, but you're giving me the silver lining. | ||
| I have fought so many unwinnable battles in my life. | ||
| I know an unwinnable battle when I see one. | ||
| This is a winnable battle. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| It's inherently unsustainable. | ||
| So two things. | ||
| What Douglas talked about, speaking truth in the face of danger. | ||
| It's a Greek virtue called parrhesia. | ||
| Ironically, Foucault writes about it. | ||
| And that's what we need. | ||
| We need a thousand Paul Rossi's. | ||
| We need a thousand Jody Shaw's. | ||
| And then we need a cascading effect of people who are willing to speak out. | ||
| So the most important thing is go to these events, show up, document, make videos, put yourself out there. | ||
| And if you're afraid, piggybacking off of what Travis said, of compromising your relationships | ||
| and damaging your friendships, I would argue that these people | ||
| weren't your friends to begin with. | ||
| Aristotle talks about the highest form of friendship is between two virtuous people. | ||
| Two people who are willing to speak about an injustice. | ||
| Two people who are willing to speak about a truth. | ||
| And so, you should never have to obfuscate or hide what you believe or what you say. | ||
| You should never have to bear false witness or confess to something in which you don't believe. | ||
| And this is exactly what these people are telling us to do. | ||
| So if you're worried about your friendships being... So Dave, if you and I have a disagreement, we will talk to each other. | ||
| We've done it before. | ||
| And we'll be honest with each other, and we'll be forthright with each other, and then we will have drinks. | ||
| That is not the case with the people who have been infected by this ideology. | ||
| And so the first thing that people need is speaking truth in the face of danger, the Greek virtue of parrhesia. | ||
| And the second thing is, these people are probably not your friends. | ||
| So if you want to have authentic relationships in your life, that has to be based upon truth. | ||
| Well, I love that you guys are all sort of going on the offense here, because that's what we've needed for a long time. | ||
| We all were diagnosing it, talking about it, interviewing the people about what was happening, but now there seems to be this feeling of like, oh, now we can make a move. | ||
| Travis, when you're making a documentary like this, how do you make sure that you don't wade into propaganda, that you actually stay with something that is true, even when it's this closely held to you? | ||
| That's a fair question. | ||
| It's a great question. | ||
| I mean, when I left Christianity behind, one of the guiding lights for me was truth. | ||
| I wanted to know the truth no matter how it made me feel, which is a scary position to put yourself in. | ||
| It's very discomforting. | ||
| But I think that's one way that I navigate this, is that if I—as a matter of fact, I was talking with Peter recently, and we have disagreements here and there, and I have to always be honest about it. | ||
| And I think that that's just what you have to do. | ||
| And in terms of propaganda, there's a story I could tell, but I won't. | ||
| Maybe behind the scenes I'll tell you. | ||
| I fought very hard to make sure that this was the truth as I saw it. | ||
| So I have biases. | ||
| I'm sure people will say it's biased. | ||
| I did my very best, just as I did with Christianity, to examine it honestly, and just to be honest about the problem, and I want to piggyback off what they said. | ||
| People have to start speaking out. | ||
| I didn't really have a horse in this fight in the sense of, it wasn't at my school, I'm independent, it's not necessarily a problem, but when I see everyone going fucking mad around me, people need to stand up and not put up with it anymore. | ||
| So Douglas, if this is a winnable fight, as you said it is, what do we do after? | ||
| Let's say we really do get some wins and this thing starts turning around a little bit. | ||
| It seems fairly obvious to me that the real, you know, the Kendys and the people that have really been driving at D'Angelo, et cetera, they're not gonna ever wave the white flag and say, oh, we were actually wrong about everything we said about the nature of reality. | ||
| I think some of the foot soldiers, maybe, we can show them a better path out, but what do we do about the sort of intellectual drivers of this thing that it's their reason for existence? | ||
| Like, what happens after with them? | ||
| Because they wanna burn it down. | ||
| I mean, they're telling us that's what they want. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, they are the intellectual drivers of it, and they have a sort of pattern of intellectualism. | ||
| I think they're being found out. | ||
| I think they're being seen through. | ||
| And that's the most dangerous thing for any intellectual movement, like with any politician. | ||
| It's not when people dislike you, it's when they see through you. | ||
| And we can see through this now. | ||
| I made a lot of jokes in The Madness of Crowds about this, about the execrable way in which these people write. | ||
| You can tell in the prose that they don't really know what they're doing. | ||
| Because if they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't write so badly. | ||
| You only write as badly as they do when you're trying to cover over a lie or you don't know what you're saying. | ||
| So I think the intellectual pattern is being seen through. | ||
| I don't think there's much more left in it. | ||
| I think that they are clearly the people you described as intellectual drivers, clearly | ||
| working with an increasingly inflated currency. | ||
| They have called everyone Hitler now. | ||
| Literally everybody is a racist. | ||
| Everybody is a fascist. | ||
| They've devalued the entire currency. | ||
| And I don't think that they've got much further to go on this road. | ||
| I think they're in a situation of Zimbabwean hyperinflation with their currency. | ||
| I think it's a very dangerous position for them to be in. | ||
| They will continue to wheel around their wheelbarrows full of excrement. | ||
| But there is no reason why, as the years go on, everybody will continue to pay them the attention that they have. | ||
| I think most people will continue to look at them with some interest. | ||
| Once they've seen through, they will discard these people. | ||
| They will keep going, but their thoughts will be discarded. | ||
| Just as surely as it only took a few extraordinary people like Solzhenitsyn to muck the whole game up. | ||
| for the the the crass uh far-left marxist apologists of totalitarianism in the late 20th century very few of them by the way ever actually as Peter knows very few of them ever actually said oh okay guys the game's up they just slithered away they slithered away and that's what will happen with these guys at some point in the future Robin DiAngelo will be writing books still it's just no one will be reading them We know they're lying, they know they're lying, and they know we know they're lying. | ||
| That's pretty much it right there. | ||
| They're like televangelists. | ||
| That's exactly what they are. | ||
| No one cares about televangelists anymore, and that's exactly what these people are. | ||
| Pete, what about the institutions that they'll leave behind? | ||
| I mean, would you view a place, I don't wanna put you on the hot seat at your exact university, but like, would you view these places that have been so infected that they could ever come back, even as more and more people move away from this? | ||
| No, Portland State University is a festering ideological cesspool. | ||
| I wouldn't even send a dog there. | ||
| And I was trying not to put you on the spot. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Well, you have to speak about it what it is, right? | ||
| It is an ideology mill. | ||
| It is an indoctrination center. | ||
| And the purpose of the entire institution is based upon equity. | ||
| The president has come out, Stephen Percy, and said repeatedly in video, on email, the highest priority of the university is to address racism. | ||
| the highest priority, not to educate students, not academic excellence, no intellectual virtues, | ||
|
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not even to be solvent, not even to be fiscally solvent. I think the university is lost. We've | |
| given some hardcore ideologues, we've given them jobs for life. They're intent on indoctrinating | ||
| students. They come into the classroom with the right answers, and they test people on what those | ||
| answers are and you mark right or wrong as a consequence of that. | ||
| That leaks out into the... | ||
| into the broader public in our institutions. | ||
| The problem is that the mission of those institutions is the same, like the ACLU, but the people | ||
| occupying those positions have different moral values. | ||
| I was taught civics when I was a kid. | ||
| I'm 54. | ||
| As younger people occupy those institutions, the values that they've been indoctrinated | ||
| with-- and that's one of the things that's so destructive about this and so hurtful, | ||
| is that they think that they're doing good. | ||
| They think that they're basing their beliefs on the basis of evidence because their professors | ||
| told them so. | ||
| But their professors are really third-rate ideologues. | ||
|
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And as Douglas says, "Do you think that the people occupying those positions are doing | |
| Judith Butler, for example, she's a paragon of unclarity, like she just does not write clearly. | ||
| She obfuscates. | ||
| And one of the things that I think that we'll see, we're already seeing, is the new institutions, academic institutions, that are evolving and that are rising up. | ||
| The problem is that we cannot maintain our economic competitiveness if the meritocracy is destroyed, if our colleges and universities are suspect, And already there's been a crisis of legitimacy, so there's been an erosion of confidence in our public institutions. | ||
| I don't think it's possible to get that trust back unless we build new institutions. | ||
| That's the only way I see it. | ||
| Here's one other thing that I want to stress that's so important, that if you had a magic wand, and you can wave the wand and take the ideology totally out of K-12 systems of education, The problem is that colleges of education are entirely predicated upon this ideology. | ||
| They're literally built on Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. | ||
| They're built on critical consciousness. | ||
| They're built on ideas that are that come in a suite to the woke ideology. | ||
| So, those K-12 systems would then just be populated, again, with ideologues. | ||
| So, we know the root of this problem, right? | ||
| So, in the Grievance Studies Affair we tried to expose that, and Cynical Theories and the Madness of Crowds, those two books explained it. | ||
| Now we're in a new phase of this, and the new phase is to solve it. | ||
| The new phase is ideological warfare. | ||
| The new phrase is shifting the Overton window to push these ideas into disrepute. | ||
| But part of that is we need structures in our society. | ||
| We need institutions and systems that come up commensurate with that. | ||
| K through 12 systems, higher colleges and education, because if we don't have that, it will be impossible to maintain our economic competitiveness. | ||
| Pete, I got nothing better to do than save the world. | ||
| So I look forward to doing this with you. | ||
| Travis, I wanna give you the last word, and then we'll explain where people can watch and communicate with you guys directly. | ||
| Great, well, first, I just wanna say thanks again for having me on. | ||
| I'm really honored to be on a virtual stage with all you guys. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Secondly, I want to touch on what you kind of hinted at in your last question to Douglas, like what comes after this, right? | ||
| Like what do we do when we've just dismantled this? | ||
| The idea is not just to dismantle and just deconstruct for no reason. | ||
| There's a reason to do that. | ||
| And that's to live meaningful lives, to enjoy friendships, to explore, to travel, to make art. | ||
| You know, there's so much to life, so much more to life than this bullshit. | ||
| And there are injustices that we ought to fight, but this is not the way to fight them. | ||
| We know how to fight these injustices. | ||
| We learned from the civil rights. | ||
| We have the liberal values that we need to push back and to unify. | ||
| So that's my call to action, I suppose. | ||
| Douglas, I would be remiss if I didn't give you the opening for a classic Douglas Murray ending of an episode. | ||
|
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No, I entirely endorse what Travis just said. | |
| I think the point is to get these people out of the way, to drop the friends if they want to drop you because of this. | ||
| If your friend's indoctrinated, try to get rid of them. | ||
| They don't want the best for you. | ||
| And to get these people out of the way, get all of these fraudsters and intellectual hucksters out of our way. | ||
| And there is no single answer to what we're meant to do with our lives after this. | ||
| But we do know that this system is going to be holding back so many people. | ||
| It's going to be, as it already has done, it's going to be ripping families apart, ripping friendships apart, ripping societies apart, ripping cities apart. | ||
| And we need to get this out of our way to get on to what we do. | ||
| What should we do? | ||
| Almost anything else. | ||
| Almost anything else. | ||
| Just not this. | ||
|
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You'd be better off looking at a wall. | |
| Can I add one last thing? | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| Just one last thing, which is we do need to get these people out of the way, but anyone who changes their mind needs to be forgiven. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
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Absolutely. | |
| 100%, great ending. - Very important point. | ||
| Yep, excellent. | ||
| Hey, we've got a redemption narrative, which is that we're humans and we're flawed. | ||
| And I think that gets to Pete's earlier point, that they don't have that narrative. | ||
| They kind of want you to bow forever. | ||
| Well, listen, I'm thrilled to be in this fight with you guys, and I'm also thrilled to tell everybody | ||
| that this is sort of the first original that we're doing on Locals. | ||
| So if you go to thewokereformation.locals.com, you can actually see clips of the series already. | ||
| You can communicate directly with these guys. | ||
| I'm gonna be happy to help in any way I possibly can, and I'll jump in the community as well. | ||
| And you know, you've always got an ally in me. | ||
| So Travis Douglas, Pete, I thank you guys. | ||
| Have a great weekend. | ||
| And we'll talk soon. |
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