June 20, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
57:18
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| I don't think I, I don't, I still don't think I am conservative in the older meaning of the word. | ||
| Um, I'm definitely not, you know, if you went and read some particular political treatise on conservatism, I'm going to disagree with quite a bit of it. | ||
| At the same time, I find a lot of sympathy for the arguments of preserving something that is worth preserving or conserving that. | ||
| So yeah, I was definitely not a radical, definitely kind of middle of the road, average every day. | ||
| liberal left kind of guy. | ||
| And I was genuinely, like you said, apprehensive. | ||
| It's kind of an understatement to work with conservatives in any significant regard, | ||
| which has been really an interesting experience because they're exactly the opposite | ||
| of what the leftist propaganda had told me they would be like. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| Joining me today is the founder of New Discourses and the co-author of "Cynical Theories, | ||
| "How Activist Scholarship Made Everything "About Race, Gender, and Identity." | ||
| James Lindsay, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey Dave, good to see you, man. | ||
| It's good to see you. | ||
| You know, I didn't realize until we booked you for today that you've been on the show a couple of times, but only in panel form. | ||
| You've never been on as a solo entity. | ||
| This is as good as it gets, huh? | ||
| Yeah, well, here I am. | ||
| Let's change that. | ||
| Here you are. | ||
| So actually, the first time that I had you on, I had you on with our friend Peter Boghossian, who everybody knows. | ||
| And when the show ended, that was probably about, it's gotta be a good three years already or so. | ||
| And when the show ended, I think you sort of still thought you could maybe modify some of this stuff from within the left. | ||
| And I had kind of shifted a little bit. | ||
| And when the cameras went off, I said, well, you know, James, I sense that The conservatives are gonna start liking you, and you might wanna go in that direction a little bit, because I think you're gonna find fertile ground for these ideas. | ||
| And I sensed you kind of were like, ah, I don't wanna do that just yet. | ||
| That's three years ago, and man, it's been a wild ride, huh? | ||
| Yeah, it's been quite the few years. | ||
| You were very largely right about that analysis. | ||
| This interview's over. | ||
| That's all I needed to hear from you. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| David Rubin was right. | ||
|
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You know, put it on your book. | |
| Yeah, so, all right. | ||
| I didn't mean that you were right, but I think- No, I really don't. | ||
| But it does illustrate a certain something. | ||
| So before we even go into that part of it about sort of looking to the right for new bridges, when did you get interested in all of this? | ||
| You seem to be the main guy covering critical race theory. | ||
| You've been warning about it forever. | ||
| You're taking the heat for doing so. | ||
| When did this even get on your radar? | ||
| You know, it hit my radar is very interesting. | ||
| I didn't know what I was looking at, obviously, seven or eight years ago, but I got involved in a conversation with a number of people. | ||
| The conversation was about a topic that nobody finds controversial whatsoever, affirmative action. | ||
| And, um, I was talking with a blue collar friend of mine and he's talking about his experience and the probably well-founded suspicion that his boss was a diversity hire as opposed to somebody who was actually qualified. | ||
| And in fact, I was talking about how there had been some incidents where, you know, people have been put physically at risk since he actually works in a factory. | ||
| And there were a number of other people. | ||
| And if memory serves, a younger white woman was present as well. | ||
| And she pointed out, you know, that there was no need to tell this story because white men's stories have been told. | ||
| And I kind of interjected and I said, now, hold on. | ||
| You know, I get where you're coming from historically. | ||
| However, we're in a new circumstance now, and he's trying to tell his actual experience with what he's dealing with. | ||
| And so the idea that, you know, white working class people are going to be put underneath the dominion of possibly incompetent bosses that were hired for affirmative action or diversity reasons is a new story. | ||
| And we should be telling that story and hearing that story and seeing what there is to get to the best possible result. | ||
| And it was just like, Ice, his story has already been told. | ||
| And I was like, there's something bad wrong in that attitude. | ||
| That was the very first kind of tip of the iceberg. | ||
| And then, as you know, we were involved in the New Atheist Movement, Peter and I, and our heroes, who were friends previously, I think, with both of us, who largely don't like us anymore. | ||
| We're getting accused of things like sexism and sometimes racism for, for charges that didn't make any sense. | ||
| And that's where I started to hear these words, systemic racism, systemic sexism, and to start to connect that to certain stories aren't allowed to be told, whereas other stories have to be amplified or centered or whatever. | ||
| And that's where I really started to get concerned and nervous about this as early as 2000, probably 14 at the latest. | ||
| And Peter and I started to talk about it then, really. | ||
| So you and Pete were ahead on this, and then when were you like, okay, well, I either want to make a living dissecting this, or I'm going to write a book about this, or I need to, you know, this isn't a fun thing for anyone to be involved in at a certain level, especially the way you're involved in it, because you're always going to be accused of being the worst things at all times. | ||
| When did you make that shift? | ||
| Yeah, so Peter and I decided fatefully in early 2017 to write a hoax paper targeting gender studies, as we've discussed. | ||
| And we wrote the conceptual penis as a social construct. | ||
| That was its own little scandal. | ||
| But we spiked a football. | ||
| I don't think we had a right to spike. | ||
| We said we proved gender studies is bogus. | ||
| I don't think we actually had the evidence for that, given the poor quality of the journal that accepted it. | ||
| And this created some controversy. | ||
| So Peter and I, being Peter and I, talked about it and we decided maybe we should write more papers. | ||
| And so we recruited Helen, fatefully, and we set up, set out on writing the papers of the Grievance Studies Affair. | ||
| And that's where, by the end of the year 2017, well into that project, you know, we're actually reading their literature in detail. | ||
| We're not just trying to pull jokes by that point. | ||
| We're getting feedback from academic journals saying these are the things that you've written, for example, like this idea that you have to kind of abuse students in the name of progressive ideology under a progressive stack with experiential reparations is like the mistake they told us that we made. | ||
| They said white fragility is the right idea, but the mistake you've made is centering compassion. | ||
| You have to center discomfort. | ||
| Otherwise you might refocus on or recenter the needs of the privileged. | ||
| And that's where I remember getting that feedback and looking at this and thinking this like pulling back a tarp and finding a dead body. | ||
| Like, something really bad is happening here. | ||
| And as I've gone on, and I've read more of their literature over the years, especially when I first read a book called, Is Everyone Really Equal?, in probably the middle, early part of 2019, which is written by Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo. | ||
| It's an education book written in 2012. | ||
| Now, it's like, wow, this isn't a dead body under a tarp. | ||
| It's a mass grave. | ||
| And at that point, it's like, okay, I have to basically dedicate Most of my time and energy to exposing this. | ||
| It's not about making money. | ||
| In fact, I didn't make any money for a long time. | ||
| My wife actually literally supported us completely because she also saw how important it was for somebody to research this and speak up about it. | ||
| To say, you know, something is badly off the rails. | ||
| That these ideas exist isn't itself a problem, but that they're institutionalizing is a big problem. | ||
| That they're capturing a political party is a big problem. | ||
| And so I didn't make any money for a very long time actually working on this. | ||
| And I started to research and I noticed how often they use the words revolution. | ||
| Equity is not enough. | ||
| This isn't a mathematics education paper. | ||
| Maybe equity isn't enough. | ||
| Maybe what we need is a revolution. | ||
| And I thought something really bad is at the end of this rainbow. | ||
| And that's where it's everything. | ||
| It's all I do now is something really bad is the end of this rainbow. | ||
| Let's stop it. | ||
| Yeah, that's why I think your story is so interesting, because it seems like you just kept peeling the onion, and it kept going deeper and deeper, and getting, in some ways, more perverse. | ||
| I mean, for the people that didn't see the episode that I did with you and Pete in studio, where you talk about the Sokol hoax, I mean, in essence, what you're saying is, you wrote something to be nonsensical, and yet it wasn't even nonsensical enough. | ||
| That's the really bizarre part of the whole thing, right? | ||
| I mean, you couldn't, you tried to make up as nonsensical thing as you could, Yeah. | ||
| And that was the thing we, I mean, there was one of the things that clued us in that there was a problem and it wasn't like finding a dead body so much as it was, you know, something's bad, bad off with academia is that every time we'd write a paper and we were all proud of ourselves for how ridiculous or horrifying or whatever it happened to be, we would find something in the existing literature that actually already went further. | ||
| Like we wrote one paper arguing that the real reason that men participate in combat sports like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, was because secretly their little society is repressing their secret homosexual urges. | ||
| And so they have to put those forth in a, in a reasonable, you know, a male acceptable way. | ||
| So they have to beat each other up and that's the only way they can possibly express their desire to hug on and wrestle with other men and get that touch. | ||
| And we wrote this and then I found, I'm looking for citations and I find this paper that it's like, no, all competitive sports, right? | ||
| By a guy and the guy's name is Brian Pronger. | ||
| It's written in like 1999 or something in the title of the paper. | ||
| It's just so absurd was, you know, out of my end zone. | ||
| And it's basically talking about how football teams are all arranged around the idea of basically having the opportunity for men to engage in It sounds like the name of a gay porn, frankly. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is! | |
| I mean, that made for a lot of fun for us, of course. | ||
| You know, we end up tying my paper, you know, in through the back door, for example, you know, about sex toys and all of this. | ||
| So, I mean, it opened up a lot of doors for fun, but it's like every paper we tried to write, there was already something that took it further. | ||
| We said, this one sport, and they said, no, all sports. | ||
| And can you just explain for the people that didn't see that interview, and again, we'll link to it down below so people can really get an hour on the entire paper hoax that you guys did, but can you just explain the mind comp piece of this thing? | ||
| Because I think that if people aren't getting how absurd this all was, that pretty much puts the nail in the coffin. | ||
| Yeah, especially in light of the papers that have come out recently, you know, where they're comparing whiteness to a parasitical ideology of dominion and whatever. | ||
| It's like, yeah. | ||
| We have this idea that it would be brilliant to take some horrible thing from the history and just rewrite it as intersectional feminism or whatever. | ||
| And so it struck eventually that, you know, what is kind of this, you know, the iconic horrible thing of history is Mein Kampf. | ||
| So let's look through Hitler's autobiography and political manifesto and see if we can find anything. | ||
| So I'm reading this book for the first time in my life, and it's shockingly bad in all regards. | ||
| And you know, you read chapters one through whatever, and it's him whining about his life. | ||
| And then he gets, you know, well, here's all my enemies and he's railing on the communists. | ||
| And he's eventually chapter 11, he's railing on the Jews. | ||
| And then chapter 12, I turned the page, chapter 12, it's like, we need a movement. | ||
| You know, here's the answer. | ||
| We need a movement. | ||
| And I'm reading this chapter 12 and I'm like, wow, that's, Very useful. | ||
| I can use this. | ||
| And so we took out the word, our movement. | ||
| He didn't call it Nazis at the time. | ||
| He called it our movement in the book. | ||
| And we took out the words, our movement. | ||
| And I just replaced it with intersectional feminism, literally just find and replace on like word or whatever. | ||
| And then it was like, okay, now I read through it and I changed the sentences so that they're not complete nonsense that since we changed words, and then it was like, you know, layers of let's work in some research, let's work in a little bit of, No citations, let's pull from bell hooks, let's pull from these angry feminists. | ||
| And we came up with this idea that there's a type of feminism called choice feminism, that women enacting their own free choices is inherently feministic. | ||
| It's something they actually hate. | ||
| The intersectionalists hate this. | ||
| Freedom of choice. | ||
| They're not big on freedom of choice. | ||
| So that's not real feminism. | ||
| That's selling out solidarity. | ||
| So the whole thing became, which is what Hitler was asking for in that chapter, because he's got like, you know, you have to get rid of all of your, you have to subordinate your will, no half measures, blah, blah, blah, you know, and all for solidarity to our movement. | ||
| So it's like, so we just rewrote this thing as intersectional feminism. | ||
| We thought there's no way. | ||
| Anybody's going to take rewritten Hitler as feminism. | ||
| We sent it off to a journal, a feminist theory journal, and they peer reviewed it, which shocked us. | ||
| And they sent back some suggestions to improve it. | ||
| So we improved it. | ||
| We sent it off to another journal because they did not accept it. | ||
| And it was a feminist social work journal. | ||
| And they did accept it. | ||
| They did accept a rewrite of Hitler's solution to his political enemies in solidarity as, uh, and we kept, you know, his bad mood is we'll just call it a bad mood. | ||
| We kept that there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very bad mood. | ||
| Um, we kept that, that, that, that grievance, that anger in and wrote this railing on women who believe that making free choices represents the goal of feminism and that they're selling out their black sisters, for example. | ||
| And it was accepted by a social work journal, which shocked us beyond any level of being shocked. | ||
| At which point we knew, you know, something really bad is going on here. | ||
| Yeah, little did you know where we'd be, you know, just two years later because it all seems to have burst forth in a much more perverse way. | ||
| So, to get to where we started for a second, when I said to you, oh, you're going to find common cause with some of the conservatives and it's going to be a little scary and all that, can you just tell people, because I think for people that maybe only know some ancillary little thing about you, You, well I don't want to put any words into that, but you were sort of, you used to be just sort of a nominal liberal, something like that? | ||
| Like, you're not a political radical in any way. | ||
| That's the irony. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not. | ||
| In fact, I still describe myself on Twitter, to many people's chagrin, so it's a little troll going on there too, as apolitical. | ||
| I don't actually find politics that interesting. | ||
| I mean, I don't really care what Joe Biden's up to. | ||
| I just don't find, like, oh, Democrats said this, Republicans... I don't find it interesting. | ||
| So in that regard, I really am apolitical. | ||
| I definitely, you know, kind of morally and politically, like policy-wise, and tilted to the left, I'm largely not in like the strict sense that you would see from the libertarian party, but I'm largely libertarian. | ||
| I just want people to do what they want to do, leave people alone for the most part, and let's try to organize a society that kind of works around that as a basic principle. | ||
| And so I've never really been terribly radical. | ||
| I did lean left for sure, and I was always a little bit annoyed. | ||
| Um, with conservatism overall, I don't think I, I don't, I still don't think I am conservative in the older meaning of the word. | ||
| Um, I'm definitely not, you know, if you went and read some particular, you know, political treatise on conservatism, I'm going to disagree with quite a bit of it. | ||
| At the same time, I find a lot of sympathy for the arguments of preserving something that is worth preserving or conserving that. | ||
| So yeah, I was definitely not a radical, definitely kind of middle of the road, average everyday, liberal left kind of guy. | ||
| And I was genuinely, like you said, apprehensive. | ||
| It's kind of an understatement to work with conservatives in a significant regard, which has been really an interesting experience because they're exactly the opposite of what the leftist propaganda had told me they would be like. | ||
| All right, okay, so let's do that then, because flash forward a couple years and suddenly, I believe it was last December, so December 2020, it was the one speaking gig I did in all of 2020, public speaking at least in front of a crowd, probably same for you, I bumped into you at Turning Point USA. | ||
| This is obviously Charlie Kirk's event, it's in essence a Well, it's a conservative movement, obviously, | ||
| but it's very linked to well-known Republicans and all that. | ||
| And that's where I was like, ah, James, look at this. | ||
| Look at you, two, three years later. | ||
| What have you found as you've talked about critical race theory, as you've exposed this stuff, | ||
| what have you found each side has sort of shown you? | ||
| Well, the left is either delusional about what's going on or lying. | ||
| There's no other way to put it. | ||
| They claim that people that criticize critical race theory, for example, haven't read it. | ||
| So that's the new thing. | ||
| As we're taping this today, it's the number one trend on Twitter right now. | ||
| And it's because people like Joy Reid from MSNBC are saying nobody even that criticizes CRT even has any understanding of what it is. | ||
| That seems to be the big move. | ||
| And even though I'm seeing plenty of people explain it over and over again. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think they've read it. | ||
| Or if they have read it, they've read it with kind of these rose colored glasses or without an understanding of what the specialized language actually means. | ||
| You know, you read a word like democracy and you think it means something. | ||
| Oh, I know what democracy means. | ||
| But if you don't understand that in a liberationist paradigm, that it's not possible to have a true democracy till everybody is equal. | ||
| In other words, till communism is achieved. | ||
| It's a loaded word. | ||
| So they don't understand that a lot of the words in these things are loaded and they were intentionally loaded. | ||
| The right, however, has been a bit, um, facile in its analysis of critical race theory. | ||
| So it's been very helpful, you know, or very good for me to be able to help them understand it at a deeper level, because for them, they've just been saying socialism. | ||
| And while that's some percentage truth, 20 something, maybe percent, I don't know how to qualify those things. | ||
| It's not the whole story. | ||
| It's not the whole story by any stretch. | ||
| And they have, however, been very receptive to trying to understand more about it. | ||
| They've been very curious about it. | ||
| They perceive that something is wrong and don't have the vocabulary to comprehend what that is. | ||
| Whereas what I perceive from people on the left is that they don't want the vocabulary to comprehend it. | ||
| It's almost like they want their head, if they're good, decent, everyday liberals, not activists, it's like they want their head in the sand to not comprehend what's going on. | ||
| And so they constantly get blindsided. | ||
| It's like I watched some of these people on Twitter that kind of you know, left country club, very smart people, I call them. | ||
| It's like watching them step on a rake over and over and over again. | ||
| It's like whacks them in the face and they're like, you know, | ||
| why are there these rakes here? Whack! And they do it again and it whacks them in the face and | ||
| everybody should be nicer. Whack! And it hits them in the face again. | ||
| I think they should be more responsible. | ||
| It's very sideshow, Bob. | ||
| It's it is. | ||
| It's really it's really horrific. | ||
| So I feel like there's this very deep, you know, desire to learn more and get it accurate among most conservatives, whereas others are just kind of like, no, it's socialism, the end. | ||
| And then on the left is just straight. | ||
| either delusional ignorance or lying about it, which is shocking. | ||
| Has that changed your feelings on what a liberal is in a way? | ||
| Because to me it exposed a fatal flaw in liberalism that I did not want to see. | ||
| It doesn't change for me what a liberal is in the kind of classical philosophical liberal sense. | ||
| What it changes for me is people who identify as the liberal label have, they're largely a country club. | ||
| They are largely, almost at this point, a cult that want to believe and have a social identity | ||
| baked into being left of center to where upholding that social identity | ||
| becomes much more important than the truth. | ||
| So when you talk about actual classical liberalism based on Enlightenment rationalism, the truth is supposed to be the North Star for almost everything. | ||
| And so they have diverged and it literally is a country club mentality or a social identity mentality that has captured an enormous swath of that population to the point where it's like I've had conversations with family members and And they say things like, oh, well, I really like what that | ||
| Ron DeSantis says, but he's a Republican, so I could never vote for him. | ||
| And that's the entirety of the analysis is that they don't want to look bad to | ||
| their, oh, this is we only ever vote Democrat friends or whatever. | ||
| And that is disgusting. | ||
| That's something I never would have identified with or respected even in somebody even several years ago when we were having that conversation. | ||
| Right, and it's anti-liberal. | ||
| It's anti-liberal. | ||
| It's anti-reason, right. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| So as you then were talking about this publicly, then you start getting invited to these turning point things and onto other, let's say conservative leaning shows. | ||
| And then you go on and you, I've been, I've watched enough interviews. | ||
| You talk about being an atheist. | ||
| You talk about some of the differences you have as you're unpacking all the CRT stuff. | ||
| And it seems to me nobody cares, which is very much my experience. | ||
| No, I actually ended up having really interesting conversations | ||
| with people who want to learn more about my perspective. | ||
| If I were trying to be subversive, which I have no real interest in doing, | ||
| but it's much more effective to be making friends and coming in in good faith rather than just attacking | ||
| because they actually want to hear my perspective. | ||
| Oh, I'll think about that rather than, you know, shut up, Libtard. | ||
| You know, it's been a very different experience. | ||
| I've had nothing but a very welcoming, friendly, kind, interested experience as I go along because I'm trying to offer them something that is of value to speaking vocabulary into their experience that they know something's wrong and they don't know what. | ||
| And I found nothing but acceptance, actually. | ||
| I mean, what a big red pill experience for me. | ||
| I went to CPAC in 2020, you know, so obviously let me get my devil horns out. | ||
| But I went to CPAC and I didn't know what to expect. | ||
| I didn't really want to go, but I was in D.C. | ||
| and I thought, you know, let's pop over for a day, see what's going on. | ||
| I went one day just for the afternoon. | ||
| I didn't make a big deal of it. | ||
| I wasn't part of the conference. | ||
| Just wanted to walk around and see. | ||
| And I expected, you know, I was going to walk in from leftist indoctrination. | ||
| I expected I was going to walk into like the whitest room in the world and all of, you know, all of these things that they've said. | ||
| And it wasn't that. | ||
| And before that, I went to this big conservative, uh, Christian conference and I expected again, and it wasn't that, you know, expected all of this kind of like, you know, hate against the libs and You get a little bit of that at CPAC, but you know, hate against this and it's going to be super white and it's going to be anti-gay and it's going to be this and that. | ||
| And it just wasn't, it was just people coming together, getting to know one another. | ||
| And the amount of actual individualism that each person is, who they are bringing, what they're bringing to the table was the thing that shone through the most. | ||
| And I was just shocked. | ||
| I mean, I went home and I had to like, just think about this. | ||
| It was like, this doesn't make sense. | ||
| It doesn't match what I was told about these evil conservatives, these so-called evil conservatives. | ||
| And then that's, you know, once you start realizing how much you're being lied to, bricks start falling out of the wall real fast. | ||
| Right, you start seeing it everywhere. | ||
| You see a little bit of it, and then there's no middle ground. | ||
| Then you just kind of see the lies absolutely everywhere. | ||
| What about on the religious side? | ||
| Because I know for a lot of my liberal friends, those very smart people, as you call them, whoever will still talk to crazy guys like us, they seem to have two things that just fully stop them from shifting into what I would say is a more cohesive reality. | ||
| One is abortion, and the other is belief. | ||
| The abortion one, if you want to go into it, we can, but I think we don't have to do that much political stuff. | ||
| But the belief one I think is really interesting because you go into these conferences and suddenly you're being invited by Christians, by believers, and here they have an atheist telling them about the thing that's in essence destroying their church. | ||
| And that's the, that's the reason, right? | ||
| There's this thing destroying their church. | ||
| And I remember the first couple of times I got invited to these, you know, I was hesitant. | ||
| I didn't know what I was going to step into. | ||
| And what I found were people who it was, I don't want to put myself on too high of a, of a pedestal here, but it was almost like I was their doctor and they're saying, you know, our church has cancer. | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| Can you tell me what's happening here? | ||
| And I sat down with some actual fairly significant leaders of faith, you know, in private settings, both private and public settings, and just talked them through, you know, this is what it is, this is what, and again, that's very welcoming, like, we brought food for you, come to our house, my wife's making food, we're gonna have a dinner together, you know, and I thought, this is very interesting, I'm of course going to be respectful, I'm not gonna, like, go into like a full, like, Atheist tick and just start arguing with them when they've invited me and we're not that's not the purpose So then I was like, you know what they're gonna they bring their faith into everything So it's like I'm just gonna listen to them about their faith. | ||
| I'm just going to talk to them like I'm not gonna just Pretend I'm gonna be who I am, but I want to listen to them and understand the world the way they understand the world. | ||
| I Like, okay, you know, articulate this for me. | ||
| What does faith see within critical race theory? | ||
| What does it see about the brotherhood of man? | ||
| What does it see about Imago Dei? | ||
| Let's talk about these things. | ||
| And I just had some very prominent people of faith, both Catholic, I think we're both friends with Bishop Barron now, and Protestant, just lay it out for me. | ||
| And instead of arguing when they say some faith-based thing, I was like, well, I'll listen. | ||
| What a radical concept, right? | ||
| And I was like, well, this is, I don't agree with all of the presuppositions behind this, but this is a way to understand the world. | ||
| And as a matter of fact, it's a good way to make sense of a lot of things in the world. | ||
| And so I feel like it's actually deeply enriched. | ||
| My understanding of people, of each other, of humanity, but also of the issues that we're facing in the world right now, and what it takes to stand up to them, and what it takes to find what is inside of you, the moral fiber inside of you, that you have to have to be able to resist an ultimately communist demoralization. | ||
| And has this changed your feelings about belief in any way, for you personally? | ||
| I'm much warmer to the idea of people believing. | ||
| It hasn't changed my belief. | ||
| I very much like to draw off of the lessons. | ||
| I love to sit and listen to pastors or priests speak and tell the lessons that they draw from their scripture or from the philosophy around their scripture or from the history. | ||
| I think there's a lot of depth and value there. | ||
| I'm very interested in hearing it. | ||
| Still would be in the, you know, great repository of wisdom, but not literally true category. | ||
| But it's been very enriching as another perspective, another way for me to look at the same questions that we all kind of grapple with in life. | ||
| And I feel it hasn't changed my belief underlying, I'm still an atheist, but it's Been, I think, enormously enriching to how I think about the problems of navigating life and society and, you know, interacting with one another. | ||
| So I think, but correct me if I'm wrong, you came up with the term crypto woke, related to these, was that yours originally? | ||
| Yeah, as far as I know. | ||
| Yeah, basically these people that like kind of get it, but then they refuse to do all the measures to defend themselves against it, which is sort of what you're describing of the modern liberal, let's say. | ||
| Can you just unpack that a little bit more? | ||
| Because I think if we can break those guys, whoever's left, that could be the key here. | ||
| Yeah, I think it is the key, actually. | ||
| Sure, and this is the thing. | ||
| I realized right before the election, I got invited to do a long podcast episode with Brett Weinstein and Jesse Singal, and to talk about, and we were going to represent three positions in the election. | ||
| Brett was going to vote neither of the two major parties. | ||
| I had decided and declared that I was going to vote for Trump and Jesse, of course, was going to vote for Biden. | ||
| We were going to hash out our differences in what he called a unity campfire. | ||
| And in the process of listening to Jesse defend his desire to vote for Biden over the course of a couple of three hours, I realized that these people that are rationalizing woke ideology are a major problem. | ||
| Now, crypto woke is a pretty stinging term, so I don't really want to apply that as injudiciously as sometimes the fray on Twitter Cryptowoke would actually imply that they are faking it. | ||
| I don't think, for example, that Jesse is faking his beliefs. | ||
| I think he's just kind of- Just to be clear, for people that don't, he's a writer for New York Magazine or? | ||
| Yeah, something, New York Magazine or New Yorker. | ||
| I get confused between these things frequently. | ||
| New York Magazine, I think. | ||
| He's got a book. | ||
| He's a, I've had dinner with him. | ||
| He's a genuinely nice guy to spend time with, as far as I can tell, but he just doesn't get it and he's quite vicious on social media. | ||
| Well, I was gonna say, he's said some absolutely horrible things about me. | ||
| I've never engaged with him other than to call him out on the things that he's called me. | ||
| I'm just putting that out there. | ||
| But anyway, we're having this conversation with him. | ||
| No, so yeah. | ||
| And I realized these people who are rationalizing this, what they called the useful idiots back in Soviet times, are the people who are What's the right word? | ||
| Whitewash is a word I want to use, but they make this very radical ideology seem safe and acceptable to normal people who read outlets like New York Magazine, or the New York Times, or the Atlantic. | ||
| Some do it probably willfully, and they are genuinely crypto-woke, and then other people do it just not realizing. | ||
| I think the mentality And I've heard this from them many times, they can't really mean what it actually says. | ||
| I can read to them a piece, you know, critical race theory calls into question The very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, enlightenment, rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law. | ||
| And they seize on, well, it just calls it into question. | ||
| They can't really mean that they want to undo those things. | ||
| They just call it into question. | ||
| And then, you know, I say, you know, another quote, that quote, by the way, is in the first paragraph of critical race theory and introduction. | ||
| Another quote from that book is, you know, critical race theorists are highly suspicious of another, another liberal mainstay, namely rights, highly suspicious of rights. | ||
| And they say, Oh, they're just highly suspicious of there's ways that rights can go wrong. | ||
| You know, by focusing on rights, you actually can kind of screw people over. | ||
| Like somebody could say something really hurtful. | ||
| I could say something really rude to you. | ||
| And then I, you could shoot back at me, man, that was wrong. | ||
| Why'd you say that? | ||
| And I could say free speech. | ||
| I have a right, you know? | ||
| And so, They're going to seize upon, oh, well, they're not against rights. | ||
| They're just highly suspicious of them. | ||
| And it's like, come on guys, like look at the fruit in practice. | ||
| There's, there's a, you know, speaking into the faith, what you learn from listening to people of faith and how they conceptualize the world. | ||
| Look at the fruit that the tree is bearing. | ||
| This is a bad tree. | ||
| It is bearing bad fruit. | ||
| And if you go and read the texts, yeah, you can, you can whitewash this down, or maybe the word is redwash. | ||
| this down to where it's pretty milquetoast or whatever, but it's genuinely quite radical. | ||
| And then they don't have explanations for things like maybe equity is not enough. | ||
| We need a revolution. | ||
| That's Rochelle Gutierrez. | ||
| I'm not making these things up by the way. | ||
| Um, so that I figured was the problem. | ||
| So I started calling them out starting in October of last year. | ||
| I turned my main gun from the woke who I think are a huge problem and started aiming at the people who are Largely making it seem more socially acceptable than it is. | ||
| They're laundering it, right? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah, they're laundering these ideas, but in a different way. | ||
| They're not doing, you know, what we called ideal laundering before, which is to get them into socially acceptable publications, like academic journals, but they're doing a different duty. | ||
| They're literally making them seem, no, no, no, there's this really reasonable interpretation where if you absolutely pretend it couldn't happen here, Then that must be what they really mean. | ||
| These people must be more reasonable than they are. | ||
| And I feel like it's with the ones who are unintentionally crypto-woke, I feel as though they lack the capacity to believe that there are people out there who genuinely think outside of the broadly liberal, classical liberal paradigm, and who genuinely want to subvert or overthrow that paradigm for something different that they control that's truly totalitarian. | ||
| Okay, so since the number one trend right now is critical race theory, and the idea here is that, oh, the critics of it can't even define it. | ||
| James, I think I asked you to do this once before, but now I will give you the perfect opportunity. | ||
| I've got two minutes and 20 seconds on a Twitter video. | ||
| What is critical race theory? | ||
| I don't need two minutes and 20 seconds anymore. | ||
| Critical race theory is the belief that the fundamental organizing principle of society is Racism, namely systemic racism as they call it, which is what you call the cause, otherwise unknown, unspecified cause for when there are differences in outcomes where white people come out ahead of some people of color sometimes. | ||
| And systemic racism hides itself better. | ||
| So critical race theory believes to add on to this definition. | ||
| The definition is racism is the organizing principle of society. | ||
| The belief that that. | ||
| But to add on to that, they believe that when you tackle racism, it doesn't improve. | ||
| You can't actually get over racism. | ||
| It's very tricky under a doctrine called interest convergence that leads it to hide itself better, to put a better mask on, to cover itself up better. | ||
| And so racism doesn't get better over time. | ||
| It actually is permanent and becomes worse because it's more insidious. | ||
| It's more hidden and critical race theory is the tool they use to uncover that hidden racism that is present in all features of society because it is the fundamental organizing principle of all social phenomena. | ||
| I hate to guess that I know the answer to this question, but since Joy Reid is asking people publicly on Twitter, can any of the Critical Race Theory critics come on my show? | ||
| Have you tried to get onto any of these shows? | ||
| Have they invited you on any of these shows? | ||
| And would you go on any of these shows? | ||
| I have not tried, but I would go. | ||
| I've certainly not been invited. | ||
| I don't know if you've noticed on Twitter that people keep saying, like Joy Reid, I think I even used her earlier on Twitter, They post, nobody blah blah blah can define it. | ||
| And then I just post a gif of a stealth bomber. | ||
| That's me. | ||
| I'm the stealth bomber. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, they don't pay attention to me. | ||
| They try to pretend I don't exist. | ||
| Maybe it's because they don't know who I am, and maybe it's because they know good and damn well I can do it. | ||
| Well, not only you, but also Karlyn Borsanko. | ||
| She immediately responded to Joy Reid and said exactly what it was. | ||
| She laid it out beautifully. | ||
| Chris Ruffo responded. | ||
| I mean, it's not that nobody's... I've had enough shows on this that it's not that nobody is responding. | ||
| What about the other... | ||
| Part of it where it is prescribing things that we all fundamentally believed were good, like being on time and hard work and knowing empirical truths like two plus two equals four, that suddenly those things are thought of through the critical race lens as white supremacist tools. | ||
| I mean, if that's what a white supremacist is, showing up to work on time, working hard, caring about truth, I guess I'm a white supremacist. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| They've included things like loyalty and all kinds – I mean like basically every single virtue that upholds society because they are utterly convinced that the society that we currently occupy, which is broadly we could say a classically liberal republic, Is, was founded by people who are white supremacists and they founded it with, this is a conspiracy theory by the way, they founded it with the intent to maintain white supremacy forever. | ||
| And so everything that they valued, everything that Thomas Jefferson valued, everything that George Washington valued, everything that Thomas Paine valued, everything that John Locke valued, everything that Isaac Newton valued, and he's even kind of pre-enlightenment in a sense. | ||
| All of these people were actually trying to establish white supremacy as the dominant orthodoxy for the rest of time. | ||
| That's literally a conspiracy theory. | ||
| What in the world? | ||
| I mean, the books are, they have a book, Charles Mills has a book 1997 or something like this called The Racial Contract that says that all white people are secretly involved in a racial contract and we all assent to it, although nobody ever actually talks about it or tells anybody about it, that we're going to keep white people up and keep people of color, especially black people down. | ||
| Do you sometimes admire it for sort of like the conspiracy behind it, like how sort of all-encompassing it came to people? | ||
| You know, we played the clip, I know you saw it too. | ||
| We played the clip of Mark Lamont Hill's show when Chris Ruffo was on, and Mark Lamont Hill lays out a question that just on its face makes no sense. | ||
| He's saying to Ruffo, well tell me what you think about being white, why being white is so great. | ||
| And that's not Ruffo's intention. | ||
| His intention is not to be racist, but it's like, even in Ruffo's answer, which was quite good, you could see there was literally no nugget of truth that Lamont Hill was gonna be willing to accept. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's like a highly evolved virus, frankly. | ||
| And then the sense of like- That's why I keep comparing it to Alien. | ||
| It's Alien, you gotta admire it. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, yeah, stepping back and looking at it from that perspective, it's like, wow, it's really figured out in the virus metaphor, which I use liberally because they have a paper called Women's Studies as a Virus. | ||
| They published in 2016, where they say that the ideal way to think of themselves is as a virus, for instance, HIV, Ebola and SARS. | ||
| Those are the ones they name. | ||
| Or a virus that causes cancer, because cancer represents true transformational change, so therefore cancer good, where cancer, that's their argument, If you look at it from that though, to see how it's exploited the receptor sites of liberal society, but also even, you know, like religion and conservative society, like it's going to latch onto that kindness, that respect, that charity. | ||
| It's going to force you to be kind. | ||
| But then when you say, well, you need to be kind in return, they say, well, you're, you're forcing me to participate in your regime. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The way that it's been so successful at latching onto those receptors, like, Oh, I want to hear your argument. | ||
| Give me your best argument. | ||
| Let me hear you out. | ||
| And then the second you turn around, they say, Oh, well, your argument is based in trying to maintain your privilege. | ||
| You know, there's something, you know, from the virologist perspective, perversely beautiful to behold in this, but, um, This is a matter of great interest, I think, for psychologists to start sorting out over the coming decades if we survive this as a civilization. | ||
| It's hard to respect in the kind of direct sense, though, because it's patently evil. | ||
| It's blatantly racist. | ||
| It's blatantly destructive. | ||
| It has nothing to build. | ||
| Look at, for example, the brand equity of Harvard University. | ||
| I just saw the article in the Wall Street Journal that said, I won't hire Ivy Leaguers anymore, which I predicted, by the way, in a conversation with the Yalies. | ||
| A few months ago, I was like, it's only a matter of time. | ||
| I wouldn't hire an Ivy Leaguer right now. | ||
| I wouldn't either. | ||
| And I would hesitate to hire a college grad. | ||
| And it's like, that's the next step. | ||
| That's where it's going. | ||
| It burns through brand equity. | ||
| It burns through real equity so quickly because it can't build. | ||
| It has nothing to build. | ||
| There's nothing to respect in that. | ||
| Do you think a guy like Bernie Sanders, who I don't know what he truly thinks about critical race theory. | ||
| I mean, he'll constantly tell you America is racist and all of that kind of stuff. | ||
| I don't know what he really thinks in terms of that specifically, but do you think he realizes what he helped usher in? | ||
| Like the average progressive, I would put him at the spear of like the radical movement. | ||
| Do you think he realized what was going to come behind him or that it is going to destroy him one day? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think that they have any realization that they actually played a significant role in bringing in this thing, which has largely already marginalized them. | ||
| I mean, with Bernie, he's been co-opted. | ||
| He was certainly not an identity politics guy in 2016. | ||
| And then all of a sudden he's like a raging identity politics guy, like something changed. | ||
| A lot of my friends who are big Bernie supporters, Uh, we're very much against identity politics. | ||
| And then they walked through the years of Trump that, you know, they brainwashed these people that were, Trump's a racist, Trump's a sexist, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So if you, you know, don't come on the board with the identity politics, you probably are somehow a Trumper and therefore, you know, you sympathize with Trump ideology or whatever. | ||
| And they were very successful at this. | ||
| And so what I, I don't think they're able to accept. | ||
| Their own involvement in what has occurred. | ||
| Um, because they see themselves as having, having been against it. | ||
| And then some greater evil, I think, came into the world that they Trump, of course, the greatest evil of all, all orange menaces and they've ever been. | ||
| And they have to, I seriously, I think it cooked their noodles, man. | ||
| I don't think that they're seeing things straight because the orange man bad is just such. | ||
| a center, it's like a, it's like not a black hole, but like an orange hole that just bends all the light rays | ||
| around it and they can't see straight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| That's like interstellar. | ||
| You can't see on the other side of it kind of thing. | ||
| Cause it's sucking the light through. | ||
| What else, what should the average person know? | ||
| Like, for the average person that doesn't want to fight about this all day, but what do you think the average person can do? | ||
| Because that seems to me is the answer. | ||
| And we're seeing more and more of it, by the way, every day now. | ||
| There's a viral video of a mother at a conference fighting the teachers, fighting the administrations. | ||
| I don't want to teach my children to be racist. | ||
| I don't want to teach my children that they're bad because they're white. | ||
| Or I just saw one this morning of a black mother saying, I don't want to teach my children that they're damaged because they're black. | ||
| All things that a sane person would agree with. | ||
| What do you think can be done for the average person? | ||
| Or by the average person? | ||
| The average person has to realize what I started to say very vigorously last summer. | ||
| And I was, of course, resoundingly mocked for this. | ||
| This isn't going to blow over. | ||
| We're either going to push it out of power or it's not going to get out. | ||
| It's going to continue. | ||
| There is no letting it blow over. | ||
| It's not going to blow over. | ||
| So you have to decide what you want to do with that. | ||
| Not everybody is going to be the person who stands up and speaks at their, their school board, but you can be the person who makes that person dinner. | ||
| You know, not everybody is going to be the face. | ||
| Not everybody's going to take the risk, but you can be the person who offers moral support, who, you know, creates a network. | ||
| But the most important thing then for people to realize is, and this is a lesson that I learned watching people stand up to absurd COVID policy, is that courage begets courage and cowardice begets cowardice. | ||
| It's a two-sided street or two-sided coin. | ||
| When you see so there's this video went around. | ||
| I don't know if I could find it again easily on Twitter and I think is in Canada, but maybe it wasn't there's a bakery or a shop or something and you know, the health inspector comes in or whatever the covid cops come in and they're hassling them. | ||
| And finally this one guy says you're trespassing you need to go and everybody was kind of cowering and then Second one guy spoke up, the whole crowd starts yelling, you gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go. | ||
| And they ended up, you know, leaving. | ||
| And it's the most blatant demonstration I've ever seen. | ||
| Nobody's speaking up. | ||
| Everybody kind of shied. | ||
| Everybody's getting kind of bullied around. | ||
| The second one person spoke up, a crowd erupted. | ||
| And that's one other thing. | ||
| If you're afraid to be the person who's going to inspire the courage that begets courage. | ||
| I jumped off a cliff, man. | ||
| You jumped off a cliff. | ||
| We didn't know where we were going to land. | ||
| Right now, if you jump off the edge, it's not a cliff, it's a stage, and there are hands ready to carry you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Right? | ||
| And people need to understand that. | ||
| The groundswell against critical race theory, it's the biggest trend on Twitter right now, as we were just saying a minute ago at the time of the taping. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| It is a hot issue. | ||
| It's 85, 95 percent, depending on where you are, red or blue, issue for most people in most jurisdictions right now of get this crap out of our schools. | ||
| So the You have every reason in the world to be courageous, and your courageous is going to be infectious. | ||
| On the other hand, if you're a coward, other people see your cowardice, and either somebody's going to step up and be courageous instead of you, and you did nothing respectable, or it's just going to encourage more people to stay silent, more people to keep their head down, more people to hope, oh, maybe it'll blow over, and I don't have to take a risk. | ||
| But that's not what's going to happen. | ||
| It's either going to get pushed out, Or it's going to kill us. | ||
| Jump, it's all people can do. | ||
| So actually, speaking of jumping, when you jump and then suddenly you're out there and you're taking what are thought of as unpopular positions, however true as they may be, you're gonna get mobbed. | ||
| And one of the interesting things was a few months ago, you were trying to explain to people that critical race theory was going to be incredibly destructive and perhaps the biggest threat to Jews in modern times. | ||
| In our times now, let's say since the Holocaust, something like that. | ||
| You got then called an anti-Semite for that, and there's been a ton of people calling you. | ||
| I've defended you. | ||
| I'm more than happy to defend you always on this stuff. | ||
| And these are the same people who call everyone else a Nazi. | ||
| Can you explain a little bit about how Jews don't fit into that calculator? | ||
| And why you were warning about this? | ||
| Well, I mean, there are multiple reasons I was warning about it, but I do think that critical race theory poses the greatest threat to Jews in America and throughout the West, maybe the whole world today. | ||
| Certainly we're not talking about 1930 whatever Certainly not that but the greatest threat now we see people getting beat up it posits that Jews and there's a book called how Jews became white folks by Karen Brodkin from the 90s 98 or something like this and she lays out that Jewish people were not considered white when they came to America, you know largely following the Holocaust for example and They were discriminated against, they were ghettoized, etc. | ||
| And then they worked very diligently to become recognized as white, often throwing black people and other people of color under the bus, which is not historically accurate. | ||
| They often tended to be progressive and integral in civil rights movements in many regards. | ||
| And so they positioned themselves, and she actually makes this argument, not just as white to gain access to white privilege, But as the setters of whiteness, the people who are the highest level of white culture, who get to be the cultural, yeah, the people who create white culture and define white culture. | ||
| So they literally become the people at the very top of white culture and then they hoard the resources for themselves. | ||
| And this is a literal recreation of antisemitism. | ||
| And the thing is, what I was warning about is this is its own Serious danger. | ||
| Far left anti-Semitism is on the rise. | ||
| It's going to continue to be on the rise. | ||
| I said there's a normal baseline, which apparently I got accused of that, like apparently I was normalizing it, they said. | ||
| I was just trying to express in a tweet that anti-Semitism already exists. | ||
| Now there's more coming from the far left. | ||
| But I said there's also more coming from the far right, because many progressive Jews are actually touting this ideology. | ||
| And then for me, who ties it to its historical roots, for example, in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Which is correct, to tie it to that. | ||
| Those guys were all Jews. | ||
| The so-called cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, that's a Wikipedia entry now, there is no cultural Marxism explained there, there's just a conspiracy theory, is that, oh, these Frankfurt School Jews wanted to overturn Western civilization, and that's a conspiracy theory, it's anti-Semitic. | ||
| So I said there are people, as somebody who criticizes that a lot, people come to me all the time and they're like, James, just admit that it is actually Jews. | ||
| I'm like, no, it's communists, and they're like, just take the last step. | ||
| So all these actual anti-Semites are always trying to get me to go that far. | ||
| And I've had some very scary conversations with some far-right characters, not Nazis, but like kind of mainstream dudes who are getting more and more seduced. | ||
| And I said, there's going to be a rising or there is a rising far-right anti-Semitism that's new from that normal baseline. | ||
| And by the way, the point that you're making there is also something that Dennis Prager has been arguing for years and years and years, that these people who traded in all their beliefs as Jews for progressivism, leftism, socialism, communism, everything else, they're not doing it in the name of Judaism, they're doing it in the name of that ideology. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And the problem is, as reactionaries often tend to be, They're not real precise. | ||
| So they see a bunch of Jews taking up communism, and they're like, aha, communism is Jewish. | ||
| Just take the last step. | ||
| And I'm like, guys, this is a disaster in the making. | ||
| This is a tidal wave of hate for Jews from both sides, from the fringes of both sides, that's on the rise, rapidly on the rise. | ||
| And I warned about this, and then some important blue check people, He immediately accused me of blaming Jews for anti-Semitism, which is one of these third rail things you're not allowed to touch. | ||
| And I was like, well, I'm going to continue to point out this problem because we're headed to a catastrophe. | ||
| When we see what's happened over the last couple months, so okay, so there were the attacks on the Jews in New York and L.A. | ||
| and all over the place, but then also what was preceding that was all of these attacks that unfortunately were done almost exclusively by black people on Asian people, so it was very confusing for the intersectional calculator and very confusing for mainstream media. | ||
| But so all of the messaging out there was, oh, we stand with our Asian brothers and sisters, which I don't want anyone to have any hate crimes against them, of course. | ||
| But they could never really say who was doing it. | ||
| And now there's some videos leaking out where we are seeing black people attack Asian people. | ||
| And then there was one video just in the last little while where the guy said, well, you're the oppressive class. | ||
| I can't be racist towards you. | ||
| You're Asian. | ||
| I'm black. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| That is critical race theory. | ||
| That's literally in the docs that you're referring to. | ||
| No, that's exactly right. | ||
| So yeah, Asians and Jews also, when they're not considered white directly, Asians are often considered white adjacent. | ||
| They're said to have taken up the values of whiteness and these hard work and, you know, punctuality and loyalty and all of these different things. | ||
| They've taken up these values and therefore they're complicit in the maintenance of the oppressive white supremacist system, even though they're not. | ||
| So now they're seen not just as, uh, People who are upholding the system, but also traitors to the solidarity of racial oppression that the theory posits. | ||
| And so you add in that to the fact that, oh, this oppressive system is screwing you over. | ||
| If you're black, you have no opportunity because the oppressors, you know, I don't know if they think that black people can't read, but they go, you know, they can and they go and read and they say, oh, Joe Biden thinks they can't open computers or something. | ||
| Yeah, Joe, I don't know. | ||
| Joe Malarkey. | ||
| I said that on TV accidentally. | ||
| Whoops. | ||
| Um, no, but it's, they go look and they say, you know, well, all the opportunities in education are being stolen because of whiteness and they're excluding black people and they're stealing it from black people. | ||
| And then you'll look at the statistics and see these advanced high schools are 70% Asian. | ||
| And it's like, it's not that hard to figure out who you're going to get jealous and mad at. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then when you add in the fact that you have economically depressed and stress and the COVID and the crime and everything else is rising and all these stresses are rising, mentally ill and criminal people are being like, | ||
| just let off in these Democrat cities. | ||
| It's only a matter of time you're gonna start seeing violence | ||
| and the violence is going to happen along predictable pathways where there's scapegoating. | ||
| And so, whiteness, Asian, you're having your opportunities stolen from you. | ||
| Well, who's stealing? | ||
| Well, the school 70% Asian, well, it's probably the Chinese. | ||
| Let's get them. | ||
| It's not hard logic. | ||
| Speaking of the Chinese, do you think, not the Chinese people, but the government of China, | ||
| Do you think that it is somehow complicit in spreading this stuff in the United States? | ||
| It seems to me that if you wanted to win a war against the United States, you're probably not doing it with nukes and troops on the ground, right? | ||
| We're not gonna suffer a ground invasion. | ||
| But that in essence, we will just do it to ourselves and you won't need one bullet fired or perhaps Russia or something else. | ||
| Well, it's certainly the case that the Chinese understand the dynamics of a cultural revolution. | ||
| That's undeniable. | ||
| But the direct answer to your question is it has to be yes. | ||
| I don't think it's always been that way, or even necessarily for long been that way. | ||
| They used to make fun of the Baiso, the white left, and then they stopped making fun of them. | ||
| And then all of a sudden you see this summit, you know, this diplomatic summit in Alaska. | ||
| And what are the Chinese hitting our American diplomats with? | ||
| And they have no defenses to it. | ||
| So, oh, well, you guys are systemically racist. | ||
| And what do you see there? | ||
| You know, their propaganda accounts on social media constantly hammering, oh, you guys are systemically racist. | ||
| We're not going to listen to the West because there's no or to America because there's no moral authority because of its systemic racism problem until they fix it. | ||
| Meanwhile, of course, very famously, they have like commercials where the Chinese girls washing the black guy Asian in the washing machine with soap. | ||
| You know, it's like they're not exactly great on that issue themselves. | ||
| So certainly they're aware of it. | ||
| Certainly they are fueling it. | ||
| Certainly they have been throwing money at things that have gone down this path. | ||
| And certainly they would understand that it will weaken America from within. | ||
| The strategy, broadly speaking, is what's known as top-down, bottom-up, inside-outside. | ||
| So if they can infiltrate on the inside and weaken something from the inside, outside pressure can then crush it. | ||
| So that's that aspect of it. | ||
| And they would understand political warfare and these strategies extremely well. | ||
| I mean, they wrote—Souza wrote the book on this stuff. | ||
| 2,000 years ago or something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Last question for you. | ||
| You've given me the, okay, you got to jump and there's going to be some hands to catch you. | ||
| I mean, just talk directly to the parent that's watching this right now or the 16 year old kid who doesn't want to believe he's evil because of the color of his skin or the teacher who is afraid of saying what the truth is. | ||
| I mean, this has infiltrated everything. | ||
| The guy in HR, the freaking plumber, Feel free to talk directly to them. | ||
| I got some bad news to start with, and then we'll get a little more encouraged. | ||
| You actually have to learn a little bit about this. | ||
| You actually are gonna have to go read at least a couple of pages of critical race theory to defeat that argument that we hear from Joy Reid or whatever, that the people criticizing it don't know what it is. | ||
| Luckily, if you start with some of the basics, it's not that hard. | ||
| You have to get the gist. | ||
| Now, the bad news is over. | ||
| You do have to become educated and informed. | ||
| That said, you're not racist. | ||
| They are. | ||
| They don't have the argument. | ||
| You do. | ||
| The evidence is not on their side. | ||
| It's on yours. | ||
| So they don't have the evidence. | ||
| They don't have the argument. | ||
| They don't have the moral high ground. | ||
| You do have all three. | ||
| You have the evidence. | ||
| If you go look where they're implementing these diversity programs, companies and schools are doing worse. | ||
| The evidence Racism is on the rise. | ||
| We see these problems arising in our cities being justified along the lines of these doctrines. | ||
| You have the evidence. | ||
| You have the argument. | ||
| It's not hard to see through how their argument is actually completely bogus that, oh, we're going to overcome racism by putting more social significance into race. | ||
| And intentionally making the white race a negative thing and applying this imposition of racial identity on everybody in this kind of very politically active way and turning everybody into political activists instead of, you know, educated, informed, active, interactive citizens. | ||
| And then you also have the moral high ground. | ||
| If they are injecting racism into everything, if they are the people who want to tear things down, You're not in them. | ||
| They try to frame you out as a white supremacist or a sympathizer or as a racist or whatever. | ||
| It's not you. | ||
| It's actually them. | ||
| So you have the evidence. | ||
| You have the argument. | ||
| You have the moral high ground. | ||
| Don't be afraid. | ||
| Get a little bit of informed. | ||
| Get together with some of your friends, your other parents at the school. | ||
| Talk to your kids. | ||
| Engage with them. | ||
| Engage with them on these ideas. | ||
| Ask them to talk about it and then show up. | ||
| Show up and cheer if you don't want to talk. | ||
| Show up and find out who is talking and bake them cookies. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Get involved in some way. | ||
| Start getting organized. | ||
| You can do it. | ||
| It's all on your side. | ||
| James, you have truly been an all-star in this thing. | ||
| And if anyone wants to support you or find out more about your work or bake you some cookies or whatever else it might be, they can go to newdiscourses.locals.com, where you own all your stuff, my friend. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do. | |
| You own it. | ||
| Absolutely crazy. | ||
| James continued. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| I look forward to seeing you in real life one of these days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about academia instead of nonstop yelling, check out our academia playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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