This week, Daniel and Jack discuss Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, two alumni of the Intellectual Dark Web, their 'origin story' as 'public intellectuals' in the Evergreen College kerfuffle of 2017, and their current views on Black Lives Matter and Trans Rights as expressed in their Dark Horse podcast. Jack gets angry and giggly. Next week, we will move on to Bret's brother Eric Weinstein. Content Warning. Bari Weiss, "Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html Bret Weinstein homepage: https://bretweinstein.net/ Heather Heying homepage: https://heatherheying.com/ Evergreen State College at Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_State_College Programs and Courses at Evergreen. https://www.evergreen.edu/academics/programs Bret Weinstein Explains the Day of Absence on Joe Rogan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-st73zhZL3A Bret Weinstein on Tucker Carlson, May 26 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j9nFced_eo Jacqueline Littleton, "The Truth About the Evergreen Protests." https://medium.com/@princessofthefaeries666/the-truth-about-the-evergreen-protests-444c86ee6307 Noah Berlatsky, "The Real Free Speech Story at Evergreen College." https://psmag.com/education/the-real-free-speech-story-at-evergreen-college "Another Side of the Evergreen State College Story." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/evergreen-state-college-another-side_b_598cd293e4b090964295e8fc?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAEpQrgKs2MwkdM5iym8soDVnkkpQYbq3YKgw6fp62JA2xw_v_vSfS_O1EkcMNbbaM_leOCssfRJspZ8CiodkDerxlEWdw5vx3Vdmoe-2UFbmTkYSkhEMWWDMBaa_48LFSb6BMWtFz2X1xbCSS51b_fYIFe27hfLdLeFCj232fAlS Nancy Koppelman, "Bret Weinstein's Second Act." https://medium.com/@nancykoppelman/bret-weinsteins-second-act-from-liberal-arts-professor-to-public-intellectual-88471fdb2518 "The Intellectual Dark Web Goes to Washington." https://theoutline.com/post/4717/the-intellectual-dark-web-goes-to-washington?zd=1&zi=ft4wuqma The Dark Horse Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi5N_uAqApEUIlg32QzkPlg "Overlooked No More: Valerie Solanas, Radical Feminist Who Shot Andy Warhol." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/obituaries/valerie-solanas-overlooked.html William Simon U'Ren Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Simon_U%27Ren William Simon U'Ren Plaque in Oregon City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Simon_U%27Ren Mariame Kaba, "Yes We Mean Literally Abolish the Police." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html For fun: Majority Report, 19th July 2020, ‘Weinstein Bro Politely Calls Dave Rubin a Paid Shill’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4uSlbqSXVA Potholer54, ‘Did Covid-19 Start in a Chinese Lab?’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab-r0capbzk
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, he, him, and my friend Daniel Harper, he, him, have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
Every episode comes with a big content warning.
And welcome to I Don't Speak German episode 60.
Amazing.
Amazing that we've got to that number.
And I'm here with Daniel, as usual.
Hi, Daniel.
Hi.
And yeah, thanks for sticking with us for 60 episodes, listeners.
Assuming you have.
And yeah, so this week we're going to be talking about a gentleman by the name of Brett Weinstein.
Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather Hying, to be fair.
We're going to kind of bundle them up in one One episode which is not to be unfair to Dr. Haing there.
Certainly we are not going to approach this from the anti-feminist perspective that she would not be worthy of her own episode.
But there's very little light between these two and so it is we can just kind of cover the Yeah, they're kind of a unit.
So that's our subject for this week, but first we have a little bit of news to cover, which is about one of the subjects of our last episode, Matt Heimbach.
Yeah, he emailed me.
I was kind of not expecting that to happen, but Matt Heimbach, someone calling himself Matt Heimbach from an email address, emailed me.
I checked out the email and it's the same one that's listed in the legal documents and you know that I had checked that out after I had emailed back and was like yeah can you give me you know can you record some of your voice and give me indication that you are the person that you know you say you are and you know 20 minutes later he sent me an audio file that you know it's clearly his voice I know his voice very well and I happen to not have a whole lot to do that evening and so I chatted with Matt Heimbach for 90 minutes.
I would rather, I mean I kind of said I'm not going to discuss a lot of the details of this conversation.
That you know it was meant to be kind of a private thing and we both kind of agreed to that.
We are both feel free to kind of express kind of like kind of big-picture stuff about it.
I would rather not talk too much about how I feel about where Matt is so much as I would like to Kind of wait on that because we are still kind of DMing a bit, and I think he's very confused.
I would like to believe that his heart is in a good place, although I think he's still got a lot of fucked up stuff in his head, but I'm trying to kind of work through that with him.
The one thing that I did want to highlight in this episode is that apparently I implied or said that he was a fan of the cops, and he wanted to be absolutely clear that he is not a fan of the cops.
I don't know, I might have described him as a radical centrist or something who attacked Antifa and not the cops or whatever, but I didn't go back and re-listen to the episode to verify exactly what I said, but he wanted to be absolutely clear about that, that he is not a fan of the police.
And so we'll just kind of highlight that here and kind of leave it there for now, but we will kind of come back to Matt Heimbach in a future episode when we don't have as much to cover as we do in this episode because, believe me, this episode is overflowing as it is.
Yeah, so that's interesting.
And we're quite happy to stipulate what Matt wants to say.
He wants to clarify that.
We're quite happy to pass that on to you.
And there was much, much more.
I mean, I spoke to him for about 90 minutes and we've again kind of messaged back and forth a bit after that.
He had a lot to say.
Ironically, he didn't really disagree with the big picture that we had expressed.
Although he had some differences, he wanted to defend himself a bit.
I think part of what I want to do is make sure that I can accurately describe.
Not that he gets final say about this, but I do want to make sure that I really understand where he's coming from on some of this.
We're going to leave that aside for now and not really talk about those details.
We'll come back to that here in two or three more episodes when we have a little bit more time.
For now, we have a lot of other things to do.
Indeed.
Indeed.
So we'll keep you posted on that one.
And moving straight on to the main topic, as I say, Brett Weinstein and his wife, Heather Haying.
Haying?
Haying?
Haying.
You should be Haying, I believe.
Haying.
It is Weinstein, not Weinstein.
It's Weinstein.
Yeah, it is Stein.
There's a sort of German versus Russian We care about accuracy.
We make mistakes.
It's a thing that happens, but we do actually care about accuracy and we welcome people's corrections.
And ironically, I want to get these things right.
So, yeah.
We care about accuracy.
We make mistakes.
It's a thing that happens.
But we do actually care about accuracy.
And we welcome people's corrections.
It's actually a thing we try to do.
We do.
And we don't believe that we think that people should be treated with respect.
You know, except in so far as they do things that forfeit that respect.
And obviously your name is something that people should respect.
We'd rather criticize people for the right reasons and not the wrong ones.
That's it.
That's the concise version of what I said very fuzzily.
So, why don't we just dive straight in?
I mean, this is Brett Weinstein, brother of Eric Weinstein, and these two guys were featured in the now infamous Barry Weiss article about the renegades of the intellectual dark web.
These are two members, Heather Hying as well, I suppose, by extension.
These are members of the infamous Iconoclastic, intellectual dark web.
Indeed, in fact, Eric Weinstein was the person who coined the term.
Indeed, yeah.
So my original plan was going to be to do the Weinstein Brothers together, because my initial thought, you know, maybe three or four weeks ago when I said, okay, we need to do this, Because, as we will learn, as the Minneapolis protests, as the George Floyd protests got bigger and as that started to kind of become a national story, the Weinstein brothers completely lost grip with reality, insofar as they had it to begin with.
Yeah, I was gonna say.
And Eric actually said some things that, like, deeply, deeply pissed me off.
And so I'm like, well, we need to do a podcast.
We need to do an episode about this.
This is important.
And I thought, okay, we'll do the two brothers together.
And, um, as I, because I always kind of thought Brett was sort of the innocent one.
Like he had kind of, kind of come along on this IDW journey, but like most of the stuff that I had heard from him up until that point was mostly kind of clueless and innocuous, to be honest, um, as opposed to sort of like actively harmful, um, At least that was kind of my impression I got from him.
And oh boy, as I started doing the research, I realized that, you know, clueless, maybe, but there's a lot of, there's definitely enough material here.
There are lots of, shall we say, lies of omission rather than commission.
But there's a lot of bullshit.
But even so, this will be a ramp up into the real episode, which is that Eric is, you know, Brett is evil.
Brett is misguided.
Brett is stupid.
Brett has a lot of really bad takes, and he's kind of a bad person.
But Eric is, like, on a completely other level.
And so we will, this will be, for our audience, a ramp up into the real episode, which is about Eric.
And I am not looking forward to having to, you know, do the final prep on that one.
Although I've been burying myself in these people's podcasts and writings for the last, like, three weeks now.
And, like, my brain is leaking.
But we soldier on.
So just sort of an intro to these guys.
Eric did actually coin the term intellectual dark web They are both and along with Heather Hying and a handful of other people profiling the original Barry Weiss article that she wrote for the New York Times, kind of coining the term intellectual dark web, and that's the, I've linked in the show notes, it's the, you know, the portentous, you know, iconoclast academics posing near a shrubbery article. iconoclast academics posing near a shrubbery article.
Oh, yeah.
Remember that.
The intellectual dark web is kind of not a thing anymore, at least in terms of sort of, it's kind of like alt-right in that it just sort of got, like, abused to the point, like the term got abused to the point to where, like, nobody really wanted to be associated with it anymore, and it was never sort of, The Intellectual Dark Web is kind of not a thing anymore, at least in terms of sort of, it's kind of like alt-right in that it just sort of got, like, abused to the point, like, the term got abused to the point to where, like, nobody really wanted to be associated with it anymore.
And it was never sort of, like, an identifiable thing, even so much as alt-right was.
But now, like, if you kind of listen to them talk, they even talk about how, like, the IDW just doesn't really exist.
Although, despite the fact that, like, the people who were involved with it, like the former members of the alt-right, have enormous influence on sort of politics and discourse.
And the kind of the big picture, sort of the sociopolitical phenomenon that engendered it definitely has an influence.
So, in fact, the Harper's Letter, which was, you know, a bunch of very well-respected academics complaining that, like, college kids are angry at them on Twitter.
Yeah.
To oversimplify only slightly.
That has its roots in a lot of this kind of intellectual dark web culture.
Oh yes, and very much in Brett Weinstein as well, as I think we'll see as we get into his story.
Oh yes, we're going to get there very soon.
So, uh, we're going to briefly summarize Brett and Eric here at the very beginning, kind of give you a general sense of who they are.
This episode will be focused on Brett, although Eric will make a couple of appearances.
And then the next episode will be focused on Eric, although Brett will make, you know, at least one very significant appearance.
Because there's one incident in Brett's life that actually fits more neatly into Eric's story in a weird way.
So, um, but, uh, they're brothers.
They're not twins.
They're about three years apart.
Eric is 54 and Brett is 51.
We're somewhere in there.
Eric, they're both academics.
They both have PhDs in scientific fields.
Eric has a PhD in mathematical physics and Brett has a PhD in evolutionary biology.
Heather Hying, Brett's wife, Also has a PhD in evolutionary biology.
Her bachelor's degree was actually in anthropology and her father was one of the kind of original like kind of 1960s computer scientists who worked heavily on like the CPM and the CPV like a mainframe computing technology and so like he helped to like develop the bootloader and a lot of this kind of other stuff and so Um, these are people who kind of come from this, you know, upper middle class, academic class background, for sure.
And so this is the language they speak.
And these are, I mean, these are not, these are not total fools and suits.
These are people who, you know, this is not Dave Rubin we're talking about.
These are people who somewhere along the line did the work, you know, and got the qualification.
Right, and there is a bit of, I mean, you know, for instance, we are going to be focusing on Brett.
I mean, you know, when we get to Eric, there's a little bit of a different story, but Brett seems to have bounced around a bit.
I mean, you know, if you, one of the things that I try to do when I do these episodes is to sort of dig up as much sort of early material as I can on one of these figures, and one of the issues that I run into, that I ran into with these guys is that they don't have a long There's a lot of paper trail kind of going back.
You know if you think about like Jordan Peterson who was kind of just an eccentric professor in Canada until he decided he didn't want to like treat trans people with respect and became like kind of a hero based on that but he was kind of this like kind of weirdo guy who you know was I guess well liked by his students or whatever who was sort of you know he's an eccentric professor he's kind of off in his own little world doing his thing
And nobody's really gonna complain too hard as long as he's not, you know, doing, as long as he's not, like, committing, you know, sexual assault or anything, right?
Yeah.
But then he bravely refused to, you know, comply with the government police orders to call trans people by certain pronouns, which didn't exist.
Those orders didn't exist.
And he, you know, he got turned into a sensation by the right-wing media, and he parlayed that into this career that he's got now.
No, absolutely.
Although right now he's apparently off in a mental health facility in, uh, I think Eastern Europe or Russia or something?
Yeah.
Anyway, uh, and there's, there are rumors that his sis, that his daughter, there are rumors that his daughter is sort of like controlling his life and possibly poisoning him.
I don't know.
There's a lot of like weird stories that kind of go around with Jordan Peterson.
I do not intend to ever do a Jordan Peterson episode.
There are enough people who have already done that.
Then again, I long said I wasn't going to do an episode about the Weinstein Brothers, and now I'm doing two.
So, you know, we'll see.
So look forward to our Jordan Peterson episode somewhere down the line.
Way, way down the line if we ever plan to do one.
I do have some more episodes planned about some of the kind of rationalists, you know, this kind of sphere of people, because I think it's importantly, it's increasingly important to cover some of these guys, even in this kind of Nazi space.
One thing that we didn't say at the very beginning that I probably should have, but, you know, for the Reddit audience who is certainly going to find this, and, you know, neither of these men are Nazis.
We're not going to highlight that over and over again the way we did with Sam Harris.
I was going to say that we should stipulate, as indeed we did when we covered Sam Harris, these guys are not Nazis.
That's all.
Right.
They are not Nazis.
I'm not claiming they're Nazis.
They are deeply problematic people.
They fit into the remit of this podcast, I think, for some interesting reasons, particularly Eric really belongs.
You know, he fits squarely.
But you can't really understand Eric without understanding Brett, and so we're going to kind of do these.
And the way to keep them separate, because I have a hard time, I had a hard time for a long time,
Remembering which one is Bretton which one is Eric and Brett is the biologist B&B I just remember that and Eric is not and if you want sort of the one-sentence summary of who these two men are Brett is the one whose students told him he was racist and he has spent three years whining about it on the internet and Eric is the one who has been completely Flummoxed by the fact that no one has yet started to refer
I started to use Weinstein as a rhyme for Einstein in the public discourse, because Eric believes he is the greatest living public intellectual.
Yeah, and he has all sorts of theories about why this isn't widely acknowledged as well.
Oh, we will get to this next week.
I have some really juicy bits here.
This is a guy who not only has theories about why he isn't universally acknowledged as the greatest genius since Einstein, but he's given his theories about this acronyms.
Oh yes, oh yes.
Intellectual Dark Web is pretty catchy, I mean he did seem to coin that one, so we'll give him credit for that one.
Um, all the rest of his little acronyms that he uses are completely clunky and nonsensical and only make sense if you are deeply invested in Eric Weinz.
Um, so anyway, we're going to now leave Eric behind until next week and talk about Brett and Heather.
Um, and again, the sort of the earliest thing I could find on really either of them is, um, we're going to end up spending a lot of time in 2017 and kind of spend a lot of time in the middle of this story.
Again, there's kind of a deeper story.
Preferable in many ways to 2020, but never mind.
Well, we'll also spend some time in 2020, don't get me wrong.
But, you know, the one kind of big thing that you can kind of find about like Brett's history, if you've got to go and look for him, is he was a college student.
He was like a freshman college student in Pennsylvania in the late 80s.
And he went to, he was invited to a frat party where he found that Uh, the frat had hired, um, strippers.
They had hired exotic dancers.
And, um, Brett thought they were being abused.
There was some, you know, abuse kind of happening.
It's very difficult 30 years later to really get to the bottom of exactly kind of what was going on.
Um, Brett alleged there was, you know, kind of lewd behavior, kind of abusive behavior with, like, hot dogs and, like, condiment packages or something like that.
Um, it sounds very much like kind of a, you know, like a Porky's kind of style story, and so it's kind of hard to know exactly kind of what was going on.
Um, because, you know, some of these things can be kind of taken down to purience if we were going to view it in a less than favorable light, but um...
I'm willing to believe that, uh, you know, I'm willing to kind of give him the benefit of the doubt on that, especially since apparently the university did, um, uh, did actually, uh, discipline the fraternities, which seems like, you know, they would not do so without a good reason.
You know, uh, frats typically get, like, very wide berth, especially on party school campuses, and, um, Brett got so much hate for that, uh, as an undergraduate that he eventually had to leave school and move to another school in California, which is where he ended up doing his bachelor's.
So, um, you know, if there is a, uh, if we are going to kind of give him some credit here, that does seem to be a bit of courage and a bit of, uh, you know, legitimate, like, good action, uh, from him, uh, when he was, when he was a very young man.
And I feel the obligation to report that.
That's the earliest thing we really have on record about him.
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
It sounds like you did good there, Brett.
Congratulations.
Sure.
Yeah, on the surface, I'm on his side.
He was effectively a whistleblower on the fraternity because they abused some sex workers, I suppose, or sex industry workers.
If that's true, well done, Brett.
Good.
And there's reporting from the time that kind of indicates this.
I didn't put it in the show notes.
I'll probably try to find it.
After that, the trail goes a little bit cold.
The next time he shows up is when his giant, you know, kind of media thing happens in 2017.
He becomes, you know, sort of nationally and even internationally famous.
And we will get here and discuss that here briefly.
We will discuss it more than briefly.
We will discuss it at some length, but we'll get there in a second.
The only other thing is, you know, it is worth noting that he marries Heather Hying in the early 2000s, I believe, and at that point he had not yet completed his doctorate.
He was a grad student.
He had kind of been apparently bouncing around as a grad student for a while.
It's unclear exactly kind of what his work history was.
I mean, it seems like he was kind of a, you know, he says personally that he was kind of a middling student.
I believe it.
I was a middling student in a lot of ways.
You know, I had a lot going on in my life when I was doing my degree.
It's also, you know, like we're talking about like scientists here.
And, you know, I don't talk about this on the show, but like I have a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
You know, I understand what like STEM coursework is.
And so since we are talking about scientists, it is kind of highlighting that, you know, I am not completely unfamiliar with this world.
Although I kind of came at it. - I speak, I was a brilliant student, and the only reason that I haven't been acknowledged so far as the main genius in modern philosophy and literature is that there's a conspiracy theory to suppress me.
And I have an acronym, actually, to explain the conspiracy theory that has suppressed me from winning all the prizes.
I believe that.
I believe that.
We'll talk about that next week, perhaps.
Good, good.
I want to get into this one day.
I think we should.
Because I'm very angry about it.
But he marries Ha Ying.
I'm not sure exactly when.
Sometime in the early 2000s.
And she is hired as faculty at Evergreen State College.
After her PhD, and we're going to talk a lot about Evergreen.
In fact, we could do a full episode on Evergreen.
I dug into this a lot, and one of the problems that I ran into is that it's very difficult to get reliable sources that I feel like will kind of tell the fuller picture.
Like, I've gotten Rhett telling this story over and over again, And I've got some documentation, but it's very difficult to sort of, like, really parse through it because there's just not a lot there.
Like, Brett has managed to get kind of his version of events out there to a degree that it's really difficult to, like, kind of find the counter narratives, at least in sort of a way that, you know, that kind of come along with, like, real evidence.
We might, I mean we could probably do, again, we could do a full episode and dig into some of these details a little bit more, but for now we're going to kind of, we are going to tell this story, but there's a lot I'm going to have to leave out here because there's just no way to do it properly.
Yeah.
But Hying was hired... We're going to glance at this.
It's fascinating in itself, but we're going to... Oh no, no, yeah it is.
Kind of glance at it.
Yeah, no, we'll, I mean, we'll, there's just, there are like many like kind of interlocking stories that appear to be happening.
Um, and there are a lot of allegations back and forth.
And, um, you know, really kind of sifting through that is just not something.
If, if you were a student or faculty member at Evergreen in 2017 and you would like to contact me and give me some of those documents I may be lacking, particularly if you were on the faculty Listserv, or Listserv around that time, uh, believe me, I am definitely interested in kind of digging into that.
As much as I do not want to spend any more time thinking about Evergreen State College, it is, I think, a story that still needs to be told, let's put it that way.
We want to hear from you.
But, you know, so Hying is hired as kind of a full-time faculty member in 2004.
It appears that Brett was hired, he kind of comes along as her spouse, and he's hired as an adjunct, and then he eventually finishes his degree Only in 2009 when he would have been something like 40 years old and he's like 38 or 39.
And there's nothing, again that's not me kind of like putting shade on this guy for like finishing his PhD late or kind of like being a less than stellar, having a less than stellar academic career.
But it is kind of worth noting that like he did kind of finish his stuff late, he was not kind of the best person in this regard.
I mean, I actually spoke to a couple of biology PhD, like, kind of ABD, you know, kind of grad students, who told me that, you know, if you look at, like, Brett Weinstein's background, if you look at his CV, if you look at his publication record, you know, I have more than that.
You know, plenty of people who do not have PhDs, you know, he has not, like, sort of, like, surrounded himself in the kind of academics.
He's been someone who's been interested in teaching.
And this is where we get into the Evergreen State College story.
Yeah.
And the best way, if you want this in kind of a quick bite, and you want this from the horse's mouth, I put a link to like an 11-minute clip from the Joe Rogan experience, like kind of as this stuff was all happening, in which Brett describes it.
And I'm gonna kind of summarize it here, but I mean, he has told the story in many, many other times and places, and so there's no need to You know, I'm going to summarize it hopefully fairly from his perspective and then we're going to tell the story that he doesn't tell because there's a lot that he doesn't tell in this.
And I have put every link I could find kind of talking about this I have put in the show notes so you can view this for yourself and sort of examine the evidence for yourself and make your own determinations.
But I am doing this as I understand it.
So the story he tells is Evergreen State College was a deeply experimental university.
It was kind of founded in the late 60s and as a teaching college primarily.
It didn't have a kind of traditional class structure.
So here I've got a link to actually a current page at Evergreen talking about how their academics were.
And so they have, you know, sort of a graphic of, you know, like your typical education at your typical university.
So if you were entering and you were a freshman, you might take, say, economics, physics, and history.
It's like kind of three separate courses, and that would be your kind of semester.
You take, you know, 12 hours of academic credit, and you kind of move on to the next semester.
Well, at Evergreen, instead of taking those three classes, They might all be integrated into one single unit, which was, it might last an entire year.
You would be with the same kind of group of 25 students with typically two if not three professors who would teach individual kind of bits of this class.
And so instead of taking those three, economics, physics, and history, you might take a program called Earth Dynamics.
And they call them programs instead of classes.
And so If you're a professor there, then if you're an economics professor, you'll have, you know, you will teach your kind of economics background material, and then you'd hand them off to, you know, kind of the physics side or the history side.
It's an integrated learning approach.
Evergreen is one of the most progressive universities in the country.
It is state-funded, which is something that kind of comes back.
It actually is not a, you know, kind of a private university, which means that the in-state tuition at Evergreen is about $7,000 a year.
Which is, you know, if you have looked into going into university recently, that's a very, very reasonable cost for this kind of education.
A private school typically costs, you know, like 7 or 8 times that.
You could easily spend $50,000 a year for this kind of education.
And so, I highlight this because this is easily one of the cushiest jobs in academics you could possibly get.
Like, if you want to teach undergraduates and you want to kind of have that experience of bouncing ideas and kind of really having the freedom to teach the way you want to, this is literally one of the best jobs you could possibly get, right?
And the fact that Brett gets this job as an adjunct teacher without his, or as an adjunct professor without even a PhD, I mean, it does speak to, like, he was given a really amazing opportunity to go to this, to teach here.
Um, now, uh, what this also means is that, uh, you know, his students loved him.
Uh, you know, uh, he, he's, uh, he very, uh, continually is kind of considered to be, um, someone, you know, everyone agrees that his students really enjoyed his classes, that, uh, he always had a wait list for his classes.
There was never, you know, he was, he was very well liked by students.
Um, I do have, uh, we'll talk about this here in a minute.
A little bit of one of the one of the people who worked with him has slightly different opinion We'll get to that here in a second.
But so the story is from Brett's perspective is I was at this school I had this amazing opportunity.
We had all these students.
They really loved me.
Nobody ever thought I was a racist.
There was never a kind of thought to that kind of perspective, et cetera, et cetera.
I was close to my students.
They were close to me.
We all understood each other.
And it was this very kind of free and flowing environment where we just got to spread ideas and really kind of engage in the highest level of discussion between professor and student possible, et cetera, et cetera.
And then this administrator, this new administrator shows up.
This new president of the college shows up.
And he has new ideas of wanting to spread this sort of racial, like, wokeness.
And he wants to kind of make faculty kind of consider their own internalized racism in a more direct way.
And for years, you know, from the beginning of the university, one of the things that the program, one of the things that the university has done is they have this program called the Day of Absence.
The Day of Absence is on one day a year, usually in the spring, or I believe always in the spring, but on one day a year, you know, the university would run programs whereby the African-American students, the people of color more broadly, would leave campus for a day as a way of sort of showing their own importance to the university by like what it's like when they're not there.
Then yeah since the early 90s that had been followed by a day of presence where everybody kind of comes back And you know everyone on the university is expected to in some way participate in this but there was no sort of like Guideline as to exactly what you did and didn't have to do but that you kind of had there were a lot of Listen, there were a lot of programs or a lot of where like speeches and there and it's meant to be sort of this Way that we all kind of examine the kind of the effect of racism in our society It's a very kind of like Upper-level university kind of thing to do right?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's kind of it's kind of adorable It's you know, this is in what you kind of run across and again, you know you and I I think can can see this maybe more clearly than some of the people there and this is part of what makes this story more complicated is that it does seem like like look this is a very kind of liberal educator kind of
We're going to solve racism by making people really sit and consider their place in the world, and we're not actually going to challenge the big picture of what racism actually means in this society.
This is pretty anodyne, but it's a thing.
It's people trying to do the right thing, quote unquote.
It's a program.
It's a thing.
So in 2017, in response, and keep in mind, this is April 2017 is when this starts.
This is three months after Donald Trump's inauguration, and particularly, you know, the students of immigrants, and you know, like, there was a lot of very reasonable fear about what exactly it was going to mean to be a person of color in this new America.
Yeah, what was coming next?
Right, exactly.
And we still kind of have that fear, although we've got a little bit more of a handle on it in 2020.
And I mean, you know, there's but certainly in like it is completely reasonable to think in 2017.
And we will put this in even more context here in a minute.
It is completely reasonable for the university to want to kind of address this in a more direct way.
And so what they did was they switched.
They said, we're going to switch this year.
We're gonna ask the White students and the white faculty to leave campus for a day and then to allow the people of color To be on the campus and to enjoy this world without this sort of oppressive whiteness or whatever I don't know exactly what language they used but you know like that was sort of the idea is to get the you know the white faculty to absent themselves and And Brit Weinstein throws a fucking hissy fit.
Yeah, yeah.
All through the faculty listserv, he writes a formal letter to the university, and he says, like, well, if African Americans want to absent themselves from the university by their choice, and they are allowed to do that, and that's them making a decision to do this, but if you're asking the white people to leave, then you are oppressing the white people.
And so A, and I'm trying to present this through Brett's eyes here, but this was always a corporate diversity style program, and it was always asking people to leave or to stay.
It was never people choosing to absent themselves.
Also, all these programs are voluntary, and in fact, even the event space where the day of absence was going to be held that year would not hold the number of white students that were on campus.
And so there was no question of every white student leaving campus to begin with.
It's a largely symbolic gesture, but one that, again, seems to be coming from a reasonable place.
Again, this gets more complicated because it does seem like there are allegations that the university president, the new university president, was sort of like working to create administrative bloat.
I mean, at least there are some kind of – there are some allegations that there is some skullduggery going on.
This is stuff I can't really speak to because I couldn't find anyone really talking about this in detail at all, one way or the other.
But Haing makes this sort of, like, claim at one point in a documentary that, you know, that there was an attempt to destroy the university by bringing in administrators, etc, etc.
That there was literally something kind of, you know, something sinister kind of going on from the administrators' point of view.
And that he was using this to sort of, like, distract from that in some way.
Again, can't comment to that.
I have no ability to judge that.
I have seen no other indication from that.
This guy is still the college president today, if that tells you anything.
But anyway, so Weinstein does this, sends out these emails, he does the thing, and in his telling of this, His class is invaded by students, by a mob, which he describes as a Maoist insurrection.
Okay?
It's shining path.
A Maoist insurrection of students.
A mob who invade his classroom and call him a racist.
And I was defended, he says this in his voice, I was defended by my students, by people of color that I know and will tell me that I am clearly not a racist.
You defend me to this.
And then the next day, these students, like, they show up and they're actually attacking the university president's office.
And they start, they invade that office.
And they're, like, taking, there was, like, an emeritus function where they were, like, honoring these faculty members.
And they took the, like, the cakes that were meant to be for the, like, high-end faculty members.
And they took that away.
And it's only for, like, students of the people of color.
and they actually trapped people inside this building.
The local cops, like the campus cops, were actually ordered to stand down and I was threatened by people and then there were like students with bats who were like chasing me around and like that's the story he tells, okay?
Mm-hmm.
Do you have any questions thus far?
You know, we've told it from Brett's perspective.
That was an important thing to do, I think, to put his view of things out there.
I suspect, in fact I know, that it wasn't quite like that.
It was not, it was not.
In fact, we're going to talk a little bit about what a neo-Maoist insurrection really means.
Because it took me a while to figure out exactly what he was referring to, and then eventually I kind of found it, and I'm like, oh, that, that's, yeah, that's deeply stupid.
Here's what's missing from this, and you can get, again I've put a bunch of links here, Noah Berlatsky wrote a very good piece about a year after all these incidents at Pacific Standard Magazine describing a lot of the kind of real history, and that one is entitled, I've got it here, Here's the big picture of what's being left out.
at Evergreen State College, how right-wing media has tried to stifle students' speech at Evergreen State College.
Here's the big picture of what's being left out.
First of all, there was a history of racial strife at Evergreen.
In 2015, in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests in 2014, in 2015 there were some, not students, but there were two African American kids who were shot by a cop after they had tried to shoplift a six-pack of beer.
These kids were not killed, but one of them was paralyzed.
They both did prison terms and the cop was exonerated for this.
And there were protests at Evergreen in 2015.
There were a number of student activities and student protests around racial segregation and racial issues in the college.
There was an occasion in 2016, I believe, in which two African-American students were rousted from their dorm rooms at like 3 in the morning on some kind of maybe real, maybe spurious charge.
But, you know, and that created a more kind of racial tension because it turns out there were a couple of African-American kids and I believe there was a white kid who was Not rousted in the same way, who were kind of guilty of the same thing.
So these incidents and kind of many other kind of similar things, there was a kind of ongoing question about like kind of what, you know, racism meant on Evergreen State College campus that Brett completely leaves out of the story.
So when Donald Trump is elected, and this is also something that we talked about to some degree in our in episode three about our about the Unite the Right rally.
The Unite the Right rally was in August on August 12th, 2017.
What people forget is that there was a whole line of racist rallies going on all through that summer and that spring that this was not an isolated incident.
This was, you know, sort of the apex of a whole year of this that had started with Donald Trump's inauguration at that point.
And so none of this is happening in a vacuum.
There is a deep question about kind of what How we're going to respond to the kind of ongoing, oncoming racist and racialized violence against African American people and against other people of color within society.
And again, this gets completely left out of Brett Weinstein's narrative, like this entire thing.
All that context gets completely lost, right?
The other thing he doesn't tell you is that he's compressing the time frame considerably, right?
The day of absence was on April 12th and the day of presence was on the 13th of April.
The protests, where students were invading his classroom was on may 23rd six weeks later yeah and so the initial like his letter about like i'm upset about the day of absence and the day of presence thing people were upset about that i mean students complained about it and there were letters about it and like but like there were some minor protests but this was not kind of like the really the inciting incident no no not no
i thought the incident with the black students in the dorms actually happened after the the the day of absence thing and the email.
I thought that was what caused the protest that Weinstein decided to go out and confront.
I'm just a bit confused, because the Berlanski report says that you have that whole business with the Day of Absence and Weinstein's email, and then in May 2017, that month, it says police took two black students out of their dorms just before midnight following an altercation in the cafeteria the day before, according to Littleton.
Somebody called Littleton.
The non-black student involved in the altercation was not detained.
In response, activists organized protests which included demonstrations and marches through classroom buildings in order to raise awareness.
During this march, Weinstein decided to come out of his classroom and confront the protester.
That's what the Bolatski article says.
So yeah, I was just looking into some of this because it turns out my sources disagree.
But I did find another source, just as I was looking at here, and it does seem that you're right.
The initiating incident is related to that incident with the two students who aroused from their dorm in 2017.
And it was 2017, not 2016.
Sorry, I've got some Again, there's some difficulty in terms of, like, people kind of telling these stories.
There's a bit of a game of telephone.
It doesn't seem that the, like, the incident was in winter of 2017, but there were some sort of, like, legal matters with the, even that kind of first incident.
There was some frustration kind of boiling to the surface.
And so there's not some kind of one incident that made this happen, but it was certainly, you know, kind of up there.
That seems to be something that was kind of the real incitement to, people kind of invading Weinstein classroom.
It does seem that they targeted him because of sort of the memory of him making a big stink about the day of absence and the day of presence just a few weeks before.
But again, it's clear that it's not like they got mad at him over that and that alone, because there is this kind of version of the story which he seems to want to tell.
You know, oh, it's just a bunch of like dumb college kids who got, you know, really upset over nothing, basically.
Which isn't the case.
They have like real grievances here.
There are real kind of things that they're talking about and they're using him as sort of a focal point of that.
Also, while this video went viral in 2017, you know, on May 23rd, and it got spread around on right-wing media, which we will talk about here in just a second.
Oh yeah.
You know, no one, even Weinstein, even Brett, doesn't allege that, like, anyone, like, hurt him or anyone, like, did anything, that no one even, like, damaged any property or anything.
It's just a bunch of kids, like, kind of getting angry and calling him names, basically.
You know, they did call for him to be fired, although they withdrew that.
They withdrew that, like, a day or two later.
Yeah.
This was, you know, they were kind of asking for his resignation, but, I mean, again, that was sort of something that, like, you know, it turns out even the mob can be reasoned with, right?
You know?
Which, again, is something we're going to come back to here shortly.
God, where are we?
Like, 45 minutes into this episode.
Um, and so, um, this was all, this was like a planned event, this was a planned action by student groups, essentially.
So, the video goes viral, and, uh, it gets picked up by right-wing media, and two days later, on May 26th, uh, Brett Weinstein shows up on Tucker Carlson's show.
Tucker Carlson, yes indeed.
He does a, I think, a seven-minute segment on Tucker Carlson describing this incident, describing all these things, and it comes out as part of this, like, campus craziness thing.
Yeah.
I remember at the time listening to the showaboys had a lot to say about this, and like, No, they're never going to do anything to Brent Weinstein because he's Jewish, obviously.
This was a big news story at the time.
If you were following right-wing media, this becomes this giant incident.
This becomes another example of these crazy, woke college kids being children and asking for things that they shouldn't be asking for, etc.
etc.
He also does Joe Rogan, just a couple days later, and then does a whole lot of right-wing media appearances right there in that sort of late May, early June kind of time period.
Yeah.
God, it's just like Jordan Peterson, isn't it?
A campus college spat with a goofy professor who doesn't understand, you know, the young'uns, who gets into a tizzy about something, you know, they call me racist or whatever, and he gets seized upon by this right-wing propaganda machine.
I mean, I'm not denying his agency in the thing, but these people really are predatory.
And Weinstein definitely leaned hard into that, I mean, you know, and... Well, yeah, as did Peterson.
As did Peterson, but I think, you know, and again, I was perfectly willing to kind of give Weinstein a lot, or Brett, a lot of leeway on this, and that, like, he was kind of used by the right-wing noise machine, but when you go back and, like, kind of look at this in context, you look at, you know, sort of, like, what he's doing now, He leaned hard into this I mean he still brings up this we're spending a lot of time on this story Because he spends a lot of time on this story.
This is the origin story really of both of these men to a large degree Yeah, this is this is the fundamental story like this is like like Brett will bring this back over and over and over again in terms of like an almost every video he does and He mentions like, oh, back at Evergreen, you know, as if everyone who follows him understands this history, but understands it through his particular lens, obviously.
So, yeah, if he was a Marvel superhero, this would be his first movie.
The evergreen story So after the appearance on Tucker Carlson and you know, I'll give him Tucker Carlson now is much more clearly understood as being One step away from an actual white nationalist himself.
This was a little bit less understood in that time period It really wasn't until about a year later that you know that that you really started to see news articles kind of going like yeah Nazis really like this guy right like really like this guy Yeah.
And so I'll give him, you know, again we have to kind of treat this with a bit of nuance and kind of treat it with the history and where things were in May of 2017.
What is not under dispute is that in the aftermath of this appearance on Tucker Carlson, the university starts getting threats.
Threats from far-right groups.
Yes.
Yeah, this really puts this business on the radar of the far-rights.
Joey Gibbs is in the Patriot Prayer and I promise we will one day do an episode on Patriot Prayer.
I keep waiting to find the perfect guest who will help me do that one but you know it's always a challenge.
And relatedly on Andy Ngo.
Oh yeah, well on Andy Ngo, yeah, we'll have to do that one as well.
He's going to come back.
Andy Ngo makes an appearance in this story, believe it or not.
Cameo.
Not at this point, not at this point.
Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson of Patriot Prayer, threatens the school and says, you know, we're Basically come invade and we're gonna do marches on campus.
It's unclear to me whether they actually did anything on campus or whether they only threatened to.
What is not in the dispute is that a certain right-wing group started putting up flyers around the Evergreen State College campus.
And that right-wing group is Atomwaffen Division.
Yes.
So an actual Nazi terror organization, satanic neo-Nazi organization, is posting flyers threatening your campus.
Guess what words I have never heard Brett Weinstein speak out loud?
Patriot prayer and Adam Watson division.
Yeah, never talked about it.
Because it goes completely against his version of events in which he's the central person who is being threatened by woke college students, the neo-Maoist insurrection.
That's right.
And not like, no, no, the reason your university was shut down is that like actual neo-Nazis were like actually threatening the people of color who are on campus.
And while you are not 100% responsible for the fact that Adam Woffin is doing that, It was in response to your media tour and you're going on Tucker Carlson's show and your complete inability to see that and to maybe consider the consequences of your actions is deeply, deeply fucked up, right?
Yes, indeed.
And so this is again something that Weinstein does not ever address whatsoever in talking about this.
Um, the other thing that I would like to highlight here just before we kind of get off of the Evergreen story is that I actually do have a Medium post which was written by one of his colleagues.
And this was in August 2018.
This is by Nancy Koppelman.
Nancy Koppelman is a, I believe, a professor of American Studies.
She is still at Evergreen.
Her, she still has a website at the Evergreen State College website.
I did do the kind of basic, you know, kind of due diligence on that.
And she talks at some length about, she actually taught with Brett Wines.
And so let's, there's a particular quote here.
Um, this is very long and very scathing, but she says, among other things, Weinstein was indeed a popular professor, and his classes tended to be full with waiting lists.
He is a bright and entertaining person.
He's witty, funny, and a creative thing.
But his classes were also popular because he successfully cultivated a campus persona as something of a celebrity.
He was fond of claiming that college in general was largely a sham, but that the knowledge students would gain in his classes was so profound, so life-changing, so unusual, so startling, that something completely unique and almost impossible to describe would happen to them when they studied it.
The character of these claims echo those of 19th century figure P.T.
Barnum, who promised to surprise his audiences by creating conditions for them to think hard about what truth is and ultimately to trust their own judgment.
For Barnum, this was a successful business tactic that attracted a public highly skeptical of expert knowledge.
but this tactic is not what liberal arts professors are trusted to do.
A sizable number of students flocked to his classes precisely because they were long on historiotics and short on homework.
I don't doubt that students had a great time with him.
Ours did when we talked together, but under the surface was a dire neglect of the everyday duties and responsibilities that can frankly be boring and yield no attention or accolades, but that make teaching the hard and generous work that changes lives.
Ouch.
shh I'm sorry.
There's one more bit I'm going to quote here.
Weinstein lacks respect for all fields of study.
He is convinced that evolutionary theory is the grand organizing principle for virtually everything, and that other fields are derivative.
Liberal arts professors embrace complexity.
We encourage students to see value in all disciplines.
He did not.
Weinstein lacked curiosity.
When I taught with him, I read the books he had signed.
Dawkins is the selfish gene in diamonds, guns, germs, and steel.
Okay, first of all, the fact that those are the books he's...
I mean...
In, like, 2017, he's still teaching for the fucking selfish gene.
Okay, and Diamonds, Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Also, that book has like deep, deep problems and no anthropologist takes it remotely seriously.
Anyway, this is common practice in interdisciplinary teaching teams, but he wouldn't read the books I assigned.
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Mensa's Huck's Raft, A History of American Childhood.
He tried to fake it and fool me.
He did not.
And so this is definitely worth a read.
You know, if you've spent any time at all kind of digging through Brent Weinstein's garbage, this was really crystallizing for me.
Again, this could be, you know, we could treat this uncharitably and treat it as someone who has an axe to grind against Brent Weinstein.
But in many cases, Koppelman praises him.
I mean she gives him credit where credit's due.
She says that he's charming.
She says that the charge that he is a personal racist is actually overblown, that she doesn't agree with that.
She encourages him to move on into his place as a sort of public intellectual because he's gonna be better at that than he was at being a liberal arts professor, which is something that he Actively was not very good at it and didn't seem to enjoy it all.
I mean, it's a very balanced picture despite the fact that like It's scathing in those places You know, it's you know, it's worth reading, you know, and I think Bernstein's fans should be aware of this So we are now like nearing an hour or just past an hour depending on what gets cut in and out of this episode and so We are going to have to leave the Evergreen State College story behind.
Again, there is an entire narrative around this.
I found yesterday, as I was prepping this, there's a 20-part documentary by one of Brett Weinstein's former students about the Evergreen State College fiasco.
Which is fawning towards Brett Weinstein.
I watched the first like five minutes and I it was it was yeah no I did not have time to watch this for this podcast.
There is a three-part documentary by this guy with the last name Mena I believe.
Who has previously done many like sort of like YouTube videos, documentaries about the Grievance Studies professors, and convinced me that I'm going to have to do an episode about the Grievance Studies professors at some point.
You know?
Anyway, you know, kind of very similar story, but we do need to kind of move away from the Evergreen State College story.
Yes, we do.
The one thing that we'll kind of end with on this is that a few months after, so they were they were let go.
Both Hying and Weinstein were let go from there.
There is some kind of back and forth about exactly what happened here.
It seems that essentially they were asked not to return.
You know Hying and Weinstein did a lawsuit against the university for Yes, they did.
For false firing.
The university settled out of court for $500,000.
They were asking for $3.8 million.
They got $500,000.
thousand dollars uh the uh they were asking for 3.8 million they got 500 000 um essentially uh you know the university uh paid them to go away you know so yeah um well 500 000 in return for you know basically bringing down nazi terrorist threats on the university by by hyping up student protests as you know maoist guerrillas i I think that's a pretty good result for you, to be honest.
Right.
So, what happened from that point forward was you end up with, they kind of go off and they become public intellectuals.
They each have, quote-unquote, public intellectuals.
They start doing You know, in-person appearances, they seem to be making most of their cash by doing panel appearances and such.
A lot of kind of college Republican clubs kind of bring them on to talk about how, you know, the leftist insurrection is, you know, actually stifling free speech on universities, and they've kind of turned this into a pretty good money-making opportunity for themselves.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, they're being silenced, you see.
Being silenced, exactly.
You see, no one is willing to listen to them and their very reasonable criticisms of Of the policies of this kind of hyper-woke, you know, examine our racism thing at Evergreen.
And so we are now going to go off and spread this story to an audience of millions.
Yeah.
And they have built a bit of a YouTube following as of, you know, kind of middle of last year into last year.
Brett started a YouTube show called The Dark Horse Podcast.
The very first episode The very first guest was Andy Ngo.
What do you know?
Right after the incident, the milkshaking incident, which we covered on this podcast at the time.
It was one of the very first appearances that Andy had made.
The Evergreen State College is actually in Olympia, Washington.
They did move to Portland, Oregon shortly after they left the college, and that's where they live today.
Uh, I find it really... I try not to be conspiratorial in terms of my kind of day-to-day life.
I find it really interesting that Andy Ngo's milkshaking incident was just in time to be the very first guess.
And Brett calls Andy a friend, a personal friend, and even says he visited Andy Ngo in the hospital while he was suffering from the terrible brain aneurysm that he was clearly suffering from.
So there's a lot of questions about what really was going on in that Andy Ngo milkshaking thing, but suffice to say that Andy got to do his right-wing grift thing and kind of give a promotion to his buddy Brett's podcast at the very same time.
Yeah, it worked out very nicely, Reverend.
It worked out very nicely for everybody.
Now, I have not listened to every episode of this podcast.
I made a good effort.
At a certain point, the original episodes were kind of bringing on a lot of these kind of right-wing guests and sort of doing these rationalist figures and various kind of talking about issues.
And they would bring on scientists and talk about stuff.
Pretty quickly, after about 10 or 11 episodes, it shifted into being basically Brett and Heather sitting and doing a live stream where they would first kind of do an independent live stream talking about, you know, kind of whatever issues they had to bring up.
And then they would do a kind of a part two, which was sort of a Q&A.
And I think that sort of was brought up during the kind of beginning of the COVID-19 crisis.
Uh, the first many number of episodes are kind of directly on point to COVID and kind of talking about that kind of, um, the sort of whatever was kind of going on in that week's news about the, uh, the pandemic.
Um, Brett has landed pretty firmly on the, I believe COVID-19 was designed in a Chinese lab somewhere.
Yes.
And as much as I would like to dig into that, we just don't have time.
We just don't have time.
We might cover it a bit next week, because Eric is even more batshit on this topic.
Yes, he is.
As he is on several topics.
As he is on a lot of topics, yes.
I mean, it is the considered professional opinion, and Brett does have a, you know, he is an evolutionary biologist, like, let's give him, like, he does have the technical knowledge to read these papers, right?
The bulk of the scientific establishment, you know, has very good Very fundamental reasons for like, this seems really unlikely that this was sort of engineered in a lab somewhere.
Brett found a biotech entrepreneur who agrees with him and then he kind of brought him on this show and this guy wrote like in this long medium piece.
I read, you know, I read that to sort of, like, get the big gist of it, and it does seem to be, like, it's sort of superficially convincing if you don't know anything about, like, how these kind of, like, biotech things are actually done in labs.
Yeah.
And how you actually, how you would actually kind of design, like, the virus, the structure of the COVID-19 virus is not, it's not conducive to the way that you would design a bioweapon if you were going to design a bioweapon.
And so we can't say it definitely was not made in a lab, but the vast majority of scientists kind of look at this and go, this doesn't seem to make sense to us.
Like, there's just a lot of other reasons to think that this isn't valid.
Anyway.
Yeah.
I might, just for fun, link to a Potholer54 video where he debunks the claims of one sort of blogger about stuff like this, and incidentally, you know, as he goes, explains why it's very unlikely.
Right.
Sorry, go on.
Oh no, yeah, sure.
Please feel free to link to that.
I literally was just going to skip right over that because there's just so much here and we've already gone on so long.
Literally, he thinks COVID-19 was designed as a bioweapon in a Chinese lab.
We'll just mention that in passing and then move on.
I actually, the thing that really kind of got me, and this is the thing that really made me want to do the episodes, was the response of Hying and Weinstein to the protests, and particularly to the Portland protests.
And I have watched many of their recent live streams several times, actually, especially the ones, you know, about sort of the Portland riots and about kind of the responses to that.
And the way that they compare these, the kind of reaction of the authorities to what happened, quote unquote, happened to them at Evergreen, right?
Because what is the big story that they're missing about Evergreen?
It's like, well, there's a giant context of like the, you know, kind of institutionalized violence that's being done against like African-Americans, et cetera, et cetera. - Hmm.
And, like, none of that matters because, like, ultimately, well, we have to have law and order, and we have to have, you know, and they kind of continually go off on, like, the problem is that there is this institution of postmodernism that is coming in, and that is making us lose our sense-making apparatus.
where we can't even make sense of the world because like and spoiler alert they lean heavily into some transphobia here um you can't even tell that a man is a man anymore like people will argue with you about that and so like clearly if you can't make these like very obvious decisions and these very obvious discernments then you know you're you're just being asked to believe something that isn't true and you're just going to lead us into these are civilization destroying ideas
and you know the whole idea of like abolish the police well you can't abolish the police because if you abolish the police then who's gonna who's gonna go after the criminals we have to have law and order here and certainly if you're going to abolish the police you can't abolish the prison at Because, like, if you abolish the prisons, then they're going to let all the psychopaths out of prisons, and then you need police to deal with that.
And it's like, you have not begun to approach... you have not even read beyond the headline.
You have not... you want everyone to take your ideas seriously, with nuance and complexity, and to understand that what you're saying Yeah, yeah.
You've assumed the invalidity of these ideas.
And you have not even begun to do that for this entire, for anyone to the left of you, essentially, right?
Yeah, yeah.
You've assumed the invalidity of these ideas.
So you've assumed you don't need to investigate them or listen to anybody or read anything or find out what people actually say and think.
And you've just taken the first thing that pops into your head in response to, you know, defund the police, whatever, as an objection.
and just blurted it out and think, well, there you go, that settles the matter.
Right.
They talked about our, you know, the patron saint of the last episode, Taserface16, whose real name is Chris David, who is very much a liberal reform type.
You know, on Twitter.
I've seen him on Facebook.
He is, you know, I follow him on Twitter.
He is a very kind man who has his heart in the right place, but is definitely not a radical, you know, like, definitely not a radical socialist or whatever, an anarchist.
when they saw the same video that horrified every reasonable person who saw it of this innocent man being violently assaulted by federal troops, their response is, well, I mean, he was standing there and they had ordered him to go back already.
And so clearly he was in violation of their orders.
And so clearly they had, you know, it's just there so that it makes it look bad.
You see, they're just looking to create footage that looks bad and sort of justifies this idea that there are federal troops, that Trump's Gestapo is coming out to destroy America, when really you're just creating this footage when you're not actually kind of talking about like the reality on the ground.
And the reality on the ground is, like, the protesters are actually trying to destroy civilization because they're postmodernists who, say, abolish the police.
And you can't argue with these people.
There's no, like, this is something they keep wanting to, like, call, call the Portland protesters manager.
Like, you just get this response over and over again.
Yeah, they see them as like overgrown children, right, who just need to be put in their place by like daddy government.
And they actually make that like pretty explicit on many, many occasions in this podcast.
And I promise you I'm not oversimplifying it.
They will literally treat these rioters and protesters as little children.
And, you know, suggest that, like, it was when we were, well, we are parents and we have our own kind of issues with it, etc, etc.
Anyway, so we're not going to play three clips from the Dark Horse podcast, so you can listen to it for yourself.
I have been very kind to you, dear listeners, and to Jack, that I have sped these up to 1.5x speed.
Believe me, listening to them.
I was going to do 2x because I typically listen to these guys at 2x, but not everyone is capable of listening to content that way.
And I assume people will listen to this podcast at high speed as well, so 1.5x is kind of my compromise here.
So we are going to play this first clip.
I've got it open here.
It'll be an interesting experience listening to this at 1.5, because they still sound sort of slow and ponderous, even at 1.5.
They do.
Which gives you some idea.
I'm just wondering how many of these bloody people they need saying the same bloody things, you know?
How many talking heads do you need saying, oh, well, science, and Western civilization, and objective truth, and it's under threat from post-modernism, and objective truth going, because you don't even know if it's a man or a woman.
How many...
How many times do they need to fucking hear this?
Well, and what I'm kind of leading up to here, you know, is that there's this whole, like, I've said, you know, for a while that, like, doing this work on YouTube with Nazis doesn't really lead me anywhere anymore.
Because, like, most of these guys that I follow are too far gone to be on the YouTube radar.
And YouTube has sort of, like, done things to successfully kind of suppress results, et cetera, et cetera.
And so, you know, you just don't get recommended hardcore Nazis.
If you watch one hardcore Nazi, you don't typically get, like, 20 more on your mentions, right?
But with these IDW people, like, you start watching Brett Weinstein videos, and first of all, you get Eric Weinstein, and then you get Jordan Peterson, and then you get a bunch of Sam Harris, and then you get all the, like, lesser figures that, like, interact with all these guys.
And it's a thing.
It's a thing.
And I also just want to say, in passing, your account of what they say about the clip of... Sorry, what's the guy's name?
Taserface?
What's his actual name?
Chris David.
Christopher David.
Chris David.
They respond to that clip of this guy who is standing doing nothing except exercising his democratic right to protest as we said last week and this video of the police beating the shit out of this guy savagely and you know it's just so fucking easy for them to get there isn't it to the point where they're justifying that.
Where they are just straight-facedly justifying police violence against peaceful protesters.
These woolly-minded, insulated, perfectly nice, probably not personally racist, probably not genuinely, probably not personally racist, probably not genuinely, probably not personally authoritarians or anything like that,
But this trajectory that they get themselves on, and they get themselves flattered, and they get attention from people like Tucker Carlson and Breitbart, and they get love-bombed by people like, oh, it's so terrible about what was done to you, and they just glide effortlessly to this place where they're looking at footage like that and going, yeah, that seems perfectly reasonable to me, it's actually his fault.
It's kind of chilling, isn't it?
No, we don't know what happened beforehand.
We only saw a little clip of it.
And of course that sort of context is never extended the other way around.
Right, exactly.
So yeah, we are going to play some clips here.
Sorry everybody, I just needed to get that out of my system.
Oh no, not at all, not at all.
You're completely right.
Part of my problem here is I'm getting a little lost in the weeds and the details because I think the details are important to cover them properly and to understand what's actually going on here.
But you're absolutely right.
We could have done this in two minutes.
Like, man, these fucking people are stupid.
So, what I've done here is I actually did something.
I picked three clips from one episode.
Just to give you a sense of what you can find in one episode of the StarCourse Podcast.
And I could have picked anyone, but I picked episode 26, and so this is from, I think, early June, and so we are kind of looking back in time just a little bit, so just kind of keep that in mind.
Ironically, episode 33 was so amazing, I almost just put these clips aside and picked three from episode 33 because it is amazing.
Believe me, if we wanted to do this sort of like live stream YouTube chat over a video and pause it every now and then, sort of like low energy content or low effort content, we could do this with like every single one of the videos.
They are routinely, it's hard to get through five minutes of one of these podcasts without just mouth agape, chomp, and what the fuck did you just say?
So we're going to start here, and this is from episode 26.
This starts around 35 minutes into the episode, and it's talking about, you're actually going to hear Heather Hying here.
I actually picked clips where she was talking more than he was.
And she just gets to the point a little bit faster.
So again, keep in mind I did speed this up to 1.5x speed.
And she's talking about a little trip she took around a little walk in the park around Oregon City.
So we'll play this and then we'll kind of come back and talk about it.
But it also reminds us once again of something that I and we have been saying for a long time, which is that for people who literally do not do anything that is physical in the world, and therefore have no thing that they do from which they can get feedback, which cannot be gamed, those people have an easier time fooling themselves and the rest of the world about what their true intentions are and whether or not their supposed solutions will work.
I actually don't really want to hear from someone who's got proposed solutions if they can't demonstrate to me that they can do something in the physical world successfully.
I was walking around Oregon City a week ago or so, waiting while our youngest son was having an orthodontist appointment, and I passed by a statue outside the local courthouse.
I'd forgotten the guy's name, but he was some important figure in Oregon City, maybe one of the first judges, an important lawyer, and the bust of him had all of those things, but the very first thing that it had on the statue in terms of what he did was welder.
And I hope I have this right, I hope I have which trade it was and which all these other things were, but I commented to Toby, our son, whose appointment I was waiting on, after I said, you know, isn't that amazing and wonderful that they chose to point out first, maybe it was blacksmith, I can't remember, you know, that they chose first and foremost to identify the trade that he was skilled in before pointing out the things that he did that are why his bust is here.
If he had just been a blacksmith or a welder or whatever it was that he was doing, he wouldn't have a statue in front of the courthouse, right?
But I would argue that had he not had that background in the trade that he did, he also wouldn't have his bust in front of that courthouse because he wouldn't have the sense and the wisdom that those skills gave him in order to do good in the world.
You have had the correct response, Jack.
I hope you managed to edit this so that your laughter is layered out on that.
Okay, so beyond just the sheer hilarity of this, I'd like to reiterate that Heather Hying is an academic evolutionary biologist with a thicker resume than Brett's.
I mean, let's be clear about that, but I don't think anyone is saying that she's one of the great evolutionary biologists of her time, or one of the most well-published evolutionary biologists of her time.
Also, like, this is something that, like, STEM people, that science people like myself will say all the time is, like, unlike you stupid English majors who can just spout out nonsense, you know, we here in the sciences, like, we actually have math problems that can be wrong, and we actually have to know things about the physical world.
And like, these are people who've never taken like a literature class or a philosophy class beyond like the very basic one that they needed for their gen ed requirements.
And believe me, that's going to be really clear here in a minute with the next clip.
The other thing I just wanted to highlight and the reason that really, the plaque that she's referencing.
She can't remember who it is that she... No.
She's like, this person was significant clearly because they have a plaque of him and clearly he would not have been that had he just been in the political sphere.
She didn't even remember his profession.
No.
A blacksmith or a welder.
A welder, right.
So, I did.
I mean, you know, she's just kind of talking idly.
She didn't know she was going to bring this guy up or whatever.
And so, you know, we'll give her a little bit of credit.
I did do the three minutes worth of work to go and figure out, you know, because she's talking about a certain courthouse in Oregon City.
So I figured out the name of the courthouse and then figured out the name of I found the local tourism board and found the local sites to see and found this plaque.
And then I found the plaque on Wikipedia.
I found the name of the guy.
I found the plaque on Wikipedia.
And then the Wikipedia, they didn't have a good quality version of it where I can actually read the plaque to you.
But then I found another.
So again, I did more work on this than she has.
I just want to be clear about that.
The person she's referring to is named William Simon Uren.
He was a progressive activist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Oregon.
Mm-hmm.
Politics.
I don't know if you know this guy at all.
No, but I'm not surprised by what you're saying.
No, I'd never heard of him.
So, you know, like he, according to his Wikipedia page, championed the initiative of referendum and recall systems in an effort to bring about, wait for it, a Georgia single tax on the unimproved value of land.
She's honouring a George's performance in the early 20th century.
Oh God.
See, this is why I'm not surprised because literally every time these people do stuff like this, when you actually go and look at the specifics, the actual facts about what they're talking about, it's always something that's ironically opposite to what they're trying to say.
So, it turns out that William Simon Uren's father, William Richard Uren, was a socialist who had worked as a blacksmith.
He trained his son in the blacksmithing trade, and so he was a blacksmith.
He is more accurately described as a miner, because he actually did work as a miner briefly during his life, but that was after he went to law school.
And then later on, he worked as a ranch hand briefly, you know, when his law practice wasn't doing that great.
But he basically spent his entire life as a lawyer and as a legislator and as a socialist reformer.
And it is worth reading his actual, just to be clear here, in honor of William Simon Uren, blacksmith, lawyer, political reformer, author of Oregon's Constitutional Provisions for the Initiative Referendum and Recall, giving the people control of lawmaking and lawmakers, and known in his lifetime as father of Oregon's enlightened system of government, and known in his lifetime as father of Oregon's enlightened system of government, this memorial is dedicated in gratitude by the Oregon City Hilltop Boosters and by friends and admirers on behalf of the people of
So, all that context is completely missing from anything.
Just wanted to highlight that.
Just thought I'd highlight it.
That's brilliant.
She sees Blacksmith and she thinks, oh it's one of those salt of the earth little people.
And he does come from a legitimate working-class background.
I mean, let's, I mean, he seemed, he was, I mean, I don't get, it's hard to know just from his Wikipedia page, he was probably a pretty decent, like, human being.
Like, you know, to the degree that anyone deserves a plaque, he probably deserves his plaque.
I mean, I can't, I didn't see, like, horribly racist or anything, but, you know, it was Oregon in the late 19th century or whatever.
Please, sorry, I interrupted.
Yeah, sure.
No, I mean, my point was just that she sees the word blacksmith and she thinks, oh, you know, a salt-of-the-earth little guy that worked with his hands and that's why he achieved things in the world.
Well done, little fellow.
And sort of gives him this metaphorical pat on the head in the podcast, you know.
It doesn't occur to her really that, you know, possibly the import of what she's saying, that he might have understood the world in practical terms a bit better and what's actually going on out there and what needed to be done precisely because he had been somebody who worked in a working class... You know, the people in the protests are almost entirely working class people.
They're not people who don't work with their hands and don't work with practical things and are insulated from those.
That's you!
When you describe that, you're describing yourself!
For God's sake!
And no amount of, like, I've written papers about, like, the sort of evolutionary transfer of, um, you know, she's, you know, she's done some legitimate work in the sciences, but, like, you know, that's, it's a different kind of thing.
You know, running a cash register is more working with your hands and salt of the earth and, like, manipulating things in the real world than being a PhD evolutionary biologist.
Well, this is exactly how people from this coddled environment of academia can end up at the point where they're looking at the photo of Chris David being beaten by police with batons and say, yes, he deserved it.
It's because they're the sort of people that sit in their lecture theatres thinking, you know, I'm in touch with Western civilisation and I know all about, you know, I reject post-modernism, I know all about objective truth and da-da-da-da.
And their response to, you know, the woman that cleans the lecture theatre for them every fucking night is at best, you know, a little pat on the head.
And, you know, if she expresses an opinion, oh, shut up, you post-modernist.
This is how they get there.
Exactly.
All right!
More of not knowing what the fuck you're talking about?
Would you like another dose of that?
By the way, just in passing, you should study literature and art and things like that so that you can pick up an awareness of empathy and imagination and nuance and the multiplicity of meaning precisely so that you don't lead yourself into cul-de-sacs like this by dunder-headed empiricism.
Anyway, yes, please, go on.
Well, just on that topic, she is deeply, deeply upset about a particular... Like, I do care about the arts, you see, and I care about writing and actors and, you know, I care about all these things.
Don't you think it's really terrible that this book, American Dirt, has been so vilified by the woke skulls?
Do you know this book, American Dirt?
I don't, actually.
I've never heard of it.
It's one of these, like, either late last year or early this year, literary novels written by a well-off white woman who is writing about the experience.
It's a novel about a young Latino woman crossing the border illegally and, you know, sort of the pressures of her life.
What I have been told is it's very beautifully written and you know It is it is kind of worthy of study like it was like on Oprah's book club list, etc, etc What I have also heard from it about it by people who have gone through that experience is Wow, this book is really really racist in that way that you know white people writing about the experiences of Mexican immigrants just kind of is and yeah, you know, yeah, she's not being criticized this the author of this book is not being criticized for
being a white woman writing about an experience that's foreign to her, it's in doing it really badly.
Like in fact her critics routinely say, "We actually want more, you know, people kind of writing these stories and doing it properly, like we have no, zero problem with that." It's that it turned out, yeah, you were really racist about it.
It's not that we don't want these topics to be the subject of literature, we just don't want every book to be written by Lionel Shriver.
That's why they call it literary criticism.
It's not being silenced by the woke scolds, it's criticism.
You're being criticised in ways that you don't like.
You know what?
We get criticised, I get criticised all the time!
People like you are always... People like you are always... Not you, them.
Always on about how everything should be open for criticism and nobody should be shut down and debate should... Free speech, debate and everything.
But of course the minute you actually start criticising stuff they like it becomes a different story.
Anyway, sorry.
No, it's fine.
Boy, just wait till next week, Jack.
Yeah.
All right, we're gonna play this next clip now.
This one, again, at 1.5x speed is a minute and 53 seconds long, so I do... We're gonna play it at 1.5x and it would just sound like a normal person talking.
Well, I did the pitch adjustment so it actually doesn't sound like a chipmunk, so it is actually done properly.
But yeah, no, even at 2x speed, these people sometimes take a lot of time getting to their point.
So, again, if you do want to skip ahead, it's a minute and 53, but here we're about to play it.
So the premise of this piece is that this... Oh, it's an obit.
She died.
Is that the idea?
She's gone.
The premise of the piece is that her work has been overshadowed by the fact that she shot Andy Warhol.
Now, I should say, she shot Andy Warhol multiple times.
Premeditated murder.
Or would have been attempted murder.
He survived but was desperately injured.
Now the work that this author at the New York Times is claiming is overshadowed is a work in which he advocates the killing of all men.
Now many people took this to be ironic apparently.
She insisted it was literal.
So my point is it is impossible for this woman who attempted to murder Andy Warhol to have her high-quality work overshadowed if the point of that work is actually perfectly consistent with the murder that she attempted.
But from the point of view of this author, And by author, I mean the author of this... The obituary.
The obituary.
I actually don't think it's an obituary.
I think she's been gone some time.
This is a... It's in obituaries.
Oh, this is, I think, an obituary.
It's an obituary of somebody who died long ago and the New York Times didn't cover it.
So anyway, this woman's manifesto called SCUM advocates the destruction of... It's apparently an acronym that stands for... Wait, where was it?
The Society for Cutting Supplement.
Right, Society for Cutting Up Men.
The author of the article describes the fact that the Scum Manifesto is apparently alive and well in some women and gender studies classes and departments at American universities today.
Can I say this?
I'm only seeing this for the first time.
Here's a sentence in the early part of this obit.
The manifesto, self-published in 1967, reads as satire, though Solanas defended it as serious.
This sounds exactly like, we don't really mean to defund the police.
Well, and in fact, this is exactly what Ezra Klein and Sam Harris were fighting about, was that Ezra Klein swore that when the New York Times published Kill All Men, that that was meant to be taken ironically.
And the point is, was it?
Yeah, partially.
It's meant to be taken ironically if you're going to be a stickler about how ugly a thought that is, and then if you're not going to say anything, then maybe it's not going to be taken ironically.
Do you think that in Jonathan Swift's era, people, anyone thought that he was serious?
I mean, isn't, in order to count as satire, don't the vast majority of people who read Oh my god.
Sorry, I should have highlighted, this is about Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol, served three years in prison for it, served her time, got out, and lived for another, you know, lived until 1988.
Who shot him because he was stealing her work, or she believed he was stealing her work.
And profiting from it as one of the wealthiest artists in the world at that time, abusing his power as that over the women in his life, despite having an outwardly feminist, progressive idea.
Also, how little do you have to know about the radical movements in America in the 60s to have never heard of the Scum Manifesto?
I'm pretty sure I was a teenager when I heard about the Scum Manifesto.
And I'm no expert in this, right?
I think maybe if you're just hearing about it, maybe you shouldn't be commenting on these issues just yet, you know?
Do a bit more.
Do a bit more research.
A little bit more work?
Yeah.
And I also just want to highlight here just these are people who, despite being professors in biology, despite having this STEM education and this taught, team-taught, with other teachers in vastly different disciplines, and should be expected to have some knowledge of the world around them.
They were teaching at a progressive liberal arts college.
Yeah.
The idea of discovering this.
Now, I guarantee you they were just like browsing the New York Times and went like, oh she tried to kill, she tried to kill Andy Warhol and like she wrote this scum manifesto and what about, don't they, what about all those coffee mugs that say kill all men?
That just seems, you know, this is just a radical thing and we're not supposed to believe it.
It's just like complete Ignorance on their part.
It's complete ignorance.
It's complete talking out of your ass to an audience of like, I believe this video has like a hundred thousand views.
God, it's terrifying.
They make their living doing this, right?
Yeah.
And that clip came pretty much immediately after the one I just played, FYI.
So that was like a two-for-three in one little five-minute bit.
You get those two pieces of glorious wonder.
I love this solemn, serious tone as well.
Yes, it's called the... Hang on a minute, let me... Yes, it's the Society for Cutting Up Men.
Which is actually disputed, as I think most people know.
It is disputed, yeah.
As to whether the original title was just scum, and it's certainly... It's not even really satire.
It's sort of a radical plea for gender equality in the late 60s.
I mean, you know, this is, there's a giant complicated contention history behind this.
It's completely lost and you're just like, oh, is this just like Kill All Men?
Is this just... Jesus Christ.
The ignorance.
That's right.
The willing and willful ignorance that just like spews from these people continually is baffling.
I mean, it's just baffling that this gets taken really seriously.
Right.
You know?
It extends forwards and backwards in time.
They're pontificating about Jonathan Swift.
No clue about the context in which Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal.
None.
It just becomes an empirical exercise again, doesn't it?
What did people know he meant?
That's not the fucking point, is it?
It's almost as if there's a reason to write literature beyond just having a You know, baseline literal or non-literal interpretation, right?
It's almost as if these things are complicated and contingent and like audience is something that has to be considered and maybe it doesn't play the same way 300 or 400 years later or 30 years later.
Or outside of this tiny radical left community of artists in the 60s at that, you know?
Yeah, yeah, there's a context, you know, but they're treating it like, oh, this terrible woman who's talking, who's putting forward as a completely serious policy proposal that we should actually dismember men, you know, and you can tell she meant it because she shot Andy Warhol.
Yeah, that's how it works.
Yeah, well done.
And I guarantee you, when Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal, there were people exactly like this, the equivalent of these people back then, having the exact same conversation about his satire of injustice.
This is the irony.
Exactly.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, I wasn't even going to go there, but you're absolutely right.
And then, what was that bit about, oh, you know, it's satire, and that's like, oh, we don't really mean defund the police.
Well, they've got this- But we do!
We do really mean different!
Well, they get this thing of like, you know, we can't trust the protesters because they say abolish the police, but abolish the police is this complete nonsensical thing that no person could actually support.
Nobody could actually believe that and yet this gets published in the New York Times and I put this in the show notes and we're not gonna but like if you actually so there's a headline that says yes we actually do mean abolish the police and they read no further but if you read the article which is a very brief and very like straightforward explainer
Well, no actually there's a long history of like people making this argument this goes back to at least the 19th century in the United States of like maybe we should abolish the police force because of these exact kind of racial abuses.
And, uh, you know, this kind of comes in with a whole lot of, like, other things that we have to do in the process of, like, you know, building up community support and building up, you know, mental health services, et cetera, et cetera, and there's a complex literature here, and there are, like, two dozen links in this, like, very brief article, and all that gets swept away in terms of because it's like, oh, it's a bunch of, like, woke scolds wanting to abolish the police, and this is obviously completely absurd, and no one can actually do this.
And they go on and on and on and on about this.
They talk about it continually.
We could play an entire episode of where they just whine about this and whine about it and whine about it and whine about it.
And they don't do the slightest bit of effort to do any bit of research into these topics whatsoever.
Yeah and of course it looks completely you know it looks completely beyond the pale insane to people like them because they have their own their own version of what Terry Eagleton called Richard Dawkins view which was you know the the view of the universe as seen from North Oxford which is which that's actually slightly unfair to Dawkins actually in this instance because you know Dawkins actually once spoke to Brett Weinstein there's there's a clip of this you can you can go and watch and
Weinstein was talking some completely insane rubbish.
I saw this clip, he's talking about like, well no, the lineage view of organismal immortality.
And you know, lineages are the unit of selection.
It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Yeah, this makes no sense.
He's off on his own, like, bizarre little world.
He's beyond even group selection.
Like, he agrees with me that group selection is basically nonsense, but he's often talking about lineage selection, and, like, this sort of justified the Nazis' treatment of the Jews in the Holocaust?
On a species level, if not a, like, a group level, if not a moral level?
I mean, it's, ah, God.
And when even Dawkins is kind of going like, yeah, maybe you should listen to the historians on this one.
When even Dawkins is like, yeah, I'm not going to pontificate quite on that level, you know, my head isn't that far up my own ass.
There you go.
And I keep calling him Weinstein.
I'm not doing that deliberately.
I know his name is Weinstein and I apologize for that.
It's very easy to do.
I'm just glad I haven't called him Eric yet.
Somebody will find out where I did call him Eric.
Alright, I've got one more clip and then we can start to wrap up here.
This is Transphobia.
We've got to get into this.
Ironically, this is far from the most assertive version of this I could have shown you.
Episode 33 got much, much nastier about this.
I do apologize to our translisteners, and I do apologize for bringing this up often lately, but it's universal, and it speaks volumes as far as I'm concerned.
So we are going to play this.
Again, my 1.5x speed version of this is a minute and 55 seconds long.
It's hard to know exactly what movements versus factions means in terms of the distinction, but to return very briefly to a point that we spent a fair bit of time on last time with regard to what is trans ideology and trans rights activists?
doing so prominently in the Black Lives Matter movement, when that would seem to be antithetical to their main principle.
So I've just got three images to show, not quite, Zach, that suggest that at both the top of social media and in politics, we are already seeing a change in messaging from Black Lives Matter to Black Trans Lives Matter.
So here's actually put up my screen.
Here's the official Twitter account, as of yesterday, has changed its bio.
Um, to read Black Queer Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, oh, by the way, third hashtag, Black Lives Matter.
So wait, wait, let's just stop and process that.
That is the official Twitter account.
That is the official Twitter account.
That is the bio of the official Twitter account.
Okay?
The official Twitter account also tweeted this, and this is on the billboard, um, so they retweeted, um, quote tweeted I guess, Black Trans Lives Matter, that's all, that's the tweet.
Okay.
And then the mayor of Seattle, who's doing such a brilliant job with CHAP-CHAS.
I guess I had not looked into her, but I guess she may be a lesbian herself, even.
Not that that matters at all, except check this out.
She tweeted this pride.
We can celebrate how far we've come, but we must recognize how far we have to go.
We cannot rest until our trans community, particularly trans women of color, have full freedoms and do not have to fear hate, violence, or persecution.
Hashtag Pride.
Particularly trans women of color.
Particularly trans women of color.
This Pride, let's focus on natal men.
Let's do that.
Put aside the racial thing.
I mean, none of us are supposed to be allowed to do that right now.
But I kind of don't even want to go there, right?
Why is everyone feeling not just empowered, but forced to focus on men who have declared themselves women, often without any other evidence to support the idea that they are?
Do we even have to do this anymore?
Well, I would like to think that that speaks for itself, really, to be honest.
They have gone on on this extended rant before, and in fact, Haing was kind of ranting about this on Twitter, and saying that the Black Lives Matter matter webpage, you know, blacklivesmatter.com, like, about us, what we believe, is full of things that go far beyond Black Lives Matter, and they support full rights for trans people, and they make that part of their agenda, and they support the de-emphasis on nuclear family, and how could anyone believe this?
The nuclear family, the family is 600 million years old.
How could we possibly have this?
And it's like, no, the nuclear family is like, it dates back to the end of World War II.
Like it's, it's really not.
Extended, extended kin groups.
That's actually, you know, kind of more the way people were raised, um, throughout most of history, throughout most of the world and still are in most of the world.
Um, and you have a bachelor's degree in anthropology and you would think you would know that, but apparently not.
And then she goes on about how the website is being edited as a way of hiding the real agenda and focusing on why is it that trans people are so centered in this?
Why is it that so many of the leaders of these movements are trans?
Yes, why are movements... It's called solidarity, you fucking idiots!
It's called a social movement!
Why are movements dedicated to ending oppression... Why do black trans people exist more towards the forefront of those movements?
Why would they have a special interest in fighting against oppression?
I can't imagine!
What are they up to?
What's their agenda?
What do they want?
Why are they... I mean, why are Black Lives Matter talking about trans people?
Why are trans people interested in Black Lives Matter?
They're antithetical, apparently.
What have they got to do with each other?
What's the real agenda going on underneath the surface?
It's like a mission creep, right?
Or it's like an ideological creep.
Everybody agrees with Black Lives Matter.
We obviously are not racist, we're obviously very progressive people.
To be clear, on the contrary, we're forced to not de-emphasize race.
Right.
We're actually forced to talk about race.
We'd rather not talk about it, but we have to.
Exactly.
But, you know, of course we agree.
And, you know, when you actually, like, listen to Brett, like, talk for himself, and sort of, like, expresses, sort of, like, policy preferences, he hits, like, he is, like, sort of a former Bernie supporter kind of guy, like a very, you know, progressive, you know, kind of, you can kind of imagine, like, lowercase s, lowercase d, Social Democrat kind of.
He's well to the left of 90% of the U.S.
They definitely need to reform the police.
There are absolutely abuses, etc., etc.
And, you know, if you check the boxes on sort of an ideological checklist in terms of, like, where do you know, he's well to the left of, you know, 90% of the U.S. population, most likely.
He is a legitimately sort of progressive guy, but he spends his time punching left.
He spends his time doing it in the most ignorant and stupid way possible.
Because he was personally offended because students called him racist one day.
And he built an entire career on it.
Yeah, it's a perfect illustration of how this kind of narrow, insular, personal, aggrieved, reactionary politics is so insidious.
And also, incidentally, of why that quite narrow, Bernie-progressivist social democracy isn't cutting it now.
Because they can find homes inside each other.
But yeah, it's pretty frightening.
I love the scandalised tone, the quietly scandalised, sombre, solemn, serious tone.
It reminds me of experts wearing suits and smoking cigarettes sat in a TV studio in a 60s debate show, talking about how About how, you know, smoking marijuana has now been scientifically proved to lead to communism and wholesale rape and stuff like that.
It reminds me irresistibly of that sort of thing.
This tone they strike.
Absolutely.
I mean, and ultimately what they're, again, what they get really, really upset by is that there is no, like, they keep complaining that there's no, like, leaders of these riots.
There's no leader that you can talk to.
There's no Martin Luther King of the Portland riots.
That you can just, like, sit him down and let him, make him lead, and make him make these people understand that, you know, we just can't do this.
There are perfectly reasonable reasons that we just cannot abolish the police.
Clearly, you know, why do they have to be so unreasonable?
And we just have to get the federal troops to come in there and do what needs to be done.
And the mayor of Portland, Mayor Wheeler, is just not being aggressive enough with these children and their petulant desires.
They just need to be put down.
I want to be really clear here.
I know people on the streets in Portland right now, and they're very close to opening up with live fire.
By the time this episode comes out, there may very well have been a shooting in Portland with live real ammo, and there have already been many injuries and near deaths of people who were shot in the head with quote-unquote near-lethal munitions.
That's not enough.
Clearly something has to be done to put this down because this is anarchy and these people are just going to destroy civilization unless we do something about this.
It makes them feel uncomfortable and therefore they need the government, they need the state, they need the police to come in and take care of this problem for them.
Despite their very progressive, very liberal, very open You know, our very progressive beliefs.
No, no, you can't do things that make us feel uncomfortable or else we're just going to have to call the manager.
And the manager is the Federal Troops, apparently.
That's right.
I mean, the thing about leaders, they always, the reactionaries, from every angle, they always look for the leaders, the ringleaders, you know.
Whether it's, you know, either it's because they want to kill them and that way the, or you know, take them out some way and that way the errant children that are just following them out of, you know, like the rats followed the Pied Piper, you know, they will just disperse and go home now that their leader's been put down.
Or to buy them off, you know, in their terms, to have a reasonable discussion.
What that actually means is always buy them off.
Yeah, they will, you know, if it comes to it, they will ultimately, exactly the same way they look at the footage of Taserface being beaten with sticks, eventually it will come down to people, unarmed civilians protesting, being shot, being killed in the streets, and they will, they might be sad about it, they might wring their hands, they might have a little tear in their eye, they'll talk about it in solemn, serious tone about this sad thing, but ultimately they'll be on board with it.
Because they always are.
Well, you know, when it comes down to it, you know, you side with, you side with, you know, Donald Trump, or you side with the mob, and, you know, ultimately who are you going to side with, you know, when it comes right down to it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's almost as if it's about class, ultimately.
Yeah, it's almost as if we've seen this happen in history before.
Yeah.
There's one more thing.
We're just gonna do this very very quickly.
I don't know if this is even gonna keep lasting or else I would just stick it in the next episode because we are very very long for this one.
Brett Weinstein has an idea about how to not elect Joe Biden or Donald Trump for president this year in 2020.
Oh yeah.
It was initially called the Dark Horse Duo Plan, and it's now the Unity 2020 ticket.
And there's a whole website about it, and I am not going to describe this in detail.
But essentially, the idea is that there are these two parties that have just solidified all control over the political discussion, and the fear is always if you vote for the other guy, then if you vote for If you vote for a third party that's more in line with your side, you're just going to take votes away from the person you agree with more.
And so we're going to put up a slate of two candidates, one from the center left and one from the center right, who are going to run as a team and they're going to flip coin as to who actually runs at the top of the ticket and who's vice president.
And then if they don't garner enough support, you know, up to election day, they bow out completely and allow the election to go on as normal.
Um, this is a batshit idea that has, like, no conception in terms of an actual, like, history of, like, how politics works.
Even if you just sort of take it in isolation.
He puts his plan out in early July of 2020.
This one actually is like, no, no, we're actually going to do this.
And the candidates he's been pushing is his center-left.
His center-left candidate is Andrew Yang.
Who, let's be clear, like topped out about 4% in some of the polling of Democratic candidates.
Yep.
Within this hotly contested primary, topped out about 4%.
Okay, okay.
The center-right candidate is someone named Admiral McRaven.
Admiral McRaven was like, he's a Navy Admiral, he's now retired.
I know him because he did this like really famous commencement address at West Point, and you know, that gets played in like corporate trainings and stuff, you know, like, you know, It's sort of a feel-good sort of like, oh, you know, make your bed properly and, you know, get up in the morning, etc, etc, whatever bullshit.
But he's also like a former Navy SEAL who like headed up SEAL Team 6, who was in command of that operation that killed bin Laden, and so that's sort of his like claim to fame.
He's also connected to some wartime atrocities, and we're not going to really get into that here, but, you know, he had a long career as a Navy guy.
And I just want to be clear, this is how far you have to go to find a reasonable patriot on the center right at this point in the United States.
You can't even find someone who's even a reasonably well-known figure within any field of, like, politics or arts or literature.
You find a retired general, a retired admiral, and you put him up as, like, oh, no, this is the guy, this is the guy we like.
I don't know that either of these two men has actually signed on to this in any way whatsoever, but these are his suggested slate of candidates, and I think it's, I think it's that or It's brilliant, isn't it?
Well, it's less realistic than the politics of Narnia.
Indeed.
So, that's it.
For now.
Next time, we are going to do Eric, and hopefully we will not go this long, but probably we will, so look forward to that.
I was going to say.
Okay, that was great fun.
At least I get to stop watching Bret Weinstein videos now.
Now I get to go re-listen to some Eric Weinstein podcasts for the next day or so.
Yay!
Although, to be honest with you, I found the clips you just played us so funny that I may actually have to go and watch some of the Dark Horse podcast.
Go watch 33.
It's pretty good.
If you like those clips, go watch Dark Horse 33.
It's pretty great.
There's a live stream and then there's a question and answer, and they're both glorious.
I can actually imagine myself doing that.
I might have to get drunk first, but it could happen.
That does help, I agree.
Okay, that was episode 60.
Thank you so much for sticking with us through this long episode.
I'm going to try and edit it down a bit, but it's still going to be a long one, but I think it was worth it.
And thank you so much for sticking with us for 60 episodes.
And if you didn't, thanks for joining us before or when we got to 60 episodes, and be sure to tune in for the next 60.
And yeah, thanks ever so much for listening and sharing and retweeting and talking about us and all the support you give us.
If you can help us materially at Patreon, that's very much appreciated.
That helps us make the show.
But if that's not something you can do, certainly don't put yourself in any difficulties to do it.
Just listening and talking about us and spreading the word is very much appreciated.
So yeah, next week it's on to the other brother.
It's on to Eric Weinstein.
Weinstein.
Sorry, I'm honestly not doing it deliberately.
Weinstein.
Indeed.
And until then, cheers!
Bye!
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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