88: The Long Shadow of New Atheism, with Eiynah Mohammed-Smith
And so, episode 88 is finally here. And we found the best way to deal with it. In this episode, we welcome back the brilliant Eiynah Mohammed-Smith - of the Polite Conversations podcast - to talk about the long shadow of New Atheism. In the process we also talk about some of the crop of IDW-criticism proliferating these days, and our issues with it. We also talk about other things. Rude things. *Jack blushes* Content Warnings. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Show Notes: Polite Conversations Soundcloud Eiynah on Twitter Eiynah’s Patreon Friendly IDWsphere photo tweet Video connected to those photos. 4chan hate campaign against kink at pride Richard Dawkins wants to lovebomb Iran — with erotica James Lindsay “Woke Jews” tweet James Damore at Portland State (2/17/18) Event hosted by Andy Ngo, introduced by Bret Weinstein. Heather Heying, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian were the panelists. Event disrupted by protestors, which made international news. Anti-Trans Bills and the Bigoted History of “What About The Children” - SOME MORE NEWS Eve Fairbanks, The Reasonable Rebels Donna Minkowitz, Why Racists (And Liberals!) Keep Writing for Quellette John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry Wikipedia, Comparison of United States incarceration rate with other countries The US incarceration rate peaked in 2008 when about 1,000 in 100,000 U.S. adults were behind bars. That’s 760 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents of all ages.[27][25] This incarceration rate was similar to the average incarceration levels in the Soviet Union during the existence of the infamous Gulag system, when the Soviet Union’s population reached 168 million, and 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in the Gulag prison camps and colonies (i.e. about 714 to 892 imprisoned per 100,000 USSR residents, according to numbers from Anne Applebaum and Steven Rosefielde).[37][38] Some of the latter Soviet Union’s yearly incarceration rates from 1934 to 1953, however, likely were the world’s historically highest for a modern age country.[39] In The New Yorker article The Caging of America (2012), Adam Gopnik writes: “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag under Stalin at its height.”[40] Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America”
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And welcome back to IDSG.
It's finally the long fabled, the long feared, the long talked about episode 88, which for a long time, people have been saying, what are you going to do about episode 88?
And we've been batting the question away.
But here it is.
And it's not so bad, is it, once you get here?
It's just a number.
It's just another episode.
And I'm here, as usual, with Daniel.
Hi, Daniel.
And we're also very happy To be welcoming back to the show, to help us through this difficult number, one of our one of our very favorite people in the world, Ina Mohamed Smith.
Hi, Ina.
Hi.
Thank you guys so much for having me on again.
You're very welcome.
Daniel, how are you doing?
Doing well.
People are not wearing masks in grocery stores now because all the restrictions were lifted officially.
About half of the people that I run into are not wearing masks, so it's fun times.
That's so weird.
That's life in Michigan right now.
Oh, you mean that COVID thing?
Well, that's all over, isn't it?
Yeah.
Once Joe Biden came into office, just suddenly it just disappeared.
It just was gone, you know, just drifted away.
And Joe Rogan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have said that the threat is over.
Yeah.
I learned from Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying that all you need to do is take ivermectin and it's much safer than the vaccine, clearly.
So awful.
So awful.
I literally spent like an hour and a half just watching these two at 2x speed today.
Like, half that time was spent on ivermectin and how terrible vaccines are.
They barely even talked about how terrible trans people are in those episodes, you know?
That's how much they're pushing ivermectin.
I mean, I'm not saying they didn't talk about how terrible trans people are, but not nearly as much as I was expecting.
Obviously, they talked about that some, you know, but they actually made some time aside from talking about how terrible trans people are to talk about other things.
That's a real sign of how seriously they're taking this.
Clearly, yeah.
So anyway.
Did you guys see those photographs of like this meeting or summit or whatever it is with Brett and Heather and James Lindsay and Helen Puckrose and Andy Ngo?
From like Portland University?
Yeah.
That's like a year old or a couple years?
Not only did I see the photos, I found the video.
Oh wow.
Yeah.
Because Mike Naina, who is one of the, who's basically the documentarian of the IDW Extended Universe, who has, who's an Australian filmmaker, who kind of moved into kind of filming James Lindsay.
He is deeply invested in the Grievance Studies hoax.
And he did a kind of three-part documentary, which we talked about in the first Heather Hying and Brett Weinstein episode.
About the Evergreen State College fiasco.
Once you know he's in the shot with his, all of his camera equipment, you know, there's a video somewhere and it's on his channel.
And so I didn't see the Andy Ngo stuff, but like once you saw Andy, once you saw James Damore, you know, oh yeah, they did a little documentary segment about James Damore around that time because that incident happened right around the same time as the Evergreen State College stuff.
So yeah, all that, all that video was filmed in like summer 2017, most likely.
Yeah, it was heartwarming to see just the affection between these ideological kindred.
And I mean, Andy Ngo was the very first guest on the Dark Horse podcast.
Like these guys are friends.
There's no, this isn't, this isn't like a question.
Andy Ngo at Portland State University actually was the moderator of a conversation that involved Boghossian and Pluckrose.
And I believe Hein was there too.
Like these are people who are all like deeply connected.
So yeah.
Oh yeah, and then Helen has deleted her photos with Andy Ngo online.
I think they don't want to be as open about how close they were with him.
Now, or maybe Helen doesn't.
Yeah, well, Helen is clearly trying to distance herself and shouldn't we really hand it to her for realizing how terrible some of the people she hangs out with are?
Oh, is this a conversation that might come back later down the line?
Maybe.
You do not gotta hand it to the slightly better ones.
Especially when you're still pulling the same bullshit, but you're slightly less overt about it.
Yes.
Yes.
Your entire project is to push the same shit.
You just don't like how they're not helping you hide your power level still.
So that's why you've pulled away.
That sounds pretty convincing to me.
That's what I think it is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was pretty clear watching those, you know, very affectionate photographs.
You know, this is a real little salon of people, despite their way of presenting each other as this network of like-thinking individuals.
Yeah, I mean, what the fuck is this?
Sorry, can I swear?
I forget.
Please, fuck yes, swear all you want.
We actively encourage it.
Yeah.
Excellent.
What the fuck is this counterweight thing that Helen has started?
Have you guys seen this?
It's like some bigot hotline, like rescue, bigot rescue hotline.
Yeah it's like she's publishing articles and like she was putting out a thing of you know we really want to get like diverse voices and we want to get people who can talk about like critical race theory on the positive side and people of kind of varying perspectives but then she was like misspelling people's names like I think she misspelled Audre Lorde and you know a couple of others I forget exactly what the details were on that but it was like it was this very like low effort like you know not even not anything like a
Professional, like, call for submissions or anything.
It was just like, oh, yeah, we want to get some people in here.
We want to bring all kinds of perspectives and not just like the Quillette crowd.
But, you know, it's always the Quillette or the dollar store Quillette, which is what she runs.
Yes, exactly.
Okay, so, crashing into the episode.
We are both off and on topic, apparently.
Yeah, it's weird, isn't it?
We're on topic, but we're sort of on the edge of the topic.
But to, I mean, firstly, I won't try anybody's patience with this, but firstly, To do something which looks like it's going to have to become a regular segment at the beginning of every episode, which I'm thinking I'm going to call Jack apologizes for fucking up yet again.
I need to apologize for fucking up yet again, because in the last episode I said something that wasn't the case.
I said something about Gramsci using the phrase critical theory.
I think, in his prison notebooks.
And that was just completely wrong.
I was actually thinking of a different phrase.
The philosophy of praxis is the phrase he used.
And I said critical theory.
And a couple of people got in touch with me to very helpfully tell me that I was talking out of my arse, which indeed I was.
So sorry about that, everybody.
So, yeah, see you back here next time for another edition of Jack Fucks Up about whatever I inevitably say this time that was wrong.
But yeah, moving into the episode, I think first of all we want to sort of try to work our way off the edge of the topic into the topic proper by talking a little bit about the recent flap about kink at Pride, don't we Daniel?
Yeah, this was a thing if you're, I mean, we're recording this on, I think, what, May 30th of 2021?
Yeah, we're a bit late to this now.
Yeah, so Jack and I had talked about doing just, like, kind of a full emergency episode on this, and then, like, 12 hours later, it kind of disappeared from the quote-unquote discourse on Twitter.
But I think it's a really important thing because, like, while there is a There is a complicated narrative around people who are sex-repulsed, who nonetheless are part of the queer community, and there are people who have traumas related to kink and that sort of thing.
And there is abuse that happens within the kink community, although that is not a part of kink, but that is something that happens and it needs to be acknowledged very clearly.
A lot of abusers use it as cover.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, and that's obviously something that we need to be able to have an adult conversation about.
The narrative that was driven that, like, Queer people, the kinky people at Pride, were going to convert people's children by exposing themselves to children and kind of create more kinky queer people out of that phenomenon is absolutely a far right.
Or even, to steal Matt for a moment, even the softer version of it, which is that in some nebulous way that's never quite defined, children would be harmed by seeing things that are like kinky costumes and stuff.
Yeah, this is a right-wing obsession.
Like, it actually came out in the 4chan threads where people were actually planning to do this just a couple of weeks ago, came up on Twitter, and it's like the exact same personalities.
This has been an obsession of the far-right forever.
They will routinely use the acronym LGBTQP.
P, that's right.
P stands for pedophile.
And they will just, anytime they see the LGBT acronym, they will just add P to the end of it.
In their kind of like casual chats, because for them, it's all the same fucking thing.
And this is a deeply complicated, complex thing that deserves really more than one episode if we were going to go into it.
But the fact that it became this like super prominent thing that even like normie YouTube Left of center live streamers were getting involved in this.
It was pretty fucking disgusting.
And I'm just saying, it's a right-wing op.
Learn how to recognize these fucking things.
That's what I'm here for.
And my God, it just put the most disgusting taste in my mouth for the five days it was trending or whatever.
Anyway.
But even though it's a right-wing op, it becomes more worrying than that when, you know, left-tubers are saying the same stuff.
Yes, right.
I mean, it's what the right-wing does and what these like kind of communities do is see these ideas into sort of the online discourse space and then Edgy, again, I guess we can name Vosh, goes out there and shows his fucking ass, which he does on a regular basis and starts, and she, well, I don't even consider she one head is like remotely figure it all.
She's a reactionary dipshit who wants free healthcare.
Like, I mean, I'm sorry.
I mean, she was even worse, obviously, but like, at least people mostly sort of understand what shoe is.
I mean, I think she's, you know, got a few people.
I don't know.
I feel like there's more of a recognition that shoe on head is not actually meaningfully on the left, whereas I think people really do seem to recognize Vosch is that.
And when you see these kind of reactionary responses, and you see this kind of, like, leaning into this, like, why can't we have, like, some places that are family-friendly at Pride?
But they do!
Exactly!
Pride is like a corporate-funded event these days, you know?
To further marginalize people who are outside of the sexual mainstream.
The whole point of Pride is to let people be who they fucking are.
It's just, it's just, it's so, like, it's just so, like, you're just buying into this, like, right-wing lie, ultimately.
And also, the kinds of things that people pointed as kink were, like, just, like, men in, like, small shorts and stuff, where Hollywood movies show way more than that.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
It's pretty ridiculous to put kink under such a broad umbrella, but it includes everyone walking down the street.
Kids.
I mean, it's always children, isn't it?
The right wing scaremongers.
It's always.
Yep.
Think of the children.
They always do this with everything, you know, with I mean, I don't know who it was.
It might have been Cody Johnston on that.
Some more news or something was saying in a recent video, you know, it's always what about the children?
You know, it self rejects if it's women get the vote.
What about the children if it's Gay and lesbian liberation.
What about the children?
And now they're doing it again with trans people.
And yeah, it's just the same moral panic over and over again.
And now they do that with racism, too.
Like, that's why it's so bad to teach, you know, anti-racist stuff in school, because white children are feeling, you know, horrible about being white and it's traumatizing them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just it's so transparent.
Well, it's transparent to you and me, but it's not transparent to everybody, sadly.
A lot of people don't see it, do they?
They get taken in over and over again.
Yeah, and that's why people use kids, because it's that emotional thing that they can get you with, right?
That's it.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Because we obviously do want to protect children.
But, you know, that also means queer children and trans children.
Yeah.
And I just don't like that that photo was going around of this little girl.
I don't know how old she was, like seven or six or something, talking to this guy that's obviously in this slightly kinky fetish outfit, you know, like he's wearing like a dog muzzle mask or something.
And people go like, what?
I mean, what do you?
Children are exposed to stuff like that constantly.
You're noticing because it's inflected with gay culture.
I tweeted about this.
I tweeted a picture of Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns.
This was PG-13, you know, which means a lot of people didn't get that because they don't apparently know what that means.
That means under 13s can go in.
They might need parental guidance here and there, but they can go in.
So, you know, society is fine with kids seeing kink stuff, including adults dressed up in a kinky way as animals.
But in this instance, suddenly it's... Also, they don't understand that kids don't have the context to get this stuff, right?
Of course.
It's really easy if your child comes across someone like that.
You just make up like, oh, you know, he's just playing make believe or whatever.
And they'll be like, oh, okay.
And just walk along.
Yeah.
Sure.
I mean, it's different if you, your child comes across someone with like a strap on going at it.
That's an, but that's not really happening.
No, exactly.
Where are the incidents of this actually happening?
If you're a grown up with a child and you're walking about in the world with your child in tow, then yeah, you have a certain responsibility to shield your child from some things that they might encounter out in the adult world that they shouldn't see.
Right.
And Pride goes through specific streets, at least it does in Toronto.
So if you are, you know, terrified of it, then you kind of stay away from those streets on that one day or two days tops.
That's it.
Yeah.
Just don't take your kids to those specific areas at those specific times and you should be okay.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, your six year old girl is going to be watching television with adverts and looking in magazines with adverts and God knows what else where she sees countless images of women that are, in my opinion, immensely more damaging.
Right.
Yeah.
Extremely sexualized.
My favorite version of this is like, you know, well, it's just inherently sexual, that pride is inherently sexual.
And because you just know what these people get up to in their bedrooms.
And I do just kind of want to go, are you wearing a wedding ring right now?
Because what that implies to me is like, there's some fluid exchange happening.
I just can't help but see your wedding ring and not think of you on your knees just chugging that cock.
Spooge going everywhere.
I just, that's just everything in my mind.
You just, that wedding ring is so inherently sexual to me.
I just, like, you need to not wear that.
You are triggering, you know, I just, I can't, I can't handle it.
I can't.
Yeah.
If my kid sees that wedding ring, oh my goodness.
All I see are cream pies.
It's just cream pies all around.
We might cut some of that.
That's pretty funny though.
That's a spin to put on it.
Look, you know, the fact that your parents are there standing next to each other and you... No, no, no, no, no.
My parents didn't do anything like that.
Not that I want to think about.
We should probably get off this topic now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But the thing that we're kind of titling this episode, Cream Pies Galore, no, is...
A long shadow of the new atheism.
With a transition from cream pies to new atheism.
To new atheism, yeah.
I mean, it's, you know, whenever I see Sam Harris, I just can't think but imagine.
I'm sorry.
Do you remember Dawkins' thing about, you know, tasteful, loving erotica?
No, but I do remember his tweet about bitches 69ing or something.
Oh, God.
I just remember the honey tweet.
Now I'm just, you know.
Oh, just combine all those together, you know.
Oh, no, it was a classic bit of Dawkins on Twitter.
I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was something like, you know, oh, I don't know, Islam would be brought down by by erotica that taught people to respect women.
Lady Chatterley's lover or something is going to bring down.
Oh, no, Dawkins, I don't think so.
There's plenty of.
Loving erotica that gets sold in the markets there.
No, really?
You mean people actually like to fuck regardless of the language they speak and the religions they practice?
That's right.
That does not seem accurate to me.
Anyway, sorry, I derailed.
Yeah, go ahead.
So anyway, we are calling this episode The Long Shadow of New Atheism, and that is because we really wanted to talk about Some of the, you know, some of the kind of related issues of... Does the size of the shadow matter, though?
No, I'm joking.
I would say it's a shadow cast by a strap-on, but a strap-on is much, much more useful and wholesome than the long shadow created by duodenum.
This conversation is definitely going in directions I had not anticipated.
Well, I did ask you if we could do the Kink It Pride thing in the DMs.
Yeah, I just didn't think it would flow into New Atheism like that.
That's fine.
I used to write a blog about sex.
I can handle it.
No, I'm very aware.
It's lovely.
So you run a blog, you run a podcast called Polite Conversations.
You've been running it for quite a long time and have, you know, had I've had quite a polite conversations with a number of people in this kind of like larger conversation sphere, I guess, and have recently been doing this kind of Woking Up Project, which is excellent, kind of going through not just how bad Sam Harris actually is, but like kind of your own relationship to that and your own kind of complicated feelings about your own history with this stuff.
And again, since we've been kind of transitioning into talking about some of these more, you know, far-right adjacent figures, I really wanted to bring you on here to kind of talk a little bit about that process of making Woking Up and kind of what, for people who may not have heard it already, and they definitely should go check it out, tell us a little bit about that project, about kind of where you've kind of come with that.
Yeah, so I'm an ex-Muslim woman that grew up in Saudi Arabia and, you know, had to experience things like literal morality police and stuff.
So I guess that leaves you with some scars and trauma and can leave you very angry with religion.
So I've been a non-believer for Much of my life but you know when I found like an atheist community online at first it was like you know harps and oh lovely I found my people I can finally be open about how much I don't like religion and how much it pisses me off and um you know that stuff got boring after A couple years, but then I saw that there was more to it.
I had always, like, when I entered the scene, the new Atheist scene, I think it was right after Game Brigade ended, so I didn't fully understand that whole context, but I guess I didn't take the critics as seriously as I should have.
And looking back now, I mean, they were right all along, right?
It was just me that was, I didn't have the bigger picture yet.
I was only seeing like a small slice.
I was like, what are you talking about?
You know, they're not all bigoted and you're just trying to silence people for speaking freely about, you know, their atheism.
And that's not okay.
I lived in a country where that wasn't okay.
And I don't want to stand for that.
So, but then, As I, you know, as you spend more and more years in it, your lens gets wider and you begin to see patterns and how things are repeated and how, like, every awful thing these people would try to, like, rationalize and make excuses for.
And one of those major figures was Sam Harris.
So it took me a while to see through that because I so badly wanted, like, an ally for ex-Muslims and I didn't want to believe that he was everything that people said he was, you know, but it became apparent like over the years when he's defended people like Lauren Southern and
You know, Tommy Robinson and just like every awful person you can think of.
Douglas Murray is impeccable to him.
You know, he quit Patreon over Sargon being deplatformed.
I mean, come on.
It just became harder and harder to defend that shit.
I did defend him before, though, and I did invite him on my show, which he now weirdly claims is that he helped me launch my podcast, but that is such a strange lie because My podcast was in existence for maybe a year before he ever came on.
So I don't know what that's about.
Maybe he thinks like just him appearing like his presence was the real launch of it.
Otherwise, it didn't really exist.
I do think there's a bit of a peekaboo quality to Sam Harris in that things don't exist once they are not directly in front of him.
I don't think that he has quite the idea of object permanence on some of this stuff.
You know, I didn't notice the podcast until I appeared on it, and then once I did no longer appear, once I was done appearing on it, I no longer recognized its existence until INA gets angry at me and my mentions.
And then I am reminded of its existence, and I get angry because Hulk smash, because he's- With his brain.
Smash with his brain.
With his big rational genius brain and his- That's right.
You know, million or so Twitter followers.
That's my secret.
I'm always a rock star.
But yeah so I feel kind of like I feel bad for defending him for uh you know even though when I had him on my show I challenged him more than most people I have seen like in his interviews because he doesn't accept interviews with people that he thinks will challenge him so it's very rare that and and I guess because he thought you know I mean I was a fan but he didn't think that I would
Kind of grill him on his associations in the way that I did.
So it just kind of happened.
And, uh, yeah.
But Woking Up is kind of going back over that whole story, and towards the end of Woking Up, I'm going to sort of re-dissect my conversation with him, and how it makes me cringe at certain parts, and how I'm so desperately hoping he says the right thing, how he's the good guy that I want him to be, but at every turn, I give him a chance.
Like, come on, Sam, you don't really mean that, do you?
You're different from Douglas Murray.
No, no, Douglas Murray is excellent.
And his comments about London becoming, you know, where whites are becoming a minority in London are fine.
That's not how we meant it.
Let's make some excuses around that or I don't know.
So that's what Woking Up is about.
It's basically me doing my part to untangle all that bullshit because I don't want to play a part in that.
Anymore at all and I want to actively dismantle it.
So I'm such a small person.
I don't know if I can have any impact or not.
Well, you certainly should have because it's a fantastic series.
I mean, I don't think anybody Honestly, could listen to the way you lay out the hypocrisy and the dodging and weaving and come away with any illusions about that, man, to be honest.
Yeah, it's excellently produced.
And I feel like a lot of the thing is like, even if you're only talking to other people who are, you know, more active, even if it's not to a large audience, then the ideas definitely seep out there, I think.
And for sure, I mean, I think it's excellent work and I can't I can't recommend it highly enough, although it does mean listening to quite a bit of Sam Harris talking, so if that's a problem for you.
If your ears start to bleed, that is not my fault.
There's a warning for you all.
Consume in small doses.
Which I think the I Don't Speak German audience will definitely understand on some level for sure.
That's right.
I think we've got our fans have quite strong stomachs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, it's really interesting how you guys have sort of gone from Nazis into these Rational genius friends.
And I feel like you guys are more interested in covering that these days, right?
Well, it's more important.
I mean, the Nazis are still out there.
They're still doing things.
In fact, I am kind of planning in like June or July to kind of go and do like a bunch of episodes in a row, kind of covering some of the More overtly, you know, kind of genocidal material.
We've got to get back into our wheelhouse a little bit.
There are some, like, historical episodes that I've been, like, kind of prepping and there's some other stuff kind of going on.
But we started drifting in this direction because, like, I started to realize that the... I've always been interested in the propaganda and, like, the way that the ideas kind of get pushed into the mainstream from these online communities and the way that these online communities work.
To kind of launder these ideas and kind of push them into this kind of like online zeitgeist, right?
And in 2018, 2019, we were seeing, you know, a lot of the kind of like great replacement stuff, a lot of the, there were a lot of the memes kind of going around, a lot of this stuff that you would see kind of get discussed.
I could track back to like particular points in like material history In this extremely far-right space, in this actively anti-Semitic, actively race-realist space.
At a certain point, once they all kind of got the band hammer, and once they no longer had quite the ability to affect the discourse in the same way, and to affect the political sphere in the same way, and they were really just kind of talking to each other, It became less kind of interesting to kind of look at that because they were just kind of in their little echo chambers, right?
But what I did see, suddenly started seeing, was that a lot of these guys in this kind of IDW space, in this less overtly racist, still racist, but less overtly racist space,
We're suddenly feeding their ideas not just into the mainstream, but suddenly you started hearing, like, the Nazis started to talk about critical race theory and started to talk about, you know, some of the, like, very particular phrases that I had seen coming from the Weinsteins, particularly, like, Brett and, like, Eric Weinstein and Brett Weinstein and some of that stuff from Evergreen and sort of those kinds of ideas.
And then Christopher Ruffo and James Lindsay and a lot of those kind of figures really started making headlines and really started kind of pushing this kind of narrative around these ideas and really started talking to local state legislatures and that sort of thing and having real political power.
And that those ideas were then being laundered in these kind of far-right spaces into even more virulent forms.
And then you start to see the movement kind of go the other way as, you know, James Lindsay is suddenly getting right up to the edge of blaming the Jews for the Holocaust and shit, right?
Not in the way that is like, you know, he leaves himself just that slight amount of wiggle room, but like, it's right there.
It's right there.
I could play you James Lindsay clips and Daily Show clips, which basically say the same thing, just with the serial numbers and the roughest of the rough edges filed off of it.
It would be pretty trivial at this point.
I started covering the IDW a lot more on the show because, well, that's where, that's where the power, that's where, that's what needs to be talked about.
And then six months later, it kind of blew up.
So I was like, well, I was early to the party on that one.
So, you know, good, good for us, I guess.
Yeah, I really, I really enjoy the overlap that our work has.
Like, I find it kind of funny and also sad, but it's interesting that, The Nazi covering podcast also covers the IDW because that is how, like, I mean, that is...
That's how bad these guys are.
Not like Nazis.
Nobody's saying they're Nazis, but they are a far right talking point laundromat.
You know, they rinse and sanitize the same talking points and they put them out there.
I mean, Sam Harris has said these awful things about migrants coming to Europe to rape white women that sound extremely Quite nationalist-y, you know?
Yeah, I mean, the whole thing is that, like, the difference is that Sam Harris will say, well, there are the good Muslims who are the ex-Muslims who are the rational Muslims who have rejected their religion, because ultimately it's the thought process that people have that is the thing that causes terrorism, for instance, as opposed to Larger socio-political material influences and etc, etc.
Whereas the Schindler Nazis just say, well, this is just something that people from that part of the world do.
And so we need to exclude all of them as opposed to the relative handful who meet Sam Harris's respectability standards, right?
Right.
It's almost literally like they pull their pants up and wear a nice shirt, and therefore we allow them into our civilized society, as opposed to all the other dirty ones that don't believe as we do.
And the difference is that the Nazis say, no, even the nice ones don't get to come in.
You know, that's precisely what so many of them do, though, isn't it?
I mean, most of them have stuck to that ostensibly more respectable version.
They've switched to it and they maintain that they're not racist.
Right.
And it's not about race.
It's about like culture and stuff.
And most of the far right have switched to that.
And, you know, the danger is starkly illustrated by Sam endorsing the the words and claims of somebody like Anne-Marie Waters.
Yeah, yeah, and on the topic of immigration, like he has tweeted out, you know, interviews of hers and said that she's brilliant on this specific topic.
It's not like Anne-Marie Waters was caught randomly saying, you know, oh she had some useful advice about how to, I don't know, hammer a nail into your wall or something.
No, no, she was talking about her specific far-right shit and he enjoyed that interview and he tweeted it out to his audience.
And then when you challenge him on it, he's like, oh no, no, no, I didn't know who she was.
But come on, if you were listening to her talk, That should kind of set off alarm bells, right?
And then he also does this, um, Muslim birth rates, right?
He, he fear mongered about that in one of his books.
He took, he took, he took like a data from this, like what was his Arabia book?
Oh my God.
Yes.
Like an Alex Jones-ian level conspiracy book.
Yeah.
Which is literally like the brown people are going to invade Europe and like take over its culture and we're all going to do Sharia law.
Yeah, yeah.
There will be no more white people in France in 50 years.
That kind of book.
And that's just another version of the Douglas Murray thing.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It shouldn't matter if you know who she is or not.
If you're listening to her and you're nodding in agreement, then you find out she's a fucking fascist.
You've got problems.
There's something going wrong with your thinking.
If you're nodding in agreement with people, you later find out to be fascists.
And this is the great chink in Sam's intellectual armor.
He keeps on finding common ground with these people.
He can abjure them and condemn them as much as he likes, but he keeps on finding these crucial areas of common ground with them.
Yeah, I mean, he wants to be charitable to Trump because he says he hates Trump, so he wants to overcome his biases.
And, you know, that's what he should do.
He should bend over backwards to be charitable to him.
But when he calls countries shithole countries, we don't know that he's thinking about race.
He could just be talking about infrastructure or something.
Surely, that's not a racial thing.
No, it's because Trump is rich and those countries are not.
That's what it is.
But that charitableness never comes up for AOC or Ilhan Omar, you know?
No, because he hates the left.
Right.
That's the whole point.
That's why he wants to be charitable to Trump and people like that, because, you know, it's that or give some ground to the left.
And the main priority is hatred of and opposition to anything on the left.
Right.
And I feel like if you cannot recognize this basic truth about Sam or anyone in the rational genius sphere, the IDW sphere, you're not really understanding or you're deliberately misrepresenting.
Because the whole entire project, in my opinion, It's just a right-wing rebranding project, you know?
If you can't recognize they're coming from the right, if you can't recognize that their goal is to push the Overton window further and further right, then what the fuck are you doing?
Especially if you're framing yourself, positioning yourself as an IDW critic.
Yeah, you're playing with fire and it's not you that's going to get burned.
Right, right.
Historically, what we find is that fascist parties gain power largely by centrists allying with the far right as a way of preventing gains by the left.
Um, and so, you know, when I hear, you know, Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying start talking about the need for greater police presence to put down anarchists and socialists and Antifa members in Portland, and it doesn't matter how violent the cops need to be to do that, we understand who you're willing to ally with.
I mean, you know, like, They're literally friends with Andy Ngo.
They're friends with Douglas Murray.
This is a concerted political project.
We know that there's funding going on behind the scenes to a lot of these people.
And so, it's hard to say, well, is Sam Harris funded by Peter Thiel?
I doubt it.
I think Sam Harris is probably rich enough on his own.
But, you know, Eric Weinstein is like number two guy to Peter Thiel at Thiel Capital, and Brett Weinstein is Eric's brother.
Where do you think they got the money to build that fancy studio they have in their house?
There's obvious financial incentive here, right?
We don't know exactly where the money is coming from, but this is a concerted political project on the part of these IDW reactionaries, and it is meant to do a very particular political thing, which is to defeat the left, right?
Yes.
And if you're going to be critical of these people, of Brett Weinstein or Sam Harris or Coleman Hughes or, you know, whoever, and you're not engaging with that very real political reality, and you just use the word conspiracy theory 500 times, you're not actually engaging with the content of what's happening in front of you.
Well, yeah, that's really like the low-hanging fruit kind of criticism, right?
So as you said earlier, the IDW criticism world kind of exploded recently, right?
And now we have a whole bunch of IDW critics, and they kind of are, you know, all over the political spectrum.
Whereas a few years ago, maybe pre-Trump, It was, especially within the atheist scene, it was really taboo to criticize Ruben, even.
Ruben, who's like an accepted clown now.
Yeah, so of course the dog is gonna bark at the mention of Ruben, because who wants to talk about Ruben?
That guy can't even do comedy, right?
I love that.
Dave Rubin, woo!
Shut up, I don't want to talk about Dave Rubin!
Anything but Rubin, anything but Rubin.
Yeah, I know, he's like the worst of the worst.
Oh, I was watching Lindsay and Boghossian on Rubin this afternoon while I was eating lunch.
Oh dear.
Like an old episode?
From like 2019, yeah, because I'm still doing my kind of background Groovin' Cities research.
Oh God, man, just...
I don't know how anybody spends any amount of time with Ruben, like it's just so painful.
He's such an obvious dipshit.
But yeah, he is like even his friends kind of backed away from him but not enough to be given credit for.
Well, and there's like a backing away and there's a backing away.
I mean, I think a lot of people wanted to kind of give like Helen Pluckrose a certain degree of credit for, you know, once James Lindsay started getting like really deep into some really nasty stuff on Twitter.
Yeah, like some anti-Semitic stuff like blaming woke Jews for anti-Semitism.
Yeah, we're not blaming the Jews.
We're blaming the Jews because they're woke.
And if the Jews would be less woke, then there would be less anti-Semitism, because it turns out that the Jews, that people blame Jews for being Jews when they get too woke.
And see, that's the problem.
And this is the exact same logic as, like, the literal fucking Nazis.
And since then, they called it cultural Bolshevism.
Right.
Which is a term that Majid has hurled at me before.
Majid Nawaz, that is.
Another esteemed IDW member who's gone down the QAnon or something rabbit hole.
Yeah, no, he's a pretty nasty piece of work, but yeah.
I think I've heard Sam Harris mentioned Marjeet Nawaz once or twice.
Yeah, he only helped build up his entire career and then quietly backed away as if he has nothing to do with all that, you know?
After appearing, I think he appeared even on Rogan with Noah's.
Yes, yes.
We need a million watching Noah's, right?
Exactly.
If only somebody had receipts for all that.
If only somebody compiled them into a convenient little podcast mini-series.
Yeah.
If only.
But yeah, so as I was saying, the IDW criticism has exploded, and so then we have all kinds of IDW critics.
Even just slightly say that kind of, Reuben is maybe not a good guy to stand behind.
He's not, he's not doing what he says he's doing.
And then criticizing Sam Harris.
That was just like, you couldn't even like, sorry, sorry, puppy.
He said it again.
He said Reuben again.
I think he barked at the mention of Sam Harris this time, which I don't blame him for.
So what was I saying?
Yeah, so then we've got now because it's become more normalized it's so much easier to do than back in the day when you would get dogpiled for maybe two weeks if you said something mild.
Now we've got everyone coming in and doing all this I.U.W.
criticism and then you've got like people that are not really even on the left that are sort of I.D.W.
sympathetic.
That have gotten into this IDW criticism thing, which I find bothers me quite a bit because I feel like it's going to have some really bad effects that I've already started seeing, right?
Like these types are like the IDW's favorite IDW critics.
They provide them like a safe space for saying that they do actually engage with criticism of the IDW, but just not like irrational lefty criticism.
Look at these reasonable dudes!
Criticizing, but also saying mostly nice things.
That's the kind of criticism everyone should do, like toothless, harmless criticism.
Yeah, and like people who are, you know, who have a kind of legitimate, or I don't wanna say legitimate, but a more aggressive kind of political stance on this, and who are, you know, angrier about the acceptance of these ideas into the mainstream, and who are a little bit more open about expressing that, well, you're not a serious critic, you see, because you're not willing to decouple your beliefs from your ability to discuss these bigger ideas.
Right, right.
You're emotionally involved.
I mean, I'm sorry, I'm sorry that, you know, Sam Harris' fear-mongering about Muslim birthrights being ominous and then the Christchurch shooting happening with similar lines like that.
I'm sorry that that scares me a little bit, you know, as someone who has a Family full of Muslim loved ones that did used to go to mosque once in a while when COVID didn't exist.
That scares me.
So, yeah, he does what he says and spouts does impact me on a personal level, I suppose.
But still, I think on my show, I'm never really like ranting or angry.
I try to make it funny and I make jokes and You know, but still.
If anything, you're too polite.
I mean, honestly, you know, I mean, you know, I understand that, you know, as the cis white guy, you know, I get to kind of just come out and just, you know, be the bull in the china shop a little bit and, you know, break some plates.
And then suddenly it's like, oh, well, you know, what do you expect from that guy?
He's just a barefoot barbarian from Alabama.
You know, he's just doing the thing, you know.
But you know, I do have that privilege to be able to do that and to gain respect for it, whereas people from more marginalized communities...
There is much less engagement with Woking Up than I get with I Don't Speak German, I think.
I don't see nearly as much conversation around the actual content of the episodes.
Maybe I'm just not seeing it or whatever.
You can communicate with that.
Like I see a lot of people kind of saying, no, IDST Pod is like a great resource that people should absolutely be listening to, to understand a lot of these, a lot of these figures and understand, you know, some of the stuff.
And I'm like, go check out Plague Conversations, go check out Woking Up.
It's great.
It's great content.
I mean, I spent way more time on Sam Harris than I'm ever going to put all those clips together and assemble all that.
And because I did it, I don't have to worry about it.
I get to do James Lindsay instead.
And oh, God, I hate my life.
But no, there's a fair amount of engagement with it.
I mean, I've gotten some like, you know, big journalists that have talked about it and recommended it to others and, you know, some comedians and stuff.
So that's been pretty cool.
But yeah, a lot of people I find that are in the IDW criticism world do not engage with it.
So that's interesting to me.
So what I've seen on Other people's social media is people bitching about me.
So there was like a podcast that someone did about Sam Harris and they were literally ranting and screaming with their voice quivering angrily.
And I love a good criticism of Sam Harris, but even for me, this was like, I, your points are sort of getting lost in your ranty angriness.
So please try to make your points better.
But anyway, I see that the engagement under that is like, oh yeah, this is so much better than that hateful bile Ina puts out.
And I'm thinking like, she's just a hysterical, you know, SJW.
And I get this reputation all the time for being like this hysterical woman.
And it's, It's pretty unwarranted, I think, when a white dude can put out, like, his voice is quivering, kind of angry episode about Sam, and he gets told, wow, how rational, calm, and reasonable he was.
I'm like, what?
I just can't do anything right, for some people.
It's almost like some people just get the assumption of reasonableness, you know, just automatically.
And other people of a different type, you know, just get automatically assumed to be unreasonable and unhinged and emotional.
Exactly.
I don't know.
Yeah.
There must be some way of categorizing people.
Something I can't put my finger on, you know.
And really, like of the three of us, if you're going to have a polite conversation and get like kind of reasonable responses, I think Ina is definitely the one you want.
want to talk to in terms of you know kind of like respectful engagement because like i think jack just tells most people to just fuck off and i can tell you for a fact that there were some radical opinions that i made on the polite conversations episode that jack and i did that got edited out of the final finished product So, you know. -
Just for sure, the realities of the way that Jack and I do this and the way that we criticize some of these figures.
And the lack of response and the kind of respectful response that we get to this versus what you get, I think it's pretty disgusting.
And I just think that people should give you a lot more credit for being as reasonable, you know, in those terms as you are.
And I don't think I'm unreasonable at all.
I have a very particular political opinion and I value the way that I use my time and I don't get engaged with, you know, bad faith actors on Twitter.
It's just not something I do.
You know, I have better, I have, I spent too many years on Facebook arguing with libertarians.
Let's just put it that way.
But yeah, I think it's true that the, the IDW is a very important development in the way that, I mean, we talked about this when we guested on your show, I know about the, the ecosystem, you know, of right-wing ideas and about how they, it occupies different niches in, in the conversation in it occupies different niches in, in the conversation in different ways and how they feed each other.
And yeah, and you certainly were ahead of a lot of people in criticizing these sorts of developments.
And in our own small way, as Daniela said, we were a bit ahead of the curve as well, starting to talk about IDW people before it became This quite well accepted thing now to talk about this.
But now we have this, this subsequently we have this new development which is kind of what I suppose what you might call liberal critics of the IDW or centrist critics of the IDW people.
I just call them IDW sympathetic critics of the IDW.
IDW lite.
Right, because I've listened to some shows that I would put into that category, like Liberal Critics of the IDW, and come away with some useful information about people.
The low hanging fruit they do well, right?
Like if someone's going full Alex Jones, sure.
But you know, when it comes to like the more nuanced, when it comes to the less blatant characters, the less, the more slimy, slippery ones.
You know, those are the people that I feel really should be exposed.
The people who actually gain the legitimacy and are able to mainstreamize terrible opinions, rather than people who are kind of showing their ass everywhere.
But those people in the IDW are often defended or given way too much credit by a certain Group of quote-unquote IDW critics, you know?
And so that worries me because I feel like people who don't watch this stuff as carefully, they just see like, oh wow, you know, IDW critics here, they're good, they're great.
But what about the times that they sympathize with or say they're politically similar to like the less terrible members of the IDW who are also incredibly terrible and spread like great replacement conspiracy theories, you know?
It's not like that's not dangerous just because it's not like, oh, blaming the Jews for blaming the woke Jews for anti-Semitism type of stuff.
Yeah, and I think I agree with that.
And I think there are some problems with the way some of these people and I think we're not going to name names, but there are there are several of these podcasts and writers who engage with with the people in the IDW sphere.
And some of them, I think there are problems with the kind of engagement that they carry out and also sort of just the atmosphere, just the air, the affect of some of the criticism.
To tackle that first, I think a lot of it has this kind of almost collegiate feel to it.
Like some of the critics will, they will criticize James Lindsay one minute and then they will be criticizing figures on the left.
As if they're remotely comparable.
And while, you know, some of the figures on the left that they might criticize would be people that, you know, I would definitely have criticisms of them as well.
And yet, you know, to lump them all in together makes it seem like it kind of has this decontextualizing effect that I find worrying.
It kind of takes the edge off the threat, I think.
Exactly.
And it feeds into that whole thing, right?
No, no, no, no.
The entire IDW isn't bad.
It's just these You know, these more openly bad people, like these three, four of them, but the rest of that crew, not so bad.
Guys, you know, if you're Cathy Young's favorite IDW critic, I mean, like, I would worry.
I honestly would.
And I say that as someone who even bought into many, many years ago that maybe Cathy Young is one of the more reasonable Sort of anti-SJWs.
Sure, she's not like Cernovich or she's even denounced Milo.
But I mean, after observing these, all these more reasonable anti-wokes throughout the Trump era and watching how they did not really change their tone at all, their entire project is just to go after the left, even when, like, Nazis are flourishing, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That just changes everything.
Yeah, no, I absolutely agree that the context of it, because you can say, well, such and such a person is the most reasonable person on this side.
And you might even be right.
But the very fact that they're on that side, and as you say, in the context of the historical and the political moment that we're living through, they're still on that side.
And they're still even if they're doing it in this very reasonable way in this watered down way.
And I wouldn't even say I wouldn't even use words like that to describe Cathy Young.
But, you know, you know what I mean?
Just illustratively.
It doesn't make any difference, does it?
You're still publishing this, you're still platforming it, you're still pushing it, and you can be the IDW critic as much as you like.
If you then help people who are still within that sphere to get their message out, you're kind of just, whether you mean to or not, you're using criticism of the IDW then to To still push these ideas.
That's what it feels like to me.
It feels like being a bridge builder when nothing has been deserved to build that bridge.
Yeah.
Do we really want anybody from the other side of this river to cross over?
I mean, even the nicer ones?
No, like, I mean, Quillette did a criticism of Dave Rubin.
You do not got to give them Credit for that.
You really don't.
And it's not hard.
We did an episode on the National Justice Party when that first started.
And that's part of the Daily Shoah crowd, kind of building this kind of political party.
We will do more episodes about them down the line, et cetera, et cetera.
But we did an episode about that.
And in that episode, I played clips of Richard Spencer criticizing the National Justice Party as being the stupidest thing you'd ever heard of, right?
Right.
You can do that, and then also go, and also Richard Spencer is very likely a spousal abuser who is a complete asshole on every other possible issue, and Richard Spencer is not someone we ally with at all, but even he- He's still a white nationalist, yeah.
He's still a Nazi, but even he recognizes how stupid this thing is.
That's all you really have to do, because I don't really care if Richard Spencer is nice to- in fact, I would be really upset if Richard Spencer did decide he liked me, all of a sudden.
You know, that shows I'm doing something wrong.
Yeah, that would be a warning sign.
Yeah.
And so you don't you can say, yeah, Helen Bluckrose has been along this side for the entire time that she published a book with James Lindsay.
She was part of the Grave Aesthetics Hoax.
She was right there the whole thing.
She's still pushing this reactionary agenda.
Yeah.
But suddenly James Lindsay is slightly toxic on Twitter because he's a fucking bully and an asshole.
And When she starts to distance herself.
She didn't say that, did she?
No, she didn't.
But she distances herself and, you know, there was, there was, it was kind of an unstated thing of like, she's just kind of like, she took his name off of things and it's like, I'm not working with him anymore or something worse to that effect.
She didn't come out and say anything, but just then she got praise from people for distancing herself while she's still pushing the same old shit, just with better optics.
Exactly.
And pushing it more successfully.
It's looking at well, James Lindsay is pretty successful, so I guess we'll find out in time, but like he's successful in the like openly right wing circles, right?
I mean, she is probably successful.
In the liberal circles, more successful in the liberal circles.
But pushing the same thing and pushing the same kinds of ideas, and they have the same enemies.
And those enemies are us!
That's the point.
And if you're criticizing these people and taking this very superficial look at it, and treating them as if they are good faith actors, when in fact, They are just as much to blame, but slightly less asshole-ish about it.
You're missing the real story.
Exactly.
Completely.
And then when you present yourself as an IDW critic, and then you kind of...
Make inroads with anti-IDW people, but then you're also at the same time kind of legitimizing some of the better ones.
I feel like you're bringing people full circle back to be more accepting of the IDW on some level.
And if you agree with Helen Pluckrose and her less overtly anti-Semitic kind of version of this, if you agree with that political stance, I can't, I mean, I'm not going to say,
Say that, you know, you have the right in a liberal society to believe in that, of course, and I have the right to criticize you for it, you know, but if you do consider yourself on the left and you are critical of Helen Pluckrose and you're platforming her or giving her kudos for being just as much of a dipshit but a little bit less obvious about it, that just strikes me as kind of a fundamentally dishonest I hate to say it, but I think some of this does come down to audience.
To wanting a larger audience?
Or wanting a certain kind of audience.
We gravitate towards a left-wing audience because that's who we're speaking to on I Don't Speak German.
And we get criticized by liberals for, you know, being a little bit aggressive about that sometimes.
And it's a valid criticism, but it's ultimately like, this is the show we make.
And if I were to pretend to be a kind of rational centrist, kind of criticizing these things, A, I wouldn't be as effective at understanding these things and explaining these things as I am, as I think I am.
And B, it would be kind of fundamentally dishonest, right?
So I just feel like, you know, it's just a, Like, why bother, you know?
Well, I make, you know, part of this, I mean, I just, I am who I am, so I have to be who I am, and I make this show, and this show has me in it, and therefore this show just has a lot of who I am in it, right?
And I'm, you know, I stand where I stand, and I can't stand anywhere else, and my way is to just say, you know, this is where I stand.
And it might even be just a temperamental thing.
I don't think that necessarily means I'm wrong, but I'm very impatient with this.
I mentioned the word before, this collegiate manner that some of these anti-IDW critics have.
I like to call it IDWA.
I find that funny.
The anti-IDWA people.
Some of them have this kind of, well, you know, let's have a debate.
And even while they can be quite Quite savage sometimes in some of the criticisms.
What you find is that, I think anyway, a lot of the content of the criticism, it will point out things like outright discrepancies or outright contradictions, and it will point out connections to the bad people, you know, whether it's Christian nationalists or whatever, and it will point out conspiratorial thinking, and it will point out this fallacy and that fallacy,
And it will do that very academic thing of picking through the form of the argument and stuff like that, and the connections to the people who are beyond the pale of like, you know, this kind of academic or academically flavoured discourse.
But it won't really go into the political problems with the content that's being pushed.
You know, and so I just find myself, I mean, I'm becoming more and more concerned about steel manning as a fetish.
You know, obviously, if you are engaged in a kind of intellectual exercise in the in the dreaming spires of the Academy, then sure, steel manning.
Hey, is some kind of kink shaming OK, then?
Like, is the...
Absolutely, yes.
No, I kink-shame people that fetish steel men.
That's right.
That's just sick!
And debate fetishists.
Yeah.
It's not a bad thing to do.
If you're investigating somebody's writing or speaking or whatever, employ the principle of charity.
Try to make their words make sense.
That's a good thing to do.
It's a good way to understand people.
And try to tackle the toughest version of their argument because that sharpens your counter-argument.
All that is true.
I don't have a problem with that.
But that's kind of just, that's an intellectual exercise for when you're writing a paper or whatever.
These are deeply important and urgent political questions that require deeply important and urgent political responses.
I find.
And I just find this sort of collegiate, let's debate it, let's point out the contradictions and the fallacies and let's steal man.
I find that really worrying as a response.
I think it's very inadequate.
And I think a lot of the time, actually, paradoxically, it just has the opposite effect.
It kind of legitimizes these people.
I mean, as we did in the last episode, I mean, you know, we named this particular podcast, a particular person in the last episode, but I will not do so here, who absolutely legitimized James Lindsay, starting in 2014, by inviting him on the show over and over again as a honored guest, despite the fact that some of the things he was saying were pretty openly bigoted.
Okay, now I'm curious.
Who is that?
You can edit it out.
No, that's, that's Tom Smith.
That's the Sirius Inc.
Oh, okay.
Right, right, right, right.
Because he did invite, he did invite James Lindsay on the show.
Yes, yes, yes.
And yeah, no, I mean, and, and, you know, we can leave it in.
That's fine.
It's just like the, I mean, believe me, we had that criticism.
In total fairness.
He turned against James Lindsay and, you know, quite spectacularly on his own show.
And, you know, all applause for doing that.
Well done.
But should it really have gotten that far?
I mean, it shouldn't it shouldn't have taken that long.
James Lindsay, yeah, was was not this extreme back then, but Yeah, I would not have wanted to give him any attention, even at that time.
Even the clips that I played.
I mean, I did not have to select too hard to find things.
But even in that very first appearance, James Lindsay is talking about like, oh, it's just one extra syllable.
Why do you have to say gay pride?
You could just say, I'm proud to be gay because it's a self-defined characteristic.
It's an important characteristic.
I could be proud of it.
And then we sit and have this conversation for two hours.
About this, and like, what value are you actually adding to discourse by doing this?
Like, what's the point in having this conversation at that length?
When Smith absolutely, like, rejected, you know, like, he had the right answers, like, well, yeah, everybody kind of knows why you don't do that.
It's because, like, people have actually, like, dealt with all kinds of oppression, and so they're proud to Still be here and proud to say who they are and duh, James Lindsay.
And yet he keeps inviting James Lindsay back until James Lindsay really goes off the deep end with the conceptual penis stuff, right?
Yeah.
And I just I just feel like that probably does more harm than good that, you know, you don't need to have this debate.
These are these things.
It's like it's the just asking questions thing again, isn't it?
There's nothing wrong with asking questions, but it's the question of Are the questions genuine or not?
Are they good faith?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Are the questions needed now?
And if the questions are answered and the answers are widely available, and you continue asking the question anyway, then what you're doing is undermining the answers that exist.
And if that means targeting or putting in danger or, you know, harassment or whatever, of vulnerable people, then you're actively malevolent.
I'm sorry, you just are.
And I'm not saying Tom Smith is actively malevolent, but I'm saying that he is contributing towards the legitimization, or at least he was at this point, of somebody who is.
And it should have been pretty obvious, I think, by then that he was malevolent in his asking of questions like, you know, why can't gay people say this instead of that?
He should never have gotten to that stage, I don't think.
Yeah, I mean, I see when I was a new New Atheist, I was pretty into the idea of kind of discussing everything with anyone who wants to.
Like, I've chatted with Tommy Robinson and it took me a while to learn how that is harmful, right?
Because what happened with Tommy Is to me, I thought that was a great conversation because I was able to tell him that, oh, Tommy, you know, I'm also not a fan of Islam, but like, see, we have very different ways we go about this.
Your rhetoric is extremely hateful and divisive.
And this is when Tommy was like newly saying that he's left extremism behind and he wants to turn a new leaf.
So that's why I was like, hey, you know, I want to extend a hand to him and help to get him Out of that.
But all he did was he kind of dulled his hate and watered everything he usually says down and he kind of agreed with everything.
I said, yes, yes, you know, you're right.
And he just got a chance to appear more reasonable.
And it took me a while to realize that, that actually I thought it was good because he admitted that he was wrong and he shouldn't do that.
But then he went right back to doing the same shit.
He just got a platform.
He got to broadcast that he was having, you know, reasonable discussion and he's not as bad as people think he is.
And that's what came of that, unfortunately.
So yeah, I learned that lesson.
It's worth noting that the guys who started the Daily Showa podcast in 2014 all met each other on Facebook political discussion groups in 2012 or so.
They got their start just talking about politics with other people on the internet.
Um, not even in like platformed ways, but like, you know, this is like, this kind of like, we're just going to have a space for like discussion.
And then what they, what, what they eventually started doing was just pushing white nationalist talking points, white nationalists trolling into those spaces and making more white nationalists that way.
I mean, you know, like people who have, you know, an overt political ideology that is built on this kind of inherent violence, the way that they, Respond the way that they spread their ideas is by, it's like an opportunistic infection.
They're coming into these spaces and using your goodwill against them, against you and in their favor, right?
And you have to be able to recognize this.
Like, I don't need to bring James Lindsay on this show to demonstrate what a dipshit James Lindsay is.
No, it's actually better to not invite James Lindsay on the show to exactly that.
You know, it's almost as if, you know, if you if you've got a wolf who's wanting to come and eat the sheep and you're the best thing to do if you're another sheep is to just, you know, talk them out of it.
You know, just just have the polite conversation with the wolf.
That's hey, my my podcast name was always tongue in cheek.
It was never about, like, sincerely saying we should politely Debate our own existence or anything.
However, I have actually literally heard that in the IDW spaces, like someone was saying, well, what's wrong with needing to debate your existence?
Like it happened in the times of slavery and some people were successful and convinced other people.
And I'm like, what the fuck?
John Brown, John Brown got a lot more accomplished than me, frankly.
Yeah.
Engle said that an ounce of action is worth a ton of theory, and I think John Brown at Harper's Ferry is worth a lot more than every single debate about whether or not black people deserve to not be owned and used as farm machinery.
Yeah, I don't think debate really...
And when we look at like Frederick Douglass, I mean, he's not debating, he's expressing his history.
And these are like wildly polemical speeches.
I mean, this is not a discussion between like the reasonable slave owner, you know, who's just like, well, what do we do?
How do we get these people educated up to, you know, our standard?
What we need to do is just to have, you know, a slow methodical process by which we educate the slave owners about how terrible slavery is.
And, you know, educate the slaves and maybe teach them to read in, you know, 100 years or 200 years.
And, you know, we were just kind of gradually the whole institution will fade away because and that's the way we need to do things, because otherwise, you know, we might have to take an actual political stance.
Well, this is what I always think about people like Sam.
You know, if you transport them back in time to the you know, the antebellum United States, Sam would be He would be debating pro-slavery people on his, well, whatever the equivalent of a podcast was.
No, no, no.
He wouldn't be debating them.
He would be nodding along.
Well, pretty much, yeah.
But he'd be doing it in a debating sort of way.
It would be like how he had Charles Murray on, though.
Yeah, yeah.
He'd be talking to the slave owners and it'd be like, yes, I mean, obviously the science shows that the African race is inferior, but do we have to actually do the X, Y and Z?
And then at the end, he'd be saying, well, you know, I think it's good that we had this debate.
And then he'd go back to what he was doing 90% of the time, which is criticizing the crazy abolition.
Right.
That would be the real problem.
I don't agree with John C. Calhoun's opinions about the inferiority of the Black slaves, but it's clear that there is some science that we definitely need to understand.
And really, what are we going to do?
Are we going to actually engage in violence to prevent John C. Calhoun from speaking?
Those abolitionists who are out there who are actually willing to To do these violent things, those are the ones who are the real problem, because they represent a threat to the order of our civil society and our system of government.
Clearly, they're the real racists, or the abolitionists.
Absolutely, yeah.
This is why I get so frustrated with this collegiate debate bro pose, you know.
And I don't say that necessarily because I think all the people that strike it are necessarily lying or pretending or grifters or whatever.
I think a lot of it is is probably well-intentioned.
And as I say, the basic idea of using the Socratic method and methods like the principle of charity and reading, etc.
Yeah, fine, that's great.
There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but using that in these sorts of politically charged interventions, I just find it so...
Because it's the absence of the very politics that is supposedly the problem.
No, you need the political orientation to steer you right.
Because if you don't have that, always...
And by political orientation, I don't mean like necessarily a particular ideological commitment, but I mean like just the remembrance that you're talking about actual people involved in actual material struggles in real life, you know, about their identity and their existence and their rights and their freedoms and their safety, et cetera.
That's what you need.
And if you detach it all into this kind of ivory tower debate subject, you just, I think there's something about that that just, There's an inherent danger of being led into this downplaying of the problem.
Well, you can tell that the stakes aren't very high for a lot of people.
It is just an intellectual exercise, right?
Yeah.
But for some other people, like all other minorities, kind of bearing the brunt of this far-right Explosion now, and you know, anti-trans rhetoric, like the IDW is into every kind of bigotry you can imagine, anti-Muslim, and also anti-BLM stuff, and like pro-police, like kind of doing police propaganda right now.
Yeah.
It's so obviously a political project and to spend your time kind of... To think you can ever take the politics out of it and just examine it as sort of just this play of ideas.
Yeah.
Of course you can't do that.
But that's where these free speech brain... and again, you know, I love free speech.
I'm not anti-free speech.
But when it turns into a fetish again, like Steel Manning turns into a fetish, these free speech brain worms, you end up with, well, why shouldn't we debate the existence of a certain group?
Surely everything should be up for debate.
And I'm like, Also, how many times can you debate these things, right?
At some point you have to accept that we have debated as a society and debated and debated and come up with answers that we should all agree upon.
Not to revisit, you know, because... And look, however uncertain and unsatisfactory the ultimate long-term effects, and we're still trying to sort this thing out now, right?
The ultimate victory in the debate about slavery was the Civil War.
It was actually going down there and kicking the shit out of the slave power, wasn't it?
It wasn't a nice friendly collegiate batting back and forth of ideas.
Well, and even before that, it's slave rebellions and the Underground Railroad.
This is not a peaceful transition of power.
You mean it's not like a podcast appearance?
It's not like a podcast appearance.
We lionized Harriet Tubman, rightfully so, because she committed treasonous crimes to save people.
If this was 1933 Germany, you know, like, hiding Jews was a capital offense.
Like, you go off to the death camps as well as the people you're hiding.
Well, Frederick Douglass' famous speech, I stand before you a thief.
I stole these hands.
Yeah.
I stole this head.
And now we, and now we value that.
And it's like, there's no, this is what I get from like this kind of like centrist perspective, this kind of, you know, like kind of generalized, well, we can't rock the boat too much kind of perspective.
It is this kind of like lack of a willingness to see the morality of the situation for what it is.
And someone else has to do the hard work and then you're going to jump on the bandwagon.
That's also how it is with the IDW criticism, right?
Not comparing the struggles, obviously.
To any major historical struggle for human rights.
Criticizing the intellectual dark web is just like being in the Underground Railroad.
No, no, no, no, no.
That is not what I'm saying.
I'm joking.
But I'm just pointing to like an attitude of like how social struggles of the past are always accepted.
By like rational bros, but like the struggles of today.
Yeah, but that's because somebody else, everybody else did the work.
And somebody else already did the fighting and dying.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
As long as you're not the one taking the trench yet, right?
You know?
But any of the struggles of today are, oh, the wokes are going too far, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah and they just as I say you know you put Sam back in time and a lot of these people and they'd be they'd be doing the same shit they're doing now but re-slavery or whatever.
Yes there's an article by Donna Minkowitz I believe I hope I'm getting her name right and it's a wonderful article about like how the IDW's rhetoric matches like some of the more rational Bros at the time of slavery and I'll find it and link it.
I'll send you a link and you can put it in your show notes.
Great.
We started out talking about the Kink at Pride thing and about how the won't somebody think of the children moral panic thing just comes back over and over again, didn't we?
Yeah.
And the people doing this now as a as a pretext to, you know, kick LGBT people, they're recycling the exact same rhetoric that was used against abolitionists and suffragettes and civil rights, etc, etc.
You're too angry.
You're too visible.
Just be polite middle-class people.
No, but he's a white guy, so he's still more rational than me.
Exactly.
I'm accorded the assumption of rational and reasonableness, you know.
Ina can sit there having polite conversations as much as she likes.
You know, she's still the angry, unreasonable one.
Exactly.
I can scream, you know, a red-faced and bulging-eyed spittle flecked into the microphone, and I'm just, well, isn't he reasonable?
The accent helps too, Jack.
Oh yeah, for sure.
Oh yeah, the accent's a good one.
It's helpful to youth and also to Douglas Murray, unfortunately, though I assume they're not the same accent, but they both sound kind of... And Andinho as well these days.
I don't think he dropped that, I don't know.
Did he?
Oh, right.
On my episode, you gave us the origin of how he got that accent.
I think it was like he got hit by a milkshake or something.
He got hit with a milkshake, yeah.
Oh yeah, that's right.
I got in trouble for revealing the truth, which is this accent comes from a milkshake impact to the head.
We all have to have our milkshake.
It only works with vegan milkshakes, too.
That's way too woke.
But yeah, see, so the status quo warriors of today are, you know, what makes like, what makes anyone think that they're going to be there?
They're better than the status quo warriors of before, right?
They're just people that are fighting for the status quo, always.
Well, in the status quo, the status quo never has to be defended on its own merits.
It is the status quo.
It is the thing that already exists.
And therefore it is automatically better than anything else that you might challenge it with.
So if you say, maybe things should be better on, maybe we should have healthcare and maybe queer people should be allowed to be who they are, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, that's a challenge to the kind of existing order.
And that has to be justified.
That has to be something that has A whole conversation around how much can we afford to move and how much can we afford to change and how much can we afford to do these things without ever questioning the existing horrors of the existing system, because that just gets to exist as the baseline assumption thing that we just all live under.
Right, right.
My favorite example of this is that the U.S.
prison industrial complex currently imprisons more people than were in prison except for at the highest of the highest tiers of the Soviet gulag complex.
In the highest years, the Soviet gulags actually, per capita, had a higher population than the current U.S.
prison industrial complex.
But, other than in those handful of years, the current U.S.
prison industrial complex actually imprisons more people.
And that's just a fact.
And so, whenever we start talking about the terrors of other societies, we need to look at the actual things at the center of our great liberty-loving United States of America.
Right, right.
It's like that recent Biden clip that's been going around about how every other nation is defined by its race or religion, except for America.
You know, America is defined by an idea.
Right.
And that idea is, let's just steal all these people's land, apparently.
And definitely no religion or, you know, race stuff happening in America.
Yeah, it wasn't built on slavery.
It wasn't built on, you know, genocide.
It wasn't built on any of those things.
It was just built on liberty.
You know, Patrick Henry had some nice words to say.
Thomas Jefferson, he wasn't raping his slave.
It just wasn't a thing.
So, you know, yeah.
So, can you tell me why you wanted to have me on for 88?
Well, I wanted to discuss this topic and, you know, I didn't want to do like the obvious thing and I wanted to have you on again.
And so it was like, hey, would you be willing to come on for 88?
Like, you know, it wasn't necessarily like, and then we're going to get Ina on for 88 and we're going to totally troll people or something.
It was just like, you know, we wanted to do, we wanted to not do the obvious thing because like people wanted us to do like, oh, who's going to be number 88?
Who's going to be bad enough to be 88?
And it's like, I don't want to give any of these Nazis credit for getting to be number 88.
You know what I mean?
I don't want them to get the bragging rights for it.
So it's like, yeah, let's just do something completely different.
So we had talked about doing the movie Downfall for 88, but this was definitely the better choice.
Bringing cream pies into the I don't speak German extended universe is the way to go.
Yeah, no, it's much better this way.
You know, we brought a brilliant person on and we had a fun chat and we just no celled it.
And I think that's the that's the best way to just, you know, stick your middle finger up at 88 and everything.
That's right.
What it stands for.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, thank you guys so much for having me on.
And no, thank you.
Thanks for coming on again.
Yeah.
You're welcome back.
Welcome back anytime for sure.
Yeah.
And you guys are welcome back on my show, too.
I really.
Enjoyed having you guys on.
And yeah, for anyone listening, beware of the IDW light trap.
Yeah.
I mean, some of some of this stuff we've been talking about, you can get some information from it, but you can get that information from other places without Or if you get the information but just kind of know what you're walking into.
Just know what the limitations are, that's all.
It's like if you're reading a Quillette article and they have some good criticisms of Dave Rubin, then fine.
But just know that it's a Quillette article, you know?
Yeah.
Hey, I've even enjoyed the odd episode of Chapo.
That doesn't mean, you know.
Oh, God, don't even don't even get us in that discourse.
No, no.
No, you don't want to talk about that at all.
Cut, cut, cut.
No, really.
Ina, where can we find you on the Internet?
So I'm on Twitter at NiceMangoes.
No E in mangoes.
And my podcast is on all the places you get your podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, and whatever other app you use.
And I'm on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash NiceMangoes.
And that's it.
Awesome.
Links to all that will be in the show notes, obviously.
Yeah.
So check out Aina.
Yeah.
Thanks guys!
Okay that was episode 88.
Thank you ever so much Ina and thank you Daniel and thank you everybody for listening.
Daniel do we have any announcements about the next episode or are we just winging it?
Well next episode has already been recorded actually.
I did a very nice interview with the two producers and co-hosts of the Sounds like hate podcast about some of their reporting around the base and in particular around the people who at one point threatened my life.
So that was that was an interesting chat.
And we've already we've already recorded that.
And so you will get to see that probably just a few days.
We'll just go ahead and put it up.
So yeah.
So coming soon.
Yeah.
Okay.
bye bye bye you know i've thought about like when i hit like a certain number of patrons of making like a silly kind of reward where i can do like um i don't know like some idw porn script or something Just, like, with really silly, like, oh, Steel Manning all night long or something.
I don't know.
I haven't thought about it fully yet.
That would be amazing.
Yeah, I've thought about putting that out there and maybe we can have, like, I don't know, guest voice actors, and it'll just be really funny to do.
Oh, I'm volunteering.
Yeah, I know.
Jack gets to play Douglas Murray.
Oh, God.
Douglas Murray.
Poor Noah.
I was just thinking...
I was just thinking so hard about these migrants and their Sharia law and I just started to get a little hot under the collar, if you know what I mean.
I was at a dinner party and I just started talking and then suddenly my temperature was rising and I just, well, the mousse just came out of the souffle.
Andy Neo turns up.
I'm here to fix your cable.
No, I was contemplating a sort of Marvel movie parody, Steel Man.
That's much sweeter than my idea.
Oh, no, the porn script would be great.
I don't know.
I think we're going to get a lot of responses to this one.
It's going to be great.
Yeah.
If anyone wants to suggest lines for the intellectual dark porn.
Go for it.
Let me measure your brain.
Let me pull out my calipers, if you know what I mean.
Oh baby, your forehead slant is just ideal.
This bump on your cranium means horny.
Don't worry, I can measure both heads.
I don't know when that one happened.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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