BONUS: Hanging Out with Eiynah 2 - Monarchy, Misogyny, and Mixed-Race Nazis
By way of a little compensation for you while you wait (patiently, bless you) for us to get our shit back together (which we are in the process of doing) here is a little bonus, a slightly edited recording of a Twitter space that we did with our friend Eiynah Mohammed-Smith (@NiceMangos) on 12th May last. We chat about the coronation of Prince Charles (that's his name goddammit!), the revolting sexist discourse around E. Jean Carroll's suit against Trump, and the equally revolting discourse from deniers and obfuscators around the deadly shooting in Allen, Texas, with special reference to the bullshit about his ethnicity. Other subjects come up, naturally. Some interesting people took part and made great contributions. Hope you enjoy it. See you soon.
Jack, you can also just request a invite to use your microphone and she can turn you on that way.
That's what she did for me.
Sorry, I should have said turn you on that way.
I mean, although, you know, also that, but this has turned out great.
Yeah, I've already embarrassed myself.
Very rational discussion.
Maybe I just don't do it for Jack.
After that episode of the Weirdos, you know, the Sykes and the Parr right there, definitely turned everybody off, I think.
Are you talking about the Evo Syke episode that I did?
Yeah, that one.
All the very, very sexy talk from the likes of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and all the rest of them.
Look, who doesn't want to hear about Ben Shapiro talking about moist vaginas?
Isn't that what everyone wants?
No, no, no.
I know, and I'm sorry.
I did warn you all.
Hello, can you hear me now?
Hello, Jack!
Hello!
We can hear you.
Hello.
Good.
Hello.
Somebody turned you on.
Well, yes.
Yes.
I won't say who, because I wouldn't want to embarrass them, but it's Daniel, of course.
I knew it!
All right, now that everyone's turned on, we can begin.
All right.
Hello, hello, everyone.
We are here with Jack and Daniel of the wonderful I Don't Speak German podcast and You've got me too, Ina, of the Polite Conversations podcast.
And, you know, I'm expecting this to be extremely polite discussion where nobody will be rude.
And we'll talk about civility the whole time.
Imagine a more chill, lo-fi, beat-to-study-to version of the Lux Freedman podcast.
That's basically what I expect this to be.
The volume never goes up or down by more than three decibels at a time.
That's clearly how we roll here.
That's definitely how we roll, yep.
I don't speak... I don't change my tone very much, and I'm very, very radical.
And, uh, you know, got a good skull shape, I just checked.
Yes, you've got that particular bump on your skull that stands for politeness.
That's right, that's right.
That's why I do what I do.
And we are here to talk about the very polite conversation, the very polite topics of monarchy, misogyny, and multiracial Nazis, which people have a hard time getting their heads around.
So yeah, what do we want to talk about first?
Jack, since your country went through this, um, this strange thing, like where people were dressed all funny and What the hell is happening over there?
There's a Grim Reaper somewhere?
Oh yeah.
Now they're fucking changing... They're changing our money because of that?
Yep, yep.
You'll be all across the world.
People will have a different odd face on their money from now on.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, you're welcome.
Yeah, the Grim Reaper turned up to the coronation apparently.
I've seen the footage and it's deeply, deeply eerie.
A robed figure just Well, he sort of runs, actually.
He sort of runs across, I don't know, the... Oh God, it's been a long time since I knew the names for bits of cathedrals and churches.
The transept, or the nave, or some such thing.
Anyway.
And yeah, of course, they're, they're, they, you know, capital T, they, are telling us it was just a verger.
But yeah, yeah, right.
We all know... A what?
A what, sorry?
A verger.
It's a...
Again, it's a sort of church functionary.
I think in little churches he just does the gardening or something like that.
So what was he supposed to be doing in this black robe carrying this scythe-like thing?
Well, there's so many people around in silly clothes that it's hard to know.
You're not kidding.
I started off on the Internet talking about Doctor Who, you know, and people people who know Doctor Who back, you know, proper old fashioned Doctor Who will know that it's just a smorgasbord of people in silly clothes and silly hats.
And what you don't realise is as such, it's a very, very accurate representation of Britain, because that that really is just Britain for you, especially, you know, official high status Britain.
It's people in very silly robes and very silly hats.
Walking and talking in very unnatural ways and that's really That's what the coronation looked like to me.
It looked like an old episode of Doctor Who, you know with everybody in their strange clothes and Yeah, why not?
Why not have a strange mysterious cloaked figure in the background?
Yeah, that was probably the best part about it I think I saw these like official official portraits that they released and I had to check and Check and double check.
Like how can that be real?
Why are they so bad?
Like I've seen photographers like on Instagram do much better portraits.
These just look like cheap and like satire.
Like the shade of purple is so terrible and I love purple.
It's just like a gross purple.
Like a dollar store purple.
It really is weird, isn't it?
They look incredibly cheap and silly and I don't know, maybe it's just because it's happening in 2023.
You know, the last time we did this was 1952, 1953, something like that.
And maybe the film stock was different and maybe the Queen as a young woman just had more panache than old Charles.
But I think it's just that that was 1950, whatever it was, and this is 2023, and the whole thing just looks different now.
We can see how tatty and silly the whole thing is.
And they do look ridiculous, as I said on Twitter.
I challenge anybody without the filters of ideology to look at those photographs without Just laughing, because they look ridiculous.
And there's a teddy bear that they're selling?
A coronation bear that's like, what, fucking £400 or something?
Oh yeah.
Who?
Who buys this?
Who buys this stuff?
British people.
British people buy this stuff, that's who.
I can think of so many better ways to spend that much money.
Just take it out to the garden and set it on fire, really.
Yeah, probably a better way to use it, honestly.
Like, fuck, $400 for a teddy bear.
It's crazy, isn't it?
It seemed very, very odd in 2023.
It seemed very, very odd in 2023.
Yes.
And yes.
Yeah.
Good job.
I don't think anybody has any, there's not much real respect for the institution going around.
There's a lot of enthusiasm, although there's much less than there was back in the day.
Like even in the 70s when you had the Queen's Golden Jubilee or Silver Jubilee or whatever it was, you know, it was a big thing.
And even when I was a kid I was dragged out of school to watch the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana, you know, and there was a great big party and we all had cakes and stuff like that.
And it's not like that anymore.
People, there's no, I mean, you know, there's plenty of crowds on the coronation day, but they're pretty thin compared to even like 20, 30 years ago.
The public are more and more, still a depressing number of people impressed by it, but fewer and fewer all the time.
And I think part of the problem is that people just don't respect this current lot.
I don't think they ever really had much grounds to respect them, even way back when.
We just know too much about them.
We just know too much about who these people really are now.
And especially in conjunction with what's happening around, everyone is going through tough times financially, and there's this huge flamboyant display of just throwing money at really ridiculous things, and it just seems in such bad taste.
We've got more people eating out of food banks than ever before.
Food banks are being closed down for the coronation weekend or whatever.
Homeless people are being cleansed off the streets to make room so that everything looks nice for the cameras.
I laugh about it, but really it is obscene.
The whole thing is an obscene display.
Absolutely.
And I believe I saw a Dave Rubin type coronation grifter as well.
Even though I'm on the left, this is why I really like the monarchy.
Oh yeah, there's never any shortage of that sort of thing, particularly not among the British punditocracy.
That grift can be transplanted so beautifully and seamlessly onto anything, almost.
Like, I'm on the left, I promise.
And this is why this thing that doesn't seem like it's from the left, or relates to the left, is very good.
Trust me, I'm on the left, I promise, I promise.
And everyone, people just continue to buy it.
Yeah, and it's such a weird formulation if you think about it, isn't it?
I'm on the left, that's why you can believe me when I say that this opinion I have that's very much not on the left is actually right.
Well, that doesn't stand.
We're supposed to have this, we're supposed to all believe in this fiction of national unity on some level, you know, and it's just not a, it's just not a real thing.
And I think, I think part of the role that the monarchy or the royal family, whatever you want to call them, has played in this country for so long has been to kind of prop up this tottering, limping idea of a common national identity.
I just, you know, it's just, it's no surprise to anybody that knows my politics, but I just don't see any intelligible way in which you can talk about an us that includes me and Prince Charles, as I insist upon calling him, because as far as I'm concerned, that's just his name.
Right, right.
I'm sure there's a lot of people who feel like that, right?
It's from a different planet.
Yeah.
Well, they are.
They live in a different world.
Yeah and I think this what this is inadvertently done is it's really showcased that to lots of people I think an awful lot of people watching have really had that brought home to them in common as I say with learning an awful lot about them some of their dark you know darker and nastier secrets being becoming common currency particularly with the whole Prince Andrew thing you know see it's not just that Prince Andrew was doing what he was doing it's that it's to see him and the rest of them
Deeply involved in this international group of people that are all going back and forth on each other's private jets and doing business deals with each other.
You know, Prince Andrew hobnobbing around with American billionaires before you even get to the disgusting things that they're doing.
It just makes them look like what they are.
They're increasingly visible for what they are, which is basically a kind of international firm that has a particular client relationship with the British state.
That's really all it is.
Right, so they're in the era of social media, I guess.
They've been completely demystified, right?
That mysterious aura of royalty or whatever, that magic, it's just not around them anymore when you heard, like, you know, what Prince Andrew's been doing.
You know, Charles's conversations about wanting to be a tampon.
That was the one thing I knew about the royal family growing up as a child.
The one thing that I gathered throughout the entire 80s about the royal family was the tampon bit.
And I think that's only because Saturday Night Live did it, so you know.
Yeah, so it's just not got that same Uh, I guess appeal anymore.
And, you know, when I was a kid in Saudi, uh, they actually came, they came to my school and they told us that the prince is here.
And as a little kid, like, right, obviously all the kids are very excited.
The prince, there's a prince at our school.
That's amazing.
Oh, sorry, kid.
Only British children can go and see the prince.
So they pulled out the British kids.
And they left the rest of us there.
Oh no, that's terrible.
That's terrible.
So you were cheated of the opportunity to stand in the presence of Prince Charles.
That's a real shame.
Looking back on it, it's not such a great loss, but at the time, I don't know, when you're six or something, it feels kind of sucky to be excluded.
Yeah, absolutely, but that's what the whole thing depends on.
It kind of depends upon us all getting our development arrested round about that age when we're still old enough to think, oh wow, a prince!
Don't grow up any further than that.
It's kind of like religion, right?
I hate to say it, and I hate to be the always picking on religion person, but like, That's kind of what happens when you're a kid, it's all magical and amazing, but then when you grow up and you look at scripture, you demystify the text, and it kind of loses that magic.
And you're like, wait a minute, what does this verse say again?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's always the thing, isn't it?
The more you learn, the more it takes The more it takes the shine off the things that you're supposed to be impressed by.
That's really it.
Learning too much is a terrible curse for these things.
Careful, we don't want to sound like, you know, the IDW.
Look, when our brains get too big and we just know too much, then nothing satisfies us anymore.
That bunch should be more, you know, I don't know, intuitively I feel like that bunch should be more likely to be... Well, you see, in evolutionary psychology we know that humans are, you know, hardwired through their genetic development to have this instinct to worship magical figures above them, and that's why we have...
Hereditary monarchies and you can't get rid of it and and it's just natural for us and you shouldn't try you shouldn't try to get rid of it because that's just you being a fanatical leftist who's trying to socially engineer human nature and Right you missed the lobsters you got to put lobsters in there we got to have the hierarchies because lobsters yeah well as we know lobsters have royal families and kings and queens and so
We have to have them too.
Yes, exactly.
Absolutely.
All right, so now that we've talked about silly clothes and silly hats and kings and things.
That's monarchy thoroughly disposed of.
What shall we talk about next?
There's some less I guess we can't laugh as much.
No, that's the comparatively harmless bit, isn't it, that we've just done.
Which is not harmless at all, but still, yeah.
So what was the next bit?
The next word was misogyny, wasn't it, which I think that was on the list because of the E. Jean Carroll case and the reaction to the verdict.
Yeah, so much more.
But go on, you've you've got more, like, you're more up to date on that and been reading about it.
So.
Well, not not really, to be honest, but I mean, yes, Eugene Carroll.
I think most people probably know the background.
It was about it was in the 80s.
I think the event happened and she she came out about it publicly a few a couple of years back when she published a book in which the accusation was made that Trump Not spoilers, I beg your pardon.
Trigger warnings, everybody, because I'm going to talk about sexual assault and stuff like that.
But she made the accusation in the book that Trump raped her in, I think it was a changing room in Bergdorf in New York City.
And Trump, of course, immediately said, she's lying.
Don't know this woman.
Never heard of her.
She's just lying.
And she sued him for defamation, because that's defamation of her character.
And she's just won the case, although I think one of the many disgusting things that happened in the immediate aftermath was that the jury didn't find there was enough evidence to say that Trump actually raped her.
They found that he sexually assaulted her, and they found in favour of her pretty much in every respect, except that they said, you know, we can't be 100% certain that he raped her.
I mean, I don't know.
Personally, I don't know how you doubt it for a second, but there you go.
Yeah, and Trump, of course, just immediately did exactly the same thing again.
He just said, as he's been saying all the way through the trial, I don't know her, it's a put-up job, it's the witch-hunt, it's the greatest witch-hunt in American history, implying that she's being funded by high-ranking Democrats and George Soros and, you know, all the usual bullshit.
And of course, CNN invited him on.
CNN invited Mon to steal that again and again and mock her and just, I hope she sues him again and wins again.
But that was really disgusting.
Well, yeah, I mean, you know, the GOP's reaction to the verdict was as revolting as you can imagine it was.
And then the thing that just happened, you know, between now and us deciding to talk about this, was that he went on his so-called town hall on CNN and that is just outrageous and shameful on so many levels, that event.
But one of the most particularly disgusting things about it was that he repeated the defamation.
He just lied about her again again I said I don't know you know and he mocked her he called her a wacko and all this sort of thing and just with every with every utterance about the case just downplayed it and laughed about it and made it into and you know he had an audience in there who were just laughing laughing their heads off so I don't think he made a single factual statement it's factual claim in the entire show that wasn't false and he spent pretty much the entire show mocking and belittling and insulting
Um, this woman who's the victim, at the very least, the victim of his sexual assault.
Uh, and, uh, yeah, it was, it was on, uh, CNN to, you know, who's doing that, to gales of laughter.
And it just goes to show we're still, we're still doing this in 2023, you know?
And in the, in the, in the trial itself, she's being cross-examined by Trump's disgusting lawyer, Takapina, and he's, um, You know, were you flirting with him?
Why didn't you scream?
Why didn't you say no?
All this same shit that the rape victims get.
And it's just it's so dispiriting and so depressing because you hear that and you think, really, we're still doing this now?
In 2023, we're still putting victims and survivors through.
Why didn't you fight harder?
Why didn't you scream louder, implying that you're kind of to blame?
It makes you absolutely despair.
Yep, it's really depressing.
And just to see that even the media just doesn't learn anything.
And they just walked right into that.
And I don't know what they were trying to do with that half-assed pushback.
If you look a little bit into the person that they had at the town hall, pushing back at him.
That person has written all these like articles that kind of portray Trump in a positive light.
Maybe that's the only way he agreed to it.
And I believe she also worked for the Daily Wire.
I think I saw something like that as well.
I think it was, I think it was the Daily Caller.
I think it was Tucker.
I think she worked for Tucker Carlson.
Yeah.
And she's promoted, essentially, she's promoted all the Alex Jones, you know, George Soros conspiracy theories on the TV.
Yeah, and I think you're right.
I think you probably agreed.
I think she was probably his choice, you know, from a list of possibles.
And from some things I've seen, she's also dabbled in a little bit of anti-Arab racism.
Oh, yeah.
Well, who hasn't?
Come on.
I kid.
I kid.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
I'm afraid.
He did some articles about like, these Syrian refugees, are they hot or not?
Something like that.
Really, really gross, I think.
And it's just like, really?
This is the person that you chose to push back at Trump on this like, really important town hall and It didn't save her from being humiliated by Trump at all, being such a kiss-ass, right?
Like he called her a nasty person and the audience laughed and it's just gross, just gross.
One of the ironies here, and I want to be clear about what I'm saying and what I'm not saying, I mean I think the whole thing was I think it was outrageous.
I think it was reckless.
I think it was damaging.
I think it was, you know, totally ill-advised on every level.
And I think she's wrong to have agreed to do it.
I think, you know, she's obviously ideologically pretty disgusting herself, etc.
You know, all that I stipulate to.
Even so, one of the ironies here is That's probably the most hostile treatment I've ever seen Trump receive from a member of the American press, so to speak, the American media.
That's probably the most pushback he's ever had face-to-face from an American journalist.
It's incredibly depressing.
It is, it's incredibly depressing, but she did, you know, she did at least sort of, she pushed back a little bit, which is more than I've ever seen.
A little bit, but like half-assed, really.
Not too strong.
Yeah, again, let me be clear.
It was useless.
It was completely useless.
She completely soft-pedaled it.
And just the whole project of having him there at all was completely wrong and ill-considered from the start.
They shouldn't have had him on.
She shouldn't have done it.
The whole thing.
But within the confines of that, he probably got a tougher time from her than I've ever seen any other journalist give him face-to-face.
Which is really saying something.
You know, Jack, it reminded me a little bit of how, you know, on a much smaller scale, we get frustrated at like, say, certain types of IDW critics that are like soft and gentle, but like are definitely, you know, critical and pushing back, so to say.
But like, All the criticism is like mostly toothless and it just kind of provides a A reason for the IDW types to say, Hey, look, we engage with people that disagree with us.
That's the function that it serves in my view.
And, uh, that's the function that that serves.
It's like, look, Trump went on the opposite side there and, you know, he gave him such a hard time, even though, you know, he wasn't on his own, uh, territory and they, they tried to push back at him, but they couldn't.
Yeah.
It's exactly the same, I think, and we saw that from Anderson Cooper.
The day after, he was saying, well, yeah, I mean, he sounded to me like quite critical of his own network, of his own bosses.
But at the same time, he's saying, you shouldn't shut yourself off in an ideological silo and not listen to people that you disagree with.
And like, fuck you, Vanderbilt.
The problem here is not that we're unfamiliar with these people's arguments, OK?
That's not the problem.
In fact, as somebody said to me on Twitter, you ask your average leftist to describe the quote-unquote arguments of Trumpism, you're going to get more understanding and familiarity from them than you're going to get probably from most sort of, you know, of Trump's audience.
Because they've just got buzzwords and aesthetics and feelings, whereas we are the ones who actually know what these people say and what they think and what they do.
It's not as if he said anything that was particularly new or novel or a revelation.
The election was rigged.
You're a nasty woman.
He said these things over and over again, like, what new philosophical or political ground is being broken here such that I must listen to this?
Man, it's ridiculous.
There's no discussion or discourse happening.
He's just spewing bullshit.
Yeah, it achieved nothing of any value at all, nothing informative about it.
The only thing it achieved was to have this guy say on television, well actually I was right to, effectively say on television, yeah I was right to overthrow American democracy and I'm going to pardon the people that helped me do it and I'm going to have another go at it.
He said that on a mainstream American cable news network to wild applause.
All that achieves is it further normalizes it and further mainstreams it.
It makes it look more like a respectable position.
Yep, yep.
And I mean, he said unhinged, completely ridiculous things like Democrats are murdering babies after they're born.
Yeah.
What the fuck is that?
And there's nothing you can say even to someone who's talking like that.
It's like trying to bang your head against a brick wall.
There's no point in even attempting to debunk something so crazy and out there.
Well, one of the things that I think, in my opinion, one of the things that people don't get about this, because they I mean, it's quite natural to respond this way, with outrage and amazement, to such staggering statements.
And the instinct to point out inaccuracy and hypocrisy and lies is incredibly strong and it's incredibly understandable and we should do it and we need to do it, etc.
But on a fundamental level, whether these things are true or not is just not the point to these people.
When they say things like that, when they say, You know, Democrats, Hillary Clinton or whatever, they support Roe v. Wade, and Roe v. Wade used to mean that doctors could murder nine-month-old babies after they were born.
When they say things like that, they're not actually, you know, in real terms, they're not actually making that factual claim, because they know it's not true, their audience knows it's not true, none of them care.
They don't care if it's true or not.
The point of the statement is The people that we're talking about, the people we all hate, Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, whoever we're talking about, trans people, the left, any given moment, those people are evil and we should be able to kill them.
That's what it actually means.
Uh, a bit of a, you know, killing babies after they're born sort of thing.
Also has a long, uh, history in terms of being used as a, uh, anti-abortion talking point.
So that is a, uh, you know, he's, he's dog whistling to his people.
They're not even dog whistling.
That's just an outright blaring horn to, to the people who are, uh, anti-abortion that he's like on their side.
That's something that's like, it's very, very common among even like mildly right to center, um, uh, people, uh, using, uh, using that kind of language.
Yeah, and I think it's that common because the discourse is fundamentally about saying over and over again, you know, we all hate X group, Democrats, whoever, and they should die, they're the worst people imaginable, they're evil, they're satanic, they're demons, they're pedophiles, whatever.
Whatever way we phrase it, what we're saying is they are the worst people, they're evil, and we should be able to kill them.
And who knows, maybe one day we will.
I think that's all they're saying, over and over and over again, in just different ways.
And that kind of position is impervious to any sort of factual debating, any sort of fact-based discourse, because you could, for instance, say, well, late-term abortions are incredibly rare, they're only done in very dire, very tragic
with circumstances, but that the time and energy it would take to engage in that kind of explanation, you've already lost because those evil people over there are killing babies after they're born.
And so it's self-defeating, I think, to approach that kind of politics in this sort of, you know, IDW, let's debate controversial ideas, bullshit.
The people who are saying that their opponents are killing babies after they're born are not interested in Logic, reasoned debates and, you know, factual disagreements and that kind of thing.
They are committed to a political project and that political project is to defeat, to totally defeat their political opponents.
And I think so long as we, the targets are distracted by this ridiculous idea that, you know, we should all be engaged in never-ending debates, then yeah, we're not doing what we need to do in order to win the battle against the right.
Yeah, I don't think that we should be engaging in those kinds of debates either and, you know, I used to be someone that didn't fully believe that a few years ago.
I was always like, well no, you can always try to reason with someone and If you're like good at knocking down their points, then that can only be good.
Cause people will see you like debunking their points in real time.
And, but the thing is that when people start like spouting off absolute nonsense, there's nothing to effectively debunk there, right?
If they start saying like, you know, uh there's like um the left is doing this like satanic thing and turning all the babies I don't know gay or trans or whatever there's just no real response that that that can be effective in that case because the person is so far gone already like and and then you just
Providing them a platform to say that kind of stuff, and then that's bad.
I feel like you absolutely should engage with those points, but I feel like you should not give those people a chance to just spout their nonsense without pushback.
In a more controlled environment, you can take their ridiculous points and debunk them and But I also think that there are some points that it is grossly unfair to expect at least some people to engage with, and I'll give an example.
I agree, I agree.
In England, as a black Jamaican, somebody born and raised in Jamaica, there were some people who really wanted to discuss the proposition that, you know,
People of African descent are somehow intellectually inferior genetically, and my response to that is, hell no, I'm not having a debate with you about my humanity.
Absolutely.
And I was very careful telling them to fuck off, and also some choice words that they didn't understand.
Yeah, no, I agree with you.
There are some things that just, you know, do not warrant a debate or a debunking.
And we shouldn't have to keep going around in circles just because these people want to keep rehashing the same ideas.
Should women have these rights?
Should people of color have these rights?
Are white people superior?
These are things that are just, you know, no, we we've got to move past these types of things.
I wouldn't engage in Endless debate about these topics.
But what I'm saying is that there are some people on the left that will say, scold people like me, or even maybe Jack and Daniel for covering the topics that we do.
And I don't think that it's a good idea to just completely disengage with these kinds of views when they are out there, when they're everywhere.
It's at least important to Show people what, what some of these people are saying to cover it without giving these people a platform, without debating it, but just presenting it, um, and saying, well, this is pretty fucked up.
Not trying to do a fair and balanced, both sides kind of thing, but just showcasing the absolute horror of some of what they say.
Well, and to go back to your example earlier, Ina, where you were like, you know, oh, the kids, you know, they're making the kids gay, they're making the kids trans, and then, like, your immediate response, I think, is to say, well, no, that's not happening, et cetera, et cetera, which just, you know, it encourages the frame that being gay and trans is kind of a bad thing, that shouldn't be, you know, that trans should be exposed to, right, you know?
And so, like, it's very tricky sometimes to not find yourself in that, And that kind of rhetorical space, even if you chose to kind of be in this conversation, you know?
And that's why these guys love the debate format, why they love this sort of, like, this pseudo-intellectual, this faux-academic kind of pose, in which, like, we're just trying to discuss these ideas about, like, what's happening, because they can always twist it in a way that serves their own ends.
Yeah, it's just kind of pointless.
Like, anytime I try to I start to, like, debunk something, like, in a Twitter thread, or whenever I'm, you know, prepping an episode or starting to talk about, like, an idea, it's always like a... I have the impulse of, like, and let me explain why this is wrong, and then, like, increasingly, I'm like, no!
I don't have to explain why this is wrong!
It's fine!
I can just let it pass that this is wrong, and I can... I can move on to more interesting material, so, you know.
Right, right.
The amount of times that I, uh, you know, get, like, what, Sam Harris fans in my mentions trying to debate with me about how he's not a right winger.
And have you even seen his anti-Trump stuff?
And it's like, dude, I think I've covered this 49 and a half times just today.
Please, please.
I can't.
It's the stuff where he says, he says very seriously, he says, you know, I know that Trump is, I have no idea that Trump is racist, but every single example of Trump's racism pointed out by people on the left, Sam goes, but that's not racism.
Like, yeah, dude, what the hell are you on about?
It's gaslighting, it's wasting.
It's wasting your time.
So here in Jamaica, we are now having the trans panic.
Everywhere.
The gender critical panic has now reached Our tiny island.
And so we know how fundamentalist Christians who are a daily hazard in a place like Jamaica.
So we know how fundamentalist Christians who are seizing on a few lines in agenda policy at the University of the West Indies that's been in place since 2017.
And these lines talk about respecting people's pronouns.
and using them.
And so now we have fundamentalist Christians saying this is the trans-agenda being imposed on Christian lecturers at the university.
Remember, this has been in place since 2017 without a problem.
I had a comment about it, and I said, basically, we should be organizing to defeat these Christian bigots.
And so one of them showed up to say, to ask me, how many genders are there?
And I just said, yeah, I'm not playing this game with you, sorry.
And he kept asking, but I just want to know how many genders are there?
I'm like, no, not answering your question, not playing this game.
It's a trap.
Yeah, it's a trap.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm not wasting my time.
I'm really not wasting my time.
I am concerned about how much time we can waste and how much energy we waste sometimes trying to Engaging these debates, trying not to look like, I don't know, like we're snowflakes and, you know, we can't handle challenges to our positions and our philosophy and that kind of thing.
I think even that framing is itself a trap.
And I've reached a point where, I don't know, maybe I'm becoming less tolerant in my old age, but I've reached a point where I'm just like, yeah, I'm not having these conversations with you at all.
Yeah, no, that's fair.
That's fair.
I've reached that point to a great degree as well, though I still feel like An obligation to have some content that I put out that's on record, uh, just going through with a fine tooth comb.
Some of these guys that people, uh, don't necessarily see as obviously as say, I don't know, like Tucker Carlson, but they're saying the same things as Tucker Carlson.
That's the, that's the space that really interests me, which is why, you know, Sam Harris is a guy that really interests me.
Um, but he is exhausting to cover.
I feel emotionally drained after just all that gaslighting, dishonest, speaking out of both sides of his mouth kind of content.
So yeah, I have taken a bit of a break from that, but, um, Yeah, so let's move on and talk about this thing about multiracial Nazis and people not really understanding that.
And the recent shooting in Allen, Texas.
Sorry, just got distracted.
Yeah, that shooting was just a horrific, horrific, horrific tragedy.
Just mute your mic until you're speaking.
Yeah, and you know, we've seen the rights reactions to it and how they're trying to paint it as like some kind of psyop and fake and they tried to say that the guy was a member of
Some cartel because he's Latino and then even when it came out that he had these like massive Nazi tattoos on him there was like all this like just trying to downplay that like okay he might have the Nazi tattoos but what was his real motivation and even in the headlines you see they're like you know we're still looking for a motive and
He, he, he did have like Nazi ideation though.
Though I imagine that they're looking for a more specific motive, like why there, why then, why that?
And just the fact that people have people like Tim Pool and I think Andy Ngo and all those people that just like trying to so hard deny that someone non-white Could be steeped in white supremacist ideology.
And really, we've seen it so often, right?
There's the Proud Boys guy.
There's Nick Fuentes.
There was a piece a few years ago about this neo-Nazi couple who had this Nazi-themed wedding in Mexico.
Like, it's there.
It's there.
And you see it, like, you see this kind of, like, tokenization on the right on different levels, right?
You see that in, like, mainstream right-wingery.
You see that, you know, with, like, transphobic trans people.
You see that with homophobic Gay people, they're doing the rights work for them, but their status as a minority gives them credibility.
You see that even in, like, UK government, like, the people that are saying the worst things on the right seem to be, like, people of color nowadays, and they appoint those people for a reason.
Suella Braverman.
Yeah!
And Preeti Patel before her.
Also, Sonak has also engaged in some fairly suspect language around a month or so ago.
He was going on about Pakistani grooming gangs.
Who's this?
The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunia.
Oh, okay, I didn't hear what he said.
I thought you were talking about Maajid Nawaz.
But yeah, him too.
I try never ever to talk about Maajid Nawaz.
Sorry, I don't know why this is escaping me.
The Home Department.
Some of the worst treatment meted out to West Indians in the Windrush scandal came when the Home Department was under the stewardship of Priti Patel.
And now that it's under the stewardship of Serena Breverman, I mean, there is just no justice in sight.
For those of Black Britons of Caribbean descent who were unjustly deported to islands that a lot of them just didn't know about, had no real connection.
A lot of them ended up living on the streets when they were deported to places like Jamaica and Trinidad.
It was horrific.
But you have these, you know, Black and Brown You're cutting off.
Yeah, I can't hear anything you're saying.
Jack, do you want to say anything about all the stuff that I just said?
Jack, Daniel?
Yeah, sure.
I don't want to talk over the gentleman.
If he comes back, I'd like to hear what he has to say.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
It's one of the things that bothers me no end about my own country, really, is that we... This is frustrating.
I'd like to... We can't hear you.
Am I the only one?
No, I'm not hearing you.
You're breaking up.
Yeah, I was just going to say that the whole Windrush scandal, the way we just sort of moved past it in this country, the outrageous, disgusting thing that happened in the midst of, in the course of trying to create what was, you know, actually publicly called the, create the hostile environment for immigrants.
Like that's, like that's a good thing.
That's something to boast about.
Yes, we're going to create a hostile environment for immigrants.
Great!
Yeah, well done.
Applause, everybody.
Like, that was the respectable part of the policy, you know?
And in the course of that, we end up deporting people that have lived in this country that have been British for decades and their children.
And, you know, because of the complexities of history around the Windrush, just outright racial.
I mean, that's what it was.
But, you know, people can argue about the levels of deliberateness.
You can't argue that the whole policy in what was intended was racist to the core right from the start.
It was basically a little mini outbreak of racial ethnic cleansing.
and deportation.
Absolutely shameful!
I mean, but nobody suffered any consequences, nobody got fired, nobody suffered public opprobrium.
We've all just kind of gone, oh yeah, that happened, didn't it?
Oh well, never mind.
And it's absolutely shameful.
It's, you know, I don't have any national feeling, but it is shameful.
And they do, like, kind of Have people of colour saying the things that maybe they feel that not people of colour can't say?
It seems like it's easier to have them say it when it's about the awful... I don't know how deliberate that is.
I think there's probably a level of cynicism sometimes, but I think really just that's the way the system works now.
The system has managed to expand to encompass people, you know, the system particularly in the personage of the Tory party itself has managed to expand to encompass people of non-white heritage, as long as they're of the right ideology and the right class background, you know.
And this is what people always constantly, persistently misunderstand about how white supremacy works.
White supremacy is a system.
Capitalism is a system.
They are interrelated systems.
They're different versions of the same system, I would say.
They work systemically.
It doesn't work on this one-to-one literal There's a connection where, you know, if you're a white supremacist, that means in order to be a white supremacist you have to subscribe to this position and that position and that position in order to be fully signed up to the 10-point program of white supremacy.
If you don't do that, you're not a white supremacist.
And in order to do that logically, in order to be logically a white supremacist, obviously you have to be white.
As if there's anything logical about any of this nonsense, you know?
No, it works systemically.
It doesn't work in this literal, logical, one-to-one manner.
So of course, if you're going to have an organisation like the Tory party that expands its worldview to be able to accept people who are black and brown, and some of them are willing to subscribe to its policies and they're from the right social group, of course you're going to have people of colour doing stuff like this.
Why wouldn't you?
Why wouldn't you?
And this is precisely the misunderstanding And I think to all intents and purposes and a lot of the time very obviously the willful misunderstanding, the deliberate misunderstanding that is behind people doing this nonsense where they say, well, you say it was white supremacy, but he had a Mexican name.
You know, one of the things I've noticed is that Because Twitter has been turned into a Nazi-Chan board, basically, by Elon Musk.
And it's determined to funnel right-wing ideologues at me, regardless of the fact that I don't follow them.
It's constantly making me read tweets, well, it doesn't make me, but it's constantly providing me with tweets from Ian Miles Chong.
And him and Michael Tracy are basically saying exactly the same shit about this.
They're both doing this whole sort of faux-skeptical, let's stroke our chins and think very deeply about what this all means sort of thing.
And it all amounts to denialism.
It all just amounts to white supremacy denialism.
Yep.
And you have people like, what's his name, Enrico Terrio of the Proud Boys?
And you have him on record saying things like, um, I'm pretty Brown.
I'm Cuban.
There's nothing white supremacist about me.
And that's really what they hide behind.
Like when there are people of color that are, you know, pushing this or subscribing to this.
Yeah, and it's so historically illiterate as well.
Why is Latin America called Latin America?
Because of the entire history of Western imperialism.
The entire continent is the way it is because of the history of European imperialism.
Right the way through South and Central America you have such societies that are riven by the class and race, the interconnected class and race conflict between the Whites, which, you know, the paler people, who are generally, of course, because white supremacy is continent-wide, generally have a higher economic status, generally more politically powerful, generally have more property and more land, etc.
And the native people, the people of more native extraction, who tend to be darker-skinned and tend to be poorer, etc., etc.
In so many of these South and Central American countries, you have exactly this, and that's why they have Such deeply entrenched far-right fascist movements in those countries.
So the idea that you can't have a white supremacist who's got a Latinx name, it's insane!
It's a level of ignorance that is so profound it can only be willful.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Some people are so confident about that just not being possible, right?
And I hate to go back to old It's Harris, but he would say things like, well, how can Milo be right-wing or far-right?
He's flamboyantly gay.
Is he really that ignorant?
He is, though!
I mean, just listen to what he says, Sam!
It's no more complicated than that!
Just listen to what he says!
Yeah, it boggles the mind.
Are they really that silly?
Are they really that ignorant?
Or are they just trying super hard not to see what's in front of them?
Well, it's very convenient for them, right?
Like, it's very convenient if you're, you know, if you're Ian Miles Chong, or, you know, or some of these guys.
If you're Ian Miles Chong, it's very convenient to say, well, I'm not white, and therefore I can't be a white supremacist, right?
If you're Andy Ngo, you could say, well, I'm not white and I'm gay, and therefore I cannot be encouraging white supremacy.
And if you're sort of a white ally to these people, and you agree with these sort of political goals that Andy Ngo and Ian Miles Chong have, then it's very easy to sort of point to those people and go, well, yeah, but these, these are not white people, and therefore they can't be doing so, because I agree with them.
I'm, you know, I'm not, I'm also not enshrining white supremacy.
White supremacy is just the, you know, the actual, you know, sick, high-lying Nazis in the corner there.
Those are the, those are the really bad people, you know.
And, you know, like, I'm reminded of the, uh, when Kelly J. Keane was in Melbourne.
And, uh, held a rally and, like, Nazis showed up and were like, no, we're on your side.
And her response is like, no, those were, those were clearly, they had their own rally.
It was like 20 feet away.
They were far away from our, from our thing that we were doing.
And they were probably just agent provocateurs anyway, et cetera, et cetera.
And, uh, it's like, yeah, just because they believe everything that I believe about this topic, that doesn't make us allies at all.
So yeah, clearly it's a very, very different thing, you know?
And so the, like, the Allen, the Texas shooter was non-white.
It was like a gotcha.
It's just like, you know, well, he couldn't be a Nazi because he was, he wasn't white.
And, you know, like, you know, you need to be judged by the character, by our character and not the color of our skin.
And therefore, you know, suck on it liberals.
That's, that's really what, that's really all that's meant to do.
And.
Because social media just encourages this kind of dunking, you know, process and doesn't respond to any kind of, you know, logic and reason, etc.
It allows, it is allowed to fester and it's allowed to continue and they just get off scot-free with this.
And it's the most infuriating thing because it is so, it's just so stupid as to be, you know, just unimaginable that we keep having to have this conversation in public.
Yes, it is possible to be non-white and to enforce white supremacy, because white supremacy is a stupid ideology, but sometimes brown people can be stupid and bigoted.
It's not any more complicated than that.
Right, no, definitely, definitely.
I mean, all sorts of people can be all sorts of bigoted.
That's what people need to understand.
And as like, society changes that obvious form of like caricature, KKK, white robes kind of racism is going to be harder and harder to like slip in, right?
As it doesn't actually, As it gets recognized for what it is, as it's not accepted, racism too will shift and evolve in order to survive and spread itself in society today.
That looks different.
That looks like, you know, intersectional bigotry, bigots of all colors and orientations and genders.
And it's possible.
Anything is possible.
And to just like be so ignorant as to say, well, someone can't be, um, Someone can't be far right because they're Jewish.
Someone can't be, like, spreading homophobia because they're gay.
Like, man, we live in the world of, you know, Dave Rubin and Blair White.
How are you still saying this?
Jordan Peterson, too, like, he was tweeting things about the shooting, like, haha, you know, I think he quote-tweeted something.
That was like a joke, like, oh, white supremacy is in such short supply that we had to outsource it to Mexico?
And he's like, are Mexicans white nowadays?
It's just so ridiculous.
And actually, there are, as Jack was saying earlier, there are Mexicans that identify as white.
And do you know, Again, the historical ignorance on display.
White is a socially and historically constructed category.
It's a thing that was invented and constructed over a long time.
Who was and wasn't white was a thing that was decided and assembled over a very long time.
Yeah, in some contexts Mexicans can, people of Mexican descent, can be white or they can decide to ally themselves with white supremacy.
Can we just, like, can we just start with acknowledging what's real?
Like, the guy had that name, sure, but he also had swastikas and SS lightning bolts tattooed all over himself and in a hundred other ways we can see that he absolutely was A far-rightist of some kind, a fucking Nazi!
Can we start from the things that are empirically confirmed and then get into the complex metaphysics?
You know?
It's fascinating to watch them switch back and forth between literalism and metaphysics, depending on what they need to argue.
Yeah.
Pie, did you want to say something?
Hi, yeah, yes, I mean, I do want to say a lot of things, but I've joined in pretty late and I don't know the kind of things that you've already discussed, but it's very interesting, everything that you're saying.
And I was wondering, I mean, it's something that I think about quite a bit is like who, because of social media, as you said, that everything is changing now, you know, and everything is, everything evolves and it is evolving.
Racism is evolving.
With social media.
And I was wondering, like, social media has changed so much.
Like, our actor through the world has changed.
How we, you know, sort of see each other has changed.
Who do you think has, you know, has a more advantage?
Is it the racist ideologies or, you know, the more liberal, free-thinking ideologies that have, like, more support on social media and that get more
Yeah, I mean, I know what I hope is true, but it's hard to say, because I feel like right-wing stuff is so much more well-funded, well-organized, because for a long time it seemed like they were
so badly losing the culture war that they've really tried to get their shit together and in an organized well-funded way just do their propaganda hardcore to make their ideology more appealing and kind of repackage it for a younger audience.
And I just, I don't know.
I don't know if it appears that it's getting popular because it's horrifying what I see online.
That could just be because it's so insecure that it has to work that hard, right?
Because they're fighting against time and modernity.
But I don't know.
I used to take these things for granted and be like, well, the rights that we won, Are not going to be like rolled back.
So we're just moving forward.
And that has happened in front of my very eyes these days.
So I'm just, I'm not sure anymore.
Does anyone, anyone else, Daniel, Jack, have anything to say about that?
I think it's, it's pretty clear that, I mean, broadly speaking, we seem to be moving in the right direction.
I don't want to sound like I'm being Whiggish and too optimistic and so on, but fewer and fewer people buy into bigoted ideas about people of other races and so on, at least in their fully formulated ideological at least in their fully formulated ideological form.
Fewer and fewer people will say yes to a proposition like, do you think that white people are biologically superior?
There's still plenty of people like that, but much fewer than there were, let's say, a hundred years ago.
Yeah, but at the same time people still accede to loads of propositions and assumptions that are part of white supremacy as a system, you know?
And like we were talking about before with the E. Jean Carroll case, loads of people that would never think of themselves as being
sexists or rape apologists or anything like that might still ask those sorts of questions of a survivor of sexual assault you know and those sorts of questions like what were you wearing did you struggle hard enough etc they're all part of how that that system of violent patriarchy just continues and reproduces itself and I think I mean it's it's terrifying to think about like The amount of influence that this Andrew Tate character has over young boys.
We've been hearing a lot about this clown recently and I didn't really realise...
Like, you have school teachers talking about this being a real problem that they face every day, facing in class from quite young children, boys of 11 and 12 years old, and they have a problem dealing with them because they're reciting attitudes and ideas and stuff like that that they get directly from Andrew Tate, because he's incredibly popular with that young age group.
And it's not that people are still clinging to, you know, yesterday's racism.
But these forms of organized prejudice, they mutate to try to survive.
You know, like a virus will mutate to survive.
And the thing that the right are really good at is understanding that it's not about winning an argument.
And it seems like a strange thing to say because they spend so much of their time and their money promoting their ideology.
But they're really they're not trying I don't think they're really trying to win the battle of ideas I really don't think they are trying to like recruit people to their ideas or win with their ideas And it's I think they've realized that they're losing on that front What they're trying to do and they seem to get this and this is a really scary thing The aim is to disrupt and to confuse and to create these endless
Debates, these distracting debates, kind of like what we were talking about before, to endlessly defer certainty and endlessly disorientate people with their bullshit arguments and keep people arguing on that level.
And all the time they're doing that, under the level of the debate and the war of ideas, they're chipping away materially at democracy.
That seems to be the formula they've hit upon, and they're, you know, to put it crudely, they're losing the battle of ideas, but they are winning the material battle.
That's the thing that frightens me.
I think we've got, I've got a lot to say to that, but I'll keep it brief.
I think, I broadly agree, I think that one of the things is, you know, they use this sort of war of ideas as this Trojan horse, or as this sort of like stalking horse, as a way of like,
Um, getting this stuff, getting these, getting this propaganda out there in a way that makes it seem, I don't know if you want to say less threatening or sort of like less overtly nasty, but it's like if we're debating a proposition or apparently debating a proposition, I don't have to say the thing that I obviously want to say.
Right.
And so I get to kind of exist in that environment.
I think to the initial kind of ideas, like who's kind of winning the battle here, I think that like, Broadly speaking, everyone who's on this call, whether it's a speaker or it's a listener, is very, very heavily online.
And online is, in general, a space that is just rife with this shit because there was a concerted effort by, like, actors who have names and addresses and email addresses and websites to push this into this kind of space because it was easy to make it spread here in these online spaces.
I don't see as much of it in my day-to-day existence.
I can go about my day-to-day life and never run into these ideas unless it's in this very rarefied, off-the-wall form.
That said, also the way that this manifests itself and the way that Twitter in particular is a mechanism or is a vector for this stuff is that every journalist is on Twitter.
And so it makes the news more because they're being harassed by neo-Nazis or because they're having like this kind of what they just feel like they have to respond.
And of course, the legislatures and, you know, other newsmakers of various kinds are also kind of following that same discourse.
And so we're seeing laws like really draconian anti-trans legislation being passed all over the country right now, but always at like the state and local level.
We're seeing libraries, you know, like ripped apart.
We're seeing all of this kind of stuff.
And that's happening because people in positions of power believe they can use anti-trans hate as a cudgel in order to win elections, in order to consolidate their base of power.
Now, that's having middling effects.
DeSantis is clearly kind of on his... His balloon is deflating, and he's been arguably at the forefront of this stuff, at least in Florida, for the last couple of years.
He was really running on being the more bigoted, effective Trump, effectively.
And I think that, um, realistically, the, you know, kind of the, the Republican voter base, while they may like, like seeing all that trans stuff taken out of, uh, schools, et cetera, they're not going to vote for DeSantis over Trump because ultimately getting rid of trans people is less important to them than, um, Trump, like as a person and as a candidate and other things that they care about, you know, politically, even on the aesthetics of the politics.
So all that to say, Shit is fucked up and bad.
And I don't think it's I don't I think I think we get like a skewed perspective of how bad it is.
If we're just sort of following the news, and we're just sort of like following, you know, your Twitter feed, I think I think like, again, and you know, my experience is not, you know, I have a very privileged existence in a lot of ways, but I'm not seeing the kind of the levels of overt hate in my day to day life that you would expect if it was really getting that bad.
And That does not mean they're not going to do horrible things to trans people.
They haven't already done horrible things to trans people and people of color.
And, you know, name your group here, they will do terrible things to them, and they will use the state apparatus to do so.
People at large are mostly reachable, you know, and I think that's kind of the logic.
And I think that, you know, if we are going to try to reach these people, we need to reach them through, you know, positive messaging through like, have you ever met a trans person?
You know, I know quite a few and they're perfectly fine people.
Mostly some of them are terrible because again, people are sometimes terrible, but like, you know, it's, it's such like responding to Michael Knowles or responding to Dave Rubin, It's pointless for you and I because we don't have the platform to, like, respond to.
But if we really are going to make, like, positive change, it has to be, like, meeting the people and, like, giving them the not bigoted version of this as opposed to just responding to the bigots, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I agree somewhat, but I do want to say that I am seeing it more and more in my real life too.
Like, I mean, I'm not seeing the kinds of Nazis and incels that I see online, of course, but I am starting to see like anti-wokeness come into play.
And just like, you know, one time I went to a Christmas party with a A bunch of my neighbors it was in my neighborhood and I was the only non white person there and I think that was the year where there was like some kind of fear mongering about the gender of gingerbread men in some Some cafe or something.
And so like my neighbors brought this up and they were all like, Oh my God, things are getting so crazy and you can't even say anything anymore.
And I just felt really like, Hmm, I know where this line of thinking leads.
Whereas if I was not an online person, I would just think, okay, yeah, they're talking about cookies, whatever.
But like, you know, there's a whole, there's a whole pipeline here.
You start, With like the milder anti-woke things and it gets worse and worse.
And then later on, it did turn out that one of my neighbors, um, was a Trump supporter in Canada.
She's not American, but like, you know, we had been pretty good friends and one day she just let it out.
She's like, yeah, it's so bad that no one can say anything anymore.
And why do they demonize Trump like that?
And I just was like, Whoa, it was pretty horrifying to watch that in real Life, because you don't come across many Trump supporters in Canada.
And, uh, then the pandemic happened.
And so I never saw her again for like years.
So it was weird, weird, weird.
Yeah.
So it is out there just, uh, slowly making its way out there.
And, uh, I guess when we're online, we kind of learn about these things first.
And then slowly, slowly, like, over the years, you hear, like, people in your real life mentioned, like, oh, Milo Yiannopoulos, or oh, Alex Jones, or, you know, I feel like it gets out, but just later.
Yeah, no, I don't disagree with that.
And again, I was not trying to be Pollyanna-ish about any of that.
It was more just trying to say that, like, you know, it's happening, and it is Continuing to, I mean, it is continuing to get worse.
I keep saying things will get worse before they get better.
Um, I was really suggesting that we do get the skewed perspective of just being like very online.
Um, and that that's having, you know, going outside and touching grass does, does, does help if you get like, If you're like me and you're in this like all day every day and then like going like I'm gonna take my headphones off for 20 minutes and maybe just go on a walk in the park and it's like oh I feel better now.
So it's it's you know again my perspective is obviously skewed and I have my own you know privileges in this of like certain things I don't I'm not forced to look at but you know I see it I do see it and it is.
That's right.
Yeah, we've got a couple of hands up.
I think Brown had your hand up before.
Yes, I did.
Hey, everybody.
I wanted to sort of loop back to the sort of time and sort of like time sort of being like the time and progress or time and, you know, Being something that would improve the situation that like that progressively, the country will become more progressive, America, especially.
And I, I want to the way I want to, I'm not pushing back on it.
But I will say that I will say that I went to a to a talk with that Jonathan Hyde hosted in 2019.
And the idea it was it was I was at the launch for a book.
And he did the introduction, and he talked a lot about about the demographic shift.
And I think that it's one of the biggest.
I kind of feel like it's a it's a bit of a straw man, because, yes, you know, by I don't know, 2040, 2050, whatever the time they they they'll throw out, this America will be a majority minority or whatever.
You know, the majority of people in this country will not will be nonwhite.
But, I mean, this is the United States.
It's not as if this country doesn't have a history of being able to subjugate a population that is actually the, you know, the demographic majority of the country.
You know, and it's not as if we don't have examples of that all over the world.
So, you know, does this sort of make the assumption, like, it's as if they built a future, they built that future out as, like, to sort of pull back on progressive thought or pushing for change. to sort of pull back on progressive thought or pushing Because you just know that in 20 years, you know, things will be different.
But there is not going to be some sort of ceremonial handover.
You know, America is not Hong Kong or, you know, any other, like, protectorate where the people who are the demographic majority will suddenly be ceded all of the institutional power in the country because they are the majority.
So, you know, so I think that the and I think that that thought is very it's very pervasive on both sides.
And it kind of helps the right in two ways because it raises fear in people who are reactionary and complacency in people that, you know, maybe would push for change, but think it's inevitable.
I don't know what you guys think of that.
Uh, right.
I only caught some of it because I was distracted by the noises in the background there.
I'm sorry.
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm nearest.
I'm actually, I'm in Central Park, and I thought it would be quiet, speaking of touching grass.
But you know, just like Trump said, it's just, it's just so crazy here.
So much crime, so much noise.
Sounds like a very fun evening.
There's like wind and live music.
And yeah, sorry, I Yeah, I got distracted.
You sound great.
Sorry about that.
Sorry about that.
So if you could just like kind of briefly... All right, Jack, if you know what you're saying, then go ahead.
Oh, I was just going to say, I'm just kind of struck by how amazing it is that I'm sat here in my little room in England, and I'm talking to a guy who's walking in Central Park.
I'm just kind of mind-blown.
But basically, I just agree with everything you said, really.
No notes.
I mean, it's a bit underwhelming, but there it is.
I agree.
Yeah, and when you say that there's a history, obviously, of them subjugating a population.
Yeah, I mean, Jonathan Haidt, right?
He's one of these IDW type guys.
And what context was he talking about demographics in?
Like, I find it always shady when... Do you mind if I cut in?
Oh, yeah, we have an expert here.
Sorry.
Go for it.
Against my will.
So I bet he was talking about Eric Hoffman's book, White Shift.
That's my guess.
And yeah, it's this thing of, you know, we'll find anything that progressives want, and we'll say that, oh, don't do that thing, because it's going to cause the right to react even more harshly, and you'll get the opposite of what you want.
And then, but now Jonathan Haidt's thesis seems to be the problem that we're having is that young people are all mentally ill.
They're all anxious and depressed and so that's why they're acting totally out of control.
Haidt has been like favorably quoted by like Richard Spencer going back to 2016 as well.
So yeah, I mean just to be clear like Haidt He's not a Nazi, but he's very favorably quoted by Nazis because he says things that they like.
Ugh, so many of these guys, eh?
I was going to say, that's basically just a capsule description of the IDW, isn't it?
Yeah, basically all of them, yeah.
Totally not Nazis, but you know, they're kind of quoted by Nazis often.
All right, we have some other hands up.
I think next we had JDSU put his hand up.
Hi, just one second before we get into anything.
I'm going to have to get out and get out of here in a few minutes.
So I really like being here.
And it's been a lot of fun.
I just didn't want to leave without saying thank you for inviting me, etc, etc.
I just got things I got to do right now.
So I'm going to listen for a little bit longer.
But if I dip out, then very nice to be here.
Cheers.
Okay, see you then.
Bye-bye.
Can you guys understand me?
I'm a tongue cancer survivor, so it... Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, you sound fine to me, yeah.
Okay, yeah, regarding two things.
Regarding Andrew Tate, he kind of reminds me a little of So, similar to Gabriela D'Annunzio a little bit, and in regards to the multiracial Nazis, that is not something that's new even.
For example, in the interwar years, the Chinese KMT faction had a group called the Blue Shirts, Society, which were modeled after the Italian fascist.
So, yeah, it's nothing new, really.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Fascism has been very adaptable to various different nationalities.
And yeah, absolutely.
It always has been.
I mean, it's adaptability is one of its one of its terrifying strengths.
Gabriele D'Annunzio, he was an Italian poet, I think, if I remember rightly, but I'm not familiar particularly.
He, a poet, he also was in World War I, and after 1919 he took over a city in Fiume, if my pronunciation is Offer anything, and pretty much basically set up what could be considered a proto-fascist regime.
It did not go well.
Yeah, that rings a bell, but I have to confess near total ignorance.
But yeah, I think I know the guy you're talking about.
And it's often a part of fascism, isn't it?
This weird aggressive machismo factor?
Well, I think almost invariably, actually, and there's definitely something of that about Tate.
As you know, that aspect has been running through our entire sort of modern resurgence of fascist ideology right from the start, I mean, right the way... Yes, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
No, no, that's fine.
Just showing my support of what you were saying.
I did.
I do want to discuss like this, like very intertwined nature of misogyny and Nazism or far rightness in a bit.
But let me just talk to the people with the hands up first.
I think it was Teddy.
Teddy next.
Oh, looks like Teddy's disconnected.
All right.
We kept him waiting too long.
Yeah.
Let Teddy go before me.
He's a real expert.
Oh, he's back.
Okay.
Yeah.
Let me just approve his request.
All right, Teddy.
What's up?
Hey, Teddy.
I thought I approved the speaker request, I guess.
Did I not?
These kinds of things always happen in spaces.
Forgive me.
Anyone listening?
I cannot find him now.
Oh, no, it says you're a speaker.
It says you're a speaker.
Okay.
I don't see him anymore, so I don't know what's happening.
All right.
In the meantime, I could just, yeah.
I think he's back.
I think he's here.
Teddy?
No?
Okay.
No, I see him, but I don't hear anything.
So.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay.
DS.
Yeah, I just want to offer a factoid, and then I have a question for you guys.
Just an interesting factoid.
I remember this lecture by this historian, George Michael.
Not the singer, he's like a historian of the far right.
But actually, believe it or not, the guy, you know the term Rehoah?
You know this Nazi term, racial holy war, whatever?
The guy who came up with it was half black.
He was like one of the leading figures in like the Nazi punk movement.
It was half black.
Anyways, my question and sort of what I've been thinking about is, I think you guys are exactly right about the virus analogy of how this sort of bigotry mutates over time and adapts.
I think of Fuentes, Nick Fuentes, as sort of The next adaptation after the failure of Charlottesville, which was sort of like a more conventional neo-Nazi thing.
And I think his innovation, and it's what makes it disturbing is, I think he's adapted his bigotry to, he's trying to create Sort of a multicultural, anti-Semitism, far-right movement by replacing the overt swastika with the cross, even if it's just a cynical strategy.
But my question for you guys, since you guys know a ton more than me, is I try to keep tabs on the far-right.
I have a list on Twitter, and I'll go in there every few months and see what's changing and stuff.
It seems like in the recent years, they've decided to embrace the sort of anti-Semitism a little bit more than the racism, maybe as a strategy of, you know, if we do that, we can, people of different races can embrace that more easier.
But I was just wondering what you guys thought about that.
Thank you.
I wish Daniel was here still, because he's more likely to be... I'm still here.
I was listening.
I didn't log off yet.
Sorry, I'm just making dinner, so I'm trying to do that.
But, you know, I think that certainly the far-right, you know, sort of the heavily far-right, you know, kind of like the National Justice Party, etc., lean into the anti-Semitism because it's kind of the one thing that they overtly disagree with the mainstream right on.
It's, you know, the more overt kind of anti-Semitism, where the more mainstream right avoids the really overt anti-Semitism, mostly because they don't want to piss off certain donors they don't want to piss off.
They don't want to look like actual Nazis.
And when you start talking about the Jews, you start to look a lot like an actual Nazi.
And so they tend to, you know, double down on like, no, we don't hate Jews.
We love... Jews can just be Christians and they'll be great, you know, in that sort of language.
Um, and, uh, in that way kind of masks their, um, masks the kind of, you know, their actual genocidal project.
Um, but, uh, yeah.
So I think that may be why you're seeing more since Charlottesville, um, or since Unite the Right, uh, why you've been seeing a little bit more of that kind of overt anti-Semitism.
Um, you know, in those spaces, I think it is like one of the ways they differentiate themselves from, um, the more kind of movement conservatives.
Teddy?
Hey, can y'all hear me now?
I can, yep.
Yep.
Hey, Teddy.
Howdy, y'all.
Yeah, sorry.
I don't know what was going on with my signal.
It was going crazy and I couldn't hear some of you and I could hear others.
It was ridiculous.
That's why I had to log off and try to log back on to fix it.
But, you know, such is life on Elon Musk's Twitter.
So yeah, I mean, Jesus, I have like 15 points to make.
I'll do it very quickly.
I would say one of the things
Um, as far as like, kind of all of this being reflected in real life, I will say that, you know, now, granted, I live in Texas, so like, you can, um, color some of this, uh, the way you want, but, um, I have seen an uptick in kind of various far-right kind of narratives or kind of conspiracy theories among, I don't know, just associates, people I don't know, people I do know, kind of
Hearing them in kind of just regular, everyday conversation a whole lot more, especially over the last, I don't know, couple years?
Especially since kind of the heat of the pandemic.
So like especially things around COVID and all the conspiracy theories around COVID.
I've heard, I can't tell you the number of times I've heard things like vaccine injury from just like regular everyday people or heard really random kind of QAnon adjacent conspiracy theories being talked about like in line at the grocery store.
Like there's just been an uptick in that kind of thing and I'm not sure how much of it is Because of where I live and the people, the circles I kind of fall in, or also how much of that has to do with how online people were for several years, you know?
But I will go to kind of a larger point, like the question about the amount of increasing anti-Semitism.
I would say, like, if you kind of study the far right and Racist, white supremacist, xenophobic movements.
They seem to be kind of cyclical, like they come in waves almost.
Kind of like the idea that, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
And I think right now, one of the things I've noticed is, at least in the American context, there seems to be a lot happening in the culture, in politics right now that reminds me of The mid-1990s, which was also a time where there was a lot of rising anti-Semitism.
There was a really increased amount of activity among neo-Nazis, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.
There was a lot of activity, neo-Nazi activity and white supremacist activity there, as there is today.
And I think Especially with anti-Semitism, when you look at the ideological framework of white supremacy, anti-Semitism is always at the core of it, at the base of it.
It's difficult to be a white supremacist and not also be anti-Semitic because of the importance of that narrative.
And you see it, I think, filtered and laundered in a lot of other arguments.
I think there's a lot of really blatant anti-Semitism in the arguments of a critical race theory, right?
The whole kind of, the people that were really pushing this idea about how CRT is like really kind of culture, quote unquote, cultural Marxism, people like that pushed it, like James Lindsay,
Have this whole kind of conspiracy theory about that CRT was started by Jews coming over from Germany into America in the 1930s and 40s in order to like, and they started critical theory as a way to agitate the blacks and stuff.
Like there's this really deep kind of core of anti-Semitism to a lot of this.
So I think, You know, anti-semitism is always there.
And it's also so easy to kind of mask.
Like somebody said, you know, Fuentes is using the cross instead of like...
Any other symbology?
There's a lot of like, you can do so much winking and nodding at it, like the whole, you know, you can make up all these kind of conspiracy theories or far-fetched notions about how George Soros controls the left and blah blah blah and all his money and kind of have plausible deniability that you're, um, not being antisemitic when you do it, even though all of that stuff is coded in antisemitic dog whistles.
So, yeah, I think it's, it's, it's always there and it, and it kind of, I see it as kind of coming in waves.
And so I think if you kind of, if people are kind of interested in kind of understanding where we are, um, historically, um, Go back and kind of look at the mid to late, well, early to mid-1990s that has the same flavor.
But I think that the Kanye model Is like a real inspiration to the far right.
I think they see it as, you know, if we if we emphasize antisemitism, first and foremost, we can build sort of a broader coalition than just being like, yeah, white people are the best.
I wonder if that's this is sort of the next adaptation is going to be this sort of Kanye Fuentes multicultural far right model.
They had this version of this when, you know, there was much more talk about Islam and Muslim immigrants bringing, you know, coming to the West to rape white women, blah, blah, blah.
Like, there was so much of And there was always like, well, no, no, no, we're not criticizing anyone's race.
How can you be racist if we're just talking about religion?
Like we're just, you know, secularists here.
We're talking about, we're criticizing religion.
And, you know, people like me, I'm an atheist.
I'm more than happy to criticize religion.
And I think it's necessary even, especially the religion that I was born into.
But when that turns into, like, you know, race and IQ and fear-mongering about immigrants, that is not valid critique of religion.
And that is something that they use to build a broader coalition of, you know, multi-racial anti-Muslims.
A guy on Twitter that was talking to me about like the shifting demographics of the UK and he's like, well, how can that be?
I was like, I don't want to talk to you about that.
Like, get off my timeline.
You're being racist.
And he's like, how can that be racist when, you know, my black friends also are worried about Muslims coming into the UK.
And, you know, Tommy Robinson used that kind of rhetoric all the time.
We have Sikhs, we have Hindus, we have, you know, black members.
And it was all built around their anti-Muslimness.
But really, he was also retweeting things like, you know, accounts titled white rights or talking about white genocide.
And yeah, it just bleeds into that.
Does that answer your question?
Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
I think they definitely- It's sort of interesting, I don't hear, they don't, that sort of talk about Islam and immigration, at least in the American context of Fort Wright, I've seen it's been like a precipitous fall in focus on that.
Yeah, because now the focus is on trans people, unfortunately, and LGBT.
Cue people and you know panic about drag shows.
It's it's a cycle It always goes through different like they pick a different enemy and then that's the one that everyone's talking about It'll you know, come back probably I feel like this kind of ties into what Teddy was saying just now about our current moment being quite similar in many respects to what was going on in the in the 90s, which is something I also I I also feel.
I think that's very true.
And I feel like, I don't know, this isn't a developed thought, but...
I feel like with the War on Terror, what happened was 9-11 and more broadly the rise of neoconservatism as the dominant mode of American right-wing thought and power in the early 2000s, which of course was consolidated by 9-11 and the
And the War on Terror era, I feel that was kind of like an interruption to a process that was underway, you know, and it's almost like the similarities we have now to the early 90s processes, where right-wing American thought is heavily cultic and conspiracist and stuff like that.
It's almost like that process that started in the 90s is now, it's, you know, after the interruption of neoconservatism and then I suppose maybe the Mm-hmm.
the 07, 08 crash, it's like that process is resuming.
I feel like that's something, 'cause it is very similar in many respects.
And I feel like that's kind of where the anti-Muslim stuff went, you know, it was kind of the dominant racist mode and then it outlived its utility.
Sorry, please go ahead.
When I think of the 1990s, the biggest difference, and I think it's a big factor we should think about, is just the advance of conspiracy theories.
It's so much greater than it was like in You know, 1995.
I think, like, partially, it's just, it's almost like a natural mechanism of the internet, where the content has to become, you know, it's like, oh, 9-11, truth, yeah, that was kind of interesting, and JFK, you know, yeah, that was sort of interesting, but I need something stronger, you know, like, I need, like, the reptilians, I need the Jews, I need, and
I think that there's sort of like an addiction going on to more and more novel and extreme conspiracy theories that's continually getting worse.
Yeah, and of course that addiction dynamic ties in fatally well with how the algorithm works.
Just the processes that have been developed for funneling content to people, it just kind of inherently accelerates.
Any kind of extreme experience which is provided by online content, the algorithm just blindly works to provide you with more, more, more, more, more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, so let's take the one hand and then maybe we can talk about how misogyny and white supremacy are intertwined before people have to start going.
All right, Pai, what's up?
Oh hey, yeah, I just wanted to share like a personal experience that's just recently happened and I'm still trying to figure out like how to deal with that and how to You know, sort of resolve this.
I mean, if it's something that needs to be resolved, but I have a niece who's eight years old and she goes to school in the Midwest and she was visiting me.
I live in New York and you know, she was an eight year old girl likes to put on makeup and she was putting makeup on where she was like making her skin lighter than what it is.
And she looks in the mirror and says, I'm not white.
And I got confused for a second.
I'm like, why is this eight year old?
She cares about that.
She's not white.
And then I realized like in her school, all the children are white.
And she is like, you know, because that is like the most common identity there.
And that's what her friends are.
So I think because they talk about being white, she's trying to identify with them.
Like, you know, the thing with nationality is that it's something that everybody can take.
But with this colorism is that, you know, I mean, what is white?
But everybody wants to identify with it.
Most people want to identify because it's something that's also celebrated and I feel like what you said to algorithms is that they amplify because we ourselves amplify that because that's what we're raised to believe in so many different ways, like culture and everything.
So, yeah.
Teddy, did you want to say something about that?
Yeah, actually.
So years back, I had a friend of mine who was a graduate student here at Texas A&M.
And she was originally from El Paso, and she's Latina.
Both her parents are, well, her mother was born in Mexico.
Her dad was White, and I can't remember where he was from.
Anyway, so where she grew up in El Paso, she was a light-skinned Hispanic girl, and she was always, you know, this is her telling me this, she was always kind of identified as white, kind of by her, kind of the people that she lived with.
She was always kind of viewed as a white person, essentially.
And so she said, when she came to Texas A&M as a graduate student, she was suddenly very aware of actually how brown she was, and that she was definitely not white within this context, because Texas A&M is in the middle of Texas.
Predominantly white.
And she would be in these classrooms and meeting rooms as a grad student, kind of often the only, sometimes the only woman and very often the only woman of color.
And so there's a real kind of the context of that kind of whiteness and what whiteness is, is so malleable, depending on the situation.
And so I think for a lot of Especially white folks that don't have any experience within communities of color or haven't engaged with and talked with people of different backgrounds, different communities of color.
That's one thing that most white folks are not aware of is how whiteness as an identity can be, like I think that was talked about earlier, can kind of be bestowed on people in different circumstances.
Rihanna.
I think Rihanna said she was bullied in Barbados for being white or whatever.
They considered her white where she grew up.
Interesting.
Yeah, it just goes to show how malleable and constantly shifting that concept is, right?
Before, I believe, Italians weren't considered white.
I think Irish weren't considered white.
Oh my god, the right loves to bring up the Irish any time they talk about slavery and they introduce their view of white Irish as if it was comparable to chattel slavery.
It's like the most annoying thing!
Yeah, there's a really good guy on Twitter, Liam Hogan, who's done loads of work on this.
He's constantly sort of batting away the Irish weren't considered white myth and the Irish slavery myth.
I mean, in like Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race and a lot of work that's been done on The construction of whiteness, you know, Barbara Fields and amazing people like that.
Yeah, sure.
People were brought into the category of white and, and so on and so forth.
But like the way the way the right and reactionaries talk about the Irish thing, it's, it's incredibly misleading.
But yeah, I, I feel like one of the things to hit when we talk, I mean I feel firstly incredibly unqualified to talk about it.
The idea of like a little girl being sort of worried by the idea that she's not white at school, I find that just incredibly upsetting and depressing.
But you know I don't want to comment on it really because I feel completely unqualified to.
But one of the things I think we need to kind of remember with the With how whiteness is framed in white culture is that it's always seen as the default.
It's the vanilla.
It's the standard setting.
It's contentless.
You know, white is kind of not a color.
It's the absence of color.
And it's everybody else who's got color.
And if you're not white, you're sort of diverging from a neutral template.
You know, and that's where so much of the culture war harping on about like, you know, cultural issues like recasting and stuff like that.
So much of that is what it's really about underneath all the stuff about, oh, you know, you're not allowed to be white and proud anymore and so on.
And they're trying to make everything woke.
Underneath all that, what they're really defending is that assumption of white as the, like, the standard.
Yeah, yeah, I mean just like in little things like Band-Aids, right?
When they made Band-Aids that are like different skin tone colors, I thought it was pretty neat because It's not like I have walked around desperate for a band-aid that matches my exact skin tone, but it just, like, you realize in those moments, like, oh, you know, I guess that is why that is that color, because it's supposed to match a generic, like, skin color and not be so obvious, except for on me.
I mean, I'm much darker than that color, so it never, like, It was subtle when I had a band-aid on, right?
So just to have like band-aids in different skin colors feels nice.
When you go shopping for like leggings and there's like the nude color, it's very hard to find like one that is like matching your skin tone.
I don't know, maybe I'm getting into things that guys are like.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm getting into girl stuff.
All right maybe you haven't had these issues when you've gone shopping for like uh tights but trust me it's an issue because I would trade it and just buy like sheer black tights if I wanted like a sheer legging because you can't find one that's like skin colored or maybe you can but I didn't look hard enough it's like very light skin colored or like Darker brown, like it's harder to find.
Anyways, I'm going off on a weird tangent.
You're not here to talk about me and shopping for tights.
If I could back up a little to the last part of the discussion about the myth of Irish enslavement, that kind of thing.
So, that plays into very anti-Black, very anti-African responses to movements, reparatory movements, in relation to slavery as it was practiced in the North Atlantic.
So, the racialization of African people and then their enslavement and then their reduction in law to the status of chattel.
And so whenever people like myself, a Jamaican whose, you know, Jamaican society is 90% descended from people who were forcibly transported and enslaved on this island.
And so whenever we raise, you know, issues of proprietary justice for that kind of thing, we usually get the response of, oh, but the Irish were also enslaved, or there was a time when Italians weren't treated particularly well.
And I think when people, when certain elements on the right do that, what they're trying to do is to downplay and dismiss You know, the specific and unique horrors of transatlantic slavery, enslavement, how it was practiced in this part of the world where, yes, slavers existed, unfortunately, across this planet for a very long time.
But the enslavement of Africans in the North Atlantic, in Europe, in the Caribbean, in North America, it marked a specific, unique form of enslavement where the status of slave was legally passed down through the blood.
So that if your father was enslaved on a plantation in Jamaica, for instance, When you were born, you were also automatically a slave, and that would be the case for your children and their children, etc.
So that was particularly unique to the system as it was practiced in most parts of the world.
So when the descendants of enslaved Africans speak about it, speak about the Union Horrors, We get this sort of downplaying of what happened to say, oh, the Irish are also enslaved, and, you know, Italians at some point weren't treated particularly well.
So I can't remember who it was who said they're not in a position to necessarily speak on it.
I'm in a position to speak on it as a black Jamaican whose primary academic studies focus on transatlantic slavery.
That's before I sold out and became a liar.
But yes, it's a form of, when you hear this thing from the writer about Irish enslavement, it's a form of It's meant to silence black people who speak about reparatory justice for the specific crimes, unique crimes committed against Africans in this part of the world.
It's also particularly egregious when, hearing that from the right, in the context of the Caribbean and chattel slavery there, when you look at the history
Of the United States, a lot of the slave codes that were written and the laws that were intended to further establish white supremacy within particularly the South, a lot of those laws were written directly into response to slave revolts, revolts by the enslaved people in Haiti and other places within the Caribbean.
I mean, so like when they say that When they compare it, it's just historically just, I don't even know the right word, just disgusting when they make those claims.
Yeah, it's always good to hear.
Sorry, go on Jack.
No, I was just, you know, registering agreement with all of that.
Yeah, no, I agree too.
It's always good to hear like people point out like these right wing tactics of like soft peddling or downplaying certain things for a specific agenda.
So that's very just good to know and good to hear pointed out.
But now I thought maybe we can just touch on the topic of how white supremacy and misogyny are Like, so interlinked.
If, if you're not speaking, if you could just mute your microphone, because then we can hear like every little movement and then that gets distracting.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, um, yeah, I, I was, uh, reading this thread by this, um, extremism researcher and like, I found that person's threads a bit kind of off and odd before.
And, uh, they were like, I don't want to, I don't want to say who it is or shame anyone, but the gist of it was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, we know that the guy has Nazi tattoos.
He's talking about the Allen shooter.
Um, but what I'm more interested in, what's more unique is, uh, the fact that, uh, there's like this through line of misogyny that's running through the, like all of his posts.
And I thought to myself, like, that's not really anything new.
There's like an undercurrent of misogyny and so much like of what the far right and white supremacists nowadays, uh, do put out.
And I thought that we could talk about that a bit.
I mean, I have a quote from Andrew Anglin.
I mean, there's many quotes, but let me just see.
Right, he says, the fact is, when you give women rights, they destroy absolutely everything around them, no matter what other variable is involved.
Even if you become the ultimate alpha male, some stupid bitch will still ruin your life.
And that's Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer.
And there's so many more examples of that, too.
Yeah, so I thought, does anyone else want to chime in on that?
I mean, it's just shit people say.
That's how I see it.
And they should just not be celebrated, I feel.
Well, no, it's more than just shit people say.
It's like a very strong undercurrent.
It's like a theme, right?
And so I think it's important to recognize the themes and the work of extremists so that we can recognize them again.
Hi, Aina.
Teddy?
Who's speaking?
This is Erin.
Sorry.
Oh.
Hi, Erin.
Hi, everybody.
How's it going?
I've been thinking a lot about patriarchy lately, and its crossover with white supremacy and other systems in general.
I feel like what's been missing from a lot of conversations I've had with men about this is the distinction between the system itself, so the system of patriarchy, versus the individual.
And that comes up so much in all discussions of systems and how they act on us.
And I noticed that men will often conflate patriarchy with misogyny.
And so it's important to distinguish these things, you know, make sure that when we're talking about the system itself, that it's, you know, that that we're all vulnerable to the system.
And we're all vulnerable to white supremacy, we're all vulnerable to patriarchy.
It's just gonna impact us in different ways, and how we become responsible for our behavior within those systems is really, you know, the judgment of our character and everything.
And, you know, I focus a lot on tradwives and tradwife culture, and I follow these adorable people on Instagram, and I stalk them, and boy, they really represent the crossover of those two systems, and capitalism, of course.
Right.
I think what's been interesting for me as someone who kind of identifies as a housewife, somebody who's at home and is a wife, with those being the only really accurate descriptors outside of, you know, any sort of culture, I don't identify really otherwise.
But it's something that I think about, and I think a lot of women think about in their life when they're doing something that is super traditionally considered their gender role, it goes through our head.
Like, what does this feel like?
What am, you know, how am I behaving in a system right now?
Am I being responsible?
Is this fair?
Like a lot of those questions.
And so I'd love to hear you guys talk, talk about those things.
So I had a professor early on who, well, Well, what he thought was that both white supremacy and various forms of misogyny, that they both applied the same hierarchical frame,
which is that certain people which is that certain people based on certain biological characteristics are suited to rule, are suited to be at the top of the hierarchy.
And then other kinds of people, um, deservedly, um, belong, uh, at the bottom of the hierarchy, right?
So that, uh, so that if you take white supremacy, uh, for instance, I mean, not to really explain what that is, it's basically, Right there in the term.
So the hierarchy should be white people, however that is defined, at the top and, you know, various other so-called races below with, you know, people of African descent, dark-skinned people at the lowest, occupying the lowest are wrong.
What my professor used to say is that you can see a similar frame being applied to the sort of man-woman, male-female dynamic that some people think for some reason that men have a biological, I don't know, right to rule, and so therefore women must always be subordinate.
And he also linked it to, he was dealing specifically with the sort of sociological situation Um, in, in Jamaica, um, where a lot of homophobia here is coded in very, in very anti-female terms.
Um, so that one of the worst things you can say to a man in Jamaica is to say, which means, um, which means young man, why are you acting like a woman or like a woman would?
And so, Yeah, the same in Pakistan as well.
Yeah, exactly.
So a man, somebody who is identified as male, merely behaving In the way a woman is supposed to or is expected to behave, then that automatically lowers him in the hierarchy.
And so what my professor was saying is that being Female, or that which is identified as traditionally female, is coded as necessarily inferior or necessarily subordinate to that which is coded or considered male.
And he was saying that you can see that they The similar, if not the same, but a similar frame was being applied when you were dealing with white supremacy, which is really a system of It was really a racial caste system.
So yeah, I fully agree that there is not just a link, but white supremacy, racism on the one hand, and various forms of misogyny and sexism.
I've always thought of those two things as being two halves of the same coin.
Yeah, definitely.
And also, I feel like White supremacy relies on, I guess, white women to kind of create and further their supreme race, right?
So a lot of misogyny comes in play in that, right?
They don't like when white women have choices of non-white men.
Because they're no longer producing pure white babies.
They don't like when women prefer to prioritize their career or their education because they're not focused on producing pure white babies.
White babies, exactly.
And you hear echoes of that in people that are much more mainstream and celebrated and invited to speak at places like Stanford, unfortunately, like Jordan fucking Peterson, you know?
Or Douglas Murray.
Or Douglas Murray, yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, Michaela Peterson taking up the mantle, really, from her position is really interesting.
It's not surprising.
It's almost, like, created.
I mean, you couldn't almost ask for a better partner than a very attractive young daughter who's Ultimately, just completely willing to do whatever it takes to fit into the Tradwife mold and gain her followers and bring people along with her and wear her red lipstick.
Why does her red lipstick in particular piss you off?
Red lipstick has some pretty interesting feminist roots, really as a symbol of power, one of the few symbols of power that women have in certain time periods.
It's considered very sexual and very racy and so wearing red lipstick can be often the cheapest and only way to be sexual.
You know in times of war, in times of poverty, sometimes the only thing you can afford is red lipstick.
And so for it to be sort of co-opted by These very conservative, very backwards women who want to put, who want to basically be using it as a, as this weird cosplay, which I think is what's so strange about that version of Tradwife is, is like,
The intense transphobia, the intense white supremacy, but trying to do it with a modern spin, and I think that's exactly like what you guys were talking about with Just the right, in general, having this really strong online presence and rebranding themselves and trying to kind of like, appeal to a younger generation.
And these girls are definitely doing that, like, they're attractive, and they're cosplaying in eras and genres and aesthetics that are really appealing.
It's like, that's why I kind of play around with that identity a little bit, because it's, I think there's nothing wrong with the cosplay part of it.
It's just that people don't realize that's what they're doing and they start to really identify with like, I care about my cleaning products.
And it's like, don't, don't, don't do that.
Right.
No, no, no.
You're supposed to ironically dress like a fifties housewife.
Not really.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I hear you.
Yeah.
They take Betty Page and they turn it into, I don't know what, like something not her at all.
But yeah, exactly.
Yeah, or as you know, Peterson says, like red lipstick.
It's like women evolving to mimic ripe fruit or signaling orgasms, just like bizarre bullshit that everyone can hear more of if they want to check out my recent Evo Psych episodes.
That was awesome.
And it's very weird to hear him say that.
That's the juxtaposition that I can never understand.
If you think women are signaling arousal when they're wearing lipstick, then why are you sitting there always with your daughter who's wearing a heck of a lot of lipstick?
I don't I don't see how that's consistent or maybe it's consistent in a weird way.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Thinking about those, that relationship always creeps me the fuck out.
But, and yeah, she sends like pictures to her dad and like sexy lobster costumes or weird shit going on there.
But sorry, Teddy, you've had your hand up for a while.
Well, that's a hell of a lead in.
I don't know how to.
That was super distracting.
No, I think it sounds weird, but misogyny and patriarchy and the role that they play in white supremacy and far-right authoritarian movements is kind of one of my favorite subjects to talk about and discuss.
I think it's one of the most under-discussed subjects.
I really do like How Kenyatta laid it all out and their relationship.
And I will say in a historical context, there's really great scholarship that goes back to look at the role that white women played in establishing and maintaining white supremacy in the South.
Particularly in the role that gender played into that, and how, you know, when you talk about hierarchies, right, even within a patriarchy, if you're a white woman, that automatically lifts you up above all other people of color.
And so there is such a long history of white women kind of being willing to stand on that, and as long as it secures their place and their safety, Right?
Even if it harms everyone else underneath them.
And I think of particular interest if you want to look at how they enforced it.
Speaking of scholarship, there's a lot of really interesting history about the role that white women played in maintaining slavery and the plantations during the Civil War when all these men have left.
It was left to all these white women to basically run these plantations.
And in some instances, did it almost more brutally than their white male counterparts because of the role that gender played into it.
And they, so yeah, there's some really interesting scholarship going back a long ways about that.
And that the kind of white women's role in enforcing white supremacy and their part in holding up the patriarchy within U.S.
culture kind of, there's like, Example, example, like, you know, among probably the most famous is the murder of Emmett Till, right?
And the role white women played in that.
And so, and if you look at a lot of the history of lynching in the United States, kind of specifically between like 1880 and the 1930s, there's, I think, the African American History Museum Alabama has like really great resources around this.
If you look and dig into a lot of those lynchings, at the root of so many of them is basically the purity of white women.
A lot of it is about black men interacting with white women and that getting them killed or getting the black men killed.
So yeah, and also In the modern context, I think there's a lot of examples of similarly of the role that white women play within kind of far-right white supremacist movements.
I mean, there's a lot.
Yes, yes.
Especially, you know, there's a very specific role that white women play within the neo-Nazi movement.
There's very prominent white women within that movement that play a very specific kind of role of Because of how integral the patriarchy and misogyny is to those movements.
And so enforcing those gender norms and having a woman do it is very kind of integral to that power structure.
So, anyway.
Yeah, that was very well said and I agree 100% with everything you said.
Yeah, it's the interconnections between Patriarchy and white supremacy as interlocking systems.
They're just essential to fascism because fascism is about, you know, in its fundamental imperative, it's about defending those systems from, you know, whether it's challenge from below or whether it's instability from, you know, problems with capitalism.
It's about defending those systems, insuring them up.
And you see that in far-right movements.
I mean, we've talked on the podcast a lot about how, you know, there are women in these movements and they have these paradoxical conditions.
Just recently, on one of the episodes, we were talking about Sidney Watson and Elijah Schaefer and, you know, she's engaged completely in the same project as him, but at the same time she's in an environment where she's You know, like the women at Fox News who are subjected to the hostile, misogynistic work environment in working for Tucker Carlson and everything.
It's Sidney Watson, subject to sexual harassment, and Elijah Schafer, sexually harassing his fellow Far-rightists because they're because they're women etc.
It's and it creates these it creates these paradoxical situations.
Teddy bringing up the Civil War was really interesting because that's something I've been reading a lot about the American Civil War recently actually and I'm fascinated by the various ways in which the Confederacy is a proto-fascistic society.
I think that's an interest personally anyway I mean I'm far from an expert but personally I think that's an interesting lens to look at it through.
And yeah, white women absolutely integral to the slave system in the South, even more so during the war, of course, for fascinating reasons.
And I've read a really interesting book called Confederate Reckoning.
I'm blanking on the title of the author, but it's a really good book.
And it's about, partly anyway, it's about how women in the Confederate States of America started altering government policy.
And even the structure of the Confederate government by making demands on the Confederate state, you know, for things like welfare and because, you know, their men, so to speak, were off at war.
And at the same time, it was integral to the ideology of slavery in the South that you had this special thing, Southern womanhood, by which, of course, they went white Southern womanhood.
And it was on this elevated, almost mystical, religious level, you know, and it had to be protected.
uh and all this stuff so yeah and you you see the same in various fascist societies nazi germany has this um elevation you know of german womanhood and so on and and at the same time of course it's deeply deeply based upon or and it's so extreme it's almost a parodic version of patriarchal patriarchy you know the housewife and everything like that so those interrelationships uh i mean i
Don't really have anything to say about it except that yeah, it's a it's really interesting I'm gonna have to call it a night guys.
Thanks for coming and This has been a really great conversation and I hope you carry on without me and I'll be listening to the rest of it But it's late here in in Merry England.
Okay, so I'll say goodnight to you all.
Thanks, Jim, it was lovely talking to you.
Goodnight, all.
Yeah, so great points, everyone.
Erin, did you want to say something?
I was just thinking a little about the ways that When you're having a conversation with a certain person, like in one area, say it's patriarchy, and you can tell you've hit a wall.
I think I see it a lot in the Tradwives I watch on Instagram.
They get in the comments section, and the comments are really interesting because you'll see a lot of men in their comment sections talking about how hopeless they feel, that they'll never meet A traditional woman who's willing to submit and all of these things, and then the tradwives jump in and start supporting them and showering them with all the love and all the affection that they, you just know they're not getting rightfully in the rest of the world.
And it's really strange.
It's like no other comment section that you've ever been.
The reinforcement from both sides of Both white supremacy and patriarchy is like, it's just written so clearly that you can't unsee it.
And it sometimes feels like in conversations where you kind of feel like the blindness from the other person is really strong, it can be helpful to use the other system as a way to break through that.
I think if you're talking about patriarchy, sometimes it's more helpful to use white supremacy because maybe that is so obviously different and easy to kind of see.
Like, how are you a part of white supremacy might be easier to see for somebody than how am I a part of patriarchy.
Yeah.
Yeah, but you know what's interesting is that a lot of these Like I did an episode a lot like many years ago, I think 2017 or something like we cheekily titled it fashy feminism.
I think it was called.
And we talked about people like Lauren Southern and at the time there was Tara McCarthy who was like a part, I think she had like South Asian or Indian heritage, but she was like a full-on neo-Nazi who was against race mixing pretty openly.
Jordan Peterson went on her show to complain about cultural Marxists also.
And we talked about how like They think that by joining these movements, they're kind of like securing their place.
But it always comes for them, too.
And because there had been, at the time that we did this episode, there had been a bunch of videos from these women talking about how they're getting harassment from their scenes, from their audiences, for not being the trad wives that they praise.
And at the time, Lauren Southern hadn't had any kids.
She wasn't married.
So they were like, you know, bothering her about that and just saying really misogynistic things.
And obviously, fashy feminism is not a thing, because it's not really feminism if it's fashy.
But, you know.
Yeah, that you're free from the system.
Well, I can't be a part of patriarchy.
I'm a feminist.
It's it's completely blind to the fact that it's a sea that we're swimming in and that nobody is free from it.
Nobody's not breathing in.
The patriarchal heir.
And that's that responsibility part.
Like, yeah, we're all here.
We're already here.
You're not choosing to be a part of this.
I think I heard language used that was a patriarchal male.
And I think that's interesting, because you do hear about people self identifying as white supremacists, but not as a patriarchal male.
And that's basically because, yeah, you're not aware of that so much.
And the system is so clearly damaging to everybody that nobody really thinks that they're touched by it.
It's weird.
Yeah, I mean, I only hear, like, Peterson and stuff, like, talk about it ironically or Joke about it not being a real thing.
Oh, maybe she's opposing the patriarchy.
Like, it's not really a thing.
You know?
Yeah, exactly.
They're wise men.
Very.
Only the smartest men.
So it's interesting how some of these things reproduce themselves in non-white societies and spaces.
So for instance, in In a place like Jamaica or a place like Uganda or Kenya, right, where you have this sort of, you know, virulent anti-gay political sentiment.
And what they do, and that is, as I've said before, all bound up with with misogynistic ideas about, you know, that a gay man must be a man who wants to be a woman and is therefore, you know, making himself inferior.
But, I mean, going back to the idea that, you know, a lot of these approaches and expressions, you know, are there to reinforce, I wouldn't call it fascism necessarily, maybe quasi-fascism.
But if you look at some of the, you know, some of what's happening in, as I said, countries like Jamaica or Uganda or Kenya, you will see politicians talking about protecting the Jamaican family or protecting the virtues of the Jamaican woman or the Kenyan woman or the Ugandan woman, you know, from these degenerate foreign LGBT
A lot of these societies, what you find is you will get a terribly oppressive law passed in Uganda, an anti-gay law, and if you actually listen to what these politicians are saying, they are saying that homosexuality is un-African,
and foreign to Uganda, and so therefore it is an imposition from the outside meant to destroy traditional Ugandan values and family structures, etc.
And in that way, they can actually better oppress people.
And we get this here in Jamaica a lot, where People who campaign, who are brave enough to campaign for, you know, equal rights for LGBT people in this country, they're often accused of being, you know, a fifth column, you know, representatives of some foreign, some, you know, demonic, evil foreign agenda.
Right, that's happened to me.
Personally, because in 2014, I wrote this children's book called My Chacha is Gay, which means my uncle is gay.
And it was set in Pakistan.
And, you know, there's no mention of religion or anything like that.
It's just, you know, a little boy who, you know, his uncle is the greatest uncle ever.
And he doesn't understand why people don't accept him or they're rude to him.
And he just wishes that They would, because his uncle is the very best uncle in the world.
And that's really how simple the message was.
And it got read in schools in my province here in Canada, and it caused an outrage.
I still get, almost nine years later, hate mail to do with this children's book.
And I was called like, you know, Satan's daughter.
People wished like AIDS on me.
They said I was destroying the Muslim family.
I was destroying the brains of Pakistani children.
I was corrupting them.
And there's this guy who's a fan of Jordan Peterson, this Islamic YouTuber, I think he's called Daniel Hakikeju or something like that.
Terrible, shitty, shitty guy.
He came across my book just a couple years ago and so I think he posted about how that's like worse than Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses and just like, you know, it's kind of scary to hear that because you know the kind of response that Satanic Verses had.
Uh, and ultimately got him stabbed just recently.
And, um, you know, they were saying that this is way worse than that could ever be.
And people threatened to sue the school boards here in Ontario.
And then, you know, the school just like shut it down.
Like they never ever talked about it again.
It could have been.
like a good part of the curriculum.
First, the teachers were so receptive and everybody loved it.
And then no silence, shut it down.
They had too many complaints.
And so I completely personally feel that demonization, very personal level, like it's scary, scary shit. - About, I want to say it was in 2014, It might not have been in 2014.
It might have been the year before or the year after.
You know, I'm getting old, so I don't remember things.
We had here in Jamaica, you know, a national meltdown over, it was literally like three paragraphs in a home economics, sorry, a home and family life textbook.
For second formers, sorry.
And by second formers, I mean students in, I think the American and Canadian equivalent would be grade eight.
So three paragraphs in a text for kids in grade eight, which in Jamaica would be high school and not middle school.
And the paragraphs basically just said, I kid you not, gay people exist.
some people are gay, some people aren't.
Yeah.
That resulted in a debate, like a three day long debate in parliament The Ministry of Education ordered all the books removed.
The leadership of the Jamaica Council of Churches and the Jamaica Umbrella Group of Churches and the Lawyers Christian Fellowship and the Love March movement, they're all on Yeah, really over three paragraphs in a textbook that weren't even all that controversial.
I just say gay people exist, they're human beings and they deserve certain rights and freedoms.
The Ministry of Education ended up making new unnecessary regulations just to prevent these three paragraphs from ever, I don't know, sullying Jamaican students ever again.
So it's this kind of freak out and overreaction and constantly what it's meant to do is to message to certain people or certain kinds of people that they are to know their place and that they are not to step out of their place.
So the issue with Jamaica is that This country is not nearly as homophobic as some of the news reports from outside of Jamaica would lead you to believe.
20-25 years.
So I turn 40 next year and I can actually see a difference from when I was a kid in high school till now.
The culture in Jamaica has actually changed A whole lot.
It's become much more tolerant.
So we now have openly gay people in the media.
We now have very public, dedicated organizations.
For instance, JFLAG, We change and those organizations of open out LGBTQ Jamaicans who are lobbying, constantly advocating for their own rights.
So Jamaica has actually changed significantly.
But when you have that kind of change, there is always, you know, a great backlash against it.
And it's always about protecting Almost this mythical conception of either the family or the state or
Here, it manifests itself in people in certain groups, and they're usually fundamentalist Christian groups, saying that you can't be gay, you can't be trans, you can't be bisexual, et cetera, and be Jamaican at the same time.
Incidentally, their view also is that... It's an absolute thing, like a Western thing, like homosexuality is not a thing.
That belongs in Pakistan.
It's something that I was corrupting people's minds with.
It's Western influence and just nonsense.
And here it also manifests itself in the idea that you can't be a non-Christian and also be authentically Jamaican.
So I was raised, yeah, so my family is Muslim and like the only Kind of discrimination I've ever faced or ever had to deal with in Jamaica as a black Jamaican man who is not poor,
And I'm cis and I'm straight identifying, so that in my society there isn't anything about me that immediately marks me out as different.
But when people, like sometimes in my workplace, when people get, when people realize, so I had a situation maybe a month or so ago, My mom visited me at work and my mom is, I wouldn't say that she is a super traditional Muslim woman, but she was wearing hijab that day.
And so there are people in the office who suddenly realized that the lawyer, at least his mom, is Muslim.
And that brings out the fundamentalist Christians who are just going to harass you and that kind of thing.
So there is a certain faction of fundamentalist Christians in Jamaica who try to narrow the definition of what it means to be authentically Jamaican.
And I've always been fascinated about how that actually mirrors what you see happening in the United States, for instance, and what you see happening in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, where they will say, for instance, that an authentic Englishman Can't have brown skin or black skin or certainly can't be Muslim or Hindu.
I mean the other day I think it was It was that idiot historian David Starkey who was saying that the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom doesn't understand what it means to be British just because Rishi Sunak is a brown Hindu.
To tell you the truth, I didn't shed any tears for Suna, because that man is a Tony and he's been involved in, you know, yes.
But yeah, but that's the kind of thing.
I'm fascinated by how that is a mirror in so-called third world societies.
And it's been my experience in spending some time in Uganda and Kenya, and it's really the same sort of thing.
Homosexuality Transness, you know, basically any kind of queerness is on Kenyan or on Uganda.
Yeah, sounds very familiar.
All right, I'm gonna move on just because I'm gonna try and wrap this up.
So we'll hear from Teddy and maybe a couple more questions after that and then we'll close.
Hi, Teddy.
Hey, yeah, I was just gonna touch on something that he brought up about the Western perception of Jamaica.
And I think there's a critique I have of particular kind of Western media.
And it also I see it among the left and in progressive spaces of when things, especially In places like Uganda, with what is going on there with the anti-LGBTQ legislation and all that, there's a framing within Western media often that I see of that, you know, this is the U.S.
Christian right or the U.S.
right kind of exporting hate.
That's kind of a A really common narrative.
And while, yes, the U.S.
Christian right does try to exert its influence throughout the world, like, I think there's a, I think it's a real problem in the kind of U.S.
media that it portrays countries like Uganda, and I think I've seen it in the context of, like, Romania and also in South America, that, like, The U.S.
Christian right is exporting these values as if there's not far-right fundamentalist religious movements within those countries that have their own, like, political makeup, right?
They're independent of whatever it is the fundamentalist Christian right in the U.S.
is doing.
Teddy, let me help you.
We have agency and we're making these bad decisions for ourselves.
Right, exactly.
But I just say that because I've seen that kind of narrative pop up in progressive and left-leaning spaces.
and I want to...
I used to get frustrated about that whenever there was an Islamic terror attack too.
And to some extent absolutely we should talk about causes like racism and alienation and all of that, but also acknowledge that these people have agency and it wasn't all...
I'm an immigrant, I've experienced racism and I didn't turn to those types of ideologies.
So it is kind of offensive and condescending.
When people try to put it all on things like that and just act like, oh, you know, these people of color that just don't have any agency or, you know, the West must have influenced them to do that.
Yeah, it's very US centric, which is like part of why I love listening to you and of course, decoding and so many of You guys that are doing great podcasts are not in the US.
It's really nice.
Thank you.
All right.
Does anybody else have any questions or comments before we start winding down?
You can just like raise your hand or whatever.
Request to speak.
All right.
All right, if nobody else has anything to say, then I guess thank you everyone for joining.
This was a wonderful, wonderful chat.
I always have fun at Twitter Spaces, but I find it a bit chaotic to set up all the tech issues in the beginning and being like an obsessive editor on my podcast.
I find it really annoying that whenever I put out a recording of a Twitter Space, it's like, Sometimes like five minutes of dead space while we're trying to figure out the logistics of this damn thing.
Um, but other than that, like it's a very different experience to podcasting.
I get to talk to a bunch of people and uh, yeah, that's so great.
And talk, talking to people live, it's super fun.
So thank you to everyone who participated and who listened and uh, Yeah, I'll see you out there in the Twitterverse or, um, or you can email or come leave me messages on Patreon and you can find all that information on my Twitter banner.
So take care everyone, and this will be recorded so you can listen to the beginning if you missed it.
