Michael Shermer faces intense scrutiny for hosting controversial guests like Douglas Murray and Jennifer Fraser while allegedly deflecting from credible sexual assault allegations against himself. Critics argue Shermer's "rational skepticism" fails to address systemic power imbalances, gaslighting victims, or the dehumanizing rhetoric used to justify war crimes in Gaza. By prioritizing ideologically aligned narratives over genuine accountability, the hosts contend Shermer undermines the very principles of evidence and human rights he claims to champion, effectively shielding imperialist aggression under a guise of moderate centrism. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Michael Shermer and Sensitive Topics00:01:54
Jack here.
Firstly, this one is about Michael Shermer.
It's a long one, and it contains, at various points, discussion of various difficult, sensitive, distressing subjects, including sexual assault and gaslighting.
Later on, we talk about Shermer's discussion with Douglas Murray, and that takes in the question of Israel, Israel's attack on Iran and Lebanon, and of course the genocide in Gaza.
It's also long and in various parts, so I've given you the warning.
What I'm also going to do is I'm going to give you time signatures so that you can navigate your way through this episode.
The first Part obviously starts with the intro.
That's from zero onwards.
Then, from around 13 minutes 50, we're doing an intro, and that includes talk about sexual assault.
Then, we get to a discussion of Michael Shermer's interview with an author called Jennifer Fraser.
That also contains talk about sexual assault.
That starts around 24 minutes 10 seconds.
Then, we get to a section where we talk about Michael Shermer's conversation with Nellie Bowles.
That's starting at around one hour, four minutes.
And then, we finish up talking, as I say, about Shermer's conversation with Douglas Murray, which Contains all the stuff about Israel and the war, and that starts around about one hour, 31 minutes.
And these time signatures are in the podcast description, too.
So hopefully, this will help.
And with this little introduction over, it's into the cold open, which isn't really a cold open now, but just pretend.
Riffing now on my previous commentary on Renee Good, you know, it's a really risky thing to do that.
Yes, they have a right to protest.
But according to the federal government and the Department of Homeland Security, the ICE agents have a right to be there to perform their actions of deporting illegal aliens.
Nuance Between Activist Classes00:03:28
Yeah, yeah.
And according to the Reich's chancellery, the SS had a right to be there in the streets, dragging you out of your homes and putting you on the cattle trucks.
Yeah, that was all legal.
Both sides.
It's both sides.
I'm a rational centrist.
Hello and welcome back to IDSG, the podcast that proves that the humanities and STEM can coexist peacefully or at least converse relatively politely once every few weeks.
Daniel, how's it going over there?
Well, over on the STEM side, I guess that's the implication over on the STEM side of things.
We think of numbers and math, and there's no feelings at all.
And politics is purely a matter of rational actors being acting rationally and doing the math.
And it's all about tweaking the knobs of how.
How society should work because we're all very good liberals here.
That's how it works in STEM land, yes.
Yeah, and there's always two sides to every story.
Yeah, always two sides to every story.
The truth is complicated.
Nuance, the key to the realm is nuance.
If you don't have nuance about things like, you know, murdering innocent civilians in the street, how can we ever find what's right and wrong ultimately?
Yeah, it's funny though how nuance always seems to be called for certain things like, you know, Ice killing people in the streets.
And yet, in other contexts, nuance suddenly becomes this terrible thing.
Like, for instance, the rights of trans people and things like that.
Nuance there suddenly becomes this very dangerous thing that mustn't be allowed.
And we must stick by the literal meaning of every word and the textbook definition from 40 years ago, or we're lost.
Well, no, no, the nuance there is well, look, there's an activist class.
So these are just activists, these are just young people.
You know, they don't really know what they, you know, maybe they're mentally ill, maybe they're doing all the, you know, but these are activists.
That's the word they always use.
See, there's an activist class, and they want to mess things up for the rest of us because we're just rational actors.
What we're saying is, well, these activists, you see, they're asking for radical things like being treated as human beings who believe, who are who they say they are.
This is purely speculation.
This is completely, I mean, you know, some of them are probably okay, but most of the time they're just mentally ill or they're deluded.
They're just young.
They'll grow out of it.
And so we have to find the nuance by understanding that, like, well, What is the role of sports bodies, professional sporting agencies, and college sports agencies in terms of navigating the complexities here?
See, on one side, you've got the absolute transphobes, these terrible people who just want to do violence.
Now, this is a tiny minority, but these are real people.
But we can neither respect their needs or the needs of the trans activists, the trantifa types.
We've got to find the nuanced middle between them.
See?
I can make a career doing this.
Do you understand?
I'm going to shave my beard and change my name and use a voice modulator.
I'm going to be the next one of these.
I will make so much fucking money.
It will not.
Anyway.
Finding the Middle Ground00:10:21
So, obviously, the thing to do is if somebody's in a congressional hearing and somebody is asked, can men get pregnant by some Republican fuckboy?
And they give an answer that you don't like, an answer that seems a little bit too nuanced.
For instance, the thing is to take to Twitter and explain to everybody about no, no, that's wrong, and then commission 48 more articles for Skeptic Magazine about how wokeness poisons science and things like that.
And the free press and the free press and Colette and all these, all these, you know, very rational, citrus organizations, very strict down the middle organizations.
Anyway, we need to get off this or else we're just going to keep riffing on this for hours because you and I can do this forever.
I was actually referring to the subject of our episode today, which is famous slime ball.
And so, I mean, skeptic, sorry.
Michael Shermer.
Yes.
And I promise you, audience, I promise you, I meant for this to be a fun one.
I meant, I literally messaged.
I think I couldn't figure out.
I was working on one episode.
I was kind of working on some stuff.
And we were just going to do a bonus.
We were going to read a book or whatever.
And I was like, I heard Michael Shermer with this bullshit flim flam artist.
And I was like, hey, when I just mock Michael Shermer for an hour and a half and like 10 minutes, usually it's like, you know, we're out of sync on times.
I think Jack saw that message and was like, yes, please, let's do it.
And then now, like three weeks later, when I finally, like, because, and then.
Once I started doing the due diligence of the episodes, like, I can't, I have to, we have to, this has to, this has to be much darker.
We'll do the fun Michael Sherman one in a couple of weeks, maybe, maybe a week from now.
I don't know.
We'll, we'll figure it out.
We want to do, I still want to do the fun one because, you know, I fucking deserve it after doing this one, but, um, you know, not that, not that I'm the biggest victim of this, but, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
Daniel is cursed with the, with the perfectionist gene, I'm afraid, uh, to, to be a bit, uh, biologically reductionist about it.
He's got, we'll get to that too.
No, anyway.
I, well, again, again, I'm, I'm foreshadowing Daniel.
You don't give me enough credit for my, for my pod craft.
I'm also doing it.
I'm just doing it from the.
I'm the asshole.
Anyway, continue.
Oh, I know.
Yes, we all know.
We all know that the asshole is here.
No, please, please continue.
So, yeah, Michael Shermer.
I mean, should we start with a little intro on who he is?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, I was going to kind of.
So, we are going to be talking to Michael Shermer today.
He is the author of a number of books, including.
I mean, I don't know.
I think you and I both read it in our 20s.
And I think I, you know, I.
I quite liked it at the time.
I think it's generally well regarded even today.
At least it has less of the bullshit that you get with Michael Shermer as he gets older and dumber.
Or, you know, I don't know, maybe you go back and reread it and you find the nonsense in it.
You know, who knows?
But I haven't reread it in 20, 25 years almost.
So, yeah, that book is Why Smart People Believe Weird Things.
And it's kind of considered to be one of the sort of classics of rational skepticism and, you know, sort of that kind of social movement, you know, kind of the.
anti religious, you know, secularist, you know, like understanding why we believe things and understanding, you know, arguments against pseudoscience and et cetera, et cetera.
So I don't know.
That's kind of a potted history.
I know quite a lot about Michael Shermer as it happens.
And so I was wondering, you know, kind of what you know and kind of where, where, how you want to get started.
Sure.
I did read Why People Believe Weird Things back in the day.
And I remember quite liking it mostly, although that, you know, there were some moments that made me, Stop and sort of make the huh face, which we might talk about.
I perhaps wasn't as impressed with it as I might have been because I had by that point already read Carl Sagan's book, The Demon Haunted World.
So when I read Why People Believe Weird Things, it did feel a bit like, oh, this again, but not as good.
And I mean, just to compare a little bit with Michael Shermer then and Michael Shermer now, and I'm sure he was just as much of an asshole in his.
Private life, and certainly with his fundamental politics, then as he has become.
But there's a video where he is promoting his latest book, which is the old book is called Why People Believe Weird Things, okay, which is a good, fun, pithy title.
His latest book is called Truth.
That's what it's called.
It's called Truth.
And it's got this shaft of light on the cover, and it's got the word.
Truth in big letters.
And he's promoting it on his Twitter and he's holding it up to the camera.
And incidentally, there's a framed photograph of Isaac Asimov behind him, just parenthetically, which is kind of appropriate in multiple ways.
Well, appropriate and inappropriate for that matter, but we'll get there.
But as he's doing this, he's doing this complete with a tweet underneath where he says, This is from 27th January this year.
Alex Pretty shooting.
Why scrutinizing frame by frame video misses something essential about how humans behave under stress and fear?
Responding to comments about my comments.
How should we think about personal responsibility and judgment in moments like this?
So you can see what he's doing.
He's, he's, he wants, I mean, surely, the murder which happened on camera out of existence.
Surely, he's suggesting that the police officer who shot him, um, that that man, you know, really should have been had at least better training or should have had the more skeptical ideas about like, well, we've already disarmed this guy.
So, like, clearly he's not a threat.
And, you know, like, like, clearly the, the, the complaint is that the police officers who, you know, committed the murder. Need to consider their actions a little bit more before they out-murder a man, not an unmanned man.
Clearly, that's where he was going, right?
Yeah, do you know what?
I don't think it is.
I think he's trying to justify the murder that happened on camera by a bunch of fucking brownshirt, jack-booted thugs who murdered a peaceful protester.
I think that's what he's doing by suggesting that there's something more complex to it than we can plainly see with our own fucking eyes while brandishing a book that he wrote that's called Truth.
Yes, indeed.
And I think this does kind of refer back to that old book in a way, because the thing that made me put it down and go, huh, was the fact that in the middle of this quite good book about skepticism and not believing in UFOs and why Holocaust deniers are wrong, et cetera, et cetera, you suddenly get a bit where he starts talking about how great Ayn Rand was.
Although he recognizes that she did become a cult leader and she was a bit funny, but he still believes, and I quote, I still believe in her philosophy of capitalism.
Yes.
In a book called Why People Believe Weird Things.
You know, I mean, capitalism is just, it's just the nature of the, capitalism is just, it just, it derives from fundamental features of the universe itself.
And therefore, that's what he thinks.
That is exactly what all these people think.
It is, it is one of those things.
It was something that, like, you know, I kind of bought that bullshit for longer than I should have.
And it was really not until, you know, like, really I was engaging with you and people like you that, like, oh no, we could, we can question that.
In fact, I immediately rejected it because it's fucking stupid.
But it is incredibly common, particularly over here in the United States and in, you know, kind of US, Canada, et cetera.
Capitalism is just the way the world works, you know.
Like, yeah.
Absolutely.
But there is capitalism, and then there's that view of capitalism, and then there's Ayn Rand's view of capitalism.
Well, true.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, I think, yeah, no.
The funny thing is, I would love to sit here and talk to you about this, but we're avoiding what we have to talk about because, you know, usually, usually, The way we do this is we start with something light, you know, and then we go to something fucked up, and then something a little more fucked up, and then we do the dark stuff at the end.
And there's really no way not to do this when we talk about Michael Shermer.
And in fact, I think maybe we've, you know, we've been avoiding it a little bit too long.
Michael Shermer was credibly accused of sexual assault back in 2013.
The event happened in 2008.
This was a young woman who was a, she has come out, she has named herself.
I'm not going to name her on this podcast, but, you know, it's just, She's easily Googleable if you choose to.
She's been identified since, yeah.
Yeah, she has come out since.
She has identified herself since.
She's given interviews about it.
So, you know, it's not a matter of like, oh, she was doxxed.
I mean, I think, you know, we would be within our rights to name her.
I'm choosing not to.
So, you know, just to be clear.
Because ultimately, it's not, I mean, it both is and is not about her because the allegation, and, you know, Sherbert in some ways doesn't even really dispute this, is that, you know, like they were at a conference, they were at the amazing meeting, one of the many kind of atheist conferences around this time period.
This sort of event took place in 2008.
The amazing meeting.
I always thought that sounded like a superhero conference.
Well, it's because it's for the amazing Randy.
James Randy was the person who organized it.
And so he got at the amazing meeting after.
I mean, there was a tongue in cheek element to all this.
It was supposed to be kind of fun and silly.
It was supposed to be, you know, like.
There was a moment, there was a hot minute back there where skeptics did seem to be able to do that.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, it's one of those things.
I don't know.
We'll talk about this here more in a minute.
But I want to get into this.
At one of these meetings, I don't remember exactly what meeting it is.
I did.
Include a bunch of links.
I included a couple of YouTube videos that Rebecca Watson produced recently, kind of talking about some of this stuff, and particularly kind of like things about the Epstein files.
And we'll kind of get into that a little bit here momentarily.
But the story is in kind of the version of events that I believe.
And of course, we're beyond the scope of limitations on this.
There's no criminal case that can be made.
The PZ Myers Blog Incident00:15:43
It was too late even when she came out in 2013 and revealed to the blogger PZ Myers, so the Farigula blog, who was.
One of the biggest names in organized skepticism, organized atheism at that time.
He was the big guy on the Mount Rushmore of atheism at that time.
He was one of them in that kind of blogosphere era.
Maybe more in the kind of 2008 than 2013, but still he was a big figure.
And came up and basically emailed him and said, look, back in 2008, I was at this thing with Michael Shermer.
Approached him.
I was interested.
And I mean, you know, there was kind of a culture of, you know, it's a convention and, you know, we're all open skeptics.
And, you know, sometimes people like to hook up, you know, and, and, you know, at the time it's kind of like, oh, this is, you know, this is ordinary behavior.
You know, it's something that, you know, we're not fuddy ditties about this.
We're not like really, you know, the whole point is to be open minded about like people choosing to do things with their bodies and having full consent and everything.
And so she was like, yes, that's, that's the key, isn't it?
That, that, that last clause.
Yes, yes.
Well, you know, We'll get to that in a moment.
But I do want to describe this particular incident.
Not in scrutiny.
I mean, we don't have excruciating detail, but in enough detail to kind of.
She approached him and she was interested.
She was flirting with him.
He flirted back.
At some point, they were at the bar.
They were drinking drinks.
Apparently, he was buying her drinks, buying himself a drink, and then disposing of his drink without actually drinking it.
And so she drank many more alcoholic drinks than he did.
And then he gets her into his hotel room, and one thing leads to another.
She wakes up the next morning with.
Vague memories of what had happened, knowing that they had had sex and not feeling like she had meaningfully consented to that act because, you know, she was too drunk to meaningfully consent.
And this was, you know, Shermer would have been probably about 40 at this time.
I didn't look up his exact age, but he's, you know, he's a functioning adult.
I don't know how old the woman was, but, you know, you hear from, you know, stories around this time, especially like as things have kind of moved on, that Shermer was well known for hitting on young women, particularly women who are 20 years younger than him.
It was just a thing.
He was a star and he was an author.
And, you know, look.
People like to fuck the star.
I get it.
But if that's true, you don't have to functionally drug a young person until they cannot meaningfully consent to you if you can kind of get it on your own anyway.
And also, he admits that he did this, that he was serving her drinks and then not drinking his own.
Like he was disposing of it in a houseplant or whatever.
I mean, he admits that he does this.
This is not like, oh, we only have this from second.
He denies that it was sexual assault.
He denies that it was in any way kind of unwanted.
I don't know what language he uses.
He's admitting it at the same time.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
And, you know, this was, I mean, again, he will always say, well, this is an adult woman and it's all these things.
I think this is, I mean, the very best version of this is this is.
Pretty representable behavior.
I mean, this is just disgusting.
And not because I think people should have the right to have sex if they want to, but if they want to, and if they are meaningfully consenting.
The fact that he's not drinking his drinks and feeding her more drinks is just the crux of it.
It's like if they both just got really wasted, maybe there's an argument there.
I don't think there's even an argument there, you know, but maybe.
But like the fact that he's not drinking his and he admits that he did that.
And also, you do this once, you did this a bunch of times.
There's just, I mean, it's just one of those things.
We just know that this is how this works.
And so, to my knowledge, there has not been another person who has kind of come out with this particular allegation, but he was well known to be a womanizer.
I have no doubt that, like, if we had, you know, if we had a record of the time that we had, you know, a lot of people would have stories similar to this of like, you know, he kind of put me in a situation where I couldn't say no, regardless of whether I legally could be called certain words is another question.
But even if it was just that one incident, and we have no reason to think it was just that one incident, that's pretty fucking damning.
Like, that's the sort of thing, you know.
Yeah, that is intentionally really, really, really terrible behavior.
And the only reason I'm not using more aggressive language is because Shermer is pretty litigious.
And so I'm trying to stay away from legally actionable words, shall we say, that I would otherwise very openly use.
Well, yeah, we should make it clear then that these are allegations.
Yes.
These are publicly available allegations.
You can Google this and you will find a whole lot of this kind of stuff.
This is kind of the one that seems to be the most substantiated.
But there was a rumor mill going around this guy for years and years and years, and um, no doubt, um, no doubt there's a whole lot of stuff that we just never even heard.
Also, in the in the in the so in 2013, nothing really, I mean, it kind of um, it caused some consternation, and like I think he got kind of slowly kind of disinvited to a certain number of gatherings and kind of you know they kind of kept it on the on the on down low for a while, and it really wasn't until me too hit in kind of 2017 2018 that you know everything kind of resurfaces.
I mean, uh, PZ Myers to his credit, like published it, he said, um.
I think the exact blog post, and I put it in the show notes so you can go read it.
But PC Myers put it as somebody handed me a hand grenade, like worse to that effect.
And then the end of the blog post is, and there's the hand grenade I've been, and then I pull the pen and boom.
And then, because Michael Sherman was this highly respected guy, and PC Myers, for any, I think he regrets not being even more aggressive about it now.
He's made some statements.
He's like, I really should have been even better about this than I was.
Openly, as he just kind of said, Yeah, no, fuck this guy.
You know, I'm, you know, it's kind of hard for me to criticize him too far.
And that's not, he's a dude and therefore, you know, he gets credit.
But, you know, there is a sense in which I think PZ Myers did largely the right thing.
And maybe I'm not hearing the whole story.
I was not deeply involved in that kind of fan culture, con culture at the time.
So, and I'm not today.
So, you know, I don't know.
But there is that blog post.
You can go read it.
And I think it is very worth your while to read.
Anyway.
So in 2018, he got, when Me Too happened, people kind of dug up these allegations and these revelations.
And, you know, at this point, it's 10 years past the actual, you know, the kind of incident that is the hand grenade.
And this young woman had been public for several years at this point.
And suddenly it's like, oh, no, we actually need to, like, not invite Shermer to things.
We need to stop paying him to, like, you know, head on our events.
Maybe we should act on this.
Maybe we should actually, you know, give him the slightest amount of shunning.
Now, he's still the editor at large of Skeptic Magazine, he does his podcasts.
He makes millions of dollars a year, presumably.
He writes books that people buy.
And that's just, that's Michael Schirmer.
He suffered the mildest of flu.
He didn't suffer as much as Dave Chappelle suffered for this.
He didn't suffer as much as, I mean, he lost a couple of speaking gigs for like a year.
He wasn't available.
And so people criticized him harshly online.
But he has barely suffered at all financially.
And he has still.
Highly respected in this world.
He gets tons of very important people on his podcast to talk about things.
We will listen to some of them today.
So, I was originally going to produce this episode because he had a member of Doge, a former member of Doge, appear on his podcast.
And they just got into the most batshit stuff.
It was the funniest.
I was literally sitting there and I was doing my boring day job.
I'm listening to this and I'm just like, I've got to show.
If nothing else, Jack has to hear this.
This is bizarre.
And then I was like, can we do just the fun Michael Schreiber episode?
And I thought, well, we'll do a little bit of them.
And we'll say, like, yes, he's been accused of this and he's a disgusting guy.
And also, let's do the fun stuff.
And then I started thinking about it.
I was like, no, because what happened two weeks later was he had an actual self described.
She writes a book on gaslighting.
She's a psychologist, or she's written papers in psychology.
Her background is more in, I don't know, it's complicated.
But it's this woman, and I've got her name in front of me.
It is Jennifer Fraser.
She has written a number of books, including The Bullied Brain.
Yes.
I've heard of her.
Yeah.
The Bullied Brain and the Gaslit Brain.
The Gaslit Brain.
And this is a podcast to promote the Gaslit Brain.
We're not here to criticize Jennifer Fraser here.
In fact, I have a lot of feelings about her.
I think the only way I can interpret this is she either does not know this story, she does not know anything about this background.
Because she comes out of this.
Well, hopefully, somebody send her this podcast episode.
Not, um, and this is not the way she should find out about it, just to be clear, but you know, um, uh, you know, um, Shermer just like is still friends with like Steven Pinker, he's still friends with all these guys in the FC.
He did it, that's no surprise.
Steven Pinker's a slime ball as well, so it was a really good thing.
The thing is that like, um, Shermer did a so he does like these, like Shermer says, uh, like like kind of bonus episodes like in his feed that are just him talking for like 20, 15, 20 minutes about like kind of.
The news of the day, or what's on his mind, and um, it's like, yeah, I'm gonna go through all the like the six things where I'm in the Epstein files, and it's really like he was somebody's trying to get him to go to a conference.
And like, apparently, he has no real connection to Epstein beyond like he's friends with a lot of people who are deeply involved with Epstein.
I see no evidence that he was like ever interested in underage girls or that he ever went to the island or anything of that nature, you know.
Like, you know, I mean, to be clear, better than Jeffrey Epstein is not like a ringing endorsement here, you know, it's not, yeah, the bar is very low here, isn't it?
And I know I'm gonna, I'm gonna, actually, I'm gonna save that.
I'm gonna save that because we got to get into our clips here.
But so, what we learn, what I learned pulling clips and kind of like prepping for this, like this afternoon, this morning and this afternoon, was Shermer does not talk much on his podcast.
And so, mostly what you're going to hear today is people talking to Shermer and Shermer kind of nodding and adding like a few words here and there and a few sentences.
To be clear, he's talking.
And what kind of lazy hack just sits there while somebody else talks?
Honestly, people like that disgust me.
I promise you, you're right.
You ever run much more, many more words, much more percentage of talking comes from you than Shermer does on his podcast typically.
Also, you push back on me, even though we kind of prep together and I kind of tell you what we're doing.
You do add things and add perspective.
And Shermer is just a sponge.
He is just like, you know, of course, he never, I don't know, we'll get into this.
But I mean, I didn't realize until I was listening to it again today, like looking for clips of Shermer talking.
And he just doesn't talk much.
He's really just like, he just asked like very basic, simple questions, like very, you know, General skeptic questions of, you know, and then like let's let these people talk.
And so he lets Jennifer Fraser talk.
And I think what's fascinating to me here is she's describing what was happening at these atheist conferences, at these skeptic conferences back in 2008.
She's describing the exact procedure for how this stuff happens.
And Shermer just lets her talk and gives her, like, there's no pushback.
There's no, I was expecting it to be some, like, well, yeah, but these guys don't mean to do this.
Or like, Fraser herself was a victim of sexual assault when she was very young, starting when she was 13.
And she describes that story.
I mean, we're going to start with her kind of telling some of that story.
And so, you know, if this is not for you, you know, this is not for you.
I mean, the two things we're really going to talk about today are like gaslighting and sexual assault and Israel committing war crimes.
Those are the two topics today.
And so I imagine there are a whole lot of people who just do not want to listen to any of this.
We are against both of these things very, very strongly.
Michael Shermer, less so.
We'll just go it that way.
And if that's all you need for this episode, please feel free to leave with my condolences and.
Thank you for listening this far.
We are about to get into this, and there is no need to get into this.
This starts, by the way, this is like the very beginning.
The bit that I'm about to play you starts about five minutes into Shermer's podcast episode with her.
And I put all these links, all the links to these podcasts will be in the show notes so you can go listen to the full thing just to verify I've not taken this dramatically out of context.
But it has driven my work ever since university.
And even my, I wrote an honors paper, it was like a MIDI kind of dissertation.
That you wrote to get an honors degree in English.
And I wrote all about abuse in Shakespeare.
So it was always on my mind, but I wasn't aware of it.
Oh, interesting.
In Shakespeare.
Okay, I didn't know that.
I don't know my Shakespeare that well, I guess.
But that makes sense.
He covers pretty much everything about the human condition.
How old were you when this happened to you?
The Grumman started in my science class at 13.
And then.
Comments about Shakespeare there?
Don't mind me.
I did include this clip particularly because it's like, you know, I wrote a paper about abuse in Shakespeare, and she'll be going, like, whoa, I, you know, I can't imagine that being a topic of interest.
Although Shakespeare wrote about everything, right?
Like, I thought, oh, maybe Jack might have some insight there to share with the audience.
Sounds interesting.
I wonder if that's published or, you know, one person.
Oh, she would have written this when she was like 15, 16 years old.
This is like a teenage work.
Yeah, this is, you know, She's talking about being abused when she was young, and she's still at the school, and they're kind of in the midst of the abuse.
She's like writing about this topic without really understanding that she's actually being a victim of this abuse, you know?
And like, you know, that she wrote this honors thesis is kind of like it's something that's kind of in her brain because she's interested in this topic because she suffered it.
And this is a very, very common thing.
I mean, I have dated particularly young women who are victims of abuse at a young age who never really realized it until years later, you know, sort of thing.
And it's, it's, it's, you know, obviously I'm not giving details.
It's not my details to give.
But it is something that, like, if you are, you know, If you are a decent human being who is able to listen to these things and care about the people that you are in intimate relationships with, you do find this is not as uncommon as people like to pretend it is.
And it progressively got worse and worse and worse until they were full on having intercourse, these teachers with teenagers.
Sorry, hang on.
What?
Sorry, I cut into this because she's telling this whole story of it's not just.
One teacher, it's not just one student.
There's a whole network of teachers around her who are grooming and abusing multiple students over years.
This is like a secondary school?
This would be a public high school.
I believe it's a public high school in the US.
Yeah.
So this would be 13, 14, 15.
Maybe sexual abuse is more like 15, 16, 17 kind of thing.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
This is not where I thought this was going.
Oh, yeah.
No.
Well, the point is that.
Examining Cycles of Abuse00:03:49
What Shermer is going to come to is, well, that's really bad because those are very young girls and there are people in positions of power who are allowing this and, in fact, and they're gaslighting these young girls to believe these things.
And he's never in a million years, never, never, never once during this whole conversation does he ever say, yeah, you know, there are some people around me back in, you know, when I was doing this, when I was in these like atheist conventions who were engaging in some of this behavior, maybe not with young women, but with older women, you know, like there's never, there's never, It's always like because it's almost like because her stories are so lurid and they get in, she does focus on some fairly lurid stories.
It is like there's like a distancing effect where he doesn't have to get invested in understanding like kind of the role of more ordinary people in these kind of cycles of behavior, despite the fact that she calls out over and over again that this does happen in, you know, in less extreme versions by focusing on the more extreme stuff.
You're almost like allowing absolution for the less extreme, for that kind of stuff.
And I think this is something I was going to get into this earlier.
I think this is that they didn't, I didn't, they talk a lot about Epstein.
They took 30 minutes talking about like Epstein and Keith Renarian, kind of more like overt, like cult stuff, right?
And that's all what I think a lot of the book is about is kind of examining that.
And I think there's some stuff where like, you know, like talking about like, well, it's like these certain kinds of brains are just like the images, you know, they don't feel empathy where other people feel empathy.
And I don't really.
I'd have to read the book and kind of go into the research to kind of know how I feel about that.
I really distrust a lot of that unless you have actually like examined the particular brains in question.
And she admits that they don't have brain scans of like, you know, Gillian Maxwell, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's one of those things of, yeah, that it's also like it's very convenient for Shermer to have like a physical, you know, there's this, you know, there's a biological explanation, you see.
It's not socialized.
It's not something that's like just endemic to our culture because of misogyny and because of patriarchy, et cetera, et cetera.
It's just, It's a thing that just comes in there, just these people's brain, and these people are just messed up.
These people are fucked up, and we need to define these people and make sure that they can't, you know, do the terrible things to that small number of people that they're able to do these things to.
And not, and of course, not indict a certain, like, manner of behavior, and not, like, set up rules that, like, make these things more difficult, or not, like, listen to the lesser people in our society who might be victims of these things.
See, we don't, we shouldn't do all that.
We should just, you know, understand this is, like, it's fundamentally something wrong with the brain.
There are these people, there are certain people in our society who just, they're just fucked up, you see.
And if they're just fucked up, then, um, We can just challenge that.
We can medicalize this whole situation and not have to look at our own behavior and not have to look at the things that we have done in our own society to let this happen.
See, that's kind of the angle that you kind of get the sense of where Shermer wants to take it.
Although he doesn't, again, he barely talks and the whole bunch of this, but he keeps bringing it back to Epstein and Ranieri and kind of like the extreme examples.
And he keeps kind of going to this kind of area instead of kind of, you know, what I think is a more, you know, A more holistic idea of like, well, this stuff seems endemic to society.
And it seems like that's what her book is largely about as well.
Like, her book does kind of talk about brain scans and stuff.
But I don't think, again, I have not read the book.
I should probably read the book at some point, or one of us should read the book and kind of get into it.
But, you know, it seemed less interesting to me to read the book than it is to listen to Shermer not respond to this and not talk about this in detail, you know, because he does just listen to it and he never asks a really compelling question.
Complicity in Sexual Abuse00:15:06
She's coming at me and being like, Yeah, and there are all these people that are these victims of sexual abuse, and they have the abusers kind of going out the thing.
And no one ever mentions that Shermer might actually have a little bit of at least some complicity in some of this, regardless.
Even the best version that makes Shermer out to look the absolute best he can look, he knew a whole bunch of people who were committing a whole lot of sex crimes.
That's just true.
But then I suppose he wouldn't relate that to himself.
He probably doesn't see himself that way.
I think that's really, I think that was kind of where I'm getting to.
I don't know.
Shermer, I think if you got him in a place where he had to answer honestly, you know, if you really like, you know, like, let's say, let's just say I was sitting in a bar with him and I was like feeding him drinks and then not drinking my own and just asking him questions, you know.
He might consider that kind of trick.
And imagine I had a microphone in front of me and like a hidden microphone.
And like he might consider that a violation of his privacy if I made those comments.
He probably would.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Imagine somebody doing terrible things to poor Michael Shermer.
You know.
It's funny.
They literally got him into a state of mind where he couldn't.
He probably would absolutely consider that a violation of.
And all the people out there who are like, ah, well, she was asking for it.
Absolutely.
Well, he showed up to.
He drank the drinks by himself.
He was very happily sitting down with Janiel.
He was grinding those and having some of that whiskey.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
My God.
That's what he was waiting for.
I just stumbled into that.
I like that.
I like that.
Yeah, no.
Sorry.
15, 16.
I walked away from the program at 17.
And I really just simply had no vocabulary for what had happened.
I would never have called myself an abuse victim.
As an adult, I reported to police.
And the police called me two months later and said, Yeah, we have 50 victim statements against two of the teachers because one of the teachers had.
Imagine the scale of that.
Imagine the scale of that.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Being charged and convicted and did time.
The other two hadn't.
And so they said, oh, yes, we've got 50 victim statements about these two teachers and we're not going to press charges.
Gee, gee, I wonder why.
I wonder why.
Wow.
Yeah.
I was like, okay.
What?
Why?
Because.
The surprise.
The surprise.
They don't press charges against people who may have committed sexual assault.
Jeez.
I am shocked.
Just imagine like the Victorian old lady, you know, like the smelling salts, you know.
That sounds like the sort of wacky scenario that a woke stir or a feminist might, you know, and I wouldn't, of course, I won't let the fact that I've encountered it actually happening in the real world.
Change my opinion of such people, I'll just carry on as before.
Absolutely, absolutely, that's how the legal system works.
It's unbelievable.
I mean, when people are reading about the Epstein files right now, they you know have all of these beliefs and they're sort of surprised how come people aren't being charged and like where is the law?
Where was the FBI?
What, why wasn't it investigated?
And it's exactly the kind of thing that I think you and I both write about, which is that I think one of you writes about this.
I don't think you have this.
I mean, I think she's going off his general sense of, oh, well, you're a skeptic.
And so, of course, you're interested in the ways that we fool ourselves and the way that, you know, and it's like, and of course, it has to be, it can't be like society at large just sort of accepts certain kind of behavior.
Like, there are structures in place that make certain things possible.
It has to be like a pure cognitive habit, like a mistake in the brain.
And this is the way both of them are going to approach this for the rest of the podcast episode.
It's like, there's just something in the brain.
There's something that we need to find like cognitive tricks to get us out of these things.
And, A lot of the advice that she gives is actually not bad.
I mean, I actually agree with a lot of it, you know, but without looking at that like more systemic picture, without looking at that more, you know, here's how you cannot be victimized.
It is like, it is, it is, again, this is a very dark metaphor, you know, it is very much like, well, you just shouldn't have worn that and gone down walking down the dark alley.
It's that kind of advice, you know, like, you know, regardless of whether that's true, maybe we should make the dark alleys not dangerous to walk down dressed certain ways.
Maybe that's the way we should be handling these problems.
But of course, that requires a systematic approach.
And, um, yeah.
Yeah.
In fairness, she is talking about the systemic problem of how the legal system works.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
No, no.
I mean, she's doing better than a lot of people.
She is.
She is.
Again, I am not criticizing her.
Like, this is really, I would like to make these kinds of things not possible to exist as opposed to like warning people of like how to make it happen to them.
You know, that's kind of why I land on it.
Yeah.
Truth is in the hands of those who have power often, and they tell us what's real.
And what's to be pursued for, and what's not, and what to believe.
It's really critical training for the 21st century, I'd say.
That's pretty good.
Absolutely.
No, no, no, absolutely.
I mean, a lot of this I really like, I quibble with certain elements of it.
That's all I'm going to say.
I question certain, like, I want to see more about some of this and a little bit more of a holistic view of it.
But as far as she goes, again, I have, you know, we are not criticizing Fraser here.
This is not criticizing her.
This is, she's telling this.
To Michael Shermer, and Michael Shermer has no response.
Michael Shermer has no response.
He's just sitting there like a lemon.
He's sitting there just like, you know.
Oh, interesting.
What, they didn't prosecute them?
Oh, gee, I wonder why.
That seems odd.
Man, how does that happen?
Why wouldn't they prosecute?
It seems very silly to me.
I can't explain it.
Starting the next clip, this starts about two minutes later.
So we skipped over a little bit of Epstein kind of talk and a little bit of stuff.
We're just kind of skipping around a little bit just to kind of find like it kind of just to give you a sense of kind of the full conversation without playing literally 20 minutes of it.
So, um, you have to have four key components one is humiliation, the other is this is like how this kind of gasoline how you get people to uh to accept their victimization without knowing they're victims.
Um, this is kind of what she's talking about here.
Okay, on a psychological level, other is fear when you're a teenager and your teachers are telling you you're stupid.
You're full of fear because this is a comment on your not just your present but of your future.
They open and close doors for you in terms of getting into university.
So, people in position of power can exert that power over you in psychological ways.
Michael Shermer, do you have any comments on this?
For me, being called stupid was like a disaster.
My teachers, they're the people empowered and given the credibility and professional standing to tell me my value, and they think I'm stupid.
So, humiliation, fear.
Retaliation.
So I was retaliated against because I would not sexually engage with them.
And yes, they were sexually engaging with girls, my friends.
And that's a whole other story.
And then the other key component that many people forget about abuse culture is favoritism.
So if you slept with these teachers when you were 16, you were a favorite.
If you didn't, you were targeted for bullying.
So, you know, teenagers make horses.
That's a real thing.
Gee, it's almost like rape culture is a real thing.
Yes, absolutely.
I don't know how Michael Shermer would feel about that, but it sounds to me like she's talking about aspects of that.
Yeah.
And that's other things, obviously.
No, no, no, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
Really tough choice for a teenager.
Do I want to be humiliated in front of my peers when actually adolescent brain development is driving me to get peer approval?
Or do I want to do what the teacher tells me?
I've been told since kindergarten do what the teacher tells, obey the teacher, follow the teacher, respect the teacher.
I think I better do what the teacher says.
Oh, have sex with them?
Okay.
Indoctrination into systems of power.
Yep, absolutely.
And, you know, again, I wanted there to be at least some Shermer comment, but he's really just, he's listening to this and he has, he doesn't, I mean, I guess it's okay that he doesn't interject, but he's not, there's no conversation.
So I don't even want him to push back.
I just want him to, I want him to respond to this in some way.
The fact that he's not talking about the allegations against him, the fact that he's not saying, I mean, I, It's almost like I would like, I expected him when I got into this podcast episode, when I started listening to this, I expected him to come back and say, Oh, well, you know, I was actually, you know, I was actually accused of this, or there are people in my orbit who were accused of this, and this is why what I experienced was wrong, and it's not in Fitcher model.
I expected him to do like that, you know, and the fact that he doesn't even respond that way, I think is fascinating.
I mean, presumably, presumably, he was contacted by a booker, by an agent, by somebody who told him what she was going to talk about.
He agreed to put this person on his podcast.
I mean, you know, it's, I mean, I'm not saying that I expect that.
I would, I expect something.
I expect some reference to it.
And the fact that it's just not there at all is fascinating.
The fact that he's just, I mean, what it tells me, what it tells me is he doesn't think that what he did is of a kind of this.
What it tells me is he doesn't see himself in these words.
He's still, he has no need to respond to this because what I did, what I, I have always engaged in all the utmost respectable matters with every sexual encounter I've ever had.
And there is no sense in which I, in the positions of power that I was in, and the people that I slept with who wanted to sleep with me because I was the big guy.
Who could get them a career in publishing or could retweet them or whatever?
There was no sense in which that had any impact on the people who chose to sleep with me over the years.
And therefore, everything that I've done is completely on board.
They just gave themselves to me of their own volition.
And they were all adults.
And so, therefore, it's fine.
Despite the fact that they were routinely 20 years younger than me or more.
That's just the nature of the business.
That's the only logic I can imagine.
It's part of the psychology of abusers that they don't see themselves as abusers, isn't it?
They talk themselves into believing.
That's what they're doing is not abusing people.
Bullies do that.
All right.
This is the next clip.
And this is where they kind of talk about Me Too a little bit.
I assume some of them said no and others acquiesced and others didn't know what to do.
And I mean, it must have been a wide spectrum of responses.
Obviously, this is pre Me Too movement.
I mean, why didn't any.
The one, the one, wonderful reference to Me Too in this entire transcript is right there.
And okay, we've mentioned it.
He knows it exists.
We know it exists.
This is the thing.
Okay.
I love the idea that Me Too meant that suddenly victims of sexual abuse were just suddenly, oh, suddenly they all knew, well, Me Too, I can Me Too this guy that's doing this to me.
That's all right then.
That seems to be the assumption, doesn't it?
Like Me Too came along and suddenly victims had recourse.
Right, yeah.
And suddenly, most of the Me Too women were scorned and ridiculed and rejected and told they were lying and didn't get any justice.
And then, you know, immediately it started as they've documented on If Books Could Kill, you know, immediately Me Too started.
The main discourse became Me Too Has Gone Too Frown.
Me Too Has Gone Too Frown, which is, I mean, this is total, I mean, God, I'd have to find.
It's just, I was looking for Me Too, and he barely, even when he references it, it's like barely, like, I couldn't find a specific episode in which he really went into Me Too.
It's always like, well, we'll get to that.
We'll get to that.
We'll get to that.
Gary Weiss's wife is here to talk about some of that.
And believe me, the way they talk around these issues is infuriating.
It's like, you know, so much cotton candy drivel is kind of where we're going to get to.
But here we have more of this kind of gaslighting conversation.
This again starts about, you know, 30 seconds a minute later.
Again, we're kind of dipping in and out of this as, you know, we're just kind of cutting a little bit of the fat.
That's kind of what we're doing.
Anybody go to the principal and go, hey, you know what this guy's doing to me?
Yeah, it's not easy.
If you don't have the vocabulary to tell the truth, you can't.
So, we were not taught the words to go to the principal.
We didn't have the words to tell ourselves what was happening.
And again, in the neuroscience, when you look at this, if you don't have the vocabulary from your internal systems to be able to articulate what's happening on a brain level, if you don't have the language, then you can't have the experience.
So, I couldn't have the experience of being physically, emotionally, and sexually abused because I didn't have the language.
I couldn't experience it, let alone tell it to my mom and dad.
And my dad's a lawyer, and my mom is a political backbencher.
Like, I didn't, it would never occur to me to tell my parents because I had no vocabulary.
That's why kids hand it over to be individual.
But you seem to know it was wrong.
I don't think I even had the moral language to say right or wrong.
I knew that what was happening.
Or that it was.
Or that it was creepy, or you know, there's something off about this.
You must have had a sense about that, absolutely.
So, because it's so simple minded, yes, you're talking about her not liking it, of course, she didn't like it.
That's not the same thing as knowing that she was being abused by powerful authority figures that were taking advantage of the.
That's so simplistic.
What she's saying is it makes so much sense.
In order to do something difficult and complicated or scary, you need to be able to envisage yourself doing it.
You need to be able to conceptualize it, and that takes language.
And if these systems of power that put people in a position where they're there to be used and abused, they deliberately withhold.
That kind of language from them so that they can't do that.
Well, I mean, you know, these are new concepts to him.
I mean, well, it's very clear when it's pseudoscience and UFOs and religion and, you know, creationism, you know, that like certain words are just forgotten and certain words get redefined so that you don't get to understand them as clearly as you would otherwise.
But when those words are rape culture and patriarchy and power imbalance and, you know, those sorts of ideas, like those are the kinds of things that, you know, the Michael Sharpers of the world, rather, you just kind of not know too much about.
You know, those are.
Those are the big dangerous words.
Those are the ones that are just going too far, you see.
Gaslighting and Cognitive Hacking00:12:52
We're radical centrist here.
We have to be able to think skeptically about these things.
And if, you know, like, yeah, no, it's all just defense.
I'm reminded of the James Lindsay stuff we did all those years ago of him just rhetorically pulling out the moves of, like, you know, well, we just have to kind of find this needle just a little bit more.
We can't talk about these things as overtly as we would otherwise.
We've really got to make sure it's the conceptual PETA stuff all over again.
You know, it's.
Fascinating.
All right.
All right.
So, one of the things I clipped there, one of the reasons I clipped that was because she says, like, look, I'm, you know, not that it's okay if she had come from poverty or whatever, you know, but she's like, look, my dad had a law degree.
My mom was working in politics.
You know, I was going to a good school.
I think this actually wasn't a public school.
I think it was like some kind of private school.
Anyway, but she's pointing out, like, look, I did not come from poverty.
I was smart.
I was a smart kid.
I was, Targeted in part because I was a smart kid.
It's kind of the story that we get from this.
That is, they liked me because I was smart and they could kind of use me because I was smart enough to know that there were certain things I wasn't supposed to tell people about, et cetera, et cetera.
And then they go into, they start to talk about Epstein and Ranieri and, you know, kind of cult dynamics and, you know, what's the base rate, how many people might be fooled by this.
It's, you know, Shermer Big J.O. motion is kind of where I go on that, you know, because he's clearly trying to deflect from the more systemic issues that she's obviously trying to bring up.
And, um, There's a story in her book, apparently, about a person from your country who ended up with this.
And this is a high level person, like a full grown adult with full on adult responsibilities who is a high up member of a particular organization.
Anyway, we're going to get into this.
But I include this for a particular reason.
And that is a defense that Shermer might, or a Shermer type might have, is, well, look.
These are people preying on literal children and teenagers.
These are people clearly committing sexual assaults of people whose brains are not well developed, et cetera, et cetera.
And this is very different than anything that I have done because, of course, everyone that I interacted with was fully consenting adults, regardless of how many drinks they had and I did, et cetera.
So, you know, this is a possible either cognitive or intellectual or rhetorical move that somebody like this might use, right?
And Fraser has.
She has a response to that without realizing that she has to respond to that.
So I include the story.
I include the story.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
And I think that's a very important question.
Now, I went into writing The Gaslit Brain thinking to myself, you know, one of my questions I was asking is Are people who get gaslit, are they indeed vulnerable?
Are they in the protected class?
Do they have some kind of a, you know, something that makes them, you know, are they uneducated?
Is ignorance?
What is it about them?
I couldn't figure it out.
I ended up writing my four case studies about the top people I could find because I and I wanted to show very specifically yes, vulnerable people will fall for gaslighting.
Certainly, children will, they're the most vulnerable, but so will the very top, smartest, most educated, most advanced in their career people.
So, I chose a British counterterrorism expert who was slated to be the next commissioner of the MAP police in London.
He now we may have particular feelings about his job, but that's not relevant to the conversation.
No, sure.
Yes, okay.
He was gaslit and he had no idea, he didn't know the word, so he couldn't articulate what was happening.
And he was They almost destroyed him.
Like he almost committed suicide.
So I chose him.
He lost his career.
Yeah, tell us that story.
Yeah, go ahead.
That's a good one.
I just love Shermer's response.
He's clearly read the book.
So, you know, he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, tell that story.
That's a good one.
I like it.
Yeah.
It's funny.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you kind of have to hear it to believe it.
So I write about it in depth because it exactly that was my response as well.
What happened was, and it's a really good lesson for all of us.
So what happened to him was he was being bullied.
But again, you know, he's got a law degree.
He's been in the force for 28 years.
He deals with, you know, he reports to MI5 every day in the home office.
Like he's not being bullied.
Bullied is what happens to children, right?
He's, as he said it to himself, I know how to handle dealing with difficult people.
So that's how he handled it.
Now, he got a target on his back, which is frequently the pattern that I saw in my work.
He got a target on his back because he has too much integrity.
When you have integrity matched with smarts, And you call stuff out.
Like when he's right away in this new position, he saw really like suspect stuff going down, hauled it out, big target on his back.
Because the people that want to, the people that are corrupt, that blurred lines, they like to get little benefits in here and there, do their thing, not be held on, you know, pulled out in the carpet, whatever.
They don't like truth tellers.
They don't like skeptics.
They don't like people that ask questions.
They do not like it.
And so they will do everything in their.
I don't know.
I find this fascinating.
I find Shermer's lack of response here to be completely fascinating.
He's sitting there thinking, oh, that sounds like me.
I'm a skeptic.
I don't like me.
It's me being a victim of all those bad women who just wanted to tell me that what I did was wrong.
I'm sure this is exactly the psychological motivation there.
People don't like me because I ask difficult questions.
It's like the Garfield thing.
I wonder who that's for.
Yeah.
So they started to lie to him, these two guys, and they started to say just as just up superiors, they would say things like, Hey, we're hearing from your team that they don't like the way you talk to them.
Well, being a person of integrity who's highly intelligent and very educated, he turns and looks inward.
He goes, What have I done wrong?
Have I been, I don't know, am I under stress?
Am I not using the right tone?
And so he asked the guys, He's like, Well, who is it?
Well, we can't tell you.
Has to be protected for confidentiality.
You know, they don't want you to retaliate.
So again, he's like, What have I done?
So he checks in with his teens, his people.
No, they don't have a problem.
They don't know what he's talking about.
He's always been close to his teams.
He's always had an excellent working relationship.
But he doesn't think, here's my 28 year track record that shows I never have a problem with my teams.
What are these guys doing?
He doesn't do that because he's such a good person that he looks inward.
So, one of the things I say in the gaslit brain is do not look inward.
It's counterintuitive.
That's all supposed to be self aware and self reflect, not when you're dealing with one of these people.
When you're dealing with these people, you laser focus on them and you don't take your eyes off them.
Because they're not at all trustworthy.
They're very, very dangerous.
All right.
Your thoughts on that, Jack?
I have thoughts, but I was going to let you kind of go first here.
This is difficult because I.
She goes into.
There's like five minutes more of this that I just couldn't include in the podcast.
So there is more detail here.
But yeah, please continue.
Please go ahead.
I don't have context.
I don't have details.
I don't know.
I don't actually know what happened or the case or anything.
I don't know.
It sounds a bit squirrely to me.
I mean, how do we know that this person wasn't abusing their subordinate?
How do we know that he was being gaslit and bullied by people above him because he asked awkward questions?
People do abuse their subordinates, and it's perfectly legitimate for subordinates to want to complain to the higher levels about the fact that they're being abused by their boss and want to remain anonymous in case there's retaliation.
That's perfectly.
I don't know.
I don't know the case, so I don't know which way around it.
I don't respond immediately very well to this sort of don't look inward thing.
I think.
No, no, no.
That was definitely something I wanted to talk about.
It's like.
Even if, like, because I know the place she talks about, like, if you think you're being gaslit, like, because the whole thing is, like, the film gaslight.
That's where the term comes from.
Like, the lights are dimming, and, like, you're in some.
Great movie, by the way.
Yeah, yeah, great movie, great movie.
The idea is, like, have some, like, physical thing, like, write down what you think is happening at the time.
Write down what's happening, and then come back to it.
And then when they lie to you and they say, well, no, that's just how you remember it.
It's like, well, no, I have it written down right here.
And so, again, it's like this very idea of, like, you're preparing, you're not wearing the outfit going through the dark.
You know, the dark alleyway.
You know, it's all about like protecting yourself and not like, let's build systems that make this more resilient.
It is very built on that thing.
And this, like, don't look inward at that point.
I mean, she even says, like, looking inward is a very good thing.
But when you're dealing with these people, when you're dealing with these, like, this kind of abusive personality type, what they are going to use this sense of internal regulation, they're going to use this introspection against you.
And that's like your, I think that's what she's going for.
And without looking into the exact case, without kind of knowing the details, taking what she says is kind of broadly true, right?
Just for the moment.
I get where she's going with that, you know.
But of course, she's saying, telling this to Michael Shermer, who if he sees himself as, you know, the put upon the door, of course, the thing that he's going to do.
And so that's why I think, again, I don't want to criticize Fraser here.
I don't have the tools to do that at this moment.
I want to kind of like take this as it lays and kind of go, I think she's broadly the good guy here.
But I think you're right.
I think knowing more about these cases and kind of looking into it might give us a little bit more context of like criticisms we could have.
Taking it as it lays, I think it is weirdly good advice in a way, but also terrible advice.
If, as I believe, Shermer sees himself as the put upon victim and as the person who is being gaslit by all these horrible women around him and by these Me Too people, they've gone too far because this is telling you to hack your cognitive, but it's telling you ways of using your cognition.
To understand the world around you more clearly by understanding where your logical biases are going to be.
But it doesn't tell you about like understanding yourself in a world with other people, understanding solidarity with other people, understanding like that you might have a place, that you might have a vantage point in which you're going to see the world in a fundamentally different way than other people.
And like by understanding everybody's perspective, you can reach a more broadly accurate, you know, point of view.
Yeah.
Even within these like pure like cognitive thought load type problems.
And this is something that like, you know, this is a conversation I think I was in, you know, 20 years ago, basically, people talking about like, you know, it's all about understanding not just what I see, but what you see with your eyes and what that other person sees and getting all those perspectives together.
You know, that's the question of, you know, like, again, very, very basically skeptic stuff that we did 20 years ago, but, you know, forgive me.
It's the, you know, the blind men and the elephant.
You know, I see, I feel this and I feel this and I feel that.
Well, if everybody talks to each other, then you can compare it on this and go, like, oh, it must be some giant animal that has all these features.
And you compare your positions to other people.
That's the way you solve these problems.
Talking to other people and having, you know, but the way you do that is by having like broad understanding of like the people, not just in your little milieu, but in broader pictures around you.
And it's difficult, it's very difficult.
But yeah, I mean, I think, I think, I don't know, I found that element fascinating is that he's even saying, I mean, she's even saying, and he's agreeing that bright, educated, smart people can fall for this, right?
And still, he's not connecting it to like, he's not overtly connecting it to, well, you know, Bright young women can also be, can maybe be victims of sexual assault because I gave them too much to drink, et cetera.
You know, I found that, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Unless he is making that connection internally and he's just thinking, but I got away with it, so yeah, that's that's always the possibility, yeah.
No, um, again, again, I'm I'm kind of I'm kind of granting we're we're playing the tabula rasa here, we're kind of doing a little bit of the oh, well, he wouldn't like that.
He always likens anything that, you know, a social justice worldview or a progressive left worldview to the blank slate theory of the human mind, which is a strong man.
Store Brand vs Real Writer00:02:56
Yeah, no, absolutely.
The veil of ignorance.
That's what we're going to, you know, we're going to build a society.
Final thoughts on the kind of the Fraser bit.
I know we kind of went on that for a little bit.
I think it's interesting, you know.
Very interesting.
Yeah, just the sheer sort of irony of that conversation.
Happening on his podcast, given the allegations and his weird sphinx like silence and apparent obliviousness.
It's kind of, yeah, it's kind of chilling, to be honest with you.
Yeah, no, absolutely agree.
Yeah.
We are now done talking about gaslighting, and to some degree, we're done talking about sexual abuse and Shermer's.
Sexual habits.
Um, although his lack of interest in what his guest is saying, well, now we're going to get into Jack.
Do you know who Nellie Bowles is?
I do not.
No, that's not the lead character of Cabaret, is it?
Well, it may be.
I don't know.
I've never seen Cabaret.
I don't think I remember, but um, no, Liza Minnelli would be a very um welcome addition to this podcast at this point, relative to Barry Weiss's wife.
That's what we're talking about today.
Um, No, no, no.
I'm going to go and watch Cabaret instead.
I'm sorry.
I've had enough of this.
Yes.
Barry Weiss's wife.
Great.
We should do that as an IDST one day.
I think that'd be fun.
So, Nellie Balls is.
She's the only musical I like.
Sorry, go on.
Among certain bits of our audience, I think them fighting words, my friend.
But, you know.
Yeah.
All right.
So, here's trying to distract you from getting into Nellie Bowles.
You're like, come on.
We've done the hard part already.
Oh, don't worry.
This is the fun part in the middle.
This is where we're going.
Because we've got Douglas Murray to contend with at the end.
Oh, dear God.
So, Nellie Bowles, Barry Weiss's wife.
And if you imagine every take that Barry Weiss has, imagine the just slightly slower, just slightly more unhinged version.
That's kind of Nellie Bowles is like the store brand Barry Weiss, is sort of the way I'm trying to describe it.
You know, it's only that's weird because Barry Weiss is already the store brand Barry Weiss.
So I cannot recall a particular moment in which I have seen Nellie Bowles and Barry Weiss have any substantive disagreement on issues.
I'm sure there's something, if you really went and dug into it.
She used to be a writer on our right now.
She writes for the free press, and she appeared.
Oh, that's a coincidence!
Yeah, I imagine.
How did that happen?
She's gonna be doing a CBS radio at some point.
Radical Chic and MLK00:15:49
I'm sure it's gonna be the next step.
No, she does not.
She does not have the skills for that.
Um, anyway, um, so she appeared on Shremer's show a few months ago, and uh, this was I was looking for like a big long discussion about me too.
I didn't get it.
This is.
How do these people talk around me too in this circumstance?
And so, this is in particular, this is Lily Bowles.
And to be clear, Lily Bowles is she's married to a woman.
She's married to Barry Weiss.
I don't know if she describes, I don't know how she defines sexually, but you know, she's in that, you know, we have no beef with that in particular, of course.
But she has certain opinions about who was in the right and who was in the wrong on gay marriage and kind of how that relates to BLM and.
The Me Too movement, George Floyd.
Anyway, we're just going to let these two people blather onto each other for a minute, and we're going to draw a conclusion at the end.
I think there's potential for someone like that to arise who's not a corrupt.
And I hear, just to be clear, it was far enough ahead of this.
They're talking about like a modern day MLK type, which they don't completely understand who MLK was.
But, you know.
So I hate this, who's the modern day MLK discourse, because it's so transparent.
It's like they've decided retrospectively that MLK was.
The good one, despite the fact that you know people like them back then were ripping MLK to shreds, and if you transported them back in time, they'd be doing it too.
But from this vantage point, they've all agreed to say, Oh, he was the good one, he was the one that he was doing politics in the right way.
Yes, so when they say, You know, who's who's who's going to be the new one, what they mean is who's going to be the left winger or the civil rights movement person or whatever who who does it the way we think it should be done, yes, which basically just means not doing it at all.
Doesn't it?
Well, well, well, we're going to learn.
We're going to learn where these people think the best advocates for social change are.
You'll be shocked.
You'll be shocked.
Figure and who just believes in these things.
And I think that would be pretty exciting, pretty interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I don't know.
Do you think there's any of them like that?
No, I've not.
Well, I mean, someone like Ibrahim X. Kendi, I suppose, thinks of himself that way.
I don't think.
Euromess candy is like such a slur word for these guys.
They are just so terrified of.
I mean, I don't know.
I liked Stan from the beginning.
I liked that book a lot.
I would have issues with it, but I think it's a very, like, it is great as far as it goes.
I'm amazed at how, like, they make him the boogeyman.
It's just, it's, it's, he is a very quiet academic.
He is a very normal, normal academic.
It's, it's bizarre, you know.
I like that this someone who just believes as well.
Like, that's all MLK did.
He just believed.
Yeah.
He just believed.
That's it, you know.
He's the right person for that.
Yeah.
But at least trying to lay out an intellectual foundation.
I don't know if he would think that about himself and, You know, I and again, he's not an activist.
I mean, he doesn't do, I mean, Ibrahim does not lead a movement, he does not like, he's not marching on Washington.
I don't know, this is just a different thing.
I don't know, like, you know, and he doesn't want for a black man talking about racism.
Yeah, yeah, that's what he's doing.
That's what you know, he's writing books and doing podcasts.
He's he's trying to, you can disagree or agree how successful he's being, but that's what he's trying to do.
He's trying to lay a framework.
I mean, they're just talking about the version of him that exists in their heads.
Yes, exactly.
They're not talking about the actual MLK.
They're talking about the MLK who gave nice speeches, who did politics the right way.
And the same with Kendi.
They're just talking about the fictional version they've imagined, not the real one.
Well, the fictional version that they've imagined is a much more radical bomb thrower than, you know, like, you know, it's like secretly, you know, he's out there, like, encouraging people to throw Molotovs at the White House or whatever.
That's just, that's kind of how people think of him.
They use his name as if he is, you know, Again, actively advocating for, you know, mass political violence with rifles on Washington, D.C.
It's like, what if J6, but woke is kind of what they imagine he's advocating for.
It's almost like there's something about the things he says that makes people like this feel uncomfortable for some reason.
I can't imagine.
Yeah, geez.
Can't imagine.
But then, can't imagine.
Yeah, these are people that would have been made uncomfortable by, I can't remember the name, but the person that wrote that white fragility book, you know, that was Robin D'Angelo.
Robin D'Angelo.
Yeah.
So the whole thing is, you know, MLK, good guy in the past, safely dead.
He doesn't.
He doesn't have opinions we have to care about anymore.
Even as Kimby, the more radical they give him, maybe he's the guy who's kind of like the reasonable guy that we can work with to kind of talk about race issues.
For the movement, where you go from there.
I mean, there are other arguments for reparations, for example, where they actually try to make a case by putting some numbers on what was lost in slavery.
Of course, you'd have to apply that same reasoning to the Native Americans.
And what was lost, all that land, is probably even more valuable.
And so on, but and therefore, we shouldn't do it for the descendants of slaves.
That's right.
That's the you know, well, how far does this go?
They're gonna get there, they're gonna go, how far does this go?
This is kind of the logic they're going for.
It's like, well, then we'd have to think about the Native Americans and maybe like you know, uh, people who came over the southern border and you know, the farm workers and in the southwest, and you know, we have to think about a whole lot of people are really you know, but isn't it just easier to just you know, well, call it a wash, white supremacy one.
Patriarchy one, and let's just, you know, let's not rock the boat now.
Let's not make me lose my stuff.
Let's not raise my taxes for this.
And I think, you know, I think Shermer considers himself kind of a moderate on this.
He sees like, well, look, see, there's the radical form of reparations or reparations, right?
There's a radical form of, you know, we want it all versus like, well, if Thomas Sowell sits down and kind of figures out, okay, here's like a number that we can, you know, and then somehow we pay off that, you know, it's like a, A dividend, a slavery dividend that we give to certain people.
We make it a policy.
See, we put it through the liberal machine and we figure it out and we make it so that anything that doesn't upset the app, it's not revolutionary.
It's just, look, we know that we owe a certain amount to you guys and we're going to write you a check.
We're going to make that happen and then we're just going to call it good.
We're just going to call it good.
That's where, and of course, we're going to make this number as small as humanly possible.
The other answer is like, because if we actually had to.
Compensate people for the backbreaking labor that went into the cotton trade and all those other things.
Yeah, no, this does not look like this is going to radically restructure society.
But he is at least in conversation with that being a thing that maybe we should think about, which puts him further to the left than most of these people.
I want to be clear.
I want to be fair to Shermer, where he's a dickhead and a right winger and he's a douchebag.
But he is thinking more seriously about this than a lot of other people do.
Let's just put it that way.
In rhetoric, anyway.
Yeah, in better.
If any actual policy proposals were ever actually.
Oh, yeah.
If anything actually was put on the Senate floor, if AOC came forward and, like, here's the.
Yeah, or whoever, you know.
Yeah.
You know, came up.
Okay, here's a number.
This is not like the full thing, but this starts the process of reparations.
Suddenly it's going to be like, well, that number's too high and the tax structure works like this.
And no, we got to fiddle with it.
We can't.
And really, do we get the.
Yeah, yeah.
There would always be like this thing that, you know, you're never going to like.
Make it, you're never going to actually pass it in a way that he's never going to sit down and go, Yeah, that seems fair.
Let's do that right now.
It's always going to be find more nuance in it, find more things we can argue about so that I never have to pay the taxes until after I'm dead.
That's the answer, right?
Yeah.
Obviously, I can't pay you back the full value of everything I stole from you because there's just so much.
Yeah, I'll give you a little ex gratia payment.
No, not that much.
No, not that much either.
I would have to give up my summer home.
I'd have to live in a slightly smaller mansion if we did that.
Oh, by the way, once you've been fobbed off with any amount at all, you lose the right to complain about anything.
Absolutely.
No, that's the flip side of it.
You hear this from God, okay.
I'm going to go here.
It's fine.
You hear this from the actual white nationalists sometimes.
And maybe we'll do an episode on this.
I think Warren Balog, who was formerly of the National Justice Party and now does a Unhinged, completely unhinged podcast with Eric Stryker.
We're gonna go over Nazis for a minute, just to be clear.
You know, just to, yeah, watch your whistle for future episodes.
Um, because we do, I do still follow these Nazis around.
It's not just these radical centrist types.
I've just been doing a lot of episodes about this because it's just weird and fascinating.
Um, they will sometimes like sit and talk about Warren Bailey in particular.
It's like, so what we're gonna do is like we're gonna have their leaders, so the black people's leaders, and like the Native Americans' leaders, and like the leaders of the Jews, and the leaders of the, you know, and all the, you know, so we're gonna all have tribes.
We're all like, And we're going to sit down at a table one day, and we're going to work out this is your land, this is their land, this is where we get, and we're just going to separate.
And there's going to be some value that we owe you.
There's going to be some value that we owe you.
And then that'll be it.
And then there's no more, and then we just all get to live on our own.
There's no more, you don't get to leech off of us anymore, et cetera, et cetera.
You'll sometimes hear that kind of conversation.
And I think Warren Ballack actually thinks that that's a thing that's going to happen one day.
That one day, there will be after some calamitous civil war, Everything's going to return to tribes, and then there's going to be, you know, these high up leaders of like the white tribe is going to like sit down with Lee.
And that's just, this is, it's utterly bizarre.
But so, you know, it's funny, like that's more reasonable than what Shermer is suggesting, you know?
As unhinged as that is, the idea that, like, you know, we're just going to, we're just going to rent him a check one day.
It's just going to be, you know, we're just going to take an excise tax.
It'll be fine, you know, like, I don't know.
Anyway, I am far afield, but we're on the, we're on the track to understanding just how unhinged Shermer is at this point.
So, you know, I think something like that, you know, and, you know, I wrote The Moral Arc, so that was published in 2015, you know, just, Just as the Supreme Court voted to make same sex marriage the law of the land.
Okay, so it seemed like we've made it.
We?
We?
Michael Schumer?
We?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I did.
Right?
And then all this other shit starts going to the Me Too movement, BLM, George Floyd, and all these.
All this other shit.
They're never happy, these people, are they?
You know, you give them gay marriage, and surely that's.
We're there, right?
They should shut up at this point.
But absolutely, oh, I don't want to be raped.
And could the police not murder me in the street, please?
And all this whinging fucking hell things.
And it's like, oh, there's something else going on here.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
I think the broader question you're asking is basically there's a long march of liberalism towards ever more sort of progressive philosophies.
And who are we to ever say, stop here or don't go there?
Well, you do.
That's all you do say.
And I think it's a really interesting argument.
And it's one I kind of wrestle with.
But you can hear, like, you know, they're pretending to take this stuff seriously.
They're pretending to be like, we're just airing out these ideas.
And, like, I'm a reasonable person.
I can understand that there's an argument to be made here.
And, like, where's the line?
And where do we go too far, et cetera?
And, of course, people think that BLM and Me Too and all this stuff, they've just clearly gone much, much, much too far.
I think they haven't gone far enough.
But, you know, that's me looking through the lens of history and reality.
But.
Ask me.
I'm not putting on my skeptic hat, not my rational centrist hat.
You could also go the opposite direction and you could say, well, okay, we should walk that back.
We should walk back, back.
And I mean, you could end up arguing yourself all the way to women shouldn't have the right to vote, right?
Like you can.
A lot of these people do.
They do.
Yeah.
Liberalism begins a little while ago now.
This is so vapid.
I think throughout the movement to, let's say, gain my rights, the right to vote, the right to marry, it was often the moderate who got that win.
So let's say the right to.
Gee, I wonder why.
I wonder why, Nellie Bowles, it was the moderate.
For gay marriage was won not by the radical chic activists.
It was won by the practical people who said, this is better for our taxes and this is.
And this is, you know, we deserve this kind of economically, if nothing else.
Ding, We made the financial argument.
Well, no, we are respectable middle class people like you.
We just happen to put our genitals in places that you find uncomfortable.
But really, we are like you, and we will crush all the other little people who do not have the same economic interest as you, so long as you give us this little bauble that we want.
And look, gay marriage, same sex marriage, is absolutely an important step forward.
It was woefully insufficient for what was what you know queer activists were actually arguing for at the time.
It was always seen, as I understand it, as you know, a chip, you know, a little chip in the edifice of repression against gay and lesbian people and queer people in general.
Sorry, not to be you know, it was always seen as the little thing.
I will just be a little bit smug and point out that it's what I said at the start, which is absolutely now that MLK is long dead, they can construct him as a moderate and they can say, That's the guy you should be.
You know, it's the moderates that do it all right.
Whereas the historical MLK was not a moderate.
Oh, no.
He was hated by people like them at the time, and they would have hated him themselves if they'd been there at the time.
And exactly the same way they do hate the.
Did she say radical chic?
The radical chic activists, you know, these people, they have luxury beliefs.
They believe that trans people are real and that maybe we shouldn't.
You know, privilege marriage, and I was like, maybe, maybe there are other kinds of social organizations that can be of equal validity.
And those crazy queers who think like you can change your gender and like you can sleep with more than one person at a time, and all that said, no, no, we are very ordinary.
We are very ordinary, um, just lesbian, gay, lesbian people.
Forget the queers, forget this, forget the trans.
Centrism and Procedural Compromise00:02:05
You know, those are, those are not, those are not our kind of people.
You know, you understand, yeah, yeah.
It's the, it's the, it's the argument of the, of the pick me, of the one that thinks they've bought in.
I mean, it's Barry Weiss's central argument.
When she does these talks and speeches, she always opens with, Well, I'm a lesbian woman married to another woman, but I think the rich people's taxes should be lower.
So I'm one of you.
I'm one of you.
It's exactly that kind of language.
No, it's 100%.
It's so bougie and it's so complacent and cynical and it's so condescending as well.
Yeah.
The chic activists, like people have convictions just because it's fashionable.
And whereas us realistically minded people, we understand that it's actually all about tax policy and stuff like that.
And you lot should be quiet and let us deal with it.
Sam Harris will use this language a lot.
Let us fiddle with the knobs of society.
Can I tune in just that little bit?
We had just 6% more of this and 4% more of that.
We tweaked this a little bit here and we tweaked that a little bit there just to make society run.
It's just a machine.
And we're just trying to make it work for everybody, particularly middle class people like me.
Kind of wealthy people, make sure I'm not paying too much.
I'm okay paying a little bit of tax, you know, the truly needy people.
But, you know, just as long as they don't put butt on my front door, you know, that's the key for sure.
And certainly don't think about revolution or anything, you know.
Yeah.
It's the central sort of thesis of that movie Spielberg made a few years ago about Lincoln.
Very well made movie, beautifully acted, beautifully shot and everything.
But the ideology of that is kind of this hymn to, Centrism and procedural compromise.
You know, the slaves get freed, the Emancipation Proclamation gets issued because of Lincoln's skill as a political operator and compromise and process.
And it's about getting Thaddeus Stevens to just toe the line, and that's how you get things done.
Shamed Gay Rights Activists00:05:43
Whereas the reality of the history, as pretty much every, you know, even conservative Civil War historians now say this, the slaves were freed because of generations of.
Abolitionists and because the black Americans rebelled against their masters at the first, you know, the ringing of the war bell and the union troops dying for what they saw as democracy and getting radicalized during the course of the war.
It's such a smug and elitist and fake argument.
It's not true.
Things change because it gathers from below and people protest and make arguments and make a noise and bang on the doors.
That's why we have the vote in Britain because of the Chartists.
It's not because of Disraeli and Gladstone thrashing out a deal.
It's because people occupied Hyde Park and pushed those people to the point where they had to do that.
Absolutely.
And I include all of this.
This may seem a little bit far afield, but I include this because they put Me Too in with all this other stuff.
You see, there's Ibram X. Kendi and BLM and George Floyd and radical queer activists.
And Me Too is just one of those things, right?
That women are people in general, but particularly women.
Talking about their experience of dealing with powerful men who have sexually abused them, you know, it's just gone too far.
You see, it's just gone too far.
The same way BLM and they'll get the response to your dreadful, you know, he died of a drug overdose, right?
You know, clearly.
And those people, you know, it's all one thing for them.
And that's why we're including this here.
It's like, it's the way they talk about me too.
It's like, obviously, nobody thinks that like 15 year olds should be sexually abused by their teachers, but you know, a guy just out there.
Buying a few extra drinks for a young woman who already wanted to fuck him anyway.
I mean, come on, that's just boys being boys, right?
Clearly, that's the logic.
That's the logic.
That's why I'm including this.
Yeah.
The minute to these people, the minute any movement gets started, it's time for it to stop because it's gone too far.
Its existence is it going too far?
You start talking, you start marching, you start making demands.
Time to shut up and go home and let the enlightened centrists and the people in charge deal with it all in the way that they weren't doing.
Five minutes before you started marching and demanding they do something.
And the proof of the pudding is that when they manage to smother these movements, things go back to pretty much the way they were before, which is what happened with Me Too.
They smothered it, they shut it down, they exhausted it.
And aside from maybe some changes in attitudes, it's been put back.
It's been put back the way it was.
And proof of the pudding is that people with long strings of credible allegations of sexual assault and harassment and all sorts of things can just.
Behave like everything's normal and do interviews about abuse and gaslighting, and it doesn't come up.
Absolutely.
Anyway.
All right.
We just got a few more seconds and then we get to talk about Douglas Murray.
Aren't you excited?
Oh, great.
And the radicals actually were anti the gay marriage fight.
Anti gay marriage as a priority, and anti gay marriage as an idea because marriage was heterosexual, it was heteronormative, it was capitalist, it was.
All the things that were bad.
And so.
And isn't that true?
Citation needed, I think is the phrase.
Sure, sure.
No, I'm just like, well, I mean, there were certainly elements who were like, well, we shouldn't be.
I mean, I think what she's right there is anti gay marriage as a priority, you know, like this.
So, like, we shouldn't be fighting for this thing before we fight for all these other things first, you know.
I think that's largely true in terms of like some of the.
But like, I think everybody kind of goes, well, we should be fighting for this.
A minute ago, we were talking about the entire gay rights movement, and now we're talking about.
The fringe of the gay rights movement.
You could almost call it a constant shifting of rhetorical focus.
Almost.
It was not considered the chic leftist thing at all.
And the people who want it were, for a long time, or the people who argued for it early on were for a long time kind of shamed for that.
Oh.
Shamed.
Shamed for, you know, geez, I just want my particular marriage to be recognized to reduce my tax burden because I am wealthy and I have power in our society.
And then there are, you know, poor queer people starving on the streets and trans people.
Who can't find social services to even serve them, dying on the streets.
And they would ashamed me for wanting my tax burden to be reduced.
And for me, arguing very strenuously my position that I should pay fewer taxes because I'm one of the good ones.
That's exactly the argument she's making.
But these people, you see, they're not like poor people, starving people who actually need social services, who are actually being shunned by society, who are actually being oppressed.
Chic radical leftists.
They work in trendy places who get, you know, like, and that's the chic leftist argument, the chic activist argument.
Is that like, these are not people arguing for their rights because they are actively being oppressed.
These are people, they're just being trendy about it.
They're wearing like funky clothes because it's just, it's the cool thing to do.
These rich college kids, you understand?
The only ones you see are the rich college kids who believe in these things because the rich college kids exist in a similar social strata as you.
That's why you think it's only rich college kids who argue for this stuff.
The Last Gaza War Logic00:15:04
That's the point.
Yeah.
No, it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, it makes you see that the trans trend thing is just an adaptation of an older argument.
You know, kids are deciding that they're trans because they've heard about it and they think it's cool.
That's just, that's what they always say about anybody that they don't like who has opinions to their left.
Well, and 20, 30 years ago, it was, you know, kids are only being gay because they find out about it on the internet.
You know, kids find gay forums on the internet and suddenly every kid wants to be gay because it's the trendy thing to do, you know.
Before that, I was just using that link because Shermer has interviewed Abigail Schreier and let her peddle her actual contagion theory on his podcast.
This is not a full Shermer thing.
This is going to be the last handful of episodes.
And then it was like, well, we just have to talk about this more in dark shit because it's just the necessary thing.
All right.
We're here.
Douglas Murray is going to hate on Islam, Muslims, brown people who live in the Middle East.
Yeah.
That's his full time job.
And again, Michael Shermer, not going to say a whole lot during this, but it's like, it's very much a smile and nod.
It's very much a, you know, nod and agree.
This is Douglas Murray talking about.
This is the kind of stuff I hate to play, even for this audience.
This is stuff that's just, it's Douglas Murray.
I can see the title and I can guess.
Let me read the title.
Let me, okay.
This is, and I tell this so I get this, so I, I, I tell these so that I kind of know where they go in the, in the, in the outline, you know.
Douglas Murray.
Atrocity video and death cult starts around 4 15.
So it starts around four minutes, four minutes and 15 seconds in this like hour and a half, two hour long conversation between Sherber and Murray.
Just to be clear, this is four minutes and 15 seconds in.
Would you hazard a guess what atrocity video means in this context?
This is going to be something from October 7th in Israel.
Yes.
It's going to be something about Hamas and it's going to lead Douglas Murray into a diatribe about basically how the entire culture of Islam is a death cult.
So, I guess we don't have to play this one.
So many people decided to jump on the side of the terrorists.
What does.
Yeah, you open here.
What does being on the side of the terrorists constitute?
What constitutes being on the side of the terrorists, Douglas?
It means opposing Israeli war crimes mostly.
That's kind of the whole point.
Yeah, I thought so.
Yeah.
Saying we shouldn't genocide the Palestinians constitutes being on the side of the terrorists.
Yeah, I thought so.
Aaron, your introduction of that video that we've all heard now of the atrocity video.
This podcast episode was from about nine months ago, just to be clear.
So it is a little bit of an older video.
But I didn't want to cover some of what Shermer has had to say about Iran and about Israel and Palestine.
And this was kind of a go to place to kind of get there.
Again, he has no sense.
I think he would be less harsh on this.
Like, I think if you really sat him down, he'd be a little bit more moderate on this than Murray.
But he considers Murray to be a completely valid source of information about these topics.
And he broadly agrees with him.
So I think this is fair to sort of put it out there.
Douglas Murray, who, to be clear, is a far right crank.
Yes.
He never saw an Islamic country he did not want to bomb.
There was never a moment in which Douglas Murray thought, maybe we should not bomb this particular year, or maybe America or Israel should not bomb.
I don't think he's going to go out there and pick up an M4 or anything like that.
That's certainly not what Douglas Murray is going to do.
I believe he wrote an entire book, a book length defense of neoconservatism.
Yes, yes, no, absolutely.
He is among the most warmongering people on the planet.
He and Sam Harris are like peas in a pot on this topic.
You know, it is one of those things.
If anything, Douglas Boyd goes on Sam Harris, and Sam Harris is like, I might even go further than you.
It's like, that's how far Sam Harris is on this.
All right.
This gets very dark right about now.
We're in the midst of the attack.
The terrorist made a phone call back to his family in Gaza.
The excitement in his voice was obvious.
Hi, Dad.
The three minute call begins.
Open my WhatsApp now, and you'll see all those killed.
Look how many I killed with my own hands.
Your son killed Jews.
The father replies, May God protect you.
The son is exultant.
Dad, I'm talking to you from a Jewish woman's phone.
I killed her and I killed her husband and I killed 10 with my own hands.
He goes on and on, repeating himself, boasting, Dad, I killed 10, 10 with my own hands.
Put mom on.
That's astonishing.
I mean, that's just hard to even read.
Is that what you mean by a death cult?
Yes.
I mean, okay.
Before we get to the I mean, we are going to get to the death cult idea.
And he's going to say, yes, of course, this is the death cult.
Soldiers committing murders in the middle of a war do this shit all the time.
This is what people who commit murders in war do.
This is just a thing that happens.
GIs in Vietnam walked around with necklaces made of human ears.
Yes, yes.
You can find, I mean, you know.
Sorry, we'll go here.
Graham Plattner on Reddit was talking about what indigenous wars he would have wanted to fight in himself were he given a time machine, you know, sort of thing.
This is something that people talk about murdering.
And like, it's meant to, like, the reason that this went viral at the time, the reason this is like such a powerful thing for these people is like, well, these are, yeah, he called his dad and was like proud of killing Jews.
Jews.
He was proud of this as if it was, well, Douglas Murray, is it different if instead of it being an individual walking into someone's house and murdering them in cold, you know, if that's bad?
But, you know, if you carpet bomb a city, if you put a bunker bomb onto the top of a hospital, if you do a tap of bomb, you know, you warn the people, we warned them we were going to bomb that hospital.
But then, you know, well, that's just war.
That's just how war works, right?
The asymmetry in terms of numbers, like, is, you know, even before October 7th, there was like 200 to 1.
Is like, oh, yeah, the asymmetry is vast.
If you look at just, I mean, I hate doing this because it feels so crude and callous.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Just in terms of casualty numbers, the so called Israel Palestine conflict, the imbalance is.
Colossal.
Before October 7th, the numbers skew the numbers a lot, let's be honest.
Well, but then after October 7th, the response is even more disproportionate.
Exactly.
October 7th skews the numbers, and then you have the so called Gaza War, which skews them completely the other way again to an unprecedented scale.
And this is a conflict that's been going on for generations, and the imbalances, apart from one brief blip, it's all been.
Well, of course, that's why they focus on October 7th.
Like, you know, the poor, you know, the hostages.
How many months do we have breathless coverage of like the Israeli hostages of Hamas?
Hamas, this death cult, there's, it's infuriating.
Hostages that Netanyahu could all have gotten back straight away if he'd wanted to.
Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly.
Again, 100% on the time, on the side of, you know, Palestinian civilians who are being massacred during this process.
And those people don't get consideration because, see, we bomb them from above.
We don't get to see the faces of the drone operators who operate these things.
They're just like board technicians.
They're just sitting in an office, they're wearing a lanyard somewhere.
And they don't get to crow to their dad about that.
I saw the actual Palestinian person, the actual Palestinian mom I killed.
Whereas this soldier did.
And therefore, he's much more savage than the other side, regardless of the numbers involved.
And so one side is a death cult, and the other side, oh, you know, it's just.
We're just engaging in necessary war work.
That's just how it works.
That's a good point.
I will also point out IDF soldiers' TikToks, which is something we talked about with Aina on that space that we did with Aina about this.
The atrocious way they talked about the things they were doing and the people they were killing.
But yeah, the real reason, of course, is that the Palestinians are not white.
So they're not people, they're cockroaches.
They don't count.
That's what's really going on here.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, you could also pull up, you know, visions of IDF soldiers committing like similar types of like videos, similar, similar.
I wanted to not even like, you don't even have to go there.
You just have to go like just the sheer scale of the atrocity.
You see, this is, we get to call it war.
We get to just call it like, this is just how state actors act.
You know, this is a thing that's happening and it's a tragedy, but it's just, you know, nobody's in control of it.
Nobody knows that we can't blame the individuals.
We can only blame, you see, there's terrorists and there's rational people.
And rational people use bombs.
And terrorists, they use paragliders.
See, that's the, there's the, you know, like one side is irreportably evil.
And the other side, look, they're just responding to the nature of the evil.
And if that nature of the evil means you just have to eradicate a whole population of people, well, you got to get rid of that evil somehow.
That's just how it goes.
Everybody knows you want to get rid of a molde infestation, you burn the house down.
Not that I'm comparing Palestinian people to a molde infestation, but that's the logic they're using.
That's their comparison.
Yeah, literally.
That's their comparison.
That's what they literally say.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's not a death cult, of course, basically because that's us and our allies.
Right.
Well, we'll get into how Douglas Murray is defining death cult here.
We're in there in like two seconds.
So let's.
Table it for a moment and kind of get there.
Literally, the glorification of death.
As you and many of our viewers will know, I mean, there have been some death cult ideologies throughout history.
One thinks of things like Imperial Japan.
And here, I think we stepped over a little bit of the like, he's saying that like they want death not just for themselves.
So, like a kamikaze pilot, that's not a courageous soldier engaging in an activity to fight a war machine that they, you know, believed was valid and good.
That's a death cult, you know?
Young soldiers sacrifice young American soldiers or British soldiers sacrifice their lives in defense of their fellow men or in the defense of no, that's not a death cult, you know, that's a different thing, you see.
You know, like I think it's fed, you know, there were cultic elements around empire, oh, yeah, sure, sure, sure, things like that in Imperial Japan, but that's far from unique, uh, to Japan.
And uh, you know, he's his next example he goes to is is again, um, non white people, uh, it's not unique to non white people, this sort of thinking, no.
Where some people were willing to get into a plane and commit suicide by flying the plane into American aircraft carriers and more.
There have been many groups throughout history, sadly, from all political directions and religious directions who've literally glorified in death.
But yes, in the case of Hamas, this is Hezbollah and their backers in the Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran.
These are literally groups that say they want death.
And Want to bring death to others and get it for themselves.
And as I mull on quite a lot in the book, that's something which the Western mindset is largely almost impossible to comprehend.
And yet it is.
Oh, really?
Oh, oh, oh, oh.
So here, the specific thing that I think he's referring to is the Iranian nuclear doctrine, it's like the desire to get nuclear weapons so that, you know, to prevent, you know, the destruction of the regime or, you know, kind of whatever, like that.
I think that's kind of the logic he's reaching for there.
Well, that's, yeah.
That's to prevent the destruction of the regime isn't to just spread death because we love death.
You know, those are different things.
As if a whole bunch of white people didn't engage in mutually assured destruction for half a century.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And bomb each other's cities into smoking ruins.
As if you and I did not grow up under like the threat of nuclear war throughout our entire childhoods.
As if that was not.
As if Douglas Murray did not experience this during his lifetime.
Douglas Murray is not that young.
But of course, that's just rational actors behaving rationally because these are white people who have ideologies and they're fiddling with dials and they're doing this thing.
And of course, communism was evil.
But of course, the West had to do this in order to contain the threat.
And of course, that's not a death cult when you build so many nuclear weapons that you can destroy the population of the planet many times over.
That's certainly not a death cult.
That's a different thing.
Death cult is like, that's more.
That's more terrorism than nuclear apocalypse.
You see, that's a, it's a different, it's a totally different thing.
It's clearly, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The British Empire overseeing tens of millions of deaths from needless anthropogenic famines in their colonies.
That's not a death cult.
No.
It's not an accident.
No.
And so on.
Yeah.
Racism.
All right.
All right.
One more clip, Jack.
Okay.
This one, I'm just going to read it A Country's Desire and Sympathy to the People of Dresden is how I titled this one.
You want to take a stab at where this one's going, or should I simply just hit play?
This one, I have no idea.
So, oh, oh, you we're going out on a high point and a low part, my friend.
That's that's how this is going.
The preconditions are set up for the next round of the conflict, which is why I've said from the beginning of this war that the real question is is this the umpteenth Gaza war or the last Gaza war?
Is the umpteenth Gaza war or the last Gaza war?
Imagine what the last Gaza war means.
Just think of it like a yeah, the last Gaza war that would that would be kind of a final solution to the Palestinian question, to the Palestinian question, yeah, yeah.
Is this the third?
Uh, uh, Lebanon war or the last one, and I would like to see it being the last one.
Israel's Right to Attack00:08:02
I don't think Israel or any of her neighbors should have to exist in this situation where rocket fire is normal, and you just, you know, the Israeli citizens, uh, they migrated here fairly recently, historical time frame.
They have other options, you know.
Um, just saying.
Rocket fire coming in, we mean, of course.
Yeah, right going out.
Right going out.
Right going out.
Everything, everything, Israel is us.
Israel is the nominal white people in this situation.
They're the rational actors because they don't follow the death cult of Islam.
So, therefore, when they fire rockets, that's just a rational response to rockets being thrown at them.
When other people do it, when other state actors engage in the same kind of activity, well, that's because they hate Jews, you see.
That's the answer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, rockets going out of Israel onto other people.
Let's just state normal.
Let's value neutral.
That's the null hypothesis.
Israel has the right and prerogative to do that, obviously.
Yeah.
Let's invent cleverer and cleverer ways to cower, shelter your people from such routine assault.
I think I would also like that for Israel.
This is the thing I would like that for Israel.
The thing to do is for Israel's government to stop being an aggressive, violent.
Rogue state that routinely violates international law, attacks its neighbors, and has spread its borders through conquest.
Yes.
Absolutely.
If you don't want to have to live that way in Israel, that's probably the way to go about it.
And commits ethnic cleansing among its own citizens, even before October 7th, just to be clear.
That's another thing that's important to note.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah, that's kind of included in what you were saying, but I wanted to highlight that as well.
It's like one thing we definitely want to include is that.
You don't want Israel to be attacked by Hamas.
Okay.
Don't create Hamas.
Don't create Hamas, basically.
Yes, yes, yeah.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I think it's something that, again, it goes back to this thing about legitimate and illegitimate criticism.
If you can't sympathize with.
He's talking about legitimate and illegitimate criticism of Israel, just to be clear in context.
The country's desire to stop its citizenry being repeatedly bombarded by rockets, you're not really being serious and considering the whole picture at all.
Is that its desire, though, Douglas?
That's the question.
Is that actually the people take your man seriously?
That English accent and that very slow, measured way of talking really gives him a lot of.
He gets, you know, if he was saying this, if he said these exact words in like an Alex Jones affect, everybody would think this is ridiculous, right?
Everybody would hear it for what it was.
Yeah.
But he's a talented, oh, what's the term?
Gaslighter.
Yes.
So the emphasis by some on the left of the atrocities allegedly being committed by Israel, of, let's say.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
He has to throw that allegedly.
This trustee is allegedly committed.
And this is right up that Pallywood shit.
Like, this is right up that, like, you know, oh, it's just, they're just pointing the camera at, like, these terrible victims who maybe aren't even from this, maybe from other bombings that we've seen around the region.
Maybe, you know, who knows what's real and what's fake?
It's all just, you know, it's allegedly committed.
Oh, my God.
Well, you know, it makes sense for Michael Shermer to always maintain that crimes committed in the past are.
Alleged and exist in this area.
Those are just allegations.
Yes.
Those are just allegations.
Yeah.
Who knows?
Maybe they happened.
Maybe they didn't.
But it just proceeds as if they didn't because it would be unfair otherwise.
Children in Gaza who are dying or starving and so on.
Those things are perhaps some of it is real, but that's just a byproduct of war.
Just a byproduct of war.
Just a byproduct of war.
War just happens.
It's just a thing that happens.
It's just a byproduct of war.
Of course.
War happens.
No one.
No one started it.
It doesn't happen for any reason.
There's no, you know, it's just, well, you know, wars are happening.
I mean, the Israeli citizens who have been, you know, killed by rockets, those are, you know, we must fight back.
We must, no rational actor could possibly stand against that sort of thing.
But that's not war.
This is just a thing that happens in war.
That's the reason to prolong the war.
Whereas, you know, Palestinians being murdered, well, that's just, you know, it's just the cost to do a business, you know, sweep it under the rug.
It's, you know, it's the, Those people don't count.
You see, that's the way that works.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because they're not white and not human.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're talking about the assumption.
And Michael Schirmer is a rational centrist.
He is not like a skeptic.
Yeah.
No, no.
Yeah.
When he hears an idea, he's from Missouri.
He says, Show me.
So he, you know, when somebody says something to Michael Schirmer, it's like, Well, that's all very well, but that's a big claim.
I'm going to need to hear evidence.
You know, if somebody sat in front of him and just came up with, Rank apologetics for genocide.
He wouldn't fall for that.
He'd say, Well, you know, that's not true.
You need to show me the.
It's so selective.
It's so selective.
And the selectivity reveals a hell of a lot.
It reveals the bias.
I mean, look, there are some people we don't invite on this podcast as well.
We certainly don't, but we don't pretend to be rational centrist looking at everything, using this podcast to sift through the evidence.
You know who I really want to, you know what a proper skeptic would have regarding these issues?
I wanted to bring on someone from Bellingcat.
The people actually examining, like, well, this rocket was launched from this direction.
We know this because we got this kind of data.
That's what the actual skeptics are doing.
It's like, we need to look at every missile firing.
We need to understand exactly how it happened so that we have an accurate picture of what's actually going on on the ground.
That's what actual skeptics are doing when it comes to war zones in this context.
I don't know.
When it comes to Israel Palestine, for instance, just somebody from Amnesty International.
Or Human Rights Watch or Betzelem.
The human rights, you know, none of these are perfect organizations, don't get me wrong.
But these organizations have been on the ground in Palestine, in the Palestinian occupied territories, so called, because international law makes it very clear that Israel has no right to these territories.
It is occupying them illegally.
They've been on the ground in these territories for decades now, and they've been documenting Israeli atrocities against the occupied population.
That's not based on ideology.
They don't go there because they're pro Palestine.
Or anything like that.
They go there because they're members of organizations that go to places where human rights abuses are likely and they try their best to document them based on the evidence.
Isn't that what skepticism is supposed to be?
Yeah, absolutely.
Inquiry, gathering evidence, drawing conclusions based on the evidence.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
But no, you got to listen to Douglas Murray just spew bullshit.
That's true skepticism because he speaks slowly and he has his British accent and he speaks in measured tones about just how inhuman all people of the Islamic faith are.
That's the real rationalism because those people, that's just a death cult.
Well, it's not just the voice, though.
It makes sense.
On some level, it makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I'm mocking, but it's deeper than that.
Sorry, I was being silent.
No, I agree with you.
Skepticism and Inhumanity Claims00:12:32
I'm just saying it wouldn't work if Michael Shermer didn't already have those assumptions.
Yes, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Because no doubt you could find a Palestinian activist with this similar.
Absolutely.
I mean, Mehdi Hassan would surely come and do that podcast.
I mean, you know, Mehdi Hassan will kind of show up anywhere, and he would, in no uncertain terms, tell Michael Shermer exactly where he can shove his head.
You know, that would be the answer to that.
Mehdi Hassan doesn't claim to be unbiased on this issue, but, you know, you could do the skeptical thing and could just do it.
Neither does Douglas Murray.
Neither does Douglas Murray.
Does not claim to be unbiased.
Douglas Murray openly admits his bias.
And yet, like, this is the, you know, like, you know, yeah.
I bet if Mehdi Hassan did go on, he'd be subjected to a lot more, you know, skeptical peppering of questions than Douglas Murray was.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, we can't be sympathetic to the people of Hamburg and Dresden in World War II.
They started the war.
That's just okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Really?
Okay.
Can't we?
First of all, as I recall, there's a fairly famous novel that does exactly that.
Yeah, I think we might even have talked about it.
I think we might have even talked about it on a Bronis episode.
Yeah.
What was that called?
God, man.
It's a number in it.
It's a number in it.
Yeah.
Something to do with like a meatpacking plant.
Oh, it was the jungle.
The jungle.
It was the jungle.
That's the one.
Yeah.
Upton Sinclair.
That's right.
Famous name.
The Jungle Five.
That's it.
Yes.
No, for listeners who may not know, Southern House Five is very much inspired by and includes much of the details of Vonnegut himself was in Dresden at the time of the bombings.
And it's very much informed by that experience.
So, yes, we can actually express sympathy for those people.
Also, Including the young children that were in Dresden.
Yes, yes, yes.
They had no part in the Nazi takeover at all, even arguable.
And also the logic of, I mean, we might want to rewind a little bit.
Like, they started it.
That's the good thing.
Well, they started it.
Well, who's they?
Yeah.
Who's they exactly, Mike Shermer?
Who's they?
Because, you know, regardless of like polling data, regardless of how many young men were sent to the front lines from Dresden or, you know, kind of whatever, I don't think the civilians in Dresden are the people who.
Created World War II.
They're not the people who created the death camps.
Those are not the same people, just by definition, you know?
No.
And so, yes, World War II, there was a whole lot of bombing of civilian populations on all sides of that war.
This is the bloodiest war in history.
This is an absolute atrocity of history.
And reasonable people see that and go, yeah, maybe we shouldn't do that anymore.
Maybe we should think about this a little bit more seriously.
I mean, the entire, like, you know, as leaky and terrible as it is, the entire system of international law that rose up after World War II was in response to this.
So the idea that even you can use that language of, like, well, they started it.
I didn't include this in the clip because it was like three minutes further on, and I knew you were just going to blow a gasket.
But he starts doing the Hitler's Willing Executioners bit.
Oh, good.
Where he cites that book.
I really think I'm going to have to read the Holocaust of Live OEMs.
Seriously?
He cites that in 2026?
He does.
What a fucking clown.
Exactly.
Discredited Zionist propaganda.
There was a way to get there, but I would have had to cut all the stuff we already talked about before.
There's like a knowledge fight in Michael Shermer episodes.
That's what I'm like.
Clearly.
The way it goes?
Well, that's a part of it.
I mean, even Douglas Murray is pushing back a little bit on that.
Like, yeah.
That's a bit much, even for me.
It's certainly a morally complex question.
He's dodging that one.
Yes, part of it is, I mean, there is a cost to starting wars against your neighbors.
And one of the costs is losing.
And Hamas kept starting wars.
And one of the costs was.
Hamas!
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that it's that simple.
Hamas kept starting wars.
Just for the sake of argument, it's that simple.
Sure.
Hamas, not the Palestinians.
Exactly.
Not the entirety of the people of Gaza.
Not the babies who were incinerated or buried under their schools and hospitals.
Yep, absolutely.
Absolutely.
No, even if you did want to eradicate Hamas, like you're, you know, I mean, they set it up 20 years ago.
Like, you know, we didn't want more reasonable Palestinians.
We wanted the violence so that we could portray them this way.
We said it was terrible.
They wanted to undermine the PLO and FATA because, yeah.
So they deliberately, you know, they didn't like the secular resistance, the ostensibly socialist resistance.
They wanted the power of the PLO broken.
So they.
They allow Hamas in, they support them, fund them.
It's classic.
It's actually October 7th, it's classic blowback in the 9 11 pattern.
It's almost exactly the same.
I've always just thought of it as anti colonial violence, honestly.
Like, you know, like this is just what anti colonial violence looks like, you know?
It's just, you know.
And you, you know, colonialism forces people into the position of having to fight that way because they have no other option.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the way to fight this, if you were going to take this seriously, I know that I don't run along, and there's no reason.
If you were being a proper skeptic in this moment, and you had even my level of knowledge of this historical conflict, and I do not have a deep knowledge of the players and all this thing, wouldn't the answer be, well, if you wanted to go after Hamas, you give rights to the Palestinian people?
Wouldn't a rational skeptic possibly.
Submit this as a possibility.
You allow peaceful Palestinians into your.
You give them full rights so that as people who are invested in the society and who are earning more money, who are becoming more moderate, might help you go after members of Hamas who are now no longer their only source of resistance against the violence that is predated against them from the violent Israeli state.
Wouldn't that be a proper skeptic position to take if you wanted to take this position?
Wouldn't that be like just a thought experiment?
Just think about it for like 10 seconds.
Like, just don't occupy their land, lift the blockade.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I wasn't even going that far.
I was just like, you know, like even within the apparatus of the state in this league, if you lean up on the oppression a little bit, you know, if you just like, you know, you just pull back like 10%, then maybe, you know, that's another way to go about it.
I don't know.
I was trying to put myself in that rational centrist brain and not like think of this as a leftist, too.
You know, like, you know, even aside from the fact that it's the ongoing occupation, the legal.
Occupation and blockade of Gaza that has allowed Hamas to stay in power.
The last time they had elections there was 2006.
Even then, even apart from the fact that Israel has actually funded Hamas.
And this is 2006.
So you've got people that weren't even born.
You're bombing people that weren't even born when this election took place.
It's just, it's so transparently dishonest.
These arguments are so transparently dishonest.
And skepticism should have, but above all else, it should have to reckon with the facts.
That's supposed to be the whole point, isn't it?
Yes.
Yes.
It's very significantly lost.
Again, one of the things that I think any reasonable person should take into account is to at least notice that Hamas desires the death of people on its own side as much as.
Welcomes it as much as it embraces and seeks the murder of people on their opponent's side.
And that's something which is, again, you just have to take this into account if you're going to be a reasonable critic of any of these actions.
You can say the exact same thing about Israel.
Yep.
The logic is, well, these people are just so dangerous and violent.
They're like the berserkers.
They're zombies, basically.
They're just out there for death.
You know, that's all they know how to do is, you know, the ones they kill get up and kill.
You know, it's that logic.
You know what I mean?
Sorry, I'm not, I mean, but that is that, you know, you do have to fundamentally treat the Palestinian people and the people of Iran and the people, like basically all Muslims, you know, at least those who would resist imperial ambitions by the Israeli state in the region.
You have to treat these people as fundamentally irrationalist, fundamentally evilist, fundamentally inhuman, non human, monstrous.
These are, These are not people that you can argue.
These are not people that respond to rational arguments.
These are not people that respond to rational entreaties.
These are not people that you can, they just want death, you see.
And so, therefore, everything that Israel does is rational because if all they want is death, they want their death and your death, then you just give them their death, which is what they want anyway.
That's the logic.
It's completely, completely disgusting.
And it's so much of discourse in my country about the way this stuff works.
Revolves around if that is aggressive, is what's going on in Douglas.
Douglas is unusually aggressive, but he's a fairly mainstream figure in terms of the logic that people use when talking about this stuff.
And they've been doing it 70 years.
Like, going back, you know, it's just disgusting stuff.
Like, I am no fan of Islam.
I do not want to convert to that.
I do not want to live under a repressive society, you know.
Of any kind, yeah.
Of any kind.
But I also don't think that the victims of these regimes, to be clear, like, yes, women can't drive a car.
Let's bomb them.
You kill them, and then they don't know they can't drive a car.
I mean, it's such.
Nonsense.
It's such like, and it's put through this like geopolitical realities kind of lens.
It's like, well, you know, Syria and Hamas, and you never think about the actual people.
You never think about the actual human being on the ground.
And something I always want to come back to whenever we talk about this stuff is ultimately these are human beings.
These are individual people who had individual lives who get snuffed out because imperialist aggression, period.
Yeah.
And until we deal with that problem, I don't care about the West.
That's the answer.
Yeah.
This is a genocidally racist white supremacist fantasy.
It's a fairy tale.
It's the plot of 300.
You're talking about real people like they're the Persians in 300.
Yeah, I mean, God, yeah, no, absolutely.
Well, I wanted, I mean, wrapping up, what I wanted to do was kind of give you kind of a, the idea was to give you a portrait of Shermer and how, and a look at this kind of rational skepticism and this pose of rational skepticism and even maybe a belief in his mind about it.
Lends to defenses of atrocities, both on the personal level when you talk about sexual assault of young people and on atrocities committed in the Middle East by imperialist aggressive states.
And this idea that the left is always wrong.
The left is always wrong.
That's the operating principle.
And this comes up over and over and over again.
And he always gets to pose it as well, I'm just finding the nuance in these questions.
And Michael Shermer, however good he might have been in the past, He is nowhere.
I mean, he has lost his steps.
Ezra Klein as a Hack00:01:48
See, he's not even giving like good questions and answers.
I think, like, an Ezra Klein, you know, as much as I disagree with a lot of what Ezra Klein has to say, when he gets somebody like this on his podcast, he does ask like very decent questions.
And he will do that from all sides.
He is a very good interview.
You get a very good sense of what people believe and their responses to good arguments if you listen to Ezra Klein's podcast.
Again, I'm not defending Ezra Klein.
There's a lot of shit that he says that I absolutely agree with.
I absolutely do not agree with, to be clear.
Um, Michael Schumer can't even do that.
Michael Schumer can't even muster any kind of thing.
And he paints himself as this ultimate rationalist, is out there just trying to find the right answers.
And instead, he's just a fucking hack.
And that lends him to supporting the absolute worst kinds of atrocities on the planet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's a poor man, Sam Harris.
It's no mystery why he's much less successful at this boondoggle than Harris is.
I mean, Rebecca Watson, in her video about people doing apologetics about the murder of Renee Good, she drags Shermer over the coals and.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a good video.
But she says, you know, what's he getting out of this?
You know, Tim Poole is at least being paid by the Russians.
What's Shermer getting out of it?
He's trying to get some more views for his shitty YouTube channel and get another invite on Rogan.
Yeah.
Pathetic.
Really is.
Okay.
Well, all right.
That was.
That was certainly an episode.
That was certainly an episode.
I don't know, Jay, you were doing more Shermer in the next few weeks?