Ep 79 | We're All Racist, Sexist Bigots & 2+2=5 | James Lindsay | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Well, the woke revolutionaries on Twitter are gunning for James Lindsay.

He's a mathematician.

He's an academic prankster.

It's not quite the right word.

He's brilliant.

James Lindsay does not care.

He's moved beyond caring about academic radicals who bully anyone they disagree with, and they disagree with most of us.

The last time we had James Lindsay on this podcast, he was a little different than he is now.

He still cared about trying to find a way to reason with the bullies of woke liberalism, but his new book doesn't give me much hope that that's going to happen.

It is a groundbreaking book.

It's called Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity and Why This Harms Everyone.

This is a must-own book.

Go out or just go online and order it right now.

You'll see why after this interview.

These days, James is spending much of his time fighting the cult of critical theory, translating the language of the woke and math now into plain English.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make four.

If that is granted,

all else follows.

In a world that is becoming more and more 1984 by the day,

James is a very brave man, willing to stand up and say, yeah, two plus two does not equal five.

So, James, I want to really concentrate on the book, Cynical Theories,

because I don't think people, and we've talked about it before, I don't think people really understand what's happening.

They're being duped by a lot of things.

And really, in a way,

you know, in America, it is always this way.

Our Achilles heel is, I think, our willingness to just live and let live and, you know, just let people.

And I don't believe that, but that's okay.

And we're in a different time now.

They've used that against us.

and now we're just at the very beginning of seeing how dangerous and literally deadly this will be.

Yep, that is a correct assessment.

This is not a ideology that we're looking at with everything going on, as we southerners say, everything going on now.

This is not an ideology that can tolerate compromise.

So live and let live requires an

acceptance that there will be compromise.

It requires acceptance that there will be forgiveness of mistakes and

that people can work together and that our differences will be our strengths, the e pluribus unum

founding concept, the motto of the United States.

And

as was outlined, kind of ironically, you know, going back into the 40s with Karl Popper,

outlining the paradox of tolerance.

When you are struck with genuine intolerance, too much tolerance becomes a problem.

And so the question becomes, of course, how do you tell when it's speech, which should be protected universally, people's beliefs,

people's matters of private conscience are their own.

But when the

Popper says when they bring out the knives, when they bring out the guns, that's the point where you absolutely can't tolerate any longer.

And the question becomes, in a realistic sense, and there are different ways to analyze this:

what do you do in a society built on tolerance and plurality, what do you do to deal with a genuinely intolerant ideology that won't compromise?

And that's the question that we're now facing, not in a theoretical way, but in a real way, maybe for the first time since the late 1960s.

I think it's more serious in the 1960s because there doesn't seem to be anything that is strong standing against it.

We still had

some universities and

some professors and scientists and everything else.

We had some churches that understood exactly what was going on.

We had a society that

was at the end of understanding the importance of the Constitution, but we recognized the Constitution and we saw

double-speak

and Orwellian kind of world coming from the Soviet Union.

We don't have any of that now.

We have nothing.

Right.

The brakes have been taken off of the train and it's rolling down the hill.

That's where we are now.

And

the primary way that it's taken the brakes off of the train is by making things about matters of identity and thus bigotry, which are

so sensitive for so many people that they would rather

just roll over and maybe even hand over the keys to their way of life than be caught up in association with bigotry.

And so, this is the way that they figured out how to remove the brakes from the same kind of thing that was attempted in the 1960s.

There was a major summit for liberation, as they call it, in 1967.

We saw the rollout of riots and violence through late 1967 to 1968.

That was largely informed by Herbert Marcusa, the neo-Marxist who started the so-called new left.

And he's the one that led the charge toward identity politics.

And now we've had 50 years of that line of thought ripening.

Plus, as we document in the book that you mentioned,

the adoption of postmodernism so that it no longer has any tether to the truth.

It's all about feelings.

So if somebody accuses somebody of bigotry or racism or sexism or homophobia, or

you name it, there are so many that even Judith Butler, one of their scholars, called it that exasperated, et cetera.

If you accuse somebody of it, that's a wholly subjective determination.

And if you say, where is the evidence that racism is happening, say, in our school, in our institution, at NASA?

If you say, where is the evidence that racism is happening here?

They say, the evidence is my lived experience.

And that you think we need more evidence than that is just proof that you're racist, and that it's actually a racist system to ask for evidence because it denies the realities of my lived experience.

And by having moved the entire question into matters of lived experience on something as sensitive as bigotry in our society, which tries to be open and tolerant and pluralistic and welcoming and inclusive and diverse, they've removed the brakes from the train that would drive the revolution.

So, James, I've been saying for a long time there's going to come a point where you won't recognize your country.

Some people found that during the Kavanaugh hearings where they were like, wait, wait, wait, how is this happening?

Where is the evidence?

I'm open-minded.

And if he's doing those kinds of things, but we don't just convict somebody like that without anything.

And people thought the world was upside down.

That was a year ago.

That's a playground state.

That's like McDonald's playground compared to where we are right now.

I can't even imagine 12 months from now.

Are you seeing any slowdown?

Are there, and we can get into these.

I know you have a great answer for how to fight it, but are you seeing anything on the horizon that makes you feel better that maybe we're going to slow down on this?

I see a grassroots movement waking up, and that is the

most interesting and hopeful thing.

I also

am hearing from more and more people who are within business, within industry, within education, within universities, within the nonprofit sector, within the activist sector that has pushed for many even progressive left changes in society, all saying, wait a minute, this has all gone too far.

I wrote an article a while back, I guess two months ago, called The Woke Breaking Point.

And I compelled people in that article to think for yourself.

Maybe if you're out there and you're listening and you're somewhat progressive or you think this is, you know, a movement that has the best interests of certain vulnerable people at heart and you have sympathies toward it,

you need to wrestle with yourself.

And you need to take this to your friends and get your friends to wrestle with it and your family and anybody else that you can reach is that supports it.

You have to wrestle with where is the line that's too far?

What does it look like?

And you have to understand that psychologically, we have to see that line before we cross it in order for this to be effective.

Because what happens is, you know, something happens that's we normally wouldn't tolerate.

Then we end up going and we get in a culture war on Twitter or whatever, and we rationalize something unacceptable.

And

as long as you haven't.

So, what is the line for you?

Give

Give me some questions.

I crossed my line in 2013 or so when I saw my intellectual heroes getting called sexist for things that had nothing to do with sexism.

And then that's when I realized something wrong was happening here.

And when I asked questions, I got the academic literature, a sociological, they called it, but it's not actually a sociological definition of systemic sexism, then systemic racism.

And I said, well, here we have two definitions.

Why are we not trying to be clear?

Why are we muddying the water and using these like they're interchangeable when they mean different things?

And for me, that was my breaking point.

And that was that was seven years ago.

Kavanaugh, I actually heard from somebody yesterday that the Kavanaugh hearing was his breaking point.

When he saw that, he said that that's it.

A lot of people, though not many on the left, when Donald Trump was elected and we saw the emergence of a so-called hashtag resistance,

and we saw marches for abstract concepts like women, and

with no particular policy goals in mind, with no particular, just a women's march for what to resist Donald Trump and his existence.

And then, particularly, I've heard many people say the movement of, quote, not my president, where all of a sudden a duly elected president, according to the Constitution, was considered illegitimate based on who he was.

That was a lot of people's breaking point.

I've heard hundreds, if not thousands of people, that the recent month or two month long frackets on Twitter over whether two plus two equals four or five was a lot of people's breaking point where they said, okay, if they're willing to throw out objective truth, that's too far.

Yeah.

That's too far.

So even basic mathematics, science, I shared a thing on Twitter this morning.

It's actually old.

I've seen it before, about a project to decolonize light, saying that the way that we've studied light has been wholly from a scientific perspective and other perspectives on light aren't considered legitimate as science.

And so we have to decolonize light.

And this is real.

This was funded, I think this is Canadian, but it was funded by their government to

support this line of research.

And so when people see things like that, or when they see Dr.

Ibram Kendi, the how-to-be anti-racist book author, getting invited to speak at NASA recently, last week, that was too far for some people.

When they see today, Jack on Twitter announced that he's giving Ibram Kendi and his anti-racist policy institute at Boston University $10 million.

That was some people's breaking point.

A lot of times, though, it's going to be personal.

It'll be when somebody that they love gets fired, gets canceled, gets pilloried, gets called a racist illegitimately, like it was for me.

My intellectual heroes got called sexist when they weren't sexist.

And I said, something's wrong here.

So it'll be something for everybody, but people need to find out what it is.

And they need to get their friends to deal with it and say, you know, if they tear down a statue, a lot of people should have said, if they ever tear down a statue of George Washington, it's gone too far.

And a lot of people didn't.

And they tore down a statue of George Washington and a lot of people rationalized it.

Let me tell you one of the more frightening things that I've done recently is

while I was on vacation, I read 1984 again.

And I haven't read 1984 since, I don't know, I was in high school or whenever.

And I remember reading it then and it being a really good book, but you had to, you had to kind of,

you know, play into it and give it a little more credibility.

And you could think of, when I read it, you could think of the Soviet Union or whatever.

This thing read like a newspaper.

It read like today's newspaper in America.

And it was hair raising, which brings me to the two plus two equals five

you you you released a Twitter storm that just I mean it became like a category five hurricane where you were mocking two plus two equals five right

that's right and you all of a sudden saw all of these people

backing that up and arguing that you're right, two plus two isn't for

that's right.

Even today, while I was waiting to sit down with you, I was checking my Twitter and seeing that one of the most prestigious mathematicians in the world, one of the most accomplished mathematicians in the world, a Fields medalist, was still arguing about how 2 plus 2 doesn't always have to equal 4.

And so this is happening.

It all started where somebody had asked me to explain how would this ideology, the critical social justice or woke ideology, think about something like two plus two?

Would they say it's four?

Would they say it's five?

Would they say it's three?

Would they say it's something else?

And I said the answer is that it would say, is that they would say that it doesn't matter what two plus two equals, but that we should be suspicious of the answer four, because that's a hegemonic narrative that came from white supremacy.

And so I made this card that I put on Twitter.

I call them woke minis, and I put just little satirical quips and little pretty cards, and I put them out on Twitter and it said something to the effect of 2 plus 2 equals 4 is a perspective in white Western mathematics that excludes other possible values or marginalizes other possible values maybe.

And so

this

kind of just was funny and then somebody ended up tagging the creator of the 1619 project, Nicole Hannah Jones, with it about a month later.

And then she tried to make fun of it by saying that I had used Arabic numerals for two and four.

And she said that's so damn classic.

And she made fun of it.

Well, this ends up within a few days, it had tapped into this massive movement.

So, this is actually not just a Twitter fight, it tapped into this massive movement to change our education in terms of ethnic studies.

This is already the law in Washington, it's already the law in California, it just passed in California.

In California, now what they no longer are going to be teaching just history, they are now going to be teaching what they call herstory

where they my head hurts and they H-E-R to HXR,

HXR story instead of history.

And so this is working its way into the education system of New York.

This is three, of course, very blue states, but it will go to others.

This is the objective to change our education system.

And so one of the reformers, if we'll call them that, one of these activists trying to change our education systems in Washington, the secretary director of their program there

tweeted, wow, you know, somebody had gotten into the two plus two two equals five thing.

And she said, wow, there's this line of attack against my ethnic studies program in Washington mathematics saying that it would mean two plus two equals five.

How can we turn this into a true statement?

That's what she said.

How can we turn two plus two equals five into a true statement?

And now that was at the very beginning of July.

Here we are in mid to late August.

And ever since it's been raging for people to try to turn two plus two equals five into a true statement.

And the reason is because they want to, and they've said this explicitly, I'm not just interpreting.

interpreting, they want to undermine the idea of objectivity and mathematics so that you can't trust your own senses, just like in 1984.

You can't trust your own reason, just like in 1984.

You have to listen to them.

They will tell you what 2 plus 2 equals, when it equals 4, when it doesn't equal 4, because 2 plus 2 equals doesn't matter, but we should be suspicious of the white supremacist answer 4.

You should.

And they want to set themselves up as the arbiters of what is true and false for everybody.

You need to read an article article that I just read this morning in Forbes, and it was

doing your own research may be deadly.

And it was that no one, even some scientists by themselves, no one is qualified to give you the truth unless you're an expert in that particular field.

And so that

people should no longer do their own homework.

No matter how hard you try, you will never come up with the right answer because you don't know even the questions to ask.

That's the most

enslaving idea I think I've ever heard.

Yeah, it's a complete perversion of the idea of expertise.

Expertise is supposed to mean that somebody has studied the proper

methods or the proper material to be able to be more likely to render a correct opinion.

Not that they automatically will

and that everybody therefore must trust them.

The liberal principle, meaning philosophically liberal like our Constitution, when applied to knowledge, is that we have checking of each by each.

Science works because anybody,

anybody, it could be some teenager in his basement fooling around with his chemistry set, could overturn the biggest Nobel Prize winning scientist by saying, Wow, the experiment says you made a mistake.

So, you are correct.

This is the exact opposite

of what leads us to truth, what leads us to knowledge, and what prevents us from falling into the tyranny of people who

on Twitter, I've just started calling them our betters in a very sarcastic, satirical way.

Oh, our bettors have said this.

Oh, our betters think of us this way.

This is what our betters say.

And I mean, you know me, I'm not exactly a right-wing populist, but this is a

this is this is the sentiment, though, that has to rise up from everybody who's not already captured by this mindset is that these people are attempting to appoint themselves philosopher kings who are going to rule us because they know better than us and that we can't do the experiment for ourselves.

The other one that's when you were telling me about Forbes, I was thinking of how many things I've seen where they're trying to make homeschooling illegal or now they're trying to, with the coronavirus, where we're all having to, you know, a lot of school is going to be virtual.

It's going to be by the web.

And I just saw, just saw an article minutes ago that was talking about how a school system,

and I don't know where, I'd have to actually look into it more closely, but a school system is requiring parents to sign forms saying that they won't watch what the teachers are doing with the kids in their own homes.

And,

you know, you had the guy at Harvard saying that homeschooling should be illegal.

The children are literally wards of the state, and therefore they need this state education.

And all of these people are now arguing that homeschooling is racist.

It's a way for racists to keep making racist children and to perpetuate the ideologies of white supremacy.

And there's a real threat that this could win.

I keep hearing people say, well, if this keeps up in our schools, I'm going to homeschool.

And I keep thinking, if you don't fight back now, in a year, that will be- You won't.

You won't be able to homeschool.

You won't have the, yeah, it'll be illegal.

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James, you know that I built the Blaze years ago because I was in the system.

I worked for CNN and then I worked for Fox, and I saw it's the same game.

It's the same game.

And I wanted an independent voice that no one could ever squelch.

Depending, if things move as quickly as they are moving right now, I'm not sure that I have a voice left in 2021.

And a lot of people go, oh, that's ridiculous.

I'm not alone in that.

I've talked to some of the biggest broadcasters and some of the biggest people on YouTube and online, and they're all saying the same thing.

I'm not sure we're going to be able to say things next year.

Right.

Yeah, it's actually very concerning, and there are very realistic mechanisms.

I don't think a lot of people, we've been, this is a problem we talk about in cynical theories, is that a lot of people have become comfortable with liberalism, again, in the not left-right American politics, but the broad constitutional sense.

And so they don't,

not only do they not have the ability to articulate clear defenses of what it is and reasons that people should stand up for it, they also have come to take it for granted and they can't think of how a system like ours could become illiberal.

Even while models for such things are happening in the world today, the social credit system

is a model.

I don't know how people don't see it happening here right now how are people still duped when people say oh what rights have you lost are you kidding me are you not seeing the handwriting i feel like uh a jew in germany who's like i i don't know maybe we should get out of here no there's nothing to worry about i mean this is how it happens

Yeah, I've actually had the same feeling.

And the problem is, is that all of the Western democracies, democracies of course not all of which exist in the west but all all of the the the advanced democracies in the world are going to be subjected to this yes too they're they're it's like where do you escape yeah where can you go because this is um this ideology is

uniquely parasitic it is modeled to it is designed to to model itself after whatever it attaches itself to so if it gets into the republican party it'll speak the republican party language and will twist the words twist the policies, and subvert.

That's actually the term that they use for their activism, subversion.

It will subvert the thing from within.

People say, oh, well, there's contracts or there's the Constitution or there's the First Amendment or there's this or there's that.

You change the word.

If you change the meanings of the words.

Then you change the contract without changing a single word in it.

You change the meaning of the words and the Constitution doesn't mean the same thing anymore and it doesn't and it doesn't protect you at all.

And so this is what's happening so when we come back not to drag back to two plus two but this was one of the literal this is the main argument that's being made that two plus two doesn't always equal four is that well if you change the meaning of two or if you change the meaning of plus or if you change the meaning of equals, or if you change the meaning of four.

One person even said explicitly, now this isn't a person of any significance, but one person even says explicitly that if we just allow the symbol two and the symbol four to mean completely different things or the symbol five to mean completely different things, then two plus two equals five is a true statement automatically.

We just change the meaning of the symbols and then the new statement is, it means whatever they want it to mean.

But when this seems silly and funny or whatever, but it's very serious because if you change the meaning of the words in the Constitution, the Constitution now means something different.

And you have no protections left.

If you change the meaning of the words in your contracts, your contract means something different.

And now you can be held to something you never signed up for.

And this is a real threat, and this is actually how this ideology operates because it's so concerned with the power of language that it manipulates at that level, and it's able to, therefore, enter into anything and subvert the thing itself by changing the way that the language that that, whether it's a community, whether it's an organization, whether it's a company, whether it's a government, whether it's an individual relationship, how all of the language used by those people,

how that takes on meaning, that all gets changed.

And then it has all the power by making you think in its terms.

You know, I used to just think this was, excuse the expression, mental masturbation of, you know, of

naming and necessity.

Saul Kripke wrote, a wheel is only a wheel because we call it a wheel.

And I thought that's the biggest waste of time,

in my opinion.

That's a useless philosophy for me.

But that's really

not useless anymore.

They have found a way to make the naming and the necessity of naming really a powerful weapon.

That's right.

So that's ultimately what we wrote Cynical Theories to track was how did that happen?

Because we know that this, and it was mental masturbation, really,

this postmodern idea of putting everything in the world of language.

We take Jacques Derrida and we say, oh, he said all the words exist in discourses, and discourses are kind of like webs of words where meaning is connected.

You know, the meaning of any one word is actually defined in terms of its relationship to other words.

So if I say dog, we have to think things like animal, we might think canine, we might think carnivore or omnivore, I guess for dogs.

We might think,

we also have to think plants because plants are not animals.

We have to think cat because a cat is an animal that's not a dog.

We have to think in terms of things that dogs are and are not.

So all of the words are just in relationship to other words and meaning is completely deferred.

You can't say dog and point to a dog and anybody actually understand you.

That was the point he was making.

And in the same token, you can't...

read a text and understand what the author intended.

You can only understand

the words in relationship to the other words on the paper and in terms of how those words mean something to you.

And so

you take that and that's his post-structural deconstruction idea.

And so then you take that and you combine that with Michel Foucault.

Oh, power works through everybody and power is generated by what we validate as knowledge and what we don't.

And to talk about truth and falsity misses the point that it's politics that decide what's true and politics that decide what's false.

And that constrains people and their potentialities of being.

And so you had a whole generation of

kind of worthless academics just doing this screwy stuff with language that didn't make any sense.

And as you said, it's mental masturbation.

And then what happened is in the late 1980s, in the early 1990s, a bunch of literally radical activists, properly radical activists who wanted to change society in exactly the way that Marx laid out,

figured out how to use those rhetorical tricks.

to take apart everything they considered to be dominant in society while

safeguarding everything they decided to be their own interests.

And so they learned how to twist that postmodern language game, which that's what they actually referred to as language games,

to their advantage for real effective activism.

And so these people, this handful of activists in the late 1980s and early 1990s who were deeply informed from the Frankfurt School of Neo-Marxism,

the black feminists, the radical feminists,

these these people who are deeply informed in those regards figured out how to play postmodern language games to remove the necessity of truth and falsity from

their work at all.

They no longer had to be constrained by the truth.

They no longer had an obligation to tell the truth or to find the truth or to look for the truth or to communicate the truth.

In fact, they were able to recast, and this is famously in a paper by, I think her name was Kelly Oliver in 1989,

that it was no longer a necessity to be concerned with true theories or false theories, but only politically useful theories.

And so the idea of true and false following Foucault became political.

The idea that meaning cannot be found by pointing to the world, but only in how words relate to one another gave them language games.

They came from Derrida.

And the next thing you know, these radical activists, who were the same ones that rose up in the 60s that we were talking about earlier, had the means to take the brakes off the train and run it down the track anyway.

So, James, what is the?

I mean, because

you're just making imbeciles out of people.

You're creating the situation that the Soviet Union had, where they couldn't grow a crop, they couldn't make a timepiece that could actually keep time.

And when you can't make a timepiece, you really can't do a lot of things.

What is the goal of the people?

I mean, are they just evil?

How do they see good coming out of this?

So it's complicated.

There are, of course, one people who are more cognizant of how this is a very explicit kind of revolution in the way that you are talking about.

But I think the majority are sincere, to be honest with you.

Most people don't agree with me on this, but I do think that the majority of the even the scholars are very sincere.

And they've been convinced by, as

South Park put it, by smelling their own farts for now a very long time by getting too lost in the theories.

I mean, we have that saying, you know, an idea so stupid that only an academic could believe it, or something like that.

And so they've convinced themselves that oppression really did come from the system.

I hear people all the time who say that, you know, well, I used to think about things this way, and then I studied, say, critical race theory, or I studied even Marxist theory.

And then I had to learn to think in systems.

And now that I think in systems, I see how it's the system itself, that everything has to be torn down.

And so they believe that if they can get all of the problems out of the system, if they can unmake the problematic system, that the utopia is sure to follow.

That everything,

they believe that the problems, all the problems of society come from the fact that dominant groups create the problems.

They've completely

lost all perspective of anything else.

And I think that the majority of the people doing this are, in fact, in some sense, what would be called useful idiots.

They don't realize that their theory is bad.

They don't realize that there's a giant non-sequitur.

It's the same non-sequitur, but in a different context that Marx had.

Marx laid out his great theory about the failures of liberal societies, of capitalist societies.

And he wasn't wrong about everything, obviously.

He was able to identify some real points, in particular, the groupishness of people and the way that society stratifies and sees themselves as class groups for Marx or identity groups as we see it now.

And that this has real meaning for people and that they act in that way.

But his belief was, well, if you just wake everybody up to this, everything will be perfect.

And there was no mechanism by which that was supposed to work.

There was no actual economic theory that would explain how this is supposed to work out in practice.

And so then what you get is people who have to start denying the truth when it doesn't work, then to get increasingly brutal to force people to go along with it.

And then, as you pointed out, to make them dysfunctional, to make them, they don't have time pieces that work.

I talked to a systems expert, if you want to talk about systemic things,

a systems expert recently who was telling me about his own research, one of the things that he had done years ago, without any knowledge of this particular question, was what happens?

if you just desynchronize, say you have a functional organization, you did a computer model, and you just desynchron people's clocks so that on average, people are a little bit late to every meeting.

They miss deadlines by a little bit.

And then he had built a slider on it.

And so, what happens is that the drop-off in productivity is

not anywhere near

as slow as you might think it is.

You slide that thing a little bit.

You desynchronize people a little bit.

You take their time pieces away a little bit, and productivity drops off a cliff.

And he said, you don't even have to go very far.

And actually, the entire, the productivity of the organization organization falls to zero very, very quickly.

The entity cannot function just by desynchronizing people to a relatively small degree.

So, when you talk about building time pieces that don't work, or as we hear about it now, you can hear about decolonizing time, or you can hear people literally in the state of Washington and then their government who are on video saying things like keeping to a schedule and a meeting agenda is literal white supremacy coming out of my mouth.

It is now a, I think this, it was on the, I don't remember if it was on the list the Smithsonian published or not, but they had that horrendous list of things that were white supremacy.

But it's very common now to see punctuality is a vestige of white supremacy.

But if you remember,

it falls apart.

I remember, I don't remember what city it was in, and I remember telling this story back then.

I used to do, believe it or not, at one point before the world got so serious, I was actually, I did comedy.

And

we went to this big,

you know, Fox theater or whatever it was in this southern city.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so we didn't have the busing.

We just didn't have that problem.

And so I didn't really understand it.

And I remember I walked up and I was talking to the sheriff of the town.

I think the mayor of the town was there and the person that was running the theater, the general manager of the theater.

And we just chatted for a while and I said,

I got to go and I looked at the theater manager and I said, and we really like to start on time, eight o'clock, eight o'clock, seated or not, we start.

And they all laughed.

And one of them said, well, you're on colored standard time down here.

And I couldn't even process it.

I was like, what?

Color?

What?

And then I realized, oh my gosh, you're talking about black people.

I felt like I was in the heat of the night or something.

This is,

this is exactly what the Smithsonian put out.

It was just reverse racism.

And that's what's happening now in California, where they're trying to take away that you can't discriminate based on race.

They believe now that the only way to reverse discrimination is to exact, is to do that, reverse discrimination and discriminate against those who they say are racists.

That's not progress.

It takes you back 400 years.

Right.

And so you can even, we mentioned Ibram Kendi, the how to be an anti-racist guy who's now bestseller lists all over the place, is speaking to NASA, just got a huge grant from Jack at Twitter.

And

he explicitly says in his book, which many, many people have been compelled to read now, he explicitly says, explicitly says that if anti-discrimination creates unequal results, then it's racist.

And if discrimination creates more equal results, then it's anti-racist.

And that's the impetus behind what's going on in California.

You have literally people saying we need to start discriminating.

And they can say some nice thing like, oh, well, we just mean something like affirmative action, which you could say is a positive discrimination.

We're going to discriminate in favor of certain groups to try to help them out.

But because

I mean, what does this turn into?

You know, there are only so many spots.

It's not to say that everything is zero sum, but at some level, this does require negative discrimination against other groups.

And you see this very vividly with the now, it was at Harvard, and now there's a much bigger scandal about Asians at Yale.

And then Yale comes out and just like, yep, we're going to keep doing it.

You know, Justice Department, whatever, we're just going to keep doing it.

And

it's astonishing because there's now the,

I

cringe to call it intellectual, but there's now the intellectual architecture in place to justify

the unmaking of one of the crowning achievements of American history, which is the Civil Rights Act.

And it's like you said,

it's like you fell back into the heat of the night.

I felt the same way when I was watching the video of this meeting I mentioned in the Washington State Equity Task Force.

So this is again state-level.

This is not a legislative body.

This is an administrative state-level body that has been installed.

It exists.

And they literally were talking about how if people, you know, somebody came in late to the meeting, need to, we need to pay attention like they would do in South Africa.

And we need to, you know, this kind of slowed speech we would do like in South Africa.

Hey, how's your family?

Let's chat and catch up for 10 or 15 minutes.

Then we'll catch you up on what happened in a meeting and we'll delay everything 30 minutes.

And

she said, well, you know, we need to really work on kind of like South African time.

And it's just like, holy crap.

What in the world is, I mean, I saw that in January.

I was in a hotel and somebody sent it to me at, you know, it was like 12.30, and I had to give a talk the next day.

And it's like, I just couldn't stop watching this in boring administrative meeting.

I just stared at it for nearly an hour.

I couldn't stop watching it, just aghast.

And that was in January.

And now it's like, oh, yeah, that's normal.

That's just how things are now.

And so,

what, what,

for instance, in the book, you talk about,

you know, the fat theories.

I think that's what you call it.

Fat studies.

Just a thumbnail of fat studies here.

Okay, so yeah, the book traces just to kind of give a quick overview,

what postmodern philosophy is, how it changed in the 1980s and 1990s, as we spoke about.

And then it details a number of the specific branches of this new way of thinking, new way of thought.

One of them is fat studies.

So fat studies is

not what so I tell people about this a lot, and they're like, oh, you mean people doing research into like obesity and health?

And they're like, no, this is not what fat studies is.

Fat studies, if we give the thumbnail version, is if you could imagine, you know, almost the most,

you know,

sketch comedy support group for fat people and then turn that into an academic theory.

That's what it is.

It denies that the word, it only uses the word obesity in scare quotes.

It denies that obesity is real.

It calls it a medicalizing narrative that is used to induce fat phobia, which is a systemic hatred of fat people, just like homophobia.

It's not the fear of fat people, it's a systemic hatred, just like homophobia, and that it encourages fat stigma.

And so, obesity needs to be taken out of the consideration of the medical field.

Your doctor should not be allowed to tell you that obesity is linked to health conditions whatsoever.

They shouldn't be allowed to tell you that you're overweight, because that assumes that there is a correct weight, which is a hegemonic discourse that excludes fat people from society.

And it is an entire effort to essentially remove any expectation that we would be able to talk about

being overweight or

the medical implications of being overweight in any realistic or scientific way.

There's only talking about the ways in which

people who are overweight are oppressed by a society who doesn't welcome them, who doesn't accommodate them at every turn.

So airplane seats having a standard size, for example, is an example of fat phobia, a hatred of fat people, because

the airplane seat having a standard size is not accommodating the fact that some people are larger.

And the fact that there are, you know, seatbelt extensions implies that there's an accurate size, you know, a proper size.

And so it's humiliating to have to get a seatbelt extension.

And so it's a further way to embarrass and stigmatize fat people.

So fat studies

is a way to stop studying anything to do with being overweight in a realistic way and to turn it into something like a

support group on steroids that believes that society literally hates fat people and is out to get them at every turn and needs to rearrange itself completely to accommodate obesity and to pretend that it doesn't have health-associated risks.

So I was having dinner with Vince Vaughan about 10 years ago, and we were just talking about our backs.

I have a bad back, he has a bad back, and the conversation just kind of meandered into that.

And

he said, you know, I just got my back fixed.

He said, I've never felt better.

He said, you know, my wife was always giving me her theories and, you know, why my back was bad.

And he said, I didn't listen.

And he said, so I went and I went to all these doctors.

He said, I finally tried acupuncture.

He said, have you tried acupuncture?

And I said, yeah, it didn't work for me.

And he said, well, it did for me.

He said, I went to this old Chinese guy in Chicago.

and he said, I, you know, took my clothes off and I'm laying down.

And he said, this guy is just ancient.

He said, I felt like I was in China.

And he said, he came up and he said, you know, they put him in your ears, right

in the ears.

And he said, so they were poking the pins.

And he was poking the pins in the ears.

And he said, the Chinese guy said,

you fat.

And he said, I realized my problem was I was overweight.

And so I lost weight.

And so his version of acupuncture working was him just having somebody else say what his wife had been saying, you're fat, lose some weight, and you'll feel better.

Your back will feel better.

The point of this is, is all of these studies

are dangerous.

They are telling, I mean, you tell me, if you create a world where Glenn Beck is every right and he should feel good about going having more ice cream, I will have more ice cream because you're just enabling me to have more ice cream.

In my case, I bring my fatness on because I'm lazy.

I don't like to work out.

You have a doctor stop telling me to work out.

You have a doctor stop telling me, hey, stop eating that stuff.

It's bad for your blood pressure.

You're killing people.

You're killing people.

It's like

these theories and these

critical studies.

It's like a death cult.

It is in certain regards.

Within fat studies and disability studies in particular, there are direct health implications, direct health implications.

So we can talk about.

And it causes us to deny as well.

And I don't know if you've heard of this, I'm sure you have.

The people who say they're born handicapped and they're born with only one arm, but they have both arms.

And in Canada, they were debating on whether or not doctors should amputate arms, perfectly good arms.

No, man, that's a psychiatric issue.

You have two arms.

That's right.

That's right.

And it gets very literally psychiatric as well, because within disability studies, for example,

diseases like depression, which can end in suicide, are often characterized as identities.

And they talk about the depressed community and the depressed identity with a capital D.

And so at that point, you no longer try to treat depression.

You try to lean into your depression and you try to make your depression part of who you are.

And most importantly, because these are critical studies, just like with fat studies, and this is part of why they deny medical intervention, but also here and just with everything else, you're supposed to turn your identity into a political, a site of political activism, a political identity.

So we heard that with the 1619 Project woman, Nicole Hannah Jones, where she tweeted about people being politically black isn't the same as them being racially black.

We have politically fat.

One of the things when we did our grievance studies fake papers, we wrote fat bodybuilding, and it was based off of reading in the fat studies literature.

Somebody said that it takes time to build a fat body.

It takes even more time to build a politicized fat body.

And I thought that's just the funniest thing I've ever read in my life.

So that's where fat bodybuilding came from.

And so, but this is true, though.

So now you're supposed to adopt your identity as as a means of politics.

That old saying, the personal is political, is taken to the absolute extreme.

And the point is to do radical identity politics where you claim that the system is hurting people with my identity.

It's an extreme example, but it's true.

This actually,

within fat studies, for example, and it also shows up in disability studies.

The doctors encouraging people to lose weight, or if we invented a weight loss pill, of course, every pharmaceutical company in the world would love to invent this, that causes people to get to their ideal weight if they just take this pill.

Within fat studies, such an invention or even the advice of doctors is

construed as encouraging a fat genocide because it would make it so there are no fat identities any longer.

You see this with the impetus to cure certain disabilities, most frequently deafness.

It's a deaf genocide to give people, say, cochlear implants or other implants that would allow them to hear when they're deaf.

And so this is this very warped mindset where the identity politics and

the cultural identity of

everything becomes the most important factor and reality becomes basically irrelevant.

So, James, I...

You know, I think you were really nervous the first time you came on my program because, I mean,

you could say a lot of things about me and and people have said those things

but they're all most of them are cartoon characters and and and inaccurate but the one thing that is true about me is I'm a I'm a very religious man I'm open-minded and I'm not trying to preach my religion and you know you I know great atheists

And in the last couple of years, I've tried to,

maybe five years, I've tried to stop using the word evil because it's such a powerful word and

means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

And I think we've just gotten so cavalier with

that word.

However,

if you just categorize evil as just destructive, intentionally destructive to the wellness

of a species, a planet, whatever.

I can't find another word to describe this.

I mean, I just.

That's right.

It's just evil.

So I, as you know, am not a particularly religious man,

but I have

many religious friends,

some of whom are very significant religious people, and I listen to them very seriously.

I want to understand how their faith informs their thinking, how it informs their life.

I want to understand it on those terms.

And I do agree that the word evil applies.

And so it's one thing where there's the intentional desire to tear apart and destroy, and that is evil.

There's another thing

where

a person has given into self-centered

envy.

to such a degree that they'll destroy anything so that other people can't have something that they don't have.

That's also evil.

And so I see this in a very kind of spiritual way:

that

this movement is, I mean, scratch the surface and you find that envy.

It's always there.

Somebody has something that I don't.

And the desire to,

so I don't want to get too theological, seeing as I've just set myself up as not

religious.

But the truth is that there are a few features of the character of Satan or of the deceiver

that

it is the temptation to obsessing about the self and then to turn that to not to oh how do I improve myself but how do I tear down that which is against me that that's a very

spiritual way to see evil and that's present here it is a deep focus inward on the self in a negative way and then projecting it onto the world.

And then the second way, and I think this is very important, is that

they seek justice, but in not to, again, get too theological, but in the Bible, justice is paired with mercy.

Right.

And that's what makes God righteous and good.

And this is justice with the opposite of mercy.

There is no forgiveness.

There is no mercy.

There is

what they consider to be justice.

It's French

revolutionary justice.

That's right.

And when you combine that with the manipulation of language and you remember that the point of the character of Satan is the deceiver, and so people are deceiving you with their, I mean, it's just all there.

I don't subscribe to the theology myself, but I understand the archetypes that it's speaking to, and it's all there.

And to consider this to be evil is,

as I think we've spoken about once before, I don't like to use that word.

But

this is it.

This is what evil looks like.

And there are other kinds of evil in the world, but this is one, and here it is.

So

what does this society look like?

And how long do you think it takes us to get to...

I mean,

it never stops eating.

I mean,

it will eat itself.

So eventually it destroys itself.

But when does it get to a place of real oppressive power to where we would recognize it as the former Soviet Union or

the Nazis or whatever.

How far away are we from that?

What has to happen?

It's very difficult to say how far, but the first instance where a significant institution that we truly depend upon, like our food supply chain, collapses, that's where it starts to recognize,

to look like that very quickly.

Of course, if people were better students of history, and I don't want to set myself up like I am a great student of history, they would recognize that the riots that we're seeing in the cities mirror

incidents in previous revolutions yeah and so they're the cultural revolution of China the cultural revolution of China is I mean this is where you add

Mao's objective was to destroy the four olds the the old culture had to be completely removed and that's exactly what you see now is the status quo you even see everybody who's you know okay boomer everybody's a dinosaur we're gonna going to watch the dinosaurs die.

And it was led by the youth who Mao turned into the Red Guard.

Right.

And he printed his little red book, and it had all of the little communist sayings and the Maoist sayings.

And this is what you're seeing in all of this anti-racist literature.

The same kinds of thought-stopping and revolution-driving aphorisms like white silence is violence.

These are the exact kinds of things, you know, white complicity.

Now there's brown complicity.

These kinds of ideas

have a strong historical precedent in the cultural revolution of China.

And so

I don't know how to answer your question for how do you recognize it?

How will people recognize it?

Because I already see it and I can't not see it at this point.

And I don't know how other people can't see it.

But what

will, I mean, I have a few points if we talked about woke breaking points earlier that I think will be unambiguous for large segments of the population.

One would be the collapse of a major necessary institution that we actually depend upon for our livelihoods.

Like whether that's

the economy,

banks, the economy, the food supply chain.

I mean, we almost saw that early on with some

shutting down all of the meat packing plants with the COVID-19.

I think the shutting down of the banks is

I believe it could happen between now and spring easily.

It might take longer than that, but it could happen tomorrow.

It could happen

at any time.

It could happen very soon.

And it's very difficult to make predictions about how soon that will be.

But there are certain things.

Another sign, and I don't know what form this will take, as far as getting people's attention.

I predicted from the first moments of the riots breaking out in Minneapolis after George Floyd died.

I predicted that the sign that would tell the majority of the public that it's time to wake up would be one of two things.

It would either be literal marches on the suburbs where they're trying to do the disruptive nonsense there in people's homes, or, and this was the more poignant one, police officers swinging from trees and

literal lynching.

And those things, I think, would actually

wake people up.

No, I don't know.

The neighborhoods are already happening.

There were two neighborhoods last night.

Yeah, two neighborhoods.

Well, then there are three because this week I've seen two different neighborhoods where they are literally marching and saying in the middle of the night, wake up, white people, wake up, we're here for it.

Another one I saw was this poor family was just out barbecuing

and a white family and this group was just talking about how they're going to take their house and they're racist and and the kids were just standing there and I thought,

how do you feel comfortable?

How much longer

do Americans stand by and take it?

So one of the things that people need to understand about the ideology, and

this was directly from a teaching education conference, but it also comes out of a myriad of their literature.

There is actually a statement, there's a concept within their literature called white comfort, and they say that the idea of white comfort is that white people are comfortable with the racial status quo.

And the next follow-up line is, therefore, anything that maintains white comfort is suspect.

So, this idea of going around and doing that to make people uncomfortable is core to the ideology.

And so, it will continue.

Anything that makes white people feel comfortable is suspect.

And this is, I mean, this is from Robin D'Angelo, who's now one of the most recognized figures in our culture.

This is literally one of her ideas.

And so, this is what's going to continue.

And so, my question, you know, is actually:

A, when do we decide that this is enough?

And B, how do we decide that it is enough?

And hopefully, we decide through the law and not through vigilante action.

And that's where I actually have the most fear.

I really do hope.

And, you know, there's a trick here that's being played.

And it's that, you know, they've laid this story for so long that Trump is a fascist,

that he's an outright fascist.

He's going to take control.

He's never going to give up the presidency.

It's going to be, you know, whatever, all these things that they say.

And he's a dictator, and so on and so forth.

And so many people that lean left of center believe this

that we can't even have the police show up to arson

or to riots or to the physical beating of a person almost to death in the street.

We can't even have the police show up because they'll cry, ah,

the force of the state is cracking down on peaceful protesters.

This is fascism in action.

Trump's finally enacting his fascism.

And people believe it.

People believe it.

That right there is the issue.

The problem with that is,

again, again, it's two plus two equals five.

We're being asked to deny what we see.

You know, they've made Trump into this fascist.

And quite honestly, you know, before he was president, I, you know, I was like, something goes wrong.

This guy could turn into a dictator like that.

But he has resisted every single call for taking over situations.

COVID, everything.

They were encouraging him to do it.

The left was encouraging.

And the states, the left states are becoming much more fascistic.

And they're denying that that's what fascism is

and

protecting just the average store owner, you know, or the or the neighborhood.

That's now fascist to the left and to the Democrats.

Yeah,

it's just like two plus two equals five in two ways.

One is the demand that we deny the reality that we can see with our own eyes.

The other is the manipulation of language.

Two plus two does equal five if we just change what five means.

And so, or if we change what plus means, or if we change what equals means.

And so here

there's a completely different definition of fascism, which if you look into it, the definition of fascism that's in operation is a state that functions.

That's it.

It has police.

It has order.

It has

expectations that people will follow rules.

That's fascism.

And that can be traced again to these same thinkers,

tracing back into the 1960s in particular.

These same thinkers

laid down these ideas and they've been festering for 50 or so years and have turned into this.

You do something where you have a social justice dictionary that I think is really, really important because there's all these new words, and everybody seems to speak them overnight.

All of a sudden, everybody's saying this new word, and you're like,

when did that happen?

What does that word mean?

And

I want to go through a few of them with you because I intentionally did not

read the definition of these words because I want to see if I can get anywhere even close, and I don't think I can.

Medicalizing,

that that is

like mansplaining, except to

by a medical professional?

That's actually fairly close.

Medicalizing is to turn an issue that should not be thought of in medical terms into

a medical issue.

And so you could think of a real example, and there's a real debate around, for example, addiction.

Should addiction be treated as a social issue?

Should it be treated as a medical issue?

Is it a disease?

What kind of a problem is it?

And so to just say, well, we're just going to give people methadone and send them home or whatever, that would be medicalizing the issue and thus missing the nuance.

And so there's a real use of this word.

And then there's the use,

as we actually mentioned in fast studies and disability studies, where saying somebody is depressed and treating that as a medical issue, or somebody's overweight and treating that as a medical issue.

They say that it turns this into a medical issue when it's really not a medical issue.

should not be treated as a medical issue.

And then they assert further that this is an example of the application of hegemonic power, where we believe scientific discourses and don't believe non-scientific discourses.

And this constrains people and hurts them.

So responsibilize,

that is

saying that something is responsible that is part of

the

fascist state or

the white

culture?

you're close again.

So to res again, this is a term that has a real legitimate use.

The term in its legitimate use means to make a person responsible for something that previously some other entity, often the state, took care of.

So if

Social Security went away

to responsibilize you have to.

To now responsibilize

the elderly.

Right.

But

where we hear these ideas like victim blaming.

So somebody has a sexual assault happen to them and we say somebody were to reply, oh, well, what was she wearing?

That makes her responsible for something that shouldn't have happened.

So the way that the critical social justice ideology sees it is anything that the system should not be allowing that we then say somebody should take responsibility for.

So a more realistic situation is when maybe on college campuses, maybe just in broader society, we recommend women's self-defense classes.

Women learn how to learn to use a gun, you know, get your carry permit, learn a little basic martial arts so that you can be rape safe.

That would responsibilize the woman.

Now, she has to do this extra thing that she wouldn't have otherwise had to do.

And if rape just didn't exist because the system didn't allow rape to exist, she wouldn't have to do it.

So, you've responsibilized her, you've given her responsibility in her life where she shouldn't have to have responsibility.

I have to tell you, and again, I go back to evil.

Everything this preaches is against everything that we learned was good.

It's the exact opposite.

Don't have responsibility.

You don't have responsibility.

I grew up in a world where take responsibility for your own life.

Pull yourself.

The world can throw manure on you all the time, but how you react to it is what is going to make the determining will be the determining factor in your life.

That's no longer, that's nonsense.

That's white

power.

Well, I mean, to give you an explicit example of that, you're already hearing people suggesting, and I've heard several people email me about this, say even in the context of their therapy sessions where they've been raped and they have post-traumatic stress over their actual rape and they're dealing with it.

And then their therapist tries to point out to them, you know, say they're raped by a black man.

This is a true story somebody sent me.

And

they were discussing it with their therapist in the context of therapy.

And the therapist said, well, you have to think about the way systemic racism shaped

those people's lives.

And so maybe they aren't fully responsible for what they did.

And you shouldn't put responsibility on them that would responsibilize them.

You see it with these new movements now.

I don't know if you've seen just in the last few days the idea of considering crime as a social construct.

Crime doesn't really exist.

And if you understood the systems of poverty, the systems of racism, the systems of bigotry, then you would understand why people say break into homes and steal things or loot a store or

whatever else.

And so these people can't be held responsible.

We saw that literally with the looting that followed George Floyd's death.

People were saying, well, look at the

systemic racism.

They can't be held responsible for the material conditions of their lives.

So obviously they're going to turn to these kinds of actions or they're going to turn to crime because they can't be held responsible.

So saying, you know what, you need to actually be responsible and not loot a target.

You need to be responsible and not shoot people.

That would also, under under this, within the context here of race, would also count as responsibilizing people.

And so this taps into literally the defund the police and the prison abolition movements, saying that those people can't be held responsible because racism is what made them into criminals.

And that calling them criminals applies a, straight out of Foucault, a disciplinary term to them that is socially constructed and unfair and meant to just control their black and brown bodies.

This is literally the way they use language and think about the world.

So

the other things are genocide, exclusion, science, fascism, identity.

I thought I could

like genocide.

I mean,

trying to kill everybody of a certain race.

That's not how it's, that's not what that is anymore.

Well, it's that.

And it's also the idea that you would in some way wipe out a cultural identity.

So say, for example, that you were to encourage all fat people to lose weight.

There are no fat people.

There's no fat identity.

That's a fat genocide.

Or you were to cure deafness.

That's a deaf genocide because there are no deaf people and no deaf culture.

Or if you were to say, teach, say that you have a hypothesis like we see in critical race theory that science is white supremacist.

So you were to encourage black people to think scientifically, that would take them out of their whatever black cultural context.

Or maybe it's South African, you know, we can talk about, there was actually a movement there called Science Must Fall that said that science was a colonizing colonizing way of thinking that was displacing traditional knowledge.

And so it would be a genocide of those cultures to teach them to think scientifically because those cultures would no longer exist the way that they did previously.

So, I mean, part of that is a little savage all over that.

I mean, part of that is we should have some conversation.

I have a daughter with cerebral palsy.

I wouldn't wish that on anybody.

However, she's changed me.

She's changed, she is a remarkable individual because she has it.

It is a heavy cross that tears my heart out almost on a daily basis.

But should we reverse all,

you know, birth or genetic defects?

I mean,

as a dad, I say yes.

As somebody who looks at issues and it's a way to

make you or the people around you better

if you adapt to it, I say no.

I mean, so we should have that conversation, but we don't have these conversations.

They just happen.

Right.

I don't think it helps the conversation.

So, I mean, there's a simple line where so long as somebody is sound enough of mind to have power of attorney over themselves, They should be allowed to make those decisions.

If somebody's deaf and wants to remain deaf even in light of a technology, they shouldn't be forced

to take it.

And if they want to lean into that culture around being deaf, that's perfectly acceptable.

And there's a lot of strength and there's a lot of wisdom and there's a lot of opportunity to learn and learn more about each other and the world in that.

And so it can be made into an individual choice, but turning it into a collective choice and then to shame people, say if, say, there was some magic treatment that could change your daughter's cerebral palsy and it were to come along and you brought it to her and said, well, what do you think?

And she was like,

i want that

i definitely want that there's nowhere in the universe that it can possibly be right to try to shame her for wanting that but if she also said you know i like who i am i don't want that there's all it's not inappropriate to shame them that way either there's only what's appropriate is to give them make the most informed choice possible, which means getting to the bottom of objective truths about the situation and then conveying those truths to people and then letting them make up their own minds.

That's the line, that's what we grew up with.

That's the line that actually works.

And when you start thinking in terms of collectives, like that she would be betraying the disabled community

by choosing a different life for herself, that's horrific.

Horrific.

Let me, uh, and then when you do this with theory that's not even real, I mean, it's even worse.

So,

let me let me just leave you with some Kipling here.

I'd love to get your thoughts on this.

Sure.

Kipling wrote a poem called The Gods of the Copybook Headings.

It's one of my favorite poems.

And

he wrote it after the progressives and the Fabian socialists

really moved on World War I, and they tried to make this utopia in Europe, and it just led to all these deaths.

And he wrote it as a warning for future generations.

And it's the gods of the copybook headings are the things that we knew were true.

You know, you would write, you know, water will wet, fire will burn, God is good, and you would copy those for your penmanship.

And

let me just pick it up in the middle.

With the hopes that our world is built on that, they were utterly out of touch.

They denied the moon was Stilton.

They denied she was even Dutch.

They denied that wishes were horses.

They denied that pigs had wings.

So we worship the gods of the market, who promised us all of these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, they promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed, they sold us and delivered us bound to our foe.

And the gods of the copybook heading said, stick to the devil, you know.

On the first feminine sandstones, we were promised the fuller life, which started by loving our neighbor and and ended by loving his wife.

Till our women had no more children and the men had lost their reason and faith.

And the gods of the copybook heading said, The wages of sin is death.

In the Carboniferous Epic, we were promised abundance for all by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul.

But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy.

And the gods of the copybook headings said, If you do not work, you will die.

Then the gods of the market tumbled, and their smooth-tongue wizards withdrew, and the hearts of the meanest were humbled, and began to believe it was true.

That all is not golden that glitters, and two and two do make four, and the gods of the copybook headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of man.

There were only four things certain since social progress began, that the dog returns to his vomit and the sow returns to its mire, and the burnt fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the fire.

And after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins, when all men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins, as surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn, the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return.

Yeah, that's

it.

That's oddly prophetic.

Yeah, it is.

Is it, and very hard to find?

I've only found it in one book.

They've done everything they could to erase this poem, I think.

Is

you know,

in your book,

you talk about the solution, and

it is the solution.

It is the common sense solution.

It is the solution we all have been taught and now seemingly are rejecting.

Is it going to take terror and slaughter to return to those things?

One hopes not.

And I don't think that it has gone that far yet.

And we hope that that doesn't come about.

But people actually do have to understand what's happening.

The reason that that poem seems prophetic, it's not prophetic.

It understands.

It understands the dynamics of a certain thing.

And when that thing is put into practice,

what is going to

it's the theme of the poem.

That which is going to come from that is what is going to come of that.

And so there's no prophecy there.

And there's also, of course, a reminder that reality is going to last.

And

you can't manipulate the situation to get away from the reliable consequences of bad theory.

So we are in a crucial moment, and I mean that literally in the sense of a crookes, a point, an inflection point in history, where

if people can quickly begin to understand

what is happening, what this ideology actually is

of social justice, anti-racism, diversity, these all sound great.

The branding is awesome.

Black Lives Matter, branding is perfect.

If you can look inside the box and realize, wait a minute, this is definitely not what we're signing up for.

These good things that it,

the glitter of the not gold is

not what's really going on here.

And people are willing to say,

no,

things that work

are not inherently racist.

Things that work are not inherently sexist.

Society functioning is not actually fascist.

This is lunacy.

And we're not going to play by these rules.

We're not going to keep being rolled by this.

We're not going to have to keep giving in to this.

And the mob on Twitter will not make us.

Then maybe there's a chance that we can avoid the catastrophe that we really don't want to have have come as the reset.

A few people have died.

I don't think that it's necessary that any more die.

But we have to remember what principles, you know, people need to,

I've gone back and read a little bit again of the Federalist Papers.

People need to go read this.

People need to understand the Constitution.

They need to understand the Declaration of Independence.

They need to understand the basic principles of how checking of each by each and accepting the fact that when you lose the argument because the experiment said that your hypothesis was wrong, that that's okay and actually good.

When people start to remember how we built ourselves out of medievalism,

clawing our way 500 years out of medievalism, and then they can see that this theory leads to medievalism again rooted in something like ethnic Gnosticism,

they can then decide, no, we're staying with modernity.

We're not going back to a medieval system, we're not giving in to these little petty dictators and their fiefdoms.

And we can avoid the violence that will come if they keep pushing.

I don't want to take this

amazing conversation and

turn it political or especially leave it political.

So answer this question any way you want.

I've heard people say all the time,

it doesn't make a difference who you vote for.

They're all the same.

You know,

I'm hearing it's all kinds of stuff.

Does it matter?

And you don't have to get into who, but does it matter who wins in this election?

Will this election

change things

for the good or for the worse?

I generally see no good options in this election.

I see no good options.

It will matter, and it will matter either way.

And I think that we have to hope that enough people realize that we are now on a train that is barreling down the tracks and about to shoot off the edge of the cliff to realize that we have to not invest as deeply in the outcome of the election as we are likely to culturally.

That said,

I'm very worried in particular, and I say this as a lifelong liberal who does not want to be political, I'm very worried about what will happen if Biden wins this election.

I'm very worried about it because I see

no, I don't see brakes on the train anywhere, but I see the accelerator pedal

over there.

And I don't necessarily even see it in Biden himself.

I just, I don't.

I don't think so.

I see it.

in the architecture around him and the fact that the that most of this ideology operates administratively which is why in some sense it matters, and in some sense it doesn't, because even under Trump, even under any other president, if some rogue third candidate were to come into the situation and sweep up all of the electoral vote somehow by some act of thought, experiment, magic, the administration underneath is still

the level of middle management, which is still pretty big at the federal government, is where most of these changes are taking place.

And unless that gets straightened out,

there's nothing good down this road.

That said,

as much as I hate to say it, one of the two candidates seems to put up resistance, and one of the two candidates seems to accelerate that process.

And I'm horrified.

I'm horrified because I feel like I can vote for neither.

James, I can't thank you enough for being honest and brave and

just being who you were meant to be and not

slinking away in the darkness.

These are the times that

produce the men and women that eventually civilizations build statues

to remember

because while they're afraid,

And while they may know that no good is probably going to come from my standing up, they do it anyway.

And you make a big difference.

And

I don't know if you feel the same way,

but I consider you a friend, and I'm honored to be your friend.

I feel that way about you for sure, Glenn.

I've said it many times before.

I don't agree with you on many things, but I would love it if you were my next-door neighbor.

Yeah, me too.

Me too.

We'd have great conversations.

Thank you.

The name of the book is Cynical Theories, How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity, and Why This Harms Everybody.

It's by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsey.

James, thank you.

Thanks, Glenn.

You bet.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.