Ep 43 | Noah Rothman | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Today, I'm going to spend time with a guy who goes into work every day and does battle.

I mean, and he holds his own.

He is a contributor to MSNBC frequent guests on shows like Morning Joe, where you can find him flanked and outnumbered by a whole bunch of people who, at times, you think might be frothing at the mouth just a little bit, waiting to see him fail.

But his goal is to bring a conservative voice to an anti-conservative part of the media with a lot of influence on public opinion.

He is taking one for the team, if you will.

He is the associate editor of Commentary.

That's a conservative journal.

He has recently authored a book that I think is extraordinarily important.

It's about social justice.

He deftly compares the social justice left and the white nationalist right.

He is a guy who understands Nazis.

socialists, an awful lot alike.

He examines the pitfalls of the political system based on tribalism and looks at the growth of woke capitalism and what it means for all of us.

He is incredibly smart.

He uses big words that I don't understand.

He's very eloquent and has his finger on the pulse of America with a unique view of our past, our present, and our future.

I remember in 2008

being called a racist conspiracy theorist, whatever, getting it from all sides when I said,

warning,

social justice may sound good,

but it is antithetical to absolutely everything you think it is,

what it sounds like, and what it was with the Catholics.

Yeah.

So

the critiques of social justice in this book aren't really new.

Right.

Robert Nozick did this, Frederick Hayek did this.

We've just forgotten all these lessons.

Right.

And as you say,

if you don't really have a lot of experience with social justice activists, they're not in your daily life.

You might think this is a pretty unobjectionable notion, just thinking about freedom and equality and righting true historical wrongs.

And it is that, or at least it was that.

But in the hands of its activist class, it has become the antithesis of the American idea.

But isn't it?

Because I want you to, I want to first delve into what it is, you know, historically, et cetera, and then what it has become.

It's a, well, start with the Catholics in the 1800s.

Yeah, so in the 19th century,

Jesuit philosophers in the Catholic Church were seeking a way to create an alternative theory of social organization to compete with the Enlightenment, a very secular Protestant Enlightenment, because their experience with the Enlightenment in France wasn't the experience that was shared by Englishmen and Scotsmen who developed those sort of ideas.

The Catholic churches were sacked and priests were assaulted and killed and idols to self-worship erected.

So they were very skeptical of what the cult of pure reason could reason you into.

And also the idea that

Adam Smith's invisible hand should be the font from which charitable works spring was something sort of anathema.

It shouldn't be the pursuit of self-interest that benefits society.

It should be devotion to God.

And so they developed a theory of social justice that was much more like charity.

It developed into the ecclesiastical rerum novarum, which has some collectivist elements to it.

It was a way to combat the symptoms of society that were leading to the development of socialism and Marxism.

But fast forward about a century later to John Rawls, and John Rawls put a lot more meat on these bones and made it seem, created the idea of social justice that we now know he did he advised a series of thought experiments so we could think about justice as like a finite commodity only so much exists in the world and it needs to be distributed justly and evenly so that everyone can have access to an equivalent amount of social justice how do you do that You create institutions that are dedicated to these distributions, idealized institutions, perfect institutions.

And the distributor, the enlightened distributor, operates from behind a veil of ignorance so that they cannot know the object of their distribution and satisfy their own biases.

Modern social justice advocates have turned against the philosophy that supposedly is the foundation of their thought process.

They think the veil of ignorance is morally obtuse.

How can you have a just distribution if you don't know who the objects of your distribution are?

Who are the oppressed and who are their oppressors and who deserves to be lifted up and who is due a comeuppance?

And even Hayek and Nozick note that Rawls abandons the veil of ignorance too whenever it becomes inconvenient to realizing the sort of just distributions that he envisions.

This is a feature of this movement.

It is not a bug.

It cannot see individuals as individuals.

It doesn't pursue justice in the kind of objective quantities that we see it in a courtroom.

It is, I mean, every statue of justice always has a blindfold.

Always.

And it is the principal idea

of a just West that you have to treat the white and the black and the rich and the poor, and we haven't always done that, but the idea of true justice is it doesn't matter who you are.

Yeah, no,

it has developed into an antipathy towards individuality.

And it sees people not as people, but as avatars of their particular tribe and treats them as such.

And it is a dehumanizing philosophy in that sense.

And once you dehumanize someone, you can do a lot of things to them.

We're not the first society that has begun to experiment with these ideas.

They're pretty old ideas.

And

when I had the idea for this book, I was in Ukraine.

I was on a government-sponsored junket there.

The post-revolutionary administration was sending people over, influencers, and they wanted to talk to them about what they were doing, building a civil society.

And I met a lot of very influential people and very smart people who were committed to creating a Republican culture in this post-Soviet state.

It was a noble project.

But I was very disheartened when I sat across from the country's chief prosecutor, who explained to us at the time that they had no interest in, and it wasn't in their interest and therefore not in our interest, to see them prosecute anybody who was engaged in violence in the Maidan Revolution on their side.

And why should you want to see that?

We're on the same team here.

That was the kind of justice, an idea of justice that is common in the rest of the world, but it doesn't look like the kind of justice that we see in a courtroom.

It looks to me a lot more like revenge.

Yes.

And you're feeling that now.

Let me stay in the Soviet Union for a second.

Lenin,

first of all, everybody's starving because of his policies with the farmers.

And then it starts to work itself out a little bit.

And the farmers start to make some money and they're starting to sell

their harvest.

And it's starting to pick up and things are kind of okay.

And Stalin comes in and he finds a group because

he needs to say the farmers are capitalists now and we gotta we gotta shut this down

this is social justice

is is the greatest tool in the hands of anybody gone bad or anybody who even believes something good and needs a highway to do it because you can say as he did they're stealing the wealth this these crops belong to all of us i have another story from the Soviet Union that's in this book.

So affirmative action as we know it was essentially invented in the former Soviet Union.

Bolsheviks inherited a vast Russian empire.

It was multi-ethnic, and the Russians governed it like viceroys.

And they did so in a very chauvinistic way.

Russian chauvinism was a problem, not just from a governing standpoint, but from

a pragmatic standpoint.

This was an assault on the kind of egalitarian global communist order they wanted to build.

So they developed indigenization policies lifting individuals up in these individual republics who are representative of the ethnicity in those republics.

But that was only one half of this program.

The other half was to disempower and disadvantage ethnic Russians.

Ethnic Russians would be denied a sense of nationality, nationalism.

They were to be punished for the approach that they took to governing these territories.

This policy was a disaster.

These people, most of the individuals who were lifted up, a lot of them were incompetent Aparacheks.

Many of them were liquidated in the purges.

But the kind of backlash that was sown as a result of this policy among Russians resulted in its exact opposite.

Russification was engaged in.

The individual cultures were tamped down.

And a sense of grievance among individual Russians manifested in a backlash against the republics that was probably the result of the sense that they had been robbed unjustly of a sense of individuality, of a sense of commonality and nationality.

So again, the story is, and the story throughout this book is people who, with the best of intentions, convinced of their own competence, made everything worse.

I will tell you, I have been

watching the rise of this and

tired of warning against it.

We're seeing, and I want to get into identitarianism,

we're seeing

all of this just turn around and backfire.

I mean, an example I think Americans would be able to relate to is

I think Barack Obama had the greatest opportunity of any president ever.

If he would have been transformative in nature on race,

if he would have been more like the King message, more like the Gandhi message, more like Nelson Mandela, it would have changed everything.

But he believed in collective salvation, he believed in social justice, and social justice feels like vengeance.

There were some times when Barack Obama was transcendent on race.

In particular, I'm thinking of the wake of the verdict in the the Trayvon Martin killing trial.

That was a transcendent message.

But he delivered different messages for different audiences.

That was the message for the country, and it was very healing.

He was very, if he would have been the guy who spoke at the Democratic Convention in what was it, 04,

it would have been transformative.

It would have been transformative.

But even if it wasn't him,

this started to, it's been going on for a long time in the universities, but this started to co forefront where the average person started noticing a change, and it is accelerating so rapidly.

And we're starting now to say,

I think Kavanaugh was a breaking point where people, average people went, wait a minute, this could happen to me.

This could happen to my son.

This isn't justice.

This is not...

What's happening here?

Maybe the most disturbing element of that episode for me was the way in which you saw a deluge of people who were influential in media and politics and entertainment and just about every facet of life come out unashamedly and without any reservation to say that this is the result of a privileged white man who's rebelling against his own circumstances, just reducing him to the accidents of his birth and stereotyping from that basis and ignoring that the pausity of evidence before us was such that you didn't really have a lot to pour over.

So why not get into his accidents of birth?

That, in any other other context, we would call pernicious prejudice.

Oh, yeah.

But it was the kind of thing that was not only acceptable, but lauded.

So here's what I don't understand.

And I ask this sincerely.

I have actually talked to

one of the daughters of one of the writers that went to prison

for...

you know, being one of the Hollywood 10 during the Roundup of the Communists in the 50s.

And we completely disagree on things.

But on this, we come into line on.

And I don't, I literally don't understand how can

people who say they represent a group of people who have been afraid to say who they are because they were kept in a closet,

or a group of people who have seen jail time for what they believe in a political sense, people who have been oppressed,

how do they not see

all that's happened is you're flipping the script instead of instead of Gandhi Martin Luther King judge me by the content of my character judge me by merit Martin Luther King said live up to the words of your founding documents

we throw those out now yeah that those appeals to common humanity are um judged to be insufficient to the moment by the social

what's wrong with us well we're not seeing that.

So this is a common human impulse, right?

I mean, the kind of tribalism and identity politics is so common and ingrained and universal that it must be an evolutionary trait.

So the fact that we have these structures in this country that are designed to thwart those impulses is not a natural condition, and we're essentially rebelling against our own humanity.

It has worked in an entropic way, in part because the founders were so far-sighted.

But it is not a natural condition.

We are rebelling against nature.

You start with Kurt Vonnegut,

and you say it's actually worse than what he saw in 1961.

Tell the story and

explain how it's worse, because he came up with a pretty dystopian look.

Yeah, it's Harrison Bergeron.

So the story of Bergeron takes place in the

distant future in 1961, but it's not too far from now,

In which society was characterized by negative discrimination, the kind of discrimination we were talking about in the Soviet Union.

Individuals who have advantages bestowed on them by nature, natural advantages of birth, whether they look attractive or they have unique athletic abilities or they're intelligent, they are disempowered by the state, given various impediments to deny them those privileges.

Mask if you're beautiful.

Mask if you're beautiful, acoustic distractions if you're smart, weights around your legs if you're athletic.

The design being social equality, but downward social leveling.

And in order to envision this scenario in 1961, which is kind of anathema to the American consciousness, he needed to create this big brother character, which would impose these conditions on people.

I don't think he foresaw the situation that we're in now where there is no imposition from above.

This is being demanded from below.

This is a sort of bubbling up from beneath.

It is by popular demand that we are seeing these kind of demands for downward social leveling.

And that's much more dangerous because you can't just vote out the demos.

Is it coming for the most part?

And I'm not talking about

the social justice warriors who know exactly what it is and what they're doing.

But there are people that I just saw an interview with a bunch of

Columbia students, and you talk about this in your book with the Nazis, the neo-Nazis here.

Guy goes on campus.

He says,

blacks want to have separate, but equal dorm rooms, classrooms, everything else.

And all of the people on campus are like, well, I mean, I think that's fine if that's what they want.

I think that's fine.

Without even thinking, you know,

this is segregation.

We got rid of that.

But as I was watching it, I thought that is,

for some, that was motivated, I think, by, look, I don't care what people want to do.

If you want to live together, live together.

You don't want to live together, live over here.

It's fine.

So

this twisting of

right and wrong and universal endless truth,

part of it is coming from our own

strength

of

just wanting to get along.

Right.

Just wanting to do the right thing.

Yeah, I mean, there's one thing to be said for wanting to steep yourself in a lifestyle that complements a particular field of study.

I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with that.

The new,

although it might manifest in something you could call segregation, that's not necessarily healthy, but it's not an assault on the American idea.

What's a little different and a little more disturbing is now

the pretense that this kind of segregation has anything to do with study is being abandoned.

You see non-faculty administrators now saying that we need to have essentially segregated spaces in all forms of campus life, segregated lunch tables even, because it prevents, quote, uncomfortable learning.

It's insane.

Have you ever been, have you ever, at any time, learned anything in your life that was worth it that didn't cause you some sort of discomfort, pain, questioning?

Right.

No, that's the essence of competition, markets.

There's no advantage to be gained in stasis.

It hurts when I work out.

Organization, sure.

I neither tell you the truth, to my wife's information.

You should, otherwise you'll end up looking like me.

Unfortunately, though,

this is the sort of thing, and I said this is bubbling up from beneath, but this is seen as the most healthy approach to

developing a sort of communal instinct, because the notion here that segregated areas of lifestyle and complete separatism

is the way to create some form of racial enlightenment seems to me a very difficult way to combat racism.

You're basically telling people that the only culture you're allowed to appreciate is essentially your own.

I don't know how that combats the kind of, uh, the kind of hatred that social justice advocates say they want to fight.

But when you boil it down, when you talk to them and you start, you know, really working through these issues, it's not, it doesn't become about addressing hatred and creating more common understanding and commonalities and universality.

It becomes steeping yourselves in these grievances, holding fast to these grievances, because they are empowering.

You just said with Kurt Vonnegut, you just said

that we would accept it and bring it on ourselves.

I think we've gone one step worse.

I think we are

incentivizing people

to be intersected.

If you can find a way to a grievance, congratulations.

Congratulations.

You're

10 points for you.

Find another one, another 10 points.

We are celebrating.

It is truly a rejection of everything we've ever been as a nation.

We are celebrating our differences in a negative way.

We are looking for things that say kept us down, where Americans were always like, I don't know, Rocky Mountains, I got a horse, wagon, let's go.

You know what I mean?

Not me.

I'm glad I wasn't around at that time.

But we were never put off.

And we never...

The people used to always say about America, they still do, which is saying something.

You know the thing I like about Americans is they're almost naive.

They trust everybody.

We never turned each other in.

We never turned on each other.

We didn't matter.

We had our problems, but in the end, we were in this together.

We're not.

Nothing.

We're being dismantled bit by bit.

And

people are smart.

They see incentive structures.

They know that there is capital in victimhood.

And when you create an incentive structure for a certain type of behavior, you're going to get more of it.

I wish I could say this was unique to the left.

This book is mostly about the left, but not exclusively.

Shouldn't be.

Because the right is just as attracted to these ideas as much as the left is.

They understand a marketplace when they see one, and they're engaging in it.

When I was at Fox

2009, 10,

I kept saying,

Democrats, be careful because you're not always going to be in charge.

Don't do this because you may not think it's a problem now.

But what is it that you're creating that's coming in after?

Now we have Donald Trump.

Now I find myself saying, Republicans, don't do this because what are you doing?

You're creating somebody else that's going to be a bigger dog.

Both sides.

We want

our vengeance.

We want to shut people up.

How does this end?

So,

I mean, I have good news and bad news.

Okay.

So, my.

Start with the bad news.

Oh, well, that's that's unfortunate.

Just because I just want some happy news.

Go ahead.

Start with the happy news.

Well,

you got to get to the bad news for the happy news.

So the happy news is I don't think the kind of downward social leveling that social justice advocates seek is possible in this country.

The institutions in this country are not equipped to meet out the kind of justice that they seek.

So, that's the good thing.

I don't think these without a whole entire remaking of the constitutional order, will we see that kind of thing?

Aren't we?

I mean, just look at the Green Deal.

Forget about all the cow farts and all of that stuff.

Just the line in the new Green Deal that it is to reform our system and change our system into a system of

ecological and social justice.

It is that fundamental transformation of the entire economic system.

Absolutely.

So I read the Green New Deal, the proposal, the subcommittee proposal, the FAC, all that stuff.

And it is only tangenti related to environmental remediation, right?

Most of it is about these ideas about progressive desiderata that they've been seeking for generations.

generations.

The notion

of desired, objects of desire.

So

the notion here that you're going to have, through the Green New Deal, the federal jobs guarantee that FDR wanted in 1937 tomorrow seems to me unlikely.

The notion that you're going to have Medicare for all.

and you're going to wipe out a $900 billion industry tomorrow in this one proposal seems unlikely.

So yes, you're moving towards a transformation of society, but it is one that has been at least 100 years in the making, and so far it has encountered a series of impediments.

I'm hopeful that those impediments are not going to disappear tomorrow.

The problem, however, is that the social justice advocate who has developed these moral imperatives will encounter this resistance and then

react in one of two ways.

One, despondency, withdraw.

back off, say your political activism isn't worth it.

And the second is to radicalize, to resolve to attack the foundations of these institutions because they are so immoral and so unresponsive that they cannot be allowed to stand.

And that is, in my view,

why we have seen so much political violence in this country over the last 10 years, more than we've seen in a generation.

Began with Occupy, and it has only gotten worse.

Right and the left fringes are at one another's throats in the streets, literally knifing each other in the streets.

It's sort of the narcissism of small differences there.

The two groups resemble each other in more ways than they don't.

But yeah, they're at each other's throats.

And I think that is a product of the fact that they are reacting reacting with frustration because their demands cannot be met.

Do social justice warriors, for instance,

you look at the people up in Portland and

an Antifa.

And

you have a hard time squaring the circle on this one.

Hang on, you're against fascism.

But you're doing these things.

And you're against Nazis.

Okay.

Well, so am I.

But you're acting an awful lot like a Nazi.

Right.

I mean, they might have subtle differences, but when it comes to social justice, when it comes to really socialism and the way the state operates, they are just two sides of the same coin.

Everybody was horrified by what happened in Charlottesville, as we should have been.

But it wouldn't have come as a surprise if we had reacted as we should have to the events in Sacramento a year earlier.

And the year prior, you had a demonstration of pyramided white nationalists rallying under fascist flags, and they were attacked by the proto-form government or proto-government, proto-organization that formed anti-FOS called By Any Means Necessary.

And these two groups, rallying under a communist flag and a fascist flag, attacked each other in the streets.

People went to the hospital.

There were serious injuries.

It was a melee, video evidence everywhere.

And we didn't talk about it.

It was America's Weimar moment.

And we did not talk about it.

I don't think we wanted to see what was happening.

But we should have.

What do you mean by America's Weimar moment?

It was the moment in which, and it's probably

unlikely that we're going to see

the effects of the Weimar

Republic here, incredible

inflation and political instability.

But the notion that we're going to...

We can talk about our debt on another episode.

But the notion here that we are beginning to see the elements of identitarian politics manifest in street violence is, to me, a warning sign of the kind of instability that was experienced in the interwar years.

And it's hyperbolic, sure.

But the notion here that we're experiencing something that could become that kind of the kind of formative experience that Hayek had

is to me something that shouldn't be ignored.

And yes, we would address it with the terms that are relevant to creating the kind of urgency that I think the crisis demands.

Aaron Powell,

you're the first person I've talked to that's in mainstream media at all that

even begins to understand identitarism.

It is so pernicious and

yet

so

easy to see how people can fall into, in my opinion.

See if our understandings are the same.

If you're over in Europe,

you're in Sweden,

you're a racist if you fly a Swedish flag.

It has to be the U flag.

You are being forced to lose what is uniquely you as a group of people.

Instead of saying, you know, like Walt Disney, this is fantasyland, this is adventure land, this is tomorrow land.

You can go to all of them, but they're different.

They're all each different with their own personalities.

I was in Sweden, and somebody said,

you know, well, we just don't really have our own culture.

And I said, what?

I said,

I've never seen architecture like this anyplace else I've ever been.

Okay.

I'm not finding that in Bangkok.

I'm not finding that in Chicago.

I'm not finding that anywhere.

Here, this is your culture.

And they're being forced to abandon it.

At the same time,

injury upon injury, they are saying also, you're a racist if you believe that what you grew up with is good and noble and has a reason to be preserved or even talked about.

You force people, as soon as somebody comes in and you have a population that feels that way, And they come in and say, no, no,

we have a noble culture.

That can go awry that fast.

Yeah, you shouldn't be surprised that there is a backlash to that sort of thing that manifests in really extremist ways.

It's what happened to Germany.

So we have something like that here on the social justice left, which they embrace a contradictory notion.

At the same time, America doesn't have a culture.

It has this sort of hodgepodge that

has been appropriated ill-be-gotten goods, essentially, from other cultures.

And so it is, at the same time, while we don't actually have a culture, the culture that we do have is not our own and is misbegotten.

And as a result,

we shouldn't welcome or celebrate anybody assimilating into it.

That is a form of captivity.

And the result is that you have the extremist response to that, which is to say essentially not only that we have a culture, but it is a supremacist notion of that sort of cultural identity.

Group identity, again, is an evolutionary trait.

Mankind cannot live in the kind of hermetic

individuality that is envisioned by the extreme libertarian idea of social organization.

It simply doesn't work.

Well, wait, wait, explain what is the extreme.

The extreme idea of mankind is divorced from the kind of civil mediating institutions, non-governmental institutions that result in community.

Like we churches, community organizations, what have you, creating a sense of

common purpose around a shared identity.

Articles of Confederation is too close to anarchy, and so the constitutional.

But you can live much freer than this, but

you do have systems.

And the American civic religion.

around the Constitution has sufficed for a form of political identity in this country for the last 240 years.

And it's a pretty healthy one.

I mean, the First Amendment protects you from the government infringing on your right to freedom of speech, right?

But at the same time, we don't view the First Amendment as though it was just a protection against government intrusions.

It has become a religious idea about our capacity to express ourselves in whatever fora we want, and that if you personally infringe on my right to free speech, that is an infringement of that civic religion.

It's a broader understanding of what the Constitution really was, and it's one that I think is especially healthy.

Is especially healthy?

Is especially healthy when you get to the alternative, which is advocated by social justice advocates, which is much more around cultural identity based in the kind of way that Europeans see cultural identity.

Your blood and soil nationalists and the individuals who see

cultural identity as sort of a shared global common humanity on the left.

These two things, I think, are antithetical to the American experiment.

Also, the notions that are shared by the social justice advocates on both sides of these coins, that you do not have the capacity to rise above your station into which you were born, that your accidents of birth put you on a course in life that is essentially predestined.

That you cannot navigate this unnavigable labyrinth of prejudices and the obstacles that are put before you by unseen, ubiquitous elites without somebody holding your hand and essentially selling you something.

Somebody has to help you navigate this environment because you are not equipped to do that on your own.

These are pernicious ideas.

They are the platforms on which individuals seek and pursue and achieve power.

And they're getting more and more power as a result of this philosophy.

So

talk to me.

You're a

scholar on Russia.

Do you still follow it pretty closely?

What's happening in Russia?

Not as closely as I would like, but yes, I studied it in undergrad and grad.

Okay.

You know who Alexander Dugan is?

Yes.

Okay.

Good for you.

Fourth Political Theory.

Have you read that?

No.

That's his book that

has said

communism didn't work.

Fascism didn't work.

Capitalism doesn't work.

But we're going to take the best of those.

frightening and come up with a new system.

It's the fourth political theory.

And when you read that, when you read,

when you read,

you may be different than I am.

I read Das Kapital and was like, this is ridiculous.

I mean, it just, it was gobbledygook to me.

Some people read it and they're like, oh, it's fantastic.

His theory.

is ridiculous and beyond that it is terrifying.

He ties it directly to end of times kind of philosophy.

The world has to burn down completely before it can restart and give a rebirth.

It's terrifying.

But his

arguments, which are being espoused by people, honestly, like Steve Bannon and others.

If you don't know,

if you don't know what he's talking about, if you don't know where this leads, it is so seductive.

Yeah.

How do we back away from this

nightmare when everything in culture is pushing you the opposite way?

Yeah, so we're a victim of our own success here, right?

We are so prosperous and so comfortable.

And the generations, we now have at least two,

probably just one generation, my generation, but another coming up behind me, that have never experienced anything resembling political violence.

They have never experienced the kind of

systemic

public sector oppression resulting in violence in the streets that other societies are much more familiar with.

And so they have begun to romanticize it, having never experienced themselves.

It is essentially, it is the bloodlust of the bored and the comfortable.

And that's why I think you're beginning to see, in part, these manifestations of violence in the streets, because these individuals have never experienced political persecution.

And so they're begun to fantasize about it as a very effective tool in the tool shed, just another one to effect a political end.

They do actually convince themselves that they are oppressed.

Yeah, I think they genuinely see themselves as oppressed again because they do not know oppression.

It's an insult to the rest of the world.

I mean,

I hope the Chinese never hear about

our oppression here.

I was in Mexico City with my wife for two days, and I interviewed

women who were slaves that were just freed by one of my charities.

And

one of them literally had chain marks around her neck.

You know, that famous picture of

the slave with his shirt off, and he's standing in a chair or sitting in the chair, and you can see the whip marks.

That's what she looked like.

It was horrifying.

And I'm spending two days with these guys,

and we're talking about, you know, what they went through and everything else.

And this woman,

I give her a blank piece of paper, and I'm cutting something with her, filming her.

And I said, I want you to say your name, and then I want you to say, I was a slave.

But no one writes my story.

My life is a blank piece of paper, and I write my story.

She said, no.

And I said,

why?

She said, because I was never a slave.

They might have called me a slave, but I was never a slave.

Chain marks around her neck.

Okay.

I fly home and my wife and I are just like

inspired and devastated.

We land.

I look at the TV

and people are crying on TV in America about the oppression that they're feeling from statues in the parks.

And I about lost it.

I was.

Yeah, there's a distinction I guess we should make between oppression and injustice.

There are injustices.

There are racial grievances.

There are discriminatory actions that are taken by public institutions that are manifestly unjust and that should be combated with everything that we have in us.

But that's distinct from oppression, the kind of political violence that we've seen in other societies.

Excuse me.

Sorry.

Talk to me a little bit about

where we're headed with

social justice, do you think?

Who are the pernicious organizers of social justice that we should be watching for?

What are the moves that are coming that we should be aware of?

Well, it's much easier to see them on the left than on the right.

On the left, it has become such an organizing principle, an unchallenged, unquestioned organizing principle, that it's just in the water.

And people talk about social justice as though it was just a nod to just being a good person.

You say it like, you know,

I used to hear my boss talks about how in the 1980s or so, you would append and the environment onto whatever it was you were talking about because who hates the environment?

Right.

It just marks you as a good person.

Social justice has taken that place.

So you just say social justice, and it appends social basically onto just any other word, and it modifies it and destroys

its meaning, is what Hayek said, but also it marks you as somebody who's socially conscious.

They are out in the open.

They're easy to identify.

On the right, it's much harder to see them.

They are underground.

Who are they?

The philosophers of the dark Enlightenment, which is exactly what it sounds like,

an attack on Enlightenment philosophy.

People like Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, who advocates for an anti-democratic philosophy, an anti-Republican philosophy, who was attracted to Donald Trump's movement.

And Donald Trump's movement was attracted to him.

He was apparently in contact with Steve Bannon when Steve Bannon was in the White House as a chief strategist for the president.

Steve Bannon, you see, I give

And you know, I assume you know where I stood with Donald Trump during the election.

I thought he was an extraordinarily dangerous man because of who he was surrounding himself with.

Beyond that, I don't think he really cares about anything, I don't think he believes anything deeply except tariffs and maybe immigration.

Maybe immigration.

Tariffs, I know he's got that one down.

Hey, no changing him on that.

The rest is,

I don't know, yeah, bring them in.

Sure, I'll play to them too.

Steve Bannon, however, knew exactly who he was.

And you have this movement in Brexit the same exact way.

You're mixing, and the media does this, and it is incredibly dangerous.

They take everybody and they mix them together.

Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, same.

No,

not at all.

Completely different universes.

Anyone for Brexit over in the European Union?

The same.

No, they're not.

They're not.

How does the average

conservative

give me some way of knowing who's who if you're just somebody who doesn't really pay attention?

How do you know who you're standing with?

Well, so Donald Trump in 2016

embraced a lot of ideas that are antithetical to conservatism, right?

Among them, some of the stuff we talked about.

notions like you as an individual are being robbed of your station in life, that which is your due, by a series of ill-defined elites, obstacles are put on your path, and that you have to appeal to a strong hand to restore it.

Wait.

Let me play devil's advocate here and have you answer to them.

Well, we tried the Tea Party.

We tried everything else.

We tried to stand up.

They're not even listening to the people anymore.

They don't care.

It's a cabal.

who's they

the republican party it's a cabal oh well yeah so if what is the objective here you're saying that um reduced spending and and fiscal yeah well it's a tea party things that you know hey we want because donald trump's movement wasn't against fiscal profligacy no i know that no i know that i i'm not i'm not defending i'm playing devil's advocate okay

uh if you don't know i was not anywhere close to the trump campaign.

Okay.

So I'm just playing Devil's Advocate because this is what I heard.

This is what I heard.

Glenn, we tried to do it the right way, and it is so stacked up with corruption and greed and the media, you're never going to burn it down.

Burn it down.

Yeah, I heard a lot about that.

Also, what has conservatism conserved?

Was the question I was posed very frequently.

And that to me is so myopic and just simply rejects objectivity.

Barack Obama's presidency all but ended in 2011.

The legislative phase of Barack Obama's presidency was over.

They confirmed a couple of judges when they had, but when they lost the Senate in 2015, that was the end.

Conservatism served as a bulwark against change, which is what conservatism tends to do.

And if you reject that, you are rejecting.

what conservatism's fundamental elements are, which is preservation, not radical transformation.

And then the burn-it-down crowd really wants radical transformation.

They're not entirely clear on what that transformation is, but they're consumed with the belief that everything must change, that these institutions that have preserved this republic for 240 years are failing them and their families, and therefore they are not worth preserving.

That's not conservatism.

That's something.

No, I know.

And I don't think that that is.

I think that might be a feeling, but I could be wrong.

Maybe hopeful thinking.

It may be a feeling, but when push comes to shove, it's kind of like, I think the Democrats, the leadership

has so miscalculated.

You know, they started miscalculating with Occupy Wall Street.

Hey, these are just great kids.

No, they're not.

No, they're not.

They don't believe in what you believe in if you believe in the Constitution.

And they embraced it and they used it as fuel, thinking that they could control it.

And I think it's out of control.

And,

you know, you're watching Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and everybody else just brushed off to the side.

And it's because there is a feeling on both sides, this doesn't work what we're doing right now.

But when you get right up to it, if they nominate somebody like Bernie Sanders or they nominate somebody who's like, you know what, the free market system, I'm not sure.

Unless we have an economy that is depression,

I don't think Democrats will vote for them.

Aaron Ross Powell, it's it's I would say I would bet that too.

Democrats,

or did the Occupy Wall Street again thing, very

miscalculating in the pursuit of political expediency by embracing the women's march

leadership and insofar in

doing that, legitimized the kind of critique of the liberal order and a critique of anti-Semitism that has become, again,

mainstream in the party.

Right.

And so the right,

I'm hoping, and I'd love your opinion on this, I'm hoping that the right says burn it down,

but they have a decent respect for

the institutions that

we must have.

And I don't know if they go there unless we hit real economic trouble.

And then I think all bets are off.

Yeah, they might.

I also think, and again, the Trump administration has improved from the campaign period, in part because there's no intellectual infrastructure in the Republican Party for the kind of identitarian policies that they wanted to see manifest.

They had to fill this administration with some conventional conservatives.

And for the most part, you had a pretty conventional Republican administration.

Some exceptions.

What the Democrats did when they embraced the Women's March was elevate

the tenets of intersectionality into a governing ethos, a sort of

a mandate for political organization.

Intersectionality is really central to social justice thinking.

It's a pretty legitimate idea for anybody that doesn't know what intersectionality is.

It's a very legitimate idea in an academic context.

It's a way to think about, as a thought experiment, it's a way to think about how prejudice manifests in the real world.

So you and I are born with disparate traits.

Some of those traits are more discriminated against than others.

So an individual who is, say, white and male will experience less prejudice than someone who is white and female.

A black man will experience less prejudice than a black woman because women experience more prejudice than men.

A Native American lesbian will experience more prejudice than all of them and so on.

Again, a valid idea.

As an organizing principle, which is what the Women's March was dedicated to, it is self-defeating.

It results in your organization tearing itself apart, which is exactly what the Women's March did.

They couldn't see their own allies as allies, even if they agreed with them, because they possessed disparate traits, some of which were seen as more oppressive than others.

So the members, white Jewish members, weren't really allies, not in the words of Tamika Mallory, because she, the individuals who maybe agreed with them on everything, but also possessed traits that advanced white supremacy, whether they knew it or not.

Similarly, this organization embraced people with no political constituency whatsoever, people like Asada Shakur, who's a convicted cop killer living a fugitive from justice in Cuba, or the Minister Louis Farrakhan, people you could have jeffisoned easily without losing any political capital.

Indeed, you would gain some in the process.

But to do so would be to legitimize the prejudices against which they claim to fight.

And so the Women's March tore itself apart.

It was disempowered by this philosophy because Democrats had to abandon them.

But Donald Trump evinced a little intersectionality himself when he was so disinclined to forcefully, vehemently, and frequently, often, denounce the white white nationalists who were attracted to his campaign.

They gave them the idea that maybe our ideas are a little less marginal than we thought they were.

That is an intersectional philosophy, too.

That is the practice of embracing all because

you're in a war of all against all.

You are a combatant in

this navigable labyrinth of prejudices.

And anyone who subscribes to your philosophy is necessarily an ally as long as they advance these particular traits.

It is a terrible philosophy for political organizing, but the students I talk to who agree with this sort of thing think it is a very empowering philosophy.

It helps them understand the world in which they live.

It helps them to figure out how to navigate it.

I think this is a really deleterious idea.

Let me go to the press for a second.

Donald Trump's use of the press as

an axe.

Help me use the press and what's happening with the press as

a way to navigate around

being used or being riled up for justice and what's really happening.

For instance.

I'm sorry, but the press is just

I mean, they are who they are.

And if they just came out and said, yeah,

yeah,

I'm liberal.

Pretty much everybody who works here is liberal.

We don't really see it the same way.

That doesn't make me a bad person.

That's the way it is.

And had respect to say, here's somebody else who's really smart on the other side who sees it someplace out, some other way.

And you had that conversation.

We wouldn't have these problems.

Instead, they insist that they are fair and they're the arbiter of truth.

And it's many times, not always.

I read the New York Times, sometimes really good stuff in the New York Times, sometimes garbage.

People listen to me.

You say the same thing.

Sometimes garbage, sometimes really good stuff.

Okay, that's fair.

Conservatives know

that there is a glass ceiling over us.

You know, I was,

I signed a contract with ABC.

I never served one day

because they put a press release out care went to the mouse and the mouse folded okay

everybody knows that okay

Donald Trump

is saying things that people know is true and instead of going

you know what the Kavanaugh thing or you know, at times the Russia thing really did get out of hand,

they just keep hammering back.

they're they're winding up their audience he's winding up his audience and the person who knows both of you suck sometimes don't know what to do they are forced to pick a side yeah so as a member of the of the press sort of um not i don't consider myself a reporter but i am i am in the media um

i think Everybody goes to work every day wanting to do the best job that they can do.

And in the very beginning of this Trump administration, I think there was a sentiment that prevailed in a lot of places in the press where I didn't work at the time, so this is speculation on my part

that this was a new phase of history, that we had entered a crisis period and that it was an all-hands-on-deck moment.

And it was the fatal conceit of the resistance that viewed American institutions as far more fragile than they are,

as

not as tested and capable of maintaining themselves, self-perpetuating in an entropic way, that they needed to be propped up.

And that was a terrible conceit.

It's the kind of thing that moves you from being mission-oriented, from being objectivist first, to being an activist.

And I think you did see a lot of that in the press.

I think you're seeing less of it now, but it is still prevalent.

And we could probably...

You probably all know who the main practitioners of this sort of thing are.

But

it is out of a fundamental lack of appreciation for the robust stability that has been the result of American institutions.

They can withstand somebody who is potentially

disrespects the office of the presidency, for example.

A pernicious actor, a malicious actor in a position of power and authority.

We're actually seeing, I think, one of the greatest experiments in the executive branch that we've seen in a generation or more in the fact that we have a really understaffed executive branch.

We don't really need as much of the executive branch as we have because the Trump administration has not fully staffed it.

A lot of that's not great.

The number of acting cabinet-level secretaries

is not wonderful.

But I was very

and I have a background in education and diplomacy, and I was one of the few people with that background who was very happy to see the State Department sort of gutted because it is overstaffed and overburdened and

it is replete with this idea that process and process alone is the means to an end, that engagement in dialogue is sufficient diplomacy, and that sort of thing needed to be purged.

And it was fortunate to see that happening.

But there are dangerous things that could result from having an understaffed administration.

This administration has been fortunate insofar as that it's existed in sort of this period of placidity.

There hasn't really been an exogenous crisis that's really tested them.

But also, you know, everything's still moving along pretty good.

And it's not because the members of the media have their hair on fire every day.

country has been tested before and it is being tested now and it is withstanding the test.

And I think we should all be pretty happy about that.

It's amazing to me how resilient this is.

I mean, I thought, I think we all did on September 11th when we watched the towers fall, not knowing who did it to us,

just watching,

I mean, that was our,

you know, to reverse this, that was our Notre Dame in a way.

That was our,

that

went to the heart of America, if you will.

It was Wall Street.

That was New York.

It was strong.

It was banking.

It was invincible.

And they came down and it was like, oh my gosh, we're fragile.

And I have been shocked

at how many body blows this country can take.

I mean, since then, it has been almost a non-stop body blow, and we're still standing.

We're dizzy, but we're standing.

Yeah,

I think that's,

you would think that that would be something worthy of celebration, but

I'm not sure the critics of the current state of affairs when it comes to the founding of the country and its history and its form of government are really all that interested in learning about why it is so resilient.

When I talk about the American ideal, and I write a little bit about this in the book, when I talk about the American ideal in schools and in colleges, I get kind of a hostile response because from the perspective of the modern undergraduate, the American ideal has failed because what they know of the American Ideal is that we have never achieved it.

And that is sort of a misunderstanding of what the word ideal means, right?

I mean, it is aspirational.

We have not improved.

You may never achieve it, but that doesn't give you license to stop trying because we have not improved upon concepts like meritocracy, egalitarianism, and English common law notions like the presumption of innocence, which are under attack by these people.

We haven't made anything better than that.

And so you're not at liberty to abandon those ideas.

But these students don't know what the founders knew because they don't, not only do they not read the founders, they don't read the Federalist Papers, but they don't read what the founders read.

They haven't read Burke or Hume or Montesquieu.

They don't understand the nature of representative governance and why it is a superior form.

of social organization, of governmental organization.

So it's a product of ignorance, which is in some ways ways excusable, but mostly not.

Self-imposed ignorance.

And it's one of the reasons why we need to rededicate to the study of civics and not just how a bill becomes law, but again, these Enlightenment thinkers that served as

the philosophical foundations that resulted in the government that we have today.

That sort of thing has been lost.

I don't think people understand that

they don't understand social justice.

And they don't understand that

this movement postmodernism is

anti

it's postmodern it is anti

uh enlightenment it's anti-fact anti-study anti uh uh you know uh observing it's it goes against everything the enlightenment

taught us

and it

it will flip us back into a world of

I don't even know no it's conceited right I mean if you think you can remake the world anew it's probably because you have no idea what the world was before

and you know generally that you have a very

very high impression of your own competence

which is so I think it's mostly hubris I mean a lot of that comes with youth it's most of it's beaten out of you I think by the real world but not everybody not everybody succumbs to that sort of thing

so yeah, I'm just probably a function of ignorance.

So

the year zero mentality.

I want to go back to what we talked about earlier about

this system

not feeling right to a lot of people that We don't even know what the system is that we should be operating on.

We haven't been operating on that system for a long, long time.

The Constitutional Bill of Rights, real true understanding

of this.

And what's headed our way with technology?

Technology,

what we're looking at now, nobody is asking the big questions.

Nobody's really, we'll talk about privacy.

A privacy.

Your refrigerator will be able to report on, you know, whatever.

And not necessarily in a nefarious way,

but

the capitalism that we're moving towards, by choice,

is a surveillance capitalism that is

the idea is to be able to predict you as close to 100% of the time as possible.

Amazon changes from a sales company to a delivery company, in their own words, when they can predict 95% accuracy.

We haven't even talked about that.

We haven't even talked about that.

And

just that one thing becomes,

are you,

do you have self-control or self-will?

Are you determining your future?

Or are you being shaped for the future?

So what kind of impact do you think that'll have on

our political environment?

I think we're already seeing it.

I mean, unless we start talking about deeper thoughts and root ourselves into what is real,

until we dislodge ourselves from

thinking that the end-all-be-all is the wealth of nations and realize that moral sentiments need to be put with it,

we don't survive this until we can say,

yeah, that's life.

That's life.

And define it clearly.

How can we possibly expect to live in a world of AI and teach it don't kill?

Yeah, I mean,

that's fascinating.

And frankly, I haven't devoted a whole lot of thought to it.

I mean, just about everybody who wrote an economics book has also wrote an ethics book.

And there's kind of a reason why

You know, Adam Smith wrote an ethics book and Hayek's written an ethics book.

And Marxism is an ethical philosophy in many ways.

It has very little to do with economics and much more to do with human interaction.

In part because economics isn't really, it's the dismal science.

The science part is really de-emphasized.

It's much more about philosophy and how to organize societies.

I'm less skeptical about innovation, I think, than a lot of people who share my political inclinations.

In part because...

I'm not a technophobe.

No.

I didn't hear technophobia in what you're saying.

These are reasonable fears, and I can't speculate on them because I haven't devoted a whole lot of thought to the idea.

But

I am

hopeful about future economic development

resulting from technology,

in part because

just about all the predictions of catastrophe that have resulted,

about economic catastrophe have been the result of this idea of scarcity that doesn't exist,

which is again an economic concept.

But the scarcity presumes straight line projection, just stasis, that we do not develop these new resources.

Shale was garbage 10 years ago.

We made that into a resource.

When the American colonists were

just crossing the Appalachian and navigating into the American Midwest, they saw silicon and bauxite in the soil, and it was just dirt because there was no value to it.

We made these resources into the resources that they are today.

Aluminum

was everywhere.

It was just garbage.

The extent to which you could process aluminum made it more valuable than gold in the Enlightenment period.

We have the capacity to innovate to the extent that we can create these new realities and create new economic realities that make the old ideas of

hardship and want resulting from scarcity seem really naive.

So

when people, environmentalists talk to me about the catastrophe that is imposing upon us, with assuming even their own assumptions,

I say that I will never bet against mankind's capacity to engineer itself out of a problem because we've done it so many times in the past.

That's an article of faith on my part, I suppose, but it's not unfounded.

But when you're talking about innovating your way out, what I'm concerned about is

the seeds that have been planted now, social justice where there is no justice.

It is vengeance.

It is you have it, I want it.

When you have this period of,

I mean,

you're sitting in a studio

that was owned by Paramount to make films, made all kinds of famous films in this room.

That went out.

And now,

then it made television and made you know lots of television shows for HBO and CBS.

And now we own it.

And I'm a disruptor for the people that you go to work for every day at NBC.

And

the people at the network ladder are doing everything they can to hold on to everything they can as long as they possibly can.

But it's going to disrupt.

And so will this, what I do, will be disrupted at some point.

It's going going to just get faster and faster.

And disruption, disruption, disruption.

In all of that disruption, you have people who will want to manipulate things to hold on, to last longer, to stop

things,

and others that will be motivated to pit people against each other.

Because it would be in their best interest.

That's what I'm concerned about.

I'm concerned about that 10-year period where everything's being disrupted and everybody's just trying to save their own ass.

Yeah.

Well, I don't fear the disruption.

And clearly, you don't either.

I mean,

as a self-described disruptor, you welcome it.

This is the creative destruction of the marketplace.

And again, as we were saying earlier,

nothing good comes for free.

I mean, this is the sort of thing that develops strength and immunizes you and makes you a stronger, more competitive individual.

The disruption is good for everybody.

In the interim, yeah, there will be, in the transition period, yeah, there will be a lot of people who will just be displaced.

And those people will be very sympathetic and they will get the most attention.

They always do.

But the invisible beneficiaries of the new normal will be the vast majority of the individuals who benefit from these conditions.

I agree with you 100%.

But now put in social justice.

And social justice warriors in that mix.

Yeah.

So that's, you know, our biggest threat has always been, will always be bad ideas.

This is a bad idea.

One that springs from a noble place with a very valuable philosophical foundation.

And the people who are attracted to these ideas are not bad people.

They're good people.

These ideas are fundamentally about American ideas.

And we should approach them like that.

You are attracted to these things because you're a good person.

I might agree agree with you in a lot of these ways, a lot of these ideas, but they are making our lives harder because they are fundamentally at odds with a lot of the ideas that are at the heart of this founding and are making us a less attractive member of a political coalition.

That's sort of what I get to in the last chapter of this book, which is basically back to the women's march.

The women's march was embraced by the Democratic Party for a time, and then it made itself so unattractive as a result of these ideas that they were jettisoned.

They no longer had the political authority that they once held.

So the people, so they might have some things they want to get done in government, but they're not going to get them done now because they're no longer the kind of attractive member of a political coalition.

And the only thing it wants to do is get to 50-plus one at the polls.

No political organization or movement jettisons its own members.

Asking them to do that is asking them to abandon their instinct for self-preservation.

You're fighting against the tide.

It's not going to happen.

You can marginalize and stigmatize bad ideas.

That has been done many times in the past, often through conflict and usually through circumspect

approaches to isolating and stigmatizing individual ideas.

Democrats and Republicans have models they can appeal to.

Republicans marginalize the Birchers over a very long period of time and through circumspection and attacking these ideas in a series of ways,

not so as not to make themselves,

the attackers, seem unattractive.

Democrats similarly exposed and removed the communists from the organized labor movement in the 1940s.

There are models to which we can appeal if we really want to do this.

It's pretty hard to demonize something when, I mean, I saw an interview with you with about eight people and you were quite brilliant

fighting there kind of by yourself.

And it's a given they hadn't had time to read the book,

but their gut-level response is social justice is good.

Right.

And these are intelligent people.

Yeah.

These are well-read, intelligent, informed people.

So how do you demonize when

you have people how do you how do you expose and demonize when it

your voice is being relegated really to

one channel of people

well

I don't know I mean I wish I had the the good answer there is I'm I'm the very beginning process of trying to expose this ideology and the alternative theory of social organization that it is,

trying to challenge that in a way that it really hasn't often been challenged, particularly for the audiences that I go to.

I go to predominantly liberal audiences on television and universities, and the effort here is to start a conversation.

I've been

happy with the response so far.

Yeah, I have been.

Nobody's thrown an egg at me.

Everybody, there have been a lot of challenging, probing questions,

incredulity in a lot of ways, but they're listening.

And I think it's in part because we all see the excesses.

The movement's successes are pretty visible.

And just about everybody, even if they agree, would say, you know, well, those guys kind of went off the rails a little bit.

My mission here is to say that this is not an out-of-the-norm expression of how this philosophy manifests in the real world.

That is, that's a, it's a feature, not a bug.

That's the argument I'm making.

There's a lot of hostility towards that.

But it is nevertheless, I think,

unavoidable and inescapable once you dig down down into the philosophy and how it has manifested.

By the way, this movement, we've been talking about big issues, big philosophical issues here all day long.

That is not to suggest that the social justice movement is focused on the big ideas of the day.

They are increasingly dedicated to small things and attacking one another.

This movement's efficacy is demonstrated in getting individuals to supplicate genuflex before the mob.

And the mob only has about 72 hours worth of influence.

So they dedicate themselves to attacking their fellow social justice advocates, young adult novelists, restaurateurs, artists, comic book makers.

Pop culture is where you mostly see social justice activism manifest on a day-to-day basis.

In part because those are the only people who are listening.

I don't want to make the claim here that this movement is strong and getting stronger.

Some days I'm convinced that this is overtaking all of society, and some days I see them as very marginal and lacking influence.

I'm erring on the side of caution in

this instance, in the presumption that this is a movement with more power and more authority than

its numbers.

You talk about

capitalist companies that are regurgitating this stuff.

Nike is a good example.

Woke capitalism.

Yeah, woke capitalism.

That's not spreading.

No, that's definitely spreading.

It's taking advantage of people who are made increasingly naive by this philosophy.

I don't care.

You remember what Nike's

slogan was for the Colin Kaepernick campaign?

It was:

believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything.

Nike didn't sacrifice anything.

Their sales jumped 10%.

Audi did the same thing when they broadcast an Super Bowl advertisement talking about the flawed notion that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes.

Their sales went up.

Gillette's sales went up when they talked about toxic masculinity.

Republicans and Democrats who respond to polls like this sort of thing.

They want their brands to engage in divisive social politics.

In part, in my view, the theory I have, is that it's because it allows them to engage in politics, which we all see as a good thing.

We incentivize that.

But you don't actually have to do any of the homework, because this isn't about legislative affairs.

It's not about political coalitions.

It's not about politics as we understand it.

It's much more about cultural combat.

It mimics the passions and emotions of politics, but it doesn't really have anything to do with politics, and the stakes are incredibly low.

All you have to do is buy something.

So it's a popular way to engage in political activism today.

I don't know if it means the Republic is collapsing, but it is a way to take advantage of people who are attracted to these social justice ideas.

And the best example of that is the story of Fearless Girl, the statue in Lower Manhattan that was dedicated to advancing the notion that

more women should be in C-suite executive positions in the financial services industry.

This statue, this arms akimbo elementary school age girl, was feted by Democrats as this really powerful attack on the patriarchy.

Bill de Blasio said that men were deeply offended by it somehow.

I'm not sure if he was certain they were.

It's hard to find them.

Elizabeth Warren made a pilgrimage down there.

Gail Collins in the New York Times said it was the most effective protest against patriarchy since the protests, the ante-bellum protests that desegregated the trolleys in New York City.

Oh my gosh.

This was a commercial for an investment firm.

An investment firm sponsored it.

It allowed them to evade the kind of scrutiny that they were due because they were transgressing against a lot of social justice norms and some of the literature about how they talked about approaching female investors, you know, appeal to emotional reasoning, kind of pernicious stereotypes.

But they didn't get the kind of scrutiny they were due because of this statue.

And we later learned why they did it.

A Department of Labor audit found they were systematically discriminating against their female employees, paid about $5 million to 305 women.

But they didn't get any of that.

Everybody would have seen that coming, I think, if they hadn't suspended disbelief in deference to these social justice ideals about gender discrimination and idealized gender equality resulting in negative discrimination against men.

And so they suspended their disbelief and in the process, fell for a commercial for a Wall Street investment firm.

People like Elizabeth Warren, who can't go two breaths without attacking Wall Street greed, was down there giving these guys a boost.

Last question.

How many times have you seen in your studies that this rears its ugly head and then just goes away?

It's stopped without

real negative impacts.

So that 72-hour window?

That's a real thing.

Governor Ralph Northam would be gone if he'd have paid attention to the 72-hour window, but he didn't.

He said,

if I were to leave office now, according to reports, then he would be viewed as a racist for the rest of his career.

He's much better off trying to stick it out and hoping some event down the road gives him some other legacy.

So he waited at the 72-hour window, and the outrage went away, and the Democrats who demanded his head have now sort of begun recanting.

You see that pretty frequently.

Unfortunately, you see the reverse more often, in part because it's an assault on commercial vehicles, commercial entities.

The Twitter mob, which consists of maybe 3,500, 4,000 people that's really angry,

feels like the universe is coming down around your shoulders.

And any firm with a fiduciary responsibility to its investors feels like its bottom line is imperiled by not acquiescing to its demands.

And more often than not, they do.

But if they hold fast for those 72 hours, a lot of times it just goes away.

Maybe the sentiment doesn't.

The notion that there has been some transgression that is due some sort of reprisal against the offender will persist.

But

its effectiveness

as a vehicle for getting individuals, for example, fired from their jobs who have transgressed or just maybe said something inappropriate or maybe done something genuinely inappropriate that is due a response.

That goes away within that 72-hour window.

And you've seen some companies now respond respond by just not doing anything.

You saw Governor Northam and just basically the entire government of Virginia that was implicated in all those scandals a couple of months ago.

They waited it out.

The movement demonstrates its efficacy by collecting scalps, which is why it's focused so much on its own, because those are the people who are listening.

For the most part,

if you're not listening to this organization, you can survive its wrath.

And so that to me indicates that it's not this overpowering movement that is overtaking our politics.

It can, and I'm treating it like it could, because I think it's worthy of that kind of caution.

But I don't want to overstate the problem.

I don't think this country is falling into a morass of totalitarian social justice identity politics tomorrow.

That's great.

Noah, thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.

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.