In this episode, we are joined by James and Lindsey Bogosian and their co-author, Helen Pluckrose, to talk about the ridiculousness that is the gender dysphoria paper by James Damore and his co-hosts, Helen and Lindsey, and how they managed to get their ridiculous piece published in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin of the Association of Sexually Dyslexic Professionals (PSA). We also discuss the process of peer-review and what it takes to get a paper published in a journal like Psychological Bulletin, and why it's so important that it's published at all. We also talk about what it means to be a feminist in a male-dominated field and how it's important to have a sense of humor about it all. This episode is sponsored by Fish and Chip's and made possible by a generous grant from the National Center for Gender Identity and Sexuality at the Human Rights Campaign. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: PODCAST at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase of $10 or more! Thank you so much for all the support, it means the world to us, and we'll see you again next week with our next ad-free episode! If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, review, and subscribe to our podcast! and tell a friend about us! We'll be looking out for you in the next episode of our next week's episode of the podcast, in the iTunes store! Thanks again for listening to our first episode! <3, Timestamps: 0:00:00 - 5:30 - What's your thoughts on this episode? - What do you think of it? 5:15 - What would you like to hear from us? 6:40 - What does it mean to you? 7:00 - Is it funny? 8:00 | What's more? 9:30 | How do you like it better? 11: What's the worst thing you think it's better than that you're a feminist? 12:30 13:40 | What are you looking at me? 15:15 | Is it more difficult? 16:20 | What is your favorite part of the piece? 17:20 - How would you rate it? / 16:00 / 17:40 18:10
00:00:42.000Let's explain what you guys did and what's so significant about it because When I first read it, my first inclination, I had two reactions.
00:01:45.000And it was translating into the real world.
00:01:48.000And so we collaborated and here we are.
00:01:51.000Well, let's explain what you did and what was ridiculous.
00:02:00.000There's many fields of studies that you can get legitimate degrees in that are absolutely preposterous.
00:02:08.000Literally filled with nonsense, taught by nonsense people who live in these nonsense bubbles, and then they give these degrees and these people go out in the real world.
00:02:31.000Well, let's explain what you guys did.
00:02:32.000Yeah, so we started about a year, I guess a year and a half ago now, it was last summer, we started writing a bunch of academic papers for the journals that represent these fields.
00:02:42.000And so everybody understands what an academic paper is getting out of the gate.
00:02:45.000This isn't like an op-ed that you dash off for like Washington Post or some magazine or whatever.
00:02:50.000This is a thing like academics work their careers to write one or two of these a year.
00:03:16.000Maybe five or six more would have gotten in.
00:03:18.000What's the difference between getting accepted and getting published?
00:03:21.000So the process with everything in academia is really slow, and a lot of people don't know this.
00:03:24.000So you send off this article, the editor looks at it, and the editor either gives it the thumbs up or the thumbs down.
00:03:30.000If they give it the thumbs up, it goes off to peer reviewers, and that process takes months, often as long as—I mean, with one paper, there was eight months under peer review.
00:04:05.000So now you're probably three, four months in just the review process, not to the writing, which should also take months.
00:04:11.000And then the editor will either send it back to the reviewers to see if it was good enough or they'll just evaluate it themselves depending on where it stands.
00:04:19.000And then they'll make a decision as to whether or not to accept it or reject it or ask for more revisions.
00:04:25.000And then when they accept it, That means the journal is ready to publish it.
00:04:28.000But then the publishing process requires all the typesetting, proofing, all the stuff that goes into making it professional for an academic journal.
00:04:49.000That's how you get tenure, which is a job for life.
00:04:51.000That's how you get to teach people these ideas who then, as you said, go out into the workforce five, six years later and infect everybody with total silliness.
00:05:01.000So it's the gold standard peer review.
00:05:51.000Judith Butler is probably the most influential feminist scholar, or gender scholar, actually, I should say, that's been in maybe the last 30 years.
00:06:30.000Just under 10,000 dogs and then interrogated their owners as to their sexual orientation.
00:06:34.000So we checked out the dogs nuts and then said, excuse me, sir, are you gay?
00:06:39.000And you asked them if they gendered their dogs...
00:06:42.000Yeah well we made up these totally insane you know dogs humping incidents and how they they beat female dogs but they didn't beat male dogs so that's one of the papers that we made you know the other paper that well this one also they had the whole thing like if a male dog humps another male dog especially men would freak out and break it up yeah stop that because that's the queer performativity part yeah but then if a male dog humped a female dog they'd be like You know,
00:07:17.000We told them exactly what they wanted to hear.
00:07:19.000And we gave them bogus statistics to fuel what they already wanted to believe.
00:07:23.000Yeah, and we started off with the idea that what we wanted to get to was a conclusion, and then we made up all the crap in between to get to it.
00:07:30.000Feminism should train men the way we train dogs so that we can get rid of rape culture.
00:08:01.000So this journal's been doing this for 25 years.
00:08:04.000And it's their 25th anniversary, so they're picking out the best papers throughout the whole year and putting them, you know, pride of place in some issue of their journal.
00:08:13.000And ours was going to be in the seventh issue.
00:08:15.000So it either is great or it's not great.
00:08:18.000So it either is great or it's not great.
00:08:42.000They claim that there should be a category introduced in traditional bodybuilding called fat bodybuilding, where people come and display their fat before the audience.
00:08:51.000And we didn't manufacture any statistics for that, and they loved that.
00:08:54.000They thought it, you know, one line in that paper was, a fat body is a built body, and one of the reviewers was like, I wholeheartedly agree, or something like that.
00:09:37.000We went into talking about how Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have the right idea, but then the journal was like, ah, but they're straight white males, so you have to nuance around that to make it clear that their position as white men, even though they're on the side of social justice, it's not quite good enough.
00:10:16.000It's so funny how racist you can be as long as you're racist against white people.
00:10:21.000That's what we saw, is that as long as you are going up the river against privilege, then you can really just get away with some nasty stuff.
00:10:38.000It's very strange that this is the left.
00:10:40.000You know, I was a kid in San Francisco in the 1970s.
00:10:45.000We lived in, you know, like, there was the hippie times.
00:10:50.000And I lived there from age 7 to 11. And it kind of formed a lot of my opinions about people, like the who gives a shit part of my appreciation for any group, whatever it is,
00:11:05.000whether it's race or gender or sexual orientation.
00:11:10.000I don't understand it from either way.
00:11:12.000I certainly don't understand it from a racist perspective, but I really don't understand it from racism that's condoned because it's racism against white people.
00:11:24.000These are the people that are preaching against hate.
00:11:28.000And these are the people that used to be the people that were supposedly so open-minded And so open to ideas, and now they're trying to stifle creativity and stifle dissent and stifle anything that doesn't fit inside that very narrow paradigm that they're trying to push.
00:11:55.000They're fighting against sexism, misogyny, etc., And the thing is, is that's not really what's going on here.
00:12:01.000They've actually tapped into this, to throw around the term, this postmodern notion that everything in society has to do with power dynamics, and the power dynamics have to be understood in terms of groups, and how those groups have traditionally held power and exercised power.
00:12:15.000And so immediately it becomes complex.
00:12:18.000Stuck in this idea that it's all about this group or that group and how they relate to one another.
00:12:22.000And I don't mean like, hey, let's get along, relate.
00:12:24.000I mean like white people are imagined to always be over black people and therefore, you know, there's always this natural power dynamic of oppressor versus oppressed.
00:12:34.000And this is stuff that came straight out of this weird postmodern philosophy where you saw these dissatisfied French philosophers in the 60s, you know, all the stuff you were talking about was going down.
00:12:47.000They saw all this stuff and they said, wow, you know, okay, power dynamics are the thing because – I should go back a step.
00:12:55.000The postmodern philosophers like Foucault and all of this got all hooked up on power because they were dissatisfied with seeing what they called grand narratives, Christianity, Christianity.
00:13:37.000And then it took this huge turn in the 1990s and got really vicious.
00:13:41.000And that's where it really got – that's when it turned intersectional actually.
00:13:44.000Trevor Burrus That was during the political correct days.
00:13:47.000That's – That's when the political correct thing kind of blew up, yeah, is when all this stuff was coming out.
00:13:51.000So that would have been, you know, late 1980s is really when all of this political correctness stuff started coming out of the academy, and then a few years later you see it coming all over politics, which is typically what happens.
00:14:02.000It starts in the academy, a few years later it leaks into the culture.
00:14:21.000If they miss the mark and it's not funny, it won't work.
00:14:24.000And then it'll be a bad show and no one will like it.
00:14:27.000But if it's funny, there has to be something about it that people find ironic, satirical.
00:14:34.000There has to be something about it that people are enjoying that has to point to some truth.
00:14:38.000And the denial of this, and instead, like the saying, oh, it's white males that are causing this problem and you shouldn't attack this or that, or, you know, there's subjects that are off limits and social justice should never be attacked, like, to agree to that.
00:16:08.000Once you say, hey, I'm an ally, now you've made it so that you have a shield where people can't call you a white supremacist anymore, and you are acting on behalf of other people, and you're speaking for them, so you now have assumed power, and you're reproducing the same power dynamics.
00:16:25.000Yeah, our paper that rewrote Mein Kampf actually was about allyship, and they were like, you didn't problematize allyship.
00:16:30.000Yeah, we had two of them that did Mein Kampf.
00:16:33.000One of them we just more or less replaced Jews with white men.
00:16:38.000You literally took Mein Kampf, the actual words from Mein Kampf, and put it in this paper and replaced the word Jews with the word white men and they accepted it.
00:16:49.000Well, we had two papers that did Mein Kampf.
00:17:17.000They didn't accept that paper, though, because that paper, turns out, was written from the perspective of a white lesbian who hated her own whiteness, and they said that it was positioning her as a good white, and because she's making herself out as a good white, again, allyship isn't...
00:17:31.000As all is cracked up to be, she was making a problem.
00:17:34.000She should have really been forwarding the ideas of the black scholars that she read way more and not talking about herself so much, even though it was a paper designed to be talking about herself.
00:17:44.000Yeah, because that was what Hitler did, so that's what we had to do.
00:17:49.000Now, the other Mein Kampf paper was about feminism, and what we did was we took the chapter—it's chapter 12—we took the chapter where he says, this is why we should have the Nazi Party and what is expected of people who are going to be part of it.
00:18:00.000And we took out our movement or party—he didn't call it a Nazi Party in the chapter, but everywhere he's like, our movement.
00:18:06.000Took that out, put in intersectional feminism.
00:18:09.000And then modified the words and added theory around it so that it would fly.
00:18:47.000It was something like – this is about South Park, how it's been laundering racism into society and making everybody comfortable with racism, and that's why everything's so racist and people are shooting Jews is because South Park made it normal.
00:19:03.000It's conceivable that you could actually try to parse out what variables need to be controlled, see South Park came out, it started doing these themes, how does it track?
00:19:14.000Statisticians can do kind of amazing things with that stuff, but they're not doing that.
00:19:19.000Instead of testing it, they're concluding it, and they're using theory to do so.
00:19:23.000No, it's even bigger than that, because why don't they test it?
00:19:27.000Well, if they tested it, and I'm not making this shit up, you won't believe me, but this is true.
00:19:31.000If they tested it, and the test showed that their hypothesis was wrong, They would say that the test was racist, that the test is condoning racism, and that's why it didn't give them the desired result.
00:19:40.000How would you test something like that?
00:20:03.000Trevor Burrus Yeah, but there's no effort to do this.
00:20:06.000They're like, oh, South Park presents these ideas, which they then cherry pick because there's other ideas that they don't talk about that point the other direction.
00:20:41.000So they start with an agenda, and then you mentioned the word laundering, which could your former guest, Brett and Heather, talked about ideal laundering.
00:20:50.000I think that's important for the listeners.
00:21:47.000So we wrote this paper saying that straight men are generally transphobic, meaning in particular the kind of niche weird definition that you see on the internet and activists sometimes that they aren't interested in having sex with trans people who have penises, trans women who have a penis in particular.
00:22:04.000And so we said, well, that's a kind of transphobia, and clearly the reason that they might be transphobic is because they don't practice putting things in their butts.
00:22:12.000So if they start putting stuff up their butts, in particular, we called the paper dildos.
00:22:17.000So you can imagine what we were saying, they should put up their butts.
00:22:33.000So we argued that if straight men just penetrated themselves and had their girlfriends peg them through exposure therapy, you know, you start small and then work your way up, you can remediate transphobia.
00:22:46.000Yeah, we'll make them less transphobic as a result.
00:22:49.000So by self-penetrating or having your girlfriend peg you, you can be less transphobic.
00:22:53.000And they thought this was a great idea.
00:23:11.000So we could just put in crazy things that a conservative might say about this.
00:23:16.000And they were like, why weren't there more conservatives participating?
00:23:20.000So I was like, well, I'm going to run with this.
00:23:24.000We invited six conservatives to participate, and only one accepted.
00:23:29.000And to kind of summarize why, and this is in the paper, in the words of one, I don't want to be a part of some stupid liberal study about shoving things up your butt.
00:24:45.000There is a paper out there about that show, and it's all about how hot sauce has everything to do with masculinity and being manly, and they didn't have enough women on the show.
00:26:48.000In this commentary and criticism section, the authors introduce a diverse sample of case studies that demonstrate the emergence of feminist ideas in and through food media.
00:27:24.000I was going to write a paper about how cornbread is being gentrified, and that's why we'll never get over racism, because white people are making pumpkin spice cornbread.
00:27:30.000There's something that I tweeted the other day about some...
00:27:33.000Gadsad tweeted it, and I retweeted it, about some woman.
00:28:09.000There's a thousand papers like this out there for everyone we wrote.
00:28:13.000Yeah, a thousand of them that you might as well have written.
00:28:15.000Well, you couldn't tell if we did or didn't.
00:28:17.000And that's part of the thing, is people can't differentiate what we've done.
00:28:21.000In fact, not only can they not differentiate, they give us an award.
00:28:23.000So they can't differentiate it from the stuff that's already out there, and the stuff that's already out there is polluting people's minds.
00:28:30.000Now, you guys, at least you used to work in academia.
00:29:19.000Well, the idea was supposed to be that you work your ass off for a few years, and then it was supposed to be to defend academic freedom.
00:29:25.000So you get tenure, then you can go forth and put out some crazy ideas, really dig into some stuff, and they can't fire you for coming up with maybe weird stuff.
00:30:03.000You know, I mean, the only thing I can think of, it's like, is if you taught at a Christian school and then you went in and, you know, took videos and posted them on YouTube of defecating the Bible and then just walked into the school...
00:30:15.000So I think it's kind of similar in that they have bought hook, line, and sinker into microaggressions, trigger warnings, safe spaces, diversity initiatives.
00:30:27.000And it's something for me that makes me...
00:30:30.000I'm deeply uncomfortable when my students can't ask questions, when they can't – they're just uncomfortable to voice their opinions about things.
00:30:40.000And I think that, to say the least, a lot of people are enraged at me.
00:30:46.000But exactly what Jim said, some people will come in like, oh, thank you so much.
00:30:50.000But again, I can't be public about this.
00:31:07.000Well, you know, through the videos from Evergreen State...
00:31:11.000You can see Brett Weinstein's interactions with not just students, but also some of the professors that were there, some of these preposterous people that he had to work with that are buying in hook, line, and sinker to this stuff, and they live in these insulated worlds.
00:31:24.000And they just create these people that also want to stay inside these insulated worlds and then just sort of stew in these ideas and then, again, go out into the real world.
00:31:39.000Yeah, and they think they're better people as a result.
00:33:55.000Because I made up papers about dog humping and made up the conclusion before I wrote the paper, and then, boom, they publish it and give it an award.
00:34:04.000If I can start with the conclusion and then work backwards to that conclusion, then I'm not doing rigorous scholarship.
00:34:21.000Going into a university, you're trying to – your young mind, your young kid – And I'm deeply concerned about these kids that are going in.
00:34:28.000They never hear the other side of an issue about immigration.
00:36:10.000And I don't remember the whole thing, but someone in...
00:36:15.000Someone in the class said, Everybody has a preference.
00:36:39.000Like, you can't say that no one had a preference.
00:36:40.000I said, it would be as if I said, well, you know, I don't want to date someone who's 400 pounds.
00:36:48.000So that comment then got turned into something when they called somebody else in, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion called someone else in, and it was made that I was rendering my opinion about people who were 400 pounds.
00:37:03.000What I was doing is saying that homosexuality itself, there's no reason to give that.
00:38:28.000And then they become a protected class, and then someone goes back and looks at what you said ten years ago about blue or green people, and you get fired.
00:38:56.000It's like you see people in society, it's like, oh, the Black Lives Matter people go nuts, and then all of a sudden the white supremacists are out and they're like, oh, white people have it hard too.
00:39:04.000The second somebody hears, oh, black people have it hard, somebody's got to be like, white people have it hard too.
00:39:10.000And so then when you have a moral economy, if you will, where you can kind of cash in and gain status or gain access to speaking or whatever it happens to be by holding a certain status of victimhood or grievance, then you're going to find people competing to find ways to get that for themselves.
00:39:36.000So, people over seven feet tall aren't a protected class yet, but the second they realize that they might be able to cash in on it, they might lobby for it.
00:40:25.000Like, that's, I think, one of the reasons that your show has been so successful is it's a combination of authenticity with you can have – you're totally willing to have conversations with no holds barred, right?
00:45:26.000It's also, if you're enforcing diversity, we would have to find out, like ultimately the goal is to find out what causes people to succeed, and especially succeeding in something as benign as talking,
00:46:20.000And theory, I mean theory in terms of postmodern critical theory that this stuff's all based in that we studied...
00:46:26.000The idea is that if you have a particular identity, now you have a particular view of the world, and people of other identities have different ones.
00:46:33.000And in fact, there's this whole thing called standpoint epistemology that says that if you have a marginalized identity, you know more about the world than other people because you live in two worlds at once.
00:46:43.000So the idea is, oh, if we get a black guy in here, he's had a different life experience.
00:46:48.000Therefore, he can speak truly to that.
00:46:50.000If you get a Chinese lady in here, she can speak to that, so on and so forth.
00:46:54.000So the guess is that by virtue merely of bringing in people who look different with different races or genders or sexes or sexualities, then you automatically get a diverse set of opinions.
00:48:30.000It's again, all the stuff comes back to the literature.
00:48:33.000So if you look at the word equity in the dictionary, you get one definition.
00:48:37.000But if you look at the word equity as they're applying it, Yeah, in sociological definitions, it's a very specific thing that means something slightly different from what people assume it means.
00:48:47.000So here's the question you should ask somebody.
00:48:49.000Anytime you hear someone use the word equity, just ask, oh, I'm curious, why didn't you use the word equality?
00:48:55.000Can you think of a – would the sentence be the same?
00:49:27.000You take some money, you got ill-gotten money, you put it through this shell company or this thing or the other thing, and it comes back to you, and now it's had a legal trail that makes it legit, right?
00:49:38.000Well, here you take some prejudice, you write it down as an academic paper, you publish the thing, it gets the academic stamp on it, it's the gold standard of knowledge now, and now this prejudice you started with now looks like legitimate knowledge that can go straight in the classroom, it can go straight to accurate.
00:51:26.000They want to save the world by clearing out the evil of privilege, by clearing out hate from the world.
00:51:32.000For them, utopia means nobody hates, and by hate we mean something like racism, sexism, etc.
00:51:38.000So it's a noble idea, but then when you start looking at it in this ridiculous way, you're born with privilege and now you're just stuck with it.
00:53:43.000And that's a sad thing because their response to this has been, oh, we're going to screen better to see who is actually writing these papers so they can't trick us.
00:53:52.000Well, how could they possibly trick you?
00:53:54.000The point is that scholarship is that it should stand on its merits.
00:53:57.000If the argument's solid, if the research is good, and they thought our research was good.
00:54:01.000That's my point about the dog-humping thing.
00:54:04.000They should leave it the way it is if they're saying that this is such an important piece.
00:54:49.000Because they can't differentiate real scholarship from bullshit because they're in this crazy ecosystem in which their ability to make discerning judgments about things has been dulled because they put an agenda before the truth.
00:55:02.000I keep seeing all these academics coming like they get their gotcha moment on us.
00:55:22.000But that means, of course, they don't want to admit that we actually learned this stuff because then when we say it's shit, they're stuck with somebody who knows what they're talking about saying it sucks.
00:55:33.000Now, when you said there's people that are trying to save the world, what do you really mean by that?
00:55:38.000I think they're the people who are trying to build the kingdom of God on the planet Earth.
00:55:42.000To draw a metaphor, a religious metaphor, they're people who see an evil and they want to purge the world of that evil by any means necessary.
00:56:30.000I mean, it's so stunning how easily people sort of slide into these preconditioned slots.
00:56:38.000Here's the one difference, and I think this is a key difference.
00:56:42.000The reason that it's easier—and I mentioned this to Pendleton when we did a talk, and he just couldn't believe it—the reason that it's easier to talk to a Christian, for example, about faith or about their religion is because at the end of the day, it comes down to faith.
00:57:24.000Well, you see that, I mean, even in nutrition, you see it in everything, in terms of almost a religious or religion-like acceptance of specific ways of eating or specific ways of communicating, specific ways of being.
00:57:40.000It's just so strange how people seem to have this natural inclination to adopt predetermined patterns of behavior.
00:57:49.000Yeah, I think actually there's a pretty decent understanding of that from the perspective of moral psychology.
00:57:55.000You've got this idea that somebody has seen something as good, so it elevates them, it makes them better.
00:58:19.000You know, we have this kind of vague sense, oh, you know, holy, this, that, that's sacred, and it's something really important to somebody.
00:58:26.000Well, what it really means is that it's taken on so much moral importance to somebody that they no longer will allow it to be questioned.
00:58:32.000When something's sacred, it's now been removed from the sphere of being doubted, questioned, or whatever.
00:58:36.000And so when you have this idea like that...
00:58:42.000Let's say that privilege is the cause of racism and you've elevated that – the problem with everything in society even – and you've elevated that to like a sacred value that can't be questioned.
00:58:53.000You can't say maybe there's another dimension to it.
00:58:57.000That's when you start getting these kind of religious-like behaviors.
00:58:59.000You start getting these problems because you've got a place where it can't be A, questioned, B, made fun of.
00:59:05.000We were talking about the comedy earlier.
00:59:42.000Well, it's because everybody knows these guys have power.
00:59:45.000They're trying to pretend that they don't have power, that they're the victims, they're the oppressed.
00:59:49.000Meanwhile, they're bullying everybody into everything.
00:59:51.000They're firing people for saying the wrong thing in class, you know, whatever it is.
00:59:55.000That's only possible if they have power.
00:59:57.000And the joke, when South Park makes fun of, like, what was it, PC Principal or whatever?
01:00:01.000When South Park makes fun of that, the only reason people laugh, if their theory is right, is because they're powerful.
01:00:08.000If their theory is wrong, because it's just funny, then we can talk about something different.
01:00:11.000But if they're actually right, if they're actually making a point here, they're not recognizing that they're admitting that they have seized a lot of cultural power.
01:00:20.000And that's why people celebrate when you go back against stuff.
01:00:23.000That's why people have sent us so many emails like, this is the greatest thing ever.
01:01:05.000And I've read some articles about some things that we've said on this show that are just fucking completely preposterous and taken totally out of context and presented as some evidence of whatever transgression that's impossible to defend.
01:02:13.000So that body of literature, here's something that I learned when I read this, is they don't use the word obesity because, this is really interesting, because obesity, it gets back to what Jim was saying, obesity is a narrative.
01:03:30.000And they also claim to be the healthy at every size movement.
01:03:34.000You can be healthy at every size, and obesity is just a medicalized narrative.
01:03:38.000Yeah, and that's really important, though, because the point of that is to say, if your doctor tells you you're fat and it's a health concern, then you don't have to listen.
01:04:04.000There have been some studies on people who are overweight and that there could possibly be some health benefits to being overweight.
01:04:14.000These studies have been widely dismissed now.
01:04:17.000Not only dismissed, but they go in direct contrast to the great volume of studies that show how terrible it is for your health to be that fat and that heavy.
01:04:30.000This person, I don't remember who it was or why she was doing this, but she was clinging to these one or two studies that have been dismissed.
01:04:39.000These are biased epidemiological studies that have been dismissed.
01:04:43.000But she was putting them in this blog as if this is some sort of evidence that not only is it not unhealthy to be fat, but it might be healthy to be fat.
01:04:53.000And now think about this person in an academic position as a professor teaching young people this, particularly younger.
01:05:00.000Particularly young girls who might have eating disorders.
01:05:37.000There's some legit stuff that they might want to say, hey, can we do something about this?
01:05:43.000But on the other hand, the whole thing, saying that it has nothing to do with health, it has nothing to do with your triglyceride levels, It's anti-evidence.
01:05:54.000It runs in the face of every conceivable piece of evidence.
01:06:49.000So I'm telling you, you go to a slimming class, you're going to go lose weight, you take a fitness class or something, whatever slimming classes are.
01:07:10.000The oppression of fat people is built into institutions pervades the cultural landscape and affects – dude, we could have written this – it affects the relationship and perceptions of people of size.
01:07:19.000It is its introduction to the special issue on – I love people of size is now the new people of color.
01:07:30.000Well, you can, but you see there's people of color and then there's BIPOC, which I don't know how you pronounce it.
01:07:35.000I don't know if it's BIPOC or what, but that would be black and indigenous people of color because they have even more oppression than the other people of color and they've got to fight over who gets...
01:07:55.000But then that's even a problem because indigenous has recently been branded a racist term because you're not actually honoring, yeah, you're not hitting the actual tribal identity.
01:08:04.000If you get right on the cutting edge of the stuff, it's like really going into meltdown mode.
01:08:08.000Indigenous is because it's too random?
01:08:13.000Because you're not saying Cherokee, Javajo, Nez Perce, yeah, okay.
01:08:18.000So you can see, again, the competitive victimhood going on.
01:08:20.000Who gets to claim more of the victimhood pie?
01:08:23.000And, oh, now we've got this thing about people of color, so they get victimhood status.
01:08:28.000But if that goes to all people of color equally, that's not fair, because these people of color are even more discriminated against, so they should get more of it.
01:08:35.000It's really, they're fighting over a piece of a pie of victimhood-ness.
01:08:41.000I love the Canadian term, First Nations.
01:08:43.000First Nation people, it's a better term.
01:08:46.000Because really, fucking every single human being that came to North America came from somewhere else.
01:08:53.000So speaking of which, in the sense we're talking about in the fat bodybuilding paper, I put I put in a Star Trek reference at the end.
01:09:24.000Your whole worldview is so utterly distorted and twisted, and the things you believe are totally untethered to reality, but yet you believe there's knowledge.
01:09:32.000You believe it's knowledge because it's published.
01:09:33.000And think about what it does to the students that pick this stuff up.
01:09:36.000You go to college, you pick this up, you start majoring in it.
01:09:38.000You could be majoring in something where you actually learn to do critical thinking to engage with ideas.
01:09:43.000If you're disadvantaged going into college, that's your best chance to get out of that situation is to grapple with great critical thinking, learn some great skills, whether that's, you know, engineering and the sciences, something like that, whether it's even if it's you want to get into,
01:09:59.000like, studying race and sociology, soft sciences, or you want to get into just literature.
01:10:04.000Do it honestly and you're going to get somewhere.
01:10:06.000But you get into this stuff where you can literally just make up your conclusions.
01:10:28.000The hard part is we could actually probably write ten books.
01:10:31.000So condensing it down to a book, usually you've got an idea and you've got to blow it up to a book.
01:10:36.000We have to condense this down to a book.
01:10:38.000I think talking about the problem, like just explaining what you've already explained on this podcast and actually having those studies that you did publish and the whole thought process behind creating them would be a great book.
01:10:52.000Well, we've got a documentary happening about it.
01:10:55.000Mike Naina is a documentarian from Australia that got hooked up with us.
01:11:24.000We're telling this one guy, a buddy of ours, and he's like, oh my god, I know a documentarian who's investigating all this shit going on in the universities already.
01:12:10.000Yeah, and so he thought it was, you know, going to be that, and he'd have to, like, convince us to let him show it, because we wouldn't want to.
01:12:18.000But does he know that you don't work in academia anymore?
01:12:44.000And if it does, then if I try to get a job working for a think tank or a university or anything that depends on that, I'm locked out of that now.
01:13:38.000Like, pushing people out of their jobs, like students patrolling the campus with bats trying to find Brett to pull him out of his car if he showed up?
01:14:12.000When there was that scene in the, wherever it was, conference room, or wherever it was, when the kids were telling him to put his hands down, because he was being aggressive with his hands, Yeah.
01:14:21.000And he puts his hands down, and they start laughing.
01:15:07.000It's too bad because when it was doing well, as Brett was explaining, it was a wonderful place to teach because he could do whatever he wanted to.
01:15:56.000It's a strange, strange time for ideas.
01:15:59.000But I think this is also some sort of a symptom of this culture that we live in where everyone gets to voice their opinion.
01:16:10.000Everyone feels entitled to voice their opinion because of social media and because of this instantaneous ability to post whatever you feel about anything, whether it's a comment on YouTube or a tweet or a Facebook post.
01:16:23.000This nature of everyone putting in input, instead of earning your right to be heard, you know, and through merit and through your work and through people saying, hey, this guy is smart.
01:16:41.000Before we used to criticize people from a point of expertise.
01:16:45.000Now people who have absolutely no expertise feel that they're entitled to not only criticize, but have everybody else listen to their criticisms.
01:16:53.000I think you're onto something with the social media, right?
01:16:56.000Because you post something and it gets like four interactions and you're like, well, how come Joe Rogan's thing got like 4,000?
01:17:04.000And so there's this, like, kind of competitive jealousy kind of thing going on.
01:17:08.000And I think we've seen that a lot, you know, these kind of, you know, people who don't have a lot to bring to the table, and they want to get, you know, maybe it's a spot on a podcast.
01:17:16.000Maybe they want to get on, you know, a conference or something, a speaker at a conference.
01:17:35.000Or when they start to get more power, it's like, let's make sure half of our people are there or else we're going to make sure that we say your conference is racist.
01:17:42.000Then that becomes like just a hot mess.
01:17:51.000And I think you're touching something where social media, and Tom Nichols talks about it too, generating a kind of narcissism where people feel entitled.
01:18:23.000That's what it's supposed to be all about.
01:18:24.000If you have a problematic person, you have a person that you feel is, they have ideas that are questionable, you bring in a person whose ideas you feel are Counter to those ideas.
01:18:37.000And you let the audience see how these individuals discuss these things.
01:18:42.000When I was in high school, Barney Frank debated some guy from – he was some very conservative person.
01:18:49.000I forget what the – There was a ridiculous conservative group that had some really funny name.
01:19:21.000And I got a chance to watch this one guy talk about all these different – whatever it was, gay marriage or whatever is conservative ideas and values and a marriage should be between a man and a woman and all these different things that would – Today,
01:19:37.000at a lot of college campuses, you'd want those shut down.
01:19:40.000You don't want someone propagating these ideas.
01:19:43.000But Barty Frank came on after him and eloquently dissected what was stupid about it and what the Constitution is all about.
01:19:51.000What makes America great is our freedom and our ability to express ourselves.
01:19:55.000And by doing so, me as a 16-year-old kid in the audience got to see ideas dissected and ideas debated and see two people From polar opposite perspectives, just battle it out and let the best idea win.
01:20:14.000And I'm sure there was probably some people that were in that audience that came out of it with a different perspective.
01:20:19.000Like, yeah, gay people shouldn't get married.
01:20:22.000And yeah, marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman.
01:20:27.000And that's what happens in a democracy.
01:20:29.000Yeah, you're talking about the very foundation of liberal society.
01:20:33.000You're talking about John Stuart Mill here.
01:20:35.000I mean, you're talking about John Adams.
01:20:38.000You're talking about the foundation of a liberal society here.
01:20:40.000And that's what the scholarship runs, what we looked at, runs directly counter to this.
01:20:45.000Remember, the idea is that if people are putting out language, the idea that some people are going to come away with a heteronormative idea or a homophobic idea, that's already a catastrophe.
01:23:48.000One of the things we wanted to do with this project is give people the opportunity to speak out and say, you know, they don't speak for me.
01:23:55.000I want to hear what someone has to say about immigration, the other side, quote-unquote.
01:26:01.000Yeah, and we need to study these areas, gender and race, but we need to do it right.
01:26:06.000Yeah, and we need to do it freely, where you could just talk, and you don't get accused of all sorts of horrible transgressions.
01:26:14.000Exactly, and that's the culture that we want to see in here, and that's not the culture we have.
01:26:20.000Well, I think there's, you know, everyone is railing against identity politics, and I think we can all agree identity politics are a huge problem.
01:26:27.000But another problem that goes along with it hand in hand is identifying personally with ideas, where these ideas are connected to your ego, to who you are.
01:26:42.000And it sounds like I'm just going to go after religion, but it's actually the culmination of my study of religious psychology.
01:26:48.000And so really what it was was targeting – I mean it talks about what's going on with religion and why people believe religion and what God actually stands for in terms of psychology as it might see it.
01:27:01.000But then what it was really targeting was I saw all these people who are like loudmouth atheists.
01:27:06.000And they were like this and that and the other thing.
01:27:26.000Favorite that was old I watched a whole speech like Like smoking a joint and laugh my fucking ass off at this dork who is speaking in front of some other group of dorks that were all part of the atheism plus movement and he just kept Just ranting about sexual harassment and diversity and all these different things and attaching them to atheism.
01:29:03.000But the truth is, though, if they think that, I mean, this is the article of faith here, is that privilege exists and always preserves itself.
01:29:42.000But you would have to step so far out of your belief system and be so objective and so self-aware that you're realizing you're in some sort of a preposterous group.
01:29:53.000And very few people are willing to admit that most of their life's work has been nonsense.
01:29:58.000Especially when you get rewarded for that, you get promoted for that, you get accolades from that.
01:30:35.000So everything they put out about thetans and volcanoes or whatever they've got, all of a sudden that's not like just crazy, you know, L. Ron Hubbard, was it Dianetics or whatever.
01:30:44.000That's gold standard knowledge, academic press, Oxford, you know.
01:31:16.000I don't know if you saw a year before all this, we did this really bad attempt at it called conceptual penis as a social construct.
01:31:23.000So we said that penises are a social construct and they cause climate change.
01:31:28.000And this got a little bit of attention.
01:31:30.000I've been getting emails ever since then from some member of EU Parliament, and they're like, we have another gender initiative that we're going to try to basically foist upon EU, and then it's going to dictate how Europe now works with Africa.
01:32:15.000And these people are emailing me saying this scholarship that you guys are criticizing is really – it's on the agenda of the EU parliament.
01:32:49.000And that's a great example of a place that went too far.
01:32:53.000Yeah, and what we don't want to have happen is we don't want people to pull their kids out of the universities because there are some— Not the university, but these departments don't major in it.
01:33:38.000Israel, TV, you know, I was on Israeli TV. What the hell?
01:33:43.000And so all these Israeli journalists are calling me, talking to me about it, and over the Mein Kampf, and I read this one paper.
01:33:50.000They're like, well, do you think that Jewish studies is like this?
01:33:52.000And I found this paper just before this all came out that was Jewish studies criticizing critical whiteness studies because there's this whole thing about how the critical whiteness people accuse the Jews of being white, and then there's all this, you know, who's – where does the oppression lie because, you know,
01:34:10.000Over the last 2,000 years or thereabouts.
01:34:13.000But then you got the critical whiteness people being like, no, they're white.
01:34:17.000It's a white privilege, blah, blah, blah.
01:34:19.000And then the Jewish studies people are like, hold up.
01:34:23.000Don't put us up here and say that we're all white supremacists.
01:34:26.000We were gassed by the white supremacists.
01:34:30.000So there's this huge critical studies fight between the Jewish studies people and the critical whiteness people over whether Jews count as white people or not and have white supremacy built in.
01:34:40.000And they asked me about this, the Israeli journalist did, and I was like, well, you know...
01:34:44.000I have to sympathize with what their argument is, but they're still using the same broken methods, and so you still want to see better methods, right?
01:34:52.000I think the Jewish people have a point.
01:34:54.000You know, we've been pretty heavily oppressed for 2,000 years.
01:34:57.000You start with, like, you know, the Romans decimating them, and then the diaspora, and then the Holocaust, and every – it's just not good.
01:35:05.000So I think they have a point that, you know, don't just say, oh, we have crazy white privilege and therefore white supremacists.
01:35:13.000But if you want to do that, you know, maybe this methodology of complaining about it's not the best way to go.
01:35:20.000It's complicated stuff, but at least they're against the critical whiteness stuff.
01:35:25.000This critical whiteness thing you were saying, they have a journal?
01:35:35.000It lasted for about three years, and I don't know exactly why it fell apart, but it fell apart because I was really upset because I wanted to send a paper to it, and it doesn't exist anymore.
01:35:45.000What were you going to send a paper on?
01:35:47.000The rewrite of Mein Kampf where the lesbian woman excoriates her own whiteness.
01:35:51.000I was going to send it to that journal, and then it doesn't exist anymore, so I had to send it to a critical race journal who then said, ah, it's a...
01:35:58.000Good idea, but you're positioning yourself as a good white, and that's a problem, so we can't publish it.
01:36:03.000All these papers, by the way, they're all online.
01:36:04.000We were completely transparent and honest with everybody.
01:36:41.000One of Sweden's most merited and acclaimed political scientists and long-term critics of identity politics, Bo Rothstein, has argued that identity-based disciplines like grievance studies, which deals with the concept of collective guilt, have no place in academia.
01:36:57.000Yeah, Grievance Studies is, yeah, right on.
01:38:03.000What I'm excited about is how many people are interested in the debate of ideas and that this is not happening on the college campuses, but a lot of these people that have graduated from college or are in the working world,
01:39:40.000So they're upset at you because you have whatever, a big show or a lot of followers, whatever they're upset about, big platform or audience.
01:39:47.000They're just generally disagreeable people.
01:39:51.000And they found these communities of other people who are enraged, who are also under-accomplished, who they can lash out at people together and then virtue signal, you know?
01:40:02.000Get rewarded for, oh, you know, rogue in that bat, whatever they want to call you or whatever they want to call us or whoever else.
01:40:19.000I mean, our attempt to do this was to try to delegitimize where they get their knowledge from, like what they call knowledge, what they could point to.
01:40:27.000We tried to say it's not knowledge and delegitimize it.
01:40:30.000But we really do need to get back to some kind of productive discussion, productive politics, where the far right disown their lunatics and we disown our lunatics, and we get back to work about...
01:40:44.000Whatever, the oceans, plastic, whatever it is that we're talking about, because right now the discourse is corrupted.
01:40:51.000We're not doing what we need to do in the academies.
01:40:53.000These people are continuing to pump out this nonsense that's totally untethered to reality.
01:41:22.000You see when you get into the critical race literature that it's like, okay, so you're brown or you're black, but you have slightly lighter skin, slightly darker skin, slightly darker than that, really dark.
01:41:31.000They have different levels of privilege, and it's just cutting things apart.
01:41:34.000The idea, though, that this is going to create some kind of a coalition...
01:41:37.000They can then defeat, you know, the plurality or something like that is ridiculous.
01:41:48.000They've lost like a thousand legislative seats across the U.S. since Obama got elected in 08. How are you going to get your agenda if you don't have any legislators, if you don't have anybody elected?
01:42:00.0002016. I can't say that the reason that Trump got elected, because there's lots of reasons, had something to do – no, I will say it had something to do with this because every conservative person I know that's not just a reactionary is like – and I live in the southeast, man.
01:50:34.000In general, I would say that what you're seeing is that this stuff...
01:50:39.000The big turn to making this applied was in the 90s, right?
01:50:43.000So they've had an entire generation of students that have just been really getting this stuff crammed down their throat.
01:50:48.000They really have taken over the education in the last 10 years.
01:50:51.000It was just starting when I left academia in 2010 that, you know, it was like, oh, we're going to focus on diversity.
01:50:57.000We're going to have diversity commitments.
01:50:59.000We're going to get into the general curriculum.
01:51:01.000So you're getting more and more students that are getting educated in this that are now going out to the workplace, right?
01:51:06.000So if half your workforce in tech, because tech moves so fast—I'm just guessing why this might be a thing—tech moves really fast, so you've got to have some fresh training to go in there.
01:51:16.000If they've been educated with diversity stuff crammed down their throat the whole time, and there's huge initiatives to try to, you know, increase representation of women in particular in tech— And these are seen as, you know, automatically good initiatives.
01:51:31.000This is the culture that they're being educated in.
01:51:36.000And then they take that culture to the workplace and think this is what tech is about.
01:51:39.000And then they're surrounded by like-minded people who encourage it.
01:51:42.000It's totally plausible that what you've got is sort of a tech echo chamber that's bouncing these things around and keeping it there.
01:52:53.000So that's when – what was the biggest fear for every Republican congressman then was that they're going to get primaried from the right.
01:52:59.000So they were going to have some populist Yahoo go screaming about whatever they scream about.
01:53:04.000There's going to be more to the right, harder conservatism, conservative movement, capital C, capital M kind of thing.
01:53:10.000And they're going to just drill into the – the reason that the conservative politics aren't succeeding is because we're not conservative enough.
01:53:17.000That's the prevailing view where I live in the southeast.
01:53:21.000It's the same thing as you see in the universities but reversed in terms of polarization.
01:53:32.000It's an excuse combined with a commitment to the ideology, whether it's conservative movement ideology, whether it's social justice, scholarship, whatever it happens to be.
01:53:43.000Right, but you see far more of these left-on-left attacks than you do right-on-right attacks.
01:54:15.000This is the kind of behavior you see in a panic, a moral panic, for example.
01:54:18.000And so, Helen and I, the third person who worked on the project with us, Helen and I wrote an essay about a year and a half ago, and talking about how the extremism on both sides is really the problem, and most people reject it and should fight it.
01:54:32.000Most of us are sensible people in the middle who hate this.
01:54:34.000In fact, data just came out showing that it's 80% of the population hate the fringes, both sides.
01:54:41.000So, and only 8% are on the left and 12% are on the right of the fringe, however that works out.
01:55:29.000And so when you have that kind of a situation, you have a panic, and you see the slightest bit of advantage happening on the other side is just something to completely freak out about.
01:56:42.000That actually makes a lot of sense if you can conceptualize it like an object.
01:56:45.000There's really a damn good YouTube video floating around out there where somebody takes a jet of water and spins a skateboard wheel until the centrifugal force gets so high from it spinning so fast it rips it apart.
01:56:57.000I don't know what the hell you'd search to find it, but...
01:57:00.000It's a powerful visual, and you can see it.
01:57:02.000As stuff moves to the outside, the centrifugal force goes up and up and up until finally the structural integrity of the thing that's spinning can't hold itself together anymore.
01:57:57.000There's a link to all of the documents we put out.
01:57:58.000To our aerial piece, we explained what every paper does, why we wrote it, what we were trying to show with writing the papers, what the problem is that we need to address, and what we think that this shows and what we can do.
01:58:13.000Yeah, it's all accessible through his YouTube channel.
01:58:16.000We're kind of making that the central hub.
01:58:17.000And so people can go there and explore and watch some more videos of us.