In this episode of the podcast, we talk about what it means to be woke, and why we should all be woke. We also talk about the idea of moral panic, and how it's been around for a long time, and what it's like to be a part of a moral panic-driven culture that's obsessed with being a better person. We're joined by our good friend and long-time co-worker, Alex, to talk about all of this and much more. We hope you enjoy this episode, and that it makes you think about how important it is to have a healthy dose of woke people in your life. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! We'll see you in the next episode! Timestamps: 3:00 - What is a woke person? 4:30 - What does it mean to be more woke? 5:15 - Moral panic? 6:20 - How do we become more woke 7:00 What are we all about? 8:40 - What do we need to do to become a better human being? 9:20 10:00 | How can we be woke 11:15 | What is moral purity? 12:30 | What does moral purity mean to us? 13:40 | Why do we have a moral code? 14:30 15:20 | How does it matter? 16: What is it a good thing? 17:10: What does the word "woke? 18:40 19:10 | What s a good person do? 21:10 22:00 // How do you need a good word? 25:00 + 16:00 / 16: Is it a bad word ? Can we become better? 26:30 // Are we all woke? 27:30 + 17:00/16:30/17: What do you have a good idea of what we should we be better than that we can be? 27:40 / 18: What are you better than a woke thing? / 19:30 / 27 + 18:00? & so on? We ve got a better idea of a better word for the word that we ve got it? 29:00 & 26:40 + 27:00+
00:00:36.000The whole idea was you pay for this experience with the elephants and in that they rehabilitate these elephants and they've released many of them back to the wild.
00:00:53.000So they came over and you were introduced to the elephant that you were going to take care of for the day and then you start feeding it sugarcane and they love you.
00:01:01.000So you're feeding them and you touch them.
00:02:50.000It has this idea that comes from French philosophy, that words and ideas and thoughts and patterns have traces that don't ever really go away.
00:02:59.000And so if something used to be associated with something bad and we still use the word or even if you pretend that it was the case and you still use the word, then it carries this negative trace.
00:03:09.000So the moral panic and the psychology side of it is fueled by this kind of like stupid idea that words always have to mean kind of what they meant in the first place.
00:04:25.000So those are the ones that are probably aware of all the nonsense.
00:04:29.000They're making the nonsense, actually.
00:04:31.000I think they pick some of it up from culture, you know, from activist groups or whatever, but then they refine it and turn it into something, and it has this really weird feeling to it.
00:04:39.000Like, you get the impression that it's like they're wrestling with their inner demons, and then, like, writing it down?
00:05:34.000And she was worried that she was racist because of that, and therefore all white people are racist?
00:05:39.000See, that's what I'm thinking is going on, right?
00:05:40.000So I'm thinking, I've thought this for a number of years, is that a lot of this stuff where you get these woke activists doing their blogs or these scholars writing this stuff down, It's like Sigmund Freud.
00:06:12.000That everybody wants to have sex with their mothers and like your psychology is all how you resolve that problem.
00:06:17.000And it's like maybe you just wanted to have sex with your mother, Sigmund Freud, you know?
00:06:21.000And then now it's everybody's a racist is kind of the vibe of the new thing.
00:06:26.000And there's like this weird religious kind of thing happening around it.
00:06:30.000That's really the thing that gets me, is how similar this is to not just religious ideology, like how rigid it is, but also indoctrination, like religious cults, how they indoctrinate people.
00:06:44.000And one of my friends, Kurt Metzger, a really funny guy who was a Jehovah's Witness when he was younger.
00:06:51.000And so he's really, really, really sensitive to this stuff.
00:06:54.000He's like, I know where this is going.
00:06:56.000This is the same thing that I got when I was in the Jehovah's Witness.
00:08:41.000But an insane number of emails from people who are in different levels of stress with different things that are happening in their lives around this woke explosion that's happened in the last month or so.
00:08:52.000So this lady's like, I had to go through a Brown fragility training at work.
00:09:32.000Because brown people, in general, like it's some kind of block of brownness or whatever, brown people have anti-black racism too, and that upholds white supremacy.
00:09:49.000And so it's like they cold read and they wait for somebody to start looking like they're getting a sweat or something happening.
00:09:53.000And then they say, now what we need to do, now that we've introduced this idea of your brown fragility is we need to – your anti-blackness is we need to interrogate the feelings that came up.
00:10:03.000And so they go one by one through the room.
00:10:06.000And made every single one of them confess their feelings.
00:10:52.000And so it's like I still do think that we have certain impulses underneath that lead people to build religious structures around themselves and have religious, you know, thoughts and feelings and want to have spiritual development and all of this.
00:11:05.000And so religions can kind of do one of two things.
00:11:08.000I used to be kind of hard-ass about religion and like tough, angry atheist kind of picture.
00:11:13.000But I thought about it more, which you're not allowed to think about things and change your mind now, but I did.
00:11:19.000And what I realized is that some religions look up.
00:11:22.000They're like looking at God and they're afraid of sin, but they're paying attention to God.
00:11:31.000And all they do is look at the sin, and they focus on the sin, and that's where the witch hunts came from.
00:11:35.000That was when the Calvinists got, like, you know, fire and brimstone, Jonathan Edwards screaming, you know, sinners in the hands of an angry god.
00:11:42.000You're hanging on a spider's thread above the fires of hell, and God should knock you into it because everybody's full of sin.
00:11:49.000Next thing you know, they're killing witches.
00:11:50.000So it's like you start – if you look up, you know – Then religion can be great.
00:11:57.000It can actually lead people, spiritual development, community, so on.
00:12:01.000But if you're looking down, you're going to start obsessing about – if you're obsessing about sin, you're going to start obsessing about everybody else's sin too.
00:12:08.000Because you're going to want to like – there's this feeling with – again, reading Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, there's this feeling like – That she doesn't want to feel alone.
00:12:21.000Like she has these struggles and she doesn't want to be alone.
00:12:33.000Yeah, $12,000 for two hours and teaches – she goes in and tells white people that they're racists and then like interrogates their feelings when they get defensive about it.
00:13:07.000Defensive is one of the symptoms of white fragility.
00:13:09.000You just want to deny your complicity in the system of racism that you benefit from, and it's just like you can't get away from it because— Right, that kind of language, like what you just said, is like—that's like a checkmate.
00:13:21.000It's like the kind of stuff like— So the other day, right, Stephen King got dragged into this with the whole trans thing.
00:14:47.000If you had someone who has taken steroids for 30 years and then they got off steroids for two, you would absolutely think that person had a massive advantage for being on steroids all those years.
00:15:35.000I understand fighting more than probably understand most things.
00:15:39.000You're crazy if you think there's not a difference between female and male bodies.
00:15:43.000I mean the data are unequivocal about that.
00:15:47.000Yeah, but it was one of those things where I was like, okay, this is one of the rare places where I really, if I go down on this one, like this is not, I can't see trans women just dominating in women's MMA. It's crazy.
00:17:25.000So, like, if we look at psychological profiles, for example, sometimes there are...
00:17:30.000The data are always hard to parse with things like this, but there are very slight differences in the two – the male distribution and the female distribution of all the people.
00:20:04.000And it therefore confuses the situation.
00:20:07.000And I think that there's almost like a lot of manufactured drama, not just in that issue but in all of this where these definitions are getting blurred out.
00:20:17.000So I mean that's what I do all the time now.
00:20:20.000The last year is like all I've been doing is researching how they misuse words and writing – not trans people specifically but this whole woke ideology or social justice scholarship – And I've been writing an encyclopedia on my website about that.
00:20:35.000And it's just like I've been writing my own encyclopedia.
00:21:36.000So the people can understand where it's coming from.
00:21:38.000So the reason they say folks is the same reason the Germans said folks in the 1930s.
00:21:43.000As it turns out, it's an idea of a group culture, okay?
00:21:48.000So it's the idea of moving a culture into, you know, it's identifying a group of people and saying that they are a folk, that they have a culture.
00:21:57.000And of course, we're most familiar with that, you know, as they say in the original German because somebody picked it up and yelled it a lot.
00:22:04.000There's also this issue that if a culture has been maligned, if they are marginalized, like trans people, then people who are not trans people are automatically thought of as in some way negative or bigoted.
00:22:20.000If you're a straight white male, for instance, you're automatically a piece of shit.
00:22:43.000Like, that's kind of what this book is about, is that I've traced that for like, it goes back to actually, I don't want to mislead people and say, oh, this is Marxism.
00:22:53.000You know, you have to whisper Marxism.
00:22:55.000But it is Marx who took the idea and he cooked up this idea called conflict theory.
00:23:00.000He actually took it from other German philosophers and made this – you can't even say what he changed.
00:23:05.000He changed Hegel's idea of what's called – you can't even say this anymore – the master-slave dialectic because those master and slave have traces.
00:23:11.000Even though that's what it was called, you can't talk about it.
00:23:14.000So Marx took the idea of the master-slave dialectic, which was that people who have – Hegel wrote that people have power.
00:23:23.000And then there are people who don't have power.
00:24:01.000Oppressor class is always the enemy of the underclass.
00:24:06.000And this has actually traced down through history.
00:24:09.000It was economics then and then this philosophical school started in Germany at first, moved to Columbia University during the World War II. It's called the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
00:24:22.000And they moved it into ideology and culture.
00:24:24.000And so the dominant culture, whoever has the most status and power, the elites, which at the time was genuinely like white, straight men for the most part.
00:24:34.000Those people basically brainwash the underclass into not realizing that they should rise up against.
00:24:40.000So you have this whole dynamic of conflict where the oppressor class doesn't realize what it's like to be oppressed.
00:24:46.000The oppressed class constantly can't get away from it.
00:24:58.000The underclass always has to be at war to try to overturn the power above them, which is called hegemony, which comes from this guy, Antonio Gramsci, who is an Italian philosopher who came up with this idea of a long march through the institutions,
00:25:13.000which I think we're now seeing for sure happening, like take over the institutions from within with this stuff.
00:25:18.000So this stuff all has, like, I mean, we don't have to be dorks, but, I mean, I can do that on my own.
00:25:25.000This isn't, like, it didn't just pop up in 2014 when Michael Brown got shot.
00:25:30.000Do you think when things happen, like the George Floyd murder, that it just, it opens up a door and this stuff comes through and then the vibration changes?
00:25:39.000Like, it moves to a higher frequency because it's more common.
00:26:37.000So it's really more prominent in – I mean it's pretty clear you can see the video with George Floyd.
00:26:42.000But if you back up to Michael Brown, it's more complicated than Ferguson because the short video that went viral in the first place was a few – not very many seconds clip.
00:27:22.000I'm going to skip tracks to a different video because I want to make a point that we live in a – We live in a mediated world now, right?
00:27:29.000A mediated epistemology is what I would call it.
00:27:32.000The media itself, social media, so all of us participating are able to spin narratives around like a 30-second video.
00:27:41.000So the other day, this guy sends me a video on Twitter and I watch it and it's some black guy.
00:27:45.000With a microphone and, you know, like in a radio studio and he's like going, he's like, you know, these white people ain't gonna take it no more!
00:29:18.000And he was smiling in the Native American's face and they got a photo of it and it really looks like this kid's a prick and that he's taunting these Native Americans who are just peacefully banging on their drums.
00:29:43.000You said, you know, does it just jack everything up to a higher frequency?
00:29:46.000And absolutely it does because everybody can take that clip and then just upload their story of what they want to have to be true into that clip.
00:29:55.000And it becomes like, it's like, I mean, we're already talking about religion.
00:29:59.000Like, you know, back in 2000, 3000 years ago, you know, something weird happened.
00:30:04.000And then, you know, people, one person tells another and another and another.
00:30:08.000And it's like, And I swear, you know, an angel came down from the sky and touched him and he was healed and he could walk again.
00:30:13.000You know, so it's like a miracle story but mediated through partially informative video.
00:30:20.000It's almost like, you know, everybody's scared that deepfake is coming where they can basically put your face on whatever porn star or saying some horrible thing that you never said or whatever.
00:30:52.000So that same clip I saw, I don't know that it would be a good example, but, you know, you could take it as the riots and, you know, that black guy's sick of the riots.
00:32:06.000I actually called Twitter a deconstruction machine, which is straight out of this, again, the same critical...
00:32:12.000Postmodern philosophy stuff that I kind of keep circling around.
00:32:16.000Deconstruction is the idea that – it's the same thing as the mediated ideas, that we're going to take a thing apart, make it look absurd, or we're going to show it in a particular light and then pull it apart until you don't really trust its validity anymore.
00:32:31.000And that's specifically its purpose is to make it so that you don't trust the validity of the thing anymore.
00:32:35.000And so anything you put on Twitter, once you get an account of a certain size at least, anything – I have an account that's big enough now, so I experience this regularly.
00:32:45.000It's a 100% chance that some jackass is going to say something that just messes with your head.
00:32:51.000Or somebody's going to take it out of context, or they're going to tell you what they thought you mean, and now that's the thing you mean.
00:32:57.000Or they're going to screenshot it, and it's going to go around.
00:33:02.000I mean, you're famous enough where it obviously happens to you all the time, I'm sure.
00:33:05.000It's like they take something that you say on a podcast or you put on Twitter or your shows or whatever, and they clip it up.
00:33:11.000And then there's like, you know who Joe Rogan is, but then there's like this new Joe Rogan that they created that's out in the universe, right?
00:33:19.000The real Joe Rogan and your real intentions and your real meaning.
00:33:22.000And then they put it out into the world and there's this new Joe Rogan that does a horrible thing or this new Joe Rogan maybe that's a saint.
00:33:27.000Well, I always tell people too, like, if you have an issue with some of the things that I say, guess what?
00:33:33.000I have an issue with some of the things I say.
00:34:50.000All I know is that when Zuckerberg sits down and he opens his laptop, you see he's got his little camera covered up, and I'm like, what's up with this?
00:35:38.000It's kind of like – I made the analogy actually a while back that it's like doing – I mean I've never done a stage show, so don't – I've given talks, but I haven't done like a stage show.
00:35:48.000But you get a heckler in the audience, but really you have like 70,000 of them.
00:35:54.000And when you're doing the show as a comedian, you either interact with the heckler a little bit or you try to flip it on them or whatever or you try to ignore it as long as it's like not too obtrusive.
00:36:07.000And you kind of have to have that same mindset.
00:36:09.000You have to think of Twitter as being on stage.
00:36:58.000Well, there's a lot of people that are doing it, too.
00:37:00.000I know people that are mentally unwell that are on Twitter 12 hours a day, and they're just constantly arguing with people, and I can just imagine them nervous and sweating and freaking out, reading the at replies and seeing if it's going their way, or people are piling onto them,
00:37:45.000So it gave them a social outlet where they could fit in.
00:37:50.000And I think that this actually has contributed – like internet social media culture is so strongly built by people, A, who are that way now, and B, by people who are that way when these things were getting set up, that it's all kind of built around – You know,
00:38:06.000maybe people with personality disorders, people who are just socially awkward, people who don't want to interact with human beings in the normal way.
00:38:12.000But just the whole structure of it, though, even if you're normally, like, a personable human, when you're typing things out and just sending it out there, and, you know, you've got an egg for an avatar, and if someone reads it, you're completely anonymous, and it's just a bizarre way to interact with people.
00:38:53.000On Facebook, you, like, you unfriend somebody or whatever.
00:38:56.000And, like— I actually have felt that impulse in real life.
00:38:59.000Like, you know, I'm hanging out with somebody and he says some dickheaded comment and I'm just like, yeah, where's my block button?
00:39:04.000How do I remove this person from my life like right now?
00:39:06.000There's no room for nuance and there's no room for, like you said earlier, for growth, for someone to learn, live and learn and get better at it.
00:39:17.000And that's what galls me about this woke stuff because they're like, this is about healing.
00:40:48.000That's the point is to make something funny and everybody bombs.
00:40:51.000But when you start doing that with like people's lives and social philosophy and calling them things like racist and sexist that can ruin their lives, it's a totally different ballgame.
00:41:03.000So it's like looking for that place to just be critical becomes a problem.
00:41:08.000Don't you think it's also just because it can be done?
00:41:10.000Like if you gave people a keyboard and if you told them, look, every time you press that Q button, a rocket's going to fly out of the sky and slam into a part of the planet.
00:41:25.000If they just knew, and they don't even have to be there when it hits, because you're essentially like, if you say something mean to someone online, and it really gets them, especially if you're anonymous, you're sending an emotional bomb their way.
00:41:40.000And, I mean, I know a lot of 15-year-old guys, because I hung out with several of them, and at times I probably was one who would basically have, like, two little, like, xylophone hammers, just like...
00:42:41.000But it was CHAZ and it became CHOP. So Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone is CHAZ. And then CHOP, I think they derived directly from the French Revolution.
00:42:51.000Like, they're going to get guillotines?
00:42:52.000Like, these badasses are going to get guillotines?
00:42:53.000Well, they put a BLT outside of Jeff Bezos' house.
00:43:40.000There's this poem talking about the builder or something.
00:43:43.000And it's like, or maybe it's the demo guy, but it's like this poem about how easy it is to just knock the bricks down and knock the building down.
00:43:49.000And it's like, this took builders like six months to build and it took me a day to knock it down or whatever.
00:44:07.000And so that's kind of How we ended up here in the long run.
00:44:11.000Again, I go back to that Frankfurt School to kind of root this in deep philosophy and history.
00:44:16.000They came up with this idea of critical theory that we've talked about now, and they had this other idea, traditional theory, and they said you're supposed to use them together.
00:44:23.000Critical theory was how you complain that things aren't Marxist enough, more or less.
00:44:27.000And then people bomb me for saying that, but it is actually generally true.
00:44:36.000Traditional theory was understanding things.
00:44:39.000It's figuring out how to make airplanes work and figure out how to get the air traffic control so they don't crash into each other, the whole complicated mess.
00:44:46.000And one of these things, you're supposed to use them together, but one of these things is a lot easier.
00:44:52.000So what happens when you start kind of getting a lot of half-assed PhDs in the academic world who need something to do?
00:44:58.000You think they're going to do the hard thing versus the easy thing?
00:45:01.000Everybody who did—I mean, I majored in math.
00:45:03.000I'm going to be my little elitist, you know, dorky thing here.
00:45:07.000Everybody who majored in something hard watched people bounce off of their hard major into the easier majors so they could still just get a degree.
00:45:34.000So there's this bias that's happened over the last 100 years in academia toward this easier thing, criticism, and away from the harder thing, which is understanding and developing fundamental research and so on.
00:45:46.000And it's basically taken over academia now.
00:45:50.000And that's how we – I think that's actually a lot of how we got here is the easy thing is the easy thing and complaining is cheap.
00:46:39.000So there's this – one of the guys in the Frankfurt School's name was Herbert Marcuse.
00:46:43.000This is the guy who laid out the idea of repressive tolerance that you have to violently fight against ideas that might cause intolerance to rise up.
00:46:51.000He did that in 1965. What happened in 1967 and 1968?
00:47:15.000And he actually complained on TV that this had happened, that there had been a sliding away from the serious work and toward the easier complaining stuff.
00:47:23.000And so, yeah, I think that it's historically justifiable that that's exactly what happened.
00:47:28.000And of course, you know, I was here before and we talked about those fake papers that Peter and Helen and I wrote.
00:47:33.000Let's tell everybody what those are just because it's an amazing source of enjoyment and entertainment for folks that are looking for something to read.
00:48:40.000Where we claim that we're a feminist researcher who spent 1,000 hours in Portland, Oregon dog parks over the course of one year, never in the heavy rain.
00:48:49.000We put that in the paper, never in the heavy rain, like that's some relevant detail or something.
00:48:53.000So 1,000 hours over a year is already ridiculous.
00:49:49.000And then we said when there was a dog humping that she would go up and she would inspect the dog's genitals and she inspected 10,000 dogs' genitals and then interrogated the owners about their sexual orientations.
00:50:00.000What she wanted to find out was if straight men would discourage gay dog humping versus straight dog humping and it was different for women and gay men.
00:50:11.000And then we said we're going to pass that data through black feminist criminology, which makes no sense.
00:50:18.000And then we said that the conclusion was that dog parks are petri dishes of canine rape culture and that they are rape condoning spaces just like human nightclubs.
00:50:28.000So human nightclubs are automatically now rape condoning spaces.
00:50:32.000And so the conclusion was that we now have to train men the way that we train dogs with like leashes and shot collars and things in order to get rape culture to go away.
00:51:22.000I can tell you, man, it was the craziest thing ever.
00:51:26.000I remember, I'm almost positive it was May 7th, 2018, I got the email.
00:51:31.000And it's like, I can remember, it was just like, go in the house, I was out doing like yard work or something, and I come in, and I check my email.
00:51:38.000And I just remember like, Gaping at the screen.
00:51:56.000He's the one that did that three-part documentary of Evergreen that showed everybody how – I mean that's where everybody's Evergreen now.
00:52:02.000And so Mike, it was like, anything that happens, film it.
00:52:05.000So I grab my GoPro and I have this footage and it's like sideways because I didn't even like think about it.
00:52:10.000And I'm just like running outside trying to find my wife.
00:52:12.000I'm like, you aren't going to believe this.
00:52:14.000You know, there's a really freaking crazy, you know, like it's almost like it's almost like the world slid off of its foundation a little bit when they get that paper and award for me.
00:52:52.000I mean, we were talking about, you know, the raising the frequency thing when these events happen, but mostly they took over our colleges of education about 1980, and so they've been slowly turning teachers to the project.
00:53:05.000And then in 2002 and 2003, there were a couple of Supreme Court cases that were talking about affirmative action.
00:53:14.000And they said that if you want to do affirmative action, you can do it if it increases diversity and equity and inclusion.
00:53:19.000So they started to build these offices in the university.
00:53:22.000And those university offices started to, like, dictate what you could and couldn't say.
00:53:25.000You could get in trouble or brought up to hearings.
00:53:28.000Even if you don't—even if the hearing finds you innocent, you still had to waste your time going through this humiliating hearing.
00:53:32.000And they're bringing up stuff and all your—you know, how do you—imagine you're, like, in a department, right?
00:53:38.000And you get hauled before the diversity office.
00:53:40.000What are all your colleagues thinking about you now?
00:54:09.000I'm like, you're not allowed to do that.
00:54:12.000Like the most recent ones in law journals, like substantive ones, are from the 1990s.
00:54:17.000So there's nobody criticizing this stuff.
00:54:19.000So when you aren't criticizing it, I mean, scholarship depends on people shooting down your bad ideas.
00:54:24.000You know, when South Park talks about them smelling their own farts or whatever, smelling each other's farts, it literally, it's like, it's that.
00:55:18.000It's like they've kind of gone into this mass delusion, where everything's power dynamics, and the power dynamics define how everybody experiences life, and Do you remember when Jordan Peterson was on television on the CBC and he was talking to some professor,
00:55:35.000I think may or may not have been transgender, who was saying that there's no such thing as biological sex?
00:55:42.000And I can unpack that for you if you'd like and then keep going as if it's just like you made a statement that there's no such thing as biological sex.
00:56:13.000You could tell when he was saying the things he was saying that he was knowing that he was going to get support from the people that he works with.
00:56:21.000It's this thing that you do where you've indoctrinated yourself into this world, or you've been indoctrinated, and now you have to sort of keep up...
00:57:48.000Douglas Murray put something up on his Twitter because someone was describing a gay person as a cisgendered non-heteronormative, like something really crazy.
00:58:01.000And he said, I think there's another word for that.
01:00:17.000Derogations, plural, characterized primarily by a verbal or nonverbal attack meant to hurt the intended victim through name-calling, there's your hyphen, avoidant behavior, or purposeful discriminatory.actions.
01:00:31.000The grammar on that's broken all to pieces.
01:01:31.000And so there's something, like, kind of totalitarian about making people do things like that that are difficult, like jumping through these little hoops and then holding them to massive account.
01:03:05.000Then you have this thing with white people.
01:03:09.000There's like a Black Lives Matter movement that's white people that are like washing black people's feet and like calling them and apologizing and like freaking them out.
01:03:20.000Could you imagine what it's like being like somebody calls you like all your all your white friends start calling you and they're like, by the way, I've always kind of been racist.
01:03:28.000Like you had a relationship with that person.
01:05:38.000They could order pretty young women around that have to do what they say.
01:05:43.000And, you know, they can patriarchally order – taking their orders is a pun.
01:05:49.000And this one woman wrote like this long review of it and she was like, this paper – remember, it was submitted to a journal called Men and Masculinities.
01:06:00.000It was a paper that was supposed to study the masculinity.
01:06:03.000And she wrote back, this paper talks about men instead of women and victim blames and blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:06:35.000I think your feeling is that there's really nice people that get bamboozled into really bad ideas.
01:06:42.000And then when you snuck in these hoax papers, that you're essentially speaking their lingo and they don't even know that they have a lingo.
01:06:52.000And so I actually think that what we're looking at with this woke movement, and we've kind of compared it to cult, we've kind of compared it to real, I actually think it's evil.
01:07:01.000And the reason is because exactly what you just said.
01:07:27.000And it's like it's literally trying to use people's best, fairest, most just and caring instincts to make them program into this way of thinking.
01:08:29.000And the reason this is going to sound absolutely insane, but it's actually true, is that they believe that something like Starbucks is a big corporation.
01:08:36.000And when it comes into a neighborhood, it starts taking resources, capitalist resources, money from that neighborhood and then dumping it into a corporation.
01:08:44.000And they see that as a form of violence against the neighborhood.
01:08:46.000So they're justified in using violence to disrupt that by throwing a brick through the window, even though it's probably some franchise owner who's just trying to make a buck, trying to have a job that runs it.
01:09:26.000In queer theory, calling somebody saying you're a man or a woman is called a violence of categorization.
01:09:32.000So there's all these different types of violence, and they're sort of marinating in this idea that these things that are happening, the way people talk, micro-assault, is a violence.
01:09:41.000And I mean, I even saw a thing somebody sent me today from some university, Indiana maybe, where the person's saying that, you know, we're tearing down these physical monuments, but maybe we need to think about discursive, so verbal monuments.
01:09:56.000And then in the middle of this, which is otherwise...
01:10:01.000He actually says something to the effect of that we really need to be prepared to do violence against this violence.
01:10:08.000And so they're marinating in these kinds of thoughts.
01:10:11.000So you get these like – like with Antifa, what are these dudes?
01:10:13.000These dudes are like hopped up, mostly young men trying to put out – I mean there's some women in there too of course.
01:10:18.000But there's a lot of young men who are like doing their young male rage and they're pissed off at society and they've read all these books saying how America sucks and how it hurts all these poor people.
01:10:56.000And they don't even have to really intellectualize it or really – like when they're rationalizing this, they don't have to really make cogent points.
01:11:02.000They just have to have like some iconic enemy in their head.
01:11:07.000We really should have saw Target getting set on fire when Target got deemed essential and people started making a big deal about Target's essential.
01:11:35.000And so it's – OK. I'm not – let me start right – and this is already bad, but I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
01:11:41.000I don't actually buy into conspiracies.
01:11:42.000But we are in a situation because of a lot of political currents for the last 50 years where there's a lot of billionaire philanthropist groups, right?
01:12:19.000So what I think is actually going on is political operative types wait for – I mean the saying is never let a good crisis go to waste, right?
01:12:26.000So they wait for a precipitating event and then they've been making – Easy Digest materials for a long time and paying people like, you know, hey, come work for our forum.
01:12:37.000What we really need to do is look at how we can get books for like anti-racist toddler books, you know, anti-racist kids.
01:12:44.000And so they get people writing these books and they think they're doing it.
01:12:46.000It's not like some, you know, boardroom nasty stuff.
01:13:10.000The amount of being lied to that's just so obvious, you know, through a lot of the news right now at these protests, especially in riots, is just galling.
01:13:18.000Well, the article that I showed you that shows that the COVID kick up, the uptick in cases had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter, but probably had to do with people staying inside.
01:13:53.000It's like you were allowed to go out in, like, groups less than 10, but not if you were protesting, then they could be up to 1,000 or something.
01:15:48.000But he's just so nice that he wanted to say it because it's a thing that people like to say and he wanted those people to like him and not come after him.
01:17:46.000It's considered a medicalizing narrative.
01:17:48.000And if we were to come up with, let's say, like you invented tomorrow Joe Rogan's, you know, you're getting a supplement company, and Joe Rogan's weight loss pill, but not like some bullshit.
01:18:35.000They actually say that in disability studies about people who are deaf.
01:18:38.000If they invented a surgery or whatever that fixed deafness or an implant that could fix deafness for everybody, they say it's a deaf genocide because there'd be no deaf people left.
01:21:12.000I can't now, because this is why I think you learn it, because if you can't smell, for me, my experience was that if I couldn't smell or taste something and I just kept forcing myself to have it, before long I could, and then it would start to taste normal.
01:21:33.000So all of a sudden I came home from a trip like last year and I'm like, you know, I busted open the cream from my coffee and I've like poured it in and I'm like, this is a sour coffee.
01:25:14.000All these people that are tearing down these businesses and looting, they haven't built anything.
01:25:18.000I mean, I think about it all the time.
01:25:20.000It's almost like this weird belief that everything just happens by magic or something.
01:25:24.000You can just go fire everybody who knows what they're doing and replace them with people who don't know what they're doing and want to be just diversity.
01:25:30.000And I'm not even going to say they're not competent, but they do want to focus on diversity or whatever the issue of the day is.
01:26:01.000And if you don't have people that are at the top of their game programming that stuff in those towers, looking at that stuff, but it's everything.
01:26:08.000We actually have a society – when you have an advanced society like we have, you actually have to have people who know what's going on and who are focusing on the job.
01:26:20.000And it can't all be – I mean of course we have to pay attention to the human resources issue.
01:26:26.000But this stuff is all about turning everything into the human resources issue.
01:26:30.000And then with like scholarship, I don't even know what to say because they're saying we need to do research justice and like – so that means take … Trevor Burrus Research justice?
01:28:28.000That came out in January or something that was saying the same thing, that we need to start questioning whether there's objectivity in math.
01:28:35.000We need to question what math is about.
01:28:37.000And then I see this curriculum last fall.
01:28:41.000And you can look that up on Seattle's government education website.
01:28:45.000We need to make math class be like asking kids, how have you seen math be used to uphold oppression?
01:28:57.000How have you seen math be used to break down oppression?
01:29:00.000And then how can we turn math to a more collectivist endeavor instead of individual endeavor?
01:29:07.000And it's like this is what they're teaching in schools at this point.
01:29:09.000So their belief is that objectivity, like actual knowledge, is not possible and that every culture has its own access to it.
01:29:19.000And those cultures, like we talked about conflict theory, are in conflict with one another.
01:29:23.000So science is something that was cooked up by white Western men, and it doesn't let other ways of knowing, they call it, in, specifically so that white Western men can keep the power of getting to define what's scientifically true and what's not.
01:33:30.000What's interesting is that this equality language never makes its way into blue-collar jobs.
01:33:34.000Like, nobody's clamoring for female garbage men or garbage folk.
01:33:38.000It's only for high-status jobs, especially ones that work in cultural production, right?
01:33:44.000So you have faith, you have education, you have journalism, you have media in general.
01:33:51.000It's in scientists and so on, people who get to control knowledge, ideas, and so on.
01:33:55.000Because again, they live in this world where they believe that if they can engineer how people think by what ideas are valid and invalid, then they can make their utopia.
01:34:07.000So it's, I mean, like the idea of inclusion, right?
01:34:18.000But when you cook the books and decide that anything that disagrees with you makes you feel unwelcome, now all of a sudden nobody is allowed to disagree with you.
01:34:28.000And then when you have this idea – you see this in these videos for these universities where you'll have some little student stand up and say, well, this center has too many white people in it taking up space and that makes us feel uncomfortable because we're used to having our space taken up and we have no space of our own.
01:34:43.000And like the most egalitarian – the whole campus, you can be anywhere you want.
01:38:12.000I suspect most men would suggest the reason for adopting the more spread posture in sitting would be the avoidance of testicular compression from the thigh muscles.
01:38:22.000The pelvic rotation goes some way to improve compression in both aspects.
01:38:27.000It's funny the way they say it that way.
01:38:41.000It's like, you know, if I know I'm going to have to walk a long distance, I have to wear the right underwear, I'm going to get chafed on my thighs.
01:39:30.000And fat studies would say that that is a problem of body blueprinting and that it's actually a sign that fat phobic society hasn't designed all clothing around that problem.
01:39:39.000They didn't design clothing with fat in mind.
01:39:41.000That was another one of my favorite papers he did was fat bodybuilding.
01:42:00.000They need to add a fifth one in for fat bodybuilding where people of any body shape and size can come in and it can't be competitive because that would be fat shaming.
01:42:08.000And so it has to be just a political performative display rooted in Judith Butler's politics of parody.
01:42:37.000But, they protested the 2000, and she's in London, so they protested the 2012 games, summer games, and what they did is they held in a park, like, Fattylympics is what they literally called it.
01:42:51.000And it was like them playing Dizzy Bat and like yelling about and holding up protest signs about how the Olympics sucks.
01:42:58.000And so we're like, what in the hell is this?
01:43:00.000And so then we decided to write this fat bodybuilding paper based off of the idea of politics of parody, of like making a joke out of the thing.
01:43:07.000So we're going to make a joke out of bodybuilding.
01:43:09.000And we said that competitors can wear the fat-tion, that's their word, not ours, of their choice, which is clothing designed for fat people.
01:43:18.000So it's really hard, it's really hard to talk about, to explain, to criticize the fat study stuff without, like, it's just so preposterous.
01:43:28.000How do you walk the line of, like, tipping them off?
01:43:33.000Like, because it seems like some of your stuff is so loony that I just, like, how do they not know they're being fucked with?
01:43:40.000Because they're too serious about that.
01:45:10.000When I was in grad school, actually, we had to learn about, so there's this thing in probability theory.
01:45:14.000It's named after a mathematician whose last name was Wiener.
01:45:17.000And so it's actually called the Wiener Measure.
01:45:19.000And so we had this Chinese teacher, he was talking about the wiener measure, and we're all laughing, and he had no idea why we were laughing, because his English wasn't great.
01:47:02.000It's like, literally, if I open the book, I can quote it.
01:47:06.000They say that it's politically actionable to use intentional confusion, like to put contradictions, and in particular, Yves Kovsoski Sedgwick.
01:48:48.000That's the critical theory of the Frankfurt School that we were talking about all along.
01:48:51.000So what is this person's – what was the issue that you had with what they were teaching?
01:48:57.000Well, I mean this person is like the body positivity person.
01:49:01.000So the body positivity movement – I was actually just bringing up the person's name being Bacon and Fat Studies is kind of funny, but that's rude of me.
01:49:21.000So if like a doctor says, we're worried about your weight, you know, you need to do something about it, that actually is not body positivity anymore.
01:49:29.000That's now telling them that they are wrong for who they are.
01:49:34.000So there's this like coddling aspect to it.
01:49:36.000And then this has actually moved into even more, they go even further, like people with letters, I don't need a person with letters after my name to tell me who I am.
01:49:43.000So with like mental illness, a lot of them self-diagnose and they say that somebody with letters after their name shouldn't determine who they are.
01:49:56.000There's this woman that we talk about in the book, Linda XY Brown, I'm sure that's her real initials.
01:50:03.000She's got like 12 of the things, but she self-diagnosed herself as autistic.
01:50:07.000And she has this thing, we quoted it in here, and she says that, I guess there's a stim, they call them, for autistic people called flapping, and she doesn't flap.
01:50:17.000Like, it's not one of the things, because she maybe isn't even autistic, who knows, because she won't get diagnosed.
01:50:22.000And then when she says she's in public, she flaps on purpose.
01:51:01.000Food addictions is one of the weird addictions where you're supposed to not judge the person by it, and you're also supposed to not offer up any suggestions on how they can fix that, because Then you are not just judging that person,
01:51:19.000you're condemning them and their choices.
01:51:40.000You have to get to a point where you're so sick of the way you're living that you will make the necessary adjustments to become a healthier person.
01:51:50.000Whether it's gambling, where you lose all your money, or drug addiction, where you almost overdose and die.
01:52:14.000Once I started to get into the territory of diagnosis, once I started playing around with the problem of diagnostic thinking, when it is only left to trained diagnosticians, that allowed me to challenge how all of us must contend with thinking diagnostically.
01:52:28.000And so it says right before that, in fact, I don't believe in giving power to the medical-industrial complex and its monopoly over getting to define and determine who counts and who does not count as autistic.
01:53:10.000Jamie's on the fucking ball as always.
01:53:12.000When a person with autism engages in self-stimulatory behaviors such as rocking, pacing, aligning, or spinning objects, or hand flapping, people around him or her, you asshole, may be confused, offended, or even frightened, also known as stimming.
01:53:29.000These behaviors are often characterized by rigid, repetitive movements and or vocal sounds.
01:53:36.000So Lydia X.Y. Brown writes, I, as an autistic person who doesn't instinctually or innately flap my hands or arms, it was never a stem that I developed independently.
01:53:45.000Will deliberately and frequently choose to flap, especially in public, in order to call attention to myself so that other people, whether autistic or not, might identify me as autistic.
01:53:53.000And it's like this stuff is – that's a scholar!
01:53:59.000I mean, we should actually talk about freaking autoethnography, man.
01:54:02.000It's a diary entry that pretends to be sociology.
01:54:26.000What if I decided I self-diagnosed myself, even though I'm a comedian, I say a lot of words I probably shouldn't say in polite company, but I say them all the time.
01:54:36.000What if I self-diagnosed myself as having Tourette's?
01:54:39.000And so that when I'm out in public, I just go, cunt!
01:55:03.000I mean, I'm pretty good at figuring out what theory would do if somebody genuinely did have Tourette's and then part of their tick worked out to be that they said racial slurs.
01:56:07.000Yes, but South Park in particular, because they have these characters that they could speak through, and these characters don't really resemble people, so you can murder them, you can kill them off every episode, like Kenny, and they have this amazing leeway.
01:56:27.000I'm trying to lay down the tracks so that people feel like they can actually get into this.
01:56:32.000Well, I think through what you and Peter and Helen have done through these hoax studies, you've at least highlighted to many people that not only is this a real problem, but it's really hilarious how far they're willing to go And accepts what kind of nonsense you guys are pushing.
01:57:01.000Because it seems like, is there going to be a peak and we're going to hit peak woke and it's going to slide to normalcy?
01:57:08.000I don't know societally, but I actually wrote an article I put on New Discourses the other day that I said that we – people need to be having conversations right now because I'm like kind of getting disowned by friends and family a little bit.
01:57:20.000And the question that I think people need to be asking is where's the line?
01:57:24.000Like because the way people reason is that they'll let themselves slide and then justify it.
01:57:28.000They call it post-hoc rationalization.
01:57:42.000I've already defended riots, but let's say that they fire all of the department heads or whatever at a university or they fire this or they burn that down or whatever it is.
01:57:53.000Everybody should have a line that says, okay, wait, this is too far.
01:57:56.000And I think individuals need to start figuring out what theirs were so they can tell the story if they've already had it, like you and I have already had that.
01:58:04.000And then other people who haven't, like we need to be talking to our friends and say, you know, I get that you think the woke movement's important and that it's doing good things.
01:58:12.000And, you know, there's some crazy stuff going on and I'm stressed about it.
01:58:26.000And the changes are so radical in what's acceptable and not acceptable and what people are willing to do to people that don't toe the line.
01:59:12.000But also, obviously, Black Lives Matter.
01:59:14.000So why are you so compelled to follow the narrative that if you say something that's obviously true, instead of following the narrative, you get fired?
01:59:25.000So because of that, people are willfully self-censoring and they're changing their perspective on things because they don't want to be canceled and they don't want to be fired.
02:01:57.000But they put them on public – on a stool in public, yelled at them and humiliated them and made them wear a hat with – like a dunce hat or whatever.
02:02:05.000And that's what these cancel sessions – they're actually the same thing as struggle sessions.
02:02:10.000They're just happening on social media.
02:02:12.000It's also signaling to all the other people that haven't been in trouble that this will happen to you if you do not comply.
02:02:31.000It's so psychologically damaging that it might actually be worse than death.
02:02:35.000And so that's what people are faced with and they're so afraid of it, which is so bad because it's just so transparently bogus and it can't defend itself.
02:02:55.000It will just – the backlash to it, which can be reasonable and liberal, people are going to wake up and they're going to have peak woke and they're not going to have more woke.
02:03:04.000And it will chew itself up from the inside with these fights between us.
02:03:13.000Nicole Hannah-Jones writes this kind of fake history of the United States saying that we're all about slavery.
02:03:19.000Slavery is everything to do with the United States in every regard from the beginning and still – And then what are they doing now, right?
02:03:26.000So there's this huge intense fight between the black population and the indigenous population for most racially oppressed.
02:03:32.000And they both have a pretty good claim on it, right?
02:03:34.000So that genocide thing was pretty big.
02:04:58.000I mean, the number of people right now that are saying they want deferrals partly because of the COVID and online classes, they don't want to go back to college.
02:05:05.000And then this stuff's blown out and every college president's like, we're going to be a full anti-racist thing.
02:05:09.000The other thing nobody's factoring in yet is the other backlash, which is going to be law.
02:05:23.000So all of a sudden this event happens.
02:05:26.000Everybody is supposed to have their statement.
02:05:28.000There's tons of social pressure to make your statement.
02:05:29.000If you don't make a statement, it's compelled to say, oh, your business didn't say something about Black Lives Matter, so you have to say something one way or the other.
02:05:38.000Everybody's trying to do the thing, and they don't know what to do.
02:05:41.000So I hear from a lot of people that email me about – at their job, they talk to their boss, and the boss is like, well, we have to do something, and there's this.
02:05:50.000There's this program, this anti-racism program, so we have to do something, and that's the thing.
02:06:15.000They're opening themselves up to a lot of future litigation.
02:06:19.000If you're actually having an official statement or policy of your company that says something like that you believe that all white people are complicit in racism or are racists, then you've now called all your white employees racist.
02:06:35.000But do you think you can actually sue someone for that?
02:06:38.000My point isn't whether or not you can.
02:06:40.000My point is that a lot of people are going to try.
02:06:43.000But I think that the courts are even siding towards being more woke because it's society's...
02:06:49.000Cultural shift has moved in that direction.
02:06:51.000Some yes and some no, and there's a point to that.
02:06:54.000But on the other hand, for example, if you look at the Title IX cases where those mostly boys, but it wasn't always boys, got totally railroaded in kangaroo courts.
02:07:01.000They got accused of sexual misconduct.
02:07:04.000The university ends up expelling them or whatever, the girl with a mattress or whatever that happened.
02:07:09.000And then they're suing in civil court, and they're almost all winning.
02:07:13.000Did that kid, the mattress boy, did he sue?
02:07:18.000I don't know if he did specifically or not, but I do know that there have been a number of civil suits.
02:07:22.000That lady was bringing her mattress on the stage when she accepted her diploma.
02:07:37.000What's really strange too is that if you accuse someone of something and it turns out that not be true, you don't really get in trouble for that.
02:07:48.000Because there's no actual repercussions for being deceptive and ruining someone's life.
02:07:54.000I have a friend who was accused of sexual assault by a woman and it was proven that he didn't do it and nothing ever happened to her.
02:08:02.000He just made some stuff up about him and So we got laws against revenge porn, right?
02:08:08.000You can't film your girlfriend or whatever and then you break up and then you put her on the internet to put her on blast or embarrass her or whatever.
02:08:17.000I mean this doxing stuff or these videos where they're filming people and accusing them of being racist and it blows up their lives.
02:08:24.000There may have to be legislation built around that.
02:08:26.000So the question becomes, will the political will be there?
02:08:29.000That depends on the people and it depends on the politicians.
02:08:32.000I know your lovely state here, California, just the state legislature has voted to take the anti-discrimination language out of the state constitution, which I think is a bold move.
02:08:42.000I think the people get to decide on that in the end, in maybe November.
02:08:46.000What is the anti-discrimination language in the constitution that they're removing?
02:09:15.000If you listen to this guy that's blasting all over, Ibram Kendi, how to be anti-racist, he even has a sentence in the book where he says that you have to evaluate everything according to whether it has racist or anti-racist outcomes.
02:09:28.000So if you have discrimination policy that says you cannot discriminate and then that makes it so you don't have equity, then that's actually a racist policy.
02:10:02.000They just say it all the time, is that if you don't have equal outcomes, then the system must be – I mean, you can see how this is like putting wallpaper over a hole in your wall.
02:10:11.000If the system has unequal outcomes, it must be discrimination, so you're just going to – I mean they say it explicitly.
02:10:52.000I don't know what happens because it's in violation of the federal laws.
02:10:57.000So, I mean, it's directly against Title VII. Who's pushing for that?
02:11:03.000I mean, all of these kind of hustlers that are getting all famous are pushing for it, but then, again, as your state legislature actually voted amongst themselves to put it up to a vote, all the more reason to move to Texas or something.
02:11:20.000It's like, where do they think this shit goes?
02:11:22.000It's like there's no map of the territory.
02:11:25.000There's no, like, if we do this, then, you know, we're going to have this kind of success in the future because, you know, we'll discriminate to the point where we reach some sort of homeostasis.
02:11:54.000Politically motivated lawsuit brought by Edward Blum and the organization he created Students for the Fair Admissions wants to remove the consideration of race in college and university admissions.
02:12:07.000The ability of colleges and universities across the country to create the diverse communities essential to their educational missions and the success of their students.
02:12:17.000So the problem was that so many of these Asian kids were doing so well that they had a disproportionate number of Asian students and they wanted to balance it out better.
02:12:26.000They want more blacks and Latinos specifically.
02:12:28.000They usually say it, at least in New York City, they actually say it, that it's blacks and Latinos.
02:12:32.000They say it over and over and over again, that Asians and whites and Jews are filling all the spots and blacks and Latinos aren't.
02:12:40.000So what you're actually looking at is they're trying to move to a space where they can put racial quotas in.
02:12:52.000So if you take somebody who's academically not prepared for Harvard and you stick them in Harvard, they're going to underperform.
02:12:57.000And then if you would have stuck them in a school that they actually are, you know, it matches their capabilities, then they're going to excel.
02:14:23.000If Harvard really wanted to make things equal, they would try to figure out why they're not.
02:14:28.000Based on, you know, like if they have only X amount of white people and X amount of Asian people, like why are there less of this race or nationality than the other?
02:14:37.000And let's put some study into what can be done and use all these brilliant minds to figure out what can be done to make this better.
02:14:45.000So that's the difference between critical theory and traditional theory.
02:14:48.000So you're saying we should use traditional theory, which every reasonable person in the world now...
02:14:55.000Like, this systemic thing makes that impossible.
02:14:59.000So imagine – I'll give you an analogy that helps you understand what systemic, say racism or systemic, what this idea really means.
02:15:07.000So imagine like you and I go out for a walk down the sidewalk, right?
02:15:12.000And for whatever reason, You step on, you know, the back end of a broken bottle and you trip and you bump into me and you knock me into the road when you trip and I happen to get hit by a car and I die.
02:15:27.000Obviously, usually we'd probably say it's like no fault or whatever.
02:15:30.000But if you start looking at it the way that these scholars do, and this is actually tracking the same argument that's in the book, Being White, Being Good, by Barbara Applebaum about white complicity.
02:15:39.000What happens is you could say, well, it's your fault for tripping, and it's my fault for deciding to walk on the street side versus the inside and walking right next to you instead of sitting in front of you.
02:15:50.000It's the person who drove the car's fault for, you know, maybe they were speeding...
02:15:55.000Maybe they happened to have chose to go at that time.
02:15:57.000Maybe the doctor called and they had to run out of the house.
02:15:59.000So the doctors now got some complicity in the situation.
02:16:04.000The kid who broke the bottle last night after he had a couple of beers, well, it's his fault, so he's complicit.
02:16:09.000But then if you go all the way to this systemic understanding where you're just looking at the back end, the wallpaper over the hole in the wall, it would be saying, well, we live in a culture where people drive cars.
02:16:22.000We live in a culture that supports cars and beer.
02:16:41.000Everybody, car culture is to blame for me getting hit by that car.
02:16:46.000And so you can see it makes it impossible to figure out where moral responsibility actually lies because it puts it on everybody.
02:16:52.000And it makes it impossible to see what the actual causes are.
02:16:56.000Another story I had from – similar to this was from University of Michigan.
02:17:00.000There's this program called Stride and it's supposed to fix for these disparities.
02:17:05.000So I'm talking to somebody and he's talking about hiring, academic hiring, and he says, OK. The way the Stride program looks at it, for whatever reason, men have twice as many of this as women, whatever the thing is.
02:17:16.000And so Stride says, okay, so if a woman applies, you count the number, if a man and a woman apply, you count the number the man has, you double the number the women have.
02:17:24.000And I said, hang on a second, wait a minute.
02:17:27.000Do you know why that number is different?
02:18:16.000I mean, this comes back to, if we look at the book, Michel Foucault's philosophy, power and politics work through everybody constantly by the way that we speak about things, by the way that we think about things.
02:18:28.000So you have this kind of like vague mystical sense of how society works is that it's operating through everybody and everybody's complicit and tied into it.
02:18:34.000Well, I don't have a problem with them being wrong.
02:18:48.000You know what else I have a problem with is that they come in and they sell you something like anti-racism or diversity or inclusion or equity, and they don't tell you really what it means.
02:19:47.000We're screwing with what things actually mean to the point where everything gets very vague and confusing and to challenge it, you're ostracized.
02:20:19.000Because anything that could lead to a total fascist state equals fascism in the present, according to the way you think about it.
02:20:25.000That comes again from that Herbert Marcuse guy who wrote it explicitly in Repressive Tolerance in 1965. We live in a perpetual state of emergency now that fascism has entered the world.
02:20:36.000So everything that could produce fascism is fascism.
02:21:50.000That seems a fairly new expression, but it's getting tossed around like a beach ball at a concert.
02:21:55.000It became big just in the last few years off of a couple of these authors like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, who dedicate a lot of their work to it.
02:22:04.000DiAngelo's book That's relevant was 2018. And Kendi's was, I think, I think, I have to check 2019 for his How to Be an Anti-Racist.
02:22:16.000And this is the same lady that wrote the White Fragility book?
02:22:18.000That is White Fragility I'm talking about.
02:22:19.000Oh, that is from 18. I mean, she has other, yeah, it's 2018. She has other books that are even crazier, like What Does It Mean to Be White?
02:22:31.000And it's called something about the racial cray-cray, white neurosis and the racial cray-cray from 2013. Like, you can find it if you Google that name.
02:22:44.000It's one of the most insane things I've ever read.
02:22:47.000It's got these sections in the paper, introduction or whatever, and then at the beginning of each one, it's like they just make something up, like this weird rant, and then it ends in a poem, and it says that white people and white supremacy cause a racial cray-cray in white people, and then white racial cray-cray causes...
02:23:05.000I want other people to have to live with racial cray-cray so they get racial cray-cray too.
02:23:16.000Trevor Burrus You know what some things – and so I'm going to point out this is actually from a legislative body – sorry, an administrative body set up by the state legislature of Washington in January called the Equity Task Force.
02:23:29.000And you know what they said was white supremacy coming through their mouths as they said it?
02:23:51.000So there's actually something that I read a year or so ago because of the schedule thing that wearing a wristwatch, because that means you care about time and being on time, is white supremacy.
02:24:02.000White supremacy is believing that the society that white people created, which means science, reason, logic, civility, rule of law, democracy, that that's good.
02:24:12.000That's the definition of white supremacy.
02:24:13.000So if somebody calls me a white supremacist, once you know that— Is that all white society?
02:24:33.000So this Alison Bailey woman has this paper where she literally – the point of the paper is to say anything that disagrees is a man – or anything that disagrees is somebody just trying to keep their privilege.
02:24:42.000She calls it privilege-preserving epistemic pushback.
02:24:54.000The master's tools that maintain white supremacy are like philosophical soundness, epistemic adequacy, which means knowing what you're talking about, science, reason.
02:25:06.000Like that's what they think white supremacy is.
02:27:37.000So the reason she said that was because I didn't, like, there's a thing called benevolent sexism where you're too nice to women, and I just don't do it.
02:28:14.000I don't know, I'm not a sexist, so I don't hold doors open for women because they can do it themselves.
02:28:18.000So here's Helen's example of a perfect double bind, but it's race, it's not sex, but it could work exactly the same.
02:28:23.000She says, imagine that you have a store, and a shopkeeper's there, and a black customer and a white customer are both in the store at the same time, and the shopkeeper goes up to help one person first.
02:28:34.000So if they go, and this is what critical race theory, this is how it would analyze what happens.
02:28:38.000So if the shopkeeper goes to the white person first, it would say that's clear racism, white favoritism, and make the black person wait.
02:28:47.000But if it went to the black person first, it would say it's clear racism because she wanted to get the black person out of the store faster.
02:28:55.000That's literally how critical race theory would operate with that because one of the – Damned if you do.
02:29:00.000Well, one of the tenets of critical race theory is that racism is ordinary, not aberrational in the United States society.
02:29:06.000And it is not – the question is no longer did racism take place for that as to be assumed but rather – How did racism manifest in that situation?
02:29:17.000So I mean that's – I quoted Robert D'Angelo for that.
02:29:21.000So the belief is that racism is in literally every interaction and it's up to the critical race theorist.
02:29:29.000That's the critical race theorist's job is to find it even if you have to make it up like master bedroom.
02:30:40.000It's a very dangerous game, because people don't want to hear that.
02:30:44.000I can do it, because I actually know what I'm talking about.
02:30:46.000So when they come back at me, I quote their own literature at them, and usually they don't know their literature as well as I do, because I've read all this crap.
02:30:53.000I've read a lot of it over and over again.
02:31:12.000That grifter term gets used really inappropriately all the time.
02:31:16.000Anybody who doesn't disagree with someone is a grifter, particularly if you disagree with someone who has a right-wing philosophy, or excuse me, a left-wing philosophy.
02:31:24.000You don't even have to make money to be a grifter.
02:31:26.000I made zero dollars for the vast majority of the time.
02:31:28.000I make a little on Patreon now, so I can't say it anymore, but I made zero dollars for the majority of the time that I've done this, and people are calling me a grifter because I was getting Twitter followers.
02:31:37.000Like, Twitter followers are somehow, like, I think?
02:33:45.000And that's where this is so – like my answer to this problem is we need to remember that objective principles work and that we need to defer to reality not lying to us because we can lie to ourselves all day.
02:33:57.000We can lie to ourselves and say that Fallon Fox is exactly the same as the people whose heads she literally beat in and then went on Twitter and bragged about how it was fun to crack that person's skull.
02:35:04.000Yeah, that's a problem with just thinking, right?
02:35:08.000Just thinking and then also expanding and expounding upon those thoughts in front of other people that are also just thinking and you're all doing it together.
02:35:17.000You need some sort of a tangible physical discipline to go along with that that sort of tempers you.
02:35:46.000Because it—I mean— You know, I've had matches before where I went on and I was all hot shot or whatever back when I used to do sport karate and some dude just kicked me in the side of the head and I was like unconscious and that's just the end of that.
02:35:56.000You know, and it's like you've got to reassess your cockiness real fast.
02:36:12.000Something like that where you're going to have these pitfalls or like I had when I was learning the martial arts I train now, I had a really long period of time where what we called it was a knowledge use gap.
02:36:21.000Like I could do the forms or whatever.
02:36:24.000I could practice the techniques and I could do them what looked to be accurate.
02:36:27.000But when I tried to do them on a person, it didn't work.
02:36:30.000Until it works on a person, it doesn't work.
02:36:33.000I even said this on Twitter this morning, is I think we need to have an ethic, like our culture needs to start remembering an ethic that your education, whether it's school or whether it's training or whatever it is, is worth what you can build with it.
02:36:48.000It's not worth anything more than what you can build.
02:36:51.000So if you go to trade school and you end up building some great business empire, Your education was good.
02:36:58.000And if you go to university and get a PhD and do a couple postdocs and all you can do is whine and complain and you can't do anything productive, your education wasn't good.
02:37:10.000And it doesn't see you immediately remove like these weird elite credentialing things from that It's what can you do with it that proves whether or not it was good in the world?
02:37:18.000I think we need to kind of remember it's like a pragmatic thing, right?
02:37:23.000Right and some people that can only teach the same thing that they learned Right and that becomes a problem because then you're so indoctrinated in the system and you just sort of perpetuating the same shit that got you to where you are We're good to go.
02:38:56.000But there is the ability to have faith in that if you do the work and that if you get yourself organized and you put your effort in— On a program that can actually achieve a result that you can.
02:39:09.000Again, jiu-jitsu is a really great example.
02:39:12.000I mean everybody who trains jiu-jitsu gets humbled.
02:39:15.000But the deal is if you go to a qualified jiu-jitsu instructor, whether it's a Gracie, whether it's one of these other – there's lots of them now.
02:39:35.000You're going to get beat by – you're going to be a purple belt and get choked by a white belt who got a good move on you at some point and you're going to have a bad day afterwards.
02:39:44.000It's going to come up sometimes, or some tricky kid that knows some wrestling is going to throw you, and you're like, how did this happen?
02:40:04.000Let's defer to a rule of law knowing that we have a democratic process where we can remake the law as we need to hopefully incrementally and not through some stupid revolution and then that can work.
02:40:15.000So I have to be hopeful because I know the thing can work.
02:40:19.000If we're willing to kind of stand up for it and remember it.
02:40:24.000I'm hoping that with all this looting and the chaos and the smashing things and the riots and the people – like we were talking earlier before the show about this guy who was at a – He was at a protest in Provo, Utah, and he was just trying to honk his horn and get through,
02:40:54.000Like if that's being – like for me, so much – I mean I was already past peak woke, but like a real moment of wake-up call like this – there have been moments where this stuff has flared up in the past and you're like, oh, it's going to die down.
02:43:02.000I mean I hear – I mean I remember Martin Luther King wrote the thing and he said that the riots are the voice of – the utterly voiceless of the frustrated person.
02:43:15.000But he also said … He also said … That you—I don't want to misquote him, so we should probably get the exact quote, but there's more to that quote.
02:43:27.000And I understand, like, with the COVID, the whole thing, I understand that massive frustration, and I understand this.
02:43:33.000But I expect my journalists, I expect my politicians, I expect my university presidents to be able to make clear— Statements that side with civil society.
02:43:48.000You can even say, I recognize that outburst.
02:43:54.000The problem is, the anger that they will experience from people that disagree with them is so much stronger than the support that they will experience from people that do agree with them.
02:45:02.000Actually is an allegory for Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X. So King T'Challa is Martin Luther King and Eric, the bad guy, the fake Black Panther, is Malcolm X. And he gets in power and he starts changing all the rules and he's,
02:45:19.000you know, there will not be the fight anymore.
02:45:21.000I'm just the king and the whole thing, right?
02:45:23.000And then what happens is they have the big epic fight at the end and the Martin Luther King side wins and then there's the morality tale at the end that tells why.
02:45:30.000So I actually think it was a movie that's an allegory that repudiates radicalism in favor of Martin Luther King's message.
02:45:40.000And then the woke people went nuts for it.
02:46:45.000One of the things I've been saying for all along is that I'm actually against the social justice movement, the woke social justice movement, which is formally in the literature called critical social justice.
02:46:54.000I'm against that because I am for social justice.
02:47:21.000Maybe some of it is prejudice, some of it's discrimination, some of it's cultural discrimination, like not valuing each culture that, you know, cultural values the same way or whatever.
02:47:30.000It's also the echoes of the suppressive past.
02:47:44.000Well, even more recently, they're not wrong to bring up things like redlining and white flight and all these things that economically dispossessed.
02:47:55.000Grandpappies and stuff are – that's them.
02:47:59.000So the wealth – when they make the argument about accumulated wealth, what the average accumulated wealth of a white family versus the average accumulated wealth of a black family – There's something there, right?
02:48:08.000We should expect that there's something there and we should be trying to understand that and then trying to figure out actual solutions to those problems, right?
02:48:16.000But like when you take the analysis, say, of the guy who started critical race theory, his name is Derrick Bell, first African-American tenured professor at Harvard, Harvard Law, real pessimistic guy.
02:48:27.000He actually said that the point of – he said that Brown versus Board of Education, which desegregated schools, …was done so that white people could feel better about themselves and then to open up black people to new problems like having to face discrimination in schools, like real pessimistic.
02:48:41.000But in 1992, OK, get your head on 1992. In 1992, he wrote a book called Faces at the Bottom of the Well.
02:48:48.000And what he said is that black society is a face at the bottom of the well and whites – he says right in the first page, even the poorest, most downtrodden, awful situation white person Always knows that they can have status by looking down at the face of the bottom of the wall.
02:49:04.000Okay, I was in 1992. I was impoverishing my parents with Michael Jordan gear, right?
02:49:11.000I'm not looking down to Michael Jordan.
02:49:44.000I have to take – after reading this stuff for so many years, I have to take them at their word.
02:49:48.000And the game that they play is to play off of your – they can't really mean that instinct.
02:49:53.000Derek Bell held the position that desegregating the schools was bad because it just allowed racism to maintain in another direction.
02:50:02.000Derek Bell introduced a concept called interest convergence that says that any time – Any time black people get more rights, it was because it was also in the interests of white people, so it was actually an act of racism.
02:50:13.000So if you become anti-racist, this is literal.
02:50:16.000If you become anti-racist, there's books about this.
02:50:19.000If you become anti-racist according to their demands for you to become anti-racist, that was in your best interest.
02:50:24.000It turns you into a good white, a good white progressive or a good white liberal.
02:51:14.000And then because of this interest convergence thesis of Derrick Bell, which is at the core of critical race theory to this day, anything a white person does, according to the theory, I don't agree with this, anything a white person does To help a black person also raises their own moral standing and is therefore in their own interest and was therefore a racist act.
02:52:11.000The way that they believe that white supremacy and whiteness can be taken out of society is to completely, in a full-on revolution, Remake society from the bottom up.
02:52:22.000That's in their literature all over the place.
02:52:25.000You can't get rid of whiteness until you get rid of all vestiges of white society.
02:52:29.000And that level of revolution is what's inspiring these frickin' riots.
02:52:33.000Do they know about him and his work or is this just a continuation of the idea?
02:53:55.000What I think it is, okay, so I've described it before pretty publicly as a Trojan horse.
02:53:59.000So you know the story of the Trojan horse, right?
02:54:01.000So they wheel up the horse and what's inside is assassins.
02:54:03.000So they bring it in and they open up from the inside, come out, kill the guards, open the gate, and then the army can come through.
02:54:09.000This is a Trojan horse full of bureaucrats.
02:54:11.000So what they do is they go fill in administrations, and then they fill in HR departments, and then they start making policy changes at those levels so that everybody's stuck playing by their rules.
02:54:21.000In a lot of cases, there aren't necessarily that many of them, and you actually can push them out.
02:54:38.000But the CEOs in particular, and they say, well, a lot of times they're just people in the office and you know how they are.
02:54:44.000And so they come in and they ask for a promotion and you know they're going to make trouble if you don't give it to them.
02:54:48.000So it's just easier to give it to them and kind of let them do the thing.
02:54:52.000And it's like, We really need to stop getting bullied.
02:54:57.000Do you think that part of this, the movement, and why it's so, like, with Antifa in particular, and the looting and all the craziness in the streets, because people aren't working, so it's like there's so many more people that have the time to do this.
02:55:11.000And so it really refuels, it's like dry wood on a fire.
02:56:24.000And they're basically going to try to just step out of the language game.
02:56:28.000I don't think most people will do that, but there will be a contingent, and this is where your fears are valid, where that's going to happen.
02:56:34.000But some of them are going to grab onto that identity and they're going to latch onto it.
02:56:39.000And of course, what does the theory say?
02:56:42.000Critical race theory says that everybody's a racist and is just hiding it under a mask.
02:56:47.000And so if they start acting racist, they're, oh, they were racist all along.
02:56:52.000And they do this to people in their jobs.
02:56:54.000I know people who disagree with woke stuff who have applied for jobs.
02:56:59.000And there's these professional forums and then people set it up and they say, we're going to, you know, he's associated with this or associated with that.
02:57:06.000So we can't hire him, make sure he's not going to get an academic job.
02:57:09.000And I've actually seen screenshots people sent me of the texts where the point is that we make sure he can't get an academic job.
02:57:16.000So he has to take a job with some right wing outlet.
02:57:18.000Then we call him a conservative and he's done.
02:57:36.000One of my more controversial beliefs right now is that we might actually be in a second civil war already in the sense, though, that it's being fought in information and in culture, not in...
02:58:13.000They're afraid to speak up, and I know because they email me and tell me things like, I have a fake account that I follow you on Twitter or I come and look at your Twitter but I can't follow you.
02:58:57.000But they're going to go where they see the least liability and where they see the most likelihood to generate profit.
02:59:07.000I mean I'm not going to say that I don't support capitalism in general but I don't support the exploitation of a movement based in pain and fear to sell t-shirts or shoes or whatever else.
03:00:44.000So we can go, like, Thelma and Louise into the canyon...
03:00:48.000I don't think it's going to end our careers because I think one of the things that is very important for people like you and people like me now is to be that person who points things out that are logical and reasonable and when you hear your words, you know,
03:01:20.000And that's what's dangerous about it is because we have these religious tendencies.
03:01:24.000We have these fundamentalist, ideological tendencies to adopt a particular pattern of thinking and behavior and to stick with it without deviation because if you do, you'll be ostracized.
03:01:36.000And that's what you're seeing with woke culture.