Based Camp - Richard Hanania on the Legal Origins of Woke Culture

00:00:00.000 Hi, today we are joined by a very special guest, the author on Substack and Twitter, Richard

00:00:05.920 Hanania. Really awesome work. We love following him and we love talking with him even more. So

00:00:10.500 we're so excited he's coming on the podcast. Well, so an interesting thing is, with our

00:00:16.220 audience, you're hitting an audience that's going to be great for your book, The Origins of Woke,

00:00:20.360 but great in an interesting way because we are so interested in the same type of stuff.

00:00:25.980 We actually are going to have persistent disagreements about the types of questions that normal people

00:00:33.180 have literally no vested interest in. So I am so interested, and I know our audience are

00:00:39.040 interested to hear your theory on The Origins of Woke presented in the short version that

00:00:45.680 will get them excited for the book. Would you like to know more? Yeah. So the basic argument,

00:00:52.340 if you're going to sum it up in a sentence, is that wokeness is caused by government policy via

00:00:59.740 civil rights law. And it's a strong claim, and it's a claim that could be misinterpreted. And

00:01:06.200 of course, it doesn't explain literally every single thing that ever happened. It doesn't

00:01:09.640 explain Zs or pronouns or whatever. But the basic outline of all policy is racist if it has a

00:01:16.420 disparate impact, how we classify race in this country. You know, the fact that our institutions

00:01:21.080 have HR departments and DEI offices that are obsessed with race, that is ultimately traceable

00:01:26.720 to law. There's a fascinating history there, and it can potentially be undone by law too.

00:01:32.500 Yeah. So, I mean, you've gotten fairly in the weeds in your book into like how this first was

00:01:37.940 introduced into law and why it wasn't stopped as it was happening. Can you talk a little to that?

00:01:44.720 Yeah. So this is a history book. I mean, when I say origins of woke, I mean, my background is in

00:01:49.300 political science. I'm trying to like meet the standards of like a good social science argument

00:01:53.680 of like how we got here. And so that requires a lot of history. And yeah, I mean, the civil rights

00:01:59.400 movement, I mean, that's the basically every school children know about it. It's, you know,

00:02:03.440 the idea that, you know, there was, there was a sort of this moral sort of wave and reaction to

00:02:08.320 Jim Crow laws in America in the 1960s that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

00:02:14.720 And what happened after that is that the people, you know, who were involved in that movement

00:02:19.000 didn't just pack up and go home and embrace the issue wasn't solved overnight. There was, you know,

00:02:23.520 pretty much immediately within, you know, within, you know, within literally years, there was a

00:02:27.720 move towards equality of outcome rather than equality of results. And what happened, what happened from

00:02:32.340 there was you had to start pushing, you know, quotas or quasi quotas onto private institutions. You had to

00:02:38.060 start going after standardized tests. And later, the same Civil Rights Act and other, you know,

00:02:42.520 associated laws, smaller, less important laws were used to go after free speech through hostile work

00:02:47.940 environment and harassment and all these things really led to the rise of HR, really led to like

00:02:52.660 institutional homogenization. And so that's sort of the genesis of how we got here.

00:02:57.860 So can you talk about when really the moment happened when it moved from equality of opportunity

00:03:03.680 to equality of outcome, like in the legal system?

00:03:06.440 I mean, there are, you know, there's so many sort of, you know, there's so many sort of,

00:03:10.700 you know, steps on the way, but I think the Griggs decision in 1971 was, you know, pretty much the

00:03:15.880 ratification of it by the Supreme Court. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission thought it would

00:03:20.580 lose that case. It actually encouraged the plaintiffs not to appeal because they thought the legislative

00:03:26.000 history was so clear that you could use tests and you couldn't just say they were racist on the

00:03:31.300 grounds that whites do better on them than blacks. They said, clearly, that's not what the law meant.

00:03:35.860 That's not what the law says. They thought they would lose. It goes to the Supreme Court and

00:03:39.700 there's a unanimous decision. I mean, the Supreme Court would surprise people on race in a lot of

00:03:43.360 ways and during the Warren and Berger years in the 1960s and 1970s, but that really, that really

00:03:48.700 codified it. And then it was sort of off to the races. So can you educate our audience on the

00:03:52.900 Griggs decision? What happened in it? What was at stake? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the Griggs decision was

00:03:58.140 basically a lawsuit against a corporation in North Carolina, a company in North Carolina. I think it was a

00:04:02.980 textile factory and they had given basically a test. You know, they used to discriminate based

00:04:07.320 on race, you know, before the Civil Rights Act, then they integrated, but they used to, they would

00:04:11.320 have basically like an IQ test and they would have some educational requirements like high school

00:04:15.740 degree. And basically went to the Supreme Court. Somebody argued that this was discriminatory just

00:04:21.040 because blacks did not do as well on the test as whites did, right? This idea of disparate impact had

00:04:25.740 been around for a while, but when they passed and signed the Civil Rights Act, you know, the belief was

00:04:31.400 that the discrimination had to be intentional. You had to actually have an intent to want to keep

00:04:36.140 somebody out of a job. But then this was the theory of disparate impact. You went to the Supreme

00:04:41.320 Court on that basis and the Supreme Court basically said anything that has a disparate impact is basically

00:04:47.360 presumptive, can be presumptively seen as discriminatory, as violating the Civil Rights Act.

00:04:52.120 And then it becomes on the business as a, has the burden of proving that it's actually necessary.

00:04:56.140 And there's, you know, all the, all kinds of steps to determine what that means. We can get

00:05:00.020 it to vote weeds, but that's basically the idea. So when you hear something is racist because whites

00:05:03.840 do better on it than blacks, it's all from a Supreme Court decision in 1971.

00:05:08.740 Fascinating. So question, when you look at the current, the most recent Supreme Court ruling

00:05:13.700 that's, you know, on everyone's mind these days was, was, you know, tied to early colleges and

00:05:18.420 admissions and everything like that. I don't know what it's called off the top of my head, but

00:05:21.940 is it sort of like the opposite of this? Do you think it could lead to an untangling of some

00:05:25.980 of this or do you think it's, it's just farting in the wind? It's, it is a, it's a related area

00:05:31.480 of law. It's not the, so that, that one was about employment. This one is about universities

00:05:36.300 directly discriminating based on race. But it's a, you know, you can't do that. And it is, I mean,

00:05:42.980 it is important. I think you've seen stories, even though it doesn't directly apply to employment,

00:05:47.640 you've seen stories of like corporations, like sort of becoming a little more skittish about

00:05:51.660 diversity. It's a signal of sort of how the Supreme Court is thinking about these issues and how

00:05:56.580 future cases will be ruled on. And, you know, whether it matters or, you know, how much it

00:06:01.260 matters in the end is really going to be determined. It's a very, it's sort of a boring answer, but it's

00:06:05.320 going to be determined by, you know, who the judges are in the future. I mean, it's going to be determined

00:06:08.620 by election results and who's appointing the judges and who's, who's the Senate, you know, confirming

00:06:12.560 them because like every, you know, every decision is sort of never in our legal system, nothing is ever a

00:06:19.740 final decision. Everything is just sort of shifting, you know, the goal points one direction

00:06:23.520 or not. If a three conservative Supreme Court just says die and I replace tomorrow, right? That

00:06:27.880 decision will go back and we'll go, we'll go even further in the other direction. So it, I mean,

00:06:32.300 it matters. You see sort of, it's sort of like, you know, like you fire, you know, artillery barrage at

00:06:37.480 an enemy and they scramble for a while. If you don't follow up with any other fire, they're going to

00:06:41.460 regroup and they're going to be right back in their original position. If you start hitting them again,

00:06:44.660 while they're scrambling, you can really change things. So, you know, how much it matters will depend

00:06:48.940 on future decisions and future elections as boring as that sounds as an answer.

00:06:54.120 Well, no, it is, it is actually an interesting answer. So what I find interesting is how different

00:07:01.080 our perceptions on the origins of woke are and what woke is. And I'd love it if you could comment.

00:07:07.560 So I'll give a brief explanation of where I think our differences of perception are. And I'd love you to

00:07:13.100 present an argument for, for your perception versus our perception. Ours. So, so if I'm going to

00:07:19.360 characterize yours and you can tell me if I'm mischaracterizing it is wokeism is downstream

00:07:24.740 of legal decisions that were originally tied to the civil rights movement, but basically ran out of

00:07:31.040 control. Um, whereas our perception is that wokeism is a memetic virus, much closer to a religion and

00:07:41.780 that it literally evolved out of a form of Quakerism. And that it, instead of coming from these decisions,

00:07:49.340 that it actually sort of infects cultural movements, even iterations of religions, basically kills

00:07:57.640 everything they ever stood for, then marionates their corpses and claims to be them. And that it is 0.53

00:08:04.220 not the civil rights movement, that the civil rights movement had entirely different goals in modern

00:08:08.840 wokeism. And that the civil rights movement now is just the corpse of something that used to matter

00:08:14.040 being marionetted by the thing that killed it. So how do you, I mean, I hear these arguments and I

00:08:21.280 talk about them a little bit in the book. How does one go proving that, I mean, what is this sort of the,

00:08:25.820 the, the, the historical analysis that gives you the causal mechanism that shows you that,

00:08:30.680 that Quakerism is sort of the root of this? Well, so we sort of try to trace it through time and

00:08:35.860 through the educational system that was originally controlled by the Quaker movement. And then we look

00:08:40.100 for weird thing that woke culture does that we don't see in any other culture. I can almost think

00:08:45.720 of it as like vestigial organs. So like an example of this would be two things that are like really

00:08:52.220 weird that I wouldn't, or three things. So three things that we only see in wokeism and this form of

00:08:58.500 Quaker culture. One thing that was really common in Quaker culture was that young children would

00:09:03.260 chastise adults for moral failings. No other culture in society does this yet was in the woke

00:09:09.540 movement. We have things like Greta Thornburg. Another thing that they would do is they would 1.00

00:09:13.620 have a form of religious meeting where you wouldn't have a leader, but people would just stand up and

00:09:20.300 talk when moved by God, which is very similar to the way meetings were structured. If you look at

00:09:26.180 something like occupy wall street, the final one is, is that Quaker culture was famously really,

00:09:31.800 really prudish about sexuality yet like claimed to be like sexually open ish, which is a weird thing

00:09:39.520 you see in woke culture, which is like the idea of what culture is sexual openness. And yet they are

00:09:44.560 extremely prudish, especially about male sexuality, which seems to go against their raison d'etre.

00:09:51.220 The reason I don't think it's the civil rights movement, which I think is pretty interesting as a

00:09:55.560 direct is the civil rights movement was about creating equality where I think woke culture's

00:10:01.360 goal is to remove in the moment emotional pain, which is a very different goal than creating

00:10:06.900 equality.

00:10:08.520 So, yeah, as far as that vestigial organ, you know, analysis, you know, I think that,

00:10:13.080 you know, I'm just trying to think, is there any historical examples where I could say, well,

00:10:16.860 you know, there's this year, I mean, it sounds to me a bit like Maoism. I don't think civil rights 0.96

00:10:21.220 wokeness comes from Maoism, but if I wanted to, I could say, you know, young generation denouncing the

00:10:26.300 old prudish about sexuality. What was the, what was the second one? We crazy meetings that are,

00:10:31.380 you know, I mean, it seems they did have that under, under Mao, right?

00:10:36.620 Well, I mean, could you argue that woke culture, I mean, we do know if you look at something like

00:10:40.500 Antifa, so I'm just going to make a different argument now, woke culture is Maoism. We do know

00:10:44.180 with stuff like Antifa that we had actual like communist training cells, like training these

00:10:49.600 organizations, which then could have disseminated to other parts of woke culture.

00:10:52.860 Yeah. So, so I think that like the, you know, the, the stronger argument for it being,

00:10:59.380 you know, descending from the civil rights, I have the strongest argument is that 0.85

00:11:02.480 it was a lot of cases, the same people. I mean, it was the same people who were preaching

00:11:07.360 equality of opportunity. A lot of it was a strategic, I mean, there was a lot of communist

00:11:12.720 involvement in the civil rights movement. They, you know, they of course sold it as, you know,

00:11:17.140 colorblindness and most of the members of Congress and the senators who voted for it were not

00:11:21.140 communists or anything close to that. But then on a drop of a hat, sort of when they were,

00:11:25.460 when the public attention was off of them, you know, they went and they pushed for equality

00:11:29.540 of results. So whatever was motivating the civil rights movement, I think it's a combination of

00:11:33.640 like, you know, going back to Lincoln, the sort of noble idea of just like race, not mattering and,

00:11:37.580 you know, free markets and free labor and people living as individuals. There was, there was that,

00:11:42.040 there was a coalition of that and just communists who just wanted, you know, equality of results,

00:11:45.400 no matter what. And sort of the, that, that latter part of the movement just sort of took over. And

00:11:51.260 you can just say, I mean, it's a, it's a safe organization. It's the NAACP, right? Colorblindness 0.98

00:11:55.120 in 1960, all about quotas in 1970, 1975. Well, it sounds like that the, the Richard explanation is

00:12:02.920 like the statutory legal governing origins of it. And the Malcolm story is the like memetic

00:12:09.880 religious, like sort of intuitive origins of it. And they both totally play into each other.

00:12:15.220 They just come from really different like perspectives of like how, how actually they

00:12:20.340 both sort of reflect on you, like both of your, your ways of modeling the world and your education.

00:12:24.960 Like, you know, you're coming from a very different sort of academic background. Like Malcolm is looking

00:12:30.040 at this from the perspective of someone who studied psychology and neuroscience. And you're looking

00:12:34.840 at it from the perspective of like politics and history and like, you know, what, what concrete

00:12:39.100 things are happening. I think it's really interesting to see like how that plays out.

00:12:43.520 By the way, I found your arguments very compelling and they made me challenge some of my own beliefs,

00:12:47.420 like going through your book and going through you talking on other podcasts and hearing just

00:12:53.600 how specifically you were able to chart things.

00:12:57.600 Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, I think people, yeah, I think people can, I think I'm glad you said that

00:13:02.300 because that is really sort of a strength of the book when I'm talking on social media or when I'm

00:13:06.340 talking on podcasts, it's, it's hard to just, cause it is, it's not a, it's not a long book.

00:13:11.220 It's like 210 pages, but it's dense. Like, you know, I don't do the academic thing, book author

00:13:16.520 thing of repeating the same things over. I'd be a hypocrite if I did, because I wrote an article

00:13:20.040 about why you shouldn't read books because books are often just a bunch of fluff of people saying

00:13:23.620 the same thing over and over. I only gave you 210 pages, but they're all, each one is necessary.

00:13:27.660 Right. And, you know, I do trace, you know, I do trace that history very, very closely.

00:13:32.180 And it depends on what you're talking about. There are some things that I think I can show like

00:13:35.500 absolutely conclusively that it was governed, like how we classify race. I mean, that chapter,

00:13:40.860 the word AAPI, the phrase didn't exist in the English language before the 1970s. It was a

00:13:45.460 government classification. And then it became part of the English language. What are the odds that it,

00:13:49.320 you know, was anything, it was anything else. Right. I'm not familiar with this. Can you go into

00:13:54.220 this part of the book? Oh, so it's called Asian American Pacific Islander. So we have this category

00:13:58.400 in America called Asian American Pacific Islander. I have a chapter on how the government created new

00:14:02.980 races. Right. And when I have Google, I have a couple of graphs of Google n-grams for one for

00:14:08.340 Hispanics and one for Asians. And I showed that it does not, AAPI, Asian American Pacific Islander, 0.97

00:14:13.560 does not appear in any English language book until the late 1970s. It doesn't exist.

00:14:18.240 It's fascinating.

00:14:19.240 And it's a government category. And why it became a government category is just sort of funny.

00:14:23.400 It was just because Hawaii was a state and like, it was like a third, like native Hawaiian and like

00:14:28.920 a third Asian or something. They're like, okay, miscellaneous. Everything, everyone from Hawaii

00:14:32.320 is just an Asian American Pacific Islander. And it became an identity. And now in 2020, you see

00:14:37.360 hashtag stop AAPI hate. You see on Hulu, they say AAPI heritage month. I mean, it's amazing. 0.89

00:14:43.560 This mimetic thing, which was literally just invented by the government. And now it's like,

00:14:49.240 it's like race. Like the thing that you think would be like sort of primordial, right? Something

00:14:53.640 that would just be very natural was just clearly so clearly created by the government.

00:14:58.240 Oh, that's also fascinating because there are groups that have so little in common.

00:15:02.520 Yeah.

00:15:03.220 Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of a test case of like how ridiculous, like you could just construct

00:15:10.000 these things, right? 0.98

00:15:10.660 Well, I mean, it's the same with Latino though. Like, I don't know, like we grew up, I think, 1.00

00:15:14.840 insensitively, like just sort of running with it, at least like I did in California and super

00:15:21.740 progressive Silicon Valley society. And then Malcolm and I acquired a business with headquarters

00:15:26.480 in Peru and then like a U S team that had people from all over Latin America. And we discovered that

00:15:33.680 like people that would be considered Latino or Latinx, though no one wants that, like totally don't

00:15:42.060 see themselves as part of a group. Of course not, because they're not, they're super culturally

00:15:45.860 different. They would hold on. I can see how plausibly you could say these groups were colonized

00:15:51.820 by many of the same people and stuff like that. And so they had the same pressures on them,

00:15:55.460 but like comparing a Pacific Islander to like a Chinese person is insane.

00:16:03.500 Yeah, it is. 0.65

00:16:04.740 It is.

00:16:05.040 Okay. Okay. What are some of the other quirks you ran into?

00:16:08.860 Yeah. Yeah. So there, I mean, the Hispanic one is not as absurd as the AAPI one, but you do see 0.88

00:16:14.600 the word Hispanic Latino sort of takes off. So it's not like it didn't exist in the English language.

00:16:18.720 It existed. And actually Mexican American and Puerto Rican go down around the same time period.

00:16:23.580 So we start thinking, we start sort of lumping these, you know, these groups together, you know,

00:16:28.680 like the, you know, some things are so direct, like the title nine stuff, this is more recent history.

00:16:32.580 So people even might be familiar with this, but like the government and the Obama administration was

00:16:37.540 basically going to universities and telling them hire a title nine coordinator. This is how you

00:16:42.200 judge sexual assault cases. You know, you have preponderance of the evidence. You don't have,

00:16:46.480 you know, beyond a reasonable doubt standard. And they're just like, and they're giving them

00:16:49.700 like the feminist literature of like, you know, how to understand gender relations and telling them 0.97

00:16:53.940 like who they have to hire. Right. They're saying you're going to have to have, you know,

00:16:57.540 a title nine coordinator. And so there's very direct here. Another thing I mean, I think people will

00:17:01.680 really appreciate is universities, right? So you think of universities, they're the origins of,

00:17:06.320 they're the origins of wokeness, right? They're places where, you know, the craziest people go

00:17:10.740 and they have the craziest ideas and they're obsessed with identity. In 1971, it was the

00:17:15.940 federal government that goes to Columbia University and they go, give us your data on your, you know,

00:17:20.780 race and sex of your hires. We want to see if you're discriminating. And the president of Columbia

00:17:25.380 University is scandalized by this. He writes an open letter saying, what do you talk, we're an institution

00:17:30.420 of higher learning. We don't even collect that data. We are, we are so decentralized. I don't want to

00:17:35.440 start asking departments like which race are they hiring or if they're hiring enough women. 1.00

00:17:39.820 And at the, you know, at the end of the note, he, at the end of the letter, he goes, you know,

00:17:42.980 we have to do it to maintain our funding. And so we'll have to become a new kind of institution.

00:17:46.580 I mean, you have the history of Columbia, literally holding the line for merit and, and, you know,

00:17:52.120 colorblindness and, you know, academic standards, and then just being bullied into becoming something

00:17:56.880 else through the federal government. And I wish there was more, you know, I wish there was more

00:18:02.240 research on like the history of this because you, you look at, and there's not like tons of like,

00:18:06.120 you know, there's not like historians haven't like really paid much attention. Yeah. You can go

00:18:09.620 back and you can see the New York times articles from 1971 talking about this. You can find the

00:18:14.180 open letter. It's sort of an obscure document from the Columbia president. But, you know, there's

00:18:18.760 like, you know, there's, there must be a rich history there of what was going on in these years

00:18:22.440 that I don't think anyone has taken up to my knowledge, but it's just, it's just sort of,

00:18:26.460 you know, it's sort of crazy how, how like direct you could see the influence of government

00:18:30.620 on these institutions. So if it started with government, are you of the opinion that would

00:18:34.980 have to end with government that like, if people wanted to shift culture in a different direction,

00:18:39.920 they would be best advised to try to do so through policy and government?

00:18:44.240 I think it's the most direct way to do so. Yes. And it's not, you know, they should,

00:18:48.680 they should fight the mimetic war, of course, and they should make culture and art and media and

00:18:53.160 go on Twitter and art and make their arguments. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all that is, all that is great.

00:18:57.000 The law though, I mean, it shapes incentives and it shapes institutions and what it does is not

00:19:01.500 always visible, right? If you like, if you have a law that says you have to make sure you don't have

00:19:07.520 a disparate fact, you hire some HR person, you know, five years later, they do some program,

00:19:12.120 nobody traces it to the original civil rights law. Right. And so it's like going in the reverse

00:19:16.240 direction is going to be like the same thing. You're going to be basically making these HR people,

00:19:20.960 you're going to be making them less necessary. You're going to be making corporations less

00:19:24.300 skittish about racial discrimination or maybe more skittish in the case of anti-white or anti-male

00:19:29.040 discrimination. And there's going to be downstream effects, you know, months, years, even decades

00:19:33.760 down the line. And so, yeah, I have a, you know, my second to last chapter, it falls out the political

00:19:39.020 program. There are specific things, you know, government can do. Well, so what, what are you going

00:19:47.760 to run for office? Yeah. You think I would do well running for NBC by Twitter? I mean, name

00:19:53.700 awareness is like the number one factor that you need. Maybe. Yeah. When I get to Trump's level of

00:19:59.320 name awareness, maybe, maybe all the stuff I say won't matter, but yeah, no, I don't think I have

00:20:02.820 enough to overcome all that. Simone went to a council thing to like teach you how to run for office. 1.00

00:20:08.580 Cause she's thinking about running in the next election cycle. And they're like, well, the first

00:20:11.660 thing you have to do is delete all your social media. So no one knows anything crazy you've said.

00:20:15.400 And we were like, wow, if we had a political assault, they would literally have a heart

00:20:19.960 attack. Yeah. What are you running for Simone? We're looking at potentially running for just

00:20:26.580 state house in Pennsylvania for our district. No, don't say just state house. I would be

00:20:30.480 impressed if you became a state rep. I would be impressed too. It's a, it's a what the hell it's,

00:20:35.620 it's a, our district is very much on the edge and running as a Republican, like the, the female

00:20:39.660 Republican challenger to our democratic incumbent has lost two times in a row. So like not, not a good

00:20:44.640 sign, but I mean, we agree with you that government is, is crucial in changing things. We also

00:20:51.220 somewhat disagree with the, the philosophy that those who are elected to office are elected

00:20:56.960 because they are like good guys with clean records. I mean, Trump, we say broke the ultimate

00:21:02.440 glass ceiling and prove that people like office. Exactly. Yeah. I think there is, I mean, I don't

00:21:09.240 know like other candidates don't, there's not a lot of Trump like candidates, right? 0.98

00:21:13.820 There are, but there's not a lot of people who have the balls to do it. Here's the thing 0.98

00:21:16.820 is you, you decide you want to run for office and you're serious about it. Right. So like

00:21:20.100 you do all the right stuff, which is you hire the political consultant, you hire the campaign

00:21:23.760 manager, you hire the pollster. They all tell you to do exactly the same thing. They are not

00:21:27.620 incentivized to look at efficacy. They're not incentivized to look at ROI. They're incentivized

00:21:31.220 to get hired again. So they're not going to do anything risky. They're not going to do

00:21:34.040 anything weird. Of course, they're going to do all the stuff that is like extremely conventionally

00:21:38.320 safe because if they, if they do something weird and for any reason you don't get elected.

00:21:43.160 And there are many reasons why you could be a really promising candidate and not get elected

00:21:47.440 and your district is just, you know, zoned in a weird way, like they're out. So they're

00:21:52.060 not going to do anything. So I think the problem is that most responsible people who care about

00:21:56.040 it don't have the balls to run for office using any unconventional tactic. We also think,

00:22:01.380 and I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on this because you recently got a lot of press

00:22:05.920 for something that most people would be terrified to get press about, right? You got sort of like

00:22:10.320 a lot of controversy, but we found personally that the most controversial coverage we get and the

00:22:15.620 most hate we get also leads to the most actual reach for people who are genuinely like engaged with

00:22:20.420 our message. So whenever we get positive press, we're like really disappointed because it literally

00:22:25.120 does nothing. Like nothing moves the needle, no new subscribers, no new engagement, no new followers.

00:22:30.380 And then like we get hate and we just like tons more, tons more engagement and meaningful

00:22:34.700 engagement, positive engagement. So I'm curious, like, and so like part of, part of our thing with

00:22:38.920 like running for office is we're like, you know what, you know, leave the bad social media up.

00:22:43.320 Let your, let your opponent smear you because as long as your vices are not deal breakers for the

00:22:49.720 thing you're running for and like for Trump, right? Like in the fact that he was like, that he lied

00:22:55.180 about his finances and that, you know, yeah, I'm curious. Yeah. So the adage, you know, no publicity

00:23:01.780 is bad publicity. I think there's, there is some truth to that. The worst thing in the universe for

00:23:06.220 a politician or an intellectual, you know, depending on the, on the field, but a lot of field is to be

00:23:10.940 ignored. So bad press at least puts you in the arena, right? If anyone is, you know, most people

00:23:16.080 are not thinking about most other people most of the time, and most people will not leave a mark in

00:23:20.360 most things that they try. So if they can write 10 hit pieces on you, a house candidate in

00:23:25.560 Pennsylvania, that's, that's, you're at the 99.9th percentile of attention for someone running for,

00:23:30.780 for that position. You know, and I, the one thing you're getting at Simona that I think is, you know,

00:23:36.560 there might be something to it is that like the whole sort of industry, you know, there's fake

00:23:40.660 expertise. I've heard about fake expertise that the whole sort of political conventional wisdom is

00:23:45.160 sort of fake that there was, you know, something to be said for that. It was, you know,

00:23:49.280 the whole Trump phenomenon. I mean, if you watch the Trump, you know, the Trump phenomenon, they

00:23:52.840 were always like, he can't get when the primaries, okay, he can't win the election. Okay, now he's

00:23:56.740 finished. He's not going to be the nominee in 2024. They're always, they're always wrong, right? On

00:24:01.060 Trump. And the market, even the markets are following sort of the conventional wisdom. The

00:24:04.360 markets have always underestimated Trump. And I think, you know, another case, I think, I don't

00:24:08.220 know how much, how close you're following the court Republican primary, but my, my friend,

00:24:12.240 Vivek Ramoswamy is sort of doing the unconventional thing. He's not as unconventional as you guys are,

00:24:17.540 but he is like, he's trying to be the new Trump, like the reasonable Trump.

00:24:21.360 Yeah. And I, he's got a very good sort of ear for where the base is. So it is, I don't know if

00:24:27.180 he's actually doing something that unusual or different, or he's just like, he's just like

00:24:31.220 better than the consultants are sort of knowing where the base is and where to go. Yeah. But the

00:24:35.660 idea that conservatives are, but I will say he's way too like good. He doesn't have enough. I don't

00:24:41.000 know what's wrong with him. If I cannot clearly name someone's vices, they're not doing it right

00:24:45.220 per our philosophy. Yeah. I mean, there are people do say he's too slicker there, this and that. I

00:24:50.200 mean, you know, he, but he's done amazingly for someone who came from nowhere, right? The fact

00:24:54.060 that he's, you know, almost in second place and some polls, you know, ones that I've seen,

00:24:58.000 but in fact, he's even like in the top five, uh, given he was nobody, you know, six months ago,

00:25:02.080 it's just amazing. And so, yeah, I mean, I think you guys, yeah, I mean, I, I, yeah, it's, it's,

00:25:09.140 it's, it's, it's a theory worth testing. I mean, you guys are not going to be like,

00:25:12.940 what are your options? You're not going to become a conventional, you know, political

00:25:16.140 couple, right? We can't know. So like, you know, we'll learn something from it if nothing

00:25:20.520 else. So yeah. Are you, are you, is it a sure thing you are running? We're not totally sure

00:25:25.740 yet. Yeah. Whenever I hear something like, I'm like, okay, how do we fix this? And you're

00:25:29.880 like, here's how you could fix this. And I'm like, okay, then how do we do that? You know,

00:25:33.440 get more sane people into office, I think is a really good goal. And I like what, I mean,

00:25:39.620 you seem to be working on it with Ramaswamy. So that's cool. I'd love to see you run someday

00:25:45.360 though. The world would have to be a lot, a lot crazier. I've sort of, you know, I've just,

00:25:51.540 I value my freedom a lot. I've sort of, you know, I wasn't thinking about academia for a while. And

00:25:55.980 then I was sort of doing a few think tank things. And then finally it was just like, I am, you know,

00:26:01.060 I just, I just don't want to be, I don't want to be chained to anything.

00:26:04.000 But politics is like academia. You just don't have to be competent.

00:26:08.560 Well, yeah, but you have to be in a certain place at a certain time, right? You have to sort of,

00:26:13.820 you know, go where they tell you, right? I'm fine with being competent. I just, I just don't want to,

00:26:18.220 I just don't want to have to be anywhere. I just, I just love my own schedule and my own,

00:26:22.540 my own freedom. So, but no, you guys doing it. That's awesome. I mean, I, I, I didn't know about

00:26:27.540 this. I'm really glad to hear it.

00:26:28.780 So what are you going to do with all our guests, try to convince them to run for office?

00:26:33.600 You know, okay, well, we'll, we can do the test run, right? We'll throw ourselves under the bus.

00:26:37.540 Then we'll get like, actually meaningful tactics.

00:26:40.400 It would expand my sort of, my understanding of what's possible. Yeah.

00:26:43.180 Yeah. Yeah. Like if we were like, oh, if you do this and here's our secret way of making it work,

00:26:47.460 then you might actually like.

00:26:48.980 We'll get all of our spicy internet friends to run.

00:26:51.920 No, but you know, here's the thing is, and many people, like I think Tyler Cowan,

00:26:55.160 like put out a blog post about this recently, that he, he genuinely believes that, that one of

00:26:59.580 the most meaningful EA causes is to reform the Republican party, because right now it's kind of,

00:27:05.440 it's kind of lost. It doesn't have like, like a sort of intellectual leadership or new tone.

00:27:09.220 It could really use it. And we'd love to do for the Republican party, what justice Democrats kind

00:27:14.560 of did with the, the, the democratic party where they moved the Overton window and they installed some,

00:27:20.180 some specific Democrat story or like.

00:27:23.040 What's that?

00:27:25.920 Justice Democrats. Are you familiar with what happened there?

00:27:28.000 Oh no, I'm familiar with justice Democrats. Yeah.

00:27:29.840 Yeah. I mean, they were incredibly successful. So for the audience who's not familiar,

00:27:34.320 there was this group that was like, can we change the Overton window of the democratic party by

00:27:38.180 basically holding like America's got talent style, like auditions for who would be good candidates

00:27:43.100 and then funding them to run by basically telling them what to do. And you know, this sounds like an

00:27:48.880 insane idea, but this is where like AOC came from. This is where Omar came from. This is where

00:27:53.020 like the squad came from. They really did move the Overton window of the entire democratic party

00:27:58.700 while capturing democratic Gen Z.

00:28:02.020 Yeah, no, yeah, you're right. You know, the, the, the, the specifics of the Republican party

00:28:07.260 though is it's interesting because it's, you know, like the, the justice Democrats were sort of,

00:28:12.500 they were coming from a place where they sort of, you know, the base, you know, like the base of both

00:28:18.180 parties is sort of more economically leftist than the parties themselves are. So they were just saying

00:28:23.180 be even more economically leftist. And then also like, well, I mean, they were also more economically

00:28:28.000 liberal. And so like, they were sort of, you know, in that place where, and it was considered like,

00:28:32.060 you know, being socially liberal was sort of consistent with all the, you know, I think that

00:28:36.260 the, with the Republican party, it's sort of different in that, like, first it's like, it's,

00:28:40.020 has less of an intellect, intellectual elite culture. It has more of sort of a podcast and

00:28:44.340 sort of not podcasts like radio and TV mostly. And you guys are good on radio and TV, but you know,

00:28:50.220 your, your audiences, you're competing with like, you know, Sean Hannity or something, right. Just

00:28:53.980 like the mouthpiece, right. As far as like, as far as reach. And then you have like this very sort of,

00:28:59.080 you know, these sort of like religious sort of rural concerns, you know, you're going to have to

00:29:03.660 sort of navigate that, you know, your socio, your socioeconomic class is sort of different from

00:29:07.620 where the Republican voter is. So it's an interesting, it's an interesting idea.

00:29:11.700 Have you thought about like running as a Democrat? I mean, was it always going to be Republicans for

00:29:15.340 you guys? I, I do not, one, I don't think it matters to run as a Democrat anymore. The

00:29:20.160 Democratic party's agenda is set. There's nothing you can do to change it. The Republicans post Trump,

00:29:24.620 they can be anything they want. It's really exciting. But in addition to that, I do not think

00:29:30.380 we keep having people trying to start pro natalist foundations that are tied to Democrats

00:29:34.460 that are like, that are politically neutral and they keep getting crucified.

00:29:37.860 Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. The Republicans can't be whatever. I think you have to, you have

00:29:41.300 to, you have to check a few boxes. I think abortion, guns, taxes. I think you have to check those. And

00:29:46.780 you have to be like, I love Trump. You have to just love Trump personally. Right. But you're right.

00:29:51.560 Other than that. Yeah. Democrats is sort of, there's more of sort of a comprehensive agenda of

00:29:55.460 all Republicans. You have, you have a lot of space.

00:29:58.120 Yeah. Well, we'll see. I mean, we'll see. All right. I have loved chatting with you.

00:30:03.160 So this was fantastic. We'll definitely do another episode with you. And thank you so

00:30:07.040 much for your time. I would really encourage our audience to check out his sub stack. Like

00:30:11.300 somehow you don't know who Richard Henenia is yet. You know who we are. He is very ideologically

00:30:17.460 similar to us, but much more famous and has a broader reach. So I am surprised. Like if you

00:30:24.580 know who we are, but don't know who he is, you should.

00:30:28.240 And definitely also check out his book, The Origins of Woke. Really interesting book. And

00:30:33.320 yeah, the sub stack Twitter, I'm, I'm, you know, every thought I have is, is basically

00:30:37.620 put on one of those places. So yeah. Thought you could follow that.

00:30:40.440 Awesome.

00:30:41.640 Great. All right.

00:30:43.640 Thanks, guys.

Based Camp - October 11, 2023

Richard Hanania on the Legal Origins of Woke Culture

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