In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with my good friend and long time friend, Malcolm Gladwell, to discuss the idea that conservative supporters are racist. We talk about why this is a myth and why it s actually not.
00:01:04.680A lot of the time when conservatives say Democrats are racist, they mean like affirmative action is a fundamentally racist policy in many ways.
00:01:12.440But they're sort of twisting things around a bit.
00:01:15.220I mean just like actually, blatantly, normally, in the normalist sense of the term, the Democratic base is about as racist in the most traditional sense as the Republican base.
00:01:36.440When I look at the conservative intellectual sphere, where do I see the actual like loud racist, right?
00:01:43.660I call them in like the Nick Fuentes sphere.
00:01:45.580I think when you think through the ideology, you realize it's almost so stupid that no one could actually hold it.
00:01:51.340And it's so incongruous with actual right-wing ideology that there is no way that these individuals could have real large followings within the right-wing sphere.
00:02:03.480Which leads me to believe they might be plants either by the CIA or a foreign government.
00:02:16.640There's been this song that went viral in first conservative circles and then progressives freaked out about it, which was Richmond, north of Richmond, which started out, which I love, very appealing to like progressive audiences.
00:02:29.280Like the first half of the song is like how hard it is to be a working man in today's society.
00:02:33.500And then it starts talking about, you know, welfare queens and, you know, protecting minors.
00:02:38.480And they are, obviously they have a meltdown about this.
00:02:41.620But what's been very interesting is the follow-up to this, which liberals are being very smug amount, which is the guy who wrote the song, then said, we are the melting pot of the world.
00:02:54.820And that's what makes us strong, our diversity.
00:02:57.940And we need to learn to harness that and appreciate it and not use it as a political tool to keep everyone separate from it.
00:03:05.620And progressives are like, oh, now he's going to get beaten up by all the conservatives because they hate that talk.
00:03:15.100There have been a few like your typical like crazy racists who have gotten mad at him.
00:03:20.020But in general, his base still really likes him.
00:03:23.460And that is because this view, like if you actually hang out with the conservative base, if you hang out with like real conservative voters in this country, you would intuitively know this is what most of them think.
00:03:38.980And this is really interesting for me because it's it's it got me thinking a few questions.
00:03:45.400One, where did this idea that there's like conservative racists come from, which, you know, historically, the Democrats were the party of the Klan.
00:03:54.280Yes, parties, quote unquote, switched at one period, but not exactly.
00:03:59.360They switched about as much as they did when Trump was president.
00:04:02.840And by that, what I mean, you know, when Trump was president, now all of a sudden the right is more protectionist.
00:04:09.840The right, you know, it just it just a lot of things switched, but not everything switched.
00:04:13.180So how did how did one party go from being the party of the Klan to then the other one being the racist party?
00:04:19.300And what I'm going to argue is that never actually happened.
00:04:21.900Oh, Republicans were never actually the racist party.
00:04:25.020And we're going to go over a lot of stats here, but also some some narrative stuff.
00:04:30.580But first, the first way that this perception has happened that I want to dig into, because I find it very fascinating and something that you've definitely seen as well,
00:04:38.680is we know a lot of the political elite of the conservative party.
00:04:44.460You know, I've had presidents that were people who would be president or past presidents.
00:04:48.560I've been to House parties that they're hosted and stuff like that.
00:04:51.420I know the type of people that they're associating with.
00:04:54.240And the vast majority are progressives.
00:04:59.880So Simone, for example, she was managing director of Dialogue, which was a secret society that was originally founded by Peter Thiel and Arn Hoffman.
00:05:06.580So, you know, very conservative founding, you could say.
00:05:10.160And yet they had to institute an affirmative action policy for getting in if you were conservative, because so few people of the type of people that they're admitting, you know,
00:05:21.020leaders in, you know, Fortune 500 companies, major tech companies, stuff like that, were like out conservatives.
00:05:28.820And this is something you see across the political sphere, is that typically the ultra wealthy who live in cities in our society and control a lot of the wealth, there's just not many conservatives in those groups.
00:05:41.000And so when the politicians are associating with people who they see as their peers, the truth is, is they interact with very few actual conservatives, very few actual people in their base.
00:05:51.220And so when they are constructing an image of who their base is, they often rely more on the stereotypes progressives have of their base than on their actual base.
00:06:04.600Well, in an open secret in D.C., and Simone, you've had these conversations with people before as well.
00:06:10.040We talk with conservatives in D.C., and they're like, it is an open secret that a lot of the campaign staffers of the major, you know, Senate campaigns and stuff like that, presidential campaigns who are in the conservative group are actually just Democrats who are holding their nose.
00:06:24.820And the reason for this is, is there are very few people with the right degrees to hold these positions who are also willing to be mindless bureaucrats to like a giant bureaucratic machines who also have a conservative ideology.
00:06:41.880So not only within the political class in this country, if you're talking about conservatives, is their friend network often really, really progressive in their mindset, but their staffers who, when they're asking, you know, what does my base think?
00:06:57.700And because there's become some, you know, don't, don't poll that was seen as sort of an overly Democrat thing to do, to do all this polling.
00:07:03.820So they use their intuition and their intuition is often the intuition of a progressive based on the stereotypes progressives have of conservatives.
00:07:11.880And so it has created a picture for a lot of politicians, which can lead them to act in ways, which genuinely seem like they're trying to pander to a racist demographic that I will go further to argue doesn't really exist.
00:08:26.540So the next one would be, this is spooky conservatives.
00:08:30.920When asked, has America become too soft and feminine?
00:08:35.96063% of Republicans agreed and 24% of Democrats did.
00:08:41.200Would you say that's just intuitively true?
00:08:43.380I think most sane people would say that.
00:08:45.380I mean, I think that progressives, it's a very feminized political affiliation, whereas the conservative political affiliation is more masculine.
00:08:53.920I did see a really interesting set of stats showing that actually the male to the female gap between conservatism and progressivism in some nations are actually like very low.
00:09:13.540Not totally unique, but it's not a truism that in every country, the more conservative faction is more male and the more progressive faction is more feminine.
00:10:20.580Well, I mean, you could argue that everyone faces discrimination because everyone has views about different groups, whether they want to admit it or not.
00:10:29.040Oh, here's another statistic I found, right?
00:10:31.380They go, okay, when respondents were asked whether they approved of the teaching of critical race theory, 78% of Republicans disapproved, was only 16% said they were in favor of the practice, and 75% of Democrats said that they approved of teaching it, well, only 15% disapproved.
00:10:47.700Critical race theory isn't, like, about racism.
00:10:51.160I mean, it is one theory around how to view systemic racism that started in the legal profession, as I understand it.
00:10:58.720Yeah, it's not necessarily an endorsement of being anti-racist.
00:11:04.720I think it's interesting because a lot of the differentiation is on certain specific performative anti-racist views that are really held strongly by one group, and then another group that I guess just isn't that interested in having all those conversations.
00:11:24.420And I think it's more, through its actions, anti-racist.
00:12:37.040So up until Obama, more Democrats said they would not vote for a black president than Republicans.
00:12:43.340Yeah, between 15% and 7% of white Democrats said that they would not vote for a black president, whereas by comparison, only 5% of white Republicans reported that they would not vote for a black president.
00:13:03.140I mean, I do get the impression that a lot of white Democrats or white progressives in general are a lot more racist because they're, like, to a certain extent, I think they're overthinking race.
00:13:15.880Like, just to the point of them ending up being really racist or, like, even avoiding other races because it's too stressful.
00:13:33.880But that's my point, is I think that because white progressives are way, way, way more sensitive about racism and, like, all the performative things they're supposed to do around racism and that they're supposed to feel really bad about racism and they're the bad guy.
00:13:48.320Like, it's frankly just too stressful to have friends outside your own race.
00:13:52.720And when you actually look at it, when you look at the...
00:13:56.380I don't think that's what a progressive would tell themselves, but I think it's a lie.
00:13:59.600The truth is, is that Republicans are just less racist.
00:14:05.080The Democrats, look, you saw the statistics.
00:14:08.320You're acting like, oh, they're just too sensitive.
00:14:11.040They literally said they would not vote for a black person for president more than Republicans until Obama became Simone.
00:15:19.140And what they really mean is they, because even Trump wanted a skilled immigrants, like policy plan to let in skilled immigrants, like we have proposed.
00:15:27.500What they wanted to do was keep out like a flood of unskilled immigrants.
00:15:42.000But let me just, let me just argue though, that I think ultimately the progressive perspective on race is actually for group separation.
00:15:49.440Like Robin DiAngelo and many of her seminars that she would, she would lead.
00:15:54.020She's the woman who wrote White Fragility would actually encourage employees at companies to create race affinity groups, like the white people group.
00:16:03.060So they could talk about their experiences.
00:16:04.500They would never stop acting like the Klan.
00:16:07.300Well, that's, that's why the Klan, I think also the Klan has gotten along so well with some leaders of the nation of Islam, for example, because both groups are like, yeah, you stay in your group.
00:16:38.000So they've been pretty much neck and neck always.
00:16:40.120However, white Republicans up until about 2009 were a slightly more racist on this front than white Democrats.
00:16:49.320And then slightly more, but this is not the perception you're getting in the media.
00:16:52.760If I was a politician and I was pandering to a racist base, and these are the polls I was seeing, it would not make sense for a Republican to pander to racism any more than it would make sense for a Democrat to pander to racism.
00:17:04.880Well, and we're talking about a difference of two to three percentage points with this graph.
00:17:08.300This graph is showing that the rates peaked in maybe the late 80s at, for Republicans, maybe 43%, and then for, sorry, 33%, and for Democrats, around 30%.
00:17:37.820So these are like genuinely, I mean, maybe one percentage point apart in the late 80s, but they're neck and neck through 96 and they start to diverge.
00:17:46.600Um, yeah, but even with Democrats, even still it's 20%, you know?
00:18:00.400No, this is, this is really interesting because you definitely, if you'd ask me to predict what are the differences on these things, you know, would, would not vote for a black president who would not want to live in a half black neighborhood.
00:18:12.640Like I would have thought that there would be at least a 20 percentage point difference.
00:18:17.360And here we're seeing like two to three percentage points different.
00:18:20.200And in some cases, Republican, sorry, Democrats being more racist than Republicans, which is wild.
00:18:27.620Like I think a lot of the time when conservatives say like Democrats are racist, they mean like affirmative action is a fundamentally racist policy in many ways.
00:18:36.760But they're sort of like, you know, twisting things around a bit.
00:18:39.740I mean, just like actually blatantly, normally in the normalist sense of the term, the Democratic base is about as racist in the most traditional sense as the Republican base.
00:18:55.820And there is a great article that actually goes over the history of this and how this lie sort of started and how it was propagated.
00:19:03.060So the article I suggest, and I can link to it, is the myth of the racist Republicans, the truth about the Southern strategy.
00:19:11.480And basically what it points out is this was all a lot more nuanced.
00:19:14.460And it's very similar, you know, to calling somebody who's against affirmative action or somebody who is, you know, against unrestricted immigration racist.
00:19:23.200We're like, yes, I suppose somebody could be motivated by race to believe those things.
00:19:27.660But the vast majority of people who are against these things are not motivated by racist reasons.
00:19:31.900And so then this gets me to a really interesting point.
00:19:40.900Like, where is this coming from if it's not coming from the Republican actual base?
00:19:46.300If this guy who wrote this song, you know, Richmond North, North of Richmond, I think very much represents the actual concerns of the Republican base.
00:19:56.140One is this misunderstanding of what Republicans think that is taken on by politicians.
00:20:02.360But I also think that this misunderstanding is taken on by a lot of young, like, firebrand conservatives who don't actually have real conservative friends.
00:20:32.020Yeah, I think that that's a huge part of it.
00:20:33.940I think another big part of it is coming from what we call the tyranny of the unemployed problem.
00:20:39.280And this is to say within any online community, the most interaction you're going to see, if it's like a completely unfiltered, like just based on how much they comment or how much they upvote or something like that, people who have disproportionately been kicked out of society for being like a turd or like annoying or a twerk, they are going to disproportionately comment in these environments, right?
00:20:59.880And so, and they are going to disproportionately upvote stuff.
00:21:03.620They are going to disproportionately interact with stuff, right?
00:21:07.320This is what you see on YouTube comments often, although we have the best audience, so we don't see it, but you see it in other environments.
00:21:13.780And it can create a perception for people that this is actually the mainstream view within this person's fan base or within the base of people who consume this content.
00:21:25.160And so I do think that there are a lot of right now, like unemployed people who have an extremely, you know, external locus of control.
00:21:33.900So these are like slovenly white people who just blame all of their problems on other, you know, on whether it's women or black people or something like that.
00:21:44.060And they feel like when they're looking and they say, who do I identify with?
00:21:49.600They think the conservative party is going to have their back.
00:21:52.080So they're like, okay, I'm going to go online.
00:21:53.820I'm going to engage with these people.
00:21:55.800But their actual ideology does not really align with a cohesive right-wing intellectual theory or view of the world.
00:22:02.980They are just random whiners that really have almost nothing to do with real conservative politics.
00:22:10.280They just appear in online circles a lot.
00:22:12.480A final thing that I think is really interesting is when we talk about the media coverage around this, how far the left has to go to paint a picture that the right is racist.
00:22:25.240Remember how I was going through all those leading survey questions?
00:24:03.460I call them in like the Nick Fuentes sphere.
00:24:05.280This is the Catholic integralist sphere.
00:24:07.700And yet, the more I think about it, like I've talked about how stupid this ideology is before, but I'm actually going to go into it because I think when you think through the ideology, you realize it's almost so stupid that no one could actually hold it.
00:24:20.200And it's so incongruous with actual right-wing ideology that there is no way that these individuals could have real large followings within the right-wing sphere, which leads me to believe they might be plants either by the CIA or a foreign government.
00:24:38.880All right, so what Catholic integralists want from the world, right, is they want a world in which the entire world is ruled under a single Catholic monarchy.
00:24:52.420They want sort of a Catholic caliphate to rule the entire world.
00:24:57.000However, they're also like anti-immigrant and racist, which makes no sense.
00:25:02.260The majority of the immigrants coming to the U.S. are Catholic, right?
00:25:08.440Presumably, if you thought that the whole world could operate under a Catholic caliphate, interculturalism was in our country in which that interculturalism is represented by a larger Catholic voting bloc should not be a concern at all.
00:25:24.200Second, Catholicism more broadly is, I think, one of the least racist religions on the planet.
00:25:55.140They have, what are you, this does not make sense that this is an anti-Hispanic group or that they would have this big anti-Hispanic contingent.
00:26:05.040They have many black saints, you know?
00:26:10.600Then what you're saying is that this ideology is popular among U.S. conservatives who are predominantly Protestant and predominantly anti-globalist.
00:26:21.880That this globalist ideology, like, super-globalist ideology has somehow taken over?
00:26:42.900It is the insane ramblings of the worst that progressives assume of conservatives.
00:26:50.260Well, yeah, because something has to not be true.
00:26:52.460Either the Catholic caliphate is not an actual end goal or because there's no other explanation as to how it's really going to effectively take place unless, like, the Catholic populations are able to coalesce and unite and move more freely in a way that helps them create strong coalitions of power.
00:27:11.580Yeah, and it's not that there aren't Catholics that do eventually want to convert everyone.
00:27:16.540I mean, Catholicism is, at the end of the day, a dominating religious group.
00:27:19.840But Catholicism as a dominating religious group is incredibly intercultural.
00:27:24.700They are just incredibly intercultural.
00:27:27.080And, in fact, they're even structured in a way, the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church is really useful because all people are intrinsically racist to some extent when they meet a group that they're not familiar with or they're around another group.
00:27:41.720And that hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church has historically allowed them to say, hey, you colonizers are going a little far right now.
00:29:16.320What would be the benefit of that to paint one party as, like, the racist party?
00:29:21.620Okay, well, so this is actually interesting.
00:29:24.300So the deep, the Republicans are not wrong when they say the deep state.
00:29:27.480You and I know a lot of people in D.C., okay?
00:29:30.240We know a lot of high-profile people in D.C.
00:29:32.300Democrats and people with progressive leanings, as well as this, frankly, culturalist, racist, whatever you want to call it, view of urban Americans, are the dominant cultural faction there, okay?
00:29:44.980They do not want, when Trump was coming into power, they saw that as an existential threat.
00:29:49.740Yeah, I guess you could argue that, like, D.C. is run by elitist technocrats who typically come from progressive backgrounds.
00:29:57.460So they are not representative of the rural disenfranchised.
00:30:02.420The CIA literally, like, they have been caught in these cases having lied, or it might have been the FBI, I can't remember which one, trying to get Trump indicted.
00:30:11.440You know, these communications, oh, you know, you don't know the text chains that came out, like, we have to get Trump, we have to-
00:30:36.120Yeah, so, I mean, I don't know, it was like everyone saying that.
00:30:38.600No, but the point I'm making is this was actually felt within, like, there are large, I'd say near-unanimous factions of major government security organizations who believe this.
00:30:50.360And I think that anyone who's pretending that's not true, okay, the deep state might be a kind of in, you know, you could say it's a conspiratorial concept.
00:30:58.700But I think anybody who actually has a lot of friends in government does know that they are predominantly Democrat-leaning, even in the intelligence services these days.
00:31:07.180And this idea that they wouldn't, like, that this is an impossible thing to happen, I think is almost a fever dream.
00:31:15.640Of course, of course they might think this could be a threat to our country.
00:31:19.380Of course they might think, oh, we need to discredit this party.
00:31:22.140Of course they may think, oh, we can use this as a honeypot to discredit people.
00:31:52.500So what I think is actually going on here is there might be a small portion of people out there.
00:31:59.420Because I think this is how these plant jobs often work, is they wait for some idiot individual to come to this ideology on their own.
00:32:06.740And then they'll manipulate algorithms or stuff to promote that individual to make them seem like they're a bigger deal or have a bigger audience than they actually have.
00:32:14.880So there's these, so an individual is out there and he just has a very hierarchical mindset.
00:32:22.780A very sort of, like, everything must be hierarchical.
00:32:25.820Everything must go back to the origin.
00:32:27.480I'm going to be as traditionalist as possible.
00:32:52.540I think very few, okay, so again, I know we have a lot of Catholic viewers here and I say very positive things about Catholicism.
00:32:59.620However, I think from an outsider's perspective and from every Christian tradition's perspective, they're the original iteration of that Christian tradition.
00:33:06.460From an outsider's perspective, Catholicism is not the oldest iteration of Christianity.
00:33:14.220Orthodoxy has a slightly better claim to that, although I can see how the claim could go either way.
00:33:19.380For people who aren't really familiar with what happened, originally Christianity, and you can see this from the early, you know, Christian letters,
00:33:25.520and mostly due to how hard it was to communicate, and Christianity was just like this group that was just trying to do anything to convert people in the early days.
00:33:33.240It was run by, essentially, you would have a collection of cities, and then within each city, you would have a sort of a local patriarch,
00:33:41.040like a person who was known as like the most important Christian in the city.
00:33:43.660It's actually very similar to modern Judaism, but a bit more hierarchical.
00:33:49.260And then, and of course it would be similar, it came out of Judaism, right?
00:33:52.280And then, after Constantine and Rome was made the official head of Christianity, because the Roman Empire became officially Christian, right?
00:34:00.600And so, the Roman patriarch became much more important than the other patriarchs.
00:34:06.320Then you had the division of Rome between the East and the West, and obviously that began to build tensions,
00:34:12.880because for a long time, there was a reason for the Roman patriarch to be the patriarch in charge, right?
00:34:18.100But after a while, this began to get on other patriarchs' herbs, especially the other really important patriarchs,
00:34:23.920which was the Byzantine patriarchs, because they were the other capital of this major Christian empire.