Classically Abby - The AMAZING Story Of How James Lindsay Met His Wife! ｜｜ Get To Know The EXPERT on Critical Theory

00:00:00.000 How did you meet your wife? I was just curious.

00:00:02.620 You haven't heard this story? I've told it a couple times. It's a legendary story.

00:00:07.640 Oh, I'm sorry. I have not heard it. And my followers, I'm sure, are going to want to hear

00:00:12.160 because a lot of us are females and we like romance.

00:00:16.180 I'm about to turn with some kind of heartthrob. Watch out.

00:00:19.380 I met my wife at a stoplight in traffic.

00:00:21.680 Hello, Classic Crew, and welcome to today's episode of Let's Be Classic,

00:00:34.200 where I'll be interviewing James Lindsay.

00:00:37.120 James Lindsay is a mathematician, an author, and a cultural critic.

00:00:41.320 You probably know him on Twitter as AtConceptualJames,

00:00:45.060 where he talks a lot about critical theory and critical race theory.

00:00:49.080 That is his beat. He is known for his involvement in the Grievance Studies affairs

00:00:53.460 with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose.

00:00:56.380 We'll definitely be talking more about that in today's interview.

00:00:59.600 He also wrote a book called Cynical Theories with Helen Pluckrose,

00:01:02.860 which you should definitely check out. It's available on Amazon.

00:01:05.880 He is also the director of the website New Discourses and has a podcast of the same name,

00:01:11.460 so you should check that out as well. I'm so glad I had him on my channel.

00:01:15.280 We were supposed to have about an hour-long interview, and it turned into about two and a

00:01:19.600 half hours because we had so much to talk about. So it was really an incredible opportunity to talk

00:01:25.100 with him, and I'm so excited to share his thoughts with you all. I think this is the most important

00:01:31.160 thing happening right now, and I really want to share it with you and make sure you guys know

00:01:35.220 what we're up against. But before we get into today's video, I would love if you would,

00:01:39.800 number one, ring that notification bell. It makes a huge difference to my channel if you ring

00:01:43.920 the notification bell and make sure notifications are turned on because then you will always see

00:01:48.400 when my videos get published. I would also love if you would consider subscribing to my Substack.

00:01:53.080 If you subscribe to my Substack newsletter, you will get access to exclusive content not available

00:01:57.920 anywhere else. That includes two exclusive videos every month, weekly articles, live-streamed Q&As

00:02:04.760 where you can submit your questions, as well as content pitch contests. Now, it's only $7 a month

00:02:10.620 if you decide to join, but if you decide to sign up for the whole year, it's $70, so you actually

00:02:15.380 get two months for free. Make sure to join the hundreds of people who have already signed up.

00:02:21.140 I think you guys are going to love it, and I'm really excited to share this one with you.

00:02:25.120 So now that we've got that out of the way, let's get into today's interview.

00:02:28.460 Thank you so much for coming onto my channel. So I wanted to start off by just having my subscribers

00:02:34.860 and my followers get to know you. So where are you from, and how did you become an academic?

00:02:42.580 I am from East Tennessee, Knoxville area, most specifically. And I went to the Knoxville area

00:02:51.740 as a child, so my family's from New York, so I'm not technically a Southern Appalachian by birth.

00:02:59.300 I grew up here, though, in the Southeast, or in Appalachia specifically, which is a different

00:03:07.720 thing. A lot of people say the South. Well, we have here in Appalachia roughly the same view of

00:03:12.700 Southerners as everybody else does, which isn't necessarily a negative view, but rather we

00:03:17.200 understand them to be their own culture that's separate from Appalachian culture, which is its

00:03:20.920 own culture, although they do have some overlap, obviously. How I came to be an academic, I think

00:03:26.880 I knew from very early on that I would be going to school basically forever. It's sad in a way,

00:03:34.500 but it's like I always knew what I was really good at was school until I got to grad school,

00:03:40.100 and then I realized I'm terrible at school. I'm smart, which is its own other thing, because I had

00:03:45.920 no study habits whatsoever, and I was in a PhD program and almost failed out of my PhD program

00:03:51.980 because I couldn't pass the qualifying exam because I refused to study for it, and then

00:03:57.820 I had a second chance, and I studied for it, and I got one of the highest scores that the

00:04:03.260 department's ever had, so it wasn't apparently ability. It was lack of work. Merit apparently

00:04:08.680 has two sides to it. I was able to take for granted. But no, when I was in junior high, I wanted to be a

00:04:17.000 meteorologist. I was fascinated, even like back to elementary school with the weather. I've always

00:04:21.460 been fascinated with weather, and maybe I should have done that. I don't know, but at some point I

00:04:26.540 took physics, and I decided this is, I really like this. This is interesting. So I wanted to major in

00:04:32.240 physics. Once you choose a major in physics, you're either going to get into some kind of a laboratory,

00:04:37.220 or you're going to go on to be a professor, probably, unless you go into some specialty in grad

00:04:42.200 school. So I intended to go to grad school, but by the time I got to the end of my physics program,

00:04:46.180 I was like, I hate physics. What do I do? And this is really hard, and it's not actually that fun.

00:04:52.600 And so those bad study habits were a problem too. And so then I changed majors to math for grad school,

00:05:02.080 not because I had a particular love of math that I was aware of, but because I didn't hate it. And the

00:05:08.020 school I was at, which I was staying at adamantly because of a woman who I wanted to stay with, who was

00:05:13.960 also at the school. Great decision-making processes at the age of 20, 21, or whatever.

00:05:20.680 Yeah. I mean, it was like, go to Yale for grad school or stay here at this small Middle Tennessee

00:05:26.860 college with this girl who is going to break up with me in a couple of years, but I didn't know

00:05:30.660 that part yet. Well, my husband followed a girl to his college. And even though I think it's silly,

00:05:37.200 it did end up in us meeting. So like later down the line. So, you know, it all works out in the end.

00:05:44.760 That's my wife's take on the whole thing. She was like, well, you stayed in the area. And then

00:05:48.960 that led one thing to another. I even chose to go to the University of Tennessee for my PhD,

00:05:54.220 which put me in the location where I met her. I wouldn't have been in the Tennessee area had I

00:05:58.940 gone off to grad school somewhere else. Exactly.

00:06:00.880 But I kind of always intended to get a doctorate. I ended up switching to math because there were like

00:06:05.420 four graduate programs at that school. And math was the closest one to physics and things that I

00:06:13.280 liked. So I chose math and I said, well, I'll try it. And I did a master's in math there and then went

00:06:19.220 on and got a PhD in math later. And the environment around teaching. So I didn't really stay in academic

00:06:26.800 very long. I finished my PhD and quit. Long and short was the kids were starting high school.

00:06:31.860 My stepkids are, I claim them. So my kids were starting high school when I graduated with my PhD.

00:06:38.720 And it was like, who wants to go to three high schools? Nobody. So, you know, so there was that.

00:06:46.800 But there was also the fact that in around 2007 and 2008, there was a dramatic shift, you know,

00:06:51.860 in our faculty meetings to where student retention became the primary objective. And it was like,

00:06:57.460 don't fail anybody, like one F per class or fewer. And, you know, it's like our class average,

00:07:02.780 like curve the grades, whatever you have to do so nobody fails. And it's like, what? This is making

00:07:09.540 the class average be like an, you know, 87 with a B plus or something. And it's like, this isn't

00:07:14.140 except maybe even a minus sometimes. It's like, this can't be, we can't have a class with 14 A's and

00:07:18.880 one F or zero F's out of 30. It's like something, this is great inflation. This is, and they were

00:07:24.020 like, no, student retention is the top objective. How do we keep the students in? How do we keep them

00:07:28.340 happy? How do we make sure that they don't lose their scholarships or lottery scholarships and student

00:07:33.000 loans that are paying for this? You know, it was very, very corrupt. And I was like, this isn't

00:07:37.360 education. And I didn't realize at the time the door that that would open to where the students would

00:07:42.000 start making demands and the faculty would, and administration would just cave to every demand

00:07:46.260 as the, you know, the students came to, the lunatics came to run the asylum. And that's sort of the mess

00:07:51.400 that we're in here 10 years later. But I didn't want to participate in this student, student retention

00:07:57.020 centered academic farce either. So those two reasons, family obligations and that were the reasons that I

00:08:04.600 wanted out and didn't feel like continuing. I mean, first of all, I have to say, endlessly impressed

00:08:11.840 by people who are good at math and science. I mean, I'm not bad at math, but it was just

00:08:18.960 never something I was like interested in. Like if you had to make me go to school for math, I would

00:08:25.020 probably just not go. And I was very grateful that getting an operatic degree that wasn't even part of

00:08:31.700 my general education courses. Very relieved. But I also had a terrible physics teacher in high school

00:08:37.880 who probably destroyed any interest I would have ever had in something like that. And that was

00:08:42.380 unfortunate. So it's cool to me when people are actually interested in these topics that for me

00:08:47.220 are a huge struggle. But it's fascinating also to me that, in my opinion, you move from something that

00:08:52.920 is so numbers based into something that's critical theory, which is really not that at all.

00:09:00.320 So how does that transition happen? Because I mean, you sort of started to describe it, but those are

00:09:05.720 really kind of, to me, at different ends of the spectrum. Philosophy and math, those are really

00:09:11.240 different. They are in some regards. I mean, math is more of a philosophy than it is a science. I mean,

00:09:18.600 I fall on, if we're going to get into the philosophy of these things, I would fall on that side. I

00:09:23.840 actually like to say that mathematics is a form of philosophy where the logic is very, very strict

00:09:30.980 and the axioms are mostly agreed upon. Whereas in philosophy, spend most of your time arguing about

00:09:35.480 the axioms. True enough. When math, you don't really argue about the axioms. There are numbers,

00:09:42.140 they work like this. People can propose new axioms and then you can say, if those are the ones you

00:09:46.840 want to work within, you know, as long as they're clearly defined, who cares, go ahead and do your

00:09:50.360 thing. And nobody gets that worked up about it. People say, no, they're not clearly defined. Look at the

00:09:54.500 geometry where there's the five postulates versus the four postulates. And then you have

00:09:58.200 planar geometry and then you have spherical and you have, you know, hyperbolic and different

00:10:03.640 curved geometries. It's like, no, no, no. Those aren't ambiguous. You just have to declare which

00:10:09.100 one you're working in and then everybody's okay. It's just, that's fine. We all, once you say,

00:10:15.360 oh, this is the axiomatic system you're working in, everybody agrees. And there's no arguing about

00:10:19.720 the axioms, partly because nobody cares because it's super abstract. And partly because the ones that

00:10:24.600 are realistic are actually pretty close to what axioms are supposed to be, which is self-evident.

00:10:29.660 So it's more philosophy than it is science. But I do think it's actually derived from empirical

00:10:34.860 observation. People were measuring things primarily, counting things and measuring things, and came up

00:10:40.660 with these rules that are the basic, highly agreed upon axioms of math. That said, there's something

00:10:48.940 else mathematicians often have as a trait, which is this sort of allergy to BS. And

00:10:55.000 I can understand that.

00:10:58.900 Critical theory is like the mother load of BS. It is absolute BS. You know, Sam Harris got in a lot

00:11:05.480 of trouble many years ago for saying that Islam is the mother load of bad ideas. I wanted to try to

00:11:10.880 like say, no, really critical theory is also one of these. I tried to talk to Sam about it on Twitter

00:11:15.580 at one point. It didn't go anywhere. But I mean, he followed me at the time, so he would have probably

00:11:21.300 got the notification, but it didn't go anywhere. But it's actually more accurate to say that it is

00:11:26.000 a mother load, not just of bad ideas, but specifically of a particular kind of BS. And I do have kind of a

00:11:32.440 cognitive allergy to BS. And I have another one to unfairness. And it's, to me, very unfair. So as I

00:11:38.040 started to do the, you know, I got academically bored once I left the academy. So I started reading and

00:11:43.260 writing, just to kind of scratch that itch and see what's out in the world, networking with people

00:11:49.100 who got involved in the new atheism movement, as it turned out, talking a lot about philosophy of

00:11:54.100 religion and philosophy of science. And then the next thing, you know, they had a Me Too. The Me Too

00:12:00.720 movement hit new atheism in 2011, way ahead of the curve. And so I started watching people get accused

00:12:07.860 of stuff that was very unfair, accusations of sexism, to some degree, racism around the Islam

00:12:12.620 issue. But mostly, you know, very paradoxically, sometimes, like you'd have these ex-Muslims who are

00:12:19.060 clearly, as the phrasing goes today, brown, like, obviously, brown, if you will, people were being

00:12:26.280 accused of racism against people who were also brown, because it's just like, in the same brown,

00:12:33.460 like literally the same brown, if you actually were to break it down into, you know, geographic or ethnic

00:12:39.460 or national groups or whatever. And it's like, none of this makes sense. What's going on? And so that's

00:12:44.580 where I learned about systemic sexism and systemic racism.

00:12:48.000 And was that kind of like the beginning of you learning about woke stuff? Or I know you mentioned

00:12:54.080 it a little bit in your teaching while there was that happening, and they were trying to kind of even

00:12:59.740 out the score. So nobody, so nobody left the school. So where did it actually start for you?

00:13:04.620 And then how did it progress to become something that kind of overtook your career in a way?

00:13:09.380 Right. So I mean, I actually remember the starting place where I decided this is serious. Like I was

00:13:13.960 watching people get accused of sexism, and there's a lot of unfairness, and there's making the whole

00:13:17.820 movement and the whole, they called it a community. And people argued about if there was a community or

00:13:23.260 not, you know, a cohesive atheist community. So I learned a little bit about people defining communities and

00:13:28.220 deciding what the community standards would be, you know, and it doesn't, it's a lot of people are

00:13:31.620 like, wait a minute. But what there was an actual incident, there's an actual conversation that I got

00:13:36.860 involved in, where we were actually the conversation was revolving around affirmative action, which is,

00:13:43.800 of course, a very controversial topic. And people were trying to express that some blue collar guys I

00:13:50.820 know, were trying to express that they had a supervisor at work, who, in the lingo, lingo of

00:13:59.280 today would be a diversity hire at the time as an affirmative action hire, a jurial position who

00:14:05.560 probably wasn't qualified to be in that position. And they were trying to make the case that it was,

00:14:11.900 they were unqualified in this kind of expanded into this, you know, somebody else was shooting back in

00:14:15.980 a very woke way saying, you can't say that. It's racist to say that to assume a black woman would

00:14:21.540 be less qualified. And they're like, we're not assuming she's less qualified because she's a

00:14:25.260 black woman. We're assuming she's unqualified because she's unqualified. And that she got the

00:14:29.880 job because of her identity, which is a dangerous thing on a factory floor. And that's basically what

00:14:37.200 they were talking about. And then it kind of kept expanding. And I still remember the sentence,

00:14:41.460 because I ended up intervening and saying, listen, you know, this is all about people trying to tell

00:14:47.120 their stories, trying to communicate what they're experiencing in life. So it's kind of already

00:14:50.460 woke a little bit. And I was like, these guys are in a new circumstance where kind of the affirmative

00:14:57.740 action or diversity hires are indicative of the landscape. And being somebody that works in that

00:15:04.700 kind of a situation with the different racial makeups of these factory floor workers dealing with

00:15:10.120 that. And then, you know, not being, you know, being told essentially by, by circumstance,

00:15:18.080 or even directly, in many cases, you're a white male. So don't ever expect a manager job out of

00:15:23.480 this, right? This is a new story. That's what I said. This is a new story in our cultural history

00:15:28.960 that has to be told and has to be reckoned with also. And the reply was, white men's stories have been

00:15:35.460 told. In other words, that story won't get told anymore. I was like, okay, so my BS and my unfairness

00:15:41.180 alarms went to like peg. And I was like, something bad is going on here. And that's when we really

00:15:47.120 started to read the woke literature and started to see just how scary what we call it now. It wasn't

00:15:52.280 called that then. We mostly looked at the gender studies literature because of the sexism thing and

00:15:58.000 the atheism movement. And I say we, meaning my colleague, Peter Boghossian and I at the time,

00:16:03.900 because Peter and I decided in looking at this, not knowing what else to do about it,

00:16:08.180 that'd be hilarious to write an academic hoax paper about it. And one thing that was its own

00:16:13.600 experience, we call it the conceptual penis as a social construct. And that led to us doing what's

00:16:19.680 now known as the Grievance Studies Affair. So what made us become experts was digging in to really

00:16:24.300 learn it to succeed at the Grievance Studies Affair endeavor. We got seven papers.

00:16:29.560 Yeah, I was going to say, if you want to give a brief overview for my subscribers and followers

00:16:33.280 who don't know exactly what that is, of course, I know because it was big news at the time. But

00:16:37.560 for those who don't. I'll come back to it in just a second so I can finish the thought. What happened

00:16:42.160 basically was we came out of that very successfully, front page of New York Times, media all over the

00:16:46.600 world, branded as experts in something that we knew somewhat. And therefore decided,

00:16:52.940 like, you know, what do you do with that? You either take your 15 minutes, or you decide to

00:16:58.440 lean in and really figure out what's going on. Well, along the process of doing the Grievance

00:17:02.920 Studies Affair, it had dawned upon us that what we were looking at wasn't like a humorous sideshow

00:17:09.480 in academia, but rather was a possibly existential threat. Like we were referring to it as the biggest

00:17:16.720 crisis or the biggest scandal in probably in academic history since Galileo, when we finally

00:17:25.440 realized the scope and scale of what we were dealing with, just how corrupted this had become.

00:17:29.900 And so it was very, we decided to, okay, especially Helen and I, who, Helen Pluckers and I, who wrote

00:17:34.280 Cynical Theories together, we decided to apply what we learned and learn more about it. We dove full on

00:17:38.700 into the literature. Pete was marketing a book by that point, another book that we had done.

00:17:42.680 And so dive full into the literature and decided to start doing it. And then the ball, as it started

00:17:48.720 to roll, rolled faster and faster. So now all I do is critical theory.

00:17:51.740 Yeah. I mean, well, it's very, very needed. I was going to say, I don't know that necessarily

00:17:55.920 you were anticipating that this would be as needed as it is, and also that it would be your entire

00:18:00.640 kind of career, but people want to hear it and they need to hear it, which is, I think, even more

00:18:06.180 important. I had no idea. I tell people I fell ass backwards into it all the time when they ask me how I

00:18:12.080 get into it. But just so your subscribers can keep up, the Grieving Studies Affair, I kind of give a

00:18:18.580 little longer background since I mentioned the conceptual penis. Peter and I decided to write

00:18:22.080 this fake paper, The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct, in 2016, near the end of the year.

00:18:27.540 We ended up actually submitting it to some gender studies journals, one of which we uncovered a scandal,

00:18:33.940 but we misnamed which scandal we found. So we submitted it to this small masculinity studies journal

00:18:40.940 that rejected it. There's something called, it's literally, it's an acronym, NORMA. I forgot what

00:18:46.600 all that stands for. Yeah. But NORMA rejected it and sent it, they offered an email to send it

00:18:55.440 to this other journal called Cogent Social Sciences. Internally, we didn't have to do anything. They

00:19:01.400 were just forwarded along to another Taylor and Francis branded journal if we wanted. And we're like,

00:19:05.580 okay, sure, whatever. Not knowing anything about Cogent Social Sciences, we said, yeah.

00:19:11.540 Turns out Cogent Social Sciences is probably a predatory journal. Publish anything for money.

00:19:18.000 You pay them $1,300, they publish your academic paper. And they were running a sale when we had it,

00:19:24.400 so it was half that. It's the economics of these things. It's really dirty. And so the scandal we

00:19:30.460 actually uncovered was that they were forwarding these things internally, which is really not

00:19:36.420 okay. You know, it's one thing if somebody seeks out a predatory journal, but if you have this kind

00:19:41.840 of an in-house network of forwarding them there to make money, that's dirty. But we didn't spike

00:19:48.360 that football. We decided to say gender studies is fake because Cogent Social Sciences accepted it

00:19:53.380 and ended up publishing it. Their operation's so tight, they forgot to charge us.

00:20:00.660 That's great.

00:20:02.320 Yeah, they published it and then tried to charge us afterwards. And we were like, no.

00:20:08.120 You're like, thank you. Yeah, no thanks. Thanks, but no thanks. We'll just take you

00:20:12.900 having published it.

00:20:15.960 So we were rightly criticized that that didn't prove what we'd claimed it proved. And so that's

00:20:20.760 what led us to write the Grievance Studies Affair paper. So the Grievance Studies Affair,

00:20:24.040 we decided in the wake of that, which was in spring, summer of 2000, it was May 2017 when that

00:20:30.260 happened. By mid-summer, we had decided we're going to probably try to do this again and do it right

00:20:36.420 and started figuring out what it would take to do it right. And by August, we got started,

00:20:40.980 figured out what we would do, targeting large journals, as many papers as we could write,

00:20:45.120 try to write for about a year. We had research questions that we sort of laid out for ourselves.

00:20:49.500 Can we hoax them with a fake academic hoax paper? If we can't, what can we get published? What's

00:20:55.460 going on in their culture, academic culture around these journals? And so we ended up writing 20

00:21:00.140 papers. Seven of them ended up being accepted. Four of them were actually published because there's

00:21:05.400 some delay between acceptance and pushing publish. They have to typeset it and so on.

00:21:09.440 Yeah.

00:21:09.800 I mean, sometimes that delay can be days and sometimes it's months.

00:21:12.860 We had seven more that were still under peer review. We decided, no, they don't fall for

00:21:20.000 academic hoaxes. In other words, they do know what they're talking about. They are doing something

00:21:24.020 that mimics scholarship, but our conclusion ended up being that it's sophistry because we started with

00:21:29.100 our conclusions, which we thought were ridiculous, and wrote the papers to fit them or tried to do kind

00:21:36.000 of wild antics. The most famous of these papers was actually about tracking dog sex to see something

00:21:46.020 about rape. And the dog parks in cities are petri dishes of canine rape culture and rape condoning

00:21:53.060 spaces that we then analogized to nightclubs. And then we concluded that taking like dog training

00:21:59.620 manuals and applying those to men to overcome rape culture would be a good policy proposal.

00:22:06.500 And that paper got an award for excellence and scholarship because we claimed to have an enormous

00:22:11.620 body of data that we destroyed our data. We also told them that so we couldn't be asked for it.

00:22:18.340 We said that we took all the notebooks and put them through a shredder and put them in a compost bin

00:22:22.660 or recycling bin. Or recycling bin, sorry. And so, you know, Portland.

00:22:28.340 So anyway, we claim to spend a thousand hours over the course of a year in Portland, Oregon,

00:22:34.020 in dog parks, but never in the rain, which is its own joke. And then we said that we examined 10,000

00:22:41.620 dogs' genitals and interrogated their owners about their sexual orientations. There are not 10,000

00:22:46.740 dogs in any given dog park in a city like Portland. They serve like a neighborhood. There's probably like

00:22:51.460 60 dogs or 80 dogs over the course of any year that actually come to a dog park. 10,000 is what we

00:22:56.500 see. And they bought it. Hook, Lion, Sinker gave it an award for excellence. The other paper, although

00:23:02.500 there were seven and they got in and there were others that almost did or were close to and probably

00:23:07.380 would have that we're very proud of that make various points. The other paper that kind of was

00:23:12.340 the most shocking and got the most media attention was that we actually did take a chapter of Adolf

00:23:16.260 Hitler's Mein Kampf and rewrote it as feminism, intersectional feminism specifically. And a

00:23:22.820 social work journal accepted that. And it was, you know, very, you know, we will not tolerate

00:23:27.460 half measures in our movements, you know, this kind of like rhetoric, which I happen to notice,

00:23:32.180 I was reading through a little bit of a critical race theory standard textbook earlier today. And I

00:23:35.940 noticed that they complained that liberalism uses a bunch of half measures. And I was like,

00:23:39.140 that's Hitler language. Oh my God. I had never read Mein Kampf before I was like hunting down a

00:23:45.380 chapter we could maybe use. Not that any of the book is particularly nice to Jewish people, as you

00:23:50.900 know, it is not, however, the chapter that really gets mad at them. That's the previous chapter. So,

00:23:56.260 chapter 11 is laying out the Jewish problem and chapter 12 is we need a movement to solve this

00:24:01.620 problem. And chapter 12 is the one we rewrote. Right. Well, I mean, and I think the world was

00:24:08.820 like, this is, you know, at first it was, this is hilarious. And then there was this realization of,

00:24:13.540 oh, this isn't funny. This is kind of terrifying, you know, that this stuff is being published as,

00:24:20.500 by critical, you know, journals that are supposed to be, supposed to be scientific and clearly are just

00:24:27.220 publishing what they want people to hear. And that wasn't just a, you know, of course it was,

00:24:31.540 it was funny, but there was also this moment of like, oh God, what is, what is this world? What

00:24:36.180 are we walking into? It's really actually scary. I mean, another one of our papers that was very

00:24:42.420 favorably reviewed, but hadn't met the reviewers kind of exacting standards yet. So it was on the,

00:24:48.500 on track to be published in a major journal, Hypatia specifically advocated, you know, teaching kids

00:24:55.140 lessons. It's a progressive stack oriented pedagogy or classroom experience. So it was like,

00:25:02.020 we won't answer questions from white male students. They're not allowed to send in emails.

00:25:06.820 They have to sit in the floor in chains to experience reparations. If they're male,

00:25:10.820 they'll be spoken over because women are always interrupted. So we'll make men experience being

00:25:14.980 interrupted. And this is going to teach them about their privilege by intentionally reversing that

00:25:19.380 in the classroom. We invite them to listen and learn in silence while sitting in the floor

00:25:24.500 in their college classes and things like that to, you know, reverse the playing field as an

00:25:29.780 educational experience. Right. And we claimed in the paper that we actually, you know, had been doing

00:25:33.780 this to kids in college. Oh my God. And they were like, yeah, that's great. You know, this makes it,

00:25:38.980 you know, and it's like, whoa, you know, so that the idea that they would be quite abusive was there.

00:25:45.220 And when our first draft of that paper that we sent in, they were very warm to, but they were like,

00:25:49.860 you got a big problem here because we thought there's no way they're going to let us get away

00:25:53.780 with aiming to abuse students. So we said that when you do this, you have to engage it with what's

00:25:58.900 called critically compassionate intellectualism. So you have to be compassionate too, right?

00:26:04.020 You have to not injure these people. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no compassion.

00:26:10.500 We're going to tell you about the pedicogy of discomfort. You only learn about privilege

00:26:14.340 by being forced into discomfort. And I was like, this is gulag stuff. You know, this is bad. You

00:26:20.580 know, and this is a piece of rhetoric we heard with the riots all last year is that white people's

00:26:25.620 comfort is being upset and people will learn by being made uncomfortable. AOC said that repeatedly,

00:26:30.660 isn't it? You know, it's supposed to be uncomfortable. You learn by being made uncomfortable.

00:26:35.300 That's straight out of the academic literature. It's straight out of our fake papers where we're

00:26:39.620 advocating abusing students, um, mentally and emotionally, if not physically in, in classrooms.

00:26:46.020 Right. And so, yeah, it was, we can't, that's where, that's when, you know, it was that paper

00:26:50.180 in specific, not even the mind comp thing where we were like, whoa, something really bad is going on

00:26:57.780 here. And that's when, like, that's when we realized that this is, this, this isn't just funny,

00:27:03.620 you know, dog sex, haha. This is like, oh no. Right. Oh no. Yeah. And people are okay with this

00:27:13.300 and condoning it. It's not just, it's not just a fringe thing. If people are actively saying, don't,

00:27:19.620 don't have compassion. Even I find that I didn't know that part of the story that you had to take

00:27:25.220 out the idea that maybe we need to soften this a bit. That's, that's crazy. They said that would

00:27:31.860 re-center the needs of the privileged. Ah, well now we, now we understand. So,

00:27:38.740 so going on a little bit of a tangent, actually, I wanted to ask you about something unique to you

00:27:44.180 very briefly, which is, I know you're interested in Chinese sword martial arts. How did you get into

00:27:51.060 that? Well, the sword is an accessory. I'm interested in, I've been doing martial arts. I started when I was

00:27:56.020 a teenager. Like a lot of people, I probably saw a karate kid and thought it was cool. Yeah. And I hope

00:28:00.580 you've been watching Cobra Kai. Well, yeah, um, sleep the leg, you know, the whole thing. Um,

00:28:07.860 you know, no mercy. Uh, no, I started more. I don't know exactly what made me interested in it. I

00:28:15.060 kind of do, you know, I had a vague interest. I think a lot of young guys did at the time. And I

00:28:19.700 actually was at a gym, a PE class in school. It was extraordinarily unstructured. It was like the

00:28:25.060 weightlifting class. And the guy that I ended up paired up with as like my workout partner

00:28:30.980 by the demands of the class took karate at this school in town and just, you know, he basically

00:28:37.380 talked like mall ninja. Like he's like the most bad-ass MFR that ever existed. And like, you know,

00:28:42.820 he was sort of a scary dude, but he's a nice guy. And so we were buddies and I got interested enough to

00:28:48.420 go check out the school and try it out. And so I was 15 or 16 something. And I started taking

00:28:54.820 karate. It was back in the nineties. We could figure out how old I was. Um, and so I started

00:28:59.380 taking karate. Then I got into jujitsu. I was doing Brazilian jujitsu before anybody knew what

00:29:03.140 Brazilian jujitsu was, but I got sick of getting a rug burn on my face and toes. So I quit. I didn't

00:29:08.260 get very far in it. I'm not good at it. I'm not like, haha, I'm awesome. I took Brazilian jujitsu so long

00:29:13.700 ago that, um, I had a rank that doesn't exist anymore. They phased it out. It doesn't even

00:29:20.260 exist. And so, uh, it's not a very, it's a very low rank. It's a kind of a halfway rank, but they

00:29:27.540 used to, I don't know if you know anything about it, but they give stripes on your belts now and

00:29:30.900 there's four stripes on each belt. So you can be a one stripe, no stripe, one stripe, two stripes,

00:29:36.420 belt, white belt. Well, they used to just put a stripe of the next color belt, just one of them

00:29:41.380 on your belt. And it meant that you were ready to test, except maybe you hadn't taken enough

00:29:46.100 classes yet, or you hadn't decided to test yet. So I was a blue stripe, white belt, which means I,

00:29:51.140 I was ready to take my blue belt test, but I never took it because I got rug burn on my face really

00:29:56.100 bad. And I went to work and people are like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I'm done with this.

00:30:01.460 E burn on my face was enough. So I quit doing jujitsu. I did a little MMA fighting for a little while

00:30:05.940 though. Back in the late nineties, I sport fought, I was all into it. And then in 2006,

00:30:12.180 I actually met this Chinese guy. And I was like, holy crap, martial arts for real.

00:30:18.260 Everything I've been doing is a problem. And not to say Brazilian jujitsu, Brazilian jujitsu is a good

00:30:23.620 art. And I was just like blown away though, by how good it was. So I started studying the Chinese art.

00:30:29.700 And a few years later, I got introduced to the gigantic saber that I practiced with very,

00:30:35.460 very vigorously in 2008-9. And then somewhere in about 2010, I kind of put it away and kind of

00:30:43.540 didn't do anything with it. And as a martial arts club, we moved on and started practicing Chinese

00:30:50.020 longsword, jian as it's said in Chinese. And so I am much better actually with the Chinese longsword,

00:30:57.860 but I don't have a very good one. So I don't, and it's very light and it looks kind of weak.

00:31:01.860 So I don't like it that much. And the big one really, I mean, the big Dao,

00:31:05.300 the thing that people have seen the videos of is actually mostly for building strength and

00:31:08.500 coordination. It's not, you could, I guess, sharpen it and fight with it, but that's not

00:31:13.540 actually the point. It's like the equivalent of weightlifting. It's like in Chinese wrestling,

00:31:18.420 which is called shuaijiao, there's a tool called a guandao, which is this gigantic

00:31:24.900 kind of thing. But in the Chinese style, it's got like a giant blade on the end and a huge shaft.

00:31:31.540 It's a spear mixed with a sword kind of thing on one end. But the guandao can weigh

00:31:37.380 up to like 110 pounds. It's not meant to fight with. It's meant to move it around,

00:31:42.900 like you get it on your shoulders, move it around like you're throwing somebody.

00:31:46.100 Right.

00:31:46.660 The saver is the same kind of deal where actually, you know, it's how do you move with weight? How do

00:31:51.060 you put your force out into something that big? How do you control it? And so I do train with the

00:31:56.740 saver a little now, again, I haven't taken it back up seriously since 2010. It's good for strength,

00:32:04.340 and it's good for exercise, but it's also really good for tendonitis. But I'm actually quite

00:32:09.300 competent, not I wouldn't, you know, think that I'm great, but I'm competent with the Chinese longsword.

00:32:13.700 That's really cool. But they do success to the actual regular martial art training.

00:32:21.060 Right. So I didn't know anything about, like, my husband is very into UFC,

00:32:27.220 and that was funny. At the beginning of our relationship, he showed me a fight

00:32:31.940 which happened to be very bloody. Not all UFC fights are very bloody, but this one happened to be

00:32:36.340 very bloody. And I was like, we are never, I don't want to watch this again. If we have children,

00:32:41.460 we're never watching this, we're never seeing it. I hated the whole idea. And then he showed me a few

00:32:47.700 more different fights, and I was good-natured enough to sit down and watch them. And now I've,

00:32:53.300 it turns out I'm very good at calling fights because I kind of see, not from necessarily,

00:32:58.980 like, knowing anything about jujitsu or wrestling or boxing, I don't know that much about it, but just

00:33:05.220 from seeing the faces of the fighters, I feel like I have an idea of who's going to be more

00:33:09.380 determined and who's going to, like, push through to the end. But I never would have thought I would

00:33:14.900 be someone who could stomach watching UFC and understand anything about fighting and,

00:33:21.220 you know, being married to someone who likes it, you'll kind of do, you'll, like, get into that with

00:33:26.420 them. So that's, that's my only, my only background with any sort of physical fighting stuff.

00:33:33.140 You should go back and watch UFC's one through seven when they were much more rare and they

00:33:38.500 didn't really have rules yet. They were very different. Those are the, I mean, I watched

00:33:43.300 those when they were new, like when they were happening. I didn't watch them like pay-per-view,

00:33:47.860 but, you know, as soon as they would come out on VHS afterwards, you know, we'd all rent them

00:33:51.620 and watch them. Real brutal stuff. Crazy, but the fights didn't have time limits. So some of them

00:33:58.340 would go 35 minutes. I think that was, I don't remember if that's when Hoist Gracie beat Dan

00:34:02.260 Severin or not, but, uh, Dan Severin, look at these two guys. Dan Severin's like this beast of a man,

00:34:07.220 just huge, brutal fighter. Looks mean the whole thing. And Hoist is this kind of like skinny little

00:34:12.500 Brazilian guy, you know, looks kind of like he's got, he's wearing a face kind of like, um, like in

00:34:18.340 The Godfather or whatever, Scarface or something. Right. And, you know, he's kind of got that, like,

00:34:23.780 pissy face and the fight went like 35 minutes though. And I don't remember if that's which

00:34:29.620 one it was, but Hoist did have a 35 minute match against one of these really big bruiser type guys

00:34:34.820 and wore him down and I think choked him out or something in the end, like a little 135 pound

00:34:40.900 dude or 140 pound dude. Um, and that was the, that was the spot where Brazilian jujitsu was all of a

00:34:46.900 sudden the thing like, right. Okay. It's now been decided. It's the best art in the whole universe.

00:34:51.220 Right. And so it's really interesting. It's kind of cool to watch that stuff.

00:34:57.700 Totally. I feel like I've learned a good amount from just watching the different

00:35:03.380 techniques that people will use in the moment. I don't know. It's just fascinating to see.

00:35:07.540 It really is a study in psychology for me is to see how people react to the situations because

00:35:13.140 obviously they're not, they're not totally sure what's going to happen with the fighter across

00:35:16.820 from them in the ring. So seeing how they respond, it's, it's kind of interesting.

00:35:20.020 Yeah. Um, I haven't been in our ring in a very long time and I being in my forties now,

00:35:26.900 I don't, and then the making my living off of my brain and having had a few good concussions.

00:35:31.780 Yeah. I was going to say, it doesn't seem like the best idea.

00:35:34.820 The best idea.

00:35:36.500 Yeah.

00:35:37.060 So last question about your, about you specifically, as opposed to kind of woke stuff and critical

00:35:43.300 theory. How did you meet your wife? I was just curious.

00:35:46.020 You haven't heard this story. I've told it a couple of times. It's a legendary story.

00:35:51.700 Oh, oh, I'm sorry. I have not heard it. And my followers are, I'm sure are going to want to hear

00:35:56.420 because we're, a lot of us are females and we like romance. So I met my wife at a stoplight in traffic.

00:36:05.860 Oh my God. That's amazing.

00:36:10.340 Yeah. Here's what happened. I was going to said karate studio and, uh, to go train. It turns out

00:36:18.340 that it was in May. I was in my first year of my PhD program, which the other woman had now left me.

00:36:25.700 And so I had chosen the school. It was sad, man. I chose this school.

00:36:29.620 I chose to go to the university of Tennessee because it would stay close to her and school

00:36:35.300 started in August. She broke up with me in September.

00:36:37.140 Oh no.

00:36:39.380 Yeah. Right.

00:36:40.740 I don't laugh at the time. I wouldn't have laughed, you know, after the fact I could laugh.

00:36:44.260 It's, it's comical now, but then we get to May and finals are happening. So the, the schedule is

00:36:50.900 all different. So I was like, yeah, I have some days off because the way finals week is different.

00:36:55.300 I'll go down and work out at the studio. And so I went down to, to, to go work at the studio and

00:37:01.940 the drive that I was taking actually had all my gear stored at my mom's house. Uh, so I swung by

00:37:08.260 there and I picked up all my stuff and I was driving along this route that put me side by side in traffic

00:37:14.900 on the way to the studio with the woman I'm now married to and have been for, and if I calculate it,

00:37:20.340 I think it's 1.7 million years now. Um, 17, actually we're coming up on 17 years since that day.

00:37:29.220 Oh my gosh. That is exciting.

00:37:31.780 Yeah. So, um, she looked over at me, I'm listening to this music. I'm playing it really loud. I was

00:37:37.940 listening to Jack Johnson. I'm at the sunroof open, the windows down, I'm singing along, I'm having a

00:37:42.500 good time. I look over, she has this huge grin on her face and I'm like, Oh God, you know? And I'm like,

00:37:48.500 turning it down and I shut up and like sliding down in my seat and roll up the window. Like,

00:37:56.020 and then she keeps looking over and then the light turns green. She was turning left. I was going

00:38:01.940 straight. And so we parted the moment that was on a Thursday evening. And I happened to notice,

00:38:10.500 this is a relevant part of the story that she, for reasons that she had been partying with some people

00:38:15.940 out on a camping trip or something. And some drunk party goer had bumped into her side mirror and

00:38:21.620 broke her driver's side side mirror and broke it off. And she just duct taped it back on. And so

00:38:28.020 I had been trying to date. This is absolutely gorgeous, high maintenance woman for most of my

00:38:33.780 single year in grad school there. And so, you know, she was like telling me exactly how many children

00:38:39.460 there would be and which genders they would be and in what order. And I was like, Oh God.

00:38:42.980 Oh goodness.

00:38:43.540 Yeah. Like, good luck with that.

00:38:46.180 I was going to say, that seems difficult to accomplish.

00:38:49.220 Yeah. No. I see this, like, I'm good, but I ain't that good. I saw that duct tape and I was like,

00:38:58.660 that is what I need in a woman. Just down to earth, just solve the problem and go on with life.

00:39:05.860 Don't freak. It doesn't have to be all prissy or whatever. And I went on, nothing else happened

00:39:10.820 Thursday night. Then Tuesday, I ended up again, still finals because finals usually straddle weird

00:39:16.500 times of the week. And I went to the studio again, and she had decided that she would drive by one time.

00:39:23.620 And if my car was there, it was fated to be and she would come in and say hi. And then she chickened

00:39:30.100 out and just left a note in my windshield instead, because I happened to be there. She drove by at the

00:39:34.100 right time. My car was there. She recognized it. She knew I was going to the studio because I had

00:39:37.460 a sticker on my car and was headed in that direction. And so it was a good guess as to

00:39:41.460 where I was going. And I probably was wearing a karate uniform and you could probably see it or

00:39:46.820 whatever. And so she left a note. I went home afterwards and I called her. It was like,

00:39:54.340 if you don't have a girlfriend or whatever. And so I would have called either way because you

00:39:58.100 don't leave people like that hanging. That's rude. But I called her and we ended up talking

00:40:02.420 like four hours. And then we talked on the phone. We were totally like, it was, you know, it's not

00:40:08.820 what happens a lot of times these days. We talked on the phone for weeks before we finally went on a

00:40:13.780 date, hours and hours and hours, almost every day. Then we finally go on this date. We went for a walk

00:40:18.340 at the park and then she decided I probably wasn't a murderer. So we rented a movie, went back to her

00:40:22.500 house. I literally like sat at the opposite end of the couch from her. She jokes, I sat on my hands.

00:40:28.900 I don't remember doing that, but I might have. Anyway, a little gentleman behavior. And we gave

00:40:34.740 each other a big hug when I left. And I texted her and was like, that's back when texts cost 25 cents

00:40:40.580 a piece to send. And you had to push the button 17 times to get to your letter. And I was like,

00:40:46.260 need another one of those hugs or something cute. I don't remember. It's probably way less just bold

00:40:51.380 than that. It probably had more words, but you can only send like a hundred characters.

00:40:55.540 And then we decided that we would actually date and be a thing by the end of May and early June.

00:41:03.620 I love it.

00:41:04.180 We took the entirety of May. Married three years later, also in May. So yeah.

00:41:12.580 That's an amazing story. That's an amazing story.

00:41:15.700 Hands under my butt, apparently. So that's how we met.

00:41:20.340 I love that story. That's incredible. You know, there are some people who have

00:41:24.980 like really unique meeting stories and that's, that's the best stuff. I just love it. It's so good.

00:41:31.780 Yeah. She always jokes like, if we were to split up, you're meeting somebody's story would be,

00:41:36.260 how did you meet Twitter? And it's like, it kind of is.

00:41:39.780 Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. No, I'm, I'm just grateful. Not grateful. I think that it,

00:41:45.380 however you meet the person you end up with is totally great. And it's just good that you met

00:41:48.900 them because it's hard. But I think it's nice that my husband and I met through a mutual friend

00:41:53.860 as opposed to meeting through a dating app, because just a lot of people I know have met through a

00:41:57.860 dating app. And I, I was like, oh, that's nice. Our story is slightly more old fashioned.

00:42:04.420 Yeah. Mine's more like movie.

00:42:08.980 It really is like a movie. Yours is very, very much so. I love it. Now I'm glad I know,

00:42:14.900 and I'll have to go back.

00:42:15.860 I live a romantic comedy over here. I am a rom-com.

00:42:19.220 I mean, your, your job is only something you would think exists in a rom-com. So I feel like

00:42:25.780 that fits like philosopher man who literally makes his living off of philosophizing.

00:42:34.820 Um, so now moving on to woke theory, because this is something I, the reason I wanted to have you on

00:42:42.900 my channel is because I think this is so important. I think this is something that my subscribers and

00:42:48.020 followers who really aren't familiar with this may not even recognize the scale of threat.

00:42:52.900 And I want them to be educated, uh, as I was educated by reading your stuff and my husband

00:42:59.620 introducing me to your content, um, which I really wasn't totally aware of until he started saying,

00:43:05.620 you have to understand what we're talking about here. And all of a sudden I was, it's like my mind

00:43:09.940 was open. So would you be able to give me, I mean, would you mind giving me, uh, an idea of what

00:43:17.460 woke means and critical theory. And I know that that can be an incredibly long description. So

00:43:23.380 you, it's up to you to decide how much or how little you want to talk about it. Cause I, again,

00:43:28.580 I recognize you've written an entire book on this topic. So however much you want to talk about it,

00:43:34.260 I trust you. Sure. I'll keep it short. Um, just to give you the idea, but just to give you another

00:43:40.180 idea the other day, I got invited to do a talk at a college by zoom. And, um, I didn't know before

00:43:48.820 the talk, they said it was going to be like a dialogue. And then I got there and they were like,

00:43:53.140 no, you're just going to talk for an hour. And I was like, okay, what do you want me to talk about?

00:43:57.940 And they were like, just where does critical race theory and critical theory come from? I'm like,

00:44:01.540 oh, that's easy. So I just talked for an hour, like no problem. So I could give a very,

00:44:05.620 very long description and is however much depth you want, we can get there. Um, the short answer,

00:44:11.940 woke means awakened to the idea that our society is constructed out of so-called systems of oppression.

00:44:20.180 Okay. So it's what they used to call back in the days, critical consciousness. And that's a

00:44:26.900 consciousness that's critical of the existing order of society in a very specific way. Uh, that way is

00:44:33.220 known as Neo-Marxism or critical theory is another name for Neo-Marxism. Uh, and so it is the extension

00:44:40.260 into a broader scope. When Marx was talking about people developing class consciousness,

00:44:46.740 the consciousness here is the same, but we're no longer being aware of being either working

00:44:50.740 class versus capitalist class. We're now aware of being either part of a, uh, oppressed,

00:44:57.860 in the oppressed circumstance or in a privileged circumstance, uh, and being,

00:45:03.220 uh, or, uh, and, uh, people who benefit from racism being able to deny that they do so or to maintain

00:45:32.180 that system to their benefit while, uh, maintaining willful ignorance of their complicity and upholding

00:45:39.140 the system. In other words, they're trying to keep their privilege, even if it's like psychologically

00:45:44.180 repressed from them that they're trying to keep their privilege. And so being woke is being aware

00:45:49.220 that that's what's happening. It's having awakened to the fact that we live in a, a society that's made

00:45:54.100 out of systems of oppression rather than based on principles like, uh, everybody being created equal,

00:46:00.980 having certain inalienable rights that precede the, uh, privileges of the state and so on.

00:46:07.860 So that's what woke means. And I know that I put enough in there to where we have miles and miles

00:46:13.460 of things we could unpack, but I think it should have been accessible that it's a completely different

00:46:17.380 way of viewing the world where you believe that oppression dynamics are the main thing that

00:46:23.380 characterizes how society is organized. Um, whereas everything else is somehow fit into that paradigm.

00:46:31.460 So it's a different, it's being awakened to a whole different consciousness of the world.

00:46:35.540 In other words, it's like joining a cult. Uh, yeah. Yeah.

00:46:39.140 I mean, what do you think is the most obvious dangers in that? Obviously you can hear that

00:46:47.860 and you can think, okay, well, that doesn't really logically make sense with, with how we should be

00:46:52.980 viewing the world, right? People are created equal. We shouldn't be changing definitions of kind of base

00:46:59.300 level truths. But what would you say is kind of the biggest danger to someone who, who is hearing

00:47:04.820 this for the first time, how would you define that danger of what woke being woke means and

00:47:11.780 what critical theory is going to like how that would affect their lives?

00:47:15.620 So the danger of this, the biggest danger of wokeness is that not only is, is that a really

00:47:21.940 bad way to try to characterize what's going on, it will lead people to look for those power dynamics

00:47:26.740 and everything. And then to assume that those are the correct interpretations of things that happen.

00:47:31.380 So if there's, for example, within critical race theory, which is one of these critical

00:47:36.180 theories, it's boiled down the idea that the question is no longer, and this is a direct quote

00:47:40.740 from the scholar Robin DiAngelo, who's quite famous. Um, the question is no longer did racism take place,

00:47:46.900 but how did racism manifest in that situation? Direct quote. So what that means is the operating system

00:47:52.660 is we're now going to, they say, interrogate every situation until we find where the racism is.

00:47:59.060 Well, this isn't going to hold things together very well. Um, the second thing that I would say

00:48:03.780 is a big danger about it is besides kind of poisoning every social interaction you can possibly imagine

00:48:10.980 and opening the door to every form of corruption that you could possibly imagine, uh, because somebody

00:48:15.460 who can claim racism can then claim power and then can make demands. And those demands have to be met

00:48:20.420 or further racism is occurring and can see how that becomes a agent of corruption very quickly.

00:48:26.020 But the second more important one is that the critical theory, and this is a little bit more

00:48:29.700 technical reason, critical theory actually doesn't know what's going on. It doesn't know

00:48:34.740 how society works. It doesn't know why things are organized the way that they are. And it doesn't

00:48:39.460 know how delicate in some sense these, you know, having the right ideas about how society works is crucial

00:48:46.660 to keep society going. Critical theory has no obligation to know this. And I'm not saying

00:48:52.020 this like flippantly. We can go all the way back to when critical theory was originally defined.

00:48:56.180 This was the first description of critical theory explicitly was given in 1937 by Max Horkheimer in

00:49:01.140 a book called Traditional and Critical Theories, where he outlines the difference between traditional

00:49:05.380 theory and critical theory. A traditional theory is in kind of shortest expression, those kinds of

00:49:11.460 theories like science and philosophy that you use to understand how the world works. The goal of it is

00:49:16.580 understanding or in the original German, whereas a critical theory has a different objective.

00:49:23.780 It's separate from traditional theory. Traditional theories are for understanding,

00:49:28.180 where stand the world that we live in. Critical theory has a very specific definition. It starts with a

00:49:35.780 idealized normative vision of a perfected society. They call it liberation. Marx called it communism.

00:49:43.460 You have an idealized normative vision of a perfected society. That's step one. Step two,

00:49:52.500 what you are obligated to know in a critical theory is not how anything works, but rather how the existing

00:49:57.460 society falls short of that vision. All you have to do is know what the problems are against a perfected

00:50:03.860 utopia. You don't have to know how things work or why there are trade-offs that led for it to be that

00:50:09.460 way or what the constraints or the contingencies are. You only have to know how it's not perfect.

00:50:15.620 And then the third thing a critical theory must do, and it has to do all three of these

00:50:19.060 these things to qualify as a critical theory, is it must, as Marx put it, wed theory to praxis.

00:50:23.860 Praxis was an idea that Marx had made up, which is theory put into practice. And so this is where you

00:50:29.460 actually end up with, you know, dialectical materialism was Marx's idea. The dialectical process is

00:50:35.300 praxis. It is putting that theory, the theoretical ideas, into practice to what was Marx's other idea.

00:50:41.220 The point that, you know, what is it? Hitherto philosophers have only sought to understand the

00:50:45.380 world. The point is to change it. And so critical theory is the side of the thing that is to change

00:50:50.820 the world, whereas traditional theory is a side that is to understand the world. So it's very dangerous

00:50:55.780 because critical theorists are under zero obligation to know how and why it's arranged the way that it is.

00:51:01.140 They have a particularly poor understanding of human nature. It's very naive, at best,

00:51:10.420 their understanding of human nature because it's all rooted in believing that people have a repressed

00:51:15.380 libido dominandi or desire to affect power. And it's more or less the depth of their entire

00:51:21.140 analysis. So they have this very poor view of human nature. This is where you get these crazy ideas now,

00:51:27.060 like that. If you just fix all the material conditions, crime will all go away because

00:51:31.700 nobody will have a reason to be a criminal. It's a very poor understanding of good and evil and of

00:51:36.500 the motivations that lead people to be criminals. And the fact that many criminals in their own words

00:51:40.340 describe that they think doing crime is fun, that it's the risk taking, the breaking the rules,

00:51:45.940 the stepping into the taboo, that these things are actually fun.

00:51:49.220 And then some people are genuinely not normal. They're not mentally and emotionally healthy. And

00:51:57.540 so they aren't going, you can't just talk those people out of being, you know, people who do bad

00:52:03.220 things. They don't have a very poor understanding of that because they have no obligation to understand

00:52:08.820 the world as it actually is. That's the job of traditional theorists. And if you actually break

00:52:14.100 it down, this idea of where stand is in traditional theory is replaced in, in by this other idea

00:52:20.100 called, uh, where new, new, I can't pronounce the German words. I can spell it. V E R N U N F T.

00:52:26.660 Okay.

00:52:28.100 Nunft. We're numft. I can't say German words. German is a hard language. It's easy to pronounce some

00:52:34.100 things and really hard to pronounce other things. I can't do that one. But anyway, that's a higher level

00:52:38.660 of thinking in their philosophy. And so since that's a higher level of thinking, it's, you know,

00:52:45.780 understanding things, that's low level stuff, that's less important. And so when you actually

00:52:49.860 have a philosophy that's taking over, that has no obligation to actually understand how things work

00:52:53.460 and only has the obligation to complain about how they're not perfect. You know, we've all heard the

00:52:57.540 saying that perfect is the enemy of the good idea. I was thinking about, as you were talking about

00:53:02.900 this, there's a speech that you gave that you also, I believe, put on your new, new discourse as

00:53:08.500 this podcast. It's also available on YouTube. And it's talking about how critical theory is

00:53:14.180 a virus and it's meant to be a virus and how all of this is meant to destabilize society because they

00:53:21.860 want to destroy society in a sense, in order to build it up in their own image with all of the

00:53:28.100 ideas that they believe are correct. But it's their version of correct. And yeah, that's correct.

00:53:36.580 Right. So this is, and I, it's funny because I'll actually go to that podcast or go to that YouTube

00:53:41.540 video when I want to reference certain ideas because I thought that that video, and I'll put

00:53:46.180 the link in my description box, is so, that speech was so well, well said, and it defined this idea so

00:53:56.100 well. So if you can talk a little bit about, because I talk about this on my channel a bit,

00:54:00.020 the idea that left, you know, leftists and wokists, they're looking to destroy the society kind of that

00:54:09.060 we have, or to stabilize it. And when you're not starting from the same, you know, fundamental truths,

00:54:16.100 it's very difficult to have a conversation across the aisle. Can you talk on that a little bit?

00:54:20.740 Yeah, so I mean, that idealized vision, what they believe is in the way of it is Western civilization,

00:54:29.860 and they're not wrong. The values of Western civilization prevent us from going into

00:54:35.940 likely to know guaranteed to fail, you know, idealist utopia. So having that misalignment of

00:54:47.700 values is very dangerous, but they're, they're explicit. I mean, whether you want, whatever level

00:54:52.980 you want to talk about it, they talk about how Western civilization has all of these bases of

00:54:57.460 exploitation and oppression built into it, whether it's, you know, white supremacy, whether it's

00:55:02.340 capitalism, which they see as inherently oppressive, whether it's, you know, sexism, and patriarchy,

00:55:07.140 and misogyny, whether it's things about homophobia, and transphobia, whatever the different dynamics

00:55:11.540 are, whether it's actually they have long winded arguments that the endpoint of freedom is fascism.

00:55:17.300 And so fascism is inherent in free societies, according to them. Copious writings on this,

00:55:23.940 they talk about the goal is to actually unmake capitalist systems and replace them with socialist and

00:55:30.180 rethought liberated socialist systems, not bureaucratic socialism, they say.

00:55:36.100 So this is genuinely what they're trying to do is take apart Western civilization. And they,

00:55:40.740 they have come up with the plan that operating as a virus is the right way to do this. And that's

00:55:47.380 quite explicitly, I can talk about it in general and say, oh, well, it latches on to certain things

00:55:53.380 within, you know, your desire to be charitable or generous to their argument or nice, or the need

00:56:00.020 to feel smart, you know, to look like you have an open mind, these virtues of kind of liberal and open

00:56:06.980 and free societies, it latches on to those and then abuses them. So those are kind of like where the,

00:56:13.460 what is it, spike proteins we have to talk about, I would latch onto whatever receptor it is and get

00:56:18.980 the viral DNA in there. It's how it gets into an organization and it turns the organization or the

00:56:23.940 institution or the individual into somebody who reproduces a critical consciousness. Once you

00:56:29.780 have a critical consciousness, you, you're now copying their DNA. And to kind of put the punctuation

00:56:34.900 point on this, and I think that's what I do in a podcast, they have this in their own paper,

00:56:39.540 they have a paper, it's called Women's Studies as a Virus, and they compare themselves,

00:56:43.380 they say that the virus is the ideal metaphor for what they're doing. And then they say they

00:56:48.740 compare themselves favorably to HIV, because it suppresses the immune system, and therefore makes

00:56:53.540 itself more effective, compare themselves favorably to Ebola, because it's so contagious and hit so hard.

00:56:59.620 This was all before COVID-19, I'm sure that they would love to compare themselves to COVID-19.

00:57:04.500 Yeah, this was a 2016 paper, I think. And so they, Michael Carver and Brianne Fahs are the authors,

00:57:12.100 I'm not making it, I didn't write it. I have to say that now. So they, they say they compare

00:57:17.860 themselves favorably to viruses like HPV that cause cancer by modifying and damaging DNA, because

00:57:24.100 they say that cancer represents permanent transformational change. So they're literally

00:57:28.180 referring to themselves as a virus that causes cancer as an ideal metaphor. And what the paper's

00:57:32.580 actual argument is, is that programs like classes and minors and even majors, but mostly minors and

00:57:40.340 courses and colleges should be taking people in training that who are, say, majoring in biology

00:57:47.460 or majoring in medicine or majoring in something else, and training them in critical and then sending

00:57:52.900 them out into their own disciplines as now infected agents to bring, to carry the, that viral DNA into the

00:58:01.140 new institution and turn that other institution into a quote-unquote agent for change. In other

00:58:08.420 words, to, to, they're trying to get inside and change the, the makeup of institutions and people

00:58:15.540 intentionally. And they use the viral metaphor to describe themselves. And this is a hundred-year-old plan.

00:58:20.020 Antonio Gramsci wrote about this a hundred years ago in his prison notebooks. He was a communist. He was,

00:58:24.900 um, he, he had this idea that, that societies have a cultural hegemony, a general way that it is, what

00:58:33.300 it's the society's values and how those are upheld among each other and transmitted generation to

00:58:38.740 generation from parents to children and authorities to children. And his thought was, if you want to open

00:58:43.460 western civilization up to communism, there's only one way to do it, which is to get inside of those

00:58:48.660 institutions, whether it's religion, uh, the family, media, education, law, or specific institutions,

00:58:57.540 maybe like Harvard university or CNN or the Republican party, as a matter of fact,

00:59:03.940 side of them and establish what he called a counter hegemony. The radical ideology has to infiltrate and

00:59:09.860 then establish itself from within until it gets so powerful that the institution that it infected

00:59:15.300 becomes that it takes on the new hegemony, which is the exact same idea. He just didn't use the

00:59:20.580 metaphor of a virus to express it. So this isn't even a new idea. This is at the core of this project.

00:59:25.700 And it has been at the core of this project for a century, um, unambiguously.

00:59:30.420 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, and you can, you can see it, you can, looking at universities, I feel like that's

00:59:36.500 a very, very good place to start, but it's now it's even starting to spread into workplaces, but in

00:59:41.140 universities, it's like, it's already kind of, it's lost. We can't, it's very, very difficult to think

00:59:46.020 about how you could, how you could turn universities, turn the clock back on universities a bit.

00:59:51.460 Um, they're totally cooked. One that's that I'm watching kind of in real time right now in this

00:59:56.340 regard, it's kind of funny that it's a virus metaphor is the American Medical Association.

01:00:01.620 Um, the American Medical Association, if you don't know, just recently had a podcast for like 15

01:00:07.540 minutes come out and the guy was slightly skeptical of certain aspects of the systemic racism claim

01:00:15.380 and equity thing. It turns out the guy is an actual all out, like critical race theory,

01:00:20.980 toting, touting leftist, uh, but it didn't matter. He was vaguely skeptical of some of this stuff.

01:00:27.220 The activists seized upon this. They declared that this is proof of all these systemic problems in,

01:00:32.340 in medicine, all throughout medicine. They've leveraged the journal,

01:00:36.020 the American Medical Association to, to, to remove the editor who allowed the podcast to go out.

01:00:42.740 They issued all these apologies about all the harm and trauma that it caused people. That's their

01:00:46.660 usual. That's them manipulating the liberal value of caring about and caring for the sick and injured

01:00:51.860 and the dispossessed and which are great, you know, Judeo-Christian values as well. They're manipulating

01:00:57.140 those values, which is evil. And so now they've got this guy removed and now the American Medical

01:01:01.700 Association itself in the broader sense is coming out with all these statements about how they're thinking

01:01:05.700 about revamping their literature, their leadership. They're going to commit to anti-racist principles.

01:01:09.700 The virus just went right in and the spike protein, the, the manipulation of their, their compassion

01:01:14.420 and their care. And note that this was a guy who's already on their side. He just admitted a little bit

01:01:19.700 of skepticism. That guy got canceled, right? He's canceled. People who let him have a platform canceled,

01:01:26.420 canceled, uh, literally removed from their positions. And now the activists are moving in and taking over

01:01:33.700 that institution and they're forcing by manipulating people's best virtues, their care, their compassion,

01:01:41.940 their, their, their egalitarianism, their desire not to be involved in or participate in or uphold bigotry,

01:01:50.020 uh, their willingness to consider other points of view. They're manipulating all of those and are

01:01:54.260 basically doing an activist takeover of the American Medical Association, which is a very

01:01:57.860 important institution. I would imagine, um, people will die if medicine becomes woke. Lots of people

01:02:04.340 will die. This is Lysenkoism, but rather than in farming, uh, as Trofim Lysenko in the Soviet Union

01:02:10.500 actually did, uh, it will be, um, in medicine, people will die. This is absolutely-

01:02:16.260 Absolutely. I have a question because you use the word anti-racist, uh, and I know that that's

01:02:23.460 something that you've been kind of going on about on your Twitter. Um, can you explain that word for

01:02:29.460 the people and like how it's used for the people who don't know? Yeah. So two things that need to be

01:02:34.820 said are three things really. So first of all, let me explain that, uh, the word anti-racist means

01:02:41.060 more than one thing and that that's deliberate. Uh, secondly, just to give you some context,

01:02:46.260 this is a deliberate strategy that has been used by radical left activists for a very long time.

01:02:53.300 To give you the context for that, I've shared this actually on Twitter the other day,

01:02:56.660 the screenshot from it. If you look, there's a woman, Dr. Bella Dodd, she was a member of the

01:03:01.060 Communist Party USA in the 1930s and 40s. In 1953, she was brought- she had- she actually, uh, left the

01:03:07.860 Communist Party and in 1953, she was brought before the House Committee on American Activities

01:03:13.300 and testified about what the Communist Party was doing and how it did all these different things

01:03:17.380 and what its different goals were. But one of the things she says in there, and I shared the quote

01:03:21.060 on Twitter, so I can share it again at any time, is that, um, the Communist Party used the agenda of

01:03:28.660 dressing up its activism in high-minded and high-value terms. And she specifically says that they branded

01:03:36.020 themselves at the time as the anti-fascists. So that if you came out as anti-communist,

01:03:40.900 they would say that must mean you're pro-fascist. And this- as stupid as that argument is, it works.

01:03:47.140 It worked then, it's working again now. You hear it on- on social media all the time,

01:03:52.740 Antifa burns down the city, half the people on the- on the, um, the internet are like, well,

01:03:58.260 if you're against Antifa, then you're anti-anti-fascists. You must be pro-fascists.

01:04:02.420 Exactly. This is a deliberate communist strategy that's been working since the 1930s.

01:04:07.060 And anti-racism is actually the same thing. If you're against anti-racism, you must be racist,

01:04:11.780 right? No, they've redefined the term. So there's two meanings, right? You could be,

01:04:16.260 just like with anti-fascists, you could actually be against fascism, or you could be a communist

01:04:20.580 that's calling themselves anti-fascists. In this case, you could be somebody who's against racism,

01:04:24.820 or you could be a critical race theorist, um, who's claimed the mantle of anti-racism. And it's two

01:04:30.180 different terms. And the critical race theory one describes itself as a lifelong commitment

01:04:35.620 to an ongoing process of self-reflection, self-critique and social activism, which is

01:04:40.340 probably not what you thought of when you heard, you know, well, I'm against racism. Um, it's a very

01:04:46.340 different thing. It is, it is also a no middle ground. Uh, it's a very, uh, Manichian kind of

01:04:52.100 situation because they tell you explicitly that there is no neutral. You can either be racist or anti-racist.

01:04:57.700 So my camera died, but we are back. And I wanted to mention the fact that you're a liberal, a classic,

01:05:06.500 a classical liberal, and an atheist. And obviously for my subscribers and followers who know me,

01:05:13.300 they know that I'm conservative and a religious Jew. And I think it's really important that you and I

01:05:18.740 can communicate despite being on different sides of the aisle. Something I say on my channel all the

01:05:24.100 time is that it's important to engage with people who disagree with you by understanding that there

01:05:28.260 are some fundamental basics that we agree on. And I try to just draw a distinction between

01:05:35.220 wokists, leftists, and liberals. I'd love it if you could draw that distinction for my,

01:05:40.500 for my subscribers also. Yeah. I mean, what you said is true.

01:05:45.060 We all need to be communicating with one another. Uh, as far as like the woke thing goes, you do have

01:05:49.940 to understand in some sense that this is like the asteroid is coming and it's probably better if

01:05:54.420 everybody who can recognize that as an asteroid can, can not make other differences that they have

01:06:00.020 quite so loud and maybe focus on the problem at hand. Uh, but that said, that also reveals like a

01:06:07.860 lot of friendship, a lot of common ground that for the last decade or two, we've kind of forgotten

01:06:12.180 that we have with one another. Um, I find a lot of reasons to get along very well with conservatives

01:06:18.500 and also with libertarians and with religious people, whether Christian or Jew or Muslim or

01:06:24.020 whatever that has absolutely, you know, like living life, basic values, understanding, you know,

01:06:29.460 the functions of society. And it's, there's so many places that there's connection to be made.

01:06:35.380 And then it gets even more complicated though, because these ideas, like you said, of, of wokeness,

01:06:39.860 leftism and liberalism are actually not the same thing. You can actually be a liberal and be,

01:06:47.620 that this is going to blow people's mind, but in the classical sense, the actual definition

01:06:50.980 of liberalism, which waves a gold flag in case you wondered why the one with the snake on it,

01:06:54.740 it's yellow. Uh, the, the liberalism is a separate thing entirely. Um, classical liberalism,

01:07:01.940 but you can be conservative or on the left. So you can be on the right, I should say, or on the left

01:07:08.660 or in the center and still be a liberal. Yeah. I don't know if you can technically be a phone,

01:07:11.620 formally a conservative and to be a liberal, those things might be antagonistic, but classical

01:07:16.180 liberalism is basically the view that's enshrined in the, enshrined in the, uh, Declaration of

01:07:21.940 Independence and the documents surrounding that. It's a focus on, on individualism, on individual

01:07:27.540 rights, on rights preceding the state is being secured by states, but not granted by states, uh,

01:07:33.860 favors merit. It favors the idea that there's an objective reality that we can know something

01:07:37.940 about, that we can use reason to try to get to that, that we can rely on empiricism to do a better

01:07:43.380 job of it. Um, these are the kinds of values that reside, that has rule of law. The idea is that we

01:07:49.540 should have a law that's separate from the people. It's nobody's whim. When you go to court, um,

01:07:57.300 judge doesn't decide what he thinks is right or wrong in a situation. It's his job to defer to the,

01:08:01.700 to the statutes as they're written. And so it's separate from people. And so the idea was to take

01:08:07.940 the caprice of individuals or rulers in particular out of the organization and operation of civil

01:08:14.500 society in order to, um, safeguard the liberties. So it's the liberal and liberties, same root word

01:08:23.220 of people. So of, of, of every, of every citizen. So this is, this is a big philosophy with a lot of

01:08:29.620 room. Most people who identify in the United States, anywhere on the spectrum are probably

01:08:36.180 more liberal than they're not. And I'm not playing some word game. I'm saying that other people have

01:08:40.260 played word games and identified, you know, team Democrat with the word liberal, which isn't even

01:08:46.020 correct. There are some. I just want to briefly say in one of my videos, I said classic, classical

01:08:53.460 liberal ideals describing my views and people were like liberal, really? And it was exactly what you're,

01:09:00.660 what you're saying and what you're describing. Yeah. This is the thing is it's like liberalism is a

01:09:06.340 very broad philosophy. And then there are reasons that it does make sense to tie not great, not

01:09:13.780 totally like, aha, you know, nail in the coffin kind of reasons, but there are reasons why the left

01:09:19.860 is identified with liberalism versus conservatism on the right. And the, that reason is because there is

01:09:26.820 this idea general with the left of expanding that, which is the range of affairs or being more liberal

01:09:35.460 with spending being more, more, more forthcoming with public spending and therefore with taxation.

01:09:41.460 Those are actually things that fit another definition of the word liberal. You have multiple

01:09:45.540 definitions a lot of times playing here. Leftism is generally speaking, the idea that left politics

01:09:51.780 are correct and that they should be advocated for and pushed. That's also a pretty broad tent. It

01:09:56.980 obviously would exclude all conservatives and all people on the right by its very nature. There are

01:10:01.780 leftists who fall within the liberal paradigm, some of whom are actually progressive.

01:10:07.700 Generally, I would say that leftism though is a fairly, you got to have a, have a pretty good eye

01:10:13.300 on it, but communists would be leftists, old school progressives would be leftists, left liberals

01:10:19.300 would be leftists, and the woke as kind of this other new entity are also leftists, but they're a very

01:10:25.860 specific type of leftist, which is this, like we talked about, you know, awakening to this particular

01:10:30.900 kind of critical consciousness about how the world works, and they happen to be very authoritarian

01:10:35.140 type of leftist. So, you know, leftists can be more or less liberal or libertarian in their orientation,

01:10:44.340 and if they're more, generally we reserve the word leftism, although it doesn't have to mean that to be

01:10:50.180 very specifically authoritarian approaches to left politics. And then, because usually that's what ism applies,

01:10:57.140 we might say that somebody who's conservative is on the right, but we wouldn't call them a rightist,

01:11:00.980 unless they were rather authoritarian about it. Same thing with left, it can be on the left,

01:11:05.940 and the more authoritarian you get, the more likely the word leftist is going to stick to you. And then

01:11:10.660 woke is a very specific form of very virulent, very totalitarian leftism within that, and it means that

01:11:18.980 you're aware of these, you know, power dynamics and thinking everything in terms of systemic power,

01:11:23.700 especially as related to identity categories, with the objective of magically ending those by

01:11:30.660 completely uprooting the entire society.

01:11:32.900 Mm-hmm. Okay. So that's good to know your perspective on it, because I know that on my

01:11:39.380 channel I've used leftist and wokeist generally a little bit more interchangeably, but you're saying

01:11:44.340 it's a little bit more like a rhombus and a square?

01:11:46.820 Yeah, yeah. It's kind of, it's really complicated too, because people vary on different issues,

01:11:51.780 right? You know, there's people kind of awakening to the idea that they're fairly socially liberal,

01:11:57.860 but they're rather fiscally conservative. This is apparently a very popular thing right now.

01:12:02.340 Yes.

01:12:02.980 And when I think about the different dimensions of these things, I can kind of like play that game,

01:12:09.140 and I understand it's like I'm moderately liberal fiscally, I'm much more liberal socially,

01:12:16.100 probably, probably much more open liberal or liberalist, not even leftist though, because

01:12:23.620 leftism is too far for me in terms of social issues, but you know, there's all different dimensions,

01:12:29.940 usually social and cultural or social and economic are the two that most people think about and talk

01:12:34.100 about. And those politics also, probably more centrist, where it gets to things like economics

01:12:40.660 and gets things like politics. And socially, though, it's like, yeah, do whatever you want,

01:12:44.900 don't hurt anybody, you know, very like, if it's your life, and you're not imposing on anybody else,

01:12:50.980 you want to identify as whatever you want to identify as you want to have whatever sexuality you

01:12:55.620 want to have, and you keep that to yourself and don't force other people to participate in it.

01:12:59.620 Good for you. I'm glad you're happy.

01:13:01.300 Right, right. It reminds me of Jonathan, Jonathan Haidt's book, I'm sure you've read it or heard of

01:13:06.020 it, The Righteous Mind. I've talked about it on my channel a bit and just kind of defining the

01:13:11.380 differences between conservatives and, and liberals, and whatever, maybe liberals, leftists,

01:13:17.300 whichever word you want to use, and kind of their view of the world. But I also wanted to briefly

01:13:23.940 kind of change topics a bit and say, I know you changed your mind about Trump during the election,

01:13:31.860 because you saw that he was useful for pushing back the woke tide. Even, even though I'm not like

01:13:37.300 the biggest Trump fan, I do think he was, he did some good things and some useful things,

01:13:41.540 personally, that's my own opinion. In fighting the woke, have you changed your mind about the right

01:13:48.740 and its ideas beyond thinking that conservatives or Trump are useful for fighting this huge threat?

01:13:54.420 Is there more to that? Or, yeah, what do you think?

01:13:56.900 There's more to both of those things, actually. So with Trump, it's probably,

01:14:00.180 I'm probably a bigger Trump fan than you are.

01:14:01.780 I actually, well, I don't know if it's Trump specifically, I've become quite enamored with the,

01:14:07.220 not the crazy movement, but the idea behind the movement of MAGA. So I do tend to describe myself

01:14:13.460 as fairly MAGA. I do hesitate on that last day, because I know that the, there is a little bit of,

01:14:19.060 like, stinky stuff going on in that again, right? I don't really want to harken back to

01:14:25.380 the good old days or whatever, that part of it. But I do worry about the direction America is headed,

01:14:31.460 and so there is, and I think that it's already taken many steps in the wrong direction down that

01:14:35.700 road. So again, does apply. As far as Trump goes, here's what happened. Well,

01:14:40.260 I didn't decide to support Trump. I was going to vote for myself.

01:14:45.220 I figured people asked me why, and I said, because I don't want the job. And as far as I can tell,

01:14:49.540 that's the best qualifier for having the job that you could possibly come up with. And so I was going

01:14:55.940 to vote for myself because I knew very early, based on all of the woke stuff, I wouldn't be able to vote

01:15:00.980 for Biden and seeing how they were already leaning. The Democratic Party was leaning into that.

01:15:05.220 People were saying pandering. It was much more than pandering. It was explicitly parts of, like,

01:15:10.580 pillars of their program that they were, the racial equity programs that they were laying out and so

01:15:15.620 on. I was like, I can't vote for Biden, but I can't vote for Trump. And that was most of my 2020.

01:15:21.700 And then by October, I decided I have to vote for Trump because people on the Democratic side went way too

01:15:28.900 far with certain things. They were talking about packing the courts. They were talking about,

01:15:34.820 you know, people are writing articles. I know it's not like Joe Biden, but people are articles,

01:15:38.580 like in seriousness, publishing them saying maybe we should abolish the Constitution. And it's like,

01:15:42.420 okay, the left is just too far. Their slope is actually slippery over there. Not all slopes are

01:15:47.140 slippery, but I think every slope that points left is slippery right now. Like real slippery, like

01:15:52.900 lubed up slippery. And it's like, uh-uh, not going there. And so, um, it's like the time when we

01:16:00.820 figured out to put like vegetable oil on our slip and slide and then turn the hose on when we were

01:16:04.660 kids. It was like, you know, it was like we had like back to the future flames coming off of us as

01:16:09.780 we just scraped through the grass for half a mile on the hill. Of course.

01:16:14.260 Yeah. Well, when we figured out to put the pledge that would polish, we'd spray the floor with that

01:16:20.580 and then the dog would hit it. It looked like Scooby Doo, like the legs going, the dog going nowhere.

01:16:27.380 It's like that's kind of slippery. Not good. And so, I had to vote for Trump. But what happened

01:16:33.380 actually was before that, it's sometime over the middle of the summer, I started to realize how much

01:16:37.940 people were lying about him. And then something started to change. And it went from me listening to

01:16:42.580 Trump and spending three years, three and a half years, horrified every time the man spoke,

01:16:46.580 as far as I could tell, to doing two different things. One, actually listening to him rather than

01:16:51.460 listening to what I got served up in 30 seconds or a minute and a half sound bites, actually listening

01:16:56.900 to the whole speech. And secondly, I realized I was laughing all the time. It was like, I went from

01:17:01.140 horror to laughter. And my wife actually realized it and what it meant first. And she was like,

01:17:07.620 we think he's funny now, you know, something has changed. And so, I got actually kind of very

01:17:13.300 positive about that. And I decided while I don't think he's the ideal individual, and he's probably

01:17:17.780 not even the ideal executive, in some very perverse and stupid way, he's sort of the right guy for the

01:17:25.060 time. And so, I became something actually legitimately of a supporter of his in that regard. Now, regarding the

01:17:31.140 right, I have actually increased my depth of understanding, I had a very left wing understanding

01:17:36.420 of conservatism, before probably early 2019. And I started actually spending time with conservatives,

01:17:43.220 found myself in a lot of conservative spaces, and I decided that the right thing to do, shocker,

01:17:47.940 listen to this, get ready, I know, was listen to people and hear them on their own terms and try to

01:17:54.180 understand what they were saying, instead of just arguing with it. Like,

01:17:57.860 can I make the argument back from a conservative perspective, even if I don't agree with it? Can I

01:18:05.060 comprehend the issue the way that a Christian sees it, or the way that a Jew sees it, or the way,

01:18:10.020 you know, a conservative religious Jew or Christian? Can I understand, you know, how does this violate

01:18:17.300 the gospel for a Christian? Can I understand how this goes against the religious duty for whoever?

01:18:24.340 Trying to actually understand it. And I was like, Oh, wow, there's a lot more that I understood only

01:18:28.340 a straw man of this stuff before. And so there's a lot more depth, this is actually, you know,

01:18:33.540 not as it's characterized. And in the process, not only have I feel like I've dramatically increased my

01:18:40.580 depth of understanding of crucial issues, and gained an appreciation for right wing thought,

01:18:45.860 some of which I agree with some of which I don't. But I've made a bunch of friends, mostly on this

01:18:54.420 bizarre basis of a friendship of, you respect what I actually think and listen to me. What a weird

01:19:00.900 thing, right? It's like you wanted to hear me on my own terms and consider it, you know, with no obligation

01:19:07.620 to agree, but you actually wanted to listen. And to do my diligence to represent that view correctly,

01:19:17.460 and to ask, I mean, it sounds very religious when I talk, but then to ask in humility to be

01:19:22.420 corrected when I don't have it quite right. Like, I don't have to agree with something to be able to

01:19:27.300 represent it correctly. Absolutely. And so that's been sort of the project for

01:19:33.940 two years that's now got me named every possible evil, horrible name that you can think of on the

01:19:39.300 internet. I was going to say, we'll get to one briefly. But yeah, I think that one was mostly

01:19:47.540 the result of misunderstanding something or not yet understanding something as well. But there's

01:19:51.780 another layer to it. So we can talk about that in a minute. Yeah, no, I think that I have a

01:19:56.660 the idea that somebody would just like, oh, well, we have to have like a dirty cobelligerent alliance

01:20:01.460 because the asteroid's coming. Like, that's like level one of many, many more deep layers of value

01:20:09.620 and connection that are available by this radical idea of listening to people and trying to represent

01:20:15.300 their thought accurately. And realizing that there are things to put ahead of the argument. Sometimes

01:20:22.500 you can just know that you disagree with somebody and enjoy the margaritas anyway.

01:20:26.900 Exactly. Oh my gosh, I have one of my best friends ever is very much to the left of me.

01:20:34.340 Um, and when we talk, we can disagree, we could straight up disagree about something,

01:20:39.220 and that's okay. Or we can just not talk about the stuff that we really disagree about. And that's

01:20:43.780 also fine. And I went to, uh, you know, I did my all of my degrees in opera. And so I was in probably

01:20:51.780 the most leftist or wokest, however you want to describe it, uh, environment there could be,

01:20:58.820 at least at the time I was in school. And the, I was just among that for years. And, uh, a few videos

01:21:08.180 ago, someone asked me in a Q&A if I was ever leftist. And I said, I think briefly I was because

01:21:13.060 you're surrounded by this thought all the time and you're not really getting any, any response

01:21:19.940 unless you yourself go out and search it. And so for a while, I could understand every argument

01:21:27.620 for the other side of things. And that has given me a better understanding of my,

01:21:32.180 of now being a conservative and having done the research, why I think the things that I think.

01:21:38.500 Like it's not just coming from a position of, oh, I grew up this way and this is what people taught me.

01:21:44.340 That may have been what it was like as a child, but now as an adult, having been through a, an

01:21:51.060 education system and a group of friends that really believed pretty much the opposite of everything

01:21:56.180 I grew up with. And then imbibing that, I was able to say, okay, so what, which of these things do I

01:22:02.180 want to, do I want to understand and maybe stick with? Which, which of these things do I want to,

01:22:08.020 you know, do research and understand more the other side? And as I did more research, I did find that my

01:22:13.220 views were more conservative, but I understood what the other side was saying. And I can understand why

01:22:18.500 people would think the things that they think. And it doesn't mean that, and that makes everything

01:22:23.460 better. It means that when you're actually having a conversation, you're not just there to be like,

01:22:26.660 here's how I can really win this argument. Yeah. It switches from like dueling monologues to actual

01:22:33.780 dialogue. It's really, it's really good. Yeah. And my husband always says it's important to have

01:22:38.580 those conversations because you want to have pushback on either side. So you get to the pinnacle of, okay,

01:22:43.140 here's what the best thing really is, as opposed to, you know, I just want conservative and you're digging into

01:22:49.060 the mountain or I just want left, you know, liberal and I'm digging into the mountain. Yeah, that's a good

01:22:54.580 way to put it. So talking about being name called a few weeks ago, there was a Twitter drama storm

01:23:04.340 based on some comments you made about how critical theory is dangerous for Jews. Based on my experience

01:23:09.380 as a Jew and receiving threats from the worst of the right and the left, I knew exactly what you were

01:23:15.220 talking about. And I, in one second knew that you were not anti-Semitic. And even though you were

01:23:20.340 called anti-Semitic, it was ridiculous to me and very frustrating. And honestly, that was the impetus

01:23:25.780 for me to have you on my channel because I wanted, I wanted to talk about this. I thought this was so

01:23:30.420 silly. So can you explain what your point was as you meant to communicate it? And can you explain what

01:23:37.060 happened with the way you said it originally and how people took that to accuse you of anti-Semitism?

01:23:42.100 Yes. So there, I did play into a trope because partly, and this is actually a very general phenomenon.

01:23:52.340 I'm very, I'm very interested in this phenomenon. So pardon the tangent for a moment, which is that

01:24:01.940 perfect means of communication. It is structurally a horrific means of communication. When you try to

01:24:06.580 cram a complicated idea into 280 characters, you cannot possibly articulate it correctly, especially

01:24:15.780 in this case, which was an idea with three layers to it. And so that's, it does a lot of things. One of

01:24:24.340 the things that won't go into the rabbit hole of this, but is that it does condition us to be used to

01:24:30.740 truncated communication without nuance. We don't expect anymore because of things like Twitter to

01:24:36.500 have to read a long argument explaining something. If you can't express it in 280 characters, then it's not

01:24:41.860 there. So what I had done is I was actually having a conversation. I know that you're not allowed to have

01:24:46.820 friends anymore, but I have a Jewish friend and I was happy. I know I have Jewish friends. I'm not anti-Semitic.

01:24:55.380 So I was having a conversation with a Jewish friend of mine and telling her experience that I had had,

01:25:03.060 and it was a recent experience. And then it meshed with something that was happening on Twitter a lot.

01:25:07.780 So what I had actually tweeted was that I saw that anti-Semitism is on the rise again. And I said that

01:25:13.940 there is a new strain that's rising virulently in the woke left under critical race theory.

01:25:22.500 And then I used the wrong word. I said normal when I meant usual. There's the background anti-Semitism

01:25:30.260 from the right that we shouldn't be accustomed to, but we all kind of already know is there,

01:25:35.220 right? So it was the normal, I called it normal, but that was a bad word choice apparently. And then

01:25:42.020 there is a new anti-Semitism on the right that's particularly virulent, that's arising as a

01:25:46.740 reaction to seeing what I called nonsensically woke Jews. And I think nonsensically woke needs to be

01:25:53.300 unpacked because critical race theory is actually anti-Semitic in its orientation. It actually is.

01:25:59.220 It says that Jews, first of all, it separates Jews, I should say, into white Jews and Jews of color,

01:26:05.460 which is already separating Jews, which can't possibly be good. And then secondly, white Jews

01:26:13.220 are to recognize that they are white and white is the thing that has privilege. Now, I don't know a

01:26:19.700 ton about all of this, but anti-Semitism is not actually a form of racism as much as it is a conspiracy

01:26:25.780 theory that Jews are hoarding resources and power and that they've used privilege. And so when you start

01:26:30.820 telling Jews that they are in the privileged category, and then if you read the book, like there are

01:26:36.100 books about this, like how Jews became white, they talk about how Jews, basically they argue that Jews

01:26:43.860 threw black people under the bus so that they could be designated as white and have white privilege

01:26:48.580 given to them. And then when they get accused of white privilege, they hide behind the Holocaust

01:26:53.220 and say that, you know, well, I can't possibly be privileged because of this. And a bit nonsensical

01:27:02.740 for Jews to subscribe to woke ideology because it is actually anti-Semitic. And that's without even

01:27:08.180 getting into the rampant anti-Zionism. Like it's the most virulent anti-Zionism outside of straight up

01:27:14.420 Islamism in the world. It is intense anti-Zionism. Now it's, for them, Israel is a settler colonialist

01:27:24.420 project. It's been compared to, it's literally been compared to the Nazis. It should be wiped off

01:27:29.140 the face of the earth. It's not good. Really not good. So this is, it's like, it doesn't really make

01:27:34.660 any sense for Jews to be woke. So that was the nonsensically woke part. But this part that really

01:27:40.580 blew everybody up as if there was a new anti-Semitism arising, an extra anti-Semitism

01:27:44.660 arising on the right that wasn't there before. Here's why. This is why I said this. What I had

01:27:49.220 noticed, first of all, there's a conversation and we'll come back to that that triggered it. But

01:27:52.500 before that, when you talk about critical theory a lot and you criticize critical theory a lot,

01:27:58.260 these right-wingers, most people don't realize this, all of the major critical theorists may be minus

01:28:03.940 one or two were Jewish. They were German Jews. They escaped Germany when the Nazis started to take

01:28:12.740 over. They fled to Geneva briefly, then the United States. And they are, they are Jewish thinkers. Now,

01:28:18.820 of course, so is Milton Friedman, who wasn't exactly on board with their project, but the critical

01:28:24.980 theorists were Jewish. One of the earliest critical theorists, whose name was Walter Benjamin,

01:28:30.180 a lot of his stuff was rooted in Jewish mysticism. So they're, in some cases, actually religiously

01:28:36.580 Jewish in a weird way. And so there are a lot of people who then reply to me with,

01:28:45.220 why don't you take the, I get this all the time, why won't you take the last step? For them,

01:28:49.860 the idea is critical theory is Jewish theory. It's not that these people are communists, it's that

01:28:55.620 they're Jews. That's the problem. And they're mad at me because I won't take the last step.

01:28:59.460 That's what they call it. Take the last step. And they're very angry at me because I won't actually

01:29:03.940 fall into the anti-Semitism that they are in. But this is increasing because people are tracing

01:29:09.460 backwards and seeing that the critical theory did arise from Jewish thinkers. And then they,

01:29:16.260 rather than paying attention to the relevant variable, which is communism,

01:29:19.940 they're paying attention to the Jewish variable. And then beyond that, they're like now saying communism

01:29:27.620 equals Jewish. You know, it's like somehow, which again, doesn't make any sense. Some of

01:29:32.180 the most vigorous thinkers who came out against critical theory and communism first and earliest

01:29:37.780 and most passionately and most effectively were Jews. And it's like, none of this makes sense,

01:29:41.540 but this is the way that they think. And they want, I'm getting constantly told that I have to take

01:29:45.940 this last step. And for what it's worth, when I notice this, I don't notice most of my notifications

01:29:49.940 because I get tens of thousands a day and I just miss most of them. But I block those people.

01:29:57.700 I don't even block the woke that fast. I block those people the first time I see it. Like,

01:30:01.780 I just don't need any of this in my life. So then I end up going to this event and I'm talking to some

01:30:06.900 people and there's a guy at the table with me and he's like saying this same stuff. He's like,

01:30:11.140 I traced it back. The critical theorists were all Jews. It's time we just started to admit.

01:30:15.380 And then he's like, you know, basically repeating straight up like Nazi level antisemitism because

01:30:22.420 it was bad enough for what I literally said to him. I was like, dude, that is Hitler's stuff.

01:30:27.140 And his response to me was Hitler knew how to get rid of communists. At least he knew how to stop

01:30:31.220 the communists. And I was like, this is bad. And so I'm trying to like literally intervene with this

01:30:35.300 guy. I'm trying to like talk him down and talk him back from actual antisemitism. Then he starts

01:30:40.500 explaining to me that I am essentially too sympathetic to Jews and a liberal in the classical

01:30:47.380 sense. And therefore, in that I'm not an illiberal will eventually need personally to, they said,

01:30:54.660 you talked about useful, right? He said that I'm very useful to his movement right now, but in the end,

01:31:00.180 I will have to be done away with or forcibly converted too. And I was like, even the other people

01:31:05.700 from table to table were kind of like shocked, always one other person, you know, like, what is

01:31:10.260 this? You know, like we got, who's this little, like, who's this little Nazi, like for real. And

01:31:17.460 I asked him how convinced he was like, how, how strongly do you believe this stuff that you're

01:31:23.220 saying right now? Are you just kind of talking? How strongly do you believe what you're saying? And

01:31:27.620 he said he was as in his exact words, or I'm as convicted as a suicide bomber. And I was like,

01:31:33.620 whoa, you know, and now this wasn't, I wasn't at like a dive bar with like militia dudes. It's like,

01:31:40.980 you know, that's not what I was hanging out with this. These were people who are in professional

01:31:45.540 positions saying this. And I was like, this is concerning. And so I'm telling my Jewish friend

01:31:50.340 the story about this and how it links up to what I keep seeing on Twitter, you know, take the last step,

01:31:54.020 take the last step. They're in my DMs all the time too. And I block them there too. You know,

01:31:57.860 take the last step, finally, just take it, admit that it's Jews that are the problem and will never solve the

01:32:02.340 problem until we solve the Jewish problem. It's like Jesus. And so, I mean, I don't know if that's

01:32:07.860 the right exclamation for the show, but, but then I was like, I should, I should tweet about this.

01:32:14.980 And then my friend was like, you should. No, apparently I should not. But no, I think it's

01:32:21.460 really important. People do need to understand that there is a, there is a rising antisemitism

01:32:27.060 that was not previously present. Not that the problem is ever justifiable, but there's a rising

01:32:32.980 antisemitism both on the left and on the right. And they're both rooted in the same thing, which is

01:32:38.980 critical theory. And then the reactionary reaction to critical theory. My actual point was that

01:32:43.300 reactionaries aren't exactly precise in their, their, their criticism. And so when progressive

01:32:50.740 and even outright woke Jews are out here like pushing this stuff, it's like, you, you don't

01:32:55.780 understand what's coming. And then all my conservative Jew friend, Jewish friends are reaching out to me

01:33:00.660 and they're like, we're the ones who are going to get beat up. I had a bunch of like rabbis and stuff

01:33:05.460 that are, you know, visibly Jewish. They, you know, they, the whole thing, Orthodox. And they're like,

01:33:11.220 who do you think gets attacked physically in New York City when this happens?

01:33:15.460 And they, they're like, it's us who gets beat up while they're like, not me or whatever. And so

01:33:20.100 they're all, you know, very sensitive. They understood what was going on.

01:33:22.740 And understanding antisemitism, especially if it's kind of

01:33:27.300 changing its strain as of right now is incredibly important. And the idea that you would put down,

01:33:35.220 you would put the idea down before it's even able to be discussed, to me was, it was so frustrating

01:33:43.460 because it's, this is useful. This conversation needs to be had and not having this come. Yes. And

01:33:50.100 having this conversation.

01:33:51.140 It's the same strain. Yes. It's the same strain as 1933. Yeah. It is a strain that is not new to the

01:33:59.380 world, but it is new to our time. Correct. And it's coming up for the same reason, because those were,

01:34:06.020 same dynamic was playing out then against the communists at the same time. And so it is,

01:34:13.060 we've seen what that strain of antisemitism can, can turn into. Meanwhile, you have the other side,

01:34:18.420 the woke side, literally saying, oh, Jews need to recognize their white privilege. And

01:34:24.660 you need to recognize yourselves as white. And it's like, this is a recipe. These concepts have

01:34:32.340 bad conclusions. And, you know, we've got to take them seriously. And if I had to pick, you know,

01:34:39.140 when you're going to nip something like that in the bud sooner rather than later, because it's scary

01:34:45.540 stuff. So I decided to speak up about it. And I will continue to speak up about it. I'll probably

01:34:49.220 try to be a little more careful. But apparently what I fell into was the blaming Jews for antisemitism

01:34:55.620 trope, which isn't quite what I had intended. You were not doing that. You were not doing that.

01:35:00.980 And it's... No, I was blaming reactionaries for not understanding what's going on,

01:35:04.500 at least as far as I thought. But I'm not really particularly happy with anybody being woke.

01:35:08.740 And... Right. Well, and I think that there's an issue, right, with

01:35:13.220 Judaism has so many different parts to it. It's something I actually did a video about on my

01:35:18.180 channel where I talked about how there's... You can be a Jewish atheist. You can be born Jewish,

01:35:24.500 you can be culturally Jewish, and not be religiously Jewish. And there are Jews who

01:35:31.860 kind of treat wokeism as their religion. And that's also very confusing for people who don't know

01:35:38.180 Jews and don't know the differentiation between all the different kinds of Jewish you can be.

01:35:42.580 And all they're seeing are celebrity Jews who are not really keeping Jewish law or are religiously

01:35:49.780 Jewish, who are very openly Jews, who then spout woke ideas. Then you're getting... Again,

01:35:56.420 it's a very confusing... It's a very confusing topic even for people who know Jews to recognize that

01:36:02.740 Judaism has, you know, a cultural and ethnic... It's cultural, it's ethnic, it's a religion.

01:36:08.340 Yeah. And I don't think people realize how bad it is in critical race theory. Like I mentioned that

01:36:12.340 in that book, How Jews Became White, that they claim that Jews threw black people under the bus

01:36:16.340 to gain white privilege. But then they go on and argue, and explicitly... See if you've ever heard

01:36:21.620 this kind of thought before. This is in a woke book about critical race theory in Jews. And they say,

01:36:27.060 they argue explicitly that what is by Brodkins, her last name, I can't think of her first name,

01:36:31.780 it's like from the 90s, argue explicitly that then Jews, after obtaining white privilege, went on to

01:36:38.580 take all the positions of cultural power and authority and to start to dictate what whiteness

01:36:43.700 actually is. They became the setters of white culture. It's like, that's the thesis of Mein Kampf, man.

01:36:50.580 Right. What are we doing here? Why do you think that paper apparently worked? That is the same thesis.

01:36:57.540 And this is alarming. And I tried to... It's like, nobody understands, nobody will listen,

01:37:03.060 and then I get called names. Granted, maybe I didn't say it the way it needed to be said

01:37:07.700 for everybody's sensibilities. It's like, that's, that's, you know, that's a real book. And it's not

01:37:13.780 published by like some like fringe press, I'd have to check, but I think it's published by an academic

01:37:18.100 press. And it's like that art. Yeah, I saw your eyes. That argument has been made before. It's

01:37:24.500 like they've got into all the power positions of power and cultural institutions and have set the

01:37:29.060 tone for what dominant culture looks like, who the Jews, and then, then they hide behind. That's the

01:37:34.820 new aspect of the argument. They hide behind the Holocaust to deny that they can, they refuse to

01:37:41.220 recognize themselves as privileged, or maybe even the most privileged members of society who have hoarded

01:37:47.700 resources away from black people in order to reach that. I mean, this... Which is also so upsetting

01:37:52.420 because we marched along with blacks when we were, when they were fighting for their equal rights. That

01:37:58.260 was like part of, that was huge. The Jewish community was very involved in that. So it's very fresh.

01:38:03.380 That's a very frustrating twist on history. Right. And then it's like, like, it will not be the,

01:38:08.980 the reactionaries will, as we noted, will not dole this out appropriately either. They're

01:38:16.980 right. The wrath will find, it's like, you know, a number of years ago, there was a shooting

01:38:21.860 of some Sikhs because people were mad at Muslims and like they didn't know the difference between

01:38:25.140 Sikhs and Muslims, uh, stupid reactionary hillbillies. Same thing. So the people are going to get whacked

01:38:30.900 over the head, probably literally over this, or people who are going to be, you know, the full out

01:38:35.700 orthodox in New York or somebody wearing a yarmulke, um, just going about their everyday business has

01:38:43.220 nothing to do with any of this might be anti-woke himself. And that's who's going to get it because,

01:38:50.660 you know, the simple visible target is the thing that reactionary, my whole point all along is that

01:38:56.660 reactionaries are not, well, some of them are actually quite intelligent. They're not terribly nuanced.

01:39:01.220 Right. No, I mean, I think it was a really important point to make and I think people should

01:39:08.100 be more, everyone knows exactly as you mentioned that Twitter is not, is not the best place to put

01:39:14.740 out ideas. So if you know a person and you know their ideas, I think that kind of giving them the

01:39:20.820 benefit of the doubt in a situation where you have, like you said, 280 characters to make a point,

01:39:26.340 I think would have been a useful, a useful, uh, sense of judgment. There would have been

01:39:33.700 especially like, I didn't think there was anything wrong with your initial tweet,

01:39:36.660 but if you did have an issue. Yeah. But if you did have an issue with your initial tweet,

01:39:41.060 I just think to myself, you know, who James Lindsay is, why would you jump to that conclusion?

01:39:47.620 Yeah. So, I mean, somebody, uh, what's her name? I have the book somewhere nearby. It's a

01:39:53.220 neuroscience that I'm looking at and probably is in this room. It is, uh,

01:39:57.620 college wrote, wrote a book about neuroscience. Thank you.

01:40:09.940 I'm going to troll about where my apologies are because I've still got zero of them.

01:40:15.780 I know. I've seen that no one has apologized to you yet and I am not.

01:40:19.460 I shouldn't say that though, just to be fair, people with smaller accounts have,

01:40:24.340 but nobody that has, you know, a really big account or especially one of those dreaded blue

01:40:29.380 checks that makes you, uh, makes you more different. Um, none of those people have apologized. Zero.

01:40:38.260 Yeah. Makes sense. Unfortunately. So I wanted to ask you about how to navigate

01:40:48.020 this woke world that we're pretty much living in. Uh, I would say that we're all living in it now.

01:40:53.700 Um, how can the people who are against wokeism, how can they defend against it personally and fight

01:41:02.020 against it in a bigger sense? Yeah. So the practical one is a little easier, um, to answer in terms of

01:41:09.460 what's required of somebody and it post seeds. Is that a word? Um, rather than pre-seeds, uh,

01:41:16.100 the, you have to get yourself right first. Jordan Peterson was actually right to say you have to

01:41:20.660 clean your room before you try to fix the world and in that sense. But, um, what you have to do

01:41:26.660 practically is you do have to stand up and resist. You do have to, when you know that something's not

01:41:33.460 right, you're going to be afraid, but you have to have the courage not to go along with it. You

01:41:37.860 have to say, no, that's not right. As the woke people used to say when they're much less scary

01:41:42.580 years ago, you have to call it out. You don't have to play vicious name and shame games and all of that,

01:41:47.860 but you have to be able to come in and you have to make the argument. And very specifically,

01:41:51.860 what I've said in the past is you have to be able to make both arguments because what they often have

01:41:57.140 is, you know, they get to play in this equivocation thing. They mean two things by anti-racist or

01:42:01.780 whatever. So you have to be able to articulate what anti-racism really looks like. And you have

01:42:06.180 to articulate why, what their version of anti-racism look like, looks like and why it's wrong. So you,

01:42:12.580 you have to be able to do both of those things and you typically are not going to achieve,

01:42:16.660 you have to understand if somebody is fully into this, it's cult deprogramming to get them out of it.

01:42:21.460 You're not talking as much to them as you are to the audience that's watching.

01:42:25.460 So that's sad to say, but it's, I, cult deprogramming is beyond my skill, but it's very

01:42:32.100 difficult for people who are fully in on this to back them back out. What do you have to do

01:42:38.740 personally though? And that's much more important is you actually need to spend time. This is a very

01:42:43.620 conservative thing. It's funny. You have to spend time getting to know who you are and what your

01:42:48.020 principles are, where they come from and why they're the right ones. This is something conservative

01:42:52.420 generally in many cases for a long time. You have to understand why you believe, not just that you

01:43:00.180 believe that people are individuals and that racism is intolerable because it's a bad thing,

01:43:06.900 one individual to another, or it's even worse when it's so unfair to bake it into an institution.

01:43:13.460 You have to understand where your principles that, where they came from, why they matter.

01:43:18.820 You have to actually, this is something usually, like I said, the conservatives are very good at.

01:43:22.100 You have to get in touch with those. And then the second thing you have to do

01:43:24.980 is you have to regain confidence in those. This sounds silly, like, oh, I'm just offering magic

01:43:32.020 spells. No, this is a magic spell. The thing that they're most against is chauvinism. They try to

01:43:37.060 characterize confidence in your principles as chauvinism. And we all should be against chauvinism.

01:43:42.260 We should remember our humility. But basically, if you've ever watched a woke person go up against

01:43:47.140 a genuine chauvinist, they don't know what to do. And I don't mean necessarily a male chauvinist.

01:43:50.740 Think of a cultural chauvinist. Like, I've given the example because I know a Spaniard who is like,

01:43:56.820 Spain has never done anything wrong ever, right? Ever. Spain is the best thing that's ever happened.

01:44:02.100 And you just can picture, you know, this, you know, how dare you talk about Spain this way?

01:44:07.060 This very strong chauvinism, like, no, we're never wrong attitude. It actually withers to woke. They

01:44:12.980 don't know what to do with it. Shelby Steele, in his book, White Guilt, explains why. Wokeness is

01:44:18.900 actually, as a virus, what it does to get in is it actually, you know, your immune system is your

01:44:24.420 moral authority, your sense that you know who you are and that you're a good person. It might be your,

01:44:29.700 it's a little nerdy too, but it might be your epistemic authority that you know what you're

01:44:32.740 talking about. It likes to make people feel stupid. It likes to make people feel like bad people.

01:44:37.540 So if you can be certain that, no, I'm a good person, and what you're doing here is actually

01:44:42.740 a manipulation on that, it's shocking how well that works. If you can just be confident in yourself,

01:44:48.420 the second, this is the most important thing to start practicing with, is the second you feel

01:44:52.900 yourself slip into that kind of defensive, on your back foot, kind of apologetic, oh, well,

01:44:58.580 you know, Evan, you know, you start kind of stumbling around or you start feeling like you

01:45:02.980 need to defend yourself rather than just being prepped. No, like, actually, no, I have this right.

01:45:07.220 What are you talking about? Like, stop making me try, stop trying to make me question myself

01:45:11.380 on something I know I have right. The second you get on your back foot, that's their goal,

01:45:14.820 and that's their natural habitat, and that's how they win. If you want to resist it,

01:45:18.900 you have to do the work inside yourself. I hate to use their phrases, but you have to get inside

01:45:22.820 yourself and understand where your principles are, why you actually are good for holding those

01:45:28.100 principles, and to be, to find that ability to be unashamed. You remember the gay pride movement was

01:45:33.540 being unashamed of being gay. It really means not being abashed rather than being proud of.

01:45:39.780 Lie. I'm willing to take the risk to see, maybe it does cost me my job, but I'm going to be,

01:45:44.020 I'm going to be, I'm not going to compromise myself on the way. Those things actually do work.

01:45:48.180 They have no defense against that. Those are the biggest things you can do. You can also ask for

01:45:53.060 details and evidence, because they usually don't have either of those either. Those are kryptonite

01:45:57.860 to the woke movement. I mean, I think that's really great advice, and I think that,

01:46:03.540 I mean, it's something I had to do, was I wasn't being open about being publicly conservative, because

01:46:10.100 in the opera world, if I was, I would have been blacklisted and not been able to perform.

01:46:15.460 Luckily, with COVID-19, no one's performing, but luckily or unluckily, but you know, I wasn't,

01:46:21.460 it was something that I kind of knew. If I took this step, if I stood out and said like,

01:46:27.140 I have these conservative ideas, then I knew I wasn't going to get work. And it's been somewhat

01:46:33.380 true. I mean, I definitely haven't heard back from people that I've sent messages to who previously

01:46:39.220 would have, you know, sent me an email back or texted me. But I knew what I was doing was right,

01:46:47.460 and taking the stands I was taking, at least the ones, even if you disagree, they were right with

01:46:52.580 what I believe. And then especially the stuff that we're talking about today, woke ideology,

01:46:59.860 that was hugely important for me to talk about, especially given how much of it I had been living

01:47:06.100 among for seven years while I studied, and seeing that it was already infecting the places that I

01:47:12.820 was working. And it isn't easy, but I also tend to think that when you do take that stand,

01:47:22.020 you're going to be, you're going to end up in a more fulfilling life, because you're not

01:47:26.820 constantly feeling like you have to hide, and you have to not tell people what you actually believe.

01:47:33.460 So here's an interesting, an interesting practical point of practicality on that too.

01:47:38.900 So if you know a word like conservative, it is poisoned. There is this practical, like I should

01:47:45.060 be able to stand up for who I am and say who I am. And then there's this weird practical thing to it.

01:47:48.900 So this is a trick I learned from our good friend, Donald Trump, actually not Donald Trump,

01:47:54.500 Donald Trump's lawyers, not the ones that were on TV. So there's this executive order where he

01:47:59.700 served a critical race theory. That was a decisive moment for many people. It was significant in my

01:48:03.540 decision to want to vote for him last year. But if you read this critical, sorry, this executive

01:48:10.580 order against critical race theory, critical race theory is not in the executive order, right?

01:48:17.380 What it actually is, is about principles. Nobody is going to racially stereotype, scapegoat,

01:48:22.020 discriminate, call the country fundamental evil, etc. So you can, it may, I'm not saying anybody should

01:48:30.340 compromise on who they see themselves as. If you want to name yourself as a conservative, fine. If you

01:48:34.100 want to name yourself as, you know, religiously Jewish, that's great. And yet, there is an immense amount

01:48:40.660 of power by going back to the first principles by talking about what those things, what that

01:48:45.460 represents without sticking the, the label that's kind of like got a target built into it. So if you

01:48:53.300 talk in terms of the fundamental principles, think in terms of the fundamental principles,

01:48:56.900 instead of saying, I'm a conservative, and that means this, you just say, these are the things I

01:49:00.740 believe. And I fall on the spectrum where I fall, and you can know in your heart, you're whatever you

01:49:06.740 are, but these are the things that I believe. It doesn't give that kind of like latching on point

01:49:11.060 for, for them to stereotype your argument, and it, they're, they're not good at dealing with it.

01:49:15.460 It's, it's a superpower. The, the, the, the executive order is brilliant in that regard,

01:49:23.060 that it names specific things that it's against. Those things, the executive order bans explicit

01:49:31.060 patriarchy, and it bans white supremacy. The KKK could not open a, you know, a training center in

01:49:36.180 a school, or whatever, if that thing were still in effect. It actually prevents both sides of the bad

01:49:42.820 thing. And so if you can stick in that consistent principle, and articulate the principle, that's

01:49:48.820 very strong. Now, don't compromise anybody, nobody should compromise on who they are. I just said you

01:49:53.140 should be proud in whatever it is, and understand if you think it's right. But as a matter of strategy,

01:49:57.700 it does a great point. And it's something I've said to my subscribers is don't take stupid stands,

01:50:04.980 just for the purpose of taking the stand. Strategy is important. You know, I'm, I'm in a position,

01:50:11.380 my, my channel is about being conservative. So saying that I'm conservative, you know, I, I took a

01:50:17.540 strategic, that was my own strategy, that was my own strategic plan, was to say, okay, I'm, I'm gonna

01:50:22.020 say it, and this is what I'm doing now. But if you're in a position where you can do what you just

01:50:26.260 described, absolutely, that makes entire sense to me, that you don't necessarily have to slap that label

01:50:32.180 on, if it's gonna end up not actually being to your benefit. And it actually could, in some

01:50:38.020 situations prevent the conversation that you might be trying to have.

01:50:41.380 It's good in both regards, too, because it makes you think in the, if you, if you even just go

01:50:45.620 through it as an exercise for yourself, how could I make the argument for conservatism without ever

01:50:49.700 mentioning conservatism? Yeah, you have to get into the principles and articulate the principles,

01:50:54.900 and you have to do so in kind of a very universal way, that all of a sudden, what happened with,

01:51:00.020 you know, you asked me the question about what I've learned about, and the right,

01:51:03.540 the number of principles that we actually share in common are tremendous, even though there are

01:51:10.020 some, like the, it's like the old joke, the things that are different between us are much smaller in

01:51:14.500 number than the things that are, that are similar. There are a lot of that, that common ground,

01:51:20.340 you know, those basic assumptions that you mentioned that people tend to have, that is,

01:51:26.020 that's like a huge ocean. And then there's like, you know, like a little lagoon over here of

01:51:32.260 differences. Exactly. It's really a, it's a thing to, when, if like you and I just talk in

01:51:39.380 principles, we never bring out, if we never brought words like liberal and conservative,

01:51:42.900 we would probably figure that we agree on an overwhelming proportion of things. Yeah. And

01:51:49.140 it helps to discover that, but it also deepens your own understanding. If it's conservatism,

01:51:53.140 you want to deepen your understanding of good for you. If you argue purely in terms of principles,

01:51:57.380 and you have to think only in terms of the principles, you actually will deepen your

01:52:00.180 understanding of those principles because you don't have, the label actually can become a crutch

01:52:04.660 as well. You no longer have to think as deeply. So if you want to be conservative and really

01:52:08.180 understand what that means and deepen that for yourself or Jewish, which is even better because,

01:52:12.740 you know, conservative is a political orientation in many regards, whereas, you know,

01:52:16.900 No, I actually, I think, seriously, with Judaism, I think that's a really, I don't mean to interrupt you,

01:52:21.620 but I agree. I think that's a really good point. When you take the time to explore Judaism,

01:52:26.340 then you do understand how many levels there are. And for people who just slap that label

01:52:30.740 on themselves and don't ever actually take a second to know what that means, you know,

01:52:35.620 you do end up sometimes, depending on the person, with that person who does have woke as a religion

01:52:40.980 as a Jew. But continue.

01:52:42.580 Yeah, this is actually a very important point with this too. And nobody, this is something that we've

01:52:47.540 had wrong, I think, for a long time. Like, so if I asked you, like, spend the next hour or

01:52:52.900 to articulating your beliefs without ever mentioning anything specifically Jewish,

01:52:58.900 so that it has to be expressed in universal terms. My goal is not to get you to, it should not be to

01:53:03.220 get you to say, aha, a lot of this universal, so you don't really need to be Jewish. No,

01:53:07.300 you should come away, like, I feel like an atheist, a Christian, and a Jew could walk into a bar,

01:53:13.380 never heard this joke before. An atheist, a Jew, and a Christian walk into a bar, they should be able to

01:53:17.940 argue, besides the jokes that we've all heard, you know, they should be able to walk into that bar,

01:53:22.340 they should be able to have deep conversations about their ideas, their ideals, their principles,

01:53:27.940 principles of their faith, the things they agree and disagree, especially about. And each one of

01:53:32.500 them should be able to walk out of that bar enriched in themselves, enriched in their own faiths, and

01:53:37.460 still totally comfortable in the perspectives that they're in. This isn't a conversion game,

01:53:42.500 this isn't also a silly interfaith game, like, oh, how do we kind of blend Christianity and Judaism

01:53:47.460 into one thing? That doesn't really recognize deity at all, so it can be atheist too. That's not the

01:53:51.940 objective. Everybody should be able to be true to their tradition while bouncing that tradition off of

01:53:57.140 other things to deepen their own understanding. And I think that's a huge gift I've learned over

01:54:03.780 the last year. The opposite, though, of asking people to compromise on their faith.

01:54:08.500 Absolutely. It's in order to get along. It's not compromising on your faith to get along. It's the

01:54:16.260 opposite. I agree. And as I've said on my channel also as well, many of my friends are, most of my

01:54:24.580 friends, I would say at this point, are Christian and Catholic, Protestant. I have some Jewish friends,

01:54:29.620 I have atheist friends, and just by understanding everyone's viewpoints and religion and faith,

01:54:36.580 I think that you end up deepening those friendships and connections because you understand who they are

01:54:42.180 and what they believe. That's always a good thing. But I think that's a really good place to stop.

01:54:48.020 I think that you gave some great advice to my followers, and I'm really excited for them to

01:54:53.620 to watch this because I think that hopefully they learned a lot. I know I did. So thank you so much

01:55:00.020 for coming on today. Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it very much. I'd love to have you back

01:55:05.780 on at some point. And we'll see if we can keep it to under two and a half hours. Yeah, we'll see if we

01:55:10.260 can. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, a famous Jewish person once made a movie called Spaceballs.

01:55:15.940 And at the very end, there's a joke that even in the future, nothing works. And Zoom and Skype and

01:55:21.060 all of these things have proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Yeah, very much so. So,

01:55:27.220 well, I'm really, yeah, I'm glad that you came on and we'll see you next time. Thank you so much

01:55:31.940 for watching today's interview. Make sure to follow James Lindsay absolutely everywhere. I'll

01:55:36.340 have his stuff linked in the description box. If you would like to follow me on social media,

01:55:40.580 it's at Classically Abbey absolutely everywhere. And make sure to subscribe to this channel so

01:55:44.420 you'll get notified of all my new videos. Please consider subscribing to my Substack newsletter where

01:55:49.140 you will get all of this exclusive content directly to your inbox, which is just the coolest thing.

01:55:54.340 Thank you so much for watching today's video, and I'll see you guys in my next one. Bye!

Classically Abby - June 17, 2021

The AMAZING Story Of How James Lindsay Met His Wife! ｜｜ Get To Know The EXPERT on Critical Theory

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