In this episode, we discuss scapegoating and the scapegoat as a tool of social justice. We discuss scapegoats like George Floyd and John Neely, and how they are used as scapegoats in order to get us to see the humanity in others.
00:00:17.600And, you know, I think you could say with a lot of accuracy that currently conservatives are scapegoating drag queens or transgendered people or gay public school teachers or whatever, in the sense – and not that there aren't real issues with all of those things.
00:00:44.800I think there unquestionably are, but there seems to be an overemphasis on these people and a demonization of them and a way of kind of putting all of our problems onto the back of a gay teacher in Florida who is destroying the world or something, the libs of TikTok effect, as it were.
00:01:14.800And so it's clear that conservatives are kind of engaging in a certain type of scapegoating.
00:01:23.680And I think that there's also a certain type of scapegoating with someone like George Floyd or Neely.
00:01:34.820But I think it's a very complicated one.
00:01:39.620So a lot of times conservatives will react like, why is the left – why are they lionizing George Floyd or Neely?
00:02:33.120These are weird people to choose as heroes.
00:02:38.580But I think that's missing the point in many ways.
00:02:43.340I think they are a kind of scapegoat because they're bad people.
00:02:50.040And what they're trying to do is demand that you see the humanity in the scapegoat.
00:02:59.180And I've been influenced by Girard on this, who I had not read until fairly recently.
00:03:06.340But what he was saying is, so with Christ on the cross, you have the greatest sacrifice of all time in order to end all sacrifice.
00:03:22.560So at this point, certainly sacrificing human, but even sacrificing an animal is seen as uncivilized and barbaric and unnecessary, at the very least, and grotesque, etc.
00:03:35.400But we can kind of see Christianity as almost like ending that sacrificial tradition that was much longer than the Christian tradition.
00:03:49.020But at the same time, it was the ultimate blood sacrifice.
00:03:53.240I mean, God sacrificed his son, or in a way himself, to cleanse us of sins.
00:04:04.200We are relieved of original sin as well.
00:04:07.940But what Girard was saying is like, it was also a kind of way of, he was the ultimate scapegoat in the sense that he was kind of the reverse of a scapegoat.
00:04:17.180So the classic scapegoat is a blameless goat, literally, that we project our sins on and then mistreat.
00:04:28.960We kill, we cast out, etc., in order to kind of cleanse ourselves of the guilt that we feel.
00:04:37.060So it served a social function in that way.
00:04:39.860And what Jesus, who is a sacrificial lamb, as he's described, but he asked you to kind of see the humanity in the scapegoat.
00:04:54.480And from a Christian standpoint, he must be killed, in fact.
00:04:57.740But then at the same time, he was a kind of perfect person.
00:05:01.820And I think someone like Neely is in that tradition in the sense that, as I often say, his bad behavior is a kind of feature and not a bug.
00:05:18.920Like, the liberals and the left, they're demanding that you see the humanity in this sacrificial victim.
00:05:28.740Like, you need to care about George Floyd.
00:05:31.660And in a way, George Floyd was a martyr, not in spite of the fact that he was this drug user and bad dude, but almost because of it.
00:05:43.300Like, you're challenged to not just see the scapegoat and kind of with a sociopathic glee in your eye, like, sacrifice the goat and say,
00:05:53.240ah, I'm cleansed of my sin, you're supposed to look the goat in the eye and kind of see its innocence or see its humanity.
00:06:02.120And the Jewish quality to the Holocaust was, it wasn't that the Jews were bad, but they were kind of innocent.
00:06:10.620And so the Holocaust is a kind of grand sacrifice, but it's demanded of you that you sympathize with the thing being Holocausted.
00:06:23.260I mean, Holocaust means burnt offering, literally.
00:06:26.220It's demanded of you to see them as innocent, maybe even see Jews as Christ.
00:06:32.420You know, kind of reiteration of this myth in a modern context.
00:06:40.040And I think in a way, like, you know, we're all agreed on this, how the world's kind of moving beyond the Holocaust.
00:06:46.760And I think we are moving towards a kind of post-Jewish period in the sense that we tend to see an African-American as Christ or as the lamb that we're actually meant not just to sacrifice, but we might need to sacrifice, but as innocent.
00:07:09.940And you can kind of see this, I mean, Nancy Pelosi was criticized for this, but I thought she was, in a way, kind of laying bare the dynamic of this when she went up and she said, we're, you know, to George Floyd, we are so glad that you sacrificed yourself.
00:07:26.660She was, you know, and she is a Catholic.
00:07:29.720She's just laying bare the religious quality to all of this.
00:07:34.880This isn't just a crime where we want to talk about police misconduct.
00:07:38.820And, you know, we can talk about police misconduct.
00:07:42.020Are the police out of control in some situations?
00:08:08.820And I think in some ways, we're kind of post-Jewish in the way that we look at these things, where we've moved beyond the Holocaust as a central moral icon of life.
00:08:26.520And we've kind of moved in a new direction.
00:08:29.880And so I think we're going to talk less about Holocaust victims from 1943 or something.
00:08:37.140And I think we're going to talk more about, you know, black victims of 2023.
00:08:46.500And this can be, you know, put in contrast to something that Mark has written about, and it's a central aspect of the book, the first one, that is the pharmacoy.
00:08:56.560So there's a tradition of, in a way, scapegoating the ugly and sick and gross and maybe you could even say Semitic or criminal of a society.
00:09:11.480That there's a tradition of just beating them, casting them out, maybe even killing them.
00:10:21.000Because it just becomes absurd at some point where they're the most successful ethnic group in the world, right?
00:10:29.440And we're still upset about this event that happened during World 2.
00:10:37.240Meanwhile, everyone else is already mourned their dead and is not bringing forth their dead from World 2 and asking for reparations from Germany or whoever.
00:11:04.180I mean, one thing that we've all criticized in this group is the kind of, I guess you could say passive aggressive, but victimization that white nationalists have.
00:11:17.860And, you know, look, I don't dispute the fact that whites get the short end of the stick in the affirmative action regime.
00:11:28.600You know, I, of course, agree with that.
00:11:30.720I also don't dispute, even though these things are kind of anecdotal, I don't dispute that there are, you know, there are anti-white hate crimes in effect where someone will be attacked.
00:11:42.900Because he is white by some out of control black and that these don't get nearly the publicity that the reverse situation would get.
00:11:58.240But I think the ultimate criticism of that is kind of this, like, you're, you're playing the victim.
00:12:06.360You're, you're never going to be really be treated as a victim.
00:12:08.720But also, do you, do you really want to be the victim?
00:12:11.400Like, do, do we want to, there's something inherently demoralizing about imagining white people as these just, like, innocent fools, basically, out there being attacked by Jews and blacks at every corner.
00:12:26.060You know, there, there's just something so kind of.
00:13:12.560But I think it's, it's worth questioning, at least, you know, like, are we, have we moved to a point where you, you can scapegoat someone in that pharmacoy or old fashioned way?
00:13:33.820Like, can you look at someone who's weak and sick and ugly and crush him for being weak and sick and ugly?
00:13:48.540Like, are we, are we maybe, like, as advanced or, or as retrograde, depending on your perspective, to, to think in that way?
00:14:01.740I mean, that, or, or, or should we kind of be moving towards, like, another vision for, for how scapegoating will be?
00:14:14.480I don't, if you understand what I'm saying.
00:14:16.980Because there's always going to be that dynamic in society, like, the libertarian fantasy of everyone just being just and, you know, we prosecute criminals, but, you know, it's not going to be like that.
00:14:30.000We live in a religious society where you have to engage in this.
00:14:32.860There's, there's, there's going to be a scapegoat, a scapegoating dynamic to any society and, um, how that is.
00:14:44.780I mean, I, I think on some, I mean, Nietzsche was kind of, of two minds of this.
00:14:49.880On one level, Nietzsche clearly sympathized with the blonde beast and it's just kind of like, yeah, the blonde beast, they were badass.
00:15:01.300They won and they saw victory is good.
00:15:06.160If you're ugly and weak, I'm, I'm going to squeeze your throat until you suffocate.
00:15:12.120Like you, you just, you, you're not deserving to live, but there is something, as you can tell, like obviously kind of sadistic.
00:15:19.880Or inherently brutal about that kind of mentality.
00:15:26.480And Nietzsche didn't think we could just go back to the blonde beast.
00:15:30.440I mean, he, he thought that we, we had to, you know, in a way the Jewish revolution in morality made us deeper.
00:15:38.700It made us, it, it, it added depth to our personality and consciousness.
00:15:45.620And I, you know, Nietzsche certainly didn't think we could just go back and be, you know, Aryan warlords, you know, crushing all other races beneath our heels or something.
00:16:00.420I mean, he, he wasn't that kind of, you know, bald or brutal or something.
00:16:07.660Um, he, he, he, he needed to pass through the Christian era in order to get to something else.
00:16:15.200Well, so, and what people in, in this is probably related at least to, um, you know, the aspect that you're criticizing of the DR.
00:16:24.920And I share your criticism, which the, uh, the victim mentality, they believe themselves to be victims.
00:16:29.820Um, you know, on some level, of course, we can say that, uh, the white man has been scapegoated, uh, to a large extent in, uh, liberal, um, you know, kind of liberal view of the world, whether in academia, in history or in cinema.
00:16:48.680He's been, you know, uh, they've, they've made a kind of effigy of the white man as a kind of reoccurring villain, for example, in cinema, um, or, you know, to the extent that a white man is interested in his own, you know, genetic interests, for example, is a white nationalist, essentially.
00:17:07.600He's the devil, of course, in, in cinema or in culture.
00:17:21.600And I think that people, you know, people in the DR would say, okay, that is the case.
00:17:26.020And that's why we, you know, so they've essentially adopted that kind of effigy or that model, which is really kind of one of the points of art is it creates, you know, people imitated, right?
00:17:40.760Um, and they identify with that scapegoated, um, white man or that villainous white man, um, and, and understand themselves, start to understand themselves also as villains, as it were.
00:17:55.420Um, you know, so they're imbibing that propaganda.
00:17:59.820Now, I, I share your, um, sense that they shouldn't be thinking of themselves as victims, of course, right?
00:19:03.420Well, yeah, no, I, I, we're, we're in agreement.
00:19:05.740I mean, I'm, I'm just asking like how you get out of this because we, you have to first understand the dominant religious dynamic of society.
00:19:17.540And, you know, like, like people, you know, Candace Owens, I mean, there are a couple of things here.
00:19:24.840First off over the past three or four years.
00:19:28.040And I, and I think this is coming from Trump.
00:19:30.320You have the entrance of white victimhood into the mainstream conservative narrative.
00:19:50.820And the blacks bad, you know, that was basically what the Southern strategy was.
00:19:56.480It's a pretty good imitation of his voice.
00:19:58.040Yeah, you don't want to, you don't want your kids, uh, go, you know, being in school with those blacks.
00:20:06.700So you go to a private school or whatever.
00:20:09.040And, uh, you know, they're obviously, I don't even want to go into it, but they're, they're just kind of problems and self-serving qualities to this.
00:20:16.700Um, one of the interesting aspects of, of, uh, of like Tucker or Trump is you have this white victimization where it's, you know, they, they hate you.
00:20:34.940They, they're bringing in Hispanics in order for the Republican party never to win again.
00:20:41.160And a great replacement kind of this stuff.
00:20:43.800And that is entered into the scene where it's actually kind of everywhere.
00:20:49.820Like you, you see that in the daily wire, you saw, certainly saw it on Tucker.
00:20:53.580You see it on conservative Twitter where they'll just say things, you know, and these are not like major figures.
00:21:00.020They might even be anonymous, but they're just like the anti white, you know, Biden administration and, and stuff like this.
00:21:05.660So it's, it's kind of seeped in there and they're, they're playing the victim.
00:21:10.360And, um, and, you know, again, to be fair here with there's justification, et cetera, et cetera.
00:21:19.860But so you have to understand that dynamic.
00:21:22.800You also have to understand the religious dynamic of why half of the country will, will inherently sympathize with Neely.
00:21:32.860They, they will look at this figure as a, a lamb and Candace Owens can go around and be like, oh, well, look, I, he, he was arrested 40 times.
00:21:42.660And, and he threatened people on the, all that's true, but you're, you're just kind of nitpicking.
00:21:47.000You're, you're, you're making these technical critiques.
00:21:52.320Feelings don't care about your facts at the end of the day, as we know, like the, the, the whole point of it is that he is a sacrificial lamb.
00:21:59.740In this Christian or post-Christian manner.
00:22:04.380And so I guess I, I'm just kind of like asking, you know, how you get past this because it's, you know, on, on maybe on some level.
00:22:17.800Conservatives and, and myself to be brutally honest here.
00:22:23.100I mean, you look at someone like Neely and you're just like, who cares?
00:22:27.100Like he's, he's just some, he, he, he, he's just some criminal thug.
00:22:32.260And why are we, why are we wringing our hands over this?
00:22:37.800Um, but you know, I, I, I think I, Nietzsche would, his rejoinder to that would, would probably be to agree with you, agree with us on one level.
00:22:49.880But his ultimate rejoinder is like you, you, there's no way out, but through like you, you, you, you're, you're, you're kind of brutal perspective on this matter is going to lose at the end of the day to the overwhelming Christian religious impulse in your society.