In this week's episode, we look at the new female weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard, and the implications of her decision to compete as a woman in the World Weightlifting Championships. We also take a look at what it means for the future of women's sport in the UK, and whether or not it should be allowed to happen.
00:08:15.500I mean, I don't even know what to say.
00:08:18.220This is just such an obvious violation of biology.
00:08:24.660The argument they use is that the level of testosterone in Hubbard's system is within the bounds, the legal bounds that permit this person to compete as a woman.
00:08:38.500And of course, what they manifestly fail to understand is that this person has become a woman quite recently and therefore has developed, obviously has developed as a man and therefore will be much, much stronger.
00:08:55.880But I would say this, I agree that we're seeing a backlash.
00:09:02.220I think even this, I don't know if you've been paying attention to it, but this critical race theory obsession that's going on with conservatives,
00:09:11.440I think this is part of this backlash and it's vehement.
00:09:20.240I have no doubt that that's where we're going, but I also see a just sort of inevitability to all of this and I can explain why.
00:09:33.840I think that the animus that is pushing forward this New Zealand weightlifter and that's pushing stuff like critical race theory, all the critical, CRT is a rather minor thing.
00:09:49.860Just pushing forth the whole demoralizing agenda.
00:09:55.120I think it is inevitably going to win because it is going with the flow of the entire logic of a society and it is going with the flow of policy logic and conservatives don't criticize either of those two things.
00:10:13.040And therefore, they are going to lose as usual.
00:10:17.040I can go into that more, but why does it follow that they're going to I'm not sure that conservatives are going to lose.
00:10:23.660I think what's what what you're seeing is just more evidence of of just polarized of just of polarization.
00:10:30.240So neither, neither, no question, neither, neither group is going to give way.
00:10:35.040It's not like at some point these people that are financially, emotionally, psychologically, you know, self esteem early invested in all of this woke nonsense are going to give in.
00:10:44.120But similarly, I think increasingly one gets the impression that the people on the other side, whereas before they would just there would just be this incremental movement towards the left.
00:10:54.120It's been going on since probably World War Two or at least since the 60s.
00:11:00.860And increasingly, when you get what happens when you get a far left society like this is eventually the evolutionary mismatch becomes so extreme that there's enough people that won't see ground.
00:11:14.160And it's and if it's those people that are breeding, which they are, and if it's things like social media as well.
00:11:21.580There was a paper published recently, which which argued that quite cogently that things like Twitter and Facebook have contributed to polarization by creating incentives to towards groupishness.
00:11:45.720And so you just end up basically what I can only see as a slow breaking apart of people.
00:11:52.280You even see this in America in a very subtle way in Idaho, in counties, not states wanting to break away from the union, but counties wanting to change state so they can be part of a right wing state.
00:12:05.620And I see this as a subtle, slow reaction that is going to gradually occur.
00:12:12.200I don't fully disagree, but I would emphasize the overall flow of this river that they're in, that they are swimming upstream in a sense.
00:12:26.440I remember one time at summer camp where I was swimming really hard upstream and then I stood up in the river and I realized that I had actually gone backwards about 50 yards.
00:12:36.440So I felt like I had, you know, swum a hundred yards that I had actually gone backwards as I was swimming upstream.
00:12:43.420I was really working and furious about it, but I was still going backwards.
00:12:47.040And I think that's the, that's the experience of conservatives.
00:12:59.340I mean, now the level of distrust among conservatives, they don't trust the election.
00:13:05.640Anything the New York times prints is a lie.
00:13:08.520You know, I mean, it's got, it's gone to extreme limits and almost to a kind of, I don't know where it can go from here.
00:13:17.040Um, that being said, we have seen very similar things like this reactions by conservatives to things that they perceive as demoralizing, demoralizing, and they ultimately give way and lose.
00:13:32.300There is extreme polarization to the, basically the kind of racial revolution in the sixties that ultimately led to riots and so on.
00:13:43.140And there was actually major, and, and going back to the fifties as well, there was major pushback, um, from the right, if that's what you want to call it.
00:14:02.500No, I, I've never heard, I don't know.
00:14:04.140Remember the last time a conservative questioned gay marriage, they're now, they're now getting freaked out about transgenderism.
00:14:10.720They're saying, Oh, this is, this is it.
00:14:12.520They were, they're questioning the integrity of the body at this point where they were saying, using similar language 10 years ago, and they ceded ground.
00:14:21.340And they will, they always, they always ceded ground.
00:14:24.900It's something I'm looking at in this book I'm working on.
00:14:30.200Because you have, you have these five moral foundations that the right have all five of them.
00:14:34.600The left basically are low in three and high in two.
00:14:38.040So that means the left can, the right can sympathize, empathize with the left and then not vice versa.
00:14:43.120And so what that means is that right-wing people will always cede ground.
00:14:47.480Also being left-wing does seem, I don't think it's, I don't think it's a cultural, I think it's an inherent thing, does seem to be associated with mental instability and things like this.
00:15:01.540Ed, there are millions of people who are successful humans living in the suburbs, administering the government and major corporations.
00:15:12.480I never said, I never said there weren't, but it's, it's a, it's a, no, that's not, that's not the issue.
00:15:18.440The issue is what does the, what does the large data indicate?
00:15:21.240And what it indicates is that mental instability is higher among people that are left-wing.
00:15:25.340I don't mean mental to be like they're going around killing themselves.
00:15:27.580I mean, they're more neurotic and that can give, that can act as incentive, that can act as an incentive to desire power, to desire, sorry.
00:15:36.960Why are they, why are they so dominant if they're so?
00:15:39.840Well, because if you're, there are, there are, it can be socially positive, there's various studies on this, to be moderately high in neuroticism.
00:15:48.340So, for example, there's evidence that people that are optimally high in neuroticism do better at university than those who don't, because they work harder and they worry and they're concerned.
00:15:57.920And so they, and so they act as an incentive and in much the same way, if you have a sense that the, even only a limited sense that the world is fundamentally unfair and everyone's against you or whatever.
00:16:07.740And you want, therefore, you want to take control, you want power, you want to take control of everybody and because then you feel better.
00:16:15.460Or, and so you can see how, therefore, that I don't, when I say mentally unstable, I don't mean they're all nutters.
00:16:20.100I mean that it acts as something that makes you more Machiavellian.
00:16:23.160And so, anyway, I think that these, these two reasons, these two factors are why there is a tendency for the right to see ground.
00:16:30.600The right are, there were studies on this, people that are conservative are literally less fervent.
00:16:34.840So if you present a person that's conservative with evidence which counters their viewpoint, like logically and reasonably,
00:16:41.280they will be much more inclined to change their viewpoint than is the case among people who are more liberal.
00:16:48.220They will more strongly hold on to their viewpoint in the, in the face of counter evidence.
00:16:53.300So all of these things would be consistent.
00:16:55.460The fact that it would be the conservatives that would see ground every time.
00:16:59.460I mean, look, I, I think that's an interesting supplement.
00:17:04.600I, I, it does strike me as promoting such things to strike me as self-serving for conservatives in the sense of,
00:17:11.580um, they want to imagine the radical left is Antifa terrorist and they are all actually moral and upright and good.
00:17:20.100Um, I, I think that's, I mean, it's, it's interesting studies, but I, I mean, the, the fundamental issue is what is the ideological trajectory, trajectory of the United States.
00:17:33.060And all of these Western societies that are, you know, since 1945 are in the United States is wake in the sense that you can even find, um, I mean, Germany, for instance, the defeated power doesn't have an actual constitution.
00:17:48.740It has a kind of base groundwork for a constitution, um, so to speak.
00:17:54.280Like, and you see them being maybe a decade or two behind, but in some ways a decade or two ahead in some directions, but, uh, a few years behind, but ultimately defining their sovereignty, the legitimacy of their state on American like grounds.
00:18:10.620Like there's actually never been a German people in Germany has always been diverse.
00:18:16.340Everything's following in this ideological wake that's created by the United States that probably does go back to the core issue of its founding, um, in the, in the sense of, uh, um, Calvinist coming here to escape what they perceived as religious persecution.
00:18:36.920But I, I think ultimately also does derive from the kind of liberal mechanistic conception of the state in the constitution that you end up at, you, you end up here eventually.
00:18:53.040It might take a few hundred years and there might be a lot of nationalism and racism in between, but this is where it ends up when you define yourself on the basis of natural rights, which the United States did.
00:19:05.940At some point, I don't know, I don't know if it has to be, uh, if I think because you, you have very similar processes that have occurred in other civilizations.
00:19:15.380So they start, so therefore it's, um, there's a deeper way of understanding it.
00:19:21.460And I think that the idea that it's to do with the nature of philosophy or something that causes these things is, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's too, you can go beneath that.
00:19:30.420You just always get the same process that these things start off as an ethno state.
00:19:34.880America basically started off as an ethno state.
00:20:39.140And then eventually you get people who literally aren't Roman at all, just taking over the society.
00:20:45.820And, and, and then it starts to falconize and fall apart.
00:20:48.920And that's, I don't fully disagree, but you ultimately, in, in terms of like just the demography that you've set out, I, I obviously don't fully disagree.
00:21:00.140But if you looked at, if you look at the way that they defined themselves explicitly, it is more complicated.
00:21:08.340And there actually is something unique.
00:21:10.200I, I, in a way believe in American exceptionalism.
00:21:13.700I think it is a unique invention, this American experiment.
00:22:38.780Can you point to a single instance of Jesus being racist?
00:22:42.520The new, the new, the new Jewish people.
00:22:45.240Well, can you point to a single instance of Jesus being racist?
00:22:49.080Well, he says things, I think at some point he does say that he does, he is a Judaizer at some point.
00:22:53.740So there is, there is salvation comes from the Jews.
00:22:56.220There is some evidence for that, but it's not the, the, but the, the thing is the idea that Jesus, I mean, what the Jesus was that was built up was the Jesus in the Bible plus sort of Constantine and Mithras and this hodgepodge of stuff.
00:23:10.040And if you want to interpret it, find ways to interpret it in a, in a sort of a, um, egalitarian way, then I suppose you can do that.
00:23:16.860But if you want to find things that you can use to interpret it in a group oriented way, you can do that as well.
00:23:21.260Uh, and it's just a question of what the people who are, what stage of their development they're in, that they're going to draw upon the religion to justify something that is this or is, is that.
00:23:31.640And I think you've got the same thing with America.
00:23:33.620So you have elements of the American, whatever you want to call it, um, the, uh, the American, um, imagined community or something like that.
00:23:42.320Um, which you can, which you can, which, which have been, and were interpreted in this more ethno-nationalistic or whatever kind of way.
00:23:48.960And then you've got elements of it, which if you want to, you in, in this sort of enlightenment values, kind of, kind of, kind of dimension, uh, and, and so on.
00:23:56.260And it's just a question of what the nature of the people is at the time and what they therefore choose to sort of draw upon to sanctify themselves.
00:24:02.480Well, because I don't, I don't want to just react to men beating women at weightlifting, lifting competitions.
00:24:12.840I want to look at what the ultimate, like the, the ultimate basis of this is.
00:24:19.820And I, I don't, unless you believe that all religions are the same and they all are just ethnocentric, uh, which I don't agree with.
00:24:29.160Um, Christianity is a unique religion.
00:24:31.800There is a certain motive in Christianity towards something very different from the old law.
00:24:38.620Otherwise there would be no need for a new Testament.
00:24:40.820I mean, it's the whole point of the religion.
00:24:45.140It was the point of it at various points.
00:24:48.080So if you're, if you're in the middle of society and you want to try and get to the top, then you, you traditionally, you, you signal these, these individualistic values.
00:25:33.700One thing that I noted this week in the newspapers was that the church of England and therefore presumably eventually its equivalent in America has declared that it wants to abolish its traditional formal, you know, titles of address, like the reverend and the venerable and things like this.
00:25:49.320And I thought this was very, very interesting because the last time it did that, the last time it had a major change in its forms of address was the reformation.
00:25:57.520And before that, if you were a junior priest, you would notice like Sir John Smith, like a knight, you were Sir John Smith priest.
00:26:04.140And if you were a vicar or something, you were Master John Smith like that.
00:26:07.620And this whole reverend thing didn't exist.
00:26:10.020And then gradually, sort of late 1600s, gradually those titles die out among priests and income, the system we have now, the reverend.
00:26:19.000So it's almost like the Church of England is going through a new reformation as society goes through.
00:26:50.080Whenever I say her name, I always think of garden gnomes.
00:26:53.400But anyway, she is a governor of South Dakota, I believe.
00:26:59.100And the legislature, the Republican-led legislature, put up a bill that was going to ban trans athletes, effectively.
00:27:13.020And she had trouble signing it because she got some pressure from the NCAA.
00:27:18.680She was worried about her universities not being able to compete.
00:27:22.180She was just kind of playing both sides of this thing.
00:27:26.560She wants to present herself, in fact, as a presidential candidate.
00:27:30.860But at the same time, she realizes that she's got to play along with the big boys, you know, with the NCAA, wherever that's located in Washington.
00:27:40.440She also defined her stance against trans athletes as defending Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
00:27:52.280So, Title IX was not in the original 64 Act.
00:27:59.240The 1964 Civil Rights Act did not mention women whatsoever.
00:28:05.720It didn't mention transsexuals at all.
00:28:07.960It was about public accommodations that might be privately owned and public funds and positions and so on.
00:28:20.080And it was obviously directed towards Blacks, although it did not, you know, used more general language.
00:28:25.780So, racial discrimination cannot be a factor in accommodations and public monies, public positions, public schools, etc.
00:28:34.160Some seven years after that, in the early 70s, 1972 or 1973, the feminists basically jumped on that bandwagon and they built upon the 1964 Civil Rights Act to add in Title IX.
00:28:50.440Now, they never mentioned sports when they were promoting this, but it was basically against sexual discrimination that was added to the Civil Rights Bill.
00:29:02.580I think one person did, and he offered to exempt college athletics from the logic of this title, but they didn't take him seriously.
00:29:12.560Well, what happened with Title IX in college athletics when the rubber hit the road is that universities will certainly spend more money on, say, the football team than they spend on the girls' volleyball team.
00:29:28.400But when it comes to distributing goods, that is, a scholarship, which is like money in a way, it's a, you know, it's a good, you don't have to pay $50,000 a year or whatever.
00:29:42.440So, Title IX led to a huge boon for women's sports in the sense that you used to have, you know, if you have 100 scholarships for the football team, you have to have another 100 for the softball team.
00:29:55.320Despite the fact that 100,000 people want to go see the softball team, and maybe 100 people want to go see the softball team, but you have to equally distribute it.
00:30:05.440So, it has been a massive boon for women's athletics, and it's created something that I think some traditionalists might kind of dispute.
00:30:14.680I don't think anyone would dispute girls playing sports in general.
00:30:19.300I think it's a great thing, but just this kind of hyper-competitive, man-ish, let's say, female athletics would not exist, at least to the extent that it is now, without Title IX.
00:30:33.380So, Christy Noem, when she was discussing trans athletes, she declared that she wants to protect Title IX.
00:30:42.640What I see is this general tendency of conservatives to reject the latest innovation and outrage, you could say, but then want to go back 30 or 50 years and protect the foundation on which the outrage is laid.
00:31:03.820So, they want to go back 30, so they want to go and protect the Civil Rights Act.
00:31:07.960Everything that they oppose, policy-wise, when the rubber hits the road, is built upon the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
00:31:16.260Whether through Supreme Court decisions, the 64 Act applies to sexual orientation, whether upon sexism and hiring or sports or whatever, and ultimately about race.
00:31:33.380So, everything they oppose has been built on this act.
00:31:37.900This is the paradigm for policy that is controversial over certainly my lifetime and well before that.
00:31:48.740And it just creates, this is why they're going to lose in the sense that, yes, it's polarized, they're reacting, they're mad.
00:31:56.240But there's a dynamic where they want to ultimately protect what the left did 30 years ago going forward.
00:32:06.800That is a dynamic that will lead to endless leftward drift.
00:32:13.120I don't know where they're going to go after transsexuality five years from now.
00:32:17.800Well, it will be, I can only, it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be, child, it'll, no, I think it'll be childhood adulthood.
00:32:24.420I, I, there's already some hints of this.
00:32:27.220And I think that if they carry on and that's when we think, because people have a natural repulsion, pedophilia and so on.
00:32:33.300So that was even in the seventies, they tried that, uh, in Britain and then they had to roll it back in because people were so horrified.
00:32:40.860And so it's as if they've, it's as if they've waited, uh, they've, they've, they've played the long game.
00:32:45.340Uh, and, and eventually you've already got these societies, you know, but what do they, they call them men attracted to, um, Nambla or Nambla or Nambla.
00:32:57.100They call themselves and they, and they, and they're trying with the success of transsexuality to try and argue that, uh, they are a persecuted minority and they should have rights and, uh, uh, whatever.
00:33:07.520So, so I think to the logic, I mean, it's so disgusting that it's going to have more trouble, but it ultimately has the same logic to it.
00:33:18.340They're a, they're a persecuted minority.
00:33:19.980I mean, they kind of are in the sense that everyone, you know, it's, it's partly genetic or it's part of their upbringing or whatever it's not their fault.
00:33:29.120And so, um, and then also just, I think the, the, the, the, the, the blurring of the line between adult and child.
00:33:34.800Once you start problematizing things, asking, well, what do you mean by race?
00:33:41.140What do you, then, then, then, then what do you mean by childhood?
00:33:44.060I mean, it's the, it's the, it is the logic of this, of this, uh, tactical nihilism that they engage in, um, in the same way that they don't like it.
00:33:52.260The reason why they react so strongly against Rachel Dolziell and such people is because it's, it's, it's taking their logic to a place which then undermines their power base, which is to make white people feel terrible about being white.
00:34:04.100Uh, and so that has to be stamped down on that can't be allowed, but, but, but somehow, uh, men who surely have more power than women being allowed to become women, um, that somehow that's gradually, that's okay.
00:34:17.720So, yes, I do think the next step is, would, would be people identifying as children and, uh, all of this kind of stuff.
00:34:25.960Uh, and at some point, I just, I don't, history tells us that at some point, you can talk about American exceptionalism.
00:34:34.600But also it seems to be quite striking the way that these parallel, these, these, um, patterns, these cycles happen again and again and again.
00:34:41.700And history tells us that this kind of nonsense, whether it's Gnosticism or whatever, happens in the winter when things come apart.
00:34:49.320And that's what is increasingly at increasing speed happening.
00:34:57.620I, I, look, we're not in total disagreement.
00:35:00.840I would just stress this, that the conservatives, the, the way that they understand their resistance to this is so flawed that I, I don't think that we're just going to have a kind of, uh, a breaking apart.
00:35:17.540And even if we broke apart, I think they would recreate the same society.
00:35:24.500There's an obsession with CRT, which is, um, uh, uh, I guess mostly a kind of legal, um, philosophy, critical race theory that I think is just in a general paradigm in academia.
00:35:39.660It's in a paradigm bigger than itself of, um, you know, seeing race everywhere, looking at oppression and the, the persistence of wealth within races and all of this stuff.
00:35:52.120Um, um, and undermining the fairy tale of American history that I learned even in the, in the eighties, uh, and conservatives understandably perceive this.
00:36:04.880They perceive that they're being demoralized and that their stories and icons are being smashed.
00:36:10.780And so I get why they're reacting to it.
00:36:13.460I don't like it either, but look at the way they're reacting.
00:36:18.220So there was a bill in Florida that has, I, I think it might've been signed this week and I'll have to go look at it, but just stick with the broad strokes here.
00:36:27.520There's a bill in Florida that effectively banned critical race theory and it went further.
00:36:33.000It banned all sorts of racism and sexism in general.
00:36:37.900So you cannot display racist, uh, media in any form in public education.
00:36:47.520So that would include, I don't know, reading Mein Kampf when you're studying the second world war or inviting Richard Spencer to your campus.
00:36:56.500All of those things, according to this bill would be illegal.
00:37:00.400Um, you cannot demoralize a student on the basis of sex or race.
00:37:05.480And they're calling all of this stuff, sexism.
00:37:07.640So we're against racism and sexism that is now illegal in public universities.
00:37:12.480And they want to bring in this like Patriot education about learning about anti-communism.
00:37:16.740Well, this is obviously a violation of free speech.
00:37:21.320So I don't think this will last, but beyond that, I think it's even more fundamentally flawed in the sense that they're,
00:37:29.740they are speaking in the language of the 64, um, uh, of the civil rights act.
00:37:37.040All of those acts were based on removing racial discrimination from accommodations and, and public institutions.
00:37:44.360Then five to seven years later, we need to remove sexism from this.
00:37:48.440Then 30 years later, we need to remove homophobia from any accommodations or public institutions.
00:37:54.600Then it's, we need to remove transphobia.
00:38:22.060That the, the conservative just doesn't like change.
00:38:24.160So if the conservative is, if the conservative is brought up in a communist society, you could argue that those people that were rebelling against, uh, against Mikhail Gorbachev and tried to, uh, and there was a coup and they took, took him out of power for a few days.
00:38:39.120Those people in a sense were kind of conservatives, right?
00:39:04.560It's just getting, it's just, you know, you're left wing when you're young, you get more conservative with age and, and then you're conservative for the things that were radical.
00:39:11.360When you're young, those things are the established things.
00:39:13.420So it's like, you know, going to Rolling Stones concerts now when you're in, when you're in your sixties or seventies, it's the same sort of attitude.
00:39:19.740Oh, when he was young, Rolling Stones was radical and cool and new and breaking.
00:39:23.840So it's just, it's just that as distinct from the more sort of, um, profound conservative who is basically low in these individualizing values, low in them.
00:39:32.280And, and like Margaret Thatcher, to some extent was a bit like, I think she just didn't, didn't care about the feeling, not interested, and was interested in the group oriented.
00:39:41.360Stuff and that's the, that's the difference.
00:39:43.280And so, yeah, they will always frame things in those ways.
00:39:45.380The argument you could put in their favor is that the whole society has been so indoctrinated with the idea, the post 64 idea, perhaps that you have to treat, treat people as individuals.
00:39:56.460Um, and to a certain degree, I quite liked that idea, but anyway, you, you, that you, it's so indoctrinated with it that you have to put it in those terms.
00:40:04.920The idea that you can say there shouldn't have been the civil rights act is just such anathema to, to almost everybody.
00:40:10.580So in a sense, you, it's to, it is a sort of real politic.
00:40:14.240It has to be expressed, um, in those to get support in those kinds of terms.
00:40:19.580And so that's kind of what they're doing.
00:40:21.620Um, and that allows them to draw in quite a lot of conservatives who, let's face it, they are, they're high in the group oriented values, but they're equally high in the individualizing values as well.
00:40:30.860You know, therefore don't discriminate against people or whatever.
00:40:33.440And so that's the tactic that they're using.
00:40:35.660Um, but it is, it is true that eventually what, or it is seemingly accurate, that eventually what seems to happen is it is that society gets pushed so far.
00:40:45.920And this is the danger that the react, this is the danger that Charles Murray highlights.
00:40:50.280He highlights it as being a very bad thing.
00:40:52.040He says, it's a very bad thing, but that you, the reaction will be that you get, people will rise into positions of influence who are, well, like Trump perhaps, who are just low in individualizing values,
00:41:04.480They're not, and they will be permitted to, um, not care because it will be such chaos by then that people will regard these individualizing.
00:41:13.980And you just need to sort out the problem, the rise of the Caesar, um, and the Rubicon needs to be crossed and the problem needs to be sorted out.
00:41:22.160And I think that's what there is the path down which they're going.
00:41:28.220And I suspect that it's over the next 10 or 20 years, you're already seeing evidence of a reaction.
00:41:34.620And I don't think that is, that is a superficial, I think that it's, it's going to get worse.
00:41:40.860But Trump was about making America great again.
00:41:45.920It was about going back and it was about uniting one country.
00:41:50.360And I, I think that, I think the Rubicon is because, and, and ultimately let's be honest that, that whole project failed to a very large degree due to Trump's own limitations and the limitations of the, the absence of a real movement behind him.
00:42:10.140Trump had a lot of grifters and fanboys and sycophants that they, he didn't have a real movement.
00:42:19.000I mean, going, doing pageants in Ohio and, you know, uh, speaking to the crowd and getting them riled up that that's, that's something, but that's not what you ultimately need.
00:42:30.040Um, I think the Rubicon is crossed when they start saying things like, we don't want to be part of this country or we don't want this.
00:42:41.940Maybe even we don't, we want to repeal the 64 civil rights act.
00:42:44.960I doubt they'll say that, but we don't want to be a part of this anymore.