RadixJournal - July 14, 2020


Who's Cancelling the Cancellers?


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 1 minute

Words per Minute

173.18611

Word Count

10,707

Sentence Count

710

Misogynist Sentences

9

Hate Speech Sentences

22


Summary

The McSpencer Group discusses the ins and outs of cancel culture, J.K. Rowling's "Open Letter" against the cancelers, and the role of conservative intellectuals in the anti-cancel movement.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 It's Tuesday, July 14th, 2020, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
00:00:07.460 Grindelwald did nothing wrong.
00:00:10.700 This week, I'm joined by Edward Dutton and Tyler Hamilton.
00:00:15.500 First topic, who's canceling the cancelers?
00:00:20.100 Did you ever post some edgy shit on an anonymous chat forum?
00:00:24.800 Do you think that gender might, in fact, be real?
00:00:27.660 Well, you'll probably soon find yourself canceled.
00:00:32.540 But never fear.
00:00:34.020 If you're a best-selling author of young adult fantasy fiction or a tenured researcher at
00:00:39.060 a neoconservative think tank, you can publish an open letter expressing your devotion to
00:00:44.040 free thought and liberal principles, and your status will be secured.
00:00:48.580 Otherwise, you'll just be fired.
00:00:51.180 The panel discusses the ins and outs of cancel culture.
00:00:57.660 Okay, so I wanted to talk about the dominant political dynamic of our age, at least on
00:01:10.180 the intellectual scene, and that is cancel culture or canceling and what this means.
00:01:18.540 Obviously, we can complain about it, but I think it's more important to understand it.
00:01:23.100 So, recently, there was some pushback against the cancelers that was apparently led by J.K.
00:01:31.560 Rowling and of Harry Potter fame, wildly popular books that are pretty extremely shallow, in my opinion.
00:01:43.740 I've never quite gotten the whole Harry Potter thing, but then I'm not a millennial.
00:01:50.580 I actually have listened to one of the books and was not impressed.
00:01:55.420 But J.K.
00:01:57.280 Rowling has basically put forth the wild and outlandish extreme right notion that biological sexes do, in fact, exist.
00:02:07.500 But that doesn't mean that she wants to undermine all of her trans friends.
00:02:13.400 And for that, she's been called a TERF and other epithets.
00:02:18.640 And I don't know if they'll be able to really cancel her.
00:02:22.780 She's a multimillionaire at this point and wildly popular with young people.
00:02:28.560 But just the fact that there is pushback against someone like Rowling is remarkable and kind of demonstrates the lengths that they will go.
00:02:39.780 They will even destroy their favorite childhood stupid fairy tales.
00:02:44.080 But she put out something in Harper's this week that was co-signed by a number of liberal and neoconservative intellectuals, some journalists, some academics.
00:02:58.520 And so there is pushback against this in some way.
00:03:04.120 But I think the main thing about it is that I think the boomer liberals and neocons are going to lose this battle because all of the energy is on the other side.
00:03:19.840 So anyway, before we start kind of diving into cancel cultures, again, you know, every conservative show will complain about this phenomenon.
00:03:30.460 I think it's more important to kind of get beneath the surface.
00:03:33.800 It's a surface and understand it.
00:03:36.460 But but Tyler, do you have any kind of opening remarks on canceling?
00:03:44.760 Yeah, I mean, I saw the letter, you know, some of the figures in there, of course, were remarkably consistent.
00:03:49.980 So you have people like Noam Chomsky in there, who's always been on the side of speech against canceling no matter the cost.
00:03:57.180 And so to me, there is a consistency in a lot of people that signed it.
00:04:00.600 But then you also have others who are obviously very culpable when it comes to cancel culture anyways, at least in their actions in the past and how they've supported it on other people when they go against them.
00:04:11.760 So my initial my initial thought upon reading and discovering this whole controversy was really the fact that it seems to me to be more of an inter elite conflict rather than anything to actually do with the phenomenon we see right now, where average working people are being, you know, canceled in a far worse way than the word canceled encapsulates.
00:04:32.260 You know, they're having mobs on Twitter, go after their jobs and every facet of their livelihood over something they might have said six or seven years ago, even.
00:04:41.580 And that's where we are right now.
00:04:43.400 And so you have this inter elite conflict between these various figures who themselves are largely formative in cancel culture in the first place.
00:04:51.840 And then the whole actual, you know, what we experience is cancel culture, which is affecting the lives of everyday people is completely lost in that dialogue.
00:05:01.800 Yeah.
00:05:03.160 Also, I would agree with Tyler.
00:05:04.600 Yes, it's totally.
00:05:06.220 I looked at this on my show a while ago.
00:05:08.820 It's a steaming hypocrisy of these people.
00:05:10.880 I mean, basically, they're afraid that they're going to come for them next.
00:05:13.580 That's it.
00:05:14.000 And they may well be right.
00:05:15.680 They're realizing when you're in a cultural revolution like we are in, that it's an example we looked at on the show with Keith was Munster and the Anabaptists and all this kind of thing.
00:05:26.080 What did they do?
00:05:26.800 First, the Anabaptists came for the Catholics and smashed all the Catholic churches and whatever.
00:05:30.740 And once they'd done that, then, of course, they go for the next stage, which is the Lutherans, which is other Protestants.
00:05:36.400 And they, as it were, cancel them in the 16th century equivalent of canceling, which is killing.
00:05:42.100 And this is what they're obviously concerned about.
00:05:45.440 And they're realizing it's going to affect them.
00:05:47.840 They will be targeted next.
00:05:49.900 And so what can they do?
00:05:51.260 Well, one way is to try and calm it down, which is exactly what the Lutherans did.
00:05:55.120 They realized, Martin Luther and whatever, realized it was becoming absolutely insane and it could even sweep over him and whatever.
00:06:01.540 And so, therefore, there was this magisterial reformation, which was this kickback against the radical reformation of these nutters of the Anabaptists.
00:06:09.880 And so that's what you'll see.
00:06:11.020 They've had to make a decision.
00:06:12.140 It's quite a difficult decision for them.
00:06:13.620 Do I shut up and hope they don't come for me?
00:06:16.140 Or am I so convinced they may well come for me that I will use the last effort and energy and power that I have to try and calm this down, reverse this insanity, which I have helped to set off.
00:06:28.640 Right.
00:06:28.940 And that's what they've done.
00:06:31.140 Look at the list of people.
00:06:32.700 Look at the kind of people.
00:06:33.840 Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 year rule, race differences in sport, nothing to do with genetics, apparently.
00:06:40.280 Naomi Chomsky, who said that if you research race differences, you are ipso facto a racist.
00:06:45.540 Right.
00:06:47.420 These are the kind of people that we're dealing with.
00:06:49.460 They're not in favor of freedom of expression.
00:06:51.080 They're not in favor of scientific freedom.
00:06:52.620 They're in favor of themselves and their own interests and preserving themselves.
00:06:56.640 And that's why they've written this letter.
00:06:58.100 And so it's an attempt to calm down this cultural revolution.
00:07:01.760 It's quite predictable, really.
00:07:02.640 Yeah, I mean, I sincerely hope that they come for them next.
00:07:07.720 I mean, the other thing, David Frum is on that.
00:07:12.020 Very famous person for canceling the paleos in the pages of National Review.
00:07:17.260 I mean, that's in a way the least of his crimes.
00:07:21.240 But the idea that we would want to stick up for any of these people.
00:07:25.260 I mean, I might stick up for J.K. Rowling if she actually wrote good books that were expanded people's imagination.
00:07:31.620 But being the fact that she writes crap.
00:07:35.260 Yeah.
00:07:35.680 Feed her to the wolves.
00:07:36.680 I don't care about a single person on that list.
00:07:39.680 The other thing is that.
00:07:40.800 I like.
00:07:41.460 Oh, go ahead.
00:07:42.380 Go ahead.
00:07:42.620 I like the way that she stood up against this this transsexualism insanity.
00:07:48.480 I mean, I like the obviously I do.
00:07:49.880 Did she?
00:07:50.260 I do think she's taken a risk by doing that.
00:07:51.980 She did.
00:07:52.600 She did.
00:07:52.960 I mean, she's she's prepared to publicly question this ridiculous dogma.
00:07:56.520 And she's doing so with a person that has some influence.
00:07:58.960 So she has done that.
00:08:00.560 But if you look at the nature of the books, there's plenty.
00:08:03.380 Because that's the thing with this offense culture.
00:08:05.720 You could always find something.
00:08:08.160 It's not about being rational or reasonable or fair.
00:08:10.780 If you want to look for it, then you will find something and you can find.
00:08:14.640 Of course, you could find something in her.
00:08:16.140 You could talk about if you wanted to.
00:08:17.660 If you wanted to push that far.
00:08:19.020 Anti ginger prejudice.
00:08:20.560 Having a ginger boy and calling him Weasley like a weasel.
00:08:25.820 Is this is this is and is this really you could try to argue you could try and insinuate this relates to racism, perhaps, and her views on race.
00:08:32.640 Oh, and look, she doesn't have any non-white characters among the main characters in Harry Potter.
00:08:36.560 To the already gays to the extent that she had to retrogressively declare that one of her characters was gay.
00:08:41.880 She did, even though it's not clearly in the in the book, as I understand.
00:08:45.180 I've read I've only read one of the books.
00:08:47.380 And and and then you've got this fetishization of the public school system of the English public school system.
00:08:53.800 I mean, these kinds of places are which which this is based around.
00:08:56.680 What is this other than a fetishization of power and tradition and of all the things which these people are trying to tear down?
00:09:03.980 And so if you wanted to, if you really wanted to, you could you could go for her.
00:09:09.380 Go for the jugular with regard to those books.
00:09:11.460 Yeah, I mean, she pushed back in she did push back kind of philosophically against transsexuals in the sense of saying that gender is biologically based at some level, but that shouldn't actually change our opinions of transsexual rights and so on.
00:09:31.840 So it was a rather meek pushback.
00:09:34.820 And, you know, the thing is about it, they start off from the beginning where they surrender the past before the battles begun.
00:09:41.660 So they basically endorse all of these people cancelling them on a philosophic level, but then say, oh, we just don't don't do us.
00:09:50.720 You know, like we're the argument was the argument was that Trump basically Trump is a dictator.
00:09:55.840 That was the beginning of the letter.
00:09:57.080 Right.
00:09:57.500 That effect.
00:09:57.940 And this kind of the the insinuation and the wording, I don't have it in front of me, but I recall it was something like this cancel culture is creating will create a backlash, which will be bad for all these lovely left wing things.
00:10:12.180 Right.
00:10:12.500 Right wing demagogues will make hay with this.
00:10:18.680 And so it was kind of trying to say to them, please stop it.
00:10:21.820 You don't stop it.
00:10:22.680 Then bad, bad people will be empowered by this because people they didn't directly say it, but because people will be so upset by basically, if you create chaos, then you make people want a right wing government.
00:10:33.240 And that's kind of what they what they said.
00:10:35.320 And then they and then they went in the importance of they ceded everything to these nasty bullies immediately and then kind of begged them to.
00:10:45.320 Oh, so so look, we've frustrated ourselves before you, but we do think this is going a bit far and it really shouldn't go so far as to affect us.
00:10:51.860 So could you leave us alone?
00:10:52.880 Well, this is it is institutionally revolutionary.
00:10:56.820 And we are the ones who are better at kind of managing new people in the sense that, you know, the Steven Pinkers or David Frums or J.K. Rowling's of the world are kind of the better ones who are highly placed in institutions who will kind of throw various bones to Black Lives Matter or, you know, non white identity politics, etc.
00:11:18.780 And they're actually kind of seeing that these things are becoming so powerful that they're they're actually creating an institutional instability.
00:11:27.260 I don't think they would have done this five years ago when they felt like they had these things out of control.
00:11:32.080 But they recognize that it actually is getting out of control and they feel like they have to push back in some light way.
00:11:39.720 But yeah, I mean, from my perspective, you know, let the bad times roll for these people.
00:11:45.060 I will not defend them.
00:11:47.240 I think that's a good way of summing it up.
00:11:49.480 Yeah, they recognize it's got to a point where it is out of control.
00:11:53.540 It's like it's like the the the the popular reformation.
00:11:57.100 It's out of control. Chaos, chaos.
00:12:00.060 You dread reading the newspaper website the next day because you think, what's it going to be now?
00:12:04.360 What now? Who's been cancelled?
00:12:06.780 Who's been declared a heretic?
00:12:08.140 Who's been exiled from from normal society, from polite society, from BBC, whatever.
00:12:14.920 Now, who's next?
00:12:15.940 Who's the next person for the show trial for the witch hunt?
00:12:19.220 And it's and they know it could get to where it swallows them.
00:12:23.060 And so they have done this.
00:12:23.840 So they're just the most important cowards.
00:12:26.540 Stephen Pinker, for example.
00:12:28.040 Oh, yeah.
00:12:28.280 He's really in favor of free speech.
00:12:29.600 He's the person that with regard to my my perfectly reasonable and cautious defense of Kevin McDonald's paper, said in public that should never have been published.
00:12:40.420 He couldn't believe it had been published.
00:12:41.940 It was terrible.
00:12:42.560 It was awful.
00:12:43.120 And sort of put pressure on the editor of the journal to come out with a statement against it and all this kind of thing.
00:12:49.480 And now, of course, they go for him.
00:12:52.280 They go for him in terms of this of this survey, this petition against him.
00:12:55.760 And they go for him in terms of this this council culture he's scared of with the letter.
00:12:59.340 And of course, it strikes me he might have other problems which will come to life and all.
00:13:03.080 But, you know, it's it's it's it's utter cowardice.
00:13:07.920 And then one of them, of course, we drew her name from it.
00:13:10.780 She said, oh, I wouldn't have or he or this transsexual person on it said I wouldn't have signed it if I'd known J.K. Rowling would sign it.
00:13:16.840 I'm really in favor of free speech.
00:13:19.620 I wouldn't have signed it if I'd known that bitch signed it.
00:13:23.220 Absolutely extraordinary.
00:13:24.540 So even among themselves, they're not united.
00:13:28.180 Yeah, well, it's like with Rowling's case, right?
00:13:29.740 Like she helped create this before it got out of hand when she declared Dumbledore retroactively gay.
00:13:34.980 Yeah.
00:13:35.180 And then there's a backlash among the fans.
00:13:37.640 And then they were, you know, like, you're not a real fan if you don't accept that Dumbledore is gay because she said that you're just as transphobic, you're homophobic or whatever.
00:13:45.840 And then so she helped create insulate this mass council culture from the mob mentality.
00:13:50.620 Now, though, it's getting out of hand because these other elites like Daniel Radcliffe, for example, who's like he responded to her tweets.
00:13:57.460 And, you know, he's like, you know, Rowling may be famous.
00:14:00.740 She may be a part of the elite, but I can't endorse this.
00:14:03.380 And I have to speak out against her in this.
00:14:05.340 And it's just this way in which is inter-elite warfare is coming up and they recognize the tide is coming for them.
00:14:11.120 And so they're trying to be the ones who could sit on top of it and attack the other ones.
00:14:14.940 Right.
00:14:15.120 And so then you have even people on the letter, a few of them, like Ed was mentioning the one who was like, oh, I wouldn't have signed it if Rowling was on there.
00:14:21.900 But there was others saying I've reconsidered it after the pressure.
00:14:25.440 And, you know, they're right.
00:14:26.400 Maybe cancel culture isn't really real at all.
00:14:28.420 They're just holding us accountable for our speech.
00:14:31.040 Right.
00:14:31.320 And, of course, anyone knows when you're actually a victim of cancel culture, you're it's not holding you accountable for your speech.
00:14:37.800 It's preventing you from your livelihood.
00:14:39.420 The only people where it's holding them accountable for their speech are people like J.K. Rowling, who are multimillionaires, who have no possible real back, like consequence to their livelihood from being canceled.
00:14:51.620 Right.
00:14:52.040 Right.
00:14:52.360 And I think it's worth mentioning a someone else who got canceled this week.
00:14:59.960 And this opens up a kind of another line of discussing this matter.
00:15:04.960 Obviously, a week at 10 days ago, we were all canceled, at least from YouTube.
00:15:10.920 I actually thought we were going to hang on there for a moment.
00:15:15.660 But alas, no, we'll work it out.
00:15:21.000 But it actually is clearly detrimental in terms of reaching a wider audience and ultimately being monetized.
00:15:28.180 And that's what it's all about.
00:15:29.940 And it's, in a way, far less detrimental from the canceling from payment processors, which is something that has gone on for quite some time.
00:15:38.340 And that is where it, you know, the rubber hits the road and it really affects your pocketbook.
00:15:43.820 But there was another interesting thing.
00:15:46.000 And there was this case of this young person named Blake Neff, who is someone that I had heard about.
00:15:57.380 He wrote for the Daily Caller that I understand.
00:16:02.000 I had heard about him a few years ago as, you know, one of these various hour guys working in the conservative movement.
00:16:10.980 And then he became apparently the chief writer for Tucker Carlson's program, Tucker Carlson Tonight.
00:16:19.900 And he bragged to, and I think probably accurately bragged to his college newspaper, that, you know, anytime Tucker says something on television, I wrote the first draft.
00:16:32.100 And that probably is true.
00:16:34.680 Tucker's a busy guy.
00:16:36.040 I'm sure he has these writers doing these work, these scripts that he looks over and approves.
00:16:42.200 But I have no doubt that he has people like Blake Neff writing them.
00:16:46.720 And CNN went after, I'm forgetting what the journalist's name is, Darby or Darcy.
00:16:56.240 Anyway, I've heard of him for a number of years now, but they went after him and they found this web forum that I had never heard of, but is supposedly a hotbed of red-pilled dialogue of some sort.
00:17:10.300 And they found all of these comments by Blake Neff that were kind of, I don't know, maybe something you could hear on this show, certainly things that I've heard a million times on Twitter or in private company that were kind of red-pilled talk about race and women and crime and all that kind of stuff.
00:17:34.640 But said in, you know, rather, you know, humorous, juvenile, kind of tongue-in-cheek manner.
00:17:43.360 So, I mean, was I offended by anything that he wrote?
00:17:47.180 No.
00:17:48.620 You know, was that stuff meant for public consumption?
00:17:53.160 No.
00:17:53.620 And I think we should have a right to some kind of space where we can crack a joke and not feel like this is going to be secretly recorded and broadcast on the internet.
00:18:06.640 Or we can, you know, express ourselves in some way.
00:18:10.340 I think carving out that private space.
00:18:12.480 So basically, I don't have any problem with what he said whatsoever.
00:18:17.980 But, you know, again, it gets to this point with Tucker.
00:18:23.660 And apparently, according to some of these reports that I read, Tucker will address this subject on Monday's show.
00:18:29.960 So we'll see what happens.
00:18:31.300 But Tucker complained.
00:18:33.040 And Tucker's not the only one.
00:18:34.660 He's just the most famous and maybe most articulate.
00:18:37.940 This is a long-time theme on Fox News discourse, which is that the left is about canceling people.
00:18:44.740 They don't believe in free speech.
00:18:47.240 Blah, blah, blah.
00:18:49.140 They're out of control.
00:18:50.900 And really, what would it mean?
00:18:52.340 You know, this is like almost Dave Rubin.
00:18:53.880 What does it even mean to be right?
00:18:55.680 That just means that you're interested in ideas and so on.
00:18:59.700 This is one of the narratives that they present about themselves, which is a completely false one.
00:19:05.440 The fact is, Tucker accepted his resignation, Blakeneff's resignation, or fired him.
00:19:13.120 Fox News condemned him.
00:19:15.940 So they did not say, you know, well, we hope he gets his life together and he's going to take a break or something like that.
00:19:24.200 They condemned him, which is a slightly, a little bit different than that.
00:19:30.560 They also sent a message to these dozens of alt-right or alt-right friendly people who work in the conservative movement and write for the Daily Caller or write for Tucker Carlson.
00:19:46.240 And basically, the message was loud and clear.
00:19:48.740 We will find out about you.
00:19:50.400 You cannot post anything on Facebook or some web forum that I had never heard of.
00:19:55.320 I don't know if it's famous or not.
00:19:57.940 We will find you.
00:20:00.260 We will target you.
00:20:01.360 And we will destroy you.
00:20:02.640 That is the message that people should have heard a long time ago.
00:20:08.000 But again, did Blake Neff do anything that was immoral?
00:20:12.980 No.
00:20:13.520 Did he do something that might have been unwise?
00:20:16.280 Sure.
00:20:16.820 Okay.
00:20:17.220 But the fact is, Tucker, Fox, the conservatives engaged in the exact same cancelling that they have been engaging in for decades.
00:20:29.280 And that actually does go back to the beginning of the conservative movement.
00:20:34.920 Although, yeah, go ahead.
00:20:36.920 No, I was going to say, the worst thing about it is that it's such a basic thing that if you give in to bullies, then bullies don't just go, okay, yeah, I'll bully about that.
00:20:47.300 That's fine.
00:20:47.800 They'll find something else and something else and something else.
00:20:50.140 Ultimately, they're motivated by a kind of death wish, by a kind of death lust to destroy what are the target of their bullying.
00:20:58.060 And there's evolutionary reasons why this happens.
00:20:59.760 But anyway, that's what they do.
00:21:01.620 And so if you give in, if you give ground, then that's why I think it's one of the reasons why things always push leftwards, because the right always gives that ground.
00:21:10.880 Because once the left are the people who dictate what is respectable, who dictate what is polite society, who've got to a point where what is polite society, what is acceptable in public is what they say it is.
00:21:23.560 But in order not to have the sort of stigma of being a dissident surrounding you, which I think the people like Fox don't really want.
00:21:32.880 They don't want to be seen as dodgy, extreme.
00:21:35.540 Therefore, they will always placate them and they will always give in in situations like this.
00:21:40.420 The mail online is a bit like this.
00:21:42.380 So on the one hand, it will campaign for free speech and whatever.
00:21:44.780 But on certain things, it will completely cut and just give in to leftist pressure.
00:21:51.040 But who are the bullies?
00:21:53.240 Are the bullies really the left or the conservatives themselves?
00:21:57.440 I mean, conservatives engaged in this kind of behavior long before cancel culture began.
00:22:03.640 And I think they are actually more culpable in terms of the suppression of free speech and dialogue and, you know, alternative ideas than the leftist.
00:22:18.200 And I mean, I think it's kind of a convenient narrative for them to tell themselves that, like, there are all these bullies out there, these journalists who are doing this to us when it's they who are doing it.
00:22:28.020 And they've been doing it for decades.
00:22:29.380 But they're doing it because they're doing it because they're giving in to that pressure.
00:22:33.580 They're doing it because they're weak.
00:22:35.180 I hate them, too.
00:22:37.260 All I'm saying is that, like, they are the ones enforcing their own dogma.
00:22:43.500 And, like, I think it's almost letting them off the hook to say that they're weak.
00:22:48.620 They're sinister.
00:22:49.860 And they're not weak when it comes to other issues.
00:22:52.500 In terms of other issues that are actually important to them and important to their ideology, they will defend people to the death.
00:23:03.160 No one got canceled because, you know, Ben Shapiro quite literally called for displacement, ethnic cleansing, you could say, of Palestinians.
00:23:13.580 And every conservative would lay down the gauntlet for him.
00:23:18.980 But they won't lift a finger when someone posts some edgy content on some web forum that no one saw outside of, you know, a bunch of kids in their basements.
00:23:34.220 So, I mean, I don't know.
00:23:36.720 I feel like it's letting conservatives off the hook to say that they're weak.
00:23:40.040 I think they're sinister and they're deeply engaged in this.
00:23:44.100 Yeah, I mean, when you take a look back, I mean, the left critique of the conservative emphasis on free speech is not entirely wrong, really.
00:23:52.220 I mean, they're kind of trying to set the tone for who has the hegemony to actually, you know, determine which ideas are going to disseminate and they're going to gatekeep those ideas.
00:24:01.120 You had the same dynamic all the way going back to the neocons versus the paleocons and who won out on that.
00:24:07.280 You look at the free speech movement in the 60s.
00:24:10.140 I mean, they were largely leftist.
00:24:11.440 Of course, there's always a cynicism in that because now that they have, you know, they've moved the Overton window, they're the ones enforcing these very same rules.
00:24:19.820 And that's the way these things always play out.
00:24:21.540 It's really about who can actually set the tone for dialogue and who is going to be gatekeeping access to other kinds of speech that aren't allowed.
00:24:28.860 Right.
00:24:29.460 And it's the same thing now with Fox News in this regard is because what is the purpose of like Tucker Carlson show?
00:24:35.780 If you look at what he's saying and what Blake Neff is saying in these comment forms, they're not really that different from Tucker Carlson's own ideas.
00:24:42.320 They're just stated in a very, a more like rugged or more honest way.
00:24:47.380 Right.
00:24:47.640 You could say.
00:24:48.080 And so it's what it seems to me is it's more of an effort of gatekeeping, which is the same thing we see with maybe Tucker Carlson's show in general, which, you know, I do like some points that he makes on that show.
00:25:00.700 But it's the same phenomenon that conservatives have always engaged in, is setting the parameters for around what actually constitutes free speech.
00:25:08.440 And then so once you get to topics of like Israel or AIPAC or things like that, and next thing you know, poof, these free speech advocates, they just completely disappear.
00:25:16.420 And they're very much part of behaving like pride bullies, you know, someone might call them.
00:25:22.000 And so it's interesting because they're very much a part of forming that culture.
00:25:25.120 And they've been like that all throughout the conservative history.
00:25:27.920 And to me, so battles over free speech isn't really about free speech.
00:25:31.460 It's about who gets to set the parameters for what is socially unacceptable.
00:25:36.520 Like what's verbatim, off topic.
00:25:38.760 You can't reach that because it's somehow sacred.
00:25:41.580 Right.
00:25:42.000 Questioning Israel is wrong because it's morally wrong to do so.
00:25:47.480 Zionist America.
00:25:48.860 Right.
00:25:49.740 I suppose you could argue that one of the problems with conservatism in the sense of mainstream conservatism is that they are kind of almost by their very nature against things.
00:25:57.920 Which are radical.
00:25:59.380 So radical conservatism, anything that rocks the boat seriously, anything that seriously questions the status quo, even though the status quo is being pushed in a constantly left wing direction.
00:26:09.540 If they push back against that in a moderate way, then that's fine.
00:26:14.460 But they push back against it in a pronounced and clear and divisive and charismatic way, like Enoch Powell, let's say, in Britain in 1968.
00:26:24.320 Then that's too much because that's that's that's that's incendiary and they don't like that.
00:26:31.060 That's that's too much rocking the boat.
00:26:32.460 That's too much.
00:26:33.020 And therefore he gets sacked.
00:26:34.940 And I think that's the thing with the conservatives.
00:26:37.040 They they have these values which parallel those of the people who are, let's say, radical conservatives or extreme conservatives.
00:26:42.060 But they don't like controversy.
00:26:43.280 They don't like rocking the boat.
00:26:44.580 They don't like anything incendiary or which which the cause is like a lack of control, which they don't like sincerity and and and seriousness.
00:26:53.580 I think I have not heard very many denunciations of, say, QAnon from conservatives.
00:27:02.840 And I'm sure you could find some here and there.
00:27:06.560 But generally speaking, QAnon is going with the flow.
00:27:11.460 It might be totally wacky and fraudulent and risible, but it is going with their general flow.
00:27:19.320 And they're not going to denounce it at all, despite the fact that it actually is a huge phenomenon of wild conspiracy theorizing going on the right.
00:27:31.180 But it ultimately supports the GOP and it supports their foreign policy and business agenda.
00:27:37.000 And they're not going to go against it.
00:27:38.760 I mean, you can go back to the early stages of the purges with William F. Buckley and see this very similar dynamic.
00:27:47.040 So the John Birch Society was much, much larger than it is now.
00:27:52.720 I think the John Birch Society is still around and they still publish some pieces, but they're way out of the mainstream.
00:27:59.260 And I can't even remember the last time someone I saw an article by them, but they are still publishing.
00:28:04.200 They were an extremely powerful organization that was attracting actually a lot of good people, kind of civic leaders, businessmen, kind of middle American types, but people who had money and influence of some kind.
00:28:21.720 Certainly they weren't attracting the East Coast elite, but they were attracting people who were actually powerful in their way.
00:28:29.260 They were purged because Robert Welch was in opposition to the Vietnam War.
00:28:40.940 They were not purged for engaging in wild conspiracy theories, such as Dwight Eisenhower was a secret communist agent, which quite literally Robert Welch kind of suggested in his book, The Politician.
00:28:55.560 They could be wacky so long as they were going with the flow.
00:29:01.560 And it's kind of interesting.
00:29:02.380 Robert Welch and the Birchers supported the Goldwater campaign before Buckley and them did.
00:29:08.500 They might have even given them the idea.
00:29:10.880 But Buckley and the conservatives purged them when they went against the real power agenda of the state.
00:29:20.840 And at that point, they brought out all this conspiracy theory stuff.
00:29:24.720 And then later on, they started to claim that they were racist and anti-Semitic, which the Birch Society actually was, in fact, not.
00:29:32.460 And they just kind of tell this story about how Buckley cleaned up the right and saved the right from anti-Semitism or something, when he didn't do that in the slightest.
00:29:42.380 He actually had anti-Semitic friends, Revelo Oliver being a major one.
00:29:49.960 But it was basically when the Birchers opposed the power agenda that he decided to engage in a kind of destruction of them, which was successful.
00:30:01.400 And so, again, you can be wacky, you can be out of bounds, you can say all sorts of nonsense, and conservatives will more or less defend you so long as you are going along with their agenda.
00:30:15.860 If you say something that is sincere and sincerely divisive in the sense of, you know, I mean this, and there are implications to the words that I'm saying.
00:30:28.580 This isn't just me mouthing off on Facebook about my ex-girlfriend.
00:30:32.920 No, this is actually a sincerely held belief that has implications, and that means that we have to change our lives.
00:30:40.020 The connecting thread here is lack of sincerity.
00:30:42.240 What I always found interesting about the right wing in America is this connection it's always had with allowing a proliferation of conspiracy theories.
00:30:50.100 You could say things like Obama is secretly a reptile, right?
00:30:53.360 And then this will be allowed.
00:30:54.860 This is acceptable discourse.
00:30:56.860 And it's always been bound up, partly from the history with Cold War paranoia, then partly just that legacy carrying on forward.
00:31:03.720 And then so you have this allowance for as any wackier conspiracy theory that you can possibly have.
00:31:09.640 And then conservatives like to present themselves as like dangerous truth tellers, right?
00:31:13.760 We've uncovered the real conspiracy or we're going to stick it to the PC crowds when we do our university tour and Crowder is going to tell the real dangerous truth that nobody wants to hear.
00:31:22.760 But, of course, we know the moment that you actually say something sincere about, you know, maybe, you know, AIPAC has a role in our international affairs, right?
00:31:34.180 Then it's like, OK, well, you can't say that. We've got to shut you down.
00:31:37.280 And like I was saying earlier, then all of a sudden they, poof, they disappear.
00:31:40.560 And it's interesting to me how these leftovers of these conspiratorial thinking that's so allowed because it services the interests of the elites and distracting you from the real issues.
00:31:52.640 Because it spills over into these same terrains as well.
00:31:56.140 I mean, that's why you get endless comments saying, oh, well, maybe because Spencer has a picture with the Bush that he's secretly a Fed working blah, blah, blah.
00:32:03.560 Like these very same these very same currents run through all notions of the right in America, not just not just mainstream conservatives, but it's within our own spheres as well.
00:32:15.620 It's very prevalent. And it's a huge problem to try and get to get over that, because when you're trying to appeal to people and get them on board, you're always stuck with these leftovers of conspiratorial libertarian thinking that just permeates all the political atmosphere.
00:32:31.300 They don't they don't they don't like anything radical. That's that's the point.
00:32:34.700 And so sometimes things that are radical have to be proposed and things that are radical have to be done and decisive things have to be done.
00:32:40.620 And in those kinds of situations, often there are exceptions. Someone like Mrs. Thatcher, perhaps in some ways, was an exception.
00:32:48.080 There was a difficult situation. There was this thing with the Falklands. The Argentines invaded the Falklands.
00:32:53.220 A decision had to be made. The Belgrano had sailed into the exclusion zone around the Falklands.
00:32:59.420 What do we do? And she made that decision that was dramatized in the movie The Iron Lady, you know, sinker.
00:33:04.280 And that's it. And someone like Boris Johnson is much more of a conservative or David Cameron.
00:33:10.900 They don't want to have to do things like that. It goes against their instincts to have to do radical things.
00:33:17.000 And when you're in a situation of a cultural revolution like this, then what you need is to stop it or to confront it is decisive action.
00:33:24.700 And that's what I was referring to earlier about Enoch Powell. What he was saying was there are terrible things happening in the land and we need to do something decisive.
00:33:33.340 We need to do something dramatic. We need to do something radical in order to stop this, in order to nip this madness in the bud, as he saw it.
00:33:40.860 But a conservative of the Edward Heath kind, they can't do things like that.
00:33:45.720 They would freeze in the headlights like rabbits in response to that kind of thing happening.
00:33:51.080 And that's what that's there. That's their problem, as far as I'm concerned, in situations of crisis, in situations of non-crisis, then fine.
00:33:59.360 They can manage things and they'll be quite calm and whatever.
00:34:02.640 But this is not the situation we're in. We're in a situation, basically existential crisis for the West that's been that's been pinpointed into this.
00:34:10.500 And they've prevented the rise of people who actually would do something decisive.
00:34:18.780 I mean, and they have, every one of those people you mentioned.
00:34:23.700 And so one of the fundamental reasons why nothing can really be done, there can't be real opposition to cancel culture, the left, the riots, or what have you, is the lack of any serious right-wing opposition that would say no.
00:34:43.500 So, indeed.
00:34:47.700 Well, this is probably what interests me about it, is because we're talking about cancel culture, this division and battle between elites, which it is.
00:34:54.940 But at the same time, the cultural purge is happening on a mass scale, right?
00:34:59.980 It's hundreds of thousands of people participating in it and allowing it to happen.
00:35:03.620 And as we were talking about the conspiratorial thinking and the gatekeeping occurring even within the right and within the distant right, it spills over the exact same attitudes, usually without people knowing it.
00:35:14.400 Is it self-purging of any actual challenging authority that could rise up or movement that could actually say no?
00:35:21.680 Because it's always, you're attacking, ultimately, at the end of the day, you're attacking a large cultural revolution mass, which, while it has its origins in battles between elites, that's infecting every manner of how we actually think and engage politically on the online sphere and in the real world, right?
00:35:37.280 And so you're always pushing against this mass, and it's always nameless, and it's always overwhelming.
00:35:42.700 And this is why it's so hard to get proper organization going, because that thinking spills into it.
00:35:48.580 And everyone starts, you get very distrustful, and you immediately cancel somebody.
00:35:52.500 Like, at the moment you hear, okay, well, this person shook hands with somebody at a conference years ago.
00:35:58.520 They're secretly working for Russia.
00:36:00.420 But this permeates everything, and it's a part of the same cancel culture that the left and the liberal left is engaging in.
00:36:06.260 And we're not at all separate from that.
00:36:09.060 We're very much a part of that.
00:36:10.600 Distant right is not culpable, right?
00:36:14.900 Right.
00:36:15.340 I think I would also add that there's a trend over the last two to three years, and one that's really been accelerated in the last three months.
00:36:27.440 And that is that the online cancel culture is starting to reach new people.
00:36:32.540 It's starting to reach the white middle class.
00:36:35.240 And it is increasingly moving from online into real world matters.
00:36:41.760 So I can remember with, you know, the old ride in 2017 and Charlottesville and all that kind of stuff, there was this huge engagement in doxing of people who attended that rally.
00:36:55.520 So, you know, and it quickly moved from, you know, doing the typical attack on Richard Spencer or whatever that we had seen for months, and which wasn't really affecting me at all, to let's figure out who that one guy was in the polo shirt holding up a tiki torch, and let's figure out who he was, where he works, and let's get him fired.
00:37:22.060 And they were successful in some pretty dramatic ways.
00:37:25.740 There was actually one young person who I had never met or even heard of, who after being doxed, committed suicide.
00:37:35.200 And he was actually, I believe his last name was Dodson.
00:37:38.260 And he was actually someone who was an impressive young man who was doing research of some kind.
00:37:48.380 He was doing intellectual activity.
00:37:50.020 But there were also attacks on people who were so far out of power.
00:37:55.880 The idea that you were going to attack them is just grotesque.
00:38:00.580 People who had blue-collar jobs, who attended something.
00:38:04.960 Oh, we need to get him fired from the restaurant where he's working.
00:38:10.360 It was obscene.
00:38:12.860 No, let's put this in different terms.
00:38:16.040 I did a book many, many years ago on a collateral ancestor of mine called Sapir's Dutton.
00:38:21.340 It was called The Ruler of Cheshire.
00:38:23.280 Sapir's Dutton, Tudor Gangland, and the Violent Politics of Palatine.
00:38:26.200 And what you have when you have a breakdown in law and order, which is what you had in Tudor England, and particularly Tudor Cheshire,
00:38:33.260 it was extremely lawless, beyond the control of the crown.
00:38:36.680 It was Palatine anyway.
00:38:38.380 You just have gang warfare.
00:38:40.560 That's what you have.
00:38:41.280 That's what happens.
00:38:41.980 If you go to, let's say, London, the Catholic part of London, that's what you have.
00:38:46.860 The British government aren't really in control in parts of these areas.
00:38:49.620 It's gangs.
00:38:50.480 It's gang warfare.
00:38:51.540 And that's what you have.
00:38:52.220 Now, if you look in Tudor England, you can see it.
00:38:55.080 You can see it whenever there's gangs, is you go for the weaker members of each other's gangs, because those are the easy targets.
00:39:02.160 So you kill off.
00:39:02.880 There's two rival gangs fighting for control of some particular part of Cheshire.
00:39:08.400 And so you get a court case which says that this person killed one of Sapir's Dutton's servants.
00:39:15.020 The worst servant was all-encompassing.
00:39:16.660 Anybody in his gang is his servant, his retinue.
00:39:19.080 But it would be someone low down, a husbandman, a yeoman farmer, someone like that, because those are the people you can easily get to their property and kill them.
00:39:26.500 And then, oh, and then as a consequence, then a load of people from the other gang, William Brereton or whatever, lay in wait for some people from Dutton's gang to pass through this land and they kill them or whatever.
00:39:37.060 That's how gang warfare works.
00:39:39.620 So it seems bizarre in the general scheme of things.
00:39:42.440 Yeah, why didn't they go for you?
00:39:43.640 Why didn't they go for someone more significant within the movement?
00:39:46.200 No, if it's a gang warfare, which is what it is, then you should go for the people that are at the bottom.
00:39:52.220 And that was more effective, ultimately.
00:39:55.580 It is more effective.
00:39:56.400 Yeah.
00:39:56.960 Because it sends a chill factor to chill.
00:39:58.440 Yeah, yeah, and they, they, yeah, I remember going after Kyle Bristow, who was acting as my lawyer and so on.
00:40:05.420 Yeah, going after support, buttressing support is absolutely more effective than doing yet another article on how Richard Spencer is evil.
00:40:16.480 And that was what effectively destroyed the alt-right.
00:40:19.180 But I guess to return to the longer thread that I was making, so we had that in 2017 and 2018, which was, you know, grotesque in many ways.
00:40:30.700 And then now you have people getting canceled in real life in really real ways.
00:40:37.000 The McCloskey family, this was a couple, I don't even know if they had children, but a couple of tort lawyers who became fabulously wealthy and created this home outside of St. Louis in a gated community that seemed to evoke the Tudor age in parts, as well as the 18th century.
00:40:58.600 And they, there was a, so these are, Black Lives Matter is a cause that this couple endorsed over and over.
00:41:07.660 Then it came to their doorstep and they stepped outside wearing khakis and dockers, carrying machine guns and pointing them at people.
00:41:16.740 And it, you know, became a, an amusing meme.
00:41:19.900 But they, their home was recently raided and so on.
00:41:25.360 But there, there was another, you know, now notorious example of a woman who seemed to be getting into an argument with a black person and she pointed a gun at her.
00:41:38.640 Now, I, I, I would say that, you know, one of the rules of firearms is that if you ever draw your weapon, you should use it.
00:41:47.220 That is, uh, you don't point your gun at people, uh, if you, if someone is threatening your life, you draw your weapon and you fire it, uh, pointing a gun, uh, creates, uh, nothing good.
00:42:00.500 Uh, but that, you know, tactical critique aside, uh, these people were in chaotic situations.
00:42:08.840 They, they likely feared for their life in a very genuine manner and they were attempting to protect themselves.
00:42:17.080 Uh, these people are going to be arrested and going to be absolutely destroyed.
00:42:22.120 Um, and I don't, I, I think we're actually even passing over a point where being a McCloskey and, you know, uh, suing corporations for anti-discrimination or whatever they did or for discrimination or whatever they did and talking about how you love Black Lives Matter or whatever, uh, is not enough.
00:42:41.460 Um, and those people are being canceled actually in a much kind of realer way, uh, than, uh, the cancellation of any, you know, any suffering that I've undergone, uh, or even suffering that some people underwent, um, by getting fired from a job.
00:42:58.540 Uh, these people are going to be, uh, depicted as national pariahs.
00:43:04.240 Uh, they might, they, in all likelihood, they're going to serve some kind of jail time, uh, for this offense that they committed.
00:43:11.360 That it isn't really an offense at all.
00:43:13.760 Uh, and, um, I, yeah, I, I, I think things are escalating to that point where the upper, white upper middle class is going to be increasingly canceled at least, you know, in, in, in strong examples of this, they are going to be increasingly canceled and the other members of that class are going to get the message, uh, as they do.
00:43:36.540 And they are going to basically not defend themselves, uh, against these mobs.
00:43:44.520 Yeah, we know how that goes as well.
00:43:46.260 I think this was just yesterday or a day before, but, uh, a mother got shot in the head in front of her three-year-old son and husband for saying all lives matter in response to a Black Lives Matter protest.
00:43:56.880 And that was what she got.
00:43:58.460 So if she, if she was able to defend herself, well, then she would have been in a situation like the couple or the lady in front of the grocery store who was pregnant, by the way.
00:44:06.920 And they were kicking her vehicle and standing behind it so they couldn't get away and trying to beat her down, basically.
00:44:12.700 And so it's this deadlock where you can't defend yourself.
00:44:16.400 And then on top of that, you have the middle class, even the upper middle class, the white upper middle class is already disappearing anyways, right?
00:44:24.020 It's being removed out of positions of influence and jobs and status.
00:44:27.820 They're already losing that to higher IQ immigration, not just mass immigration from below.
00:44:32.940 So you have that situation from the top and then from the bottom, you've got, you know, if you defend yourself, you're going to go to jail because this is okay.
00:44:40.860 And then we'll get hundreds of thousands of people to support you in this because you might have said the N word or something, or you might have said all lives matter.
00:44:47.500 And the interesting thing is, is creating this situation, which to me reminds me of not just the legal side of this, of course, but reminds me of how we used to have honor and shame societies instead of historically anyways, in ancient times,
00:45:01.180 where you were outcast from the group.
00:45:03.600 So instead of having guilt, you had shame in the sense that the way in which you try to reconcile yourself or remove yourself or the way in which you felt that you transgressed was against the group rather than just your own sense of guilt.
00:45:16.140 So we had this case recently in Canada and UBC, the University of British Columbia, the administrator who was working there, he simply liked a tweet that was supporting Black Lives Matter,
00:45:29.780 saying maybe don't go too far with the protests, right?
00:45:33.440 And they demanded his stepping down, and then they pressured him, he had gotten fired, and he wrote a letter of apology after he got fired.
00:45:44.080 And that's the strength of it, is that even once you've been outcasted, you're still trying to reconcile yourselves and redeem yourselves to this group shame that you're feeling.
00:45:52.440 And to me, that is part of the real danger of all this, is you've got the legal side, the attack on your livelihood, and then with that, you have the moral justification, which is permeating the way in which you see yourself and try to redeem yourself to the group.
00:46:07.740 Are they really feeling shame, though, these people, or are they just hoping that even though after he's been fired, doing some public apology might help them in some way to get back on the ladder again?
00:46:19.480 Well, I think they're actually feeling shame.
00:46:21.480 I mean, almost anyone I've encountered that's been called out online or something, they feel like they say how dirty they feel for even thinking that.
00:46:30.640 All right, like, there's a strong move to make it so, like, this is the moral norm.
00:46:37.100 And if you're transgressing in the group in this regard, you're transgressing against something that's moral, like you're being immoral, right?
00:46:43.000 And that's the real strength of this.
00:46:44.760 And I've seen this dynamic play out.
00:46:46.740 I mean, yeah, maybe if you're, like, a conservative, outrageous speaker, and you maybe overstep the bounds when you're on some tour and you're trying to be crazy, you're like, oh, I didn't really mean it that way.
00:46:55.880 Then, yeah, I doubt that they're really ashamed.
00:46:57.540 But, I mean, if you're, like, an average working person, like you're an administrator or you're just, like, a lawyer and you say, okay, yeah, I might have liked a clique that was a little bit too critical in Black Lives Matter.
00:47:10.220 Now I'm being socially ostracized by my family and friends.
00:47:13.100 And, I mean, no man's an island.
00:47:14.460 You only have your identity in relation to the community.
00:47:17.440 And it's a community saying, you know, you're failing to live up to who you should be.
00:47:20.800 I think they do feel genuine shame.
00:47:22.560 They feel like, you know, they're the morally wrong.
00:47:25.520 They're the social outcast.
00:47:27.540 I agree.
00:47:31.240 I think it is a combination of both.
00:47:33.640 I mean, there are serious incentives involved with, you know, entering the upper middle class by basically, you know, announcing a series of shibboleths.
00:47:45.540 But I also agree that we don't live, I mean, when people attack the postmodern age as, you know, anti-moral or purely rational or something like that, I think they get it entirely wrong.
00:48:01.080 We live in a hyper moral age and people need that, particularly the upper middle class people who are really sensitive to that type of stuff.
00:48:09.760 Yes, I mean, it's the replacement of the sexual shame in that sense, isn't it?
00:48:17.060 A hundred years ago, it was the way that you signaled your middle classness was by your sexual constancy and your sexual ethics.
00:48:25.660 And then there was a period, a period of chaos where this was all questioned and whatever.
00:48:30.360 And even when I was a child, there was an element of which middle class was about that.
00:48:33.260 And then some kind of flip over, I don't know when it happened, the 90s maybe, and it became the people that were questioning that system, the people that were the outsiders questioning that middle class system, the radicals, whatever, that were saying, oh, let's have sexual liberation.
00:48:48.940 That became the sign of middle classness and that and its associated, although, to be fair, even though their sexual behavior is more regulated than that of working class people.
00:48:57.420 That's just a fact.
00:48:58.120 They can't help that.
00:48:58.740 I think it's probably genetic issue, K strategists, whatever, but that became their new morality, the way you are moral.
00:49:07.280 You are moral if you are anti-racist.
00:49:09.320 That is the essence of moral.
00:49:11.460 And anyone who, that is a moral, that's what moral is.
00:49:14.020 And any deviation from that is a sign of immorality.
00:49:18.900 So, yes, I suppose you're right.
00:49:19.940 If they've been strongly inculcated with that, that's what moral is.
00:49:22.760 That's what good is.
00:49:23.660 That's what good is.
00:49:24.380 That's what goes to heaven.
00:49:25.620 That's heaven.
00:49:26.360 That's God.
00:49:26.900 Yeah.
00:49:27.700 Then you're a devil worshiper.
00:49:31.120 You're going to get a hell, mate, if you've been accused of these kinds of verbal rather than sexual inconstancy.
00:49:41.940 Rather than, oh, I've tried to be sexually pure, but I had this moment of weakness.
00:49:46.660 And, oh, it's so terrible.
00:49:47.700 And Mayor Cooper and shame on me.
00:49:49.520 It's I do my best to be morally pure by being anti-racist.
00:49:52.280 And I had this moment of weakness where I made a little joke about a Chinese person or whatever it was that I did.
00:49:57.260 I used the wrong word thoughtlessly.
00:50:00.400 Apparently this week the word Oriental is wrong, but last week it wasn't, whatever it is.
00:50:06.040 And so, yes, I think perhaps you're right with that.
00:50:08.000 Yeah.
00:50:08.060 Like these people, like David Wilde, this thing in Britain, it's called Little Britain.
00:50:12.020 It's quite a funny, quite simple comedy, but quite funny and reasonably kind of prepared to mock everything, including politically correct type things.
00:50:20.620 And that's been cancelled.
00:50:24.060 That's been cancelled.
00:50:25.340 And these are people that have spent their careers to a certain extent.
00:50:28.000 They're not really over the top in this regard, but to a certain extent, they're part of this politically correct establishment that you get that gets wheeled out on British panel shows and makes jokes.
00:50:35.280 Orange man, you know.
00:50:37.680 And they've had their programme, both their programme, two of them, Little Britain and another one called Come Fly With Me, removed from the BBC.
00:50:47.260 So I wonder how they feel about it.
00:50:48.900 Yeah, I think you are right.
00:50:50.020 I think some of them are faking it, fake it to make it kind of thing.
00:50:52.700 But I think others, they must.
00:50:54.620 I don't know what it's like, because it's part of your group, being ashamed in front of the group.
00:50:58.980 And I don't perceive left wing middle class people as being part of my group at all.
00:51:06.340 Well, here's the thing.
00:51:07.840 I mean, I think we can explain the origin of this new morality by looking to incentives and the carrot and the stick.
00:51:14.040 But at the same time, just because we've explained the origin doesn't explain away that to people that this is actually the truth.
00:51:19.820 Right.
00:51:19.920 Like this is what Foucault would call a verediction, creates this space of truth and justification in which knowledge, power and institutional power is oriented around.
00:51:28.200 It's not that they know it's entirely constructed.
00:51:30.820 I mean, to them, that is the truth that they live.
00:51:33.320 Right.
00:51:33.560 And so we can explain it, we can explain it with incentives and carrots and the sticks, which is all true.
00:51:39.300 But that doesn't mean the real morality of it is any less true.
00:51:43.000 I mean, that's what they actually dwell in.
00:51:44.460 That's how they understand themselves.
00:51:45.940 Yeah.
00:51:47.060 So it's like it reminds me of the studies I did when I was a postgraduate of the Christian Union.
00:51:51.220 They believe this stuff.
00:51:53.300 And so this is their religion.
00:51:56.420 This is how the world makes sense.
00:51:57.900 This is the means through which you compete to be the best, through which you try to get to the top.
00:52:02.540 And they've ballsed it up and the community aren't happy with them.
00:52:06.080 And if you were in the Christian Union, the way you ballsed it up was by being known as a girl to have got off with a random bloke at a nightclub, got off being snogged, you know, necked, whatever you call it in America.
00:52:16.520 And what do you call it?
00:52:18.820 You know, kissing with tongues, whatever.
00:52:20.880 Oh, OK.
00:52:21.740 Snogged.
00:52:22.320 Making out.
00:52:23.660 Isn't that what Americans call it?
00:52:24.400 Making out.
00:52:24.900 We call it getting off.
00:52:26.120 Anyway, and that was the thing you weren't allowed to do if you were in the Christian Union.
00:52:30.960 And then there'd be gossip and there'd be shame and there'd be going and reconfessing your Christianity and doing and doing a new kind of public confession.
00:52:39.340 That was what you had to do.
00:52:40.140 A public confession where you admitted, basically, that you would stop being a Christian and you become one again with your testimony.
00:52:47.960 And often you get these people that in the first year they turn up, they'd be from a Christian household and they go off the rails a bit.
00:52:54.740 And then in the third year, then Jesus would visit them in the shower or something.
00:53:00.560 And and then and then and then there you go.
00:53:02.720 Then they were there.
00:53:03.460 They do a public public confession.
00:53:05.300 And that's what these people have to do in order to the public.
00:53:08.920 Like what you mentioned, this guy from Canada, you have to do a public confession of your sins and hope that that will be enough to permit you.
00:53:17.840 And then you get, of course, an arms race in how over the top and how emotional and how self-debasing your public confession can be, as we saw with Black Lives Matter protests.
00:53:28.720 There you are.
00:53:29.060 But it's not as defacing as confessing publicly that you're snogging.
00:53:37.280 Imagine saying that snogging.
00:53:39.940 Well, they put it in some terminology that they put it in some term.
00:53:43.660 They use the word backsliding, which I think might be biblical in origin.
00:53:46.940 Backsliding.
00:53:47.540 That's not a form of sex, by the way.
00:53:48.880 That's that's a that's a term, which means that you move away from your Christianity back to both.
00:53:52.760 Well, although if they have done that, then that would have been very bad as well.
00:53:58.900 But but yeah, sorry, I digress here.
00:54:02.420 But yeah, I do think this will pass there.
00:54:05.660 I think because the covid thing, I think this will cut.
00:54:07.740 There is a reaction against it.
00:54:09.100 It's coming.
00:54:09.580 And also you have to think about what's happening behind the scenes that we talk about.
00:54:14.060 These academic papers have been withdrawn.
00:54:15.920 The Council, Culture and Academia.
00:54:17.520 And then there was this paper by Corrie Clark.
00:54:19.420 Her name is quite a spunky fellow, really.
00:54:22.040 But she did this paper in which she looked at how IQ and its relationship with criminality at the national level.
00:54:32.900 And she showed that anyway, the point is that they used the Linden Van Pyn IQ data.
00:54:38.460 They then withdrew the paper, publicly withdrew the paper because they were getting all this pressure because of Black Lives Matter.
00:54:44.180 Even even though there's been maybe a thousand papers published using Linden Van Pyn's data.
00:54:50.080 And obviously they're not all going to be withdrawn.
00:54:52.520 That data has been redone by somebody else who found a 0.87 correlation, which is extremely high, between his redoing of it and what Lynn did.
00:55:01.440 So, OK, there are mistakes and there are problems.
00:55:03.140 And the guy's 90 years old.
00:55:04.460 But it was redone and there was no reason to withdraw the paper at all.
00:55:12.200 But they did because they were put under pressure and they were told, oh, if you do this, then this could happen.
00:55:17.380 If you don't withdraw it, then we'll complain to the publisher and we'll complain to the advertisers and all of this.
00:55:23.240 This thing is magicked up and you get all these emails coordinated, obviously, saying, oh, and then you'll get mass resignations from the editorial board.
00:55:30.260 And all of these threats are given to you and we'll come for your work and we'll try to get an academic misconduct investigation done against you.
00:55:37.920 And they're normally, you know, stitched up, those kinds of things.
00:55:40.600 And so then they just caved in and shut up and hope it goes away.
00:55:43.680 But what you don't know about, I can't talk, is things going on behind the scenes.
00:55:48.740 It is happening behind the scenes that people are being pressured to withdraw their papers and they're not doing so.
00:55:54.360 And the journals are being pressured to withdraw their papers and they're refusing to do so.
00:55:59.680 And entire, you know, people have resigned from editorial boards over racist papers and then tough.
00:56:06.940 People are standing up against this behind the scenes that you don't hear about.
00:56:10.620 You only hear about the ones that cuck.
00:56:12.980 I don't think this is going to pass so easily.
00:56:16.160 I think it will reach a culmination.
00:56:18.800 And we are seeing that right now.
00:56:22.480 But it can get more intense.
00:56:25.620 And I do think it will before it passes.
00:56:28.500 What do you think will happen before it passes?
00:56:30.680 Do you have any back of the hand prognostications?
00:56:36.200 I think we're going to see increasing examples of the criminalization of defending yourself.
00:56:43.420 I don't think that police departments are going to be totally defunded or anything like that.
00:56:50.120 But I do think there are going to be serious reforms, quote unquote, that are going to affect crime.
00:56:57.540 I think the upper white middle class is going to be increasingly unable to insulate themselves from these issues.
00:57:08.300 But until there is a real alternative to these things and not just people saying, well, you know, what happened to free speech or, you know, so much for liberal tolerance, there won't be any real pushback.
00:57:23.460 Because I don't know, it's kind of an all or nothing thing.
00:57:26.440 Like you're either dominated or you dominate.
00:57:29.680 And, you know, unless there is a new hegemonic system of people willing to force others to get in line, this is these people are the strong ones and they are going to increasingly force us to get in line.
00:57:45.100 One of the things that I think we discussed a while ago and before the BLM, but during the riots, when this disorder starts to hit the middle class, when it gets to their communities, then you might see some sort of backlash against it.
00:58:01.760 And it is now hitting them in America anyway, not anywhere else, but in America.
00:58:06.820 It's definitely hitting them now.
00:58:08.680 So maybe, I mean, there's got to be some instinct still there for the survival of your children.
00:58:17.480 Your kids don't get killed.
00:58:18.960 You don't end up like a South African farmer.
00:58:21.420 There's got to be some sort of that would hit in, I would suspect, which makes me slightly less pessimistic.
00:58:29.200 I'm ultimately not pessimistic.
00:58:31.360 I think this has to reach its culmination before another, you know, domineering force takes over.
00:58:38.620 But I don't expect much of anything from the middle class.
00:58:43.400 Well, I mean, their backlash is going to be impotent.
00:58:46.200 I mean, really, what their backlash is just about it's washing over them.
00:58:49.900 It's not even that they're presenting like a fundamental challenge to what's going on.
00:58:53.700 They're just saying, no, we are tolerant, but you're on my property and we've supported you all this time.
00:58:58.820 And how could you do this to us?
00:59:00.200 They're not actually challenging the entire main current.
00:59:03.620 They're swimming with it still at the end of the day.
00:59:06.420 And any kind of backlash is just going to be like a petite bourgeois one about their own plate in the system.
00:59:12.480 And so I think that process does need to start washing over them as well.
00:59:16.120 And in that sense, that may be like what that's getting at when you have people refusing to rescind, you know, journals, articles out of journals.
00:59:23.880 Like that's a form maybe you could say like an early form of white strike.
00:59:27.280 But it's only when you reach a certain critical mass in which it starts washing over everyone and there is no solution at that point.
00:59:34.420 And then once you like, OK, well, if you want us to withdraw from the system, then we're going to withdraw from the system.
00:59:38.740 And that's the only way I think you can really send an effective message on this regard.
00:59:43.620 But you can only do that once you've been sufficiently cleansed.
00:59:47.080 You can't have people holding on to all these, you know, positions of, OK, well, I'm somewhat affluent.
00:59:53.420 I donate to BLM, right?
00:59:55.040 Just don't go on my lawn, which basically that's what we're seeing right now, which, of course, is horrible to not be allowed to defend yourself.
01:00:01.960 I'm not saying this is a good thing.
01:00:03.340 I'm just saying that's still coming out of just a position of defense, not a position of actually attacking the paradigm, which a lot of these people, of course, were going along with in the first place.
01:00:15.660 Yeah.
01:00:16.120 The paradigm has to be attacked at a moral level and it has to be undermined totally.
01:00:23.680 In order to defeat it, otherwise, it's just simply going to be stronger than any kind of reactionary force.
01:00:29.060 Yeah, because I think that's what we're doing in our own little way.
01:00:36.800 I don't think what we want is for the upper middle class whites to have their way where they can say, just like, just imagine if BLM listened to them like they're not.
01:00:46.640 But just imagine that for a second.
01:00:48.280 And they'll be like, OK, we're not going to go on your property.
01:00:51.080 We're not going to loot too much.
01:00:52.720 We're just going to protest down the streets, you know, attack more working class whites.
01:00:57.080 Yeah, or we're going to burn down our own neighborhoods or something.
01:01:00.460 Yeah.
01:01:01.600 It's still not good if they get their demands anyway.
01:01:03.980 So, of course, it's about the whole fundamental restructure in, well, what is the moral, what is the good?
01:01:09.800 And that's really what we're trying to change at the end of the day.
01:01:15.660 All right.
01:01:17.160 That was good.
01:01:18.940 That was deep.
01:01:19.440 Thank you.