Ep 431 ｜ Dissecting the Dangers of Critical Theory ｜ Guest： James Lindsay
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 17 minutes
Words per Minute
181.2758
Summary
James Lindsay is an author, a scholar, and an amazing thinker. He is the author of Cynical Theories, a book about critical race theory, and he is a frequent guest host on the podcast Relatable. In this episode, we talk about the Biden administration and its impact on women's equality.
Transcript
00:00:16.140
He is an author, a scholar, an amazing thinker, and you can already tell as you've started
00:00:24.900
I told my team after I finished this conversation that I actually need to book four hours when
00:00:31.700
I talk to James Lindsay because you'll be able to tell.
00:00:37.560
My brain just keeps going because he says so much that needs to be dissected and analyzed
00:00:44.900
and questioned, and you are going to love this conversation.
00:00:48.780
You're going to feel so smart after it because he is so smart and gives such great insight,
00:00:52.660
and I'm really excited for you to listen to it.
00:00:55.080
If you haven't listened to our first conversation from a few months ago from January, I'll link
00:00:59.920
it in the description so you can go back and listen to that.
00:01:04.200
It gives a little bit more context about what we're talking about today, but nevertheless,
00:01:22.860
Last time we talked all about your book, Cynical Theories.
00:01:27.680
We're going to continue that conversation today.
00:01:34.180
This will come out sometime in May, and so who knows?
00:01:37.280
Who the heck knows what's going to happen over the next few months?
00:01:40.080
But as we're talking, we've seen a flurry of executive orders from the Biden administration
00:01:45.340
in regards to sex discrimination, racial discrimination that maybe all sound good in the name of equity.
00:01:54.520
But it seems to me that those people who voted for him thinking that it was going to end wokeness
00:02:00.000
and a lot of the stuff that you've talked about are wrong.
00:02:05.120
Yeah, I did think and still think that those people are wrong.
00:02:12.120
We'll see where that is when this comes out, I suppose.
00:02:15.320
But I want to be as generous to their argument as possible.
00:02:19.040
So their argument is that Trump was radicalizing and galvanizing the left
00:02:26.180
so that it was impossible to make the argument against wokeness to normal people
00:02:33.180
because to try to argue against wokeness to normal people would result in them saying something like,
00:02:38.980
but Trump, you know, so Trump is a bigger problem or Trump is the problem.
00:02:44.740
And we wouldn't have to do this if Trump wasn't in office.
00:02:47.360
So their belief was that if we remove that irritant from the White House,
00:02:54.520
then we can start to make headway on the cultural argument against wokeness.
00:02:59.280
We can start to show normal people just how bad wokeness is.
00:03:03.840
My counter to that, I do sympathize and I do think they are actually right
00:03:08.500
that certainly much of the left was galvanizing around anti-Trumpism
00:03:14.840
to the point where they were unable to, I mean, it became very tribal and partisan.
00:03:20.860
They were unable to give an inch on almost anything because Trump.
00:03:28.000
So I understand their argument and I sympathize with their argument
00:03:33.280
The thing that I disagree with them on is that I believe that they are operating under the assumption
00:03:39.340
that politics as usual and culture as usual are still in operation.
00:03:49.100
I do not think we are operating in politics as usual.
00:03:52.320
I think we are now operating in a very different circumstance
00:03:54.800
and that there is now no check on a movement that Biden is either controlled by
00:04:03.520
or is bought into or both to some degree that wants nothing but more power
00:04:08.240
and is going to put the pedal to the metal to get as much, not just power,
00:04:14.600
but unassailable power as it can take while it has the opportunity.
00:04:18.340
And we see literally his first hour in the White House,
00:04:22.980
Biden signed something like 17 executive orders, at least a handful of which are brutally woke.
00:04:30.500
We're sending the critical race theory ban that Trump had put in in October or September.
00:04:36.260
We're doing whatever it is with gender identity.
00:04:42.540
And so basically women's sports and probably lots of women's safety is now compromised
00:04:50.700
And this was, I mean, we're talking first hour in office.
00:04:54.420
So these were extremely high priorities and are just the tip of a very large iceberg.
00:05:01.760
So I think those people have a compelling argument and I've always maintained since I've started
00:05:08.500
making it that they have an argument that is the correct argument if things are normal.
00:05:13.440
And I disagree with the assumption that things remain normal.
00:05:18.160
I think that there is something to, like you said, the argument that Trump was galvanizing
00:05:21.960
people, but the assumption that after after he was out of office, that that galvanization
00:05:29.700
or that feeling of anger, anti-Trump anger, anti-right anger would just go away and dissipate
00:05:36.560
because now they have the salve for their wounds and Joe Biden is wrong.
00:05:46.600
They almost still see themselves as the resistance in some strange way.
00:05:52.080
And I think that misunderstanding of their attitudes and why they're going to linger also
00:05:57.860
goes back to a misunderstanding of when this all began.
00:06:02.480
I can't even say began, but really started to ignite.
00:06:09.400
It felt like to a lot of people around like 2015, it seemed like, okay, things, things
00:06:20.780
It seems like we're in this, we have a lot of class tension.
00:06:24.500
We have a lot of tension between these groups that it didn't seem like we had before Obama
00:06:33.880
Or am I laying blame at Obama's feet that doesn't deserve to be laid there?
00:06:48.080
They, the galvanization against Trump will be permanent so long as they are able to maintain
00:06:55.240
For example, Amy Siskind tweeted following the inauguration that it can't be overstated that
00:07:04.260
They, they genuinely believe that Trump was a dictator, um, and that they toppled a dictator
00:07:10.220
and everybody who supported him supported a dictator.
00:07:13.040
And they genuinely, if you get not terribly far left, believe they have defeated the rise
00:07:19.600
And everybody who, I mean, this is still a thing people are writing about in Germany, you know,
00:07:26.260
80 years later that people, normal Germans were, were complicit in the rise of the Nazis.
00:07:38.140
So just to put that out first, um, as for where wokeness arose and ignited, uh, I go back
00:07:48.400
I actually want to go back to 2008 when Obama was elected and I live in the Southeast and
00:08:01.660
And I did witness, and I know the media jumped on it and probably, uh, I don't know, poured
00:08:08.640
a lot of gas on that fire, but there were certainly very, um, ugly reactions to the fact that we
00:08:19.120
Um, I think that most of the rage was Democrat and not black, but nevertheless, I saw the bumper
00:08:24.600
I can't deny having seen t-shirts and bumper stickers that said things like it's called the
00:08:30.380
I mean, they were blatantly racist and critical race theory started.
00:08:36.000
So critical race theory and critical race theorists had been forwarding for decades already.
00:08:41.580
The, the claim that America is systemically racist and has just been hiding how racist
00:08:48.240
And so they were able to play off of that reaction, that genuine, genuinely racist.
00:08:53.140
And also then other people who are just kind of swept along with it.
00:08:57.680
They were able to play into that reaction and say, see.
00:09:02.220
There's way more hidden racism in this country.
00:09:05.720
And a lot of people blame Obama and maybe he has some, maybe he does deserve some blame.
00:09:12.260
But I think that it's more that we saw a reaction that the critical race theorists were offering
00:09:18.200
an explanation for that many people found persuasive.
00:09:20.960
So by the time we've had two terms of this and we're getting close to 2015, we have this
00:09:28.300
As a matter of fact, I think where Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri by a police
00:09:34.400
And obviously the story that was told does not match reality whatsoever.
00:09:39.740
The true story is now known that Michael Brown was, as the juries found, justifiably shot
00:09:53.480
And again, you had this mainlining of a narrative that the cops now were the target and the cops
00:10:02.680
So here again, now we have an institution that's filled with hidden racism.
00:10:06.600
And so the football moves a little further down the field in terms of getting people to
00:10:10.780
believe that a systemic racism explanation for what the phenomena of society is the correct
00:10:17.080
And they could point back and say, see, remember how people reacted when we elected our first
00:10:20.540
black president, hidden racism, and now you can see it's all in the police forces, etc.
00:10:26.060
Then Trump ran and it was just racist, racist, racist, racist.
00:10:29.720
Only racists would vote for him, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:10:31.640
And they were very, very successful at mainlining that narrative, which set the stage so that
00:10:38.260
when Trump won and you saw massive vulnerability on the left, I mean, literally people crying on
00:10:44.180
the floor, going to therapy, not able to go to work for days, like can't can't process what
00:10:48.720
They're still acting like they're trying to process what happened in 2016.
00:10:54.140
They have no idea because they don't actually because they've adopted the frame of critical
00:11:01.140
And I hate to say it, but just a frankly elitist, like the woke would call it respectability
00:11:10.900
They don't have the necessary tools to understand.
00:11:13.440
We call gaining the necessary tools to understand taking the red pill and they have not taken the
00:11:19.840
They don't even have the tools to understand what happened.
00:11:22.640
And that vulnerability, again, with only racists would vote for Trump was just a absolute
00:11:30.480
perfect storm for mainlining the critical theory view, in particular, the critical race theory
00:11:37.140
But you see it also with the critical, the queer theory.
00:11:39.980
You know, apparently Trump hated gays, even though there's like the opposite of evidence
00:11:45.500
And so they mainlined it very successfully into that vulnerability, which, you know, as
00:11:52.000
you would know, my research before I got involved in studying wokeness was in terms largely of
00:11:57.800
cults, but also religious conversions was a huge thing.
00:12:00.620
I was studying psychologically and vulnerability is the place where that tends to happen.
00:12:05.580
And so if you can manufacture vulnerability, you can induce somebody into a cult in particular.
00:12:12.260
They tend to find and prey upon vulnerabilities.
00:12:15.480
Trump's election was a wellspring of vulnerability for people on the left.
00:12:23.960
But I will say that that was really the first place where critical race theory was able to
00:12:31.160
Yeah, and I do think that, you know, I obviously don't think that Trump, I think there are a lot
00:12:40.520
of reasons to criticize Trump from his rhetoric to some of his actions.
00:12:43.800
And so I as much as I lay responsibility at Trump's feet for some of his failures, I also
00:12:52.380
I think that he totally played in to the false narratives at Ferguson that helped fan the flames,
00:12:58.420
literally, of the riots that were going on there.
00:13:02.080
I think that he did play class politics when he said, you know, eventually you have enough
00:13:07.680
money, never mind the fact that he is now a multimillionaire.
00:13:10.900
When he said when he was campaigning that the people who didn't vote for him are either racist
00:13:15.600
or they're just clinging to, you know, their God, their guns, their religion, whatever he said,
00:13:21.380
he made it very clear that he looks with disdain upon the average working person, especially
00:13:32.640
And so I think that became very normalized that you are allowed to talk about the working class
00:13:38.840
You are allowed to start talking about people in racialized terms and class terms.
00:13:44.380
You are allowed to start looking at especially Christians in a way as if they were oppressive
00:13:53.040
And this probably didn't start with Obama, but, you know, calling everyone who disagrees
00:13:58.260
Obama certainly wasn't necessarily leading the charge in all of those things all the time,
00:14:05.660
He made it OK because the president, with all of this decorum and respectability, was saying
00:14:17.660
And then you get the wrecking ball of Trump doing the exact opposite and saying whatever
00:14:24.120
And I just think that it caused a lot of fragile people to lose their minds.
00:14:31.700
And you have to acknowledge the fact is that Obama said that one of his more influential
00:14:36.120
professors that he had worked with and was friends with was Derrick Bell.
00:14:40.760
Derrick Bell is the creator of critical race theory, and he propped up Derrick Bell on a few
00:14:47.900
So certainly, certainly Obama would have been familiar with what's going on with critical
00:14:53.460
race theory, where the vast majority of people in the country would not have had the slightest
00:14:58.560
Nobody until like the last maybe six months, except for a few people, have known what it
00:15:05.660
And so for him, when you say that, you know, they defam the flames of these things, certainly
00:15:12.280
And certainly they would have felt extremely encouraged and would have seen that as a signal
00:15:19.260
And certainly that would indicate that he would be sympathetic to many of those arguments,
00:15:24.480
even if he's sympathetic to them in a more nuanced or more responsible way, because I think
00:15:28.940
there are responsible ways to talk about the issues that critical race theory raises.
00:15:33.160
So you do have the issue that you had a president who not only behaved in the ways that you were
00:15:40.220
seeing, but he also did act in ways that directly supported the narratives that we now understand
00:15:53.500
Whereas at the time, I don't think most people, a few people, certainly conservatives understood
00:15:58.040
or at least intuited what was going on, but most other people didn't know what was going
00:16:01.500
on and, as you said, kind of fell in and felt like it kind of normalized that approach to
00:16:10.580
And that's actually pretty serious looking back on it.
00:16:15.680
Yeah, it does seem if you if you look, there's a tool that you can use on Google that tells
00:16:21.120
you when a word started to be used more and more pervasively.
00:16:26.080
And so these words, these woke words like intersectionality, probably not critical theory.
00:16:31.100
I feel like that's not often used blatantly in the media, but intersectionality, systemic
00:16:36.900
racism, white supremacy, all of those words really started to be used in a pervasive way
00:16:48.360
Like, I know that you said that this, you know, started much longer ago.
00:16:52.300
You could even say that it has roots more in the 1960s.
00:16:55.280
But what happened that all of a sudden these words and these terms and critical race theory
00:17:03.200
And gosh, it's gone so fast to where now this is the subject of executive orders and
00:17:09.880
It's funny because we're in the middle of a pandemic.
00:17:12.200
And so in the beginning of the pandemic, we all got kind of a crash course in exponential
00:17:17.080
growth, where you have something that grows very slowly and then suddenly it grows very
00:17:25.540
And there's sort of this point where it takes off in appearance.
00:17:30.760
If you look at those graphs, that's actually kind of what you see.
00:17:37.040
Certainly, there's a first time the phrase, say, systemic racism or intersectionality got
00:17:44.000
And then all of a sudden, there's this point of inflection where it just takes off.
00:17:47.940
And the obvious thing that happened in 2014, 15-ish, where that fire kind of caught was the
00:17:56.600
emergence of Black Lives Matter and thus a very polarizing event, but more importantly,
00:18:01.920
very polarizing movement where the argument about whether or not things in this country
00:18:07.380
are systemically racist and whether or not intersectionality is the right way to analyze
00:18:15.520
We could talk about lots of different factors that maybe went into that about the degree to
00:18:20.820
which it became standard in college course material, therefore priming journalists to use phrases
00:18:27.380
like that and getting those people into positions where they're starting to write.
00:18:32.200
We could talk about the influence of social media, which is now going to allow people to
00:18:35.860
mainline words that maybe editors wouldn't have done earlier.
00:18:41.580
Lots of different factors kind of all kind of come into it.
00:18:44.220
But I really think that if we just had to boil it down to a single thing, it's that Black Lives
00:18:49.040
Matter polarized the country in 2015, partly for reasons that at the time, I think, were
00:18:55.360
justifiable and also for reasons that were pretty bad.
00:18:57.920
Um, so I, I really think that the, which we, we saw and we had a huge kind of thing about
00:19:04.480
them in 2015, the Black Lives Matter eruption at the time really was the thing that started
00:19:12.580
And then of course the media was just making money hand over fist fanning those flames.
00:19:21.920
The more that they talked about Trump, the more money they made.
00:19:24.000
We were, if, you know, I'm old enough to remember 2016 CBS, the CEO of CBS admitting that he
00:19:31.280
shouldn't be covering Trump the way he is, but he just couldn't stop because he was making
00:19:36.420
And so, um, yeah, the media got into the business a long time before that of selling hysteria
00:19:42.780
and paranoia and critical race theory is like the mother load of hysteria and paranoia.
00:19:50.520
So it's like they found a gold mine full of what they sell, um, and they were off to
00:19:56.580
And I think actually, as people become convinced, you have to understand that critical race theory
00:20:02.580
or all of these critical theories present a worldview.
00:20:08.060
In fact, if you read the book, critical race theory in introduction, which is a standard
00:20:12.680
undergraduate textbook in the subject, the first sentence says that it's a critical race
00:20:18.380
theory as a movement, well, a theory is not a movement theories and movements are different
00:20:25.080
So the thing is never set up to have been an academic theory in the real sense.
00:20:31.400
And that's, that's a requirement of a critical theory.
00:20:35.700
All critical theories have to be able to be used as social movements or they're not critical
00:20:39.560
theories by definition all the way back to the 1930s.
00:20:42.160
So it's no surprise that that's what, what would be going on with critical race theory,
00:20:47.600
but they see themselves as, as, as operating in a movement space, not in a theoretical space,
00:20:53.900
And so when it found a place to take off, it took off.
00:20:59.020
And it, once you start to get into that, what they call a critical consciousness, or in
00:21:03.060
this case, a critical race consciousness, it becomes a self-affirming worldview.
00:21:08.740
Um, it's very much, you know, for, for religious people will understand that when, when they
00:21:13.640
are saved, they often begin to recognize, uh, the, the fingerprint of God or of Christ
00:21:20.660
on the world, everywhere they look and how amazing providence is or all of these things
00:21:28.460
And you start to see racial problematics everywhere you look, because that's what having a race
00:21:37.420
I think that one of the things that makes it so effective and what has helped it gain
00:21:42.740
ground over the past few years is that so many people didn't know what it was.
00:21:46.520
So many people, I, you know, I didn't know what critical race theory was until, I don't
00:21:50.680
know, a couple, a couple of years ago when people who I talk to today, most people do
00:21:56.240
Hopefully everyone listening to this podcast now knows, cause we've talked about it so
00:21:59.580
If you don't, we'll link some previous, uh, previous episodes where we talked to James and
00:22:04.320
some other people about what it is, but I think that it is so effective because it just
00:22:13.220
If first it was, if you want equality, this is what you should want.
00:22:18.400
You have to want equity, which of course has some convoluted definitions of it.
00:22:22.880
And I hear a lot of people in the church today in particular say, um, uh, social justice types
00:22:29.680
in the church say, well, I don't even know what critical race theory is.
00:22:33.420
So I can't be a critical race theorist or, um, I, you know, I affirm some parts of critical
00:22:39.180
race theory, but I don't affirm other parts of critical race theory.
00:22:43.060
I also hear an excuse of, um, that, well, if there wasn't such pervasive racism, then
00:22:53.820
And people like me, they would accuse of caring more about critical race theory than I do about
00:23:00.780
And of course I'm part of the problem because of that.
00:23:08.100
Like you can't argue against them because they're all self-certified.
00:23:11.220
And so, cause if I say anything, then again, it's because I am part of the problem.
00:23:17.020
And if I have to ask, then that just indicates that I am, I'm the reason why critical race
00:23:23.140
theory exists because of ignorant people like me.
00:23:29.740
It's a very wolf in sheep's clothing kind of situation.
00:23:32.260
You know, I've also, I guess, fairly famously in Christian circles referred to it as a Trojan
00:23:36.920
And in fact, I say it's a Trojan horse full of bureaucrats.
00:23:39.180
Um, so it's usually busy bodies who want to set administrative policy and set up your
00:23:46.680
Um, but anyway, uh, it comes in with under two guises, one of which is that it's sophisticated
00:23:53.300
academic theory and therefore you don't really understand it.
00:23:56.560
You don't understand how sophisticated or nuanced it is.
00:23:59.140
You don't know what the detail, you know, the definitions details.
00:24:01.620
And so since you don't know just how sophisticated it is, you must misunderstand it.
00:24:08.460
If you read enough of the theory, you start to see, they explain quite clearly that to
00:24:13.080
have engaged with critical race theory means to have engaged with a critical race consciousness.
00:24:17.860
In other words, you have to believe it before you can understand it properly.
00:24:21.680
So everybody who doesn't believe it doesn't understand it properly.
00:24:24.020
Then you get that self-affirmation there, but because it looks like a scholarly academic
00:24:28.780
theory, critical race theory itself sounds scholarly and academic.
00:24:32.880
It gives off this, this impression that it's smarter than it is rather than just complaining
00:24:38.800
about race and racism all the time in ways that are often, um, either exaggerated or wholly
00:24:45.960
Secondly, as you said, it plays off of compassion and it is extremely good at making the case
00:24:55.020
that people who disagree with it must not care, or in fact, care about the wrong things or
00:24:59.540
care about evil things, whether it's, you know, this kind of callous, not caring about
00:25:05.120
the harms of racism or active, actively wanting to participate in racism.
00:25:10.000
And so it's a very, um, seductive worldview when you don't understand it, when you haven't
00:25:16.940
taken the time to read it and then process what it says and then read it again, you kind
00:25:25.880
It's, and it's compassion is, I don't want to say that it's necessarily cruel.
00:25:33.400
I want to say, in fact, something much more specific is that what it has is it has way too
00:25:38.220
narrow of compassion with the compassion then turned way too high on that very narrow band.
00:25:44.240
So what it's very good at is caring way too much about one very specific type of harm while
00:25:51.820
being extremely good at ignoring all the other types of harm.
00:25:55.300
And that's an extremely important situation because that's where you land in what C.S.
00:25:59.300
Lewis is talking about, where he warns that, that, you know, the tyrant who believes they're
00:26:05.000
doing it for your own good is the worst kind of tyrant.
00:26:08.260
He's, that's where you land in that, where you have a very narrow set, a sense of empathy
00:26:18.520
And then the, that, that then overshadows and silences the ability to care about anything
00:26:23.960
So if you care, oh, we have to care about racism and we have to care about black people
00:26:28.280
or whatever they say, turn that up so loud that they can no longer hear the damage that
00:26:33.920
they're doing to other people or other circumstances or letting institutions fall apart, tearing
00:26:38.380
churches apart, driving people crazy, accusing people falsely of racism and destroying their
00:26:44.140
No longer is any of that relevant to them because their, their empathy or their compassion has
00:26:49.440
been narrowed to a very, very, very small band that they then make so loud.
00:26:54.460
They can't hear any problem outside of that band.
00:26:56.760
And I've argued, and I know it's very controversial, but I'm quite confident that this is correct,
00:27:03.280
And I don't say that that's going to bear fruit, but that particular pattern is the
00:27:10.540
Because if you can only care about a very small band of problems and you care way too
00:27:15.080
much about them and you can't hear the harm you're causing somewhere else, that's a necessary
00:27:20.660
It's not a guaranteed conclusion, but it's a necessary precondition to be able, being able
00:27:26.360
to start to perpetrate something as horrible as a genocide.
00:27:29.480
You have to not care about the harm that you're creating to be able to do that.
00:27:33.520
And the easiest way to get there is by caring way too much about one specific harm to where
00:27:38.940
you've now lost the ability to care about any other harm.
00:27:41.660
And critical race theory, I hate to say it, but it's true, is designed to make people continually
00:27:47.300
drive into a smaller and smaller range of empathy.
00:27:51.680
For example, you say, oh, it's about, you got the idea of like white fragility and white
00:27:58.600
As soon as that's taken off and it's gotten to the point where it's mainstreamed, now it's
00:28:04.000
like, oh, there's brown fragility and brown privilege and brown complicity and brown people
00:28:10.500
So again, it goes from being all non-white races to, no, we're going to narrow the range
00:28:20.520
So you can see that the theory is designed to continually narrow the range.
00:28:25.140
And where critical race theory comes from, I know I said Derek Bell, who certainly was
00:28:29.380
not this, but it got co-opted by a student, Kimberly Crenshaw, who was informed deeply by
00:28:36.240
the Combahee River Collective, which was this, is it is queer black feminism, which is a very,
00:28:42.500
very narrow, very, very specific ideology or kind of combination of ideologies.
00:28:48.860
And that's what it will narrow to is queer black feminists will be the only people who you are
00:28:54.920
allowed to care about at the bottom of that game.
00:28:59.420
And those people are the only thing that have a legitimate claim on suffering.
00:29:02.900
Yeah, which is which is who the the founders of Black Lives Matter are, by the way, like
00:29:09.220
that is the philosophy and the worldview that they have, that queer black feminism that's
00:29:13.980
been written about blatantly, that that's what they represent.
00:29:17.060
And I think also people need to understand, because to those of us who are still in the
00:29:23.260
world of sanity, we're just like, well, this just sounds like a whole bunch of hypocrisy.
00:29:27.140
And how do they not see the duplicitousness of their of their thinking?
00:29:32.900
But I think you have to also understand that critical theory, and you can explain this better
00:29:41.000
They also subvert this idea of objective truth.
00:29:44.480
They say, well, objective truth is this Western construct that.
00:29:49.160
So that's why, you know, if you try to get a critical theorist or critical race theorist to
00:29:53.140
define their terms objectively or to point to historical events to be able to support their
00:30:01.400
narrative or talk about facts and data and things like that, they will kind of brush that
00:30:13.220
But it really goes back to this kind of standpoint epistemology that says that truth comes from
00:30:19.640
my standpoint, in particular, if I am a non-white person and that they it's almost a form of
00:30:26.120
Gnosticism where they believe that special knowledge has been revealed to non-white people
00:30:31.920
and therefore a white person with all the data and objective truth in the world can't
00:30:37.200
argue against them because they even argue what truth is and where truth comes from and how
00:30:43.380
And they argue that someone like me or you doesn't actually have access to that truth
00:30:48.540
without them and without them telling us what that truth is.
00:30:55.680
And so that is also why I guess this has taken off so much and why it's so hard to rein in
00:31:02.220
with debate, because debate is moot, especially with people who either are white or who they
00:31:08.800
would say black people have internalized whiteness or white supremacy to the point to where they
00:31:18.680
Yeah, I mean, I know that we're recording this ahead of time in January and so people
00:31:22.520
have forgotten, but it did just come out a week ago or so in January or in the past week
00:31:27.020
that they're now going after this idea of multiracial whiteness.
00:31:31.140
And so you certainly are right that people who are not white by any usual definition are
00:31:38.320
being classified as white by the theory when they disagree or when they raise problems with
00:31:44.660
This is exactly right, and this is why they don't see what they're doing as hypocritical
00:31:51.080
Whether you want to talk about it from the perspective of historical critical theory or
00:31:54.700
you want to talk about it from the influence that they imported from postmodernism, both of
00:32:00.680
these traditions have lent them the tools to deny the idea that objective truth exists
00:32:07.040
and in particular to claim that the attempt to say, well, let's look at this objectively
00:32:13.940
or let's gather the evidence or let's see if you say this church or this university or
00:32:19.580
this police force or whatever is racist, let's go gather the evidence.
00:32:24.260
Let's go see what, you know, let's see how arrest numbers have really worked out.
00:32:28.080
Let's see use of force numbers, see how they really worked out for police, for example.
00:32:30.920
Or, you know, let's look at grades and see what happened and let's find out why.
00:32:34.880
Let's, at a school, you know, whatever it happens to be.
00:32:37.080
Well, let's look at the incidents between, you know, pastoral this or that or whatever
00:32:42.060
By you saying, let's look at this objectively, what they are saying is, no, now what you are
00:32:47.320
doing is forcing us to participate in what they would refer to as a white racial frame.
00:32:55.040
And the reason they prefer the idea of evidence is because it allows them to deny the lived
00:33:00.880
experience that people outside of that frame have experienced.
00:33:05.460
What the heck does that mean for a justice system then?
00:33:08.480
Like, I mean, how does that, how, how does that affect how we see justice and how people
00:33:15.840
are actually proving guilty of evidence is just a construct of whiteness that needs to
00:33:28.980
Well, what it does to justice is exactly what you think it would do to justice is it sets
00:33:34.160
up these people who will refer to as critical race theorists who have the ability to read
00:33:39.680
the tea leaves of justice and then to determine what is and is not just in that moment.
00:33:44.520
So evidence, the preponderance of evidence beyond reasonable doubt, these kinds of standards,
00:33:49.800
a reasonable person standard in court, which is necessary for dealing with things that
00:33:54.340
are not just cut and dry, what would a reasonable person think about this?
00:33:57.680
Those are thrown out the window because those standards are held up as supporting a racial
00:34:04.800
frame that is by in the in the terms of critical race theory explicitly created and maintained
00:34:10.520
to exclude other approaches or other ways of knowing or much more explicitly black people
00:34:19.780
And so what you will then have is you will have a collection of people who we will rightly
00:34:24.280
name as critical race theorists who become the genuine judges who are able to actually
00:34:29.580
adjudicate what is and is not just according to their subjective understanding of this racial
00:34:37.380
If we stick just in race, of course, with the queer black feminism, we're going to have
00:34:41.160
other dimensions of identity going to weigh in on this, which is exactly what you would
00:34:45.780
see under, say, a kind of kangaroo court or a communist court where it is the will of the
00:34:54.700
And if you start to think of the critical race theorists as the party who get to determine
00:34:58.520
what is the right way to think and what is the wrong way to think, what is the right evidence,
00:35:02.400
what is the wrong evidence, then you start to really understand how this thing operates.
00:35:07.280
So what it does to justice is that it certainly takes a blindfold off of justice, as they say,
00:35:13.100
um, and it makes justice not very just because it becomes extremely biased in the favor of a group
00:35:21.720
of people who claim to have special knowledge, as you said, based in standpoint. Um, so that's
00:35:27.080
what it does to justice. That's, that is how this, this is all organized that, that they literally
00:35:33.600
believe. And again, we can talk about it in terms of the critical theory aspect or the postmodern
00:35:38.120
aspect, which they've combined, um, into one kind of monstrosity. Uh, but they have arrived at the
00:35:47.140
belief that all approaches to understanding the world are just applications of the politics of
00:35:53.080
the people that that approach to the world benefits. So they think that white people cooked up our
00:35:59.720
justice system, our evidence-based courts, for example, so that they could buy us a system for
00:36:06.860
themselves and maintain white supremacist politics. And therefore that has to be held, uh, as suspect.
00:36:14.140
And so that's where, for example, at the Evergreen State College, where Brett Weinstein famously
00:36:19.920
got, you know, protested and eventually chased off of campus and it was his life in threat, uh, where
00:36:28.660
he at one point said, look, if this campus is racist to this angry mob of students, he said that if
00:36:33.360
this campus is racist, let's see the evidence and let's fix it. And they said, asking for evidence
00:36:38.420
of racism is, is racism because it denies the lived experience of people who have experienced racism.
00:36:46.400
And therefore, if you had experienced it, you would already know there there's your Gnosticism.
00:36:52.320
Yeah. Um, and so what it does is it creates a party of people who have the right politics,
00:36:59.060
or if you want to say theory, I suppose we can say that, but the right political view
00:37:03.040
who get to become the arbiters of what is just, what is real, what is true. And everybody else has
00:37:11.300
to, uh, be subject to that. It's really kind of interesting because, you know, I think we're
00:37:15.400
probably about to talk about postmodernism and maybe we should, but the postmodernists actually,
00:37:20.320
this is what they were warning about. And so these, the woke have picked up postmodern tools to do
00:37:25.080
exactly the thing that the postmodernists were like, this is going to be, this is a problem.
00:37:29.760
We shouldn't do this. We should avoid this at all costs. And they basically figured out how to
00:37:35.200
engineer the most poisonous movement in the universe by picking up the postmodernist warning
00:37:40.280
about truth and socially mediated truth and truth by consensus, uh, that you could possibly imagine.
00:37:48.400
Yeah. It seems like, uh, progressivism has a problem with overcorrection. We talked about at the
00:37:54.120
beginning of this very real problems. Like when Obama was elected, there were some racists out
00:37:59.940
there who said, you know, I don't want a black president. Obviously America has had at one point,
00:38:06.160
a history of racism. You could even argue at some points it was systemic racism. Um, and so it seems
00:38:12.020
that the correction that progressives are now proposing is not just, you know, what Martin Luther
00:38:17.220
King proposed that, Hey, we just want to be treated like men. We want to be treated as human beings,
00:38:22.400
as Christians would say, made in the image of God, like Frederick Douglass. He believed that the
00:38:26.380
constitution was a glorious Liberty document. He didn't, he didn't believe in getting rid of it.
00:38:31.560
He actually believed, okay, let us live up to these ideals. We talked about in our last interview,
00:38:36.920
you talked about Liberty and justice for all the, the founding ideals that we have were seeds and
00:38:42.520
they were supposed to take root and grow. They weren't, they weren't going to be perfect at that
00:38:46.700
time. And they, and they weren't. And so we can accept and acknowledge the fact that we have very
00:38:51.760
serious past mistakes and injustices that have needed to be rectified. But this seems like a
00:38:57.980
case of overcorrection and almost vengeance. Thomas Sowell calls it cosmic justice, deciding that, okay,
00:39:04.080
we've got to hold back these groups, not looking at their individual experiences, but just all white
00:39:10.000
people, we've got to hold them back. So we can push these, at least in our perception, oppressed
00:39:16.100
people forward. And you do that through punishment of the oppressors or the privileged people and
00:39:24.140
through given privileges to the other group, disregarding individuals' experiences, what they've
00:39:31.980
actually gone through, whether they've actually dealt with some sort of oppression or not. And I think
00:39:39.520
the hard thing that I have is understanding how people don't see that that is an entire world view,
00:39:46.220
that there aren't parts of that to pick and choose and to say, you know, part of this critical race
00:39:51.940
theory, cosmic justice idea is okay. And part of it is not. It seems to me like just throw that all out
00:39:58.480
and let's agree that, okay, maybe there needs to be some work done, but our goal should be true
00:40:03.920
liberty and justice for all. Our goal should be equality and viewing all people the same in value
00:40:10.780
and having the same rights. But, you know, when you talk about that, when you talk about any form
00:40:16.740
of neutrality, you're also called a white supremacist. And so I don't even know what my
00:40:21.680
question is. I just don't know what to do. I don't know what to do in those conversations.
00:40:24.960
No. That's the thing is, so what you have to do actually with, when you're in the conversation
00:40:31.880
with somebody who's woke, it's, I know it's a really weird thing to say to you, but it's like
00:40:36.980
dealing with somebody who's super, super religious. I mentioned earlier conversion experiences and
00:40:41.100
everybody knows, I know that many of my Christian friends will appreciate this, just how annoying
00:40:45.820
a new convert is. We have lots of new converts to woke right now. Yeah. So it's very important to
00:40:52.500
realize the zeal of the new convert, but you probably won't make a lot of headway with a
00:40:57.260
newly woke person. But you will talk to a lot of other people. And the first thing to do is every
00:41:02.940
time is to just start naming the dynamic and in particular, naming the asymmetry that you're trying
00:41:07.540
to point at here that, and even naming the fact that there's a level of vengeance. Like, yeah,
00:41:12.380
I agree with you that there was a problem. And yeah, I agree with you that that problem should
00:41:16.500
be undone. And I'm even willing perhaps to have a reasonable conversation about a little bit of
00:41:21.680
makeup for this. However, this isn't what's going on. And there's a blatant asymmetry in how things
00:41:28.260
are being treated. And then like you just said, if we're going to call for neutrality, and then we're
00:41:32.160
going to say, wait, neutrality itself is racist. If you want to understand why that is, they believe
00:41:37.020
it's because the playing field itself is tilted. That's what systemic racism could be boiled down
00:41:42.300
to. It's tilted in the favor of white people. And therefore, if you act neutrally, if you try not
00:41:47.520
to rebalance that thing, you know, what, yeah, water will always roll downhill, uh, and, and head
00:41:53.960
toward, you know, the benefit will roll to the, to the white people or whatever. Yeah. And so, or
00:41:59.540
punishment will roll away from them or, you know, disenfranchisement will roll away from however
00:42:03.460
you want to picture the tilt. So they are arguing that we must artificially tilt the playing field back
00:42:08.860
the other way. And there's not a lot of reason to believe that that's going to work out very well.
00:42:14.920
Uh, in fact, it seems not to be working at all. Um, I will, however, say that it's very useful to
00:42:20.700
point out to help people understand like, okay, there are at least two big things we could talk
00:42:25.600
about, about systemic racism, for example, to make it clear what's going on. And at least one of these,
00:42:31.160
I want to bring up for sure, which is you said, you know, perhaps we were systemically racist in the
00:42:35.600
past. No, we, we were, there's no perhaps. And so here's what systemic racism looks like.
00:42:41.060
This is what actual systemic racism looks like. Systemic racism looks like a person of a particular
00:42:47.840
race coming up and saying, you know, this is what I experienced and this is a big problem and I need
00:42:55.100
to be heard. And the response being shut up racial epithet. You are an ignorant racial, racial epithet.
00:43:02.520
You don't know what you're talking about. That's what systemic racism looks like. That's the
00:43:07.540
system. Well, the word systemic racism means, I think that it doesn't, it kind of depend on what
00:43:13.560
you mean by systemic racism. The word systemic means everywhere, which I would argue, I would
00:43:17.780
say, yes, there are times in history where that has absolutely been true. But I also know people
00:43:22.400
who would say, well, there were, there were times in history where maybe that seemed to be true,
00:43:27.920
but it wasn't actually everywhere. I have heard people argue that no, racism hasn't been systemic,
00:43:33.940
absolutely everywhere, like a malignant, you know, tumor in society, but you're kind of describing it
00:43:40.820
a little bit differently, I think. So it depends.
00:43:43.880
What, yeah, what they usually are referring to is that the way that we interact with the world,
00:43:49.060
every bit of the system, whether it's what we claim to, who we, who we're willing to believe,
00:43:52.920
who we're not willing to believe, who we think knows things, what constitutes knowledge,
00:43:58.040
plus the laws, the institutions, all of those things combined form a system of society, how
00:44:05.840
society operates. And if that thing is, is severely tilted, then you have a problem. But of course,
00:44:11.200
when you take, you don't specify which race it is, it's pretty clear that we have, we were in an
00:44:16.940
unambiguously systemically racist situation. Now, then we were in a much less, but not perfect,
00:44:22.920
situation. And now we're putting systemic racism back in, in the opposite direction. So the vengeance
00:44:28.200
aspect becomes a lot more clear, or at least the overcorrection aspect. Another thing that you can
00:44:33.580
say about systemic racism is just how, when you say everything and everywhere, just how preposterous
00:44:38.520
this idea is. I gave this example when I went on Joe Rogan last summer, and I talked about,
00:44:44.260
I realized this when I was out on a walk with my wife around our block, and we were walking down
00:44:49.960
this hill by the road. And I noticed, you know, a car went by really fast. And it, you know,
00:44:54.280
as your brain sometimes does weird things, I was like, you know, what if I got hit by that car?
00:44:58.980
And I don't know, you know, why does it do this? And then all of a sudden, I had this whole
00:45:02.440
understanding of systemic things much more clearly, which I thought, imagine that I like tripped,
00:45:08.240
right? And actually, instead of me getting hit by the car, I tripped over a bottle that was laying on
00:45:13.540
the sidewalk. And I knocked my wife into the road right at the wrong time. And she got hit by the car.
00:45:17.540
Who's at fault? And what the systemic explanation would be is, well, we have a system that involves
00:45:23.760
people buying and driving cars. If our system didn't have cars, then we wouldn't have that.
00:45:29.280
If our economy didn't depend on cars, that bottle, assuming maybe it's a beer bottle or something,
00:45:34.420
if we didn't have a culture that drank alcohol, if we didn't support the idea that anybody drinks
00:45:38.540
alcohol, then that beer bottle wouldn't have been there for me to trip over. You know, you can start
00:45:43.900
getting into any number of things. But the idea is that now we have this whole economic system where
00:45:48.300
the very existence of beer and the very existence of cars and thus the people who purchase and indulge
00:45:56.700
in cars or beer become, and if you don't want it to be beer, it can be Coca-Cola, but beer makes it a
00:46:03.400
little bit, you know, a little bit more punchy. That we have a society, a capitalist consumer society
00:46:12.120
that would rely on those things and name those things as good and name those things as indicative
00:46:19.420
of freedom. Everybody who's involved in those industries, everybody who's involved in propping
00:46:23.800
up those industries, which means everybody bears some moral complicity or moral responsibility for the
00:46:29.180
fact that my wife died by me tripping over the bottle and knocking her in front of a car.
00:46:32.920
That's what systemic thinking, that's actually how it works. That's if you read this book,
00:46:39.520
being good, being white or being white, being good. It's one or the other. I always do these
00:46:43.380
things backwards by Barbara Alpabom from 2010, which is about white moral complicity and racism.
00:46:50.460
That's her argument is that you have to just keep expanding until you get to the point where all
00:46:55.240
white people and all people who benefit from whiteness are complicit in whiteness and are
00:47:00.360
therefore complicit in racism and white supremacy and must therefore be able to be identified as such
00:47:05.460
as people who are complicit in racism and white supremacy. In other words, that they're racist and
00:47:10.940
white supremacists. And this is a terrible way to think. And so using that kind of example has also
00:47:17.860
helped me show people that the systemic approach to understanding racism is not a particularly good
00:47:25.700
one. People who literally had absolutely nothing to do with racism in their entire lives, who have
00:47:31.540
been, in the real sense of the word, anti-racist their entire lives, are still implicated in racism.
00:47:37.620
And you read that in their work too, everywhere. They're blaming white progressive liberals as the
00:47:42.680
worst kind of racist because they're the kind that think they get it. They're the kind that don't
00:47:46.580
don't think of themselves as being racist and therefore aren't doing more. They're willing
00:47:52.040
to sit on their laurels and not do more work, according to what the critical race theorists say.
00:47:58.280
This is a preposterous way to think about the problem. And then if you think about, again,
00:48:02.380
like I said, I think it's very important to realize what real systemic racism looks like. It looks like
00:48:06.360
shut up N-word. That's what it looks like. That's not what's happening today. That's not anywhere close
00:48:11.280
to what's happening today. In fact, it's so far to the opposite of what's happening today that
00:48:16.240
it's almost laughable that somebody would think that that's what's going on today. It's like if
00:48:21.880
a black person at this point in society complains, everybody in the whole world like gathers around
00:48:26.460
them and tries to fix the problem. It's the opposite of shut up N-word. But instead, now we
00:48:33.020
have shut up white man, your story has been told. So you can see the reinstallation. You talk about an
00:48:37.700
overcorrection. You can see the reinstallation of systemic, in this case racism, in the opposite
00:48:44.140
direction. And they say we can't call it racism. So some folks are calling it neo-racism now. And I
00:48:49.700
really like that. So yeah, it's neo-racism. Fine. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It's an awful way to think
00:48:58.920
because it's also, it's confusing because in your metaphor, they would also say if that is like a
00:49:06.120
metaphor for like some kind of systemic problem where everyone associated with even the manufacturing
00:49:10.980
of the beer can and the car is morally implicated, they would say you can't like, if this is a
00:49:18.620
metaphor for systemic racism, they would say you can't point to people who are successful who are
00:49:25.260
black to say that that's not systemic racism. So even if you're, if you didn't trip over the beer can
00:49:30.460
and you didn't push your wife in front of the car and she didn't die, they would still say the fact
00:49:37.380
that those impediments existed, the fact that those risks existed, even if you didn't trip and
00:49:43.860
nothing bad happened, that is still evidence of a systemic problem. And still everyone is morally
00:49:51.960
implicated. So that's why you can't talk about, well, hey, non-white people in America are, you know,
00:49:58.920
if you're looking at a variety of standards and categories are more successful than non-white people
00:50:03.440
anywhere else on earth, well, that doesn't matter. If the problem is that the beer can't exist,
00:50:08.080
if the problem is that the car is speeding by, then it doesn't matter whether or not you trip over
00:50:13.180
it. And I hope people are following our metaphor. No, that's correct. But, and so that's another
00:50:20.040
reason why it's like, okay, but so then by what standard are we looking at improvement? Like by what
00:50:26.660
standard can we say, okay, things are better now, things are good now, because it's almost like anything
00:50:31.600
that you point to, to say, look, things are good. The gaps are closing or whatever it is. I mean,
00:50:37.180
that's another fallacy though, saying that every disparity equals discrimination, but whatever
00:50:42.000
standards you want to point to, to say, things are a lot better than they were in the 1960s.
00:50:46.240
We keep hearing over and over. No, they're not. They're not better than they were in the 1960s.
00:50:50.840
And again, it comes down to the whole theory, the whole worldview is self-certifying.
00:50:56.020
And you do wonder these people who say, okay, we've got to fight systemic racism. I had a
00:51:01.060
conversation with someone the other day who said, you know, Christians, white evangelicals need to
00:51:05.100
do a better job of fighting racial justice. And I said, okay, what? Tell me, I'm ready. I'm ready.
00:51:10.560
I want to do this with you for, you know, I want to, I want to come alongside you and do this. You say
00:51:15.660
that I'm failing or white evangelicals are failing in this area. What? And it always goes back to,
00:51:20.980
well, just think about, or look at this disparity, or let's consider, or let's talk about, or read
00:51:28.140
this book. Okay. I'm all for thinking and reading and talking. That's pretty much all I like to do,
00:51:33.140
but that doesn't solve the problem. Does it? Like that doesn't come to any solutions. If you really
00:51:39.160
want to close these gaps and look at these, you know, actual inequalities, it just makes me wonder,
00:51:45.640
is there, like, is there an actual end goal? Do they want it to, do they want actual so-called
00:51:52.140
racial justice? It, it makes me feel like, no, they don't.
00:51:56.880
No. So what you hear with that, and they say it very frequently, in fact, now, uh, is that they are
00:52:02.920
calling to inner work that, that literally they call it doing inner work. So you, you have to think
00:52:08.800
about it. You have to read this thing and then think about it. And the goal is to induce that
00:52:14.160
critical race consciousness. It's to get you to think about the problem the way they think about
00:52:18.880
the problem so that you now agree with one another. And then you are on this kind of,
00:52:23.960
according to the way they think about it, magic path that when everybody is on the same page,
00:52:28.880
then they will be able to liberate people from racism. And so it is a goal of changing mindsets
00:52:36.260
rather than changing almost any material condition. And when they do try to change material conditions,
00:52:41.500
as we've often seen, they do in a clumsy kind of post hoc way where they just try to change the
00:52:46.980
outcomes or, or take away the test. You see it with the SAT. Oh, there's different scores on the
00:52:52.220
SAT between different racial groups on average. Therefore the test itself must be racist. Let's
00:52:56.800
get rid of it. Let's just not have that assessment anymore. Um, so what it's really calling to is,
00:53:02.420
is a form of, of spiritual work to get you to have a critical race consciousness, which is to say,
00:53:07.560
to convert to their religion. That's the plainest way to put it is what they're asking you to do is
00:53:13.420
to convert to their cult. But you can't ever really get there. Like in Christianity, we're told the same
00:53:18.340
thing. You work out your salvation with fear and trembling. That is, uh, that's a directive that
00:53:23.980
we're given, but also it is under, um, it's under this cloud of grace, this knowledge that, okay,
00:53:31.680
we're going to keep sending, like the apostle Paul talks about in the book of Romans, like the things
00:53:36.400
that I don't want to do the sins that I don't want to commit. I keep on doing and thank the Lord that
00:53:40.600
there's grace, there's mercy, there's forgiveness. And one day I'll be in heaven and I won't have to
00:53:45.740
worry about sin anymore. And that's the hope that we cling to. That's the grace that we have.
00:53:50.160
But within this religion of critical race theory, who calls you to the same, what we would call
00:53:54.300
sanctification within Christianity, this inner work, there's like, there's almost no carrot at the,
00:54:01.320
at the end of it. There's no, like, you know, it's okay. If you mess up, um, you know, you have
00:54:06.740
a hope of redemption and a hope of having, you have a hope of future glory to where you won't have to
00:54:11.280
worry about this struggle. There's no, there's, there's no hope and there's no grace and there's
00:54:16.020
no forgiveness. There is, you'll always be racist. You have to continue doing the work and like,
00:54:24.340
and, and we don't even know what it's going to look like in the end. They talk about liberation.
00:54:29.340
I don't even know. I don't even know what they mean by that. I don't even know what their picture
00:54:33.720
of society looks like. So it's amazing to me that people engage in this stuff without ever asking
00:54:40.220
those questions. So like, what does society get out of your self-hatred and your inner work? I like,
00:54:46.440
who is benefiting from it except for you and getting cultural capital?
00:54:51.300
Right. So this is actually, you could very easily put this as being like Christianity in a sense,
00:54:56.960
but with grace removed. And so the fear and the trembling, if you look at the Puritan tradition,
00:55:01.960
the humiliation is kind of constant. Hey, don't hate all Puritans on this show.
00:55:06.140
We like Puritans on this show. I'm just saying, woke, woke is the Puritanism of this very Hegelian
00:55:12.380
religion. So it is, it is, I'm not hating on Puritans. I'm saying that the Puritanical impulse
00:55:19.300
has re-arisen in another faith, and it has a different God. It does not have grace at all.
00:55:26.660
And so where Christians can hearken back to grace, as you very clearly explained and very eloquently
00:55:33.920
put, that doesn't exist here. So what happens in a faith system where you don't have that? Well,
00:55:41.680
you only have one option. You have to buy indulgences from the church. And so that's what you see.
00:55:47.480
You see another extortion coming down the pipe every single time. I know that's Catholics,
00:55:53.540
but that's why I wanted to say it to my Protestant friends here, because they'll get it. The critical
00:55:57.900
race theory church is going to force you to buy indulgences because there is no grace to rest in.
00:56:02.860
You can't go and say, no, by God, I have grace, or by God, there is grace that I'm not worthy of and
00:56:11.440
whatever else. You can't say that. There is only the institution which is going to be set up by the
00:56:17.180
critical race theorists. And because there is no grace, the I at the end of history, in history with
00:56:22.960
a capital H in the way that Hegel and Marx would have used it, is the moral judge for them in their
00:56:28.520
faith. There's no appealing to that. There's either being on the right side or the wrong side of it.
00:56:33.600
So in the meantime, the cathedral that's set up around it, if you want to call it Catholic style,
00:56:38.260
that's fine for me. I don't have a problem. We'll sell indulgences. And that's what you see.
00:56:43.760
Take up this diversity training and pay us a million dollars. And all of a sudden,
00:56:47.660
you know, you're good until we say, whoops, you're not good anymore. Take up this diversity
00:56:52.280
training and pay us another million dollars. Why don't you give up your pastorship? Or why don't
00:56:55.700
you give up your CEO position to somebody who's one of us? And we'll give you another indulgence.
00:57:01.920
And that's the process that we're actually seeing. So this is a church,
00:57:06.180
in a sense, that's being built out of the sale of indulgences forever. It's exactly the thing
00:57:10.840
Luther protested against, except now it's using race instead of, you know, maybe mafia bosses wanting
00:57:17.300
to whack a guy and going to the pope ahead of time or a cardinal and asking for, you know,
00:57:22.340
pre-forgiveness in exchange for plenty of gold for the Vatican. It's a very corrupt system.
00:57:29.680
And by the way, you can pay lots and lots and lots of indulgences and it can be all taken away
00:57:35.940
from you. If it's found out that at one point you said something, you know, that you regret or
00:57:42.420
doesn't fit into today's definitions of what it means to be anti-racist, it can be all taken away
00:57:47.880
if you don't do the proper work, if you are not following the proper rules. And by the way,
00:57:52.520
the rules are also arbitrarily applied depending on your politics. Like you can be a rich white man,
00:57:59.780
Joe Biden, who signed one of the most draconian crime bills that disproportionately affected
00:58:05.540
black Americans and who has said lots of things that could be arguably actually described as
00:58:11.260
as racist. And somehow it's all it's all OK. So that's also another confusing part about it is
00:58:20.440
that critical race theory is not really just about race. It's also just about believing in
00:58:25.760
the right politics. That's also a way that you can get some kind of social credit, right?
00:58:31.040
Yeah. So we've talked about we can talk about with politics. You've brought up
00:58:34.640
class issues repeatedly and critical race theory uses race as a proxy for those things. And so it's
00:58:44.240
not really about race at all. It's about having the right politics. And if you are useful to the
00:58:49.200
critical race theorists as Joe Biden is, obviously, with his equity proposals and so on and getting
00:58:55.820
rid of Trump as another one who is resisting them, then you get all kinds of indulgences for however
00:59:02.520
long that lasts. You you you're off the hook because your politics suit their agenda. And
00:59:07.140
the second your politics don't suit your agenda, they're going to start twisting it the other way
00:59:11.420
and you're going to have to buy indulgences from them again. It's a very important thing to
00:59:15.260
understand that this is how this works. It's when your politics align with theirs, you're good to
00:59:19.580
go until they want something from you. And then they'll find a reason to twist you. When your
00:59:24.820
politics don't align with theirs, they're going to twist you all the time. It is wholly corrupt.
00:59:32.640
And again, I think that's because to put it in a in a different frame than usual, because it's very
00:59:38.960
easy for people to say, oh, because it's godless and maybe it's communist and all of this.
00:59:42.600
It is that it's ultimately Hegelian and in its structure. And it's very important for people
00:59:47.400
to understand. Hegel forwarded the idea that ideas perfect themselves through dialectic throughout
00:59:54.320
history. And when the ideas become perfect, the dialectic, sorry. Yeah. So dialectic, the dialectic
01:00:01.060
process really, I think, derives from Kant before Hegel. But Hegel took it very seriously. And he wrote
01:00:07.240
in 1807, a book called Phenomenology of Spirit that's virtually impossible to read. And so the
01:00:13.260
phenomenology of how spirit evolves, the phenomenon of the development of spirit is what he's about.
01:00:18.520
And he's got a dialectical process. It's actually Kant's expression to say that what most people
01:00:23.020
talk about, which is that there is a thesis, an idea, and then it confronts its antithesis,
01:00:28.720
something that negates it, or Alfhaben in German. And then you take those two pieces and find some
01:00:35.700
greater whole by synthesizing them. So you have thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and a three-stage
01:00:41.120
process. So you put out an idea, you look for the contradiction in the idea, and then you try to
01:00:46.140
find some grander whole. So the best example I've encountered of this is thesis, the sky is blue,
01:00:53.680
antithesis, not at night. Synthesis, the sky changes colors and is blue during daytime.
01:01:00.540
And so it seems like this creates a greater understanding and a greater picture of the
01:01:05.520
whole. But it's in fact a form of alchemy. By working through contradictions, you're working
01:01:11.060
through a process of negating things to get something more, and that doesn't actually work.
01:01:15.980
It can expand horizons when you're being too narrow. So there is a positive use to this. But it's also
01:01:22.400
not possible to get a greater understanding. But Hegel believed that the spirit of the world,
01:01:26.780
the Weltgeist, as he put it, evolves according to this, and that there's actually behind the scenes
01:01:32.200
a – and so it's people doing this process that allow the spirit of the world, which is kind of
01:01:37.260
how the world believes about things. It's not the same as Zeitgeist, which is kind of more narrow.
01:01:43.160
He wasn't a big fan of the idea of Zeitgeist. He had this Weltgeist. So the ideas of the world evolve
01:01:49.860
as people go through this process of negating bad ideas and then finding a higher synthesis.
01:01:56.620
And he had this idea of an absolute spirit that he talks about, or an absolute that is the equivalent
01:02:04.520
for him of deity. It is, in fact, often treated as though it's the same God as the Christians talk
01:02:10.280
about, but it's not. And the idea for him is that this God becomes aware of itself when enough
01:02:17.280
dialectic has happened, when the Weltgeist gets to the right place and has merged fully. He was a
01:02:22.800
big, big statist. So when it merges fully with the state. And at that point, the eschaton occurs
01:02:30.300
because the absolute becomes aware of itself and understands that it is the absolute. And in other
01:02:36.000
words, you now have a utopia that has been built on earth and is enshrined in the state. And for Marx,
01:02:41.180
that's when socialism falls apart and becomes communism because the state becomes redundant.
01:02:46.780
That's the material, the dialectical materialist version of that same thing, of the Hegelian
01:02:53.700
eschaton being the awareness of the final awareness of the absolute spirit.
01:03:00.840
And so what you have here in Christianity, you have a God that is. I am the I am, I am the Alpha and
01:03:07.400
the Omega, that which is before everything and after everything. I am eternal, I am unchanging,
01:03:12.340
I am. Yahweh, I am. And so you have this idea of a God that's eternal and outside of the circles of
01:03:20.040
the world. In fact, he's sovereign over the circles of the world. Whereas in Hegel, you have
01:03:26.540
an absolute that becomes. It's not a God that is, it's a God that becomes. And it becomes through the
01:03:32.220
process of constantly criticizing and poking at the world and our ideas about the world and changing
01:03:37.260
them. And Hegel saw this as being kind of perfected by being entrusted to a increasingly
01:03:44.020
perfect and increasingly powerful state. And like I said, Marx translated that into the material realm
01:03:50.460
by saying that capitalism will give way to socialism and then eventually the state will become redundant
01:03:55.240
when we realize we no longer need a state. And then we'll have a communist utopia, which is
01:04:00.740
the same thing, which will never happen. Utopia means nowhere. And so this is, you have to understand
01:04:08.220
that this is the process behind it. And this is the basis. Their deity is this God that's becoming
01:04:14.480
by our process of picking at the world. And it is not a God that is, it is a God that becomes by
01:04:20.600
picking at things and picking at things and picking at things. And as a judge in the sense that we would
01:04:25.940
see like, you know, God is as merciful judge of the world. We don't have mercy. We have the judge
01:04:32.640
that says, were you on the right side of history or were you not at the very end of this process when
01:04:38.540
it becomes aware. And so though what it is, is like, you know how you can look at, we can look at
01:04:44.540
ourselves and we can look back in time, two generations and think, wow, look how racist everybody
01:04:49.220
was two generations ago. That's bad. And then you can look forward and say, wow, our grandchildren
01:04:55.720
will probably think we're really racist. That's, we're bad. And then now just kick that out to
01:05:01.040
infinity. And that's where you get the idea of this. I've referred to it as the eye at the end
01:05:05.680
of history as the Hegelian judge. So you can see how this becomes the God of progressivism because
01:05:12.320
progressive progress away from these evils is kind of taken as the axiomatic thing that's happening.
01:05:20.700
And so the more time goes by, the more of that will have occurred and the more horrific we'll look
01:05:25.040
back on ourselves and think we were in the past and be ashamed of that. And so it's like trying to
01:05:30.500
circle back around and get ahead of that thing and trying to force the world to change to that
01:05:35.940
perfect Star Trek universe. Yeah. I mean, the Star Trek universe isn't perfect either. You know,
01:05:41.280
they got that whole thing with the Romulans and the Klingons and it's like a thing there too, right?
01:05:46.000
So, um, but nevertheless, to understand it in that sense, and I know that's heavy,
01:05:52.080
but that this is actually a faith based in a completely different conception of God.
01:05:56.040
And the simplest way to say the difference is...
01:05:57.540
With a different eschatology. You've talked about eschatology.
01:06:01.700
Christians, we've got, you know, we've got disagreements within, you know, we would call
01:06:06.620
each other still, you know, faithful Christians. Our disagreements on eschatology, we see that as,
01:06:11.160
you know, more of like a tertiary issue. That's not something we would call a gospel issue.
01:06:16.000
So, um, but we've got disagreements there, but it's all within the framework of biblical
01:06:19.640
Christianity. Our idea, at least among Orthodox Christianity is that the Bible is inerrant.
01:06:24.620
So we might have different interpretations of it, but we can both agree at the end of the day
01:06:28.340
between, you know, theologically conservative Christians that, okay, the Bible's right. One
01:06:33.140
of us is probably wrong, but the Bible is right. And so at the end of the day, we agree on these
01:06:36.920
things. We disagree on that. What you're describing is a completely different narrative of what
01:06:42.380
eternity looks like, like of what the human timeline looks like. And I've talked about,
01:06:47.160
there's been a guest on my podcast who wrote a book about that progressivism, progressive
01:06:51.220
Christianity brings another gospel. It brings another form of salvation, another definition
01:06:56.960
of sin and salvation and, um, a savior. It's not the same thing as Orthodox Christianity,
01:07:02.000
but you're actually kind of showing why it's not just a different gospel, but it's an entirely
01:07:08.940
different understanding of the history of the world and the trajectory of the world.
01:07:15.720
And another reason why this, all of these theories are incongruent. And I think probably created to
01:07:21.840
be purposely incongruent and a replacement of the Christian understanding.
01:07:27.320
Oh yeah. Christianity was definitely targeted by these things. Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci,
01:07:33.160
that's for sure. Yeah. Antonio Gramsci explicitly laid out five pillars, which I can probably remember
01:07:39.280
four of them off the top of my head of, of culture that had to be attacked in order to bring
01:07:44.420
communism to the West. And religion is one of the first ones he mentions. It's religion, education,
01:07:51.480
media. Um, I've got three family is a fourth one and there's a fifth one, but I forgot what it is.
01:07:57.600
And so these are the fundamental pillars of Western culture that he, but religion and faith is, is
01:08:03.140
right at the top of his list of things that have to be targeted and targeted deliberately. The best
01:08:08.320
way I could explain kind of alien eschatology in terms of kind of Christianity, and this is going to be a
01:08:15.380
bit awkward. I apologize, but it would be as though you had a cult within Christianity arise. And the thing
01:08:23.300
that it believed is that Jesus will come back if, and only if we have a complete Christian theocracy,
01:08:29.680
so we're talking full theonomists, and at the same time that Jesus will then only come back when that
01:08:35.860
Christian theocracy has total control. That's, so that's your, your, your total control of the
01:08:41.820
state. And then simultaneously has the exactly perfect interpretation of the Bible.
01:08:47.800
And just so everyone knows, it's not my eschatology. I'm a pre-millennialist,
01:08:51.140
I've had post-millennialist theonomists on this show, but yes, that's-
01:08:57.180
I don't, you don't know the difference. Well, my view is that the world is going to get worse and
01:09:02.660
worse, which I, I think that we are winning that argument right now. Yeah. The world is going to
01:09:09.200
get worse and worse until Christ returns. But anyway, keep going.
01:09:13.680
So that, that's what it would be though. That's as close to within, I mean, it's a bit different
01:09:18.300
because Jesus still represents the, the second figure of the Godhead. And so you still have
01:09:24.760
this idea of a God that is rather than a God that becomes, but it would be actually more like saying
01:09:28.960
Jesus doesn't realize he's Jesus until we get the perfect theology and it becomes the one global
01:09:34.100
state. That would be the idea. And then suddenly by the process of these, these, you know, priests or
01:09:40.880
whoever it is, figuring out the proper Jesus and enforcing it on everybody, Jesus would suddenly
01:09:45.460
realize, Oh, that's me. And then come back down. That would be the kind of picture. And you can
01:09:50.240
see how freaking heretical that is. I mean, I've never heard any Christian ideas that are like that,
01:09:55.800
that haven't been, then if they do come up that aren't branded as insanely heretical,
01:10:00.580
you can also see how dangerous that is. You can also see how, how different that is to what,
01:10:05.920
you know, for example, Christ preached. We, and no one knows the hour and things like this.
01:10:10.020
Um, so that's, I mean, that's like I said, it's just an analogy. It's not going to be perfect,
01:10:15.560
but that's kind of the shape. And they think of that instead of it being that you're bringing
01:10:21.460
Jesus back, it's that the world will launch itself into utopia, a material world utopia with
01:10:26.800
a perfect philosophy where everyone will be liberated from all suffering, all unfairness,
01:10:31.020
all oppression, when that realization occurs. And the state will then become perfect and drop
01:10:37.260
away and everyone will get along kumbaya in perfect harmony because we won't have any of
01:10:42.000
the oppressive power dynamics that need to be contradicted out of existence.
01:10:46.920
And that's, people need to understand the, the Christians that hold to say, they say that
01:10:52.720
they hold to parts of CRT. They're also being influenced by people like James Cone, who basically
01:10:59.620
believed this in his own liberation theology. We talk, I mean, the Bible does talk about Jesus
01:11:05.040
freeing people from oppression. Um, and yes, we believe that Jesus cares about physical oppression
01:11:11.520
and that we should actually care about physical oppression, real physical oppression or earthly
01:11:16.660
oppression that's happening. But we also understand, I guess it mirrors what you were saying,
01:11:22.300
but in the, the Christian sense, we also understand that really he came to liberate us from the
01:11:27.380
oppression of sin and that are the true liberation is in eternity when there won't be any suffering,
01:11:34.260
there won't be any sin, but we believe that's a future state really outside of, of the time in
01:11:40.460
which we exist. Outside of the world. Right. That's crucial. Yes. Whereas this believes they can force
01:11:45.620
it to happen. Right. In, in, in normal material reality. And so did, and you know, I saw this very,
01:11:51.380
very, very woke Christian say, uh, the other day that, um, until we see Christianity, not as a means
01:12:00.000
of salvation, but as a means of liberation from oppression, we will see, uh, we will continue to
01:12:06.680
see Christian terrorism, which is just crazy. And so they see people like me who see, you know,
01:12:12.760
the future state sans suffering sans sin of Christ reigning in perfect peace in eternity. Um,
01:12:19.600
they see that as a real, or I don't know if they really see it this way, or they just say that they
01:12:24.360
do a real danger and, um, a prospect of harm. They say it's an immediate prospect of harm, but really,
01:12:32.600
I think what I, what they believe is what you're saying that I like people like me and even people
01:12:37.800
like you will stop the, will stop the, the, the utopian state from, from coming. And if that,
01:12:46.740
like, if that is your religion, if that is your goal, if you believe thy kingdom come means Hegel's
01:12:53.060
kingdom, then yeah, you're going to get all of the infidels out of the way. Like you're going to push
01:12:58.060
people to the side because that is your eternal goal. So your argument is that this is a whole other
01:13:03.360
faith. It's a whole other worldview and its adherents are a lot more merciless than, um,
01:13:10.440
I can't say than any other religion. Um, but then Christianity, that's for sure.
01:13:15.760
Sure. Yeah. It's, it's, how do I phrase this? It's like, um, what you said is that on some level,
01:13:23.500
there's genuinely the belief that we could have a perfect world. If everybody who didn't have the
01:13:29.040
right beliefs somehow got taken care of, whether they're reeducated, whether they're removed,
01:13:34.180
whether they're liquidated, whatever it happens to be. And on some level, that's sort of it is
01:13:38.960
everybody would just get on the same page. Then we'd finally have the right thing. And I, I, you know,
01:13:46.260
try to be as charitable as possible to communism, which is a weird thing to say, you can kind of see
01:13:51.960
that's, that's the line of thought that they have. And that's why you end up with situations where
01:13:56.500
people are going in and like gulag and everything else is that if everybody just got on the same
01:14:01.700
page, you start off there. If everybody just got on the same page, this would work. And I don't
01:14:06.340
think that's true, but we'll take it as a, as an assumption that, okay, fine. We'll pretend it's
01:14:11.180
true. If everybody got on the same page. Well, the problem is people, some people won't be on the
01:14:15.300
same page. So what do you do with them? You try to convince them that you can't convince them. Then
01:14:18.580
you start to kill them. Right. You start to get rid of them. You exile them or start killing them one or
01:14:23.440
the other to get them out of the situation. And when we're talking about something that's planet
01:14:27.440
wide, uh, you can't exile them. We can't, Elon hasn't got it together yet. We can't send them to
01:14:33.240
Mars. Yeah. So, um, we do end up in that kind of, that kind of mentality underlies this when you think
01:14:41.180
that it's your job to create the material conditions. So, and again, to put it in a Christian
01:14:47.480
phrasing that it's your job to build God's kingdom rather than your job to stay faithful and await
01:14:53.440
faithfully Christ's return for him to establish that kingdom. It's that same confusion. Yeah. Um,
01:15:00.020
and that's, again, that's what liberation means. Liberation means a liberation from all of these
01:15:04.660
systemic oppressions and so on. And I do actually agree with the idea that you could focus on a figure
01:15:09.540
like Jesus and use that figure to, um, you know, overcome biases that you may actually have in that
01:15:18.120
sense, you know, Jesus Christ can liberate us or the gospel can liberate us from, from racism. Okay,
01:15:23.420
fine. But that's a really inaccurate understanding of what's meant. We also, yes, but we also do believe
01:15:30.040
that. And we actually, that's really the argument that we have. And I really have to wrap this up.
01:15:34.820
I was just, I was messaging my team and I was like, I can't stop talking. My brain won't let me stop
01:15:39.120
talking even though we're over the time. But, um, uh, and we do believe that like, that's the
01:15:45.180
argument that we have between, uh, people who are theologically conservative and, uh, you know,
01:15:50.880
professing Christians who hold the CRT is that we say, look, the gospel regenerates hearts. That's
01:15:56.220
what we believe turns hearts of stones to hearts of flesh. And the Bible is very clear in first John
01:16:00.660
that you can't love God and hate your brother. And that includes hatred because of race, hatred because
01:16:05.740
of sex, whatever it is. And so, you know, we do believe that it is the gospel. It is Jesus Christ
01:16:11.940
who helps us in these things. But, um, the problem is that we, we, the argument is, is it just the
01:16:18.980
gospel that can do those things? Like for example, William Wilberforce was motivated by the gospel of
01:16:24.360
Jesus Christ to lead the abolition against, uh, slavery. And we see that as a very good thing.
01:16:29.480
So is it, is the gospel enough or is it the gospel and, and what I try to explain,
01:16:35.640
and I think you even try to explain, even though you're not a Christian is that
01:16:38.400
the gospel, it can't be the gospel and CRT because CRT has its own gospel. It's got its own
01:16:45.180
eschatology. It's got its own basically biblical canon. Um, and I really want to keep going and I
01:16:51.280
want to ask you your thoughts on what I just said, but I've, I've got to wrap this up. Um,
01:16:56.100
I would just say that Augustine would have named it a heresy.
01:16:59.200
Yeah, of course, of course. And you can't, all of us, we all know that you can't pick and choose
01:17:03.880
parts of a heresy and say, well, actually I'm going to keep it and apply it to my Christianity
01:17:08.980
and it still be biblical. It's just not, it's like I say, it's a bad tree that bears bad fruit.
01:17:14.340
Jesus said a bad tree can't bear bad fruit. Um, cause it's rotten to the roots and you explain that
01:17:19.400
really well. Thank you so much. Um, I will include all the links to new discourses, your book,
01:17:26.100
and all that good stuff, your social media, so people can follow you. I know people are really
01:17:30.000
going to appreciate this conversation like they did with the last one. Uh, thank you so much for
01:17:34.740
being generous with your time and, uh, and for, uh, talking with us. Cheers. You too. Thank you.