Ep 909 ｜ The Left Is Falling in Love with Osama bin Laden ｜ Guest： James Lindsay
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 8 minutes
Words per Minute
167.29257
Summary
In this episode of Relatable again, we have a conversation with James Lindsay. First, we talk about some of the conflicts and controversy that he has gotten himself into on social media, and then we get into his analysis of everything that is going on here and what it means for the future of the country.
Transcript
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Osama bin Laden's Letter to America, written over 20 years ago, is now going viral online
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as TikTokers are expressing sympathy for the terrorist behind the 9-11 attacks.
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What is the mentality responsible for this kind of sympathy among Americans online?
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And what is really going on behind the debate, the discussion, in some cases, the violent
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protests regarding the Israeli and Palestinian conflict?
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How does critical race theory, intersectionality, Marxism, liberation theology all play into
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what is going on here in America and the discussions that are being had around this conflict?
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We've got a fascinating conversation for you with one of my favorite guests, James Lindsay.
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First, we're going to talk about some of the conflicts and controversy that he has gotten
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himself into on Twitter, and then we will get into his analysis of everything that is going
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on here and what it means for the future of the country.
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And then I will also note the implications of this theologically.
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This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.
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OK, before we get into all the stuff that's going on, and I just want to get your interpretation
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of everything, I've got so many questions about the debates.
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I went to your page and I saw that it said, this profile is temporarily restricted, which
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I actually got almost no information about this whatsoever.
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Um, I tried and found a way to kind of submit a report to Twitter, and they sent me back
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an automated email that said that my account had been flagged for suspicious activity, believing
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And, um, so I don't know, uh, it resolved itself.
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It said if I would reset my password and all of this, it could resolve itself after a few
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And then after several hours, um, I changed my display name and that allowed me to, uh,
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verify that I am a human through the, the, uh, test that that gives you, if you change anything
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And once I verified that I was a human, it gave me my account access back.
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So, um, I know that I was getting mass reports, uh, yet again for making people mad.
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So yeah, tell me why I want to get into that a little bit.
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Who was, who do you think was mass reporting you and why?
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Well, I know who was mass reporting me because they were bragging about mass reporting me.
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And this turns out to be a group of radical feminists who I made very upset.
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Um, I guess, what is it about a week ago, week and a half ago, I went to the
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Genspect conference, which Genspect is a organization that's going after the kind of trans ideology
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and especially the medical transition of minors.
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It had, uh, probably a 60, 40 split of people who identify on the left versus on the right
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Somebody did a kind of informal poll and kind of determined that.
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There were D transitioners there, but there were, and there were conservatives there and
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there were just kind of people kind of in the, I don't know, social media space talking
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Biologists were there, but there was also a self-confessed auto-gynophilic man named
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Phil Illy who was there and he was wearing a dress the whole time because that's what
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I know he wasn't entering women's private spaces like women's restrooms because I ran
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Uh, and so, uh, the feminists got very, very upset.
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The radical feminists got very upset after the fact, not that he was there, but that
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Now, the thing is, is that he wrote a book that's called something like auto-heterosexual
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He was, uh, handing it out to people he deemed to be influencers who might want to read it.
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Um, he wasn't in, in that sense, promoting it with the official sanction of Jen Speck,
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but Jen Speck didn't tell him you can't give out your book.
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And so as far as I could tell, his behavior was completely respectful.
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It's a little weird to be walking around in a dress.
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I personally felt like I wanted to just go up to him and say, dude, really, uh, a bunch
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I shared the article and said that rat fans were losing their minds over a man doing something
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So after Jen Speck posted the picture and let's just be specific, the radical feminists
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are people who are feminists who like the left would consider TERF.
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So they are feminists who are against gender ideology in men and women's spaces.
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Uh, there are writers at the outlet Redux, an outlet that I've promoted a lot.
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Genevieve Glock has done a lot of amazing research.
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She's been on the show several times, just dissecting a lot of the things that are going
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So those women were upset that it seemed like Jen Speck was platforming a man who was manifesting
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his sexual fetishes at a conference that is ostensibly speaking out against, uh, gender
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Like I would say that that's probably what their complaint was, right?
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As a matter of fact, they said that more specifically because he's a self-confessed autogynophile, which
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is a man who is sexually aroused by the idea of himself being a woman or being seen as a
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woman, him being in a dress at the place was necessarily making other people complicit in
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his sexual fetish, which, uh, is in their sense of violation.
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Um, and so there is a point there, I mean, Phil could have dressed in street clothes, like
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Uh, I don't know or claim to know anything about Phil or his motivations.
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I spoke to him for maybe all of three or four minutes.
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Um, but anyway, I, even, even to the degree that they have a point, uh, radical feminism,
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and this was the point that I made, uh, that upset them, refuses to take any responsibility
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for the completely blatantly obvious and true fact that radical feminist theory and activism
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is what opened the door to this happening in the first place.
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They're only willing to blame the men who are involved and the specific men who are acting
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as autogonophiles or whatever other things, uh, for all of this.
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It's that their, their own theory can have literally no negative consequences whatsoever
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Uh, and it made particularly the kind of feminist icon, Kelly J. Keene, very upset.
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And she decided to, uh, try to be a hard ass with me or something, which as everybody who's
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ever spent five minutes on Twitter knows being a hard ass with me on Twitter never goes well.
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And so, uh, I'm not going to leave it alone and I didn't leave it alone and I'm continuing
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So it will continue to spiral into a bigger and bigger fight until, in my opinion, feminism
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is exposed for laying the roots of queer theory, but also laying the roots of the sociocultural
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milieu in which women grow up to hate womanhood or young women grow up to hate the idea of
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They grow up to see the idea that while it is uncomfortable for many, it's easy to recognize
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and unseemly and something to be talked about that as they develop sexually as teenagers, that
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they start to attract male attention and male attention is given to them in that way.
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That that gets interpreted as a form of patriarchal violence and victimization of women as a class
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only exacerbates the problem rather than helping it.
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And to be frank, the entire theme of toxic masculinity, not to, uh, this will get taken all kinds of
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out of context, but men didn't enter women's spaces very successfully when men were allowed
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As Riley Gaines has said, for example, many times, they kept waiting for a dad or a coach or somebody
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to come in and grab the William Thomas and pull him out of the women's changing room or locker room
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Well, the thing is, is toxic, toxic masculinity is a feminist trope has really prevented men from being
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able to, um, take action to stop creepy and predatory men, whether we're acting toward women or children.
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And so a portion, if not most of the blame for this problem, while we must, of course, recognize
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the complicity of the actor or the blame actually for the actor himself, who is not a gynephile or
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We also have to recognize that feminist theory and activism has opened the door.
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And that's the way I phrased it, is that it actually unlocked the door that has allowed all of this
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to manifest in society. And if they're not willing to take any responsibility for it,
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they may as well recognize that their theory, which I can talk about in that aspect as well,
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is, is completely useless. In fact, it's worse than useless for stopping the problem,
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You know, I really like Kelly J. Keene and I really appreciate Redux just for the reporting
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that they do on the stories that we don't hear about these predatory men that are going into
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women's prisons and rape shelters and are committing absolutely heinous crimes in the name
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of just, you know, being their gender, being who they are. But they're actually preying upon
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vulnerable women as they're taking on this new character of womanhood. So I really appreciate
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all of the work that Genevieve Gluck has done. However, I don't consider myself a feminist for
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the very reasons that you just listed. It's not because I don't believe that women are equal or
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valuable or any of those things, but because I think the ideology down to its roots is rotten.
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So could it, but could it be possible that they define feminism differently than what you're
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defining? Like couldn't Kelly J. Keene and the writers at Redux, they're saying, well, we're
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feminists because we simply believe in the protection and perpetuation of the rights and equality and
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the dignity of women. That's what we're trying to protect. That's what we've always tried to
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protect. And I've also seen them say, look, they're feminists going back several decades who
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were fighting against this idea of gender bending, fighting against this idea of men in women's
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spaces, fighting against the idea of gender ideology. So couldn't it just be that there
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were some feminists who really do, they just consider themselves champions of women's rights,
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and then the other feminists who say, well, no, men and women are basically interchangeable
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and femininity is akin to weakness. And so women have to be masculine in order. And so,
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cause that I understand did open the door to this idea of gender bending and men can be women and vice
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versa. But there do seem to be feminists, even if I think that they're wrong in a lot of ways,
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feminists who don't see themselves as advocates for gender bending or women becoming masculine or
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things like that. So could it just be a problem of different definitions and different factions of
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feminism? Actions is a better word than definitions, but I guess the definitions define
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the factions. What I would say is that the word feminism is not very granularly clear. In this case,
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there are many, many branches of feminism. Those branches frequently don't agree very famously.
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In the eighties, there was a conflict between what was called sex positive radical feminism and sex
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negative radical feminism. They did not agree with one another whatsoever. Queer theory was born out
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of the sex positive splinter off of the sex positive radical feminism of the 1980s going into the 1990s.
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That's really not that much in doubt. There are these people who are materialist feminists who are at war
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with what are called post-structuralist feminists. There are like 20-something, 30-something different.
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And I think the right word here is denominations of feminism. But at the end of the day, feminism
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believes that women are a unified class that can have a feminist consciousness that awakens within them.
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And this kind of excludes the idea of these kind of champions of genuine women's rights and equality
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in the same way that queer awakening or queer consciousness doesn't represent the vast majority
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of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people whatsoever. That's why there's this LGB alliance trying to
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break away from the T and the Q, which are rooted essentially in queer theory.
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So feminism is not a clear enough term. If we were to get really into the weeds, I've studied a little
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bit of this. I would definitely not consider myself in any way a radical feminist. I don't use the term for
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myself at all. But I find myself agreeing with quite a lot of what gets called choice feminism,
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for example, or liberal feminism, which are both derided in the radical feminist literature
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as kind of sellout positions. And that's, in fact, what our fake paper that was the feminist
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Mein Kampf, where we rewrote the chapter of Mein Kampf and intersectional feminism, we said that
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intersectional feminism needed to define a form of solidarity that copied the...well, it didn't...we didn't say
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it needs to copy the Nazi movement. We replaced the Nazi movement that Hitler was writing about with
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intersectional feminist solidarity as a new movement. And the thing that it was targeting
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was neoliberal and choice feminism. So there's immense differences between feminists is the main
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point I want to draw here. But the fact of the matter remains that feminist theory from Simone
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de Beauvoir asking the question in 1949, what is a woman, to Matt Walsh asking the question in gender
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theorists not being able to answer it in 2022, what is a woman, including Ketanji Brown-Jackson
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going to the Supreme Court? There's a straight line. And that line travels primarily through
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feminist theory. And yeah, it's true that men and perverts and people like John Money and Stoller and
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a lot of these...Kinsey and a lot of these other guys, the influence of the post-structuralists like
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Foucault all had huge influences on the development of queer theory and trans ideology. But it doesn't
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change the fact that the underlying construct that defines the whole thing is the definitional
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construct of radical feminism, which is gender is a social construct. If you believe gender is a
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social construct, the next stop on the train, imagine it's a train going from station to station,
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the next stop on the train is so is sex. As a matter of fact, you find Monique Wedding,
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Wedding, I should say, who is a female feminist. You find Judith Butler. You find person after person,
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even within kind of just straight feminist analyses of Beauvoir, you find this conclusion that if
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gender is a social construct, maybe sex was too all along. And then guess what? Phil Illey showing up
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in a dress, well, his gender is just a social construct. And it doesn't really matter technically
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what motivates that unless you want to make a lot of pay of it. I think these things do matter
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personally. But my point is that feminists don't get to draw the line arbitrarily at where the
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revolution that they started is going to stop. And that revolution has now consumed them. It is
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their idea that gender is a social construct that has been taken to its next dialectical conclusion
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Yeah, but it's interesting, this kind of collectivist mentality, both in what I've heard you say
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and how I hear feminists talk. Like you're saying, they have to take responsibility for this as if
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they are the ones who perpetuated it back in, you know, 1949 or in the 1970s. Obviously, this is a
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new group of people. They're not responsible for the people who identified as feminists a long time
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ago. So I do wonder if they would just say, I mean, this is what I would say if I did, if I identified
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as a feminist to what you just said is, yeah, you're absolutely right. The ideology of those people
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several decades ago did lead the way to this. It did kind of prime the pump. But I don't believe
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those things. I believe in these tenets of feminists, feminism, and this is what kind of
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feminist I am. And so I wonder if they would respond that way, although I didn't see that in
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their responses. I kind of just saw defending previous feminists. So I don't know why there
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wouldn't just be, hey, a distinction. Yeah, James, I see what you're saying. They were absolutely wrong.
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But I'm trying to correct that within feminism. So yeah, that's interesting. That's how I would
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respond. What they replied was that these are misinterpretations of Beauvoir's own words.
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In other words, they have, you know, the secret codex to how to read feminist theory from Simone
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de Beauvoir. They don't dare say that Simone de Beauvoir was wrong. No, it's that there are
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misinterpretations. And here are like, you know, 3,000 pages of crap nobody's going to read
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to try to rescue Beauvoir from herself. But the fact of the matter is that if you draw the sex-gender
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distinction and you claim that gender is socially constructed, you have no tools to stop the next
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question of whether or not sex, too, is a social and political construction. As a matter of fact,
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that's exactly what happened. That's exactly what the theory says. And the people who have decided
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to say that sex is a social construct as well can turn right around. First of all,
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citing Beauvoir just as readily as anybody else, they can turn right around and say the only reason
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that you want to reserve sex is because it benefits you politically. In other words, you're saying sex
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is reserved from social construction and gender is not because it's politically expedient for you
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as feminists who get to benefit from a certain kind of privilege that comes with identifying with
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sex. Unfortunately, queer identified people who fall outside of that normalcy framework don't have
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that privilege. And so it's again, it's the dialectical logic they've assumed. So when I say
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that I'm not assigning collective blame in this case, anybody in this category, I mean, collective blame
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would be saying it's women's fault. It's not women's fault. Feminism is an ideology. People
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who ascribe to the ideology should recognize that their ideology has consequences rather than continue
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to try to reject responsibility for that ideology. Yeah. Like I could say, OK, some things have been
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done in the name of Christianity by people who profess Christianity that I just don't agree with. I don't
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have to be an apologist for that. Like I could just say, well, that's not true to God's word. That is not a
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legacy that I want. Whatever, whatever it was. I'm not even thinking of specific examples, but I'm not really
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sure why there wouldn't be an effort to just differentiate. Or maybe there is. And I'm just kind of
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misunderstanding or missing it. But I just wanted to get your take on that conversation, because obviously I
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respect you and your thoughts a lot. That's why I love having you on. And I also really appreciate the work
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done at Redux and the work done by Genevieve and Anna. And yeah, to see two sides that I respect
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fighting, I just kind of wanted to hear a little bit more of your insight on that. OK. I'll just say
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before we go on that I've appreciated the work done at Redux, too. In fact, they mocked me for sharing
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218 or something articles in the last year alone that Redux has published. And then as it came out,
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I was sharing those as favors to people who did it. I'm very busy. I don't particularly need to
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read the details, the gory details of a story about a man identifying as a woman so he can enter a
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woman's prison and rape people. To know that sharing that is something that's worth raising public
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awareness about. So sharing not most, literally all of those articles. I've never opened a Redux article
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to my knowledge. I was sharing all of those articles without having read them, which the people at
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Redux tried to burn me for. So I've now decided I will not share Redux anymore, even though it might
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be in the public interest to have done so. And even if their work generally could have value or is
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bringing value to the issue. Unfortunately, like I said, at the heart of it, though, is this radical
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feminist constructivist ideology, a critical constructivist ideology that can't solve this
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problem. So I think it's probably better to try to figure out other ways to get to the same reporting.
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Let's move on to Israel-Palestine. And really, I just want you to break down like what is going on
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behind the conflict or the interpretation of the conflict here in the United States. We did an
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episode last week talking to someone else about what's going on in the history and things like
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that. I'm sure you would have an interesting analysis of all that. But I want you to talk
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about the debate and the discussion that's happening. And I'll just give you some of my
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observations. And there are just so many things that I've seen that I'm like, I need James Lindsay
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to interpret what is going on behind what's being said. So let me go back to something that you said
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in 2021. There's a tweet that you said, James, okay, so it says James Lindsay in my notes,
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said that critical race theory is the biggest threat to Jews in the world today in response to
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a tweet claiming whiteness is the center of American Jewish life. And I think it's really
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interesting to go back to your response to that tweet, because it seems like that's kind of what's
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underneath a lot today, like just absolute unabashed Jew hatred in these pro-Palestine protests
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on college campuses. They're not even hiding it. It's not like some nuanced position to where
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they're trying to even just say, well, we're anti-oppression, we're anti-colonialism. That's
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part of it. But it is just unabashed. We don't like the Jews. We don't like Israel in some of these
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places. So what's going on? How is this possible when the Jewish people have endured so much oppression
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for their entire history are such a small minority? Why are they seen as the colonizing
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white supremacist oppressor that must be taken down by, you know, resistance fighters and liberators?
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Yeah, I wish I had a short and concise answer for this, but it's actually super complicated.
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Like a 10,000 or 12,000 or something word essay, some absurd length back in 2020, in October of
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2020. So over three years ago, talking as called critical race theories, Jewish problem, talking
00:24:03.560
about this issue way back, because I started to read, actually, during the grievance studies affair,
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we stumbled on a large number of papers that were actually conflating Jewishness and whiteness.
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And I just kind of bookmarked that as like, that's probably a potential problem. And I finally
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came back to it in 2020, when I was studying critical race theory in more depth. And I ended
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up reading this book by a scholar, I assume, named Karen Brodkin, which is titled How Jews
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Became White Folks and What That Means About Race in America, which was published in the late
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90s, 98 or 99, something like that. And so I read this book, and her argument is actually
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that Jews were considered minorities in the United States. And until roughly the 1950s,
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then Jews started to throw other minority groups under the bus so that they could be classified
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as white. They then climbed the ladders of white culture to become the cultural kind of the trendsetters
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of white culture, whether in media or in entertainment, or in law or whatever else, and basically usurped
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whiteness from white people and became kind of the most elite vanguard of whiteness, where
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in critical race theory whiteness is considered a form of cultural property,
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bourgeois cultural property associated with race, that's meant to exclude people of color
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from other, from the full benefits and full citizenship in society. And so the goal of CRT
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is to abolish whiteness. But this sets aside this kind of very special and weirdly unique
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wrath for Jews, which is then also what you just mentioned actually plays into the story is the claim
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is that Jews became white in the 1950s and 1960s at the expense of people of color, in particular
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blacks. But they hide behind the fact of the Holocaust to say, look how oppressed we are,
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hide behind, you know, the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70, 80, and all of these other calamities
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that have been visited upon them as a people, to hide behind this and say, no, no, we're oppressed
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too. So they're the height of privilege hiding behind oppression. And I thought that that looks
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an awful lot like Hitler's ideology about Jews as well, but not exactly the same. But this is tucked
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deeply within critical race theory mentality. And so Jews are coded as white, except sometimes there's
00:26:23.280
a carve-out for what are called brown Jews, which is used in critical race theory as an attempt to set
00:26:29.340
brown Jews against white Jews and cause division within a broader Jewish community, which is its
00:26:34.280
own kind of sick, divisive, conflict-driven identity politics that you see all over the place with this
00:26:40.380
CRT. So CRT has a Jewish problem, and the essay's first half is covering that. And it explains a lot of
00:26:48.220
what you're asking about, except the settler colonialist part. And so for that, we have to turn to
00:26:54.960
post-colonial theory. Now, before I talk specifically about the Palestine Liberation Organization or
00:27:03.960
Palestinian Liberation Organization and its roots in history, I just want to talk about
00:27:08.060
post-colonial theory. Post-colonial theory is based largely off of this French psychoanalyst who
00:27:15.520
is from Martinique. His name was Frantz Fanon. He wrote in the 50s and 60s some very, very radical books
00:27:20.660
openly advocating for violence in order to reclaim the psychological status of the colonized person
00:27:27.760
from their colonizer. In fact, he says he starts the book, The Wretched of the Earth, which he
00:27:32.640
published in 61, with the sentence that no matter what you call it, decolonization is always a violent
00:27:39.740
process. And so this decolonized project has always been one rooted in violence. Now, Fannin's work was
00:27:47.340
taken up very significantly by a Palestinian-American professor named Edward Said. And Edward Said is
00:27:55.280
sort of considered the father of post-colonial theory. And what he did was mixed Fannin's very
00:28:00.220
radical, literally Marxist analysis of third-worldism into a mixed Foucault's power dynamics of post-modernism
00:28:09.820
into that. And that's basically the backbone of what Said did, followed also by Gayatri Spivak and some of
00:28:17.020
the other, Homi Bhabha and some of those being in the Indian context, being the fathers or mothers and
00:28:24.740
fathers, I suppose, the parents of post-colonial theory, which has as its center this idea of radical
00:28:30.560
decolonization of all colonized lands, which means, in effect, removing capitalism and Western civilization
00:28:37.640
from all lands that anybody can make a claim, belong to somebody else beforehand, even including Britain
00:28:45.060
somehow. And so post-colonial theory itself is an extremely angry and literally violent branch of
00:28:54.200
this philosophy. But it's relevant that Said was a Palestinian-American because it grew up within that
00:29:00.840
Palestine conflict context within Said's mind. And this also, he was also a hero of the region
00:29:08.260
in the 1970s and 1980s for the Arabs in that world looking at Israel through that lens. And so that was
00:29:18.040
kind of deeply embedded in where post-colonial theory developed. So it has a very anti, they say anti-Zionist,
00:29:25.760
but really anti-Israel project at their heart. And a lot of these crazy ideas that Jews are the new
00:29:31.460
Nazis that we've heard around this movement, but we heard earlier in various parts of time in the
00:29:38.320
world, came out of this post-colonial theory mindset, unfortunately. Now, the reason that Palestine
00:29:45.560
and Said become so relevant here is because, like I said, the people's liberation, or the Palestinian
00:29:52.280
liberation organization is actually a splinter, an offshoot. Now, liberation, PS, is like liberation,
00:29:58.420
like Mao's People's Liberation Army, like the Liberation Front in Vietnam, like the liberation
00:30:04.540
movements in South America. It's a communist project. But the PLO is an offshoot of something
00:30:10.880
that was earlier defined as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP. Now,
00:30:18.620
the Popular Front should tell you just linguistically, if you've kind of picked up on these things,
00:30:23.760
that that was a Marxist project. As a matter of fact, it was a Soviet project to bring Marxism
00:30:28.500
and division into the region following the establishment of Israel in 1948. So the PLO,
00:30:36.560
which gave birth to Hamas after the very radical traditionalist, if you want, but it's really
00:30:43.980
radical fundamentalist Islam ideas from the Muslim Brotherhood got infused into the liberationist
00:30:50.940
ideas of the PLO, actually came from Soviet setup to create division around the object of Israel
00:30:57.820
in the region. So this is all, in some sense, the downstream effects of blatant propaganda from
00:31:04.180
the Soviets trying to break apart the Middle East to make it a violent, war-torn area, make it so that
00:31:10.960
there would never be peace unless the American and English project of the Israeli state were
00:31:21.500
completely and utterly destroyed. And so there's no surprise that there's massive solidarity from
00:31:26.920
the left. When Judith Butler got caught on tape, you know, this came out now and she's trying to
00:31:31.360
disclaim it, but 20 years ago, saying that Palestine has always been a project of the global left.
00:31:37.840
She wasn't kidding. She wasn't lying. She wasn't wrong. She's trying to disclaim it now for whatever
00:31:43.560
reasons that we could speculate on. But here we have the fairy godmother of queer theory saying that
00:31:49.420
Palestine was always a project of the global left. And all of these other liberation movements,
00:31:54.540
including Black Lives Matter, which is really the black liberation movement, reconstituted,
00:31:58.720
queer liberation and so on, all have to sign on and go full bore into solidarity across this global
00:32:07.300
left push. Because for them, it doesn't matter if it's queer things or black things or race or sex or
00:32:13.000
gender or sexuality or ability status, or in this case, colonial status in specific Israel versus
00:32:18.980
so-called Palestine. The issue is not for them the issue. The issue is always the revolution. And this is
00:32:24.320
part of that far global left revolution. So you see 100 percent solidarity because that's how cults work.
00:32:31.480
Yeah. And obviously, you know, it's not about like true liberation for Muslim people because they don't
00:32:37.420
have anything to say about weaker Muslims in China. They don't have anything to say about the Muslims
00:32:42.260
that are being oppressed by their own Muslim governments in almost all of the Muslim world. So
00:32:47.340
if it were really about liberation, it would or like true liberty, they would be concerned about
00:32:53.380
those things. I thought it was interesting when Ilhan Omar, she got up in front of Congress and said,
00:32:57.760
you know what, they have a right to find liberty. And what she means by that is the destruction of
00:33:03.020
Israel. She doesn't actually mean liberty as you and I see liberty, because even if Israel was
00:33:08.220
eliminated altogether, the people in Palestine wouldn't have liberty. They wouldn't be free. Hamas would
00:33:13.820
still be in charge. Hamas is not championing their rights and their dignity and their freedom as
00:33:20.200
individuals. They would just be under total Muslim rule as they are today. Their lives wouldn't improve
00:33:26.020
in any way. And that's what you see in all of these decolonizing, liberating revolutions. I'm not
00:33:34.360
saying that every colonizer has been, you know, kind and compassionate, but the decolonialisms tends to
00:33:42.380
always lead to prolonged destruction. If you're looking at Zimbabwe or Haiti or any of these places
00:33:48.380
where they have risen up against their oppressor, they haven't improved the lives of the people that
00:33:54.820
they say that they're advocating for. They live in a lot of cases in squalor. They live under
00:34:00.480
corruption. They live under oppression. But liberation from that kind of oppression apparently
00:34:05.880
doesn't matter. It's only against the white or perceived white oppressor, the Western oppressor,
00:34:13.960
whatever it is. And so I guess I just don't understand what the end goal is. Like we already
00:34:20.180
have seen throughout history what the result of these violent revolutions are in the name of
00:34:26.700
liberation. It's never good. It never improves the lives of the people that they say that they're
00:34:31.040
advocating for. So why do they think that this time it'll be different?
00:34:35.880
Well, what they're seeking liberation from is Western values, literally free inquiry,
00:34:41.440
the ability to determine truth for yourself to the best of your ability, the ability to associate
00:34:46.860
freely without punishment. In other words, these are totalitarian ideologies. Hamas is a totalitarian
00:34:51.820
ideology. As in a totalitarian interpretation of Islam, it very specifically is, it takes very literally
00:35:00.040
that Islam, which literally means submission, is the pathway, the sole and only pathway to peace.
00:35:06.100
There will be peace when everybody submits to their very radical, very fundamentalist interpretation,
00:35:13.260
very totalitarian, I should say, interpretation of Islam as a totalizing ideology. So no Islam,
00:35:19.600
no peace would be the way that they phrase it. But that's the same as no justice, no peace that we hear in
00:35:24.180
the West, or no socialism, no peace that you might have heard under Mao. It's literally the exact same
00:35:29.940
project. There's a reason that I continually mess up when I try to say the Palestinian Liberation
00:35:35.720
Organization, the PLO, I accidentally say the People's Liberation Organization, because I'm
00:35:40.460
conflating it with the People's Liberation Army of China by mistake in my head, which is what Mao named
00:35:46.380
his communist Red Army as the PLA, and it's still the PLA to this day. The idea is very simple. What Mao
00:35:54.420
said was that there would be freedom, right? So there's your liberation, your liberty that Omar is
00:36:00.220
talking about. There'll be freedom, but it only exists under socialist discipline. That's what Mao said
00:36:04.720
would be the case in China after the revolution. Hamas is zero percent different, absolutely not
00:36:11.180
different at all. There will be freedom or liberty, or they'll be liberated from Western values or
00:36:16.660
whatever, as long as it's all under Sharia discipline or full-blown Islamist discipline.
00:36:25.060
It's the exact same totalitarian logic, and it's the exact same totalitarian logic that we have here
00:36:30.300
in the West that is in solidarity with it under different brand names that are more effective in
00:36:36.100
our culture, which is that we will have more freedom and more liberty will be liberated from
00:36:41.980
all of this oppression if and only if we have our sustainable and inclusive future where everybody's
00:36:48.000
on board with the climate change agenda and everybody's on board with diversity, equity,
00:36:51.960
and inclusion initiatives as run through the critical theories of identity like CRT, queer theory,
00:36:58.980
and so on. It's the exact same model. They're all totalitarianism. They're all pushing the same
00:37:04.540
set of concepts, and again, it's not a surprise, therefore, that there is solidarity. So what
00:37:09.640
they're looking for liberation from, I mean, you can try to conflate it with white, but that's their
00:37:14.920
thing to do. It's kind of a big trap being laid forth. It's a mistake. It is Western values. It is
00:37:20.740
the idea of free inquiry, free association, property rights that people can't abridge or decide,
00:37:28.200
you know, outside of you. It's the freedom of conscience, belief, and speech in particular
00:37:32.340
that they are absolutely against because they're running a totalitarian cult. And if anybody can
00:37:38.960
tell the truth under a totalizing ideology, then anybody can tell the truth. And if anybody can
00:37:44.760
tell the truth, eventually the lies get exposed and the cult breaks and they lose their power.
00:37:49.540
So what their end game is, Ali, is very simple. It's power and totalitarian control of the people
00:38:08.740
Okay, so the communists here, the critical race theorists here, do they understand that Islam
00:38:17.120
is incongruent with their goals? That like Islam isn't interested in their intersectional goals?
00:38:22.240
Islam doesn't see themselves actually linking arms with Black Americans here against oppression.
00:38:29.460
Maybe they, I mean, they're very, I think these Middle Eastern countries, just like China,
00:38:34.680
are really good at propaganda. And so they're really good at kind of using those messages to
00:38:39.460
cultivate support, you know, among brainless left-wing activists here. But obviously that's not the goal
00:38:48.160
of Islam. The goal of Islam is total control. And in a different way, though, than critical race
00:38:54.580
theorists here. It would be a different government, a different system. So do left-wing activists here
00:39:00.480
understand that? Like, do they understand that Islam, like, is not interested in their pie-in-the-sky
00:39:08.260
left-wing coalition? Or are, like, have they so deluded themselves into thinking that they are,
00:39:14.900
like, fighting the same fight as Hamas? Like, it's wild. Because you do see, like, professors
00:39:22.800
using that symbol, the silhouette of the paraglider, as a symbol of resistance. And I don't know if you
00:39:30.580
saw, I know that I'm kind of, like, going on a rant, so I'm giving you a lot to respond to. But
00:39:34.840
I don't want to forget this. I don't know if you saw yesterday that there, on TikTok,
00:39:38.720
that Bin Laden's letter to America that he wrote 20 years ago, basically saying, this is why we
00:39:45.820
attacked you on 9-11, that it's going viral on TikTok. And you've got, from what I see, mostly
00:39:52.820
leftists saying, wow, my perspective has totally changed. And wow, Bin Laden, someone actually said,
00:40:01.620
someone said, Bin Laden is the good guy. Someone said, why is terrorism, why is it called terrorism
00:40:09.160
when really it's just resistance against the oppressor? What? There was a TikToker who said,
00:40:15.480
she said herself, she said, you know, I'm Muslim, and now that everyone is reading Bin Laden's letter
00:40:20.380
to America, now people know the truth. James, that's terrifying. So I don't even know, I guess,
00:40:27.880
what my question is, it's just all so obvious to me that anti-Israel is anti-West, is anti-civilization,
00:40:36.420
is anti-America. And if you see terrorism as a form of legitimate resistance and moral resistance
00:40:45.040
against the oppressor, and you see Westernism, white Americans, capitalism, whatever, as the same form of
00:40:53.580
oppressor here, then what is stopping those same people from using the same tactics that Hamas
00:41:02.700
Yeah, well, you're basically, you've got your thumb right on it. So you don't need to have a question
00:41:08.980
about that. You've already explained that their logic is really bad, really dangerous, and really
00:41:16.940
frightening. As for these, you know, leftist professors with the paraglider thing, you know,
00:41:22.260
just tell them if they're listening. I doubt they listen to you and me, but if they're listening,
00:41:27.400
do not ask for whom the paraglider flies. It flies for thee. It's coming for them. And no,
00:41:33.900
to your first part of the question, Ellie, they do not realize what they're dealing with.
00:41:38.780
That the Red Guard, I don't think, fully understood what it was getting into with Mao,
00:41:44.380
for example. After Mao got his power back from Liu Shaoqi at their, due to the efforts of the Red Guard,
00:41:51.180
he sent the PLA after them and got rid of them. I see frequently when you were asking me about that
00:41:58.620
part, about if the leftists know what they're tangling with Islam. I don't think to know what
00:42:02.940
they're tangling with, with any of the things that they're tangling with. In particular, you can see
00:42:08.520
what, you know, there's these videos going around, like, what are you going to do after the revolution?
00:42:12.900
And they talk about how they're going to curate books, and they're going to do all this kind of
00:42:15.940
stuff. But Marx wasn't ambiguous about what they would do after the revolution, is that you were
00:42:22.180
going to work, you're going to do labor with a hammer and a sickle, peasant work, factory work,
00:42:27.800
stone work, and so on, until you learned the value of work, until I think his phrasing is something like
00:42:34.300
that labor becomes your prime reason for being or something like that. And that was what the point
00:42:40.900
to the gulag was. They have no idea what they're tangling with at all. It's all very whimsical and
00:42:47.460
airy-fairy and idealistic and utopian until the rubber meets the road. And this is exactly what the
00:42:55.000
case is. I think that the people in Hamas, the radical Islamists, the people who would have been
00:43:01.100
Taliban or Taliban still completely understand what they're messing with, whereas the wokes who are
00:43:08.220
supporting them have no idea what they're dealing with. And they think very much so that they're going
00:43:14.580
to be able to just come in and absolutely, once the revolution has taken place, once constitutional
00:43:20.640
protections of belief have been destroyed, they're going to be able to come in and force convert at the
00:43:25.860
sword like they've always intended to. And I think there are historical precedents for that in the Arab
00:43:30.820
region, where the socialists helped the Arabs get there, or the Muslims get, I should say, Islamists
00:43:37.560
get, and take over power. And then they turned around and immediately said, convert to Islam or
00:43:42.420
die. Islam or death, those are your choices. And those are not socialist countries today.
00:43:47.040
So I don't think they know what they're dealing with. I think that the idea of queers for Palestine
00:43:51.220
or sex workers for Palestine, or even feminists for Palestine, completely reveals that they don't
00:43:57.440
know what they're working with, that there are more brutal totalitarian ideologies out there rather
00:44:03.440
than their utopian, you know, love is love kind of picture of the world. And I don't think they're
00:44:09.920
going to win those hardliners over. They're going to get bowled over once the protections that they
00:44:16.980
have, that they have now turned against, and they're angry at, and they're rallying against,
00:44:21.580
are removed, thanks to the revolution that they're championing. So there's this weird, like, tragic,
00:44:27.100
pitiful side to this whole story, that the useful idiot is, you know, it's the bullet too, frankly.
00:44:35.980
Yeah, and you actually do. I don't want to just say that it's people on the left. I've certainly
00:44:39.800
seen people on the right, who are, I would say they're basically, and we're talking about,
00:44:47.580
I don't even know how to exactly describe this. And it feels weird even saying this, because it's so
00:44:53.740
often used by left-wing activists towards people like me or you, but truly, like, they're far right
00:44:59.820
people who I would say are also kind of, I don't know if I would say they're anti-West and anti-civilization
00:45:09.160
the same way the left is, but they certainly seem to be cheering on what's going on in Muslim countries.
00:45:15.060
There's a weird, like, pro-Islam faction kind of growing in almost the, like, manosphere of the far
00:45:22.780
right, because they see them as fellow champions of traditional values, which is just crazy. And,
00:45:29.040
like, that they would link arms with them and being, like, anti-feminist or whatever. But I would say
00:45:35.040
those people are equally deluded. Like, you are also going to be put at the edge of the sword
00:45:39.460
in this kind of, in this kind of situation. Okay, go ahead.
00:45:44.540
Those people aren't the far right. They're not the far right. This is what we call them,
00:45:48.620
because they are the most vigorously anti-left, which then by default makes us define them as far
00:45:54.680
right. But Hamas is not far right. The Nazis were not far right, although that's how they get
00:45:59.840
characterized. And yeah, Hamas is using an extraordinarily traditionalist, if you will,
00:46:06.260
or as you might phrase it, you know, right-wing interpretation of Islam. But the fact is, is what
00:46:12.420
they are, is that this, that reaction is the right hand of the left. And people just don't understand
00:46:19.280
that. It's still this dialectical, progressive mentality, this totalitarian mentality that's
00:46:24.880
against liberty. What they are, is they are the necessary reaction and foil that the left creates
00:46:30.120
so that it can do another round of damage and conflict in society. Using similar methods with a
00:46:36.180
different ideology, or as Hitler put it in Mein Kampf, literally, I learned the tactics of the Marxists so I
00:46:41.140
could drive home my own firm conditions. Sorry, my own firm convictions. And that's literally a
00:46:47.840
chapter, chapter two, Mein Kampf quote from Hitler. And so they are the right hand of the left. And
00:46:53.500
people don't understand that. They think it's, oh, these far right guys are cheering this on,
00:46:58.600
blah, blah, blah. Well, no, they've signed on to the exact same, what's ultimately distributist model
00:47:03.600
of socioeconomics that they want to go back to, which is the same thing that the left wants with its
00:47:09.660
communist program. Just they want different people with a slightly different ideology controlling the
00:47:14.520
social credit system and the totalitarian mindset. So it's better to think of these people as the
00:47:18.800
right fist of the left than it is to think of them as the far right, just to be completely blunt about
00:47:25.540
them. You know, we're saying anti-West, anti-America, anti-white, anti-civilization, and I guess you
00:47:43.320
could say it's all those things. But of course, I see within that anti-Christianity. And I know we're
00:47:49.320
talking about anti-Semitism, but you can't really talk about Western civilization without Christianity.
00:47:54.860
Christianity is what drove Western civilization. I don't think we would have Western civilization or
00:47:59.540
the rule of laws we do today without Christianity. So, I mean, I know that you don't have the same
00:48:05.540
theological convictions that I do, but it's hard for me not to look at the left and like their
00:48:10.740
complete delusion when it comes to what Islam is and like what their movement is about without seeing
00:48:16.820
something profoundly spiritual about it. Like without seeing that, oh, like they don't have eyes to see
00:48:23.340
or ears to hear or a mind that understands, like as scripture, as scripture says, like it's right in
00:48:29.400
front of them. It's right in front of them what is really going on. It's like, it's obvious that
00:48:34.200
terrorism is bad or we think it should be obvious, but really it's not obvious without this, like the
00:48:41.200
premise of Christianity that all of us are privileged to be able to access here in the West that I think
00:48:47.180
all of us take for granted. And that's another thing. I don't think that the left realized once
00:48:51.400
you've destroyed Western values, once you've destroyed Christianity, you don't have all of
00:48:57.900
the things that you hold dear, that you think just exist, I guess, in a vacuum. You don't have the free
00:49:02.900
speech to talk about the things that you want to talk about. You don't have the right to defend
00:49:06.400
yourself. You don't have the right to believe what you want to believe. All of those things were born
00:49:10.760
from the basic principles of the Bible, the basic principles of Christianity. You don't have to
00:49:15.440
live in a theocracy to know that and appreciate that. So yeah, I think it just seems also spiritual
00:49:22.000
to me. It seems like a battle between darkness and light in a lot of ways. It really is, Allie.
00:49:29.440
I'm not using the word cult here to be glib. I'm meaning it quite technically. And I know that we've
00:49:35.240
talked about it some in the past. I think that these leftist things are all manifestations of
00:49:42.260
the ancient Gnostic heresies against Christianity. They're perversions of the Christian belief system.
00:49:48.940
They are therefore anti-Christ or anti-Christian in their orientation explicitly. And this isn't hard
00:49:56.040
to find in their literature. I mentioned Frantz Fanon earlier. When Jean-Paul Sartre summarizes Fanon in
00:50:01.960
the preface that he wrote to the Wretched of the Earth, he explicitly explains that the project of
00:50:08.920
decolonization is a ritual rebirth of the native through murder of the settler. And so that's a
00:50:16.100
spiritual rebirth. So when you say that they don't have eyes to see or ears to hear, which is obviously
00:50:20.680
a biblical precept, you actually read in Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscript he wrote in
00:50:25.720
1844, which is, I think, his primary religious manifesto. And you can't understand Marx
00:50:31.840
without understanding first that document and that it's his religious manifesto. He says the
00:50:36.900
exact same thing. He says that you have to, when you become a socialist, you have a transformed
00:50:41.240
consciousness. So that's also the idea of this ritual rebirth. So the transformed consciousness,
00:50:48.520
he explicitly says, gives you an eye that sees differently and an ear that hears differently.
00:50:53.480
And so this is a literal perversion and inversion of Christianity, because rather than worshiping God
00:50:59.480
and humbling yourself, or Christ as it were, you instead are worshiping yourself. And again,
00:51:07.400
we can turn to Marx explicitly. We're not trying, I'm not like trying to write something into Marx
00:51:12.740
that's not there. The year before he wrote Economic Philosophic Manuscripts, he wrote his critique of
00:51:18.060
Hegel's philosophy of right. So the first page of that is the very famous part where the religion is the
00:51:25.340
opiate of the masses that everybody's heard. But if you read just a couple paragraphs further down,
00:51:29.880
what he explains is that religion sets itself up as a false sun for humans to revolve around. But the
00:51:36.060
goal is to use the critique of religion to set yourself up as the true sun that revolves around
00:51:42.440
itself. And so it's literally a spiritual battle between worship of God, which is based in humility,
00:51:51.000
and fear of God, and love of truth, as opposed to, in this case, a worship of self, to elevate the self
00:52:00.560
above all else, which is rooted in hubris, arrogance, and narcissism. And so it is a spiritual battle
00:52:06.640
between light and dark, and an extraordinarily real way that's extremely easy to articulate just by
00:52:13.480
reading just a few pages of Marx and comparing it against what you actually see in the world today.
00:52:19.540
Yeah. Wow. And I know we've talked about this before, and I always have to resist the temptation
00:52:24.540
to re-talk about everything that we've talked about in the past, especially with this idea that social
00:52:29.420
justice and critical race theory, it cannot be a complement to Christianity because it seeks to
00:52:35.160
replace Christianity with something different. It has a competing idea of the origin of man, of the
00:52:41.840
nature of man, the nature of sin, what salvation is, what redemption looks like, what sanctification
00:52:47.260
looks like, what morality is. It's got competing definitions of all of those things. And one of
00:52:52.780
the things that always strikes me is that it has a competing eschatology, too. So it has a competing
00:52:57.680
idea of what God's kingdom looks like. It has a competing idea of what the end times look like,
00:53:04.180
whereas Christianity says that nothing's ever going to be perfect here on this earth. There's always going
00:53:08.560
to be injustice. There's always going to be sin, sorrow, sickness. It seems like the leftist believes
00:53:14.400
that with the right revolution and the right ingredients and defeating the right enemy,
00:53:18.880
that we will finally achieve true equity, true equality. We will alleviate all sorrow and wrong
00:53:26.020
and injustice and everything. We just have to get the revolution right and kill all the right people
00:53:30.900
and destroy all the right things. Then finally, everyone will live in harmony. And they believe
00:53:35.280
that they can accomplish that through social justice and violent revolution. And there's also like,
00:53:40.200
it's very strange because I see this desire to demolish civilization and also their fixation on
00:53:51.560
romanticizing time before civilization. So they romanticize how Native Americans lived or how
00:54:00.160
indigenous people lived or how barbarians lived or how pagans lived, the Aztecs lived, as if there
00:54:07.460
wasn't, I mean, systemic oppression and child sacrifice and all of those things. They really
00:54:12.680
romanticize that. They almost want to go back to that, to a time before civilization. And I think
00:54:18.580
about that. I'm getting to my points, taking me a while because I'm like thinking through it as I'm
00:54:23.280
talking, but that also goes to like, okay, so that is a competing narrative to Christianity and that
00:54:30.620
Christians are in some ways going back to the garden, a time when we walked with God and time
00:54:37.740
when we were like fully, um, reconciled to God and could have a relationship with him and weren't
00:54:43.740
separated by sin. Uh, but the difference is between our like origin story and our eschatology,
00:54:52.080
the difference between ours and critical race theories is that they're going back to a time when there was
00:54:57.500
no order, when it was all chaos and it was all anarchy. We are going back to a time when there
00:55:04.020
was order. Like they want to go back to a time of pre-civilization, whereas Christians, we see our
00:55:10.060
end time and our end result as being in the city of God, a city with walls as it's described, where
00:55:17.120
God is dwelling with us and walking with us as he did in the garden of Eden. So it's also that
00:55:24.440
competition, like that opposition between the origin and the end times between Christianity and CRT,
00:55:31.160
they want to go back to a time of disorder without the rule of law. We are going back to a time of
00:55:36.720
ultimate order. Like when everything was ordered perfectly according to the God who made it,
00:55:41.960
that is what the city of God is going to look like in the end times. I don't know if that made any
00:55:47.460
sense. Anyone who like knows the Bible, I think could track with me. It maybe was a little bit of
00:55:52.440
like stream of consciousness, but the order disorder dynamic in opposition is interesting to me,
00:55:58.080
especially as it relates to how we view the trajectory of mankind and the universe. Did that,
00:56:05.080
did you track with that at all? Yes, all of it actually. And it was very good. And I have so many
00:56:11.600
different things I kind of want to say. Go for it. This kind of back to chaos or back to the primordial
00:56:19.100
state mentality. You know, we talk a lot about Marx, but we don't talk a lot about Rousseau.
00:56:25.620
We should talk a lot more about Rousseau because Rousseau was the inspiration for Kant and Hegel and
00:56:30.580
Marx in many, many ways, in very significant ways. And it is ultimately that mentality,
00:56:36.040
which we really should call where it became the fusion of Rousseau's romanticism. And then these
00:56:41.300
thinkers like Kant and Hegel, who were what are called idealists, German idealists, and Marx
00:56:49.020
pretended that he took a material that what we're dealing with is this project that we should really
00:56:54.020
call romantic idealism. They're looking back to this idealized, chaotic, primordial state.
00:57:00.740
And Marx's phrasing was that what you're going to do is you're going to return to the archaic form on
00:57:06.080
a higher level, which is, of course, a cult spiritual project of transformation. That's
00:57:10.600
what he thinks that you're going to do. So you're going to resurrect that primordial state and you're
00:57:14.640
going to return to it on a higher level. He says you get there through critique, you get there through
00:57:18.700
the criticism, and the all true criticism starts with the criticism of religion because religion
00:57:24.360
holds up this idea of perfect order and of humility. So he wants to cast down God and say that man was
00:57:31.860
always what made man. And so man is at the center of his own creation and being, and man is the
00:57:36.820
beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega of man. And so he creates this self-centered, man-centered
00:57:41.960
religion in place of Christianity. But these other kind of icons you brought up are strewn throughout
00:57:47.380
their literature. So I did a lot of work on the Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire, who wrote
00:57:54.760
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and he wrote Politics of Education. And another one of his disciples,
00:58:01.580
Henry Giroux, a communist educator, wrote the foreword to the Politics of Education. And he
00:58:07.840
literally calls Paulo's work a prophetic vision and says that it's prophetic in that it calls you to,
00:58:17.100
these are his own words, to create the kingdom of God here on earth in solidarity with the oppressed.
00:58:23.260
And so they are literally believing that they're summoning the kingdom of God. You see this also in
00:58:28.800
the writings of the most famous and influential neo-Marxist, Herbert Marcuse, in his earliest
00:58:35.060
major work that people know about. He had some before that, but his biggest first major work was
00:58:40.600
Eros and Civilization. Eros and Civilization is a very peculiar book. It's where he tried to mix
00:58:45.600
Marx and Freud into a new, you know, psychosocial analysis of critique. And in that book, he explicitly
00:58:53.440
says that the goal is to get back into the garden. And he says that the method for getting back into
00:58:58.580
the garden is to take a second bite of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which would
00:59:04.660
allow you to develop a critical consciousness. And so it's an explicitly religious motif. It's an
00:59:13.340
explicitly religious project. And it's an explicit repudiation of Christianity. So there can be no
00:59:19.280
harmony between this and Christianity whatsoever. Every Christian should be appalled that the idea
00:59:26.920
that you have a birthright to enter back into the garden of Eden on your own terms, and that you do
00:59:31.820
so by flaunting God and getting to the tree of knowledge of good and evil and taking another bite
00:59:36.460
of it so that you can rise up above, you know, God himself and displace him and set up man as his own
00:59:44.720
true icon and own true son to revolve around. I mean, this is fundamentally incompatible at every
00:59:50.680
level, whether it's critical race theory, queer theory, radical feminism as a kind of a Marxian
00:59:55.840
analysis, or any of these other things on down. These are all completely and fundamentally incompatible
01:00:01.880
with Christianity on the most fundamental level. There is no mixing them. To mix them is just to bring
01:00:07.360
poison into the soup, and you're going to end up poisoning everybody who eats it. It's staggering to
01:00:15.980
me that Christians have taken so long to arrive at the discernment here. And I think we, as
01:00:23.360
civilizationally, I think we really needed to be counting on them. But the subversion of Christianity
01:00:28.120
has been going on for 100 years as well, very, very effectively. And it's been very difficult for
01:00:33.640
people to start to get their heads around this. But there's, I hate to, you know, step into the
01:00:39.600
world of religious motif too much, lest I offend somebody or something. But the truth is, this is
01:00:45.240
as anti-Christ as you can get. This is as anti-Christian as it's possible to be. It is a complete, like I
01:00:53.380
said, inversion of the entire Christian project to turn what should be the worship of God and the
01:01:02.860
acceptance of Christ and total and abject humility into a project of arrogance and narcissism and
01:01:09.320
ultimately the worship of self. But because self is empty, this turns out to be a completely awful
01:01:16.280
and self-loathing project that then gets projected out of the world and causes destruction everywhere
01:01:20.340
it goes. Yep. And you said that it's taking Christians this long to kind of wake up to this,
01:01:26.720
which I agree there are more Christians awake to this than probably 10 to 20 years ago. But as you
01:01:32.520
know, there are so many Christians who are not awake. They don't understand this at all. And
01:01:39.780
my next book is on this, but it's really kind of the playing upon empathy. It's the exploitation
01:01:46.980
of empathy. It's Christians confusing empathy for love, not realizing that love and truth must go hand
01:01:54.400
in hand, but allowing their empathy to be completely exploited into supporting things that are not
01:01:59.920
biblical, true, good, or wise in any way. And as you were talking, I thought about James Cone,
01:02:09.160
who is obviously the father of liberation theology, black liberation theology, and he has had a big
01:02:15.540
effect on what you might call black Christianity, but I would say just like progressive Christianity in
01:02:20.920
general. And this is that example of replacing biblical doctrine with Marxist doctrine until
01:02:27.920
it doesn't look like Christianity at all. But he uses Christian terms, which is interesting. He says
01:02:34.120
this, he says, the coming of Christ means a denial of what we thought we were. It means destroying the
01:02:39.520
white devil in us. Reconciliation to God means that white people are prepared to deny themselves
01:02:45.040
whiteness, take up the cross of blackness, and follow Christ into the black ghetto. So that's just
01:02:52.020
one example. And he's just outright about it. We are replacing how the Bible defines these things with
01:02:57.680
how our version of, I don't know if you would call it racial Marxism, critical race theory, defines those
01:03:03.300
things. So that is still affecting in one way or another, I think Christianity today, and has deluded
01:03:09.040
people into believing in this oppressor-oppressed dynamic, not defined by facts, but defined by this
01:03:17.220
very dangerous collectivist mentality that doesn't lead to justice at all, but just leads to resentment
01:03:23.320
and death and destruction. Yeah, I couldn't have said that better myself. And you're absolutely right.
01:03:30.460
So Cone, being the father of black liberation theology, sounds very much like the liberation theologians.
01:03:36.820
In particular, I would assume he sounds very much like a very influential liberation theologian
01:03:41.560
called Dome Elder Camara, who was a Catholic bishop, the so-called Red Bishop of Recife, Brazil.
01:03:48.440
Yes. And I say that because Camara had a gigantic influence on Paulo Freire, and what you just read
01:03:54.740
from Cone sounds identical to what Paulo Freire said in Politics of Education. If you get the chance,
01:04:01.840
you really should, even if you only read chapter 10, get a copy of the Politics of Education and read
01:04:06.600
the 10th chapter. Every Christian should. It's shocking what he says, but he says that the call
01:04:12.800
is for every person to undergo their own personal Easter. That's what it means to be conscientized or
01:04:19.660
woke. You have to go through your own personal Easter. You must die and be reborn on the side of
01:04:24.940
the oppressed, which is exactly what Cone said, by the way. And just with a more specific context of
01:04:31.880
what that means, he says that the Easter that Christians celebrate is just a commemorative
01:04:37.400
date on the calendar that's devoid of meaning, that it's actually death-loving instead of life-loving,
01:04:42.720
unless that you go through this own personal death and rebirth cycle to be resurrected on the side of
01:04:49.140
class identity, which is to say that you have to be reborn as a Marxist and that this is allegedly the
01:04:58.480
true meaning of Christianity. By the way, the 11th chapter of that book, so as long as you're
01:05:03.680
picking it up and reading chapter 10, the 11th chapter of that book is a very, very short, like
01:05:08.240
two-page kind of note of praise to James Cone and the work that he's doing in Black Liberation
01:05:15.300
Theology. So they were certainly aware of one another. But what you're seeing is the attempt to replace
01:05:21.640
the entire Christian mentality, the entire Christian tradition with this rebirth into Marxism.
01:05:29.700
And that's exactly the perversion that Cone was pushing, that Freddie was pushing, and so on.
01:05:35.520
And I would just urge Christians to remind themselves, like, first of all, don't beat
01:05:39.360
yourself up if you've fallen for some of it or taken some of it on board. The devil is the deceiver.
01:05:44.900
And so being deceived is something that happens to people. That's the objective is deception. And
01:05:52.640
that there is a path back. Christians have it, you know, understand it better than almost anyone,
01:05:57.840
which is repentance and squaring back up and loving and fearing the truth. And forgiveness comes on the
01:06:04.580
other side of that. And so I would strongly urge people to understand that it's easy to become
01:06:11.240
deceived by this. Many people, the word that I think Marx used, he was talking about everybody
01:06:16.260
by himself, but its projection is mystification. They mystify you. They tell you that love your
01:06:22.760
neighbor means something that it doesn't. I like how you put it, Ali, it's perfect that there is no
01:06:28.520
love without truth. The empathy is a way to pull your heartstrings and get you to miss the truth and thus
01:06:38.960
fall out of love into enablement and harm. And I would encourage people to take a look at that very
01:06:46.540
seriously. And, you know, if you got deceived, you got deceived. If you got mystified, you got
01:06:51.940
mystified. It happened to a lot of us. And it's time to just repent of that and find forgiveness,
01:06:57.200
move forward and be more productive going forth. Amen. Well, that's a more hopeful note to end on.
01:07:03.740
And there was a period in there when I was getting, I was like, oh man, this is dark thinking about the
01:07:09.360
direction that this goes, that inevitable conclusion. But the only thing that we really
01:07:14.840
have control over is what we do. And as you said, even though we don't share the same faith,
01:07:24.220
you're right. It is repentance. It is redemption. It is taking kind of a phrase that I think has been
01:07:30.720
manipulated and exploited by the left doing better, knowing better so you can do better, but in the
01:07:36.040
real sense, in the true sense. And I will never panic or give up hope because I do. One, I believe
01:07:43.700
in the grace and the miraculous power of God, but I also believe in people's ability to wake up to
01:07:49.840
reality. And you play a big role in helping people wake up to reality. And that's why I'm very thankful
01:07:54.580
for you. So thank you so much, James. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. And I'm sure
01:08:00.600
that we will talk again soon. Yeah, I look forward to it. Thank you, Alec. Thank you.