Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 909 ｜ The Left Is Falling in Love with Osama bin Laden ｜ Guest： James Lindsay

00:00:00.960 Osama bin Laden's Letter to America, written over 20 years ago, is now going viral online

00:00:08.960 as TikTokers are expressing sympathy for the terrorist behind the 9-11 attacks. 0.93

00:00:16.700 What is going on here?

00:00:18.080 What is the mentality responsible for this kind of sympathy among Americans online?

00:00:25.940 And what is really going on behind the debate, the discussion, in some cases, the violent

00:00:34.600 protests regarding the Israeli and Palestinian conflict?

00:00:39.720 How does critical race theory, intersectionality, Marxism, liberation theology all play into

00:00:47.920 what is going on here in America and the discussions that are being had around this conflict?

00:00:54.400 We've got a fascinating conversation for you with one of my favorite guests, James Lindsay.

00:01:00.460 First, we're going to talk about some of the conflicts and controversy that he has gotten

00:01:06.660 himself into on Twitter, and then we will get into his analysis of everything that is going

00:01:11.920 on here and what it means for the future of the country.

00:01:15.540 And then I will also note the implications of this theologically.

00:01:19.680 This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.

00:01:22.540 Go to GoodRanchers.com.

00:01:23.900 Use code ALI at checkout.

00:01:25.220 That's GoodRanchers.com.

00:01:26.340 Code ALI.

00:01:36.580 James Lindsay, welcome back.

00:01:38.580 Thanks so much for joining Relatable again.

00:01:42.300 OK, before we get into all the stuff that's going on, and I just want to get your interpretation

00:01:47.060 of everything, I've got so many questions about the debates.

00:01:51.180 You were recently restricted on Twitter.

00:01:54.340 I went to your page and I saw that it said, this profile is temporarily restricted, which

00:01:58.540 I've never seen before.

00:01:59.660 What happened?

00:02:01.700 I don't know.

00:02:03.200 I actually got almost no information about this whatsoever.

00:02:06.720 Um, I tried and found a way to kind of submit a report to Twitter, and they sent me back

00:02:14.720 an automated email that said that my account had been flagged for suspicious activity, believing

00:02:20.920 that I probably had been hacked.

00:02:22.280 And, um, so I don't know, uh, it resolved itself.

00:02:28.180 It said if I would reset my password and all of this, it could resolve itself after a few

00:02:32.400 hours.

00:02:32.760 And then after several hours, um, I changed my display name and that allowed me to, uh,

00:02:40.760 verify that I am a human through the, the, uh, test that that gives you, if you change anything

00:02:46.360 on your profile.

00:02:47.160 And once I verified that I was a human, it gave me my account access back.

00:02:50.760 So, um, I know that I was getting mass reports, uh, yet again for making people mad.

00:02:57.900 So yeah, tell me why I want to get into that a little bit.

00:03:00.820 Who was, who do you think was mass reporting you and why?

00:03:03.980 Well, I know who was mass reporting me because they were bragging about mass reporting me.

00:03:07.840 And this turns out to be a group of radical feminists who I made very upset. 1.00

00:03:12.500 Um, I guess, what is it about a week ago, week and a half ago, I went to the

00:03:16.960 Genspect conference, which Genspect is a organization that's going after the kind of trans ideology

00:03:22.520 and especially the medical transition of minors.

00:03:25.180 And I went and spoke at their conference.

00:03:26.840 It was a very interesting conference.

00:03:28.420 It had, uh, probably a 60, 40 split of people who identify on the left versus on the right

00:03:34.540 or as Democrats versus Republicans.

00:03:36.700 Somebody did a kind of informal poll and kind of determined that.

00:03:41.680 Uh, so it was a very mixed crowd.

00:03:43.280 There were feminists there. 1.00

00:03:44.300 There were trans people there.

00:03:45.740 There were D transitioners there, but there were, and there were conservatives there and

00:03:50.420 there were just kind of people kind of in the, I don't know, social media space talking

00:03:55.420 about and identifying this issue.

00:03:57.840 Biologists were there, but there was also a self-confessed auto-gynophilic man named

00:04:03.280 Phil Illy who was there and he was wearing a dress the whole time because that's what

00:04:07.500 Phil Illy does.

00:04:09.100 Uh, he was completely respectful.

00:04:10.480 I know he wasn't entering women's private spaces like women's restrooms because I ran 0.95

00:04:14.740 into him in the men's bathroom.

00:04:16.480 Uh, and so, uh, the feminists got very, very upset. 1.00

00:04:20.560 The radical feminists got very upset after the fact, not that he was there, but that 0.97

00:04:25.540 he ended up in a picture posted by Jen Speck.

00:04:28.300 So he didn't speak.

00:04:30.040 He wasn't a speaker there.

00:04:31.360 He was an attendee.

00:04:32.520 Okay.

00:04:33.240 He was an attendee.

00:04:34.200 Now, the thing is, is that he wrote a book that's called something like auto-heterosexual

00:04:38.680 or something like that.

00:04:40.140 It's gigantic.

00:04:41.580 And he was not selling it.

00:04:42.980 He was, uh, handing it out to people he deemed to be influencers who might want to read it.

00:04:48.020 Um, he wasn't in, in that sense, promoting it with the official sanction of Jen Speck,

00:04:53.400 but Jen Speck didn't tell him you can't give out your book.

00:04:57.340 And so as far as I could tell, his behavior was completely respectful.

00:05:01.260 It was respectful.

00:05:02.860 It's a little weird to be walking around in a dress.

00:05:05.040 I personally felt like I wanted to just go up to him and say, dude, really, uh, a bunch

00:05:09.720 of times, but you know, whatever.

00:05:12.540 And, um, this turned into a big mess.

00:05:15.820 Jen Speck wrote an article about it.

00:05:17.340 I shared the article and said that rat fans were losing their minds over a man doing something

00:05:21.940 they don't like.

00:05:22.540 So after Jen Speck posted the picture and let's just be specific, the radical feminists 1.00

00:05:28.320 are people who are feminists who like the left would consider TERF.

00:05:33.040 So they are feminists who are against gender ideology in men and women's spaces. 1.00

00:05:38.760 Uh, there are writers at the outlet Redux, an outlet that I've promoted a lot.

00:05:44.260 Genevieve Glock has done a lot of amazing research.

00:05:46.780 She's been on the show several times, just dissecting a lot of the things that are going

00:05:51.080 on in gender ideology.

00:05:52.360 So those women were upset that it seemed like Jen Speck was platforming a man who was manifesting

00:06:00.860 his sexual fetishes at a conference that is ostensibly speaking out against, uh, gender 0.66

00:06:08.640 bending as a male fetish. 0.89

00:06:10.660 Like I would say that that's probably what their complaint was, right?

00:06:14.860 That is their complaint.

00:06:15.820 As a matter of fact, they said that more specifically because he's a self-confessed autogynophile, which

00:06:21.540 is a man who is sexually aroused by the idea of himself being a woman or being seen as a

00:06:29.760 woman, him being in a dress at the place was necessarily making other people complicit in 0.68

00:06:35.980 his sexual fetish, which, uh, is in their sense of violation.

00:06:39.600 Um, and so there is a point there, I mean, Phil could have dressed in street clothes, like 0.72

00:06:46.360 normal person.

00:06:47.660 Uh, I don't know or claim to know anything about Phil or his motivations.

00:06:52.840 I spoke to him for maybe all of three or four minutes.

00:06:55.920 He gave me a copy of his book.

00:06:57.600 I haven't read any of it yet.

00:06:58.800 Um, but anyway, I, even, even to the degree that they have a point, uh, radical feminism, 0.90

00:07:08.420 and this was the point that I made, uh, that upset them, refuses to take any responsibility

00:07:14.060 for the completely blatantly obvious and true fact that radical feminist theory and activism

00:07:20.640 is what opened the door to this happening in the first place.

00:07:23.340 They're only willing to blame the men who are involved and the specific men who are acting

00:07:29.320 as autogonophiles or whatever other things, uh, for all of this.

00:07:34.200 It's that their, their own theory can have literally no negative consequences whatsoever

00:07:38.400 in their mind.

00:07:39.660 And so that's what I was calling out.

00:07:42.060 Uh, and it made particularly the kind of feminist icon, Kelly J. Keene, very upset. 1.00

00:07:47.460 And she decided to, uh, try to be a hard ass with me or something, which as everybody who's 1.00

00:07:55.380 ever spent five minutes on Twitter knows being a hard ass with me on Twitter never goes well. 0.97

00:08:00.840 And so, uh, I'm not going to leave it alone and I didn't leave it alone and I'm continuing 0.96

00:08:06.360 not to leave it alone.

00:08:07.700 So it will continue to spiral into a bigger and bigger fight until, in my opinion, feminism

00:08:12.460 is exposed for laying the roots of queer theory, but also laying the roots of the sociocultural

00:08:17.880 milieu in which women grow up to hate womanhood or young women grow up to hate the idea of 1.00

00:08:23.060 womanhood.

00:08:23.680 They grow up to see the idea that while it is uncomfortable for many, it's easy to recognize

00:08:30.580 and unseemly and something to be talked about that as they develop sexually as teenagers, that

00:08:37.400 they start to attract male attention and male attention is given to them in that way.

00:08:42.160 That that gets interpreted as a form of patriarchal violence and victimization of women as a class 0.93

00:08:48.040 only exacerbates the problem rather than helping it.

00:08:50.880 And to be frank, the entire theme of toxic masculinity, not to, uh, this will get taken all kinds of

00:08:56.320 out of context, but men didn't enter women's spaces very successfully when men were allowed

00:09:02.020 to police other men on doing that.

00:09:04.540 As Riley Gaines has said, for example, many times, they kept waiting for a dad or a coach or somebody

00:09:11.440 to come in and grab the William Thomas and pull him out of the women's changing room or locker room 1.00

00:09:19.180 because he's male and that never occurred.

00:09:22.720 Well, the thing is, is toxic, toxic masculinity is a feminist trope has really prevented men from being 1.00

00:09:28.900 able to, um, take action to stop creepy and predatory men, whether we're acting toward women or children.

00:09:35.520 And so a portion, if not most of the blame for this problem, while we must, of course, recognize

00:09:42.340 the complicity of the actor or the blame actually for the actor himself, who is not a gynephile or

00:09:49.720 a pervert or whatever doing these things.

00:09:52.360 We also have to recognize that feminist theory and activism has opened the door. 0.86

00:09:57.520 And that's the way I phrased it, is that it actually unlocked the door that has allowed all of this

00:10:01.640 to manifest in society. And if they're not willing to take any responsibility for it,

00:10:06.520 they may as well recognize that their theory, which I can talk about in that aspect as well,

00:10:11.040 is, is completely useless. In fact, it's worse than useless for stopping the problem,

00:10:16.400 which I think we all agree is a problem.

00:10:18.520 You know, I really like Kelly J. Keene and I really appreciate Redux just for the reporting

00:10:35.320 that they do on the stories that we don't hear about these predatory men that are going into

00:10:39.460 women's prisons and rape shelters and are committing absolutely heinous crimes in the name 1.00

00:10:45.260 of just, you know, being their gender, being who they are. But they're actually preying upon 0.53

00:10:51.280 vulnerable women as they're taking on this new character of womanhood. So I really appreciate

00:10:59.140 all of the work that Genevieve Gluck has done. However, I don't consider myself a feminist for

00:11:04.820 the very reasons that you just listed. It's not because I don't believe that women are equal or

00:11:09.480 valuable or any of those things, but because I think the ideology down to its roots is rotten.

00:11:14.660 So could it, but could it be possible that they define feminism differently than what you're 1.00

00:11:19.420 defining? Like couldn't Kelly J. Keene and the writers at Redux, they're saying, well, we're

00:11:26.380 feminists because we simply believe in the protection and perpetuation of the rights and equality and 0.93

00:11:32.240 the dignity of women. That's what we're trying to protect. That's what we've always tried to 1.00

00:11:35.840 protect. And I've also seen them say, look, they're feminists going back several decades who 1.00

00:11:41.680 were fighting against this idea of gender bending, fighting against this idea of men in women's

00:11:46.860 spaces, fighting against the idea of gender ideology. So couldn't it just be that there

00:11:51.740 were some feminists who really do, they just consider themselves champions of women's rights, 1.00

00:11:56.820 and then the other feminists who say, well, no, men and women are basically interchangeable

00:12:02.220 and femininity is akin to weakness. And so women have to be masculine in order. And so, 1.00

00:12:08.120 cause that I understand did open the door to this idea of gender bending and men can be women and vice 0.61

00:12:13.440 versa. But there do seem to be feminists, even if I think that they're wrong in a lot of ways, 1.00

00:12:19.040 feminists who don't see themselves as advocates for gender bending or women becoming masculine or 1.00

00:12:27.960 things like that. So could it just be a problem of different definitions and different factions of

00:12:32.620 feminism? Actions is a better word than definitions, but I guess the definitions define 1.00

00:12:38.300 the factions. What I would say is that the word feminism is not very granularly clear. In this case,

00:12:44.860 there are many, many branches of feminism. Those branches frequently don't agree very famously. 1.00

00:12:50.460 In the eighties, there was a conflict between what was called sex positive radical feminism and sex 1.00

00:12:54.580 negative radical feminism. They did not agree with one another whatsoever. Queer theory was born out 1.00

00:13:00.340 of the sex positive splinter off of the sex positive radical feminism of the 1980s going into the 1990s.

00:13:07.620 That's really not that much in doubt. There are these people who are materialist feminists who are at war

00:13:13.160 with what are called post-structuralist feminists. There are like 20-something, 30-something different. 1.00

00:13:18.100 And I think the right word here is denominations of feminism. But at the end of the day, feminism 0.94

00:13:22.840 believes that women are a unified class that can have a feminist consciousness that awakens within them.

00:13:32.060 And this kind of excludes the idea of these kind of champions of genuine women's rights and equality

00:13:37.900 in the same way that queer awakening or queer consciousness doesn't represent the vast majority

00:13:44.080 of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people whatsoever. That's why there's this LGB alliance trying to

00:13:49.780 break away from the T and the Q, which are rooted essentially in queer theory. 0.85

00:13:54.180 So feminism is not a clear enough term. If we were to get really into the weeds, I've studied a little 1.00

00:14:00.600 bit of this. I would definitely not consider myself in any way a radical feminist. I don't use the term for 0.99

00:14:05.380 myself at all. But I find myself agreeing with quite a lot of what gets called choice feminism, 1.00

00:14:11.200 for example, or liberal feminism, which are both derided in the radical feminist literature 0.96

00:14:16.140 as kind of sellout positions. And that's, in fact, what our fake paper that was the feminist 1.00

00:14:22.360 Mein Kampf, where we rewrote the chapter of Mein Kampf and intersectional feminism, we said that

00:14:26.500 intersectional feminism needed to define a form of solidarity that copied the...well, it didn't...we didn't say 1.00

00:14:32.680 it needs to copy the Nazi movement. We replaced the Nazi movement that Hitler was writing about with 0.70

00:14:36.200 intersectional feminist solidarity as a new movement. And the thing that it was targeting

00:14:40.300 was neoliberal and choice feminism. So there's immense differences between feminists is the main 1.00

00:14:45.300 point I want to draw here. But the fact of the matter remains that feminist theory from Simone 0.98

00:14:50.900 de Beauvoir asking the question in 1949, what is a woman, to Matt Walsh asking the question in gender

00:14:57.120 theorists not being able to answer it in 2022, what is a woman, including Ketanji Brown-Jackson

00:15:02.740 going to the Supreme Court? There's a straight line. And that line travels primarily through

00:15:08.920 feminist theory. And yeah, it's true that men and perverts and people like John Money and Stoller and

00:15:15.680 a lot of these...Kinsey and a lot of these other guys, the influence of the post-structuralists like

00:15:20.720 Foucault all had huge influences on the development of queer theory and trans ideology. But it doesn't

00:15:27.740 change the fact that the underlying construct that defines the whole thing is the definitional

00:15:33.420 construct of radical feminism, which is gender is a social construct. If you believe gender is a

00:15:38.760 social construct, the next stop on the train, imagine it's a train going from station to station,

00:15:43.880 the next stop on the train is so is sex. As a matter of fact, you find Monique Wedding, 0.79

00:15:48.940 Wedding, I should say, who is a female feminist. You find Judith Butler. You find person after person, 1.00

00:15:57.540 even within kind of just straight feminist analyses of Beauvoir, you find this conclusion that if

00:16:05.020 gender is a social construct, maybe sex was too all along. And then guess what? Phil Illey showing up

00:16:11.720 in a dress, well, his gender is just a social construct. And it doesn't really matter technically

00:16:16.540 what motivates that unless you want to make a lot of pay of it. I think these things do matter

00:16:21.320 personally. But my point is that feminists don't get to draw the line arbitrarily at where the 1.00

00:16:27.080 revolution that they started is going to stop. And that revolution has now consumed them. It is

00:16:31.640 their idea that gender is a social construct that has been taken to its next dialectical conclusion

00:16:38.100 that is consuming them with this.

00:16:40.840 Yeah, but it's interesting, this kind of collectivist mentality, both in what I've heard you say

00:16:44.920 and how I hear feminists talk. Like you're saying, they have to take responsibility for this as if 1.00

00:16:50.120 they are the ones who perpetuated it back in, you know, 1949 or in the 1970s. Obviously, this is a

00:16:56.380 new group of people. They're not responsible for the people who identified as feminists a long time 1.00

00:17:01.120 ago. So I do wonder if they would just say, I mean, this is what I would say if I did, if I identified

00:17:06.040 as a feminist to what you just said is, yeah, you're absolutely right. The ideology of those people 1.00

00:17:12.120 several decades ago did lead the way to this. It did kind of prime the pump. But I don't believe

00:17:19.000 those things. I believe in these tenets of feminists, feminism, and this is what kind of 1.00

00:17:23.040 feminist I am. And so I wonder if they would respond that way, although I didn't see that in

00:17:29.520 their responses. I kind of just saw defending previous feminists. So I don't know why there 0.56

00:17:34.280 wouldn't just be, hey, a distinction. Yeah, James, I see what you're saying. They were absolutely wrong.

00:17:38.920 But I'm trying to correct that within feminism. So yeah, that's interesting. That's how I would 1.00

00:17:46.400 respond. What they replied was that these are misinterpretations of Beauvoir's own words.

00:17:51.880 In other words, they have, you know, the secret codex to how to read feminist theory from Simone 0.99

00:17:57.580 de Beauvoir. They don't dare say that Simone de Beauvoir was wrong. No, it's that there are

00:18:02.360 misinterpretations. And here are like, you know, 3,000 pages of crap nobody's going to read 0.98

00:18:07.620 to try to rescue Beauvoir from herself. But the fact of the matter is that if you draw the sex-gender 0.97

00:18:14.720 distinction and you claim that gender is socially constructed, you have no tools to stop the next 0.98

00:18:22.620 question of whether or not sex, too, is a social and political construction. As a matter of fact,

00:18:29.500 that's exactly what happened. That's exactly what the theory says. And the people who have decided

00:18:34.640 to say that sex is a social construct as well can turn right around. First of all,

00:18:40.520 citing Beauvoir just as readily as anybody else, they can turn right around and say the only reason

00:18:45.880 that you want to reserve sex is because it benefits you politically. In other words, you're saying sex

00:18:51.840 is reserved from social construction and gender is not because it's politically expedient for you 0.84

00:18:57.560 as feminists who get to benefit from a certain kind of privilege that comes with identifying with 1.00

00:19:02.760 sex. Unfortunately, queer identified people who fall outside of that normalcy framework don't have 1.00

00:19:11.360 that privilege. And so it's again, it's the dialectical logic they've assumed. So when I say

00:19:16.440 that I'm not assigning collective blame in this case, anybody in this category, I mean, collective blame

00:19:23.920 would be saying it's women's fault. It's not women's fault. Feminism is an ideology. People 1.00

00:19:28.900 who ascribe to the ideology should recognize that their ideology has consequences rather than continue

00:19:36.040 to try to reject responsibility for that ideology. Yeah. Like I could say, OK, some things have been

00:19:43.820 done in the name of Christianity by people who profess Christianity that I just don't agree with. I don't

00:19:49.520 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

00:19:54.940 legacy that I want. Whatever, whatever it was. I'm not even thinking of specific examples, but I'm not really

00:20:00.280 sure why there wouldn't be an effort to just differentiate. Or maybe there is. And I'm just kind of

00:20:04.960 misunderstanding or missing it. But I just wanted to get your take on that conversation, because obviously I

00:20:09.740 respect you and your thoughts a lot. That's why I love having you on. And I also really appreciate the work

00:20:14.300 done at Redux and the work done by Genevieve and Anna. And yeah, to see two sides that I respect

00:20:23.040 fighting, I just kind of wanted to hear a little bit more of your insight on that. OK. I'll just say

00:20:28.760 before we go on that I've appreciated the work done at Redux, too. In fact, they mocked me for sharing

00:20:33.740 218 or something articles in the last year alone that Redux has published. And then as it came out,

00:20:42.700 I was sharing those as favors to people who did it. I'm very busy. I don't particularly need to

00:20:48.880 read the details, the gory details of a story about a man identifying as a woman so he can enter a 0.94

00:20:55.060 woman's prison and rape people. To know that sharing that is something that's worth raising public 0.99

00:20:59.920 awareness about. So sharing not most, literally all of those articles. I've never opened a Redux article

00:21:05.700 to my knowledge. I was sharing all of those articles without having read them, which the people at

00:21:11.020 Redux tried to burn me for. So I've now decided I will not share Redux anymore, even though it might

00:21:16.560 be in the public interest to have done so. And even if their work generally could have value or is

00:21:22.440 bringing value to the issue. Unfortunately, like I said, at the heart of it, though, is this radical

00:21:28.180 feminist constructivist ideology, a critical constructivist ideology that can't solve this 1.00

00:21:33.440 problem. So I think it's probably better to try to figure out other ways to get to the same reporting.

00:21:41.020 Let's move on to Israel-Palestine. And really, I just want you to break down like what is going on

00:21:58.660 behind the conflict or the interpretation of the conflict here in the United States. We did an

00:22:04.400 episode last week talking to someone else about what's going on in the history and things like

00:22:08.680 that. I'm sure you would have an interesting analysis of all that. But I want you to talk

00:22:13.360 about the debate and the discussion that's happening. And I'll just give you some of my

00:22:18.200 observations. And there are just so many things that I've seen that I'm like, I need James Lindsay

00:22:22.480 to interpret what is going on behind what's being said. So let me go back to something that you said

00:22:28.720 in 2021. There's a tweet that you said, James, okay, so it says James Lindsay in my notes,

00:22:34.320 said that critical race theory is the biggest threat to Jews in the world today in response to

00:22:39.020 a tweet claiming whiteness is the center of American Jewish life. And I think it's really 0.99

00:22:46.100 interesting to go back to your response to that tweet, because it seems like that's kind of what's

00:22:51.240 underneath a lot today, like just absolute unabashed Jew hatred in these pro-Palestine protests

00:22:58.460 on college campuses. They're not even hiding it. It's not like some nuanced position to where

00:23:04.460 they're trying to even just say, well, we're anti-oppression, we're anti-colonialism. That's

00:23:09.500 part of it. But it is just unabashed. We don't like the Jews. We don't like Israel in some of these 0.98

00:23:19.020 places. So what's going on? How is this possible when the Jewish people have endured so much oppression

00:23:27.780 for their entire history are such a small minority? Why are they seen as the colonizing

00:23:36.060 white supremacist oppressor that must be taken down by, you know, resistance fighters and liberators?

00:23:45.880 Yeah, I wish I had a short and concise answer for this, but it's actually super complicated.

00:23:50.440 Like a 10,000 or 12,000 or something word essay, some absurd length back in 2020, in October of

00:23:58.240 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,

00:24:10.180 we stumbled on a large number of papers that were actually conflating Jewishness and whiteness.

00:24:14.840 And I just kind of bookmarked that as like, that's probably a potential problem. And I finally

00:24:19.740 came back to it in 2020, when I was studying critical race theory in more depth. And I ended

00:24:23.780 up reading this book by a scholar, I assume, named Karen Brodkin, which is titled How Jews

00:24:30.900 Became White Folks and What That Means About Race in America, which was published in the late

00:24:35.320 90s, 98 or 99, something like that. And so I read this book, and her argument is actually

00:24:41.340 that Jews were considered minorities in the United States. And until roughly the 1950s,

00:24:47.380 then Jews started to throw other minority groups under the bus so that they could be classified 0.99

00:24:51.140 as white. They then climbed the ladders of white culture to become the cultural kind of the trendsetters 0.93

00:24:58.300 of white culture, whether in media or in entertainment, or in law or whatever else, and basically usurped

00:25:05.280 whiteness from white people and became kind of the most elite vanguard of whiteness, where 0.92

00:25:11.020 in critical race theory whiteness is considered a form of cultural property,

00:25:15.080 bourgeois cultural property associated with race, that's meant to exclude people of color

00:25:19.280 from other, from the full benefits and full citizenship in society. And so the goal of CRT

00:25:27.280 is to abolish whiteness. But this sets aside this kind of very special and weirdly unique 0.95

00:25:32.440 wrath for Jews, which is then also what you just mentioned actually plays into the story is the claim

00:25:39.940 is that Jews became white in the 1950s and 1960s at the expense of people of color, in particular 0.93

00:25:46.000 blacks. But they hide behind the fact of the Holocaust to say, look how oppressed we are, 0.96

00:25:53.360 hide behind, you know, the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70, 80, and all of these other calamities

00:25:59.640 that have been visited upon them as a people, to hide behind this and say, no, no, we're oppressed

00:26:03.940 too. So they're the height of privilege hiding behind oppression. And I thought that that looks

00:26:08.760 an awful lot like Hitler's ideology about Jews as well, but not exactly the same. But this is tucked

00:26:15.640 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 0.88

00:26:34.280 own kind of sick, divisive, conflict-driven identity politics that you see all over the place with this 0.95

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 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.96

00:31:10.960 there would never be peace unless the American and English project of the Israeli state were 0.98

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 0.54

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 1.00

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 0.97

00:33:08.220 eliminated altogether, the people in Palestine wouldn't have liberty. They wouldn't be free. Hamas would 0.97

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 1.00

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 0.87

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. 1.00

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, 1.00

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 0.95

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

00:37:54.760 that they have under their thumb.

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? 0.99

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.67

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 0.78

00:40:59.560 and Bin Laden did here?

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, 0.56

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 1.00

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 1.00

00:43:25.860 sword like they've always intended to. And I think there are historical precedents for that in the Arab 1.00

00:43:30.820 region, where the socialists helped the Arabs get there, or the Muslims get, I should say, Islamists 1.00

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. 1.00

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 1.00

00:43:51.220 or sex workers for Palestine, or even feminists for Palestine, completely reveals that they don't 0.91

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 1.00

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. 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.97

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 0.94

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. 0.72

00:47:54.860 Christianity is what drove Western civilization. I don't think we would have Western civilization or 0.96

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 1.00

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. 0.99

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 0.88

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 0.58

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 1.00

00:53:30.900 and destroy all the right things. Then finally, everyone will live in harmony. And they believe 0.98

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 0.84

00:54:00.160 indigenous people lived or how barbarians lived or how pagans lived, the Aztecs lived, as if there 0.99

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 1.00

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 0.79

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 1.00

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 0.96

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 0.99

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 0.54

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 1.00

01:02:45.040 whiteness, take up the cross of blackness, and follow Christ into the black ghetto. So that's just 0.99

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 1.00

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. 0.76

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 0.98

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.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - November 16, 2023

Ep 909 ｜ The Left Is Falling in Love with Osama bin Laden ｜ Guest： James Lindsay

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