The Auron MacIntyre Show - April 18, 2024


Classical Liberalism’s Excremental Excuses ｜ 4⧸18⧸24


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

145.2582

Word count

1,354

Sentence count

64

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Peter Boghossian has made a name for himself in the conservative sphere as a non-woke classical liberal willing to stand against the corruption of academia. And yet, he is still an unrepentant revolutionary who clings to the political leadership of the left.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:30.000 According to recent reports, a gay Spanish politician who belongs to the country's left-wing governing party
00:00:36.080 has been forced to resign after pictures surface of the municipal councillor eating his own excrement.
00:00:42.440 While incredibly disgusting, the existence of yet another degenerate politician would be unremarkable
00:00:49.240 if not for the fact that he was defended by an unlikely ally, Peter Boghossian.
00:00:53.820 Boghossian has made a name for himself in the conservative sphere as a non-woke classical liberal
00:00:59.860 willing to stand against the corruption of academia.
00:01:03.100 The former professor of philosophy felt a bizarre compulsion to take to Twitter
00:01:06.860 and ward off those that would question the Spanish politician's behavior,
00:01:11.220 urging his followers to, quote,
00:01:12.640 mind your own business and leave the guy alone.
00:01:16.300 When Boghossian inevitably received pushback for his strange reaction, 0.96
00:01:20.580 he attacked his critics for their, quote,
00:01:22.920 pervasive normative rigidity that comes from Christian fear of judgment, end quote.
00:01:28.680 Many were confused at this absurd reaction from a man who had portrayed himself as a champion
00:01:34.900 of returning rational standards to the university system.
00:01:38.980 But Boghossian's outburst reveals an important contradiction that lies at the heart of liberalism 0.80
00:01:44.140 and makes it incompatible with those who seek to return order and civilization to the West.
00:01:50.240 Like many non-woke liberals of our era, Boghossian began his political journey 1.00
00:01:55.520 as a militant new atheist progressive who spent much of his academic career attacking religion.
00:02:01.860 The philosopher joined forces with prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer,
00:02:07.040 hosting debates with Christian apologists to drive out the last vestiges of religious dogma
00:02:12.000 from the Enlightened West.
00:02:14.200 As new atheism waned in popularity, many public intellectuals involved with the movement
00:02:18.960 discovered a new target for their acerbic deconstruction, wokeness.
00:02:23.440 The social justice warriors who dominated college campuses in the late 2000s had grown up and
00:02:30.140 taken positions as professors or administrators in the university system.
00:02:35.300 Woke dogma was threatening the liberal order in academia, and the new atheists framed the 0.95
00:02:40.400 successor ideology as the next in a long line of religions that needed to be defeated. 0.99
00:02:46.660 Boghossian's most famous salvo against wokeness in academia came in 2017 when he teamed up
00:02:53.240 with fellow new atheists James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose to submit a series of fake scholarly
00:02:58.880 papers to peer-reviewed journals.
00:03:02.100 The papers were filled with a jumble of critical theory jargon designed to draw the adoration
00:03:07.500 of woke academics despite saying nothing of substance.
00:03:11.320 Some of the papers drew praise from reviewers, and a few even got published before the hoax was
00:03:16.400 uncovered.
00:03:18.080 Peer review is the linchpin of legitimacy for modern academic expertise, and discrediting
00:03:23.360 the process threatened to deal a huge blow to the foundations underlying the power of our
00:03:28.280 managerial elite.
00:03:30.000 This revealing glimpse into the absurd system that has come to dominate many scholarly fields
00:03:34.840 won Boghossian a fair amount of credit among conservatives and classical liberals who
00:03:39.300 weren't interested in joining the woke revolution.
00:03:41.460 As I've spoken about in previous episodes, like my neocon cycle, one I'll put the card,
00:03:48.100 it should be popping up right now in the video, conservatives have a nasty habit of immediately
00:03:52.780 accepting and even elevating to leadership liberals who hate them simply because they agree on a few
00:03:58.820 issues.
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00:04:30.680 Many disgruntled liberal atheists have suddenly found themselves on the side of the very conservatives
00:04:35.840 that they loathed for decades in the fight against wokeness, but that doesn't mean that
00:04:39.880 they've had a change of heart.
00:04:41.960 I didn't leave the left, the left left me is the refrain most often uttered by these
00:04:47.020 liberal cast-offs, and they rarely take any responsibility for what their movement became.
00:04:52.540 Despite his temporary embarrassment with the pace at which progressivism accelerated,
00:04:57.880 Boghossian is still an unrepentant revolutionary who clings to every belief that inevitably led 1.00
00:05:03.940 to the very woke order he now claims to oppose.
00:05:08.060 As expectations for political leadership go, not eating excrement is a pretty low bar.
00:05:13.620 It would be nice if we could demand more from those who rule over us, but asking them not
00:05:18.160 to be so degenerate that they literally consume their own feces seems reasonable.
00:05:24.220 But this very mild request appears to be a bridge too far for Boghossian, who sees any standard 1.00
00:05:30.540 for sexual behavior as an absurd relic from our religious past.
00:05:34.480 Like most liberal atheists, Boghossian refuses to connect his purposeful deconstruction of 0.98
00:05:40.500 spiritual and moral sentiments with the dysfunctional world in which he finds himself.
00:05:45.880 The philosopher's radical commitment to individual freedom dissolved every barrier to wokeness,
00:05:51.780 but he simply refuses to own the consequences of his beliefs.
00:05:55.580 When asked to place even the slightest restrictions on personal freedom, Boghossian reflexively 1.00
00:06:01.300 strikes out at Christianity, which he still perceives as his true enemy.
00:06:06.460 And to be very clear, Boghossian is not ignorant of the fatal flaws residing in classical liberalism,
00:06:13.200 and to his credit, he's willing to discuss them at length.
00:06:16.520 I personally had a cordial discussion with the philosopher during which I laid out the reasons
00:06:22.560 why liberalism couldn't defend itself from hostile ideologies, and why a more robust
00:06:28.380 tradition was required to ground Western society.
00:06:32.200 I went in expecting a knock-down, drag-out fight, but to my surprise, Boghossian spent most 1.00
00:06:38.020 of the hour-long discussion conceding every one of my points.
00:06:42.060 But despite the posture of general retreat, Boghossian still insisted that liberalism remain
00:06:47.340 the only way forward.
00:06:48.700 Recent events have clearly shaken his faith, but ultimately the academic can't imagine a
00:06:54.260 world where liberalism does not reign supreme.
00:06:58.140 Although they often adopt the moniker of classical liberal, the leftists ejected from progressivism
00:07:04.680 share very little with the historical movement.
00:07:08.260 The father of classical liberalism, John Locke, famously wrote that atheism was immoral and that
00:07:14.480 its adherents could not be trusted, especially with political power.
00:07:19.660 In the face of overwhelming evidence that the lack of religious and moral conviction in
00:07:24.760 public life has destroyed Western civilization, liberal atheists like Boghossian simply can't 1.00
00:07:30.980 admit the failure of their ideology.
00:07:34.120 In theory, liberalism holds that rational discourse can resolve all issues in the public square.
00:07:41.080 In practice, the advocates of liberalism have proven impervious to that discourse.
00:07:46.980 The faith of the spurned liberal is, in fact, as dogmatic as the religious doctrines they sought
00:07:53.060 to undermine.
00:07:54.400 The unrepentant liberal can't take ownership over the consequences of his ideology and will
00:08:01.020 always return to his core hatred of the religious traditions it displaced.
00:08:06.660 The West must embrace a tradition that can make demands of its citizens and uphold standards
00:08:14.100 for its leaders.
00:08:15.400 If liberals can't even summon the moral fortitude to demand that their leaders refrain from literally
00:08:22.520 eating their own crap, then maybe they simply have no place in a conservative coalition.
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00:09:16.220 Thanks for watching, guys.
00:09:17.180 And as always, I'll talk to you next time.