In the wake of Harvard firing its pro-Israel president, how do the leftist factions react? And what are they actually saying about it? To find out, we speak with the great frog, the Prudentialist.
00:00:33.540I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:38.540So, there's been a huge showdown over Harvard.
00:00:42.660We've seen higher education having a big leftist civil war
00:00:47.600as different factions trying to decide who's going to be in charge.
00:00:51.140Is it going to be the establishment left?
00:00:52.780Is it going to be the insurgent DEI left?
00:00:56.220And now, we have seen the firing of Claudine Gay over at Harvard.
00:01:01.620Or I should say, the resignation of her after a great amount of pressure.
00:01:07.020Now, Chris Rufo is one of the guys who brought a heavy amount of that pressure.
00:01:10.960And a lot of leftists are up in arms over that.
00:01:14.620He claimed to have scalped Claudine Gay after she had been removed from her presidency over at Harvard.
00:01:22.760And we saw a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about that.
00:01:26.360But there are other factions that have been intimately involved in making sure that the kind of pro-Palestinian segment of the university leadership gets pushed out.
00:01:39.700And so, we're going to be asking the question, is this a win?
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00:03:40.820All right, so we've got a lot of ground to cover here.
00:03:45.360I guess the main thing that kind of originally had a lot of people's attention was the way that the left reacted to this.
00:03:53.700But we're going to have to go all the way back to the beginning because I think there's a lot of different facets to this battle,
00:03:59.840a lot of different factions behind the scene that lead us up to the reaction and the removal of gay.
00:04:06.220So I guess we can go ahead and start with the events of October 7th.
00:04:12.500So we have the attack by Hamas in Israel.
00:04:20.540You see the kind of showdown on the left immediately.
00:04:26.420We have kind of the pro-Palestinian left, the more insurgent DEI left who has been looking at this oppressor-oppressed narrative for a very long time.
00:04:37.780They see Israel as a kind of a colonial power, and so they fit it into that framework.
00:04:44.520Now, this has clashed with what has been the establishment understanding, I think, of the Democratic Party of the left when it comes to their relationship with Israel.
00:04:53.120And this starts to break out in college campuses.
00:04:55.920This conflict quickly goes from just being some kind of regional terrorist attack or a reaction by a state to an attack inside its borders.
00:05:05.980And instead, this becomes kind of almost a global protest movement.
00:05:41.340One of them is a huge hedge fund manager with a lot of influence who says, I want the names of people who are writing these kind of protest letters, these kind of disagreement papers to places like Harvard.
00:05:55.340I want their names so I can make sure that none of the companies I invest in or work with ever hire these kind of people.
00:06:00.280So we saw a very serious reaction from a lot of high-profile people inside what would be elite leftist circles when it came to this split between kind of the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian response.
00:06:14.180Yeah, that's definitely the place to start here.
00:06:18.240And we were discussing before we went live on the air that you really can't discuss this opportunity of attack that came from Rufo or after Claudine Gay without what happened on October 7th.
00:06:28.500And, of course, the congressional, you know, hearing that was held that Elise Stefaniak from New York had sort of laid into with sort of what felt like very easy rhetorical games to play.
00:06:39.940Like, well, do you, you know, are you going to just condone what appears to be blatantly, you know, genocidal rhetoric on college campuses?
00:06:46.300And they were twisting themselves into knots linguistically and rhetorically over it.
00:06:51.240And it does illustrate the contradictions inside sort of the progressive coalition is that historically, you know, there has been for decades in the United States and college campuses this, you know, sort of privilege plus power type of critical race theory or even just critical theory in general that, you know, there isn't real racism.
00:07:10.860There isn't real power unless you're the one in charge absolutely doing it to disenfranchised or disempowered groups.
00:07:16.660And since October 7th, you know, whether you're pro-Palestinian or your positions on Israel or American foreign policy towards Israel, you know, you've seen protesters go out in a way saying that, you know, you can be on, quote, the right side of history saying, you know, Palestine and other, you know, say races or people of color out in the world.
00:07:37.000Or you can be on, quote, unquote, or you can be on the white side of history where they've had flags like the United States, Great Britain, France, and then Israel is also listed on those protesters sort of placards and posters.
00:07:48.380And so they have this narrative wherein they see Israel and they see the Jewish people as white.
00:07:54.620And, of course, you know, they're doing so has created, of course, this huge form of, you know, dissonance and a lot of conflict inside the leftist coalition.
00:08:03.240And that's what's really garnered this response is that because a lot of progressives that have been raised in the university system, these college students who are woke activists, future NGO managers, future congressmen and lawyers, these people view it that way.
00:08:18.020And because they view it that way, we've seen this huge rift that has emerged and Claudine Gay's performance in Congress and having the board stand by them had let this opportunity of attack emerge because, you know, someone like Chris Burnett, who works over at Carlstack, had been talking about the plagiarism issue for quite some time now.
00:08:38.400But now with the protests and the pressure going on from Bill Ackman and other disaffected donors to endowments and so on has led to where we are today, which, of course, Claudine Gay was stepped down as the president of Harvard.
00:08:55.300She wrote a very lengthy op-ed, although whether or not she wrote it is totally up for me.
00:08:59.620It was too good for her to write it, I personally think.
00:09:15.700So this attack on all sort of leftist idols over, you know, progressivism, diversity and inclusion, the exchange of ideas, basically that, you know, a Haitian immigrant like me should be able to contribute to the storied history of Harvard.
00:09:29.860And, you know, she's been forced to step down.
00:09:32.500And the thing is, however, she still works at Harvard.
00:09:35.500She still works in the African Studies Department.
00:09:37.660She still works for their Humanities and Political Science Department.
00:10:00.260She still makes nearly a million dollars a year.
00:10:02.580And we have now triggered a sort of progressive immune response, you know, using very, you know, decades, if not centuries old, you know, fault lines in the progressive coalition.
00:10:15.820And this is where I think we're at right now.
00:10:18.340And the big takeaway, I think, is the left reaction to it.
00:10:22.920You know, this is what I would call the equivalent of a pinprick.
00:10:26.060Someone, you know, shocked themselves maybe after walking on the carpet for too long and touched someone else.
00:10:30.600And they're treating it as if they've been, you know, viscerally disemboweled or had a limb amputated when it's really not that big of a deal.
00:10:37.580And this illustrates sort of the difference in power between the right and the left.
00:10:44.980But, you know, to the left, it doesn't matter.
00:10:47.420Even if you just, you know, got a prick drop of blood to them, you know, this means sound the alarm bells.
00:10:53.660The Ivy League institutions are under attack.
00:10:56.140We have to institute a state of exception.
00:10:58.740And now we're going to be on the war footing.
00:11:00.800But that war footing is in a complicated position because of the, you know, inter-minority disputes between, say, DEI progressivism, as you call it, versus the mainstream sort of establishment, toe-the-line states of exception that we see for, say, you know, primarily left-leaning Jewish individuals versus, say, the idea that they're part of this settler colonialism white identity that a lot of woke progressives put them under.
00:11:26.420Yeah, I think there is certainly a surprise for many that there is consequences to the type of immigration policy that had been enacted in the United States and the wider Western world, that there were consequences to the rhetorical stances that had been taken in many of these institutions.
00:11:45.560And we have to remember that one of the key functions of wokeness is as an inter-elite form of combat.
00:11:55.120It's a way to cancel people inside the elite.
00:11:59.260Instead of having a duel, you know, in maybe a more civilized age, instead, you try to outwoke your opponent.
00:12:07.120And many people felt very comfortable, I think, in kind of their position of power because they felt like there was always kind of this trump card.
00:12:15.960There was always, like you said, the state of exception that was going to exist in perpetuity.
00:12:19.860But seeing as certain forms, certain lines of logic had taken power, this oppression or oppression narrative had taken power, there was an eventual conclusion that would be drawn, especially as the percentage of people being imported into the country and being advanced inside places like elite institutions were from places like Palestine or other Islamic countries that would not think favorably of Israel.
00:12:46.560And would not have the same opinion that the Democratic Party may have originally held on it.
00:12:51.620And so they certainly put themselves into a very serious situation.
00:12:55.880And so when you look at what happened, obviously, the original conflict is really about this Israeli-Palestine split inside the leftist coalition and inside their holy of holies, places like Harvard, these elite institutions.
00:13:10.480The ability of Rufo and others to use plagiarism as a wedge only really arises because of this dynamic.
00:13:20.040Now, he used it very effectively, right?
00:13:24.240And I wrote about this when I wrote about taking castles and the importance of having power pieces like Twitter.
00:13:32.120Rufo would not have been able to execute the maneuver he did without something like Twitter.
00:13:37.360And so I think it's critical that we acknowledge the centrality of having a platform like that, having the ability to apply pressure like that.
00:13:45.620But also, this fault line only existed because of really inter-leftist warfare.
00:13:51.240And that also allowed him to apply pressure because he also got help from places like Bill Ackman, who is, again, someone who's pretty progressive.
00:14:02.540He's, you know, he's somebody who has advanced those causes on a regular basis.
00:14:07.520He is angry because of the way that this, you know, Palestinian support started showing itself in these elite institutions.
00:14:16.100And then he decided to increase that pressure as his own wife was targeted.
00:14:22.120After Rufo brought the plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay, it was then discovered that Ackman's wife had also some level of plagiarism in her academic work.
00:14:35.940He decided that it was time to kind of hit the hit kind of the nuclear option.
00:14:39.880Then he started threatening to go after MIT and find all the plagiarism there.
00:14:44.500Now, the motivations behind this may not be right wing in general, right?
00:14:51.200Like, it's very clearly a leftist civil war here.
00:14:55.000And the right is so not powerful that the most it can do is kind of throw stones on one side or the other, right?
00:15:02.960However, I do think it's interesting because this war could discredit these major institutions in general.
00:15:11.180And even if the motivation to do that is not one of, you know, the best intentions, the simple fact that this is an option, I think, is important.
00:15:21.520I think you're right to say this may not be the win that many people have treated it as.
00:15:27.740But I do think it does matter that these institutions are basically committed to destroying themselves, that the different factions inside are now pointing.
00:15:37.280They're pointing the guns inward here at kind of core institutions that hold their power together.
00:15:44.260And that really threatens some of the key pillars of the regime.
00:15:47.920Well, I guess it will have to come down to only time will tell in this instance.
00:15:53.560I mean, if Bill Ackman had put out a Twitter post earlier, which was basically just a very glorified, lengthy essay on January 3rd, got 35 million views.
00:16:04.320It was a particularly interesting read, basically discussing how, you know, DEI not only just affects Jews, but it also affects whites.
00:16:14.160And, you know, to say that, you know, if we were to basically he had said the law, I'll just quote it.
00:16:18.800He says, you can say things about white people today in universities and business or otherwise, that if you switch the word white to black, the consequences would be costly and severe.
00:16:26.240And, you know, these are things that you might have heard being said on on maybe conservative or right wing Twitter, you know, five or six or even eight years ago, if not even earlier than that.
00:16:35.180And to me, I'm beginning to see sort of the ideological mugging take place where, you know, things that had not affected me are now beginning to affect me that I'm also noticing have affected other people as well.
00:16:49.820But certainly after he says these things, he goes back to Martin Luther King, you know, famous plagiarist like Claudine Gay and famous philanderer and communist, you know, where he talks about not being being judged by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin.
00:17:04.500Very similar sort of conservative talking points that, you know, you and I have discussed when sort of looking at the dark enlightenment by Nick Land, that people use Martin Luther King Jr.
00:17:15.940as their sort of go to for what they see to be the race blind approach to the world.
00:17:20.840But as we can tell about things that are secular or have political ideology, you know, people are going to believe in something.
00:17:27.280People are going to be motivated by a political formula that motivates them to act a certain way that they do.
00:17:32.480And I think this is why looking at, you know, Claudine Gay's op-ed or seeing how the left has reacted to this, that, you know, it's the same thing we see in other parts of the Western world, especially in the Anglosphere,
00:17:44.780is that when there are inter-elite or inter-minority competitions inside of the progressive coalition,
00:17:51.000the knee-jerk reaction is to typically reassert and re-aim the cannon barrel back towards the white majority that tends to vote conservative or vote for Trump or whatever.
00:18:03.460And I think that this is what they're trying to do in the meantime.
00:18:06.200I mean, it's certainly what Dr. Gay's, you know, op-ed in the New York Times is definitely oriented about.
00:18:12.140We've seen a lot of leftists go about it this way.
00:18:15.000And at the same time, they're just trying to paint, you know, a man who believes in colorblind liberalism,
00:18:21.060Chris Ruffo, you know, as this like Machiavellian evil right-winger who's just like the next Herman Goring or something,
00:18:27.000when he's just openly saying, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, and trying to frame himself as sort of a conservative, you know, Alinsky type.
00:18:37.440And we're trying to see how much of that actually works.
00:18:41.180And right now, he's gotten a very symbolic victory.
00:18:45.280The question becomes, will he seize that momentum and start aiming it at actual damage to these institutions,
00:18:52.840like their endowments, like their personnel, like their hiring practices?
00:18:57.000Or instead, are we going to be witnessing, as you had pointed out, very much from the sidelines, because the right has no power?
00:19:03.800Are we going to be living in a world where we're seeing sort of the reemergence of neoconservatism
00:19:11.060and trying to co-opt more, say, radical conservative elements with people like Bill Ackman,
00:19:16.880who remind me very much of Dave Rubin, where, you know, his long essay post here on Twitter was sort of the left-left-me type deal.
00:19:26.020Now, that's, you know, that's happened before with a lot of people, but at the same time, we've also, you know, he's made it personal, right,
00:24:18.480I think everyone involved should be careful with handing leadership to any of these people or completely embracing this as an unqualified victory.
00:24:27.860However, like you said, that is allowing these conversations.
00:24:31.200That is allowing a focus of certain attention on certain issues.
00:24:36.760And importantly, I think it also allows the training of some political battle.
00:24:42.720You know, you don't have generals unless you have experienced colonels.
00:24:46.940And you don't have experienced colonels unless you have experienced lieutenants.
00:24:50.560And you're not going to win the whole thing in just one political battle.
00:24:54.360And so even if this is not the coup de grace, even if this is not the ultimate victory over Harvard,
00:25:00.680I think there is a value in learning how to fight these skirmishes before you need to go into a larger protracted political battle.
00:25:10.420Yeah, I'm really glad that you had brought up your your neocon cycle piece.
00:25:16.040It's probably one of your best ones out there to sort of explain how this works.
00:25:19.560And it does illustrate, I think, this desperate desire to be seen as acceptable or wanted by, you know, maybe disaffected regime personnel or elites that, you know,
00:25:31.020the lesson that should be learned from out of all of that is, is that if you're on the right or if you're a conservative,
00:25:35.440if you're someone out there, you're going to probably be alone less you surrender whatever kind of sovereignty that you have.
00:25:43.160I mean, we saw this when sort of neoconservatism got popular 60 and 50 years ago was is that, you know,
00:25:49.080people that were disaffected over, say, like the civil rights regime or America's foreign policy in the Middle East,
00:25:54.000the people that were initially, you know, interested in trying to change the course of America, the old right,
00:26:00.360had found themselves in this sort of new Buckleyite sort of conservatism where whatever the majority of the nation at the time,
00:26:07.840demographically speaking, had lost sovereignty and became dispossessed in the search for these allies and elites.
00:26:13.640Conservatives are going to be alone in a lot of these issues, lest you constantly cater to the needs of others.
00:26:19.020And when you do so, you lose out on any sort of political capital or interest to keep that coalition going.
00:26:25.320I mean, we've seen this so rapidly over the course of the last 20 years, especially.
00:26:30.660I mean, to a point where 20 years ago, you know, conservatives and Democrats would agree on what a marriage is.
00:26:36.000And now, you know, we see mainstream conservative outlets congratulate, you know, quote unquote,
00:26:41.260surrogacy or having children from couples like Dave Rubin and the like.
00:26:45.020And it does illustrate how fast you lose your own principles, your morals and your sovereignty over the political issues that you care about.
00:26:52.820Now, I do agree with you. Yes, this is an opportunity for people to get some political experience in terms of activism or in terms of,
00:26:59.040you know, trying to conduct political asymmetrical warfare, because, I mean, that is what we are.
00:27:05.120We don't have we don't have billions of dollars. We don't have the media. We don't have the state.
00:27:08.540You know, the difference between Dark Maga and Dark Brandon, for example, is that Dark Brandon has no problem throwing you in jail
00:27:15.460and arresting you, you know, without any really due process, whereas, you know, Dark Maga can be some really cool edits on Twitter.com.
00:27:23.360That's just the way that things go right now.
00:27:25.680The real thing I think that will going forward from this is that, you know, can this experience be used
00:27:31.060for causes that either disrupt the neoconservative cycle or, at the very least, can help destabilize other institutions?
00:27:40.740Because, again, this is nothing more than a pinprick.
00:27:43.000You know, Claudine Gay going down is like toppling one statue, but a million other statues still exist.
00:27:49.220And you haven't taken or defenestrated anybody from like, you know, the Congress or whatever.
00:27:54.600And to me, that's a really big deal to look at in this situation is that can this experience be utilized elsewhere?
00:28:02.280I think the idea of using plagiarism to expose problems like the competency crisis, the replication crisis,
00:28:09.240and just how much of our money, tax dollars, is wasted on these institutions, on these ridiculous grants and money and classes is a good thing.
00:28:18.960I mean, it would take maybe five guys with weaponized autism and large language learning models to start going through every major publication that has been published in science or any other journal
00:28:29.280and recognize that most of the most prestigious scientists, social scientists, et cetera, that we use as talking heads for the next COVID, the next political issue,
00:28:38.260the same people that had studies saying, you know, actually protesting for Black Lives Matter reduced your transmission of COVID.
00:28:44.440You know, exposing these people as plagiarism fraud is a very good avenue of attack that they should pursue.
00:28:49.860The real thing that I think that needs to be looked at is can that momentum be seized?
00:28:54.700Because if not, you're going to see this kind of feuding between people like Chris Ruffo and Curtis Yarvin happen ad infinitum and ad nauseum until, again,
00:29:03.580whatever momentum was there has been fizzled and dried up like a puddle in a, you know, baking bat of asphalt at 105 degrees.
00:30:56.420And so we're probably not going to, in and of ourselves, get rid of the credibility of Harvard.
00:31:02.420However, the fact that these two factions are willing to go to war and they're willing to tear each other apart by also dismantling each other's credibility and throwing the kind of credibility of the institution into the fire is important.
00:31:20.160And if we can aid or accelerate certain parts of that, then that's useful.
00:31:25.160But like you said, you have to be willing to, you have to know what's happening there.
00:31:52.480I think that that is like, especially as you pointed out, when gay is just going back to a 900K salary, right?
00:32:00.680This is not somebody who's out on the street.
00:32:03.600You know, when conservatives are canceled, when conservatives lose their job, when conservatives enter into a battle of this magnitude and they lose, they're devastated.
00:32:15.560They're not going to be able to make a living.
00:32:17.420They're not going to get hired anywhere.
00:32:18.740Where the victory is total and complete and destructive.
00:32:22.380For gay, this is just a minor setback.
00:32:24.700She'll probably be, you know, in some other leadership position in a few years once people aren't looking anymore, once people aren't focused or once this story is no longer the key thing that leftists are feuding over inside their organization.
00:32:38.060But in the meantime, if you can get them to kind of shred their credibility, that's very valuable.
00:32:44.780We saw, you know, once Chris Rufo won this, places like the EAP talking about the horrible history of scalping and how white colonialists use scalping as a major tactic.
00:32:58.820And so Rufo is just adopting the white colonialist tactic of scalping.
00:33:06.060So when you have those kinds of ridiculous meltdowns, I think there is some value in these organizations knowing they can bleed and being willing to rip each other apart over this.
00:33:16.720But I do think that Yarvin's critique of, you know, the fact that this is only a kind of a semi-victory in his piece, he says specifically, it's not that this is a bad thing itself.
00:33:31.860It's, you know, it's getting high over a win like this.
00:33:35.280It's treating a small victory like this as if it's a complete toppling of the system.
00:33:41.600Because it most certainly is not that.
00:33:43.760The left is still in charge of these institutions.
00:33:45.740These institutions still rule the roost.
00:33:48.360And conservatives, they're not going to be putting Chris Rufo in as the president or anything.
00:33:54.360They're just going to replace Paddingue with a slightly more doctrinaire leftist, probably one from the winning faction of the Civil War.
00:34:03.260No conservative will be sitting in any positions of power after this.
00:34:06.360Yeah, and it looks like they've already done that with whoever the, with Dr. Barber, the currently acting president of Harvard.
00:34:14.240It certainly looks like that as it is.
00:34:15.660And yeah, that's the big critique is that, you know, victory, either you're engaging in some kind of total war scenario where like your objective is to wear the enemy down, to destroy their institutions and to do it.
00:34:28.540The difference is, of course, between, say, like the asymmetrical warfare that we're witnessing versus, say, like a, you know, a parody type event is, is that there is a huge disparity in power.
00:34:39.320Rufo or any sort of moderate race blind, let's go back to just how things were prior to the Great Awakening, they are vastly outnumbered, outfunded, outgunned.
00:34:48.560Now, I mean, it's, you know, good to have someone like Bill Ackman or the Pershing Fund in your, in your back pocket to help keep this attack going.
00:34:55.640The difference can be is, is that even if you were to go back to sort of that system, the legal American infrastructure has already adopted for it.
00:35:05.980We've seen the radical expansion of disparate impact doctrine.
00:35:09.240We, we still have, you know, the, the cases with regarding Bostwick, we've seen this with regarding, you know, race as well as gender identity being part of sort of the greater civil rights regime.
00:35:21.320And, you know, if you're still citing Martin Luther King Jr.
00:35:23.560And you're still citing like the idea of that we can have things just based on the content of our character, not, you know, race or anything like that, you're still going to be called a racist.
00:35:32.160And you're still going to be sued under these, you know, under the sort of grand jurisprudential infrastructure, right?
00:35:39.920I mean, this is the question about pressuring, you know, to examine what, what, what is the, what's the root cause of this, right?
00:35:45.960Like we, we've both seen the meme from the good old boys that you can have a 5,000 point plan to destroy wokeness.
00:35:51.460But unless you're willing to destroy, you know, disparate impact and the very blatant degree of anarcho-tyranny when it comes to race in this country, which comes really from the sort of civil rights regime, good luck even trying to go back to the 1990s or to a pre-woke era when it comes to being race blind in our selections or, or meritocracy.
00:36:12.100Because, you know, we also don't have the demographics of 20 to 30 years ago.
00:36:16.360We don't have the, the judges or the political ideologies of 30 years ago.
00:36:20.940And at very best, you're witnessing a very late rear guard action against something that has already taken over the institutions 60 to 70 years ago.
00:36:29.580I mean, this is what Helen Andrews over the American conservative talks about.
00:36:33.600You know, it's not really so much ideology as it is that we have totally replaced the pedagogy, demographics, and funding mechanisms of what these old institutions used to be.
00:36:44.180And that was half a century ago, if not more.
00:36:46.680So we're, we're in a position now where, yeah, you can get a pinprick out, but, you know, that $900,000 salary isn't being seized.
00:36:54.960That's going to say, you know, Chris Rufo's projects in Florida, but also this symbolic victory isn't giving any examples for what you could do at a local level.
00:37:04.660A good example of what's being done at the local level would be Oklahoma, Oklahoma's governor, Stitt, basically banning from the state university system, any sort of diversity, equity, and inclusion office.
00:37:15.000And that could go further as well, considering what powers the governor actually has.
00:37:22.400And the debate at the end of the day is going to be between sort of the disaffected, the left, left me types who want to reform the institutions, and then those who are far more on the right that recognize these institutions need to be raised to the ground.
00:37:37.880Because if you, it's like the age-old story about revenge, right?
00:37:43.280Well, now the son is going to spend the rest of his, like, young adult life training to get revenge on his father.
00:37:47.980And if we, you know, oh, we take down Harvard, okay, great, that means MIT or someone else who survived this Harvard attack is now going to train to make sure that Rufo is taken out or that Bill Ackman is, you know, defenestrated publicly or something like that.
00:38:02.600And I think that that's a really important thing to consider here is that on international relations, for example, to sort of provide an allegory to this, you have what are called hegemonic states versus revisionist states.
00:38:19.020Revisionist states want to usurp power, change the international paradigm, and do it how it is.
00:38:23.360So the United States is a hegemonic power versus, like, China, which can be seen as a revisionist state.
00:38:29.100You know, the question is, is like, well, are you a revisionist or do you want to, like, keep the hegemon as it is with some slight changes in reform to maintain power?
00:38:36.840And until, you know, these guys determine what they are, reformers, you know, revisionists, or they want to just keep the status quo with some slight tweaks, you know, these kind of things are going to keep happening.
00:38:48.320And, again, these are just byproducts of so many other issues in America, whether it be unfettered immigration, the complete control of ideology in the country, which is leaning towards the left, the complete demographic replacement of what used to be America's elites.
00:39:05.160Until those things get addressed, you know, these Harvard problems are going to continue, and the old sort of neoconservative establishment is going to try and restart that cycle the next time they feel that their group is being attacked.
00:39:18.760And, unfortunately, you have said it yourself, the woke isn't being put away anytime soon.
00:39:23.700So we're going to see more flashpoints like this happen as other universities try and react to the fact that, you know, wokeism, this DEI progressivism, this oppressor versus oppressed narrative, you know, as long as they keep including Israel and the Jewish state a part of that, then we're going to see more Harvard flashpoints happen.
00:39:42.560The question just becomes, we're going to just see more free speech be clamped down, we're going to see universities try and carve out a special exception, but that's not going to stop the inter-minority fights on the left coalition from doing what they usually do, which is reorienting their rifles and cannons back to the majority population, which is predominantly white flyover America that has already been systematically excluded from elite institutions, the media, government, press for decades.
00:40:12.040And that's where I think that's where I think that when the dust settles, we might see that very much likely be the case.
00:40:18.100I think that there is a very real fault line, like you said, kind of between those that understand that what is necessary is the disillusion of these institutions and not simply their reform and those who think that they simply need to make a few tweaks, right?
00:40:36.440That that's going to be the huge dividing line.
00:40:39.960The reason I'm a little hopeful about this particular scenario is that whether Ackman, I don't think for a moment, I don't believe for a minute, the guys like Ackman would actually want to get rid of academia.
00:40:53.460They support this institution in theory, but with the fervor that they feel to stop what they think is like a loss of power inside the leftist coalition,
00:41:04.800the response that the response that they have is actually picking away at the very fabric, the very core of the institution.
00:41:12.580If you can prove, if you can show that there's a huge plagiarism crisis inside academia, if you can discredit this, if you can have academics sniping at each other, different parts of the left going after each other's academic work.
00:41:29.820This is basically like getting two factions of a religious group to go to war over what their book, their religious book says, right?
00:41:38.620Like that you're creating a scenario where the coalition cannot really be held together.
00:41:45.280The institutions that are central to the coalition and to the perpetuation of its message and the projection of its narrative power can't really survive if they're kind of directly firing at the ground under which they stand.
00:42:00.020Now, it's entirely possible that this blows over, that they redirect this energy, like you said, and it doesn't go this direction.
00:42:09.720But there is a possibility that in their fervor to kind of fight for superiority inside of these institutions, the different factions of the left actually just hollow out the ground they're standing under, which is kind of the infallibility of these institutions.
00:42:25.840Harvard isn't, as we both know, Harvard isn't actually about an education.
00:42:40.140While they've been doing this, they went after, for instance, what part of their meltdown was going after Chris Rufo's Harvard degree, because apparently it was part of the Harvard extension branch.
00:42:52.880And that's just one of the degree mills that many of these higher institutions run so they can pad their pocketbooks.
00:42:58.620And so you have a bunch of Harvard professors or Harvard alumni going on about how unprestigious Harvard degrees actually are, explaining that really, basically like half the degrees we hand out are meaningless and you shouldn't even rank these people among our standing.
00:43:14.840That's the kind of stuff that wounds the credibility of an institution when you have the people who are supposed to be your priests actually saying, well, really, half of this stuff doesn't matter.
00:43:26.220And we just do it for profit and you should completely, you know, not look at Rufo with any kind of validity because he happens to have his degree from this section of Harvard and not the right section of Harvard.
00:43:38.180Again, attacking the academic credibility, attacking the plagiarism, attacking those places as degree mills, you suddenly realize that these places are kind of eating themselves alive so that these factions can figure out who's going to rule over the ashes.
00:43:55.220And I think that is the most interesting development that comes out of this.
00:43:58.100It's not even really, you know, gays stepping down.
00:44:03.140It's not really the displacement of any particular elite.
00:44:06.260It's the willingness of these two sides to just cut at the core and then the foundation about what makes these institutions important and what kind of mystifies the public about these.
00:44:19.220They'll still have power after this is done.
00:44:21.180Harvard can completely abolish the foundation of its kind of spiritual power and still wield power for a while.
00:44:29.960But once you're running on kind of pure authority, once you're kind of running on, you don't have any of the founding myth anymore.
00:44:36.160You don't have any of the political formula.
00:44:37.660You're just standing on kind of the fact that, well, rich people pay us to get in here so that some at some point they can get paid more money and be part of the ruling elite.
00:44:49.160When you no longer have that noble lie standing under institutions like Harvard, eventually they fall down.
00:44:55.800And I think that's kind of where the real victory is, even if that isn't what maybe, you know, Rufo is celebrating or what other parts of kind of this current victorious coalition of neoconservatism are celebrating about this particular win.
00:45:11.580I mean, I think that could be an effect.
00:45:15.200You know, I'm reminded of that clip with like Jim Carrey.
00:45:18.220I think it's in Dumber Dumber where you're like, are you serious?
00:45:20.600So you're saying there's still a chance, you know, and not no.
00:45:33.260Sure, you can totally destroy the the the credibility.
00:45:37.120And I mean, I feel like the last several years have done a great job at destroying that credibility, increasing polarization, divisiveness and the decrease in public trust and institutions, both on the left and the right.
00:45:48.060But as you and I both know, politics is about rewarding friends and punishing enemies.
00:45:52.300It does not matter that right wingers or conservatives or even disaffected liberals look at Harvard and they're like, whoa, I don't want to, you know, go take my son there anymore, especially if I'm, you know, if I if I'm Jewish or if I'm white, I wouldn't definitely want to take my kid to Harvard.
00:46:06.980Seems like a very hostile place for my kid to get an education.
00:46:11.320The problem is, is that for aspirational foreign students or people who just got off the boat or people whose parents want to send them off to be the next sort of like Joaquin Castro type.
00:46:22.140Yeah, I'm definitely going to send my son to Harvard.
00:46:24.280I definitely want him to be connected with other progressive elites that are going to radically transform the country like Barack Obama promised and did as he was as president.
00:46:32.920Those are the things that I think are important for us to consider here is, is that, listen, unless you radically gatekeep and tell these people, no, we're not going to bring progressives in anymore or we're going to do this.
00:46:47.500But, you know, it's again, the cycle continues and it's the same thing that we've seen from what Rufo has written about.
00:46:53.660This goes back to what Yarvin was critiquing him about.
00:46:56.160You know, if you're going to use the last generation's batch of leftists to attack the newest institution, you know, you're just a different type of, you know, Leninist trying to, you know, come, you know, come up with some sort of plan to take over the institution or to do so.
00:47:11.120And to me, that is an issue that needs to be addressed here is that, yeah, the inter-seen fighting can happen.
00:47:19.880The big question at the end of the day, and you already had said it yourself, is that they're still going to have power.
00:47:24.540How much power they have, I don't know.
00:47:26.940But they're still going to have enough where people will want to take their kids to Harvard if they are aspirational progressives that want to run for Congress, be attorneys, run a non-governmental organization that facilitates social change and the like.
00:47:40.540I'm just not seeing the potential for a win in the way that we're going to do so.
00:47:45.420I mean, like, not to throw your tweets back at you, right?
00:47:48.580But like the tanks on Harvard Yard thing would be a really great, you know, not literally, although one can dream.
00:47:54.800You want to find a way where they don't have the financial capability to fund the racket that they've been a part of for the last 70 years.
00:48:02.760And until we're in a position that they are defunded, all that we're going to do, like we said at the beginning of this episode, is look from the sidelines and throw stones at whoever we don't like the most.
00:48:18.980The problem is they don't mind living in a glass house that's full of cracks or holes because at the end of the day, they can just hire or import 50 million more people to go fix the glass and we can't.
00:48:30.080And that power asymmetry is the big deal here.
00:48:33.540How do we learn to fight a political, a cold political asymmetric conflict?
00:48:39.800And right now I'm not seeing that being waged on a level that would be beneficial to us.
00:48:46.660And if not, all that we're going to do, as I said earlier, is the reemergence of neoconservatism, the Norman Potter style, you know, disaffectation and dissatisfaction with the current civil rights regime that now includes wokeness, disparate impact, all this, you know, you know, a lot of progressives, new Jews as white.
00:49:06.100Like we're, we're going to see a repeat of what we did in the 1960s.
00:49:09.520And there are four things that allowed this to happen.
00:49:12.000As we mentioned at the beginning, the October 7th attack, the entire progressive machine evolving to incorporate these people as white.
00:49:19.220Chris Ruffo seizing that momentum and working with other disaffected, wealthy donors to do this.
00:49:24.900And then to some extent, Dr. Claudian Gay being black.
00:49:28.160Those are the four main things that really did allow this to be the perfect sort of, you know, boiling pot for this event to take place.
00:49:35.960The question becomes, will the momentum be seized that actually moves it to destroy the legitimacy, not just in the eyes of the right, but the left?
00:49:44.660And can we utilize the plagiarism accusations to destroy more of academia?
00:49:50.800And until then, I think we're going to keep having this debate for the next several months.
00:49:54.840Yeah, I think that, again, all of the skepticism is well placed, but the real question, you know, is when you don't have power, as you pointed out, when you're not going to have these particular roles, what does a victory look like, right?
00:50:11.740And I think there's a really valuable point in understanding that this is a small victory, but immediately pushing for more.
00:50:22.200I mean, this is what the left does in everything, right?
00:51:03.680And I do agree with where you're coming from that, you know, that there is something to be learned from this.
00:51:08.380There is stuff that is beneficial for us to understand because you're, we both agree.
00:51:12.760And we both have said it more than once so far that we don't have power.
00:51:16.880So we have to watch from the sidelines or we have to watch with a side that is doing something that is nominally in our favor.
00:51:22.800The question becomes, you know, if you form a coalition or if you do any of these things, how can you ensure that your interests get a seat at the table?
00:51:33.520And I think that is a big thing going forward here.
00:51:36.440I mean, like the last several years have been a very impressive, you know, opening of the Overton window, whether it's Vivek Ramaswamy talking about the great replacement, along with Ben Braddock interviewing him with IM 1776, or the, you know, even Rufo when being pushed by Tucker Carlson about it, saying that like DEI and this other stuff is blatantly anti-white.
00:51:58.160The question becomes, can those things that are being discussed by these individuals also be incorporated towards this?
00:52:05.880And I think that there's opportunity to do it.
00:52:08.380I'm, I'm skeptical that that will take place, but there are things to, to, to learn from this.
00:52:13.280Because as you had said, and as Jarvin had critiqued, you know, the left is never satisfied with one scalp, which white people didn't invent, Indians did.
00:52:20.680We just took it from them and made it better.
00:52:22.960The problem is, is that, you know, are we going to just look, are we going to rest on our laurels like we do every time there's an election?
00:52:30.740Like, is this going to just be a political release valve where we're like, yay, we won.
00:52:35.020And then we ignore things like the deep state, or we ignore the border, or we ignore billions of dollars being wasted in Ukraine, getting hundreds of thousands of people killed.
00:52:43.700And I do want, you know, and I, I know Rufo follows this both, but I, I certainly pray that, you know, in this opportunity of organizing fundraising and attacking that, you know, it's not just Harvard look towards the States.
00:52:57.300I mean, you know, governor Ron DeSantis, you know, he had done a lot, uh, inside his own state, whether it was about, you know, trying to keep sex ed away from like, you know, grooming teachers away from kids.
00:53:07.480Why not, you know, ban DEI or like, you know, lesbian dance studies.
00:53:27.140But we also need to be doing more on our side, I think, to provide competency and to provide, um, avenues for, you know,
00:53:35.280people who want an education that doesn't just mean you got, went to a degree mill to go work for an NGO.
00:53:41.100I mean, Hillsdale College is one of the best institutions in America because it still does the classics and it doesn't have obvious academic jokes like Claudine Gay, um, working there or teaching there or being students of that institution.
00:53:54.600So, I mean, if we were to just cut all of this woke fat off of the decrepit husk of America's academic institutions, that'd be a huge step in the right direction.
00:54:06.100And I, and I hope that Rufo looks at this victory or look at what he's done and looks towards the state level.
00:54:11.140Because if you could turn Oklahoma or Florida or Texas or, you know, any major institution in America, like, you know, the University of Chicago and said, no more of this DEI stuff, no more of this progressive nonsense that's anti-white, that's anti-Jewish or whatever.
00:54:25.860And, you know, this is how we're actually going to do things with much more rigorous standards, you know, whether using LLMs to check for plagiarism, et cetera, that would be a huge step, I think.
00:54:36.040And there is avenue where, again, opportunities like this, just like how the left uses arguments to create room for power, we can use this to create room for institution building, capital investment and allocation.
00:54:47.260And like you had said, training those, those captains, those lieutenants, those colonels, those generals to lead effectively against the thing.
00:54:55.220The question just becomes, is this just for reform or are we going to raise these institutions and make our own from the ground up?
00:55:03.360And there's room to do both, I think, but it requires some organization and planning and strategic discussion.
00:55:57.800And he says, you know, the most critically important demographic to look at right now are a bunch of like mechanically well-trained, competent, like 50-year-old white guys that are just like shaking their head, thinking like, oh, God, this is my replacement.
00:56:10.840These are the people I have to train who are morons.
00:56:11.840You want that because, I mean, whether it's airline doors falling off, 40% of America's bridges needing to be repaired or that most of college institutions have a doctor, you know, Claudine Gay of their own.
00:56:40.380But I also mean like airline pilots, things like this.
00:56:44.060I mean, even if we did get a return to like meritocratic, race-blind liberalism, as we saw when California banned affirmative action, you know, white enrollment went up and African and American and Hispanic enrollment went down.
00:56:57.720And that Palladium magazine article about the competency crisis is that, listen, you know, diversity does kill, and we have to ensure that if people want to look at us as the, you know, as the replacement to these jokes of institutions, we need to be recruiting, getting the most competent people on board.
00:57:16.120And this is a point that's been echoed by Rufo, echoed by Jeremy Carl at the Claremont Institute, and has been echoed by anyone who sees the writing on the wall that America's infrastructure, education, and to a large extent, also its military, is falling apart, and we can see it right before our eyes.
00:57:32.000And we're just openly reporting about it.
00:57:34.040I mean, you know, when even the military is just like the people who helped build our Minuteman III nuclear missiles, our, you know, most important strategic nuclear deterrent.
00:57:42.320We don't have the men that can remake them or rebuild them or to function them, to upgrade them for 2023 technology, 2024 technology.
00:57:51.240And so if we want to talk about regime change or competency, we need people that actually know what they're doing and not talking out of their ass or talking out of, you know, someone else's mouth with plagiarism.
00:58:53.540And guys, of course, make sure you're following The Prudentialist and all of his work.
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01:00:14.900I think I think the key is always whoever it is, is coming over to the right.
01:00:19.020The thing you always want to look for is.
01:00:23.040Do they have a real understanding that they were wrong?
01:00:26.420Because what happens so often when people make this neocon transition from the left to the right is they say, oh, I have all the same principles.
01:01:23.060The way that these different moral principles, these moral visions connect to what I saw becoming a problem inside this movement.
01:01:32.040And I have changed, you know, because of this.
01:01:34.980That's that's really the kind of conversion that you're looking for before you kind of understand that someone's actually kind of changed what they're doing and have really made their way over to, say, the conservative or the right word sphere.
01:02:56.360You are not going to see the right retaking Harvard anytime soon.
01:03:00.260I said that in the in the castle piece.
01:03:02.680So it's the discrediting of the institutional framework that undergirds the current regime that matters.
01:03:10.380And so to the extent that Harvard can make itself a joke, the extent where people can view Harvard as kind of the the the degree mill that it is, the the prestige stamp that it is, and not a institution that actually wields any real prowess when it comes to education or those kind of things.
01:03:34.040I don't think we're going to see, you know, I don't think they're going to be putting any kind of, you know, Ted Cruz isn't going to be running Harvard anytime soon.
01:03:42.080And so I don't think you should see that as the kind of term of victory.
01:03:47.440Instead, it's really that that Harvard just no longer matter matters in the long run.
01:03:52.720That's that's kind of when you'll know you've won.
01:03:54.920Yeah, when it when it when it's treated like an adult continuing education class or a GED mill, then that's that.
01:04:01.800That would be a good victory or, you know, like it's just a historical site, you know, saying like this was once Harvard, a place where like Puritan clergymen were trained or something like that.
01:04:13.880But until then, I would love to see it raised to the ground like the left has raised the William Penn statue, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, the Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington.
01:04:25.580But until then, you know, a victory will is yet to be achieved.
01:04:29.140If you go to Oxford, you know, the Central Chapel there, technically there's still services every once in a while.
01:04:35.220But for the most part, it's just a bunch of university students walking people around and being like, can you believe that people used to like worship here in the middle of Oxford?
01:04:42.980And when people do that for Harvard, like at some point, they just walk you through Harvard and you're like, can you believe that people used to talk about progressivism and these people actually ruled, you know, the world at some point in this institution?
01:04:54.560But now we just kind of look at it as quaint that that's when, you know, you've won.
01:04:58.400It's just there's a tour going through talking about how this used to be a hall of power, but now it's just a symbolic, you know, historical building sitting somewhere off in the Northeast.
01:05:10.040Creeper Weirdo says a pessimism from from the jaws of optimism.
01:05:22.980I don't do it often, but, you know, it's funny because I usually say on your show when the left does something crazy, I usually say I'm not surprised.
01:05:30.860And this is one of those times where I'm kind of surprised to see some optimism on the right.
01:05:36.120You know, I recall a very famous bald man saying optimism is cowardice.
01:06:08.580But if this is if this is a way that you can drive a wedge, if this is the way that you can kind of wound what look like the impenetrable walls of your enemy and their power, then you kind of kind of take the W there.
01:06:23.260I do think that Rufo and James Lindsay are different.
01:06:26.520I think that they they both have a core of classical liberalism, if that's what you mean.
01:06:30.980But but I do think Rufo is looking for solutions and is willing to engage in solutions that James Lindsay simply is not.
01:06:38.440Because I think that while Rufo is probably too wed to certain parts of the kind of classical liberal orthodoxy, he is, I think, still right wing in a way.
01:06:51.020He has the right wing and smell, as Dave the distributist likes to say, in a way that that Lindsay is not.
01:06:57.000Maybe he is not the terrifying fire breather in that that some of the liberal press would like to make him out to be.
01:07:03.780But but I don't I don't think that he and James Lindsay are the same animal, but that's.
01:07:08.720Yeah, I mean, I wish Chris Rufo had the right wing like nastiness that like the establishment press said that he does.
01:07:15.780But, you know, Chris Rufo is willing to talk to people like me or to Oren, which is a good thing.
01:07:21.260Whereas James Lindsay is on this like dead horse that says classical liberalism has never been tried.
01:07:27.360So, I mean, one guy is a well-known new atheist gay activist.
01:07:30.640The other one at least wants to take out progressive Harvard.
01:07:32.900So I know which guy I like more than the other.
01:07:35.980That's right. And Rufo, again, we we've we've talked a lot here, but I want to say he is the most effective conservative political activist out there.
01:07:44.360You might say, well, that's sad because there should be more effective activists.
01:07:49.300And so you should really understand, you know, when you have somebody who's racking up a lot more W's than you've seen in a long time, there should be something you're paying attention to.
01:07:57.760That doesn't mean you have to agree with everything.
01:07:58.980That doesn't mean you have to say that this is enough or this is sufficient, but you should still be noticing there's a reason this guy's winning when other people are.
01:08:06.580So when you're in this kind of situation, you can't sit around and and just bag on every single possible route to victory.
01:08:14.240That I think I think that's one thing that Rufo is right on that that Yarvin is not that, you know, that that that constant push towards we can't possibly win anything is self-defeating in a big way.
01:08:34.000People might think outside of the woke now.
01:08:36.760Yeah. And that's really what I'm saying is, yes, I understand that a lot of this discussion did not start from the place that many people on the right would wish it had that, you know, there there are certain political realities that people wish didn't have you didn't have to play inside of, I suppose.
01:08:52.580But at the end of the day, the fact that these conversations are happening, that these institutions are facing the kind of scrutiny that they are, that this warfare is damaging the credibility of the and foundations of some of these institutions is good.
01:09:06.500I'm not the person who's, oh, all of this will inevitably mean that, you know, the conservative backlash is coming.
01:09:13.140Like, I'm not that guy. I'm I'm certainly not delusional that those things are inevitable.
01:09:18.040But again, you got to get a notch those W's where you can.
01:09:20.600I mean, at the end of the day, right, like the fight is going to be between, as you mentioned, the old left or old classical liberalism versus this.
01:09:29.600And if you're on the right and, you know, you don't trust him or whatever.
01:09:34.400I mean, this is what is the right done on the line for the last like eight years that was successful.
01:09:38.540It was pushing these people for the right word.
01:09:40.560And that is what needs to happen until, you know, you are tried as a heretic to the right wing orthodoxy.
01:09:46.340Last, last one. The distributors said religious Jews would eventually move.
01:09:51.580Right. Well, I mean, that's certainly true for some, not as many as one would hope.
01:09:55.680And perhaps this event will increase that number.
01:09:58.760Unfortunately, religious Jews aren't actually the ones that wield the most power in many of these situations inside that coalition in many ways.
01:10:06.480But, but, you know, obviously, if they learn that lesson, then they realize that, hey, you know, importing a lot of people who think of me as oppressor and want to destroy me is probably a terrible way to run a country.
01:10:19.300And making sure that they're more prevalent in all of these institutions and, you know, aiming that kind of rhetoric at whites and people of European descent is also immoral.
01:10:28.980Then great. That's a fantastic lesson for people learned.
01:10:31.520And I certainly hope that that's one that people gather from all of this.
01:10:36.100All right, guys. Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.
01:10:38.540But once again, thank you to the Prudentialist for coming on.