00:00:36.000You guys are not going to want to miss it.
00:00:38.000It's one of my favorite conversations of people that should be disagreeing with each other, but actually have a very mutually respectful conversation.
00:00:46.000And that gives me hope for our country that these conversations can exist and we need to have more of them.
00:00:51.000Email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:55.000This episode was actually done on Labor Day.
00:00:58.000We work on Labor Day to give you the content that I know that you guys want and you need.
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00:01:11.000Peter Bogogian, James Lindsay are here.
00:01:29.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:37.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:50.000Welcome to this very special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:53.000I am honored to be joined today by Peter Bogogian and James Lindsay, who are co-authors of a very interesting book, How to Have Impossible Conversations.
00:02:06.000And now, just from the outset, I'm going to say I do not agree with every point of worldview and opinion that these guests today hold.
00:02:13.000However, I think we can both agree that there is a crisis happening in our country, especially in higher education.
00:02:20.000So Peter, you and I were talking before the recording started here about how you said, we'll just pick it up right here, the academy might be unsavable.
00:02:31.000I think that we have extraordinarily serious problems.
00:02:35.000The engines of knowledge production are compromised.
00:02:38.000We have third-rate ideologues, to be blunt with you, who we know where some of these problems come from, but the ideological problems, they look at the academy as an indoctrination mill.
00:02:52.000They have tenure, which means they have a job for life.
00:02:58.000They've, for example, bias response teams, offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
00:03:04.000And I can talk about my own school here, who's due to COVID and declining enrollment has hired a chief officer of diversity, equity, inclusion.
00:03:14.000And I'm quite sure public records show that, don't quote me on this, but I think it's $137,000.
00:03:20.000Meanwhile, the university has, the president of Portland State University is spending $1.5 million to root out systemic racism at Portland State University.
00:03:32.000There is no racism at Portland State University.
00:03:36.000But when we get trapped in these ideological mindsets, it's difficult to break free.
00:03:41.000So basically, we have trained individuals in college to look for grievances, to constantly look for racism everywhere, to interpret the world through a lens that's almost definitely, if not definitely, false.
00:04:00.000I would imagine that you do not subscribe or believe in critical race theory.
00:04:05.000We've been talking about this quite a lot on our podcast.
00:04:07.000Can you walk us through what critical race theory is and the danger that it presents to a neoliberal Western society?
00:04:14.000Yeah, critical race theory is a particular way to think about race and racism that arose out of the context of applying the idea of race as it was being studied in what's known as the black liberationist paradigm to the critical study of law.
00:04:32.000In other words, we've got two critical theories here that both came out of what's called the Frankfurt School line of thought.
00:04:37.000The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is what's often called as neo-Marxist thought.
00:04:43.000So you have this very radical way to think about identity, very radical way to think about law.
00:04:48.000And it started from this position that it believed that the law was intrinsically racist, that our legal institutions were intrinsically racist throughout all of American history.
00:04:59.000And even after the passage, so it arose in the 1970s going into the 1980s, even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it arose to say that nothing really changed.
00:05:12.000And in fact, the changes of the Civil Rights Act didn't solve institutional racism in the United States or even open the door to solving them over the coming decades, but rather just opened up all kinds of new problems to black people.
00:05:26.000It took on postmodern theory in the 1990s following its second major progenitor, whose name is Kimberly Crenshaw.
00:05:34.000Kimberly Crenshaw was a student of Derek Bell, both at Harvard Law.
00:05:37.000Derek Bell was the one who started critical race theory.
00:05:41.000Ultimately, with our help, Kimberly Crenshaw also introduced intersectionality.
00:05:45.000And this changed the view rather than focusing on material institutional racism as Derek Bell did, to switching over to this idea of systemic racism.
00:05:54.000So critical race theory is the view that racism is systemic.
00:05:59.000It is baked into every aspect of the system from institutions to policy, as Ibram Kendi puts it, to our knowledge systems, to our ways of speaking, to our ways of thinking, to our ways of interacting with one another, that it's pervasive in every aspect of society.
00:06:14.000So that anywhere you see a racial difference in outcomes, systemic racism is the explanation for how that must have happened.
00:06:20.000And it's the critical race theorist's job to look for that.
00:06:24.000It proceeds off a number of basic tenets, the first of which is that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society and that it has a permanence or is permanent, if you follow from Derek Bell.
00:06:35.000So they believe that racism is the permanent ordinary state of affairs, which leads Robin D'Angelo, the famous author of White Fragility, to say that now the question is not did racism take place, but how did racism manifest in that situation?
00:06:49.000So it assumes racism is involved in every situation and its goal is to uncover it.
00:06:55.000It has a bunch of other tenets and details, but that's the big picture story of critical race theory is it is this view that believes racism is at the fundamental root of everything that happens in society and it's their job to find it and call it out and then lead to a revolution to get rid of it.
00:07:14.000I've been mentioning newdiscourses.com on a couple other podcasts.
00:07:18.000I think actually yesterday I mentioned it.
00:07:20.000This graphic you have on your Twitter is terrific where you said 11 divisive tenets of critical race theory.
00:07:26.000Racism exists in both traditional and modern forms and it goes through.
00:07:29.000And the one that is actually most disturbing here, and Peter, I want to get your take on this, is the totalitarian nature of critical race theory, whereas if you do not do something, white silences violence, I think is the way that they put it into a nice rhyming phrase, that you yourself are actually defending an evil institution.
00:07:48.000And if you do not post a black square, if you did not take a knee very similar to totalitarian movements the last hundred years, and you are the problem.
00:07:56.000Do you think that this kind of idea has stemmed out of the university?
00:08:14.000No, so I mean, if you futz around with the words like they like to do, then you can conclude that it's pluralistic by meaning something completely different by pluralism.
00:08:26.000So, you know, two plus two equals five if you change the meaning of five, apparently.
00:08:43.000As for whether it came out of the university, 85% yes, 15% no.
00:08:49.000So it's one of those things where they can dive into that 15% and say, ha ha, you don't know what you're talking about.
00:08:54.000It came out of the activist movements of the 1960s and 1968, blah, black power.
00:08:59.000And yeah, well, that actually came out of Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, which came out of Columbia University and then later on UC, I think Davis, or I think he went to UC Davis.
00:09:11.000He went to one of the University of Californias anyway.
00:09:14.000So in that book, he explicitly wrote that what they needed to do was to find a fusion of the racial minorities, the outsiders of society, by which he meant literal radical activists like the Weatherman Underground, and then the liberal intelligentsia in the universities and make them into a coalition that would push for these ideas.
00:09:35.000So critical race theory came out of the activist scene, in a sense, from the 1960s and 1970s, most notably Black power or even Black nationalism, which ultimately had its own roots that were in scholarship and kind of fusing this kind of on-the-ground activism with Herbert Marcuse's ideas.
00:09:56.000She's obviously a scholar as well as a radical.
00:09:59.000She's a big name happening right now with BLM.
00:10:02.000She's very intricate in what's going on there.
00:10:04.000She also was very integral in teaching the generation of black feminists who went on to form critical race theory and intersectionality.
00:10:13.000So we could name people like Patricia Collins, we could name Kimberly Crenshaw, Bell Hooks, Patricia Williams.
00:10:19.000There are a large number, even another Angela, another Angela Harris, or a number of other Black feminists that were inspired in part or heavily by Angela Davis.
00:10:30.000So the combination that Marcuse talked about in 1960, what was that before, 1964, I think, early 1960s anyway, for One Dimensional Man.
00:10:42.000The fusion between that liberal intelligentsia and then the radical fringe of leftist fringe.
00:10:50.000I mean, these are people outright supporting Shea Guevara and stuff like that, and cheering on Castro and Cuba.
00:10:57.000It's just that's who we're talking about with the outsiders.
00:11:00.000And then mixing that with aggrieved racial minorities.
00:11:03.000You can see that there's an activist element in that that had a feedback loop with the scholarship because the scholars were explicitly naming themselves as activist scholars.
00:11:13.000But the incubator for this was Harvard Law.
00:11:16.000I mean, you don't get more academia than Harvard Law.
00:11:21.000Jim, I think it's, I think there's so much confusion around postmodernism and Marxism and people using those terms interchangeably, which they're just simply not.
00:11:32.000Perhaps we should spend a moment talking about that before we go on.
00:11:51.000Uh, Helen Pluckrose, oh, sorry, I think there was like Helen Pluckrose, the author of Cynical Theories with Jim, explains this in detail.
00:12:02.000So, postmodernism is, as Leotard said, a skepticism of metanarratives.
00:12:09.000A metanarrative is a grand overarching explanation of something.
00:12:13.000Like Christianity would be a metanarrative, it would be a story, a story of underneath and beneath the stories.
00:12:21.000So, for postmodernism, there's no God's eye view, there's no view outside the system, there's no way to get an objective view of something because we're all situated individual agents.
00:12:33.000We're situated in our own individual psychology, we're situated culturally, socially, geopolitically, linguistically, etc.
00:12:48.000Marxism is an explanatory story of working class, comes from Karl Marx, comes from Dusk Capital, is an explanation of classes and consciousness and exploitation, etc.
00:13:03.000You cannot have both a metanarrative and an incredulity or a hyperskepticism toward those metanarratives.
00:13:11.000So, Peter, can I ask a question really quick?
00:13:14.000Because this kind of blender, the fusion of was popularized in recent years by Jordan Peterson, who would argue that postmodernist or postmodernism was a rebrand of Marxist ideology into more cultural framing.
00:13:30.000Do you take exception with that kind of description, or do you think that sometimes there is an overlap that postmodernists tend to be Marxists and vice versa?
00:13:40.000I mean, there's some overlap, if I might jump in.
00:13:42.000Sorry about my lag there for a moment.
00:13:45.000So, the thing is, is that Marxism proceeded upon a concept that Marx formulated called conflict theory, which sees society as split into stratified groups that have different access to resources, power, opportunity, and so on, and that they are in conflict for that.
00:14:04.000And so, he saw this as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
00:14:08.000The bourgeoisie were people who had economic elite status, and the proletariat were the working class who did not.
00:14:14.000And he saw them pitted against each other in conflict for status, power, and opportunity in society.
00:14:21.000What you had happen was his vision didn't work.
00:14:24.000He believed that you would just have this, you know, the working class would awaken, they have class consciousness, what would happen, and then everybody would revolt, and everything would go from capitalism into socialism into communism, and utopia would be achieved.
00:14:38.000That's his vision of history with like kind of the capital H.
00:14:41.000The neo-Marxists came along in the 1920s to try to figure out why that didn't happen.
00:14:46.000And they were like, oh, he got it all wrong.
00:14:48.000Let's talk about how culture maintains an ideology within culture maintains the stratification of society.
00:14:57.000And so, that's where you have the actual shift to culture.
00:15:10.000Then you pick up Walter Benjamin, Theodore Ardorno, Max Forkheimer.
00:15:14.000They end up leading into Herbert Marcusa, our friend that we just talked about a moment ago, connecting to Angela Davis and so on.
00:15:21.000So they were very critical of Marxism, but in a particular way.
00:15:25.000They were critical by saying that Marx had misread how society works and that it needs to be studied culturally and ideologically rather than economically in order to achieve the same Pathway to the end of history, which would be: we're going to go agitate people, show them how they're being brainwashed by propaganda, by mass media, by popular culture, by enjoying their lives, by having a middle-class existence, and thinking that they're happy when they clearly aren't, because if they were happy, they would be communists.
00:15:55.000And they're going to try to affect the communist revolution by agitating in multiple dimensions of culture that way.
00:16:01.000The postmodernists actually were much more pessimistic.
00:16:05.000The postmodernists, you could say it's a rebranding of communism, but the, you know, you talk about Michelle Foucault, Jacques Derrida.
00:16:11.000I mean, Jack Derrida wrote a book called The Specter of Marxism, and he's talking about how the thing is dead.
00:16:24.000So they were themselves communist in orientation and they were big supporters actually of Mao.
00:16:30.000And they helped to educate Pol Pot, but they were not themselves all-out Marxist.
00:16:37.000They had lost faith that Marxism or anything else could work.
00:16:40.000You could actually kind of see them as existentialists who had gone political or something like that and gave up on everything.
00:16:48.000But then what happened is on down the road in the 1990s, these ideas, Marxism to some degree, which had infused into feminism, which had infused into the whole Marxist theory of race, then the neo-Marxist school, and then the postmodern school all kind of got cobbled together and cherry-picked together into what we would now call critical social justice or wokeness.
00:17:11.000And so it has lots of elements of that.
00:17:30.000And then you see, you know, Death to Capitalism and all this defensive looting book that just came out and it's talking about how the capitalist system needs to be destroyed.
00:17:37.000So there's a lot of Marxism still there.
00:17:39.000And a lot of people who are Marx-ish, I would say, but not Marxist.
00:18:41.000I'd love to actually speak to them because I think that the coming divide here, and it's only because of how much they hate President Trump, that actually, I think, actually has united some of these groups that actually have inherent contradictions with each other, where you have the workers of the world unite people that are playing nice with the identity politics people that are playing nice with the corporate billionaire class, all under this kind of unified objective that the current president must be destroyed at all costs when in reality they really should be fighting each other.
00:19:32.000I just want to unpack a few things that Jim said there.
00:19:35.000That's an extremely difficult thing to penetrate to be blunt to conservative mind because there's such an identification of these values, these invasive intersectional woke values that have parasitized liberalism that conservatives tend to lump all of these people into one category.
00:20:19.000So the kind of, I think, best way to think of this woke thing would be that normally what you would have in a, say, communist revolution is you'd have the revolution proceeds, the party, meaning the Communist Party, establishes itself, and then very obviously they set themselves up as the crony level elites that run everything for their own benefit.
00:20:40.000And so they become kind of that new bourgeois class.
00:20:44.000And that's why they keep saying real communism has never been tried.
00:20:49.000It's the new elites and screws everybody over.
00:20:51.000Well, what's happened is wokeness is sort of like it's sort of like the thing just happened really soft and the party woke is the party.
00:21:01.000It's really hard to explain this without saying that basically this is bourgeois people who've stolen Marxist ideas and are trying to pretend that they're not bourgeois, that they're trying to pretend that they're oppressed.
00:21:11.000This is, I mean, you can't learn their academic jargon without going to college.
00:21:31.000This is something only people who can lay around and spend time flipping through like their school, high school yearbook, like, oh, he, him, she, her, they, them, Z-zer, you know, with each picture.
00:21:42.000This is something only people with leisure time can possibly do.
00:21:46.000And we'll call it luxury beliefs, but it's people who have access to luxury who can learn and engage in this stuff.
00:21:53.000And the crucial link, Charlie, that I want to get people to get from this is that if you want to understand the riots, if you want to understand big sections of the, not exclusively of the BLM movement, if you want to understand much of the ideology ideology that's informing this, it happens in the university.
00:23:04.000And I would tell you that if you want to tie it to Marx and Marxism, three things are continuous all the way back to Karl Marx.
00:23:11.000One is conflict theory, the idea that society split into social groups with different access to resources and they're in conflict with one another.
00:23:21.000The second is this idea that if they just shake people up and wake them up, make them woke, make them angry at society, that the revolution will proceed and the utopia is on the other side without ever knowing how that's going to happen.
00:23:35.000And third is the underlying envy that drives Marxian thought in general, which is, I mean, what you take the woke, you take old school Marxists, and you scratch the surface, and you find envy.
00:23:48.000You find them seeing that other people have something that they want that they don't, and it's not their fault.
00:23:53.000It's not that no matter how hard they worked, they couldn't possibly get it.
00:24:09.000There's also a state of human beings in nature.
00:24:11.000It'd be almost Rousseauian Marxist that they actually believe from my interactions with them, human beings are good in a state of nature, and it's society around them that has made them do bad things.
00:24:48.000And I think you see a difference in this in the left and the right.
00:24:51.000And so the left believes if we just, and I say this as someone who's liberal myself, if we just change our institutions, then we'll be able to change the outcomes.
00:25:02.000But the fact is, from Steven Pinker's work, The Blank Slate, and Michael Shermer's work, and many, many, many others, the fact is that that's just not true.
00:25:10.000That the denial of biology, particularly evolutionary biology, is just not born out of any evidence.
00:25:18.000It's an ideological position that people take.
00:26:34.000I do not believe in God, and I have not believed in God in many years.
00:26:38.000I was raised Catholic, and it's like an atheist joke at this point.
00:26:42.000You know, raised Catholic, whoops, now I'm an atheist.
00:26:47.000So, yeah, my position in terms of who I am socio-politically, I'm not conservative.
00:26:56.000I have a belief, however, that we need both conservatism and liberalism, if you want to call it that, or progressivism, in not only in cooperation, but also in tension with one another to have a functioning society.
00:27:11.000So, I have a deep respect for conservative thought and just happen to not align with many points within it, although I see it.
00:27:20.000So it would be an utter error to call me, you know, huge, you know, MAGA guy, or although I do want America to be great, that's true, but I wouldn't put myself down in any of those kinds of camps.
00:27:35.000So if that's what you were looking for.
00:27:37.000I think it adds to the credibility of your critique prior.
00:27:40.000Can you build out the Rousseauian piece that I mentioned, where we talk commonly that Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued for the primitive over the civilized, the infant over the adult?
00:27:50.000I think that his view of social contract theory and the state of nature, directly at odds with Thomas Hobbes, he thought it was very good and heavenly and utopian where Hobbes would argue it's nasty, brutish, and short.
00:28:02.000So, you know, it's if you, I wasn't going to go into this part immediately, but since you brought up the infant part, I will.
00:28:09.000You know, a few years ago, I noticed, it would have been probably six or seven years ago, I heard somebody say that they had some adulting to do.
00:28:16.000And they said it kind of in this negative sense.
00:28:18.000And I turned to my wife and I said, that's bad.
00:28:22.000That's like civilization ending bad to think of adulting as a thing you have to do rather than something you become and that it's something people want to shy away from.
00:28:34.000I saw the word adultification the other day for the first time in the social justice literature.
00:28:39.000It was turning people into functional adults as the process of adultification.
00:28:43.000And that was seen as a problem because they shouldn't have to take on that much responsibility and so on.
00:28:50.000It's rare that the social justice literature takes me aback now.
00:28:54.000And I was just kind of, you know, had to stop for five minutes and just shake my head over adultification.
00:28:59.000But certainly what I wanted to build out is that where you see this manifesting now, the modern language for that is the decolonization movement.
00:29:07.000Decolonize curriculum, decolonize the society, decolonize STEM, decolonize your mom, decolonize everything.
00:29:14.000And so what that's actually referring to, the view, and this is very difficult for people to understand.
00:29:20.000I put a, it's supposed to be funny, but I put a humorous woke creation myth at the very beginning of one on new discourses recently.
00:29:29.000And it's, you know, to be written in the same style as Genesis, all intentionally over the top.
00:29:45.000So if you take Rousseau's view of primitive, the fall from the garden, the eating of the tree of knowledge, is figuring out science and human rationality and deferring to those.
00:29:56.000It was Sir Isaac Newton who was the true rebel against that's right.
00:30:04.000And so when you understand that, they saw that development of rationality, the development of science, the development of enlightenment liberalism as it arose, particularly in the Scottish context, and then connected that,
00:30:19.000not wholly wrong, not wholly wrongly, to the ability to then go out and colonize on a scale that's never before been possible and to use it to come up with justifications for slavery that were rooted in biology for the first time.
00:30:35.000There was always slavery, but it was never before rooted in the idea that, oh, traits are heritable from parent to child.
00:30:49.000And so they connect it to these horrors, these evils.
00:30:52.000And so the idea of colonizing is taking rational, empirical, reasoned thought, scientific reasoning, and these principles of liberalism.
00:31:02.000So when you see this thing like that, the African American History Museum with a Smithsonian put out that huge list of things of white culture and it's like showing up on time, valuing precision.
00:31:14.000You know, it's like, whoa, how racist are you guys?
00:31:17.000The reason is because they see that as intrinsically part of the colonization of the entire world by white Western European culture, Eurocentric culture, they call it.
00:31:26.000And so, like when a Chinese people, when a Chinese people start wearing suits or Chinese business firms wearing suits and they start showing up at very strict timetables, they start using scientific reasoning to get to the bottom of their things and debate and all of these other techniques we've used in the Western philosophical and scientific traditions.
00:31:44.000They would say that at the level of ideas and knowledge, they've been colonized by Western thought.
00:31:50.000So everything that uses anything to do with the Enlightenment, liberalism, meaning philosophical liberalism, of course, takes people away from that state of nature.
00:32:10.000I'd like to linger on that because I think that that's so important.
00:32:12.000And so here's what we see happening right now.
00:32:16.000James's articulation of that was spot on.
00:32:18.000What we see happening is that the way that you and I or people figure out things is through the tools of science.
00:32:25.000We figured out through reason, through empiricism, through rationality.
00:32:29.000So if we want to figure something out, like let's say that we wanted to figure out: are black people pulled over by the police more frequently than white people?
00:32:40.000Well, that is actually not a complicated question.
00:32:44.000You would turn the tools of science on that, and especially now we have body cams.
00:32:50.000What we see happening, however, is remember when I, before Charlie, when I talked about meta-narratives, so reason, rationality, empiricism, those are.
00:33:01.000This was a huge critique of the Jungian view of historical stories, but yes, continue.
00:33:08.000Yeah, so those are all metanarratives.
00:33:10.000Those are all ways to explain, but they're also processes that people use to come to knowledge.
00:34:03.000But again, if you have the idea that you're outside the system trying to look in, you can't use people's feeling claims to adjudicate anything.
00:34:12.000You feel one way about something, I feel, particularly about empirical phenomena, like what happens in the world.
00:34:18.000So if you want a more just society, what you need to do is exactly the opposite of decolonization.
00:34:27.000It's not as Jim and Helen wrote in their book, Cynical Theories.
00:34:31.000And I think that this is worth mentioning for a moment.
00:34:34.000Aubrey Lloyd's The Master's Tools Cannot Disable The Master's House.
00:34:39.000The last time I looked, it was cited like 750 times, 740 times.
00:34:44.000The idea is the master's tools, reason, rationality, empiricism, cannot dissemble the master's house.
00:34:50.000And patriarchy, cis heteronormativity, right, white supremacy.
00:34:58.000You can't use reason, empiricism, rationality, and logic to do that.
00:35:07.000So, I mean, I mentioned that there's a number of tenets of critical race theory earlier and didn't go into the details, but one of them is using counter storytelling and narrative weaving as a means to challenge the hegemony of that's your Gramsci idea, by the way, hegemony of reason, rationality, and empiricism.
00:35:26.000So, yeah, this is this is a rather troubling thing.
00:35:29.000Not only is it, you know, really dangerous to, in fact, a national security threat to try to undermine how we come to knowledge and to claim that, say, storytelling is an equally valid or even superior method of coming to knowledge and understanding truth in the world.
00:35:47.000But you also have this fundamentally kind of racist separation.
00:35:54.000It's again very Rousseauian, this kind of very racist by accident view where it's like, oh, showing up on time, that's white people's stuff.
00:36:03.000And it's like, what are you saying, man?
00:36:04.000You know, that so there's a lot of this, this kind of like getting it just exactly backwards baked into the theory because they're so desperate to try to blame everything that's not going perfectly correctly on the ways that white society as they frame it.
00:36:22.000Of course, obviously it's not white society.
00:36:24.000It's just liberal society and everybody gets to participate.
00:36:26.000That's a point, quality before the law.
00:36:29.000But they say that this is white society and that that cheats other people.
00:36:34.000So they have to use other ways of knowing.
00:36:36.000The most probably powerful example of that or most clear example of that is not in the American context yet, but was in South Africa where they have this movement that was called Science Must Fall.
00:36:47.000And they were literally arguing that one of the indigenous witchcrafts of the region should be put on par with science for explaining how lightning works as a specific example.
00:37:01.000If you wanted a roadmap to take society back to the stone age, that's how you do it.
00:37:06.000I also want to mention at this point that there are, to bring it back to the academy, there are mechanisms in the academy that prevent people from speaking bluntly and honestly about reason and evidence and the roles they play in people's lives.
00:37:22.000So while certain ways of knowing are common among indigenous peoples, there's a little thing called a style guide, a language style guide.
00:37:43.000And you should and should not use the words, you shouldn't use the words like witchcraft, spellcasting, even though folks in tribes, cultures like the Dobu, et cetera, use those words themselves.
00:37:57.000So if you want a backwards roadmap, the way to liberate yourself is through reason and science, the way to bring about your own flourishing.
00:38:08.000And it's something that everybody participates in those.
00:38:11.000It's not like, oh, you're black, so you don't have access to, you know, reasoning or empiricism.
00:38:19.000That's just, that's a grotesque way to look at the world.
00:38:22.000Well, the only way you could hold that view is if you yourself are harboring deep-seated racism.
00:38:27.000That's the only way you could square that argument is if you think that only certain people, whiteness, are able to believe in Newtonian physics or force equals mass times acceleration.
00:38:37.000That's the only way you could come to that conclusion.
00:38:40.000I'm going to tell you what I think Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility, I think.
00:38:47.000And so I want to reinforce something that's really interesting.
00:38:50.000So I'm an evangelical Christian, and I'd love to have you both on to discuss that at a different time because this topic is very interesting and very important.
00:38:58.000But what's really interesting is that the fear-mongering that existed over the last couple of decades is that it would be Christians and conservatives that would go about and attack science and destroy free speech.
00:39:08.000When in reality, it's actually more of an alliance that exists between true small L liberals and conservatives or Christians that are actually finding some agreement and differing ideas.
00:39:18.000Because I think that's a really interesting point.
00:39:20.000I mean, I can bring up a very particular thing that when Peter described, you know, how we come to knowledge, the one aspect he left out is in reformed faith.
00:39:29.000So to speak to an evangelical, the point of reformed faith was, it started, of course, with Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door.
00:39:38.000And the point was that the church, the Catholic Church, I should say, had taken, you know, had become profoundly corrupt and was controlling the interpretation of the text.
00:39:49.000And the goal was to bring that interpretation back out and to actually reform the church.
00:39:53.000That's why it's called the Reformation.
00:39:55.000And so what that did was it was, okay, we're no longer going to rely on priests and the priest caste to translate the Bible for us.
00:40:02.000Instead, we're going to create a scholarly endeavor called theology that we're now going to look into the Bible.
00:40:09.000We're going to look for, you know, understanding the text.
00:40:12.000We're going to try to find the original intent of the authors.
00:40:14.000We're going to try to figure out what this book means by the most objective standards that we can and what the writings around, I say this book, I mean the Bible, but also there are other religious writings around the Bible, other theological books.
00:40:26.000And the goal became, let's try to understand these in terms of what the authors meant.
00:40:31.000And if we take the scripture as divinely inspired, then we are actually trying to discern the objective content of the source material, which is a completely different thing than, you know, oh, well, Arrhenius said this, so therefore that's that.
00:40:45.000And then, you know, Origen said this, so there's that.
00:40:48.000And Augustine said that, you know, or Aquinas, blah, blah, blah.
00:40:52.000Or, you know, some corrupt pope was like, yeah, you can, you can buy indulgences from me.
00:40:57.000Go ahead, do whatever you want, you know, bring the gold, which is, of course, what really set Martin Luther off.
00:41:05.000And that's why you're going to find this line of agreement between folks like yourself and us, and then even these hardcore Marxists.
00:41:13.000What we have in agreement, even though we disagree about the details, is that we believe that there is an objective truth and that if we work using methodologies that are within each school of thought rigorous, that we can come to an understanding of that objective truth.
00:41:31.000So there are the people who believe in truth, and then there are the people who believe that all truth is subjective and reality is missing the point and that everything comes down to essentially political power rather than what is true about the world, whether the world is discerned through experiment, observation, or whether the world is discerned through studying the scriptures and determining what God's word was supposed to be or something like that.
00:41:58.000So that's why we find ourselves on similar footing at this point.
00:42:01.000And certainly, of course, members of any faith will fall off the wagon sometimes and become illiberal, but there is a liberal approach here.
00:42:12.000What else we have in common is the rules of engagement.
00:42:17.000Nobody's, I'm not saying you're a racist or a rapist or you beat your family or any of this stuff, which people have claimed about me repeatedly in weaponized offices of diversity, equity, inclusion, because they don't like my beliefs or they don't like what they perceive to be my beliefs.
00:42:33.000So the rules of engagement are another thing.
00:42:34.000And I want to talk about that idea of interpretation of the text too.
00:42:39.000You know, that has a long pedigree in the history of Western intellectual thought.
00:42:42.000It started with Schleiermarker and Diltai.
00:42:44.000It more or less culminated in Gautamer, who's one of my favorite and least talked about thinkers, that there is an objective interpretation of the text or as As philosopher Caputo said, it's all kind of like a radical interpretation of the text.
00:43:00.000So there's a difference between, and this is where I think it's confusing to people.
00:43:06.000Almost nobody is saying that there isn't an external world.
00:43:09.000What people are saying is that what is the relationship between power and speaking in that world?
00:43:16.000So, for example, many people are upset that Jim and I, in the Impossible Conversations book, how to have impossible conversations.
00:43:24.000We have friends who are evangelical Christians.
00:44:01.000The idea that you can peg a truth about the world, an empirical claim about the world, to somebody's race or gender or sexual orientation is demonstrably false.
00:44:16.000And that's why the arguments that Jim has gotten in, for example, on Twitter, when this just hoard of lunatics comes out defending two plus two equals five, I mean, it's so crazy, but yet they need that to destabilize and undermine their ideology.
00:44:31.000And Jim has a great podcast on New Discourses where he talks about, you know, why is it that they want two plus two to not always equal four?
00:44:42.000Well, and I think there's a, almost a need for it because I think that if they accept actually the scientific and mathematic method, then all of a sudden they accept all of the West.
00:44:52.000And here's something I always say about, well, people say, well, Sir Isaac Newton happened to be a white person.
00:45:51.000You and I are both against animal cruelty.
00:45:54.000So we can, there are commonalities that we can speak across divides and we can work to make the world better to solve our problems.
00:46:04.000But the divisive nastiness of the woke ideology makes these conversations and any kind of collaborative effort almost literally impossible.
00:46:16.000So can I ask you guys a challenging open-ended question?
00:46:19.000And thank you for being generous with your time, about 10 or 15 minutes more, if that's okay with you guys.
00:46:26.000Do you think that there is either an inevitability or it is sometimes a little bit more dangerous than not when you do, when you see this pattern of wokeism as an extension of, I hate to use these terms, but just kind of a secular atheist view.
00:46:44.000Do you think that this is a problem that you guys must do a better job of challenging and preventing it to turn into this?
00:46:51.000My point is that people are always searching for meaning in some sense.
00:46:55.000And this has given millions of people a new form of religion, a religion of wokeism.
00:47:01.000You guys, as more classical liberals and atheists, is this a concern that you guys are continually trying to call out?
00:47:07.000The same concern that I have as a Christian, that people are not going to try to engage in dominionism or trying to create a theocracy, right?
00:47:15.000That's kind of my, I try to always say that's not correct and that's not right.
00:47:19.000I hope the question is communicated clearly.
00:47:24.000So this is a complicated question because it does strike to something.
00:47:31.000You are right that people seek meaning-making structures and they seek to find understanding particularly of the world around them, their purpose within it, how they fit within it, and how to make sense of what is good and what is evil, and thus to understand themselves and their neighbors.
00:47:48.000And so this is actually a core and fundamental psychological drive that pushes people toward being religious.
00:47:55.000The psychology of religion understands this very clearly.
00:47:57.000It's one of the core things that religion satisfies for people psychologically.
00:48:01.000And so when you strip away that religious undergirding, it is plausible that people will search for something that kind of fills the void, that builds community, that has especially the drive to purpose to give life meaning and to understand good and evil.
00:48:22.000And so it is entirely possible that some of what we're seeing with the rise of wokeism, particularly along the progressive left, I mean, it metastasized for sure and erupted out of the new atheism movement, which it conquered many years before it has sprung out into the wider society.
00:48:42.000I think by 2011, the death blow had already been struck and it had fallen in its totality by 2015.
00:48:51.000So there is something there that people will often seek to find meaning-making structures.
00:48:55.000And there are some that are better than others.
00:48:57.000Joe Rogan, on his show, I talked about in terms of upward-facing religions and downward-facing religions, ones that are obsessed with God, and ones that are not obsessed, but focused on God, and ones that are obsessed with sin and trying to drive it out, which we would now identify largely as kind of a perverse version of Puritanism.
00:49:17.000And I think that what we see is actually now with the critical theory and these schools of critical thought, which is not the same as critical thinking, to be clear, that we have identified one that's playing out not in the so-called usual spiritual realm that dualistic Christians would observe, but rather in the material realm through sociology.
00:49:40.000So they're trying to see good and evil through sociology, and sociology becomes something like the text.
00:49:46.000Now, that said, there's a split because there are people who are still committed to, just like there are people of faith who are brilliant scientists, for example, and they can separate, which is a principle in a very broad sense of secularism.
00:50:01.000I don't mean legal specific secularism.
00:50:03.000I think the principle that you can set your faith aside in order to do your work is something that clearly works.
00:50:12.000There are many very brilliant, very religious scientists that find no between the two.
00:50:42.000The one aspect of religious belief is a sense of control in life.
00:50:45.000I would say that the main driver of wokeism is A sense of being able to seize control in a world that's out of control, and that's why the Trump derangement, as I will call it, has pushed it so much more vigorously is because they feel like they're completely out of control of the world.
00:51:02.000The world is not ordered the way that it should be, and it's driven to their minds, and it's driven them literally mad.
00:51:08.000And critical race theory, for example, filled in the gap and offered the explanation that they were because of all of the basically lies that Trump is a racist that were spread so vigorously in 1516.
00:51:21.000I think that's well said, Peter, I want to kind of piggyback off to that and thank you for that answer.
00:51:27.000A concern that I have is in this kind of woke emergence, and I don't think we even have found the right term to describe it.
00:51:35.000I think it's fine because we all know what we're talking about, which is just constantly pushing into a state of utter confusion and chaos and a destruction of things that all of us consider to be fundamental to a civil society of reason and dialogue and science and math and evidence-based learning.
00:51:50.000A concern I have is when young people in particular do not have an anchor of either a belief in absolute truth or a belief in shared meaning, I do think that these ideologies are more likely to take root and to grow.
00:52:06.000And that, and so as an atheist, is this something that concerns you that you think atheists have to do a better job of?
00:52:12.000Because there's not a lot of, there are some religious people that are engaging in this, but I would say it's more a religious than not.
00:52:21.000I don't know if atheists necessarily have to do a better job of it.
00:52:24.000It almost never occurs to me that I'm an atheist unless someone explicitly asks me.
00:52:29.000It's just not part of my personal identity.
00:52:32.000I think Americans have to do a better job at that.
00:52:35.000I think our educational system, which has been Lyle Astra, has done some wonderful work about how colleges of education and pre-service teachers of education have been utterly dominated by this ideology.
00:52:46.000And they get out and they start teaching kids that.
00:52:49.000So I'd like to see a return to civics education.
00:52:52.000I'm not a big fan of just blindly standing for the flag and making rules for it.
00:52:57.000I think people need to understand why liberty is important, why cognitive liberty is important.
00:53:01.000I think people need to understand what it means to vote and why that's important.
00:53:07.000And I've seen a lot of things on the right that are just totally false.
00:53:12.000You know, that they show people utterly rioting and destroying mostly in Portland now.
00:53:20.000And I hear people say, well, you know, they're Joe Biden voters.
00:53:41.000But the larger point here is we need to shore up a word we haven't used at all: our epistemology, how we know what we know, and we need to connect that.
00:53:51.000I personally believe, and maybe this is a conversation for another day.
00:53:55.000I think that one of the problems with wokeism is that at core, they do not believe their values are rationally derivable.
00:54:03.000They do not believe you can just sit down and think through and understand, you know, why is it that slavery is wrong?
00:54:28.000Christians have a built-in apology to their faith.
00:54:30.000Christians are taught to, when people ask you for your faith or your reason for belief, to answer with gentleness and kindness and articulate that.
00:54:39.000And that one passage in the Bible has been responsible for more civility and the outgrowth of more discourse.
00:54:49.000Wokeism is exactly the opposite of that.
00:54:52.000But the real danger, in my opinion, comes when people believe their when people think their beliefs are not rationally drivable.
00:54:59.000And if someone believes something they don't believe, that they're, as Jim says, an existential threat, they're a moral enemy.
00:55:07.000So I think Plato's, well, I just finally, in Plato's trashimicus, he talks about if people, if you have a different belief about reality, it could just be that your starting conditions are different than mine, and you don't have a complete picture, or you have a factual something wrong, or I have something wrong.
00:55:26.000It doesn't mean you're my enemy, it doesn't mean I should wish physical violence upon you.
00:55:34.000Yeah, I think of this completely differently.
00:55:36.000And I think it would reorient the question that you're trying to ask, Charlie.
00:55:42.000I think, and I know this is going to sound horrible, but luckily I get to pull it out of their literature because they have a paper about it.
00:56:01.000So if you think about a virus, it has, you know, whatever little proteins that attach to the receptors and then they can do whatever the hell it does.
00:56:10.000This attaches very effectively to liberal and secular entities, institutions, and structures.
00:56:18.000That's why it attached very successfully to the atheism movement, which was trying to push very hard for secularism.
00:56:24.000It was naturally progressive by its orientation.
00:56:30.000It injected its DNA very quickly and it poisoned the thing and killed it.
00:56:34.000And the cell burst open and more viruses rushed out into society to find new things to infect.
00:56:39.000It, however, can infect other things, whether the virus mutates a little bit.
00:56:43.000So, for example, my friends in the Southern Baptist Convention are up against this thing, Resolution 9, that has tried to bring critical race theory and intersectionality into the not tried to, it has brought it into the Southern Baptist Convention explicitly as an analytical tool subordinate to scripture.
00:57:00.000And you see this within the several of the different faiths now.
00:57:05.000The Presbyterians have it within some of their branches.
00:57:08.000The Catholics have it within some of the liberation theologists have had it for a long time.
00:57:12.000Liberation theology is one of the major ways that it grew in especially the global south, which led to it getting, I think that's what led to it getting to Palo Ferrere, which led to it taking over education across the Western world.
00:57:28.000It's all a matter of figuring out what language.
00:57:30.000So you can look, for example, and you can see the ways that some of these very woke, just, I mean, absolutely unrepentantly intersectional, say, leaders at Southern Theological, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, I can name some, Matt Hall, Curtis Woods, Jarvis Williams.
00:57:52.000I mean, they are unrepentantly woke, unrepentantly teaching critical race theory and intersectionality at the largest Southern Baptist Seminary, which is a conservative seminary.
00:58:02.000And so, and they do it by attaching it to, oh, well, we can't understand Jesus unless we understand the lens of oppression or something like that, because he was, you know, a brown Middle Easterner.
00:58:11.000He obviously was kind of in a sense the epitome of oppression as he walked on the part of Earth.
00:58:16.000So if we're going to understand the gospel, we have to understand it through a liturgy of lament and so on and so forth.
00:58:23.000So it can attach to anything and pervert it.
00:58:27.000And it's all a matter of how people find a way to resist it.
00:58:32.000And meaning is one aspect of it, but I think it's actually, I read Shelby Steele's White Guilt recently.
00:58:38.000And I think Shelby Steele has the missing ingredient that people aren't latching onto, which is guilt and shame.
00:58:46.000It's digging into people's guilt and shame for these so-called systems of oppression that were very real 50 or 100 or 200 years ago, but are much less real now.
00:58:55.000But it's able to manipulate that guilt.
00:58:57.000And that's sort of the receptors that it is able to get into.
00:59:02.000And for whatever reason, liberals and progressives, meaning people on the left, are much more susceptible to it.
00:59:08.000Yeah, I think the way it's willing to stand up for it.
00:59:15.000This is why conservatives, while they're not immune to the woke virus, why they're less susceptible, is because conservatives, I live in the Southeast, so I spend a lot of time with conservatives.
00:59:47.000I think that the way that I perceive Jim's talking about this, I think the single word summary of that is parestatize.
00:59:55.000I think that this is, it paresthatizes the liberal mind.
00:59:59.000I also want to say that if you have someone whose mind has been parestatized by the intersectional virus or who's woke, the response to that is not to be upset with them.
01:00:10.000I know really, really smart people who have been hoodwinked by this, who've fallen to this.
01:00:16.000I think it preys upon liberal impulses of justice.
01:00:23.000But if somebody, if you have a friend or you know somebody who's woke or that happened to them, the way to deal with that is not to be angry at them because they should know better.
01:00:36.000And I think that's you're seeing a lot.
01:00:38.000Like I've personally lost three friendships as a result of this.
01:00:41.000And these are like legitimately smart people.
01:00:45.000I do think that there's something, Jim has called it in the past, correct me if I'm wrong, Jim, a universal solvent.
01:00:51.000It just corrodes and destroys everything.
01:01:58.000But the world has told us that speech is actually the problem.
01:02:01.000And this is something that's been really interesting for me to learn is the idea of Socratic dialogue is actually completely under attack by the critical race theorists or the woke people because they actually don't care as much about the fact that you and I think things that are different.
01:02:18.000They actually think the process of dialogue and being able to is the problem.
01:02:52.000Basically, the Socratic method has it starts in wonder.
01:02:55.000Somebody wonders something about something, and then you put forth a hypothesis, like what is justice, and then someone answers the hypothesis.
01:03:03.000And the next stage, they say, you know, justice is like Plato's Republic, justice is paying your debts.
01:03:08.000And then you have the chords, the elinkus, it's the back and forth.
01:03:12.000It's like the old Lauren order when the police would go and they'd find the detectives, and the detectives would go to the captain, and the captain would argue against them to see if it withstood scrutiny, then it could go to court.
01:03:25.000They either have no case or they have to go back out.
01:03:28.000And that's the next stage of the Socratic method, which is to revise your hypothesis and then ultimately, which is not in the Socratic method, but it's act accordingly.
01:03:37.000You'd want to act according to what the reasons, what the dictates of reason showed you.
01:03:43.000And the way that you do that is not by engaging people who already agree with you, it's by engaging people who don't agree with you.
01:03:50.000And that's also just parenthetically what we're missing in the academy right now.
01:03:54.000We need intellectual diversity where people hear all debate, argumentation, et cetera, et cetera, and where we don't have that.
01:04:04.000The Socratic method is, in my opinion, my lettered and well-considered opinion at this point, it's the best way to come to moral knowledge.
01:04:13.000It's not the best way to come to memorize things or come to knowledge about the, you know, the factual situations, how what's the speed of light in a vacuum, or how 9.8 meters per second squared is how something falls, how fast something falls.
01:04:28.000But if you want to clarify your ideas and work out tricky moral concepts, okay, but you can't have a Socratic method, you can't have a dialectic, you can't have an elinkus under woke ideology because the purpose is not to find the truth because they believe they already have the truth.
01:04:45.000If you already have the truth, then anybody who wants to question or challenge that is a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, et cetera, et cetera.
01:04:53.000And I think that way of conceptualizing or understanding the problem, dialogue and discourse itself, particularly between people who, at this point, I'm hated so much it doesn't make any difference anyway.
01:05:29.000I mean, it's very important to understand that, as you said, Charlie, the ideology we're speaking about, the woke ideology, does not value dialogue and discourse because it sees them as part of the hegemonic power structure.
01:06:02.000There's not enough women at these things.
01:06:04.000So enough identity factors haven't been historically and often aren't, I guess, represented to have all viewpoints being brought to the table because they believe that identity and viewpoint is the same thing.
01:06:17.000But they take that further and actually believe that this process is a, the Peters just described, is a product of the Western culture, and that because it's a product of the Western culture, it disadvantages people who don't subscribe to it that they won't do as well.
01:06:36.000So, you could imagine, you know, if you wanted to pull a very kind of stereotypical picture, is that you have somebody that, you know, you pull up, you have a distinguished professor, and then you're like, oh, well, he's going to have to learn about the black perspective or whatever.
01:06:48.000And they put, you know, some guy from the hood or whatever up there.
01:06:52.000And it's like, well, he hasn't learned all the correct ways to say things.
01:06:57.000And he doesn't cross his legs and stroke his beard the right way.
01:07:00.000He doesn't have all the right signs and he doesn't look and sound as intelligent.
01:07:03.000You know, you have tons of films, in fact, that speak to this exact concept that the underappreciated intellect still knows lots and lots of things.
01:07:14.000But they believe that the system, like when Pete says, oh, we're going to have a dialectic, they would say that the dialectic was itself constructed in a way that favors white people and men to do better and other people to do worse, who obviously apparently have to not use the same, they can't like learn it.
01:07:31.000I don't know what their racist thinking is.
01:07:34.000So they don't actually value the mechanism.
01:07:40.000So they are unwilling to want to participate.
01:07:42.000But more, even more importantly than that, they believe, like when you and I are talking, this is what I'm going to hear for the next, whenever you drop this, and I bet you'll hear it too to some degree, but for the next, however many weeks after this, and probably two years from now at some point, somebody will still throw it at me like, James says he's not a conservative and he talked to Charlie Kirk, ah, turning point, ah, you know, and that's what's going to happen.
01:08:04.000And you're going to be like, what are you doing talking to a liberal atheist?
01:08:07.000I know this because I talk to these Southern Baptist guys I'm friends with, and they're like, you put an atheist on there.
01:08:13.000And so what they believe is that when people communicate with one another with differing views, whoever has more power in that situation is using the person with less power.
01:08:25.000And the dominant ideology is being promoted.
01:08:30.000And say, let's say it's you that has a dominant perspective.
01:08:33.000Now I've become a tool for Charlie Kirk.
01:08:36.000I'm lending power to Charlie Kirk's terrible ideology or whatever it is.
01:08:40.000And therefore, I'm giving my endorsement to your worldview.
01:08:44.000Whereas I could literally say every third sentence in this whole thing, I disagree with you about everything.
01:08:49.000And it would still be the case that I'm now lending my status to your brand and thus helping you prepare put out those dialogues.
01:09:00.000So when we saw when we saw Christina Hoff Summers try to have the debates with Roxanne Gay, so they're both feminists.
01:09:09.000Christina Hoff Summers, at the time, maybe she still works for AEI.
01:09:14.000She's a registered, or was at least a registered Democrat.
01:09:17.000It's not like she's like some crazy out there Republican or whatever, but she's got a different perspective than the radical feminist perspective that Roxanne Gay has.
01:09:24.000And you just saw Roxanne Gay almost, if you watch the video back, it's a total mess.
01:09:30.000She just almost refuses to participate because for her to participate in that would be her being involved in those discourses.
01:09:37.000And they refuse to be involved in the wrong discourses.
01:09:54.000So the discourses, the ways that we think and talk about things are the conveyors of power.
01:09:59.000So their objective, the woke view of the world, is that we have to purge the discourses of all things that shouldn't be said and all ways of thinking that shouldn't be thought.
01:10:09.000And thus, all people who think that way can't be given a platform, can't be given space, and can't be given social status or social capital with which they can put out their views and maintain the discourses.
01:10:57.000Without any question, Jim's already laughing.
01:11:01.000Without any question at all, they have been correct historically.
01:11:05.000In the symposium, Socrates threw the women and the slaves out of the room.
01:11:09.000There is no question about it that there have been historical injustices where people have been disallowed from participating in dialogues, disallowed from public debates.
01:11:57.000The problem is we've seen disrupting these events come down as a virtue.
01:12:02.000You know, I'll do events at Portland State, for example, the James DeMore event or with Christine.
01:12:06.000Jim just mentioned Christina Hoff Summers.
01:12:08.000I did one with Brett and Heather and Christine Hoff Summers at PSU.
01:12:12.000And a tenured professor stands up and starts freaking out at me, starts screaming in the middle of our panel discussion and saying, I'm part of this discussion.
01:12:21.000No, you are not part of this discussion.
01:12:51.000So, but no, the question, the operative question should be, how did things get better?
01:12:55.000And it got better through more speech and more dialogue.
01:12:58.000And I'm afraid, and I've seen this happen when I visit universities.
01:13:01.000If you remove speech and you remove differing ideas, or if you remove cross-examination, I think we as human beings are a lot more basic and we give ourselves credit for it.
01:13:27.000I just, I think that it's only going to be more pervasive and more dramatic.
01:13:32.000And that's, that's my fear is that if human beings are not allowed to discuss ideas and be foolishly wrong, be foolishly wrong at times and be brought back into a vein of normalcy or reasonability, people will go pick up a stick.
01:13:46.000That's just the way that I think that we're hardworking.
01:13:48.000And the main punch home that I want to make on that comment is if someone has a different belief than you do, let friends be wrong.
01:13:58.000In fact, and if all of your friends think exactly what you do, and if you only invite people on who believe exactly what you do, man, and I question your podcast, right?
01:14:09.000I question those people who only have friends who believe exactly what they do.
01:14:13.000And if someone believes something that's a little different, they have such demands for ideological purity, perhaps because they have insecurities about their own belief systems, that they just discard those people as friends.
01:14:25.000That's a huge, that's a very, that problem has become acute in this age in which we're living.
01:14:32.000What you guys have articulated is a very interesting alliance that I think is going to be probably the most important to defend civil society as we know it, which is those people that believe in dialogue and difference of opinion and different ideas, and those people that don't, that just think that's just an instrument of power and oppression.
01:14:49.000And I think that your point about Martin Luther is very interesting because Protestant Christianity and reason-based enlightenment, I don't want to say secularism, but let's just say reason-based enlightenment thinking is actually their perfect partners in this fight.
01:15:05.000I published a piece called The Great Realignment, Culture War 2.0, and I talk about how divergent forces, like one of the this is talk about a mind blow.
01:15:43.000And thank you again for taking the time and being so generous.
01:15:46.000I know people are really going to benefit from this.
01:15:48.000So first, James, and then Peter, any other closing thoughts?
01:15:50.000I would, I mean, probably the people listening to your podcast are already aware, but a lot of people are not aware.
01:15:56.000I keep kind of running into this, kind of keep running into this.
01:16:00.000This problem is much more significant than I think people, a lot of people realize.
01:16:06.000And I'm not saying that we have to go out and like scaremonger or fearmonger or get people worked up, but we are actually seeing in real time an ideology installing itself, you know, as everybody's now aware, thanks to the president, even throughout the federal government.
01:16:26.000It's throughout all of our education system.
01:16:50.000But this is actually that grade of threat.
01:16:54.000And so opening up the dialogue, and thanks to the president for taking a step that will definitely open a huge dialogue about things like critical race theory, becoming somewhat informed about these ideas and becoming at least conversant in what they actually believe, not forcing like, oh, well, that would be ridiculous if they believe that.
01:17:15.000So I'll reinterpret it into this softer thing.
01:17:20.000If you want to go to new discourses or you want to read cynical theories, go read those, get to build a bridge to them.
01:17:26.000But read their primary texts and get to know what they actually think about the world because it's had the luxury of spending 50 years under the radar festering.
01:17:37.000And sunlight is a very powerful and very necessary disinfectant.
01:18:18.000The lesson, if I were to say, from the series, Chernobyl, that lots of people saw that told the story of Chernobyl, was that it was the inability to speak up about something going wrong when they saw it that led to a catastrophe of, you know, just unbelievable scale that we're still talking about as like a paradigm of catastrophe.
01:18:40.000That's what you're going to have under widespread critical race theory as well.
01:18:45.000Something that's going wrong that would possibly be able to be declared as white supremacists to call it out is not going to get called out.
01:18:53.000And so you're going to have these same very dangerous dynamics within the United States federal government, within our education, with it, you name it.
01:19:01.000And if some companies decide they want to take this on and screw themselves over and collapse, hey, that's capitalism, baby.
01:19:08.000If our federal government does, however, or our state governments or our local governments do, that's another matter.
01:19:13.000Those are accountable to the people who are spending our money to do it.
01:19:17.000And it's very important to realize that that's a very dangerous threat.
01:19:32.000We need to get lawyers involved even and sue.
01:19:36.000And we need to have policies like what the president has just done to try to safeguard American values of equality before the law, for example, throughout all of the levels of our institutions.
01:19:51.000Yeah, I want to take from low res to high res one thing Jim said, which is we published a piece in the Wall Street Journal a while ago.
01:19:59.000You really need to believe these people when they say things.
01:20:03.000I don't mean you need to believe that it's true.
01:20:06.000I mean you need to believe that they believe it.
01:20:08.000And I think one of the problems confronting us right now is that the things that they believe are not only just demonstrably false, they're so absurd that people will think, well, they don't actually believe that.
01:21:02.000Let me jump in real quick because something they need, your listeners need to tell their liberal friends, because I don't think a lot of liberals are listening to you.
01:21:19.000And that's the thing is I want a return of liberalism.
01:21:23.000I grew up in America where I was told to agree to disagree.
01:21:27.000I went to a public high school in the northwest suburbs of Chicago is 53% English is a second language, so majority Hispanic school.
01:21:34.000And we did not look at each other based on skin color.
01:21:36.000I know that sounds weird, but the black kids didn't meet with the black kids in the cafeteria, like that nonsensical pile of garbage, that book that is being distributed.
01:21:44.000It's actually, we just looked at each other as other human beings in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade.
01:21:49.000And now eight years later, I'm looking back at the very same high school I went to with BLM flags.
01:21:55.000The white kids have to atone for something they didn't do.
01:21:57.000I said, this is a regression, the likes of which that most people cannot comprehend.
01:22:02.000And human beings are not wired for this kind of accelerated change this quickly.
01:22:06.000And the person with the most clenched fist and the loudest voice, unfortunately, is going to win in this dialogue because most decent people are not equipped.
01:22:13.000Because as soon as you say racist, people run away.
01:22:15.000Oh, you're racist if you dare disagree.
01:22:18.000They don't have the capacity for that kind of disagreement.
01:23:21.000I'm not doing this to be some kind of hedgemon to tell people how to use words, but it's absolutely essential when you hear the word equity, particularly in an educational context, what do they mean?
01:23:33.000Most people think it just, oh, because it has a positive emotional valence.
01:24:37.000But if you want to do one single thing to figure this out, it would be to read Jim and Helen's book, Helen Pluckrose from England, called Cynical Theories.
01:24:46.000In Cynical Theories, it is a master's degree crash course in all of this stuff.
01:24:52.000And I don't know, am I allowed to say, Jim, about the NYT, the New York Times thing?
01:24:57.000I mean, you can say whatever you want.
01:25:01.000It hasn't, I mean, time hasn't ended, but you can say whatever you want about it.
01:25:06.000Are you meaning that they did not put us on the bestseller?
01:25:09.000Is that because they can edit this out?
01:25:54.000They said, because we emailed and asked, they said they're still watching it.
01:25:58.000Hopefully, I've been there, done that.
01:26:02.000I have landed on the New York Times list, but only through, and they totally, it should have been much higher than it was, but they play incredible games over there.
01:26:11.000But they wouldn't want to platform you because that is actually giving credence to your book.
01:26:16.000So they think that math and numbers are just a construct of Western civilization.
01:26:21.000So the numbers don't mean anything for them.
01:26:23.000It's just an instrument of their conversation.
01:26:25.000It's two equals three for my book and two plus two equals five for their books.
01:27:30.000I'm saying this just happened to be very pressing, but I'd love to have you guys back on.
01:27:33.000It's been a real thrill and I love discussing big ideas.
01:27:37.000And I think that we need to have more conversations with people where you don't specifically align on every single issue, but we certainly align on this one.
01:27:44.000And I think this exercise in dialogue is actually evidence of that.
01:28:04.000Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
01:28:06.000Please email me your thoughts on this episode and also our sister episode, Corporations vs. America, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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