The Charlie Kirk Show - 2 Liberal Atheists and the Virus of ‘Wokism’ w- Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay

00:00:00.000 Thank you for listening to this podcast one production.

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00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:09.000 Today's a real special episode.

00:00:10.000 We have two atheist liberals who I have a lot of respect for.

00:00:14.000 It's a super fun conversation.

00:00:15.000 You guys are really going to enjoy it.

00:00:17.000 We explore some very big ideas.

00:00:19.000 You're going to want to listen to the whole thing through.

00:00:21.000 It's Peter Bogogian and James Lindsay, who co-authored a book, Having Impossible Conversations.

00:00:27.000 And James Lindsay also wrote Cynical Race Theory.

00:00:31.000 We talk about that in so much more.

00:00:32.000 We talk about critical race theory, BLM Incorporated.

00:00:35.000 We talk about Christianity. 0.94

00:00:36.000 You guys are not going to want to miss it.

00:00:38.000 It's one of my favorite conversations of people that should be disagreeing with each other, but actually have a very mutually respectful conversation.

00:00:46.000 And that gives me hope for our country that these conversations can exist and we need to have more of them.

00:00:51.000 Email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:55.000 This episode was actually done on Labor Day.

00:00:58.000 We work on Labor Day to give you the content that I know that you guys want and you need.

00:01:02.000 And it's made possible by those of you that support us at charliekirk.com slash support, charliekirk.com slash support.

00:01:11.000 Peter Bogogian, James Lindsay are here.

00:01:14.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:01:15.000 Here we go.

00:01:16.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:18.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:01:20.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:23.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:27.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:28.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:29.000 His 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.

00:01:37.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:46.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:49.000 Hey, everybody.

00:01:50.000 Welcome to this very special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:53.000 I 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.

00:02:03.000 And it says a very practical guide.

00:02:06.000 And 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.

00:02:13.000 However, I think we can both agree that there is a crisis happening in our country, especially in higher education.

00:02:20.000 So 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.

00:02:28.000 What do you mean by that?

00:02:29.000 I think so.

00:02:31.000 I think that we have extraordinarily serious problems.

00:02:35.000 The engines of knowledge production are compromised.

00:02:38.000 We 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.

00:02:52.000 They have tenure, which means they have a job for life.

00:02:56.000 They control university policies.

00:02:58.000 They've, for example, bias response teams, offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

00:03:04.000 And 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.

00:03:14.000 And I'm quite sure public records show that, don't quote me on this, but I think it's $137,000.

00:03:20.000 Meanwhile, the university has, the president of Portland State University is spending $1.5 million to root out systemic racism at Portland State University.

00:03:32.000 There is no racism at Portland State University.

00:03:34.000 It's the least racist place on earth.

00:03:36.000 But when we get trapped in these ideological mindsets, it's difficult to break free.

00:03:41.000 So 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.

00:03:57.000 So James, let's pick up right there.

00:04:00.000 I would imagine that you do not subscribe or believe in critical race theory.

00:04:05.000 We've been talking about this quite a lot on our podcast.

00:04:07.000 Can you walk us through what critical race theory is and the danger that it presents to a neoliberal Western society?

00:04:14.000 Yeah, 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.

00:04:32.000 In other words, we've got two critical theories here that both came out of what's called the Frankfurt School line of thought.

00:04:37.000 The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is what's often called as neo-Marxist thought.

00:04:43.000 So you have this very radical way to think about identity, very radical way to think about law.

00:04:48.000 And 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.

00:04:59.000 And 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.

00:05:10.000 Nothing significant changed.

00:05:12.000 And 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.

00:05:26.000 It took on postmodern theory in the 1990s following its second major progenitor, whose name is Kimberly Crenshaw.

00:05:34.000 Kimberly Crenshaw was a student of Derek Bell, both at Harvard Law.

00:05:37.000 Derek Bell was the one who started critical race theory.

00:05:41.000 Ultimately, with our help, Kimberly Crenshaw also introduced intersectionality.

00:05:45.000 And this changed the view rather than focusing on material institutional racism as Derek Bell did, to switching over to this idea of systemic racism.

00:05:54.000 So critical race theory is the view that racism is systemic.

00:05:57.000 That means it pervades everything.

00:05:59.000 It 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.

00:06:14.000 So that anywhere you see a racial difference in outcomes, systemic racism is the explanation for how that must have happened.

00:06:20.000 And it's the critical race theorist's job to look for that.

00:06:24.000 It 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.

00:06:35.000 So 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?

00:06:49.000 So it assumes racism is involved in every situation and its goal is to uncover it.

00:06:55.000 It 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.

00:07:12.000 James, I want to compliment you.

00:07:13.000 Your Twitter account is terrific.

00:07:14.000 I've been mentioning newdiscourses.com on a couple other podcasts.

00:07:18.000 I think actually yesterday I mentioned it.

00:07:20.000 This graphic you have on your Twitter is terrific where you said 11 divisive tenets of critical race theory.

00:07:26.000 Racism exists in both traditional and modern forms and it goes through.

00:07:29.000 And 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. 0.60

00:07:48.000 And 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. 0.50

00:07:56.000 Do you think that this kind of idea has stemmed out of the university?

00:07:58.000 And is that an oversimplification?

00:08:01.000 Just the way I described it, is that accurate?

00:08:03.000 Because I've used that description, and some people in BLM and critical race theory say, no, that's not true.

00:08:07.000 It's not totalitarian.

00:08:08.000 It's actually pluralistic.

00:08:10.000 Is that a true description?

00:08:11.000 Jim, I'll let you take that one.

00:08:14.000 No, 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.

00:08:26.000 So, you know, two plus two equals five if you change the meaning of five, apparently.

00:08:30.000 Right.

00:08:31.000 That's what we've seen all summer.

00:08:32.000 But yeah, critical race theory is pluralistic if you change the definition of pluralism.

00:08:37.000 Critical race theory is unrepentantly multicultural.

00:08:40.000 It is not actually pluralistic.

00:08:41.000 There's a distinct difference there.

00:08:43.000 As for whether it came out of the university, 85% yes, 15% no.

00:08:49.000 So 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. 0.94

00:08:54.000 It came out of the activist movements of the 1960s and 1968, blah, black power. 0.87

00:08:59.000 And 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. 1.00

00:09:11.000 He went to one of the University of Californias anyway.

00:09:14.000 So 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.

00:09:35.000 So 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.

00:09:54.000 His primary student was Angela Davis.

00:09:56.000 She's obviously a scholar as well as a radical.

00:09:59.000 She's a big name happening right now with BLM.

00:10:02.000 She's very intricate in what's going on there.

00:10:04.000 She also was very integral in teaching the generation of black feminists who went on to form critical race theory and intersectionality.

00:10:13.000 So we could name people like Patricia Collins, we could name Kimberly Crenshaw, Bell Hooks, Patricia Williams.

00:10:19.000 There 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.

00:10:28.000 So you have the same carryover.

00:10:30.000 So the combination that Marcuse talked about in 1960, what was that before, 1964, I think, early 1960s anyway, for One Dimensional Man.

00:10:42.000 The fusion between that liberal intelligentsia and then the radical fringe of leftist fringe.

00:10:50.000 I mean, these are people outright supporting Shea Guevara and stuff like that, and cheering on Castro and Cuba.

00:10:57.000 It's just that's who we're talking about with the outsiders. 0.70

00:11:00.000 And then mixing that with aggrieved racial minorities.

00:11:03.000 You 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.

00:11:13.000 But the incubator for this was Harvard Law.

00:11:16.000 I mean, you don't get more academia than Harvard Law.

00:11:19.000 Yeah, and Derek Bell's work is key.

00:11:21.000 Jim, 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.

00:11:32.000 Perhaps we should spend a moment talking about that before we go on.

00:11:36.000 That would be helpful.

00:11:37.000 I sometimes use them interchangeably and I've been criticized for doing so.

00:11:40.000 And I'm not alone in that.

00:11:42.000 But I would screw this up, man.

00:11:44.000 I'll tell you.

00:11:45.000 Yeah, this is.

00:11:46.000 Well, good.

00:11:47.000 Tell us why we're wrong.

00:11:50.000 Yeah, this is really important.

00:11:51.000 Uh, Helen Pluckrose, oh, sorry, I think there was like Helen Pluckrose, the author of Cynical Theories with Jim, explains this in detail.

00:12:02.000 So, postmodernism is, as Leotard said, a skepticism of metanarratives.

00:12:09.000 A metanarrative is a grand overarching explanation of something.

00:12:13.000 Like Christianity would be a metanarrative, it would be a story, a story of underneath and beneath the stories.

00:12:21.000 So, 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.

00:12:33.000 We're situated in our own individual psychology, we're situated culturally, socially, geopolitically, linguistically, etc.

00:12:42.000 So, Marxism is a metanarrative.

00:12:48.000 Marxism 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.

00:13:03.000 You cannot have both a metanarrative and an incredulity or a hyperskepticism toward those metanarratives.

00:13:11.000 So, Peter, can I ask a question really quick?

00:13:14.000 Because 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.

00:13:30.000 Do 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?

00:13:40.000 I mean, there's some overlap, if I might jump in.

00:13:42.000 Sorry about my lag there for a moment.

00:13:45.000 So, 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.

00:14:04.000 And so, he saw this as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

00:14:07.000 There's a very economic splitting.

00:14:08.000 The bourgeoisie were people who had economic elite status, and the proletariat were the working class who did not.

00:14:14.000 And he saw them pitted against each other in conflict for status, power, and opportunity in society.

00:14:21.000 What you had happen was his vision didn't work.

00:14:24.000 He 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.

00:14:38.000 That's his vision of history with like kind of the capital H.

00:14:41.000 The neo-Marxists came along in the 1920s to try to figure out why that didn't happen.

00:14:46.000 And they were like, oh, he got it all wrong.

00:14:48.000 Let's talk about how culture maintains an ideology within culture maintains the stratification of society.

00:14:57.000 And so, that's where you have the actual shift to culture.

00:15:00.000 But the neo-Gramsci, right?

00:15:02.000 Antonio Gramsci, who piloted it.

00:15:05.000 Gramsci was one of the key philosophers.

00:15:07.000 Georg Lukac was another.

00:15:10.000 Then you pick up Walter Benjamin, Theodore Ardorno, Max Forkheimer.

00:15:14.000 They end up leading into Herbert Marcusa, our friend that we just talked about a moment ago, connecting to Angela Davis and so on.

00:15:21.000 So they were very critical of Marxism, but in a particular way.

00:15:25.000 They 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.

00:15:55.000 And they're going to try to affect the communist revolution by agitating in multiple dimensions of culture that way.

00:16:01.000 The postmodernists actually were much more pessimistic.

00:16:05.000 The postmodernists, you could say it's a rebranding of communism, but the, you know, you talk about Michelle Foucault, Jacques Derrida.

00:16:11.000 I mean, Jack Derrida wrote a book called The Specter of Marxism, and he's talking about how the thing is dead.

00:16:16.000 And they were super pessimistic.

00:16:19.000 They're not classified as neo-Marxists philosophically.

00:16:22.000 They're classified as post-Marxists.

00:16:24.000 So they were themselves communist in orientation and they were big supporters actually of Mao.

00:16:30.000 And they helped to educate Pol Pot, but they were not themselves all-out Marxist.

00:16:37.000 They had lost faith that Marxism or anything else could work. 0.81

00:16:40.000 You could actually kind of see them as existentialists who had gone political or something like that and gave up on everything.

00:16:48.000 But 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.

00:17:11.000 And so it has lots of elements of that.

00:17:13.000 And it is somewhat Marxist.

00:17:16.000 It's more focused on identity than class. 0.77

00:17:20.000 But depending on the individual that you talk to, I mean, you see like the BLM people come out and say, we're trained Marxists.

00:17:26.000 They don't say neo-Marxists. 0.52

00:17:27.000 They don't say postmodernists.

00:17:28.000 They say Marxist.

00:17:30.000 And 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.

00:17:37.000 So there's a lot of Marxism still there.

00:17:39.000 And a lot of people who are Marx-ish, I would say, but not Marxist.

00:17:44.000 That's a good way to put it.

00:17:46.000 Are usually kind of fellow travelers with that.

00:17:48.000 But if you find like the actual, Peter and I are now friends to some degree with people at the World Socialist website.

00:17:55.000 And I say website because they put a space between it.

00:17:57.000 I think it's just adorable.

00:17:59.000 So these are these are card-carrying Trotskyites and they hate woke.

00:18:03.000 They hate it.

00:18:04.000 They see it as a theft of the left from the working class.

00:18:14.000 Their thing that they wrote about it all is that it's supposed to be workers of the world unite, not races of the world divide.

00:18:21.000 And they are super not cool about it.

00:18:24.000 It's supposed to be class consciousness transcends racial or other identity factors.

00:18:28.000 And they are quick to point out that people like, say, Nicole Hannah Jones at the New York Times are not exactly working class people.

00:18:36.000 This is a very bourgeois philosophy.

00:18:39.000 Yeah, that's sorry to interject.

00:18:41.000 That's very interesting.

00:18:41.000 I'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.

00:19:08.000 Sorry, I didn't mean to interject.

00:19:10.000 Can you finish that point?

00:19:11.000 Well, I mean, that's just generally it.

00:19:13.000 The Marxists, like the all-out Marxists, I mean, they were the first ones to drop the big expose on the 1619 project.

00:19:19.000 They're very much against the woke movement.

00:19:22.000 And they don't like President Trump, but they're certainly not carrying water for the woke.

00:19:28.000 I mean, they're going after the woke as hard as they're going after anybody else.

00:19:31.000 And that's a very difficult thing.

00:19:32.000 I just want to unpack a few things that Jim said there.

00:19:35.000 That'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.

00:19:54.000 And it's simply not true.

00:19:56.000 It's just factually incorrect.

00:19:59.000 To defend conservatives, though, sometimes it's very hard to differentiate, though.

00:20:02.000 Sometimes they'll use the terms interchangeably and not as accurately as they could.

00:20:08.000 For example, the BLM people will say they're trained Marxists. 0.77

00:20:11.000 Adding neo-Marxists, you guys will understand that. 0.99

00:20:14.000 Most of the country won't understand that distinction.

00:20:17.000 But I think it's a fair point.

00:20:19.000 So 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.

00:20:40.000 And so they become kind of that new bourgeois class.

00:20:44.000 And that's why they keep saying real communism has never been tried.

00:20:47.000 It's always the party sets itself up.

00:20:49.000 It's the new elites and screws everybody over.

00:20:51.000 Well, 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.

00:21:01.000 It'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.

00:21:11.000 This is, I mean, you can't learn their academic jargon without going to college.

00:21:15.000 That's not working class stuff. 0.51

00:21:17.000 You can't figure out what the hell they're talking about without. 0.99

00:21:23.000 Do you think that the average working class person has time or energy to memorize 400 people's pronouns? 0.89

00:21:29.000 Of course they don't. 1.00

00:21:31.000 This 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.

00:21:42.000 This is something only people with leisure time can possibly do.

00:21:46.000 And we'll call it luxury beliefs, but it's people who have access to luxury who can learn and engage in this stuff.

00:21:46.000 Yes.

00:21:52.000 Yeah.

00:21:53.000 And 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.

00:22:13.000 We know the nucleation point.

00:22:15.000 It happens in certain departments.

00:22:17.000 That spreads to other departments in the university.

00:22:22.000 We can call that, for lack of a better word right now, wokeism.

00:22:25.000 People have been learning this.

00:22:27.000 Well, they've been learning this in cynical theories, Jim and Helen talk about.

00:22:33.000 They call it applied postmodernism.

00:22:36.000 This has had decades to develop in the university.

00:22:39.000 People have been indoctrinated into this ideology.

00:22:42.000 They get out of the university.

00:22:44.000 They go into their jobs.

00:22:45.000 They take the same ideology.

00:22:47.000 You know, and then five years ago, it was trigger warning, safe spaces, and microaggressions.

00:22:53.000 Now that's metastasized.

00:22:55.000 And what you're seeing is that people acting upon these moral impulses get their ideas from the university.

00:23:04.000 Right.

00:23:04.000 And 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.

00:23:11.000 One is conflict theory, the idea that society split into social groups with different access to resources and they're in conflict with one another.

00:23:19.000 That's continuous.

00:23:20.000 That's still happening.

00:23:21.000 The 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.

00:23:33.000 That's continuous with Marx also.

00:23:35.000 And 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.

00:23:48.000 You find them seeing that other people have something that they want that they don't, and it's not their fault.

00:23:53.000 It's not that no matter how hard they worked, they couldn't possibly get it.

00:23:57.000 They couldn't possibly pull themselves up.

00:23:59.000 And so that envy is underlying as well.

00:24:02.000 And that's continuous back to Marx.

00:24:04.000 And I would add one.

00:24:06.000 I actually love your opinion on this, Peter.

00:24:08.000 You might totally disagree.

00:24:09.000 There's also a state of human beings in nature.

00:24:11.000 It'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.

00:24:21.000 Would you agree with that?

00:24:22.000 Is that another add of a direct line?

00:24:25.000 I would agree to that.

00:24:28.000 And I would also say this is what happens when you have biology denialism.

00:24:33.000 This is what happens when you attack evolutionary biology, et cetera.

00:24:38.000 Then, the underpinning, there can be no possible genetic explanation or evolutionary explanation for things.

00:24:46.000 It has to all be social.

00:24:48.000 And I think you see a difference in this in the left and the right.

00:24:51.000 And 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.

00:25:02.000 But 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.

00:25:10.000 That the denial of biology, particularly evolutionary biology, is just not born out of any evidence.

00:25:18.000 It's an ideological position that people take.

00:25:21.000 Yeah, that's well put.

00:25:23.000 So, James, can you?

00:25:25.000 I think it'd be helpful actually to take a step back.

00:25:27.000 Can you introduce just your worldview and how would you describe yourself?

00:25:32.000 I actually think it adds more credibility to the prior statements you said.

00:25:35.000 Sure, sure, sure.

00:25:36.000 Especially for our audience.

00:25:38.000 Yeah, and then I'll add to the Rousseauian view there because there's an important point that we should get into.

00:25:44.000 So, my background, I have a PhD in mathematics.

00:25:47.000 I have never in my entire life voted for a Republican for anything.

00:25:54.000 That includes having voted enthusiastically for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

00:26:00.000 I don't identify as terribly interested in politics or even as political.

00:26:05.000 My Twitter bio says that I'm apolitical.

00:26:08.000 But if I take any of those tests, I land pretty far to the left and pretty deep into libertarian territory.

00:26:13.000 So, my libertarian friends out there, I like to tell you, kind of poking in the ribs a little, but more serious.

00:26:20.000 I'm a minarchist who believes in a much bigger min than you do.

00:26:24.000 So, I do believe government should be as small as possible.

00:26:28.000 I just think it has to be fairly large.

00:26:30.000 And so, I'm also an atheist.

00:26:34.000 I do not believe in God, and I have not believed in God in many years.

00:26:38.000 I was raised Catholic, and it's like an atheist joke at this point.

00:26:42.000 You know, raised Catholic, whoops, now I'm an atheist.

00:26:47.000 So, yeah, my position in terms of who I am socio-politically, I'm not conservative.

00:26:56.000 I 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.

00:27:11.000 So, I have a deep respect for conservative thought and just happen to not align with many points within it, although I see it.

00:27:20.000 So 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.

00:27:35.000 So if that's what you were looking for.

00:27:36.000 No, that's very helpful.

00:27:37.000 I think it adds to the credibility of your critique prior.

00:27:40.000 Can 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?

00:27:50.000 I 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.

00:28:00.000 Can you build on that, please?

00:28:02.000 So, 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.

00:28:09.000 You 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.

00:28:16.000 And they said it kind of in this negative sense.

00:28:18.000 And I turned to my wife and I said, that's bad.

00:28:22.000 That'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.

00:28:31.000 So there's that aspect for sure.

00:28:34.000 I saw the word adultification the other day for the first time in the social justice literature.

00:28:39.000 It was turning people into functional adults as the process of adultification.

00:28:43.000 And that was seen as a problem because they shouldn't have to take on that much responsibility and so on.

00:28:50.000 It's rare that the social justice literature takes me aback now.

00:28:54.000 And I was just kind of, you know, had to stop for five minutes and just shake my head over adultification.

00:28:59.000 But certainly what I wanted to build out is that where you see this manifesting now, the modern language for that is the decolonization movement.

00:29:07.000 Decolonize curriculum, decolonize the society, decolonize STEM, decolonize your mom, decolonize everything.

00:29:14.000 And so what that's actually referring to, the view, and this is very difficult for people to understand.

00:29:20.000 I 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.

00:29:29.000 And it's, you know, to be written in the same style as Genesis, all intentionally over the top.

00:29:34.000 It's meant to be funny.

00:29:35.000 But it really is true that they believe that the Enlightenment and especially the birth of science are like the beginning of time.

00:29:43.000 That's the fall from the garden.

00:29:45.000 So 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.

00:29:56.000 It was Sir Isaac Newton who was the true rebel against that's right.

00:30:04.000 And 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,

00:30:19.000 not 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.

00:30:35.000 There was always slavery, but it was never before rooted in the idea that, oh, traits are heritable from parent to child.

00:30:42.000 That's the main thing.

00:30:43.000 And therefore, there's the inferiority of other races and thus were justified by science to enslave other people. 0.95

00:30:48.000 That was novel. 0.90

00:30:49.000 And so they connect it to these horrors, these evils.

00:30:52.000 And so the idea of colonizing is taking rational, empirical, reasoned thought, scientific reasoning, and these principles of liberalism. 0.88

00:31:02.000 So 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.

00:31:14.000 You know, it's like, whoa, how racist are you guys?

00:31:17.000 The 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.

00:31:26.000 And 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. 0.85

00:31:44.000 They would say that at the level of ideas and knowledge, they've been colonized by Western thought. 0.93

00:31:50.000 So everything that uses anything to do with the Enlightenment, liberalism, meaning philosophical liberalism, of course, takes people away from that state of nature.

00:32:00.000 And that's colonization.

00:32:01.000 And the goal is to decolonize and remove those influences from everything.

00:32:07.000 I want to speak to that for a second.

00:32:10.000 I'd like to linger on that because I think that that's so important.

00:32:12.000 And so here's what we see happening right now.

00:32:16.000 James's articulation of that was spot on.

00:32:18.000 What we see happening is that the way that you and I or people figure out things is through the tools of science.

00:32:25.000 We figured out through reason, through empiricism, through rationality.

00:32:29.000 So 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?

00:32:40.000 Well, that is actually not a complicated question.

00:32:44.000 You would turn the tools of science on that, and especially now we have body cams.

00:32:48.000 Excuse me.

00:32:50.000 What we see happening, however, is remember when I, before Charlie, when I talked about meta-narratives, so reason, rationality, empiricism, those are.

00:33:01.000 This was a huge critique of the Jungian view of historical stories, but yes, continue.

00:33:08.000 Yeah, so those are all metanarratives.

00:33:10.000 Those are all ways to explain, but they're also processes that people use to come to knowledge.

00:33:18.000 And so Jim's correct.

00:33:19.000 When you decolonize, you want to remove those.

00:33:22.000 But what you're doing is you're removing the very tools that allow us to adjudicate competing claims, propositions, ideas, et cetera.

00:33:30.000 And instead, you're substituting another academic theory for that, standpoint theory, or in common parlance, lived experience.

00:33:38.000 So my lived experience, your lived experience, we don't have access to other people's lived experience.

00:33:44.000 So what we do is we just ask Black people, are you pulled over by the police a lot?

00:33:50.000 How does that make you feel, et cetera?

00:33:52.000 But that's not a substitution for knowledge.

00:33:56.000 That's a feeling claim that somebody makes.

00:34:00.000 I can make any feeling claim I want.

00:34:03.000 But 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.

00:34:12.000 You feel one way about something, I feel, particularly about empirical phenomena, like what happens in the world.

00:34:18.000 So if you want a more just society, what you need to do is exactly the opposite of decolonization.

00:34:27.000 It's not as Jim and Helen wrote in their book, Cynical Theories.

00:34:31.000 And I think that this is worth mentioning for a moment.

00:34:34.000 Aubrey Lloyd's The Master's Tools Cannot Disable The Master's House.

00:34:39.000 The last time I looked, it was cited like 750 times, 740 times.

00:34:44.000 The idea is the master's tools, reason, rationality, empiricism, cannot dissemble the master's house.

00:34:50.000 And patriarchy, cis heteronormativity, right, white supremacy.

00:34:58.000 You can't use reason, empiricism, rationality, and logic to do that.

00:35:03.000 You have to shift to something else.

00:35:05.000 Jim, did you want to add to that?

00:35:07.000 So, 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.

00:35:26.000 So, yeah, this is this is a rather troubling thing.

00:35:29.000 Not 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.

00:35:47.000 But you also have this fundamentally kind of racist separation.

00:35:54.000 It'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.

00:36:03.000 And it's like, what are you saying, man?

00:36:04.000 You 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. 0.61

00:36:22.000 Of course, obviously it's not white society.

00:36:24.000 It's just liberal society and everybody gets to participate. 0.58

00:36:26.000 That's a point, quality before the law.

00:36:29.000 But they say that this is white society and that that cheats other people.

00:36:34.000 So they have to use other ways of knowing.

00:36:36.000 The 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.

00:36:47.000 And 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.

00:37:01.000 If you wanted a roadmap to take society back to the stone age, that's how you do it.

00:37:01.000 Right.

00:37:06.000 I 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.

00:37:22.000 So while certain ways of knowing are common among indigenous peoples, there's a little thing called a style guide, a language style guide.

00:37:22.000 Excuse me.

00:37:34.000 I'll send you the link later.

00:37:35.000 Progressive style guide.

00:37:36.000 Yeah, progressive style.

00:37:38.000 And it talks about what words, what terms you should and should not use.

00:37:38.000 Thank you.

00:37:43.000 And 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.

00:37:57.000 So if you want a backwards roadmap, the way to liberate yourself is through reason and science, the way to bring about your own flourishing.

00:38:04.000 We know what those tools are.

00:38:06.000 We know what they are.

00:38:07.000 It's not a mystery.

00:38:08.000 And it's something that everybody participates in those.

00:38:11.000 It's not like, oh, you're black, so you don't have access to, you know, reasoning or empiricism. 1.00

00:38:19.000 That's just, that's a grotesque way to look at the world. 0.92

00:38:22.000 Well, the only way you could hold that view is if you yourself are harboring deep-seated racism.

00:38:27.000 That'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.

00:38:37.000 That's the only way you could come to that conclusion. 0.68

00:38:40.000 I'm going to tell you what I think Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility, I think.

00:38:40.000 I kind of want to...

00:38:44.000 That's exactly it's a confession.

00:38:46.000 It's what it is.

00:38:47.000 And so I want to reinforce something that's really interesting.

00:38:50.000 So 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.

00:38:58.000 But 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.

00:39:08.000 When 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.

00:39:17.000 Can you guys comment on that? 0.71

00:39:18.000 Because I think that's a really interesting point.

00:39:20.000 I 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.

00:39:29.000 So to speak to an evangelical, the point of reformed faith was, it started, of course, with Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door.

00:39:38.000 And 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.

00:39:49.000 And the goal was to bring that interpretation back out and to actually reform the church.

00:39:53.000 That's why it's called the Reformation.

00:39:55.000 And 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.

00:40:02.000 Instead, we're going to create a scholarly endeavor called theology that we're now going to look into the Bible.

00:40:08.000 We're going to study the Bible.

00:40:09.000 We're going to look for, you know, understanding the text.

00:40:12.000 We're going to try to find the original intent of the authors.

00:40:14.000 We'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.

00:40:26.000 And the goal became, let's try to understand these in terms of what the authors meant.

00:40:31.000 And 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.

00:40:45.000 And then, you know, Origen said this, so there's that.

00:40:48.000 And Augustine said that, you know, or Aquinas, blah, blah, blah. 0.57

00:40:52.000 Or, you know, some corrupt pope was like, yeah, you can, you can buy indulgences from me.

00:40:57.000 Go ahead, do whatever you want, you know, bring the gold, which is, of course, what really set Martin Luther off.

00:41:03.000 So there is this same process.

00:41:05.000 And that's why you're going to find this line of agreement between folks like yourself and us, and then even these hardcore Marxists.

00:41:13.000 What 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.

00:41:31.000 So 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.

00:41:58.000 So that's why we find ourselves on similar footing at this point.

00:42:01.000 And certainly, of course, members of any faith will fall off the wagon sometimes and become illiberal, but there is a liberal approach here.

00:42:12.000 What else we have in common is the rules of engagement.

00:42:15.000 Nobody's punching each other.

00:42:17.000 Nobody'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.

00:42:33.000 So the rules of engagement are another thing.

00:42:34.000 And I want to talk about that idea of interpretation of the text too.

00:42:39.000 You know, that has a long pedigree in the history of Western intellectual thought.

00:42:42.000 It started with Schleiermarker and Diltai.

00:42:44.000 It 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.

00:43:00.000 So there's a difference between, and this is where I think it's confusing to people.

00:43:06.000 Almost nobody is saying that there isn't an external world.

00:43:09.000 What people are saying is that what is the relationship between power and speaking in that world?

00:43:16.000 So, for example, many people are upset that Jim and I, in the Impossible Conversations book, how to have impossible conversations.

00:43:24.000 We have friends who are evangelical Christians.

00:43:26.000 We're talking to you.

00:43:28.000 They feel that even this conversation itself is reinforcing hegemonic power structures, is reinforcing a dynamic.

00:43:36.000 And so they'll look at, you know, there's a word called mantles, panels filled with men.

00:43:41.000 And so now we're three white cis hetero men speaking here.

00:43:46.000 And the idea is we don't have access to truth because that's mediated through all these things.

00:43:50.000 And this is somehow some unfair.

00:43:53.000 Now, I personally, I think that's, I'll clean up my language for your show.

00:43:58.000 I think that's utter BS.

00:44:01.000 The 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.

00:44:14.000 It is patently false.

00:44:16.000 And 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.

00:44:31.000 And 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?

00:44:42.000 Well, 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.

00:44:52.000 And here's something I always say about, well, people say, well, Sir Isaac Newton happened to be a white person. 0.67

00:44:58.000 He discovered. 0.66

00:44:59.000 I said, well, you just said he discovered.

00:45:00.000 He didn't create Newtonian physics.

00:45:02.000 He just happened to stumble backwards into it and be able to articulate his first three laws.

00:45:07.000 And it would have been the same if you would have discovered it in Japan or in South Africa.

00:45:12.000 I mean, the rules apply evenly. 0.94

00:45:14.000 And so I just, it's, I think it's such a foolish and argument to discontinue. 0.96

00:45:18.000 Here's another thing that I think is I'd like to really punch home. 0.94

00:45:22.000 You know what?

00:45:23.000 It's okay if you believe there was a talking snake.

00:45:27.000 That's fine.

00:45:28.000 It's okay if I don't believe that.

00:45:30.000 We can still have a conversation.

00:45:33.000 We have more in common by far than we do not have in common.

00:45:37.000 I'm against plastic in the ocean.

00:45:39.000 You're against plastic.

00:45:40.000 I don't even know you.

00:45:41.000 And I guarantee you're against plastic in the ocean.

00:45:43.000 I happen to love dogs.

00:45:45.000 My dog just passed away.

00:45:47.000 It was an utterly devastating loss for myself and my family.

00:45:50.000 We're going to get another dog.

00:45:51.000 You and I are both against animal cruelty.

00:45:54.000 So we can, there are commonalities that we can speak across divides and we can work to make the world better to solve our problems.

00:46:04.000 But the divisive nastiness of the woke ideology makes these conversations and any kind of collaborative effort almost literally impossible.

00:46:16.000 So can I ask you guys a challenging open-ended question?

00:46:19.000 And thank you for being generous with your time, about 10 or 15 minutes more, if that's okay with you guys.

00:46:23.000 I know that we got started late.

00:46:24.000 I'm really enjoying this.

00:46:26.000 Do 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.

00:46:44.000 Do you think that this is a problem that you guys must do a better job of challenging and preventing it to turn into this?

00:46:51.000 My point is that people are always searching for meaning in some sense.

00:46:55.000 And this has given millions of people a new form of religion, a religion of wokeism.

00:47:01.000 You guys, as more classical liberals and atheists, is this a concern that you guys are continually trying to call out?

00:47:07.000 The 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?

00:47:15.000 That's kind of my, I try to always say that's not correct and that's not right.

00:47:19.000 I hope the question is communicated clearly.

00:47:21.000 Either you guys can take it as it is.

00:47:24.000 So this is a complicated question because it does strike to something.

00:47:31.000 You 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.

00:47:48.000 And so this is actually a core and fundamental psychological drive that pushes people toward being religious.

00:47:55.000 The psychology of religion understands this very clearly.

00:47:57.000 It's one of the core things that religion satisfies for people psychologically.

00:48:01.000 And 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.

00:48:22.000 And 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.

00:48:42.000 I think by 2011, the death blow had already been struck and it had fallen in its totality by 2015.

00:48:51.000 So there is something there that people will often seek to find meaning-making structures.

00:48:55.000 And there are some that are better than others.

00:48:57.000 Joe 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.

00:49:17.000 And 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.

00:49:40.000 So they're trying to see good and evil through sociology, and sociology becomes something like the text.

00:49:46.000 Now, 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.

00:50:01.000 I don't mean legal specific secularism.

00:50:03.000 I think the principle that you can set your faith aside in order to do your work is something that clearly works.

00:50:12.000 There are many very brilliant, very religious scientists that find no between the two. 0.53

00:50:17.000 Yeah, Francis Collins, for example.

00:50:20.000 They find no tension.

00:50:21.000 So it is possible to rest in that rationality with or without faith, is the way that I would put that.

00:50:29.000 And in this case, you do probably have people that are looking for the meaning.

00:50:33.000 They're looking for the purpose.

00:50:34.000 But I would tell you the one aspect, I've talked about meaning, I've talked about purpose, I've talked about control.

00:50:39.000 I'm sorry, I talked about community.

00:50:40.000 I haven't talked about control.

00:50:42.000 The one aspect of religious belief is a sense of control in life.

00:50:45.000 I 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.

00:51:02.000 The world is not ordered the way that it should be, and it's driven to their minds, and it's driven them literally mad.

00:51:08.000 And 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.

00:51:21.000 I think that's well said, Peter, I want to kind of piggyback off to that and thank you for that answer.

00:51:26.000 It was terrific.

00:51:27.000 A 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.

00:51:35.000 I 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.

00:51:50.000 A 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.

00:52:06.000 And that, and so as an atheist, is this something that concerns you that you think atheists have to do a better job of?

00:52:12.000 Because 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.

00:52:19.000 Do you agree with that?

00:52:21.000 I don't know if atheists necessarily have to do a better job of it.

00:52:24.000 It almost never occurs to me that I'm an atheist unless someone explicitly asks me.

00:52:29.000 It's just not part of my personal identity.

00:52:32.000 I think Americans have to do a better job at that.

00:52:35.000 I 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.

00:52:46.000 And they get out and they start teaching kids that.

00:52:49.000 So I'd like to see a return to civics education.

00:52:52.000 I'm not a big fan of just blindly standing for the flag and making rules for it.

00:52:57.000 I think people need to understand why liberty is important, why cognitive liberty is important.

00:53:01.000 I think people need to understand what it means to vote and why that's important.

00:53:07.000 And I've seen a lot of things on the right that are just totally false.

00:53:12.000 You know, that they show people utterly rioting and destroying mostly in Portland now.

00:53:20.000 And I hear people say, well, you know, they're Joe Biden voters.

00:53:25.000 No, none of those people.

00:53:27.000 Those people are, you wouldn't, if they voted at all, you're not going to find a single one of those people voting for Joe Biden.

00:53:36.000 These are hardcore anarchists.

00:53:39.000 I doubt they've ever voted at all.

00:53:41.000 But 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.

00:53:51.000 I personally believe, and maybe this is a conversation for another day.

00:53:55.000 I think that one of the problems with wokeism is that at core, they do not believe their values are rationally derivable.

00:54:03.000 They do not believe you can just sit down and think through and understand, you know, why is it that slavery is wrong?

00:54:13.000 Why is it that fairness is right?

00:54:15.000 And the reason they don't do that is because they're inherently distrustful of reason.

00:54:19.000 And once you understand that, you understand why they don't have a dialogue, discourse. 0.98

00:54:24.000 Christians are not like that. 0.95

00:54:26.000 Christians have 1 Peter 3:15. 1.00

00:54:28.000 Christians have a built-in apology to their faith. 0.97

00:54:30.000 Christians are taught to, when people ask you for your faith or your reason for belief, to answer with gentleness and kindness and articulate that. 0.96

00:54:39.000 And that one passage in the Bible has been responsible for more civility and the outgrowth of more discourse.

00:54:49.000 Wokeism is exactly the opposite of that.

00:54:52.000 But the real danger, in my opinion, comes when people believe their when people think their beliefs are not rationally drivable.

00:54:59.000 And if someone believes something they don't believe, that they're, as Jim says, an existential threat, they're a moral enemy.

00:55:07.000 So 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.

00:55:26.000 It doesn't mean you're my enemy, it doesn't mean I should wish physical violence upon you.

00:55:32.000 Jim, go ahead.

00:55:34.000 Yeah, I think of this completely differently.

00:55:36.000 And I think it would reorient the question that you're trying to ask, Charlie.

00:55:42.000 I 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.

00:55:48.000 So I'm not doing this to them.

00:55:49.000 But I think it's best to think of this particular ideology as a virus.

00:55:55.000 And so secular liberal society is particularly susceptible.

00:55:55.000 Okay.

00:56:01.000 So 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.

00:56:10.000 This attaches very effectively to liberal and secular entities, institutions, and structures.

00:56:18.000 That's why it attached very successfully to the atheism movement, which was trying to push very hard for secularism.

00:56:24.000 It was naturally progressive by its orientation.

00:56:28.000 It attached extraordinarily effectively there.

00:56:30.000 It injected its DNA very quickly and it poisoned the thing and killed it.

00:56:34.000 And the cell burst open and more viruses rushed out into society to find new things to infect.

00:56:39.000 It, however, can infect other things, whether the virus mutates a little bit.

00:56:43.000 So, 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.

00:57:00.000 And you see this within the several of the different faiths now.

00:57:05.000 The Presbyterians have it within some of their branches.

00:57:08.000 The Catholics have it within some of the liberation theologists have had it for a long time.

00:57:12.000 Liberation 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.

00:57:26.000 So certainly it can attach to faith.

00:57:28.000 It's all a matter of figuring out what language.

00:57:30.000 So 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.

00:57:52.000 I mean, they are unrepentantly woke, unrepentantly teaching critical race theory and intersectionality at the largest Southern Baptist Seminary, which is a conservative seminary.

00:58:02.000 And 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. 0.58

00:58:11.000 He obviously was kind of in a sense the epitome of oppression as he walked on the part of Earth. 0.97

00:58:16.000 So if we're going to understand the gospel, we have to understand it through a liturgy of lament and so on and so forth.

00:58:21.000 You get the same thing.

00:58:23.000 So it can attach to anything and pervert it.

00:58:27.000 And it's all a matter of how people find a way to resist it.

00:58:32.000 And meaning is one aspect of it, but I think it's actually, I read Shelby Steele's White Guilt recently.

00:58:38.000 And I think Shelby Steele has the missing ingredient that people aren't latching onto, which is guilt and shame.

00:58:46.000 It'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.

00:58:55.000 But it's able to manipulate that guilt.

00:58:57.000 And that's sort of the receptors that it is able to get into.

00:59:02.000 And for whatever reason, liberals and progressives, meaning people on the left, are much more susceptible to it.

00:59:08.000 Yeah, I think the way it's willing to stand up for it.

00:59:11.000 And if you want to say that.

00:59:12.000 That's really, really well put.

00:59:13.000 That's my thinking.

00:59:15.000 This 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.

00:59:24.000 Most of my friends are conservatives.

00:59:27.000 Conservatives tend to know who they are better than people on the left.

00:59:31.000 They actually know who they are.

00:59:33.000 They don't feel like they have to signal the right opinions.

00:59:35.000 They don't have to fit in necessarily with the crowd.

00:59:37.000 They get to be who they are and they're more confident in understanding who they are on average, in my observations at least.

00:59:45.000 I want to add to that quickly.

00:59:47.000 I think that the way that I perceive Jim's talking about this, I think the single word summary of that is parestatize.

00:59:55.000 I think that this is, it paresthatizes the liberal mind.

00:59:59.000 I 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.

01:00:10.000 I know really, really smart people who have been hoodwinked by this, who've fallen to this.

01:00:16.000 I think it preys upon liberal impulses of justice.

01:00:20.000 It's not just.

01:00:21.000 It's not kind, and it's not fair.

01:00:23.000 But 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.

01:00:36.000 And I think that's you're seeing a lot.

01:00:38.000 Like I've personally lost three friendships as a result of this.

01:00:41.000 And these are like legitimately smart people.

01:00:45.000 I do think that there's something, Jim has called it in the past, correct me if I'm wrong, Jim, a universal solvent.

01:00:51.000 It just corrodes and destroys everything.

01:00:54.000 It infects, corrodes, and destroys.

01:00:57.000 Once it's in a system like Southern Baptism, boom.

01:01:00.000 And the question is, how do we develop a prophylactic? 0.89

01:01:04.000 How do we develop tools to keep our institutions from falling to this?

01:01:11.000 And remember, this is a dangerous, divisive ideology that's predicated upon, it wants to rip things down.

01:01:19.000 And it's not a built-in.

01:01:21.000 It's deconstructionism at its pure.

01:01:23.000 I think that's probably an even better term than Marxism.

01:01:26.000 And you guys would know the academic basis for that better than I would.

01:01:30.000 But deconstructionism is a school, is a line of thought that is taught in many academies now.

01:01:34.000 And it is a perfect harmony to this.

01:01:37.000 I guess, and the other question, we can go one by one.

01:01:40.000 I want to talk a little bit about your book in the couple minutes we have remaining.

01:01:43.000 You guys have the book, How to Have Impossible Conversations.

01:01:46.000 The world is telling us that I should not be talking to you and you should not be talking to me.

01:01:50.000 Correct.

01:01:51.000 We found a point of agreement.

01:01:52.000 I have a lot of respect for both of you.

01:01:54.000 Incredibly smart.

01:01:55.000 I've learned a lot.

01:01:56.000 And our listeners will as well.

01:01:58.000 But the world has told us that speech is actually the problem.

01:02:01.000 And 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.

01:02:18.000 They actually think the process of dialogue and being able to is the problem.

01:02:22.000 It's actually the exercise of it.

01:02:23.000 It's not just the differing ideas.

01:02:25.000 Can you talk about that, Peter and then James, and then why you wrote the book?

01:02:30.000 Okay, so, wow, that's a very insightful thing to say.

01:02:37.000 So, I did my dissertation on in prisons, and I spoke to prison inmates to try to help them to system crime through Socratic techniques.

01:02:47.000 So, I'd find questions from the history of Western intellectual thought.

01:02:50.000 I'd use the Socratic method.

01:02:52.000 Basically, the Socratic method has it starts in wonder.

01:02:55.000 Somebody wonders something about something, and then you put forth a hypothesis, like what is justice, and then someone answers the hypothesis.

01:03:03.000 And the next stage, they say, you know, justice is like Plato's Republic, justice is paying your debts.

01:03:08.000 And then you have the chords, the elinkus, it's the back and forth.

01:03:12.000 It'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.

01:03:24.000 If it didn't, it's no good.

01:03:25.000 They either have no case or they have to go back out.

01:03:28.000 And 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.

01:03:37.000 You'd want to act according to what the reasons, what the dictates of reason showed you.

01:03:43.000 And 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.

01:03:50.000 And that's also just parenthetically what we're missing in the academy right now.

01:03:54.000 We need intellectual diversity where people hear all debate, argumentation, et cetera, et cetera, and where we don't have that.

01:04:02.000 So you're absolutely correct.

01:04:04.000 The 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.

01:04:13.000 It'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.

01:04:28.000 But 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.

01:04:45.000 If 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.

01:04:53.000 And 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.

01:05:06.000 But I'm sure you are too.

01:05:07.000 And I know for a fact that Jim is.

01:05:12.000 So dialogue, discourse, reason, rationality, and finding common points of agreement, that's what we should be focused on.

01:05:21.000 But that's the other reason that they need to undermine any kind of Socratic discourse.

01:05:25.000 They can't have that. 0.66

01:05:26.000 Jim, do you want to add to that?

01:05:29.000 I 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.

01:05:43.000 They say fallow logocentrism.

01:05:45.000 They also look at it.

01:05:48.000 Yeah, that's dare enough.

01:05:50.000 So they think of this idea that we're going to sit down and have a debate.

01:05:55.000 They would see that through a lens that said, oh, well, historically, they didn't even let black people sit at the table.

01:06:00.000 Peter brought up mantles earlier. 1.00

01:06:02.000 There's not enough women at these things. 0.99

01:06:04.000 So 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.

01:06:17.000 But 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.

01:06:36.000 So, 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.

01:06:48.000 And they put, you know, some guy from the hood or whatever up there.

01:06:52.000 And it's like, well, he hasn't learned all the correct ways to say things.

01:06:55.000 And he doesn't speak academic ways.

01:06:57.000 And he doesn't cross his legs and stroke his beard the right way.

01:07:00.000 He doesn't have all the right signs and he doesn't look and sound as intelligent.

01:07:03.000 You 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.

01:07:14.000 But 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.

01:07:31.000 I don't know what their racist thinking is.

01:07:34.000 So they don't actually value the mechanism.

01:07:40.000 So they are unwilling to want to participate.

01:07:42.000 But 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.

01:08:04.000 And you're going to be like, what are you doing talking to a liberal atheist?

01:08:07.000 I know this because I talk to these Southern Baptist guys I'm friends with, and they're like, you put an atheist on there.

01:08:11.000 Ah, you know, they freak out.

01:08:13.000 And 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.

01:08:25.000 And the dominant ideology is being promoted.

01:08:30.000 And say, let's say it's you that has a dominant perspective.

01:08:33.000 Now I've become a tool for Charlie Kirk.

01:08:36.000 I'm lending power to Charlie Kirk's terrible ideology or whatever it is.

01:08:40.000 And therefore, I'm giving my endorsement to your worldview.

01:08:44.000 Whereas I could literally say every third sentence in this whole thing, I disagree with you about everything.

01:08:49.000 And 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. 0.54

01:09:00.000 So when we saw when we saw Christina Hoff Summers try to have the debates with Roxanne Gay, so they're both feminists. 0.99

01:09:09.000 Christina Hoff Summers, at the time, maybe she still works for AEI. 0.98

01:09:14.000 She's a registered, or was at least a registered Democrat. 1.00

01:09:17.000 It'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. 0.99

01:09:24.000 And you just saw Roxanne Gay almost, if you watch the video back, it's a total mess. 0.99

01:09:30.000 She just almost refuses to participate because for her to participate in that would be her being involved in those discourses. 1.00

01:09:37.000 And they refuse to be involved in the wrong discourses.

01:09:40.000 Platforming.

01:09:41.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:09:42.000 It's the validation of the platform is somehow elevating the power structure in their favor.

01:09:47.000 Right.

01:09:47.000 And what they believe that is because discourses themselves are the conveyors of power.

01:09:52.000 That's the relevant postmodern idea.

01:09:54.000 So the discourses, the ways that we think and talk about things are the conveyors of power.

01:09:59.000 So 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.

01:10:09.000 And 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.

01:10:21.000 So this is the view.

01:10:23.000 You know, we talk about social engineering.

01:10:24.000 This is discourse engineering.

01:10:26.000 They're trying to rearrange how we speak so that we rearrange how we think, so that we rearrange how the society is produced.

01:10:32.000 And collaboration across difference does not engender moral purity.

01:10:38.000 It's in fact requires communication and thus, as they would see it, moral contamination that's unjustifiable.

01:10:47.000 And in case anybody is not wholly biting this ideology and they're teetering on the brink, I'm going to give you something.

01:10:55.000 I'm going to give it to you.

01:10:57.000 Without any question, Jim's already laughing.

01:11:01.000 Without any question at all, they have been correct historically. 0.99

01:11:05.000 In the symposium, Socrates threw the women and the slaves out of the room. 0.77

01:11:09.000 There is no question about it that there have been historical injustices where people have been disallowed from participating in dialogues, disallowed from public debates. 0.77

01:11:20.000 No question about it.

01:11:22.000 The solution to that, however, is not no debate for anybody.

01:11:27.000 It's not no conversation across divides.

01:11:30.000 The solution is, as Jim and Helen say in Cynical Theories, it's to include more people in the public conversation.

01:11:36.000 It's to make the democracy more robust.

01:11:38.000 It's to have those conversations across divides.

01:11:42.000 The problem, however, is that particularly in education, we're teaching, what's it called, Jim, Judith Butler's parody disruption.

01:11:53.000 The politics of parody.

01:11:55.000 Yeah, politics of parody.

01:11:56.000 Thanks.

01:11:57.000 The problem is we've seen disrupting these events come down as a virtue.

01:12:02.000 You know, I'll do events at Portland State, for example, the James DeMore event or with Christine.

01:12:06.000 Jim just mentioned Christina Hoff Summers.

01:12:08.000 I did one with Brett and Heather and Christine Hoff Summers at PSU.

01:12:12.000 And 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.

01:12:21.000 No, you are not part of this discussion.

01:12:25.000 So I'll give it to them.

01:12:27.000 Yes, there have been historical injustices.

01:12:29.000 Yes, people have been marginalized and it was horrific thing to do.

01:12:34.000 Yes, those people have not been allowed, you know, gentry, for example, where you had to own property. 0.99

01:12:40.000 The solution is more discourse and more dialogue.

01:12:43.000 And we have to teach people how to do that.

01:12:46.000 Well, if you want your campus really to blow up, invite me and you and I can have a civil conversation.

01:12:50.000 That would really be something.

01:12:51.000 So, but no, the question, the operative question should be, how did things get better?

01:12:55.000 And it got better through more speech and more dialogue.

01:12:58.000 And I'm afraid, and I've seen this happen when I visit universities.

01:13:01.000 If 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.

01:13:11.000 Force will come next.

01:13:12.000 And that's the problem.

01:13:13.000 Is that it?

01:13:14.000 Absolutely.

01:13:15.000 There's not that much in between speaking and force.

01:13:19.000 In fact, no, wait, you're wrong.

01:13:21.000 Not only has it, will it not, it's already here.

01:13:24.000 There is no.

01:13:25.000 Well, that's.

01:13:26.000 Yeah, and you're right.

01:13:27.000 I just, I think that it's only going to be more pervasive and more dramatic.

01:13:32.000 And 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.

01:13:45.000 And I don't support that.

01:13:46.000 That's just the way that I think that we're hardworking.

01:13:48.000 And 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.

01:13:58.000 In 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?

01:14:09.000 I question those people who only have friends who believe exactly what they do.

01:14:13.000 And 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.

01:14:25.000 That's a huge, that's a very, that problem has become acute in this age in which we're living.

01:14:32.000 What 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.

01:14:49.000 And 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.

01:15:03.000 Yes, I'd like to.

01:15:05.000 I 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.

01:15:16.000 This is the most bizarre thing.

01:15:17.000 It's less bizarre to me now because I understand the mechanism behind it.

01:15:20.000 But some of my most ardent supporters are evangelical Christians.

01:15:25.000 That's the great realignment.

01:15:27.000 Yeah, and I love your guys's website.

01:15:29.000 I read newdiscourses.com all the time.

01:15:32.000 And right after I get done with my Bible reading, go figure that one out.

01:15:35.000 So it's kind of so.

01:15:38.000 So the book is called How to Have Impossible Conversations.

01:15:42.000 Any closing thoughts, guys?

01:15:43.000 And thank you again for taking the time and being so generous.

01:15:46.000 I know people are really going to benefit from this.

01:15:48.000 So first, James, and then Peter, any other closing thoughts?

01:15:50.000 I would, I mean, probably the people listening to your podcast are already aware, but a lot of people are not aware.

01:15:56.000 I keep kind of running into this, kind of keep running into this.

01:16:00.000 This problem is much more significant than I think people, a lot of people realize.

01:16:06.000 And 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.

01:16:26.000 It's throughout all of our education system.

01:16:28.000 It's throughout all higher education.

01:16:30.000 It's in almost all of our corporations.

01:16:32.000 And this is an ideology that is holding, you think of the old Weezer song, you know, it's holding the end of that string of the sweater.

01:16:39.000 This could unravel the fabric of society.

01:16:42.000 And I'm not saying that we're at the brink of the edge or of the end or whatever, or that, oh my God, the Marxists are going to take over.

01:16:48.000 It's not necessarily like that.

01:16:50.000 But this is actually that grade of threat.

01:16:54.000 And 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.

01:17:15.000 So I'll reinterpret it into this softer thing.

01:17:17.000 But no, read their primary texts.

01:17:20.000 If you want to go to new discourses or you want to read cynical theories, go read those, get to build a bridge to them.

01:17:26.000 But 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.

01:17:37.000 And sunlight is a very powerful and very necessary disinfectant.

01:17:42.000 And we need to apply that.

01:17:46.000 So I encourage people to spend, as they say, do the work.

01:17:51.000 It's not my job to educate you.

01:17:53.000 Actually, it is my job to educate you.

01:17:55.000 So I want you to go study some of this stuff.

01:17:58.000 I want people to understand that this is a serious thing.

01:18:00.000 This isn't just some fringe academic thing happening in Narnia.

01:18:04.000 The president had to drop an order to get it out of the federal government.

01:18:07.000 This is not just happening in the academy.

01:18:10.000 This isn't just some college kids. 0.73

01:18:11.000 This is happening in our nuclear weapons facilities.

01:18:16.000 So that's very serious.

01:18:18.000 The 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.

01:18:40.000 That's what you're going to have under widespread critical race theory as well.

01:18:45.000 Something 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.

01:18:53.000 And 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.

01:19:01.000 And if some companies decide they want to take this on and screw themselves over and collapse, hey, that's capitalism, baby.

01:19:08.000 If our federal government does, however, or our state governments or our local governments do, that's another matter.

01:19:13.000 Those are accountable to the people who are spending our money to do it.

01:19:17.000 And it's very important to realize that that's a very dangerous threat.

01:19:21.000 It's not just kids on college campus.

01:19:23.000 And the only way to stop it is to start learning enough about it to know what it is and say, wait a minute, this isn't okay.

01:19:31.000 We need to stand up to this.

01:19:32.000 We need to get lawyers involved even and sue.

01:19:36.000 And 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.

01:19:51.000 Yeah, 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.

01:19:59.000 You really need to believe these people when they say things.

01:20:03.000 I don't mean you need to believe that it's true.

01:20:06.000 I mean you need to believe that they believe it.

01:20:08.000 And 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.

01:20:24.000 Well, they actually do believe that.

01:20:27.000 I hear this all the time from decent people.

01:20:29.000 They say, oh, no, they're just blowing smoke.

01:20:31.000 They don't actually believe in only blowing smoke out of like a fire they set in the mayor's lobby.

01:20:39.000 I mean, they're literally blowing smoke.

01:20:43.000 They're just all the time.

01:20:43.000 It's incredible.

01:20:44.000 Please continue.

01:20:46.000 So I think that's the first thing is that when they say this stuff, you need to believe them and you need to listen.

01:20:52.000 And we have a crisis in listening right now.

01:20:54.000 So if you do nothing else, just position yourself as a listener and say, wow, and to try to understand what they believe.

01:21:01.000 That's the first order of business.

01:21:02.000 Let 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.

01:21:09.000 I'm sorry.

01:21:11.000 That when they say liberals get the bullet too, you should probably believe them.

01:21:16.000 They mean it.

01:21:18.000 Yep.

01:21:19.000 And that's the thing is I want a return of liberalism.

01:21:23.000 I grew up in America where I was told to agree to disagree.

01:21:27.000 I went to a public high school in the northwest suburbs of Chicago is 53% English is a second language, so majority Hispanic school.

01:21:34.000 And we did not look at each other based on skin color. 0.98

01:21:36.000 I 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. 0.98

01:21:44.000 It's actually, we just looked at each other as other human beings in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade. 0.95

01:21:49.000 And now eight years later, I'm looking back at the very same high school I went to with BLM flags. 0.93

01:21:53.000 They're teaching critical race theory. 0.73

01:21:55.000 The white kids have to atone for something they didn't do.

01:21:57.000 I said, this is a regression, the likes of which that most people cannot comprehend.

01:22:02.000 And human beings are not wired for this kind of accelerated change this quickly.

01:22:06.000 And 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.

01:22:13.000 Because as soon as you say racist, people run away.

01:22:15.000 Oh, you're racist if you dare disagree.

01:22:18.000 They don't have the capacity for that kind of disagreement.

01:22:20.000 And so that's correct.

01:22:22.000 Yeah, that's correct.

01:22:24.000 So, one, believe them.

01:22:27.000 Two, I think one of the reasons that this ideology has been so successful is because they've changed the meanings of basic words.

01:22:37.000 Antifa, anti-fascist.

01:22:39.000 I just saw Linda Sassur's tweet.

01:22:40.000 You know, it's just that simple.

01:22:42.000 Anti-fascist. 0.98

01:22:43.000 If you're against Antifa, you're a fascist.

01:22:46.000 So it's really, they've spent decades now perfecting this.

01:22:51.000 They've spent decades, I don't want to say hoodwinking people.

01:22:57.000 It's Orwellian is what it is.

01:22:58.000 Yeah, changing the meanings of words.

01:23:00.000 And the best example of that is equity, inclusion.

01:23:04.000 And Jim and I did an event in London where we talked about this.

01:23:08.000 It's on the discourses page.

01:23:09.000 So you need to learn what these words mean and how they're using these words.

01:23:14.000 And you also need to learn when they use these words.

01:23:18.000 And this isn't academic.

01:23:20.000 This isn't pedantic.

01:23:21.000 I'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?

01:23:33.000 Most people think it just, oh, because it has a positive emotional valence.

01:23:38.000 Oh, equity.

01:23:39.000 That feels great.

01:23:39.000 I feel good about equity.

01:23:41.000 I feel good about inclusion.

01:23:42.000 Inclusion doesn't mean what you think it means.

01:23:44.000 It means restricted speech, ultimately.

01:23:46.000 So for that, New Discourses has some great stuff.

01:23:49.000 Jim's done the translations from the Wokish, where this isn't his opinion.

01:23:55.000 It's not my opinion.

01:23:56.000 It's not your opinion.

01:23:57.000 He has taken their literature and he clearly articulates it and then gives a commentary on it.

01:24:04.000 So that's one thing.

01:24:06.000 Or that's thing too.

01:24:08.000 I think the next thing is we need to start talking to each other again.

01:24:12.000 We need to start talking across divides.

01:24:15.000 And I hope you do have us back on to your show.

01:24:19.000 We'll talk about God, beliefs, and faith.

01:24:22.000 And the fourth thing is, if anyone is listening to this, they're like, how on earth am I going to figure out?

01:24:28.000 This is so insanely complicated.

01:24:31.000 First, you're right.

01:24:32.000 It is insanely complicated.

01:24:34.000 There are a lot of moving parts.

01:24:35.000 There are a lot of variables.

01:24:37.000 But 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.

01:24:46.000 In Cynical Theories, it is a master's degree crash course in all of this stuff.

01:24:52.000 And I don't know, am I allowed to say, Jim, about the NYT, the New York Times thing?

01:24:57.000 I mean, you can say whatever you want.

01:25:01.000 It hasn't, I mean, time hasn't ended, but you can say whatever you want about it.

01:25:06.000 Are you meaning that they did not put us on the bestseller?

01:25:09.000 Is that because they can edit this out?

01:25:11.000 I love to say that.

01:25:12.000 You can say whatever you want.

01:25:13.000 Why not?

01:25:14.000 It's not on there.

01:25:14.000 Last week, the bestseller list came out for Cynical Theories in its first week.

01:25:19.000 It's on like every single bestseller list.

01:25:22.000 It was on USA Today's.

01:25:24.000 It was on the Wall Street Journal's, which is apparently very hard to get on.

01:25:27.000 I googled the name of the book last night and I'm like, I wonder what anybody said about it.

01:25:32.000 And it's just like page after page after page after page of newspapers.

01:25:36.000 It's like, oh, it's on all these bestseller lists.

01:25:38.000 I can't even find if there's a review that I haven't read yet.

01:25:40.000 Wow.

01:25:41.000 And so it's on all of them, but not the New York Times.

01:25:44.000 It should have, by the raw numbers, landed at number eight on the New York Times.

01:25:48.000 And it sold in this first week three times as many as the last two on its list.

01:25:52.000 But no, it's not there.

01:25:54.000 They said, because we emailed and asked, they said they're still watching it.

01:25:58.000 Hopefully, I've been there, done that.

01:26:02.000 I 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.

01:26:11.000 But they wouldn't want to platform you because that is actually giving credence to your book.

01:26:16.000 So they think that math and numbers are just a construct of Western civilization.

01:26:21.000 So the numbers don't mean anything for them.

01:26:23.000 It's just an instrument of their conversation.

01:26:25.000 It's two equals three for my book and two plus two equals five for their books.

01:26:29.000 Yeah, right.

01:26:30.000 So just on that note, I really do believe if people are saying, oh my gosh, I'm trying to understand the riots.

01:26:37.000 Why are they doing this in society?

01:26:39.000 Why is everybody all of a sudden not wanting to treat people equally regardless of the color of their skin?

01:26:46.000 Why is the meritocracy under attack? 0.69

01:26:48.000 Why is democracy a white construct? 0.90

01:26:50.000 Why are they trying to decolonize? 0.71

01:26:52.000 You know, you're not supposed to teach white men or men. 0.69

01:26:55.000 Okay, if you want to know why, cynical theories is your crash course for that.

01:26:59.000 So you have to educate yourself on where this stuff came from, what the meanings of the words are.

01:27:04.000 You have to believe them when they say what they actually claim to believe.

01:27:09.000 And then once you get that, you need to start thinking about how to have constructive conversations with people across the box.

01:27:16.000 I have a really good friend who just read your book, Cynical Theories, and just raved about it.

01:27:20.000 So I look forward to going through it as well.

01:27:22.000 Well, thank you guys so much.

01:27:23.000 We'll have to have you back on about the existence of God and, you know, other less important.

01:27:29.000 I'm totally kidding.

01:27:30.000 I'm saying this just happened to be very pressing, but I'd love to have you guys back on.

01:27:33.000 It's been a real thrill and I love discussing big ideas.

01:27:37.000 And 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.

01:27:44.000 And I think this exercise in dialogue is actually evidence of that.

01:27:48.000 So thank you guys so much.

01:27:49.000 And again, it is how to have impossible conversations and also cynical theories, which should be on the New York Times list.

01:27:56.000 Everyone go pick up a copy.

01:27:57.000 And thank you, James.

01:27:58.000 And thank you, Peter.

01:27:59.000 Thank you.

01:28:00.000 Appreciate it.

01:28:00.000 Thanks, guys.

01:28:01.000 See you soon.

01:28:04.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

01:28:06.000 Please email me your thoughts on this episode and also our sister episode, Corporations vs. America, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:28:13.000 We're going to give away some signed copies of the New York Times bestseller, the MAGA Doctrine.

01:28:17.000 So type in Charlie Kirk Show to your podcast provider, hit subscribe, give us a five-star review, screenshot it, and email us, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:28:27.000 If you guys want to get involved with Turning PointUSA, go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com.

01:28:33.000 Thank you guys so much for listening.

01:28:35.000 God bless you.

01:28:36.000 Hope to see you soon.

01:28:37.000 Make sure to listen to our sister episode, Corporations vs. America.

01:28:40.000 Thanks so much.

The Charlie Kirk Show - September 08, 2020

2 Liberal Atheists and the Virus of ‘Wokism’ w- Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay

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