Dr. Vodibacham is the Dean of Theology at African Christian University in Zambia. He talks about social justice and what he calls ethnic Gnosticism. We also check in with Matt Ridley on Coronavirus and what's the truth and what is not, and the guy who was fired for making a peace sign.
00:01:29.400So can you can you please explain the difference between social justice that a Christian would understand
00:01:35.660and the social justice that is now being preached from many of our pulpits that is an anti-Christian message?
00:01:43.280Well, social justice has been understood clearly for a while.
00:01:54.280And social justice is distributive justice.
00:01:58.960Social justice is about redistributing resources and opportunities.
00:02:06.520Social justice is not the same as the biblical idea and the biblical concept of justice.
00:02:12.600You also need to understand that social justice is built on the back of critical theory, which is all about the idea of, you know, hegemony and power structures.
00:02:26.800And hegemony may sound like a big academic word.
00:02:30.260It just means that there there's a power structure that exists because of the individuals who set the rules of the game.
00:02:51.680The idea is that the power structure comes from the elites who establish things.
00:03:00.540They set the rules of the game and they set the rules of the game in order to benefit themselves and their posterity.
00:03:08.960And everybody else is oppressed because they're not part of the hegemony.
00:03:13.060This, by the way, is why women, although they are majority, are considered an oppressed minority because the hegemony is white, male, Christian, heterosexual, cisgendered, you know, on and on and on and on and on.
00:03:43.660And again, this is why this bothers me so much, because as a Christian and as a minister of the gospel, I preach Christ and him crucified.
00:03:53.400I preach the work that he has done and that we need to receive personally.
00:03:58.520Secondly, if we get into this critical theory business where everything becomes structural, all of a sudden, this gospel has to either be transformed into something that the Bible doesn't recognize or it has to be cleared out.
00:04:15.260And so this social justice movement, Black Lives Matter, for example, anyone who reads what they believe will see that they are anti-Christian.
00:04:25.560They are fundamentally anti-Christian.
00:04:28.080And so this whole idea, this whole idea of the social justice movement, and I get a lot of flack for it because, you know, either you have conscious bias or unconscious bias, or you have internalized bias if you don't, you know, buy this hegemony, right?
00:04:45.720You know, so it's interesting how critical theory sort of hedges itself in and protects itself on all sides.
00:04:59.780I mean, you know, that's exactly what a witch would say.
00:05:03.360Well, I mean, how do you defend yourself?
00:05:06.680So let me ask you, let me ask you, I have two more questions for you.
00:05:11.400First of all, the people that I know, the white people that I, the Americans that I know, first of all, this is happening all over the world.
00:06:18.160How do, what do we do without playing into the evil of Marxism?
00:06:24.780Yeah, and, and I'm, I'm going to tell you, I, this is one of the things that really bothers me about this.
00:06:33.800I, you know, on social media since the 22nd of May, but these messages have been out there for years.
00:06:41.260I've been talking about this for years, and I've really been frustrated with this and with the way that the attacks come.
00:06:49.420Um, um, I, I've been trying to talk about this from the perspective of the big picture, and unfortunately, when you talk about it from the big picture, people tend to think, oh, you just don't have empathy.
00:07:05.700You just don't understand how bad it is.
00:07:08.420Um, me, who, who grew up in drug-infested, gang-infested South Central LA, born in 1969, grew up during the crack era, grew up during the crack wars, if you will, raised by a single teenage Buddhist mother.
00:07:24.180I wasn't raised in Christianity, never heard the gospel until I got to the, to, to university.
00:07:29.560And so, for people to try to marginalize me because I don't understand, I've been pulled over by the cops.
00:07:37.460I've been down on the sidewalk because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
00:07:41.880I know these kinds of things happen, and yet, I still say that these ideologies are poisonous, and they have to be confronted, because these ideologies actually undermine our message as Christians.
00:08:06.560And I know where this stuff comes from.
00:08:09.720I understand where it comes from, and I am not willing to lay down my Bible and have anyone force me to agree with certain things, simply because if I don't, they will, you know, they will somehow label me and call me names.
00:08:26.100I couldn't care less about people labeling me and calling me names.
00:08:35.420And so, I'm worried about this like you.
00:08:38.760I'm also an American who, as an expat in a foreign country, I've been to dozens of countries in the world, and there's two things that I know.
00:08:48.840Number one, black people in America are the freest and most prosperous black people in the world, period, bar none.
00:09:00.680People outside of America think that we are the most oppressed people in the world.
00:09:08.240And people actually think that things like George Floyd are happening every day, that they're not an anomaly, but that they're commonplace.
00:09:19.620And the reputation that black people have, that somehow we are weak and impotent, and that we can't do or be anything unless white people do it for us, which, by the way, is kind of racist.
00:09:41.620I believe that by race, I am a descendant of some of the strongest people in the history of the world.
00:09:52.240But we overcame slavery, and now we're bowing and scraping like we need somebody to do something for us.
00:12:19.360That's another thing that I'm hearing is that there's very little hope.
00:12:24.060And if our only hope is that certain people begin to have empathy or begin to do whatever it is that we think certain people need to do, then we have no hope.
00:13:07.640There are people in academia who are not free to investigate issues and do honest academic work.
00:13:19.560And so what we're left with is these simplistic answers, right?
00:13:24.720And so you have people who quote statistics on this side versus people who quote statistics on that side, right?
00:13:31.780Two and a half times more likely to be shot by police.
00:13:34.580Eighteen and a half times more likely to, you know, shoot police officers, whatever, right?
00:13:38.280And in both instances, we're giving these simplistic answers where the truth is something that's complex.
00:13:45.260And so if we have automatically said anybody who picks the statistics from this column is evil and shouldn't be listened to, then we've also said that we are not going to honestly pursue complex answers to complex issues.
00:14:05.460And what that means is we're going to use white people, or use black people, rather.
00:14:24.720We have black mayors, black police chiefs.
00:14:27.880You know, we have a president who's a bi-ethnic president, you know, all of these senators and everything else, right?
00:14:37.600But by the testimony of black people themselves, the feeling is that things are actually not better.
00:14:46.240The feeling is that the questions haven't been answered, and so the frustration grows, and the hopelessness grows, and the alienation grows.
00:14:58.400And what I'm saying is we're looking for answers in the wrong places.
00:16:17.340Anyway, so, Matt, I want to talk to you a little bit about, as we start to go back to work,
00:16:25.380we're starting to hear that this thing is heating up, and I think the worst thing that any of these officials could do
00:16:33.700is to tell people that it's okay to go out in March, and it was responsible,
00:16:40.120after telling the rest of us, screw your business, you may lose your job, but you must stay in.
00:16:47.680Now, if there is another wave of this, and it is really bad, I think you're going to have a hard time convincing a lot of people to stay in.
00:16:56.100They're going to say, screw you, you didn't even believe it.
00:16:59.620Well, I do think there has been an extraordinary double standard expressed by a lot of people in the media
00:17:05.560and officials condoning protests, but still telling the rest of us that we have to stay home
00:17:13.120and mustn't go out and mix with people.
00:17:16.480You know, in this country, we're not allowed to go to the pub, we're not allowed to, you know, have any fun at all.
00:17:22.960But if we were to go, as thousands did a couple of weekends ago, to London and march in really close proximity to each other
00:17:31.280and shout and scream, which, of course, means you're, you know, spreading a lot of droplets in the air,
00:19:06.380Well, of course, the true answer is we still don't fully know this is a new virus and we are still learning all the time.
00:19:13.380However, we can say some things with with great clarity.
00:19:17.460And one of them is that young people are at very, very, very low risk indeed.
00:19:23.460That if you're over 80, it is a serious problem.
00:19:26.860It is a very dangerous virus if you've got underlying conditions.
00:19:30.700And those are the people we need to be really careful and keep away from crowds and keep away from social contact with with people,
00:19:37.040because young people can spread it, but they're very unlikely to suffer seriously from it.
00:19:41.040So that's a that's a really important point, I think, that we need to understand.
00:19:47.160And on the point of immunity, there are lots of different things leading in different directions.
00:19:52.880There isn't a huge amount of what you call B cell immunity, that is, say, antibodies in the population.
00:19:58.900But there's another kind of immunity called T cell immunity, which is partially effective and which seems to be very widespread in the population.
00:20:07.240And some reports have said 40 percent. Some reports have said 70 percent of kids under the age of four have this kind of immunity.
00:20:14.680And that's why they're not catching the disease. Now, why have they got this kind of immunity?
00:20:19.580Because there are four other coronaviruses that we catch pretty well every winter.
00:20:24.780They're called the common cold. They're one of the causes of the common cold.
00:20:28.540And they have given us a degree of immunity to coronaviruses.
00:20:33.000And once you factor in that, that maybe a big chunk of the population is already partly immune,
00:20:39.240then it turns out that the virus will die back of its own accord, particularly in summer,
00:20:45.360with only voluntary measures. And you won't need these drastic compulsory lockdowns.
00:20:51.840But as I say, we don't know that for sure. That's the way it's looking at the moment.
00:20:56.020It does seem, Matt, that, you know, the seasonal aspect of it can be both encouraging and discouraging.
00:21:04.240Like we are seeing some in the United States where there have been some states where we're seeing a little bit of a bounce back.
00:21:08.940But it does seem to be at least some seasonal effect.
00:21:12.460However, does that signify we're in for it in a big way going forward when we get to fall?
00:21:18.360I think that is a concern because all these respiratory viruses are seasonal.
00:21:25.680Flu is seasonal. Colds are seasonal. And we don't really know why.
00:21:30.300I mean, it's just quite interesting to talk briefly about one of those coronaviruses that cause colds.
00:21:35.300It's called OC43. It's the commonest of the common cold coronaviruses.
00:21:39.780It's highly seasonal. You only get it in winter on the whole.
00:21:42.540Now, genomic evidence, genetic evidence suggests that that first entered the human population around 1890.
00:21:50.420Well, it turns out there was a very bad epidemic of what was so-called Russian flu in 1889 to 90.
00:21:56.220And it sounds very like what we had today.
00:21:58.560It hit old people harder than young people. It hit men harder than women.
00:22:03.060So it could be that that was the first entry of that virus into the population.
00:22:07.600And it killed a million people and it spread all around the world.
00:22:11.400But then it became much more harmless.
00:22:13.700And it's so harmless now that you and I have probably had it several times.
00:22:17.320We get partial immunity to it. But in a few years later, you can get it again.
00:25:32.160We know that when they do these experiments in Wuhan to make combined viruses, they take the so-called receptor binding domain from one virus and add it to the backbone of another.
00:25:43.720And that's what this virus looks like.
00:25:45.500It looks like it's got a pangolin part for one part and a bat part for another.
00:25:49.700We know they can do that without leaving a trace.
00:25:52.460It used to be argued until a few weeks ago that if they had done that, they would very clearly leave a signature, a sort of restriction enzyme signature to give it its proper name.
00:26:04.220We know that they can do it without doing that.
00:26:06.240So there's a whole bunch of things that we know make it possible for this to have been made deliberately in the lab with a view to understanding its virulence, not with a view to making a bioweapon.
00:26:16.400And that it's possible that it therefore leaked.
00:26:19.200Now, to rule that out, the Chinese authorities need to bring forward all the researchers involved in that program and give us a complete and open account of exactly what experiments they did and why they think it did not leak.
00:26:31.880And then we can be reassured it's in their interest to do that.
00:26:35.320How do you think history is going to look back at the response of this?
00:26:42.080This is the first time in human history that we have shut everything down.
00:26:45.460I mean, they they shut things down in London for the London plague, but not like this.
00:26:52.680This is really kind of a test run of does this work?
00:27:19.580We relied too much on scientific models which were flawed in forecasting.
00:27:24.280And as you say, we used thoroughly illiberal and compulsory means to shut down the whole of society, doing huge economic damage without.
00:27:34.580And then the worst mistake of all, we let it run rampant through the care home system, both in my country and in New York state.
00:27:41.880There have been cases where patients were sent from hospitals to care homes without being tested for the virus.
00:27:49.140That caused an epidemic in the care homes.
00:27:52.200So so there's a whole series of mistakes that I think, I'm afraid, are pretty disastrous.
00:27:56.500And we're going to have to to to learn very carefully from this not to behave that way in future.
00:28:03.200We ought to have been able to handle this with a with a voluntary restrictions that saved old people who were most at risk from getting close to the virus,
00:28:14.060but didn't interfere with young people going about their business and earning their living.
00:28:18.800And that, I think, is one of the things we've got to do in my book called How Innovation Works.
00:28:27.400And I think the other lesson we have to learn is that we didn't do enough innovation in vaccine development and other things before this pandemic came along because we knew it was possible.
00:28:36.900I'm so afraid that we're going to pass this and the same thing is going to happen is going to happen again.
00:28:42.940We're just going to lose interest in it once we get past it.
00:31:51.380Do you not have anything else to do with your life?
00:31:54.020So his name is Emanuel Cafferty was fired from his position at San Diego Gas and Electric because the Twitter user posted this, which has now been deleted, said that he was a San Diego Gas and Electric employee.
00:32:10.220And he was making the white power symbol near a black lives rally.
00:32:47.240Other than being unemployed, I'm fine.
00:32:51.760So when our producers reached out to you, you said you just want your job back.
00:32:58.580And then we reached out to, you know, San Diego Gas and Electric, and they said, our employees are held to a high standard and expected to live up to our values every day.
00:33:12.780Whether in interactions with fellow employees or the public, we conducted a good faith and thorough investigation that included gathering relevant information and multiple interviews and took action in line with those values.
00:33:23.620While we're not able to reveal the furrow circumstances surrounding our investigation, Mr. Cafferty's separation from the company, we stand by our decision and will not be commenting any further.
00:33:33.660So basically what they're saying is they know you're a racist, but they can't tell anybody why you're a racist.
00:36:12.700Luckily, when you look at my face and you see that I'm, I'm Mexican American, it's not going to be the first thing to come up to your mind that I might be a clan member.
00:36:25.920So you started a petition on change.org.