Dr. James Lindsay joins Glenn Beck on the show to talk about the Elizabeth Warren DNA test, and why it may have been faked. Glenn also talks about a Chinese curse and why he doesn't think it's a real one.
00:02:00.240He wrote fake papers to get them submitted into real top-level journals, and he goes through all the, you know, how the scientific community, and in particular gender studies and feminist studies, were, you know, faked into, you know, publishing nonsense.
00:03:56.020His name was Sir Austin Chamberlain, and he was meeting with unionists, and he spoke of the grave injury to collective security by Germany's violation of the treaties.
00:04:09.560So he said, look, not so long ago, I spent some years of service in China, and there was this old Chinese fellow who told me of a curse.
00:04:49.780My dad taught me when I was really young that no matter what happens to you, there is no bad.
00:04:57.240Now, he taught me this when I was really young, but it took me hitting rock bottom, alcoholism, divorce, everything else, my life completely falling apart before I really learned that.
00:05:09.980It took a dark chapter in my life that taught me there is nothing that life can hand you that is in itself bad.
00:05:20.480It just depends on what you do with it.
00:05:22.580Is this going to change you in destructive ways?
00:05:58.920So living in interesting times, I think that's a blessing.
00:06:05.260And we're going to learn this one way or another.
00:06:07.660We can either learn this the easy way, like with my dad telling me, or we're going to learn it the hard way, like I actually had to take at the end and learn through just total collapse.
00:06:18.360But one way or another, humility will reign again, because we have an unbelievable lack of humility in D.C., in Hollywood.
00:06:28.760I have a story today to tell you about Michael Buble, who's now quitting the music industry.
00:06:35.320He says he's tired of the celebrity nonsense.
00:06:40.720Everybody on the left and the right, we all have an ego problem.
00:06:46.500We're utterly convinced that our side is absolutely right.
00:06:50.780And if you violate that, if you violate one part of that, you're a traitor.
00:06:57.060You're a traitor to the race, the party, the cause, whatever.
00:07:00.240However, they are wrong and we remain right.
00:07:04.600Now, there are real, true right and wrongs.
00:23:29.720So the thesis was, well, the original idea behind the thesis was that we should write a feminist paper arguing that we should train men the way that we train dogs to prevent rape culture.
00:23:41.580And so I thought that up today, thought it was pretty funny when I was brainstorming ideas for papers, threw it to Peter.
00:23:49.340Peter takes his dogs to the dog park every day, said, let's work in some of the stuff from the dog park.
00:23:55.740And as we started working in just, you know, absolutely absurd ideas from what might be considered the most ridiculous dog park in the world, the paper grew into that.
00:24:07.720And so we made it about so-called queer performativity and human reactions at the dog park and then ended up concluding things like that we should be able to leash men like we leash dogs to prevent rape, except it's not politically feasible.
00:24:24.760And it would be great if we could put shock collars on men, but that's not okay either.
00:24:31.260So we have to shock them out of, you know, hitting on women by screaming at them to scare them and get them to desist from their behavior.
00:24:38.740The thesis of the paper was, though, that humans reacted differently to gay dog humping as opposed to straight dog humping.
00:24:49.460And men were far worse about this than women.
00:24:52.560And then we concluded that this is indicative of rape culture, and we called the dog park rape condoning space, which we then likened to nightclubs.
00:25:02.700We said nightclubs are also rape condoning spaces with no evidence for that whatsoever.
00:25:50.380That was one of the most disturbing parts of this, I feel like.
00:25:53.960Because, again, it wasn't like these journals looked at this and didn't really go through it and kind of just made its way through the process.
00:26:01.380There are very specific comments from dozens of reviewers who are doing peer review and saying specific things that you wrote that are completely ridiculous are amazing new accomplishments in the field.
00:26:15.700I mean, that had to be, while funny and it proved your point, it had to be really disturbing as well.
00:26:55.120They said our analysis was good when our analysis was terrible.
00:27:00.480They didn't raise an eyebrow about the data we gathered, the idea that, you know, that dog park paper contains a bit of completely irrelevant evidence about where dogs go to the bathroom in unauthorized ways, as we worded it.
00:27:17.340And that's completely irrelevant to the paper, but nobody raised an eyebrow about how ridiculous that is.
00:27:22.560They were concerned, however, that we indicate that we're humans, not dogs, so that we can be sure that we don't claim that when a dog does a humping of another dog, whether or not the dog that got humped wanted it or not, because how could we know that as being humans, not dogs?
00:27:41.960And they were really concerned, as I hope everybody's seen in our little video we put out to announce the project.
00:27:48.600They're really concerned with the fact that we respect the dog's privacy in the process of inspecting their genitals.
00:27:58.140What specifically were they concerned about?
00:28:46.600That was a pretty exciting acceptance, especially because we actually had a real scholar who let us use his identity, who we claimed wrote that paper.
00:28:58.120And he actually is a professional bodybuilder, Mr. Northern Hemisphere, 1978 or something.
00:29:03.160I mean, this guy's 70 years old and just stacked.
00:29:06.140And the picture in my mind of this guy being the author of this paper for fat bodybuilding was just kind of hilarious.
00:29:34.580And I don't want to get too far into the weeds here.
00:29:36.920But honestly, scholarship should stand or fall on its merit, not on who did it.
00:29:42.440And so a lot of people are making that point.
00:29:45.260And we deliberately chose names that would be hard to find in a Google search.
00:29:49.240In specific, we chose very common names on purpose.
00:29:52.420I actually used – I rolled dice to pick off of a list of the most common names for certain years.
00:30:00.660We're talking to Dr. James Lindsay, author of Life in Light of Death.
00:30:05.020He is – you can follow him at Conceptual James on Twitter.
00:30:13.220He is one of the, if not the mastermind behind the papers of record that were being written for feminist studies and queer studies.
00:30:28.060And were published in some of the leading journals and critiqued, but not really critiqued in a way that most people would.
00:30:38.860I'll just quickly go through some of them going in through the back door, which is not something we're going to discuss here that's really great.
00:31:13.680The journal was inviting us to resubmit it and give it another go.
00:31:21.920It says it's a solid essay that, with revision, will make a strong contribution to the growing literature of addressing injustice in the classroom.
00:31:31.560Yeah, and so what it argues for is that we take students in college classrooms and we have them go through some kind of a inventory that determines how privileged they are.
00:31:43.480It recommends a thing called the step forward, step back game as a possibility.
00:31:49.200Once they determine how privileged they are, the students are ranked according to their privilege.
00:31:54.580Then the more privileged you are, the worse you get treated in class.
00:31:57.900So the most privileged white and male students are invited to listen and learn throughout the semester, which means they aren't allowed to speak or ask questions in class.
00:32:08.420They're invited to sit in the floor in chains to experience reparations and level the knowing field to de- and re-privilege the classroom learning environment.
00:32:20.760And the problem that the reviewers seem to have with this set of suggestions was that we thought there's no way this will get in.
00:32:30.960We have to temper it by saying we have to be compassionate to these students as we put them in the floor in chains.
00:32:35.960And they said, watch it with a compassion that re-centers the needs of the privileged over the oppressed.
00:32:43.140And there's this idea out there called the pedagogy of discomfort, which means that you learn to overcome your privilege by being made uncomfortable and left to sit in that without being comforted.
00:32:54.560And so they actually wanted to make a terrible, scary idea properly evil.
00:33:00.160And that's the worst part is it's only a small step from what already exists in a great deal of the feminist and race-based education literature.
00:33:12.000So this was not this was not accepted because it didn't it wasn't bad enough?
00:33:17.000At first, yeah, and then later they were a bit concerned with the depth of the scholarship and the kind of routine things that you would expect out of a scholarly paper.
00:33:29.100They claimed, for example, that we drew on too many concepts and it would be confusing for the reader and to try to narrow it down to something a bit tighter and so on.
00:33:36.640But the idea that giving students experiential reparations and asking them not to be able to speak in class or to be spoken over and interrupted to teach them what that feels like, none of that was questioned.
00:33:53.200So what if this were published and it were real, if this were published, what would that mean to the university system?
00:34:03.760So all these answers are really complicated.
00:34:06.640There would be people who try to take this up.
00:34:09.520In fact, we got the idea from a news article about somebody at the University of Pennsylvania who was employing a similar but less extreme version of this in her classroom and got in trouble for it late last year.
00:34:23.140So this idea didn't come to us out of the vacuum.
00:34:26.540This was actually something that people are attempting in classrooms.
00:34:29.940And so there would have been some educators primarily working in social justice side field topics courses, I guess is the best way to say that, but also probably into some of the general ed stuff who would take up some degree of these suggestions as experimental but legitimate to use in the classroom.
00:34:52.100And this was being submitted to the gold standard journal.
00:34:55.980This wasn't some fringe journal in education.
00:34:58.480This was the gold standard feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, that we were working with here, which is where a lot of the literature that's like this already exists.
00:35:06.500Which, if you don't mind me going on a little bit, this is kind of what's happening.
00:35:10.720We think that what's happening here is kind of the equivalent with ideas of money laundering, called idea laundering.
00:35:19.920So they take these bad ideas, some of which are just opinions.
00:35:26.320Some of them are genuinely terrifying, like this educational thing.
00:35:30.680And then they launder them through the academic process, and they come out with the stamp of academic approval that makes them look like they're real knowledge.
00:35:38.740So you'll hear people say, oh, well, there was a study, or we've based this program on studies that show.
00:35:44.380Well, that's fine when the studies are good, but when the studies are coming from a place that can't tell truth from prejudice and opinion, it becomes a real problem.
00:35:56.760James, one of the other ones I found disturbing was the HOH2 and HOH1.
00:37:08.700That's Robin DiAngelo, who has just had a big book published on that this year but introduced a concept in 2011,
00:37:15.980which says that if somebody with privilege, in particular white people for her work, is challenged so that their privilege is put into question,
00:37:25.080that they are fragile and don't know how to deal with it because their privilege made them weak.
00:37:29.520They don't know how to psychologically deal with having that challenge.
00:37:31.960And they act out in anger or grief or something like that in trying to maintain their privilege.
00:37:38.340And so these ideas are already getting out there.
00:37:58.060It was definitely to put them in that position.
00:38:00.240And I've asked Hypatia to stand by the paper that they accepted and published in our right names.
00:38:05.040They haven't responded yet, but we'll see what they do.
00:38:08.060That way, indeed, people who want to criticize our project from a position of intersectional feminism will need to cite us in order to criticize us.
00:38:41.640It was written from the position of an autoethnography where the researcher is reflecting on, in this case, her own experience as a white lesbian woman coming to hate her own whiteness.
00:38:52.280And it was rejected partly because the scholarship wasn't quite there, which is the case in all of the papers, but also because it positioned the author as a good white rather than being sufficiently supplicant or whatever to critical race theories.
00:39:07.820So there was an explicitly political reasoning behind why it was rejected, and it was that the author, as a white woman, was trying to make herself look good by criticizing her own whiteness.
00:39:25.480And that took the parts of Mein Kampf where he was talking about Jews and replaced the words Jews with whites.
00:39:35.440Yeah, in that case, it was either whites or whiteness.
00:39:37.900And then we edited the text around it and added a whole bunch of literature and reworded things so it would get past plagiarism checks and things like that.
00:39:45.960So yeah, that was a—it started with scanning through Mein Kampf, picking out passages about the Jews and replacing Jews with whites or whiteness, and then editing around it.
00:39:59.840The feminist one didn't do it quite the same way.
00:40:02.420The feminist one was not about—it didn't take Jews out and replace it with men, for example.
00:40:07.540It actually is the chapter in Mein Kampf where Hitler explains the need for the Nazi party as Chapter 12 and what its members would be expected to hold to, including especially the sacrifices that they have to make to be Nazis.
00:40:23.380And we replaced our movement, the party, et cetera.
00:40:27.860He doesn't mention Nazis specifically in that chapter.
00:40:30.760We replaced that with intersectional feminism or solidarity or allyship, something to do with the feminist movement, and criticized the idea that some feminists do what they call choice feminism, which is the idea that if a woman is living her own life the way she wants to
00:40:49.320and considers that to be a statement of feminism, then she is doing feminism.
00:40:54.480It's feminist for women to have, you know, full agency and make their own choices in the world.
00:40:58.040That's what this paper was criticizing, saying that, no, no, their responsibility, if they really want to consider themselves feminists, is to be—to make sacrifices and stand in solidarity with other oppressed people,
00:41:10.140particularly of, you know, women of color or women of other marginalized statuses.
00:41:19.940A, this had to be one of those things that you entered into and hoped that you were wrong, and when they were accepted, you had to celebrate and then short time later going, good God, this is bad.
00:41:37.260So especially with the Mein Kampf paper, I think, the one that got accepted, the idea there was that we were trying to—it's very different from Mein Kampf, of course.
00:41:47.540Don't let me mislead you that it's a one-to-one thing.
00:41:49.720But the politics of grievance coming through, and I really am glad I get to talk to you about this if I can, because politics of grievance is everywhere, and it's certainly being used in the academic left as we were trying to demonstrate.
00:42:06.680And I think this is why we're so divided politically right now.
00:42:10.580I was really happy to talk to you because, I mean, I don't want to get anything touchy with you, but you're a real dude, and that's why I wanted to talk to you.
00:42:44.060We on the left need to take responsibility for our own lunatics, and so our project was kind of that.
00:42:50.160You know, we're left-wing people who want the left to come back from the edge, and we hope that, you know, the same thing is happening on the right, and we can all start.
00:42:59.120I think, you know, people in general, I get a lot of sense of this.
00:43:02.660People send me emails about this now all the time especially.
00:43:05.540We're all kind of sick of all this nonsense, all the fighting, all the polarization, and we can't get anything done.
00:43:12.300I think we want to get back to productive politics, and as long as we're relying heavily on this grievance stuff, which clearly the academic left is, I think we see a lot of it coming out of the right-wing media sphere as well.
00:43:24.340From my perspective, I think as long as we're focusing on that, we can't have productive conversations.
00:43:29.320We can't remember, you know, you're an American.
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00:45:40.700There is a fascinating story about Michael Buble.
00:45:43.640If you're a longtime listener of this program, you know that Michael Buble is a friend of the program and somebody that I have known, I think, since before he was really, really famous.
00:46:11.980Michael Buble is officially retired from music following his son Noah's cancer battle.
00:46:18.740The singer, 43, explained that the heartache he endured following his son's cancer diagnosis at just three years old has changed his perception of life,
00:46:59.980The Canadian singer has won four Grammys, sold 75 million records, earning him $35 million a year.
00:47:05.960He has been married to a stunning Argentinian model and actress for seven years.
00:47:10.980The couple lived the life of luxury with their three children, Noah, five, Elias, two, and daughter, Vidya, Amber, Betty, who is 11 weeks old.
00:47:19.400Yet all of this seemed meaningless when Noah was diagnosed with liver cancer two years ago,
00:47:24.320and the devastated couple immediately announced that they were putting their careers on hold for the care of their son.
00:47:30.300Noah has been declared now cancer-free.
00:49:03.620What was hard was going to the store and buying hot dogs and toilet paper and going to the gas station, going for a walk by the sea to clear my head.
00:49:11.040Everyone recognizes me and says, how's your son?
00:49:13.840You think you're close to getting over it, and you're sucked right back into it.
00:49:17.040But at the same time, I was given back my faith in humanity.
00:49:22.460He said the illness made him realize he needed to make a change in his life.
00:49:28.620I spent a good deal of time with people who aren't so lucky.
00:49:33.820When this terrible news came, I realized I wasn't really having fun in the music business.
00:49:38.580I had lost the joy, and at some point just before the Brits, I was starting to lose the plot.
00:49:44.840But I'd become desperate to hold on to something I thought I might be losing, and I thought I had to do something special to keep it.
00:49:51.900I started doing things out of my comfort zone, like presenting, and the truth is, it had been a while since I had been having fun.
00:49:58.500I started to worry about ticket sales for my tours, what the critics said, what the perception of me might be.
00:50:05.500I felt like I was living with this over my face, and the reality I was seeing was all blurred by it.
00:50:12.300I decided I never wanted to read my name in print again, never read a review, and I never have.
00:50:18.980I decided I'd never use social media again, and I never have.
00:50:22.580But the diagnosis made me realize how stupid I had been to worry about all of these unimportant things.
00:51:42.140It is fascinating to read these things from him, because what I've always felt about Michael Buble was he was just having fun.
00:51:56.600He was just living a dream, and I wondered, and I never spotted it in him.
00:52:06.200I just wondered if it was ever going to get old to him, because what makes him, I think, the best performer I've ever seen on stage is that joy.
00:52:18.820He just has a joy of performance, and it is so infectious.
00:53:38.120So why would he possibly be saying that he is now?
00:53:44.520It seems like it might be one of those situations where the internet has taken somewhat a sarcastic comment and turned it into reality.
00:53:51.780His spokespeople are coming out today and saying that he's not actually going to retire because he's in the middle of a tour and a book, album release, and all that other stuff.
00:54:01.280So here's what he says exactly to the reporter.
00:55:01.480The most important thing, though, is looking at that and saying that is really the type of thing that changes your perspective completely.
00:55:08.540You go through something like that, and you stop and you examine all the nonsensical idiocy that you participate in every day, and you can reprioritize.
00:55:18.980You don't want to have to go through that to do it, but sometimes it's the only thing that makes you kind of reprioritize the things you're doing in your life.
00:55:24.800And he seems to have—I mean, he is making $35 million a year if he's out there touring and stuff, and he's able to walk away from that because he just wants to spend time with his son.
00:55:38.160How many times do we hear those excuses?
00:55:40.880It's so quitting to spend more time with my family.
00:55:43.140That was completely real with this guy.
00:55:45.060It's nice to see somebody who actually cares.
00:55:47.160And it's nice to see that he got through it and has made it into a good thing, you know?
00:55:53.780I have probably more respect for Michael Buble than any other professional that I have ever met in the entertainment industry because he has found a way to keep his feet on the ground.