In this episode, I sit down with a conservative commentator who goes to work every day and does battle. He is a contributor to MSNBC, frequent guest on shows like Morning Joe, where you can find him flanked and outnumbered by a whole bunch of people who at times you think might be frothing at the mouth just a little bit waiting to see him fail.
00:01:40.820He is a contributor to MSNBC, frequent guest on shows like Morning Joe, where you can find him flanked and outnumbered by a whole bunch of people who at times you think might be frothing at the mouth just a little bit waiting to see him fail.
00:01:54.620But his goal is to bring a conservative voice to a anti-conservative part of the media with a lot of influence on public opinion.
00:02:03.500He is taking one for the team, if you will.
00:02:15.620He deftly compares the social justice left and the white nationalist right.
00:02:21.040He is a guy who understands Nazis, socialists, and awful lot alike.
00:02:26.940He examines the pitfalls of the political system based on tribalism and looks at the growth of woke capitalism and what it means for all of us.
00:02:38.360He uses big words that I don't understand.
00:02:40.400He is very eloquent and has his finger on the pulse of America with a unique view of our past, our present, and our future.
00:02:50.140I remember in 2008 being called a racist, conspiracy theorist, whatever, getting it from all sides.
00:03:13.000When I said, warning, social justice may sound good, but it is antithetical to absolutely everything you think it is, what it sounds like, and what it was with the Catholics.
00:03:40.840We've just forgotten all these lessons.
00:03:42.780And as you say, if you don't really have a lot of experience with social justice activists, they're not in your daily life.
00:03:49.600You might think this is a pretty unobjectionable notion, just thinking about freedom and equality and writing true historical wrongs.
00:03:56.400And it is that, or at least it was that.
00:03:58.420But in the hands of its activist class, it has become the antithesis of the American idea.
00:04:02.520But isn't it, because I want you to, I want to first delve into what it is, you know, historically, et cetera, and then what it has become.
00:04:12.780Um, it's a, well, start, start with the Catholics in the 1800s.
00:04:18.200Yeah, so in the 19th century, um, Jesuit philosophers in the Catholic Church were seeking a way to create an alternative theory of social organization to compete with the Enlightenment, very secular Protestant Enlightenment.
00:04:30.860Because their experience with the Enlightenment in France wasn't the experience that was shared by Englishmen and Scotsmen who developed those sort of ideas.
00:04:38.060Um, the Catholic Churches were, were sacked and priests were assaulted and killed and idols to self-worship erected.
00:04:44.600So they were very skeptical of what the cult of pure reason could reason you into.
00:04:48.520Uh, and also the idea that, um, Alan Smith's invisible hand should be the font from which charitable works spring was something sort of anathema.
00:04:56.720It shouldn't be the pursuit of self-interest that benefits society.
00:05:01.460And so they developed a theory of social justice that was much more like charity.
00:05:05.760Um, it developed into the, the ecclesiastical rerum novarum, which has some collectivist elements to it.
00:05:12.580It was a way to combat the symptoms of society that were leading, uh, to the development of socialism and Marxism.
00:05:19.040Um, but fast forward about a century later to John Rawls and John Rawls put a lot more meat on these bones and made it seem, made, created the idea of social justice that we now know.
00:05:30.540He did, he advised a series of thought experiments so we could think about justice as like a finite commodity.
00:05:37.200Only so much exists in the world and it needs to be distributed justly and evenly so that everyone can have access to a equivalent amount of social justice.
00:05:45.680You create institutions that are dedicated to these distributions, idealized institutions, perfect institutions, and the distributor, the enlightened distributor operates from behind a veil of ignorance so that they cannot know the object of their distribution and satisfy their own biases.
00:06:01.200Modern social justice advocates have turned against the philosophy that was supposedly is the, is the foundation of their, of their, their thought process.
00:06:08.420They think the veil of ignorance is morally obtuse.
00:06:14.080If you don't know who the objects of your distribution are, who are the oppressed and who are their oppressors and who deserves to be lifted up and who is due a comeuppance.
00:06:21.860Uh, and even Hayek and, and Nozick note that Rawls abandons the veil of ignorance too, whenever it becomes inconvenient to realizing the sort of just distributions that he envisions.
00:07:32.640Um, and the, when I had the idea for this book, I was in Ukraine, I was on a, uh, government sponsored junket there.
00:07:40.680The post-revolutionary, uh, administration was sending people over influencers and they wanted to talk to them about what they were doing, building a civil society.
00:07:47.540And I met a lot of very influential people and very smart people who were committed to creating a Republican culture in this post-Soviet state.
00:07:54.880But I was very disheartened when I sat across from the country's chief prosecutor who explained to us at the time that they had no interest in,
00:08:01.740and it wasn't in their interest and therefore not in our interest to see them prosecute anybody who was engaged in violence in the Maidan revolution on their side.
00:08:24.240Let me stay in the Soviet Union for a second.
00:08:29.400Lenin, um, first of all, everybody started.
00:08:31.740He was starving because of his policies with the farmers.
00:08:34.740Um, and then it, it, it starts to work itself out a little bit and the farmers start to make some money and they're starting to sell their, their, uh, their, uh, their harvest.
00:08:48.160And it's starting to pick up and things are kind of okay.
00:08:53.240And Stalin comes in and he finds a group and cause he wants, he needs to say the farmers are capitalists now and we gotta, we gotta shut this down.
00:09:04.240This is social justice is, is, is the greatest tool in the hands of anybody gone bad or anybody who even believes something good and needs a highway to do it.
00:09:21.720Because you can say, as he did, they're stealing the wealth.
00:09:26.820This, these crops belong to all of us.
00:09:29.800I have another story from the Soviet Union that's in this book.
00:09:32.060So affirmative action, as we know it was essentially invented in the former Soviet Union.
00:09:36.600Bolsheviks inherited a vast Russian empire.
00:09:39.660It was multi-ethnic and the Russians governed it like viceroys.
00:09:42.640And they did so in a very chauvinistic way.
00:09:44.640Russian chauvinism was a problem, not just from a governing standpoint, but from a, uh, a paradigmatic standpoint.
00:09:50.760This was an assault on the kind of egalitarian global communist order they, they wanted to build.
00:09:57.480So they developed indigenization policies, lifting individuals up in these individual republics who were representative of the ethnicity in those republics.
00:10:06.120But that was only one half of this program.
00:10:08.260The other half was to disempower and disadvantage ethnic Russians.
00:10:12.400Ethnic Russians would be denied a sense of nationality, of nationalism.
00:10:15.500They were to be punished for the approach that they took to governing these territories.
00:10:22.800These people, most of the individuals who were lifted up, a lot of them were incompetent apparatchiks.
00:10:26.500Many of them were liquidated in the purges.
00:10:28.160But the kind of backlash that was sown as a result of this policy among Russians resulted in its exact opposite.
00:10:36.240Russification was engaged in the individual cultures were tamped down.
00:10:40.900And a sense of grievance among individual Russians manifested in a backlash against the republics.
00:10:46.140That was probably the result of the sense that they had been robbed unjustly of a sense of individuality, of a sense of commonality and nationality.
00:10:55.840So, again, the story is in the story throughout this book is people who, with the best of intentions, convinced of their own competence, made everything worse.
00:11:16.140I will tell you, I have been watching the rise of this and tired of warning against it.
00:11:35.680But we're seeing, and I want to get into identitarianism, we're seeing all of this just turn around and backfire.
00:11:48.160I mean, an example I think Americans would be able to relate to is, I think Barack Obama had the greatest opportunity of any president ever.
00:11:59.860If he would have been transformative in nature on race, if he would have been more like the King message, more like the Gandhi message, more like Nelson Mandela, it would have changed everything.
00:12:14.640But he believed in collective salvation, he believed in social justice, and social justice feels like vengeance.
00:12:22.740There were some times when Barack Obama was transcendent on race.
00:12:27.000In particular, I'm thinking of the wake of the verdict in the Trayvon Martin killing trial.
00:12:49.260But even if it wasn't him, this started to, it's been going on for a long time in the universities, but this started to go forefront where the average person started noticing a change.
00:13:01.280And it is accelerating so rapidly, and we're starting now to say, I think Kavanaugh was a breaking point where people, average people went, wait a minute, this could happen to me.
00:13:22.580Maybe the most disturbing element of that episode for me was the way in which you saw a deluge of people who were influential in media and politics and entertainment and just about every facet of life come out unashamedly and without any reservation to say that this is the result of a privileged white man who's rebelling against his own circumstances.
00:13:46.260We're just reducing him to the accidents of his birth and stereotyping from that basis and ignoring the paucity of evidence before us was such that you didn't really have a lot to pour over.
00:13:56.600So why not get into his accidents of birth that in any other context we would call pernicious prejudice?
00:14:10.520I have actually talked to one of the daughters of one of the writers that went to prison for, you know, be one of the Hollywood 10 during the roundup of the communists in the 50s.
00:14:30.780But on this, we come into line on and I don't I literally don't understand how can people who say they represent a group of people who have been afraid to say who they are because they were kept in a closet or a group of people who have seen jail time for what they believe in a political sense.
00:15:01.780All that's happened is you're flipping the script instead of instead of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, judge me by the content of my character, judge me by merit.
00:15:12.100Martin Luther King said, live up to the words of your founding documents.
00:15:31.660So this is a common human impulse, right?
00:15:33.280I mean, this the kind of tribalism and identity politics is so is so common and ingrained and universal that it must be an evolutionary trait.
00:15:41.940So the fact that we have these structures in this country that are designed to thwart those impulses is not a natural condition.
00:15:49.280And we're essentially rebelling against our own humanity.
00:15:51.540It has worked in an entropic way, in part because the founders were so farsighted, but it is not a natural condition.
00:16:21.340So the story of Bergeron takes place in the distant future in 1961, but not too far from now.
00:16:28.540In which society was characterized by negative discrimination, the kind of discrimination we were talking about in the Soviet Union.
00:16:37.540Individuals who have advantages bestowed on them by nature and natural advantages of birth, whether they look attractive or they have a unique athletic abilities or they're intelligent.
00:16:48.040They are disempowered by the state, given various impediments to deny them those privileges.
00:16:56.960Mask if you're beautiful, acoustic distractions if you're smart, you know, weights around your legs if you're athletic.
00:17:01.640The design being social equality, but downward social leveling.
00:17:07.660And in order to envision this scenario in 1961, which is kind of anathema to to the American consciousness, he needed to create this big brother character, which would impose these conditions on people.
00:17:21.160I don't think he foresaw the situation that we're in now where there is no imposition from above.
00:17:29.060This if this is a sort of bubbling up from beneath, it is by popular demand that we are seeing these kind of demands for downward social leveling.
00:17:37.380And that's much more dangerous because you can't just vote out the demos.
00:17:40.160You is it is it is it coming for the most part?
00:17:47.300And I'm not talking about the the social justice warriors who know exactly what it is and what they're doing.
00:17:53.800OK, but there are people that I just saw an interview with a bunch of Columbia students.
00:18:03.500And you talk about this in your book with with the Nazis, the neo-Nazis here.
00:19:15.460I mean, there's one thing to be said for wanting to steep yourself in a lifestyle that complements a particular field of study.
00:19:22.980I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with that.
00:19:25.560The new although it might manifest in something you could call segregation.
00:19:29.580That's not necessarily healthy, but it's not an assault on the American idea.
00:19:33.900What's a little different and a little more disturbing is now the pretense that this kind of segregation has anything to do with study is being abandoned.
00:19:42.520You see non-faculty administrators now saying that we need to have essentially segregated spaces in all forms of campus life, segregated lunch tables even, because it prevents, quote, uncomfortable learning.
00:19:55.240I mean, I'm the never have you ever been have you ever at any time learned anything in your life that was worth it that didn't cause you some sort of discomfort, pain, questioning.
00:20:07.120Right now, this is this is the essence of competition.
00:20:22.860Otherwise, you'll end up looking like me.
00:20:25.900Unfortunately, though, this is the sort of thing.
00:20:29.400And I said this is bubbling up from beneath.
00:20:31.060But this is seen as the most health, most healthy approach to to developing a sort of communal instincts, because the notion here that segregated areas of lifestyle and complete separatism is the way to create some form of racial enlightenment.
00:20:49.580It seems to me a very difficult way to combat racism.
00:20:53.020You're basically telling people that the only culture you're you're allowed to appreciate is essentially your own.
00:20:57.840I don't know how that combats the kind of the kind of hatred that social justice advocates say they want to fight.
00:21:05.060But when you boil it down and you talk to them and you start, you know, really working through these issues, it's not it doesn't become about addressing hatred and creating more common understanding and commonalities and universality.
00:21:17.340It becomes steeping yourselves in these grievances, holding fast to these grievances because they are empowering.
00:21:24.120You just said with Kurt Vonnegut, you just said.
00:21:28.520That we would accept it and bring it on ourselves.
00:25:32.680Oh, desiderata, you know, desired objects of desire.
00:25:35.360So you're the notion here that you're going to have through the Green New Deal, the federal get jobs guarantee that FDR wanted in 1937 tomorrow seems to me unlikely.
00:25:46.940The notion that you're going to have Medicare for all and you're going to wipe out a nine hundred billion dollar industry tomorrow in this one proposal seems unlikely.
00:25:55.680So, yes, you're moving towards a transformation of society, but it is one that has been at least a hundred years in the making.
00:26:02.680And so far it has encountered a series of impediments.
00:26:05.180I'm hopeful that those impediments are not going to disappear tomorrow.
00:26:08.440The problem, however, is that the social justice advocate who has developed these moral imperatives will encounter this resistance and then react in one of two ways.
00:26:20.960One, despondency, withdraw, back off, say your political activism isn't worth it.
00:26:26.300And the second is to radicalize, to resolve to attack the foundations of these institutions because they are so immoral and so unresponsive that they cannot be allowed to stand.
00:26:34.000And that is, in my view, Wall Street, why we have seen so much political violence in this country over the last 10 years, more than we've seen in a generation.
00:26:41.360Began with Occupy and it has only gotten worse.
00:26:44.160Right in the left fringes are at one another's throats in the streets, literally knifing each other in the streets.
00:26:49.860It's sort of the narcissism of small differences there.
00:26:52.300These two groups resemble each other in more ways than they don't.
00:26:55.840But, yeah, they're at each other's throats.
00:26:57.220And I think that is a product of the fact that they are reacting with frustration because their demands cannot be met.
00:27:02.680Do social justice warriors, for instance, you look at the people up in Portland and Antifa, and you have a hard time squaring the circle on this one on, hang on, you're against fascism, but you're doing these things.
00:27:26.520And you're against Nazis, okay, well, so am I.
00:27:31.440But you're acting an awful lot like a Nazi.
00:27:35.780I mean, they might have subtle differences, but when it comes to social justice, when it comes to really socialism and the way the state operates, they are just two sides of the same coin.
00:27:47.800Everybody was horrified by what happened in Charlottesville, as we should have been.
00:27:51.360But it wouldn't have come as a surprise if we had reacted, as we should have, to the events in Sacramento a year earlier.
00:27:58.640In the year prior, you had a demonstration of permitted white nationalists rallying under fascist flags, and they were attacked by the proto-government, or proto-government, proto-organization that formed Antifa's called By Any Means Necessary.
00:28:12.180And these two groups, rallying under a communist flag and a fascist flag, attacked each other in the streets.
00:28:30.260What do you mean by America's Weimar moment?
00:28:31.840It was the moment in which it's probably, it's unlikely that we're going to see the, you know, the effects of the Weimar, you know, Republic here, incredible, you know, inflation and political instability.
00:28:47.320Well, we can talk about our debt on another episode if I go ahead.
00:28:51.020But the notion here that we are beginning to see the elements of identitarian politics manifest in street violence is, to me, a warning sign of the kind of instability that was experienced in the interwar years.
00:29:07.060But the notion here that we're experiencing something that could become that kind of, the kind of formative experience that Hayek had is, to me, something that shouldn't be ignored.
00:29:17.160And, yes, we would address it with the terms that are relevant to creating the kind of urgency that I think the crisis demands.
00:29:25.760You're the first person I've talked to that's in mainstream media at all that even begins to understand identitarianism.
00:29:32.240It is, it is, it is so pernicious and, and yet so easy to see how people can fall into, in my opinion.
00:29:49.360See if our understandings are the same.
00:29:51.340If you're over in Europe, you're in Sweden, you're a racist if you fly a Swedish flag.
00:30:56.560And they're being forced to abandon it.
00:31:00.720At the same time, injury upon injury, they are saying, also, you're a racist if you, if you believe that what you grew up with is good and noble and has a reason to be preserved or even talked about.
00:31:17.260You force people, as soon as somebody comes in and you have a population that feels that way and they come in and say, no, no, we have a noble culture that can go awry that fast.
00:32:14.220And the result is that you have the extremist response to that, which is to say, essentially, not only that we have a culture, but it is a supremacist notion of that sort of cultural identity.
00:32:26.120Group identity, again, is an evolutionary trait.
00:32:28.560That mankind cannot live in the kind of hermetic individuality that is envisioned by the extreme libertarian idea of social organization.
00:32:44.640The extreme idea of mankind is divorced from the kind of civil mediating institutions, non-governmental institutions that result in community.
00:32:52.780Churches, community organizations, what have you, creating a sense of common purpose around a shared identity.
00:33:00.520Articles of confederation is too close to anarchy and so constitutional.
00:33:06.380But you can live much freer than this, but you do have systems.
00:33:12.180And the American civic religion around the constitution has sufficed for a form of political identity in this country for the last 240 years.
00:33:54.000When you get to the alternative, which is advocated by social justice advocates, which is much more around cultural identity based in the kind of way that Europeans see cultural identity.
00:34:04.620You're blood and soil nationalists and the individuals who see cultural identity as sort of a shared global common humanity on the left.
00:34:15.700These two things, I think, are antithetical to the American experiment.
00:34:20.020Also, the notions that are shared by the social justice advocates on both sides of these coins, that you do not have the capacity to rise above your station into which you were born.
00:34:29.420That your accidents of birth put you on a course in life that is essentially predestined, that you cannot navigate this unnavigable labyrinth of prejudices and the obstacles that are put before you by unseen ubiquitous elites without somebody holding your hand and essentially selling you something.
00:34:47.520Somebody has to help you navigate this environment because you are not equipped to do that on your own.
00:37:16.380We are we are so prosperous and so comfortable and the generations we have now have at least two, probably just one generation, my generation, but another coming up behind me that have never experienced anything resembling political violence.
00:37:31.360They have never experienced the kind of systemic public sector oppression resulting in violence in the streets that the other societies are much more familiar with.
00:37:44.180And so they have begun to romanticize it, having never experienced themselves.
00:37:48.540It is essentially it is it is the bloodlust of the bored and the comfortable.
00:37:53.060And that's why I think you're beginning to see in part these manifestations of violence in the streets, because these individuals have never experienced political persecution.
00:38:02.860And so they're begun to fantasize about it as a very effective tool in the tool shed.
00:38:07.880Just another one to affect a political end.
00:38:10.280But they do actually convince themselves that they are oppressed.
00:38:15.280Yeah, I think they genuinely see themselves as oppressed again because they do not know oppression.
00:38:20.300It's an insult to the rest of the world.
00:38:22.640I mean, I hope the Chinese never hear about our oppression here.
00:38:29.360I was I was in Mexico City with my wife for two days and I interviewed women who were slaves that were just freed by one of my charities.
00:38:40.940And one of them literally had chain marks around her neck.
00:38:46.900OK, you know, that famous picture of the the slave with his shirt off and he's standing in a chair and are sitting in the chair and you could see the wit mark.
00:40:18.540There are discriminatory actions that are taken by public institutions that are manifestly unjust and that should be combated with everything that we have in us.
00:40:27.000But that's a that's distinct from oppression.
00:40:29.840The kind of political violence that we've seen in other societies.
00:40:38.660Where we're headed with social justice, do you think?
00:40:48.340Where are the who are the who are the pernicious organizers of social justice that we should be watching for?
00:40:57.600What are the moves that are coming that we should be aware of?
00:41:00.380Well, it's much easier to see them on the left than on the right.
00:41:03.000On the left, it has become such an organizing principle, an unchallenged, unquestioned organizing principle that it's just in the water.
00:41:11.980And people talk about social justice as though it was just a nod to just being a good person.
00:41:18.560Say it like, you know, I used to hear my boss talks about how in the 1980s or so you would append and the environment onto whatever it was you were talking about.
00:41:34.020So you just say social justice and it pins social basically onto just any other word and it modifies it and destroys its meaning is what Hayek said.
00:41:42.380But also it marks you as somebody who's socially conscious.
00:41:53.200Philosophers of the dark enlightenment, which is exactly what it sounds like.
00:41:56.260An attack on enlightenment philosophy.
00:41:59.480People like Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, who advocates for an anti-democratic philosophy, an anti-republican philosophy, who is attracted to Donald Trump's movement.
00:42:11.520And Donald Trump's movement was attracted to him.
00:42:14.100He was apparently in contact with Steve Bannon when Steve Bannon was in the White House as a chief strategist for the president.
00:42:18.700Steve Bannon, you see, I give and, you know, I assume you know where I stood with Donald Trump during the election.
00:42:28.720I thought he was an extraordinarily dangerous man because of who he was surrounding himself with.
00:42:35.420Beyond that, I don't think he really cares about it.
00:42:37.860I don't think he believes anything deeply except tariffs and maybe immigration, maybe immigration tariffs.
00:43:29.720In fact, how does the average conservative give me some way of knowing who's who?
00:43:44.260If you're just somebody who doesn't really pay attention, how do you know who you're standing with?
00:43:49.760Well, so Donald Trump in 2016 embraced a lot of ideas that are antithetical to conservatism, right?
00:43:57.040Among them, some of the stuff we talked about, notions like you as an individual are being robbed of your station in life, that which is your due, by a series of ill-defined deletes, obstacles are put on your path, and that you have to appeal to a strong hand to restore it.
00:44:15.580Wait, let me play devil's advocate here and have you answer to them.
00:45:20.100Also, what has conservatism conserved was the question I was posed very frequently.
00:45:25.240And that, to me, is so myopic and just simply rejects objectivity.
00:45:31.500Barack Obama's presidency all but ended in 2011.
00:45:34.800The legislative phase of Barack Obama's presidency was over.
00:45:38.640They confirmed a couple of judges when they had, but when they lost the Senate in 2015, that was the end.
00:45:43.420And conservatism served as a bulwark against change, which is what conservatism tends to do.
00:45:49.720And if you reject that, you are rejecting what conservatism's fundamental elements are, which is preservation, not radical transformation.
00:45:59.540And then the burn it down crowd really wants radical transformation.
00:46:03.260They're not entirely clear on what that transformation is, but they're consumed with the belief that everything must change, that these institutions that have preserved this republic for 240 years are failing them and their families, and therefore they are not worth preserving.
00:47:03.040And, you know, you're watching Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and everybody else just brushed off to the side.
00:47:09.240And it's because there is a feeling on both sides, this doesn't work, what we're doing right now.
00:47:19.020But when you get right up to it, if they nominate somebody like Bernie Sanders or they nominate somebody who's like, you know what, the free market system, I'm not sure.
00:47:28.920Unless we have an economy that is depression.
00:47:51.360And in so far in doing that, legitimized the kind of critique of the liberal order and a critique of anti-Semitism has become, again, mainstream in the party.
00:48:33.800But I also think and again, the Trump administration has improved from the campaign period, in part because there's no intellectual infrastructure in the Republican Party for the kind of identitarian policies that they wanted to see manifest.
00:48:47.780They had to fill this administration with some conventional conservatives.
00:48:51.160And for the most part, you had a pretty conventional Republican administration, some exceptions.
00:48:54.780What the Democrats did when they embraced the Women's March was elevate the tenets of intersectionality into a governing ethos, a sort of a mandate for political organization.
00:49:09.460Intersectionality is really central to social justice thinking.
00:49:47.220As an organizing principle, which is what the Women's March was dedicated to, it is self-defeating.
00:49:53.840It results in your organization tearing itself apart, which is exactly what the Women's March did.
00:49:58.060They couldn't see their own allies as allies, even if they agreed with them.
00:50:02.280Because they possessed disparate traits, some of which were seen as more oppressive than others.
00:50:06.760So the members, white Jewish members, weren't really allies, not in the words of Tamika Mallory, because she, the individuals who maybe agreed with them on everything, but also possessed traits that advanced white supremacy, whether they knew it or not.
00:50:19.740Similarly, this organization embraced people with no political constituency whatsoever, people like Assata Shakur, who's a convicted cop killer living a fugitive from justice in Cuba, or the minister Louis Farrakhan, people you could have jettisoned easily without losing any political capital.
00:50:35.520Indeed, you would gain some in the process.
00:50:37.680But to do so would be to legitimize the prejudices against which they claim to fight.
00:50:44.100And so the Women's March tore itself apart.
00:50:45.680It was disempowered by this philosophy because Democrats had to abandon them.
00:50:48.880But Donald Trump evinced a little intersectionality himself when he was so disinclined to forcefully, vehemently, and frequently, often, denounce the white nationalists who were attracted to his campaign.
00:51:02.140They gave them the idea that maybe our ideas are a little less marginal than we thought they were.
00:51:06.500That is an intersectional philosophy, too.
00:51:08.640That is the practice of embracing all because you're in a war of all against all.
00:51:14.440You are a combatant in this unnavigable labyrinth of prejudices.
00:51:18.820And anyone who subscribes to your philosophy is necessarily an ally as long as they advance these particular traits.
00:51:26.540It is a terrible philosophy for political organizing.
00:51:31.000But the students I talk to who agree with this sort of thing think it is a very empowering philosophy.
00:51:36.520It helps them understand the world in which they live.
00:51:38.760It helps them to figure out how to navigate it.
00:51:40.700I think this is a really deleterious idea.
00:51:52.540Donald Trump's use of the press as an axe.
00:51:57.520Help me use the press and what's happening with the press as a way to navigate around being used or being riled up for justice and what's really happening, for instance.
00:52:18.160I'm sorry, but the press is just I mean, they are who they are.
00:52:26.420And if they just came out and said, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm I'm liberal.
00:52:31.600Pretty much everybody who works here is liberal.
00:54:14.800So as a member of the of the press, sort of, I don't consider myself a reporter, but I am in the media.
00:54:21.840I think everybody goes to work every day wanting to do the best job that they can do.
00:54:26.340And in the very beginning of this Trump administration, I think there was a sentiment that prevailed in a lot of places in the press where I didn't work at the time.
00:54:34.840So this is speculation on my part that this was a new phase of history, that we had entered a crisis period and that it was all hands on deck moment.
00:54:45.160And it was the fatal conceit of the resistance that viewed American institutions as far more fragile than they are, as not as tested and capable of maintaining themselves, self-perpetuating in an entropic way that they needed to be propped up.
00:55:08.140It's the kind of thing that moves you from being mission oriented, from being objectivist first to being an activist.
00:55:14.660And I think you did see a lot of that in the press.
00:55:17.860I think you're seeing less of it now, but it is still prevalent.
00:55:20.740And we could probably you probably all know who the main practitioners of this sort of thing are.
00:55:24.940But it is it is out of a fundamental lack of appreciation for the robust stability that has been the result of American institutions.
00:55:34.900They can withstand somebody who is potentially disrespects the office of the presidency, for example, a pernicious actor, a malicious actor in a position of power and authority.
00:55:46.080We're actually seeing, I think, one of the greatest experiments in the executive branch that we've seen in a generation or more in the fact that we have a really understaffed executive branch.
00:55:57.360We don't really need as much of the executive branch as we have because the Trump administration has not fully staffed it.
00:56:06.200The act, the number of acting cabinet level secretaries is not is not wonderful.
00:56:11.440But I was very and I have a background in education and diplomacy.
00:56:17.160And I was one of the few people with that background who was very happy to see the State Department sort of gutted because it is overstaffed and overburdened.
00:56:25.540And it is it is replete with this idea that process and process alone is the means to an end, that engagement and dialogue is sufficient diplomacy.
00:56:34.700And that sort of thing needed to be purged.
00:56:37.640And I was fortunate to see that happening.
00:56:39.380But there are there are dangerous things that could result from having an understaffed administration.
00:56:43.820This administration has been fortunate insofar as that it's existed in sort of this period of placidity.
00:56:47.640There hasn't really been an exogenous crisis that's really tested them.
00:56:50.580But also, you know, everything's still moving along pretty good.
00:56:54.820And it's not because the members of the media have their hair on fire every day.
00:56:58.840This is the country has has been tested before and it is being tested now and it is withstanding the test.
00:57:04.680And I think we should all be pretty happy about that.
00:57:06.440It's amazing to me how resilient this is.
00:57:08.980I mean, I thought I think we all did on September 11th when we watched the towers fall, not knowing who did it to us.
00:58:02.300Yeah, I think that's you would you would think that that would be something worthy of celebration.
00:58:08.020But I'm not sure I'm not sure the critics of the current state of affairs when it comes to the founding of the country and its history and its form of government are really all that interested in learning about why it is so resilient.
00:58:22.220When I talk about the American ideal, I read a little bit about this in the book, when I talk about the American ideal in schools and colleges, I get kind of a hostile response because from the perspective of the modern undergraduate, the American ideal has failed because what they know of the American ideal is that we have never achieved it.
00:58:41.420And that is sort of a misunderstanding of what the word ideal means, right?
00:58:48.440You may never achieve it, but that doesn't give you license to stop trying.
00:58:51.320Because we have not improved upon concepts like merit of meritocracy, egalitarianism and English common law notions like the presumption of innocence, which are under attack by these people.
00:59:00.080We haven't made anything better than that.
00:59:02.500And so you're not at liberty to to abandon those ideas.
00:59:06.000But these students don't know what the founders knew because they don't not only do they not read the founders, they don't read the Federalist Papers, but they don't read what the founders read.
00:59:14.700They haven't read Burke or Hume or Montesquieu.
00:59:17.740They don't understand the nature of representative governance and why it is a superior form of social organization, of governmental organization.
00:59:25.780So it's a product of ignorance, which is in some ways excusable, but mostly not self-imposed ignorance.
00:59:33.280And it's one of the reasons why we need to rededicate to the study of civics and not just how a bill becomes law.
00:59:39.440But again, these Enlightenment thinkers that served as the philosophical foundations that resulted in the government that we have today, that sort of thing has been lost.
00:59:50.340I don't think people understand that they don't understand social justice and they don't understand that this movement postmodernism is anti it's postmodern.
01:00:07.760It is anti enlightenment, it's anti fact, anti study, anti, you know, observing it's it goes against everything.
01:00:22.200The Enlightenment taught us and it it will flip us back into a world of.
01:00:31.540I don't even know that's conceited, right?
01:00:34.980I mean, if you think you can remake the world anew, it's probably because you have no idea what the world was before.
01:00:41.220And, you know, generally that you have a very, very high impression of your own competence, which is I think it's mostly hubris.
01:00:50.840I mean, a lot of that comes with youth.
01:00:52.940It's most of it's beaten out of you, I think, by the real world, but not everybody, not everybody succumbs to that sort of thing.
01:00:59.780So, yeah, it's probably a function of ignorance.
01:01:06.000I want to go back to what we talked about earlier about about this system not feeling right to a lot of people that we don't even know what the system is that we should be operating on.
01:01:26.700We haven't been operating on that system for a long, long time.
01:01:29.440The constitutional bill of rights, real, true understanding of of of this and what's headed our way with technology.
01:01:42.180Technology, what we're looking at now, nobody is asking the big questions.
01:03:03.720I mean, unless we start talking about deeper thoughts and root ourselves into what is real until we start.
01:03:11.420Until we dislodge ourselves from thinking that the end all be all is a wealth of nations and realize that moral sentiments needs to be put with it.
01:03:24.460We don't survive this until we can say, yeah, that's life.
01:03:58.380And in many ways, it has very little to do with economics and much more to do with human interaction, in part because economics isn't really the dismal science.
01:04:05.020The science part is really deemphasized.
01:04:07.660It's it's much more about a philosophy and how to organize societies.
01:04:11.020I'm I'm less skeptical about innovation, I think, than a lot of people who are who share my political inclinations, in part because I'm not a technophobe.
01:04:21.500No, yeah, I didn't hear technophobia in what you're saying.
01:04:24.020You know, these are reasonable fears and I can't speculate on them because I haven't devoted a whole lot of thought to the to the idea.
01:04:30.200But I am I am hopeful about future economic development resulting from technology, in part because all the but just about all the predictions of catastrophe that have resulted that have been about economic catastrophe have been the result of this idea of scarcity.
01:04:51.120scarcity that doesn't exist, which is, again, an economic concept.
01:04:54.800But the scarcity is presumes straight line projection, just stasis that we do not develop these new resources.
01:05:05.900We made that into a resource when the American colonists were just, you know, crossing the Appalachian and navigating into the American Midwest.
01:05:15.720They saw silicon and bauxite in the soil and it was just dirt because there was no value to it.
01:05:22.940We made these resources into the resources that they are today.
01:05:30.720The extent to which you could process aluminum made it more valuable than gold in the in the Enlightenment period.
01:05:36.960But we have the capacity to innovate to the extent that we can create these new realities and create new economic realities that make the old ideas of of of hardship and want resulting from scarcity seem really naive.
01:05:53.900So when I when I when people are environmentalists and talk to me about, you know, the the catastrophe that is that is imposing upon us, you know, with assuming even their own assumptions, you know, I say that I will never bet against mankind's capacity to engineer itself out of a problem because we've done it so many times in the past.
01:06:13.500That's an article of faith, that's an article of faith on my part, I suppose, but it's not unfounded.
01:06:17.640So but when you're talking about innovating your way out, what I'm concerned about is the seeds that have been planted now, social justice, where there is no justice.
01:06:32.780It is vengeance, it is you have it, I want it when you have this period of I mean, you're sitting in a studio that was owned by Paramount to make films, made all kinds of famous films in this room.
01:06:52.800Uh, that went out and now we then it made television and made, you know, lots of television shows for HBO and CBS and now we own it and I'm a disruptor for the people that you go to work for every day at NBC.
01:07:12.440Um, and the people at the network ladder are doing everything they can to hold on to everything they can as long as they possibly can, but it's going to disrupt.
01:07:26.740And so will this, what I do will be disrupted at some point.
01:07:29.720It's going to just get faster and faster and disruption, disruption, disruption.
01:07:33.300In all of that disruption, you have people who will want to manipulate things to hold on, to last longer, to stop things and others that will be motivated to pit people against each other because it would be in their best interest.
01:09:16.840These ideas are fundamentally about American ideas and we should approach them like that.
01:09:24.920You are attracted to these things because you're a good person.
01:09:28.920I might agree with you in a lot of these ways, a lot of these ideas, but they are making our lives harder because they are fundamentally at odds with a lot of the ideas that are at the heart of this founding and are making us a less attractive member of a political coalition.
01:09:43.920That's sort of what I get to at the last chapter of this book, which is basically back to the women's march.
01:09:48.420The women's march was embraced by the democratic party for a time.
01:09:51.620And then it made itself so unattractive as a result of these ideas that they were jettisoned.
01:09:55.880They no longer had the political authority that they once held.
01:09:58.640So the people, so they might have some things they want to get done in government, but they're not going to get them done now because they're no longer the kind of attractive member of a political coalition.
01:10:06.520And the only thing it wants to do is get to 50 plus one at the polls.
01:10:10.180No political organization or movement jettisons its own members.
01:10:13.480Asking them to do that is asking them to abandon their instinct for self-preservation.
01:10:19.640You can marginalize and stigmatize bad ideas that has been done many times in the past, often through conflict and usually through circumspect approaches to to isolating and stigmatizing individual ideas.
01:10:32.340Democrats and Republicans have models they can appeal to Republicans, marginalize the birchers over a very long period of time and through circumspection and attacking these ideas in a series of ways, not so as not to make themselves the attackers seem unattractive.
01:10:50.020Democrats similarly exposed and removed the communists from the organized labor movement in the 1940s.
01:10:56.140There are models to which we can appeal if we really want to do this.
01:10:59.000It's pretty hard to demonize something when I mean, I saw an interview with you with about eight people and you were quite brilliant fighting there kind of by yourself.
01:11:11.700Um, and it's a given they hadn't had time to read the book, but their, but their gut level responses, social justice is good, right?
01:11:46.160I mean, I wish I had the, the, the good answer there is I'm, I'm the very beginning process of trying to expose this ideology and, and the alternative theory of social organization that it is.
01:11:58.720Um, trying to challenge that in a way that it, it really hasn't often been challenged, particularly for the audiences that I go to.
01:12:05.840I go to predominantly liberal audiences, uh, on television and universities.
01:12:10.800And the effort here is to start a conversation.
01:12:13.520I've been, I've been happy with the response so far.
01:12:18.320Uh, everybody, there've been a lot of challenging probing questions, um, incredulity in a lot of ways, but they're listening.
01:12:25.760Um, and I, I think it's in part because we all see the excesses, the movement successes are pretty visible and just about everybody, even if they agree would say, you know, well, those guys kind of went off the rails a little bit.
01:12:39.820My mission here is to say that this is not an out of the norm expression of how this philosophy manifests in the real world.
01:12:47.860That is, that's a, it's a feature, not a bug.
01:12:52.400And there's a lot of hostility towards that.
01:12:53.960Um, but it is nevertheless, I think, in, in, of unavoidable and inescapable.
01:12:59.080And once you dig down into the philosophy and how it has manifest, by the way, this movement, we've, we've been talking about big issues, big philosophical issues here all day long.
01:13:07.520That is not to suggest that the social justice movement is focused on the big ideas of the day.
01:13:12.560They are increasingly dedicated to small things and attacking one another.
01:13:17.420This movement's efficacy is demonstrated in getting individuals to supplicate and genuflect before the mob.
01:13:24.780And the mob only has about 72 hours worth of influence.
01:13:27.620So they dedicate themselves to attacking their fellow social justice advocates, young adult novelists, restaurateurs, artists, comic book makers.
01:13:34.580Pop culture is where you mostly see social justice activism manifest on a day-to-day basis, in part because those are the only people who are listening.
01:13:44.340I don't want to make the claim here that this movement is strong and getting stronger.
01:13:47.960Some days I'm convinced that this is overtaking all of society.
01:13:51.000And some days I see them as very marginal and lacking influence.
01:13:55.060I'm erring on the side of caution in this episode, in this instance, in the presumption that this is a movement with more power and more authority than it's due, it's numbers.
01:14:04.700You talk about, you talk about capitalist companies that are regurgitating this stuff.
01:15:31.260So it's a popular way to engage in political activism today.
01:15:35.020I don't know if it means the republic is collapsing.
01:15:38.580But it is a way to take advantage of people who are attracted to these social justice ideas.
01:15:42.940And the best example of that is the story of Fearless Girl.
01:15:46.160The statue in Lower Manhattan that was dedicated to advancing the notion that more women should be in C-suite executive positions in the financial services industry.
01:15:57.400This statue, this arms akimbo elementary school-aged girl, was feted by Democrats as this really powerful attack on the patriarchy.
01:16:06.100Bill de Blasio said that men were deeply offended by it somehow.
01:16:09.340I'm not sure if he was certain they were.
01:16:12.520Elizabeth Warren made a pilgrimage down there.
01:16:14.180Gail Collins in the New York Times said it was the most effective protest against patriarchy since the protest, the antebellum protest that desegregated the trolleys in New York City.
01:16:28.040It allowed them to evade the kind of scrutiny that they were due because they were transgressing against a lot of social justice norms in some of the literature about how they talked about approaching female investors, you know, appeal to emotional reasoning, kind of pernicious stereotypes.
01:16:40.900But they didn't get the kind of scrutiny they were due because of this statue.
01:16:46.140A Department of Labor audit found they were systematically discriminating against their female employees, paid about $5 million to 305 women.
01:16:55.180Everybody would have seen that coming.
01:16:57.620I think if they hadn't suspended disbelief in deference to these social justice ideals about gender discrimination and idealized gender equality resulting in negative discrimination against men.
01:17:09.000And so they suspended their disbelief and in the process fell for a commercial for a Wall Street investment firm.
01:17:16.160People like Elizabeth Warren, who can't go two breaths without attacking Wall Street greed, was down there giving these guys a boost.
01:18:28.940Um, unfortunately, you see the reverse more often, uh, in part because it's an assault on commercial vehicles, commercial entities.
01:18:35.860The Twitter mob, which consists of maybe 3,500, 4,000 people, that's really angry, um, feels like the universe is coming down around your shoulders.
01:18:46.120And any, any firm with a fiduciary responsibility to its investors feels like its bottom line is imperiled by not acquiescing to its demands.
01:19:02.940The notion that there has been some transgression that is due some sort of, um, reprisal against the offender will persist.
01:19:09.740But the, it's a, it's effectiveness as getting, as a vehicle for getting individuals, for example, fired, um, from their jobs who have transgressed and just maybe said something inappropriate or maybe done something genuinely inappropriate that is due a response.
01:19:23.100Um, that goes away within that 72 hour window.
01:19:26.840Um, and you've seen some companies now respond by just not doing anything.
01:19:31.800You saw governor Northam and just basically the entire government of Virginia that was implicated in all those scandals a couple of months ago.
01:19:39.180Um, the movement demonstrates its efficacy by collecting scalps, which is why it's focused so much on its own.
01:19:46.600Um, because those are the people who are listening for the most part, if you, if you're not listening to this organization, you can survive its wrath.
01:19:56.080Uh, and so that's, that to me indicates that it's not this overpowering movement that is overtaking our politics.
01:20:04.440It can, and I'm treating it like it could, because I think it's worthy of that kind of caution, but I don't want to overstate the problem.
01:20:09.860I don't think this country is falling into a morass of totalitarian social justice identity politics tomorrow.