The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 43 ｜ Noah Rothman ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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00:01:12.360 Today, I'm going to spend time with a guy who goes into work every day and does battle.

00:01:38.700 I mean, and he holds his own.

00:01:40.820 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.

00:01:54.620 But his goal is to bring a conservative voice to a anti-conservative part of the media with a lot of influence on public opinion.

00:02:03.500 He is taking one for the team, if you will.

00:02:06.260 He is associate editor of Commentary.

00:02:08.500 That's a conservative journal.

00:02:09.880 He has recently authored a book that I think is extraordinarily important.

00:02:14.180 It's about social justice.

00:02:15.620 He deftly compares the social justice left and the white nationalist right.

00:02:21.040 He is a guy who understands Nazis, socialists, and awful lot alike.

00:02:26.940 He 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.

00:02:35.840 He is incredibly smart.

00:02:38.360 He uses big words that I don't understand.

00:02:40.400 He is very eloquent and has his finger on the pulse of America with a unique view of our past, our present, and our future.

00:02:50.140 I remember in 2008 being called a racist, conspiracy theorist, whatever, getting it from all sides.

00:03:13.000 When 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. 0.94

00:03:31.860 Yeah.

00:03:32.860 So the critiques of social justice in this book aren't really new.

00:03:37.760 Right.

00:03:38.480 Robert Nozick did this.

00:03:39.640 Frederick Hayek did this.

00:03:40.840 We've just forgotten all these lessons.

00:03:42.780 And as you say, if you don't really have a lot of experience with social justice activists, they're not in your daily life.

00:03:49.600 You might think this is a pretty unobjectionable notion, just thinking about freedom and equality and writing true historical wrongs.

00:03:56.400 And it is that, or at least it was that.

00:03:58.420 But in the hands of its activist class, it has become the antithesis of the American idea.

00:04:02.520 But 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.

00:04:12.780 Um, it's a, well, start, start with the Catholics in the 1800s.

00:04:18.200 Yeah, 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.

00:04:30.860 Because their experience with the Enlightenment in France wasn't the experience that was shared by Englishmen and Scotsmen who developed those sort of ideas.

00:04:38.060 Um, the Catholic Churches were, were sacked and priests were assaulted and killed and idols to self-worship erected.

00:04:44.600 So they were very skeptical of what the cult of pure reason could reason you into.

00:04:48.360 Correct.

00:04:48.520 Uh, 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.

00:04:56.720 It shouldn't be the pursuit of self-interest that benefits society.

00:04:59.680 It should be devotion to God.

00:05:01.460 And so they developed a theory of social justice that was much more like charity.

00:05:05.760 Um, it developed into the, the ecclesiastical rerum novarum, which has some collectivist elements to it.

00:05:12.580 It was a way to combat the symptoms of society that were leading, uh, to the development of socialism and Marxism.

00:05:19.040 Um, 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.

00:05:30.540 He did, he advised a series of thought experiments so we could think about justice as like a finite commodity.

00:05:37.200 Only 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.

00:05:45.140 How do you do that?

00:05:45.680 You 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.

00:06:01.200 Modern social justice advocates have turned against the philosophy that was supposedly is the, is the foundation of their, of their, their thought process.

00:06:08.420 They think the veil of ignorance is morally obtuse.

00:06:12.040 How can you have a just distribution?

00:06:14.080 If 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.

00:06:21.860 Uh, 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.

00:06:33.060 This is a feature of this movement.

00:06:34.660 It is not a bug.

00:06:35.540 It cannot see individuals as individuals.

00:06:37.420 It doesn't pursue justice in the kind of objective quantities that we see it in a courtroom.

00:06:42.440 It is.

00:06:43.800 I mean, every statue of justice always has a blindfold always.

00:06:51.180 And it is the principle idea of, of, of a just West that you have to treat the white and the black and the rich and the poor. 0.96

00:07:03.840 And we haven't always done that, but the idea of true justice is it doesn't matter who you are.

00:07:10.380 Yeah, no, it, uh, it has, it has developed into an antipathy towards individuality.

00:07:16.780 Um, and it sees people not as people, but as avatars of their particular tribe and treats them as such.

00:07:22.700 And it is a dehumanizing philosophy in that sense.

00:07:25.140 And once you dehumanize someone, you can do a lot of things to them.

00:07:28.020 Um, we're not the first society that has begun to experiment with these ideas.

00:07:31.700 They're pretty old ideas.

00:07:32.640 Um, and the, when I had the idea for this book, I was in Ukraine, I was on a, uh, government sponsored junket there.

00:07:40.680 The 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.

00:07:47.540 And 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.

00:07:53.520 It was a noble project.

00:07:54.880 But 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,

00:08:01.740 and 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.

00:08:09.420 And why should you want to see that?

00:08:10.740 We're all on the same team here.

00:08:12.300 Uh, that was the kind of justice, an idea of justice that is common in the rest of the world.

00:08:17.600 But it doesn't look like the kind of justice that we see in a courtroom.

00:08:19.820 It looks to me a lot more like revenge.

00:08:21.840 Yes.

00:08:22.340 And you're feeling that now.

00:08:24.240 Let me stay in the Soviet Union for a second.

00:08:29.400 Lenin, um, first of all, everybody started.

00:08:31.740 He was starving because of his policies with the farmers.

00:08:34.740 Um, 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.

00:08:48.160 And it's starting to pick up and things are kind of okay.

00:08:53.240 And 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.

00:09:04.240 This 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.

00:09:21.720 Because you can say, as he did, they're stealing the wealth.

00:09:26.820 This, these crops belong to all of us.

00:09:29.800 I have another story from the Soviet Union that's in this book.

00:09:32.060 So affirmative action, as we know it was essentially invented in the former Soviet Union.

00:09:36.600 Bolsheviks inherited a vast Russian empire.

00:09:39.660 It was multi-ethnic and the Russians governed it like viceroys. 0.87

00:09:42.640 And they did so in a very chauvinistic way.

00:09:44.640 Russian chauvinism was a problem, not just from a governing standpoint, but from a, uh, a paradigmatic standpoint.

00:09:50.760 This was an assault on the kind of egalitarian global communist order they, they wanted to build.

00:09:57.480 So they developed indigenization policies, lifting individuals up in these individual republics who were representative of the ethnicity in those republics.

00:10:06.120 But that was only one half of this program.

00:10:08.260 The other half was to disempower and disadvantage ethnic Russians.

00:10:12.400 Ethnic Russians would be denied a sense of nationality, of nationalism.

00:10:15.500 They were to be punished for the approach that they took to governing these territories.

00:10:20.060 This policy was a disaster. 0.52

00:10:22.800 These people, most of the individuals who were lifted up, a lot of them were incompetent apparatchiks.

00:10:26.500 Many of them were liquidated in the purges.

00:10:28.160 But the kind of backlash that was sown as a result of this policy among Russians resulted in its exact opposite.

00:10:36.240 Russification was engaged in the individual cultures were tamped down.

00:10:40.900 And a sense of grievance among individual Russians manifested in a backlash against the republics.

00:10:46.140 That 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.

00:10:55.840 So, 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.

00:11:16.140 I will tell you, I have been watching the rise of this and tired of warning against it.

00:11:35.680 But we're seeing, and I want to get into identitarianism, we're seeing all of this just turn around and backfire.

00:11:48.160 I 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.

00:11:59.860 If 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.

00:12:14.640 But he believed in collective salvation, he believed in social justice, and social justice feels like vengeance.

00:12:22.740 There were some times when Barack Obama was transcendent on race.

00:12:27.000 In particular, I'm thinking of the wake of the verdict in the Trayvon Martin killing trial.

00:12:32.520 That was a transcendent message.

00:12:35.140 But he delivered different messages for different audiences.

00:12:37.660 That was the message for the country, and it was very healing.

00:12:40.100 If he would have been the guy who spoke at the Democratic Convention in, what was it, 2004, it would have been transformative.

00:12:47.740 It would have been transformative.

00:12:49.260 But 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.

00:13:01.280 And 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.

00:13:17.000 This could happen to my son.

00:13:18.700 This isn't justice.

00:13:19.840 This is not, what's happening here?

00:13:22.580 Maybe 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.

00:13:46.260 We'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.

00:13:56.600 So why not get into his accidents of birth that in any other context we would call pernicious prejudice?

00:14:02.980 Oh, yeah.

00:14:03.660 But it was the kind of thing that was not only acceptable, but lauded.

00:14:06.100 So here's what I don't understand.

00:14:08.600 And I ask this sincerely.

00:14:10.520 I 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.

00:14:28.340 And we completely disagree on things.

00:14:30.780 But 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.

00:14:53.640 People who have been oppressed.

00:14:57.640 How do they not see?

00:15:01.780 All 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.

00:15:12.100 Martin Luther King said, live up to the words of your founding documents.

00:15:17.920 We throw those out now.

00:15:19.340 Yeah, that those appeals to common humanity are judged to be insufficient to the moment by the social justice activists.

00:15:28.360 So what's wrong with us?

00:15:30.040 How come we're not seeing that?

00:15:31.660 So this is a common human impulse, right?

00:15:33.280 I 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.

00:15:41.940 So the fact that we have these structures in this country that are designed to thwart those impulses is not a natural condition.

00:15:49.280 And we're essentially rebelling against our own humanity.

00:15:51.540 It has worked in an entropic way, in part because the founders were so farsighted, but it is not a natural condition.

00:15:58.180 We are rebelling against nature.

00:16:01.480 You start with Kurt Vonnegut.

00:16:03.960 And you say it's actually worse than what he saw in 1961.

00:16:09.140 Tell the story and.

00:16:12.280 And and and explain how it's worse, because he came up with a pretty dystopian look.

00:16:18.600 Yeah, it's Harrison Bergeron.

00:16:21.340 So the story of Bergeron takes place in the distant future in 1961, but not too far from now.

00:16:28.540 In which society was characterized by negative discrimination, the kind of discrimination we were talking about in the Soviet Union.

00:16:37.540 Individuals 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.

00:16:48.040 They are disempowered by the state, given various impediments to deny them those privileges.

00:16:55.820 So mask if you're beautiful.

00:16:56.960 Mask if you're beautiful, acoustic distractions if you're smart, you know, weights around your legs if you're athletic.

00:17:01.640 The design being social equality, but downward social leveling.

00:17:07.660 And 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.

00:17:21.160 I don't think he foresaw the situation that we're in now where there is no imposition from above.

00:17:26.560 This is being demanded from below.

00:17:29.060 This 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.

00:17:37.380 And that's much more dangerous because you can't just vote out the demos.

00:17:40.160 You is it is it is it coming for the most part?

00:17:47.300 And I'm not talking about the the social justice warriors who know exactly what it is and what they're doing.

00:17:53.800 OK, but there are people that I just saw an interview with a bunch of Columbia students.

00:18:03.500 And you talk about this in your book with with the Nazis, the neo-Nazis here.

00:18:09.800 The guy goes on campus.

00:18:14.580 He says.

00:18:16.600 Blacks want to have separate but equal dorm rooms, classrooms, everything else. 1.00

00:18:24.260 And all of the people on campus are like, well, I mean, I think that's fine if that's what they want.

00:18:29.940 I think that's fine.

00:18:31.900 Without even thinking, you know, this this this is segregation.

00:18:37.360 This is we got rid of that.

00:18:38.960 But as I was watching it, I thought that is for for some that was motivated, I think, by I don't care what people want to do.

00:18:49.160 If you want to live together, live together.

00:18:50.760 You don't want to live together.

00:18:51.740 Live over here.

00:18:52.340 It's fine.

00:18:53.720 So this this this twisting of what of right and wrong and universal, endless truth.

00:19:02.640 Part of it is coming from our own strength of just wanting to get along.

00:19:13.080 Right.

00:19:13.560 Just wanted to do the right thing.

00:19:15.300 Yeah.

00:19:15.460 I mean, there's one thing to be said for wanting to steep yourself in a lifestyle that complements a particular field of study.

00:19:22.980 I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with that.

00:19:25.560 The new although it might manifest in something you could call segregation.

00:19:29.580 That's not necessarily healthy, but it's not an assault on the American idea.

00:19:33.900 What'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.

00:19:42.520 You 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.

00:19:54.480 It's insane.

00:19:55.240 I 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.

00:20:07.120 Right now, this is this is the essence of competition.

00:20:09.460 Yeah.

00:20:09.720 Markets.

00:20:10.340 And there's no advantage to be gained in stasis.

00:20:13.500 It's it's it hurts when I work out.

00:20:16.620 Immunization. 0.86

00:20:17.020 Sure.

00:20:17.360 I work out, but I neither tell you the truth to my wife's.

00:20:21.440 You should.

00:20:21.860 You should.

00:20:22.860 Otherwise, you'll end up looking like me.

00:20:25.900 Unfortunately, though, this is the sort of thing.

00:20:29.400 And I said this is bubbling up from beneath.

00:20:31.060 But 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.

00:20:49.580 It seems to me a very difficult way to combat racism.

00:20:53.020 You're basically telling people that the only culture you're you're allowed to appreciate is essentially your own.

00:20:57.840 I don't know how that combats the kind of the kind of hatred that social justice advocates say they want to fight.

00:21:05.060 But 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.

00:21:17.340 It becomes steeping yourselves in these grievances, holding fast to these grievances because they are empowering.

00:21:24.120 You just said with Kurt Vonnegut, you just said.

00:21:28.520 That we would accept it and bring it on ourselves.

00:21:32.460 I think we've gone one step worse.

00:21:34.920 I think we are.

00:21:37.580 We're incentivizing people to be intersected.

00:21:43.120 If if if you can find a way to a grievance, congratulations, congratulations, congratulations, you are 10 points for you.

00:21:52.880 Find another one, another 10 points.

00:21:54.600 We are celebrating.

00:21:55.920 It is truly a rejection of everything we've ever been as a nation.

00:22:02.300 We are celebrating our differences in a negative way.

00:22:07.300 We are we are looking for things that say kept us down.

00:22:12.660 Where Americans were always like, I don't know, Rocky Mountains. 0.96

00:22:17.020 I got a horse wagon.

00:22:18.400 Let's go.

00:22:19.220 You know what I mean?

00:22:19.880 Not me.

00:22:20.640 I'm glad I wasn't around at that time.

00:22:22.340 But we were never put off and we never.

00:22:27.500 The people used to always say about America, they still do, which is saying something.

00:22:33.580 You know, the thing I like about Americans is they're almost naive. 1.00

00:22:37.740 They're they're they they trust everybody.

00:22:39.840 We never turned each other in.

00:22:42.920 We never turned on each other.

00:22:44.660 We didn't matter.

00:22:46.040 We had our problems.

00:22:47.420 But in the end, we were in this together.

00:22:52.120 We're not nothing.

00:22:54.380 We're being dismantled bit by bit.

00:22:56.900 And people are smart.

00:22:59.620 They see incentive structures.

00:23:01.800 They know that there is capital in victimhood.

00:23:05.520 And when you create an incentive structure for a certain type of behavior, you're going to get more of it.

00:23:10.840 I wish I could say this was unique to the left.

00:23:13.220 This book is mostly about the left, but not exclusively.

00:23:15.880 Shouldn't be because the right is just as attractive to these ideas as much as the left is.

00:23:20.260 They understand a marketplace when they see one and they're engaging in it.

00:23:23.880 So when I was at Fox 2009, 10, I kept saying, Democrats, be careful because you're not always going to be in charge.

00:23:38.960 Don't do this because you may not think it's a problem now.

00:23:42.900 But what is it that you're creating that's coming in after?

00:23:48.060 Now we have Donald Trump.

00:23:49.520 Now I find myself saying, Republicans, don't do this.

00:23:53.780 Because what are you doing?

00:23:56.520 You're creating somebody else that's going to be a bigger dog.

00:24:00.620 We jump both sides.

00:24:03.000 We want our vengeance.

00:24:06.760 We want to shut people up.

00:24:10.680 How does this end?

00:24:12.900 So, I mean, I have good news and bad news.

00:24:16.220 OK, so my start with the bad news.

00:24:18.420 Oh, well, that's that's unfortunate.

00:24:20.620 Just because I just want some happy news.

00:24:22.620 Go ahead.

00:24:23.040 Well, you've got to get to the you've got to get to the bad news for the happiness.

00:24:26.200 The happy news is I don't think the kind of downward social leveling that social justice advocates seek is possible in this country.

00:24:32.600 The institutions in this country are not equipped to meet out the kind of justice that they seek.

00:24:38.700 So that's the good thing.

00:24:39.880 I don't think these are without a whole entire remaking of the constitutional order.

00:24:44.200 Will we see that kind of art?

00:24:45.660 We I mean, just let's look at the Green Deal. 0.95

00:24:48.220 Forget about all the car for cow farts and all of that stuff.

00:24:51.920 Just the line in the new Green Deal that it is to reform our system and change our system into a system of ecological and social justice.

00:25:05.200 It is a fun.

00:25:07.800 It is that fundamental transformation of the entire economic system.

00:25:14.520 Absolutely.

00:25:15.100 So I read the Green New Deal, the proposal, the subcommittee proposal, the fact, all that stuff.

00:25:19.480 And it is only tangentially related to environmental remediation.

00:25:23.520 Right.

00:25:23.800 Yeah.

00:25:24.080 Yeah.

00:25:24.620 Most of it is about these ideas about progressive desiderata that they've been seeking for generations.

00:25:30.840 The notion.

00:25:31.560 Excuse me.

00:25:31.860 What's a ziderata?

00:25:32.680 Oh, desiderata, you know, desired objects of desire. 0.98

00:25:35.360 So 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.

00:25:46.940 The 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.

00:25:55.680 So, yes, you're moving towards a transformation of society, but it is one that has been at least a hundred years in the making.

00:26:02.680 And so far it has encountered a series of impediments.

00:26:05.180 I'm hopeful that those impediments are not going to disappear tomorrow.

00:26:08.440 The 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.

00:26:20.960 One, despondency, withdraw, back off, say your political activism isn't worth it.

00:26:26.300 And 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.

00:26:34.000 And 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.

00:26:41.360 Began with Occupy and it has only gotten worse.

00:26:44.160 Right in the left fringes are at one another's throats in the streets, literally knifing each other in the streets.

00:26:49.860 It's sort of the narcissism of small differences there.

00:26:52.300 These two groups resemble each other in more ways than they don't.

00:26:55.840 But, yeah, they're at each other's throats.

00:26:57.220 And I think that is a product of the fact that they are reacting with frustration because their demands cannot be met.

00:27:02.680 Do 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.

00:27:26.520 And you're against Nazis, okay, well, so am I. 0.66

00:27:31.440 But you're acting an awful lot like a Nazi. 0.79

00:27:35.520 Right.

00:27:35.780 I 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.

00:27:47.800 Everybody was horrified by what happened in Charlottesville, as we should have been.

00:27:51.360 But it wouldn't have come as a surprise if we had reacted, as we should have, to the events in Sacramento a year earlier.

00:27:58.640 In 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.

00:28:12.180 And these two groups, rallying under a communist flag and a fascist flag, attacked each other in the streets.

00:28:19.360 People went to the hospital.

00:28:20.540 There were serious injuries.

00:28:21.560 It was a melee.

00:28:22.480 Video evidence everywhere.

00:28:23.620 And we didn't talk about it.

00:28:24.820 It was America's Weimar moment. 0.81

00:28:26.380 And we did not talk about it.

00:28:27.620 I don't think we wanted to see what was happening.

00:28:29.380 But we should have.

00:28:30.260 What do you mean by America's Weimar moment?

00:28:31.840 It 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.

00:28:46.280 But the notion here that we're...

00:28:47.320 Well, we can talk about our debt on another episode if I go ahead.

00:28:51.020 But 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.

00:29:04.720 And it's hyperbolic, sure.

00:29:07.060 But 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.

00:29:17.160 And, yes, we would address it with the terms that are relevant to creating the kind of urgency that I think the crisis demands.

00:29:25.760 You're the first person I've talked to that's in mainstream media at all that even begins to understand identitarianism.

00:29:32.240 It is, it is, it is so pernicious and, and yet so easy to see how people can fall into, in my opinion.

00:29:49.360 See if our understandings are the same.

00:29:51.340 If you're over in Europe, you're in Sweden, you're a racist if you fly a Swedish flag.

00:30:05.060 It has to be the U flag.

00:30:06.840 You are, you are being forced to lose what is uniquely you as a group of people.

00:30:19.000 Instead of saying, you know, like Walt Disney, this is fantasy land.

00:30:23.020 This is adventure land.

00:30:24.740 This is tomorrow land.

00:30:26.080 You can go to all of them, but they're different.

00:30:30.120 They're all, they're all each different with their own personalities.

00:30:33.300 I was in Sweden and somebody said, you know, well, we just don't really have our own culture.

00:30:41.740 And I said, what?

00:30:43.940 I said, I've never seen architecture like this any place else I've ever been.

00:30:49.600 Okay.

00:30:50.060 I'm not finding that in Bangkok.

00:30:51.500 I'm not finding that in Chicago.

00:30:53.300 I'm not finding that anywhere here.

00:30:55.180 This is your culture.

00:30:56.560 And they're being forced to abandon it.

00:31:00.720 At 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.

00:31:17.260 You 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.

00:31:34.640 Yeah.

00:31:34.760 You shouldn't, shouldn't be surprised that there is a backlash to that sort of thing that manifests in really extremist ways.

00:31:40.300 It's what happened to Germany. 0.98

00:31:41.760 So we have something like that here on the social justice left, which they embrace a contradictory notion.

00:31:48.060 At the same time, we don't, America doesn't have a culture.

00:31:50.460 It has this sort of hodgepodge that has been appropriated, ill begotten goods, essentially, from other cultures.

00:31:59.320 And so it is at the same time, while we don't actually have a culture, the culture that we do have is not our own and is misbegotten.

00:32:06.820 And as a result, we shouldn't, we shouldn't welcome or celebrate anybody assimilating into it. 1.00

00:32:11.940 That is a form of captivity.

00:32:14.220 And 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.

00:32:26.120 Group identity, again, is an evolutionary trait.

00:32:28.560 That mankind cannot live in the kind of hermetic individuality that is envisioned by the extreme libertarian idea of social organization.

00:32:39.740 It simply doesn't work.

00:32:42.000 Well, wait, wait.

00:32:42.960 Explain what is the extreme.

00:32:44.640 The extreme idea of mankind is divorced from the kind of civil mediating institutions, non-governmental institutions that result in community.

00:32:52.780 Churches, community organizations, what have you, creating a sense of common purpose around a shared identity.

00:33:00.520 Articles of confederation is too close to anarchy and so constitutional.

00:33:06.380 But you can live much freer than this, but you do have systems.

00:33:12.180 And the American civic religion around the constitution has sufficed for a form of political identity in this country for the last 240 years.

00:33:21.220 And it's a pretty healthy one.

00:33:22.280 I mean, the First Amendment protects you from the government infringing on your right to freedom of speech, right?

00:33:27.960 But at the same time, we don't view the First Amendment as though it was just a protection against government intrusions.

00:33:34.020 It has become a religious idea about our capacity to express ourselves in whatever fora we want.

00:33:41.720 And that if you personally infringed on my right to free speech, that is an infringement of that civic religion.

00:33:47.000 It's a broader understanding of what the constitution really was.

00:33:49.560 And it's one that I think is especially healthy.

00:33:52.280 Is especially healthy.

00:33:53.100 Is especially healthy.

00:33:54.000 When 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.

00:34:04.620 You're blood and soil nationalists and the individuals who see cultural identity as sort of a shared global common humanity on the left.

00:34:15.700 These two things, I think, are antithetical to the American experiment.

00:34:20.020 Also, 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.

00:34:29.420 That 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.

00:34:47.520 Somebody has to help you navigate this environment because you are not equipped to do that on your own.

00:34:52.120 These are pernicious ideas.

00:34:54.160 They are they're the platforms on which individuals seek and pursue and achieve power.

00:34:59.560 And they're they're getting more and more power as a result of this philosophy.

00:35:03.360 So talk to me, you're a scholar on Russia.

00:35:21.720 You still follow it pretty closely.

00:35:23.860 What's happening in Russia?

00:35:24.720 Not as closely as I would like.

00:35:26.020 But yes, I studied it in undergrad and grad.

00:35:28.400 OK.

00:35:31.060 You know who Alexander Dugan is?

00:35:32.800 Yes.

00:35:33.020 OK.

00:35:33.840 Good for you.

00:35:35.060 Fourth political theory.

00:35:36.780 Have you read that?

00:35:37.840 No.

00:35:38.900 That's his that's his book that has said.

00:35:45.920 Communism didn't work.

00:35:47.520 Fascism didn't work.

00:35:50.680 Capitalism doesn't work.

00:35:52.580 But we're going to take the best of those.

00:35:54.980 Frightening.

00:35:56.080 And come up with a new system.

00:35:58.100 It's the fourth political theory.

00:35:59.800 And when you read that, when you read, when you read.

00:36:07.980 You may be different than I am. 0.97

00:36:09.760 I read Das Kapital and was like, this is ridiculous. 0.92

00:36:13.840 I can make that. 0.96

00:36:15.140 I mean, it just it was gobbledygook to me.

00:36:17.260 Some people read it and they're like, oh, it's fantastic. 0.99

00:36:21.700 His theory is ridiculous. 0.96

00:36:24.820 And beyond that, it is terrifying. 0.99

00:36:27.920 OK.

00:36:28.460 He he ties it directly to end of times kind of philosophy.

00:36:34.100 World has to burn down completely before it can restart and give a rebirth.

00:36:39.920 It's terrifying.

00:36:40.920 It's terrifying.

00:36:41.880 But his arguments, which are being espoused by people, honestly, like Steve Bannon and others.

00:36:52.880 If you don't know, if you don't know what he's talking about, if you don't know where this leads, it is so seductive.

00:37:00.900 You know, how do we back away from this this nightmare when everything in culture is pushing you the opposite way?

00:37:13.120 So we're a victim of our own success here.

00:37:16.060 Right.

00:37:16.380 We 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.

00:37:31.360 They 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.

00:37:44.180 And so they have begun to romanticize it, having never experienced themselves.

00:37:48.540 It is essentially it is it is the bloodlust of the bored and the comfortable.

00:37:53.060 And 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.

00:38:02.860 And so they're begun to fantasize about it as a very effective tool in the tool shed.

00:38:07.880 Just another one to affect a political end.

00:38:10.280 But they do actually convince themselves that they are oppressed.

00:38:15.280 Yeah, I think they genuinely see themselves as oppressed again because they do not know oppression.

00:38:20.300 It's an insult to the rest of the world.

00:38:22.640 I mean, I hope the Chinese never hear about our oppression here. 1.00

00:38:29.360 I 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.

00:38:40.940 And one of them literally had chain marks around her neck. 0.87

00:38:46.900 OK, 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.

00:38:54.980 That's what she looked like.

00:38:56.200 It was horrifying.

00:38:57.680 And I'm spending two days with these guys and we're talking about, you know, what they went through and everything else.

00:39:08.480 And this woman, I I give her a blank piece of paper and I'm cutting something with her filming her. 1.00

00:39:17.300 And I said, I want you to say your name and then I want you to say I was a slave.

00:39:23.420 But no one writes my story.

00:39:27.600 My life is a blank piece of paper and I write my story.

00:39:31.900 She said, no.

00:39:34.660 And I said, why?

00:39:37.040 She said, because I was never a slave.

00:39:39.760 They might have called me a slave, but I was never a slave.

00:39:43.100 Chain marks around her neck.

00:39:44.700 OK, I fly home.

00:39:46.940 And my wife and I are just like inspired and devastated.

00:39:52.800 We land.

00:39:54.820 I look at the TV and people are crying on TV in America about the oppression that they're feeling from statues in the parks.

00:40:06.140 And I about lost it.

00:40:08.340 I was.

00:40:10.540 Yeah, there's a distinction I guess we should make between oppression and injustice.

00:40:14.540 There are injustices.

00:40:16.740 There are racial grievances.

00:40:18.540 There 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.

00:40:27.000 But that's a that's distinct from oppression.

00:40:29.840 The kind of political violence that we've seen in other societies.

00:40:34.120 Excuse me.

00:40:34.980 Sorry.

00:40:36.860 Talk to me a little bit about.

00:40:38.660 Where we're headed with social justice, do you think?

00:40:48.340 Where are the who are the who are the pernicious organizers of social justice that we should be watching for?

00:40:57.600 What are the moves that are coming that we should be aware of?

00:41:00.380 Well, it's much easier to see them on the left than on the right.

00:41:03.000 On the left, it has become such an organizing principle, an unchallenged, unquestioned organizing principle that it's just in the water.

00:41:11.980 And people talk about social justice as though it was just a nod to just being a good person.

00:41:18.560 Say 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.

00:41:28.420 Because who hates the environment?

00:41:30.140 Right.

00:41:30.340 It just marks you as a good person.

00:41:31.920 Correct.

00:41:32.460 Social justice has taken that place.

00:41:34.020 So 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.

00:41:42.380 But also it marks you as somebody who's socially conscious.

00:41:45.900 They are out in the open.

00:41:47.420 They're easy to identify.

00:41:48.900 On the right, it's much harder to see them.

00:41:51.020 They are underground.

00:41:51.900 Who are they?

00:41:53.200 Philosophers of the dark enlightenment, which is exactly what it sounds like.

00:41:56.260 An attack on enlightenment philosophy.

00:41:59.480 People 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.

00:42:11.520 And Donald Trump's movement was attracted to him.

00:42:14.100 He was apparently in contact with Steve Bannon when Steve Bannon was in the White House as a chief strategist for the president.

00:42:18.700 Steve Bannon, you see, I give and, you know, I assume you know where I stood with Donald Trump during the election.

00:42:28.720 I thought he was an extraordinarily dangerous man because of who he was surrounding himself with.

00:42:35.420 Beyond that, I don't think he really cares about it.

00:42:37.860 I don't think he believes anything deeply except tariffs and maybe immigration, maybe immigration tariffs.

00:42:44.040 I know he's got that one down.

00:42:46.500 No changing him on that.

00:42:48.480 The rest is, I don't know.

00:42:51.560 Yeah, bring them in.

00:42:52.580 Sure, I'll play to them, too.

00:42:55.000 Steve Bannon, however, knew exactly who he was.

00:43:00.100 And you have this movement in Brexit the same exact way.

00:43:05.660 You're mixing, and the media does this, and it is incredibly dangerous.

00:43:11.740 They take everybody and they mix them together.

00:43:15.100 Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, same.

00:43:17.780 No, not at all.

00:43:20.060 Completely different universes.

00:43:22.520 Anyone for Brexit over in the European Union?

00:43:25.960 The same.

00:43:27.500 No, they're not.

00:43:28.860 They're not.

00:43:29.720 In fact, how does the average conservative give me some way of knowing who's who?

00:43:44.260 If you're just somebody who doesn't really pay attention, how do you know who you're standing with?

00:43:49.760 Well, so Donald Trump in 2016 embraced a lot of ideas that are antithetical to conservatism, right?

00:43:57.040 Among 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.

00:44:15.580 Wait, let me play devil's advocate here and have you answer to them.

00:44:20.960 Well, we tried the tea party.

00:44:23.440 We tried everything else.

00:44:24.820 We tried to stand up.

00:44:25.780 They're not even listening to the people anymore.

00:44:27.800 They don't care.

00:44:28.640 It's a cabal.

00:44:30.620 Who's they?

00:44:31.900 The Republican Party.

00:44:33.500 It's a cabal.

00:44:35.020 Oh, well, yeah.

00:44:35.800 So what is the objective here?

00:44:38.140 You're saying that reduced spending and fiscal profligacy?

00:44:42.500 Yeah, well, it's a tea party thing that, you know, hey, we want.

00:44:45.980 Because Donald Trump's movement wasn't against fiscal profligacy.

00:44:48.720 No, I know that.

00:44:49.420 No, I know that.

00:44:50.380 I'm not defending.

00:44:52.120 I'm playing devil's advocate, okay?

00:44:54.020 If you don't know, I was not anywhere close to the Trump campaign.

00:45:00.140 Oh, I know.

00:45:00.740 Okay.

00:45:01.940 So I'm just playing devil's advocate because this is what I heard.

00:45:05.260 This is what I heard.

00:45:06.680 Glenn, we tried to do it the right way.

00:45:09.540 And it is so stacked up with corruption and greed and the media, you're never going to burn it down.

00:45:18.740 Burn it down.

00:45:19.160 Yeah, I heard a lot about that.

00:45:20.100 Also, what has conservatism conserved was the question I was posed very frequently.

00:45:25.240 And that, to me, is so myopic and just simply rejects objectivity.

00:45:31.500 Barack Obama's presidency all but ended in 2011.

00:45:34.800 The legislative phase of Barack Obama's presidency was over.

00:45:38.640 They confirmed a couple of judges when they had, but when they lost the Senate in 2015, that was the end.

00:45:43.420 And conservatism served as a bulwark against change, which is what conservatism tends to do.

00:45:49.720 And if you reject that, you are rejecting what conservatism's fundamental elements are, which is preservation, not radical transformation.

00:45:59.540 And then the burn it down crowd really wants radical transformation.

00:46:03.260 They'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.

00:46:18.700 That's not conservatism.

00:46:19.960 That's something.

00:46:20.380 No, I know.

00:46:20.760 And I don't think that that is.

00:46:25.180 I think that might be a feeling, but I could be wrong.

00:46:28.740 That's maybe hopeful thinking.

00:46:30.920 It may be a feeling, but when push comes to shove, it's kind of like, I think the Democrats, the leadership, has so miscalculated.

00:46:42.120 You know, they started miscalculating with Occupy Wall Street.

00:46:45.920 Hey, these are just great kids.

00:46:47.860 No, they're not.

00:46:49.200 No, they're not.

00:46:50.360 They don't believe in what you believe in, if you believe in the Constitution.

00:46:54.580 And they embraced it.

00:46:57.280 And they used it as fuel, thinking that they could control it.

00:47:00.720 And I think it's out of control.

00:47:03.040 And, you know, you're watching Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and everybody else just brushed off to the side.

00:47:09.240 And it's because there is a feeling on both sides, this doesn't work, what we're doing right now.

00:47:19.020 But 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.

00:47:28.920 Unless we have an economy that is depression.

00:47:31.240 Depression.

00:47:32.860 I don't think Democrats will vote for him.

00:47:36.220 It's it's I would I would bet that, too.

00:47:39.500 So, I think, or did they occupy Wall Street again?

00:47:42.860 Thing very, very miscalculating and in the pursuit of political expediency by embracing the women's march. 1.00

00:47:50.280 Right.

00:47:50.520 Leadership.

00:47:51.140 Right.

00:47:51.360 And 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.

00:48:03.540 Right.

00:48:03.840 And so the right, I'm I'm hoping and I'd love your opinion on this.

00:48:08.180 I'm hoping that the right says burn it down.

00:48:12.140 But they have a decent respect for the the institutions that we we must have.

00:48:24.600 And I don't I don't know if they go there unless we hit real economic trouble.

00:48:31.780 And then I think all bets are off.

00:48:33.340 Yeah, they might.

00:48:33.800 But 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.

00:48:47.780 They had to fill this administration with some conventional conservatives.

00:48:51.160 And for the most part, you had a pretty conventional Republican administration, some exceptions.

00:48:54.780 What 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. 1.00

00:49:09.460 Intersectionality is really central to social justice thinking.

00:49:13.000 It's a pretty legitimate.

00:49:14.720 Explain it for anybody who doesn't know what intersectionality is.

00:49:16.740 It's a very legitimate idea in an academic context.

00:49:19.240 It's a way to think about as a thought experiment.

00:49:21.280 It's a way to think about how prejudice manifests in the real world.

00:49:23.760 So you and I are born with disparate traits.

00:49:27.160 Some of those traits are more discriminated against than others.

00:49:30.320 So an individual who is, say, white and male will experience less prejudice than someone who is white and female.

00:49:36.920 A black man will experience less prejudice than a black woman because women experience more prejudice than men. 0.99

00:49:42.020 A Native American lesbian will experience more prejudice than all of them and so on. 1.00

00:49:45.920 Again, a valid idea.

00:49:47.220 As an organizing principle, which is what the Women's March was dedicated to, it is self-defeating.

00:49:53.840 It results in your organization tearing itself apart, which is exactly what the Women's March did. 1.00

00:49:58.060 They couldn't see their own allies as allies, even if they agreed with them.

00:50:02.280 Because they possessed disparate traits, some of which were seen as more oppressive than others.

00:50:06.760 So 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.

00:50:19.740 Similarly, 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.

00:50:35.520 Indeed, you would gain some in the process.

00:50:37.680 But to do so would be to legitimize the prejudices against which they claim to fight.

00:50:44.100 And so the Women's March tore itself apart. 1.00

00:50:45.680 It was disempowered by this philosophy because Democrats had to abandon them.

00:50:48.880 But 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.

00:51:02.140 They gave them the idea that maybe our ideas are a little less marginal than we thought they were.

00:51:06.500 That is an intersectional philosophy, too.

00:51:08.640 That is the practice of embracing all because you're in a war of all against all.

00:51:14.440 You are a combatant in this unnavigable labyrinth of prejudices.

00:51:18.820 And anyone who subscribes to your philosophy is necessarily an ally as long as they advance these particular traits.

00:51:26.540 It is a terrible philosophy for political organizing.

00:51:31.000 But the students I talk to who agree with this sort of thing think it is a very empowering philosophy.

00:51:36.520 It helps them understand the world in which they live.

00:51:38.760 It helps them to figure out how to navigate it.

00:51:40.700 I think this is a really deleterious idea.

00:51:42.960 Let me go to the press for a second.

00:51:52.540 Donald Trump's use of the press as an axe.

00:51:57.520 Help 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.

00:52:18.160 I'm sorry, but the press is just I mean, they are who they are.

00:52:26.420 And if they just came out and said, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm I'm liberal.

00:52:31.600 Pretty much everybody who works here is liberal.

00:52:34.320 We don't really see it the same way.

00:52:36.460 That doesn't make me a bad person.

00:52:38.120 That's the way it is.

00:52:39.140 And had respect to say, here's somebody else who's really smart on the other side, who sees it someplace else, some some other way.

00:52:46.440 And you had that conversation.

00:52:47.740 We wouldn't have these problems.

00:52:49.200 Instead, they insist that they are fair and they're the arbiter of truth.

00:52:54.300 And it's many times, not always. 0.99

00:52:56.640 I read the New York Times, sometimes really good stuff in the New York Times, sometimes garbage. 0.79

00:53:02.600 People listen to me. 0.98

00:53:04.460 You say the same thing, sometimes garbage, sometimes really good stuff. 0.93

00:53:07.680 OK, that's fair. 0.85

00:53:12.000 Conservatives know that there is a glass ceiling over us.

00:53:18.740 You know, I was I signed a contract with ABC.

00:53:24.980 I never served one day because they they put a press release out.

00:53:32.280 Care went to the mouse and the mouse folded.

00:53:36.220 OK, everybody knows that.

00:53:39.240 OK.

00:53:40.680 Donald Trump.

00:53:42.840 Is saying things that people know is true.

00:53:46.540 And instead of going, you know what?

00:53:50.280 The Kavanaugh thing or, you know, at times the Russia thing really did get out of hand.

00:53:56.840 They just keep hammering back.

00:54:00.580 They're they're winding up their audience.

00:54:04.180 He's winding up his audience. 0.99

00:54:06.140 And the person who knows both of you suck sometimes don't know what to do. 0.99

00:54:11.960 They are forced to pick a side. 1.00

00:54:14.680 Yeah.

00:54:14.800 So as a member of the of the press, sort of, I don't consider myself a reporter, but I am in the media.

00:54:21.840 I think everybody goes to work every day wanting to do the best job that they can do.

00:54:26.340 And 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.

00:54:34.840 So 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.

00:54:45.160 And 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.

00:55:05.380 And that was a terrible conceit.

00:55:08.140 It's the kind of thing that moves you from being mission oriented, from being objectivist first to being an activist.

00:55:14.660 And I think you did see a lot of that in the press.

00:55:17.860 I think you're seeing less of it now, but it is still prevalent.

00:55:20.740 And we could probably you probably all know who the main practitioners of this sort of thing are.

00:55:24.940 But it is it is out of a fundamental lack of appreciation for the robust stability that has been the result of American institutions.

00:55:34.900 They 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.

00:55:46.080 We'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.

00:55:57.360 We don't really need as much of the executive branch as we have because the Trump administration has not fully staffed it.

00:56:04.340 A lot of that's not great.

00:56:06.200 The act, the number of acting cabinet level secretaries is not is not wonderful.

00:56:11.440 But I was very and I have a background in education and diplomacy.

00:56:17.160 And 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.

00:56:25.540 And 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.

00:56:34.700 And that sort of thing needed to be purged.

00:56:37.640 And I was fortunate to see that happening.

00:56:39.380 But there are there are dangerous things that could result from having an understaffed administration.

00:56:43.820 This administration has been fortunate insofar as that it's existed in sort of this period of placidity.

00:56:47.640 There hasn't really been an exogenous crisis that's really tested them.

00:56:50.580 But also, you know, everything's still moving along pretty good.

00:56:54.820 And it's not because the members of the media have their hair on fire every day.

00:56:58.840 This is the country has has been tested before and it is being tested now and it is withstanding the test.

00:57:04.680 And I think we should all be pretty happy about that.

00:57:06.440 It's amazing to me how resilient this is.

00:57:08.980 I mean, I thought I think we all did on September 11th when we watched the towers fall, not knowing who did it to us.

00:57:17.340 Just watching.

00:57:19.500 I mean, that was our, you know, to reverse this, that was our Notre Dame in a way that was our that.

00:57:26.240 Went to the heart of America, if you will, it was Wall Street, that's that was New York, it was strong, it was banking, it was invincible.

00:57:37.240 And they came down and it was like, oh, my gosh, we're fragile.

00:57:41.240 And I have been shocked at how many body blows this country can take.

00:57:50.960 I mean, it since then, it has been almost a nonstop body blow and we're still standing.

00:57:59.380 We're dizzy.

00:58:00.960 But we're standing.

00:58:02.300 Yeah, I think that's you would you would think that that would be something worthy of celebration.

00:58:08.020 But 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.

00:58:22.220 When 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.

00:58:41.420 And that is sort of a misunderstanding of what the word ideal means, right?

00:58:45.420 I mean, it is aspirational.

00:58:47.280 We have not improved.

00:58:48.440 You may never achieve it, but that doesn't give you license to stop trying.

00:58:51.320 Because 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.

00:59:00.080 We haven't made anything better than that.

00:59:02.500 And so you're not at liberty to to abandon those ideas.

00:59:06.000 But 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.

00:59:14.700 They haven't read Burke or Hume or Montesquieu.

00:59:17.740 They don't understand the nature of representative governance and why it is a superior form of social organization, of governmental organization.

00:59:25.780 So it's a product of ignorance, which is in some ways excusable, but mostly not self-imposed ignorance.

00:59:33.280 And it's one of the reasons why we need to rededicate to the study of civics and not just how a bill becomes law.

00:59:39.440 But 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.

00:59:50.340 I 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.

01:00:07.760 It is anti enlightenment, it's anti fact, anti study, anti, you know, observing it's it goes against everything.

01:00:22.200 The Enlightenment taught us and it it will flip us back into a world of.

01:00:31.540 I don't even know that's conceited, right?

01:00:34.980 I mean, if you think you can remake the world anew, it's probably because you have no idea what the world was before.

01:00:41.220 And, you know, generally that you have a very, very high impression of your own competence, which is I think it's mostly hubris.

01:00:50.840 I mean, a lot of that comes with youth.

01:00:52.940 It'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.

01:00:59.780 So, yeah, it's probably a function of ignorance.

01:01:03.580 So the year zero mentality.

01:01:06.000 I 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.

01:01:26.700 We haven't been operating on that system for a long, long time.

01:01:29.440 The constitutional bill of rights, real, true understanding of of of this and what's headed our way with technology.

01:01:42.180 Technology, what we're looking at now, nobody is asking the big questions.

01:01:48.740 Nobody's really.

01:01:49.700 We'll talk about privacy, privacy.

01:01:54.600 Your refrigerator will be able to report on, you know, whatever.

01:01:59.440 And not necessarily in a nefarious way.

01:02:04.180 But the the the capitalism that we're moving towards by choice.

01:02:11.180 Is a surveillance capitalism that is that the idea is to be able to predict you as close to 100 percent of the time as possible.

01:02:22.820 Amazon changes from a sales company to a delivery company, in their own words, when they can predict 95 percent accuracy.

01:02:35.000 We haven't even talked about that.

01:02:37.280 We haven't even talked about that.

01:02:40.020 And it just that one thing becomes.

01:02:45.480 Are you do you have self-control or self-will?

01:02:50.800 Are you determining your future or are you being shaped for the future?

01:02:56.640 So what kind of impact do you think that will have on the on our political environment?

01:03:01.060 I think we're already seeing it.

01:03:03.720 I mean, unless we start talking about deeper thoughts and root ourselves into what is real until we start.

01:03:11.420 Until 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.

01:03:24.460 We don't survive this until we can say, yeah, that's life.

01:03:31.620 That's life.

01:03:32.380 And define it clearly.

01:03:35.300 How can we possibly expect to live in a world of A.I. and teach it don't kill?

01:03:42.760 Yeah, I mean, that's that's fascinating.

01:03:45.040 And frankly, I haven't devoted a whole lot of thought to it.

01:03:46.900 I mean, just about everybody who wrote an economics book is also wrote an ethics book.

01:03:50.600 And there's kind of a reason why, you know, Adam Smith wrote an ethics book and Hayek's written an ethics book.

01:03:56.480 And Marxism is an ethical philosophy.

01:03:58.380 And 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.

01:04:05.020 The science part is really deemphasized.

01:04:07.660 It's it's much more about a philosophy and how to organize societies.

01:04:11.020 I'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.

01:04:21.500 No, yeah, I didn't hear technophobia in what you're saying.

01:04:24.020 You 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.

01:04:30.200 But 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.

01:04:51.120 scarcity that doesn't exist, which is, again, an economic concept.

01:04:54.800 But the scarcity is presumes straight line projection, just stasis that we do not develop these new resources.

01:05:02.620 Shale was garbage 10 years ago.

01:05:05.900 We made that into a resource when the American colonists were just, you know, crossing the Appalachian and navigating into the American Midwest. 0.85

01:05:15.720 They saw silicon and bauxite in the soil and it was just dirt because there was no value to it.

01:05:22.940 We made these resources into the resources that they are today.

01:05:26.160 Aluminum, you know, was everywhere. 0.94

01:05:28.900 It was just garbage.

01:05:30.720 The extent to which you could process aluminum made it more valuable than gold in the in the Enlightenment period. 0.91

01:05:36.960 But 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.

01:05:53.900 So 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.

01:06:13.500 That's an article of faith, that's an article of faith on my part, I suppose, but it's not unfounded.

01:06:17.640 So 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.

01:06:32.780 It 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.

01:06:52.800 Uh, 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.

01:07:12.440 Um, 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.

01:07:26.740 And so will this, what I do will be disrupted at some point.

01:07:29.720 It's going to just get faster and faster and disruption, disruption, disruption.

01:07:33.300 In 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.

01:07:52.800 That's what I'm concerned about. 0.96

01:07:53.960 I'm concerned about that 10 year period where everything's being disrupted and everybody's just trying to save their own ass. 0.98

01:08:02.160 Yeah. Well, I, I don't fear the disruption and clearly you don't either.

01:08:06.600 I mean, as it does, as I self-described a disruptor, you welcome it.

01:08:10.300 Um, this is the, the creative destruction of the marketplace.

01:08:14.200 And again, as we were saying earlier, nothing, nothing good comes for free.

01:08:19.040 I mean, this is the sort of thing that develops strength and immunizes you and, and makes you a stronger, more competitive individual.

01:08:28.060 Um, the disruption is good for everybody, uh, in the interim.

01:08:31.740 Um, yeah, there will be one in the transition period.

01:08:34.040 Yeah.

01:08:34.220 There will be a lot of people who will just be displaced and those people will be very sympathetic and they will get the most attention.

01:08:40.000 They always do.

01:08:40.780 But the invisible beneficiaries of the new normal will be the vast majority of those, of the individuals who benefit from this condition.

01:08:47.800 Agree with you a hundred percent.

01:08:48.980 But now put in social justice and social justice warriors in that mix.

01:08:58.300 Yeah.

01:08:58.860 So that's, you know, the, our biggest threat has always been, will always be bad ideas.

01:09:03.480 This is a bad idea.

01:09:05.400 Um, one that springs from a noble place with a very valuable philosophical foundation.

01:09:11.800 And the people who are attracted to these ideas are not bad people.

01:09:15.420 They're good people.

01:09:16.840 These ideas are fundamentally about American ideas and we should approach them like that.

01:09:24.920 You are attracted to these things because you're a good person.

01:09:28.920 I 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.

01:09:43.920 That's sort of what I get to at the last chapter of this book, which is basically back to the women's march.

01:09:48.420 The women's march was embraced by the democratic party for a time.

01:09:51.620 And then it made itself so unattractive as a result of these ideas that they were jettisoned.

01:09:55.880 They no longer had the political authority that they once held.

01:09:58.640 So 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.

01:10:06.520 And the only thing it wants to do is get to 50 plus one at the polls.

01:10:10.180 No political organization or movement jettisons its own members.

01:10:13.480 Asking them to do that is asking them to abandon their instinct for self-preservation.

01:10:17.820 You're fighting against the tide.

01:10:18.980 It's not going to happen.

01:10:19.640 You 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.

01:10:32.340 Democrats 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. 0.99

01:10:50.020 Democrats similarly exposed and removed the communists from the organized labor movement in the 1940s.

01:10:56.140 There are models to which we can appeal if we really want to do this.

01:10:59.000 It'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.

01:11:11.700 Um, 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?

01:11:22.380 And these are intelligent people.

01:11:23.740 Yeah.

01:11:24.160 These are well-read, intelligent, informed people.

01:11:27.460 So how do you demonize when you have people?

01:11:31.360 How do you, how do you expose and demonize when your voice is being relegated really to one channel of people?

01:11:43.280 Well, I don't know.

01:11:46.160 I 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.

01:11:58.720 Um, trying to challenge that in a way that it, it really hasn't often been challenged, particularly for the audiences that I go to.

01:12:05.840 I go to predominantly liberal audiences, uh, on television and universities.

01:12:10.800 And the effort here is to start a conversation.

01:12:13.520 I've been, I've been happy with the response so far.

01:12:15.520 Have you?

01:12:15.740 Yeah, I have been.

01:12:16.520 Um, nobody's thrown an egg at me.

01:12:18.320 Uh, everybody, there've been a lot of challenging probing questions, um, incredulity in a lot of ways, but they're listening.

01:12:25.760 Um, 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.

01:12:39.820 My mission here is to say that this is not an out of the norm expression of how this philosophy manifests in the real world.

01:12:47.860 That is, that's a, it's a feature, not a bug.

01:12:50.980 That's the argument I'm making.

01:12:52.400 And there's a lot of hostility towards that.

01:12:53.960 Um, but it is nevertheless, I think, in, in, of unavoidable and inescapable.

01:12:59.080 And 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.

01:13:07.520 That is not to suggest that the social justice movement is focused on the big ideas of the day.

01:13:12.560 They are increasingly dedicated to small things and attacking one another.

01:13:17.420 This movement's efficacy is demonstrated in getting individuals to supplicate and genuflect before the mob.

01:13:24.780 And the mob only has about 72 hours worth of influence.

01:13:27.620 So they dedicate themselves to attacking their fellow social justice advocates, young adult novelists, restaurateurs, artists, comic book makers.

01:13:34.580 Pop 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.

01:13:44.340 I don't want to make the claim here that this movement is strong and getting stronger.

01:13:47.960 Some days I'm convinced that this is overtaking all of society.

01:13:51.000 And some days I see them as very marginal and lacking influence.

01:13:55.060 I'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.

01:14:04.700 You talk about, you talk about capitalist companies that are regurgitating this stuff.

01:14:13.160 Nike is a good example.

01:14:14.780 Woke capitalism.

01:14:15.620 Yeah, woke capitalism.

01:14:18.520 That's not spreading?

01:14:19.480 No, that's definitely spreading.

01:14:21.640 It's taking advantage of people who are made increasingly naive by this philosophy.

01:14:26.880 I don't care.

01:14:27.520 You remember what Nike's slogan was for the Colin Kaepernick campaign?

01:14:33.900 It was believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.

01:14:39.620 Nike didn't sacrifice anything.

01:14:41.420 Their sales jumped 10%.

01:14:42.640 Audi did the same thing when they broadcast a Super Bowl advertisement talking about the flawed notion

01:14:48.040 that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. 1.00

01:14:50.620 Their sales went up.

01:14:52.400 Gillette's sales went up.

01:14:53.600 And they talked about toxic masculinity.

01:14:55.900 Republicans and Democrats who respond to polls like this sort of thing.

01:14:59.940 They want their brands to engage in divisive social politics.

01:15:03.140 In part, in my view, the theory I have is that it's because it allows them to engage in politics,

01:15:09.120 which we all see as a good thing.

01:15:10.820 We incentivize that.

01:15:12.620 But you don't actually have to do any of the homework because this isn't about legislative affairs.

01:15:16.180 It's not about political coalitions.

01:15:17.760 It's not about politics as we understand it.

01:15:20.300 It's much more about cultural combat.

01:15:21.980 It mimics the passions and emotions of politics.

01:15:25.180 But it doesn't really have anything to do with politics.

01:15:27.280 And the stakes are incredibly low.

01:15:29.020 All you have to do is buy something.

01:15:31.260 So it's a popular way to engage in political activism today.

01:15:35.020 I don't know if it means the republic is collapsing.

01:15:38.580 But it is a way to take advantage of people who are attracted to these social justice ideas.

01:15:42.940 And the best example of that is the story of Fearless Girl.

01:15:46.160 The 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.

01:15:57.400 This statue, this arms akimbo elementary school-aged girl, was feted by Democrats as this really powerful attack on the patriarchy.

01:16:06.100 Bill de Blasio said that men were deeply offended by it somehow.

01:16:09.340 I'm not sure if he was certain they were.

01:16:11.360 It's hard to find them.

01:16:12.520 Elizabeth Warren made a pilgrimage down there.

01:16:14.180 Gail 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.

01:16:22.900 Oh, my gosh.

01:16:23.440 This was a commercial for an investment firm.

01:16:26.300 An investment firm sponsored it.

01:16:28.040 It 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.

01:16:40.900 But they didn't get the kind of scrutiny they were due because of this statue.

01:16:44.180 And we later learned why they did it.

01:16:46.140 A Department of Labor audit found they were systematically discriminating against their female employees, paid about $5 million to 305 women.

01:16:52.660 But they didn't get any of that.

01:16:55.180 Everybody would have seen that coming.

01:16:57.620 I 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.

01:17:09.000 And so they suspended their disbelief and in the process fell for a commercial for a Wall Street investment firm.

01:17:16.160 People like Elizabeth Warren, who can't go two breaths without attacking Wall Street greed, was down there giving these guys a boost. 1.00

01:17:21.280 Last question.

01:17:36.000 How many times have you seen in your studies that this rears its ugly head and then just goes away?

01:17:45.680 It stopped without real negative impacts.

01:17:50.700 So that's 72 hour window?

01:17:51.840 Um, that's a real thing.

01:17:55.660 Governor Ralph Northam would be gone if he'd have paid attention to the 72 hour window, but he didn't.

01:18:01.800 He said, I'm if I were to leave office now, according to reports, then he would be viewed as a racist for the rest of his career.

01:18:09.560 He's much better off trying to stick it out and hoping some event down the road gives him some other legacy.

01:18:16.160 So he waited out the 72 hour window and the outrage went away and the Democrats who demanded his head have now sort of begun recanting.

01:18:26.060 Um, you see that pretty frequently.

01:18:28.940 Um, unfortunately, you see the reverse more often, uh, in part because it's an assault on commercial vehicles, commercial entities.

01:18:35.860 The 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.

01:18:46.120 And any, any firm with a fiduciary responsibility to its investors feels like its bottom line is imperiled by not acquiescing to its demands.

01:18:53.740 And more often than not, they do.

01:18:55.500 But if they hold fast for those 72 hours, a lot of times it just goes away.

01:19:00.700 Um, maybe the sentiment doesn't.

01:19:02.940 The notion that there has been some transgression that is due some sort of, um, reprisal against the offender will persist.

01:19:09.740 But 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.

01:19:23.100 Um, that goes away within that 72 hour window.

01:19:26.840 Um, and you've seen some companies now respond by just not doing anything.

01:19:31.800 You saw governor Northam and just basically the entire government of Virginia that was implicated in all those scandals a couple of months ago.

01:19:37.600 They waited it out.

01:19:39.180 Um, the movement demonstrates its efficacy by collecting scalps, which is why it's focused so much on its own.

01:19:46.600 Um, 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.

01:19:56.080 Uh, and so that's, that to me indicates that it's not this overpowering movement that is overtaking our politics.

01:20:04.440 It 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.

01:20:09.860 I don't think this country is falling into a morass of totalitarian social justice identity politics tomorrow.

01:20:15.460 Great.

01:20:16.580 Noah, thank you.

01:20:17.600 Thank you so much for having me.

01:20:24.300 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

01:20:39.860 We'll see you next time.

The Glenn Beck Program - June 29, 2019

Ep 43 ｜ Noah Rothman ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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