James Lindsay's new book, "Cynical Theories," is out now and it's a must-own book. In this episode, we talk about how to deal with an intolerant left-wing ideology that won't compromise.
00:00:57.700These days, James is spending much of his time fighting the cult of critical theory, translating the language of the woke and math now into plain English.
00:01:10.040In 1984, George Orwell wrote, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make four.
00:01:16.320If that is granted, all else follows in a world that is becoming more and more.
00:01:23.6401984, by the day, James is a very brave man willing to stand up and say, yeah, two plus two does not equal five.
00:01:35.440So, James, I want to really concentrate on the book, Cynical Theories, because I don't think people.
00:02:43.340This is this is not a ideology that we're looking at with everything going on, as we southerners say, everything going on now.
00:02:53.000This is not an ideology that can tolerate compromise.
00:02:57.120So live and let live requires a acceptance that there will be compromise.
00:03:02.600It requires acceptance that there be forgiveness of mistakes and that people can work together and that our differences will be our strength, the e pluribus unum founding concept, the motto of the United States.
00:03:16.960And as was outlined, kind of ironically, you know, going back into the 40s with Karl Popper, outlining the paradox of tolerance, when you are struck with genuine intolerance, too much tolerance becomes a problem.
00:03:33.620And so the question becomes, of course, how do you tell when it's speech, which should be, you know, protected universally people's beliefs, people's matters of private conscience are their own.
00:03:48.720But when the popper says when they when they bring out the knives, when they bring out the guns, that's the point where you absolutely can't tolerate any longer.
00:03:59.600And the question becomes, in a realistic sense, and there are different ways to analyze this, what do you do in a society built on tolerance and plurality?
00:04:09.840What do you do to deal with a genuinely intolerant ideology that won't compromise?
00:04:16.440And that's the question that we're now facing, not in a theoretical way, but in a real way, maybe for the first time since the late 1960s.
00:04:24.220I think it's more serious in the 1960s because there doesn't seem to be any anything that is strong standing against it.
00:04:35.860We still had some universities and some and some professors and scientists and everything else.
00:04:42.820We had some churches that understood exactly what was going on.
00:04:48.540We had a society that was at the end of understanding the importance of the Constitution, but we we recognize the Constitution and we saw this this doublespeak and Orwellian kind of world coming from the Soviet Union.
00:05:09.620We don't have any of that. Right. We have nothing.
00:05:12.220Right. The brakes have been taken off of the train and it's rolling down the hill.
00:05:17.240That's where we are now. And the primary way that it's taken the brakes off of the train is by making things about matters of identity and thus bigotry, which are so sensitive for so many people that they would rather just roll over and maybe even hand over the keys to their way of life than be caught up in association with bigotry.
00:05:43.560Right. And so this is this is the way that they figured out how to remove the brakes from the same kind of thing that was attempted in the 1960s.
00:05:51.420There was a major summit for liberation, as they call it in 1967, we saw the rollout of riots and violence through late 1967 and 1968.
00:06:01.960That was largely informed by Herbert Marcuse, the neo-Marxist who started the so-called New Left, and he's the one that led the charge toward identity politics.
00:06:14.100And now we've had 50 years of that line of thought ripening, plus, as we document in the book that you mentioned, the adoption of postmodernism so that it no longer has any tether to the truth.
00:06:27.440It's all about feelings. So if somebody accuses somebody of bigotry or racism or sexism or homophobia or you name you name it, there are so many that even Judith Butler, one of their scholars, called it that exasperated, etc.
00:06:40.880If you accuse somebody of it, that's a wholly subjective determination.
00:06:47.320And if you say, where is the evidence that racism is happening, say, in our school, in our institution, at NASA, you say, where is the evidence that racism is happening here?
00:06:56.080They say, the evidence is my lived experience and that you think we need more evidence than that is just proof that you're racist and that it's actually a racist system to ask for evidence because it denies the realities of my lived experience.
00:07:09.080And by having moved the entire question into matters of lived experience on something as sensitive as bigotry in our society, which tries to be open and tolerant and and pluralistic and welcoming and inclusive and diverse, they've removed the brakes from the train that would drive the revolution.
00:07:33.020So, James, I've been saying for a long time there's going to come a point where you won't recognize your country.
00:07:37.720And some people found that during the Kavanaugh hearings where they were like, wait, wait, wait, how is this happening?
00:07:45.940What you, you know, where is the evidence?
00:08:17.580Is there are there and we can get into these.
00:08:19.800I know you have a great answer for how to fight it.
00:08:21.980But are you seeing anything on the horizon that makes you feel better that maybe we're going to slow down on this?
00:08:29.900I see a grassroots movement waking up and that is the most interesting and hopeful thing.
00:08:40.300I also am hearing from more and more people who are within business, within industry, within education, within universities, within the nonprofit sector, within the activist sector that has pushed for many even progressive left changes in society.
00:08:58.400All saying, wait a minute, this has all gone too far.
00:09:01.720I wrote an article a while back, I guess two months ago, called The Woke Breaking Point.
00:09:07.280And I compelled people in that article to think for yourself.
00:09:11.500Maybe if you're out there and you're listening and you're somewhat progressive or you think this is a movement that has the best interests of certain vulnerable people at heart and you have sympathies toward it, you need to wrestle with yourself.
00:09:24.600And you need to take this to your friends and get your friends to wrestle with it and your family and anybody else that you can reach that supports it.
00:09:31.780You have to wrestle with where is the line that's too far?
00:10:28.240Why are we muddying the water and using these like they're interchangeable when they mean different things?
00:10:32.600And for me, that was my breaking point.
00:10:34.740And that was that was seven years ago.
00:10:37.760Kavanaugh, I actually heard from somebody yesterday that the Kavanaugh hearing was his breaking point.
00:10:42.420When he saw that, he said that that's it.
00:10:45.420A lot of people, though not many on the left, when Donald Trump was elected and we saw the emergence of a so-called hashtag resistance and we saw marches for abstract concepts like women and with no particular policy goals in mind, with no particular, just a women's march.
00:11:07.140To resist Donald Trump and his existence.
00:11:09.380And then particularly, I've heard many people say the movement of, quote, not my president, where all of a sudden a duly elected president, according to the Constitution, was considered illegitimate based on who he was.
00:11:23.500That was a lot of people's breaking point.
00:11:25.420The recent I've heard hundreds, if not thousands of people that the recent, you know, month or two month long fracas on Twitter over whether two plus two equals four or five was a lot of people's breaking point where they said, OK, if they're willing to throw out objective truth, that's too far.
00:11:52.440I've seen it before about a project to decolonize light, saying that the way that we've studied light has been wholly from a scientific perspective and other perspectives on light aren't considered legitimate as science.
00:12:57.980But people need to find out what it is and they need to get their friends to deal with it and say, you know, if they tear down a statue, a lot of
00:13:04.860people should have said if they ever tear down a statue of George Washington, it's gone too far.
00:13:50.860It read like today's newspaper in America and it was hair raising, which brings me to the two plus two equals five.
00:14:02.080You you you've released a Twitter storm that just I mean, it became like a category five hurricane where you were mocking two plus two equals five.
00:14:15.680Right. Right. And you all of a sudden saw all of these people backing that up and arguing that you're right.
00:14:31.620While while I was waiting to sit down with you, I was checking my Twitter and seeing that one of the most prestigious mathematicians in the world,
00:14:38.840one of the most accomplished mathematicians in the world, a fields medalist, was still arguing about how two plus two doesn't always have to equal four.
00:14:51.060It all started where somebody had asked me to explain how would this ideology, the critical social justice or woke ideology, think about something like two plus two?
00:15:02.000Would they say it's four? Would they say it's five? Would they say it's three? Would they say it's something else?
00:15:05.960And I said, the answer is that it would say that is that they would say that it doesn't matter what two plus two equals,
00:15:11.900but that we should be suspicious of the answer for because that's a hegemonic narrative that came from white supremacy.
00:15:20.520And so I made this card that I put on Twitter.
00:15:23.660I call them woke minis and I put just little satirical quips and little pretty cards and I put them out on Twitter
00:15:31.100and it said something to the effect of two plus two equals four is a perspective in white Western mathematics
00:15:37.480that excludes other possible values or marginalizes other possible values maybe.
00:41:20.860What what for instance, in the book, you talk about, you know, the fat theories.
00:41:27.420I think that's what you call fat studies, just a thumbnail of fat studies here.
00:41:33.860OK, so, yeah, the book traces just to kind of give a quick overview of what postmodern philosophy is, how it changed in the 1980s and 1990s, as we spoke about.
00:41:43.580And then it details a number of the specific branches of this new way of thinking, new way of thought.
00:42:42.120And so obesity needs to be taken out of the consideration of the medical field.
00:42:46.880Your doctor should not be allowed to tell you that obesity is linked to health conditions whatsoever.
00:42:51.220They shouldn't be allowed to tell you that you're overweight because that assumes that there is a correct weight, which is a hegemonic discourse that excludes fat people from society.
00:42:59.820And it is an entire effort to essentially remove any expectation that we would be able to talk about being overweight or the medical implications of being overweight in any realistic or scientific way.
00:43:18.320There's only talking about the ways in which people who are overweight are oppressed by a society who doesn't welcome them, who doesn't accommodate them at every turn.
00:43:29.480So airplane seats having a standard size, for example, is an example of fat phobia, a hatred of fat people.
00:43:36.460Because the airplane seat having a standard size is not accommodating the fact that some people are larger.
00:43:44.340And the fact that there are seat belt extensions implies that there's an accurate size, a proper size.
00:43:50.960And so it's humiliating to have to get a seat belt extension.
00:43:54.240And so it's a further way to embarrass and stigmatize fat people.
00:43:57.480So fat studies is a way to stop studying anything to do with being overweight in a realistic way and to turn it into something like a support group on steroids that believes that society literally hates fat people and is out to get them at every turn.
00:44:13.640And needs to rearrange itself completely to accommodate obesity and to pretend that it doesn't have health associated risks.
00:44:24.740So I was having dinner with Vince Vaughn about 10 years ago and we were just talking about our backs.
00:45:41.480The point of this is, is all of these studies are dangerous.
00:45:46.960They are telling, I mean, you tell me if you create a world where Glenn Beck is every right and he should feel good about going to having more ice cream.
00:45:57.440I will have more ice cream because you're just enabling me to have more ice cream.
00:46:03.020In my case, I bring my fatness on because I'm lazy.
00:47:07.960And it gets very literally psychiatric as well, because within disability studies, for example, there is diseases like depression, which can end in suicide, are often characterized as identities.
00:47:22.960And they talk about the depressed community and the depressed identity with a capital D.
00:47:28.580And so at that point, you no longer try to treat depression.
00:47:31.340You try to lean into your depression and you try to make your depression part of who you are.
00:47:35.620And most importantly, because these are critical studies, just like with fat studies, and this is part of why they deny medical intervention, but also here and just with everything else, you're supposed to turn your identity into a political, a site of political activism, a political identity.
00:47:51.600So we heard that with the 1619 Project woman, Nicole Hannah-Jones, where she tweeted about people being politically black isn't the same as in being racially black.
00:48:26.760So now you're supposed to adopt your identity as a means of politics.
00:48:31.200That old saying, the personal is political, is taken to the absolute extreme.
00:48:35.880And the point is to do radical identity politics, where you claim that the system is hurting people with my identity.
00:48:44.120It's an extreme example, but it's true.
00:48:47.020This actually within fat studies, for example, and it also shows up in disability studies.
00:48:53.820The doctors encouraging people to lose weight or if we invented a weight loss pill, of course, every pharmaceutical company in the world would love to invent this.
00:49:01.820That causes people to get to their ideal weight if they just take this pill.
00:49:05.880So within fat studies, such an invention or even the advice of doctors is is construed as encouraging a fat genocide because it would make it so there are no fat identities any longer.
00:49:17.960You see this with the impetus to cure certain disabilities, most frequently deafness.
00:49:25.300It's a deaf genocide to give people, say, cochlear implants or other implants that would allow them to hear when they're deaf.
00:49:31.700And so this is this very warped mindset where the identity politics and the cultural identity of everything becomes the most important factor.
00:49:47.640So, James, I, you know, I think you were really nervous when the first time you came on my my program, because, I mean, you could you could say a lot of things about me and people have said those things.
00:50:03.660But they're all most of them, but they're all most of them are cartoon characters and and and inaccurate.
00:50:09.860But the one thing that is true about me is I'm a I'm a very religious man.
00:50:15.040I'm open minded and I'm not trying to preach my religion.
00:50:24.400And I in the last couple of years, I've tried to maybe five years, I've tried to stop using the word evil because it's it's such a powerful word and means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
00:50:39.360And I think we've just gotten so cavalier with that, with that word.
00:50:46.500However, if you just categorize evil as just destructive, intentionally destructive to the wellness of a species, a planet, whatever.
00:51:01.880However, I can't find another word to describe this.
00:51:43.180There's another thing where the where a person has given into self-centered envy to such a degree that they'll destroy anything so that other people can't have something that they don't have.
00:52:13.120And the desire to, to the, the, the, the, the, so I don't want to get too theological seeing as I've just set myself up as not, but the truth is, but the truth is that there are a few features of the character of Satan or of the deceiver that, that it is the temptation to obsessing about the self.
00:52:34.560And then to turn that to not to, oh, how do I improve myself, but how do I tear down that, which is against me?
00:52:43.420That, that's a very, um, spiritual way to see evil.
00:52:48.640It is a deep focus inward on the self in a negative way and then projecting it onto the world.
00:52:55.360And then the second way, and I think this is very important is that, um, they seek justice, but in not to, again, you get too theological, but in the Bible, justice is paired with mercy.
00:53:20.060And when you combine that with the manipulation of language, and you remember that the point of the character of Satan is the deceiver.
00:53:27.160And so the people are, are deceiving you with, with their, I mean, it's just all there that I don't subscribe to the theology myself, but I understand the archetypes that it's speaking to.
00:54:18.680Um, but when does it get to a place of real oppressive power to where we would recognize it as the former Soviet Union or, you know, the, the Nazis or whatever?
00:54:36.420Uh, it's very difficult to say how far, but the first instance where a significant institution that we truly depend upon, like our food supply chain collapses, that's where it starts to recognize, to, to, to, to look like that very quickly.
00:54:53.160Of course, if people were better students of history and I don't want to set myself up like I am a great student of history, they would recognize that the riots that we're seeing in the cities mirror incidents in, in previous revolutions.
00:55:35.420And he printed his little red book and it had all of the little communist sayings and the Maoist sayings.
00:55:40.140And this is what you're seeing in all of those anti-racist literature, uh, the same kinds of, the same kinds of thought stopping and revolution driving aphorisms like white silence is violence.
00:55:53.640Uh, these, these, these are the exact kinds of things, you know, white complicity.
00:56:17.760Because I already see it and I can't not see it at this point.
00:56:20.640And I don't know how other people can't see it, but what, what will, I mean, I have a few points that we talked about woke breaking points earlier that I think will be unambiguous for large segments of the population.
00:56:31.320Um, one would be the collapse of a major necessary institution that we actually depend upon for our livelihoods.
00:56:39.100Um, like whether that's banks, the economy, the food supply chain.
00:56:45.600I mean, we almost saw that early on with some, some shutting down all of the, the meatpacking plants with, with COVID-19.
00:56:53.320I think that, I think the shutting down of the banks is, is, I believe it's, it could happen between now and spring easily might take longer than that, but it could happen tomorrow.
00:57:04.840It could happen, you know, it could happen very soon.
00:57:10.000And it's very difficult to make predictions about how soon that will be, but there are certain things.
00:57:16.220Another sign, and then I don't know what form this will take as far as getting people's attention.
00:57:21.480I predicted from the first moments of the riots breaking out in Minneapolis after George Floyd died, I predicted that the sign that would tell the majority of the public that it's time to wake up would be one of two things.
00:57:37.440It would either be literal marches on the suburbs where they're trying to do, you know, the disruptive nonsense there in people's homes, or, and this was the more poignant one, police officers swinging from trees and literal lynching.
00:57:53.200And those things I think would actually wake people up.
00:57:58.320No, the neighborhood is already happening.
00:58:03.860Well, then there are three, because this week I've seen two different neighborhoods where they are literally marching and saying in the middle of the night, wake up, white people, wake up.
00:58:17.260Another one I saw was the this poor family was just out barbecuing and white family.
00:58:24.340And this group was just talking about how they're going to take their house and they're racist.
00:58:30.560And and the kids were just standing there.
00:58:32.860And I thought, how how how do you how do you feel comfortable?
00:58:37.980How much longer do Americans stand by and take it?
00:58:43.640So one of the things that people need to understand about the ideology, and this was directly from a teaching education conference, but it also comes out of a myriad of their literature.
00:58:57.040There is actually a statement, there's a concept within their literature called white comfort, and they say that the idea of white comfort is that white people are comfortable with the racial status quo.
00:59:10.140And the next follow up line is, therefore, anything that maintains white comfort is suspect.
00:59:16.200So this idea of going around and doing that to make people uncomfortable is core to the ideology.
00:59:23.340And so it will continue anything that makes white people feel comfortable is suspect.
00:59:40.820And so this is what's going to continue.
00:59:43.160And so my question, you know, is actually, A, when do we decide that this is enough?
00:59:49.800And B, how do we decide that it is enough?
00:59:51.920And hopefully we decide through the law and not through vigilante action.
00:59:58.780And that's where I actually have the most fear that I really do hope.
01:00:04.260And, you know, there's a trick here that's being played, and it's that, you know, they've laid this story for so long that Trump is a fascist, that he's an outright fascist.
01:00:18.880He's never going to give up the presidency.
01:00:20.340It's going to be, you know, whatever, all these things that they say.
01:00:22.560And he's a dictator and so on and so forth.
01:00:25.200And so many people that lean left of center believe this, that we can't even have the police show up to arson or to riots or to the physical beating of a person almost to death in the street.
01:00:39.400We can't even have the police show up because they'll cry, ah, the force of the state is cracking down on peaceful protesters.
01:01:30.740And the states, the left states are becoming much more fascistic.
01:01:37.080And they're denying that that's what fascism is.
01:01:42.820And protecting the protecting just the the average store owner, you know, or the or the neighborhood.
01:01:52.740That's now fascist to the left and to the Democrats.
01:01:57.000Yeah, they it's it's just like two plus two equals five in two ways.
01:02:02.640One is the demand that we deny the the reality that we can see with our own eyes.
01:02:08.180The other is the manipulation of language.
01:02:12.420Two plus two does equal five if we just change what five means.
01:02:15.380And so or if we change what plus means or if we change what equals means.
01:02:19.420And so here there's a completely different definition of fascism, which if you look into it, the definition of fascism that's in operation is a state that functions.
01:02:40.040And that can be traced again to the same thinkers tracing back into the 1960s in particular.
01:02:46.020These same thinkers are laid down these ideas and they've been festering for 50 or so years and have turned into this.
01:02:54.540You do something where you have a social justice dictionary that I think is really, really important because there's all these new words and everybody seems to speak them overnight.
01:03:03.920All of a sudden, everybody's saying this new word and you're like, what, what, when did that happen?
01:03:09.700And I want to go through, I want to go through a few of them with you because I intentionally did not read the definition of these words because I want to see if I can get anywhere even close.
01:03:25.140And I don't think I can medicalizing that is like mansplaining except to buy a medical professional.
01:03:58.080And so to just say, well, we're just going to give people methadone and send them home or whatever, that would be medicalizing the issue and thus missing the nuance.
01:04:06.920And so there's a real use of this word.
01:04:08.240And then there's the use, as we actually mentioned, in fat studies and disability studies where saying somebody is depressed and treating that as a medical issue or somebody is overweight and treating that as a medical issue.
01:04:18.440They say that it turns this into a medical issue when it's really not a medical issue and should not be treated as a medical issue.
01:04:25.760And then they assert further that this is an example of the application of hegemonic power where we believe scientific discourses and don't believe non-scientific discourses.
01:04:37.640And this constrains people and hurts them.
01:04:39.780So responsible eyes, that is the saying that something is responsible, that is part of the fascist state or the the the white culture or you're close again.
01:05:01.240So, again, this is a term that has a real a real legitimate use.
01:05:06.060The term in its legitimate use means to make a person responsible for something that previously some other entity, often the state took care of.
01:05:16.940So if Social Security went away to responsible eyes, you have now responsible eyes.
01:05:38.020That makes her responsible for something that shouldn't have happened.
01:05:40.720So the way that the critical social justice ideology sees it is anything that the system should not be allowing that we then say somebody should take responsibility for.
01:05:49.260So a more realistic situation is when when maybe on college campuses, maybe just in broader society, we recommend women's self-defense classes.
01:05:58.420Women learn how to learn to use a gun.
01:06:01.500You know, get your carry permit, learn a little basic martial arts so that you can can be rape safe.
01:06:43.760You you can the world can throw manure on you all the time, but how you react to it is what is going to make the determining will be the determining factor in your life.
01:07:01.880Well, I mean, to give you an explicit example of that, you're already hearing people suggesting and I've heard several people email me about this, say, even in the context of their therapy sessions where they've been raped and they have post-traumatic stress over their actual rape and they're dealing with it.
01:07:18.880And then their therapist tries to point out to them, you know, they say they're raped by a black man.
01:07:50.340And if you understood the systems of poverty, the systems of racism, the systems of bigotry, then you would understand why people say break into homes and steal things or loot a store or, you know, whatever else.
01:08:03.480And so these people can't be held responsible.
01:08:05.020We saw that literally with the looting that followed George Floyd's death.
01:08:08.340People were saying, well, look at the the systemic racism.
01:08:13.540They can't be held responsible for the material conditions of their lives.
01:08:16.660So obviously they're going to turn to these kinds of actions or they're going to turn to crime because they can't be held responsible.
01:08:21.800So saying, you know what, you need to actually be responsible and not loot a target.
01:08:26.480You need to be responsible and not shoot people.
01:08:29.060That would also under this within the context here of race would also count as responsibilizing people.
01:08:35.340And so this taps into literally the defund the police and the prison abolition movements, saying that those people can't be held responsible because racism is what made them into criminals.
01:08:44.660And the calling them criminals applies a straight out of Foucault, a disciplinary term to them that is socially constructed and unfair and meant to just control their black and brown bodies.
01:08:55.720This is literally the way they use language and think about the world.
01:08:58.680So the other of the other things are genocide, exclusion, science, fascism, identity.
01:09:35.540That's a deaf genocide because there are no deaf people and no deaf culture.
01:09:38.900Or if you were to, say, teach, say that you have a hypothesis like we see in critical race theory that science is white supremacist.
01:09:47.400So you were to encourage black people to think scientifically that would take them out of their whatever black cultural context or maybe it's South African.
01:09:55.220You know, we can talk about those actually a movement.
01:09:56.900They're called Science Must Fall that said that science was a colonizing way of thinking that was displacing traditional knowledge.
01:10:03.700And so it would be a genocide of those cultures to teach them to think scientifically because those cultures would no longer exist the way that they did.
01:10:10.640So, I mean, part of that is, I mean, part of that is we should have some conversation.
01:10:17.140I have a daughter with cerebral palsy.
01:11:12.780I don't think it helps the conversation.
01:11:15.300So, I mean, there's a simple line where as so long as somebody is sound enough of mind to have power of attorney over themselves, they should be allowed to make those decisions.
01:11:24.580If somebody is deaf and wants to remain deaf, even in light of a technology, they shouldn't be forced.
01:11:30.760And if they want to lean into that culture around being deaf, that's perfectly acceptable.
01:11:35.780And there's a lot of strength and there's a lot of wisdom and there's a lot of opportunity to learn and learn more about each other in the world in that.
01:11:42.560And so it can be made into an individual choice, but turning it into a collective choice and then to shame people.
01:11:49.120Say if say there was some magic treatment that could could change your daughter's cerebral palsy and it were to come along and you you brought it to her and said, well, what do you think?
01:12:14.640There's all it's not appropriate to shame them that way either.
01:12:17.320There's only what's appropriate is to give them make the most informed choice possible, which means getting to the bottom of objective truths about the situation and then conveying those truths to people and then letting them make up their own minds.
01:13:59.460So we worship the gods of the market who promised us all of these beautiful things.
01:14:05.140When the Cambrian measures were forming, they promised perpetual peace.
01:14:08.620They swore if we gave them our weapons that the wars of the tribes would cease.
01:14:13.820But when we disarmed, they sold us and delivered us bound to our foe.
01:14:19.100And the gods of the copybook headings said stick to the devil, you know.
01:14:22.900On the first feminine sandstones, we were promised promised the fuller life, which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife.
01:14:32.360Till our women had no more children and the men had lost their reason in faith.
01:14:37.100And the gods of the copybook headings said the wages of sin is death.
01:14:41.840In the Carboniferous Epic, we were promised abundance for all by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul.
01:14:50.380But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy.
01:14:56.040And the gods of the copybook headings said, if you do not work, you will die.
01:15:02.080Then the gods of the market tumbled and their smooth tongue wizards withdrew.
01:15:07.340And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true.
01:15:12.560That all is not golden that glitters and two and two do make four.
01:15:19.180And the gods of the copybook headings limped up to explain it once more.
01:15:24.700As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of man.
01:15:28.560There are only four things certain since social progress began that the dog returns to his vomit and the sow returns to its mire and the burnt fool's bandage finger goes wobbling back to the fire.
01:15:44.440And after this is accomplished and the brave new world begins, when all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, as surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn, the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return.
01:17:46.140And I mean that literally in the sense of a crooks, a point, an inflection point in history where if the if people can quickly begin to understand what is happening, what this ideology actually is.
01:18:00.780The thing of social justice, anti-racism, diversity, these all sound great.
01:19:16.140People need to understand the Constitution.
01:19:18.600They need to understand the Declaration of Independence.
01:19:20.260They need to understand the basic principles of how checking of each by each and accepting the fact that when you lose the argument because the experiment said that your hypothesis was wrong, that that's OK and actually good.
01:19:34.600When people start to remember how we built ourselves out of medievalism, clawing our way 500 years out of medievalism.
01:19:43.660And then they can see that this theory leads to medievalism again rooted in something like ethnic Gnosticism.
01:19:50.780They can then decide, no, we're staying with modernity.
01:19:56.560We're not going back to to a medieval system.
01:19:58.980We're not giving in to to these little petty dictators and their fiefdoms.
01:20:03.780And we can avoid the violence that will come if they keep pushing.
01:20:08.560I don't want to take this amazing conversation and turn it political or especially leave it political.
01:20:19.080So you answer this question any way you want.
01:20:21.520I've heard people say all the time, it doesn't make a difference who you vote for.
01:20:59.420It will matter and it will matter either way.
01:21:02.760And I think that we have to hope that enough people realize that we are now on a train that is barreling down the tracks and about to shoot off the edge of the cliff to realize that we have to not invest as deeply in the outcome of the election as we are likely to culturally.
01:21:21.640That said, I'm very worried in particular.
01:21:26.600And I say this as a lifelong liberal who does not want to be political.
01:21:30.560I'm very worried about what will happen if Biden wins this election.
01:21:34.920I'm very worried about it because I see no, I don't see brakes on the train anywhere, but I see the accelerator pedal.
01:21:46.520And I don't necessarily even see it in Biden himself.
01:21:49.360I just, I don't, I don't, I see it in the architecture around him and the fact that the, that most of this ideology operates administratively, which is why in some sense it matters.
01:22:02.380Because, and in some sense it doesn't, because even under Trump, even under any other president, if some, you know, rogue third candidate were to come into the situation and sweep up all of the electoral votes somehow by, you know, some act of, of thought, experiment magic.
01:22:18.280The administration underneath is still the, the, the, the, the level of like kind of middle management, which is still pretty big at the federal government is where most of these changes are taking place.
01:22:28.880And unless that gets straightened out, uh, there's, there's nothing good down this road that said, as much as I hate to say it, one of the two candidates seems to put up resistance.
01:22:42.180And one of the two candidates seems to accelerate that process.
01:22:46.680I'm horrified because I feel like I can vote for neither.
01:22:49.340James, I, I can't thank you enough for being honest and brave and, um, just being who you were meant to be and, um, not slinking away in the darkness.
01:23:06.940Um, these are the times that, um, produce the men and women that eventually civilizations build statues, um, uh,
01:23:19.340to remember, um, because while they're afraid, uh, and while they may know that no good is probably going to come from my standing up, they do it anyway.
01:23:59.580Uh, the name of the book is cynical theories, how activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity and why this harms everybody.
01:24:09.800It's, uh, by Helen pluck, a pluck rose and James Lindsay, James.