The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 79 ｜ We're All Racist, Sexist Bigots & 2+2=5 ｜ James Lindsay ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

00:00:00.000 Well, the woke revolutionaries on Twitter are gunning for James Lindsay.

00:00:05.020 He's a mathematician.

00:00:06.520 He's an academic prankster.

00:00:08.640 It's not quite the right word.

00:00:10.660 He's brilliant.

00:00:12.040 James Lindsay Lindsay does not care.

00:00:14.440 He's moved beyond caring about academic radicals who bully anyone they disagree with.

00:00:20.320 And they disagree with most of us.

00:00:22.760 The last time we had James Lindsay on this podcast, he was a little different than he is now.

00:00:26.940 He still cared about trying to find a way to reason with the bullies of woke liberalism.

00:00:31.880 But his new book doesn't give me much hope that that's going to happen.

00:00:36.400 It is a groundbreaking book.

00:00:39.920 It's called Cynical Theories, How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity and Why This Harms Everyone.

00:00:48.200 This is a must own book.

00:00:50.780 Go out or just go online and order it right now.

00:00:54.940 You'll see why after this interview.

00:00:57.700 These 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.

00:01:10.040 In 1984, George Orwell wrote, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make four.

00:01:16.320 If that is granted, all else follows in a world that is becoming more and more.

00:01:23.640 1984, by the day, James is a very brave man willing to stand up and say, yeah, two plus two does not equal five.

00:01:35.440 So, James, I want to really concentrate on the book, Cynical Theories, because I don't think people.

00:01:57.380 And we've talked about it before.

00:01:59.320 I don't think people really understand what's happening.

00:02:03.180 They're being duped by a lot of things.

00:02:05.920 And really, in a way, you know, in America, it is always this way.

00:02:13.640 Our Achilles heel is, I think, our willingness to just live and let live and, you know, just let people.

00:02:21.040 And I don't believe that, but that's OK.

00:02:24.160 And we're in a different time now.

00:02:26.820 They've used that against us.

00:02:29.840 And now we're just at the very beginning of seeing how dangerous and literally deadly this will be.

00:02:38.780 Yep, that is a correct assessment.

00:02:43.340 This is this is not a ideology that we're looking at with everything going on, as we southerners say, everything going on now.

00:02:53.000 This is not an ideology that can tolerate compromise.

00:02:57.120 So live and let live requires a acceptance that there will be compromise.

00:03:02.600 It 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.

00:03:16.960 And 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.

00:03:33.620 And 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.

00:03:48.720 But 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.

00:03:59.600 And 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?

00:04:09.840 What do you do to deal with a genuinely intolerant ideology that won't compromise?

00:04:16.440 And 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.

00:04:24.220 I think it's more serious in the 1960s because there doesn't seem to be any anything that is strong standing against it.

00:04:35.860 We still had some universities and some and some professors and scientists and everything else.

00:04:42.820 We had some churches that understood exactly what was going on.

00:04:48.540 We 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. 0.95

00:05:09.620 We don't have any of that. Right. We have nothing.

00:05:12.220 Right. The brakes have been taken off of the train and it's rolling down the hill.

00:05:17.240 That'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.

00:05:43.560 Right. 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.

00:05:51.420 There 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.

00:06:01.960 That 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.

00:06:14.100 And 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.

00:06:27.440 It'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.

00:06:40.880 If you accuse somebody of it, that's a wholly subjective determination.

00:06:47.320 And 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?

00:06:56.080 They 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.

00:07:09.080 And 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.

00:07:33.020 So, James, I've been saying for a long time there's going to come a point where you won't recognize your country.

00:07:37.720 And some people found that during the Kavanaugh hearings where they were like, wait, wait, wait, how is this happening?

00:07:45.940 What you, you know, where is the evidence?

00:07:48.700 I'm open minded.

00:07:49.820 And if he's doing those kinds of things, but we don't just convict somebody like that without anything.

00:07:56.280 And people thought the world was upside down.

00:07:58.780 That was a year ago.

00:08:01.160 That's a playground state.

00:08:03.840 That's like McDonald's playground compared to where we are right now.

00:08:08.940 I can't even imagine 12 months from now.

00:08:13.620 Are you are you seeing any slowdown?

00:08:17.580 Is there are there and we can get into these.

00:08:19.800 I know you have a great answer for how to fight it.

00:08:21.980 But are you seeing anything on the horizon that makes you feel better that maybe we're going to slow down on this?

00:08:29.900 I see a grassroots movement waking up and that is the most interesting and hopeful thing.

00:08:40.300 I 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.

00:08:58.400 All saying, wait a minute, this has all gone too far.

00:09:01.720 I wrote an article a while back, I guess two months ago, called The Woke Breaking Point.

00:09:07.280 And I compelled people in that article to think for yourself.

00:09:11.500 Maybe 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.

00:09:24.600 And 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.

00:09:31.780 You have to wrestle with where is the line that's too far?

00:09:36.700 What does it look like?

00:09:37.600 And you have to understand that psychologically, we have to see that line before we cross it in order for this to be effective.

00:09:44.380 Right.

00:09:44.580 Because what happens is, you know, something happens that we normally wouldn't tolerate.

00:09:49.640 Then we end up going and we get in a culture war on Twitter or whatever and we rationalize something unacceptable.

00:09:56.420 And so what is the line for you?

00:09:59.880 Give me, give me, give me some lines.

00:10:01.440 I crossed my line in 2013 or so when I saw my intellectual heroes getting called sexist for things that had nothing to do with sexism.

00:10:11.440 And then that's when I realized something wrong was happening here.

00:10:15.140 You know, when I asked questions, I got the academic literature, sociological, they called it, but it's not actually sociological.

00:10:20.900 Definition of systemic sexism than systemic racism.

00:10:23.940 And I said, well, here we have two definitions.

00:10:26.460 Why are we not trying to be clear?

00:10:28.240 Why are we muddying the water and using these like they're interchangeable when they mean different things?

00:10:32.600 And for me, that was my breaking point.

00:10:34.740 And that was that was seven years ago.

00:10:37.760 Kavanaugh, I actually heard from somebody yesterday that the Kavanaugh hearing was his breaking point.

00:10:42.420 When he saw that, he said that that's it.

00:10:45.420 A 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.

00:11:05.960 Right.

00:11:06.280 For what?

00:11:07.140 To resist Donald Trump and his existence.

00:11:09.380 And 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.

00:11:23.500 That was a lot of people's breaking point.

00:11:25.420 The 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.

00:11:44.760 Yeah, that's too far.

00:11:45.880 So even basic mathematics, science, I shared a thing on Twitter this morning.

00:11:51.320 It's actually old.

00:11:52.440 I'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.

00:12:04.880 And so we have to decolonize light.

00:12:34.860 Racist Policy Institute at Boston University, $10 million.

00:12:38.160 That was some people's woke breaking point.

00:12:40.680 A lot of times, though, it's going to be personal.

00:12:42.980 It'll be when somebody that they love gets fired, gets canceled, gets pilloried, gets called a racist illegitimately like it was for me.

00:12:50.040 My intellectual heroes got called sexist when they weren't sexist.

00:12:53.240 And I said, something's wrong here.

00:12:55.060 So it'll be something for everybody.

00:12:57.980 But 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

00:13:04.860 people should have said if they ever tear down a statue of George Washington, it's gone too far.

00:13:08.860 And a lot of people didn't.

00:13:11.780 And they tore down a statue of George Washington.

00:13:13.560 And a lot of people rationalized it.

00:13:16.140 Let me let me tell you one of the more frightening things that I've done recently is while I was on vacation, I read 1984 again.

00:13:26.900 And I haven't I haven't read 1984 since I don't know, I was in high school or whenever.

00:13:33.200 And I remember reading it then and it being a really good book.

00:13:36.860 But you had to you had to kind of, you know, play into it and give it a little more credibility.

00:13:43.700 And you could think of when I read it, you could think of the Soviet Union or whatever.

00:13:48.600 This thing read like a newspaper.

00:13:50.860 It read like today's newspaper in America and it was hair raising, which brings me to the two plus two equals five.

00:14:02.080 You 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.

00:14:15.680 Right. Right. And you all of a sudden saw all of these people backing that up and arguing that you're right.

00:14:26.800 Two plus two isn't for.

00:14:29.680 That's right. It's even today.

00:14:31.620 While 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,

00:14:38.840 one 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.

00:14:48.080 And so this is happening.

00:14:51.060 It 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?

00:15:02.000 Would they say it's four? Would they say it's five? Would they say it's three? Would they say it's something else?

00:15:05.960 And 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,

00:15:11.900 but that we should be suspicious of the answer for because that's a hegemonic narrative that came from white supremacy.

00:15:20.520 And so I made this card that I put on Twitter.

00:15:23.660 I call them woke minis and I put just little satirical quips and little pretty cards and I put them out on Twitter

00:15:31.100 and it said something to the effect of two plus two equals four is a perspective in white Western mathematics

00:15:37.480 that excludes other possible values or marginalizes other possible values maybe.

00:15:42.480 And so this kind of just was funny.

00:15:47.040 And then somebody ended up tagging the creator of the 1619 project, Nicole Hannah-Jones, with it about a month later.

00:15:53.920 And then she tried to make fun of it by saying that I had used Arabic numerals for two and four.

00:15:59.440 And she said, that's so damn classic.

00:16:01.640 And she made fun of it.

00:16:02.900 Well, this ends up within a few days, it had tapped into this massive movement.

00:16:07.520 So this is actually not just a Twitter fight.

00:16:09.680 It tapped into this massive movement to change our education in terms of ethnic studies.

00:16:15.000 This is already the law in Washington.

00:16:16.480 It's already the law in California.

00:16:17.840 It just passed in California.

00:16:18.980 In California now, they no longer are going to be teaching just history.

00:16:23.940 They are now going to be teaching what they call herstory.

00:16:28.360 My head hurts.

00:16:30.000 And they H-E-R to H-X-R. 0.99

00:16:32.940 H-X-R story instead of history. 0.87

00:16:36.300 And so this is working its way into the education system of New York.

00:16:40.100 This is three, of course, very blue states, but it will go to others.

00:16:44.240 This is the objective to change our education system.

00:16:46.540 And so one of the reformers, if we'll call them that, one of these activists trying to

00:16:51.020 change our education systems in Washington, the secretary director of their program there

00:16:55.540 tweeted, wow, you know, somebody had gotten into the two plus two equals five thing.

00:17:00.960 And she said, wow, there's this line of attack against my ethnic studies program in Washington

00:17:05.480 mathematics saying that it would mean two plus two equals five.

00:17:09.760 How can we turn this into a true statement?

00:17:11.700 That's what she said.

00:17:12.380 How can we turn two plus two equals five into a true statement?

00:17:14.380 And now that was at the very beginning of July.

00:17:16.780 Here we are in mid to late August.

00:17:19.340 And ever since, it's been raging for people to try to turn two plus two equals five into

00:17:24.520 a true statement.

00:17:25.320 And the reason is because they want to, and they've said this explicitly, I'm not just

00:17:29.500 interpreting.

00:17:30.600 They want to undermine the idea of objectivity and mathematics so that you can't trust your

00:17:35.260 own senses, just like in 1984.

00:17:37.020 You can't trust your own reason, just like in 1984.

00:17:39.180 You have to listen to them.

00:17:41.860 They will tell you what two plus two equals, when it equals four, when it doesn't equal

00:17:45.920 four, because two plus two equals doesn't matter.

00:17:49.060 But we should be suspicious of the white supremacist answer for you.

00:17:52.960 And they want to set themselves up as the arbiters of what is true and false for everybody.

00:17:58.240 You need to read an article that I just read this morning in Forbes, and it was doing your

00:18:07.060 own research may be deadly.

00:18:10.820 And it was that no one, even some scientists by themselves, no one is qualified to give you

00:18:19.220 the truth unless you're an expert in that particular field.

00:18:24.980 And so that people should no longer do their own homework.

00:18:30.080 No matter how hard you try, you will never come up with the right answer because you don't

00:18:37.060 know even the questions to ask.

00:18:39.420 That's the most enslaving idea I think I've ever heard.

00:18:48.140 Yeah, it's a complete perversion of the idea of expertise.

00:18:51.840 Expertise is supposed to mean that somebody has studied the proper methods or the proper

00:18:59.240 material to be able to be more likely to render a correct opinion, not because not that they

00:19:03.980 automatically will, right, and that everybody therefore must trust them.

00:19:08.940 The the liberal principle, meaning philosophically liberal, like our Constitution, when you apply

00:19:14.320 to knowledge is that we have checking of each by each.

00:19:17.660 Science works because anybody, anybody, it could be some teenager in his basement fooling

00:19:24.660 around with his chemistry set could overturn the biggest Nobel Prize winning scientist by

00:19:29.460 saying, wow, the experiment says you made a mistake.

00:19:32.440 So you are correct.

00:19:34.020 This is the exact opposite of of of what leads us to truth, what leads us to knowledge and what

00:19:39.980 prevents us from falling into the tyranny of people who I have on Twitter.

00:19:44.640 I've just started calling them our betters in a very sarcastic, satirical way.

00:19:48.640 Oh, our betters have said this or betters think of us this way.

00:19:51.960 This is what our betters say.

00:19:53.220 And I mean, you know me, I'm not not exactly a right wing populist, but this is this is this

00:20:01.460 is the sentiment, though, that has to rise up from everybody who's not already captured

00:20:07.240 by this mindset is that these people are attempting to appoint themselves philosopher kings who

00:20:13.920 are going to rule us because they know better than us and that we we can't do the experiment

00:20:18.840 for ourselves.

00:20:19.600 The other one that's when you were telling me about Forbes, I was thinking of how many

00:20:22.920 things I've seen where they're trying to make homeschooling illegal or now they're trying

00:20:26.600 to with the with the coronavirus where we're all having to, you know, a lot of school is

00:20:31.200 going to be virtual.

00:20:31.920 It's going to be via by the Web.

00:20:33.520 And I just saw just saw an article minutes ago that was talking about how a school system

00:20:40.660 and I don't know where I'd have to actually look into it more closely.

00:20:44.340 But a school system is requiring parents to sign forms saying that they won't watch what

00:20:49.460 the teachers are doing with the kids in their own homes.

00:20:53.280 And, you know, you had the guy at Harvard saying that homeschooling should be illegal.

00:20:58.120 The children are literally wards of the state and therefore they need this state education.

00:21:03.880 And all of these people are now arguing that homeschooling is racist.

00:21:06.540 It's a way for racists to keep making racist children and to perpetuate the ideologies of

00:21:12.220 white supremacy. 0.84

00:21:13.320 And there's a real threat that this could win.

00:21:15.560 I keep hearing people say, well, if this keeps up in our schools, I'm going to homeschool.

00:21:19.980 And I keep thinking if you don't fight back now that in a year that you won't be able

00:21:25.860 to have that. Yeah, it'll be illegal.

00:21:28.800 You want to know the secret to staying sweat free this summer?

00:21:31.820 Tommy John's ultra breathable underwear and bras.

00:21:35.140 I'm wearing one of their bras right now.

00:21:37.400 And my breasts are breathing like they've never breathed before.

00:21:41.620 They have a range of summer ready breathable options, but their cool cotton underwear for

00:21:46.840 men and women is like having your own on body AC.

00:21:51.060 Tommy John's cool cotton made from premium natural Pima cotton for enhanced airflow.

00:21:56.900 It evaporates sweat super fast, keeping you drier, cooler and more comfortable than regular

00:22:01.100 cotton. And if you want to add some chill to your cheeks when the summer heats up, choose 0.69

00:22:06.560 Tommy John cool cotton underwear.

00:22:09.900 All of Tommy John's layers are built for next level comfort, whether you're on the hunt for

00:22:15.100 lounge pants or, you know, lazy day joggers or the softest zoom ready tees and polos.

00:22:20.700 It's Tommy John.

00:22:22.140 They have you covered upgraded Tommy John today with enhanced designs that are super breathable

00:22:27.920 and way more comfortable than anything else out there.

00:22:30.940 It is Tommy John right now.

00:22:33.360 You can get a full refund with their best pair you'll ever wear or it's free guarantee.

00:22:39.600 Tommy John.

00:22:40.340 No adjustment is needed for a limited time.

00:22:42.100 Go to Tommy John dot com slash back and get 20% off your first order.

00:22:48.560 They keep shape and Tommy John dot com slash back for 20% off Tommy John dot com slash back.

00:22:58.280 James, you know that I built the blaze years ago because I was in the system.

00:23:05.340 I worked for CNN and then I worked for Fox and I saw it's the same game.

00:23:10.260 It's the same game and I wanted an independent voice that no one could ever squelch.

00:23:19.220 Depending if things move as quickly as they are moving right now, I'm not sure that I have

00:23:25.340 a voice left in 2021 and and a lot of people go, oh, that's ridiculous.

00:23:29.980 I'm not alone in that.

00:23:32.140 I've talked to some of the biggest broadcasters and some of the biggest people on on YouTube

00:23:38.120 and online and they're all saying the same thing.

00:23:42.760 I'm not sure we're going to be able to say things next year.

00:23:48.020 Right.

00:23:48.560 Yeah, it's actually very concerning and there are very realistic mechanisms.

00:23:52.240 I don't think a lot of people we've been this is a problem we talk about in cynical theories

00:23:56.760 is that a lot of people have become comfortable with liberalism again in the not left right

00:24:01.780 American politics, but the broad constitutional sense.

00:24:04.980 And so they don't not only do they not have the ability to articulate clear defenses of what

00:24:10.540 it is and reasons that people should stand up for it.

00:24:13.600 They also have come to take it for granted and they can't think of how a system like ours

00:24:18.340 could become illiberal, even while while models for such things are happening in the world

00:24:24.660 today.

00:24:25.820 I mean, social credit system.

00:24:26.940 I don't understand your model.

00:24:28.240 I don't know how people don't see it happening here right now.

00:24:32.540 How are people still duped when people say, oh, what rights have you lost?

00:24:37.640 Are you kidding me?

00:24:39.060 Are you not seeing the handwriting?

00:24:40.860 I feel like a Jew in Germany who's like, I don't know, maybe we should get out of here. 1.00

00:24:46.660 No, there's nothing to worry about.

00:24:49.460 I mean, this is how it happens.

00:24:53.640 Yeah, I've actually had the same feeling.

00:24:56.080 And the problem is, is that all of the Western democracies, of course, not all of which exist

00:25:01.740 in the West, but all of the advanced democracies in the world are going to be subjected to this.

00:25:06.800 Yes.

00:25:07.360 To there.

00:25:08.440 It's like, where do you escape?

00:25:10.440 Yeah.

00:25:10.580 Where can you go?

00:25:12.160 Because this is this ideology is uniquely parasitic.

00:25:17.800 It is modeled to it is designed to model itself after whatever it attaches itself to.

00:25:25.060 So if it gets into the Republican Party, it'll speak to Republican Party language and will

00:25:29.140 twist the words, twist the policies and and subvert.

00:25:32.880 That's actually the term that they use for their activism, subversion.

00:25:36.060 It will subvert the thing from within.

00:25:39.400 People say, oh, well, there's contracts or there's the Constitution or there's the First

00:25:43.380 Amendment or there's this or there's that.

00:25:45.280 You change the word.

00:25:46.520 If you change the meanings of the words, then you change the contract without changing a

00:25:52.760 single word in it.

00:25:53.720 You change the meaning of the words and the Constitution doesn't mean the same thing anymore.

00:25:56.840 And it doesn't it doesn't protect you at all.

00:25:59.300 And so this is what's happening.

00:26:00.620 So when we come back, not to drag back to two plus two, but this was one of the literal

00:26:05.180 this is the main argument that's being made that two plus two doesn't always equal four

00:26:09.360 is that, well, if you change the meaning of two or if you change the meaning of plus or

00:26:14.460 if you change the meaning of equals or if you change the meaning of four, one person

00:26:18.560 even said explicitly.

00:26:19.700 Now, this isn't a person of any significance, but one person even says explicitly that if we

00:26:23.720 just allow the symbol two and the symbol four to mean completely different things or

00:26:28.140 the symbol five to mean completely different things, then two plus two equals five is a

00:26:32.340 true statement automatically.

00:26:33.420 We just change the meaning of the symbols and then the new the statement is it means

00:26:37.440 whatever they want it to mean.

00:26:38.760 But when this seems silly and funny or whatever, but it's very serious because if you change

00:26:44.360 the meaning of the words in the Constitution, the Constitution now means something different

00:26:50.000 and you have no protections left.

00:26:52.560 If you change the meaning of the words in your contracts, your contract means something

00:26:56.480 different and now you can be held to something you never signed up for.

00:26:59.460 And this is a real threat.

00:27:02.260 And this is actually how this ideology operates, because it's so concerned with the power of

00:27:06.860 language that it manipulates at that level.

00:27:09.780 And it's able to therefore enter into anything and subvert the thing itself by changing the

00:27:15.960 way that the language that that whether it's a community, whether it's an organization,

00:27:20.260 whether it's a company, whether it's a government, whether it's an individual relationship,

00:27:24.620 how all of the language used by those people, how that takes on meaning that all gets changed.

00:27:31.240 And then it has all the power by making you you think in its terms. 0.99

00:27:37.800 You know, I used to just think this was excuse the expression, mental masturbation of, you 0.93

00:27:43.860 know, of of naming and necessity.

00:27:48.080 Saul Kripke wrote, a wheel is only a wheel because we call it a wheel.

00:27:51.220 And I thought that's the biggest waste of time, in my opinion.

00:27:56.340 That's a useless philosophy for me.

00:27:58.720 But that's really not useless anymore.

00:28:02.820 They have found a way to make the naming and the necessity of naming really a powerful weapon.

00:28:13.220 That's right.

00:28:14.180 So that's ultimately what we wrote cynical theories to track was how did that happen? 0.80

00:28:19.300 Because we know that this and it was mental masturbation, really had this this postmodern

00:28:25.640 idea of putting everything in the world of language.

00:28:30.540 We take Jacques Derrida and we say, oh, he said all the words exist in discourses and discourses

00:28:35.720 are kind of like webs of words where meaning is connect.

00:28:39.140 You know, the meaning of any one word is is actually defined in terms of its relationship

00:28:43.160 to other words.

00:28:43.980 So if I say dog, we have to think things like animal.

00:28:47.540 We might think canine.

00:28:48.940 We might think carnivore or omnivore, I guess, for dogs.

00:28:52.860 We might think we also have to think plants because plants are not animals.

00:28:58.620 We have to think cat because a cat is an animal that's not a dog.

00:29:01.540 We have to think in terms of things that dogs are and are not.

00:29:05.060 So all of the words are in just a relationship to other words.

00:29:07.980 And meaning is completely deferred.

00:29:09.940 You can't say dog and point to a dog and anybody actually understand you.

00:29:13.460 That was the point he was making.

00:29:14.900 And in the same token, you can't read a text and understand what the author intended.

00:29:22.260 You you can only understand the words in relationship to the other words on the paper and in terms

00:29:28.320 of how those words mean something to you.

00:29:30.720 And so you take that and that's his post-structural deconstruction idea.

00:29:36.920 And so then you take that and you combine that with with Michel Foucault.

00:29:40.080 Oh, power works through everybody and power is generated by what we validate as knowledge

00:29:44.200 and what we don't.

00:29:45.420 And to talk about truth and falsity misses the point that it's politics that decide what's

00:29:49.780 true and politics that decide what's false.

00:29:51.720 And that constrains people and their potentialities of being.

00:29:54.480 And so you had a whole generation of generation and a half of kind of worthless academics just

00:29:59.080 doing this screwy stuff with language that didn't make any sense. 0.99

00:30:02.580 And as you said, it's mental masturbation. 0.96

00:30:04.440 And then what happened is in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, a bunch of literally radical 0.94

00:30:11.100 activists, properly radical activists who wanted to change society in exactly the way that

00:30:15.700 Marx laid out.

00:30:18.360 Figured out how to use those rhetorical tricks to take apart everything they consider to be

00:30:24.600 dominant in society while safeguarding everything they decided to be their own interests.

00:30:31.680 And so they learned how to twist that postmodern language game, which that's what they actually

00:30:37.400 referred to as language games to their to their advantage for for real effective activism.

00:30:43.800 And so these people, this handful of activists in the in the late 1980s and early 1990s who

00:30:50.540 were deeply informed from the Frankfurt School of Neomarxism, the black feminists, the radical 0.54

00:30:57.640 feminists, these these people who are deeply informed in those regards figured out how to 1.00

00:31:05.060 play postmodern language games to remove the necessity of truth and falsity from their their

00:31:12.280 work at all.

00:31:13.260 They no longer had to be constrained by the truth.

00:31:15.320 They no longer had an obligation to tell the truth or to define the truth or to look for

00:31:18.820 the truth or to communicate the truth.

00:31:21.380 In fact, they were able to recast.

00:31:23.000 And this is famously in a paper by I think her name was Kelly Oliver in 1989, that it was

00:31:29.140 no longer a necessity to be concerned with true theories or false theories, but only politically

00:31:34.520 useful theories.

00:31:36.060 And so the idea of true and false following Foucault became political.

00:31:40.220 The idea that meaning cannot be found by pointing to the world, but only in how words relate

00:31:45.920 to one another, gave them language games that came from Derrida.

00:31:49.220 And the next thing you know, these radical activists who were the same ones that rose up in the 60s

00:31:53.860 that we were talking about earlier had the means to take the brakes off the train and run it

00:32:00.420 down the track anyway. 0.99

00:32:01.460 So, James, what is the I mean, because it's it's it you're just making imbeciles out of 1.00

00:32:10.200 people. 0.98

00:32:10.500 You're you're you're creating the situation that the Soviet Union had where they couldn't

00:32:16.420 grow crop.

00:32:17.300 They couldn't make a timepiece that could actually keep time.

00:32:20.840 And when you can't make a timepiece, you really can't do a lot of things.

00:32:27.740 What is the goal of the people?

00:32:31.040 I mean, are they just evil?

00:32:33.120 How did they how do they see good coming out of this?

00:32:37.280 So it's complicated.

00:32:38.640 There are, of course, one people who are more cognizant of how this is a very explicit kind

00:32:46.180 of revolution in the way that you are talking about.

00:32:48.600 But I think the majority are sincere, to be honest with you.

00:32:52.400 Most people don't agree with me on this, but I do think that the majority of the even the

00:32:56.120 scholars are very sincere and they've been convinced by, as South Park put it, by smelling

00:33:03.220 their own farts for now a very long time by getting too lost in the theories. 0.99

00:33:09.180 I mean, we have that saying, you know, an idea so stupid and only an academic could believe 1.00

00:33:13.420 it or something like that. 0.99

00:33:14.780 And so they've convinced themselves that oppression really did come from the system.

00:33:21.180 I hear people all the time who say that, you know, well, I used to think about things this

00:33:24.600 way and then I studied, say, critical race theory or I studied even Marxist theory.

00:33:30.080 And then I had to learn to think in systems.

00:33:31.960 And now that I think in systems, I see how it's the system itself that everything has to

00:33:36.940 be torn down.

00:33:37.480 And so they believe that if they can get all of the problems out of the system, if they can

00:33:41.620 unmake the problematic system that the utopia is sure to follow, that everything, all the

00:33:48.300 they believe that the problems, all the problems of society come from the fact that dominant groups

00:33:54.280 create the problems.

00:33:56.600 They've completely lost the lost all perspective of anything else.

00:34:01.100 And I think that the majority of the people doing this are, in fact, in some sense, what 1.00

00:34:05.240 would be called useful idiots. 1.00

00:34:06.600 They don't realize that their theory is bad. 1.00

00:34:09.580 They don't realize that there's a giant non sequitur.

00:34:12.980 It's the same non sequitur, but in a different context that Marx had.

00:34:16.220 Marx laid out his great theory about the failures of liberal societies, of capitalist societies.

00:34:20.820 And he wasn't wrong about everything, obviously.

00:34:24.420 He was able to identify some real points, in particular, the groupishness of people and

00:34:30.280 the way that society stratifies and sees themselves as class groups for Marx or identity groups

00:34:36.400 as we see it now.

00:34:38.020 And that this has real meaning for people and they act in that way.

00:34:42.500 But his belief was, well, if you just wake everybody up to this, everything will be perfect.

00:34:46.940 And there was no mechanism by which that was supposed to work.

00:34:51.260 There was no actual economic theory that would explain how this is supposed to work out in

00:34:55.520 practice.

00:34:56.280 And so then what you get is people who have to start denying the truth when it doesn't

00:35:00.180 work, then to get increasingly brutal to force people to go along with it.

00:35:03.900 And then, as you pointed out, to make them dysfunctional, to make them, they don't have

00:35:08.040 timepieces at work.

00:35:08.960 I talked to a systems expert, if you want to talk about systemic things, a systems expert

00:35:13.940 recently who was telling me about his own research.

00:35:16.500 One of the things that he had done years ago, without any knowledge of this particular

00:35:21.260 question, was what happens if you just desynchronize?

00:35:25.820 Say you have a functional organization, you did a computer model, and you just desynchronize

00:35:29.580 people's clocks so that, on average, people are a little bit late to every meeting.

00:35:34.220 They miss deadlines by a little bit.

00:35:36.480 And then they built a slider on it.

00:35:38.600 And so what happens is that the drop off in productivity is not anywhere near as slow as

00:35:46.320 you might think it is.

00:35:47.160 You slide that thing a little bit.

00:35:48.560 You desynchronize people a little bit.

00:35:50.160 You take their timepieces away a little bit.

00:35:52.460 And productivity drops off a cliff.

00:35:54.400 And he said, you don't even have to go very far.

00:35:56.080 And actually, the productivity of the organization falls to zero very, very quickly.

00:36:02.560 The entity cannot function just by desynchronizing people to a relatively small degree.

00:36:09.400 So when you talk about building timepieces that don't work, or as we hear about it now,

00:36:13.440 you can hear about decolonizing time, or you can hear people literally in the state of Washington

00:36:19.860 and then their government who are on video saying things like keeping to a schedule on

00:36:24.180 a meeting agenda is literal white supremacy coming out of my mouth.

00:36:27.040 It is now a, I think this, it was on the, I don't remember if it was on the list of Smithsonian

00:36:31.700 published or not, but they had that horrendous list of things that were white supremacy.

00:36:34.760 But it's very common now to see punctuality is a vestige of white supremacy.

00:36:39.600 Well, I remember, I have to tell you, I remember, I don't remember what city it was in.

00:36:44.960 And I remember telling this story back then.

00:36:47.560 I used to do, believe it or not, at one point before the world got so serious, I was actually,

00:36:52.000 I did comedy and we went to this big, you know, Fox theater or whatever it was in this

00:37:00.200 Southern city.

00:37:00.980 I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so we didn't have the busing.

00:37:04.520 We didn't just, we just didn't have that problem.

00:37:07.240 And so I didn't really understand it.

00:37:09.600 And I remember I walked up and I was talking to the sheriff of the town.

00:37:14.340 I think the mayor of the town was there and the person that was running the theater,

00:37:19.240 the general manager of the theater.

00:37:20.360 And I, we were just chatted for a while and I said, I got to, I got to go.

00:37:26.500 And I looked at the theater manager and I said, and we really like to start on time, eight

00:37:31.420 o'clock, eight o'clock, seated or not, we start.

00:37:34.260 And they all laughed.

00:37:36.360 And one of them said, well, you're on colored standard time down here.

00:37:41.680 And I couldn't even process it.

00:37:43.540 I was like, what color?

00:37:44.680 What? 0.68

00:37:45.220 And then I realized, oh my gosh, you're talking about black people here. 0.73

00:37:48.620 I felt like I was in heat of the night or something.

00:37:52.140 This is, this is exactly what the Smithsonian put out.

00:37:56.080 It was, it was just reverse racism.

00:37:58.960 And that's what's happening now in California where they're trying to take away that you

00:38:04.540 can't discriminate based on race.

00:38:06.740 They believe now that the only way to reverse discrimination is to exact, is to do that,

00:38:14.460 reverse discrimination and discriminate against those who they say are racists.

00:38:21.460 This is not progress.

00:38:22.800 It takes you back 400 years.

00:38:24.800 Right.

00:38:25.520 And so you can even, we mentioned Ibram Kendi, the how to, how to be an anti-racist guy,

00:38:30.520 who's now bestseller lists all over the place, is speaking to NASA, just got a huge grant

00:38:34.760 from Jack at Twitter.

00:38:36.560 And he explicitly says in his book, which many, many people have been compelled to read now,

00:38:42.420 he explicitly says, explicitly says that if, if anti-discrimination creates unequal results,

00:38:50.360 then it's racist.

00:38:52.100 And if discrimination creates more equal results, then it's anti-racist.

00:38:56.380 And that's the impetus behind what's going on in California.

00:38:59.480 You have literally people saying we need to start discriminating and they can say some

00:39:04.520 nice thing like, oh, well, we just mean something like affirmative action, which you could say

00:39:08.240 is a positive discrimination.

00:39:09.660 We're going to, we're going to, we're going to discriminate in favor of certain groups to 0.93

00:39:15.100 try to help them out.

00:39:16.100 But because, I mean, what does this turn into?

00:39:19.960 You know, there are only so many spots.

00:39:21.780 It's not to say that everything is zero sum, but at some level, this does require negative

00:39:26.500 discrimination against other groups.

00:39:27.860 And you see this very vividly with the now, it was at Harvard, and now there's a much bigger

00:39:32.840 scandal about Asians at Yale.

00:39:36.380 And then Yale comes out and just like, yep, we're going to keep doing it.

00:39:39.780 You know, Justice Department, whatever, we're just going to keep doing it.

00:39:43.120 And it's astonishing because there's now the, I cringe to call it intellectual, but there's

00:39:52.240 now the intellectual architecture in place to justify the unmaking of one of the crowning

00:39:59.500 achievements of American history, which is the Civil Rights Act.

00:40:04.000 And it's like you said, it's like you fell back into the heat of the night.

00:40:08.160 I felt the same way when I was watching the video of this meeting I mentioned in the Washington

00:40:13.300 State Equity Task Force.

00:40:15.300 So this is, again, state level.

00:40:17.040 This is not a legislative body.

00:40:18.700 This is a administrative state level body that has been installed.

00:40:23.920 It exists.

00:40:25.120 And they literally were talking about how if people, you know, somebody came in late to

00:40:29.260 the meeting, we need to pay attention like they would do in South Africa.

00:40:33.320 And when, you know, this kind of slow speech we would do like in South Africa, hey, how's

00:40:39.100 your family?

00:40:39.820 Let's chat and catch up for 10 or 15 minutes.

00:40:42.240 Then we'll catch you up on what happened in the meeting and we'll delay everything 30 minutes.

00:40:46.440 And she said, well, you know, we need to really work on kind of like South African time. 0.97

00:40:51.020 And it's just like, holy crap. 0.85

00:40:54.140 What in the world is, I mean, I saw that in January.

00:40:56.700 I was in a hotel and somebody sent it to me at, you know, it was like 1230.

00:41:01.300 And I had to give a talk in the next the next day.

00:41:03.740 And it's like, I just couldn't stop watching this in boring administrative meeting.

00:41:08.580 I just stared at it for nearly an hour.

00:41:10.460 I couldn't stop watching it.

00:41:12.120 Just aghast.

00:41:13.100 And that was in January.

00:41:14.080 And now it's like, oh, yeah, that's normal.

00:41:16.620 That's just how things are now.

00:41:18.020 And so it's bad.

00:41:20.860 What what for instance, in the book, you talk about, you know, the fat theories.

00:41:27.420 I think that's what you call fat studies, just a thumbnail of fat studies here.

00:41:33.860 OK, 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.

00:41:43.580 And then it details a number of the specific branches of this new way of thinking, new way of thought.

00:41:50.220 One of them is fat studies.

00:41:52.660 So fat studies is is not what.

00:41:55.760 So I tell people about this a lot and they're like, oh, you mean people doing research into like obesity and health?

00:42:01.840 And no, this is not what fat studies is.

00:42:04.620 Fat studies, if we give the thumbnail version, is if you could imagine, you know, almost the most.

00:42:10.020 You know, sketch comedy support group for fat people and then turn that into an academic theory.

00:42:18.480 That's what it is.

00:42:19.240 It denies that the word it only uses the word obesity and scare quotes.

00:42:22.800 It denies that obesity is real.

00:42:24.860 They calls it a medicalizing narrative that is used to induce fat phobia, which is a systemic hatred of fat people, just like homophobia.

00:42:34.420 It's not the fear of fat people.

00:42:36.060 It's a systemic hatred, just like homophobia.

00:42:37.960 And that it encourages fat stigma.

00:42:42.120 And so obesity needs to be taken out of the consideration of the medical field.

00:42:46.880 Your doctor should not be allowed to tell you that obesity is linked to health conditions whatsoever.

00:42:51.220 They 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.

00:42:59.820 And 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.

00:43:18.320 There'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.

00:43:29.480 So airplane seats having a standard size, for example, is an example of fat phobia, a hatred of fat people.

00:43:36.460 Because the airplane seat having a standard size is not accommodating the fact that some people are larger.

00:43:44.340 And the fact that there are seat belt extensions implies that there's an accurate size, a proper size.

00:43:50.960 And so it's humiliating to have to get a seat belt extension.

00:43:54.240 And so it's a further way to embarrass and stigmatize fat people.

00:43:57.480 So 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.

00:44:13.640 And needs to rearrange itself completely to accommodate obesity and to pretend that it doesn't have health associated risks.

00:44:24.740 So I was having dinner with Vince Vaughn about 10 years ago and we were just talking about our backs.

00:44:30.240 I have a bad back.

00:44:31.000 He has a bad back.

00:44:32.220 And the conversation just kind of meandered into that.

00:44:35.740 And he said, you know, I just I just got my back fixed.

00:44:39.160 He said, I've never felt better.

00:44:40.600 He said, you know, my wife was always giving me her theories and, you know, why my back was bad.

00:44:45.900 And he said, I didn't listen.

00:44:46.920 And and he said, so I went and I went to all these doctors.

00:44:49.560 He said, I finally tried acupuncture.

00:44:52.120 He said, have you tried acupuncture?

00:44:53.540 And I said, yeah, it didn't work for me.

00:44:55.080 And he said, well, it did for me.

00:44:56.720 He said, I went to this old Chinese guy in Chicago and he said, I, you know, took my clothes off and I'm laying down.

00:45:04.240 And he said, this guy is just ancient.

00:45:06.800 He said, I felt like I was in China.

00:45:09.060 And he said he came up and he said, you know, they put them in your ears right on the ear in the ears.

00:45:14.800 And he said, so they were poking the pins and he was poking the pins in the ears. 0.98

00:45:18.980 And he said, the Chinese guy said, you fat.

00:45:23.920 And he said, I realized my problem was I was overweight.

00:45:28.700 And so I lost weight.

00:45:29.900 And so his version of acupuncture working was him just having somebody else say what his wife had been saying. 0.99

00:45:37.040 You're fat.

00:45:37.640 Lose some weight and you'll feel better. 0.99

00:45:39.880 Your back will feel better.

00:45:41.480 The point of this is, is all of these studies are dangerous.

00:45:46.960 They 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.

00:45:57.440 I will have more ice cream because you're just enabling me to have more ice cream.

00:46:03.020 In my case, I bring my fatness on because I'm lazy.

00:46:07.640 I don't like to work out.

00:46:09.520 You have a doctor.

00:46:11.140 Stop telling me to work out.

00:46:12.940 You have a doctor.

00:46:13.740 Stop telling me, hey, stop eating that stuff.

00:46:15.880 It's bad for your blood pressure. 0.67

00:46:18.020 You're killing people. 0.98

00:46:19.560 You're killing people.

00:46:21.320 It's like these theories and these critical studies.

00:46:27.800 It's like a death cult.

00:46:31.320 It is in certain regards.

00:46:33.620 Within fat studies and disability studies in particular.

00:46:36.340 There are direct health implications, direct health implications.

00:46:41.040 So we can talk about.

00:46:42.140 And it causes us to deny as well, like for and I don't know if you've heard of this.

00:46:48.140 I'm sure you have the people who say they're born handicapped and they're born with only one arm, but they have both arms.

00:46:55.420 And in Canada, they were debating on whether or not doctors should amputate arms, perfectly good arms.

00:47:02.420 No, man, that's a psychiatric issue.

00:47:04.960 You have two arms.

00:47:07.160 That's right.

00:47:07.960 And 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.

00:47:22.960 And they talk about the depressed community and the depressed identity with a capital D.

00:47:28.580 And so at that point, you no longer try to treat depression.

00:47:31.340 You try to lean into your depression and you try to make your depression part of who you are.

00:47:35.620 And 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.

00:47:51.600 So 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.

00:48:00.260 We have politically fat.

00:48:01.800 One of the things when we did our grievance studies fake papers, we wrote fat bodybuilding. 0.95

00:48:07.600 And it was based off of reading in the fat studies literature, somebody who said that it takes time to build a fat body.

00:48:14.660 It takes even more time to build a politicized fat body.

00:48:17.380 And I thought that's just the funniest thing I've ever read in my life.

00:48:22.500 So that's where fat bodybuilding came from. 0.99

00:48:25.260 And so but this is true, though.

00:48:26.760 So now you're supposed to adopt your identity as a means of politics.

00:48:31.200 That old saying, the personal is political, is taken to the absolute extreme.

00:48:35.880 And the point is to do radical identity politics, where you claim that the system is hurting people with my identity.

00:48:44.120 It's an extreme example, but it's true.

00:48:47.020 This actually within fat studies, for example, and it also shows up in disability studies.

00:48:53.820 The 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.

00:49:01.820 That causes people to get to their ideal weight if they just take this pill.

00:49:05.880 So 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.

00:49:17.960 You see this with the impetus to cure certain disabilities, most frequently deafness.

00:49:25.300 It's a deaf genocide to give people, say, cochlear implants or other implants that would allow them to hear when they're deaf. 0.83

00:49:31.700 And so this is this very warped mindset where the identity politics and the cultural identity of everything becomes the most important factor.

00:49:44.980 And reality becomes basically irrelevant.

00:49:47.640 So, 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.

00:50:03.660 But they're all most of them, but they're all most of them are cartoon characters and and and inaccurate.

00:50:09.860 But the one thing that is true about me is I'm a I'm a very religious man.

00:50:15.040 I'm open minded and I'm not trying to preach my religion.

00:50:18.140 And, you know, I know great atheists.

00:50:24.400 And 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.

00:50:39.360 And I think we've just gotten so cavalier with that, with that word.

00:50:46.500 However, if you just categorize evil as just destructive, intentionally destructive to the wellness of a species, a planet, whatever.

00:51:01.880 However, I can't find another word to describe this.

00:51:07.100 I mean, I just that's right.

00:51:08.240 It's just evil.

00:51:10.700 So I, as you know, am not a particularly religious man.

00:51:14.700 Right.

00:51:14.960 But I have many religious friends, some of whom are very significant religious people.

00:51:23.560 And I listen to them very seriously.

00:51:25.500 I want to understand how their faith informs their thinking, how it informs their life.

00:51:30.080 I want to understand it on those terms.

00:51:31.900 And I do agree that the word evil applies.

00:51:35.980 And so it's one thing where there's the intentional desire to tear apart and destroy.

00:51:42.240 And that is evil.

00:51:43.180 There'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.

00:52:01.080 That's also evil.

00:52:02.220 And so I see this in a very kind of spiritual way that this movement is, I mean, scratch the surface and you find that envy.

00:52:10.360 It's always there.

00:52:11.200 Somebody has something that I don't.

00:52:12.980 Right.

00:52:13.120 And 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.

00:52:34.560 And then to turn that to not to, oh, how do I improve myself, but how do I tear down that, which is against me?

00:52:43.420 That, that's a very, um, spiritual way to see evil.

00:52:47.080 And that's present here.

00:52:48.640 It is a deep focus inward on the self in a negative way and then projecting it onto the world.

00:52:55.360 And 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.

00:53:07.060 Right.

00:53:07.500 And that's what makes God righteous and good.

00:53:09.420 Right.

00:53:09.780 And this is justice with the opposite of mercy.

00:53:12.220 There is no forgiveness.

00:53:13.160 There is no mercy.

00:53:14.080 There is exactly right.

00:53:14.980 What they consider to be just, it's French revolutionary justice.

00:53:19.380 That's right.

00:53:20.060 And when you combine that with the manipulation of language, and you remember that the point of the character of Satan is the deceiver.

00:53:27.160 And 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.

00:53:38.520 And it's all there.

00:53:39.380 And to consider this to be evil is as, as, as I think we've spoken about once before, I don't like to use that word.

00:53:47.120 But this is what, this is it.

00:53:50.720 This, this is what evil looks like.

00:53:53.180 Um, and there are other kinds of evil in the world, but this is one and here it is.

00:53:58.480 So, um, what does this society look like and how long do you think it takes us to get to, I mean, it, it, it never stops eating.

00:54:11.840 I mean, it, it's a, it will eat itself.

00:54:15.380 So eventually it destroys itself.

00:54:18.680 Um, 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?

00:54:32.500 How far away are we from that?

00:54:35.460 What has to happen?

00:54:36.420 Uh, 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.

00:54:53.160 Of 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.

00:55:06.900 Yeah.

00:55:07.280 Uh, and so they were already the cultural revolution of China.

00:55:10.320 The cultural revolution of China is, is, I mean, this is where you had, had Mao's objective was to destroy the four olds. 0.98

00:55:18.720 The, the old culture had to be completely removed and that's exactly what you see now is the status quo. 0.90

00:55:25.440 Do you even see everybody who's, you know, okay, boomer, everybody's a dinosaur.

00:55:29.800 We're going to watch the dinosaurs die.

00:55:31.340 And it was led by the youth who now turned into the red guard. 0.65

00:55:34.940 Right.

00:55:35.420 And he printed his little red book and it had all of the little communist sayings and the Maoist sayings.

00:55:40.140 And 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.

00:55:53.640 Uh, these, these, these are the exact kinds of things, you know, white complicity. 0.61

00:55:58.440 Now there's Brown complicity. 0.98

00:56:00.080 Uh, the, these kinds of ideas are, are, have a strong historical precedent in the, the cultural revolution of China.

00:56:09.080 And so I don't, I, I don't know how to answer your question for how do you, how do you recognize it?

00:56:16.560 How will people recognize it?

00:56:17.760 Because I already see it and I can't not see it at this point.

00:56:20.640 And 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.

00:56:31.320 Um, one would be the collapse of a major necessary institution that we actually depend upon for our livelihoods.

00:56:39.100 Um, like whether that's banks, the economy, the food supply chain.

00:56:45.600 I mean, we almost saw that early on with some, some shutting down all of the, the meatpacking plants with, with COVID-19.

00:56:53.320 I 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.

00:57:04.840 It could happen, you know, it could happen very soon.

00:57:10.000 And it's very difficult to make predictions about how soon that will be, but there are certain things.

00:57:16.220 Another sign, and then I don't know what form this will take as far as getting people's attention.

00:57:21.480 I 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.

00:57:37.440 It 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.

00:57:53.200 And those things I think would actually wake people up.

00:57:58.320 No, the neighborhood is already happening.

00:58:01.280 There were two neighborhoods.

00:58:02.640 I saw that last night.

00:58:03.020 Yeah, two neighborhoods.

00:58:03.860 Well, 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.

00:58:15.820 We're here for it.

00:58:17.260 Another one I saw was the this poor family was just out barbecuing and white family. 0.95

00:58:24.340 And this group was just talking about how they're going to take their house and they're racist.

00:58:30.560 And and the kids were just standing there.

00:58:32.860 And I thought, how how how do you how do you feel comfortable?

00:58:37.980 How much longer do Americans stand by and take it?

00:58:43.640 So 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.

00:58:57.040 There 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.

00:59:10.140 And the next follow up line is, therefore, anything that maintains white comfort is suspect. 0.62

00:59:16.200 So this idea of going around and doing that to make people uncomfortable is core to the ideology.

00:59:23.340 And so it will continue anything that makes white people feel comfortable is suspect.

00:59:30.220 And this is this.

00:59:32.160 I mean, this was this is from Robin DiAngelo, who's now one of the most recognized figures in our culture.

00:59:38.580 This is literally one of her ideas.

00:59:40.820 And so this is what's going to continue.

00:59:43.160 And so my question, you know, is actually, A, when do we decide that this is enough?

00:59:49.800 And B, how do we decide that it is enough?

00:59:51.920 And hopefully we decide through the law and not through vigilante action.

00:59:58.780 And that's where I actually have the most fear that I really do hope. 0.97

01:00:04.260 And, 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. 0.98

01:00:17.780 He's going to take control. 0.94

01:00:18.880 He's never going to give up the presidency.

01:00:20.340 It's going to be, you know, whatever, all these things that they say.

01:00:22.560 And he's a dictator and so on and so forth.

01:00:25.200 And 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.

01:00:39.400 We can't even have the police show up because they'll cry, ah, the force of the state is cracking down on peaceful protesters.

01:00:47.400 This is fascism in action.

01:00:50.060 Trump's finally enacting his fascism.

01:00:52.540 And people believe it.

01:00:54.260 People believe it.

01:00:55.100 That right there is the issue.

01:00:57.380 The problem with that is, again, it's two plus two equals five.

01:01:02.060 We're being asked to deny what we see. 0.95

01:01:05.640 You know, they've made Trump into this fascist.

01:01:08.580 And quite honestly, you know, before he was president, I, you know, I was like, something goes wrong. 0.95

01:01:14.420 This guy could turn into a dictator like that.

01:01:17.720 But he has resisted every single call for taking over situations.

01:01:24.400 COVID, everything he could.

01:01:26.320 They were encouraging him to do it.

01:01:29.380 The left was encouraging.

01:01:30.740 And the states, the left states are becoming much more fascistic.

01:01:37.080 And they're denying that that's what fascism is.

01:01:42.820 And protecting the protecting just the the average store owner, you know, or the or the neighborhood.

01:01:52.740 That's now fascist to the left and to the Democrats.

01:01:57.000 Yeah, they it's it's just like two plus two equals five in two ways.

01:02:02.640 One is the demand that we deny the the reality that we can see with our own eyes.

01:02:08.180 The other is the manipulation of language.

01:02:12.420 Two plus two does equal five if we just change what five means.

01:02:15.380 And so or if we change what plus means or if we change what equals means.

01:02:19.420 And 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.

01:02:31.760 That's it.

01:02:32.740 It has police.

01:02:33.740 It has order.

01:02:35.020 It has, you know, expectations that people will follow rules.

01:02:38.340 That's fascism.

01:02:40.040 And that can be traced again to the same thinkers tracing back into the 1960s in particular.

01:02:46.020 These same thinkers are laid down these ideas and they've been festering for 50 or so years and have turned into this.

01:02:54.540 You 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.

01:03:03.920 All of a sudden, everybody's saying this new word and you're like, what, what, when did that happen?

01:03:07.800 What, what does that word mean?

01:03:09.700 And 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.

01:03:25.140 And I don't think I can medicalizing that is like mansplaining except to buy a medical professional.

01:03:37.640 That's actually fairly close.

01:03:40.020 Medicalizing is to turn an issue that should not be thought of in medical terms into medical, a medical issue.

01:03:46.660 And so you could think of a real example and that there's a real debate around, for example, addiction.

01:03:51.440 Should addiction be treated as a social issue?

01:03:53.260 Should it be treated as a medical issue?

01:03:55.340 Is it a disease?

01:03:56.420 Is it what kind of a problem is it?

01:03:57.960 Right.

01:03:58.080 And 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.

01:04:06.920 And so there's a real use of this word.

01:04:08.240 And 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.

01:04:18.440 They 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.

01:04:25.760 And 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.

01:04:37.640 And this constrains people and hurts them.

01:04:39.780 So 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.

01:05:01.240 So, again, this is a term that has a real a real legitimate use.

01:05:06.060 The term in its legitimate use means to make a person responsible for something that previously some other entity, often the state took care of.

01:05:16.940 So if Social Security went away to responsible eyes, you have now responsible eyes.

01:05:25.340 Right.

01:05:26.040 The elderly.

01:05:27.140 Right.

01:05:27.460 But where we hear these ideas like victim blaming.

01:05:32.260 So somebody has a sexual assault happen to them and we say somebody were to reply, oh, what was she wearing?

01:05:37.860 Right.

01:05:38.020 That makes her responsible for something that shouldn't have happened.

01:05:40.720 So 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.

01:05:49.260 So a more realistic situation is when when maybe on college campuses, maybe just in broader society, we recommend women's self-defense classes. 0.99

01:05:58.420 Women learn how to learn to use a gun. 1.00

01:06:01.500 You know, get your carry permit, learn a little basic martial arts so that you can can be rape safe. 0.82

01:06:07.580 That would responsibilize the woman. 1.00

01:06:09.460 Now, she has to do this extra thing that she wouldn't have otherwise had to do.

01:06:12.840 And if rape just didn't exist because the system didn't allow rape to exist, she wouldn't have to do it. 1.00

01:06:16.900 So you've responsibilized her.

01:06:18.760 You've given her responsibility in her life where she shouldn't have to have responsibility.

01:06:22.340 I have to tell you, and again, I go back to evil.

01:06:26.000 Everything this preaches is against everything that we learned was good.

01:06:32.380 It's the exact opposite.

01:06:34.560 Don't have responsibility.

01:06:35.760 You don't have responsibility.

01:06:37.720 My I grew up in a world where take responsibility for your own life.

01:06:42.880 Pull yourself.

01:06:43.760 You 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.

01:06:56.460 That's no longer that's nonsense.

01:06:59.060 That's that's white. 0.87

01:07:01.440 Power. 0.63

01:07:01.880 Well, 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. 0.97

01:07:18.880 And then their therapist tries to point out to them, you know, they say they're raped by a black man. 0.87

01:07:22.680 This is a true story. 0.97

01:07:24.160 Somebody sent me and they were discussing it with their therapist in the context of therapy.

01:07:29.480 And the therapist said, well, you have to think about the way systemic racism shaped those those people's lives.

01:07:37.060 And so maybe they aren't fully responsible for what they did and you shouldn't put responsibility on them that would responsibilize them.

01:07:42.340 You see it with these new movements now.

01:07:44.300 I don't know if you've seen just in the last few days the idea of considering crime as a social construct.

01:07:49.000 Crime doesn't really exist.

01:07:50.340 And 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.

01:08:03.480 And so these people can't be held responsible.

01:08:05.020 We saw that literally with the looting that followed George Floyd's death.

01:08:08.340 People were saying, well, look at the the systemic racism.

01:08:13.540 They can't be held responsible for the material conditions of their lives.

01:08:16.660 So 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.

01:08:21.800 So saying, you know what, you need to actually be responsible and not loot a target.

01:08:26.480 You need to be responsible and not shoot people.

01:08:29.060 That would also under this within the context here of race would also count as responsibilizing people.

01:08:35.340 And 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.

01:08:44.660 And 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.

01:08:55.720 This is literally the way they use language and think about the world.

01:08:58.680 So the other of the other things are genocide, exclusion, science, fascism, identity.

01:09:06.320 I thought I could like genocide. 0.96

01:09:09.620 I mean, trying to kill everybody of a certain race. 1.00

01:09:15.080 That's not how it's that's not what that is anymore. 0.87

01:09:18.280 Well, it's that.

01:09:19.420 And it's also the idea that you would in some way wipe out a cultural identity.

01:09:24.860 So, say, for example, that you were to encourage all fat people to lose weight.

01:09:30.760 There are no fat people. 0.54

01:09:31.620 There's no fat identity. 0.98

01:09:32.580 That's a fat genocide.

01:09:33.700 Or you were to cure deafness.

01:09:35.540 That's a deaf genocide because there are no deaf people and no deaf culture. 0.98

01:09:38.900 Or if you were to, say, teach, say that you have a hypothesis like we see in critical race theory that science is white supremacist.

01:09:47.400 So 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. 0.87

01:09:55.220 You know, we can talk about those actually a movement.

01:09:56.900 They're called Science Must Fall that said that science was a colonizing way of thinking that was displacing traditional knowledge.

01:10:03.700 And 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.

01:10:10.640 So, I mean, part of that is, I mean, part of that is we should have some conversation.

01:10:17.140 I have a daughter with cerebral palsy.

01:10:19.120 I wouldn't wish that on anybody.

01:10:23.000 However, she's changed me.

01:10:25.940 She's changed.

01:10:27.180 She is a remarkable individual because she has it.

01:10:30.900 It is a heavy cross that tears my heart out almost on a daily basis.

01:10:36.780 But should we reverse all, you know, birth or genetic defects?

01:10:47.100 I mean, I as a dad, I say yes.

01:10:50.840 As somebody who looks at issues and it's a way to make you or the people around you better, if you if you adapt to it, I say no.

01:11:05.340 I mean, so we should have that conversation, but we don't have these conversations.

01:11:11.100 They just happen.

01:11:11.900 Right.

01:11:12.780 I don't think it helps the conversation.

01:11:15.300 So, 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.

01:11:24.580 If somebody is deaf and wants to remain deaf, even in light of a technology, they shouldn't be forced.

01:11:29.420 Correct.

01:11:29.760 To take it.

01:11:30.760 And if they want to lean into that culture around being deaf, that's perfectly acceptable. 1.00

01:11:35.780 And 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.

01:11:42.560 And so it can be made into an individual choice, but turning it into a collective choice and then to shame people.

01:11:49.120 Say 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?

01:11:58.640 And she was like, I want that.

01:12:01.660 I definitely want that.

01:12:03.180 There's nowhere in the universe that it can possibly be right to try to shame her for wanting that.

01:12:09.700 But if she also said, you know, I like who I am.

01:12:13.340 I don't want that.

01:12:14.640 There's all it's not appropriate to shame them that way either.

01:12:17.320 There'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.

01:12:32.260 That's that's that's the line.

01:12:34.540 That's what we grew up with.

01:12:35.680 That's the line that actually works.

01:12:38.360 And when you start thinking in terms of collectives like that, she would be betraying the disabled community.

01:12:43.140 Right.

01:12:43.660 By using a different life for us.

01:12:45.860 Right.

01:12:46.280 That's horrific.

01:12:48.500 Horrific.

01:12:49.500 Let me.

01:12:50.180 And then when you do this with theory, that's not even real.

01:12:52.380 I mean, it's even worse.

01:12:53.320 So.

01:12:56.600 Well, let me let me just leave you with some Kipling here.

01:13:00.140 I'd love to get your thoughts on this.

01:13:02.260 Sure.

01:13:03.120 Kipling wrote a poem called The Gods of the Copybook Headings.

01:13:07.380 It's one of my favorite poems.

01:13:09.160 And I he wrote it after the progressives and the Fabian socialists really moved on World War One.

01:13:19.260 And they tried to make this utopia in Europe.

01:13:21.440 And it just led to all these deaths.

01:13:23.040 And and he wrote it as a warning for future generations.

01:13:27.720 And it's the gods of the copybook headings are the things that we knew were true.

01:13:31.840 You know, you would write, you know, water will wet, fire will burn.

01:13:35.240 God is good.

01:13:36.080 And you would copy those for your your penmanship.

01:13:38.600 And let me let me just let me just pick it up in the middle with the hopes that our world is built on that.

01:13:48.160 They were utterly out of touch.

01:13:50.580 They denied the moon was Stilton.

01:13:52.760 They denied she was even Dutch.

01:13:55.200 They denied that wishes were horses.

01:13:56.880 They denied that pigs had wings.

01:13:59.460 So we worship the gods of the market who promised us all of these beautiful things.

01:14:05.140 When the Cambrian measures were forming, they promised perpetual peace.

01:14:08.620 They swore if we gave them our weapons that the wars of the tribes would cease.

01:14:13.820 But when we disarmed, they sold us and delivered us bound to our foe.

01:14:19.100 And the gods of the copybook headings said stick to the devil, you know.

01:14:22.900 On the first feminine sandstones, we were promised promised the fuller life, which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife. 0.54

01:14:32.360 Till our women had no more children and the men had lost their reason in faith.

01:14:37.100 And the gods of the copybook headings said the wages of sin is death.

01:14:41.840 In the Carboniferous Epic, we were promised abundance for all by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul.

01:14:50.380 But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy.

01:14:56.040 And the gods of the copybook headings said, if you do not work, you will die.

01:15:02.080 Then the gods of the market tumbled and their smooth tongue wizards withdrew.

01:15:07.340 And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true.

01:15:12.560 That all is not golden that glitters and two and two do make four.

01:15:19.180 And the gods of the copybook headings limped up to explain it once more.

01:15:24.700 As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of man. 0.86

01:15:28.560 There 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.

01:15:44.440 And 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.

01:16:08.200 Yeah, that's oddly prophetic.

01:16:16.220 Yeah, it is.

01:16:17.860 Is it and very hard to find?

01:16:19.680 I've only found it in one book.

01:16:21.340 They've done everything they could to erase this poem, I think.

01:16:25.040 Is.

01:16:27.320 You know, in your book, you talk about the solution and it's it is the solution.

01:16:36.960 It is the common sense solution.

01:16:39.800 It is the solution we all have been taught and now seemingly are rejecting.

01:16:45.340 Is it going to take terror and slaughter to return to those things?

01:16:52.240 One hopes not.

01:16:53.420 And I don't think that it has gone that far yet.

01:16:57.980 And we hope that that doesn't come about.

01:17:02.120 But people actually do have to understand what's happening.

01:17:05.840 The reason that that poem seems prophetic, it's not prophetic.

01:17:10.760 It understands.

01:17:12.140 It understands the dynamics of a certain thing.

01:17:15.840 And when that thing is put into practice, what is going to come?

01:17:21.760 It's the theme of the poem.

01:17:23.480 That which is going to come from that is what is going to come of that.

01:17:26.880 And so there is no prophecy there.

01:17:28.620 And is also, of course, a reminder that that reality is going to bat last.

01:17:34.680 Yeah.

01:17:34.800 And it you can't manipulate the situation to get away from the reliable consequences of bad theory.

01:17:42.720 So we are in a crucial moment.

01:17:46.140 And 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.

01:18:00.780 The thing of social justice, anti-racism, diversity, these all sound great.

01:18:07.640 The branding is awesome.

01:18:08.520 Black Lives Matter branding is perfect. 0.99

01:18:10.580 If you can look inside the box and realize, wait a minute, this is definitely not what we're signing up for.

01:18:18.240 These good things that the glitter of the not gold is is not what's really going on here.

01:18:27.680 And people are willing to say, no.

01:18:32.580 Things that work are not inherently racist.

01:18:36.520 Things that work are not inherently sexist.

01:18:39.320 Society functioning is not actually fascist.

01:18:41.880 This is lunacy.

01:18:43.900 And we're not going to play by these rules.

01:18:45.460 We're not going to keep being rolled by this.

01:18:46.980 We're not going to have to keep giving into this.

01:18:48.660 And the mob on Twitter will not make us.

01:18:52.580 Then maybe there's a chance that we can avoid the catastrophe that we really don't want to have come as the reset.

01:19:02.800 A few people have died.

01:19:04.320 I don't think that it's necessary that any more die.

01:19:07.220 But we have to remember what principles, you know, people need to.

01:19:11.660 I've gone back and read a little bit again of the Federalist Papers.

01:19:15.160 People need to go read this.

01:19:16.140 People need to understand the Constitution.

01:19:18.600 They need to understand the Declaration of Independence.

01:19:20.260 They 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.

01:19:34.600 When people start to remember how we built ourselves out of medievalism, clawing our way 500 years out of medievalism.

01:19:43.660 And then they can see that this theory leads to medievalism again rooted in something like ethnic Gnosticism.

01:19:50.780 They can then decide, no, we're staying with modernity.

01:19:56.560 We're not going back to to a medieval system.

01:19:58.980 We're not giving in to to these little petty dictators and their fiefdoms.

01:20:03.780 And we can avoid the violence that will come if they keep pushing.

01:20:08.560 I don't want to take this amazing conversation and turn it political or especially leave it political.

01:20:19.080 So you answer this question any way you want.

01:20:21.520 I've heard people say all the time, it doesn't make a difference who you vote for.

01:20:29.420 They're all the same.

01:20:32.320 You know, I'm hearing it's all kinds of stuff.

01:20:35.080 Does does does does it matter and you don't have to get into who, but does it matter who wins in this election?

01:20:43.760 Will that will this election?

01:20:48.040 Change things for the good or for the worse.

01:20:54.700 I certainly see no good options in this election.

01:20:58.080 I see no good options.

01:20:59.420 It will matter and it will matter either way.

01:21:02.760 And 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.

01:21:21.640 That said, I'm very worried in particular.

01:21:26.600 And I say this as a lifelong liberal who does not want to be political.

01:21:30.560 I'm very worried about what will happen if Biden wins this election.

01:21:34.920 I'm very worried about it because I see no, I don't see brakes on the train anywhere, but I see the accelerator pedal.

01:21:44.860 Yeah.

01:21:45.560 Over there.

01:21:46.520 And I don't necessarily even see it in Biden himself.

01:21:49.360 I 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.

01:22:02.380 Because, 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.

01:22:18.280 The 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.

01:22:28.880 And 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.

01:22:42.180 And one of the two candidates seems to accelerate that process.

01:22:44.880 And I'm horrified.

01:22:46.680 I'm horrified because I feel like I can vote for neither.

01:22:49.340 James, 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.

01:23:06.940 Um, these are the times that, um, produce the men and women that eventually civilizations build statues, um, uh, 0.98

01:23:19.340 to 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.

01:23:32.780 And you make a big difference.

01:23:34.900 And, uh, I'm, I'm, I don't know if you feel the same way, um, but I consider you a friend and, uh, I'm honored to be your friend.

01:23:45.120 And I feel that way about you for sure.

01:23:47.680 Glenn, I said it many times before.

01:23:50.080 I don't agree with you on many things, but I would love it if you were my next door neighbor.

01:23:54.120 Yeah, me too.

01:23:55.260 Me too.

01:23:55.640 We'd have a, we'd have great conversations.

01:23:58.740 Thank you.

01:23:59.580 Uh, the name of the book is cynical theories, how activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity and why this harms everybody.

01:24:09.800 It's, uh, by Helen pluck, a pluck rose and James Lindsay, James.

01:24:14.160 Thank you.

01:24:15.440 Thanks Glenn.

01:24:16.100 You bet.

01:24:21.880 Just a reminder.

01:24:23.500 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.

01:24:29.140 Bye.

01:24:29.180 Bye.

01:24:29.240 Bye.

01:24:29.280 Bye.

01:24:29.340 Bye.

01:24:31.240 Bye.

01:24:31.380 Bye.

01:24:33.240 Bye.

01:24:33.280 Bye.

01:24:33.340 Bye.

01:24:33.380 Bye.

01:24:33.420 Bye.

01:24:33.460 Bye.

01:24:33.520 Bye.

01:24:33.820 Bye.

01:24:33.880 Bye.

01:24:34.380 Bye.

01:24:34.460 Bye.

01:24:44.160 Bye.

01:24:45.160 Bye.

01:25:01.420 Bye.

01:25:03.260 Bye.

01:25:05.520 Bye.

01:25:06.500 Bye.

01:25:07.500 Bye.

01:25:08.000 Bye.

01:25:08.040 Bye.

01:25:08.340 Bye.

01:25:08.500 Bye.

01:25:09.580 Bye.

01:25:10.440 Bye.

01:25:10.700 Bye.

01:25:10.960 Bye.

The Glenn Beck Program - August 22, 2020

Ep 79 ｜ We're All Racist, Sexist Bigots & 2+2=5 ｜ James Lindsay ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript