In this episode, Dr. Eric Peter Kaufman talks about his new book, The Third Awokening: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution. Dr. Kaufman is also the author of a number of other books, including Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: The Orange Order, etc. He's a rare bird: a conservative social scientist. And there aren't very many of them. In fact, the two of us talking are the only two that there are, and there are only a few that you might say are conservative social scientists like Dr. E.P.Kaufman. Join us for the conversation about the culture war, which continues to rage madly, especially in academia and everything it touches, and why it's not really about postmodernism, but rather about progressive literalism with its roots in the early 20th century ideas which go back a century and a half to the ideas of left-liberalism, and which are a continuation and acceleration of a pre-existing set of ideas that come together in the first decade of the 20th and early 30th century as liberal progressivism. And why the third awokening is not a deviation from these ideas, but a continuation of them, and an acceleration of them further into the next century. And how that sets the stage for the next wave of ideas and the next one, the one that will be even more radical and more radical, and that which will come in 2020. and beyond. Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort, is committed to service, cultural enrichment, and all inclusive fairs. Viking is a Viking longship. Discover more at Viking, an elegant service, a voyage through the heart of Europe on an elegant Vikingian longship, with thoughtful service and cultural enrichment and all-inclusive fairs . Viking, . Viking. Viking. Viking.co.uk Viking, a company committed to discovering the world . Viking longships, a Viking shortship, a longship dedicated to exploring, comfortable and comfortable travel across the heartland of Europe, on a graceful Viking longboat, longship longship? Viking, dedicated to celebrating the best vistas and all things in comfort and all inclusivity. Viking shortships, Viking, longships? Viking. co.uk/Viking.co/viking.uk? , Viking, co-founder, Viking.de ?
00:16:38.060We have no idea what pathologies or advantages those systems might have.
00:16:42.140So what do you think happened in 2004?
00:16:44.940Like, why did the tide start to turn then?
00:16:47.340So my interpretation, there's other data series that we can see changing.
00:16:52.160So political donations shifting towards the Democrats, for example, around roughly the same time.
00:16:58.420Now, political donations come for people who are highly educated, relatively well off, for example.
00:17:04.080I think what happens in the U.S. anyway is you get George W. Bush, who's more of a populist,
00:17:08.740not an elite-style conservative who's just about tax and spend, for example.
00:17:13.860And I actually think you see, you know, he's also, to some degree, advancing the agenda of the religious right, to some degree.
00:17:19.940I think this populist-style cultural conservatism doesn't work as well with the elite opinion formers,
00:17:27.740and so they start to drift away in terms of political donations.
00:17:31.380And the, if you like, the kind of background, the ambient noise, the mood music that is coming through the elite institutions, the schools, the culture,
00:17:39.800just starts to turn against Republicans and conservatism, for example.
00:17:44.560So I actually think women are a kind of, they kind of reflect what is the dominant ethos in a society,
00:17:50.740or at least the prestige ethos in a society.
00:17:53.660So if we actually swung the ethos against wokeism, I think women would be in the forefront of that.
00:20:18.060Because it's weird, if they're also standing up for the underdogs, is it that they accept the elite differentiation of who's an underdog and who's a power monger?
00:20:30.580And then why is that associated with youth, let's say, with women?
00:21:02.560So I did a couple of studies with the Manhattan Institute.
00:21:05.380You know, 90 percent of 18 to 20-year-old Americans that I interviewed, you know, sent the survey to, said that they had encountered at least one critical race theory concept from an adult in school.
00:21:18.020In Britain, it was about, you know, it was a majority as well.
00:21:57.180Amongst anyone over 45, it's in low single digits.
00:21:59.600So we've got a big issue with young people.
00:22:03.340But what's really interesting is that if we take this sort of should J.K. Rowling be dropped by her publisher question, you know, women are considerably more likely to say that than men.
00:22:15.720Now, you might say, well, shouldn't women be sticking up for women and women's spaces and female authors?
00:22:22.880So women are actually going against their own interests as a tribe by supporting the gender, you know, the trans activist case on women's sports, women's shelters, women's prisons, you name it.
00:22:33.440It doesn't make any sense from a purely feminist perspective.
00:22:36.140So I just think they're reflecting these are the values that good people are supposed to have and we're going to reinforce them.
00:22:42.200So do you think – okay, well, it's perfectly reasonable to suppose that something like the default young female ethos is self-sacrifice in relationship to the marginalized, right?
00:22:53.860I mean, infants are marginalized, they're in danger all the time, they have to be attended to, everything they demand has to be granted to them.
00:23:01.760So perhaps it's not surprising that women would sacrifice their own interests in relationship to the marginalized because that's actually – and certainly self-sacrifice is part of what you might regard as a core in relationship to any moral ethos.
00:23:16.720So the problem seems to be that it can be gamed, and it's gamed so effectively now.
00:23:22.040And then you also talked about the fact that these young people have been exposed to these courses, so we could flesh that out a little bit.
00:23:30.320We did find in the study that I described, which was a very good study, by the way, it was only published as a master's thesis because my research career came to a rather crashing halt.
00:23:39.980But the fact that even one course had a significant effect over IQ and temperament and sex was telling, right?
00:23:48.400So now, I don't know if you know this, but you might know it.
00:23:52.300You know that in virtually every state and province in North America, a teacher has to be certified, and that's basically the faculties of education have a hammerlock on that, which is appalling as far as I'm concerned,
00:24:05.360because I don't think there's a more corrupt branch of academia than the faculties of education.
00:24:37.760So that means that 50%, sometimes more.
00:24:41.360So that means that since the 1960s, we have handed 50% of the state budgets to the most woke graduates of the worst possible faculties.
00:24:53.440We've done that for four generations, and now, well, and as you said now in your surveys, you're finding that the vast majority of students have been exposed to, well, what's essentially, I don't know how to characterize it, postmodern metamarxist propaganda.
00:25:09.740It's something like that, although, you know, you're stressing more the emotional side of it.
00:25:13.200And so, well, I guess we'll discuss that a little bit, too, when we get to your—I'm so interested in discussing your solutions, because, you know, I think the solutions to the universities is to let them perish by their own hand, because they're certainly struggling mightily to do so.
00:25:30.640So, but you're more optimistic, and so I—okay, so that's the facts on the ground with regards to state budgets.
00:25:39.20050% of their budgets has been handed over to these propagandistic institutions.
00:25:44.460Well, I think the schools are critical.
00:25:47.100So, one of the things we're finding, for example, is that students largely are formed by the time they come on campus, and a lot of the studies of universities show people's views don't actually change a great deal between when they come on, step onto campus, and leave the university.
00:26:02.300However, so we really have to focus on the schools.
00:26:05.480So, one of the things we found in the study that Zach Goldberg and I did was we looked at how much exposure to critical race and gender theory concepts students had had in high school.
00:26:16.440And, you know, we take, for example, somebody who didn't get any exposure to any of these critical race concepts like white privilege, systemic racism, unconscious bias, or the gender concepts, many genders, patriarchy, for example.
00:26:29.300Someone who got no exposure to that is sort of 50% to 100% less likely to express, for example, white guilt, think that, you know, whites are racist and mean, to favor racial quotas and affirmative action.
00:26:45.600All of these things jump 50% to 100% less.
00:26:51.500And so that's between somebody having no concepts and the maximum of six concepts.
00:26:55.620Similarly, by the way, for partisanship, you know, someone with a Republican mother who is exposed to no concepts, there's essentially 60% of them identify as Republican.
00:27:07.200Exposed to six concepts, it drops to below 30%.
00:27:09.900So one of the points that I try to make in the book is that K-12 education, public education, is absolutely massive and must become a top priority for certainly conservative politicians.
00:27:22.940If you want to have a hope in the future in terms of turning this around, we've got to get at K-12 education.
00:27:32.420I just saw a study the other day, just a graph of a study showing across a variety of different age groups when people believe that the culture, their culture, peaked in terms of quality, music, entertainment, food, peace, etc.
00:27:49.960And the general proclivity was for people to focus on the time between they were about, say, 15 and 19.
00:27:58.000And, you know, there's a tremendous amount of neural reorganization that goes on at that point.
00:28:02.660So there's a big die-off of neurons between two and four, right?
00:28:08.160So you're born with more neural connections than you ever have again in your life.
00:28:11.400And a lot of what happens when you learn is actually pruning.
00:28:14.320There's a major pruning in late infancy, and then there's a major pruning in the teenage years.
00:28:20.100You kind of die into your adult personality.
00:28:23.260That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.
00:28:25.840Now, people have known for a long time that if you want to get men into the military in the proper way, you have to do that when they're young adults.
00:28:59.360Well, yeah, I think that's such a key point that you make about the neurons and brain development kind of ending in a certain way in the early 20s.
00:29:11.720I mean, a political scientist like myself would tend to look at these as cohort effects.
00:29:16.620So you kind of, your beliefs crystallize to some extent in your early 20s, and you carry those through life.
00:29:22.460Because right now, I think there's a complacency amongst a lot of people who say, well, you know, young people are woke, but they'll grow out of it, you know.
00:29:30.020They'll come back, they'll have kids, they'll own a house, and they'll suddenly become conservative.
00:29:34.320And I think that's quite naive in many ways.
00:29:36.900I think that may be true in terms of self-interest at paying taxes.
00:29:40.900But in terms of these core values, I don't think that's likely.
00:29:43.900And you can see that, by the way, with religion.
00:29:45.300So secularism, non-religion started with young people, and those beliefs were sticky, and they maintained non-religion through life.
00:29:53.380And now we're seeing record levels of non-religiosity in the U.S. and Britain, for example.
00:29:59.280One of my contentions is, yes, there's no question that woke has kind of peaked.
00:30:06.280We've seen a rollback of DEI in corporations to some extent.
00:30:09.800We've seen, to some extent, reduced targeting.
00:30:21.540But be that as it may in the New York Times and the Washington Post editorializing in favor of free speech and against, you know, mandatory diversity statements, what I say is that's true.
00:30:32.960And I think those senior liberals have rode back.
00:30:35.100But I think we've got to look at this in terms of cohort change, generational turnover.
00:30:39.400When the median voter and the median employee in an organization is a millennial or a Zoomer, they're going to carry the beliefs they have with them into midlife.
00:30:49.960And that is going to change our culture.
00:30:51.720So, for example, if I say here's a question that we asked, YouGov asked to hundreds of thousands of British respondents on its panels.
00:31:00.700Do you favor political correctness because it protects people from discrimination?
00:31:06.080Or do you oppose political correctness because it stifles free speech?
00:31:10.940You know, in the British public, it's sort of 47 to 37 against political correctness.
00:31:16.280Amongst academics, it's maybe 75, 20 in favor.
00:31:21.280Amongst social science, humanities, academics.
00:31:25.280They're about two to one in favor of political correctness.
00:31:27.680And what I would sort of predict is if we run the clock forward 20 years, the median in society is going to shift from essentially being opposed to political correctness to being supportive of political correctness.
00:31:39.840So something like speech codes, for example, in universities will have majority support.
00:31:44.720And so I think we really have to turn this ship around while we still have a sensible population because we can't guarantee that that's always going to be the case.
00:31:54.020And so that's why I think the schools, changing the culture in schools has to be so central.
00:32:48.540The axioms of a cognitive system, I think the word sacred is exactly right, is that you have to accept a certain number of things on faith.
00:32:58.000And then you can build a logical edifice on top of that, maybe even a functionally logical edifice.
00:33:03.280But there's going to be axioms at the base.
00:33:07.140And so I think that any assumption, for example, on the part of people like Dawkins, that we can replace the religious enterprise with something that's purely secular is nonsense.
00:33:16.680I think what we'll get is a different set of sacred axioms.
00:33:20.500And you pointed to race, gender, and sexuality.
00:33:23.680And so why do you, first of all, I want to know what you think about that and why you use the term sacred.
00:33:29.820But I'm also curious about your thoughts with regard to why it was that when we shed our previous set of sacred presumptions, let's say, that it was race, gender, and sexuality that rushed in to fill the void.
00:33:49.380Right. Well, I mean, there is a sort of earlier history, which I don't go into as much in the book for reasons of space.
00:33:55.760So to some degree, you know, this was directed against immigrant groups were sort of slightly protected by the liberal progressives, not as extreme as race post-1960s.
00:34:08.280But I think to understand this, we have to go, and one of the reasons I make the argument that this is about left liberalism is that the civil rights movement, starting in the mid-50s, but really it's in the mid-60s, this occurs with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, all things, which are things that I support.
00:34:25.720But as Shelby Steele in his book, White Guilt, which I recommend to everybody, he's an African-American, he grew up in the South, experiences what he called a dramatic shift almost overnight where the cultural power goes away from whites, where black people had to kind of genuflect to whites to suddenly white people having to sort of virtue signal that they are one of the good whites to black people.
00:34:52.560So the cultural power flows to black people.
00:34:55.620That doesn't mean economic power initially, but cultural power.
00:34:59.140And in fact, American institutions, in order to, they lost their moral legitimacy by admitting that they engaged in the sin of racial discrimination.
00:35:08.960Once you admit, he says, you give up cultural power.
00:35:11.620Now, you have to admit because these were real things.
00:35:13.720But that loss of cultural power means that you now have to fight for your moral legitimacy.
00:36:34.760So I put the civil rights movement as kind of the big bang of our moral order and it is sort of the sort of center of our moral universe.
00:36:42.980Now, once you've got this sacredness around race that you have to very tiptoe around black Americans because, you know, you've done wrong and you feel a bit guilty, then you sort of can take that sacredness.
00:36:55.540It's a bit like kryptonite and you can wield it.
00:36:58.000And you can, if you're a feminist movement, you can grab a bit of that power and use it.
00:37:02.660If you are an indigenous movement, you can use it.
00:37:06.740So it's now mispronouncing somebody's name or the Moynihan Report 1965 about the black family.
00:37:13.540That becomes a bit offensive and you have to shelve it, right?
00:37:16.680So the stretching, it's a bit like putty.
00:37:19.380You can then stretch it across to different groups, outwards to microaggressions.
00:37:24.080And this is where all the power comes from.
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00:38:36.300Well, there's another interesting dimension there too that's worth thinking about that's more psychological than sociological.
00:38:44.220So, there's a group of personality disorders that are extraordinarily resistant to treatment and should have probably never been medicalized, in my estimation, because they're not illnesses.
00:38:59.220So, antisocial personality disorder is one of them.
00:39:04.160Criminality is not an illness, even though it's diagnosable.
00:39:07.920The associated pathologies are borderline personality disorder, which is perhaps the female equivalent of antisocial personality disorder, although I would argue it's even more toxic.
00:39:17.760Histrionic personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, that kind of fleshes it out.
00:39:34.920So, they use their language to manipulate.
00:39:37.940So, if someone like that is talking to you, the only thing they're using their words for is to obtain power over you for their immediate needs.
00:40:00.560And so, psychopaths are predators and parasites.
00:40:03.420They are histrionic, so prone to high levels of emotional display, especially negative emotion.
00:40:15.040They're narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status.
00:40:19.180And, just to top it off, because that's not bad enough, they have a proclivity to be sadistic, which means they take pleasure in the undeserving suffering of others.
00:40:29.600Now, the reason I'm bringing this up is because that group of people uses claims of victimization to harness guilt to obtain power.
00:40:41.000So, there's an additional twist here that I think is stunningly dangerous.
00:40:45.780And, you see, it's tied in with your notion that the progressive liberals have enabled the radical seat.
00:40:52.680Because here's the problem, if you're empathic and progressive, you don't believe that Cluster B people exist, because everyone's a victim.
00:41:05.480And it's in times when that small minority of people, maybe that's 4%, something like that, when they get the upper hand, and they do.
00:41:14.940They got the upper hand after the French Revolution.
00:41:17.260They got the upper hand after the Russian Revolution.
00:41:20.480It is no fun for anyone, because they're chaos worshippers.
00:41:27.220Their best means of obtaining power and even reproductive opportunity is in the ashes.
00:41:34.240And so, I spent five years working with Democrats in the U.S., and it got frustrating, and so I stopped doing it.
00:41:42.440But part of the reason it got frustrating is because I could never get any of the ones that I worked with, and that was a lot, to say to me, when does the left go too far?
00:41:53.220And I would point out the dangers of the Cluster B psychopaths, and they'd just hand wave.
00:41:58.240It's like, oh, no, they don't really mean what they say.
00:42:00.100They don't mean what they say when they're talking about equality of outcome, for example.
00:42:03.920Kamala Harris, she doesn't mean equality of outcome.
00:42:06.620She just means equality of opportunity, and it is stunning the degree to which that's an axiomatic belief of progressive liberals, that that radical left fringe doesn't exist, or they don't mean what they say.
00:42:22.040I've literally not talked to one of them, including Robert Kennedy, by the way, who was willing to say, for example, what you said in your book, which is that we better watch out for the demand for equality of outcome.
00:42:34.940Because I do think that's where the pathology really manifests itself.
00:42:38.760It's like, really, you want equality of outcome, do you, along all dimensions?
00:42:42.360How are you going to obtain that exactly, except by force?
00:42:49.580Yeah, so, well, so there's this interplay between sociology and thought and psychopathology that people aren't attending to, and it's very dangerous.
00:43:01.540Because the other thing that's terrible is that social media seems to enable the cluster B types, because in normal conversation, they're subject to the restrictions that face-to-face interaction carries with it, like the possibility of getting hit, for example.
00:43:18.080But none of that is there on social media.
00:43:21.460And that enables, as far as I can tell, that enables this psychopathic manipulation to have, essentially, free sway.
00:43:31.180Yeah, I mean, that's really an interesting set of observations.
00:43:36.060And I guess we're agreeing, but from different ends of the telescope, because I think that what's happening is this large group.
00:43:43.300So, in a university, the median academic is liberal left, soft left, not far left.
00:43:49.360It's 50 to 60 percent of the university.
00:43:51.840And this is why, for example, by a two-to-one ratio, social science academics and elite universities support mandatory diversity statements.
00:44:02.320So, this is not something they're being forced to do by a few crazies.
00:44:05.280But, of course, as you say, there's a symbiosis between the authoritarian left and this large group of liberal left.
00:44:12.720So, my view is if we could work on at least convincing some of those liberal leftists to change course, then that will reduce—you know, it's like unplugging a guitar from the amplifier.
00:44:23.660The liberal left is the amplifier, and the radical left is the guitar player.
00:44:27.700So, how do we—but you make another good point, which I've heard before, which is when does the left go too far, the unwillingness?
00:44:34.900And there's really a couple of strands to this, and we might call them equal outcomes, diversity is another, and inclusion is another, the EDI triumvirate.
00:44:45.000And I would say that on all of those dimensions, left liberalism really has no boundaries.
00:44:49.900So, left liberalism is, in my view, sane on the economy.
00:44:54.560It believes in a mixed capitalist economy.
00:44:56.660And so, left liberalism really emerges as the victor through two world wars and the Cold War, as the ideology of—sort of the elite cultural ideology.
00:45:30.320And that's really where—I mean, Hanania's book on affirmative action in the United States, moving to this idea of, well, starts out as, well, we want equal treatment.
00:45:44.340Well, you know, if you have a test like the SAT and certain racial groups are not represented, then that's a kind of indirect discrimination.
00:45:52.360So, what we can see is this kind of evolutionary ratcheting.
00:45:56.040Now, that's quite different from a neo-Marxist takeover of institutions, a kind of vanguard march through the institutions argument, which I think is—I'm not as persuaded.
00:46:06.040I think there's some of that happening, but I think it's really this sort of evolving, ratcheting left liberalism because it has no boundaries.
00:46:12.700As you say, when is there too much diversity?
00:46:15.860And we know from the studies, Robert Putnam, for example, or Easterly, that too much diversity actually has negative impacts on, for example, economic development, on various kinds of, for example, trust in your neighbors.
00:46:30.240And this is now a—this is a finding I would call a consensus finding.
00:46:35.200Well, how can you have trust without cohesiveness?
00:46:47.980That is not the way the liberal left thinks.
00:46:50.460They just think more equality, more diversity, more inclusivity.
00:46:54.600Now, of course, inclusivity means we've got to have speech codes, we've got to clamp down on speech, which might be offensive so people don't feel included, might damage their self-esteem.
00:47:02.640So this is getting at free speech to get inclusion.
00:47:37.640It has no construct validity whatsoever.
00:47:40.120It's an index of your temperamental proclivity to negative emotion.
00:47:45.100And women have lower levels of self-esteem because they have higher levels of neuroticism, and that kicks in at puberty.
00:47:51.500And so this is a good example of how the educational psychologists and the social psychologists have actually perverted the whole culture because we actually believe in things that don't exist so deeply that people use them in their speech as if they're actual facts.
00:48:39.900So one of the things that was striking about your book, and I don't know how to rectify this apparent paradox.
00:48:48.340You make the case that we've raised a cohort of kids who've been thoroughly propagandized in high school, let's say, because that looks like about the place where it's occurring.
00:49:02.040And your belief is that that's pretty sticky, although there'll be some movement in a conservative direction.
00:49:08.260People get more conscientious as they get older.
00:49:12.200They do tilt a bit more towards conservatism.
00:49:14.200But you believe that a lot of those ideas will be sticky, and that means that that's going to dominate, let's say, in positions of power 10 years down the road.
00:49:22.820But by the same token, you also believe that there's time to turn the ship around.
00:49:45.780Yeah, and it was a very enjoyable experience.
00:49:47.780I didn't teach anything particularly controversial, but still.
00:49:51.020What I would say is there's really two different approaches to dealing with the issue.
00:49:55.400I mean, one is what I might call libertarian, and that's using market-based solutions, and the other is interventionists using government-led solutions.
00:50:04.500Now, I actually lean more towards the second than the first, which may jar against some of the libertarians in the audience.
00:50:11.400So, for example, I think when it comes to the battle of ideas in the media, there I think it is the barriers to entry are quite low.
00:50:20.700You can have the impact that you're having, that Joe Rogan is having.
00:50:24.360But when we're talking about universities or tech firms, particularly search engines, there are natural monopolies, and there are sort of market failures.
00:50:34.440So there are first-mover advantages to being Harvard.
00:50:37.380It's going to be very hard for Harvard's reputation.
00:50:39.900I know it's dropped a little, but it's going to be hard for that rank ordering to change a lot.
00:50:47.260So the view that we should simply have school choice, and that's going to fix the problem.
00:50:53.160One of the—I'm sort of—I think school choice is great, but I don't think it's going to make much difference.
00:50:59.120Surveys that I've looked at, for example, show that kids who go through the—to private school, to parochial school, who are even homeschooled, actually don't differ very much in their views.
00:51:11.460And in addition, the amount of critical race and gender theory that they are being exposed to is relatively similar.
00:51:21.200It's very, very—I mean, it's a little bit lower, but in the data that I've seen, which is the—at the FIRE, Foundation Individual Rights and Expression.
00:51:29.560And also, we also asked the school questions on our 18 to 20 survey.
00:51:33.780Now, we didn't get a ton of variation.
00:51:35.640Now, it could be that the homeschool kids—we got a selection of those homeschool kids, which wasn't representative.
00:51:46.140Like, well, how do you account for that?
00:51:47.580Because on the face of it, that seems—I believe it with the private schools, because my experience with private schools is that they tend to be as woke as the public schools.
00:51:56.820Maybe not quite as much, but pretty much.
00:51:59.560The homeschool one, that's more complex, but it's not that easy for parents, for example, to set up a curriculum.
00:52:07.520And the curricula are well-dominated by the ideology, let's say.
00:52:15.100Well, I think there are some differences.
00:52:17.100So on the gender ideology, there's a bit less amongst the homeschool.
00:52:20.540Now, we don't have a massive sample, but there looks to be some effect, but it's not massive.
00:52:24.860And my point is, you know, if you are a really switched-on parent, you can send your kid to a classical school if you have that option nearby.
00:52:33.240But the number of parents who are like that is quite small.
00:52:35.740Most of them will just say, what school is going to get my kid ahead into a top university gets the best results, even if they have a choice.
00:52:42.080And so most kids are just going to be put through the sort of indoctrination machine.
00:52:48.180It's not the freedom of a very, you know, switched-on parent to actually avoid these things, which is important.
00:52:54.680But it's most of these kids are being put through the same system.
00:52:57.520So we've got to, I think, get at the public school system.
00:53:00.700So, for example, I think something like what Ron DeSantis is doing, sort of essentially banning DEI, sort of getting indoctrination out of the schools, monitoring that.
00:53:46.060And I believe that the work that Rufo is doing in Florida, setting up the new university, for example, and pushing back against DEI, is laudable, partly because all the universities to speak of are woke, with the possible exception of, like, Hillsdale.
00:54:03.560And so, even if there is a risk of overshooting on the conservative side, they're at such a disadvantage that, practically speaking, at the moment, that might be necessary.
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00:56:37.440They're choosing which courses to take.
00:56:39.020Now, I do think, however, that state governments or the government has the right to defund, not ban, but to defund, say, well, we're not going to fund this kind of course.
00:56:50.960Now, that's a political decision, but it's not to say it's banned.
00:56:54.140You can cross-subsidize that from your more profitable faculties.
00:56:57.680And I think that will just, it will allow it to be taught if people really want to take it.
00:57:01.980But, so, I don't think this is practical for universities.
00:57:05.180Universities, I think there's a different set of solutions.
00:57:07.020But I think for the school system, it is perfectly legitimate to say we're going to have a politically neutral space.
00:57:12.780More important than that, sorry, I just want to say one thing, which is you have to teach about the past and the warts, slavery, genocide, conquest.
00:57:20.700But I don't think you should be allowed to teach about American slavery without teaching about, say, indigenous slavery or Ottoman slavery.
00:57:30.380You shouldn't be able to teach about…
00:57:33.860Yeah, or stolen land, you know, the Americans stealing land from the indigenous without talking about the Iroquois stealing land from the Huron and the Comanche committing, you know, atrocities against the Apache.
00:57:45.760So, what I mean is we need to have a fully contextualized discussion that all land is stolen land in a way.
00:57:52.200And that, because I think part of what the problem is, you know, 70% of, you know, 18 to 24s in the United States believe that, you know, the native peoples, quote unquote, the native Americans lived in peace and harmony prior to the arrival of the Europeans.
00:58:58.980So, then, okay, so that begs the next, well, that begs the next question.
00:59:03.180It's like, once the institutions that we're discussing, the faculties of education, let's say, once they're universally corrupted, who the hell has the wisdom or the time in order to manage something like curricula analysis?
00:59:17.860You know, like I went to the Republican Governors Association meeting, which was an interesting thing to do.
00:59:24.320And one of the things that really struck me and kind of strikes me in general about the Republicans, it was a rather dull meeting.
00:59:31.520They were trying to appeal to their donors, so I expected a bit more spice.
00:59:35.500But it was dull in a kind of competent administrative manner.
00:59:40.020So, the governors would get up and they would talk about what were essentially local micro initiatives that were sensible and practical.
00:59:47.920But they weren't the sort of cultural transformation vision that's necessary for people to sit down and say, okay, well, the faculties of education are propagandizing.
01:00:01.460What do we want our children to learn?
01:00:03.580Like, who in the—Rufo is an exception to this, maybe, but he's a singular sort of person.
01:00:08.780I don't see widely—you know, I've spent a lot of time talking to political people all across North America, and it isn't obvious to me that I see anywhere the kind of expertise or even the time that's available to manage such a thing.
01:00:25.040So, how do you envision that happening?
01:00:27.920Well, I think there are groups—so, the National Association of Scholars has model curriculum, civics curriculum that they're developing.
01:00:35.320Some of the think tanks, Manhattan Institute as well.
01:00:39.480So, there are now model curricula, and Britain History Reclaimed is working on this.
01:00:44.060So, we actually have got model curricula that, say, conservative governments could adopt.
01:00:50.260They have to have the fight with the educational establishment, which, by the way, they have had and lost.
01:00:55.760Now, you look at, for example, DeSantis, the African-American—the AP, for example, I don't know if you recall where DeSantis rejected the AP for African-American studies, was filled with critical race theory, forced the critical race theory to come out of that.
01:01:12.980That's an example of what I'm talking about, is you actually have to get into the weeds of this, and you have to insist, and you have to do inspection—you have to mainstream it into the inspection regime.
01:01:21.460All this very boring, technocratic, bureaucratic stuff.
01:01:25.140I just think—so, it's a bit—I use the analogy of Elon Musk taking over Twitter—had so much more of an effect than Gab Parler.
01:01:36.040To have these alternatives are important, but I just think we're going to have to get our hands dirty, get into the weeds of the details of the curriculum, and insist on a balanced curriculum, and actually have that fight.
01:01:54.240I'm going to point out a couple of problems again.
01:01:56.700It's not because I don't agree with you.
01:01:58.380It's just, like you said, or implied at least, the devil's in the details.
01:02:02.320I mean, the person who took over Twitter, that was Elon Musk, and he's a complete bloody monster, and he's run many difficult corporations and done impossible things.
01:02:11.320And so, he's like, there's one guy like that, and he fired, what, 80% of the Twitter staff, and nothing happened except the place got better.
01:02:19.800Now, the Pareto distribution for large corporations or large enterprises kicks in very viciously.
01:02:25.960And so, the Pareto distribution—what would you say—mathematical equations indicate that the square root of the number of people in a given organization do half the work.
01:02:36.640And so, if there's 10,000 educational bureaucrats, then 100 of them do half the work, and that basically means you can fire 80% of them.
01:02:45.280And if the whole place is corrupt, you probably have to.
01:02:48.220And, like, I just can't see how the hell the conservatives are going to manage that, because it could easily be that 80% of teachers need to go.
01:02:56.080Now, I know there are places like the Acton Academy and so forth that are setting up educational institutions where teachers, for example, are much less necessary because the students take a lot of the work on their own.
01:03:07.900And I understand, as you pointed out, that there are places that are producing model curricula.
01:03:14.620But I just—I've talked to Republican governors, for example, who've tried to take on the teachers' unions in their own states and, you know, failed because the—well, because they have 50% of the state budgets, and they're insanely powerful.
01:03:30.920They're much more powerful, generally speaking, than the governors are.
01:04:01.560It's not perfect, but I think if the Republican Party in these states is serious, it will invest political capital, and it will demand accountability.
01:04:11.740It will ask people to sort of—you know, what are the inspections saying?
01:04:16.020You know, you have to report to the legislature on progress.
01:04:19.780And I actually think that process—because I also think most teachers are—I think a lot of teachers are flexible.
01:04:25.800And actually, teachers are not quite as left-wing, believe it or not, as academics.
01:04:29.880So there is actually, I think, more receptivity.
01:04:33.080Now, you also need to open up new avenues into the profession so you don't have to require an education degree.
01:04:39.040There's all things that you need to do.
01:04:41.420So there's a whole set of things we can do as liberal democracies.
01:04:45.100Likewise, with the government, getting CRT and DEI out of government is something I think we can do.
01:04:51.260I think you can—so through political appointments, you have to—you're probably going to have to fire some people.
01:04:57.120You might have to set up new agencies.
01:04:59.360So on the UK, we have the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act, where there is a new 10-person academic freedom directorate.
01:05:14.220I mean, perhaps to some degree this becomes a matter of political contestation.
01:05:18.920Because really what all of this gets down to is the only institution that the sensible majority on the cultural side can control is the elected government.
01:05:28.300That is the only institution that we have.
01:05:30.800We don't—we haven't got the schools, the universities.
01:05:33.300We haven't got the civil service, the cuangas.
01:05:36.380What we actually need to do is to use elected government to reform all of these devolved bodies and also institutions relying on public money.
01:05:45.400We're not trying to indoctrinate them.
01:05:47.140Our goal is political neutrality and balance.
01:05:51.820And that's maybe where I disagree a bit with Rufo and some others who want to put in a different ethos based on Christianity or Yoram Hazoni.
01:06:07.520So let me ask you about—let me ask you about that because the postmodern rejoinder to your claim is that, well, you claim that your anti-DEI stance, let's say, is politically neutral or that there's even such a thing as political neutrality.
01:06:21.720But really all you're trying to do is, what would you call it, sneak in an alternative ethos of power to replace the one that is highlighting the victimized and the marginalized and, you know, pushing things back 50 years into the hands of, like, white Christian conservatives.
01:06:39.060You know, because for the postmodernists, there's no neutrality.
01:06:46.960And certainly the radical leftists not only believe that but revel in it because it allows them to use power with no guilt.
01:06:54.500And so why are—on what grounds are you convinced that the claim that institutional neutrality, for example, could be instituted and that it actually constitutes neutrality?
01:07:06.020What's your philosophical justification for that claim?
01:07:09.280Well, philosophically, you know, what I approach the whole book with is this idea of human flourishing, a kind of utilitarian argument that says we want to have a certain amount of equality, a certain amount of diversity, a certain amount of inclusion, but only the amount that is optimal to maximize human flourishing in the system.
01:07:28.700I think we've overshot on those three, and we have to sort of move it back, not back to where it was in 1950, but back a little bit further.
01:07:36.860And so the idea there is institutional neutrality is critical for people to have trust in the system.
01:07:42.900Now, we already have, for example, the civil service in Britain is supposed to be neutral.
01:07:50.520And I think a lot of people, even left liberals, will actually be convinced by it.
01:07:54.720They're not postmodern in being radically cynical the way that—I mean, some of them are.
01:07:59.680But I think many people will be won over.
01:08:01.260If you say, look, what we want is neutrality, you know, you've talked about, you know, American slavery.
01:08:06.260We want to talk about Ottoman slavery.
01:08:08.620I think that making that argument can win over some people.
01:08:12.320And I think a neutrality argument is more winnable than to say, we're going to replace your ethos of woke with our ethos of public religion, to use Hazoni's argument.
01:08:23.440So you still think that there's enough of a centrist consensus around what neutrality constitutes for that to still be a compelling argument to people, even the left, the more liberal progressive types.
01:08:37.740Well, you'd think at least they'd be self-interested enough to understand that neutrality throughout sequential elections might be a hell of a lot better than domination by the radical conservative right, which is certainly a possibility.
01:08:52.740And that's certainly something that's emerging in Europe and could easily—well, who knows how things will play out, but it's popping up its head in many, many places in Europe, right?
01:09:01.880The last country to go was the Netherlands.
01:09:04.220So that's what Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, most of Eastern Europe—like, this is starting to happen very, very widely and could certainly continue.
01:09:13.320So neutrality, you'd think, across sequential elections would be the best policy for everybody if we had enough of a consensus to define it.
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01:10:12.120Well, I'd also say, too, that right now the public, if you take a look, and I've done surveys in the U.S., Britain, and Canada, the public in all three societies leans about two to one against what I would call the woke position.
01:10:27.000And that could be teaching kids that Canada is a racist country or, you know, that there are many genders or whatever.
01:10:33.800So it's roughly two to one against across 50 questions, let's say.
01:10:38.180In a democracy, the democracy gets to set the curriculum.
01:10:41.420I think the majority of the population would be on board the idea of political neutrality and balance as they see it.
01:10:47.860And I think we have the numbers to institute that now.
01:10:51.360I mean, one of my pleas in terms of the 12-point plan is that the conservative politicians really need to upgrade the focus on culture because you have a two-to-one.
01:12:02.540Well, we explain it, first of all, by the fact that this issue has not been important enough for conservative politicians.
01:12:08.540Hanania does a good job of talking about that, and also that the abortion lobby, the gun lobby, they're very organized.
01:12:15.040You know, they put pressure on Republican politicians between elections.
01:12:19.040The anti-affirmative action lobby is totally disorganized and cannot hold conservative politicians' feet to the fire if they do nothing about it.
01:12:27.700That has to change that organization between elections.
01:12:30.980We have to be putting much more pressure on our politicians to raise the importance of this issue and to deliver on that issue.
01:12:39.260Well, I've seen in Canada—well, I talked to a lot of conservative politicians in Canada, and a fair number in the U.S., although I think the proclivity for this is much more market in Canada because it's more left-leaning.
01:12:53.300Ten years ago, the typical conservative was terrified in Canada of saying anything that smacked of social conservatism.
01:13:00.240And there was a very specific reason for that, and the reason was if any one of them came out publicly and said anything socially conservative, then the woke, psychopathic mob would take them out on social media.
01:13:16.040They'd be targeted and destroyed, and that was very effective.
01:13:20.060And the conservatives, who are also very guilt-prone, like, that's the other thing, too, is that the left has this—radicals have this tremendous advantage, because—especially the really psychopathic ones—because conservatives feel guilt, but radical leftist psychopaths feel none.
01:13:37.260And they can use guilt as a weapon, and conservatives are very sensitive to that.
01:13:41.540So you get that combination of clear threat, because it is no fun to be mobbed.
01:13:48.080It drives them to—not only to distraction, but often to suicide.
01:13:52.140You lose your job, you lose your friends, you lose your reputation.
01:13:56.140No one has enough courage to stand up beside you.
01:14:00.300The radicals had the conservatives cowed completely.
01:14:02.960And so—and affirmative action is a real touchstone for that, because to even question it—well, it's changed to some degree now, not that much—but to even question it meant you're—the probability that you could be accused of being a racist was, like, super high.
01:14:31.160But what we've actually seen in Europe and in the U.S. is—you take an issue like immigration, that was a taboo.
01:14:38.080In many European societies, that's no longer a taboo.
01:14:40.840So Sweden, for example, you could not—the sort of establishment Conservative Party tried to—one of the ministers tried to raise levels of immigration as an issue in Sweden.
01:14:52.020In 2014, he was attacked in the media as a racist.
01:14:55.120First, okay, he's shut down, but then what that means is the next year the Sweden Democrats swoop in on 12 and a half, and of course they've reached 25 percent.
01:15:05.260U.S. Trump was the only candidate of 17 primary candidates in 2015-16 to make the border a signature issue.
01:15:14.660Now, once you break the taboo, all of a sudden, as in Sweden—now all the parties are talking about immigration, and the taboo is—it's not gone entirely, but the Everton window is open quite a bit.
01:15:24.800And so in Canada, likewise, we're going to need that.
01:15:28.160Now, we've seen it a bit on the gender issue.
01:15:29.820Premier Higgs in New Brunswick, we've seen Scott Moe in Saskatchewan.
01:15:32.800That's the beginning of an opening up of a converse.
01:15:35.800You need a brave politician like Higgs to break the ice.
01:15:39.160The next thing that we need to see from a Canadian politician is to break the ice on this hoax of the mass graves.
01:15:47.200That has—somebody has to sort of say the emperor's new clothes on this thing, because there is no evidence of this.
01:15:53.860And it underpins an entire garment-rending attack on national history, on the founders of Canada, etc.
01:16:00.020Now, who is going to take—who's going to throw the first stone in that?
01:17:13.060Polyev isn't pushing the cultural issues at the moment.
01:17:16.580And I think it's partly because—and I think this is actually wisdom to some degree.
01:17:21.580If your opponent is busy slaughtering himself, you might as well just stand and watch.
01:17:26.800Well, seriously, there's not—you know, there's no sense causing a tremendous amount of trouble while that's occurring.
01:17:32.460But the Conservatives are much less intimidated in Canada than they were 15 years ago, like a lot.
01:17:39.220And they'll certainly make an issue of the sorts of things that we've been discussing in a way that wouldn't have been conceivable in, say, 2010.
01:17:49.200I think that it's all—but I do think it's important for the grassroots to, to some degree, hold Polyev to account when he's in office.
01:17:56.280If, for example, he backtracks on defunding the CBC, if he doesn't do anything, say anything on immigration, on culture wars.
01:18:05.640Because I think that—and my worry, having seen it in Britain, where the Conservative government came in with the support of Brexit voters and essentially did not deliver, hoping that the voters wouldn't notice.
01:18:18.120So that's my worry, but I don't know, is the honest answer.
01:18:23.660So let me ask you a more personal question, maybe, and then I'll see if there's anything else you want to talk about on the YouTube side of this discussion.
01:18:33.140Does it—like, would you characterize yourself politically?
01:18:37.340Where do you characterize yourself politically, first of all?
01:19:14.640I mean, you're a rare academic, right?
01:19:17.000I mean, it's not like there's no people like you, and there are a lot more of them than there used to be.
01:19:21.960You know, I'm in touch regularly with a group that we communicate by email that's got like 100 people on it, and there's more people who've been—well, many of them kind of slipped surprisingly into the Conservative camp over years.
01:19:36.980But it's rare. It's still comparatively rare, and it's particularly rare in your field, I would say, although that's also the case in mine.
01:19:44.180So, like, why is that the case with you, and how did you come to these conclusions?
01:19:49.220And how did you manage any degree of success while having them?
01:19:55.100Yeah, it's a tough one, as you probably know yourself, you know.
01:19:58.380I mean, anyone right of center is 5%, perhaps, in the soft social sciences, and that's what the surveys seem to show.
01:20:06.680Now, I haven't changed my views, really.
01:20:09.400Not really. I can't think of any major change that I've had in my views since I was in my 20s.
01:20:14.580But, yeah, you keep your head down. You write—you sort of write things that are not controversial, that are in fields that are not political.
01:20:23.660And that's what I did for many years, until about 2018 or thereabouts.
01:20:28.420I was a full professor. I was head of department.
01:20:31.360I felt that I kind of did what I'd wanted to do in terms of publishing.
01:20:35.560I published in the major university presses and journals.
01:20:39.020And so I just thought, now's the time to actually, you know, with the populist moment and the rise of Brexit and Trump, I sort of, you know, I was talking about why I think these things happened in a different way.
01:20:50.000And I was also more openly critical of the social justice movement.
01:20:53.080And that is really what got me under attack from Twitter mobs, open letters, internal investigations, right, which are prompted by people inside the university and outside who simply have to bombard your Twitter feed and, you know, put in a complaint against you.
01:21:10.340Okay, well, I think what we'll do—and I'll let everybody watching and listening know this, too—I want to talk to you for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side.
01:21:19.700Unless—let's not step into what happened to you personally.
01:21:25.180And I guess what I would like to do is there—are there other issues that you're working on now or that are germane to this new book that you would like to close with, let's say?
01:21:37.800Are there some other things we haven't talked about that you'd really like to bring to the attention of people on the YouTube side?
01:21:43.900Well, I'd just say a couple of things.
01:21:45.560I mean, first is that I think that woke and cancel culture are connected to many different issues that are very pressing to a lot of voters.
01:21:55.100And one of them is, you know, you look—the populist right is going to do very well in Europe in the European elections coming up in a couple of weeks or thereabouts.
01:22:02.500This is really a—so it's not just, you know, about free speech and truth when we talk about cancel culture.
01:22:26.440Well, then you're going to have somebody popping up and selling blue jeans.
01:22:30.220So if the mainstream parties are only selling one immigration policy, then the political entrepreneur, which is going to be you, Kip, or the Sweden Democrats, or Donald Trump, is going to pop up.
01:22:39.780So if you care about polarization and populism, you have to have free speech, which means we have to deal with woke.
01:22:45.900And I should just say one other thing, which is I'm trying to, both with this book and with a new course that I've run this year on—it's an open online course on woke—trying to get people to understand what's led to this problem and why so many of the things that we argue about and talk about—crime, health care, education—they're downstream of this.
01:23:06.280So we can't—one of the things that I fear is that the culture wars get siloed into this narrow campus bubble, and people think it's a minor thing.
01:23:15.120And they forget that it has many, many effects on a lot of issues that a lot of voters care a lot about.
01:23:20.640So I just think it's a much bigger thing.
01:23:22.260In a way, it's the future of our civilization.
01:23:28.780Well, that's the thing, is you've got to see what the source is, and it's—well, it certainly seems that the source is—the source of much of the trouble is—well, I think it's the higher education system.
01:23:40.760And then it's the—more specifically, the ideologies that have gripped the higher education system, that people have allowed to grip it, I suppose, and also enabled.
01:23:50.020And so, yes, you're absolutely right, in my opinion, that it isn't about economics with the culture war being a distraction.
01:23:58.780That's—it's partly, too, you know, one of the things I've come to deeply understand, that wealth is a consequence of an ethos.
01:24:06.920It's not a consequence of natural resources.
01:24:09.420In fact, the natural resource curse is one of the economic facts that seems to disprove that entirely.
01:24:15.760Countries that are rich in natural resources are often, in fact, statistically more often, not likely to be rich because they become corrupt, for example.
01:24:24.320You need an ethos, and an ethos makes you wealthy, and that's what happened in Japan, for example.
01:24:30.240And the default interaction between Japanese citizens is one of trust and honesty.
01:24:35.180And so, Japan can be filthy rich in the absence of any natural resources at all.
01:24:40.080And so, there's no culture war independent of economics.
01:24:43.480That's foolish, is if we get the culture war wrong, we're going to destroy the economic system.
01:24:48.060And that's actually the stated goal of many of the real deep radicals, and so that actually should come as no surprise to anyone who's listening.
01:24:55.580And so, this—and I think you're right in consequence about the libertarians.
01:25:00.340It's like, you need a certain kind of cultural consensus so that less government is even an issue.
01:25:12.240And it's not going to be less government.
01:25:14.660It's going to be better distributed responsibility.
01:25:21.020Because the libertarian ethos only works when you have a citizenry that's capable of picking up governance on their own to take that responsibility.
01:25:41.760I mean, this is sort of a point Tocqueville made as well, is that that sort of layer of civic trust is vital for the functioning of freedom.
01:25:49.920If we have more polarization—polarization means you can't enact the right economic policies,
01:25:55.560because each party is sort of wrapping that policy into its ideology.
01:25:59.900People can't be rational and detached, right?
01:26:02.400And this is one of the things I think that the left loses sight of is that if you try and infiltrate institutions and politicize them—
01:26:09.560civil service, schools, corporations—you are actually going to cause half the citizenry to lose trust in those institutions.
01:26:18.060And therefore, without trust, I mean, as Putnam's work, a lot of people have done work on the salutary effect of trust on entrepreneurship and innovation.
01:26:27.540Without that basis of trust, if that's being torn apart, as you say, by culture wars and polarization.
01:26:33.700And so I just—I'm trying to appeal to the sane left to say, look, you cannot just conduct your politics by infiltrating institutions.
01:26:42.160If you want to win that battle in the court of public opinion, that's fine.
01:26:45.960But to try and do it surreptitiously by infiltration is actually eroding the trust in society.
01:26:51.380And by the way, you can see it on the right, too.
01:26:53.780The right has kind of won over more positions on the Supreme Court.
01:26:57.740The left's trust in the Supreme Court as an institution falls.
01:27:01.180And that's what happens when you politicize.
01:27:03.160And so I just think we've got to solve—and when people say it's just a little culture war, no, these are critical issues that we have got to come to a solution on if we want to overcome this polarization.
01:27:43.900Be nice to talk to you again at some point.
01:27:45.860I'd like to delve into the issue of fundamentals.
01:27:52.420Like, your take is something like, as far as I can tell, that there's still enough centrist consensus so that we can adopt this stance of neutrality and use that as a—what would you say?
01:28:04.920As a conceptual structure to push back against the woke nonsense.
01:28:09.100And, you know, that seems plausible to me, possibly.
01:28:14.640There might be enough trust left for that.
01:28:16.160I'd like to have a conversation with you at some point about what the sacred fundamentals perhaps actually have to be.
01:28:23.520You know, what are the ones that are lurking underneath that residual consensus?
01:28:27.340Because I think you can be utilitarian when the implicit consensus still exists.
01:28:32.800But the question is, you know, are we so fractionated that that's not the case anymore?
01:28:40.480I think that we do have to sort of try and—just as we fought the Cold War, it was economic utilitarianism and well-being against economic socialism.
01:28:52.020What we have now is we've got cultural socialism.
01:28:55.140And we need that sort of cultural wealth perspective.
01:28:58.820It's a bit like the economists always talk about the pie.
01:29:02.840The more equally you cut it up, the more it shrinks or the less it grows.
01:29:06.640So you need an optimal balance between equality, redistribution, and growth.
01:29:11.020I think likewise with the culture, we have to have a conversation about the more we push equal outcomes by race and gender and other things, the more that cultural pie isn't going to grow.
01:29:20.220So you may—maybe a white man can't write about a black woman, and that impoverishes literature.