The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:00:12.740 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:00:41.780 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody.

00:01:09.900 I have the opportunity today to talk to Dr. Eric Peter Kaufman.

00:01:13.880 He's a Canadian author and a professor from the University of Buckingham.

00:01:16.880 He's written a new book. It's come out in two different forms.

00:01:21.200 The Third Awakening, or Taboo, How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution.

00:01:27.420 Eric is also the author of a number of other books.

00:01:30.200 Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.

00:01:34.180 The Orange Order, etc.

00:01:37.020 He's a rare bird, you might say.

00:01:40.320 He's a relatively conservative social scientist, and there aren't very many of those.

00:01:46.160 In fact, I think the two of us talking are about the only two that there are.

00:01:49.960 That's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much.

00:01:52.140 We talk about a lot of things today.

00:01:54.500 We talk about the sacred dimension of the victim-victimizer narrative.

00:02:00.400 We talk about the state of modern universities and what's being done to, what would you say,

00:02:07.260 stem the tide of the radical leftists.

00:02:09.520 We talk about Dr. Kaufman's, well, his presumption that much of what's happening on the culture war front

00:02:18.500 isn't precisely due to the invasion of Marxists that you often hear about,

00:02:22.900 or even about post-modernism per se, but more about progressive literalism with its roots in the early 20th century.

00:02:30.340 And so he makes that case.

00:02:31.520 We talk about sex and the different political beliefs that are emerging,

00:02:35.980 especially between men and young women.

00:02:37.360 And join us for the conversation.

00:02:40.280 You're concentrating on the culture war, which continues to rage madly,

00:02:46.280 especially in, well, academia and everything it touches.

00:02:50.040 Do you want to tell—I thought we'd start with two things.

00:02:52.340 Do you want to tell people why you entitled your new book, The Third Awokening,

00:02:56.440 and then maybe fill everybody in a little bit about your—the history you've had with cancel culture and academia

00:03:04.400 and how that ties in with your broader body of work.

00:03:10.160 Yeah, Jordan, well, it's great to be on the show.

00:03:12.300 And yeah, I've got a new book, The Third Awokening.

00:03:15.140 The title in Britain is called Taboo.

00:03:17.180 And what this book really is about, what it really argues, is that what we're seeing, cancel culture, for example,

00:03:24.540 attacks on the past, on history, this is actually a continuation and an acceleration of a pre-existing set of ideas.

00:03:34.640 It is not a deviation from this—well, there are people who will say everything was fine in the 2000s

00:03:40.760 and suddenly we've had this post-2015 deviation.

00:03:43.820 My argument is actually no.

00:03:45.860 What we're seeing is a—is really a continuation of a set of ideas which arguably go back a century.

00:03:52.820 And so these are the ideas really of left liberalism.

00:03:55.600 And we have to understand ourselves as living within an acceleration of left liberalism,

00:04:02.720 a set of ideas that kind of come together in the first decade of the 20th century as liberal progressivism.

00:04:10.540 People like John Dewey, Jane Addams in the United States, the origins of pluralism,

00:04:16.280 the origins of the critique of ethnic majorities and national identity.

00:04:20.320 And then this is sort of accelerated and every generation, but really from the late 1960s, we get a sort of takeoff.

00:04:29.520 And then we've kind of had, with social media, another acceleration.

00:04:33.040 And so the third awokening simply means that we're not in the first one,

00:04:37.580 that we've had three of these emotional outbursts and ideological awakenings.

00:04:43.360 Just like in Protestantism, you have the first and second great awakenings in American Protestantism.

00:04:48.480 These are sort of emotional upsurges.

00:04:51.860 So the first one was in the late 60s, and people forget that you had Black Panthers occupying buildings armed to the teeth.

00:04:59.440 You had students demanding, you know, 50 Black professors be studied, every Black student be admitted.

00:05:05.900 Black studies—this is how Black studies got started, for example, is through demands by occupied—

00:05:11.260 people who occupied the offices of administrators.

00:05:14.960 So the late 60s, we have a number of these things.

00:05:17.300 Then there's another awokening, which is in the late 80s, early 90s.

00:05:21.120 That's sort of probably when you and I were coming of age.

00:05:24.160 We had political correctness, Afrocentrism, speech codes, for example.

00:05:28.260 Hey-ho, Western Civ has got to go.

00:05:30.620 You know, changing the curriculum, purging it of dead white males.

00:05:34.360 That talk in the late 80s, early 90s.

00:05:38.000 And then we have another wave, which comes in post-2010.

00:05:41.460 And so these are, in my view, continuous.

00:05:43.980 They really touch on the same set of ideas, which is really making sacred a couple of things, which is identities are made sacred.

00:05:52.320 So I define, for example, woke.

00:05:55.120 One-sentence definition.

00:05:56.440 People always ask, what is the definition of woke?

00:05:59.600 Well, the definition of woke, as I mentioned in the book, is the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups.

00:06:09.640 That's it.

00:06:10.560 That's the one-sentence definition.

00:06:13.000 And that is also what I would say—what I would describe as the kind of big bang of our moral order.

00:06:18.720 And out of that emerges a kind of very fuzzy folk ideology, which says, so these are the sacred groups.

00:06:28.480 Those groups cannot be offended.

00:06:29.900 So anything you say that might be interpreted by the most sensitive member of such a group as offensive marks you out as a blasphemer.

00:06:38.340 You're profaning the sacred.

00:06:39.400 You must be excommunicated, i.e. canceled.

00:06:41.660 The other part of this is absolute equality in terms of prestigious positions and resources between these groups.

00:06:50.080 So, for example, you can't have a race gap or a gender gap in terms of the boardroom, in terms of admittance to elite universities and so on.

00:06:57.340 It's got to be zero.

00:06:58.500 So equality plus emotional safety, these are the two pillars of this ideology.

00:07:04.080 But the point I make is this ideology is not some kind of system like Lockean liberalism or even Marxism that is—it is more of a bottom-up empathizing rather than a top-down, systematizing, cognitive thing.

00:07:17.420 It's much more emotional.

00:07:18.560 We're attached concretely to the black civil rights movement, to the indigenous, to the LGBT movements, and it's our romanticization and sympathy for these concrete groups that provides our meaning.

00:07:32.600 And that's primary in the system.

00:07:35.100 It's not a set of ideas like Marxism.

00:07:38.140 It's actually a set of emotional attachments.

00:07:41.500 And so this is very much emotional, and it's driven from the ground up.

00:07:45.800 Okay, so let me ask you some questions about that.

00:07:49.660 Okay, so I guess you pulled out two strings there.

00:07:56.500 You did associate the system of ideas with liberal progressivism, let's say, starting in the early 20th century.

00:08:06.600 But then you were also stressing the more emotional side of it.

00:08:11.240 Let's call it the compassionate side.

00:08:13.900 So I want to ask you—and you talked about it as bottom-up and emotion-driven.

00:08:18.080 So it seems to me that there's—the analysis of the woke phenomena has revealed a number of potentially fundamental causal elements.

00:08:33.320 You pointed to liberal progressivism and compassion and the role of emotion, let's say.

00:08:40.120 Other people have pointed to the role of like a kind of a meta-Marxism.

00:08:44.880 So it's—the Marxists, of course, divided the world into victim and victimizer, essentially on economic grounds.

00:08:52.460 The difference now is that that same narrative seems to play out.

00:08:56.700 There are victims and there are victimizers, but there is a number of dimensions along which that axis of inequality can reveal itself.

00:09:04.480 And you talked about race, gender, and sexuality.

00:09:08.000 There's other axes as well, but those are likely the primary ones.

00:09:11.160 And then with regards to the emotional side, this is something I can't help wondering about.

00:09:17.420 And no one is talking about it, and I can understand why.

00:09:21.780 We did a series of studies that were published in 2016, which was pretty much when I left the university.

00:09:28.780 So it never got completed.

00:09:30.340 But we identified a group of ideas that hung together statistically that we called politically correct authoritarianism.

00:09:41.320 Deviated to some degree from, say, the liberal progressivist ethos in that the people who adopted the set of ideas were perfectly willing to use compulsion and force.

00:09:52.480 That being, perhaps, the primary distinction, the predictors that we found that determined whether or not people adopted those beliefs were, first of all, low verbal intelligence.

00:10:02.680 That was a walloping predictor.

00:10:04.960 And the second one was being female.

00:10:07.100 And the third one was having a female temperament.

00:10:10.100 And the fourth one was having ever taken even one politically correct course.

00:10:14.240 And so one of the things I'm very curious about, see, I've been thinking that one of the things that we're seeing is the increased female domination of the university system, especially in the humanities and the social sciences.

00:10:28.920 And I think there's a fundamental feminine ethos that's instinctive, that can be made more sophisticated with genuine education, but that has a proclivity to divide the world up into predators and infants.

00:10:43.740 And woe betide you if you happen to fall into the predator camp.

00:10:47.160 It's very tightly allied with the victim-victimizer narrative.

00:10:50.480 And, you know, you do point out in your book that there is a predilection for women between the ages of 18 and 34, and this has been shown everywhere.

00:10:59.640 They're way out of lockstep without it, with every other demographic group, way more progressive, far more radically left, way more likely to identify, for example, to even claim that the Hamas terrorists are victims in some sense, which is just an absolute miracle of interpretation.

00:11:18.460 So we've identified a number of streams.

00:11:21.900 There's a Marxist influence.

00:11:23.620 There's a postmodern influence, which we haven't talked about.

00:11:25.940 There's a liberal progressive influence.

00:11:27.920 There's an emotional influence.

00:11:30.300 And then I don't know if you have any specific thoughts about how the increasing female domination, especially of the humanities and the social sciences, plays into that, because that's a major league cultural revolution.

00:11:42.880 The fact that the universities are dominated, for example, administratively as well by females.

00:11:49.520 And so I know that's a hell of a thing to ask you to talk about right off the bat.

00:11:53.700 I think that's actually really interesting, and I think it is a contributing factor.

00:11:57.800 But I just want to sort of put in a couple of caveats.

00:12:00.660 And the first is we only see this female effect amongst young people.

00:12:05.240 So older women, we don't find greater support for cancel culture.

00:12:11.400 It very much seems to be among young women.

00:12:13.120 The second thing is, if you were to go back to 1970, for example, women were, you know, there's a survey done every year in the U.S., H-E-R-I, Higher Education Research Institute.

00:12:24.960 100,000 freshmen, 18-year-olds entering American universities.

00:12:29.540 In 1970, women were somewhat more conservative than men, 18-year-old women, 18-year-old men.

00:12:36.720 And it's really not until 2004 we start to see those 18-year-old women starting to be more liberal than the men.

00:12:43.080 And that's now widened to about 15 points.

00:12:47.240 And so something's happened to women in the recent period.

00:12:51.680 That's the first point to note.

00:12:53.300 So, and that's, the other thing is that FIRE, which is Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, does an annual survey in the U.S., 55,000.

00:13:02.980 So there's a lot of survey data in the book.

00:13:04.660 I try and ground this as much as possible in the data.

00:13:08.640 So they ask questions, for example, is it okay to shout down or block somebody from speaking?

00:13:14.020 And on those questions, actually, especially using violence to prevent somebody from speaking, women are less likely than men to support that.

00:13:24.400 On blocking, they're about as likely.

00:13:26.700 Where women really stand out is, should a speaker come to campus who wants to say something that might be offensive?

00:13:33.740 So, for example, that says BLM is a hate group, that says trans is a mental disorder.

00:13:38.860 There, you see a big gender gap.

00:13:41.400 And you see it also amongst Republican women, by the way, versus Republican men.

00:13:46.020 So it seems like the attitude, the sort of, there's the authoritarian, I want to do violence, which is, I think, not gendered, or it may even be somewhat more male.

00:13:55.720 But there's this protective, oh, I don't want anyone's feelings to be hurt.

00:13:59.460 And that, I think, is more female.

00:14:02.000 So I think there are some nuances here.

00:14:03.900 What I would say, I mean, the way I think about it is, women will tend to back up whatever is the moral order.

00:14:11.020 If the moral order is a woke moral order, they'll back that up.

00:14:13.640 If it's a religious or patriotic moral order, they'll be more likely to back that up.

00:14:17.540 Whereas men will be more likely to be the contrarians.

00:14:20.400 I think, because it's, you know, people will talk about, well, women are more compassionate.

00:14:25.540 But the point is, compassionate to who?

00:14:28.820 Like, compassionate to—

00:14:29.900 Well, that is the point.

00:14:30.800 That's for sure, that's the point.

00:14:32.180 So compassionate to the transitioner or the detransitioner?

00:14:36.260 Compassionate to the biological male who wants to enter a woman's shelter or a woman's prison or the women in the prison?

00:14:42.940 I mean, the ideology is what tells you who to be compassionate towards.

00:14:46.380 So if we go back to the liberal progressives, Jane Addams was relatively pro-lynching, or at least thought that wasn't a bad idea,

00:14:53.680 because she was very, very empathetic towards white women.

00:14:57.560 And so she was willing to accept that there were these black male predators and buy into that framing.

00:15:03.480 So what I'm just saying is, I think what's happened is, an ideology has crept in and told women who to be compassionate towards and who not to care about.

00:15:12.080 So, okay, so your point fundamentally is that, I believe, is that the ideology specifies the victim-victimizer dimension and identifies the victim.

00:15:24.880 Now, do you think it's—so when we did our study, it was agreeable.

00:15:31.320 I said it was being female and having a female temperament.

00:15:34.720 Those were both predictors.

00:15:36.680 We never saw that in any study we ever did, looking at what predicted beliefs, for example.

00:15:41.500 Generally, if we controlled for temperament, sex had no effect.

00:15:45.500 But that wasn't the case in this specific situation, which I thought was extremely telling.

00:15:51.180 And so—and it's also very interesting, as you pointed out, that it's young women in particular.

00:15:55.860 And I can't help, as someone, you know, psychoanalytically influenced, I can't help but think that a fair chunk of this is misplaced maternal instinct.

00:16:04.760 I believe that the young women who are, by and large, childless in the years when they shouldn't be are unbelievably sensitive.

00:16:13.840 Well, let's talk about what happened in 2004.

00:16:16.240 You know, you said that's when women started to shift their political priorities.

00:16:19.500 Now, I know from people who've been investigating this that TikTok is a particularly pernicious influence, especially with regards to the campus protests that are occurring right now.

00:16:30.620 And the TikTok short videos that are fostering the campus protests, at least among women, focus on compassion for the war victims to the ultimate degree.

00:16:42.620 And they seem to be extraordinarily effective.

00:16:44.400 But there's a real problem here that needs to be wrestled with, because if it is the case that young women are differentially sensitive to a certain kind of propaganda,

00:16:53.540 and they often—and they also increasingly occupy the majority positions in university institutions, for example,

00:17:00.620 then we have a whole new kind of social problem on our hands.

00:17:03.900 Because we've never had—it's only been in the last 30 years that we've had the opportunity to see what female-dominant large institutions would look like, right?

00:17:14.940 That's historically unprecedented.

00:17:17.060 We have no idea what pathologies or advantages those systems might have.

00:17:21.260 So what do you think happened in 2004?

00:17:23.920 Like, why did the tide start to turn then?

00:17:25.760 So my interpretation—there's other data series that we can see changing.

00:17:30.960 So political donations shifting towards the Democrats, for example, around roughly the same time.

00:17:37.420 Now, political donations come for people who are highly educated, relatively well-off, for example.

00:17:43.080 I think what happens in the U.S. anyway is you get George W. Bush, who's more of a populist,

00:17:47.980 not an elite-style conservative who's just about tax and spend, for example.

00:17:52.180 And I actually think you see, you know, he's also, to some degree, advancing the agenda of the religious right, to some degree.

00:17:58.900 I think this populist-style cultural conservatism doesn't work as well with the elite opinion formers.

00:18:06.860 And so they start to drift away in terms of political donations.

00:18:10.340 And if you like the kind of background, the ambient noise, the mood music that is coming through the elite institutions,

00:18:17.320 the schools, the culture, just starts to turn against Republicans and conservatism, for example.

00:18:23.640 So I actually think women are a kind of—they kind of reflect what is the dominant ethos in a society,

00:18:29.740 or at least the prestige ethos in a society.

00:18:32.660 So if we actually swung the ethos against wokeism, I think women would be in the forefront of that.

00:18:38.360 I don't think there's anything biological.

00:18:39.820 So I am more of a sociologist and a political scientist, so I tend to approach these things from a kind of sociology of emotions perspective,

00:18:48.720 which says that ideas can tell you which emotions to turn off and which emotions to express.

00:18:55.080 And now, of course, that's refracted through things like gender.

00:18:57.700 So in this case, I think women will just back up and reinforce the dominant values, dominant ideology of the elites in a society.

00:19:04.560 So I'm not as convinced—

00:19:08.080 Why the elites? Why do you think it's—okay, why would women specifically back up the dominant ideology of the elites?

00:19:15.200 Do you think that's a consequence of something like hypergamy, or what's your theory about that?

00:19:21.800 Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.

00:19:27.280 Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead

00:19:32.820 and you have no idea what to do?

00:19:35.160 In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.

00:19:38.940 It's a fundamental right.

00:19:40.240 Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,

00:19:44.500 you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.

00:19:49.560 And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.

00:19:52.760 With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.

00:20:00.140 Now, you might think, what's the big deal?

00:20:02.160 Who'd want my data anyway?

00:20:03.860 Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.

00:20:08.420 That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.

00:20:12.480 Enter ExpressVPN.

00:20:14.240 It's like a digital fortress, creating an encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.

00:20:18.920 Their encryption is so robust that it would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to crack it.

00:20:24.560 But don't let its power fool you.

00:20:26.380 ExpressVPN is incredibly user-friendly.

00:20:28.720 With just one click, you're protected across all your devices.

00:20:31.420 Phones, laptops, tablets, you name it.

00:20:33.940 That's why I use ExpressVPN whenever I'm traveling or working from a coffee shop.

00:20:38.080 It gives me peace of mind knowing that my research, communications, and personal data are shielded from prying eyes.

00:20:44.040 Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash jordan.

00:20:48.380 Because 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?

00:21:09.440 And then why is that associated with youth, let's say, with women?

00:21:15.020 I'm trying to disentangle all that.

00:21:17.580 Well, I think there are a couple of things.

00:21:18.660 I mean, one is the education system, which I think shifts in this direction in a big way.

00:21:24.220 I mean, it was there in a few radical centers like Berkeley and the Toronto District School Board, Greater London Council.

00:21:30.640 So you had these crazy places, but what's happened is a scaling up.

00:21:35.700 So what my book talks a lot about is these ideas actually go back quite a long way, but it's the scaling up.

00:21:40.680 Now it's in every school.

00:21:41.580 So I did a couple of studies with the Manhattan Institute.

00:21:44.380 You know, 90% 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.

00:21:57.020 In Britain, it was about, you know, it was a majority as well.

00:22:00.140 Not as high, but a majority.

00:22:01.240 So it's hitting saturation level.

00:22:03.960 So that's what women are getting in class.

00:22:06.360 And then they see it in the institutions that may be in the workplace, in the government.

00:22:11.400 So they're seeing this thing, DEI, everywhere.

00:22:14.380 And so they think, yeah, this is the way you have to be a good moral person.

00:22:17.420 And they simply reinforce those values.

00:22:20.100 So I think that is the biggest driver.

00:22:22.100 And I don't think it's just self-interest.

00:22:23.680 So if we take a question like, you know, should—one of the questions that I ask is, should J.K. Rowling be dropped by her publisher?

00:22:31.700 Amongst young people, it's 50-50.

00:22:34.980 Dropper, not dropper.

00:22:36.180 Amongst anyone over 45, it's in low single digits.

00:22:39.100 So we've got a big issue with young people.

00:22:41.160 And—but 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.

00:22:54.700 Now, you might say, well, shouldn't women be sticking up for women and women's spaces and female authors?

00:22:59.760 And, well, no, actually.

00:23:01.880 So 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.

00:23:12.420 It doesn't make any sense from a purely feminist perspective.

00:23:15.560 So I just think they're reflecting these are the values that good people are supposed to have and we're going to reinforce them.

00:23:20.760 So 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?

00:23:32.940 I mean, infants are marginalized.

00:23:34.800 They're in danger all the time.

00:23:36.100 They have to be attended to.

00:23:37.920 Everything they demand has to be granted to them.

00:23:40.340 So 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.

00:23:56.400 The problem seems to be that it can be gamed, and it's gamed so effectively now.

00:24:00.860 And 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.

00:24:09.240 But we did find in the study that I described, which was a very good study, by the way.

00:24:14.000 It was only published as a master's thesis because my research career came to a rather crashing halt.

00:24:19.380 But the fact that even one course had a significant effect over IQ and temperament and sex was telling, right?

00:24:27.260 So now, I don't know if you know this, but you might know it.

00:24:31.300 You know that in virtually every state and province in North America, a teacher has to be certified,

00:24:37.580 and that's basically the faculties of education have a hammerlock on that, which is appalling as far as I'm concerned,

00:24:44.340 because I don't think there's a more corrupt branch of academia than the faculties of education.

00:24:50.940 Terrible research.

00:24:52.260 Absolutely.

00:24:52.900 Counterproductive research.

00:24:54.220 Whole word learning, self-esteem, social emotion.

00:24:57.560 Name a stupid fad, and the probability that it came out of an educational psychologist in a faculty of education is extremely high.

00:25:05.820 Do you know that the K-12 education system eats up 50% of the state budgets in the United States?

00:25:16.260 Really?

00:25:16.560 That means that 50%, sometimes more.

00:25:20.360 So that means that since the 1960s, we have handed 50% of the state budgets to the most woke graduates of the worst possible faculties.

00:25:32.540 We've done that for four generations.

00:25:34.120 And now, well, and as you said, now in your surveys, you're finding that the vast majority of students have been exposed to,

00:25:42.060 well, what's essentially, I don't know how to characterize it, postmodern metamarxist propaganda.

00:25:48.740 It's something like that, although, you know, you're stressing more the emotional side of it.

00:25:52.760 And so, well, I guess that all, we'll discuss that a little bit too when we get to your,

00:25:57.820 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

00:26:06.820 because they're certainly struggling mightily to do so.

00:26:10.240 So, but you're more optimistic.

00:26:12.220 And so, I, okay, so that's the facts on the ground with regards to state budgets.

00:26:18.240 50% of their budgets has been handed over to these propagandistic institutions.

00:26:23.420 Well, I think the schools are critical.

00:26:26.100 So, one of the things we're finding, for example, is that students largely are formed by the time they come on campus.

00:26:33.120 And a lot of the studies of universities show people's views don't actually change a great deal between when they come on,

00:26:39.280 step onto campus and leave the university.

00:26:41.300 However, so we really have to focus on the school.

00:26:44.560 So, 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

00:26:52.220 students had had in high school.

00:26:55.100 And, you know, we take, for example, somebody who didn't get any exposure to any of these critical race concepts

00:27:01.880 like white privilege, systemic racism, unconscious bias, or the gender concepts, many genders, patriarchy, for example.

00:27:08.520 Someone who got no exposure to that is sort of 50 to 100% less likely to express, for example, white guilt,

00:27:16.560 think that, you know, whites are racist and mean to favor racial quotas and affirmative action.

00:27:24.600 All of these things jump 50 to 100% less.

00:27:27.720 Yes.

00:27:28.280 Wow.

00:27:28.560 And so that's between somebody having no concepts and the maximum of six concepts.

00:27:35.200 Similarly, by the way, for partisanship, you know, someone with a Republican mother who is exposed to no concepts,

00:27:42.140 there's essentially 60% of them identify as Republican.

00:27:46.140 Exposed to six concepts, it drops to below 30%.

00:27:48.500 So one of the points that I try to make in the book is that K-12 education, public education, is absolutely massive

00:27:56.380 and must become a top priority for certainly conservative politicians.

00:28:02.440 If you want to have a hope in the future in terms of turning this around, we've got to get at K-12 education.

00:28:09.020 Okay, so let me ask you about that.

00:28:11.440 I just saw a study the other day, just a graph of a study showing across a variety of different age groups

00:28:18.740 when people believe that the culture, their culture, peaked in terms of quality, music, entertainment, food, peace, etc.

00:28:29.160 And the general proclivity was for people to focus on the time between they were about, say, 15 and 19.

00:28:36.560 And, you know, there's a tremendous amount of neural reorganization that goes on at that point.

00:28:41.660 So there's a big die-off of neurons between two and four, right?

00:28:47.160 So you're born with more neural connections than you ever have again in your life.

00:28:50.460 And a lot of what happens when you learn is actually pruning.

00:28:53.320 There's a major pruning in late infancy, and then there's a major pruning in the teenage years.

00:28:59.080 You kind of die into your adult personality.

00:29:02.240 That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.

00:29:04.180 Now, people have known for a long time that if you want to get men into the military in the proper way,

00:29:11.060 you have to do that when they're young adults.

00:29:13.200 The earlier, the better.

00:29:14.020 By the time they're 23 or so, like, forget it.

00:29:17.340 You can't tribalize them, right?

00:29:21.160 So that we—and we don't know exactly the critical period for the establishment of tribal identity.

00:29:26.900 But you're suggesting that your research is indicating that it's actually prior to university.

00:29:32.140 You know, I bet it's the same time that people develop their musical preferences.

00:29:36.360 Right, right.

00:29:37.640 Right, right?

00:29:38.580 Well, 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.

00:29:48.600 And that tends to manifest itself—I mean, a political scientist like myself would tend to look at these as cohort effects.

00:29:55.360 So you kind of—your beliefs crystallize to some extent in your early 20s, and you carry those through life.

00:30:01.520 Because right now, I think there's a complacency amongst a lot of people who say,

00:30:05.340 well, you know, young people are woke, but they'll grow out of it.

00:30:08.620 You know, they'll come back, they'll have kids, they'll own a house, and they'll suddenly become conservative.

00:30:13.320 And I think that's quite naive in many ways.

00:30:15.900 I think that may be true in terms of self-interest at paying taxes, but in terms of these core values, I don't think that's likely.

00:30:22.900 And you can see that, by the way, with religion.

00:30:24.460 So secularism, non-religion started with young people, and those beliefs were sticky, and they maintained non-religion through life.

00:30:32.320 And now we're seeing record levels of non-religiosity in the U.S. and Britain, for example.

00:30:37.360 So one of my contentions is, yes, there's no question that we—you know, woke has kind of peaked.

00:30:45.260 We've seen a rollback of DEI in corporations to some extent.

00:30:48.800 We've seen, to some extent, reduced targeting.

00:30:52.320 We'll see about that.

00:30:53.420 Right.

00:30:53.840 They're pretty slippery, man.

00:30:55.180 Just because they don't have the same name doesn't mean they're not up to the same tricks.

00:30:59.840 Exactly.

00:31:00.320 But 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.

00:31:11.960 And I think those senior liberals have rode back.

00:31:14.100 But I think we've got to look at this in terms of cohort change, generational turnover.

00:31:18.400 When 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, and that is going to change our culture.

00:31:30.720 So, for example, if I say, here's a question that we asked, YouGov asked to hundreds of thousands of British respondents on its panels, do you favor political correctness because it protects people from discrimination, or do you oppose political correctness because it stifles free speech?

00:31:50.100 You know, in the British public, it's sort of 47 to 37 against political correctness.

00:31:55.280 Amongst academics, it's maybe 75-20 in favor.

00:32:00.280 Amongst social science, humanities, academics, young people take after that.

00:32:04.280 They're about two to one in favor of political correctness.

00:32:06.680 And 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.

00:32:18.860 So something like speech codes, for example, in universities will have majority support.

00:32:23.720 And 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.

00:32:33.260 And so that's why I think the schools, changing the culture in schools has to be so central.

00:32:39.620 Yeah.

00:32:40.120 So, okay.

00:32:41.040 So you, I want to bring a couple of other issues here before perhaps we turn to your solutions.

00:32:47.880 Now, when we began our conversation, you said that part of this movement was the establishment of sacred identities.

00:32:56.920 And I just brought that up because you brought up the religious issue as well.

00:33:00.900 And I know you've done some writing about that additionally.

00:33:04.560 No.

00:33:04.840 So there's a variety of, I like the idea of sacred.

00:33:09.380 See, I think what, I think religion, religious ideas are axiomatic starting points, like the Euclidean axioms for Euclidean geometry.

00:33:21.680 There's very many different forms of geometry, right?

00:33:25.000 You just have to switch the axioms.

00:33:27.540 The 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.

00:33:37.000 And then you can build a logical edifice on top of that, maybe even a functionally logical edifice.

00:33:42.280 But there's going to be axioms at the base.

00:33:46.140 And 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.

00:33:55.680 I think what we'll get is a different set of sacred axioms.

00:33:59.500 And you pointed to race, gender, and sexuality.

00:34:02.680 And so why do you, first of all, I want to know what you think about that and why you use the term sacred.

00:34:08.820 But 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.

00:34:22.960 So why them? Why those axioms?

00:34:28.380 Right. 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.

00:34:34.760 So 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.

00:34:47.280 But 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.

00:35:04.720 But 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.

00:35:31.580 So the cultural power flows to black people.

00:35:34.620 That doesn't mean economic power initially, but cultural power.

00:35:37.340 That's what he said.

00:35:38.140 And in fact, American institutions, in order to, they lost their moral legitimacy by admitting that they engaged in the sin of racial discrimination.

00:35:47.960 Once you admit, he says, you give up cultural power.

00:35:50.620 Now, you have to admit because these were real things.

00:35:52.720 But that loss of cultural power means that you now have to fight for your moral legitimacy.

00:35:58.440 Now, how do you do that?

00:35:59.260 Through virtue signaling.

00:36:00.320 So you're kind of virtue signaling that you're one of the good whites, that your institution still has moral legitimacy.

00:36:06.720 So you're going to have an affirmative action program, for example.

00:36:10.040 You're going to have some kind of racial sensitivity training, which is the precursor to diversity training.

00:36:15.140 So a lot of these things really begin in the 60s and 70s, which is one of the reasons.

00:36:19.940 And these are not Marxist things.

00:36:21.180 This isn't Herbert Marcuse saying we failed on class.

00:36:24.780 We got to move to identity because they might do the radical revolution.

00:36:28.080 Those people who are there, don't get me wrong.

00:36:29.600 You had Rufo is correct and Lindsay, that at least in terms of the ideas, those ideas were there.

00:36:36.660 But really what drove this?

00:36:38.700 You know, President Johnson was an anti-communist.

00:36:41.720 You know, he was bombing Vietnam.

00:36:43.060 This is not some kind of a neo-Marxist.

00:36:45.860 What this was really about was kind of virtue signaling and saying, I'm not one of the bad people and we're one of the good people.

00:36:51.160 So white guilt, guilt, compassion for these groups and a certain exaggerated catastrophizing fear of the right of conservatives.

00:37:00.820 They're going to drag us back to Jim Crow, back to 1933 Germany.

00:37:04.760 That constant ginning up of that alarmism.

00:37:07.760 These are the three elements of the left liberal stool that are developed.

00:37:11.700 And so that's kind of the emphasis.

00:37:13.760 So 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.

00:37:21.980 Now, 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.

00:37:34.540 It's a bit like kryptonite and you can wield it.

00:37:37.000 And you can, if you're a feminist movement, you can grab a bit of that power and use it.

00:37:41.660 If you are an indigenous movement, you can use it.

00:37:44.180 And so and then you can stretch it.

00:37:45.740 So it's now mispronouncing somebody's name or the Moynihan Report 1965 about the black family.

00:37:52.540 That becomes a bit offensive and you have to shelve it, right?

00:37:55.680 So the stretching, it's a bit like putty.

00:37:58.380 You can then stretch it across to different groups, outwards to microaggressions.

00:38:03.080 And this is where all the power comes from.

00:38:06.020 Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.

00:38:11.460 Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business, from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage.

00:38:21.180 Shopify is here to help you grow.

00:38:23.460 Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products and track conversions.

00:38:30.620 With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools, alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing, accounting and chatbots.

00:38:42.840 Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.

00:38:51.220 No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.

00:38:56.980 Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.

00:39:03.500 Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.

00:39:08.880 That's shopify.com slash jbp.

00:39:13.520 And I think we're not...

00:39:15.300 Well, there's another interesting dimension there, too, that's worth thinking about.

00:39:20.720 That's more psychological than sociological.

00:39:23.220 So, 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.

00:39:39.660 So, antisocial personality disorder is one of them.

00:39:43.180 Criminality is not an illness, even though it's diagnosable.

00:39:46.060 The 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.

00:39:58.480 Histrionic personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, that kind of fleshes it out.

00:40:03.480 Now, the people in that cluster, let's say, the personality traits they show are they're Machiavellian, so they use their language to manipulate.

00:40:17.660 So, 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.

00:40:28.620 That's it.

00:40:29.960 There's no dialogue.

00:40:34.700 There's pure manipulation.

00:40:37.540 They tend to be psychopathic, and so psychopaths are predators and parasites.

00:40:43.740 They are histrionic, so prone to high levels of emotional display, especially negative emotion.

00:40:53.660 They're narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status.

00:40:58.180 And, 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.

00:41:09.140 Now, the reason I'm bringing this up is because that group of people uses claims of victimization to harness guilt to obtain power.

00:41:19.300 So, there's an additional twist here that I think is stunningly dangerous.

00:41:24.780 And, you see, it's tied in with your notion that the progressive liberals have enabled the radical seat.

00:41:31.740 Because here's the problem.

00:41:33.980 If you're empathic and progressive, you don't believe that cluster B people exist, because everyone's a victim.

00:41:41.800 But the problem is, they do exist, and it's in times when that small minority of people, maybe that's 4%, something like that.

00:41:51.360 When they get the upper hand, and they do.

00:41:53.960 They got the upper hand after the French Revolution.

00:41:56.620 They got the upper hand after the Russian Revolution.

00:41:58.980 It is no fun for anyone, because their chaos worshippers, their best means of obtaining power, and even reproductive opportunity, is in the ashes.

00:42:13.240 And so, I spent five years working with Democrats in the U.S., and it got frustrating, and so I stopped doing it.

00:42:21.440 But 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?

00:42:32.220 And I would point out the dangers of the cluster B psychopaths, and they'd just hand wave.

00:42:37.240 It's like, oh, no, they don't really mean what they say.

00:42:39.100 They don't mean what they say when they're talking about equality of outcome, for example.

00:42:42.920 Kamala Harris, she doesn't mean equality of outcome.

00:42:45.880 She just means equality of opportunity.

00:42:47.800 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.

00:43:00.120 That's universal.

00:43:01.620 I'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.

00:43:13.720 Because I do think that's where the pathology really manifests itself.

00:43:17.760 It's like, really, you want equality of outcome, do you, along all dimensions?

00:43:21.360 How are you going to obtain that exactly, except by force?

00:43:24.560 Well, maybe we want force.

00:43:26.380 It's like, yeah, yeah, maybe you do.

00:43:29.440 Yeah, so, well, so there's this interplay between sociology and thought and psychopathology that people aren't attending to.

00:43:39.500 And it's very dangerous, because 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.

00:43:57.080 But none of that is there on social media, and that enables, as far as I can tell, that enables this psychopathic manipulation to have, essentially, free sway.

00:44:10.180 Yeah, I mean, that's really an interesting set of observations.

00:44:14.360 I think you're right.

00:44:15.060 And I guess we're agreeing, but from different ends of the telescope, because I think that what's happening is this large group.

00:44:22.300 So, in a university, the median academic is liberal left, soft left, not far left.

00:44:28.360 It's 50 to 60 percent of the university.

00:44:31.520 And this is why, for example, by a two-to-one ratio, social science academics and elite universities support mandatory diversity statements.

00:44:41.200 So, this is not something they're being forced to do by a few crazies.

00:44:44.620 But, of course, as you say, there's a symbiosis between the authoritarian left and this large group of liberal left.

00:44:51.720 So, 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.

00:45:02.660 The liberal left is the amplifier, and the radical left is the guitar player.

00:45:06.700 So, 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.

00:45:14.060 And 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.

00:45:24.020 And I would say that on all of those dimensions, left liberalism really has no boundaries.

00:45:28.920 So, left liberalism is, in my view, sane on the economy.

00:45:33.560 It believes in a mixed capitalist economy.

00:45:35.660 And 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.

00:45:44.220 It's not communist, actually.

00:45:45.700 I don't think it is communist.

00:45:46.680 I think it believes in maybe a higher tax rate, perhaps, than the free market right.

00:45:50.460 But I'm not really that concerned about the economy.

00:45:52.840 It's on the cultural side.

00:45:54.480 There are really no guardrails at all.

00:45:56.300 It's just there are – we're not diverse enough.

00:45:59.180 We're not inclusive enough.

00:46:00.280 We're not equal enough.

00:46:01.240 There's no bound to that.

00:46:02.420 So, whenever someone comes along and says, we should be more equal, it's like, yes.

00:46:06.720 So, what we have is this ratcheting.

00:46:09.320 And 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.

00:46:17.660 That's what affirmative action meant.

00:46:19.220 Pretty soon, it was goals and timetables.

00:46:21.680 Then there was disparate impact.

00:46:23.340 Well, 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.

00:46:31.360 So, what we can see is this kind of evolutionary ratcheting.

00:46:35.040 Now, 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.

00:46:45.040 I 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.

00:46:51.700 As you say, when is there too much diversity?

00:46:54.860 And 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.

00:47:09.240 And this is now – this is a finding I would call a consensus finding.

00:47:14.200 Well, how can you have trust without cohesiveness?

00:47:17.120 Right, right.

00:47:17.880 How the hell can you manage that?

00:47:19.820 Yeah, but there's no limits and there's no willingness to recognize we don't want to maximize these things.

00:47:25.240 We want to optimize them.

00:47:26.980 That is not the way the liberal left thinks.

00:47:29.460 They just think more equality, more diversity, more inclusivity.

00:47:33.600 Now, 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.

00:47:41.640 So this is getting at free speech to get inclusion.

00:47:45.520 And I just don't know what –

00:47:47.240 You know, self-esteem.

00:47:48.160 Yeah.

00:47:49.540 Self-esteem.

00:47:50.380 Well, I've been watching these pathologies grow in psychology for 30 years.

00:47:56.580 And the social psychologists in particular, they've irritated the hell out of me for like three generations.

00:48:02.520 And so self-esteem, people still use that word.

00:48:06.280 So here's what self-esteem is.

00:48:08.700 Self-esteem is trait neuroticism minus extroversion.

00:48:12.820 There's no such thing as self-esteem.

00:48:14.880 It's a complete bloody lie.

00:48:16.640 It has no construct validity whatsoever.

00:48:19.120 It's an index of your temperamental proclivity to negative emotion.

00:48:24.100 And women have lower levels of self-esteem because they have higher levels of neuroticism, and that kicks in at puberty.

00:48:30.500 And 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.

00:48:46.260 Maximizing self-esteem.

00:48:47.660 It's like, it's trait neuroticism.

00:48:50.200 It's extremely difficult.

00:48:52.220 It's very much set temperamentally.

00:48:55.340 It has a very powerful genetic, what would you say, foundation.

00:49:01.260 Neuroticism doesn't differ between boys and girls.

00:49:03.740 It doesn't kick in till puberty.

00:49:05.720 It's different between men and women all around the world.

00:49:08.340 And, you know, so we can't lower people's self-esteem.

00:49:11.600 It means we're aiming at a target that doesn't even exist, and we're using ideological means because we've got our measurements wrong.

00:49:18.000 So, all right.

00:49:18.900 So, one of the things that was striking about your book, and I don't know how to rectify this apparent paradox.

00:49:27.840 You 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.

00:49:40.680 And your belief is that that's pretty sticky, although there'll be some movement in a conservative direction.

00:49:47.260 People get more conscientious as they get older.

00:49:50.340 They get more agreeable.

00:49:51.220 They do tilt a bit more towards conservatism.

00:49:53.300 But 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.

00:50:01.920 But by the same token, you also believe that there's time to turn the ship around.

00:50:07.820 So, let's talk about that.

00:50:09.040 You have 12 ideas, and I'm really curious to see you go through them.

00:50:13.600 So, well, you lectured for us at Peterson Academy, right?

00:50:16.560 That's right.

00:50:17.240 That's right.

00:50:17.800 Yeah.

00:50:18.080 Right.

00:50:18.660 Right.

00:50:18.960 So, that's one of our answers to the problem.

00:50:21.300 And that's launching, by the way, at the end of the month.

00:50:24.220 Fantastic.

00:50:24.780 Yeah.

00:50:24.920 And it was a very enjoyable experience.

00:50:26.780 I didn't teach anything particularly controversial, but still.

00:50:29.240 What I would say is there's really two different approaches to dealing with the issue.

00:50:34.380 I mean, one is what I might call libertarian, and that's using market-based solutions, and the other is interventionists using government-led solutions.

00:50:43.520 Now, I actually lean more towards the second than the first, which may jar against some of the libertarians in the audience.

00:50:50.400 So, 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.

00:50:58.160 You can set up a podcast, you can have the impact that you're having, that Joe Rogan is having.

00:51:04.300 But when we're talking about universities or tech firms, particularly search engines, there are natural monopolies and there are sort of market failures.

00:51:13.440 So, there are first-mover advantages to being Harvard.

00:51:16.380 It's going to be very hard for Harvard's reputation.

00:51:18.900 I know it's dropped a little, but it's going to be hard for that rank ordering to change a lot.

00:51:23.060 But, and so, and similarly with school, so the view that we should simply have school choice, and that's going to fix the problem.

00:51:32.940 One of the, I'm sort of, I think school choice is great, but I don't think it's going to make much difference.

00:51:38.160 Surveys 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.

00:51:50.040 And, and in addition, the amount of critical race and gender theory that they are being exposed to is relatively similar.

00:51:57.760 If you think about universities.

00:51:59.020 Even in homeschools?

00:52:01.000 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.

00:52:08.560 And also, we also asked the school questions on our 18 to 20 survey.

00:52:12.780 Now, we didn't get a ton of variation.

00:52:14.540 Now, it could be that the homeschool kids, we got a selection of those homeschool kids, which wasn't representative.

00:52:20.000 I don't know.

00:52:20.600 Maybe that's the case.

00:52:22.320 But.

00:52:22.640 Well, is it a curriculum issue?

00:52:25.140 Like, well, how do you account for that?

00:52:26.580 Because 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.

00:52:35.880 Maybe not quite as much, but.

00:52:37.540 Right.

00:52:37.780 Pretty much the homeschool one that that's more complex, but it's not that easy for parents, for example, to set up a curriculum and the curricula are well dominated by the ideology, let's say.

00:52:51.000 But how do you make sense of that?

00:52:53.000 Right.

00:52:54.080 Well, well, I think there are some differences.

00:52:55.920 So on the gender ideology, there's a bit less amongst the homeschool.

00:52:59.520 Now, we don't have a massive sample, but there looks to be some effect, but it's not massive.

00:53:03.440 And my point is, you know, if you are a really switched on parent, you can send your kid to a classical school.

00:53:08.580 If you have that option nearby, that may make a difference for you.

00:53:12.240 But the number of parents who are like that is quite small.

00:53:14.740 Most 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.

00:53:21.220 And so most kids are just going to be put through the sort of indoctrination machine.

00:53:25.620 And that's my concern is not the freedom of a very, you know, switched on parent to actually avoid these things, which is important.

00:53:33.680 But it's most of these kids are being put through the same system.

00:53:36.520 So we've got to, I think, get at the public school system.

00:53:39.700 So, 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.

00:53:52.300 Okay, let me ask you about that, you know, because I really have mixed feelings about this.

00:53:58.640 And I'll tell you why.

00:53:59.740 I like Chris Rufo.

00:54:00.700 I've enjoyed talking to him.

00:54:02.300 I think him and DeSantis have done very interesting work in Florida.

00:54:06.020 But I have a concern.

00:54:07.500 And the concern is that once you establish the precedent that the universities can be directed from the top down by the politicians, particularly, to set their curricula straight.

00:54:23.560 You set a vicious precedent.

00:54:25.060 And 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.

00:54:42.560 And 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.

00:54:53.080 But, like…

00:54:54.560 In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace.

00:55:01.440 But here's the thing.

00:55:02.680 Prayer, the most common tool we have, isn't just about saying whatever comes to mind.

00:55:06.520 It's a skill that needs to be developed.

00:55:09.280 That's where Hallow comes in.

00:55:10.960 As the number one prayer and meditation app, Hallow is launching an exceptional new series called How to Pray.

00:55:16.900 Imagine learning how to use scripture as a launchpad for profound conversations with God, how to properly enter into imaginative prayer, and how to incorporate prayers reaching far back in church history.

00:55:28.640 This isn't your average guided meditation.

00:55:30.540 It's a comprehensive two-week journey into the heart of prayer, led by some of the most respected spiritual leaders of our time.

00:55:38.040 From guests including Bishop Robert Barron, Father Mike Schmitz, and Jonathan Rumi, known for his role as Jesus in the hit series The Chosen,

00:55:45.600 you'll discover prayer techniques that have stood the test of time, while equipping yourself with the tools needed to face life's challenges with renewed strength.

00:55:53.560 Ready to revolutionize your prayer life?

00:55:55.480 You can check out the new series, as well as an extensive catalogue of guided prayers, when you download the Hallow app.

00:56:01.820 Just go to Hallow.com slash Jordan and download the Hallow app today for an exclusive three-month trial.

00:56:07.700 That's Hallow.com slash Jordan.

00:56:10.060 Elevate your prayer life today.

00:56:14.980 If the universities are incapable of governing themselves, and that would go along with the faculties of education,

00:56:20.480 and we turn that, we move that responsibility up the political hierarchy to the elected officials,

00:56:27.240 we open the door for mass intervention in the education system for ideological reasons.

00:56:33.060 And that's like, so I just can't see that as, I see that as a solution with a lot of attendant dangers.

00:56:38.860 So I'm wondering, like I said, I understand what Rufo is doing and why, and DeSantis as well,

00:56:46.980 and I think they're both sensible people, but that doesn't mean that it'll always be sensible people doing such things.

00:56:52.920 No, so I would draw a very stark distinction between K-12, between the school system,

00:56:58.260 where you've got minors who are captive, they have to be there,

00:57:01.420 they have to parrot back what the teacher says in order to get a good mark.

00:57:04.320 Look, with the universities where academics have academic freedom, for example,

00:57:08.380 so at university level, I would be opposed to critical race theory bans.

00:57:13.580 I've taught critical race theory.

00:57:14.880 I think you've got adults, they're choosing which courses to take.

00:57:18.100 Now, I do think, however, that state governments or the government has the right to defund,

00:57:25.060 not ban, but to defund, say, well, we're not going to fund this kind of course.

00:57:29.960 Now, that's a political decision, but it's not to say it's banned.

00:57:32.800 You can cross-subsidize that from your more profitable faculties,

00:57:36.560 and I think that will just, it will allow it to be taught if people really want to take it.

00:57:40.920 But, so, I don't think this is practical for universities.

00:57:44.180 Universities, I think there's a different set of solutions,

00:57:46.860 but I think for the school system, it is perfectly legitimate to say we're going to have a politically neutral space.

00:57:51.800 More important than that, sorry, I just want to say one thing,

00:57:54.140 which is you have to teach about the past and the war, slavery, genocide, conquest,

00:57:59.700 but I don't think you should be allowed to teach about American slavery without teaching about, say,

00:58:06.400 indigenous slavery or Ottoman slavery.

00:58:09.380 You shouldn't be able to teach about…

00:58:11.020 Or Roman slavery or Greek slavery or…

00:58:13.540 Yeah, or stolen land, you know, the Americans stealing land from the indigenous

00:58:17.160 without talking about the Iroquois stealing land from the Huron

00:58:21.100 and the Comanche committing, you know, atrocities against the Apache.

00:58:24.900 So, what I mean is we need to have a fully contextualized discussion

00:58:28.540 that all land is stolen land in a way.

00:58:31.200 Because I think part of what the problem is, you know, 70% of, you know, 18 to 24s in the United States

00:58:38.400 believe that, you know, the Native peoples, quote-unquote,

00:58:43.300 the Native Americans lived in peace and harmony prior to the arrival of the Europeans.

00:58:48.360 Right?

00:58:48.660 So, this is exactly the problem is we have a very incomplete…

00:58:51.200 They were all wise stewards of nature and everything was peaceful and harmonious.

00:58:55.960 Yeah, right.

00:58:56.980 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 101.

00:58:58.820 It's so pathetic.

00:59:00.380 Yeah.

00:59:00.660 So, I think that kind of really, that sort of attempt to forge the curriculum.

00:59:05.420 And now, if you look historically, Canada, the U.S., Australia, Britain,

00:59:09.860 conservative parties have tried and failed.

00:59:12.420 They've essentially been outdistanced by the education establishment

00:59:15.580 time and time again on this stuff.

00:59:17.240 That's going to have to change.

00:59:18.780 They're going to have to get hold of the curriculum

00:59:20.500 and insist on a balanced curriculum and political neutrality.

00:59:25.280 Britain has a law on the books that schools cannot politically indoctrinate.

00:59:29.740 But what they do is they say, well, critical race theory is not political.

00:59:34.000 They get around that.

00:59:35.880 Yeah, right.

00:59:37.620 So, then, okay.

00:59:39.160 So, that begs the next, well, that begs the next question.

00:59:42.300 It's like, once the institutions that we're discussing, the faculties of education, let's

00:59:47.980 say, once they're universally corrupted, who the hell has the wisdom or the time in order

00:59:53.860 to manage something like curricula analysis?

00:59:56.860 You know, like, I went to the Republican Governors Association meeting, which was an interesting

01:00:01.260 thing to do.

01:00:02.240 I did that last year.

01:00:03.320 And one of the things that really struck me and kind of strikes me in general about the

01:00:07.240 Republicans, it was a rather dull meeting.

01:00:10.520 They were trying to appeal to their donors, so I expected a bit more spice, but it was

01:00:14.840 dull in a kind of competent administrative manner.

01:00:19.020 So, the governors would get up and they would talk about what were essentially local micro-initiatives

01:00:24.580 that were sensible and practical, but they weren't the sort of cultural transformation

01:00:32.200 vision that's necessary for people to sit down and say, okay, well, the faculties of

01:00:38.640 education are propagandizing.

01:00:40.460 What do we want our children to learn?

01:00:42.520 Like, who in the—Rufo is an exception to this, maybe, but he's a singular sort of person.

01:00:47.780 I don't see widely—you know, I've spent a lot of time talking to political people all

01:00:55.220 across North America, and it isn't obvious to me that I see anywhere the kind of expertise

01:01:00.020 or even the time that's available to manage such a thing.

01:01:04.020 So, how do you envision that happening?

01:01:06.920 Well, I think there are groups—so, the National Association of Scholars has model curriculum,

01:01:12.500 civics curriculum that they're developing.

01:01:14.320 Some of the think tanks, Manhattan Institute as well.

01:01:18.480 So, there are now model curricula, and Britain History Reclaimed is working on this.

01:01:23.060 So, we actually have got model curricula that, say, conservative governments could adopt.

01:01:29.260 They have to have the fight with the educational establishment, which, by the way, they have

01:01:33.420 had and lost—now, you look at, for example, DeSantis, the African-American, the AP, for example,

01:01:40.200 I don't know if you recall, where DeSantis rejected the AP for African-American studies,

01:01:47.040 was filled with critical race theory, forced the critical race theory to come out of that.

01:01:51.960 That's an example of what I'm talking about, is you actually have to get into the weeds

01:01:54.980 of this, and you have to insist, and you have to do inspection—you have to mainstream

01:01:59.040 it into the inspection regime.

01:02:00.680 All this very boring, technocratic, bureaucratic stuff.

01:02:03.460 I just think—so, it's a bit—I use the analogy of Elon Musk taking over Twitter, had so much

01:02:11.220 more of an effect than Gab Parler—you know, those are important.

01:02:15.040 To have these alternatives are important, but I just think we're going to have to get our

01:02:19.100 hands dirty, get into the weeds of the details of the curriculum, and insist on a balanced

01:02:24.980 curriculum, and actually have that fight.

01:02:26.800 Okay, okay, well, let's—fair enough.

01:02:33.240 I'm going to point out a couple of problems again.

01:02:35.700 It's not because I don't agree with you, it's just, like you said, or implied at least,

01:02:39.840 the devil's in the details.

01:02:41.320 I mean, the person who took over Twitter, that was Elon Musk, and he's a complete bloody

01:02:45.360 monster, and he's run many difficult corporations and done impossible things, and so he's like,

01:02:50.980 there's one guy like that, and he fired, what, 80% of the Twitter staff?

01:02:55.440 And nothing happened except the place got better.

01:02:58.800 Now, the Pareto distribution for large corporations or large enterprises kicks in very viciously,

01:03:04.940 and so the Pareto distribution, what would you say, mathematical equations indicate that

01:03:11.440 the square root of the number of people in a given organization do half the work.

01:03:16.260 And so if there's 10,000 educational bureaucrats, then 100 of them do half the work, and that

01:03:21.940 basically means you can fire 80% of them.

01:03:24.060 And if the whole place is corrupt, you probably have to.

01:03:27.280 And, like, I just can't see how the hell the conservatives are going to manage that,

01:03:30.840 because it could easily be that 80% of teachers need to go.

01:03:35.500 Now, I know there are places like the Acton Academy and so forth that are setting up educational

01:03:39.800 institutions where teachers, for example, are much less necessary because the students

01:03:45.240 take a lot of the work on their own.

01:03:46.900 And I understand, as you pointed out, that there are places that are producing model curricula,

01:03:53.560 but I've talked to Republican governors, for example, who've tried to take on the teachers'

01:03:59.720 unions in their own states and failed because they have 50% of the state budgets, and they're

01:04:08.320 insanely powerful.

01:04:09.480 They're much more powerful, generally speaking, than the governors are.

01:04:13.800 Right.

01:04:14.800 Well, so you talk about Florida, and Florida's a good model, but that's one state, you know?

01:04:20.340 And so lay out some more of your ideas for how these things might change.

01:04:25.360 Well, I do think—so it's already having an effect in Florida.

01:04:28.300 I mean, the chilling effect on the CRT bans.

01:04:30.720 And those are being now—I think there are, you know, many red states, and I've lost track

01:04:35.000 of the number.

01:04:35.540 It might be approaching 25 that are rolling this out.

01:04:39.320 And actually, there is compliance.

01:04:40.940 It's not perfect.

01:04:42.160 But I think if the Republican Party in these states is serious, it will invest political

01:04:48.420 capital, and it will demand accountability, and it will ask people to sort of, you know,

01:04:53.100 what are the inspections saying?

01:04:55.040 You know, you have to report to the legislature on progress.

01:04:58.760 And I actually think that process—because I also think most teachers are—I think a

01:05:03.600 lot of teachers are flexible, and actually, teachers are not quite as left-wing, believe

01:05:07.180 it or not, as academics.

01:05:08.880 So there is actually, I think, more receptivity.

01:05:12.100 Now, you also need to open up new avenues into the profession so you don't have to require

01:05:16.240 an education degree.

01:05:18.120 There's all things that you need to do.

01:05:20.460 So there's a whole set of things we can do as liberal democracies.

01:05:24.100 Likewise, with the government, getting CRT and DEI out of government.

01:05:28.420 It's something I think we can do.

01:05:30.260 I think you can—so through political appointments, you have to—you're probably going to have

01:05:34.760 to fire some people.

01:05:36.120 You might have to set up new agencies.

01:05:38.380 So on the UK, we have the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act, where there is a new

01:05:43.200 10-person academic freedom directorate.

01:05:45.860 That's a new institution.

01:05:47.620 Now, I actually think that's a good thing.

01:05:49.700 Now, it could be that Labour comes in and defangs it.

01:05:52.660 Fine.

01:05:52.980 I mean, perhaps to some degree, this becomes a matter of political contestation, because

01:05:58.200 really what all of this gets down to is the only institution that the sensible majority

01:06:04.200 on the cultural side can control is the elected government.

01:06:07.540 That is the only institution that we have.

01:06:09.820 We don't—we haven't got the schools, the universities.

01:06:12.300 We haven't got the civil service, the quangas.

01:06:14.620 What we actually need to do is to use elected government to reform all of these devolved

01:06:21.360 bodies and also institutions relying on public money.

01:06:24.400 We're not trying to indoctrinate them.

01:06:26.140 Our goal is political neutrality and balance.

01:06:29.220 That's it.

01:06:29.820 I think that has to be the goal.

01:06:30.880 And that's maybe where I disagree a bit with Rufo and some others who want to put in a

01:06:34.640 different ethos based on Christianity or Yoram Hazoni.

01:06:38.400 I don't believe that.

01:06:39.780 I believe we can have political neutrality and actually you can chill activists within

01:06:44.960 the academic sector.

01:06:46.200 Okay.

01:06:46.660 So let me ask you about that, because the postmodern rejoinder to your claim is that,

01:06:53.020 well, you claim that your anti-DEI stance, let's say, is politically neutral or that there's

01:06:58.780 even such a thing as political neutrality.

01:07:00.720 But really, all you're trying to do is, what would you call it, sneak in an alternative

01:07:06.160 ethos of power to replace the one that is highlighting the victimized and the marginalized

01:07:11.900 and, you know, pushing things back 50 years into the hands of, like, white Christian conservatives.

01:07:18.040 You know, because for the postmodernists, there's no neutrality.

01:07:20.780 There's only a battleground of power.

01:07:23.220 That's it.

01:07:23.700 And they believe that.

01:07:24.720 And they believe it technically.

01:07:25.960 And certainly the radical leftists not only believe that, but revel in it because it allows

01:07:31.120 them to use power with no guilt.

01:07:33.480 And so why are, on what grounds are you convinced that the claim that institutional neutrality,

01:07:41.060 for example, could be instituted and that it actually constitutes neutrality?

01:07:45.020 What's your philosophical justification for that claim?

01:07:49.280 Well, philosophically, you know, what I approach the whole book with is this idea of human flourishing,

01:07:55.160 a kind of utilitarian argument that says we want to have a certain amount of equality,

01:08:00.420 a certain amount of diversity, a certain amount of inclusion, but only the amount that is optimal

01:08:04.520 to maximize human flourishing in the system.

01:08:08.060 I think we've overshot on those three, and we have to sort of move it back, not back to

01:08:12.200 where it was in 1950, but back a little bit further.

01:08:15.860 And so the idea there is institutional neutrality is critical for people to have trust in the system.

01:08:21.700 Now, we already have, for example, the civil service in Britain is supposed to be neutral.

01:08:27.800 We already have this aspiration.

01:08:29.720 And I think a lot of people, even left liberals, will actually be convinced by it.

01:08:33.720 They're not postmodern in being radically cynical the way that, I mean, some of them are.

01:08:38.680 But I think many people will be won over.

01:08:40.260 If you say, look, what we want is neutrality.

01:08:42.660 You know, you've talked about, you know, American slavery.

01:08:45.260 We want to talk about Ottoman slavery.

01:08:47.120 I think that making that argument can win over some people.

01:08:51.820 And I think a neutrality argument is more winnable than to say,

01:08:55.360 we're going to replace your ethos of woke with our ethos of public religion, to use Hazoni's argument.

01:09:01.860 Right. Okay.

01:09:02.440 So you still think that there's enough of a centrist consensus around what neutrality constitutes

01:09:09.480 for that to still be a compelling argument to people, even the left, the more liberal progressive types.

01:09:16.740 Well, you'd think at least they'd be self-interested enough to understand that neutrality throughout sequential elections

01:09:25.400 might be a hell of a lot better than domination by the radical conservative right, which is certainly a possibility.

01:09:31.740 And that's certainly something that's emerging in Europe and could easily, well, who knows how things will play out,

01:09:36.820 but it's popping up its head in many, many places in Europe, right?

01:09:40.920 The last country to go was the Netherlands.

01:09:42.620 So that's what Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, most of Eastern Europe, like this is starting to happen very, very widely and could certainly continue.

01:09:52.140 So neutrality, you'd think across sequential elections would be the best policy for everybody if we had enough of a consensus to define it.

01:10:00.040 Well, 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,

01:10:06.280 it's the public in all three societies leans about two to one against what I would call the woke position.

01:10:11.880 And that could be teaching kids that Canada is a racist country or, you know, that there are many genders or whatever.

01:10:18.920 So it's roughly two to one against across 50 questions, let's say.

01:10:22.320 In a democracy, the democracy gets to set the curriculum.

01:10:26.440 I think the majority of the population would be on board the idea of political neutrality and balance as they see it.

01:10:32.860 And I think we have the numbers to institute that now.

01:10:36.440 I 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.

01:10:44.200 Right, that's for sure.

01:11:14.200 So these are obvious issues to go after.

01:11:16.820 Why haven't conservatives gone after them?

01:11:19.240 Because they're scared of being accused of being a racist.

01:11:21.200 I'll give you another example, which is affirmative action.

01:11:24.960 Red states, only four red states have got bans on affirmative action, 13 have bans on abortion.

01:11:30.480 Now, abortion is a relatively unpopular, and bans on abortion are relatively unpopular.

01:11:36.020 They may have a one-third support across the U.S. population.

01:11:39.820 Bans on affirmative action might have a two-thirds support.

01:11:42.540 And yet, there's very little of it in red states.

01:11:46.100 How do we explain that?

01:11:47.560 Well, we explain it, first of all, by the fact that this issue has not been important enough for conservative politicians.

01:11:53.740 Hanania does a good job of talking about that.

01:11:56.360 And also that the abortion lobby, the gun lobby, they're very organized.

01:11:59.800 You know, they put pressure on Republican politicians between elections.

01:12:03.860 The anti-affirmative action lobby is totally disorganized and cannot hold conservative politicians' feet to the fire if they do nothing about it.

01:12:12.700 That has to change that organization between elections.

01:12:15.580 We have to be putting much more pressure on our politicians to raise the importance of this issue and to deliver on that issue.

01:12:23.120 Now, that may be changing.

01:12:24.280 Well, I've seen in Canada—well, I talk 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.

01:12:36.840 Ten years ago, the typical conservative was terrified in Canada of saying anything that smacked of social conservatism.

01:12:45.540 And there was a very specific reason for that.

01:12:47.820 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.

01:12:58.660 Like, as an individual, right?

01:13:01.060 They'd be targeted and destroyed.

01:13:03.140 And that was very effective.

01:13:05.100 And 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.

01:13:19.560 But radical leftist psychopaths feel none.

01:13:22.900 And they can use guilt as a weapon.

01:13:24.660 And conservatives are very sensitive to that.

01:13:26.540 So you get that combination of clear threat, because it is no fun to be mobbed.

01:13:31.440 It's really, really hard on people.

01:13:32.960 It drives them to—not only to distraction, but often to suicide.

01:13:37.060 You lose your job.

01:13:38.100 You lose your friends.

01:13:38.980 You lose your reputation.

01:13:41.160 No one has enough courage to stand up beside you.

01:13:45.300 The radicals had the conservatives cowed completely.

01:13:47.960 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 the probability that you could be accused of being a racist was, like, super high.

01:14:03.240 It's going to happen instantly.

01:14:04.420 Right, but I think this is where you have what political scientists would call an Everton window of acceptable debate, right?

01:14:11.200 And if you're outside that window, you can be canceled.

01:14:14.040 But you can be attacked by the press.

01:14:16.340 But what we've actually seen in Europe and in the U.S. is you take an issue like immigration.

01:14:21.260 That was a taboo.

01:14:22.300 In many European societies, that's no longer a taboo.

01:14:25.860 So 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 in 2014.

01:14:38.400 He was attacked in the media as a racist.

01:14:40.800 Okay, he's shut down.

01:14:42.100 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.

01:14:49.120 Again, U.S., Trump was the only candidate of 17 primary candidates in 2015-16 to make the border a signature issue.

01:14:58.640 He was willing to go there.

01:15:00.120 Now, 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.

01:15:07.580 But the Everton window is open quite a bit.

01:15:09.820 And so in Canada, likewise, we're going to need that.

01:15:13.160 Now, we've seen it a bit on the gender issue.

01:15:14.840 Premier Higgs in New Brunswick, we've seen Scott Moe in Saskatchewan.

01:15:17.820 That's the beginning of an opening up of a converse.

01:15:20.800 You need a brave politician like Higgs to break the ice.

01:15:24.160 The next thing that we need to see from a Canadian politician is to break the ice on this hoax of the mass graves.

01:15:32.200 That has—somebody has to sort of say the emperor's new clothes on this thing because there is no evidence of this.

01:15:39.120 And it underpins an entire garment-rending attack on national history, on the founders of Canada, et cetera.

01:15:45.080 Now, who is going to take—who's going to throw the first stone in that?

01:15:48.240 I don't know, but it has to happen.

01:15:50.240 And I think I would argue that, in fact, the population will follow you.

01:15:54.180 Because, for example, in the surveys I've done, by two to one, Canadians do not want Sir John A. Macdonald's statues removed.

01:16:01.140 They support the idea.

01:16:02.980 Yes, he was a creature of his time.

01:16:05.720 No, this idea that the residential schools are genocide, et cetera.

01:16:09.060 I mean, I just think somebody needs to go after that.

01:16:12.480 Have you had a chance to talk to Pierre Polyev, the new leader of the Conservative Party in Canada?

01:16:17.960 I haven't.

01:16:19.720 I'm a little concerned.

01:16:21.500 I mean, I certainly think, obviously, that Trudeau was a disaster for all the issues we're talking about.

01:16:27.500 But I'm worried that Polyev has only largely talked about economics and only reluctantly about any cultural issues.

01:16:34.500 Now, I get it.

01:16:35.800 He's well ahead in the polls.

01:16:37.180 Why endanger that?

01:16:38.340 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:16:39.280 Priorities to get Trudeau up.

01:16:40.180 There is some of that.

01:16:41.440 Yeah.

01:16:42.080 My sense is, though, you know, my sense is in Canada that the Conservatives are a lot different lot than they were 15 years ago.

01:16:49.480 Like, Daniel Smith has a spine.

01:16:52.020 Scott Moe has a spine.

01:16:53.560 Higgs has a spine.

01:16:55.340 So does Polyev.

01:16:58.020 Polyev isn't pushing the cultural issues at the moment.

01:17:01.580 And I think it's partly because, and I think this is actually wisdom to some degree, if your opponent is busy slaughtering himself, you might as well just stand and watch.

01:17:11.800 Well, seriously, there's not, you know, there's no sense causing a tremendous amount of trouble while that's occurring.

01:17:18.040 But the Conservatives are much less intimidated in Canada than they were 15 years ago, like a lot.

01:17:23.940 And 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.

01:17:32.180 I think that's right.

01:17:33.500 Yeah.

01:17:34.220 I 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.

01:17:41.280 If, for example, he backtracks on defunding the CBC, if he doesn't do anything, say anything on immigration, on culture wars.

01:17:51.320 I think that, you know, 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.

01:18:03.120 So that's my worry.

01:18:04.220 But I don't know is the honest answer.

01:18:06.160 I don't know him or his cabinet.

01:18:08.040 So let me, let me ask you a more personal question, maybe, and then I'll see if there's some, anything else you want to talk about on the YouTube side of this discussion.

01:18:18.560 Does it, like, would you characterize yourself politically?

01:18:22.320 Where do you characterize yourself politically, first of all?

01:18:24.860 That's the first question.

01:18:25.380 Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I don't think I'm down the, so I think economically I'm sort of centrist.

01:18:31.600 You know, I have many centrist views, I believe, in the welfare state.

01:18:35.000 I actually think tackling climate change is actually a worthwhile thing to a degree in using nuclear and using a whole bunch of other.

01:18:42.380 However, on the cultural side, I think I'm very much a Conservative, and I think we are in danger of losing free speech and truth.

01:18:49.760 We're in danger of losing national cohesion.

01:18:52.740 And so in a whole series of issues, I'd say I'd probably lean Conservative for that reason.

01:18:57.420 Okay.

01:18:57.640 Is that a surprise to you?

01:18:59.640 I mean, you're a rare academic, right?

01:19:02.020 I mean, it's not like there's no people like you, and there are a lot more of them than there used to be.

01:19:07.300 You know, I'm in touch regularly with a group that we communicate by email that's got, like, a hundred people on it.

01:19:12.540 And there's more people who've been, well, many of them kind of slipped surprisingly into the Conservative camp over years.

01:19:22.000 But it's rare.

01:19:23.060 It's still comparatively rare.

01:19:24.560 And it's particularly rare in your field, I would say, although that's also the case in mine.

01:19:29.220 So, like, why is that the case with you?

01:19:31.780 And how did you come to these conclusions?

01:19:35.040 And how did you manage any degree of success while having them?

01:19:40.100 Yeah, it's a tough one, as you probably know yourself, you know.

01:19:43.380 I mean, anyone right of center is 5%, perhaps, in the soft social sciences.

01:19:49.220 And that's what the surveys seem to show.

01:19:51.700 Now, I haven't changed my views, really.

01:19:54.420 Not really.

01:19:55.160 I can't think of any major change that I've had in my views since I was in my 20s.

01:20:00.560 But, yeah, you keep your head down.

01:20:02.100 You sort of write things that are not controversial, that are in fields, that are not political.

01:20:08.660 And that's what I did for many years, until about 2018 or thereabouts.

01:20:13.420 I was a full professor.

01:20:15.260 I was head of department.

01:20:16.380 I felt that I kind of did what I wanted to do in terms of publishing.

01:20:20.860 I published in the major university presses and journals.

01:20:24.400 And so I just thought now's the time to actually, you know, with the populist moment and the rise of Brexit and Trump,

01:20:29.540 I sort of, you know, I was talking about why I think these things happened in a different way.

01:20:35.140 And I was also more openly critical of the social justice movement.

01:20:37.980 And that is really what got me under attack from Twitter mobs, open letters, internal investigations, right,

01:20:45.640 which are prompted by people inside the university and outside who simply have to bombard your Twitter feed and, you know,

01:20:52.700 put in a complaint against you and then you have to, yeah.

01:20:56.540 Okay, well, I think what we'll do, and I'll let everybody watching and listening know this too,

01:21:00.620 I want to talk to you for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side.

01:21:04.720 Unless, let's not step into what happened to you personally.

01:21:08.240 Let's do that on the Daily Wire side.

01:21:10.320 And I guess what I would like to do, are there other issues that you're working on now

01:21:16.840 or that are germane to this new book that you would like to close with, let's say?

01:21:22.940 Are 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?

01:21:28.860 Well, I just say a couple of things.

01:21:30.500 I 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.

01:21:40.120 And one of them is, you know, the populist right is going to do very well in Europe in the European elections coming up in a couple of weeks or thereabouts.

01:21:48.200 This is really a—so it's not just, you know, about free speech and truth when we talk about cancel culture.

01:21:54.940 It has downstream effects.

01:21:56.560 If you can't talk about immigration, you're not going to get control of your border.

01:22:00.920 You're not going to get to—you're not going to be able to deport people.

01:22:03.500 And then you're going to have populists rising up because the mainstream won't touch it.

01:22:07.220 I use the example of Soviet Department's story.

01:22:09.740 You can only sell black pants.

01:22:11.520 Well, then you're going to have somebody popping up and selling blue jeans.

01:22:15.320 So 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.

01:22:24.580 So if you care about polarization and populism, you have to have free speech, which means we have to deal with woke.

01:22:30.980 And 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.

01:22:51.300 So 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.

01:23:00.120 And they forget that it has many, many effects on a lot of issues that a lot of voters care a lot about.

01:23:05.640 So I just think it's a much bigger thing.

01:23:07.260 In a way, it's the future of our civilization.

01:23:10.420 It's not just a little culture war.

01:23:12.840 Yeah, right, exactly.

01:23:13.780 Well, 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.

01:23:25.780 And 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.

01:23:34.440 And so, yes, you're absolutely right, in my opinion, that it isn't about economics with the culture war being a distraction.

01:23:44.020 That'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.

01:23:52.160 It's not a consequence of natural resources.

01:23:54.420 In fact, the natural resource curse is one of the economic facts that seems to disprove that entirely.

01:24:00.100 Countries that are rich in natural resources are often, in fact, statistically more often, not likely to be rich, because they become corrupt, for example.

01:24:09.840 You need an ethos, and an ethos makes you wealthy, and that's what happened in Japan, for example.

01:24:15.220 And the default interaction between Japanese citizens is one of trust and honesty, and so Japan can be filthy rich in the absence of any natural resources at all.

01:24:25.080 And so there's no culture war independent of economics.

01:24:27.960 That's foolish, is if we get the culture war wrong, we're going to destroy the economic system.

01:24:33.160 And 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.

01:24:40.580 And so this—and I think you're right, in consequence, about the libertarians.

01:24:45.340 It's like you need a certain kind of cultural consensus so that less government is even an issue.

01:24:57.260 And it's not going to be less government.

01:24:59.680 It's going to be better distributed responsibility, and that's not the same thing at all.

01:25:04.540 Like, right, because the libertarian ethos only works when you have a citizenry that's capable of picking up governance on their own, to take that responsibility.

01:25:14.600 Then libertarianism is fine.

01:25:16.120 But if the culture war has destroyed that responsible ethos, less government is not a solution.

01:25:22.780 It just lets the ideologues win.

01:25:25.060 Well, exactly.

01:25:26.780 I 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.

01:25:34.920 If we have more polarization—polarization means you can't enact the right economic policies because each party is sort of wrapping that policy into its ideology.

01:25:44.920 People can't be rational and detached, right?

01:25:47.320 And 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, civil service, schools, corporations, you are actually going to cause half the citizenry to lose trust in those institutions.

01:26:03.580 And 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.

01:26:12.220 Without that basis of trust, if that's being torn apart, as you say, by culture wars and polarization.

01:26:19.280 And so I just—I'm trying to appeal to the sane left to say, look, you cannot just conduct your politics by infiltrating institutions.

01:26:27.180 If you want to win that battle in the court of public opinion, that's fine.

01:26:31.000 But to try and do it surreptitiously by infiltration is actually eroding the trust in society.

01:26:36.380 And by the way, you can see it on the right, too.

01:26:38.780 The right has kind of won over more positions on the Supreme Court.

01:26:41.720 So what do we see?

01:26:42.720 The left's trust in the Supreme Court as an institution falls.

01:26:46.180 And that's what happens when you politicize.

01:26:48.320 And 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.

01:27:01.280 Yeah, yeah.

01:27:02.280 All right, sir.

01:27:03.260 For everyone watching and listening, I'm going to continue this conversation on the Daily Wire side.

01:27:07.940 I'm going to talk to Eric more about what happened to him personally with regard to his experience with cancel culture.

01:27:16.240 Because, well, these things are made much more realistic when they're nailed down to actual experience.

01:27:22.520 And so if you'd be willing to join us there, please feel welcome and invited to do so.

01:27:27.620 Thank you very much, sir.

01:27:28.900 Be nice to talk to you again at some point.

01:27:30.860 I'd like to delve into the issue of fundamentals.

01:27:37.420 Like 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?

01:27:49.920 As a conceptual structure to push back against the woke nonsense.

01:27:54.100 And, you know, that seems plausible to me, possibly.

01:27:59.660 There might be enough trust left for that.

01:28:01.180 I'd like to have a conversation with you at some point about what the sacred fundamentals perhaps actually have to be.

01:28:08.520 You know, what are the ones that are lurking underneath that residual consensus?

01:28:12.340 Because I think you can be utilitarian when the implicit consensus still exists.

01:28:18.160 But the question is, you know, are we so fractionated that that's not the case anymore?

01:28:22.400 Or hopefully not.

01:28:24.520 Yeah, you know, I 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.

01:28:36.780 What we have now is we've got cultural socialism, and we need that sort of cultural wealth perspective.

01:28:44.240 It's a bit like the economists always talk about the pie.

01:28:47.840 The more equally you cut it up, the more it shrinks or the less it grows.

01:28:51.280 So you need an optimal balance between equality, redistribution, and growth.

01:28:56.020 I 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.

01:29:05.360 So you may—and maybe a white man can't write about a black woman, and that impoverishes literature.

01:29:10.460 You can't borrow.

01:29:11.880 That's cultural appropriate.

01:29:12.920 I mean, so essentially we get a poorer culture the more we push cultural socialism.

01:29:18.340 And so again, I think we need this sort of new vision, which is really about human flourishing and overcoming cultural socialism.

01:29:26.180 We'll have some concern with equality, as we did with economic equality, but it's not going to dominate the whole thing.

01:29:31.800 Right now, I feel we've got cultural socialism unbounded with no guardrails, and that's something that we're going to have to address.

01:29:40.300 All right, sir.

01:29:41.660 Thank you, everybody, for watching and listening.

01:29:44.780 As I mentioned a few minutes ago, I'm going to continue talking to Dr. Kaufman on The Daily Wire side.

01:29:51.240 Please feel free to join us there.

01:29:53.340 To the film crew here in northern Alberta, thank you very much for your help.

01:29:56.860 Where are you, Eric, at the moment?

01:29:59.400 I'm in London, actually.

01:30:01.680 You're in London.

01:30:02.320 Yeah.

01:30:02.760 Okay, well.

01:30:04.240 You're in northern Alberta.

01:30:05.040 Whereabouts in northern Alberta?

01:30:07.780 A little bit.

01:30:08.700 I'm in a town called Fairview, which is near Grand Prairie.

01:30:12.000 It's about 400 miles north of Edmonton.

01:30:14.420 Right.

01:30:14.780 I lived in Peace River for you.

01:30:16.200 I think I mentioned that once.

01:30:17.500 Oh, okay.

01:30:17.640 So you know exactly where it is.

01:30:20.080 All right.

01:30:20.460 All right, sir.

01:30:21.280 Well, thank you very much.

01:30:22.220 And good luck with your book and with your continued efforts.

01:30:26.320 And thank you to everyone watching and listening.

01:30:30.460 Thanks, Jordan.

453. Potential Solutions to Fix Mass Indoctrination ｜ Eric Kaufmann [1000658097527]

Summary

Transcript