The New York Times hired an Asian-American reporter named Sarah Jong and she has been accused of racist and sexist tweets. The left has defended her, and the right has been quick to point out that she can't possibly be racist because only white people can be racist.
00:00:37.520The left has defended her tweets and her and the decision not to fire her based on the idea that she can't possibly be racist even when she is racist because she's not white and only white people can be racist.
00:00:50.620And we'll talk about that in a minute.
00:00:52.200But we must first admit that it's actually not exactly accurate to say that these tweets resurfaced.
00:01:01.720It's not like they were at the bottom of the ocean and they happened to float to the top and people said, oh, what are these racist tweets floating here?
00:01:47.940But they kind of take turns being outraged or pretending to be outraged by things.
00:01:52.620Every once in a blue moon, you'll see, and it's very inspiring to see this, where the outrage mobs can come together and pretend to be outraged by the same thing.
00:02:02.540But usually it's a kind of back and forth thing.
00:02:05.980And the outrage mob in modern America is very different from the classic pitchfork mob that maybe you would have seen in the 18th century or something like that, where the villagers would actually grab pitchforks because they were upset by something or other.
00:02:29.100The modern outrage mob, when you look at them grabbing the pitchforks and you look at the expression on their face, they're all super happy.
00:03:09.200And I think this is part of the reason why the New York Times has decided not to fire Sarah Jong because they realize that all the people who are pretending to be upset aren't really upset.
00:03:20.240So there's no reason to take them seriously.
00:03:21.820And also probably 95% of them are not New York Times subscribers.
00:03:24.880So what, they have nothing to really hold over your head.
00:03:55.880So there's no reason to take their outrage seriously.
00:03:59.140Obviously, these tweets are 100% completely racist.
00:04:01.940But I'm not a fan of this thing that we're doing now, where both sides are only interested in personally destroying members of the other side.
00:04:14.680And I'm especially not a fan of it because it's so disingenuous.
00:04:46.480I think as conservatives, we really have to decide if we want to be right, not just on the right.
00:04:53.020Do we want to be right or do we want to score points in this weird, bizarre game that we're playing?
00:05:01.320And if we want to be right, then we can't behave exactly as the left behaves.
00:05:05.880The problem is that now when the leftist outrage mob comes for someone, the right can no longer sermonize about how the left hates free speech and it weaponizes outrage and so on and so on and so on because the right does exactly the same thing.
00:05:19.760And you want to talk about scoring points.
00:05:21.200Because it used to be the outrage mob thing up until, I don't know, last couple of years, the outrage mob phenomenon in modern America used to be kind of an exclusively left wing phenomenon.
00:05:31.220So and that was a really good point that the right could make to our own benefit.
00:05:36.340We could say, look how they look what they do.
00:05:48.280And I think that that was a very powerful point that we could make.
00:05:52.460And I think it caused a lot of people, maybe not to come over to the right, but it caused a lot of people to shy away from the left and say, I don't want any part of that because that's not who I am.
00:07:02.600Now it's just a battle for control between two leftist factions, between two factions of morally relativistic ends justify the means disingenuous people.
00:07:15.300Just two factions of that same type of thing.
00:07:38.240She was on CNN last night and she said that John is is not and cannot be racist because racism is prejudice plus power.
00:07:47.700And that's the definition of racism that the left has been using for decades.
00:07:52.000Where did they get this definition from?
00:07:53.980Well, this was a definition of racism that was first invented out of whole cloth by an obscure leftist in 1970.
00:08:02.080Her name is Patricia Bedol and she wrote a book published in 1970 titled Developing New Perspectives on Race, an innovative multimedia social studies curriculum in racism awareness for the secondary level.
00:08:30.420So any time a leftist uses this definition and you ask them where they got it from, if they know what they're talking about and they're honest, they would have to say, well, Patricia Bedol said it.
00:08:48.020So if Patricia Bedol decided to define a square as a shape with three sides, well, then geometry must change because Patricia Bedol has has decreed it from on high.
00:09:24.740The dictionary definition of racism from Webster goes like this.
00:09:29.700A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority or inferiority, of course, of a particular race.
00:09:42.020Now, there's nothing in there about power or institutions or anything, because that has no bearing on the meaning of the word.
00:09:52.940So you have what the dictionary says versus what some random leftist said in 1970.
00:09:58.480Which is the more authoritative source here?
00:10:02.900Number two, this definition absolves people of racism on the basis that their racism is warranted.
00:10:12.600So it says that a black person can't be racist, essentially because a black person has every reason to hate white people, given that he's been the victim of historical oppression and so on.
00:10:23.920But that just means that the left is guilty of racism, even in defining racism.
00:10:31.720It says that white people deserve to be hated.
00:10:35.360That's essentially their definition of racism, which is racist.
00:10:38.940So they have injected racism into the definition of racism, which is kind of interesting.
00:10:45.940Number three, the left's notion of racism is grounded in this really ridiculous idea of what constitutes institutional power.
00:10:56.680So they have arbitrarily connected racism to institutional power and said that in order for it to be racist, it depends on this idea of institutional power.
00:11:06.780Now, that in itself is nonsensical, but then they take it a step further, and they have defined institutional power in a way that is also nonsensical.
00:11:16.240So we have two levels of nonsense to cut through here.
00:11:19.660They say that institutional power is by definition white, and all white people benefit from it, and all white people have more institutional power than all black people.
00:11:32.760This is obviously madness, because it would mean that Barack Obama, when he was president of the United States and the most powerful man in the world, had less institutional power than me.
00:11:47.180It would mean that Oprah Winfrey has less institutional power than a white guy in a trailer park.
00:11:54.420So if Oprah Winfrey went to a trailer park and took out a megaphone and just started shouting anti-white racial slurs into it at all the people in the trailer park, it would not be racist, because all of those people in the trailer park have more power than a billionaire celebrity.
00:12:14.320That's, according to the left, that's the way it goes, which is idiotic, obviously.
00:12:19.660Number four, this idea of racism removes, and this is really the point, it removes all individuality and turns people into just sort of faceless representatives of their race.
00:12:34.760And it causes us all to kind of fade into the collective, which is always the left's aim, of course.
00:12:42.520And that's how you can argue that Obama has less institutional power than some random white dude.
00:12:49.720And Oprah has less institutional power than a guy in a trailer, and Eric Holder, when he was running the DOJ, had less institutional power than a beat cop in Charleston, West Virginia.
00:13:01.440Or even, like, if you work for a Fortune 500 company, and you're an intern working in the mailroom, and you're white, you have more institutional power than the black CEO of the company.
00:13:19.080Or if you're, let's say you're a white guy in prison, and a black guy is the warden of the prison, you have more power in the jail cell than the guy who's running the prison.
00:13:31.920Listen, this is the left's idea of, it's an idea so crazy, so stupid, so self-evidently nonsensical that you can't even, you can hardly even dissect it.
00:13:46.700You can hardly even debunk it because it's so insane that there's nothing, it's like either you realize just by looking at it how crazy this is, or there's nothing I can do for you.
00:13:56.500But how does this work? I mean, how can they draw this conclusion?
00:14:01.280Well, it's because they see Oprah and Eric Holder and Obama and the black prison warden and the black CEO, they see them not as individual human beings, but as black people.
00:14:15.260That's all, they're just black people.
00:14:19.700And the white person is not a person, not an individual, he's just a representative of whiteness, that's all.
00:14:27.620So although Oprah is a billionaire, and one of the most powerful people in the world, she has less power than, she has less power than a guy at a trailer park, because she's a non-individual, she's a non-human.
00:14:41.120From the leftist perspective, from the collectivist mentality of the left, Oprah is kind of just sort of a vessel of blackness.
00:14:49.820She's not a person, she is a vessel of blackness.
00:14:53.800And the white guy in the trailer park is not a person, he's a vessel of whiteness.
00:14:58.500And so when you compare the two, you don't have Jim Bob in the trailer park versus Oprah, the billionaire celebrity, you have a vessel of blackness versus a vessel of whiteness.
00:15:07.000And whiteness always is more powerful.
00:15:10.480And therefore, blackness can never be racist at whiteness.
00:15:25.820And it's also racist in and of itself.
00:15:27.860Because remember that the Webster Dictionary definition of racism is to see race as the primary determinant of a person's traits and characteristics.
00:15:40.080And that's exactly what the left does.
00:15:42.720So their definition of racism and their ways of looking at race are themselves racist.
00:15:49.740Fifth thing, notice the circular logic here.
00:15:52.940So the left constantly blames white people for being racist, and accuses us of being the only racists in the country, while at the same time claiming that by definition, through no fault of our own, individually, we're the only ones who can be racist.
00:16:09.020And we're all racist just by virtue of our skin color, no matter what we think individually.
00:16:32.640Where they, on one hand, they're not, they're essentially saying, it's no fault of your own that you're racist, because it's just, you were born that way.
00:16:41.840But on the other hand, they still want to blame you for it, and cut you down, and use it as evidence of your lack of moral character, and so on and so forth.
00:17:32.140I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this.
00:17:33.600I just think it's important to note that when we talk about institutional discrimination, for the most part, institutional discrimination is certainly not legal in the United States anymore.
00:17:48.580And for the most part, it doesn't exist in any legal, official capacity.
00:17:53.440But there is one form of official and legal institutional discrimination.
00:17:59.080There's only one form I can think of that still exists in America, and that is affirmative action.
00:18:04.960That is the definition of institutional discrimination.
00:18:08.600It is an institutional policy to discriminate against white people, especially white men.
00:18:14.680So really, if institutional discrimination is the determining factor for racism, then actually, by that logic, you could argue that white people are the only ones who can't be racist, because we're the only ones who officially, legally, can still be the subject of institutional discrimination.
00:18:33.660So, I mean, I could give you 15 or 16 more reasons why this whole idea of racism is absurd, but I think that's enough, and we'll just leave it there.