The Matt Walsh Show - August 06, 2018


Ep. 77 - The Left Claims Only White People Can Be Racist


Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

170.27661

Word count

3,197

Sentence count

231

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

14

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 You've probably heard about Sarah Jong.
00:00:01.800 She's an Asian-American reporter who was just hired by the New York Times.
00:00:05.220 And she, after being hired, some old tweets of hers resurfaced.
00:00:10.460 Lots of tweets where she is blatantly racist and sexist. 1.00
00:00:13.660 She repeatedly insults white people and men. 0.99
00:00:16.640 She compares white people to goblins.
00:00:18.760 She says that she enjoys being cruel to old white men.
00:00:22.600 She compares white people to dogs.
00:00:25.420 She calls them all kinds of names and on and on and on and on.
00:00:28.440 And there are a ton of tweets like this.
00:00:31.280 Not just a few, but it's like quite a bit.
00:00:34.800 And the Times is sticking by her.
00:00:36.320 They're not going to fire her.
00:00:37.520 The 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.
00:00:50.620 And we'll talk about that in a minute.
00:00:52.200 But we must first admit that it's actually not exactly accurate to say that these tweets resurfaced.
00:01:01.520 Okay?
00:01:01.720 It'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?
00:01:09.020 Let's take a look.
00:01:10.000 No, they were more like excavated by people on the right who were looking for another head on the trophy case.
00:01:16.240 So they went and they dug up these tweets.
00:01:19.840 They went searching for them.
00:01:22.800 And they were dug up by the right's own outrage mob.
00:01:26.840 You see that both sides have an outrage mob now.
00:01:30.460 And both outrage mobs operate the same way.
00:01:34.380 They both are just constantly looking for reasons to be outraged.
00:01:38.480 And they kind of take turns being outraged.
00:01:41.980 It seems like it's almost planned.
00:01:43.740 I don't know if they get together and they say, okay, it's your turn to be outraged.
00:01:46.660 Now it's my turn.
00:01:47.260 I'm not sure.
00:01:47.940 But they kind of take turns being outraged or pretending to be outraged by things.
00:01:52.620 Every 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.
00:02:01.100 Every once in a while that happens.
00:02:02.540 But usually it's a kind of back and forth thing.
00:02:05.980 And 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.
00:02:25.260 A similar kind of thing happens now.
00:02:27.440 But here's the difference.
00:02:29.100 The 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.
00:02:38.380 They're so happy to be outraged.
00:02:40.220 So they're grabbing the pitchforks and they're going, we're so outraged.
00:02:43.720 Oh my gosh, we're outraged.
00:02:45.720 Hey, everybody, let's be outraged.
00:02:47.100 We have a reason to be outraged.
00:02:48.180 We found a reason.
00:02:48.940 Another one.
00:02:49.720 Yes, we're outraged.
00:02:51.280 So that's what they're doing.
00:02:52.560 They're so happy to be outraged.
00:02:54.580 They're not actually outraged at all.
00:02:55.940 They're just, they're so, it's almost kind of sweet, really.
00:02:59.660 I wish that I could ever be as happy about something as the outrage mob is about their reasons to be outraged.
00:03:06.760 Outrage makes them so happy.
00:03:09.200 And 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.
00:03:20.240 So there's no reason to take them seriously.
00:03:21.820 And also probably 95% of them are not New York Times subscribers.
00:03:24.880 So what, they have nothing to really hold over your head.
00:03:27.480 They can't do anything to you.
00:03:29.400 And this is what I say to, anytime this happens where, you know, someone is, is an employee of a company is the target of the outrage mob.
00:03:40.000 And then the outrage mob tries to get them fired from the company.
00:03:42.140 I always say to the company, whoever the company is, like, there's no reason to respond to this.
00:03:47.560 These people are not really upset.
00:03:49.940 They're not.
00:03:50.500 They don't actually care at all about this.
00:03:53.560 They're really happy, actually.
00:03:55.880 So there's no reason to take their outrage seriously.
00:03:59.140 Obviously, these tweets are 100% completely racist.
00:04:01.940 But 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.
00:04:14.680 And I'm especially not a fan of it because it's so disingenuous.
00:04:18.600 And everyone knows it.
00:04:20.400 We're all taking part in, like, this game.
00:04:23.200 And we all know it's a game.
00:04:25.400 We all know that no one cares about any of this stuff, really.
00:04:29.420 Yeah, Sarah Jong is definitely racist, but I don't care. 0.96
00:04:32.280 Do you really care about that?
00:04:33.740 No one cares.
00:04:34.660 I don't even know.
00:04:35.140 I didn't know who she was up until three days ago.
00:04:37.540 And now we're all supposed to care.
00:04:38.700 Oh, my gosh, this random person said racist things.
00:04:41.500 I'm so upset.
00:04:42.860 No, I'm not upset.
00:04:43.720 Neither are you.
00:04:44.240 Nobody cares.
00:04:44.920 No one cares.
00:04:46.480 I think as conservatives, we really have to decide if we want to be right, not just on the right.
00:04:53.020 Do we want to be right or do we want to score points in this weird, bizarre game that we're playing?
00:05:01.320 And if we want to be right, then we can't behave exactly as the left behaves.
00:05:05.880 The 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.
00:05:19.760 And you want to talk about scoring points.
00:05:21.200 Because 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.
00:05:31.220 So and that was a really good point that the right could make to our own benefit.
00:05:36.340 We could say, look how they look what they do.
00:05:37.920 You know, they hate free speech.
00:05:39.220 They don't want anyone to express their views.
00:05:41.400 They weaponize outrage.
00:05:42.740 They just try to personally destroy and shut people down.
00:05:45.400 They're disingenuous.
00:05:46.780 They're dishonest about it.
00:05:48.280 And I think that that was a very powerful point that we could make.
00:05:52.460 And 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.
00:06:02.100 I don't want to do that.
00:06:03.800 You know, I'm not into that.
00:06:04.980 And so it was a very powerful thing we had in our corner that now we've lost because we're doing the exact same thing.
00:06:13.040 Look, I'll admit this.
00:06:14.060 OK, I like being right.
00:06:16.440 I really enjoy it.
00:06:17.940 I'm not saying I like being on the right because I don't see much of a difference between the two sides anymore.
00:06:22.560 I just like being right.
00:06:23.720 I want to be right.
00:06:24.660 I really do.
00:06:25.320 I just I much prefer to be right.
00:06:28.100 I hate being wrong.
00:06:29.260 I'd prefer to be right.
00:06:30.060 And that's why I really it's just it's so sad to me that the right has decided to stop being right in our effort to defeat the left.
00:06:39.440 We've become just like them, which is really the opposite of defeating them.
00:06:42.940 The whole point of the culture war is to decide whose philosophy, whose vision, whose way of doing things is going to define the culture.
00:06:52.800 Well, clearly the left has won that battle because everybody has adopted the left's vision and method and philosophy.
00:06:59.700 There's no competition anymore.
00:07:01.480 Everyone's on the left.
00:07:02.600 Now it's just a battle for control between two leftist factions, between two factions of morally relativistic ends justify the means disingenuous people.
00:07:15.300 Just two factions of that same type of thing.
00:07:18.540 And to me, that's very sad.
00:07:20.340 All right.
00:07:21.140 So that's that.
00:07:22.640 But what about the racism expressed by John?
00:07:25.540 Well, we're told, as I said, that she can't be racist because she isn't white.
00:07:29.700 She doesn't have institutional power, we're told.
00:07:33.020 Therefore, she can't be racist.
00:07:34.340 A Democratic operative was on CNN last night.
00:07:36.700 Simone Sanders is her name. 0.55
00:07:38.240 She was on CNN last night and she said that John is is not and cannot be racist because racism is prejudice plus power.
00:07:47.700 And that's the definition of racism that the left has been using for decades.
00:07:52.000 Where did they get this definition from?
00:07:53.980 Well, this was a definition of racism that was first invented out of whole cloth by an obscure leftist in 1970.
00:08:02.080 Her 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.
00:08:15.000 Classic book.
00:08:15.640 I'm sure we've all read it, right?
00:08:17.420 Well, that's the first time that this definition of racism, this idea that racism is is prejudice plus power.
00:08:24.920 And so you can't be racist unless you also have institutional power.
00:08:28.260 This was invented by Patricia Bedol.
00:08:30.420 So 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.
00:08:41.520 That's how we know it.
00:08:43.100 I mean, if Patricia Bedol said it, then it must be true.
00:08:46.000 Right.
00:08:46.500 Patricia Bedol.
00:08:47.420 I mean, she has.
00:08:48.020 So 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.
00:09:01.680 It's ridiculous.
00:09:02.500 Of course, she made up this definition, put it in a in a book.
00:09:05.740 And the left has ever since pretended that the meaning of the word has inherently changed because Patricia Bedol said so.
00:09:14.800 But there are a few problems with this definition.
00:09:16.860 OK, let's go through them one by one.
00:09:18.640 Number one.
00:09:19.560 Well, as we've covered, it's completely and totally made up.
00:09:22.700 And that to me is a problem.
00:09:24.740 The dictionary definition of racism from Webster goes like this.
00:09:29.700 A 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.
00:09:42.020 Now, there's nothing in there about power or institutions or anything, because that has no bearing on the meaning of the word.
00:09:50.100 It's irrelevant.
00:09:51.340 That's what racism is.
00:09:52.940 So you have what the dictionary says versus what some random leftist said in 1970.
00:09:58.480 Which is the more authoritative source here?
00:10:02.900 Number two, this definition absolves people of racism on the basis that their racism is warranted.
00:10:12.600 So 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. 0.71
00:10:23.920 But that just means that the left is guilty of racism, even in defining racism.
00:10:31.720 It says that white people deserve to be hated.
00:10:35.360 That's essentially their definition of racism, which is racist.
00:10:38.940 So they have injected racism into the definition of racism, which is kind of interesting.
00:10:45.940 Number three, the left's notion of racism is grounded in this really ridiculous idea of what constitutes institutional power.
00:10:56.680 So 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.
00:11:06.780 Now, 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.
00:11:16.240 So we have two levels of nonsense to cut through here.
00:11:19.660 They 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.
00:11:32.760 This 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.
00:11:47.180 It would mean that Oprah Winfrey has less institutional power than a white guy in a trailer park. 1.00
00:11:54.420 So 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.
00:12:14.320 That's, according to the left, that's the way it goes, which is idiotic, obviously.
00:12:19.660 Number 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.
00:12:34.760 And it causes us all to kind of fade into the collective, which is always the left's aim, of course.
00:12:42.520 And that's how you can argue that Obama has less institutional power than some random white dude.
00:12:49.720 And 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.
00:13:01.440 Or 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. 0.96
00:13:14.800 That's what, that's the way it goes.
00:13:19.080 Or 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. 0.79
00:13:31.920 Listen, 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.
00:13:46.700 You 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.
00:13:56.500 But how does this work? I mean, how can they draw this conclusion?
00:14:01.280 Well, 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. 0.79
00:14:15.260 That's all, they're just black people. 0.52
00:14:17.340 Oprah is not Oprah, she's just black. 1.00
00:14:19.700 And the white person is not a person, not an individual, he's just a representative of whiteness, that's all. 0.87
00:14:27.620 So 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. 1.00
00:14:41.120 From the leftist perspective, from the collectivist mentality of the left, Oprah is kind of just sort of a vessel of blackness.
00:14:49.820 She's not a person, she is a vessel of blackness. 1.00
00:14:53.800 And the white guy in the trailer park is not a person, he's a vessel of whiteness. 0.78
00:14:58.500 And 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. 0.89
00:15:07.000 And whiteness always is more powerful. 0.97
00:15:10.480 And therefore, blackness can never be racist at whiteness.
00:15:14.680 This is how the left sees all of us.
00:15:17.280 By the way, vessel of whiteness would be a great name for a band, or vessel of blackness, really, either one of them. 0.60
00:15:23.160 It's dehumanizing, it's deranged.
00:15:25.820 And it's also racist in and of itself.
00:15:27.860 Because remember that the Webster Dictionary definition of racism is to see race as the primary determinant of a person's traits and characteristics.
00:15:40.080 And that's exactly what the left does.
00:15:42.720 So their definition of racism and their ways of looking at race are themselves racist.
00:15:49.740 Fifth thing, notice the circular logic here.
00:15:52.940 So 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.
00:16:09.020 And we're all racist just by virtue of our skin color, no matter what we think individually.
00:16:13.680 So they say, stop being racist.
00:16:15.860 And then they say, you're an inherent racist.
00:16:18.400 So you're inherently racist, therefore you are racist, therefore we'll cut you down and castigate you for being racist.
00:16:26.760 But then we go back to the beginning, you have no choice but to be racist because you're inherently racist.
00:16:30.360 So you see how the circle works here.
00:16:32.640 Where 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.
00:16:41.840 But 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.
00:16:51.500 So that's how it goes.
00:16:53.020 I mean, what I'm saying is, if the left took their own definition of racism seriously, then they could never get mad at a racist person.
00:17:01.460 If you're taking it seriously, if that's really what you believe, you have no reason to ever be mad at a racist person.
00:17:06.080 Because by your definition, he has no choice.
00:17:09.160 It is not a choice that he made individually.
00:17:11.640 It came with his skin color. 0.96
00:17:13.520 And he has no choice in the matter.
00:17:16.700 So by that way of thinking it, you'd almost have to feel sorry for a racist person.
00:17:19.980 It's like a disease that he inherited.
00:17:21.700 It's not his fault.
00:17:22.760 You should feel sorry for him.
00:17:24.680 He's a victim, really, of his own racism.
00:17:28.500 Last point here, number six.
00:17:32.140 I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this.
00:17:33.600 I 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.
00:17:48.580 And for the most part, it doesn't exist in any legal, official capacity.
00:17:53.440 But there is one form of official and legal institutional discrimination.
00:17:59.080 There's only one form I can think of that still exists in America, and that is affirmative action.
00:18:04.960 That is the definition of institutional discrimination.
00:18:08.600 It is an institutional policy to discriminate against white people, especially white men.
00:18:14.680 So 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.
00:18:33.660 So, 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.
00:18:44.580 Thanks for watching, everybody.
00:18:46.120 Godspeed.