John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University and an opinion writer for The New York Times. He's also the author of Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He joins Megyn on the show today to discuss President Obama's call for an end to the phony culture wars, the National School Board Association's decision to retract a controversial letter that likened upset parents to domestic terrorists, and more.
00:03:10.640So let's kick it off with Barack Obama, which he's trying to get Terry McAuliffe elected back into the governor's mansion.
00:03:17.220And this has become a tighter and tighter race because McAuliffe committed a pretty big political blunder on stage at one of these debates saying parents shouldn't really have anything to do with the curriculum that their child is taught in a school.
00:03:32.900And his opponent, his Republican opponent, got all over him, Glenn Youngking, on that in all these ads and so on.
00:03:40.180And now it's getting tighter and tighter.
00:03:42.560And McAuliffe, who had this as basically a straightaway, he could lose.
00:03:47.320The odds are he's probably going to win, but it's gotten a lot tighter because of that statement.
00:03:54.100He's the big gun in the Democratic Party and went down there and said the following.
00:03:58.920We don't have time to be wasting on these phony, trumped up culture wars.
00:04:06.400This fake outrage that the right wing media's pedals to juice their ratings and the fact that he's willing to go along with it instead of talking about serious problems that actually affect serious people.
00:04:22.180Your take on it, because I'll tell you, I mean, I have virtually every single one of my friend is a liberal.
00:04:26.380You know, I've spent the past 20 years in New York and I don't know a mom who's not upset about what's happening in the schools from, you know, it could be covid mask policy, could be CRT, could be the trans ideology being shoved down the throats of, you know, eight year olds who aren't ready for it and so on.
00:04:42.800I don't think this is a phony culture war at all.
00:04:45.020And I don't think it's it's entirely driven by the right.
00:05:04.640And I know that sometimes he needs to play politics because that was and is his job.
00:05:10.160But on this one, no, we're not talking about a phony culture war.
00:05:14.460This is not the people yelling and screaming about tenured radicals taking over university campuses 20 years ago.
00:05:20.480Something really serious is going on that really does hurt people.
00:05:25.020And disproportionately, it's black people because part of these culture wars involves white liberal people being taught that to be a good person, you're supposed to excuse black people from real challenge,
00:05:38.240that you're supposed to treat black people essentially like children as a way of atoning for America's moral stain of slavery and Jim Crow and all of this stuff in terms of what you do in the present tense is really scary.
00:05:53.580And so, for example, CRT, we're supposed to think that there's certain people who are just dedicated to racism and slavery not being taught in schools and that these are people who don't understand that America has some explaining to do.
00:06:06.260But that's not what most people who have a problem with CRT in schools are thinking about.
00:06:11.680We're talking about what sorts of ideas, what sorts of self-conceptions you impose upon children, not law students reading articles 30 years ago, but children now in classrooms.
00:06:21.980And, you know, I don't know if anybody has the ultimate answer about these things, but to wave away parents' real concerns about really bizarre things that have been happening in our schools,
00:06:32.700especially with the major uptick over the past couple of years, to wave all of that away as just, quote unquote, phony culture wars.
00:06:39.340Again, I say I have no problem with Barack Obama, but that view, especially when coming from other people, is overly simplistic.
00:06:48.120And no, we have some real problems going on right now.
00:06:51.980There was a there was a piece in The Washington Post recently on October 21st.
00:06:56.520It was authored by Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and Jennifer Berkshire, freelance journalist who are more on the this is a phony culture war side.
00:07:10.400They said this is a Republican driven thing, this objection to CRT, that they are working right now to ensure their base turns out in force by stoking white racial grievance.
00:07:21.240And they say that the recent firestone over critical race theory is a perfect case in point.
00:07:24.940Quote, never mind that this concept from legal scholarship isn't actually taught in K through 12 schools or that it isn't what most protesters believe it to be.
00:07:35.040And they talk about how Republicans are gaining an electrical advantage by convincing their base that white children are being taught to hate themselves, their family and their country.
00:07:44.600Can you speak to that? Because we hear this more and more from people defending what's happening in schools.
00:07:50.940It's not critical race theory. That's a fake boogeyman.
00:07:55.040That's a law school concept. And people who say it's being taught are are not correct.
00:07:59.740My own take on it is there's yes, there's a theory that gets taught in law schools that that may not be the exact thing that's being taught.
00:08:06.280It's become a short form for this racial division that's being stoked.
00:08:11.060You can call it whatever you want to call it. It's been given this useful short form because before it had that, I think, thanks to Chris Ruffo, none of us really had a short form way of describing what was happening.
00:08:21.420Mm hmm. Yeah, I am. Those people need to stop that.
00:08:25.580I mean, I frankly think at this point that they're aware that what they're doing is a rhetorical trick.
00:08:29.860It's a straw man. Nobody has claimed that obscure legal doctrine is being taught to people who are seven years old.
00:08:37.180Why would that happen? Why would anybody think so? Things change. Labels are imprecise.
00:08:42.000And when people say CRT, they don't mean that somebody is being taught the legal theory of Kimberly Crenshaw in overalls.
00:08:48.460What we're talking about is what is derived from that way of thinking, which very much is a trend that's happening all over the country.
00:08:56.120And all you have to do is metaphorically open a newspaper in any big city to see it, which is that especially in private schools.
00:09:02.820But now it's trickling into public schools and quickly kids are being taught that the most interesting thing about America is that there are power differentials based on race and that there are always have been.
00:09:14.560That white kids need to be taught that they are part of a ruling class with a certain responsibility and guilt that is being taught to people who are eight years old, often with those words.
00:09:24.200That black kids are to think of themselves as potential victims of this oppression and should be wary of what white people are going to do to them.
00:09:32.440These things are actually happening, including kids being separated into different groups.
00:09:36.800And what it comes down to at this point is this. It's been happening for such a short time that there are not academic surveys yet of exactly where this is happening and to what degree.
00:09:46.560But the anecdotal and journalistic evidence is coming so fast and thick that we can say this quite simply.
00:09:52.140If there were exactly this much evidence of cops killing black men, one in Detroit, one in Atlanta, one in New England, something happens in L.A., and you have a whole bunch of them.
00:10:03.360If that was what there was, that would be considered because it is a national epidemic, racist stain.
00:10:09.380America has a problem. America must atone.
00:10:11.660All it would take is exactly the amount of evidence that we have for this takeover of CRT.
00:10:16.580People like me who are worried about it are not crazy.
00:10:19.100We're watching what's happening. And if this is really all about the right wing, if it's all about these people waving the flag and wishing that Ronald Reagan was still around, I don't know what world these people are in.
00:10:29.560Because I'm hearing problems with this from moms with half a glass of Chardonnay on a play date who vote Democratic and are blue American people with higher degrees who are really worried about what's happening in their schools.
00:10:43.140I think that we've got to stop this idea that it's only about descendants of Newt Gingrich on this.
00:10:47.680This is a national problem. And people who are worried about CRT are not people who are wishing that Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president.
00:10:58.060It's, you know, I've said before, when I had Glenn and Coleman Hughes on my show a year ago, we talked about why I pulled my kids from the New York City private schools.
00:11:06.560And it was all of this stuff. You know, it's all this stuff.
00:11:09.240But you can call it whatever you want.
00:11:10.980In my school, they were promoting an article by some so-called scholar saying in every classroom where white children learn, there is a future killer cop.
00:11:19.780I don't you don't have to call that CRT. I don't care what you call that.
00:11:22.340Don't teach it to my child. Don't teach it to his classmates.
00:11:25.680Couldn't care. You can call it whatever you want. But I want it to stop.
00:11:28.780And I think that's how most parents are feeling.
00:11:30.420Like, it looks like to me, the other side, it doesn't I don't know, want Republicans to.
00:11:34.720I'm not sure exactly what the motivation is, because, you know, everyone should be concerned about this kind of message if they're not woke.
00:11:41.280Right. We understand elect, as you would call them, the elect.
00:11:43.880Everyone who's not elect should be concerned about this and not trying to diminish it as a as a purely partisan issue.
00:11:50.940It's not. And in part, it's what your your whole new book is about.
00:11:54.780Before we get to that, though, let's stay on Virginia and McWhorter and Youngkin for just one second, because one of the things that's come out of Virginia is that one of the items cited by the National Association of School Boards as evidence that parents might be looked at as domestic terrorists now was dad in Virginia who showed up at a school board meeting and was dragged out and was made sort of the poster boy for bad behavior at a school board meeting.
00:12:20.880Turns out the guy's daughter had been raped a week or two before and the school got up.
00:12:26.300The superintendent at that school board meeting and said, it's never happened.
00:12:29.700We have not had a student attacked in a bathroom.
00:12:32.600And this guy knows his his it just happened to his daughter and that the superintendent is lying.
00:12:37.400Somebody told him that his daughter was a liar and he called that person a bitch and things went downhill.
00:12:42.440But he did. That's all that really happened.
00:12:44.260OK, so that's the backstory to why we saw this guy getting dragged out.
00:12:47.140The National School Board Association, without probing further, decides to say, based on that behavior and a few other examples, people should be treated as domestic terrorists.
00:12:55.680DOJ should get involved and they say, we'll do it.
00:12:59.540Well, there was just a reversal by the National School Boards Association.
00:13:04.040They were forced to apologize for their letter in an extraordinary 180 with with on which they had coordinated with the Biden White House.
00:13:11.520We know that thanks to a group called Parents Defending Education, which, like the group you and I support, FAIR Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, is doing great work, nonpartisan, totally nonpartisan, just supporting parents who want to push back against this stuff.
00:13:23.580So Parents Defending Education gets the email showing the White House had pregamed the whole thing with the School Boards Association.
00:13:46.100So far, the DOJ hasn't officially backed off its letter, though.
00:13:49.220Its statement saying it might go after parents.
00:13:51.460And you tell me whether it needs to do that ASAP or this is going to remain the explosive issue it's become.
00:14:01.340I mean, parents are angry that they're being labeled in this way because they're speaking out about this stuff.
00:14:08.380You know, what this is, if you pull the camera back, what this comes from is that many people would be surprised at the difference between what you would think training in education is, including educational administration, and what the people in question are often taught.
00:14:25.900And the truth is, it took me about 20 years to fully see this.
00:14:30.860If you are trained by a school of education and you take in what they're telling you often, you learn very little about how to teach kids.
00:14:37.760What you're taught is how to be somebody of a certain kind of radical leftist politics.
00:14:43.300And, you know, God bless radical leftist politics, but in another universe, there wouldn't be this massive intersection between a field that's supposed to be about how to teach kids how to read and write and do arithmetic and teaching them a certain radical and sometimes even utopian political view, which, frankly, these days is very much infused with this thing that we're calling CRT.
00:15:07.980And so what that means is that when parents resist, when parents resist a certain orthodoxy, such as sometimes trying to say that the fact that there are a disproportionate number of black boys who are violent in a school doesn't mean that the black boys should not be expelled, then you are treated as some kind of moral pervert because you're not committed to battling power differentials.
00:15:34.660The idea is that it's okay for somebody to be violent in a school because it's kind of a symbolic fight against the establishment and you don't want to be bigoted against black boys, for example.
00:15:45.500That CRT is okay because what kids should be learning is to protest the very foundations of the society they live in.
00:15:52.880And I'm not trying to make them sound like fanatics, but they, in a very placid but unreachable sense, do believe that that is the soul of what education and educational institutions are.
00:16:03.820That, I have to stick in the plug, is the sort of thing that woke racism is about.
00:16:35.060I mean, she's getting attacked, of course, you know, by the mainstream press.
00:16:38.080But I'll play one attack in particular.
00:16:40.420I'll highlight for you one attack in particular that's just gone below the belt and is indicative of this view that we're talking about, right, that, well, we'll see.
00:16:48.280Let me set it up with Condi's statements about whether CRT ought to be taught in schools on The View.
00:16:53.580It either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past.
00:18:00.960And he writes that her stance on CRT, quote, proves she's a foot soldier for white supremacy.
00:18:08.400Her appearance was offensive and disgusting.
00:18:11.500And her thoughts on CRT are completely white-centric as they revolve around the thoughts and needs of white people.
00:18:19.160Her primary argument against CRT is that history should not, history should not be taught in a way that makes white kids feel bad.
00:18:27.620And he goes on to say, I hope they do feel bad.
00:18:31.440And says, if your white kid doesn't feel bad when he learns about how all the stories where, quote, white people knock us down and stand on our necks and then ask why we're on the ground, I really don't care about them.
00:18:44.080I don't care if learning it makes them feel bad.
00:19:22.360And really what it comes down to is this.
00:19:25.820Ture is assuming that the proper view, the Black view, I guess, is that we need white people to walk around feeling guilty for things that they as individuals didn't do.
00:19:37.660I think Ture is assuming that the case for that vision has been made in an impregnable way.
00:19:54.540But the question is, after the history is taught, after a white person thinks, God, that's awful, and they may even think, hmm, my grandmother participated in that, are they then supposed to walk around feeling guilty?
00:20:09.420And there are a great many Black people who feel the same way.
00:20:11.580I can definitely say I am a Black man, and I think about it all the time, and yet I do not need, for my sense of well-being, white people to walk around feeling guilty about things that they as individuals didn't do.
00:20:30.220It is shared by millions of Black people.
00:20:33.340The idea that white people need to walk around feeling guilty is largely a conceit of the intelligentsia and certain elements in the media.
00:20:40.540All power to them, but it is not truth.
00:20:43.480And as such, for Condoleezza Rice, with her lifetime experience, including growing up in the segregated effing South, she grew up in serious racism of a kind that neither me nor Toure ever had to deal with.
00:20:55.600For her to be called a white supremacist and for her views to be called revolting, I just think that it's extreme, it's rhetorical, it's not fair, and it's not truth.
00:21:10.240A great many of us, and by us I mean Black people, don't need that white guilt that a certain other kind of Black person seems to think is so necessary for us to overcome.
00:21:22.320Hmm. And as you point out in your book, it's not just a certain other kind of Black person, it's certain other white people who are pushing these messages, maybe even more, the so-called elect that have decided that in penance for sins of the father or mother or whatever, that they need to spend their lives somehow doing penance and making it up to the Black community per Robin DiAngelo.
00:21:45.620So we're going to have more with John McWhorter next.
00:21:49.060His views on so many things are fascinating, and we're going to ask him about the latest because there's an update on the Dave Chappelle saga, and we'll get into his latest book, which I know you're going to find really interesting.
00:22:15.620So before we get into the book, let's talk about the latest on Dave Chappelle because he's been all over the news this week, and it's been sort of an interesting thing.
00:22:43.180One of the things he's getting criticized for in his latest Netflix special is that he was accused of pitting the trans community against the Black community and not sort of understanding that there are a lot of Black people who are also trans and not understanding that there doesn't need to be a war between Black people and trans people in general.
00:23:05.340Right. And he has stood his ground. He has not apologized for anything.
00:23:11.080Netflix has stood behind him, though. Ted Sarandos, one of the leaders, has said he probably could have been more sensitive and sort of rolling it out.
00:23:18.100He the head of Netflix and Dave Chappelle has now come out and said, is this on?
00:23:23.900Yeah, actually, we have this on camera. So let's listen. Here's what he's now saying.
00:23:27.920Even though the media frames us that it's me versus that community is not what it is, do not blame the LBGTQ community for any of this shit.
00:23:38.700This has nothing to do with them. It's about corporate interests and what I can say and what I cannot say.
00:23:45.700To the transgender community, I am more than willing to give you an audience, but you will not summon me.
00:24:00.220I am not bending to anybody's demands.
00:24:03.820Sort of an interesting thing. I mean, to me, I see, you know, normally the media would definitely be siding with Dave Chappelle as a black man who's made it in a tough field comedy.
00:24:22.500He's killing it. Twenty million bucks is special for Netflix.
00:24:26.220But he touched another one of their, you know, golden geese, the trans community.
00:24:31.680And that's that's a third rail that the trans activists will be very, very loud and coming for you no matter who you are.
00:24:38.360And so far, it's sort of this standoff. You know, it's like there's impasse.
00:24:44.220Dave's not bending and Netflix hasn't bent, which is shocking, but good.
00:24:47.840And the trans community is not bending. They had their walkout. They're still on it.
00:24:51.340They're still pushing that he although Dave does go on to say that his movie that he had coming out this summer with a bunch of his comedy specials in it, I think, has been canceled by virtually everyone.
00:24:59.780But what do you make of this whole controversy, John?
00:25:01.500It's the issue of degree. The idea seems to be that he's not allowed to say things, that there are things that he's not supposed to say.
00:25:09.100So it's not that he said some things that some people didn't like and they explain why partly and maybe even abusively.
00:25:16.080The idea is that he shouldn't have said it and a platform that shows him saying it and supports him saying it deserves to be walked out upon.
00:25:26.180In other words, he sinned. The way people are behaving is as if he's committed some kind of heresy.
00:25:32.260This is a very unusual kind of behavior, unless you understand that we're talking about religion.
00:25:39.600And so however you feel about his comments about the trans community and who he's aligning against to,
00:25:46.180what's interesting about the whole thing in the socio-historical perspective is the notion that what you do when you don't like what people are saying is forbid people to say those things.
00:25:55.300Make it so that everybody's afraid to open their mouth about those things.
00:25:59.060And the problem is that despite the cathartic pleasure that there is in telling people to shut the F up, and I completely get it.
00:26:07.920You have a sense that, and I don't mean sense of power. That makes it sound like they're walking around with a mallet.
00:26:12.280You feel like you can make a difference and you can get what you want.
00:26:18.620And especially if it's about something that you're sensitive about, such as whatever your identity happens to be.
00:26:23.180But the thing is, after you do it, you're not stopping people from thinking it.
00:26:27.720And I'm not sure people fully realize that just because you can't say something out loud doesn't mean that people aren't having conversations behind your back.
00:26:35.800It doesn't mean that they're not going to keep thinking what they're thinking.
00:26:38.760You can't control what people are thinking.
00:26:40.820The words are just an expression of it.
00:26:42.700And unless that's what people want, that people can think things but just not say it in public.
00:26:47.860And the problem is, why would you want that?
00:26:51.300What you really think is that you're changing the world, but you're not.
00:26:54.300You're just zipping people's mouths shut.
00:26:56.760We encourage that too much in this culture.
00:26:59.580We look at that sort of thing being done in the deep past, and we think of it as quaint, that you're not allowed to say certain things, that it's heretical.
00:27:08.080Now we just use different words like hegemony and social justice, do the same thing, and think of it as the height of sophistication.
00:27:16.420This, your comment reminded me of a scene from a show I used to watch all the time and loved, Everybody Loves Raymond, where Raymond is talking to his wife, Deborah, and she says to him, me thinks thou doth protest too much.
00:27:33.260And he says, don't say me thinks thou doth protest too much.
00:27:38.080And she says, okay, I won't say it, but me thinks it.
00:27:41.620That show is not streaming, and it's making me mad because I only got up to the fourth season.
00:27:57.160This business of you can't say it simply doesn't work.
00:28:00.960I know that the people who are doing all of this shutting down think of themselves as on the side of the angels.
00:28:05.920They think they're continuing the struggle.
00:28:07.440They think this is how you create social justice.
00:28:10.540But I think if they really took a look at themselves, they'd realize that, I hate to say it, but there's something childish in this notion that you can't say that.
00:29:49.000And it's beyond the university and K through 12 education system.
00:29:53.380And that I really would love to talk about this, that it's futile to dialogue with them, that it is futile to dialogue with them.
00:30:01.260So what is the alternative to dialoguing with the with the elect?
00:30:06.360Yeah, this is a major plank of woke racism.
00:30:09.420It's not just, you know, 150 pages about how it's a religion that would get boring.
00:30:13.380The issue is what to do about these people.
00:30:16.260And the sad fact is you cannot reason with them on these issues.
00:30:20.980You can reason with them about tax policy.
00:30:22.980You can reason with them about, you know, how to make a fruit tree grow in your backyard.
00:30:26.880But you cannot reason with them about issues having to do with power differentials.
00:30:31.160It's a religion partly because of this utter imperviousness to reason.
00:30:36.120You cannot teach somebody that Jesus doesn't love them.
00:30:38.920There are very few people who would be open to that.
00:30:40.660In the same way, you cannot reach these people on these issues.
00:30:43.720And so the question is not how can you break bread with an elect person and make them see things your way and maybe change some of their behavior.
00:31:28.720When an elect person is trying to take over your curriculum, take over your workplace, take over what your kids are being taught, or even just take over a conversation, that person needs to be stood down.
00:31:41.340We need to stop being afraid, specifically, of being called racists on Twitter.
00:31:45.980What the elect do is that if you say that you don't agree with them, or you say something they don't like, you say some words that they have decided they don't approve of, you get called a racist on social media, and especially Twitter.
00:32:58.180One needs to hear things from the hard left.
00:33:00.980Very slowly, they can help us push life forward.
00:33:03.840But since about June 2020, the elect have learned that they can stand up and have their way by stringing together a few words like intersectionality and hegemony and calling you a racist on Twitter if you dare to disagree.
00:33:43.420But that all that that might doesn't necessarily need to be a deal breaker.
00:33:48.900Perhaps you will land at a different place that you're more aligned with that doesn't fire people for speaking out against nonsense like this.
00:33:58.620That doesn't judge you based on your political views or something you write on Twitter or a meeting you go to protesting CRT.
00:34:05.480You know, perhaps you weren't meant to be at a place that is as intolerant as the one for which you work.
00:34:12.000So I do think I know it's easy for me to say now I own my own company and so on.
00:34:16.240But I got here by ruffling a lot of feathers and taking off a lot of people and being called awful names.
00:34:21.300And I would say I'm much better off and happier now than I was when I was working for places that try to speech police me one way or the other.
00:34:28.760Yeah. And, you know, I would say, Megan, that you are quite right.
00:34:33.680And, you know, I'm in a similar position.
00:34:35.900But then we also do have to acknowledge that there is, say, the assistant professor at a school who feels a certain way.
00:34:43.300But, you know, if they express their views, they wouldn't get tenure and they'd have to go try to find another job.
00:34:48.780And they might find themselves unhirable because, for example, the one place that really does scare me, unfortunately, is academia, where I have started, where it's getting to the point where the people who run the show are almost all elect.
00:35:00.240And so you can't get a job if you're not one of those people.
00:35:02.500So with them, I'm not sure that they would see it as feasible to leave and become better people by doing something unless they leave the field.
00:35:10.100I'm still in my camp. Yeah. But look, look, look at Peter Boghossian. Right.
00:35:12.880He just left his college in the in the northwest and they were they were far left.
00:35:17.640And I think he's going to do better, not in that environment.
00:35:20.900You know, they were so intolerant of him. They were so cruel to him.
00:35:24.820They targeted him for having. And again, he's a he's more of a left wing guy, but he's not woke and he spoke out against it.
00:35:32.460I think he'll wind up killing it on Substack or in the podcast world like Brett Weinstein did.
00:35:37.300Right. You can't I think you can't dispute that his life has settled in a better place now than it was when.
00:35:43.000He was on the college campus with his wife, Heather, and they were being tired.
00:35:45.980I just think I don't know if it's the universe, if it's God, it's if it's karma.
00:35:49.540Well, something happens where if you just continue working, it continue rowing, you will ultimately land in a better place.
00:35:58.520If you stick by your own ethics, your own morals and you don't let your voice be silenced.
00:36:03.160It's not to say you have to scream every position you have from the rooftops.
00:36:06.520But I think this is an important fight and we need we need as many soldiers in it as we can get.
00:36:11.780We do. I worry actually at this point about younger people who are seeking to go into academia.
00:36:18.900I think we need to work on concrete pathways that we can point them to where they can use their talents somewhere other than the university.
00:36:25.940Because it's getting to the point where, as you say, that kind of person might be happier not even going into academia at all.
00:36:32.580It might become difficult for that person to do it unless they've been unusually circumspect on Twitter,
00:36:37.260because it's getting to the point where committees are looking at people's social media beforehand in order not to be caught short.
00:36:44.140So, yeah, things are really changing in that way.
00:36:48.260Well, you point out in your book that if you think you can, you know, sort of choose like you do on a menu on between the precepts that the that the woke follow, the elect follow.
00:36:58.680Think again, because it's not enough that you I'm thinking of the actress Sarah Paulson, who has been very outspoken on LGBTQ rights.
00:37:07.260She she is part of that community, but wouldn't say her pronouns.
00:37:11.360That was like all the chips she had put into the elect bank.
00:38:42.920So but one of the one of the points you make in the book is and this is quoting the elect on what should matter to concerned black people.
00:38:50.040This is one of the exhibits that you offer historical figures who weren't woke on race must be canceled.
00:38:57.040And, you know, you sort of take this on mockingly.
00:38:59.580It made me think of the fact that in the New York City City Hall, they just took down the statue of Thomas Jefferson, which has been there for 100 years.
00:39:08.480They've also announced as of this past June that they are taking down the Teddy Roosevelt statue that's been in front of the Museum of Natural History since 1940 because they say it symbolizes colonialism and racism because Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson were not woke.
00:39:25.260They were not woke when it comes to race.
00:39:33.200Yeah, you know, each one of those cases is different.
00:39:36.700And so I'm going to ruffle some feathers and say, I think I understand the Teddy Roosevelt case.
00:39:42.080He was a great man in some ways, but he was all about America coming to bestride the world and America's bestriding of the world hurt a lot of people in a lot of ways.
00:41:21.000You're taught that it's sophisticated to instead say, we shall not look at this statue of the person who wrote the Declaration of Independence because of Sally Hemings and because he thought black people were inferior.
00:41:57.680I can appreciate what he did in the founding of this country, an extraordinary act of courage and intellectual prowess that I don't have to go back and expect him to have 2021 attitudes on all these issues.
00:42:47.000The issue, though, is that the people who are like that end up exerting disproportionate influence because they scare you into doing things their way.
00:42:56.480I have made, with Glenn Lowry, a graceless analogy, which is also in the book.
00:43:03.700And it involves that we left of center people these days are people who have, if I may, and please bleep it if I can't, we've peed ourselves.
00:43:12.840I see that all over, where people are pretending to agree with a certain kind of angry vocal person who will call you dirty names in the public square if you don't pretend to agree with them.
00:43:31.500But because of this invention called social media, and we're never going to do without it, but if it didn't exist, we wouldn't have this problem.
00:43:38.120Because the whole world is in our hands, everybody can now talk to everybody, and it's so easy to get a mob together.
00:43:45.100You can exert this kind of influence by basically calling people the moral equivalent of pedophiles on social media if they don't jump to your tune.
00:43:53.700We can't let these people have that kind of influence.
00:43:56.240Now that we realize that that's the problem, we're rubbing our eyes post-pandemic, we have to start standing up.
00:44:01.940Otherwise, we're going to have this country taken over by a religion, which is really not what this experiment was supposed to be about.
00:44:17.880You and Glenn Lowry got me through, and my friend Coleman Hughes, who I love, got me through the past couple of years just watching you guys on Blogging Heads TV.
00:44:27.640You're sort of ticked off little exchanges.
00:44:31.740You know, John calls himself, I think it's a cranky liberal, and Glenn is more of a conservative, but just reason and fact-based and honest, and you don't really give two dams who's going to come after you.
00:45:00.160Coming up, actually, after the break, we're going to have the segment, You Can't Say That, speaking of You Can't Say That.
00:45:05.200So we'll bring you the latest on why you can't say the latest thing.
00:45:07.700And then we're going to be joined by sub-sex sports writer Ethan Strauss on Nike, LeBron, Kyrie, and vaccine mandates, and much, much more.
00:45:18.640It's time for another edition of a feature we have here on The Megyn Kelly Show called You Can't Say That, or Think That, or Do That.
00:45:32.160Today, we are taking you deep into the world of birds.
00:45:35.780Yes, if the wokesters can affect the world of knitting, they can absolutely affect the world of birds.
00:45:41.400And here we talk about the racist bird names, which are now causing all sorts of drama amongst scientists and others in the ornithological space.
00:45:51.780According to a recent article in Science News, racist legacies lurk in the world of animal names.
00:45:58.520142 North American bird names endure as verbal monuments to people who are deemed problematic, according to Jamie Chambers.
00:46:27.660In 2021, thankfully, there are bird lovers with a whole lot of time on their hands, including a grassroots campaign called Bird Names for Birds, which has made it a mission to replace all eponymous bird names with descriptive ones.
00:46:45.840But then there's a group opposing that effort, and that's the American Ornithological Society, which initially rejected a recent effort to rename the bird known as McCown's long spur, named after Confederate general.
00:46:57.020They don't think you need to rename the Confederate bird.
00:47:00.520But then after pushback, the society changed its mind, saying, well, we're going to undergo a new name changing process because, as the president there says, we are committed to changing these harmful and exclusionary bird names.
00:47:12.440And remember, the gypsy moth has been deemed problematic because gypsy is considered by some to be a slur for the Romani people.
00:47:22.900So the next time you call a moth a gypsy or an Oriole a scot, you just remember you're a racist and you can't say that or think that or do that.
00:47:36.300Coming up, we've got a sports journalist who broke away from mainstream media to report on all sorts of things like China and the NBA.
00:47:43.500We are going to lead with that when Ethan Strauss joins us next.
00:47:46.820Joining me now is former ESPN writer and beat reporter with The Athletic for the Golden State Warriors, Ethan Strauss.
00:47:59.440He's recently broken away from mainstream sports media to forge his own path on Substack called the House of Strauss.
00:48:05.800Ethan is no stranger to tackling tough topics in sports, including Nike turning against its core audience, men, vaccine mandates, not to mention the NBA's dealings with China.
00:48:18.740Ethan, thank you so much for being here.
00:48:20.020Welcome to the independent media world.
00:48:22.060It's wonderful to be in the independent media world.
00:49:26.160And team sports, you know, they offer the opportunity to a lot of life's lessons.
00:49:30.520I see it now with my kids learning how to cooperate, how to take a loss, how to be a gracious winner, all that stuff.
00:49:36.720Unfortunately, now you've got places like ESPN that are trying to teach all sorts of other lessons that it's not their business to try to teach.
00:49:42.420And that's why, you know, sort of alternate sports media sites, whether it's OutKick or Dave Portnoy's, you know, Barstools or you are doing so well, because I don't think most people want their politics shoved down their throat in their sports.
00:49:58.900Yeah, I guess it's a good question as to why that happens, because I hear that from a lot of fans, from a lot of readers.
00:50:05.160They say, I don't want my sports to turn political.
00:50:08.820I don't want it to turn into a lecture that's aimed at me.
00:50:12.080But the reason it's happening is because of the neutrality they want and the neutrality that they're used to.
00:50:18.200For a propagandist of any bent, place a space that reads as neutral.
00:50:23.700I mean, that's that's great territory to have, because if you can take a space that reads as neutral and if it's very popular, people come together, then you can really shift the conversation because whatever is being said in that space is going to read as just objective.
00:50:38.840And I know people from the left would point to military flyovers as a kind of propagandizing where you're using the platform of sports.
00:50:47.160But in recent years, it's been more of the social justice messaging that we've seen.
00:50:51.920But it really opens up these fascinating incongruities where the messaging coming from sports teams sometimes bumps up against just the natural fan response.
00:51:03.640I mean, I was fascinated the first game of the NFL season of 2020, first post-pandemic NFL game.
00:51:10.920And they all the players, it was at the Chiefs Stadium.
00:51:13.920They all linked arms with one another and they were doing some big speaking out against racism and they speaking out against police violence and the jumbo traumas involved.
00:51:23.860And it was fascinating to watch because the crowd thunderously booed and you could just look at the faces of the players and these these just visages of shock as it washed over them because they had been on social media for months during that hot and heavy summer of 2020.
00:51:42.860And I don't think it ever occurred to them that the sense of consensus that they were absorbing from social media was just completely contradicted by what the NFL fans were feeling at that moment.
00:51:56.580So in that way, at that time, you just got a taste of the politics of the fans and how so much of the messaging towards the fans were completely perpendicular to it.
00:52:06.500Yeah, the media doesn't want people to know how the fan base feels.
00:52:10.880For that matter, we found out last week that the media doesn't want you to know how a liberal icon like Ruth Bader Ginsburg feels about things like protesting at the football games and taking a knee.
00:52:19.840Katie Couric admitting that she edited that part out of her interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
00:52:24.160She didn't think it was befitting for a liberal icon.
00:52:26.980Well, that's that's really not the job of a journalist to try to protect somebody's rep because you think it's going to hurt them with the left wing.
00:52:34.080I think more accurately, it's it would have shorn up a position that, you know, Katie and other liberals don't want to see shorn up, which is where they don't want to see kneeling at the football game.
00:52:43.700Even post George Floyd, people don't need a black national anthem.
00:52:47.420They don't need people to be separated based on race when they're just trying to take in a game.
00:52:52.620And the polls reflect that. All right.
00:52:54.180So let's get into what's happening now in sports in China, because I find this really fascinating.
00:52:59.080You know, I had this very contentious interview with Mark Cuban when I launched this show, not the one on Sirius.
00:53:04.020You know, I think people know this. Actually, I'm not sure.
00:53:06.800We are doing the podcast live now for Sirius XM on the Triumph Channel 111.
00:53:12.580But later we released it as a podcast. I don't know how people consume it.
00:53:15.540But the podcast before Sirius launched about a year ago and it was our ninth show, October 12th.
00:53:21.860And he was talking all about Black Lives Matter and how it's important to speak out for what you believe in, human rights abuses.
00:53:27.980And that's why he defended the logo BLM on the basketball courts.
00:53:31.040But great, great, great. I see it. You know, you're deeply held convictions.
00:53:34.900What about China? What about the hundreds of millions you're taking from China?
00:53:39.680Because like they're kind of engaged in ethic genocide right now. Seems kind of problematic.
00:53:44.200You want to speak out against them? And boy, oh boy, he wouldn't.
00:53:48.660And now today, this guy Ennis Cantor, this big basketball player, has gone to the place where no one wanted to go before.
00:53:58.000There was one guy, one guy who spoke out. It was like a team coach or a team manager.
00:54:03.120But Mark Cuban certainly didn't. So I'll give you just a flavor of what happened with Mark Cuban because we have it queued up.
00:54:08.380And then I want to get to the news of the day. Ennis Cantor taking the stand as boldly and bravely as anybody I've seen.
00:54:37.140Because they are a customer. They're they are a customer of ours.
00:54:40.020And guess what, Megan? I'm OK with doing business with China.
00:54:42.580You know, I wish I could solve all the world's problems, Megan. I'm sure you do, too.
00:54:47.000But we can't. And so we have to pick all battles.
00:54:50.200And while you'd like to get proclamation so you can create a clip that says, look what I got Mark to say, you don't want to deal with the actual action item.
00:54:57.980You might think silence is violence, but action gets change.
00:55:48.620And you just did the auditory equivalent of just kind of blinking at him and going, no, here's the question.
00:55:54.760And I think it was just a fascinating just case of somebody getting used to the Twitter environment, how you can have a snappy rejoinder and have your cheering section and walk away.
00:56:06.920And it leaves them utterly unprepared to deal with a real interview.
00:56:28.580And what gets so frustrating is I actually will take the answer that he eventually gives, which is it's about the money.
00:56:35.240What gets so frustrating and insulting is when the NBA tries to pretend it's something else.
00:56:40.160I mean, I'm looking – I could look at just some of the stuff Adam Silver, the commissioner, says is so ridiculous and insulting about their position on China.
00:56:49.760I remember a few months back where he's asked about it, and I'm reading the quote.
00:56:54.500You know, as a former political science major from Duke University, I'm still a believer in soft power.
00:57:00.880I think these cultural exchanges are critically important.
00:57:03.580And he goes on and on and on again about how this is somehow going to cool the tension between these two nuclear armed superpowers.
00:57:09.780This is going to save the Uyghurs, the Muslim minority that's being tortured.
00:57:15.540And I think there's a component to this conversation that is getting ignored by a lot of the media, though, and that's that we're living in the aftermath of failure when it comes to the NBA's China policy to say nothing of the moral concerns you're talking about.
00:57:28.900The NBA had this big colonial adventure into China.
00:57:31.720They were going to make a ton of money, and they were going to incubate a bunch of Chinese superstars in the NBA.
00:57:38.500You know, everybody remembers Yao Ming.
00:57:39.880He was 7'6 in the early 2000s, and from China, it was a big deal.
00:57:46.920So the NBA funded all these academies in China.
00:57:50.140Adam Silver in 2017, the NBA commissioner, was expressing frustration that there were no NBA players from China, and there are still no NBA players from China.
00:58:00.500So when you see China punishing the NBA and cutting off contacts sporadically as punishment for a player like Enos Kanter criticizing Xi Jinping or criticizing the former general manager of the Rockets, now the 76ers, Daryl Morey, for doing a free Hong Kong tweet, there's this element of, well, there's no real leverage that the NBA has over China because China is a very nationalistic country that likes to promote nationalism.
00:58:25.580And there are no Chinese players in the NBA.
00:58:28.640So because of that, I just think the dynamic is broken.
00:58:31.920It's like one of those election nights where you get the results early in the night, and you know that South Carolina has gone red or California has gone blue, and we just haven't counted up the votes.
00:58:58.920And that's the thing that was so infuriating about, you know, Cuban, and I do give him credit for coming on, but, and frankly, I probably wouldn't have gone as hard on him if he hadn't been so incendiary on Twitter.
00:59:09.380He loves to pick fights, especially on these issues, dropping F-bombs, going after people like Ted Cruz, and sort of always trying to get the last word.
00:59:16.860And with me, it was a real-life human being who had facts and, you know, kept pressing him, and it was a different dynamic.
00:59:27.120We have another, he could have another bite at the apple.
00:59:30.160But that's sort of why I really want to get into it.
00:59:32.440Because if you're going to play the moral arbiter of us all and lecture on BLM and why, you know, the United States has so much work to do when it comes to how it treats its people,
00:59:40.900and then take money from this regime that's, that's forcing sterilizations on women, putting them into work camps against their will, and so on, you can spare me.
00:59:51.080Please, you, you've lost the moral authority.
00:59:53.100It's like Joe Biden lecturing us on sexism in the United States when, you know, girls are not getting their heads chopped off by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
01:00:27.140So, literally, the only person who has spoken out about, uh, human rights abuses in China is that guy you just mentioned, who's now running the 76ers.
01:00:35.060And the 76ers are being punished by China, right?
01:00:37.560They're not airing their games on Tencent.
01:14:01.360I don't think customers want to be lectured about the patriarchy when they're thinking about Nike, for instance.
01:14:07.120And they actually don't even have the convictions of their courage.
01:14:09.520Because if you notice in that ad for the women's national team, there aren't any highlights of what the women's national team for the U.S., very successful, what they're doing.
01:14:18.100It's just all lecturing and these quick shots.
01:14:31.220And it's actually a favorite of the Miami Heat general manager slash president slash whatever, Pat Riley, which is keep the main thing the main thing.
01:17:30.220Why would you thumb your middle finger at men and all the women who love them?
01:17:36.020Well, I think there's this other component, which is that they're insulated from consequence.
01:17:39.800You've got these companies in the United States, these mega corporations that have such a stranglehold on the market where there's some recent indicators to say that Nike sales have stagnated of late.
01:17:51.220I don't think the strategy is working, but they're so far ahead of the game, like all major corporations, the stock market and the pandemic went way, way up.
01:18:00.260And so this is what you do when you get a little bit complacent.
01:18:12.480And I think that's one of the most fascinating aspects of the modern era we're in is this other thing.
01:18:18.460And it's something I've observed, which is you would think that the financial incentives overwhelm all.
01:18:24.980It's clearly part of why the NBA wants into China.
01:18:27.380It's clearly why Nike wants in to China.
01:18:29.440But it does seem like we're living in an age where the social media incentives are more powerful than the financial incentives sometimes.
01:18:36.500That the urge to be popular on Twitter or the fear of one's employees staging a walkout, the craziest employees, is governing a lot of what powerful institutions are saying and a lot of what they're not saying.
01:18:50.680And that opens up these market inefficiencies for independent actors.
01:18:54.100I hope to be one of them who just talks outside of that and talks past that.
01:18:57.960But it is rather strange to have something more powerful, just the the fear inspired by the social media mob, more powerful than even the money.
01:19:20.820They're not the ones actually on the courts doing the athletics and they're not the ones behind the scenes who have the spine, let's say, to actually make tough decisions and stand up against social social media bullies.
01:19:34.420Well, that's a funny thing that you're a little bit getting into here, which is that the culture of sport is not, for lack of a better term, woke.
01:19:45.100My job before all this was being a beat writer and following the Golden State Warriors around from locker room to locker room to locker room.
01:19:52.900The culture of sport overwhelmingly is quite masculine.
01:19:57.140I know this is when people say, well, what about the women's team?
01:20:00.080And, you know, my my sister is a huge sports fan.
01:21:43.260It's just not an issue that I feel like I'm an expert on when it comes to cities making their laws versus corporations.
01:21:48.960I'll leave that to people like Glenn Greenwald, who goes on your program.
01:21:52.080But I did view him almost as a window into the two warring political movements.
01:21:56.580And I I said, when you look at Kyrie Irving, somebody who and I know people who've worked with him, gets a lot of his information about the world from sitting around and just watching Instagram video after Instagram video without much discernment, which has a lot to do with why he once came out and said that he thought the earth was flat.
01:22:13.840Or at least that there wasn't enough proof of its roundness to go from earlier this guy being a man of the left who was with the Standing Rock protesters.
01:22:26.580He wanted to blow up the 2020 NBA bubble playoffs for racial justice.
01:22:31.860And he was being heralded by Dave Zirin of the nation as as like Muhammad Ali.
01:22:36.720These were the names that were being used to comp Kyrie Irving when the left liked him.
01:22:43.060And now he takes his position on not wanting the vaccine.
01:22:47.180And you've got Ted Cruz praising his courage and people on the right saying, look up to Kyrie Irving.
01:22:52.480And the whole time, Kyrie Irving is just this guy.
01:22:54.760And I think it's this part of this cultural dynamic.
01:22:57.160I think Peter Thiel has said that courage is in shorter supply than genius.
01:23:01.700So when somebody is being courageous and Kyrie is courageous, people will flock to him and they won't necessarily ask questions about, does this guy have a process that makes sense?
01:23:14.900They just like that his courage overlaps with their cause.
01:23:18.340But beyond that, what I take from it is that conservatives are insecurely opportunistic and progressives are scornfully possessive.
01:23:29.140And so when you have an athlete, a black athlete, a lot of conservatives, they know when they're animated by just the knowledge that when there's a vote, it's roughly 90 percent to 10 percent Democrat to Republican in the black community.
01:23:44.020And they know that a lot of black athletes don't like them very much.
01:23:47.020So there's any sort of overlap with any issue they like.
01:23:49.660They completely glom on and are obsequious and are praising Kyrie and holding him up.
01:23:54.580And on the other side, a lot of people on the left have that same knowledge and that same fear.
01:23:59.200They know they get 90 percent of black votes versus the 10 percent.
01:24:04.520They worry about what might happen if there's any slippage.
01:24:06.820I know David Shore, the Democratic pollster, has written that there's some slippage.
01:24:10.300And so when a black celebrity like Nicki Minaj or Kyrie Irving takes this position, there's a bit of a freak out.
01:24:16.500And on CNN, on MSNBC, these celebrities who are just celebrities, they're just being ripped to shreds.
01:24:22.920And I don't think these celebrities are going to move the needle of black America.
01:24:26.480But a lot of people with platforms are completely neurotic about platforms, especially ever since Donald Trump won in 2016, because of all in their mind, all the free advertising from CNN.
01:24:36.960So I just look at Kyrie as this window into how these warring movements are getting so ridiculous as to fight over the affections of a guy who doesn't know what he's talking about.
01:24:47.620I mean, as we speak, apparently Floyd Mayweather has issued a statement on on Kyrie and says some of, you know, espouses some of the opinions that you just offered.
01:25:00.560He says, I commend him for having some integrity and for for, quote, being your own man.
01:25:06.900America is the land of the free, freedom of speech, religion, supposedly freedom to choose, never be controlled by money.
01:25:12.600I respect you for having some integrity, being your own man.
01:25:14.580Free mind makes his own choices and an enslaved mind follows the crowd.
01:25:19.000Stand for something, fall for anything.
01:25:20.840One man can lead a revolution to stand up and fight for what's right.
01:25:23.280One choice, one word, one action can change the world.
01:25:25.760It's crazy how people hate you for being a leader.
01:25:29.540I hope your actions encourage many others to stand up and say enough is enough.
01:25:34.660I mean, but back to our other conversation, isn't this?
01:25:36.920I mean, I could make the case he found his balls.
01:25:39.660Sorry, sorry to be so crude, but you know what I mean?
01:25:41.620Like, there's so much pressure not to not to bitch about the vaccine.
01:26:15.560Look, what I'm saying is that somebody could potentially take a principled, thoughtful position on refusing a mandate.
01:26:22.640I don't necessarily think that he's that guy, but he clearly has the courage to do it, which has put him into the four and put him into the news cycle that he's in right now.
01:26:35.960And it is funny, again, to just see the freak out from prestige media, which I think has abandoned their mandate to call balls and strikes and be objective and are now in this position to prevent as Tamir Karan, the professor at Duke, calls a preference cascade.
01:26:52.980This fear that there is going to be one person who has a position and then another.
01:27:00.260I feel as though so much of the media right now is animated by guarding against a preference cascade among normal people that is definitely tainting the coverage and it's getting increasingly angry and increasingly paternalistic.
01:27:15.220And it's not just saying, hey, this is what Kyrie Irving thinks.
01:27:18.140It's, hey, you need to understand how bad he is.
01:28:31.540In the meantime, if you'd like to support the show, I would love it if you'd go to youtube.com slash Megan Kelly and subscribe to the YouTube channel.
01:28:38.420You can watch the show there, too, or show some clips to your friends.
01:28:42.120And you can also download the show as a podcast.