The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - July 13, 2026


Dr. Elizabeth Weiss - Is Anthropology the Most Woke Discipline？ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1021)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Kennewick Mann Napoleon Chagnon Philip Rushton Philip Rushdie James W. Springer The Sad Truth Francis Whittleson Suicidal Empathy Elizabeth Yussi Steven Pinker Eric Kaufman Ole Miss Elizabeth Emeritus NAGPRA
Suicidal Empathy Is Destroying America From Within (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1020) When Empathy Becomes Suicidal - My Appearance on the Atlas Society Podcast (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1023)

Episode Stats


Length

49 minutes

Words per minute

147.33

Word count

7,228

Sentence count

241

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

25

sentences flagged

Hate speech

15

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth Weiss joins me to talk about her controversial book, Repatriation and Erasing the Past, and the controversy surrounding it. Dr. Weiss also discusses her work as a physical anthropologist and her opposition to the removal of Native American bones from public display.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'm delighted to report that I have joined, as a scholar, the Declaration of Independence Center
00:00:06.120 for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.
00:00:10.800 The center offers educational opportunities, speakers, internship, and reading groups for
00:00:17.020 the University of Mississippi community. It is named in honor of the United States founding
00:00:22.720 document, which constitutes the nation as a political community and expresses fundamental
00:00:28.820 principles of American freedom, including in the recognition of the importance of Judeo-Christian
00:00:34.960 values in shaping American exceptionalism. Dedicated to the academic and open-minded
00:00:41.100 exploration of these principles, the Center exists to encourage exploration into the many
00:00:47.740 facets of freedom. It will sponsor a speaker series and an interdisciplinary faculty research
00:00:54.380 team. If you'd like to learn more about the center, please visit Ole Miss, that's O-L-E-M-I-S-S dot
00:01:02.300 edu slash independence slash. Hi everybody, this is Scott Salad for The Sad Truth. Today I have a
00:01:09.140 guest that I'm sorry that I didn't invite earlier. It is not due to the fact that I wouldn't have
00:01:16.560 wanted to speak to her earlier. I have with me today Professor Emeritus from San Jose State
00:01:21.580 university elizabeth weiss how are you doing i'm doing fine thank you so much for having me on
00:01:27.440 oh it's it's my pleasure i wanted to just mention a few things i have here uh so you were a
00:01:35.080 professor i mean i would it be correct to say a physical anthropologist that would be the right to
00:01:39.240 yes and actually um a lot of people have switched over from talking about physical anthropology to
00:01:46.240 biological anthropology but i still prefer the term physical anthropology because my my own
00:01:52.720 research is very much you know the traditional physical anthropology studying skeletal remains
00:01:59.140 and taking measurements and so forth so yes physical anthropology is a great description
00:02:05.420 of what i do and of course that got you into all sorts of hot trouble which we will get into
00:02:10.340 but so your books include let me just mention very quickly reburying the past the effects of
00:02:15.560 repatriation and reburial on scientific inquiry 2008 bioarchaeological science what we have
00:02:22.740 learned from human skeletal remains introduction to human evolution paleopathology in perspective
00:02:28.640 bone disease bone health and disease through time reading the bones activity biology and culture
00:02:35.120 repatriation and erasing the past co-authored with james springer and your most recent book
00:02:40.780 I love the title. On the War Path, My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, pretending to be
00:02:46.920 Indians, and Woke Warriors. Anything else you want to add to the bio before we get going?
00:02:51.940 No, that hits all of them. Yeah. Okay. So let's begin with you. You were going about your business
00:02:59.720 being a professor, being a physical anthropologist, studying skeletal remains,
00:03:05.200 and then you upset the wrong people.
00:03:08.760 Tell us the story.
00:03:10.160 So basically, I've been studying skeletal remains my whole career over 20 years.
00:03:16.960 I curated the largest single site prehistoric collection west of the Mississippi
00:03:22.900 in California, the Ryan Mound.
00:03:25.540 And I was at San Jose State since 2004.
00:03:28.980 Sure. And everybody knew my perspective on I'm against the reburial of these skeletal remains.
00:03:36.200 I think studying them and other prehistoric collections is important.
00:03:41.340 And I had criticized repatriation and reburial laws like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act from the very get go.
00:03:51.140 One of my earliest articles was called Kennewick Man's Funeral.
00:03:54.760 And so it's not that this was any secret. But in 2020, my book Repatriation and Erasing the Past that was co-authored with James W. Springer came out and everything went haywire in a sense.
00:04:13.700 Basically, there was a movement to censor the book.
00:04:18.240 Of course, the woke academics who wanted to censor the book wouldn't call it censoring,
00:04:24.320 but they were writing the publisher and saying that the book should be removed from libraries,
00:04:30.820 shouldn't be sold to libraries, should be out of print, should be removed from print.
00:04:37.080 All that is censorship.
00:04:38.560 um and fortunately because my co-author um Springer is is now a retired attorney but at
00:04:47.320 that time was still an attorney um he had a talking to my publisher and basically and you
00:04:53.560 know said if you depublish this book um you will be dealing with a lawsuit um and so things went
00:05:02.480 along you know um at the university after that um i had um you know my some of my colleagues were
00:05:12.820 upset about the book my um you know my chair hosted a webinar or presented at a webinar what
00:05:24.200 to do when your um tenured colleague is a racist um and he was talking about me can i stop you for
00:05:32.060 a second before you go on because it's important for people to get a sense of why your position
00:05:37.940 causes such furor is and let me see let me see if i can predict what it is and then you you'll tell
00:05:45.060 me add or remove whatever i may be getting wrong so there is something uniquely holy about indigenous
00:05:52.320 ways of handling things and indigenous rituals had these bones and you know archaeological remains
00:06:01.740 been those of another group that doesn't hold that holy status within the woke pyramid,
00:06:09.580 then it may not have been such a bad thing, the position you hold.
00:06:12.960 But it's specific to the holy nature of the indigenous people that you did a bad thing.
00:06:18.560 Yes?
00:06:19.160 Right.
00:06:20.040 You know, let me, that's a very good way of putting it.
00:06:23.680 Now, it has spread from indigenous people to other cultures now, in part because some of the anthropologists and other academics say, we don't want to show any human remains.
00:06:37.480 We want to bury all human remains so that we don't upset indigenous peoples.
00:06:42.860 You know, so by proxy. So so you're being you're being respectful to the indigenous people, even though it's not indigenous remains by you engaging in that behavior with other remains.
00:06:56.400 You're being disrespectful. So and the entire enterprise. 0.54
00:07:00.380 Exactly. And and what happened is so the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was a law that was passed in 1990.
00:07:10.220 In my book, Repatriation and Erasing the Past, which came out on the 30th anniversary of it, intentionally on the 30th anniversary of it, was written as a compromise.
00:07:20.900 You know, let's give back the skeletal remains and sacred objects to tribes who are clearly affiliated or associated with these artifacts and remains.
00:07:34.740 It wasn't like a pan-Native American law that said, you know, all Native American things need to be removed from universities and museums.
00:07:42.620 It was specific.
00:07:43.740 You know, you have a tribe.
00:07:45.480 There's a collection that's clearly linked to it.
00:07:47.900 Let's unite them and be on our way.
00:07:50.980 And then the things that cannot be connected to a tribe or the things that are not sacred, like everyday objects, those remain in universities.
00:07:59.380 And anthropologists can continue to do their work.
00:08:02.100 But that compromise fell apart. And the reason why it fell apart is twofold. One of the reasons is because the academics in anthropology and in the other social sciences started to embrace kind of this decolonization mindset where anything that the indigenous say is right and everything must be decolonized.
00:08:32.100 so non-Western. And since the science is Western, that is wrong. And since the Indigenous people 0.82
00:08:38.020 are claiming that their creationists told them that this 10,000 or 12,000-year-old 1.00
00:08:43.820 skeleton is actually their ancient one, then that is right. And so we even need to rebury
00:08:50.920 things like Kennewick Man is 9,000 years old. But the other aspect is, so that's the academic
00:08:58.240 aspect but that's the other aspect is also that um you know the activists the Native American
00:09:08.340 activists see this as kind of a gravy train and so they're not stopping at what is affiliated
00:09:14.980 they're basically oh yes everything everything that is found in this location should is sacred
00:09:22.820 or is a funerary object i mean they're asking for things like fossilized feces to be defined as a
00:09:31.160 as a burial good you know and people say they say well what's a big deal about you know giving them 0.99
00:09:38.280 that that shit even their shit is holy their shit is holy wow yeah and the thing the problem is 0.99
00:09:47.840 once you've abandoned those you know what the real definition is then they're just taking 1.00
00:09:53.880 everything out of the shelves and we're losing the science and we're not only losing physical
00:09:58.780 anthropology you can say goodbye to you know paleontology you can say bye to history I mean
00:10:06.260 I just saw one of the notices in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation
00:10:10.900 Act notice list, NAGPRA notice list, includes historic items from like the U.S. Army from
00:10:20.940 World War I is being labeled as indigenous. So they just don't want it to end, right? And since
00:10:31.880 the academics are not going to disagree with them, they're just giving everything back.
00:10:36.780 And so that's one of the terrible things. But the other aspect is when NAGPRA, the passing of NAGPRA was fatally flawed from the beginning because they allowed oral history to be used as evidence.
00:10:53.080 But it was still required a preponderance of evidence to make decisions, not just one thing.
00:11:00.540 Now, 2023, what happened is they had new regulations and those regulations turned everything upside down in a sense.
00:11:12.700 So it used to be that the scientists, the academics went into the collection, said, OK, so this part is Native American.
00:11:21.040 this part is historic this part looks like funerary objects this part looks just like
00:11:26.000 you know random stuff and then had the Native Americans come and say you know do they want
00:11:32.780 the materials back what's happened now is they that universities and museums from the 2023
00:11:40.420 regulatory changes which went into effect in 2024 the Native American repatriation activists
00:11:49.160 come in first and say what should go back and then the museum or the the um you know curators
00:11:58.560 and these native american repatriation activists sometimes are called knowledge keepers and
00:12:05.580 their knowledge the traditional knowledge does not need to be passed down so um you know if you
00:12:13.280 get a new knowledge keeper that can be completely different knowledge than the last knowledge
00:12:17.200 keeper because that's the definition of their tradition is not that it needs to be passed down
00:12:24.620 which then what it how is it traditional right but then the other thing is because they're
00:12:30.580 knowledge keepers they can keep that knowledge and they don't need to share it with you or i 0.92
00:12:35.560 so they can say this shit is sacred and you can't ask you can't ask me why i've made that 0.97
00:12:42.420 determination i've made that determination and that's that well go ahead that is one of the big 0.99
00:12:49.620 problems so along those lines as you probably know uh i discussed this in one of my earlier
00:12:55.720 books in the parasitic mind there was a woman who was at ubc going up for tenure uh i think it was
00:13:03.180 in the law faculty and she had you know not published much or anything at all and she had
00:13:09.080 not gotten tenure but then she sued and it went to some human rights tribunal because asking her
00:13:16.880 to have written things you know as you would need to do in a publication would be contrary
00:13:22.320 you mentioned earlier to her oral history and so you know sorry but you can't expect me to be
00:13:28.820 publishing things and and it actually was heard in front of the tribunal of course the other
00:13:33.540 The other examples would be the decolonization and indigenization of entire curricula in Canada, right?
00:13:42.280 It doesn't matter what you teach, you have to find a way to decolonize and indigenize whatever program it is that you teach.
00:13:49.420 And then, of course, a colleague of both of us, but certainly much more in line with your, Frances Whittleson, who's been on my show.
00:14:01.420 in a sense she dealt with something similar to yours and that she's saying wait a minute all of
00:14:06.180 these burial sites of uh you know the missing what is it called like missing missing indigenous
00:14:12.380 children i actually wrote an i co-wrote an article with her about that um and it's just
00:14:18.020 so it's in a sense you're both fighting a similar phenomenon which is if there is something that
00:14:27.860 goes contrary to the sensibilities of indigenous people in any way. It could be epistemologically,
00:14:35.740 it could be historically, it could be culturally. That is simply not a competition or a dialogue
00:14:42.280 that you can have. You simply say, yes, sir, yes, knowledge keeper, I am just a stupid white person 1.00
00:14:48.980 sitting on your stolen land, and you move aside, racist, correct? Right. And, you know, 1.00
00:14:54.440 So a little bit over a month ago, I had a Goldwater Institute report on the state of anthropology in the Southwest and how these laws, not only the federal law, NAGPRA, but also state laws, are basically killing anthropology and archaeology.
00:15:15.500 And one of the things is the University of Arizona, who deals with almost all of the repatriation and reburial efforts in the state, has decided to, has made some absurd decisions on this kind of decolonization aspect and on agreeing with the knowledge keepers.
00:15:37.940 one of the absurd decisions is they have decided to um that to redefine research as
00:15:47.720 research is even opening a box to see what's in the box so you have sometimes have things
00:15:54.120 being repatriated where they don't even know what's in the box they've literally said that
00:16:00.340 is research. Another thing is they've decided that since some Native Americans claim that
00:16:08.120 human spirits can enter into animals, that there are some animal remains that need to have the
00:16:17.820 same treatment as humans. And so we have, you know, burials of animals too. In California,
00:16:26.940 when um there was a famous mountain lion called p22 puma 22 that was trapped for years and when
00:16:34.980 it died the scientists wanted to do like in-depth research on it and they also wanted to keep tissue
00:16:41.540 samples and the bones and so forth to see how this urban um lion urban mountain lion existed
00:16:49.600 for so many years
00:16:51.900 and it was tracked
00:16:53.580 so they knew where it went
00:16:55.920 and so forth.
00:16:57.020 When it died, they wanted to keep
00:16:59.480 the remains for research.
00:17:01.780 The tribes in L.A.
00:17:03.860 said, no,
00:17:05.480 this is one of our ancient ones.
00:17:07.560 That could be grandpa.
00:17:08.980 It could be grandpa. 1.00
00:17:10.580 It needs to be buried in a traditional 1.00
00:17:13.920 Indian 0.95
00:17:16.660 mountain lion
00:17:18.760 ceremony i can guarantee you that in a thousand years ago nobody was burying mountain lions
00:17:25.760 you know they were too busy trying to survive i mean they were they weren't doing ceremonial
00:17:32.380 deaths for mountain lions there's never been one on discovered in in the record the archaeological
00:17:39.780 record it would have been found um so i think that that's another aspect and you know duty of
00:17:46.580 The new regulations also emphasize appropriate duty of care, and this means basically taking care of collections in a manner that the Native Americans say you should, Native American activists say you should.
00:18:03.480 And so at UCLA, you know, one of our esteemed universities, they go into the collection room and they talk to the artifacts and remains to make sure that they're not lonely.
00:18:16.960 Yes.
00:18:19.100 These kind of absurdities.
00:18:21.300 And we can chuckle about them. 0.99
00:18:23.120 They are funny, but they're destroying a field and they're doing it in a way that is very discriminatory against women.
00:18:32.180 they have like menstrual taboos now and you know museums are putting things in high shelves so that
00:18:40.100 women can't see them you know and yeah this is the same these are the same people who said believe
00:18:45.840 all women yeah but ironically when the my university tried to get rid of me and I sued 0.86
00:18:54.840 um and one of the reasons you know i had the book come out but i also had this um i took a
00:19:01.880 photograph of me holding a skull and i posted on on x which was twitter at the time said so happy
00:19:08.940 to be back with old friends after covid right and everybody was like aghast at this and this is a
00:19:16.200 photo that would have just been a normal photo pre the whole woke um hysteria you know i don't
00:19:24.280 know how many times in my career people said oh can you come in and take some photo can i take
00:19:29.820 some photos of you with some skeletal remains you know it was was that skeletal remain one that you
00:19:37.200 knew was of an indigenous person or any skeletal okay so that's why it was at the time yeah if it
00:19:42.780 was a swedish guy it wouldn't matter it wouldn't matter at least not then now it might matter 0.75
00:19:48.000 because if you're seeing the Native Americans seeing any skull is bothersome, you know. 0.95
00:19:57.240 But one of the funny things is, so they locked me out of the curation facility, 1.00
00:20:03.560 you know, a curation facility that I had overseen for 18 years.
00:20:07.900 And I had been taking care of the remains and I've been ensuring that international researchers could come studying them.
00:20:14.960 I did my own research on them. And ironically, the first thing that they did when they shut the lock change, they literally changed the locks in the middle of the night when they changed the locks is that they put a new set of protocols, how to get access to the remains.
00:20:34.620 And one of the things that I think was like the second or third thing on the list was menstruating personnel are not allowed into the facility and are not allowed to talk to Native American elders.
00:20:49.160 And they couldn't even bring themselves to say menstruating women because in their party, in their group, you know, men menstruate too.
00:21:00.160 so they're they're discriminating against sex but yet they can't even tell you what a woman is
00:21:06.480 exactly it's that kind of absurdity it's absurdity upon absurdity right and so i talk about this in
00:21:14.580 that report too and in my book on the war path okay so uh i want to take a step back and sort
00:21:20.980 of look at longitudinally the field of anthropology now there are many many disciplines
00:21:27.800 beyond anthropology that are laden with what i would call parasitic ideas which then leads
00:21:35.180 to you know all of the suicidal empathy that we see today but there is historically something
00:21:41.440 unique about anthropology in that we can go back to franz boas and cultural relativism and then
00:21:49.460 his students margaret mead and all the the nonsense there are no human universals who are you to judge
00:21:55.220 the cultural norms of another society. And she discovered that the Samoans actually have
00:22:00.960 different sexual traditions. And it turns out to be a complete nonsense. That's why the gentleman 0.96
00:22:06.340 wrote The Faithful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead. So then you've got the cultural anthropologists,
00:22:10.980 you've got the anthropologists of peace that Steven Pinker talks about, where, you know,
00:22:17.980 in their natural state, the indigenous people have zero violence. It's really white men that
00:22:23.480 introduced the concept of violence. There was absolutely no evidence of any violence prior to
00:22:28.620 white man. Then you've got the Napoleon, I mean, I would say Napoleon Chagnon, but I know in America
00:22:34.680 you say Chagnon, you know, he went in and was committing a genocide on the Yanomamo and so on.
00:22:41.500 So, and of course, in 2023, one of the sessions you were at was canceled because, you know,
00:22:48.760 how dare you say biological sex and so on. So there seems to be in all of the ecosystems of
00:22:55.920 disciplines laden with nonsense, you guys get possibly a gold medal. Number one, do you agree
00:23:03.480 with that? And why is it uniquely orgiastic with the anthropologists? I think you are right. And I
00:23:12.100 think that many bad ideas have stemmed from that and seeped out of anthropology. Why is it so bad
00:23:20.340 in anthropology? I think that there's kind of this over-the-top white guilt as a result of
00:23:29.640 studying skeletal remains, and specifically skulls, and trying to link this all with eugenics,
00:23:37.060 nazis um and you know i think that that's one of the things and you know like the nazis had a huge 0.53
00:23:45.940 huge slew of ridiculous superstitions they didn't need anthropology to become uh genocidal
00:23:53.140 you know that was just you know sometimes you know there might be links with all sorts of stuff 0.90
00:24:00.140 you know vegetarianism it was one of those things that came up with the nazis so but we don't
00:24:07.040 start calling all vegetarians hitler you know um but i think that that that's one of the things
00:24:14.700 and the other thing is um because anthropology is this kind of three or four field discipline
00:24:23.320 what you have is you have many people who entered into anthropology maybe thinking that they're
00:24:30.500 going to become physical anthropologists but then realizing that it's difficult and they don't
00:24:36.980 really want to study all the things like um you know anatomy dna doing statistics and so then
00:24:47.560 they go into cultural anthropology and cultural anthropology i believe in the beginning at least
00:24:53.600 was much more toxic and so i think that that's another aspect and i think that um
00:24:59.740 anthropology is a study of others and we sometimes have the tendency to romanticize the others
00:25:06.960 there's this whole thing like oh the in the past people always talked so bad about the native
00:25:11.960 americans it's not true at all you read really ancient texts and they're already romanticizing
00:25:17.840 um you know indigenous america but there's kind of so there's kind of this uh underdog
00:25:25.000 you know oh we want to stick up for the underdog kind of mentality when studying the others and
00:25:30.780 also the going native you know the the cultural anthropology students who come back from um from
00:25:37.960 africa with their uh ears elongated type of thing so i think that those kind of things play into it
00:25:45.360 um but it's it's really a shame because at its heart anthropology is one of these really
00:25:52.540 important fields that people don't think of as important when you talk to outsiders that are
00:25:57.800 fascinating but they kind of think oh well what's a big deal if some Native American materials get
00:26:03.620 reburied you know and and the thing is that at its heart what anthropology teaches us is that we're
00:26:10.700 all flawed every culture has some flaws some more than others but every culture has its flaws and so
00:26:16.960 don't villainize any the everybody but also don't you know put people on a pedestal either kind of
00:26:24.560 deal with it as you know human there's a human nature aspect that all cultures will have and
00:26:32.540 that therefore you know you'll see universals I don't know why anthropology has turned so against
00:26:40.820 universals but whenever I ask a question about universals I it wasn't that long ago I was in a
00:26:47.200 uh webinar on indigenous medicine and i thought i was being very helpful i said um
00:26:55.020 you know i noticed that you mentioned the use of comfort and menthol and these you know as
00:27:02.300 an ancient tradition this is also done and has also been found in asia and in europe and you
00:27:09.160 know it's this seems to be a universal can you talk about that and they were like no
00:27:14.100 you know we found it first i can i can explain in part why that is because this is a tension that
00:27:23.060 arises in my own work right so i i my whole career has been attempting to incorporate
00:27:30.440 evolutionary thinking in the behavioral sciences in general and in consumer behavior and economic
00:27:36.620 behavior in particular and in doing so i do study things that are human universals but even
00:27:43.540 cross-cultural differences are oftentimes due to evolutionary reasons, right? So the field of
00:27:50.100 behavioral ecology is the study of cross-cultural differences that are cultural adaptive responses
00:27:57.300 to their unique ecosystems. So, for example, Darwinian anthropology or evolutionary anthropology,
00:28:04.080 to your point earlier when you said anthropology is important, is an incredibly rigorous and
00:28:08.680 important field. Anthropology is the study of man in the Homo sapiens sense. What could be more
00:28:15.920 important than studying the ways in which all cultures are similar and the ways in which
00:28:21.660 cultures are different and why they are different? But yet, I think what's happened is that
00:28:26.900 anthropology has been hijacked by what I talk about in Suicidal Empathy, by an epistemology
00:28:32.940 of care rather than an epistemology of truth. So seeking the truth is a lot less important
00:28:40.920 than creating an epistemologically empathetic narrative. So therefore, if the truth has to
00:28:49.320 be murdered at the altar of Kumbaya, then so be it. And if your graduate students are trained in
00:28:57.620 that epistemology of care rather than the epistemology of truth then they become the
00:29:02.940 professors and then the system self-perpetuates yes and you know i you know ironically they may
00:29:10.720 be thinking that they're being the kind ones but they're not the kind ones um for a couple reasons
00:29:16.960 one thing is i think a lot of this uh care is so that they can feel better themselves not necessarily
00:29:25.820 to improve others, other people's lives.
00:29:29.520 But the other thing is,
00:29:30.920 if anybody has experience being canceled,
00:29:33.860 and, you know, I have experienced it multiple times now.
00:29:38.120 As you mentioned, in 2023,
00:29:41.280 I was supposed to give a talk
00:29:42.900 at the American Anthropological Association
00:29:45.180 on a panel about the importance of anthropological sex. 0.84
00:29:47.780 Five women.
00:29:48.620 Five women. 1.00
00:29:49.920 Five women. 1.00
00:29:51.080 We got canceled.
00:29:52.360 we are our our proposal was accepted and then retracted which had never happened before and
00:30:00.020 um but the thing is that when you get cancelled and you look at what people saying you know
00:30:07.360 they're really nasty nasty to the sense of like um you know i don't know how many times now uh
00:30:16.660 woke academics have made um allegations that i'm actually a man for example i mean maybe maybe i
00:30:24.880 look maybe you are genitalia does not define your your biological sex so maybe i am talking to a man
00:30:33.180 and the funny thing is they're saying this as an insult in the same token they are acting like 0.98
00:30:39.300 they're so caring about trans people you know it's like you know do you not get how hypocritical 0.99
00:30:47.420 that is or they say you know oh you know she's ugly or she's this you know and she's a racist 0.97
00:30:55.540 whatever it's all personal attacks which is not done by nice people you know so they might think 0.84
00:31:04.180 that they're the kind ones but really that's not kind at all you know it's funny you say this
00:31:09.020 because yesterday i won't even mention his name because he's not worthy of being mentioned
00:31:12.600 i was just uh somebody sent me a clip saying oh there are these two fellows talking about you in
00:31:19.320 your book one of whom is someone that i've interacted with as a colleague and who is the
00:31:24.160 editor of an incredibly prestigious journal and if you if you actually watch how they're acting
00:31:32.880 the mean girls in middle school would be disappointed and ashamed by how these two 1.00
00:31:41.700 grown men were acting they were so imbibed with pathological envy why is this asshole have the 0.99
00:31:51.260 number one New York Times best-selling book what and you're thinking you know I've had many enemies 0.99
00:31:57.700 in all sorts of walks of life,
00:32:00.180 whether it be in my public engagement,
00:32:02.040 whether it be fellow academics,
00:32:03.920 I've never gone on shows and defamed them.
00:32:07.400 And so I attack their ideas.
00:32:09.600 I might say, here is an idea that so-and-so espoused.
00:32:13.240 Here's why I think it's nonsense.
00:32:15.220 But if you, so to your point about the meanness, 0.96
00:32:17.740 calling you ugly and a man,
00:32:19.700 I face, that's exactly what I saw yesterday. 0.89
00:32:22.940 And I looked at this guy and say,
00:32:24.300 this guy is the editor-in-chief
00:32:26.020 of one of the most prestige.
00:32:27.240 you know at the level of science and nature and i've communicated with him in the past
00:32:33.640 about papers that i wanted to send to that journal which he kind of desk rejected and i'm like i guess
00:32:40.020 i now know why they were desk rejected so it is grotesque people don't have an appreciation of
00:32:45.640 the extent of the rot in academia this doesn't mean that all academics are like this it doesn't
00:32:50.980 mean that we don't love academia but there certainly is a lot of rot i wanted to move to
00:32:55.660 the next topic, which because it's a personal one, I made sure to clear it with you off air.
00:33:01.880 Since we're talking about forbidden knowledge and things that you shouldn't say, you were once
00:33:08.020 married to arguably, at least in psychology, to the guy who was the most despised well before there
00:33:16.600 was the word cancel culture. I'm talking about Philip Rushton. Before I cede the floor to you,
00:33:21.860 I want to set up my own personal story with Philip Rushdie. For those of you who don't know,
00:33:27.260 Philip Rushdie has done a lot of work looking at racial differences in IQ, in cranial capacity,
00:33:35.620 and so on. And, you know, I mean, you could say, oh, why is he doing this research? Or you could
00:33:41.740 say, listen, if he follows assiduously the scientific method, nothing is off limits.
00:33:47.560 There is no forbidden knowledge, which, by the way, that's exactly the position I would support.
00:33:52.400 But back in 1996, I was a young assistant professor.
00:33:56.800 I was speaking at the International Congress of Psychology, a big, big audience.
00:34:02.320 It was actually in Montreal, my hometown, at the Congress Hall, probably 1,500 people in that room. 0.93
00:34:09.040 I was idiotic enough to not check who the other speakers in my session were. 0.90
00:34:14.460 And I'm sitting there waiting to be called up next. 0.99
00:34:17.220 I'm thinking, why is there such animosity in the air, such venom? And then here comes Philip
00:34:24.800 Rushton, to whom you were married, who then puts up the stuff on racial differences and so on.
00:34:30.820 And that was the only time in my life where I actually felt great dread at going up next,
00:34:37.640 because I said, I think I'm going to be lynched by proxy just because I'm coming after this guy.
00:34:42.920 Now, the good news for me as a young assistant professor back then was that if the room was filled with about 1,500 people, once he finished his talk, 1,425 of the 1,500 rushed out of the room to sort of badger him.
00:34:59.400 And I said, thank God that there's almost nobody left in this room.
00:35:03.240 And then I went on to give my talk, which was completely non-controversial.
00:35:06.760 It was about, you know, which types of decision-making strategies you use under time pressure and so on.
00:35:12.440 having set all that up you were married to him can you tell us the old perennial story
00:35:20.240 did he do his research because he was an adherent of there is no forbidden knowledge but had zero
00:35:27.200 racism in him or was there any nefarious cause behind his research you know i was married to
00:35:34.240 him for three years but I was with him for five years and I had I never saw any race racism racist
00:35:43.060 acts you know when he was interacting with people when he was watching movies his favorite actor was
00:35:49.740 Denzel Washington you know like a racist is not gonna gonna act like that he was not a racist
00:35:57.500 he really wanted to figure out why people were different and what you know how can this help
00:36:05.500 some of the problems we have getting along um he was extremely hard working right and i don't know
00:36:13.740 if if you know he passed away i believe in 2012 i'm not 100 sure but i think he was 68 when he
00:36:21.160 passed away so he passed away and I think it was 2012 and um and he was incredibly hard working
00:36:28.880 he'd go in even on weekends you know um so like I never I never saw him like fudge numbers or say
00:36:40.060 you know let's cut this corner or you know he was really after the the truth and um I did some work
00:36:49.460 with him not a lot but you know i did do some work on um with him on skeletal remains um and
00:36:56.660 one of the things is that he also was an extremely curious person and so he was always kind of
00:37:03.860 looking like you know what is what more can i learn and he was also really happy when people
00:37:11.520 succeeded in their careers when young academics were going into their careers and they got a
00:37:18.680 10-year track he was like so happy for people when that happened and um so you know people are
00:37:25.760 like well if he was this great guy why didn't you divorce him and the divorce wasn't a pleasant
00:37:30.460 divorce it wasn't like you know and I say you know I divorced him for the same reasons people
00:37:37.220 get divorced all the time they were personal we didn't get along in some ways it was like we were
00:37:43.300 just in some ways we were too similar like we once we got you know into something um even if
00:37:51.600 it was something minor neither one of us ever wanted to give up given right so hold on i'm
00:37:57.860 glad that you said this because i was going to ask you the next sort of chicken and egg question
00:38:01.900 did you get attracted to him as a prospective spouse because i mean he is a honey badger and
00:38:09.740 that he's saying, I don't care that I'm going to be ostracized by everybody. This research
00:38:15.780 should be pursued and you're not going to stop me. And therefore you said, wait a minute,
00:38:19.680 I recognize this in him and that attracts me or, and, or is it that seeing him being the honey
00:38:27.080 badger and you being a colleague and a spouse then gave you the courage later in your career
00:38:33.600 when you had to invoke your honey badger mindset? I think it's a little bit of both.
00:38:38.860 I mean, when I first met him, I knew he was controversial, but I didn't know how controversial.
00:38:45.760 And then when we were together, he was very supportive of my own academic career.
00:38:55.620 And so, in a sense, you know, I talked about in the beginning, I talked about Kenwick Mann's funeral.
00:39:01.240 He was one who who was like, you should really write an article about how paleo Indians, how the most ancient of the remains are being attacked by this, you know, by repatriation laws.
00:39:14.040 And so he was, you know, academically, you know, we were we were very much in sync and and personality wise academically.
00:39:24.300 So I do think that that gave me strength. I also think that, ironically, he was so much more controversial, I think, than I am. And yet, when he went onto campus, even, so I was married to him from, I was with him from like 1998 to 2003.
00:39:47.420 and when he went on to campus people greeted him when he went to conferences people would talk to
00:39:54.780 him um you know he was not treated like a pariah obviously there were people who would would have
00:40:02.040 stayed away from him but he's he was not treated nearly as badly as i've been treated and he still
00:40:09.340 was giving conference talks you know throughout the time we were together and this was after his
00:40:15.480 book race evolution and behavior had been published so you know if you think about it i can't even get
00:40:21.140 on a program anymore um so i do think things have gotten nastier um but but yeah so i think that in
00:40:30.640 some ways i was kind of surprised how how nasty things have gotten especially given that i had
00:40:37.940 already encountered some stuff like this being married to phil yeah yeah interesting now you're
00:40:45.100 you're out of academia. So I think, are you with the National Association of Scholars?
00:40:49.260 I am with the National Association of Scholars. I'm a board member.
00:40:52.460 Okay. And so do you miss academia? Do you wish you had another position? Or are you like,
00:41:00.220 hey, that was a great part of my life. It ended perhaps poorly, but thank God I'm out of that
00:41:05.160 place. I am glad that I'm retired as a professor. I do think that it's sad that
00:41:13.900 It's so difficult to continue research. But even if I was still working at the university, I wouldn't I would have difficult time because my area of research is skeletal remains.
00:41:26.780 And although, you know, Indigenous, you cannot find a newly collected data Indigenous California article in the last three years, maybe four years.
00:41:45.260 They're just basically all the collections in California are off the table, many in other states.
00:41:52.400 But also, even other human remains now are being put away. And so in a sense, it's very difficult to conduct this type of research in America, in the Americas, in the US and Canada. And then also in New Zealand and Australia, it's very difficult.
00:42:16.200 So, you know, and most of the, you know, the big English speaking places. So that's, that's kind of sad. I'm not giving up. And I do have a few things on the table that I'm still working on.
00:42:33.140 And since I've been retired, I have published actually an article on the x-rays that I have.
00:42:41.780 One of the funny things is that when I was locked out of the curation facility and I was told that I wasn't going to get any access to the collections anymore, I said, well, there are all these x-rays in the collection facility and x-rays aren't considered in the repatriation laws.
00:43:03.140 And the curator, the person who took over the curation and the NAGPRA coordinator, they said, well, we've been talking to the tribes and they tell us that x-rays are sacred.
00:43:18.800 And I said, how can x-rays be sacred? By the definition of sacred in the laws is that these are sacred, and sacred object has to be an object that is required to practice your religion. Native Americans never had x-rays. And so how can they need it to practice their traditional religion?
00:43:42.880 Oh, can I take a shot? Can I take a shot? X-rays are imbued with ancestral spirits that you as a white Western woman simply don't have the capacity to understand. So I wholeheartedly agree that by you taking those X-rays, you're violating some spirit God, no?
00:44:04.780 yes that's exactly that's how it goes but what they didn't know is that I had like maybe um 400
00:44:14.080 x-rays in my office from the years when I the x-rays in the curation facility were taken before
00:44:22.260 I got to San Jose so they were quite old but I have like x-rays that I that were in my office
00:44:28.460 that um you know I had taken over the years and and I kept them in my office instead of the curation
00:44:33.540 facility um and so i took those along with me and i've used them to do some research and i have
00:44:40.780 um i have a couple more plans to do research on them and we'll see if i can get them published
00:44:47.100 um i was able to get the first one published so we'll see you know if i can get others published
00:44:53.780 one of the things is that um medical journals tend to like to publish anthropology sometimes
00:44:59.100 as a, you know, oh, this is an interesting way
00:45:02.360 to look at the skeletal remains
00:45:04.160 that can help doctors understand the body.
00:45:08.300 And the editors may not be as biased towards you
00:45:12.700 because they don't know who the hell you are.
00:45:14.680 Exactly.
00:45:15.540 If you send it to Current Anthropology
00:45:17.820 or whatever the journal, 1.00
00:45:19.200 oh, no way, this woman is toxic. 1.00
00:45:21.080 But if you send it to some journal 0.99
00:45:22.580 that is completely removed from your ecosystem,
00:45:25.560 then that bias doesn't kick in, yes?
00:45:27.740 Yes.
00:45:28.120 And there are a lot of Weisses.
00:45:30.280 You know, Weisses are very common names.
00:45:32.240 There you go.
00:45:33.440 Well, okay.
00:45:34.220 So what is, maybe as we wrap up, what is, I know you just mentioned you're working on
00:45:38.300 a whole bunch of, you know, potential new academic papers.
00:45:42.120 Any other projects that you want to tell us about?
00:45:44.520 Either I'm working on the next book.
00:45:46.420 Here's what I'm doing with National Association of Scholars.
00:45:48.720 Anything that you want to promote?
00:45:50.660 This is your chance to do so.
00:45:51.960 So I'm really trying to bring forth the problem of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, NAGPRA.
00:46:01.780 I personally think it should be repealed.
00:46:04.520 It has problems with separation of church and state because the committee members have to include two traditional Indian religious leaders, whatever that means.
00:46:16.520 Um, and, um, so I don't, I don't think I'll be successful, but I won't, I won't stop trying to get that repealed. Um, at the very least, if I was successful in removing those 2023 regulations and reopen, which would reopen collections to researchers, I think that that would be a huge success.
00:46:39.440 So I'm continuing to write about that. I'm also going this summer to the UK to the Heterodox Conference, Eric Kaufman at the Heterodox Conference, and I'll be presenting there.
00:46:53.940 um and i have something like five articles and chapters that are in and in press or in
00:47:03.000 uh in some part of the stage of being in press and yeah um one of them is from a conference i
00:47:10.740 did in um israel another one i didn't actually get to go i just zoomed in um another one is uh
00:47:18.460 from a george mason um conference i a symposium i um also zoomed in but um i really had wanted
00:47:26.780 to go to that one but my my husband who just passed away um uh three three months ago um
00:47:33.980 he was so sick that i couldn't you know i obviously didn't go um so but um i have those
00:47:42.000 things. And, you know, I'm always writing and always looking to see what's next. And, you know,
00:47:49.800 hopefully, you know, fighting back some of this, you know, woke warrior BS, basically,
00:47:59.100 and getting anthropology back to, you know, people who are interested in just like reconstructing
00:48:06.960 the past with all its warts and also looking at bones and not being like, well, this bone could
00:48:15.080 have been a warrior or actually this looks like a non-binary trans warrior from the Native American
00:48:24.260 past because they were so understanding, but reconstructing it as it really is. And so I'm
00:48:31.880 I'm just constantly pecking away at that.
00:48:34.600 Amen to that.
00:48:36.280 You are a manifestation of the fact that honey badgers can come in all forms.
00:48:42.800 They could be big.
00:48:43.660 They could be small.
00:48:44.560 They could be men. 1.00
00:48:45.460 They could be women.
00:48:46.600 They could be each of the other 873 genders.
00:48:50.460 If more academics had your courage, I think academia would be in a much better position.
00:48:55.380 Thank you so much for coming on the show, Elizabeth.
00:48:57.440 Stay on the line so we could say goodbye and best of luck in your future endeavors.
00:49:01.880 Thank you so much.
00:49:03.380 Cheers.