00:00:26.560It's great to have you on. You've got the background.
00:00:28.360you're right there in the field of beautiful flowers uh it's fantastic to have you on anyone
00:00:33.560who doesn't know who you are just tell everybody a little bit about how are you where you are what
00:00:37.740has been your journey through life how do you find yourself having this weird zoom chat with us
00:00:41.540yeah well the basic story is that i was going through life and i had a dante moment and instead
00:00:52.280of going to hell i went to this small college in the woods called the evergreen state college and
00:00:57.380I went there to study literature and narrative specifically, how it operates, how you pull
00:01:02.820it apart and put it together and what it does for and to people. And about halfway through my time
00:01:09.120at the Evergreen State College, a new president came on and he empowered some faculty and they
00:01:16.620created the college's purpose around social justice, but specifically about racial justice.
00:01:24.000And they began to implement ideas that I would ascribe to, I guess, Robin DiAngelo is the most popular proponent of these ideas called anti-racism.
00:01:35.440And whenever I speak about anti-racism, I'm putting that in quotes and we can get into that.
00:01:42.720By the spring of 2017, the college kind of collapsed in an absurdist version of a race war.
00:01:51.220And the students took over the campus, accused this very, very progressive, explicitly anti-racist institution of being the equivalent of the most white supremacist structure in the world or just a part of that white supremacist structure.
00:02:08.260they roamed the campus with baseball bats they performed these things called struggle sessions
00:02:14.180which is a kind of a technical term they didn't know what they were doing but they
00:02:17.600pilloried and mocked and yelled out and you know just kind of broke down various different
00:02:25.880authority figures and they live streamed the entire thing to the internet thinking that they
00:02:30.080were the good guys and it turned out that the world had a different idea of what they were doing
00:02:36.200And then one professor that they targeted, Brett Weinstein, went on to kind of challenge them and then make what was going on more public than it already was, seeing as that it was streamed online.
00:02:48.500Well, you're describing things that sound slightly familiar in the last few months, don't they?
00:02:54.240And this is really one of the reasons that we wanted to have this conversation with you, because you said just before we started, you felt like that would be a warning to the world.
00:03:04.860And I know Brett did as well. You know, we know Brett, we've met him, we'll be getting him on the show soon. He felt, I think, as well, that this was an opportunity for people to wake up to what was going on. And instead, as you said, it seems to have been more of a blueprint for how to move forward. So take us, you know, kind of through that, how this example of student activism running amok now seems to be society running amok or parts of society running amok.
00:03:33.720Yeah, there's this interesting chicken-egg quandary about do the ideas come first or does the radicalism or the behavior come first?
00:03:44.300So with regards to what happened in June of 2020, I think that we can see the buildup and then the explosion that happened worldwide, at least in the Western world, about protests and stuff, nominally about Black Lives Matter.
00:04:00.680But I think that there was a lot of just kind of pent-up energy being released because everybody had been in lockdown.
00:04:09.340But that narrative that gave people a reason to protest, specifically Black Lives Matter and the various different things that that means.
00:04:18.780And people try to control what that means for various different ends, but it does mean different things.
00:04:24.940You know, there's the statement Black Lives Matter, then there's the organization, then there's everything that's attached to that.
00:04:30.680So, there's that layer that if you look at what happened at the Evergreen State College, there's a very, you know, kind of basic explanation that a lot of students had been pent up all winter long and now they had a reason to just express a lot of energy.
00:04:47.920They had been given these tools, I guess, kind of loosely based on a Marxist principle of overthrowing the oppressor and lifting up the victim and kind of reversing the scales of justice in a bid to equalize the scales of justice.
00:05:05.760So the students had those ideas at hand to justify what they were doing and to explain what they were doing to the world and to themselves and to the administration.
00:05:17.020But beneath that, beneath what the students were doing, is the behavior of the faculty.
00:05:22.560And what I've done, because I was going to the Evergreen State College and I was working in the media department.
00:05:29.820So I was on camera a lot of the time filming a lot of these workshops and seminars and lectures.
00:05:35.080I saw these ideas being implemented and the ideas are very similar to, you know, exactly the same ideas that are now being implemented in a response to the protests currently.
00:05:48.180So there's been a big outcry about police injustice and the oppression of black people in America specifically, and now there's this entire set of ideas called anti-racism that corporations and school boards and municipalities and various different organizations are now implementing as a response to that.
00:06:08.720So at the Evergreen State College, this is my argument, is that the ideas allowed the protests to happen.
00:06:15.400In current events, the protests are allowing these ideas to be implemented.
00:06:20.120So I don't know if the ideas once implemented, what they will actually do within any given structure or institution.
00:06:27.240But I do know that they cause an extreme amount of tension and interpersonal conflict and it fractures community.
00:06:35.560It makes it impossible to be a human being to a human being.
00:06:39.940I mean, Benjamin, you know, we're talking about students here.
00:07:12.200It depends on where the movement is going to be implemented.
00:07:16.160What we see now is that, I guess there was a letter that was signed by 100 or 200 Princeton faculty and master's students that called for reorganization of the institution of Princeton around ideas of anti-racism, around ideas that they call equity.
00:07:41.000What equity does is that it takes perceived privilege and perceived oppression and it decreases everybody who has this so-called privilege in order to lift up everybody that has this so-called oppression.
00:07:54.360And what that ends up becoming is a redistribution of resources, both in the sense of just monetary resources or in positions of authority, but also moral reparations.
00:08:07.380That's what happens. And that's what happened at the Evergreen State College was that once everybody was no longer colorblind, everybody was focused and obsessed with color, with race, with gender, sexuality, all these different vectors or intersectional markers of, you know, your privilege, oppression matrix.
00:08:25.480and what you were supposed to do is to apologize if you're a white man you're supposed to apologize
00:08:31.080for your privilege and put yourself behind everybody else and if you were let's say a
00:08:35.740disabled black trans individual you were put in front and you were given the moral authority and
00:08:42.360it no longer had to do with the soundness of your argument you know or the content of your character
00:08:48.760it stressed not only your identity, but how you could maximize that identity to rest power and
00:08:57.580to gain attention. So the ideas that are being implemented, they make people go crazy. And
00:09:05.960everybody, depending on where they are at life, goes crazy in a different way. And what I've been
00:09:10.940doing recently is taking what I've discovered and studied at the Evergreen State College
00:09:15.860And using those tools that I developed to examine how people in New York City Council meetings, in Skype sessions and Zoom sessions, are taking these ideas and implementing the same sort of fracturing of community, of communalism, of I'm going to talk to you as a person, and using their identity to shift power dynamics and to, I guess, to forward some sort of justice.
00:09:45.080So the example I think you're talking about is a meeting in which a woman is chastising a guy for having his friend's black nephew on his lap or son on his lap.
00:09:59.640And she's chastising him for this as some kind of evidence of racism, while the boy's black father's in the background, I think, laughing his head off or something along those lines.
00:11:06.900So why wouldn't you be anti-racist in this way?
00:11:14.140There is a very short video that was shared at my place of employment now where there's a video of Ibram X. Kendi, who's the author of How to Be an Anti-Racist.
00:11:25.920And he says that in this video, and I'm paraphrasing here, he says that to say that you're not racist doesn't mean anything.
00:11:49.000And you ask, well, what does that mean?
00:11:52.100And when you get into this theology, it becomes very apparent that if you're a white person, you are operating in a state of ignorance as to the racism that is oppressing people constantly.
00:12:06.580That everything that you take for granted, be it everything from, you know, literally everything is racist now if you start to look through the lens of disparities of outcome.
00:12:18.200so like a baseball game is racist or a wedding is racist or you know technology is racist
00:12:25.420all these different parts of your life that you're taking for granted actually you can see
00:12:30.700that they're all racist that everything that you do or that you don't do is a marker of your
00:12:35.620privilege and that you're constantly perpetuating this racism that's constantly oppressing everybody
00:12:41.260else or if you're in the minoritized group or the racialized group then you are constantly
00:12:47.580under threat, both from macroaggressions, which would be, you know, history of the oppression of
00:12:54.120white people of your race, but all these microaggressions that are constantly operating
00:12:59.700behind the surface, or these peak aggressions that you can never actually locate because we
00:13:05.540don't have the technology to catch up to them. But you're constantly caught in a matrix of struggle
00:13:10.720and of oppression and once you begin to internalize that kind of process of examining your life for
00:13:19.180all the things that you did or didn't do and it doesn't matter what you intend right it strips
00:13:23.840your agency away from you you no longer have any purpose in life other than to fight against
00:13:29.800this implicit bias that you have this unconscious bias that you have and my contention if you look
00:13:35.680at how it affects people is that it gradually erodes their ability to be a normal person
00:13:42.160functioning in the world because they are constantly overrun by this program that's
00:13:50.100imaginary, that's not really tied to explicit acts of being good or doing good or being bad
00:13:56.300or doing wrong. I'm explaining in very general terms, so we should probably land on something
00:14:02.620very specific. But I see that the theology, if you listen to the people who believe this,
00:14:09.480they're constantly saying you need to read more. You need to do the work more. If you disagree
00:14:14.680with them, that's your fragility. There's all these tactics that it uses to convert you into
00:14:21.220a believer of the system. But once you're in the system, once you believe this belief,
00:14:26.000what are you supposed to do other than tear other people down or tear yourself down?
00:14:29.740i don't think of it as being constructive at all and why do you not think it's constructive because
00:14:36.900isn't it i mean we do talk about privilege and look some people are more privileged than others
00:14:41.220there's different types of privilege i mean that you know that for instance if you might believe
00:14:45.520in white privilege you're less likely to be get stopped and searched as a white person than you
00:14:49.360are if you're black you know if you're if you're a man you you're more likely to earn all these
00:14:54.100sorts of things isn't this a good thing that we're being made aware of it well that is a
00:14:59.500really good question and i constantly try to humble myself and interact with the good intentions
00:15:07.060behind the ideas and perform a struggle session on myself because that's what it's kind of inviting
00:15:13.480us to do is to really grill ourselves and i think that insofar as you withstand criticism
00:15:19.580you come out stronger as long as you don't give up your agency your self-control your responsibility
00:15:25.940to somebody else as long as you maintain ownership over your own guilt and shame and don't give it
00:15:32.440to other people so for example at the evergreen state college towards the end of my tenure there
00:15:39.200we had to go through mandatory privilege workshops or anti-oppression workshops and
00:15:44.480in one workshop i was asked to detail my privilege and then to detail the privileges that i don't have
00:15:52.020And we broke up into small groups to kind of to dwell on these things. And I was in the group with the speaker who ended up being who was a evergreen administrator who figures into the documentary that I've done. She's a character in this story.
00:16:09.160And I'm like, well, I don't see the world as vectors of privilege and underprivilege.
00:16:17.560Why would I want to look at the world that way?
00:16:19.780And she's like, well, you are privileged to not look at the world that way.
00:16:23.760And other people aren't privileged enough to not see all the disadvantages that they have.
00:16:29.000And then she detailed, she was a black woman, but she detailed all the privileges that she had about being able to go on vacation and being really happy that she was going on vacation.
00:16:37.960And she told a coworker that she was going to go on vacation.
00:16:40.740And then she realized that her coworker can't afford to go on vacation.
00:16:43.720And she was oppressing her coworker by expressing her own, you know, happiness of being able to, you know, take a break from her work.
00:16:53.140And when she went on this lecture, because I knew this is what was going to happen.
00:17:00.760So I've been exposed to a lot of the mechanics of Christianity.
00:17:05.980And I've always been very aware of when they're being abused because I've seen the mechanics of Christianity be abused to control people.
00:17:13.980So what I saw happen in this lecture that she gave was that she just kept on breaking down everything in her life into this very rudimentary, very narrow way of looking at the world of, do I have more or less than others?
00:17:28.080now when i resisted giving them my privilege and giving them my inventory it's not because i don't
00:17:36.980have privilege it's not that i it's not because i don't have a deficit deficit of privilege i don't
00:17:43.440want to use my envy i don't want to go through life envying everybody or feeling uh better than
00:17:51.820everybody which is what you're supposed to do with this and furthermore i don't want them to
00:17:56.880be able to control my shame and myself. I don't want to go through life apologizing for being a
00:18:02.640white male that completely distracts from whether or not I'm creating good content, right? So my
00:18:08.540focus is on making something good in the world. And the way that I can evaluate whether it's good
00:18:13.880or not is the effect that it has in the world. And whether or not I become, you know, better than
00:18:19.880other people or worse than other people, that's a very private thing for me to evaluate and then to
00:18:25.340either do better or to turn around and help somebody who's not as good off as me. And using
00:18:31.760all these tactics of guilt and shame, it's like a broken Christianity. It's got all the sin,
00:18:36.820but none of the redemption. It's got all the darkness, none of the light.
00:18:40.340Benjamin, so let's talk about that because I think the religious aspect of this is interesting. A lot
00:18:45.400of us who have been paying attention to this thing, particularly those of us who are familiar
00:18:48.840with how religions operate, have begun to notice some similarities. And the one worry to me,
00:18:55.020you know i'm skeptical of all religion organized religion certainly uh because i see it as a tool
00:19:01.260for manipulating people and imbuing people with original sin guilt shame etc apart from islam
00:19:08.600we're quite happy with that make one of clear yes make it absolutely clear you boys are great
00:19:14.180well done mate saving us yes uh yeah anyway uh moving swiftly on um so there seems to be a lot
00:19:23.160of similarities between what's happening and the one concern that i've had for some time
00:19:26.920which is what you put your finger on is there seems to be one thing missing from this new
00:19:32.280religion which is any sort of possibility of forgiveness uh any sort of possibility of
00:19:37.640redemption that isn't a product of being destroyed i mean if you look at something like cancel
00:19:43.440culture it's not enough for somebody to uh to come and confess their sins it's not enough for
00:19:49.300them to apologize they have to be destroyed they have to be fired they have to lose their job they
00:19:54.620have to be ashamed they must never appear on television again etc uh how much of of a religious
00:20:01.280nature is there to this whole movement well that's a really uh it's a really interesting
00:20:07.860question that i think that you could go on forever to do that and i think that i've interviewed uh
00:20:14.880people who have survived cults, gone through cults. And there's this one book that I'm failing
00:20:20.980to recall right now, but it's an inventory of how the cultural revolution in China or the Chinese
00:20:27.840government implemented a totalitarian state. And there was a number of different tactics that they
00:20:33.400used. And one of those tactics that you use in a cult in order to maintain a rigid belief system
00:20:40.220and therefore maintain control over people is methods of exclusion.
00:20:45.500If people disagree, either you're with the program or you're out.
00:20:52.340Actually, that's one of the literal tactics of a destructive cult is that they erase your existence.
00:20:59.380So when we talk about the religious nature, I think we really need to define what is religion.
00:21:05.860And this is probably beyond the confines of this discussion.
00:21:09.740But if we really want to honestly critique in what ways social justice activism or this current spate of moral panic is like a religion and the different tactics or mechanics of religious structures that the anti-racism, quote unquote, or the critical race theory or all these different theories and theosophies behave, then you really need to understand.
00:21:35.360And I really think, or I would push, that you really need to understand the function of religion and the psychology of the individual and of the group, and where the individual and the group intersect, and the negotiation between individuality and collectivism that religions prove themselves as either destructive or constructive through.
00:21:57.460I guess what I'm asking, Benjamin, is what are the similarities? Why do you say this is like a religion?
00:22:02.780um well okay there's a zealotry aspect of it there's um if you look at the ways in which a
00:22:10.640certain faction of trans rights activism operates and i'm making a distinction between transsexual
00:22:17.980transsexuals trans people and then a certain behavior on the internet specifically towards a
00:22:24.520kind of slightly well-known children's author called jk rowling the way in which jk rowling is
00:22:31.300being attempted to be erased for simply stating kind of a nuanced opinion about the conflict
00:22:39.360between women's rights and trans women's rights and how we need to have a conversation about that
00:22:45.640and the ways in which radical trans rights activists feel empowered to erase her existence
00:22:50.720because her merely stating that women are a different category than trans women so upsets
00:22:58.480these individuals because it erases or attacks their reality. And it shows that their reality
00:23:05.680is a construct of belief. In similar ways, the ways in which belief structures operate,
00:23:13.500if they aren't constantly given a feedback into producing something in the world,
00:23:17.980if your belief doesn't constantly focus or come back to how do you feel and what are you doing,
00:23:26.580are you being a good person if it is instead shifted onto are you changing the world for the
00:23:33.420better is the world bad or can it be better then the locus of control or the locus the focus is no
00:23:40.380longer on bettering yourself it's about you know projecting all of your evil and your weakness
00:23:46.140let's just say your imperfection onto the structures in the world and then therefore you
00:23:51.100go after and you assault these structures in the world i'm straying from the point about making it
00:23:56.300a religion or tying it directly to a religion but there's just so many different mechanics going on
00:24:01.040in here that i see similar areas to and you know benjamin you know i i see this movement and you
00:24:06.140know i we started this journey two years ago and we started listening to people and you know people
00:24:10.900like yourself i'm from venezuela that means everybody who's watching and listening can have
00:24:14.960a drink so that's what we do at trigonometry because i always reference my mom but i've seen
00:24:19.860these ideas before important new ideas i saw them in 99 when chavez came to power you know they
00:24:26.000putting forward all these ideas and you know venezuela collapsed it's they're crap ideas
00:24:31.560why do we keep perpetuating them why do we keep going back to them
00:24:35.900they there was an article that was released in reason uh magazine or reason.com and it was based
00:24:44.820on a scientific study of some sort and it talks about the ways in which virtue signaling or virtue
00:24:51.460signal culture empowers narcissistic sociopaths. And I've been seeing this over and over again.
00:24:57.920If you look at the footage of the Evergreen State College, you see that there's certain
00:25:01.960characters that get to the top of the fray. When the organization shatters, then it becomes a
00:25:09.120pure power play and it becomes purely theatrical. And in that type of environment,
00:25:15.120certain personalities get activated or rise to the top. So either these set of ideas
00:25:20.400kind of inspire people to act like narcissistic sociopaths or they empower people who are already
00:25:27.000narcissistic sociopaths. I think that for a certain amount of people, it's really attractive
00:25:33.520to be on the right side of history and to try to change the world. It allows you to merge into a
00:25:41.220story that has, which is so superhuman and so otherworldly that you, in a sense, get inflamed
00:25:48.980by this transcendent fire of being able to actually tackle right now 400 years of oppression.
00:25:57.060Right now, you can be involved in demolishing a system that has done nobody any good or
00:26:02.900every good that is done has come at the expense of people, somebody else, right?
00:26:07.800It's a zero-sum thinking with a messianic message that causes you to think that you're the Messiah.
00:26:14.860And it inflames your ego and then you just go on this ego trip.
00:26:18.980So I think on one level, on the psychological level, revolutionary ideas are really suited for people who are discontent with themselves and who don't have a strong moral foundation that constantly causes them to focus first on themselves and then on the world.
00:26:35.900And I think that in a certain way, because of social media, because of Facebook, the way that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are designed, it rewards narcissistic behavior. And these ideas kind of breed upon narcissistic behavior. So it's just, I think it's a conjunction of very similar different things and people being ignorant of the outcome of these ideas.
00:26:57.620Do you think part of it is also an ignorance of history? Because there seems to be these kind of cycles throughout history where it takes a few generations for people to forget what was a really bad idea. So suddenly, you've got 20 year olds now explaining to me how great communism is when I come from the Soviet Union, right? And that's because they haven't been kind of, you might say they haven't been indoctrinated against it. And to some extent, they've probably been indoctrinated into it by their Marxist professors at
00:27:27.560university do you think this is kind of the cycle of history and which is back to the kind of 1930s
00:27:32.760if that's the case then what i think we should well here's the problem with this but i have an
00:27:37.960idea why don't we just sandbox these ideas in the uk and in america and give give a city over to the
00:27:45.220communists and say okay let's run your experiment abolish the police empower social workers create
00:27:51.540a communist government i nominate hull you've never been to hull benjamin it's not no should
00:27:59.000i go there uh yeah if if you don't like uh having a good no that's unfair on the people of hull i'm
00:28:05.900sure it's a great town it really isn't i mean we love the people of hull but hull not so much
00:28:10.920anyway carry on and in a certain extent evergreen the evergreen state college story is a perfect
00:28:17.800example of how these ideas play out. But built within this activist rhetoric, built within the
00:28:23.780very foundations of critical race theory, of white fragility theory, of all these different ideas,
00:28:29.220is a shifting of the blame away from the self. So if Evergreen fails, which it has,
00:28:36.300Evergreen ran an experiment and it failed. Everybody who still believes in Evergreen or
00:28:41.580believes in these ideas that, you know, kind of took over Evergreen, shifts the blame to Tucker
00:28:47.460Carlson, shifts the blame to the right wing media, shifts the blame to the, uh, yokels down the
00:28:53.260street that voted for Trump, right? So they can, they're, they're literally unable. And this is my
00:28:58.320main criticism or the damning criticism of the Evergreen State College is that they ran an
00:29:04.660experiment like good academics, but like bad academics, they were unable to actually do
00:29:09.580the work of examining why it went wrong, where it went wrong. So even if we do give over Michigan
00:29:16.260to the Black Lives Matter government and they fail, which they will, because everybody who
00:29:22.680generates income, everybody who is productive will leave because their productivity will be
00:29:27.580given to the loudest people in the room who don't want to be productive. They just want to be right.
00:29:33.900It will fail. It will collapse. And then they'll blame it on capitalism. They'll always blame it
00:29:39.100When you say Evergreen failed, what does that mean?
00:29:48.800So if you look at the numbers, and I'll try to make a nuanced point about this.
00:29:52.740If you look at the numbers, the Evergreen State College ran their social justice experiment.
00:29:57.820In 2011, they made social justice one of their guiding principles.
00:30:02.980In 2015, they made anti-racist indoctrination the way in which they're going to achieve social justice. In 2017, they fomented and justified, after the fact, this huge protest that went absolutely viral because it's absolutely stunning how everybody acted in this event.
00:30:22.380and then the feedback from the environment was i don't want to go and get this kind of education
00:30:29.300i don't want to go to the evergreen state college and their enrollment has plummeted
00:30:33.640dramatically the administration has blamed everything except for the protest they'll say
00:30:39.260well maybe the protest did something but really we think that it's just the economy is different
00:30:43.760or blah blah blah blah blah they've gone so far as to play a marketing team i'm 90 certain to
00:30:50.040suppress my videos on the google search rhythm algorithm i'm the one who is reported constantly
00:30:57.100on evergreen and they stripped about a year ago google kind of flushed my videos from search
00:31:03.640results of evergreen and two weeks before then the college hired that team so they've tried to
00:31:08.900do everything they can to do good but nobody wants to go there nobody wants to go the evergreen state
00:31:14.800College. And this is the nuanced point. Even if you do want a social justice education, even if
00:31:20.940as a student, you want to go and change the world and to hell with understanding it, the goal is to
00:31:25.800change it. Why would you go to the Evergreen State College, which proved that they can't even teach
00:31:30.940you how to do that effectively? If you look at how the students overthrew the world, they're so
00:31:38.040ridiculous. They made complete fools of themselves, as did all the administrators. So even if you want
00:31:43.380that kind of education which is what they're offering why would you go there if you could go
00:31:47.320to any other college literally any other college in the united states but it but isn't part of the
00:31:52.320problem benjamin is that and i'm a former teacher i was a teacher for 12 years we have raised a
00:31:58.440generation of children you know to be you know to essentially see themselves as victims we try and
00:32:04.620sort all their conflicts out for them it's a very selfish culture we want to protect them
00:32:09.060we have essentially raised a generation of adults now to be self-indulgent and narcissistic and
00:32:16.680think the entire world is about them so can we really blame them when they go out and they start
00:32:20.660behaving like this well see in my reportage on the evergreen state college and now in my reportage
00:32:26.400on current events i'm not really concerned with the students or let's call it the youth or the
00:32:32.020kids or whatever i'm concerned with the administrators i'm concerned with the adults
00:32:36.580in the room. And if you look at the adults, the people who are running, we have lost our sense
00:32:43.300of authority. It's not the generation that's acting crazy. We have lost our ability to have
00:32:48.160a positive, strong role model of authority. We don't trust authority. We've gone down this road
00:32:55.680of deconstructing and deconstructing so long that we can't stomach anybody drawing a line in the
00:33:02.860sand. I think that the fabric of our society has become so reactionary in a sense, progressively
00:33:09.660reactionary, that we had to elect a very belligerent authority figure, not authoritarian
00:33:17.120figure, but authority figure in Trump just to kind of show us the dark side of what we're
00:33:24.000missing. I think that if you look at Washington State on every level, if you look at the Evergreen
00:33:28.740state college seattle and the governor they're all very weak leaders who suppress who suppress
00:33:35.820the uh let's say the conservative faction who want to get back to work constantly suppress the people
00:33:41.480who want to get back and get the economy rolling and then constantly coddle the people who want to
00:33:46.380overthrow society like it's filled with hypocrisy and weakness and it's interesting so you say it's
00:33:54.280field of hypocrisy and weakness don't you think one of the things that we saw in this country which
00:33:59.920still to this day gets me upset is the fact that you know the black lives matter movement now we
00:34:05.640can all agree that black lives matter we can all agree that you know racism wherever it occurs
00:34:11.000should be stamped out but if you look at the black lives matter organization and you see what it is
00:34:17.080that they want you know overthrowing capitalism defunding the police you know i don't know the
00:34:22.340word they use for the nuclear family but basically it's eradicating it we all know that these are
00:34:26.960terrible terrible ideas but in our country right now the head of the labor party criticized abolish
00:34:34.560the police said it was a ridiculous idea and he's now been got he's now checked himself in
00:34:40.060yesterday after the day before for unconscious biasness training
00:34:48.840no i know to be honest what else do you do when we're all fucked except for laugh i mean i'm a
00:34:54.800classical uh camusian you know it's just like the world is absurd at this point and he was head of
00:35:01.720the criminal justice uh see he was head of prosecutions that was it he was head of
00:35:07.460prosecutions in this country he's now checked himself in for unconsciousness biasness trainers
00:35:12.160But anyway, my point is, why don't we have people who look at these simple things like BLM1 and go, this is quite clearly neo-Marxist nonsense, and we shouldn't be following it?
00:35:27.900Well, you have to look at the way – there's ways to spend what I'm going to say that might be a little conspiratorial theory, but I do think that there's an iterative process of how we got to this point.
00:35:39.960It happened in education and it's happened in the media. The media has been captured or compromised where there's such a strong hold on the narrative that always goes in one direction that if three white supremacists show up on a street corner, they're going to use that as proof that white supremacy is on the rise.
00:36:04.480If an entire city gets torn down by, you know, progressive activists or Antifa activists, that will just be, oh, some people went overboard, but it was a peaceful protest.
00:36:16.000Like there's – on every level of analysis, the media shifts the blame and doctors the narrative in such a way that it makes it impossible to – for you to simply say, no, that is ridiculous.
00:36:29.740So the narrative is being controlled and insofar as the narrative is being controlled, everybody who's speaking against that narrative is atomized.
00:36:40.120We're all like we're in this kind of this network of just individuals talking to each other, which is a particular weakness and strength of those who do embody or embrace individualism is that we kind of have to do it together and let the institutions fall in a way and let the authority that they're expending on these stupid ideas just eventually completely drain them out.
00:37:01.320But it'll take a long time for Princeton to collapse. It'll take a long time for the New York Times to, you know, to collapse. But that's where they're heading. These huge trees are rotting from the inside out.
00:37:13.340well this is what i wanted to talk to you about which is the way forward and i'm not saying the
00:37:17.820three of us are going to come up with a solution right here right now but it seems to me that one
00:37:21.820of the big problems that we face as people you know with different political views and we're
00:37:26.100not necessarily all on the same page but the one thing that we embrace as you said is the idea that
00:37:30.800the individual is sacrosanct and should not be judged on their group characteristics but rather
00:37:36.300on their character which used to be uh a very fashionable idea now that's racist um yeah but
00:37:42.920but how do we deal with this because it seems to me that this idea that you know dave rubin is a
00:37:48.720big fan of this idea you know the marketplace of ideas and if someone's got bad ideas the way you
00:37:54.040defeat it is with good ideas well i know it doesn't doesn't seem to me that we are in a
00:37:58.800marketplace of ideas i think we're and have probably always been operating in a marketplace
00:38:03.580of emotions. And in the marketplace of emotions, being upset, being quote-unquote a victim, being
00:38:11.120oppressed, et cetera, that trumps almost anything else. It certainly trumps reasonableness,
00:38:18.960facts, it trumps rationality. So how do those of us who believe those things are more important
00:38:25.020triumph in this sort of cultural struggle? I recommend, and this comes from my experience
00:38:31.260as a teacher. I was a teacher too before I went to the Evergreen State College. I was actually a
00:38:35.700preschool teacher. So I don't really know if it was my 12 years teaching preschool or my four years
00:38:40.900at the Evergreen State College that gave me the tools to analyze this behavior. But we really
00:38:46.600have to play the long game. All of this emotion that's bright, that's vindictive, that's vengeful,
00:38:57.820that's victimizing and that's victim centric that's narcissistic it doesn't have a long shelf
00:39:04.520life it once it expends everything all the resources around itself there's nothing left
00:39:10.480for it and that works on a moral level too it works on a artistic and aesthetic level too
00:39:16.540so i do think that rationality should be and reason should be promoted i don't think that
00:39:22.800they're going to be enough what we need is better art what we need is better storytelling what we
00:39:27.540need is to engage people's curiosity rather than their victimhood to engage sorry let me just
00:39:33.920interrupt you there uh just very briefly you talk about this idea of uh this will burn out uh you
00:39:40.180know the the emotion explodes and then but but one of the things we're seeing as we've talked about
00:39:45.760is that that initial explosion of emotion by the kids generation that francis asked you about right
00:39:52.280you said you're not concerned about them and you're right i think to be concerned about the
00:39:57.260people who respond to that the adults in the room who then change institutions from the inside out
00:40:03.200yes and and so what you're left with that initial emotional explosion changes an institution and
00:40:08.260then we have something like the bbc in this country which a lot of us used to respect and and i still
00:40:14.700hold on to the idea of a bit of the bbc being potentially a neutral arbiter that can be used
00:40:20.700to bring the country back together but but it's been infiltrated by people with this mindset
00:40:25.920the institution has been changed from the inside out and they now and i know this because i talk
00:40:31.200to people at the bbc i get invited onto their programs etc and and some of their people will
00:40:35.680tell me in private you know i can't say what i think in this place right so if the institutions
00:40:41.440get changed by that initial explosion of the emotion i'm not sure your analysis is correct
00:40:46.300because if that if the structures change then as i say we're fucked yeah well okay
00:40:53.480the the the spike of how it's going to burn out with the raw emotion is going to be much quicker
00:41:01.340than how it's going to burn out with the implementation of you know systemic racial
00:41:06.460bias training and all this stuff i'm not saying that's going to happen overnight with regards to
00:41:12.140the shutting down of actual creative interesting critical thought but that's why we have to rely
00:41:20.200on the marketplace you know just the capitalist marketplace with regards to media people will get
00:41:27.100really tired of ingesting the crap ton of intersectional uh proper media that's now being
00:41:34.800it's going to be put in place and now because of this black lives matter themed revolution it's
00:41:41.240going we're going to have a whole bunch of media that's riding through this social justice lens
00:41:45.980And that has already been tested in smaller markets like with comic books or with video games and stuff.
00:42:29.680But people's interest will go towards other things.
00:42:33.760Now, in a work environment, if you're working at a job, you can't afford to leave the job,
00:42:38.920you're going to need to actually study these ideas and come up with good arguments against them
00:42:44.540and figure out ways to allow yourself to speak or make connections with people who you don't
00:42:51.820think agree with you. But actually, if you study people's behavior, more people don't want to go
00:42:57.000down this than do. It's going to take a lot of work. I'm not saying it's easy. And that we can't
00:43:02.060just, you're right, we can't just like let it blow through us. We actually have to actively
00:43:05.600interact with it but the feedback mechanism will be that eventually it's just not going to be
00:43:11.160satisfying on an aesthetic level or productive on a fiscal level and a lot of companies are going to
00:43:16.540say why are we spending billions of dollars on this bias training that's making my employees
00:43:21.540not like each other anymore let's get rid of that go back to work but benjamin you say all this and
00:43:26.840i'm sitting here and i'm agreeing with you isn't it pretty terrifying that you're going to be going
00:43:32.040to work and you're not going to be able to say what you think. And then all of a sudden, you
00:43:35.520know, you think, well, if I say this, if I disagree with it, I don't know the concept of white
00:43:39.800fragility, I'm going to lose my job. I mean, that's a, that's a terrible way to live. Isn't
00:43:44.860it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not saying that we're in a good spot. We're not in a good
00:43:49.840spot, but going forward, I think we do have to reify what the central values that we hold dear.
00:43:56.720And if we have to hold those close to the chest, that is an opportunity for us to really examine why the ideas that we believed in and then that now are out of fashion are very important.
00:44:09.600So we really have to get down to basics, go beyond just free speech, get into, you know, what is individualism, what is property, what is freedom of association, go back into the roots.
00:44:19.880It's a wake-up call to our civilization.
00:44:22.980If these ideas turn out to work, if anti-racism turns out to work, and if robbing from the supposed privileged and giving to the so-called depressed actually creates a better society, then maybe it was just our white discomfort all along.
00:44:38.100But if not, then we have to get back and really use this as an opportunity to get back into what are we not doing right with regards to the young people that are growing up and with regards to what we allow our institutions of media and education and so on to actually promulgate.
00:44:55.920By the way, Constantine, if this system is shown to work, we're going to turn up, we're going to rename our podcast White Discomfort.
00:45:03.660Oh, mate, White and Olive Discomfort. I'm going with Olive.
00:45:06.780that's no mate you're white if i'm going down you're going down mate two weeks ago you were
00:45:11.560saying i'm not white you make up your fucking mind i am the victim i am oppressed get on your knees
00:45:17.100there we go uh so um but one thing that i wanted to ask you was what do you think is going to be
00:45:25.980the effect of this type of thinking on our cultural institutions we're already seeing it a little bit
00:45:31.480we've already seen the bbc plunge i think it was a hundred million into into diversity i can't
00:45:37.000even remember the language they use i've got so turned off by it but what do you think is going
00:45:40.880to be the impact on our cultural institutions with this type of thinking uh having studied
00:45:46.580the psychology of it what it does and i might be proven wrong this is just a shit all i have is a
00:45:52.400crap crap load of anecdote i'm not a scientist i haven't done a data analysis but i just i
00:45:58.860witness it from a narrative standpoint, from a human standpoint, that what it does
00:46:02.940is that it suppresses meritocracy. It suppresses meritocracy. It suppresses
00:46:09.760the proof is in the pudding. It suppresses judging somebody by their output. It rather
00:46:14.760uplifts judging people by how they can be victimhood. So what you're going to see in
00:46:20.460your work environment is that there will be unstable personalities who see this as their
00:46:26.440opportunity and those unstable narcissistic sociopathic personalities were actually kept
00:46:31.980in check more or less not perfectly but kept in check by the stress on productivity so if you give
00:46:39.000a narcissist the goal of being good because they're being good for everybody else let's say
00:46:44.500like if you put a ceo let's say you have this sociopathic ceo who doesn't get to give a shit
00:46:51.040about humanity but if you reward him by tying his behavior to rewarding other people then you
00:46:57.900basically kind of harnessed that very selfish energy that has no morality this this behavior
00:47:05.600however within this system of morality that's being implemented doesn't produce anything anymore
00:47:13.260other than destruction. So I don't, I'm trying to be optimistic, but at the same time realistic
00:47:21.700with the fact that institution after institution will go through some variation of the Evergreen
00:47:27.340State College, where weak leadership will cede its authority to bad actors over and over and
00:47:33.080over again. And the proof will be in the destruction of the productivity or the educational
00:47:39.120merit or the whatever product your institution is concerned with creating will be diminished
00:47:46.140by this ideology. That's what it's going to do. So basically, just to convert that into kind of
00:47:52.600ordinary examples, it would be, for example, the BBC will already have a massive campaign to
00:47:59.200defund it to stop the taxpayer funding an organization that increasingly caters to a
00:48:04.780very small slice of the population. It's going to be things like that. It's going to be people
00:48:09.080not watching mainstream media, but watching trigonometry or watching Benjamin Boyce or
00:48:13.860whatever, because they feel that that's where they're getting good information from.
00:48:17.920It's going to be, you know, universities.
00:48:20.160The one thing I was going to ask you, and I think it's an issue that bothers a lot of
00:48:23.620our viewers and it bothers me and it bothers Francis as people who, you know, who are
00:48:28.240considering bringing children into the world is how do you protect your children in this
00:49:50.420I was really lucky because I didn't have anything to begin with, right?
00:49:53.300But Brett Weinstein, in a way, like he made good but he was an example of somebody who sacrificed his career and there's plenty of other examples of this for the truth.
00:50:03.440and you know there's people at the evergreen state college that i talk to now who who spoke up and
00:50:09.440who couldn't deny their conscience a lot of people did deny their conscience and now they're paying
00:50:14.320the price and i think that i think that it's an opportunity any great tragedy is an opportunity
00:50:19.500to really prove your character right if we do think that content of character is what matters
00:50:25.380then god damn it prove it then if that's what you really then show that you have character
00:50:30.300and which we involve sacrifice he's talking to you francis
00:50:34.220yeah mate i've sacrificed enough certainly anyway trust me but doesn't it also mean like so i'm on
00:50:43.420the left uh i always have been former teacher of blah blah blah all the rest of it and the way that
00:50:48.900this ideology has riddled the left and leftist thought which let's be fair has some excellent
00:50:54.400ideas doesn't it mean that we're just never going to get elected ever again um that's that's a really
00:51:02.980good question we'll see what happens in america it's crazy it's absolutely insane we do not have
00:51:09.180a trustworthy left party and i guess you could always say that they were always just like
00:51:14.920neoliberal or they weren't trustworthy in all these different ways but there's no set of ideas
00:51:19.360on the left that have not been infiltrated by this incredibly virulent and destructive ideology.
00:51:26.860And so what do you do? You're basically alt-right adjacent or far-left prostrated
00:51:33.960at this point in time. Those are your two options. So there has to be this politically
00:51:39.080homeless, this centrist kind of weird encampment of people just pitching tents outside of the
00:51:46.660main structures that are either, you know, something that you can't agree with, if it's
00:51:50.400too conservative with you, or something that you can't agree with, because it's too crazy for you.