Coleman Hughes is a writer, musician, podcaster, and activist. He has been a voice in the anti-racist movement known as Black Lives Matter, and he is returning to the show in person for the first time since the show's last episode in 2020.
00:10:39.000As Ibram Kendi says, I imagine your viewers are familiar with Ibram Kendi's book,
00:10:45.000you know, the remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.
00:10:50.000Few anti-racists say the quiet part out loud, but Kendi does.
00:10:57.000And the idea is we are going to discriminate against white people as a group in order to make up for all of what was,
00:11:06.000what has been done to black Americans in the past, which requires a violation of the civil rights ethic.
00:11:15.000The civil rights ethic was not to discriminate against white people, not to reverse the logic of Jim Crow.
00:11:22.000It was to to to to start anew right from a race neutral perspective.
00:11:29.000And we can, you know, all of the problems of intergenerational poverty and really dealing with disadvantage and privilege and economic inequality.
00:11:48.000We can really address those in a race neutral framework and a framework that does not say you're this color.
00:11:55.000So you're going to get you're going to get this policy and you're this color.
00:12:29.000And do you think that one of the reasons that this way of doing it, I mean, one of the things we've charted on the show in many different formats with many different people is the shift of the left from working people to certain racial and other minority groups.
00:12:45.000Do you think one of the reasons is that it's easier to motivate people in this way race runs deeper with people than something like class?
00:12:54.000It's easier to cultivate a sense of victimhood, for example, within a group based on their tribal sort of ethnicity or whatever than it is on something a bit more abstract like class.
00:13:05.000I do think that's right. I think one of the mistakes that the Marxists of the past made was thinking that class could be made such a salient and important identity to people of many different races that they would spontaneously unite and really feel one with members of different ethnicities, different languages because they were both poor.
00:13:32.000And I think it turns out that human tribal psychology is more easily activated, much more easily activated on the basis of ethnicity than it is on the basis of class to the point where you have people that have almost nothing in common, like a poor black person from the hood, right, has actually very little in common, I would argue.
00:13:57.000I would say he has more in common with a poor white person from the trailer park, from the proverbial trailer park, than he does with a black person like myself that grew up with wealth, right?
00:14:11.300So, and yet it seems to be easier to get people to connect on the basis of race and ethnicity than on the basis of class.
00:14:20.560It's amazing, isn't it, how we've seen race relations regress. It's really sad. Can you explain to us some of the things or the policies that have started or have been spoken about that they're going to be implemented in the U.S. in either the past few years or the upcoming few years?
00:14:44.680Oh, sure, yeah. So, we can start with the pandemic era aid policies that have been distributed on race.
00:14:56.420So there's the American Rescue Plan, which was a $2 trillion bailout at the height of the pandemic in 2021 to help Americans that were struggling, to help businesses.
00:15:06.520Part of that was $28 billion for restaurants that were going out of business every day.
00:15:14.260And the program was done in such a way that anyone not white was put to the front of the line automatically in so-called priority groups.
00:15:25.800If you're white, it took a lot more work to get into that category.
00:15:30.600There was $4 billion of aid for farmers with debt only if you were non-white.
00:15:41.340Zero of that money was available to you if you were a white farmer with debt.
00:15:45.400And there was zero money in the bill available to you in general, right?
00:15:48.900So it was just a pot of money only for non-white farmers.
00:15:52.160And again, if you're a white restaurant owner or a white struggling farmer that loses their farm in the context of a recession, people are losing their businesses every day.
00:16:07.340And your business is your life, if that's it.
00:16:10.640You are never going to forgive that you were not treated on the basis of need, but you were treated on the basis of race.
00:16:18.160Just like black people in America have not forgotten redlining, Jim Crow, convict leasing, all of these policies that affected black Americans have not been forgotten and in many cases have not been forgiven.
00:16:36.100And we should not expect that these kinds of things are going to be forgotten or forgiven and certainly not going to be excused on the basis of paying for other people's sins.
00:16:45.940The thing that I find completely baffling when you were talking about this and when you're talking about it now, I just think the people who come up with these ideas, do they not realize this really pisses people off quite rightly and there will be a backlash?
00:17:47.000They use the language, the Orwellian euphemisms of priority group and historically disadvantaged group,
00:17:52.800all of which is intended to soften the truth, which is that you gave people money, limited money, because of the race that they happened to be born into.
00:18:05.200And you denied it to others on the basis of race, period.
00:18:10.540But then there's also, the way this will be reported on is the groups that are part of the backlash, well, they are MAGA-backed groups, right?
00:18:19.940So there's a MAGA-backed lawsuit against the Farmer Bill, right?
00:18:24.840When you read this in the New York Times, they will make sure to front load for you and therefore prime you as a reader.
00:18:37.300So when I read that it's a MAGA-backed lawsuit, that's priming me to say, oh, well, their anger doesn't count.
00:18:44.580Well, a bunch of racists being racist.
00:18:46.220They're a bunch of racists being racist, exactly.
00:18:48.380Whereas if you were to meet one of these people, a white restaurant owner struggling, who may have had no, you know, you may assume this person had quote-unquote white privilege or whatever,
00:18:59.700but you know nothing about this person's background.
00:19:01.500He might have struggled just as much or more than a black restaurant, any given black restaurant owner.
00:19:07.480And you meet him and you look in his eyes and you go to his restaurant and you see that this person was reported on as basically a, quote, angry white guy in a way that was intended to let you dismiss his anger as invalid.
00:19:28.260I mean, you know, and by the way, what was the civil rights movement but a long overdue backlash to Jim Crow laws?
00:19:38.360So the language of backlash, I think, is it's intended to make you feel that this is, that people are reacting, that they're coming from a place of anger that's invalid.
00:19:52.160And I think it should, that anger should be seen as a, like a perfectly predictable consequence of people being discriminated against.
00:20:08.100Well, this is what I was going to ask you about because I talk about it in my book about one experience that I had in the UK when I was invited to participate in a TV discussion of these similar issues.
00:20:22.160Um, and afterwards, one of the, it was a panel of several people.
00:20:27.120And afterwards, one of the presenters during the ad break, uh, looked at me and they went, I'm so glad there weren't any white British people here to be involved in this conversation.
00:21:03.280How, do you sometimes wonder how, like when, because when you talk about MLK and that, that speech and the ideal, that's what I grew up with.
00:21:12.300That's what I, that's where I thought that was the destination.
00:21:33.660So, let's be clear, the backlash, the, let's say, the, the race obsession goes back a long time.
00:21:44.980It was there during MLK's time, right?
00:21:47.380You, you had, you had Malcolm X, you had the Black Power Movement, you had the Black Panthers.
00:21:51.220You had an intellectual tradition, um, starting, uh, with critical race theory, you know, in the 70s and 80s, and the precursors to critical race theory in the 70s, which came out of, more out of the Black Power tradition, which were saying, even back then, no, race really does matter.
00:22:10.500It intrinsically matters because of, you know, white, the country being steeped in white supremacy, being born with white supremacy, being stamped from the beginning with slavery.
00:22:34.260It wasn't, it wasn't necessarily the ruling ideology of every elite university.
00:22:41.800It wasn't a major factor in the Democratic Party.
00:22:46.320So, the question is, what changed to allow the idea that race matters, that race should be infused in every policy?
00:22:54.380What allowed that to really dominate society and dominate cultural institutions?
00:23:05.040And, you know, that's something I haven't totally figured out the answer to, but some parts of an answer, I think, are, one, I think the decline of Christianity has something to do with it.
00:23:18.320Because Martin Luther King was a Christian, and he spoke in Christian language, right?
00:23:27.700He would say, in Christ, there's neither Greek nor Jew, black nor white, bond nor free.
00:23:34.460And what that meant to an audience of Christians, black, white, and other, was that we're all made in the image of God.
00:23:45.880God is the transcendent story that unites us, right?
00:23:52.260Like, how does it matter that you're black and that I am, that, you know, that you're white, if we're both Christian, if we're both made in the image of God?
00:25:44.800No, it does—I saw a lot of this when I was at Columbia of a kind of social incentive to remember and magnify any real experiences of discrimination you've had.
00:26:06.600So I even saw this when I was in high school.
00:26:12.400This was just the beginning of the woke revolution, really, maybe 2012, where we—all the black students at my high school, we got for, you know, an hour, a couple hours we got together, you know, directed by the school and, you know, talked about black stuff or whatever.
00:26:31.580But basically what it became was a competition to find the worst thing that had ever been said to you or done to you.
00:26:40.420And it was interesting to me because it felt like the wrong way to actually deal with discrimination, right?
00:26:56.420It felt like—it felt very much like an echo chamber.
00:27:03.700And obviously the argument for that kind of thing is, oh, so we want a safe space to, like, talk about the time that, you know, somebody grabbed my Afro, right?
00:27:15.560Like, that's the kind of thing that would happen, that a white kid would do, that wouldn't have happened if you were at a more diverse school where people—or an Afro wasn't a weird thing to have, right?
00:27:24.380It's like, okay, so we need to be—we need to talk about that and being around, only around other black people is a, you know, a safe space where you could do that.
00:27:34.720That's sort of the argument for it, and there's something to that.
00:27:36.780But because what it very quickly becomes is just how, like, how much can we just crank the dial on our own sense of grievance and, like, nurse it, nurse the grievance so that it becomes bigger in our minds.
00:27:59.240And that's what happens when you're in an echo chamber.
00:28:04.120We see that with political echo chambers on the right and the left.
00:28:09.660And that's what it is to be in an echo chamber.
00:28:12.640Like, whatever it started with, it gets louder.
00:28:15.980And then we send ourselves back into the world with this sense of grievance that has become bigger because we've nurtured it.
00:28:25.600And I don't think that that's actually the right way to deal with trauma or—it's a very tempting way to deal with it, but it's actually not the mature or healthy way to deal with it.
00:28:39.560And one of the things that strikes me about this comment is, like, we've been in New York for a few days now, just walking around or sitting down, having lunch outside, watching people go by.
00:28:48.760Like, it must take an extraordinary amount of, like, effort to divide people on racial lines in the city because it's like everybody is, you know, like, you see people of every race dating people of every other race.
00:29:18.800Like, you're not seeing people hang out with only people of their race at all.
00:29:22.640And yet, here we are where the elite discourse—and maybe this is where the problem is—the sort of conversations that people have about this issue are incredibly divided in a city that doesn't look at—how does that work?
00:29:36.820Like, well, yeah, I think there's a very big difference between the way elites think and talk about this and the way the rest of people think and talk about this.
00:29:49.880Which is not to say—I mean, there's a lot of actual bigotry and tribalism out there.
00:30:07.420It's often talked about as if—this is, you know, one of my—one of my gripes is—if you were to ask me on the basis of lived experience where I've encountered the most racism,
00:30:23.160like what groups I've encountered the most personal racism directed at me from, it's actually not white Americans.
00:30:29.740It would more be, like, immigrant groups from, like, other countries.
00:30:48.100The point is racism is a sin committed by all groups of people.
00:30:53.220And yet it's talked about as if white people invented and are the only ones that perpetuate it, which I think is a very—a very—that's the kind of idea you can only really believe if you've—if you're, like, overeducated and haven't really lived in very many places in the world.
00:31:15.780You know, it's like your only experience of life is, like, your Ivy League degree.
00:31:18.980If you actually live in the world, you're going to encounter bigotry from—you're going to realize it's a human foible.
00:33:26.620And so to go from that as the defining, like, you know, ecosystem of my social life to Colombia where it was like all of a sudden there's like all these incredibly guilty white people that like are terrified of like saying the wrong thing around me.
00:33:47.760And I'm—I'm very aware of the social power that I have in any given situation.
00:33:54.180Like, at any time I can pull the race card and it's going to be viewed as valid by enough people that I can do that.
00:34:01.640And that's—that's a—that's a very, very tempting power to—to—to wield.
00:34:07.220And then I could see other black students doing that a lot.
00:34:11.480You know, like, when you're back into a corner, you play the race card and—and then—and then there was this phenomenon of, like, quietly coming out to other students as not woke, right?
00:34:24.220It was like there would be the first moment where you quietly, like, tell someone, like, I'm kind of, like, not down with the whole—this whole, like, thing.
00:34:31.540Like, and then they would admit to you, like, me too.
00:34:34.520And it would be this moment of essentially coming out.
00:34:39.920And that is something I had not experienced ever.
00:34:44.800And it was—it was—I became, of necessity, extremely curious about it because I was like, what the hell is going on?
00:34:55.640So it was, in a way, it was a kind of a culture shock.
00:35:00.580And I talk about it so much because the genesis of me writing about this issue—it's like, I used to—when I was a Columbia student, I used to write, you know, like, thousands of words in a Google Doc to nobody but myself.
00:35:16.880Just trying to figure out why kids were speaking like it—like we were living in Jim Crow in the—precisely in the most privileged, most non-racist place I'd ever been.
00:35:40.560We had—when we first had you on in the summer of 2020, that was a peak, at least in this period of time, of the divisiveness, the tensions, the—all of that.
00:35:57.060Well, we're definitely—we have descended from the peak.
00:36:02.1402020, as you say, it was the peak of racial bullying, frankly, of horrible ideas like defund the police actually getting some traction,
00:36:16.540of people being fired for the slightest offenses and for non-offenses at all.
00:36:30.500People losing friendships over disagreeing about race.
00:36:34.120And, yeah, I mean, we all remember it.
00:36:41.560I think it was—in the midst of a revolution, it's like there's a frenzy.
00:36:49.560There's a frenzy where people actually can't think straight.
00:36:52.640And then when the fog clears, you can see all the things that were done that were wrong, that were deeply wrong.
00:37:01.040And it all looks much—it looks worse in retrospect.
00:37:07.220But at the time, it just—it seemed to be what was called for at the moment.
00:37:10.960And there were so many people fired and treated unfairly for saying really the most minimal criticisms of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example.
00:37:26.720I think we're certainly in a better place than we were then, but that's not saying much, right?
00:37:32.000To me—and you can see this in the actual data on Google search terms for things like white privilege or any other term associated with woke.
00:37:44.160You'll see the trend line is, like, no mentions until 2014 spikes.
00:39:12.320Surely, doesn't that mean that you've got the best mind in order to challenge these ideas and find out the flaws in the argument and the logic?
00:39:19.800Unfortunately, I think that intelligence is not that correlated with your ability to get to the truth about something.
00:39:32.080Which is to say, tribalism is much more powerful than intelligence, right?
00:39:39.980Like, they've done studies where they show this.
00:39:44.580It's like, you show a person with a very high IQ, but who is part of, say, a liberal echo chamber,
00:39:51.880and you give them some facts about guns, and they will just come to the conclusion, the scripted left conclusion.
00:40:00.440The right-wing guy will come to the scripted right-wing conclusion.
00:45:18.360There's a couple that you may know about that are trying to innovate in the space of college colleges.
00:45:27.380You know, it's very difficult to innovate, right?
00:45:31.920It's like we're kind of just stuck with the incumbents in the college space.
00:45:37.720So I support the experiments and support the people fighting for viewpoint diversity and free speech.
00:45:43.300Colman, let's talk about culture a little bit because we were talking before we started about how we had the opportunity to meet one of our big supporters.
00:45:51.100And one of the points he made, he was sort of explained to us why he decided to support our show over other very, very good people who do good work in this area.
00:46:00.980And one of the things he said is culture is really important, entertainment is very important because in addition to doing these interviews, we also do like live streams where we joke about the issues of the day and it's humorous and it's offensive and all of that.
00:46:15.180Right. And he was sort of making the point that the work of creating a healthier conversation around all of these subjects depends also on the entertainment side of things.
00:46:26.820And you are obviously a musician. How do those two things link up? How do you see the role of entertainment and culture in this conversation?
00:46:34.820Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, so, so I'm a trombonist and a rapper and I've been releasing music videos.
00:46:42.960I've released three music videos this year. The first one was called Blasphemy.
00:46:46.360Blasphemy. And in that song, I kind of dealt with some themes of free speech and speaking your mind and self-censorship.
00:46:59.220And it's interesting because I think the entertainment world is in a bit of a pickle because it's in, frankly, the same situation that elite institutions in general are,
00:47:14.420which is that, you know, 5% of people have a kind of a veto on any, any new Netflix show, any new movie, any, which is to say what the market actually wants is pretty much what the market has always wanted.
00:47:35.780The market doesn't really want preachy, woke music or movies or anything.
00:47:47.300And that's proven over and over again by what sells.
00:47:50.880Even when the market wants, even when you have rappers that really do come from like a racial justice perspective, like a Kendrick Lamar,
00:48:00.480his latest album, you know, the whole thing is he is rejecting being this sort of socially conscious voice, right?
00:48:13.900He's like, I'm going to tell you about all the fucked up things about me and I'm not going to be your hero.
00:48:19.120Like, I'm flawed. I'm, you know, like, I'm an asshole. I'm not your, like, I'm not your, I'm not the intersectional hero you're looking for is kind of what his new album is.
00:48:34.300And there's obviously Kanye still doing extremely well saying he's what he's saying.
00:48:40.300Um, and, and so I think what I, what I have to imagine is going on in a lot of like writer's rooms for shows is you have good writers that want to ignore woke and just make a good TV show, whatever that means.
00:48:59.720Like, like you would have if the year was like 2011.
00:49:03.900And if the jokes are going to be offensive, they're going to be offensive, but they're going to be funny.
00:49:08.000And then you have a small minority of people in, in those rooms that is saying, oh, well, you can't say that.
00:49:19.600Um, we need, uh, we need more actors of color in this scene or we need whatever, even if it doesn't fit the story.
00:49:29.560And basically what, what you have to do is sort of decide between whether you just want to make a good show for its own sake or you want to cave to a small minority of people that have a lot of cultural power right now and make your show less funny, make it less engaging, make it less relatable.
00:49:51.280And, and, and I, but I think for what it's worth, I think a lot of people are doing that effectively, like even a show like Euphoria, for example, which, um, some people might say is like a woke show.
00:50:04.920I don't think it is. It's just, it happens to have a trans main, main character.
00:50:09.500Like they, they say the word retarded on that show unapologetically. They like, there's one scene where Rue is like talking about how, talking sort of praise, in a praiseworthy way about Christians and like even saying something nice about, anyway, the overall tenor of the show is, violates a lot of tenets of wokeness.
00:50:39.500And I actually think that's why it's so popular among Gen Zs because at the end of the day, people never want preachy art, whether that is preachy Christian right-wing art, moralist art, or preachy far-left woke art.
00:50:53.980People want art that taps into deep themes of human nature, and that goes as much for, for Gen Z as it does, um, for millennials and, and, and boomers and stuff, you know.
00:51:10.140So, I think, uh, the, the, the, the good thing about the profit motive is that you can't really be successful if you're ideological.
00:51:21.620You're, you know, as an entertainer, your, your ideology has to be to entertain at all costs, pretty much, like to make a good show.
00:51:28.600You know, you know, Atlanta's another great example.
00:51:32.000Um, Donald Glover received a lot of backlash from, from the woke over his reparations-themed episode where he actually showed in this kind of black mirror-esque way what reparations might look like if it, if you actually had black people tracing their ancestors back to, like, specific, like, like, what would that actually look like?
00:51:55.120And when you see it, you can't help but think, oh, my God, this is a nightmare.
00:52:00.540This is like, and, and so, you know, an episode of Atlanta showed that and got a lot of backlash, but again, Atlanta's an extremely successful show.
00:52:11.660And it's not anti-woke either, necessarily.
00:52:41.360I remember watching Who Do You Think You Are, which is a British program where they take a celebrity and they look back over their, you know, over their ancestry, their ancestry.
00:52:51.100And they, they had on this mixed race woman, former athlete, and they look back, and it turns out that one of her great, great grandfathers, who was black in the Caribbean, owned slaves at one point.
00:53:02.400And she was devastated and really upset.
00:53:05.420And to me, that seemed really incongruous, because it, that's got nothing to do with you.
00:53:10.460You know, this idea that we have to look back, and somehow, by looking back hundreds of years, we're going to be able to solve the problems of now.
00:53:22.920You know, it, it doesn't, it just doesn't seem to fit.
00:53:26.180And I guess the problem is, is, do you think we're ever going to get to a place where we're going to stop talking about art being woke or not?
00:54:14.160And in the 1950s, you know, we very much did judge art by whether it was Christian or not.
00:54:23.540You know, that was a huge deal in, in, in America, at least.
00:54:26.320And it was a huge deal for entertainers because they had very clear ways in which they could violate the, the mandate that all art must be Christian and must not offend the Christian base.
00:54:46.520And comics, and comics rebelled against that and got punished for it socially in the 60s.
00:54:54.760And, but I think, you know, in the maybe 80s and 90s and 2000s, the power of Christianity waned in the culture, especially in the, in blue America.
00:55:08.880And there was some political correctness stuff in the 90s, but it wasn't, it didn't really have staying power.
00:55:20.340It, it was confined to certain elite spaces.
00:55:25.060And in the 2000s, yeah, I mean, I don't remember having too many conversations.
00:55:30.580Or, you know, even in, like, 2010, I don't remember having too many conversations.
00:55:34.960Like, was this movie woke or was it anti-woke?
00:55:37.960Like, was this, was this episode transgressive of, like, oh, like, is this take canceled?
00:55:56.320So, yeah, I think we're going back into an era where there is a, an ideology that is very important, kind of the way Christianity was important in the 50s.
00:56:14.860And every individual filmmaker, musician, songwriter, TV writer, artist will have to make a decision of whether they want to and are willing to violate certain doctrines to make good art.
00:56:34.780And some of them are going to answer that, nope.
00:56:37.100Like, I, I got a family, I'm not going to do anything that rocks the boat.
00:56:43.600Others are going to rock the boat in all the right ways.
00:56:47.520And I think they'll be rewarded for it by, by the masses.
00:56:54.760Coleman, on another note, do you think we can ever truly separate art from the artists?
00:56:59.940We've seen, you know, a raft of, you know, celebrities, great artists, you know, behave appallingly and abominably.
00:57:08.680And people were saying, you know, we should get rid of them.
00:57:11.400We should, they should be taken off Spotify.
00:57:13.440We shouldn't be listening to their music.
00:57:15.440Well, I mean, where do you stand on this?
00:57:16.580Because it's not as, you know, there are nuances to this argument, aren't there?
00:58:59.540Like, it's not, so, I guess what I'm saying is, do you think that there is some good to all of this, too?
00:59:05.960Like, we're making progress on some things while maybe going too far in the process, or do you think this is all bad?
00:59:12.340No, the Me Too movement was definitely partly good.
00:59:14.580Because it was, well, it was shocking to many people that a guy like Harvey Weinstein could get away with what he was doing for that long in the modern era.
00:59:25.680I think a lot of people thought that that was a thing of the distant past rather than the present.
00:59:31.020And it took that much cultural power to give people the courage to come out and, like, fight this guy who had so much power.
00:59:55.360And the dishonest people came in to cash in on the trend and get their 15 seconds of fame.
01:00:04.380And, like I said, as it always does in times of revolutionary frenzy, people suspend all the important principles of due process and reason and hearing both sides.
01:00:16.900And it all looks much worse in retrospect than it does at the time, right?
01:00:22.400Like, I'm trying to think of a particular, oh, Louis is a perfect example, right?
01:00:30.640Like, you know, he's accused of something that happened, you know, many years ago, before he was famous.
01:00:45.400And no one wants to hear his side of it, right?
01:00:48.420Like, no one is interested in hearing his side of it.
01:00:50.580And from his side, it's really what he was accused of doing was actually not that bad on his telling.
01:01:05.040And on their telling, there was something sketchy about what he did, right?
01:01:10.220And this is the kind of thing we normally settle in a court of law if a crime is being alleged.
01:01:15.980And people go to prison on false charges.
01:01:20.700There's a whole—we have a whole legal system set up precisely because situations like this are so complicated and so easy to run into mistakes.
01:01:30.080But in the frenziness of the moment, people are like—it's like how grasshoppers become locusts.
01:01:37.220And seem like totally different animals, right?
01:01:41.340When there's a revolutionary frenzy going on, humans stop behaving like humans.
01:01:45.340We start behaving like locusts, and we just swarm and bypass all of our better judgments.
01:01:55.120And in retrospect, you can look back and see, how is it that people were so horrible to him?
01:02:02.600Um, but again, it's just—it's how we behave in times of frenzy.
01:02:12.260The reason Me Too always made me feel uncomfortable right from the start—
01:03:45.360And they're going to make something up, they're going to exaggerate the truth of a situation,
01:03:48.720And you're basically sending out a bat signal for shitty people that want to ruin someone's life.
01:03:56.440And that is the inevitable problem you run into when you have even legitimate and good movements, like Me Too.
01:04:07.040If you tell people, people respond to incentives, and this is what, you know, revolutionaries never think about.
01:04:13.100They never think about or consider that when you suspend the rule of due process, you're going to attract, inevitably you're going to attract bad people that see their chance.
01:04:27.780And they never account for that human nature always includes those bad motives.
01:04:34.600Those bad people will always be there to make false accusations and to seize their opportunity to climb in social status as a result of valuing victimhood.
01:04:46.700And so it's very important in those moments to fight for the rules of due process and all the principles that have made, you know, Western democracies fairly decent places to live relative to the alternatives.
01:05:11.640Well, see, the thing is that, philosophically speaking, the progressive ideology doesn't believe in the existence of bad people.
01:05:19.920There are no bad people in the progressive mindset.
01:05:22.800There are people who've been failed by the system.
01:05:24.620That's why they're behaving the way that they are.
01:06:05.420Steven Pinker's book about this was incredible and still the best treatment of the subject that I know of called The Blank Slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
01:06:15.260This is the belief, always popular among revolutionaries of all eras, that we are basically born with no nature, born inherently good, and only made bad by society.
01:06:31.420Only made selfish by society, whereas my view of human beings is that we are evolved by evolution to all have some degree of self-interest.
01:06:45.620And we can never be made, we can never be made perfect.
01:06:54.600We can never even be made close to perfect, that there will always be a subset of humans that want to be aggressive and violent for its own sake.
01:07:02.520You know, this is like one of the things that, like, you look into, like, Ted Bundy types, and you always want to find something in the background that explains who they became.
01:07:13.620And the truth is, sometimes you find it, but sometimes you don't.
01:07:19.180And beyond that, almost everyone is imbued with a kind of baseline self-interest as animals.
01:07:31.860You know, just like dogs have a nature, humans have a nature.
01:07:34.580And it's tempting to believe that because humans, our brains are malleable and culture matters quite a lot, all of which is true, that we have completely, we've completely cast aside any kind of inherent nature.
01:07:55.360The truth is, yes, human beings more than any other animal, we're capable of learning a way of being from our culture.
01:08:06.000We learn, you know, everything from the hand signals we use when we talk to, like, what kind of style of dress we think is cool.
01:08:13.560All of that is malleable and can be learned and can change over time.
01:08:20.380But at the end of the day, there is still a core to us that is given to us by our nature.
01:08:28.920And that nature includes self-interest.
01:08:30.700And it precludes the possibility of systems like communism working on a large scale, right?
01:08:38.700People are always going to prefer their children to other people's children, their biological children for the most part, their biological family, and are going to privilege that over the rest of the world.
01:08:51.900So if you try to make all of society like one family, you end up getting a disaster, right?
01:08:58.880If your theory of criminal behavior is that all of it is caused by social circumstances and poverty, and you think you can get rid of the police and address crime with, like, social programs,
01:09:12.860you're going to run into the fact that actually some people commit crime because it's fun and because they can.
01:09:20.140And this is one of the things that really grinded my gears about the 2020 riots, which is like, okay, why are the riots happening?
01:09:32.660People will say, okay, yeah, people are, you know, George Floyd, racial injustice, you know, et cetera.
01:09:39.340Like, okay, well, how come all the rioters are young men?
01:10:01.040Well, maybe they're doing it because rioting is fun, and you've given them a temporary pass to do it.
01:10:07.240Like, I think sometimes people have to become, like, more in touch with their inner teenager and remember how fun it was to just do, like, mischievous shit for no reason when you were, like, 16, right?
01:10:23.860Like, that is, to me, the Occam's razor explanation is, like, a lot of people would be, if there were no consequences, if you couldn't possibly go to prison by doing it, how many people would just do that type of shit just because?
01:11:45.320Loot a store of some, like, poor, like, Indian immigrant in Harlem that has nothing to do with this situation and just destroy his life because it's fun.
01:11:55.780Coleman, it's been great speaking with you, again, about this stuff.
01:12:01.320I don't know where the fuck this is going, but wherever it is, I feel like your voice is going to be one of the important voices in shaping that conversation.
01:12:18.600The last question, as you know, that we always ask before we ask a couple of questions for our locals that only they will get to see is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
01:12:38.200So I have been a little bit thinking about this question of birth rate.
01:12:44.280Global birth rates declining in all developed nations.
01:12:48.600And Elon Musk has been talking about this recently.
01:12:51.260So I do think we have been talking about it.
01:12:53.120But prior to him and also someone like Matthew Iglesias in his book, One Billion Americans, talks about this.
01:13:00.560It seems to be close to a law of, I don't know what you would call it, developmental economics or what have you, that as societies become wealthier and more educated, people stop having enough children to replace their numbers naturally.
01:13:21.180And you see it in pretty much everywhere on earth.
01:13:27.300And the only places you don't see it are either societies that haven't become wealthy yet or the highly religious, the ultra-orthodox Jews, the Amish and Mennonites.
01:13:46.220You know, the Amish in America have more than doubled their numbers in since the 90s, which is incredible, right?
01:13:53.920While the rest of America has receded below replacement level.
01:14:01.660That's what happens when you don't use condoms, mate.
01:14:03.680That's what happens when you don't have entertainment, mate.
01:14:09.480But it's interesting to think about the long-term future of humanity, right?
01:14:14.980Like if everyone, what we want to happen is that poor countries stop being poor.
01:14:21.480Like poor countries, we want that to happen.
01:14:23.680So let's say that happens and everywhere on earth now is below replacement level, except for the ultra-religious minorities that are doubling their numbers every 10 years.
01:14:37.180What a great recipe for a future world.
01:14:39.620It's interesting to think about what world that creates.