TRIGGERnometry - Where Woke REALLY Comes From

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00:00:31.000 The invention of this idea that you referred to,

00:00:33.920 that disparity means that there's discrimination going on,

00:00:37.640 it is completely ahistorical and non-scientific in every way.

00:00:41.380 Most people don't know what disparate impact was.

00:00:43.340 If they didn't know what disparate impact was,

00:00:44.860 they would probably be horrified by it.

00:00:46.760 If you just had quotas, it might even be better

00:00:48.800 because you could at least give a test and just take the best people.

00:00:51.840 But the law is such that you can't do that

00:00:53.720 because you have to have the facade of equal treatment.

00:00:57.360 And so you can't just have quotas.

00:00:58.740 So what you do is you just get rid of the standards completely.

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00:02:26.200 Richard, so you wrote this book, The Origins of Woke.

00:02:29.040 It's a subject that, as you know and as our audience know,

00:02:31.740 we've been talking about for a long time.

00:02:33.780 You have a different take on it, actually, to quite a lot of people.

00:02:37.080 Before we get into The Origins of Woke,

00:02:39.280 the one thing that everyone who hates people talking about woke claims

00:02:43.960 is that no one can define what woke is.

00:02:45.800 You actually start by defining what woke is.

00:02:48.300 What is woke?

00:02:49.540 Yeah, I mean, yeah, this is a sort of a strange thing to pretend like,

00:02:53.020 you know, we can't define this thing.

00:02:54.540 And sometimes people can't because people don't think about definitions well.

00:02:57.340 But, you know, I think that, you know, we all sort of have the idea.

00:03:00.760 We know something is woke.

00:03:01.800 We know Ibrahim Kendi is woke.

00:03:03.360 And, you know, the Southern Baptist Convention is less so, right?

00:03:06.380 I mean, we all sort of have this understanding.

00:03:07.940 And so I think, you know, I have a definition that I think covers most of it.

00:03:12.640 It's not too broad.

00:03:13.700 It's not too narrow.

00:03:14.420 It's the idea that disparities are caused by discrimination.

00:03:17.220 They could be past or present.

00:03:18.480 So if blacks do less well on a test than whites,

00:03:20.780 or, you know, there's a difference in arrest rates between races,

00:03:24.180 or men are more money than women,

00:03:25.940 that's due to discrimination, past or present.

00:03:28.520 You know, it has to be white versus non-white or men versus women.

00:03:31.600 We don't care about other kinds of disparities.

00:03:33.280 You need speech restrictions in the interest of overcoming these disparities.

00:03:38.140 So you have to get rid of, you know, stereotypes,

00:03:40.240 people, you know, having, you know, problematic thoughts about origins of disparities that are not discrimination.

00:03:45.960 And then there's a bureaucracy that sort of, you know, tries to overcome disparities

00:03:49.900 and also enforces the speech code.

00:03:52.700 So this is everything from, you know, the DEI offices in universities to, you know,

00:03:58.080 like nonprofits and government institutions that are trying to close various racial and gender gaps.

00:04:04.100 So the three ideas of disparities equals discrimination, speech codes,

00:04:07.800 and the bureaucracy enforced to these ideas,

00:04:09.880 I think is the core of wokeness and how we talk about it in modern society.

00:04:13.160 Very interesting.

00:04:14.580 And particularly with the reference to the bureaucracy,

00:04:17.280 this is why I mentioned you have an original way of looking at where this comes from.

00:04:21.740 Tell us where you think wokeness comes from.

00:04:24.920 Yeah.

00:04:25.280 I mean, so, you know, the civil rights movement was sort of like this moral and legal and cultural tsunami

00:04:31.160 that washed over the United States in the mid-1960s.

00:04:35.620 And, you know, it did some things that everyone agrees, you know,

00:04:39.040 most everyone agrees is good now, like eliminate explicit discrimination,

00:04:43.080 state-sanctioned discrimination, even in the private sector, you know,

00:04:47.020 told people they couldn't discriminate based on race and sex.

00:04:50.480 But, you know, so people, that's sort of the standard history, and that part is true.

00:04:54.500 At the same time, it sort of empowered a bureaucratic class to look for discrimination

00:04:58.860 wherever they could find it.

00:05:00.660 And the definition of sort of discrimination and what counts as discrimination

00:05:03.920 expanded, and it was given the force of law.

00:05:07.260 And so a lot of these things that you see as wokeness,

00:05:10.900 what people would call wokeness in the last 10, 15 years,

00:05:13.920 have been part of American law since the, sometimes, in some cases, since the early 1970s.

00:05:19.580 So the idea that if you take a test and whites do better than blacks,

00:05:22.620 you know, it's always funny to me that people, you know, Twitter,

00:05:25.200 they sort of treat it like it's a new idea that no one ever thought of before.

00:05:27.800 No, it's been law in the United States since 1971, right?

00:05:30.560 We've had two, three generations of this being the law of the land,

00:05:33.620 that if you give tests, you know, you better be careful.

00:05:35.580 Or if police arrest one group or the other, we still have disparities and we still have tests

00:05:39.520 and we still have police arresting people, right?

00:05:41.900 But it's always sort of, there's always sort of a tension in all the rules that we have

00:05:48.600 for like having a society, because literally everything you do that's meritocratic

00:05:52.680 or that tries to keep order has a disparate impact based on race, based on sex or whatever.

00:05:57.540 And so like it sort of goes through waves where some of the stuff, sometimes this stuff becomes

00:06:01.060 more prominent, sometimes less.

00:06:02.860 But it's part of, it's just very, very deep in sort of the legal fabric of American society

00:06:07.520 right now.

00:06:08.320 And I think that a lot of the cultural sort of, you know, these corporations like paying,

00:06:12.840 you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for these, you know, HR and DEI consultants,

00:06:18.360 I think a lot of it is clearly downstream of the law, which I try to show, you know,

00:06:22.320 just try to show sort of step by step in the book, the history of how that happened.

00:06:25.320 Richard, do you think, because there's always going to be people who say, you know, this

00:06:31.280 is a conspiracy, this has been put together by whoever it may be, do you think it is?

00:06:36.960 Or do you think that these were well-intentioned people, as it were?

00:06:41.000 You know, it depends on sort of what level you're, you know, you're talking about.

00:06:45.440 You know, there's, you know, the sort of civil rights movement always had a sort of communist

00:06:49.420 component, even then you might say that they're well, you know, well-intentioned, they just think

00:06:53.340 communism is a good thing. But, you know, there was always sort of that, there's sort of,

00:06:57.140 sort of, sort of that way. But then the people who actually made the decisions that really

00:07:02.060 embedded wokeness in law, you can, you know, you can look them up and they were in many cases,

00:07:05.980 sort of mainstream Democrats, center left, you know, judges, they were, you know, they didn't

00:07:10.480 want to overthrow capitalism or get rid of the system. You know, they generally, they genuinely

00:07:14.180 thought, I think every generation probably believed like, okay, we need, you know, until recently,

00:07:18.280 I think, I think like it's been going on so long, but I think, I think that like the

00:07:21.580 earliest generations that sort of, you know, uh, got the ball rolling here, um, did think

00:07:26.380 that, you know, you would have affirmative action for a generation, or you would have,

00:07:29.940 make the police less racist for a generation or 20 years or whatever, and then you would

00:07:34.360 move on. Um, it didn't work out like that. And, you know, and, and even like Richard

00:07:38.740 Nixon, who I cover in the morning, not a leftist, not a communist, not trying to, you

00:07:42.300 know, uh, you know, bring down the white race or anything like that. You know, he was, he

00:07:45.840 himself was sort of caught up in this, in the early days of the civil rights, in the

00:07:49.260 civil rights era. Um, you know, and then eventually I think when sort of all that stuff

00:07:54.000 was discredited by that time, it just became the status quo. Um, it became, if you wanted

00:07:58.660 to get rid of affirmative action, if you wanted to get rid of disparate impact, you were seen

00:08:02.220 as this, you know, big racist. And why were you thinking about these things? And nobody

00:08:05.700 did think much about these things for a while until recently, I think when the sort of the

00:08:09.740 great awakening took off and this stuff became so in everyone's face that like, there

00:08:13.100 was no, no choice but to talk about it. Um, so yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, my,

00:08:17.520 my worldview on this is more unintended consequences and, uh, bureaucratic politics than it is some

00:08:23.000 kind of, you know, conspiracy theory to, to bring society down or something like that.

00:08:27.700 Because to me, this seems very much like the law of unintended consequences that you, you

00:08:32.640 implement something and then 10 or 20 years down the line, it doesn't matter how talented

00:08:38.100 you are as a legislator and, uh, how smart you are. Nobody can look into the future and

00:08:43.320 what you think that you're doing at this particular moment. I mean, what do you have

00:08:49.340 to go on, but an educated guess? Yeah. Yeah. And you know, one thing like Thomas Sowell

00:08:54.460 points out in some of his books is that, uh, racial preferences are pretty standard in diverse

00:09:00.260 societies, you know, all over the world. Um, and so like, you know, there's not, you don't

00:09:04.300 have to explain it if there was something in American ideology or somebody did that, you

00:09:07.800 know, I think this is sort of in a democracy with racial disparities, you sort of get this

00:09:12.080 stuff, um, you know, naturally and, you know, it's the America maybe was a little bit more

00:09:16.920 resistance to it because of its constitution and its founding. Um, but yeah, you know, a

00:09:21.460 lot of, you know, a lot of the, the, the sort of the, and the sort of direction I took,

00:09:25.040 which I cover in the book, like, why do we care so much about, you know, female sports

00:09:28.980 in, uh, you know, in colleges, um, I don't think we do anymore, Richard. Yeah. We, well,

00:09:35.240 we found a little bit of a twist where the right wing position has become, you know, protect

00:09:38.240 women's sports. It's a funny thing where it's like, you know, it's just like people don't

00:09:41.800 really know the history here and they're just sort of, you know, flip-flopping their, uh,

00:09:45.080 their positions. Uh, but yeah, you know, the, I think the, you know, the, the American version

00:09:49.520 of this is very, very, you know, intimately related with our laws. Um, so Richard, as somebody

00:09:56.560 who doesn't know a great deal about American law and certainly, you know, by state as well,

00:10:01.640 can you give some examples to illustrate your case? What exactly, give some specific examples

00:10:07.280 for exactly what is actually going on here? Yeah, sure. Uh, so, you know, there, first of

00:10:12.600 all, there's the disparate impact doctrine. So in 1970, when the Supreme court ruled that

00:10:15.720 under affirmative, uh, under, uh, I'm sorry, under the, um, uh, civil rights act, the discrimination

00:10:20.280 did not just mean I have a job where I don't want black people to be hired or, or something

00:10:25.780 like that. Basically anything you did that had a disparate impact means that one group

00:10:30.600 did better than the other. And it's, it's, it's, I'm not exaggerating and saying it could

00:10:34.400 be literally anything. It could be a policy that says, if you have a criminal record, I'm

00:10:38.420 not going to hire you. It could be a tardiness policy. All of this stuff has been sort of

00:10:42.140 litigated or debated at some point. It becomes problematic from a legal perspective. You have

00:10:46.840 to show a business necessity. So the, it's not necessarily illegal, but the burden of proof

00:10:51.360 becomes on you, the employer, uh, to show that like, this is necessary and you could

00:10:56.020 potentially be sued over it. So that's one, that's a disparate impact doctrine. That's

00:10:59.360 pretty much the entire private sector. That's all government hiring. Um, you also have affirmative

00:11:03.880 action in government contracting where basically, you know, everything in American law, they deny

00:11:08.240 that there's quotas and it's all done in the name of, um, uh, it's all done in the name

00:11:12.300 of equal opportunity. Um, but if you have a contract with the government and a lot of corporate

00:11:16.800 America does, uh, you have to basically give them numbers on the race and the sex, uh, of

00:11:21.640 the people in your workforce. And then if one group is underrepresented, you have to sort

00:11:25.560 of submit plans, uh, and how to, uh, how to address that. Um, you also have sort of these

00:11:30.980 like harassment laws where like, you know, if men want to, you know, if, if, you know, you

00:11:35.540 make a group uncomfortable based on the race or their sex, you know, before the 1960s,

00:11:40.220 this was, um, this was settled by, you know, the private sector. You didn't like the job

00:11:44.420 you want and you got to do, you got a new job. Even in the first decades after the civil

00:11:47.980 rights act, people didn't interpret it as, okay, like you have to, you as an employer

00:11:53.380 have to police the speech of your employees to make sure that the men, you know, don't

00:11:57.460 be too aggressive hitting on the women or whatever. That was really an innovation in

00:12:00.620 the 1980s. So a lot of the speech codes, um, came out of that came out of the idea that

00:12:06.160 like you, as an employer became sort of the babysitter for your population to protect

00:12:10.400 some people based on their group identities. Um, and then there's all this stuff

00:12:14.160 about, you know, colleges, colleges is their, you know, it's their own category.

00:12:17.960 A lot of these things that people think are organic to the university, they come

00:12:21.140 from the federal government. So like when they used to have those title nine kangaroo

00:12:25.000 courts, when men were accused of sexual assault, in a lot of cases, that was the

00:12:28.380 Obama administration. You may know the history because this was covered well in

00:12:31.120 the press that, you know, they would come in and they would say, okay, you know,

00:12:34.440 you're, you're, you're violating the civil rights act. If you're not taking rape

00:12:37.960 seriously enough, what does taking rape and sexual assault seriously enough mean? It

00:12:41.420 means not giving any due process to the men and hiring all these feminist title nine

00:12:45.080 coordinators and letting them basically remake your university. Right. Uh, so it's, you

00:12:49.760 know, there's, there's all these doctrines and all these sort of legal and, you know,

00:12:53.440 the point is not just to sort of explain to people how this happened, which, you know,

00:12:57.620 is interesting and important enough. Uh, part of the point is also to tell people like,

00:13:01.620 well, you know, here's how it happened. And there's actually something you can do

00:13:04.260 about it because it's just, it's just laws. It's just executive orders, judicial

00:13:07.180 decisions, you know, legislation, the way this stuff was implemented. It can also be

00:13:11.640 undone the same way. Well, before we get to undoing it or changing the way that, uh, the

00:13:16.440 structure of it is, uh, how do you incorporate the impact of social media and the internet in

00:13:21.720 the cultural dimension? Because what you're really talking about is the legislative and

00:13:26.740 institutional implementation of wokeness. But I think we'd all agree that in the last decade

00:13:33.200 or so, since the emergence of social media, culturally, the ideas of wokeness have really

00:13:39.000 taken off, uh, fueled by social media, certainly in my opinion. Uh, how do you, how do you think

00:13:45.920 about that dimension of it? Yeah. So my friend, Zach Goldberg has written about the greater wokenig,

00:13:51.380 um, and he has all those charts showing that, you know, these terms like systemic racism and so

00:13:55.920 forth go through the roof around 2011. I don't think it's a coincidence that, uh, 2011 was around the

00:14:02.060 time that Twitter became prominent. Um, and I don't think it's a coincidence that as soon as Elon Musk

00:14:07.340 bought Twitter, you know, within, uh, the first year of that happening, there were all these stories

00:14:11.340 in the media about, oh, wow, conservative boycotts are suddenly working, you know, before that

00:14:15.040 conservative boycotts, if you didn't like a company doing some kind of trans initiative,

00:14:18.660 you know, that was considered hate speech and you're, you know, the algorithm either, uh, repressed

00:14:22.660 your speech or, you know, you were bad completely. Um, and so, yeah, there is room, you know,

00:14:27.680 in the theory, you know, in this world for sort of technological forces and cultural, uh, factors.

00:14:33.340 And I, I do think that the internet and social media, you know, was important starting around

00:14:37.380 2010, 2011, uh, at the same time, a lot of these ideas that sort of became more like prominent in

00:14:43.820 the, you know, in the minds of the public, they weren't, you know, they, they were there before.

00:14:48.140 It's just like liberals were sort of, they had more cognitive dissonance. They were a little bit

00:14:52.760 more ashamed of them. There were, there was, I think a little bit more of a sort of, uh, uh,

00:14:56.840 compartmentalizing. Right. So like when Ibram Kendi comes along and says, uh, you know, we have,

00:15:02.460 we need a department of anti-racism, which says that anything that has a disparate impact on blacks

00:15:06.460 relative to whites, um, needs to be, uh, you know, needs to be investigated or banned. Um, you know,

00:15:12.200 that's been, that's been something close to that has been in the, has been the law for 50 years.

00:15:16.300 It's just people started to notice it because Ibram Kendi sort of, you know, he came and he made it

00:15:20.400 explicit and like people stopped being ashamed of it and they brought them and they gave speeches

00:15:24.460 and they said, okay, let's just say this stuff out loud. Uh, but like every corporation and every

00:15:28.800 government department has been operating on this basis, has been counting people according to race

00:15:33.300 and sex and like, you know, doing soft quotas and making sure, you know, that, you know, policing the

00:15:37.700 speech of employees, they've been doing that for decades and decades. Um, so, you know, there is,

00:15:42.280 there is something new with social media. There is also a continuation, um, that I think people

00:15:47.400 don't realize all has been there. Well, I, I, what, what I mean though, is I think it's like, I don't

00:15:54.300 know, I'm probably a bit older than you in when I was a young guy and I was kind of on the, what you

00:16:01.620 call liberal, I would, we in this country call left. I don't remember people pretending that you can

00:16:08.900 change your sex by words. Yeah. Unquestionably. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've read about this a

00:16:17.580 little bit. Yeah. I think there's a, I say on race, you could look at like a conversation from

00:16:22.820 2020 in the U S and a conversation from 1975 and they're almost the exact same thing. I mean,

00:16:27.680 even like the police, the riots, like something, you know, the 19, late 1960s, some, some, you know,

00:16:32.760 gangbanger would, a career criminal would get killed by the cops. There'd be these riots. Some people

00:16:36.920 would come out and say law and order. And some people would come out and say, no, no, we got to

00:16:40.700 get at the root causes. We got to, you know, stop racism to prevent this 1970, 2020, pretty much,

00:16:46.100 you know, the exact same thing on sex. There's a little bit of development. There's this, you know,

00:16:49.560 idea that women, you know, should be just like the accommodated in work. Then it becomes, you know,

00:16:53.680 women are a oppressed class, uh, homosexuality and transgenderism here. I mean, I think that you're

00:17:00.340 right. There have been, it has been revolutionary. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm also old enough to remember,

00:17:04.520 um, when, you know, being gay was, you know, in high school was, we had one or two gay people

00:17:08.800 and like, everyone would be like, ew, get away from me. This is the most disgusting thing in the

00:17:11.860 world. Uh, right. Um, you know, 10 years later, you know, we start legalizing gay marriage. A few

00:17:16.920 years later, we have, uh, uh, you know, we have, um, uh, this new, um, uh, you know, gender identity

00:17:22.700 idea. Um, and, uh, yeah, you're absolutely, you're absolutely right. I don't think, I don't think

00:17:27.580 civil rights law explains it. It's a little bit, I mean, there, Leo Sapir and a, uh, a guy at the

00:17:33.480 Manhattan Institute has been doing some work about how some of the anti-bullying initiatives,

00:17:36.900 um, coming from the federal government might've made an impact here. Um, but it's, it's, it's not

00:17:42.680 as easy to trace with race and sex. So I, I do think, I, you know, I agree with you that if,

00:17:47.000 you know, the, the gender identity stuff is something, something quite new.

00:17:50.260 Yeah. I, I wasn't trying to explore that difference in, in opinion, just for the sake of it. It just

00:17:55.480 seems to me that as we move on to talking about how to address some of this, you're probably in a

00:18:00.920 harder place to do it because you now have social media where a lot of even crazy ideas have become

00:18:07.120 embedded in the public consciousness. So when you're talking about repealing certain legislation

00:18:12.540 or revoking executive orders or whatever, there's now a significant body of the public or certainly

00:18:18.720 the, the chattering public on social media who are just like, you know, I can't believe you're

00:18:24.440 even considering this. Yeah. But it's, it's, it's a double-edged sword because there's also,

00:18:28.380 um, I, you know, I, I document the sort of the evolution of conservatives and the Republican

00:18:32.020 party over the time too. And there's also been a sort of conservative media ecosystem,

00:18:36.240 um, that has sort of, uh, you know, come around. And if you sort of, if you look at the parties

00:18:40.280 over the last 30 years, the trend is polarization on every, almost every issue, the left becomes more

00:18:45.040 left and the right becomes more universally right wing. Um, so I think that like, it's true.

00:18:49.660 It's harder than ever to convince liberals of this stuff. It's easier than ever to convince

00:18:53.520 conservatives of this stuff and get the message out there and show them how absurd it is.

00:18:57.100 Um, so I've met, I think it's actually good because, you know, you just have, you just have

00:19:00.640 to convince some people who are in power some of the time, uh, in order to do this stuff.

00:19:04.500 And it's also very damaging to the economy, Richard, because if you think, if you run a

00:19:08.420 construction company, most women don't want to work in construction. So, I mean, what, what are

00:19:15.080 you going to do with that? Because construction is sexist, mate. Yeah. Uh, but, but so, so what can

00:19:20.880 you do as a construction company? You know, how many women are you going to go start

00:19:25.920 trawling the bars, looking for women and asking if they want a job in construction?

00:19:30.020 They do that with women's sports too. I mean, yeah, you're right. They do that with women's

00:19:33.420 sports too. And like, uh, you know, like rowing, like for example, like, cause you know, not many

00:19:37.980 women want to participate in sports as men. So they put up these rowing programs. Um, and rowing

00:19:42.780 is a great sport because it requires tons and tons of people. So you just get as many women as

00:19:47.800 possible. And you're like, okay, you're all rowers. And I remember when I was at UCLA, I knew this girl

00:19:52.200 who would like the, you know, they were just, they were filling bodies. Like a girl would

00:19:56.000 join for two weeks. She'd recruit her friends. They joined for two weeks. Okay. I don't want

00:19:59.240 to be a freaking rower. Right. You know, that's not what little girls grow up, you know, dream

00:20:03.100 of doing, but they'll just take anybody. They'll put them on the team. They've got to make the

00:20:06.960 numbers work. I mean, you're right. There is, this is like a huge tax of like every part

00:20:11.120 of society. And then it's just like, it's, you know, it's also a tax in the sense that like

00:20:15.240 you can't have standards. Like if you just had quotas, like it might even be better because

00:20:19.460 you can, um, you could at least give a test and just take the best people, but you can't,

00:20:23.820 but the law is such that you can't do that because you have to have that facade of, uh,

00:20:27.940 equal treatment. Um, and so you can't just have quotas. So you just, what you do, what

00:20:32.340 you do is you just get rid of the standards completely and then hope the numbers work

00:20:35.360 out. It's really, it's really a sort of a twisted way to run a country. I mean, it's

00:20:39.800 sort of amazing. It's amazing. But there's also hypocrisy there because nobody looks at the

00:20:45.960 hundred meters final and goes, you know what? We need some more white guys here. You

00:20:49.140 know? I mean, I'm sure there's some people who do, but they were kind of a minority.

00:20:53.100 I was looking at the New York city marathon. Yeah. I tweeted about that a couple of days

00:20:55.760 ago. I mean, it was like the top 20, like, or something like that. Like 18 were from East

00:21:00.620 African descent. Um, and they were like East Africans from East Africa and some of them

00:21:04.760 were from America and some of them were from, uh, Western Europe and they were all happened

00:21:08.880 to be from Somalia or Kenya or Ethiopia and not even remarked upon. I mean, you look at

00:21:13.940 the, uh, you look at the New York times where they're reporting out the New York city

00:21:16.820 marathon. Yeah. Just nothing. We ignore race in that situation. I guess it's just the

00:21:20.400 best people won. And yeah.

00:21:22.900 And do you think we're, we're ever going to get past the idea because Thomas Sowell,

00:21:28.400 who I'm a huge fan of, you know, this is one of the things he's been talking about for decades

00:21:33.020 now. The invention of this idea that you referred to that disparity means that there's discrimination

00:21:39.500 going on. It is completely a historical and non-scientific in every way. Yet when I talk

00:21:46.560 to people in the United States in particular, cause it's less embedded actually here in

00:21:50.880 the UK. Uh, I remember I was flying to Miami and I was sitting next to a guy who turned out

00:21:56.160 to be a pilot for the airline that I was sitting in. He was a very smart guy. He was a black

00:22:00.600 guy. And when we were talking about what was happening in Florida, he said, well, I'm an

00:22:05.040 independent, but you know, DeSantis is anti-woke. So I don't like him. And we got into a big

00:22:09.800 conversation about it. And one of the things he was saying is this very simple idea. And

00:22:15.480 I, again, I emphasize he was a smart guy, right? But he was like, look, the statistics

00:22:20.720 show that the number of black airline pilots does not correspond to the percentage of the

00:22:26.740 black population of the United States. That means there's discrimination. And I'd like

00:22:31.360 to think I'm a reasonably persuasive guy. I tried every which way. I approached it from

00:22:36.820 a hundred different angles. The poor guy was stuck next to me for about three hours.

00:22:40.680 I know how he feels, Richard.

00:22:43.440 I couldn't get it. I could not get past the idea with him. To him, it's just like disparity,

00:22:50.940 discrimination. I could not find a way through. So it's just so embedded with many people now.

00:22:56.900 This Christmas, as you're shoveling enormous amounts of turkey, roast potatoes, sprouts,

00:23:02.920 lashings of gravy, stuffing, Christmas pudding, mince pies.

00:23:06.620 Francis, are we actually going to do the advert? Or are you just going to bang on about everything

00:23:10.520 you're going to stuff your face with over Christmas?

00:23:12.620 Well, I wanted to do both.

00:23:14.460 Can we just do the advert? I'll do it, right? Francis, think about all the naughty websites

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00:23:21.840 Okay.

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00:23:28.780 No.

00:23:29.500 So I've seen everything.

00:23:31.560 But I use incognito mode.

00:23:33.220 Incognito mode does nothing except hide your history from yourself.

00:23:36.440 What?

00:23:36.680 So I've seen everything, and I mean everything.

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00:24:42.420 Yeah, I mean, there is a lot of historical guilt about the situation of black Americans.

00:24:48.160 I don't think people, like Pete, nobody thinks that Asians doing better than whites on tests

00:24:53.860 is discrimination or Asians being arrested less.

00:24:57.380 Even Hispanics and Latinos, you know, like you'll hear, but it's not, you know,

00:25:02.060 you don't see a lot of New York Times or Washington Post stories about, you know,

00:25:06.160 too few Hispanic pilots. I mean, sometimes you do,

00:25:08.220 but it's usually piggybacking off of the black experience. So you're right. It's an American

00:25:13.920 specific idea, but it's also an American black specific idea, just because we have sort of all

00:25:19.800 this racial baggage from our history that just sort of shuts off our braids, whatever we think

00:25:24.260 of the black issue. And then that becomes transferred. Like when we think about Hispanics,

00:25:27.200 when we think about women, we have this template that we sort of just are so sort of emotionally

00:25:33.220 salient, right, that it becomes sort of the way we think about everything.

00:25:37.180 Well, that's interesting because this guy was actually not African American, as you like to

00:25:42.620 say. He was from the Caribbean and he'd moved to the U.S. as a teenager.

00:25:47.240 Yeah, which is interesting because the people from the Caribbean do relatively well in the

00:25:51.020 United States. So you think if there was discrimination, right, they would see that

00:25:54.020 that's the problem. But that's often the case. I mean, Eric Holder, you know, a very left-wing

00:25:57.920 attorney general under Obama, also of Caribbean descent, right? So often they come,

00:26:02.880 the Caribbean, you know, blacks from the Caribbean succeed. But then they assimilate into the ideology

00:26:08.300 that says, you know, black people can't succeed in America. It's very interesting.

00:26:10.820 Well, what was interesting as well is when I sort of did get him to see that there are contexts in

00:26:15.480 which you can't just automatically assume discrimination because someone is not as represented

00:26:21.800 as they are in the general population. He then pivoted to, well, yes, but the company provides

00:26:29.380 a better service if it's representative of the population, which I thought was an interesting

00:26:34.500 argument because I don't know that there's any evidence for that.

00:26:37.500 I mean, especially for pilots, like for teachers or police, you hear that sometimes, right?

00:26:41.220 It sort of makes sense a little bit. But, you know, do you pay attention to the race of your

00:26:46.720 pilot? Do you feel safer when they're of your race? It's in that context. Yeah, it's a very odd

00:26:51.340 argument. So given that historical guilt and history that is awful in the United States,

00:27:01.640 let's be clear about that, right? How does that ever get healed? Is there a way to overcome that?

00:27:07.780 Is there a way to heal that? Is there a way for, you know, people talk about reparations and it seems

00:27:13.160 like a very crazy idea just because you'd struggle to implement it and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:27:18.980 But is there a way that the United States is ever going to overcome the fact that, you know,

00:27:23.120 it was a country that used slavery for a long time and then discriminated against people who

00:27:28.880 were descendants of slaves? Yeah, I mean, in like, you know, sort of these, you know, in tribal

00:27:33.420 society, sometimes you'll just have like blood money, right? Something bad will happen and one group

00:27:37.260 will just pay off the other. The point of that and the benefit of that is that that's it. It wipes the

00:27:42.960 slate clean, right? So if there was some way to just, you know, have a, you know, cut a check,

00:27:50.540 you know, we can't bankrupt ourselves, but, you know, something.

00:27:53.760 You're already bankrupt, so yeah.

00:27:55.180 We're already bankrupt, right? You know, very, very theoretically. Well, I mean, you do see this

00:27:58.800 reparations movement and, you know, you never see them say that. You never see them say, okay,

00:28:04.140 we've calculated, you know, 50,000 per person or so. You know, usually it's much bigger than that.

00:28:08.460 It's a ridiculous number, but it's never like, okay, no affirmative action, no disparate,

00:28:12.060 no, no, none of them. We never talk about race. We can't complain about racism ever again.

00:28:17.460 If it was something like that, there could be some kind of basis for a conversation, right? But it's

00:28:22.860 all, it's always just more of the same. It's you do reparations and then you have everything else

00:28:26.680 remain the same and continue to guilt people. And so, yeah, if we did, if we did have to do some

00:28:32.400 kind of healing, I would prefer a one-time payment rather than 200 years from now, we're still talking

00:28:37.400 about littering laws are racist because, you know, black people, you know, get cited for them more

00:28:41.820 than white people or, you know, airline, you know, the airlines are racist or whatever.

00:28:46.220 Yeah. It's just, it's just very, very hard because I think that there's, you know, I think

00:28:50.640 there's an understanding even among, they don't, they know it won't fix it. They know there are

00:28:53.860 problems in the black community. You know, they know that one group has, you know, 70% out of

00:28:58.220 wedlock births and another group has, you know, 30% out of wedlock births, you know, that there's

00:29:02.160 going to be disparaging. You could give people a check. That's not going to, that's not going to

00:29:05.760 fix that. Right. And so I think they even understand that. So it's, it's just a matter of, you know,

00:29:11.380 it's just a matter of sort of this permanent, this idea of sort of permanent revolution.

00:29:16.720 And, you know, conservatives, I think, you know, some conservatives might be open to one-time

00:29:19.900 reparations payment, but they see what's going on and they say, yeah, of course, we're just,

00:29:23.200 this is just another, another program and won't do anything damp and anything else.

00:29:27.860 Yeah. I think that's a very good point because the reality is, is these,

00:29:32.160 these arguments, a lot of the time, they're not based in fact, they're based in emotion.

00:29:37.800 And when someone is emotional, it's very difficult to rationalize with them and go, well, look,

00:29:42.980 what is it that you actually want? What is it that you want to achieve? What is it that you want from

00:29:47.280 this particular discussion? Because they want to feel better or they want to win or whatever it may

00:29:53.080 be. And that's very, very difficult to deal with. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I think, yeah,

00:29:59.360 people just sort of, they need a, you know, sort of a, um, look, there's a, you have, I think you

00:30:03.260 have to tell people a different story. You could tell people that story, which is true that black

00:30:07.680 people were enslaved and mistreated for much of American history. And that's fine. Um, at the same

00:30:13.160 time, you have to tell people that, you know, which is just as true that America has been, you know,

00:30:18.100 you know, a remarkable, you know, engine of sort of, uh, human wellbeing, bettering of all races,

00:30:23.320 including black people in America, you know, there's a population of 30, uh, something like

00:30:27.400 35, 40 million black Americans who have a higher standard of living than black people in any part

00:30:32.000 of any other part of the world. Um, and you know, like every other group comes here and does,

00:30:37.020 and does pretty well. And we should be thankful for that. Right. And we should be thankful in the

00:30:41.660 end that like, as bad as it was in the past, we ended up in a pretty good place from a historical

00:30:46.100 perspective. Um, and you know, I, I don't know. I think there's just sort of, there's such a

00:30:51.700 tendency to compare to, you know, or to obsess about, um, you know, past mistreatment or disparities

00:30:58.980 between groups that it's hard to get there. Um, but yeah, you're right. I mean, just like sort of

00:31:04.500 fixing the civil rights laws, I think as part of it can make this stuff less salient and at least

00:31:08.320 give them less political power. But as far as sort of the emotional baggage we have, um, here that

00:31:13.460 sort of envelops everything in society, you know, that's a much harder question and sort of a larger

00:31:18.800 project to deal with. Well, let's talk about fixing the civil rights laws. I mean, I, I,

00:31:23.760 I wonder whether I agree with you that that would give them less salience. I, my sense based on what

00:31:29.380 we've observed in recent years of American politics, purely as an outsider is, um, and this is kind of the

00:31:35.100 point I was making earlier to use every time the conservatives or the right attempts to deal with some of

00:31:41.940 these issues, everyone freaks out massively. And we saw this with Donald Trump, where essentially his

00:31:47.260 ability to do many of the things that, uh, he was trying to do was impeded by the fact that anytime

00:31:53.180 he, you know, took a breath, the media lost their share. And then, you know, he was evil, blah, blah,

00:31:58.060 blah, blah, blah. And then he ended up not doing, uh, many of the things that he promised to do,

00:32:01.940 but tell us about, uh, fixing the civil rights laws and then what we can argue about that.

00:32:06.420 Yeah. So within the book, I mean, I do have like a political analysis. I do just, I, I, you know,

00:32:12.580 I, I say that this is what you do, but I think that it's, you know, quite doable. So, you know,

00:32:16.700 when the Supreme court ruled on affirmative action, um, that got some attention, a lot of attention,

00:32:21.880 it wasn't, there wasn't protests in this, you know, in the streets. It wasn't like when George

00:32:25.920 Floyd got killed. Um, it wasn't even like Dobbs where it had this electoral backlash because,

00:32:30.500 you know, part of the reason why, because most of the public agreed with it actually. Um, and a lot of

00:32:34.220 public, well, on the abortion issue, the left knows that most of the public agrees with them.

00:32:38.360 And so they keep harping on it that it's, you know, politically advantageous for them to do so.

00:32:42.640 Um, and so that was just, you know, that was sort of more salient than most things that was,

00:32:46.420 you know, getting rid of affirmative action in universities. A lot of the stuff that I'm talking

00:32:50.000 about is very beneath the surface, right? The disparate impacts. It doesn't, are you defined

00:32:54.040 discrimination based on the number of people you, you know, the explicit discrimination or,

00:32:58.720 you know, uh, the, you know, the tests are, you know, the disparities based on tests,

00:33:02.700 you know, if people, most people don't know what disparate impact was, if they didn't know

00:33:06.100 what disparate impact was, they would probably be horrified by it. I think it was, uh, stupid.

00:33:10.340 Um, and so I think a lot of the stuff is it's, you know, what liberals pay attention to and what,

00:33:15.340 you know, sort of outrageous people isn't always the most important thing, right? So you could do

00:33:19.460 some things that are important and can, you know, make a big difference, but then people really

00:33:23.120 won't notice the way that they notice a lot of, uh, other things. Um, well, and so the media

00:33:28.060 blow it up. I mean, there's that, right? The media are going to say, but like I said,

00:33:32.520 I think they follow public opinion and even left-wing opinion, like, so like abortion,

00:33:36.800 they will, you know, keep harping on because they think it can help Democrats and they can

00:33:40.220 win elections. They want to, they want to run out of affirmative action and make that the biggest

00:33:43.460 deal. You know, they've tried to brainwash people, all that stuff. It doesn't work. You

00:33:46.540 know, people always think it's messaging. It's like, no, like the public, you know, they're not,

00:33:50.680 they're not, uh, they don't take the pro-life position and they're not going to be for

00:33:53.740 affirmative action. And like, you know, rate, you know, the equity agenda, you just can't get them

00:33:57.680 to do that. Not even California, not even Washington when they vote for it. So they can,

00:34:01.180 they can freak out, but they're probably going to limit themselves just because they, you know,

00:34:04.760 they're being strategic here or sort of like, you know, sort of subconsciously strategic about what

00:34:08.620 helps liberals. Um, and at the same time, they're just, there's just not an audience for a lot of

00:34:13.000 this, you know, sort of wokeness is law. Um, and so I do think this stuff is doable. Um, you know,

00:34:18.400 and so, you know, a lot of it can be done through the executive branch. A lot of it can be done through

00:34:22.820 the courts, the affirmative action that I talked about in government contracting, that was an

00:34:26.980 executive order. Um, that could be undone by executive order. Uh, Vivek Ramaswamy, I told

00:34:31.820 him about this executive order and he promised that on the first day of his office, not just to

00:34:35.340 me, I mean, publicly, uh, that he would, he would repeal that. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't going to

00:34:39.320 get that much attention because nobody even knows about affirmative action in government contracting,

00:34:43.180 right? There's so many things that they could be getting outreached about. Um, and so there's that,

00:34:47.520 you know, there's the disparate impact doctrine. I mean, it has to go. Um, you could do that,

00:34:51.100 that was not in the original civil rights act. I mean, it could be done through courts or could,

00:34:55.500 through the, uh, executive branch. And then a lot of this stuff is sort of the power of the

00:34:59.860 purse stuff. You know, you see, um, this isn't sort of realistic at the federal level right now

00:35:04.760 with, uh, with Biden in office, but at the state level, you do see states getting rid of DEI offices.

00:35:10.420 Um, you know, it's, it's been happening in Iowa. I've seen it happen in Texas and happening in

00:35:14.040 Florida. Uh, and so a lot of the civil rights stuff on the universities, uh, came through the power

00:35:18.640 of the purse saying, look, we give all this government money to you. You do what I want. Um, you could

00:35:24.060 do it in reverse too. And we've seen some states start to do that. Uh, Richard, sorry, just to

00:35:29.540 finish on this point. Um, uh, quick question I have is particularly at the federal level,

00:35:34.360 the stuff you're talking about, I mean, you're a smart guy, but you're probably not the only guy

00:35:38.080 that's realized this is going on. How come Republican presidents in the past haven't tackled

00:35:44.780 these issues in the way that you were advocating? Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, you know, like if you

00:35:51.060 go to sort of, yeah, I, I, I, and this is such an important question and such a good question that

00:35:56.480 I don't know that I, uh, that I have an entire chapter, uh, in the book about like, where have

00:36:00.640 Republicans been? And I frame it in exactly that way. The public is sort of with you on this. It's

00:36:04.900 important. It's a big deal. And so, you know, where, where have you been? Um, people don't, I think

00:36:10.180 people, what people don't realize is that there really wasn't a conservative media, um, until the late

00:36:15.340 1990s, right? Um, if you look at the cover, like in 1980s, Ronald Reagan actually fought on this

00:36:20.600 stuff. He tried to get rid of, uh, affirmative action to government contracting. He tried to do

00:36:24.420 some stuff that I described in the book on civil rights law to sort of, uh, take the foot of the

00:36:28.400 federal government off of, um, off of the, uh, uh, off. He actually vetoed a bill, uh, to basically

00:36:34.320 protect, you know, uh, religious liberty and basically being able to get rid of a lot of this title

00:36:39.500 nine feminist regulations away from universities. It got overridden. And you look at the media coverage

00:36:43.840 at the time, the media coverage, the only stories you could find are the Washington post, New York

00:36:47.080 times about how this is just Republicans are racist and Democrats are not racist. And so there's no

00:36:52.400 conservative media. It's, it's completely, there's a monopoly of information in the late 1990s. You

00:36:57.340 get Fox news. Um, and then you have two thousands, you, the war on terror sort of dominates everything.

00:37:02.100 This stuff has now been around for 20, 30 years. So we've only had like 25 years of like

00:37:07.320 conservatives sort of having like there's conservative legal scholars who've done a good, a lot of good

00:37:12.040 work that I've cited them. Right. But they're not the people who are getting, you know, the attention

00:37:15.820 of the senators and the, and the president. Right. Um, and so we've only had really like 25 years of

00:37:20.980 any kind of real, uh, conservative media to, to any substantial degree. Um, and you know, a lot has

00:37:27.640 been going on in that 25 years. Um, and this stuff was in many cases, decades old. Uh, so they're,

00:37:33.920 you know, they're really, you know, you sort of have to, you know, people, people forget, I mean,

00:37:37.020 a lot of this stuff was sort of life issues in the 1970s, 1980s. It went around for a very long time.

00:37:41.540 Um, and so I think now is the time to act on it. I just think that people sort of, uh, you know,

00:37:46.480 people, people sort of, you know, underestimate how much like knowledge and knowledge can be just

00:37:51.400 sort of lost. If people don't pay attention to something, it just becomes part of the status

00:37:54.800 quo. Richard, would you not say that it would need to be a very, very brave president to do this?

00:38:00.280 Because if you think how charged literally every discussion is now, now people can almost come

00:38:08.580 to blows with a discussion about, should men be allowed to walk into a woman's toilet?

00:38:12.960 And we're talking here about dismantling civil rights laws. I mean, that is going, that could

00:38:19.480 very well be a powder keg of an issue. You don't, I mean, you don't call it dismantling civil rights

00:38:23.520 laws. You say, and this is actually true. He's a political expert.

00:38:28.720 Yeah, mate. That's what I do. We're going to come out and dismantle civil rights laws

00:38:32.660 to pull it to the head.

00:38:34.540 Yeah. No, you say go to the back to, which is actually true. You say you go back to the

00:38:38.380 original intent of the civil rights act. You're strengthening civil rights law, right? Like

00:38:41.660 the people who sued to get rid of affirmative action, they didn't call themselves, you know,

00:38:44.740 the anti-civil rights coalition. They called themselves, you know, students for fair admission,

00:38:48.600 admissions. Right. Um, so yeah, I, I don't, you know, like, yeah, brave president. I don't know.

00:38:53.360 Like, like, I mean, we have, I mean, Trump was a brave president. I mean, he did a lot

00:38:57.700 of things that angered a lot of people. A lot of the time, this stuff is a lot, you

00:39:01.480 know, less unpopular than a lot of the other stuff he did. Um, so it's doable. I mean,

00:39:05.700 he signed that executive order. I mean, the more sort of the closest analog to this is

00:39:09.100 he signed that executive order in the last months of office, uh, after he saw Chris Ruffo

00:39:12.900 on Fox news that said, um, no more critical race theory training in the federal government

00:39:16.640 got a little bit of attention. It wasn't the biggest scandal of his presidency, but you

00:39:20.060 know, president, you know, Republican presidents are polarizing anyway. They do stuff

00:39:23.220 that angers the media. It's, it's not, you know, impossible to imagine.

00:39:27.780 Richard, do you think it might be that we've reached what is a lot of people term peak woke

00:39:34.340 and as a result of reaching peak woke, this is a much easier policy to implement. Or do

00:39:40.800 you think we haven't reached that point yet? We haven't reached the height of the insanity.

00:39:45.760 Yeah. I mean, I, I did, I, you know, I did write a article on this. I think that sort

00:39:49.160 of, I do think we, you know, it depends on where you're looking. So if you're looking

00:39:52.500 at universities or the media, um, I think woke has been sort of institutionalized and

00:39:57.920 it's, it's, it's, it's not like it was in 2020, but it is, I mean, it is sort of just,

00:40:02.480 you know, it's in the, it's in the ether now it's fundamental to like what institutions

00:40:06.300 are. Um, as far as the wider culture, I do think we're past peak. Well, I mean, mostly

00:40:11.980 because things can't go on forever. Like you can't maintain the frenzy of summer 2020,

00:40:16.140 you know, indefinitely, like you have to go back to some kind of normalcy. Um, but like,

00:40:21.560 you know, Ethan Strauss, um, has got a good substance, a sports writer, um, has written

00:40:25.360 about how basically the sports coverage just went back to covering sports. Like two, three

00:40:29.140 years ago, it was, you go to the front page and half of it is, you know, some kind of woke

00:40:32.460 nonsense. They're still liberal, but they're mostly just covering sports now. Um, and I think

00:40:36.700 that's sort of a good bellwether to where we are, to where we are. And so, yeah, I mean,

00:40:40.740 I think that, yeah, we are in a place where, um, you know, I think that people sort of, you know,

00:40:46.040 there's been, you know, people, media figures, you know, people in law and government, I mean,

00:40:50.500 they've, they've, they've pushed back on it. Um, I think the ports of civil rights law is like,

00:40:55.220 sort of like, it's always, it's sort of like having a state religion. It stays latent. Right.

00:41:00.260 So like, I want to make sure in 15, 20 years, we don't have another summer of 2020. Civil rights

00:41:05.980 law makes it very, very easy to do that because it's all, there's always lawsuits. There's always

00:41:10.060 bureaucracies around, you know, if they go away, you won't notice that they go away,

00:41:14.340 but they just go away. And then we don't have a summer of 2020. Again, we don't have, you know,

00:41:17.980 all these crazy sort of initiatives. Uh, so yeah, I do think overall we are probably past peak woke

00:41:22.840 and yeah, it's also a good, it's a good, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's something that might make it

00:41:26.380 harder because there's no, uh, there's no, um, uh, urgency. It's just like, Oh, the problem solved

00:41:31.180 itself. But like, no institutions are still doing racial being counting. They're still relying on

00:41:35.460 disparate impact. They're still doing affirmative action. So you got to keep reminding people that it's

00:41:39.400 actually, you know, it's important to the, you know, to, to focus on these issues and to do

00:41:43.580 something about them. The thing that I always found very interesting is the role of shareholders in

00:41:48.380 this. So for instance, you know, all these shareholders with, you know, who bought shares

00:41:52.880 in huge companies and then the performance of a said company, let's take Disney, for example,

00:41:58.480 because it has these just a random, just a random, just a random company because it embraces these

00:42:05.120 policies and policies and these ideologies. Suddenly the profits go through the floor.

00:42:11.300 I would always thought that there'd be a real tension there with the shareholder because surely

00:42:16.680 they're furious. Well, I mean, maybe, but remember before Elon Musk bought Twitter, you had,

00:42:24.560 you had civil rights law, you had sort of this bullying from the government and you also had the

00:42:28.720 media, which would, you know, you can, you stand up to black lives matter. They'll portray you as the

00:42:33.100 Ku Klux Klan. And is that good for shareholder value? No, I think in a lot of cases they were

00:42:38.000 following their interest by just giving in, you know, the mob comes and says, nice story to have

00:42:41.640 there, you know, it'd be a terrible shame if something happens to it. It's often rational to

00:42:45.100 just give in, even though you would rather, you know, you would rather ideally not have to pay

00:42:49.400 any kind of protection money. And so I do, you know, I do think this is, I do think what we've seen

00:42:54.760 is sort of consistent now with like, you know, now with like social media changed and some of the

00:43:00.040 conservatives being, you know, pushing back through the states, through the state governments

00:43:03.460 and, you know, in other, in other means, you know, I do think that there has been sort of a shift in

00:43:08.220 corporate America. So yeah, I do think all of this is consistent with sort of a classic capitalist model

00:43:14.120 where, you know, businesses do what's in their financial interest. The job of sort of activists

00:43:18.540 and people in politics is to make their interest to do the right thing. Yeah. And we saw that,

00:43:23.100 I mean, with Bud Light, they went from Dylan Mulvaney to now advertising with the UFC. That's,

00:43:28.140 that's, that's a shift, isn't it? But listen, it's a great book. I really recommend people

00:43:34.780 check it out. There's one other thing I wanted to talk to you about before we head over to locals

00:43:39.140 and ask you questions from our audience. People, when you wrote the book and when you were gearing

00:43:43.880 up to promote it, some, some people in the media came after you and sort of did an expose on your past

00:43:53.540 and you were quite, you had some extreme views in the past that you've written about

00:43:58.900 since. And I thought it was a very interesting thing where someone, A, someone in the public eye

00:44:04.360 who did have extreme views that were revealed, they came for you and they didn't manage to cancel you.

00:44:10.180 But the other thing that I thought was interesting as well was that you were someone who just owned

00:44:15.300 the mistakes that they'd made and kind of described how you went from where you were to where you are now.

00:44:20.640 Can you tell us a little bit about that? Cause I think that'd be fascinating for people.

00:44:24.720 Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, you know, it dropped, it dropped about a month and a half

00:44:27.720 before my book came out and this stuff was, you know, stuff that I'd written 15 years ago. I mean,

00:44:33.600 it's not, I don't stand by it. I think it's, you know, I think it's awful stuff. And I think people

00:44:37.940 sort of, and I was lucky, I think, cause I had a body of work since then where people can see that,

00:44:43.520 like, that's not how I think anymore. At the same time, I'm not.

00:44:46.340 Richard, sorry to interrupt. Just give us a flavor of some of the things that you were writing about

00:44:50.120 back then and sort of some of the views you held.

00:44:52.740 Yeah. I mean, so I, you know, I believed, I believed that basically a white identity politics.

00:44:56.760 I thought that the, you know, even though I'm middle Eastern, I thought that this was sort of

00:45:00.620 maybe necessary to counteract leftist identity politics. There was a sort of, you know, you know,

00:45:07.800 you know, like immigration restrictionism on that basis stuff about, you know, women shouldn't vote

00:45:14.200 and this and that, and, you know, which I, you know, I've denounced explicitly even before this

00:45:17.520 stuff came out. So, you know, basically like imagine a right wing, um, you know, anonymous

00:45:22.740 poster, but, you know, uh, you know, a little bit more.

00:45:25.620 Not hard to imagine. We see a lot of those, but what I'm curious about, and I know you've

00:45:29.620 written about in your sub stack is how you came to have those ideas in the first place, because

00:45:34.920 frankly, let's be honest, there's quite a lot of people that are leaning in that direction,

00:45:39.540 certainly online, as you say, anonymously, et cetera. So please understand, I'm not trying to

00:45:44.300 make you look bad here. I'm just very curious to know how you come to that and then how you move

00:45:49.620 out of that. That's very interesting to me. Yeah. Yeah. And then I did write an essay,

00:45:53.140 you know, explaining that. So yeah, it's, of course, uh, you know, I appreciate you asking.

00:45:57.400 Um, it's, uh, yeah, I mean, I think you start out with, I think this is where, where this is sort of

00:46:02.980 my journey. I think it's a lot of people's journey too, is that you see the mainstream media

00:46:07.100 and, you know, institutions, educations are absolutely insane on some issues, right? America

00:46:13.760 is a white supremacist nation. There are no differences between men and women. I didn't

00:46:18.600 have to, you know, I sometimes see people who read scientific papers, like, look, men are stronger

00:46:22.040 than women. I'm like, you have to read scientific papers for this. And just like the moment I heard

00:46:25.540 it, I was just like, you know, you watch the nature shows and they show the male behaves like this and

00:46:29.720 the female behaves like this. And it's like, where, where does this stuff come from? And, you know,

00:46:34.620 when I was in college, I would have like these cultural anthropology courses. And I remember

00:46:37.820 just questioning like the professor on this, you know, this assumption of like gender blank

00:46:42.560 slatism and he just had nothing. I mean, it was just really, really bad. And so you start out with

00:46:46.380 that, like, okay, people are lying to you in an extreme absurd way that, you know, it's not like

00:46:51.400 they're just, the facts are a little bit off. It's like, they're telling you the sky is green.

00:46:55.420 Um, and then it becomes easy to think all society is corrupt. You know, everything is false,

00:47:01.120 right? I think people like, you know, they get into like revisionism about like world war

00:47:04.580 two, or like they get into like anti-vax or, you know, anything people will conspiracy theories,

00:47:09.400 people will buy into anything because of the, because of just how crazy sort of society is

00:47:13.980 on race and gender. And now with gender identity, I mean, it's even, it's even, it's even crazier.

00:47:18.720 Um, and I think it's just sort of some part of it is just sort of like a logical thing where

00:47:22.780 like people have been lying to me. So I'm just going to think, you know, whatever anonymous person

00:47:26.120 says on the internet, you know, it's true. Part of it is just emotional. You become alienated from

00:47:30.540 society. You become angry. You see sort of a lot of dysfunction and you see

00:47:34.360 people are lying to you about it. Um, and you sort of just take this, you know, uh, antagonistic

00:47:39.320 view towards society. Um, and then you, uh, yeah, you, you, it could drive some people crazy.

00:47:45.520 Um, and I think what's, you know, something a little bit different for me is that I didn't

00:47:49.460 become like a leftist. I still think liberals are absolutely crazy on race, on gender issues.

00:47:55.700 Um, but you know, I grew older and smarter and thought more carefully about it and wanted to

00:48:00.420 give people constructive solutions to do something about it. Um, and you know, also my worldview sort

00:48:06.040 of became less conspiratorial over time as I did see, you know, sort of the history of civil rights

00:48:09.880 law, just more knowledge of where this stuff came from out of a genuine interest in it. Um, and,

00:48:14.760 you know, and then also observing that a lot of times the non-mainstream people, you know,

00:48:18.420 the anonymous Twitter accounts or whatever, they're also crazy. They also believe things that are

00:48:22.440 obviously not true. In many cases they're, you know, worse than the mainstream media.

00:48:26.420 Um, and so, yeah, I mean, it's just having that balance, just knowing that they're lying

00:48:31.000 to you, knowing what they're saying is false, but not going into sort of this habit of, you

00:48:35.900 know, always talking about them lying to you. That's like the default state of interacting

00:48:39.980 with the world. And, you know, that's sort of my process. And I hope that other people

00:48:43.560 who sort of know the left is crazy on some issues, you know, I hope they could sort of, uh, I hope

00:48:48.400 they could take some lessons from that.

00:48:50.380 I think the dangerous thing about extreme ideologies, whether right and left is that it co-ops

00:48:54.760 people, but also it antagonizes others. And in many ways, it's actually the people who

00:49:00.340 antagonizes are even more dangerous. Like people go to me, you're worried about woke people.

00:49:05.900 And I go, well, you know, I mean, they're here to, they're here to stay and what they,

00:49:10.980 I don't agree with a lot of what they've done, but I'm actually far more worried about the

00:49:16.260 backlash that I see coming on the horizon than I am about woke people, if I'm honest.

00:49:20.860 Yeah. I mean, you know, it's, uh, yeah. I mean, the backlash is interesting. I mean,

00:49:25.960 I do think that like, you do see people who are on the right, who are like, just, they do become

00:49:31.380 like anti-democracy. Like it's, it's sort of a trope that like, you know, liberals just made this

00:49:35.160 up. Like, no, like a lot of them do like Putin. A lot of them sort of have a grudging respect for

00:49:41.500 the Chinese. Right. Um, a lot of them do just think democracy is false. So you're absolutely right.

00:49:46.940 You know, there is a, there is a backlash that in many cases be just as bad as what it's fighting

00:49:50.980 against. Yeah. I sat next to a guy at dinner a while ago, who's like a prominent writer here

00:49:56.680 in the UK. He was telling me how China is more democratic than the U S and I was going, mate,

00:50:01.480 just like whatever you're reading, stop reading it. Cause your brain is, is melting here.

00:50:07.300 Exactly. Perfect demonstration of the point. Yeah. You're absolutely right.

00:50:09.940 But, but it's also as well that, you know, they, people become more emboldened, the bigger

00:50:16.240 the backlash grows. And, and, and the thing that I find worrying as well is, uh, you know,

00:50:22.060 by de-platforming these people, what you're effectively doing is you're giving these ideas

00:50:27.020 a kind of glamour. You can't listen to it because you know, this is, this is so dangerous. And if

00:50:31.800 you think about young people like yourself at the time, that's kind of, that could be interpreted

00:50:37.900 as dissident thought. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of them have embraced sort of the dissident thing,

00:50:43.760 right? The dissident sort of, you know, they call themselves dissident writer or whatever. Uh,

00:50:48.200 you know, the problem with that is, I mean, to call yourself a just a dissident and say,

00:50:51.400 that's your sort of identity is like, just as illogical saying I'm a mainstream media.

00:50:57.580 I'm going to believe, right. You'll be, you'll end up just as stupid and many ways worse because

00:51:02.180 like, you know, there's no accountability for like what anonymous people say online or in the media,

00:51:06.240 like, you know, there's debate and there's people go back and forth. I mean, yeah, you could find a

00:51:10.380 dissident view that China and Russia are more democratic and, you know, freer and better

00:51:14.600 countries, you know, than the United States. Um, it's, uh, yeah, I think it's just a cautionary

00:51:20.220 tale of like, you know, if you become, you know, anti-woke, this becomes, you know, goes too far

00:51:24.360 because part of your identity. Yeah. People, we, we, we've got to lead people away from that.

00:51:28.100 That's not a good place to be. Yeah. I agree with you, man. And obviously Francis and I,

00:51:31.980 you know, people would say we're anti-woke because we are anti-woke. We've never made that

00:51:36.400 our identity particularly, but it does. But we are dissidents.

00:51:40.700 But this isn't what dissidents look like, mate. But, uh, you know, the, the thought that what I

00:51:46.740 started to notice with, I mean, Ukraine was a big one for me, but there was lots of others where it's

00:51:51.140 like, oh, you are not someone who's just concerned about the fact that the mainstream has gone batshit,

00:51:56.900 which it has, you're, you've got a form of like oppositional defiance disorder where it's like,

00:52:01.800 whatever they say, you pick the opposite and that's the entire posture towards the world that

00:52:07.160 you have. What I, uh, wonder in not to get too personal with you, but I'm just curious quite

00:52:12.300 often, I think, uh, moving from that sort of extreme way of looking at the world, did you start

00:52:17.620 to change how you see the world because you maybe became a bit happier in your life? Did you,

00:52:22.800 was that part of it or am I projecting here? No, I think that is, I mean, I think that is right.

00:52:29.060 I was sort of, uh, yeah, I was much less happy 15 years ago than I am, uh, now. And a lot of it was

00:52:36.420 just sort of, you know, regular self-improvement, you know, getting in shape, you know, talking to

00:52:41.000 girls, uh, you know, the stuff that people, uh, you know, the stuff that, you know, your, your uncle

00:52:46.140 might, you know, tell you, might tell you to do. Yeah. I think that you can't really separate this

00:52:49.980 stuff. I think that a lot of the wokeness, um, you've probably seen the, uh, uh, data on wokeness

00:52:55.160 and mental illness. I mean, it's undeniably, you know, there's a connection there. And just from

00:52:59.800 being around sort of, uh, you know, sort of the right wing sort of dissident extremist sphere,

00:53:04.880 uh, you see, there's something similar going on. You know, that's, that to me is absolutely clear

00:53:09.120 from my experiences. The thing that I find frustrating with, should we just call them this

00:53:14.840 dissident community is they constantly attack woke people and they say, Oh, they're losers.

00:53:20.600 You know, they have a victim mindset. Well, mate, you've got a victim mindset.

00:53:26.200 Yes. It's often, it's often, uh, it's often, you know, it's often just as bad or, or worse.

00:53:32.160 Right. Like you'll see, you know, they'll see, they'll say, Oh, you, you know, like a lot of,

00:53:35.960 you know, it's like, you know, people still get married. People still have kids. People still buy

00:53:40.700 houses. I mean, life is continuing, right. It's like, there's not this apocalyptic dystopia that

00:53:45.940 people on the online, right. Imagine, yeah, we have problems, but you know, you do, you think

00:53:50.060 about them, you put them in perspective and you think of like, you know, smart policy solutions

00:53:55.020 to, to deal with them. That's, that's the healthy grownup way to think about these things.

00:53:59.100 Richard. And one quick topic before we move to locals, cause you mentioned being from the

00:54:02.940 middle East where, where in the middle East are you from? Uh, my dad is a Palestinian Christian

00:54:07.460 and my mom is a Jordanian Catholic. I throw the religion in there because people, you

00:54:11.420 know, of course want to know for you. Yeah. I can't see you guys, by the way, you guys

00:54:15.200 are frozen. You're frozen for us as well, Elliot. Now I see you. There we go. Yeah. Perfect.

00:54:22.740 Perfect. Cool. So, uh, one quick topic before we move to locals and do questions from our audience

00:54:28.260 with your middle Eastern background. Um, how would you solve it? Uh, you've been going hard

00:54:36.140 at it on Twitter, which I'm enjoying. You, you love trolling people. Uh, and I love watching,

00:54:41.380 I love trolling people. I love watching other people trolling people. It's a, it's a pastime

00:54:45.040 of mine. Um, but you are, I have not seen anybody go harder on the Palestinians than you. Let's

00:54:52.460 put it that way. So what is kind of your take on the middle East and, and the conflict there

00:54:57.660 and the events of the last six weeks? Yeah. So I have a essay on my sub stack. That's going

00:55:02.240 to be, I've read a few essays, but I have another one where it's just going to be talking

00:55:05.200 about, uh, how we understand antisemitism. So we are anti-Israeli sentiment. So a lot

00:55:10.320 of people, they think, you know, um, look, I, I, I, you know, I'll put it this way. I've

00:55:15.940 been reading a lot of, and listening to a lot of sort of liberals talk about the current Israeli

00:55:20.860 Palestinian conflict. And, you know, it's amazing. They don't deny, they don't deny what

00:55:26.240 Hamas is. They can't deny it. They don't even like, they don't even have a suggestion of

00:55:31.460 who you would talk to on the Palestinian side to ever get peace. It's just like, don't

00:55:36.380 fight, you know, don't fight the war. Hope, you know, give them aid. Like don't like go

00:55:40.420 to, don't go to war after this, you know, terrorist attack that killed other people, you know, like

00:55:44.500 a medieval raid, like took off women and children, uh, back to Gaza. And, you know, there's not

00:55:50.340 even like a hint of a suggestion. And so, you know, it's, there's, there's good, there has

00:55:55.300 to be an Israeli response. I mean, Israel is threatened long-term. They're having rockets

00:55:59.580 thrown at the, you know, lobbed at them from the north and from the, uh, from the

00:56:03.080 south. Um, you know, there's no, you know, there's technology that develops over time

00:56:08.320 where the rocket technology and the drone technology potentially gets better. There's

00:56:11.760 a terrorist organization, you know, that's basically a state, um, Gaza, I mean, it runs

00:56:16.160 its own affairs, um, that is dedicated to Israel's destruction. Doesn't even pretend to

00:56:21.060 want like a two states dilution or anything. And so like, you know, this is the, you know,

00:56:25.160 the, the, the framework here is not like, you know, a criminal organization or like

00:56:29.120 a terrorist organization on the other side. The framework here should be, you know, the

00:56:32.820 threat from Germany or Japan and world war. And to that, like to the U S or Britain, like

00:56:36.720 I don't think Germany or Japan was as threatening as, as, uh, Israel or as the, uh, as

00:56:41.400 Gaza is to the Israelis because they're right next to them. There's population. There's, you

00:56:45.520 know, uh, there's, uh, you know, uh, there's sort of a, uh, uh, you know, there's

00:56:49.400 already, you know, rockets, there's a different level of technology. Um, and so, you

00:56:53.920 know, I, and there's, you know, a commitment to their destruction in a way

00:56:56.620 like Japan didn't want to, you know, necessarily destroy the U S that wasn't

00:56:59.780 like they're, you know, a part of their, you know, governing ideology. Um, and so

00:57:04.060 Israel has to, you know, fight, I think Israel has to fight this war to win. Um, in

00:57:08.500 the long run, it'll be better for the Palestinian people if they're not brought,

00:57:11.480 you know, ruled by these terrorists. I, you know, I think that the idea of open, uh,

00:57:17.080 pressuring the world to open up refugees, open up to refugees and, you

00:57:20.340 know, it could be the Arab States. It could be European States. It could be, you

00:57:22.400 know, whoever, I mean, anywhere they would, anywhere would be better than

00:57:25.500 Gaza right under Hamas, um, and being, you know, constantly, uh, you know,

00:57:29.740 people call it an open air prison cap. So I think that, I think that there

00:57:33.240 should be sort of, I think Israel has to just do what it needs to do to ensure

00:57:37.320 its own security. And I think that there is no optimistic scenario of like what

00:57:42.020 Gaza looks like with the Palestinians living there. And, you know, when, when we

00:57:46.060 have these tragic situations, we all, we often are on almost every other case, we

00:57:50.520 accept the idea that people should become refugees and go start somewhere

00:57:53.780 else because it's too, you know, it's too, the situation is too tragic and it's

00:57:57.740 too terrible where they are right now. It's better for them in the long run. Uh,

00:58:00.560 so I think that should be sort of the goal here. Um, it doesn't seem like, uh, you

00:58:04.680 know, it doesn't seem like a lot of the people in the region agree because, you

00:58:07.780 know, they want to, they care about the Palestinian cause and a lot of people

00:58:10.720 don't want the refugees. Um, but I think that's the, that's the sort of, that's the

00:58:14.460 path to a long-term humane solution to all of this.

00:58:16.480 And what do you make of the argument? I mean, I heard John, uh, Maya Shima

00:58:20.860 recently saying that the reason Hamas, uh, attacked on October 7th is that, uh,

00:58:26.720 the, the resistance force fighting against Israeli occupation, fighting against

00:58:31.260 Israeli oppression. And, uh, as long as Israel, uh, continues to have this right

00:58:37.140 wing government that is being, uh, controlled by far right forces within

00:58:41.560 Israel that believe in a single state solution where Israel controls

00:58:45.380 everything. They believe in greater Israel. That's why Hamas lashed out and

00:58:50.000 they'll continue to lash out as long as the Palestinian people are oppressed.

00:58:53.720 Well, I mean, it depends on how you, I mean, I mean, it's true in a sense and

00:58:57.940 that like, it's because there's a dispute between the Palestinians and

00:59:00.340 Israelis and they're oppressed, but what does oppressed mean? I think that to, to

00:59:03.180 the, to the, a lot of the Palestinian people in Hamas and Gaza, oppression

00:59:07.400 means what happened in 1948, what's happened in 1967. Right. And so, yes, they're

00:59:11.860 oppressed. They see the existence of the Jewish state itself as a source of

00:59:15.760 oppression. So it's true. If you gave up on the idea of Jewish, of a Jewish state

00:59:19.160 now, like this idea that like, you know, you could probably, you could have peace

00:59:22.340 of course. Now this idea that, um, you know, I haven't heard, I haven't heard

00:59:25.320 Mersheimer's opinion on this, but I've taken your word as that's what, that's

00:59:28.080 what he, you know, that's what he's saying or we can, we can, uh, use that as an

00:59:30.880 argument. Um, the idea that there's a difference between like a right wing

00:59:34.180 Israeli government versus a left wing Israeli government, and that's going to

00:59:37.840 make Hamas moderate and less likely to attack. You know, Hamas itself doesn't

00:59:42.140 say that. I mean, Hamas, you know, it's just, this is a very big projection onto

00:59:45.100 them. It's not like, oh man, Nanyahu won the election. If, you know, if it had

00:59:48.720 been, you know, the, the labor party, if it, you know, the leftists had won, we'd

00:59:52.060 be, you know, we'd be, we'd, we'd get to a two state solution. There's not even

00:59:54.940 like a hint of like pretending to think like this. Right. Um, so I don't know

00:59:59.400 like what evidence it would take to get people to just see that like, look, Hamas

01:00:04.020 and you know, the Palestinian people in general, you know, the, the majority of

01:00:07.400 them, um, don't want Israel to exist. Um, and they're, you know, political and

01:00:12.720 military actions are consistent with, with that belief and their words. I

01:00:17.340 mean, and, and how they act. I just don't see what the evidence is for the

01:00:20.840 opposite perspective. It's a sensible perspective. I mean, like, you know, um,

01:00:24.460 you could, in some, you know, in some, uh, you know, the U S left Vietnam and,

01:00:28.100 you know, the Vietnamese, you know, left the Americans alone and, you know, they

01:00:31.700 were blessed, uh, ideology of destroying America, um, from the Viet Cong. But, uh,

01:00:36.480 in this case, I just don't see what the evidence is for. I mean, it's a great

01:00:40.860 point. And also as well, I just, it's that classic thing where people just want a

01:00:46.100 simple solution to a very, very complex problem. They, yeah, they don't want

01:00:50.480 trade-offs. They want to think like you must, if you're, you know, it's like, you

01:00:55.740 know, it's like if the, if the Palestinians are angry, it must be, you have to be

01:01:00.780 sort of nicer to them or be more humane. And then they're going to be less

01:01:04.260 angry and you're going to achieve your security. It would be nice. You know, you

01:01:07.640 see these ideas like, Oh, don't attack the people of Gaza. Don't kill a lot of

01:01:11.860 civilians. Just go like, kill the leaders of Hamas. It's like, you think like

01:01:15.400 people weren't like, nobody's tried that. You think Israel did a thing. Okay. Oh,

01:01:18.520 just kill the leader. No, they're, they're in hospitals. They're there. You know,

01:01:21.700 they put, uh, they put guns under the beds of their, you know, of their

01:01:25.040 children. Right. They live in these, uh, they, in these areas because that's

01:01:28.900 their hope. That's their strategy for fighting. Right. So they're not making

01:01:31.940 it easy for you. They're not going off to a field somewhere and saying, come

01:01:34.980 fight us. And you can, you know, now drone us or meet us in the field. They're

01:01:38.500 doing, they're specifically, you know, playing to this human rights

01:01:41.000 sentiment, um, in order as part of their strategy, because that's what they

01:01:44.360 have. They're not the, they're not the stronger side. Um, so yeah, I just

01:01:47.760 think that, you know, just looking at sort of the laughter of the so-called pro

01:01:50.800 peace side, um, in all this, it just strikes me as completely

01:01:54.060 unrealistic.

01:01:54.560 And Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show. The final

01:01:58.540 question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking

01:02:01.300 about as a society that we really should be?

01:02:04.200 Yeah. So, and, uh, and, you know, in the United States, we have a sort

01:02:07.660 of a, a budget, um, uh, you know, an apocalypse upon us in 10, 15 years. Um,

01:02:12.900 the population is getting older. If you look at the percentage of federal

01:02:17.180 budget going to old people through social security and Medicare, it's very high.

01:02:20.340 And these people are aging and about 20, 33, the money runs out. We're either

01:02:24.040 going to have to cut spending to old people and even like rich old people get

01:02:28.300 the same benefits that, you know, poor old, poor old people do, or we're going

01:02:31.540 to have to sort of raise taxes, uh, and become a, uh, a Euro welfare state, but

01:02:36.040 without even the welfare, it's just all going to go to old people. Right. Um, and

01:02:39.500 so there's a guy named Brian Reidel who I have my own podcast at, uh, CSPI

01:02:43.300 center.com. Um, I just talked to him about this the other week. Um, and yeah, this

01:02:48.220 is the next 10, 15 years. I think this is going to really determine, uh, you know,

01:02:52.100 the future of sort of the American standard standard of living. So I encourage

01:02:55.620 people to read up and think about the entitlements question because it's, it's

01:02:58.460 coming for us in the next 10, 15 years. All right. Well, we need a color of old

01:03:01.620 people. There we go, Richard. See, you are woke. Yeah. Richard, great book,

01:03:08.640 origins of work. I recommend everybody check it out to get your take on it. We're

01:03:12.600 going to head on over to locals where we're going to ask you questions from our

01:03:15.660 supporters that they've submitted. Uh, so we'll see you there. Appreciate it.

01:03:19.240 Thanks guys. In recent years, the woke mob and anti-racist authors have attempted

01:03:24.960 to say that only white people can be racist. How can a white person legally

01:03:29.000 complain against something that with modern language rebranding no longer

01:03:32.920 exists when applied to them?

TRIGGERnometry - December 24, 2023

Where Woke REALLY Comes From - Richard Hanania

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