Decoding the Gurus - James Lindsay & Michael O'Fallon: Eating bugs for Feminist Glaciology

Episode Date: March 6, 2022

This is an important episode. 2022 you needs to realise what 2020 you could not and what 2030 you is ready to tell you. Confused? You will be.On this episode we tackle two gurus that we have treated separately: James Lindsay of New Discourses (episode 2) and Michael O'Fallon of Sovereign Nations (episode 13). O'Fallon hasn't changed much from our episode analysing him, aside from starting a conspiracy laden daily news show. But James... well... judge for yourself.On this episode you will learn many amazing facts, including how feminist glaciology is at the core of the Great Reset, that the NFL is now the Critical Race Football league, and how what 'it' is really all about is making people into pets who are driven by AI cars and eat bugs.For this excursion, Chris and Matt are joined for the second time by Aaron Rabinowtiz, host of Embrace the Void (@ETVPod) and Philosophers in Space podcasts, PhD student, and lecturer at Rutgers University. This means we have now had two back to back episodes with philosophers... and we really can't apologise enough.LinksBen Garrison's cartoon featuring Scott AdamsSovereign Nations' Public Occurrences | Episode 7 | Woke NFLSovereign Nations' Public Occurrences | Episode 10 | Obedience TrainingClimate Justice | James Lindsay & Michael O'Fallon | Changing Tides Ep. 1A Critical Reset | James Lindsay & Michael O'Fallon | Changing Tides Ep. 2New Discourses | Groomer Schools 2: Queer Futurity and the Sexual Abuse of Your ChildrenNew Discourses | Groomer Schools 3: The Creation of an American Red GuardThat Immune book by Philipp Dettmer from Gurzgesagt

Hi everyone, just a short programming note to mention that this episode was recorded several weeks before the events in Ukraine, so that's why there's no reference of any of that in the discussion. Just wanted to mention that. Okay, enjoy. Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer. We try our best to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown.

With me is my partner in crime, the yin to my yang, Associate Professor Chris Cavanaugh. Good afternoon, Chris. Good afternoon, Matthew. You're looking startlingly beautiful today. I'm looking sunny and light. You're looking, you're looking dark and moody with your hoodie. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you mentioned this hoodie because I just say that I'm sure people

know this, I think it exists around the world now, you know, the brand Uniqlo. Uniqlo. I do. Yes. My wife is a big fan. Yeah. They're, they're kind of like the gap of Now, you know the brand Uniqlo? I do. Yes, my wife is a big fan. Yeah, they're kind of like the Gap of Japan, right? But the thing is, they're better than the Gap because they have this type of clothes

called Heat Tech clothing. I'm sure you've seen like vests. Well, I guess you don't need those, but like in other parts of the world. We went the opposite of Heat Tech. What's Heat? Yeah, you went. of what's heat. Not what's heat, but yeah, I know.

Australians know what heat is. So in other parts of the world, Matt, it gets cold and we have to wear clothing to keep us warm. And Uniqlo has... Not just to hide your shame. Both. Both. Both. It's a shame. Both.

Both. Both. Both the factors. And it usually has these under shirts and stuff or long johns, various things that make you warm. And they're branded under this thing, Heat Tech. This hoodie, Matt, is a Heat Tech hoodie. And it's so comfortable. It's so good. I've been wearing it like nonstop for three days.

And I don't think I can wear any other clothes anymore. I'm going to have to buy different colors just so people are unaware. It looks like I have different items of clothing. The only downside is that you look like a monk. Well. You look like you've been closeted in a monastery for 20 years and you're having a deep... No, no, no, no deep there's a huge amount of sexual tension between you and a younger monk and but this is just the silhouetted light from this

camera actually i look like a cool snowboarder dude out on the slopes catching some powder. Um, yeah, like ripping, ripping some, some radical snow waves. All right. Fair enough. Well, look, I'm out of touch. I don't know what the kids are into, so I'll have to take your word for it. Clearly. Clearly. Bodacious Matt.

It is. I'm, I'm using the word to say bodacious. Maybe they do. Maybe it's like gone through the irony. It's gone so far that it's come back as a ironic thing that people say now seriously. It might have. They're the surfers of the mountains, Matt, the snowboarders. So they use the same lingo.

Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. The culture is the same. So with that useful piece of information out of the way, have you got anything? We try to be sunny in 2022. Yes, we have to talk about anti-vaxxers and Joe Rogan endlessly. But do you have anything good, Matt?

Any good news? Anything to recommend that you've come across in the wild, interweb or otherwise? I had a strange dream. I had a, I had a dream that we were decoding my wife. My wife was the content of the episode and you were like, okay, Ma, here's the, here's the thing that your wife said, and you're about to play something. But the funny thing was it got real meta real

quick because in the dream literally in the dream i thought that's not something chris would say that's not a that's not i'm not i'm not doing a good script for my own dream and i became critical of the dream yeah i thought you were noticing how bad that your attempt to imitate me was he doesn't say ma, he says mat. You tried a little bit harder just then, didn't you? Just to try to show me. No, I did not. That's how I always pronounce it.

And that's why the transcription software always gets it correct. But yeah, that's interesting. We need to get Jordan Peterson or some Freudian or Jungian psychologist on this post stat to interpret what this means. It's an odd recommendation for you to recommend a type of dream. I'm here for it. I'm here for it. I remember thinking, oh no, we're decoding my wife. I'm going to get into trouble.

This is not going to end well. Yeah, that would to end well. Yeah, that would not end well. Yeah. I'm not sure how you've found out about my secret clips folder, but, um, I'll just have to scrap that project. It's it's been rumbled. How did you get those clips?

No, I mean, the only nice thing that I came across today was the book that you held up to me before the Kersergesakt, how the immune system works. It's like a great book. Yeah, this beautiful book, which nobody can see what I'm holding up for the camera. I ordered Immune, a journey into the mysterious system that keeps you alive, which I intended to read with my young son because he likes the Kersergesakt. I'm sorry, I haven't learned how to do it yet, but that thing, it's a little video series on YouTube for anybody that's tuned in for the first time that gives like science explainers and it's beautiful illustrated very nicely, but it's not a book for kids. It's extremely dense.

It would take him five years to get through it. So it's now I have a nicely illustrated book about my immune system. So yeah. And you just read it in your free time. Yeah, I will. That's right. So it'll only take me 10 years to get there as well. The other nice thing was that I saw the June movie yesterday, as you know.

Finally, like I'm really late to the party. I know that everyone else has seen it, except for you. You haven't seen it. I haven't. But I've read those books like three times. I've read the whole series. It lives in my head. I know it word for word. So really for me, it was just a visualization of what was in my head, you know? And look, I liked the original David Lynch gene. It was good too, but- Sting is in it. Sting is in it. Yeah. And he's, he's good. I liked it.

I liked it. Lots of nice little touches. Like they made the big spaceships, the big navigator guild spaceships look like worms. Just a bit. That's right. Just a bit like worms. My knowledge of Dune is I've never read it. I've never seen any of the movies, but I have read Wikipedia summaries of the plot and I've looked up pictures of what the big worm emperor looks like that's the that's the extent of my doing knowledge I've

probably taken all the enjoyment out of the series such that I know everything that will happen and I'm just fixated on the most, what seems on the face of it as the most stupid part of the story is the part that gripped me like, he turned into a what? That's in a later book. That'll be an installment another seven, but I think it's the makings of a great franchise. It's a rich, rich world. Yeah, that director, Denis Villeneuve. His films look good and are good. And are good. And Paul Atreides, Timothy Chamelet, I think his name is.

Young man. Young man. And he plays that archetypal. It's like, what's that Shakespeare play? The famous one. Macbeth? The other one. King Lear? No, about the grumpy teenager he's an angsty

teenager because he's the grapes of wrath no my brain's not working as you like it everyone listening will be going absolutely mental because we're literally the only two people in the universe who don't know you know I'm torturing you on purpose right

I don't know which one you know but but I know it's none of those. Well, I know that you know the Crepes of Wrath is not it. But anyway, the point was that Timothée Chalamet, he was in another good movie called The King, and I think it's a historical, I think it's based on, I'm absolutely talking about King Henry and Succession and stuff. And, oh, gee, it's good too. And he plays exactly the same role, exactly the same role.

Sort of young guy, he's got to become the. And he plays exactly the same role. Exactly the same role. Sort of young guy. He's got to become the new big boss man. King worm. King worm. But he's too skinny and doesn't have enough muscles. He needs to eat enough food and become a bigger worm-like guy. I know how doing works, man. You mentioned, you know what?

Both those movies were missing. They were missing the sort of... Worms? No, you know in the boxing movies where they have the video montage of training and both of them. Yeah. Eye of the Tiger or something playing.

It could have benefited from that. I'm not an expert at these things. You're not a director, but people might have thought it from the detail that'm an expert at these things. You're not a director, but people might have thought it from the detail that you provided there with your reviews. It's a surprisingly insightful review of the Dune movie and all the films which that young guy has appeared in. So very on brand, very related.

So people complain because I don't talk very much or don't talk enough, but this is what happens when I talk more. Yeah. Where was that energy in the Sam Harris interview? Well, I seen Spider-Man. I liked that, but I won't, I won't bore people with the details of my review.

I just liked that, you know, multiverse stuff. I seen it with my son, but I did have something that I wanted to mention, cause I know it upset you recently. So you've been very pro Scott Adams recently and it big fan turns out that it's pro vaccine stance is getting him in trouble. So I don't know if you've seen or not, but he was parodied by the Ben Garrison cartoonist, the right wing reactionary cartoonist who uh yeah paints these very subtle caricature images and scott adams featured in it i did see

that i know and then i saw scott was giving some bad takes so my i just wanted to pass on my condolences because I know how much of a fan you are of him. So just wanted to flag that up for people. I don't know. He was just having bad tics. And given how much you've endorsed him, I thought this reflected badly on you. Yeah. So that's that. And this week, Matt, we have a slightly different format.

We've had guest hosts before with David Pizarro for a special Weinstein world episode. And we also had Aaron Rabinowitz, a philosopher of some description. He's a moral philosopher. He's from Rutgers, isn't he? I think it's Rutgers, yes. And he has a variable bounty of podcasts which he hosts. He hosts

Embrace the Void, a philosophy-themed culture war kind of podcast that we have both appeared on. And he hosts Philosophers in Space, which is a podcast about space movies and fantasy movies and philosophers talking about it no and and books and books oh and books yes that's right science fiction and fantasy books and philosophers and i've been on it and you haven't because you don't read any of

them that's right i'm trying to convince him to do an anime he said there's not enough philosophical depth to it. Who's he to judge? But yeah, so Aaron is joining us this week because we're going to look at James Lindsay and Michael O'Fallon again, for fuck's sake, because we haven't looked at enough terrible people lately. We have two previous episodes with them individually, James Lindsay and Michael O'Fallon, so you might want to go back and look at them if you haven't. The James Lindsay one was our second ever episode and the Michael O'Fallon one, I don't remember, but a bit farther in. And they kind of track the trajectory that James Lindsay has taken in his unrelenting pursuit of going as deep into the toilet as he can. This episode was planned quite a while ago, various delays with recording and whatnot.

So the content is actually now about half a year old. and whatnot. So the content is actually now about half a year old. It actually still is before his most dramatic turn in the Maga land where he is now. But, but I think it's a good documenting of his Sparrow and it's a crossover episode with O'Fallon and Lindsay together. Yeah. It's an interesting point in Lindsay's trajectory.

As you said, we meant to record this some time ago, almost like a sequel to our previous one on Fallon, where Lindsay was there too, because this is the content we're covering as part of this Changing Tides series. And it is interesting because at the time it was noticeable the degree to which James had taken this swerve towards Christian nationalism and the kinds of conspiracy theories that are associated with it. And we revisit some of that content here. But comparing that Lindsay then to Lindsay now, where he's straight up talking about the Great Replacement, the Great Reset. He's quite frankly talking about cultural chauvinism and things like that. Yeah. It's just an interesting point on his trajectory, but it is worth noting, this

is from six months ago and James is much worse now, or much more, much more upfront. Yeah. So let's get into it. Take it away, Matt, Chris and Aaron. Take it away, Matt, Chris, and Aaron. So we've already introduced our lovely guest to the listeners with a comprehensive explanation of his background and credentials and why he is. So what remains to be done is to say, welcomearon and thank you for joining us the first second guest on the podcast all right i appreciate that thank you for having me back on i'm glad that we finally

get to get uh to get together and have this conversation where you can acknowledge that pretty much all of your work and success is derivative of my work and that realistically i deserve all the credit and arguably all the patronage that it seems like y'all have accrued as a result of this. But no, I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be back in your house of fun accents. We've designated it for this episode. You will be adopting the Ugandan accent and you can start whenever you're ready. We'll just edit out that. This is going to be a hate crime. Whenever you're ready, we'll just edit out that. This is going to be a hate crime.

So we're here to talk about two gurus that we've covered in the past. One with your assistance and the other with your inspiration, I think is fair to say. So they are the wonderful duo of Michael O'Fallon of Sovereign Nations fame and James Lindsay of internet batshit nonsense fame. They've been collaborators for a good number of years now. And we had originally planned our two standalone episodes where we would introduce both of the characters then look at their crossover material that they were producing.

And there's a lost episode where we did that, but it's now lost in the sands of time, so we're going to redo it, but this means we're going back in time to James Lindsay as he existed. When was this recorded? Like a year ago, I think? Yeah, at this point. They've been continuing to release in this series and other similarly ridiculous conspiracy series on the Sovereign Nations website. So this is like an ongoing spiral.

But I do think you get to see a lot of really good, like, you can very clearly see where this is going stuff in this content. It is funny that, like, we recorded that episode and then Chris was like, hey, let's do a bet. Let's put this on ice and wait a few months and see if every single prediction turns out to be absurdly, like, undershooting how bad it was going to get. So now we're just here to most, I guess, do a victory lap or something. it was going to get. So now we're just here to most, I guess, to a victory lap or something. I think we're doing James Lindsay a favor because this is him on his radicalization path, but not yet like full MAGA, full like mask on still power level, fairly well hidden in certain parts.

So we might need the baby even circle back and look at Lindsay, like where he's ended up at some point, but I mean, everybody who pays attention online knows that James Lindsay is pretty far gone, right? Like he's, he's not just focused on this anymore. His opposition to critical theories. He is hardcore right wing conspiracist. We'll, we'll see it in this content, but I just want to flag up that this content is not representative of his current content,

but the DNA is there. So the conspiracism that you're about to hear, he's much more beyond this now. So that's all I'm saying. If you want to know his current state, Google Michael O'Fallon and James Lindsay at Mar-a-Lago with Mike Lindell pillow man. They were a bunch of pictures of them hanging out with a bunch of QAnoners at this point. So I think it's fair to say that he's, if not already actively interacting and being part of QAnon, then he's like headed in that direction as well.

Yeah. And notably he, he, he feuded relatively recently with the Holocaust memorial site, right? Like that's right. Right. Always a good sign. It's kind of hard to imagine a more discrediting thing that somebody would choose to do.

But I'm sure he'll top that like tomorrow. So yeah. Yeah. So this is a, like a snapshot back in a time when he was trying a little bit harder in his role as being some kind of intellectual some kind of decoder of wokeism and leftism the philosophical roots of it yeah like a lot of the anti-woke folks will still use a lot of these arguments and pretend that they are divorced from this anti-globalist conspiracism that is clearly sort of stringing all of this together.

There's a clip that I want to play for you both. So I feel we have to do this because because James Lindsay recently appeared on Dr. Phil, right? He was invited as an expert on Critical Race Theory. So this is current time period James Lindsay. Let me just play the clip. It's a little bit long, but I feel that we would be doing our listeners a disservice if they haven't heard this. Please welcome co-author of the book Cynical Theory, James Lindsay. We would be doing our listeners a disservice if they haven't heard this. Please welcome co-author of the book Cynical Theories, James Lindsay.

James, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Dr. Phil. Can you say this should be an artifact? We should just put this behind us. I do not believe the critical race theory tenet that says that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in our society and if we don't dredge up a race consciousness that we can't get over it I think this is actually a lie it's very annoying to me to listen back to the back and forth here in fact I'm glad to be here to bring some knowledge I take a lot of umbrage with the idea that we're going to talk about should we have

critical race theory this or that because it's talking about racism or history when the fact of the matter is it's not are we it's how are we and i am shocked and appalled to hear the defensive side for critical race theory misrepresented this way but they don't explain for example why the first paper called toward a critical race theory education by gloria lives and billings was published in 1995 they don't explain why richard delgado's 2001 book explains on page five for example that it rapidly spread from law to other disciplines especially education They don't explain also in the exact same situation the glory lights and buildings is one of the chief authors of a

Of a and equity in Virginia that's bringing critical race theory into all of the state schools of edge of Virginia right now You must breathe through your ears right now. You must breathe through your ears. I have read the vast majority of the major works in critical race theory that have been published since 1970 to the most recent things including, for example, in 2017 we have Alison Bailey writing a paper for Hypatia, an education paper, and she says that there's the critical thinking tradition, but what we're doing in critical pedagogy, which critical race theory is an integral, integrated part of, is from a different set of tradition called critical theory, which is neo-Marxism, which is interested in studying the relationships of power rather than epistemic adequacy. You

can look the paper up. It's called Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Critical Race and Feminist Philosophy Classrooms. That's not being taught in K-12 schools. Sorry. I mean, congratulate, like, 20 other guys. Okay. Yeah. First thing I want to note, the problem with Lindsay there is not that he's talking too fast. He's saying things that are trivially true, but he thinks they're big gotchas for like silly reasons. So unfortunately, part of the CRT debate has been a confusion about what's being taught in

schools. And I think a lot of folks who defend critical race theory just didn't know that there is a branch of critical race theory, you know, critical pedagogy that is in educational theory, at least, that like this is a part of that tradition. And so when they were saying things like this isn't in schools, they genuinely believe that this isn't in schools. And for the most part, they're right. It's not being taught directly in schools, and it's probably not even influencing that much pedagogy. If we're being really honest here, it's probably being taught in education departments. And then for the most part, teachers are not being hugely supported in actually implementing it. And so you probably aren't seeing a ton of this stuff actually trickling down to K through 12 students. The annoying part of Lindsay that we'll see throughout

all of this is that rather than just disentangling that confusion and getting on with the argument he wants to treat all of this like a massive conspiracy to queer your children and make them hate themselves because they're white and stuff yeah and part of the thing for me is that he's doing so many things at once there and it will come up in these interviews well provide the manic energy right that he demonstrated there but if you look at his face he's so proud of himself to be citing page numbers and stuff and i can't help but think the people that he's supposed to hate right the people that he's supposed to oppose are the kind of people who would try to talk to a normal person and we'd use tons of academic jargon site obscure theorists and page numbers and reference but he does that like he says we have to stop people being like critical

fears but on page 12 of the 97 journal that was published in hypatia you'll see that they reference and this goes back to marcusa who of course was influenced by the Marxist. And it's like, what are you complaining about again? The people, I mean, I know that he's trying to say he became this, he views himself as a critical race theory Batman, right? Like I adopted the darkness to show you. But I think like many of those anti-heroes, he's been consumed by the very things that he hears. Now, he seems to me an unhinged critical theorist who sees it as really important that everybody knows all these connections about who Bell Hook studied under and who she cited in the first page of her dissertation.

And he doesn't even know things that well, as we'll see. But yeah, what about you, Matt? Yeah, that's the same thing that jumped out at me. First of all, that's right what Aaron said. I mean, I don't know what gets taught or doesn't get taught in American schools. I have no idea. I could assume it's something like in Australia, where certainly critical theory has some sort of influence

in education teaching departments. critical theory has some sort of influence in education teaching departments but the idea that some article that was written in hypatia in 1979 is all part of some orchestrated thing and there's some it's not plausible my brother's a teacher and you know they don't care about that stuff they're just trying to deal with grumpy parents and get the marking done and get the kids to do their homework you know yeah and you're totally right about like his accuracy when he actually does cite these things as somebody who's read ladston billings and marcus and all these folks like there are two categories of james statements about critical race theory things that are like true and unobjectionable but

he says them in a way that he tries to make it sound objectionable anyway and then then things that are just like outright false, but he knows that people aren't going to check him a lot of the time where it's not going to matter. And like, he can always just jump to the next claim or something like that, to the next version of neo-Hegelian Marxist, whatever theory he wants to then claim is going on here. But like, you're totally also just right about the larger point. I come from a philosophy background and all of my job is trying to make really complicated things sound simple enough to understand and that's a great job like it's the one of the best jobs in the world and i love my job and he just does the exact opposite he takes these things that where they are somewhat fairly comprehensible and just mystifies the fuck out of them yeah so these episodes that we're looking at it's primarily

the first two episodes in the what's the name of the series it's called changing tides which is yeah they all have hilarious names the original series was the trojan horse and they have one i think called like encroaching darkness and shit like that and the production values are hilariously pretentious the most recent time that I was watching back through these I realized what was bugging me about the setting because these ones are all set in these villa looking places overlooking the water and they're like hanging out in the the back patio area it's prosperity. That's what's going on in these videos. Yeah.

The setting to paint the picture to people is like, there's an earlier series with James O'Fallon and Peter Vergosian, and they're up in the skyscrapers or outdoor in some building, and they're discussing the horrors that are wokeness and critical experience stuff. And this one is James and O'Fallon beside a beach. They chose to focus at least the initial discussions around climate change, or sorry, climate justice, as we'll see. And then they spin out from there into a fairly predictable claim

that it's all about a Marxist conspiracy to transform the world into a communist utopia through the un and you know all the standard things that you you expect that to happen the great reset is the topic of the second one right and while we're talking design issues it's important to note these these videos are not put out in the right order. Like for all their production values, they choose a very silly, strange order where they start with what should be their conclusions, the stuff about climate justice and the critical reset, and then talk about Hegel and like the Mott and Bailey fallacy. And you just get the vibe of they used all their A material in the first two videos.

And then every subsequent video in the series, they're like scrounging for a subject, essentially. They should have hired you as a consultant for this series. This is the thing. There is absolutely no one who's going to listen to those four things in the order the two first craft. But I just think you're optimistic if you think anyone else will listen to the originals i'm just an expert on jamesiology i've just you know spent 16 hours a day on this material so people cannot listen and society can collapse and if that happens that's fine i'm just here to cassandra my way through this matt just wait till when a when Aaron is saying... on page seven of Cynical Theories, if you look, you'll see that thing indoors.

Okay. I do have direct quotes from Marcuse in my notes, so screw you, Chris. Let's get on to some of the clips to allow them to speak for themselves. So this is a fairly standard guru trope, which I think is a nice introduction to how they see what they're up to in these videos. And you and I spoke directly about critical race theory. Right. I think we tried to warn people at that time. Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. That reminds me of something, little thing in the Garoma. You've never mentioned that before.

You don't gloat every time you get ahead with this. So what is it, Matt? This is my favorite one because this is the one that I stuck in there. You know, it was pretty well developed. We had like eight dimensions. I went, this one has to go in. We have to have this one. You forced us to get the 10 by adding the ninth one.

That could have been it. Yeah. It's one around now, but yeah, the Cassandra complex, the warning of this impending doom, this terrible crisis that's about to happen or is, is unfolding that no one's listening to them. So good clip ping on the grometer. And I love that y'all emphasize that sort of hipsterism element of it. There's always this vibe of I was into this anti-globalist conspiracy before it was cool

kind of thing. And, you know, I'll be fair to their credit. Lindsay is, in my opinion, the progenitor of the critical race theory moral panic more than Chris Ruffo. And for our suitably non-online listeners, Chris Ruffo is a kind of conservative activist who worked for the Discovery Institute of Intelligent Design fame, also made some documentaries, but has kind of rode into prominence by primarily opposition to critical race theory and highlighting PowerPoint presentations that he doesn't like, or, you know,

usually there are valid things to criticize in the material that he highlights. But the question is how far that actually has any influence or is just a random presentation from a, you know, some, some training thing. Andrew Lane- Rufo popularizes it. Rufo has better connections in terms of the political arm of all of it, getting it into the White House, getting on Fox News and stuff. Partly, I think, because Rufo's a better messenger than what we just heard from Lindsay there, obviously, which is a very, very low bar, I understand. But if you look at the timeline, Rufo does probably come to it somewhat separately. But I think you immediately see the two of them joining forces on this issue.

And also, it's worth noting because one of the questions as we watch O'Fallon and Lindsay do this dance is, who's really controlling who here? And in my opinion, Lindsay is absolutely being played and O'Fallon is getting everything that he wants, in a sense. And I mentioned this in relation to Rufo because the reality, in my opinion, is that Rufo doesn't care about what's being taught in public schools. What he cares about is siphoning off as much resources to private charter schools and religious schools as possible.

Yeah, it was fun to jump this a bit later, but I think maybe it's a good point to cover at the start. We talked about it before, like Emperor and Darth Vader, or if you prefer Krang and Baxter to fly. So the influence, like you say, of O'Fallon as the subtle puppet master, because we made this point back in the episode that we covered with James and

discussed it with O'Fallon as well. O'Fallon's worldview hasn't changed. James's has. He went from pro-science, atheist, secularism is good, and pro-internationalism, I guess, that kind of standard neoliberal guy, to this is modern incarnation of MAGA, nationalist, isolationist, anti-science in many ways when it comes to COVID and all that kind of stuff. And I think a lot of this comes from O'Fallon. And there's two clips I have where you can see O'Fallon. He just needs to pull the strings a little bit and James dances merrily to his tune. So here's the first one.

See if you can notice what I did. And I think most of you need to immigration and climate justice. And then these things are always referred to as global challenges that need global solutions. Right. That in, and I would make this point too, is that whenever we're talking about things about social justice, climate justice, critical race theory, any of these things, is there's always a accompanied aspect of anti-nationism. Yeah, everybody has to get on the same, everybody has to get on the same everybody has to get on the same page it's all going to be super all the countries have to participate together because it's a global problem meanwhile the western nations because they've created more of the problem they benefited more of the problem and they have the greatest means which i actually

agree with that part of course you do because it makes sense it is it is a shared responsibility and some of the burden is greater for others no No, Aaron, I think you got that slightly wrong. And I understand why, because where he puts it in, what James is agreeing with, he's agreeing with that the West has the greatest means to resolve this problem. So I thought that as well. I was like, oh, he's saying, you know, we need to be fair, but no, he's not. He's saying he agrees that the west has the the greatest minds and the greatest kind of scientific know-how so don't give him don't give him that credit that's not what he was saying but but matt did you did you pick up the little influence uh of uh o'fallon worldview coming in there yeah it's palpable isn't it like a felon he's clearly really big on the in his

training james on the anti-globalist agenda these supranational organizations that are taking sovereignty away from nation states and stuff like that that real bugbear of the sort of xenophobic christian right and to be fair to James, that wasn't originally on his bingo card, right? But he's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I can see how that's, I can fit that into my anti-woke thing. Yeah. I mean, back at the beginning

when I was first warning about this horrible catastrophe that we're all now going to suffer from, I pointed out in the Trojan horse videos that this very much feels like conspiracy laundering. New discourses, everything that Lindsay's doing to me is in many ways just a front for these kinds of conspiracies, but it gives this allure, this impression of not coming from your, you know, like if it's just Michael O'Fallon saying it, nobody cares because of course this right-wing conservative Christian believes it, but James Lindsay, right, he was this formerly liberal or something, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And they do it a couple of times in these videos where they'll cite new discourses and they won't point out that Michael O'Fallon paid for and built new discourses for james lindsey and has been promoting this material and that this is just like a tiny little loop feeding back in on itself and not two independent individuals coming together and having a conversation well there's another a example that comes towards the end of the climate justice episode and i think it kind of supplements so we've got uh a following focusing on you know that's anti-nationalism right isn't it and it's really globalist right the globalists are the true true enemy and here's another enemy that gets introduced and and james picks it up and runs with it the way that the way the system changes is is achieved

is by just putting these people in power. Don't worry, they'll have a new system for you. Don't ask too many questions because that would be racist. Put us in power. Ruled by the technocrats as opposed to a democratic solution where we say someone makes the case to us

and says, look, these are real problems. This is a real issue and it's been tested and we've had our arguments, we've had our open debates about this. What are we going to do? That's what it's going to go to, too, is rule by technocrats. What's the difference between what is a technocrat rule by experts? And I put experts in quotes for a reason. Right. Because like with covid. Right. Tony Fauci is the expert. But you listen to the guy. You listen to the guy who invented the what's it called the pcr test right before he died right he he had this whole spiel he did about fauci about how he's more of a bureaucrat he's playing the game the public figure game right he's he's not i'm not saying he doesn't have scientific credentials but he's no francis collins he's you know he he's he's not a huge successful scientist expert.

And the way that his narrative shifts in the wind and all of this stuff is he's, he's more of a politician. So we got those, we got some of the COVID in there. We changed started with the circle squared thing with Pluckrose and Boghossian. It was much more specific, wasn't it? circle squared thing with Pluckrose and Boghossian. It was much more specific, wasn't it? They had a problem with this brand of academic scholarship,

and they had quite specific criticisms they wanted to make with that. And that broadened out to this more general anti-woke sort of thing. But then the anti-woke thing itself has broadened out, so other things are included in that too. So it's climate change that's included covid climate justice let's be clear climate justice you're playing with us you're playing with us aaron nobody ever take me seriously i hope that's clear right sorry but and experts experts generally these technocratic experts, they're the problem. So, you know, it's hard to disagree with Aaron.

These are just functioning now as like a front for basically this reactionary populist worldview. It's the same attitude that when Brexit was happening and the right wing conservative populist politicians were saying, we've had enough of the experts. And that's been a consistent theme on the right for decades, right? Like we don't trust these scientists and experts, climate change. And James is kind of like in this liminal state here because now he's basically a climate change skeptic.

He's very much in the mold of jordan peterson of like constantly casting doubt that the crisis is as bad as people say or a soft skeptic or something like that right he would deny that he's a hard skeptic but yes but then here in this lecture he wants to argue that his target is the climate justice people who he will see in some of the other clips. He wants to say, these are not real scientists. These aren't the ones doing the ice core drilling. They're not the people taking the measurements. They're not at the IPCC making the reports or that kind of thing.

But then this bit at the end is like him saying, well, but those guys, you can't trust them either because they're all like the UN, the WHO, it's all run by politicians. They're all like technocrats. So who are these, the trusted experts? It turns out to be just whoever the MAGA chuds happen to have glommed on to that will say climate change isn't the problem. It would be Robert Malone and Peter McCulloch, who I've seen him share content of online. This is the way they resolve it. I mean, there's Scott Adams who said that he trusts science, but he doesn't trust scientists,

right? Yeah. And so for someone like Lindsay or most of the people we cover, they'll never go as far to say that they're anti-science. Like you can't be anti-science these days. That's a losing proposition. But they square that circle, don't they, by making out that all of the scientific institutions are hopelessly corrupted. And I didn't catch when I was first watching through these videos that Fauci reference. I feel like he wasn't quite as much of a central villain at this point. So I do think they were a little bit on the cutting edge of demonizing Fauci as well. Yeah.

This, Aaron, was when Fauci was disagreeing with Trump. So you have to... Right. So it was like starting to become a thing. And I feel like they jumped on that right at the moment that it was happening, essentially. And it just it didn't register to me. But what I think is even funnier here is that in this same video when they are decrying technocrats their solution to climate change is the most technocratic bullshit you've ever possibly heard it's 100 technology is going to save us from this problem and america's going to invent that technology because we're the best around and nothing's ever going to keep us down and they flip and flop back and forth on that and i'm sure that like they would parse that in some way

by like saying you know they're for the science and the technology but they're not for something something the people applying it in the wrong ways or something like that like it's not a coherent argument i think part of the reason it's not coherent is because O'Fallon is doing that subliminal slipping in of the real problem is actually the globalists. So what James was saying there was like, he's not a respected scientist like Francis Collins, for example. You know, Francis Collins was saying the things Fauci was, we'd have to take that serious. I just had a quick Google. Of course, James Lindsay has tweeted out about Francis Collins, because Francis Collins has said COVID is a problem, get vaccinated. So now he has links,

six scandals the media won't tell you about Francis Collins. Shocked, shocked, I say. Inventing lies and all this stuff. So that's it, right? They don't respect science. The credentials only matter until the people fall foul of that they are seen as disagreeing with Trump or they're saying something

that isn't right. And then suddenly they're a problematic scientist, right? That was some rogue-level fact-checking there, Chris. I'm impressed. You don't hear me. Look, I've got another clip for you, which That was some roguelike fact checking there, Chris. I'm impressed. Look, I've got another clip for you, which shows how all these topics tie in together, so this is still about technocrats, but it's going to move on a bit to some of his other hobby horses.

What you end up with is actually rule by people. Every scientist who ends up getting power fails usually to realize how corruptive power becomes and staying in that spotlight and having that power and influence. And that's the thing that technocracy runs on. Technocracy runs on corrupted scientists or corrupted experts, not actual experts. Ones who could grift their way in, ones who, and you make a more griftable system like this justice nonsense. Oh, well, we have to bring in an equity expert who has an MBA, but no technical degrees. The ethno-mathematics, the main researcher in the ethno-mathematics, Rochelle Gutierrez, she has no degrees in mathematics, but she's going to redesign mathematics from the ground up. If you turned and squinted, the argument he's making there is like a climate justice argument,

right? It's like all of this advancement and stuff that we've done because, you know, thankfully because of science wasn't connected to ethics. And so we have climate change. We have this externalizing of harms onto marginalized groups because when scientists get in power, whatever the hell that means, right, that technology becomes co-opted for capitalist purposes. But like, he hates that when it's coming from his opponents. And he hates the fact that his opponents are the people who've been brought in to try to address these problems. Like, he thinks it's a huge gotcha to say that climate justice experts aren't scientists. Of course, they're not, James. They're philosophers. They're people whose job it is not to do the science, but to do the ethical theorizing around the science that is not necessarily the scientist's actual job. But for

some reason, he thinks that the scientists can simultaneously do the ethics, do the science, and do the government, but also he hates it whenever anyone actually does that. So, I don't, it's just never ever clear what he actually wants at the end of the day. No. And one issue for me is just that his critiques, they just range between targets, right? Like, and then there he mentions Rochelle Gutierrez. Thank you. Thank you. He mentions her and she is this figure who is, you know, there's these topics which are just always so popular on this. And this is somebody who, you know, has made some statements about mathematics being Western chauvinism or whatever. And we need to introduce other ways. It's kind of another ways of knowing argument. But this is not the head of the White House issuing the curriculum

for all the schools in America. This is like a person with an opinion who makes some arguments in some school district or something, but for James and stuff and Fox News, even though she probably longs to have the influence that they imagine that people like her have, when in actual fact, what they're going to be achieving in a lot of cases, and I'm sorry, Aaron, as a supporter of activists, I know this will be hard for you to accept, but is having conferences, presentations where they talk about these ideas of what they want to do. And maybe they'll get some guidelines issued and have like a class dedicated to something or some official thing, which says we should respect or be aware of other alternative frameworks and stuff. That's it, right? It isn't that you're not no longer you're going to be taught multiplication or times tables or these kind of things like i think the two the two ends

here play off against each other in an interesting way because anyone like like you guys would have experience in working in an academic bureaucracy and i know it's exactly the same in government is that the sort of highfalutin policies and ideas have this really big strong language attuned to it right and certainly you know activists or academic types they'll do their presentation all these bullet points and that they'll be phrased in terms of we need to totally restructure this and to deconstruct that and overhaul everything like this and make everything in line with whatever and then the reality is it says something more like what chris said right and kind of everyone

knows that that's how it's going to work but that definitely plays into the kind of fear-mongering that a phalan and lindsey are doing here because they find some material like that and then they present that as this is the gospel these are the ironclad rules for everything you know who's really really good at leveling devastating critiques at how performative wokeness gets watered down into like nothing actually happening the fucking marxists like my boys the marxists are really good at showing up and commenting on how this stuff doesn't actually bring about substantive change. I think I've seen some of those. Yeah.

I think I've seen some of those. This is the fucking, I mean, you know, maybe we should be careful about the way that we phrase this, about people parasiting on other people's content. But in any case, the James Lindsay podcast has this thing, right? I occasionally listen to him, subscribe to his feed, and sometimes I'm just like, do I want to feel pain today? Like, how much do I deserve my Catholic guilt, you know? There's a two-hour thing with James talking about groomer schools. It's a three-part series.

Well, I said that the handshake between the pedophiles and the communists is basically the same. All the pedophiles, so-called minor attracted to PS for pedophiles, not person, but pedophile. All of these people that they're trying to now normalize, very fast-track normalizing of the pedophiles under an umbrella of queer theory. They have a handshake agreement with the communist. You destabilize the children, create sexual abuse, whatever it is you can have your, you let it,

you help us when you can have your pick of the kids. And that's basically what we're seeing here. And so pretty important to realize how gross this is, but I think you're going to come away realizing just how deep and dangerous and insidious this is and how desperately important it then therefore is to get all of this garbage, both critical race theory and queer theory out of the schools. Yeah. Too much, too much.

So I listened to this one and it was, it was right. That's what it was. I'm not, I'm not making this up. It was James reading the introduction to an edited volume about critical education theory. So an edited academic volume about critical education theory. I don't know the terminology, but so he read the introduction. And in that introduction, the scholars were pointing out that there's a problem that basically all that critical education theory has mostly produced is academic articles and conferences on critical education.

And they were saying, you know, we are supposed to be about revolutionary action, but we mainly just seem content to talk to other academics and produce conferences. And the guy was complaining about it, right? And James was like, look at this. They're pointing out their real goal is societal revolution and that they're gonna and i was like yeah but they're also pointing out that it doesn't happen it doesn't work yeah that they haven't achieved it like and they're you know the thing was i was listening to him thinking he thinks it's a gotcha that he's pointing out look they're they're peeling back the curtain. But they are openly stating that in the introduction.

And I'm just like, it's not hard to see. And lots and lots of people, including lots of people that James hangs around with, have activist goals, political activist goals, or cultural goals. goals, political activist goals, or cultural goals. And he's fine with it as long as it's activism in the variety that he wants, which is, he's, uh, we'll get to like all his complaints about that the woke left and these people that are intolerant, but he's the same, right? He doesn't want these people to be able to advocate for the things that they want which is i don't see how you could do it at the same time and not see the contradictions

he's quickly straight into like the alex jones territory of if you take this genuinely seriously what you're saying and he does at some points call for like the imprisonment of people who disagree with him not just the firing like not just the deplatforming of these texts. And like, to his credit, that is what you should believe if you believe that people are grooming your children to be like trans queer self-hating white people or something like that. One of the reasons that I said there are more reasons that I said that I fully understand why Alex Jones gets so pissed off because you start thinking about what this really is and what's really going on. I'm sorry about what this episode is going to do to people. It's going to make you so fucking mad when it connects with you, what's actually happening, why it's happening, and that it's intentional. And this is why our schools have to be absolutely purged. What can you do?

You must form a parents coalition. You must set aside all your differences as parents and fight for your children. They're grooming your children and sexually abusing them, psychologically abusing them so they can sexually abuse them, so that they can destabilize them, so that they can have a Red Guard, so that they can have a cultural revolution, so they can achieve whatever program they have as some other kind of revolution because it's a Marxist theory. We're going to get to how this is all really just masterminded by queer black feminists but i have to think it's on a slight detour it's a play in about 20 parts but i i really have to talk about this because i hear about this so much so much and. And if you listen to any of Lindsay's content, any talk from like five years ago or, well, yeah, about five years ago up to the present day, his next talk, I'd put money that this topic will come up. So let's see if you've heard about this before. So it's the way to think the experience of the world and tell a story about it.

But there's no reason to privilege the story of science, of glaciology, of climatology, of meteorology, of atmospheric chemistry. There's no reason to privilege those stories or of carbon chemistry in general. No reason to privilege those stories over the indigenous relationship to a glacier. Right. Which is where you got started down this path. Yes. Or feminist art projects about started to look down this path. Yes. Or feminist art projects about glaciers. Literally art projects.

Or interpretive dance. Or, you know, narratives about how you feel about the changing climate and how awful it might be and how you feel like you're responsible for taking part in or complicit in some horrible evil. responsible for taking part in or complicit in some horrible evil. It's anti-science because it sees all approaches to knowledge, postmodernism in general, so also postmodern climate justice, sees all approaches to knowledge as being kind of on a level. Have you heard? Ridiculous. I actually, I teach climate justice, like I teach an environmental ethics course, and I have a book, you know, right here next to me with its climate justice section in it and stuff like that. Nowhere in there does it say all knowledge is of a part, right? All forms or sources of knowledge are

equally valid or something like that. There are really interesting conversations about alternative ways of knowing, and I am, despite being woke, on probably the more skeptical end of some of the language about alternative ways of knowing. But he's just not even describing climate justice, right? He thinks because climate justice is based in ecofeminism in some ways, that it's necessarily this glaciology paper, where the majority of climate justice stuff is like, hey, we sort of noticed that all of the benefits of industrialization, not all of them, but, large amounts of the benefits of industrialization have accrued to, like, one specific group of people, and, like, a bunch of the costs have accrued to another specific group of people. Maybe we should take that issue seriously. And it's also, I think, interesting

because James hasn't fully developed his critical justice shtick in this video yet. He will later go on to highlight, basically to make the kind of white genocide arguments that climate justice is a front for destroying white people, right? And you see a little bit of it in here in his talk about how climate justice is like the beginning of bringing down Western civilization. But he gets a lot more overt about this later on, I think, about how climate justice is really, he says, replacing all of the discussions about the science of it with issues about race, and then using that race as a cudgel to enact policies that are disproportionately harmful

to white people. The main thing for me is, like, this feminist sociology paper, it has a lot the answer for but if it's got a lot of citations if you count all of the times it's been referenced by the anti-woke it has it it's not it like i i read that paper back and like people have talked about it i've heard it twice now it's unbelievable you sound too rogue and mad about it i mean no thing is, I'm not mad with the paper for existing because it's just that it would just be an obscure paper about it. It's as if he imagines feminists, like the way that they talk about it, you would think that the whole field of our climate science is overtaken by these papers about feminist glaciology.

And that's what the whole field is about it's like it's an obscure paper i don't agree with it i think there's some stupid stuff in it but i also think yeah there's some bits that are okay about it but like i don't need to devote any time to thinking about all of the random papers that are published each week in various subfields, making various arguments like who, who gives a flying F right? Like the, the glaciologists, they can talk about it, but I don't hear any glaciologists discussing this. I only hear the anti-wolf Lindsayites endlessly cite this paper, but can't they, if it's so

common, why aren't there more papers that they reference than this one right and this is i think in this section you get a clear example of how that kind of glaciology quoting thing is part of the classic conservative approach to just like hand waving at a bunch of scary stuff so maybe you have the quote where he basically says being vibrantly queer in public is post-modernism and i think it's absolutely one of the funniest things in this whole video it's coming right now and you might be surprised to hear the feminist glaciology is attached to that this is straight out of the same playbook it's the same playbook um because it's the same model And that model is a combination of postmodern elements and critical theory elements. It's the same model that you said that I got started in all this. That was from the feminist glaciology paper. Same model that was in a much more academic sense behind that ridiculous paper.

sense behind that ridiculous paper um and so yeah the the relationships between extinction rebellion black lives matter um the not all of gay pride but the queer the vibrantly queer and meaning queer theory activism within it um that all has the same set of playbooks you know go those guys that you saw with you know with black lives matter in fact and the police would come out and some guy would go out in like rainbow shorts and twerk in the road that's the exact same thing it's the same introduction of performance art it's all the same thing it's all just the same and you know if you ask him what do you mean it's all the same he's gonna say it's all based in Marcuse, which is all based in Hegel. And the same what he means is this is all just about deconstructing society. Their big argument, if you actually try to listen to that

Hegel episode, is what the left is trying to do is take every good important thing in Western society and undermine it by counter-argument, by these weird alchemy tricks. I think it's also important to note, I'm pretty confident that queer theory is going to be the next stop on the moral panic train. So separating the young generation from everything before it to create a completely kind of societal blank slate that's going to have a new ideology becomes the objective of this Maoist, or sorry, communist really, but Maoist sure move. And this is one of the reasons that they're bringing the queer theory and the gender theory,

et cetera, into the schools and the sex stuff so vigorously. The goal is to make it so children are depressed and anxious, et cetera, but we'll get to that. But also it's to give them identity categories, sexual identity categories that alienate them from their parents. Again, a reminder, this is what they're doing to your children. This is what they're doing to your children in government schools that you pay for with your tax dollars in violation of your trust that you get to put in a state institution that has no business doing any of this and it's a 100 year long marx marxist program to destabilize the parent-child relationship in this in the in the child's own sense of identity i think that it's the only thing besides

critical race theory that can genuinely frighten white conservatives as much and i think the fact that he's pivoted towards calling everybody in the world a groomer is indicative of this new strategy. You don't see how horrible it is. This is what they are doing to your children in government schools under brand names like social emotional learning. Get that out of schools. Put people in prison who bring this crap in.

This is unbelievable child abuse, unbelievable grooming. We even see the invitation to pedophiles right there. We're going to complicate the difference between adults and children. Yeah, why? So that gross grooming adults can have sex with children, to sexualize them, to bring them into a queer identity that they didn't know was latent by abusing them sexually. It's freaking unbelievable that we've allowed this to take place because we're not willing to do the work to understand what these freaks are writing in their complicated critical theory language. non-traditional, non-conservative thing is that shift towards grooming and also sex education in schools, a more recent thing, which that's not a, like, sex education in schools is not

a woke thing. Sorry, you didn't get to own that one, Aaron. That's, that's, that's, okay. In America, it's absolutely a woke thing, but. Is it really? Yeah, but I mean, you know, seriously, I mean, when I was a kid, we had drug education, that kind of thing, you know., you know, seriously. When I was a kid, we had drug education, that kind of thing, you know. As you say, they point to all these disconnected things, say that they're all the same thing, they're all working from the same playbook. It's all part of this strategy, and this strategy has its roots in this article that McHughes wrote, and Hegel. What are you going to do with that? How do you criticize that? He doesn't demonstrate that any of that stuff is true at all. I'm also going to say that for the listeners, not for us now, because I don't have it queued up.

I'm just going to show, Aaron, you said how this all ties in and where it goes. So James didn't have the queer part entirely worked out but where it eventually goes is that the c critical theorists are teaming up with the pedophiles yep by a queer theory in schools and they're kind of sacrificing they're going to give the children to the pedophiles in order to pedophiles it's very important you understand that there are marxist pedophiles no no because like he actually he's got another thing where eventually the critical fears are going to kill the pedophiles afterwards when they're done with them when they get the revolution so i haven't gotten to that part yet and if this kind of programming in the schools continues it will accelerate because

that's the purpose of this grooming in schools it's not just to have the handshake deal with the pedophiles pedophiles are just a useful tool to the communists you have to understand that they're getting used to and on the other side they'll probably get shot uh just like the criminals they let out of jail so they'll go disrupt cities and and communities and make everything unstable and make people wish for a police state that'll settle the crime problems and cause problems for all these people accelerate the contradictions just like lenin okay so that that was that clip you guys can't respond because you didn't hear it but trust me it was the magic of podcasting but but what i'm gonna play for you guys is just another example really and it's again i don't mean

to be harping on the same topic but if i have to hear it endlessly so will you same same same same same right whether it's about wealth therefore communism whether it's about this whatever it is with racial justice ethno-communism really reparations of some kind whether it's with uh one country versus another so therefore like immigration or national uh right national origin or status uh justice whether it's across gender and i mean we saw the other video we talked about the feminist glaciology we watched the feminist glacier ted talk video as well and in that video she also points out you know oh well the women you know women most affected uh So the gender aspect is baked in. Same, same, same, same. Same, same.

He's listening to Ted talks about feminist physiology. Jesus, man. It's not healthy. He must be the biggest fan of this scholar, whoever it is that wrote that paper. They should go out for lunch one time and just geek out over all her material because it's such mileage. But there you had the whole thing.

You saw all the things being linked in, right? Immigration, ethnocommunism, racial justice is really about communism and gender. And like, it's just a grab bag, right? Yeah, and I just want to note, he cites that glaciology paper, what, 10 or 20 times in this video. He also doesn't cite anything that's actual climate justice stuff. He like references some books or something, but he doesn't say what they were. And they don't put it in the show notes. People get this illusion that he knows what he's talking about and he's citing things,

but I don't even know what he's referencing half the time. when pushed on it he will fall back every time on this glaciology bullshit oh aaron that's not fair i mean he wanted to talk about who's running things at the un and greta thunberg he wouldn't bring up feminist theology i know it's a bit tangential to the heist thing in the global but being run by people who aren't qualified to do it. Correct. It is a way to, it's also a grift. It is a way to empower people to talk about an issue like climate change with global significance, to put them on gigantic stages with massive levers of power who have no business talking about this because they think, for example, coming out of the feminist glaciology paper, they think, for example, this is a real example in the paper, they talk about, oh, you know,

you have the satellite photos of glaciers, and you see the retreat in advance of the glaciers over time during the seasons and everything else, and are they getting bigger, are they getting smaller? You have actual satellite data, and they say, glaciologists study this. Well, there's a feminist who's a painter, and she paints pictures that look like that. And they don't include the pictures that she paints along with the satellite data. That's in the feminist glaciology paper. That person doesn't get a

seat at the table. Fine. Yeah. I mean, I don't think anybody's arguing about that, honestly, for the most part. It's all fun and games, except they genuinely believe that all people who disagree with them do so because they have bought into this anti-scientific approach. The point where they blame the fact that Congo can't successfully help with climate change on them having Congolese epistemology you have to have that quote do you want to throw that one out there this is this is amongst the most hilarious things to hear from somebody who spent a year and a half hating on post-colonialism like read a single fucking book james the western nations because they've created more of the problem they benefited more of the

problem and they have the greatest means which i actually agree with that part should bear the brunt of of solving the problem okay and i don't i have to be more nuanced about that because this is on the one hand people who can like if we have to take expensive action to do something about something like the climate if we have to it's obvious that the centers of innovation and technology and the richest nations are going to be the ones that are going to be able to run say a climate manhattan project that develops the technology that might save the world i mean it's it's i don't mean to put any country down but you don't really expect that congo is going to come up with the advanced carbon technology that stops the problem right but with through their knowledges, though.

Well, I mean, that's it. Yeah. So you just have to say that their knowledges are not correct. I am. So this is what I mean, right? If you were going to come up with a list of the top five places in the world that have been fucked over by white colonialism, Congo would be a strong contender for that list, right?

Read something like Leopold's Ghost and just be absolutely horrified. But in these guys' worldview, the reason that America is where it is versus the Congo is that the Congolese didn't adopt the right kinds of epistemology or something. And so, they don't have science. And it's not decades of exploitation and colonial oppression and things that are driving this behavior. And it's just like like at the end of the day it's just racist bullshit like this is just we don't i don't have to pretend that this is a serious argument and not them just doing white exceptionalism or white supremacy without actually saying those exact words yeah i think james is an interesting spot because he's open to the idea at least that something might have to be done about climate

change and i think that's that's where o'fallon i don't think o'fallon is bought with that at all i think they shift the topic back to a more comfortable place as quickly as possible it is funny listening to james try to say in there you know maybe something needs to happen without actually saying it right you can hear him trying to waffle as he's trying to give credit and then just immediately backs away from doing so. Yeah, the point you made, Aaron, about the kind of casual racism about the Congo have their knowledges as if their approach is going to be banging drums to try and stop climate change, rather than the developing nations do have a seat at the table and they

do have an important part to play in all of the stuff about climate change, right? Because it's a global thing. But for James's worldview, and this is partly why he's so comfortable with O'Fallon, is they disparage technocrats, but what they want, you know, their worldview is very techno-utopian, right? It's like that the solution to all of these things will be great men like Elon Musk, this kind of figure who will invent a way out of it. And so we don't need to be concerned about things like carbon taxes or about restrictions on the output of greenhouse gases and that kind of thing, because that just slows down progress. So any discussion of that is not a part of the solution. And the answer is these great men of history who, as it will just happen, like Charles Murray will tell you, they're just unevenly distributed amongst white people and white societies. So it isn't the overt, I mean, it's not exactly

very covert either, but it's 100% Western chauvinism. This view of science, which is just, it's really tied in with Western exceptionalism. So yeah yeah. Yeah, and don't think you have to be woke to get that. And let me give an example of an alternative ways of knowing climate justice argument that, ironically, these guys would actually like if they took 10 seconds and listened to it, right? So, big issue in climate justice is the tragedy of the commons problem. There's a classic paper by an overt white supremacist, a guy named Hardin, where he basically, you know, lays out the tragedy of the commons, popularizes it for modern audiences. For those who are not familiar, it's the like, you know, you have a field and everybody overgrazes it.

And so, like, the commons collapses and then nobody can have livestock anymore or something, right? It's a classic example of collective action problems where if everybody acts rationally, the system collapses. A decent model for discussing climate change, in my opinion. There's a lot of debates about it. Hardin concludes we should stop feeding countries that can't feed themselves and stuff. He comes to very conservative, libertarian, eugenics-y kinds of solutions. In response, you have writing by folks like ostrom who argue that solutions to the tragedy of the

commons might be better found amongst communities that have coexisted for long periods of time with these resources so when they talk about alternative ways of knowing what they often mean is let's get away from technocratic solutions and look at the way that these communities have comfortably coexisted for long periods of time can we learn something from that and and what their solutions are often let's take power away from the globalists and hand it back to the fucking communities so like they're arguing for exactly what o'fallon and lindsey are arguing for but they just don't know that because they don't actually read any of it. And not only that, Aaron, but the problem there is that they're arguing that targeting non-Western populations, right? And serious about the Western chauvinism,

right? That clip that we played, right, where they start talking about the climate Manhattan project. This is where this leads after that. so you just need to say that their knowledges are not correct i am uh so i'm just gonna go out on a limb and guess that it's going to be a major western democracy that's going to come up with these technologies and that's going to end up funding them and that's fine but that's a means to pay right we have that capability we see that there's action needed it's another thing entirely to take that argument and leverage it into a redistribution scheme and say, oh, well, the West owes the rest of the world money. The West owes the rest of the world open borders so that people can now be, you know, refugees from their poor country or their climate changing country, which is going to be a really vague. to be a really vague bar you know it's one thing if you're accepting refugees from a war it's pretty clear when i mean it's not perfectly clear but it's fairly clear when you know those criteria

are going to be met the annoying thing about that is that it ignores the fact that it was western countries that put the carbon into the atmosphere over the last 300 years or so and benefited greatly from it in terms of industrialization and so on all modern economies are based on that and countries that industrialize have gone through that period until we invent fusion power or something like that that's an unfortunate case so the argument for climate justice is not some redistributive thing where people just give stuff away to other people who don't deserve it. It's simply that you're causing a problem for everybody. You've become very rich as a result of causing that problem. You've got the means to pay for it. And also you caused it. It's a pretty

rock solid argument. It doesn't require any complicated, excuse me, Aaron, philosophical reasoning. Am I right? I mean, the thing that annoys me too is that I'm older than you guys, and global warming was a big deal when I was a very young man. It was a very big deal, way before anyone had heard of wokeness, but heard of social justice, and straight up scientists, straight up scientific authorities were signing memorandums, waving the evidence under people's noses. And the right in Australia and elsewhere just led the charge in just flat out ignoring what was right in front of their face. And the fact that it's still going on now in this new let's go this new framing it's annoying because it's been going on for my entire life so there is one thing i'd want to say

though is that the james does know that argument yeah this is this is him a part of him summarizing at the start of this episode and that kind of point. They say that, you know, certain countries in the world have polluted a great deal through the industrialization process and being in that, you know, advanced economy stage like the United States would be. We have cars, we have jets, we produce lots of energy, often using fossil fuels to heat our homes, etc. and to provide electricity.

And they would say, well, these rich countries have enriched themselves and given themselves a lot of power and a lot of resources and a lot of wealth, whereas poorer countries have not had access to that and simultaneously have not polluted as much. But climate change affects everybody. So, for example, you may have, if the climate's changing, you may have low-lying islands in the Pacific that will go underwater if the ice caps melt. You may have beaches, you know, or river deltas or whatever that'll be destroyed as the ocean changes or whatever else. Or as weather patterns change, you may have something like the Horn of Africa become very much desert

instead of being able to support crops and and populations and their argument would be well those people didn't make the pollution that's causing the problem well done james good on him yeah but he goes on to yeah he then goes on to say but the american south is also going to hit get hit bad so this whole argument is fake or something like that yeah i just wanted to give a shout out just real quick to my friend olaf emmy otaiwo who actually just literally released a book called reconsidering reparations which is about the argument for global reparations and it's a really great book and it makes the case that they're making fun of in a really effective kind of way and it's pretty hard to deny especially when they get to the parts about

offshore accounts and the stashing of massive amounts of wealth to not sort of be in favor of what they're arguing for there and it's also i think worth noting climate refugees is going to be a real problem it's already a problem in our lifetime. That's going to continue to, I think, be a worse problem. And it's going to be horrible, I think, to have to watch the way that conservatives are just going to lock the doors and prevent anybody from coming into countries where they can live comfortably.

Yeah, I see it as very much just kind of being connected in in the way that James talks about it there with just you can see the seeds for his paleo conservative turn because he's he's just like and and this climate stuff is all going to be linked to immigrants coming in and claiming that the you know it's climate justice and they need this and they're going to be pouring over the borders and it's presented as if the west has been convinced that all its borders should be completely open and that they are giving the money away to the global south they've been tricked and that this is what they're up to now and like whatever you think about that argument it does not reflect the reality of what happens in the world or the economic situation, right?

It is not the case that the global South is just, you know, being treated really nice now by the Western powers who have been guilted into it by critical theorists. exploitation of the third world or the developing countries sorry the developing countries continues pretty much unabated right the exploitation continues and like his argument that like because the american south might also become uninhabitable which he like he kind of gets into the skepticism there you get the sound of him being like i don't actually believe all of these predictions because if they were taking them seriously, they'd be inconsistent with their own arguments. But it just ignores that, like, in America, if you're in the South and it becomes uninhabitable, you can just move to the North. Like, there's no, they're not going to lock down state borders anytime soon. Whereas if you're not in America and your country becomes uninhabitable, there's no going some other place or something like that.

So he really undercuts that. But also, I think you're right to highlight the kind of conspiratorial nature of this being a big trick. He doesn't just think that climate folks are just earnest and misunderstanding the reality. He thinks that they are out to destroy the West, that they are part of the tip of the spear of a Chinese effort. And he talks about the destruction of American energy dominance, basically, that if you take away our ability to burn coal, the next step is going to be China invades us or something. He has this big buildup, surprisingly acknowledging the entire argument for climate justice. And then segues to talking about, well, you know, bad things could happen to Florida too. So whatever. But hang hang on that doesn't like it doesn't it didn't seem to address any of the

thing at all like so what florida well maybe maybe hurricane katrina maybe partly disproves that but america will take care of americans and just because bad things might happen to some parts in the west that doesn't invalidate any of the argument that he set out quite fairly. So it was just weird. It didn't make sense to me. He's just not very good at being, he's not, he's not good at rhetoric, I think. No. Yeah.

Well, I don't know. He's pretty, he's, he's, I think that's the one thing he has done part is like endless rhetoric, but in any case, here's him summarizing that point that you two have highlighted, where he goes from the issue about climate justice and redistribution and here. Well, you got to think about this. One fact of history, and this is, you know, students of history understand this. Very few people think about history this way. What is it that has made, if you look at at and i know you're not even allowed to say these

these nasty dirty words but if you look at the big empires of history what is it that they had that made them the empires who were the like the dutch suddenly became an empire for a while how how did they become one of the most powerful europe empires for a while? Turned out they had the most efficient access to produce energy from wood, when wood was the most efficient energy source. That's right. Then what? Coal. Right. And then all of a sudden, the coal-bearing places became the industrial, the smokestacks that we all think of how dirty everything was.

That was people burning coal. And energy dominance leads to the ability to grow and prosper with externalities, of course, with costs. Well, if you're going to now say, aha, all you big Western nations, 100% renewables. Meanwhile, developing nations like China and India, which are by no means small, both have nuclear weapons. Right. You can keep burning fossil fuels until you get up to scratch. Including smaller nations,

such as those in South America, Central America, in Africa. Now their dependence upon fossil fuels and so forth can be greater. So just two quick points I want to make there. One was, I liked, you know, if you listen, you heard O'Fallon say,

that's right, James. It's like the fucking emperor going, good, good. Your hatred will be stronger. Energy dominance. Yeah, energy dominance of the technocrats. Good. But that point, first of all, just again, Western chauvinauvinism oh we're not allowed to say that colonial empires were good at some things there's no there's no mystery that the technical dominance about some of the western powers that that allowed them to exploit other countries people know that there's books written about like guns and and steel and stuff right like it's furthermore the critical theorists spend literally all of their time talking about the rise of empires and what caused it like that's but they're whole it wasn't ever always about energy

it's a lot more things than energy right like i'm just objecting to the cartoonish kind of thing he's figured out the puzzle how every empire, the whole history of empires became... Matt, Dutch trees. It was all about the Dutch trees. Literally the only thing that mattered in history was the type of trees. Do you guys remember? I hope you've blocked this out, but before

this, he talks about how the Navy have worked out a technology that is like a closed loop, where they use what is it they pull calcium carbonate out of salt water right in order to create jet fuel and and that this is a completely closed loop so there's there's no production of excess like external stuff and first of all like james's description i i really i'm i don't buy a little perpetual motion doesn't it it does slightly but the second thing is he mentions when

he's doing that description he's like yes it's extremely expensive and it requires nuclear energy or something to do it but and then o'Fallon tries to help him and is like, yes, but of course, you know, the costs could be brought down and then that would be, but no, nobody's allowed to talk about that or nuclear. And they keep talking about nuclear, right? And I understand that some elements of the environmentalist left have an issue with nuclear and it's against the science, but they act as if this is a thing that will never be spoken in the halls of park i hear that constantly i hear people

talking about it constantly and it's not just republican sources i see environmentalist people influential environmentalist people saying the opposition to nuclear fuels was a mistake right it isn't this secret thing that you cannot say on the left that nuclear might actually be good look i'm on the left i can just say it now nuclear fuel is part of the solution to the the dominance of carbon everyone knows that but your main point is is that nuclear power is unpopular it's not kept secret something like that it's it's broadly unpopular because it's it's icky people are scared of the idea of nuclear fallout and accidents and nuclear contamination and nuclear waste it has a public relations problem for very obvious reasons with a large proportion of the population

aaron i i with just one thing i have to insert here it's very important i have to get this in every episode kers gesack i'm sorry they did an episode about nuclear energy right this is like a science communication thing and they're very clear about the relative damage. They compare carbon to renewables to nuclear energy, and they highlight it with lovely little graphics and everything, and they make it clear that nuclear is a very overall, very safe and very efficient energy. But it's like, these guys are like, no, you can't say that.

Nobody can say that. So like Kurzgesagt managed to say it without endorsing a frigging neo-paleolithic conservative worldview. You're not just trying to pronounce Zizek, are you? It's not just a secret Marxist thing as well, is it? Somebody even emailed me the pronunciation guide. It's two words, Matt. It means concise and explanation or something. So it's like Kurzgesagt. But anyway, I'm doing it wrong. So I'm sorry to the German person that sent me the pronunciation guide. And just to beat y'all's dead horse here just a little bit more, my co-host from

Philosophers in Space and a big woke lefty Thomas Smith frequently does like episodes or talks about being pro nuclear energy. You might recognize Thomas Smith as one of the earliest people who called James Lindsay out on his bullshit. So like there's very clearly people who strongly disagree with Lindsay about all of this woke stuff who are still pro nuclear energy. And I myself, I recognize all those risks and concerns that Matt was talking about. And I think there's a legitimate ethical debate to be had about creating waste that you might

not have a solution to yet. But I also think there's something to the idea that it is part of this transition. But as you were pointing out, their solutions are an unproven, like an unaccessible non-public technology that's like 10 to 15 years, think from being accessible which probably means like 30 years as opposed to actual renewable energy where the technology the cost of it has dropped substantially recently so like that technology is already viable right now and they're like grasping after these other even more technocratic bs solutions just because they don't like that stuff the way that it's been politically aligned. Yeah. So there's this bit about the distinction between climate justice and climate science, right? And they go on about this at some length. So I feel two clips related

to this are quite important to play because I, yeah, anyway, let's hear the clips first and then we can talk about what they claim. So here's the first one about defining climate justice. There's a tangential project called climate justice, the tangential field of research called climate justice that looks at it from the same kind of perspective where you hear the word justice you know shoehorned in otherwise you know social justice racial justice um gender justice whatever it happens to be okay so this is his that's an initial definition now just to set up what what the problem he has

here is you think climate change you think oh science scientists are weighing in on scientists are looking to see if the climate is changing scientists are trying to answer the question scientists and engineers are trying to figure out what is it we should do about the nature of earth's climate and how it is changing uh in in different ways maybe catastrophically what could be done and thinking, oh, this is a scientific issue, scientific issue. Climate justice is done by sociologists. It is not a scientific issue.

It is done by humanities majors. It's done by critical theorists. It's done by postmodernists. It's done by humanities faculty in universities and activists affiliated with that who like to say the word science, but seem not to have anything like scientific chops behind them. Yeah. And then if you read those papers, though, what you'll immediately notice is that, of course, when these individuals are trying to prove that

climate change is disproportionately affecting already marginalized communities, shockingly, they don't cite the glaciology paper. They cite statistics about droughts and stuff, right? Like they cite useful scientific evidence that supports their claims because they're fucking academics. They're not like goofballs. This is just such bullshit. Read things like the myth of catching up. You can disagree with their science.

You can think that they're not quite getting it right or something. But the idea that like this climate justice stuff is happening completely divorced from the science as compared to what's going on in these videos is it's fucking laughable so you're going to go on record here and say that the climate justice isn't based on interpretive dance as a methodology jesus christ i mean they're right that it's about power they're right that that it's about Marxism and feminism and stuff like that. They're just they're wrong about the rigorous nature of it because like they're out to paint a straw man. Right. This is that classic conspiracism stuff. Similar to what we were saying earlier, where they're like tying together all of this stuff back through history, which we know is a classic conspiracism trope, they're also never actually conveying the depth of the work that's being presented by their opponents. Because that's like hard, that's challenging. And then at the end of the day, 90 to 95% of James's shtick is argument from sneering at whatever he just said. That's his entire method of debate. Yeah, James acts like he's discovered something amazing that climate justice people are not climate scientists.

And everyone's confused in this point. And I'm like, I was never confused about that. I'm well aware. And so are they. They're like, they're talking about topics that are interrelated. And James, in various parts of this thing, he offers these caveats where he's like and the west have polluted and maybe because they benefited they owe a bit more and that you know maybe there's something to that right and he he does that quite a lot where he's like well they might have some

point but anyway they're really about inducing communism it's like he imagines the ipcc report is like these guys sitting around trying to and of of course, you know, that I don't want to give him fuel, but that, you know, the IPCC report, which is a document that tries to reflect the science is also a political document, right? Because they all have to sign off on that. So, and it usually downplays things as a result, but still gets tarnished as unacceptable. downplays things as a result, but still gets tarnished as unacceptable. But setting that aside, it's like he imagines there's a report where there's engineers and climate scientists sitting around and they're talking about the recent data that come in. And then a fucking climate justice sociologist dressed out in tribal garb, interpretive dances their way into the room, twerks in front of them all saying, you know, we got to give all the money

to the African countries because of whiteness. In James' fantasy world, that's what's happening, right? That's what's happening at the UN and stuff. It's cartoonish. And the underlying correct point that all scientific sci-com stuff is political, the irony there is that's a post-modern argument right he's and they even actively at one point cite foucault and they're like one good thing about foucault is that he talks about biopower and stuff i think matt mcmanus has been doing a lot of really good work recently on this and the issue of conservative post-modernism that like there's this very interesting flop and as much as i i despise ross douthat most of the time i think he also

recently had an article out about the fucodian turn in conservatism where it's like they've adopted all of these post-modern ideas because they like critiquing elites and technocrats and power relations and stuff like that they just hate that it's also that arguments that are being used on the other side to critique their views yeah i have that clip for you aaron the for cool and it's interesting as well because you can see that o'fallon is a little bit uncomfortable with crazy for cold right how dare you cite this person so listen to this this is the kind of thing that we have to start saying no to because that's technocracy and that's where we're screwed by the way i have to you know you'll find this maybe a little surprising what foucault and leotard the post-modernists yeah we're warning about was technocrats absolutely that's what foucault's criticism isn't about science that's where it went

wrong that's why he's useful for some things, but not for others. That's right. But he is. He has the best criticism of technocracy in print, of biopower, he called it. And so what we have to do is we're going to have to draw from that, but we're also going to have to, like I said, you just have to say no more of this. This is nonsense. And it's not helpful.'s not useful it's not the relevant material i think he's actually he's so confused that he's also like a huge fan

of it and it's exactly what you pointed out aaron that they're like yeah that's that's what we say that's what we but obviously what we're saying is different but that's like is it i mean o'fallon talking in that clip is basically like obi-wan kenobi saying you know you know the dark side has some uses like a little force choke every once in a while goes a long way you look at the entire thing he's got this elaborate theory of power relations and these mechanisms and groups and this these great historic trends and how these little things are represented of you know reflect this this underlying reality that sort of is but below the surface that for what the everyday appearances of everything you know he may not like it but yeah lindsey's got a critical theory of power going on and it's it's doubly

funny because he they constantly recite this what he calls the iron law of woke projection which is his way of saying the people who disagree with me are projecting which is ironic because i do think so much of the time lindsey is genuinely projecting but you know he gives this impression that the woke are the real conspiracy theorists, right? And he'll talk about folks like Derrick Bell and say all of these claims about white supremacy are actually conspiracism when, like, he's using the same arguments. Like, either you're both conspiracists or neither of you are, James. Like, you can't have this both ways here. I personally think that there's a reading of postmodernism that, like, the correct

reading of postmodernism is anti-conspiracy theorist because it's saying all of these things can happen without there being any genuine active control or conspiracy like power like the real critique of power in stuff like foucault is that it's decentralized that there's an illusion of like these elites sitting in a shadowy room somewhere controlling everything is not right. What's really actually going on is there's a bunch of forces pushing on other forces and it creates these really weird, perverse systems. But they can't go that far down the deconstructive world. So they just end up thinking that they're seeing the same conspiracism in these people that they have in their own world. I think we've talked about this on the podcast before, but I've become a somewhat recent total convert to postmodernism

because, I mean, you cannot be on... Get woke, Matt. No, you... Get on it! Stop, Matt! I'm over here like, yes, yes. I'm talking about... He's your O'Fallon? He's your O'Fallon?

This is as a diagnosis, not a recommendation. You cannot look at social media and see how this boundary between people being authentic and sort of performing and how everything's drenched in these layers of irony and this disconnect between the real world. Simulacrums, Matt. I've been convinced. I should say I've only got the shallowest understanding of postmodernism. There's going to be our writing culture moment, our postmodern turn,

because I've noticed as well, I feel like I didn't like most of the postmodern scholarship. I think I still don't, as far as I've read it. Like, the little I've read, I'm not a fan. But... No, I don't like most of the postmodern scholarship. I think I still don't as far as I've read it. Like, the little I've read, I'm not a fan. But... No, I don't like it either. I mean, I'm very reluctant. I'm not a postmodernist either, I just want to be clear.

This is going to be the next thing, isn't it? Matt's postmodern. They were so good until they got woke-pilled by Aaron, and now they're so terrible. Look, Matt, you're postmodern. That's fine. That's all right. I'll accept that as a co-host.

But I do think that a lot of the things they talked about, endless, multiple approaches to the same events, and about people, the kind of endless regression of the observer, commenting on, commenting on commenting on commenting and looking at things and constructing your own realities like a lot of that is really prescient about the way the internet and social media and the modern right that's the thing not just the left the fucking mega right are more post-modern than the far left. While we're in the, the philosophical world a little bit, do you wanna talk a bit about

the Mercuse stuff that he keeps citing? Because I actually think it's philosophically illuminating to just understand what he's actually talking about and how he's getting it really wrong. Yeah. So I, I do want to swerve to that before that though, I just wanna, there's, there's one thing to cap off the climate change discussion, which I think is neat. I just want to say, before we get off the record, that I read that, this is not connected to the post-modernism, I read that, I read the article, I read the McCuse article. I

mean, I didn't understand it, but I read. Okay, fair enough. That's very good, Matt. You did your homework. I did my homework. Good little little stem boy i'm proud of that's right good good but before we get there before we okay okay still at this point james and o'fallon are getting on the same page but james is still holding on to this identity as a liberal pro-science guy but there's these two clips that i want to play and one is like saying that really there's no opposition to climate change or

discussion or anything like that i think most people agree that we should prudence at least right like yeah let's take a look and let's be at least prudent even you know the people that are like denialists right prude no i've never heard anybody denounce prudence right and so actual research actual actual research and then let's and i've never heard anybody actually take to denounce let's take steps to a cleaner planet except for you know young guys who are just being stupid or whatever the minimizing the young guys that are just being stupid right right? Like the right. how climate denial has pivoted from it's not happening to what we call mode and tempo. Why is it happening and to what extent is it happening? So they'll all now say, well, yeah, we think that it's happening,

but we think humans aren't as big an impact or it's not as widespread or it's not as severe as people think it's going to be. It's just the same thing. They've just moved to, you know, like these guys love their Mott and Bailey's, right? They've just moved to their Mott on that one. Yeah. You know, it totally reminds me of the anti-vax stuff, yeah? It's like there's no anti-vaxes, just like there's no climate change denialists.

Just Wakefields arranged vax-wise, yeah. You know, they have these issues with the science that they think it's too much, too soon, whatever. I've been hearing this for 30 freaking years, you know? It was always the same. They had questions about the science. They had questions about whether it was really happening, whether we should do something about it. Oh, okay.

Maybe it is really happening, but it's too expensive. We don't have any way to do anything about it. Oh, okay. We really couldn't do this. It's bullshit. It's, it's all bullshit. So the, the, the last clip I wanted to play though, this comes a bit later, O'Fallon highlights that they have differences, right?

And watch how quickly they pivot away from any discussion of the possible differences in worldviews that they might have around climate, science, and that kind of thing. Yeah. And so what is our answer to this? I mean, you and I, we have some differences in terms of how we view the subject of climate and climate change. Of course. But how do we- But that's not relevant because you and I believe that we can find objective-

Exactly. Answers. Exactly. The kryptonite of all of these justice movements is the demand for evidence. Right. What's your proof for that exactly show the receipts show the receipts where's what what does the science say can it can it can it withstand the scrutiny can it withstand the scrutiny and then you know how it's also you have to take into it and i hate to i hate to dip

into complexity and say it's complicated i love this one because it's a classic example of something that you all highlight a lot between these heterodox folks where they're always performatively claiming that they can disagree without ever actually disagreeing. Like it's always a point of honor that we don't agree about anything and we could argue about that stuff. But the arguments always happen off screen, right? Like there's never an on screen actual debate between any of these people. It's just let's set aside all our actual disagreements and come together and agree that like China is trying to destroy us with climate justice. It's really rich because they clap each other on the back so much for coming together and agreeing so hard on the things that they

genuinely care about and sweeping all that other stuff under the rug. No, you shouldn't be clapping yourselves on the back for that. That previous clip where like James is, you know, I've never met anyone that is properly in denial about climate change or against prudent measures. And it's like, how much of a rube are you, man? Every single measure against climate change has been fought tooth and nail by the guys that you're now cozying up to and there's tons in your MAGA chud movement who will just via all things that they have available to them turning point USA they're not for prudent steps to restrict therefore more coal mines bring back the jobs that's what Trump was fucking talking about, right?

And it's not true to say that if you just bring them the evidence, show them the receipts, then they'll agree. Right. That's not true. This is also funny to me because we hear them say that they disagree on climate change. I don't think we ever actually find out what O'Fallon's actual views on climate change are. We hear a lot of James saying that mode and tempo kind of stuff that I was talking about, but we don't even know what they actually disagree about on climate change. As far as we know, O'Fallon's a thoroughgoing denialist himself, right? What is

their disagreement? Is their disagreement that James thinks that we're only going to get to 1.5, whereas O'Fallon thinks they're going to get to 2 probably not like it's probably not a fine-grained distinction about that something it'd have to be it'd have to be a straight-up denialist or they wouldn't even mention it right yeah like I think that his views you know like based on I've consumed some of his material he now does I think it's daily or at least it's you know every other couple of days he has a series oh God, I don't even want to remember the name, but like it's hugely conspiratorial. It's not, it's not, you know, this is not neo-conservatism. It's like hardcore, one step down from Alex Jones and not that much of a step down.

And not that much of a step down. So the notion that he has a technically nuanced opinion about climate change issues. I'll go out and tell him that's my sneering denunciation of that. Okay. So a while back, Aaron, you mentioned Marcuse is a name that keeps popping up in these clips and we haven't really dwelt on that. And if you, I think if you just meet James on the street, he might talk to you about Marcuse. But how did he find out about Marcuse? I have another clip, which I titled Emperor Influence number two. So let's see who introduced James to Marcus. If you recall, I think it was in 2019 in December, we were together in Orlando. And, you know, I've done a lot of deep diving on Carl Popper and was trying to show a lot of folks that his understanding of the paradox of tolerance is that that's not something that's being followed by today by those that would claim to want to forward the concept of open society. And that's what I shared with you, the work by Herbert Marcuse, the repressive tolerance, that this is really what's in action.

And you absolutely devoured that. Yeah. And you've been spending a tremendous amount of time on that. Yeah. On your podcast and your articles. And maybe share with everybody, what is it that you've pulled out of that and what is it that you see? Just I have to say, as a teacher, this sounds so familiar, right? Like, you know, I gave you that and you read it.

And now what did you tell the class? What did you pick out as important from that? And little puppy James, like, yeah, yeah okay yeah totally totally devoured that what 17 page article yeah and i know y'all stick on the show but i do think there is some value given that he argues that marcus is the linchpin of modern wokeness and that he takes Hegel and turns it into this functional applicable system. So I think I actually pulled, I don't know if you have other quotes on the Marcuse that you want to reference, but I pulled a couple of quotes from, very short quotes from the repressive tolerance paper to address what he's claiming is being said

in this paper. And I think even somebody like Matt who like dear sweet STEM boy over there, you know, can actually read this article. Like you can still understand what's going on here. I got the gist. I got the gist. No, you did great. You did great. Chris, maybe we should hear his claims in a nutshell.

Yeah, we've got many of them so let's see this i think this is him talking about the kind of thesis statement from repressive tolerance it is the logic of the left the thesis say sentence of repressive tolerance appears actually pretty close to the bottom and he he literally says that it's that we absolutely must tolerate movements from the left and we must not tolerate movements from the right right that's a simple he makes it that simple um left good right bad that's pretty simple that doesn't sound complicated aaron i don't know what you're talking about. Tolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left.

Now, if you miss that word then in that sentence and don't understand that's a reference to a very specific historic context that he's discussing in the paper, you could misread that as just saying all right wing is bad, all left wing is good. But if you look at where this quote appears in the actual context of the paper paper he's specifically talking about in what he sees as the fascist industrial period essentially okay so he's so he's saying repressive tolerance then as in yeah in this period right and you know arguably he still thinks we're in that period because again this is written in 1965 right the civil rights act is 1964 he's literally in the midst of watching violent crackdowns against attempts at improved civil rights by the right wing. So like in his view, in this context, the right means the violent authoritarian right. But they characterize it as if he's saying anything that I think to the left of Mao is the way they put it has to be cracked down on. When instead what he's arguing is in this particular

cultural and historic moment, the views that are aligned with the right in this context are fascist in nature. And as the paradox of tolerance points out, fascist violence will prevent actual liberalism which is the goal as he lays it out in this paper it's very difficult to imagine something more totalitarian than this an orwellian which it's funny because he also says you know that the other the right is orwellian of course he does but he's literally advocating not just for censoring speech from people perceived by his movement to be on the right because that includes a lot of people who are actually not on the right as we've also seen everybody you know vaguely right of i don't know mal or something is is is all right now and like look you could make an argument that you're concerned about any

acclaim like this because you think that the wrong people will get called fascist eventually. That's why it's a paradox, right? That's why it's called the paradox of tolerance, not the solved problem of tolerance. And what I think you see from people like James is they use this argumentative strategy where they present a paradox and then they just sort of saddle their opponents with half the paradox and ignore that the people are wrestling with the same problem and make it look like those people are you know like idiots or haven't taken the issue seriously but that's just like a cheap trick for these sorts of situations so i have a question though aaron because when i did do a fact check, a simple fact check

on this claim as well. And I saw that James is not alone in his interpretation that Marcuse was advocating, basically what he said, that right-wing activism is inherently repressive, whereas quite far left activism is inherently noble and he was somebody who wanted the revolution right to overthrow the the liberal order so i'm kind of curious since there there are other people who seem to have taken that perspective is that a misrepresentation of Marcuse, or is it an unfair strawman of his position? advanced kind of interpretive question, I think. What I would argue is that a plain reading of this text suggests that what he's saying is a sort of standard moderator left-wing line, which says, in this particular context, these particular ideas are violently oppressing

certain people and preventing the spread of the kind of liberalism that we value. And it's important to note, he cites John Stuart Mill in this paper, like he's in favor of the kind of liberalism that folks like Lindsay also claim to be in favor of. He simply takes the position that that liberalism is prevented from occurring by these right-wing fascists who show up and kick over the marketplace of ideas. Let me just read another quick quote from the actual paper. This quote starts out by essentially saying, again, in reference to Mill, like, we don't always have a sense of what the truth is or is not.

And so this necessitates tolerance to some extent. And he says, however, this tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed. It cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation. and counteract the possibilities of liberation. Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debate, in conversation, in academic discussion. It is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion, but society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake. Here, certain things cannot be said. Certain ideas cannot be expressed. Certain policies cannot

be proposed. Certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument of the continuation of servitude. He's basically just saying you can't have Holocaust deniers running around talking about how the Jews are trying to kill everybody and stuff like that, right? You can debate that in academia, right? It made me think of the current stuff around COVID and anti-vax as a case in point. There are some free speech absolutists, but most people agree that even though free speech is really, really good and you want as much of it as possible, there are some limits to it. And when you're lying to people about vaccines and you're telling people it's all a plot

and vaccines will kill you, then that is something where tolerating that kind of speech is a bad idea. I think most people can understand that. So, I mean, I could be wrong, but I don't think the premise of at least the paradox of tolerance is not really that much. It's not really that complicated or radical. I feel that I'm directing this at the wrong person because I don't want to be fair to James Lindsay because I know where he goes. We're going to play some clips where he's talking about the communists taking over and all of this.

So I'm not arguing this to defend what he will link this to. But I would say that I think that there could be legitimate criticisms of people like Marcuse that they were used and maybe in certain respects were in favor of

revolutionary violence as long as it's directed at the right targets, which is something of an ongoing debate in farler ends of of both sides of politics. But even on the point of censorship and free speech, I think, and I think we're probably pretty much on a similar page with this,

that I don't have a problem with the anti-vaxxers existing and having their right to speak and to publish their books or do whatever they want. What I don't think they deserve is unlimited access to every platform and the biggest possible microphone and news organizations need to cover them. If some group wants to make like a fascist political group, my particular leaning is towards in a pluralistic democracy, you have to accept them, but call them what they are, fascists, and you don't invite them up to like, there's a whole

counter strategy, which rarely gets mentioned in these debates that Aaron, you probably have the name of the guy to hand, but the like pro fascfascist guy in America who explicitly said that he was using the tolerance of liberal institutions in order to promote fascism, right? And he would kind of present that he's softened the message and lowered down the tone in order to attract people to a much more extreme ideology. And I think that you have to have standards to respond to that. So I guess I'm just saying there are different positions that you could take, which might have some sympathy towards Lindsay's side, but you don't have to endorse all of the things which he will then go on to link it to.

Absolutely. And I'm not here to defend everything that is being said in this particular article. It's complicated because it's not easy to say these are the political positions that can't be expressed. There are, I think, really complicated questions there. And I think there are fair critiques of this particular answer to the question, just like I think there are fair critiques of the opposite answer that point out that the unfettered approach leads to more abusive, marginalized people. There's a whole rich debate. What I'm against is James Lindsay's two-dimensional portrayal of what's being written here. Like that quote that I just referenced to you, where he specifically

says this kind of indiscriminate tolerance is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, is completely at odds with the picture that James is portraying here of people who are going to silence all scientific evidence that might contradict the left-wing narrative or something. What he's really narrowly talking about here is, in our social environment, we can't have people going around saying

the Jews are trying to kill everyone with mass depopulation conspiracy theories, because that will get people killed. The final quote I wanted to reference, just because James loves to say over and over again that Mark Hughes is the foundation of modern, you know, wokeness, right? And as I think y'all are probably familiar, he also likes to say that the woke are bad because they reject objective truth. They are postmodernists. There is no objective truth, right? Here's one of my favorite quotes from this particular paper. He says, tolerance of free speech is the way of improvement, of progress in liberation,

not because there is no objective truth and improvement must necessarily be a compromise between a variety of opinions, but because there is an objective truth, improvement must necessarily be a compromise between a variety of opinions. But because there is an objective truth which can be discovered, ascertained only in learning and comprehending that which is and that which can be and ought to be and done for the sake of improving the lot of mankind, right? Like, Marcuse very strongly seems to believe there are objective truths and he wants to defend those things and like he thinks that tolerance of free speech is a key part of doing that yeah so connecting those kind of threads aren't to where james goes on to weave it like if we looked at this stuff now it

would be much more extreme right but you can you can already see the the kind of dna in the some of the things that he links in here and this is him talking about the liberals desiring a race war so here we go or the critical critical theorists i guess i should say you know what is this going to lead to are they going to try to start a race war are we going to face an attempted revolution i mean by fall of 2019 we were saying that repeatedly. In London. In London, yeah. The goal is to have a complete social and cultural revolution.

There's another clip that follows on from that, which I think builds on that and links into the conspiratorial worldview. So I'll play that. It is guaranteed that eventually what is going to happen is you're going to have what I've been referring to as a precipitating event. You're going to have a moment where something happens like George Floyd dying in Minneapolis. And then the next thing you know, it's like the ideology goes into action and the entire society, the entire organization, the entire company, the entire church, whatever it is, has to polarize around that issue. My problem with the way Lindsay frames all of this is that it's all connected. That this McHugh's paper is not just a paper. It's a secret manual that the entire movement is referring to.

The idea that this revolutionary movement is just kind of waiting for these inciting events and then seizes upon it to launch this thing. I mean, it was clearly a, like most riots in the United States that are around race issues or whatever, including white riots back in the day, they're spontaneous events, right? I mean, say what you like about them, they're motivated by grassroots resentment, sentiments, whatever you want to call it. So, implicit in his entire narrative is all of this is organized and part of a plan. And that's where I think he just puts everything into this conspiratorial light. Yeah, I agree. I think the conspiracism is really dangerous. And I mean, it's a little tricky because we're in the midst of ongoing revelations about how the January 6th thing,

people are being charged with sedition for stockpiling weapons and stuff. That doesn't never happen, which is a complicated problem when we're trying to teach and talk about conspiracism. But I think you're right that we see so many red flags here of conspiracism. So the tying it all together, this inciting incident talk, and this is problematic because you see inciting incident talk amongst a lot of different activist communities. And there's some truth to the idea that inciting incidents do provoke changes in various kinds of ways. But he's really using it as a synonym for the false flag kind of idea that folks like Alex

Jones talk about. These people are going to orchestrate an inciting incident of some sort, like a race riot. I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, Matt, about the content doesn't matter, and why even bother debunking the marquees? He's just going to move on to another thing and shit like that. But I also do have a sympathy for the idea that content can matter and in the particular case here the implication that jewish backed race wars that specifically that jews are orchestrating wedge issues amongst races to have a race war against the whites is a very concrete anti-semitic conspiracy theory that should be specifically called out i think when they are essentially implying it in this context yeah and like i think it's worth noting, right, as this is precursor stuff,

Rogan and Lindsay, their new episode, I think, just dropped. And I think we were listening to the first little bit of it before we talked. And they open with false flag talk. They open with suggesting that the FBI were involved in inciting violence on January 6th. So that's where all this ends up. That's where this goes. Yeah, no, I FBI were involved in inciting violence on January 6th. So, like, that's where all this ends up. That's where this goes. Yeah, no, I picked up that, too. The narrative is really clear when you listen to the whole thing, which is that there's this, you know, cabal of intellectuals that have this generations-long international plan to foment this awful kind of dystopian revolution. to ferment this awful kind of dystopian revolution.

And they're using black people in the United States as the kind of dumb muscle in the, this is the conspiracy theory, right? It's that simple. And it's like, I even remember it from the Seinfeld episode. Remember when George gets trapped in the, there's the episode with the Nazis and he's reading the speech and it's like, you know, the Jew will then use the black man.

It's like that cartoonish. I don't think they actually cite the Turner Diaries in that one, but that's the classic text that is literally explaining this idea. I think that a kind of common theme that you see in this is like, there's a hypersensitivity and extrapolation from anything to do with the left, right? That it's all connected. It's all connected to these ancient critical theorists and early 20th century Marxists. But a subsequent denial that there's any influence on the right from modern conspiracy movements

like the Turner Diaries or false flag conspiracies and like you even heard in that clip we played earlier where james is saying oh that's just like young guys getting a bit too animated about things or the alt-right is anybody to the right of mao right like it's a constant downplay of there being any problem with anything on the right. And the left is only comprised of either these hardcore revolutionaries that are destroying society or effeminate, ineffective liberals who are holding their water and don't have the balls to stand up like people like James do. And Aaron, we discussed this. I think there's a clip that we should play

where the masterminds of the conspiracy, so like Marcuse and the Frankfurt School is one and it does tie back the Jewish intellectuals. But this is another more proximate cause that he identifies. You'll hear it in this clip who the masterminds are.

And then intersectionality is sort of turning those two things on each other. And because these people are all living in problematize everything land, it went viral in their community, created lots of solidarity. But what it is is mafia solidarity. It all kicks up, as we now see, to the people pushing. And it's not, again, identity. It's the people pushing queer black feminism. The people who are more and more and more queer black feminists have more and more and more of the power. hold or carry water for them for three decades and say, guess what? You're anti-black too. You have to check your privilege, your brown privilege, your Asian privilege, your yellow privilege. You've got to check those things.

It's the notion that these black queer feminists from the 70s, they've been planning, you know, in the shadows for decades, manipulating the Browns and the Asians. And they waited till the George Floyd event to spring their trap. And now their intersectional takeover is coming to fruition. They've got Kamala Harris in the White House. She's one heartbeat away from the doors and they're going to take over. Like, it's yeah you know it's nonsense right well and it's even weirder than that because he's like their big reveal trap spring as far as i can tell from that quote is they then turn on other allies on the left and accuse them

of not being woke enough as like a hierarchy of oppression power move like the number of steps between that and any kind of substantial takeover of anything are gigantic like their big reveal is that they piss off some other people who used to be their friends that's not that's not something to be frightened about like this is comical that his notion that it's literally like a monty python but it's like the first thing they do is they splitter right they're just a bunch of splitters is what he's saying it is that because like you say that that's not a winning move that that leads you into the gates of power like except in james world and this is obviously a common reoccurring theme not just in conspiracism

but especially when discussing the woke they are simultaneously the most unlikable and self-isolating pricks in the universe and also appear to have a vice-like grip on everything even though they alienate everyone and are terrible at community organizing and building up political clout or something like that it's so there's a distinction aaron that i think is good to highlight before we head to wrapping up with some of the other content. But you've noted previously about this kind of treating critical theorists as if they're in a separate class, right? And the critical anything, right? Like, or anything that he links to that is different because it has a normative goal the answer is that a critical theory must have a normative vision for the world moral vision for

the world it has this picture of a perfect world or a better world at least but usually a perfected world the we're in sustainable development goals. That's in climate justice, right? Sustainable. Sustainable is the normative vision here. Matt and I have been critical about what we see is like when activism is overtaking objectivity as a value in scholarship, right?

And there's different opinions on that, but in our perspective about like social science we can see issues there but what that doesn't lead me to believe is that there are no normative values attached to my political neoliberal centrist beliefs or that pretty much the way that james and o'fallon constantly frame things is not an appeal to utopian vision of the future where we have enlightened capitalists that are solving climate change and that nations are free to set their laws without the influence of technocrats. They have a utopian vision as well. And I mean, fucking Trump fucking trump maga make american great again it's like there's one rule for their enemies where they're hearkening up to like a mystical future that will never be realized but they just completely feel the grapple that their god emperor

trump they completely claimed the same thing society was destroyed he had those speeches he gave when he was inaugurated right about the inner cities being crime ridden we need to just go back to everything you know remake society they are doing it it's in their slogan so i i just find this very hypocritical that's the thing yeah i mean if you take their account seriously the joke would be by this view emmanuel kant is a famous critical theorist we can't make that joke anymore because thanks to the impact of stephen hicks who's their philosophical guru who we haven't even talked about here these people actually do believe that kant is a critical theorist which is fucking fucking absurd. Yeah, on their view, you know,

every normative theory, like Peter Singer is a critical theorist on this kind of, but like, that's just a bad definition of critical theory. I'll give you a better definition, right? Critical theory is philosophy with a focus on power, okay? It's about philosophical conversations where the emphasis is on power, power relations, the role of power in various things. So, insofar as you might feel that focusing on power too much is a bad thing, that can be a critique of critical theory, but that's really all it boils down to is like a bunch of different analyses of different kinds of power relations, some of which are more or less effective than others, and some of which are functionally boils down to is like a bunch of different analyses of different kinds of power relations some of which are more or less effective than others and some of which are functionally

indistinguishable from analytic ethical philosophy if i'm being honest yep that's it so they um i expect them not to say something funny did it okay so i think that a good point. There's some clips I have from O'Fallon's standalone episodes on his daily politics thing, which he released. I think it was supposed to be a kind of InfoWars light or whatever, but he doesn't have the ability to produce four hours of content or whatever InfoWars pumps out a day. So it's like a 30-minute thing. And there's absolute madness in it.

But it connects with these sentiments that they get to towards the end of the talks, where they're talking about, you know, this dystopian world that's going to be ushered in. Here's, I think this is James talking about tyrants. You have to avoid the tyrant. You have to avoid the tyrant. It's so important to avoid the tyrant. Because you say, the tyrant. It's so important to avoid the tyrant because you say for five minutes, you say, wait a minute, if we all were forced to participate in this and we all did it right, maybe we could succeed. But the problem is, as we just said,

it power corrupts. And so when you hand over that power power you hand over the keys to your life you're not getting it back your freedom is going and the more you give away the harder it is to get back those tinkly keys i love it what do i trump what do i trump i know that's the immediate response right these people hang out at mar-a-lago and they're complaining about tyrants and it's just like come the fuck on this is the stuff like this it always makes me think of the another topic i don't understand but it's philosophy that you know the logical positivism and and the non-verifiable statements you know these these kinds of assertions and statements that are you know you can just invite liam onto this show like Like I know, I know. You invoke them. I just DM him.

It's accessible. I seriously find the concept useful to appreciate statements like what he's saying there with the music swelling and stuff, because they're not statements that are meant to be analyzed or checked. They're just, they're meant to be evocative, right? They're, they're, they're meant to be evocative right they're meant to inspire you to action and initiate an intuitive gut level reaction so which is so what was he saying so like about the tyrant stop the tyrant don't let the tyrant happen you know it's like well like like what who's the

tyrant what's the tyrant where you know like what do you even mean and you can't you can't analyze it because it's propaganda slash poetry so right forget about it it's like what i was saying with the paradox of tolerance right if you just shout no tyrant in response to the paradox of tolerance it's not an answer it's not a like it's it's comforting right it feels good but it like doesn't address any of the real problems but that's that's basically the depth of their analysis here and and like i do think this is at least psychologically illuminating i think it's important to understand that weirdly enough a group that also seems to be very pro authoritarian has simultaneously managed to develop a deep-seated aversion to what they see as authoritarianism and there's just this

wild inconsistency going on about the application of that concern and there's no clear way to address that but i do think that like he's not faking it like i don't think they're lying about their fear of the tyrant in this kind of way or that the people who follow them are you know like not genuinely afraid of the tyrant they're it's just like so weird to hear them say that and then like trot off to Mar-a-Lago to hang out with Q and honors like you're just yeah let me try and present the counterpoint to that Aaron let's take a pause from our present chaos here in the summer of 2021 and let's remember back to how your life was in March of 2017, just a few months into the Trump administration. Things were improving.

Remember that? Hope was high for most in our nation. For most of us, we felt like we had another chance. We had a chance to get back on track, take our nation back did you consider that that reaction yeah i mean look there is some there's some data that suggests that like especially in america when a new like a party wins the presidency right the people in that party just like they just think things are better now even if the economic stuff doesn't reflect that or like contrary, you know, like there's no evidence, for example, that after Biden got in that, like there was any recognition of the

economic improvement or something like that. So like one way to read this, it's just like, it's just a textbook example of him just admitting that his views about whether things are going right direction, wrong direction are solely tied to whether he feels like his authoritarian leader is the one in charge. I just think it's good to keep in mind what O'Fallon wants, right? And not what Lindsay wants, right? Lindsay's a MAGA chud now. It's the same. And I'll play kind of unrelated. it's not unrelated, but it should be unrelated, about how O'Fallon takes some issue with people being concerned about concussions

with the NFL. But don't worry, he links it into critical theory and woke people. So if you wanted to change something, that's how you did it. Top down, bottom up, and the middle. Church, religion, education, media, arts, and entertainment, and major league sports, those national pastimes, they were the glue that held everything together.

But everybody had to be in on it. There couldn't be any major sector of American cultural life that was not part of this giant ideological reset. But early on, the NFL pushed back. So if you'll notice in the years between 2014 to 2015, all of the sudden, after pretty much everybody knew the risks of playing football, we're all aware of it. All of the sudden, concussions sustained in the NFL and football became the big news.

It was everywhere. You couldn't escape it. I'm sorry. I forgot about O'Fallon's delivery when he's on his own. It's so good. It's so different from when he's with James, too. Like, it's so clearly, like, Palpatine. So that was the introduction.

Let me, that's the shot. Here's the chaser. You see, the NFL doesn't care about you, not one bit. Now, the NFL, they're about you. Not one bit. Now, the NFL, they're here for the revolution. The NFL too? They are now the Critical Race Football League.

The CRFL. You might want to remember that and repeat it. The Critical Race Football League. And now they're forcing every member of every team to get vaccinated even when vaccines are being shown to be ineffective in preventing the spread of covid19 that's known now and by watching woke fantasy football, you're supporting the NFL. It's time to stop. If you are really concerned about stopping the spread of the cancer known as critical race theory in our society stop watching the nfl oh my god he's such a nfl oh god

he's when the race ball league is just right there on the table like you can just pick it up and throw it like you're gonna try to make an extra word happen no did i Did I black out there? Did he swerve into anti-vaxxerism in the middle of talking about critical race? Yeah, yeah. He slipped that in. Just synonyms in his mind, right? There's nothing to fucking do with each other. Even in my ridiculous cosmos where

everything is connected, those things have very little to do with each other. I mean, like, what do you connect the critical race theory, the NFL,fl and and vaccines like the free wait wait you missed concussions it started with concussions let me ask you a question why don't they ever fucking talk about cigarettes right is am i wrong every argument they make about things like concussions also applies to cigarettes right cigarettes are cool and we all understood the cost of cigarettes and if we want to choose to smoke cigarettes then why is the government trying to cut down people's smoking and banning and you

know like all this sort of but they don't they don't ever make those arguments about cigarettes why is that has it just been abandoned because it's like it doesn't pull as well as as like football or something well but do people want concussions i know people want cigarettes like because they like nicotine but i'm like when you said i'm saying right it's the same kind of safetyism that they're hating on here is like proof of the emasculation of the west or something like that right cigarettes yeah why aren't these guys like you know don't let the liberals tell you know the cucks tell you not to smoke your cigarettes i think no but they are like joe rogan smokes his cigars joe rogan certainly yeah eats his meat but you don't and smokes his cigars into his meat

you know about smoked meat matt you're a. You know about smoked meat, Matt. You're a rebel. I know about smoked meat. I've smoked a meat or two. I mean, like, it's all consistent, though, isn't it? Like, I think if you press them, that'd be totally laissez-faire on cigarettes. So people should be able to do whatever they want. The government should get out of your business with cigarettes,

just like in everything else. Like, the safetyism thing, thing again where does it end i mean what what level of of abolishing the fda is where it ends yeah yeah i think you could be right epa fda all that stuff but it's clear where the philosophy is grounded right and they're the kind of people that would just easily embrace like a proto-fascistic kind of political thing without even noticing but i think what what drives them is that know nothing anti-government little house on the prairie little communities with the pastor and the floral dresses and the boys playing the rough sports in the backyard where everything, everyone knows what their natural role is, right?

And everybody, and the things that people do, like going to church and wearing the nice dresses and playing the rough housing and so on, men being men, women being women, all the rest, right? Like that's the natural state of man, right? This is mankind being natural and non-artificial. And I think that's how God and society works for them. Ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma.

That sounds to me like your opposition to that is pet talk. Pet talk. Do you think that all of this stops at the latest vaccine? Are you that naive? Have you not been listening to me over the past four years on the causes of things and all the conferences and all the speeches that we've given?

This will soon go digital and trackable. And it won't be just about your vaccine status. No. Because you have to obey. This is obedience training. And of course they will tell you that you must take the vaccine after vaccine

and accept all this traceable and trackable technology so you won't cause any harm to anyone around you you must obey because you are all now pets they should be required to prove that they are not vaccinated in my opinion right like if you're going to accuse people who get vaccinated of being pets you would better not actually be vaccinated and i know for a fact that these guys are organizing conferences for james lindsey down in florida so i would like to know what level of vaccination they are bringing to their particular events but like yeah it's it's such dangerous talk

yeah i mean i don't think you really get it it's not just that you know pets are they're obedient that they're taking vaccines they've got all their problems what will you do when they tell you that you can't drive your car anymore that you have to use the automated and satellite controlled vehicles that avoid all wrecks in the future. When they explain that for you to keep on driving means that you are the danger. You are the threat. Because those of you who don't just sit and let AI, artificial intelligence, do the driving for you are a threat to other people. Like a bad dog that got outside of his fence that's you you must obey because you're a pet now you know this is all coming these are good clips chris these are good clips because i think actually i actually

illustrated a lot a lot of good points there's a lot of good points in there they're making me very angry and i have several comments but yes go ahead no i mean like the sheer absurdity of them is is the secret here i reckon like what helmets for the nfl you know, vaccines, like self-driving cars, like it's literally anything, like anything new. It is so strange. It is so weird. It's just a deeply fundamentalist, conspiratorial worldview. Opportunistically trying to use any of those levers, hoping that one of those scattergun kind of things will gel with some listener.

Like, oh yeah, I don't feel right about self-driving cars. I should be able to drive my own car. Maybe that's going to pick up a few, but really the idea is get on board, reject modernity. Let's go back to the little house on the prairie. That's my take. Yeah. I have like five things wrong with this. So like, I mean, the reason I brought up cigarettes initially is because I think the reason they don't talk about cigarettes is because they're a success story for this kind of safety isn't that they hate so much like in america especially smoking has gone down fairly substantially because of anti-smoking campaigns their arguments are identical to like don't let the government tell you that you can't drive after having just one drink or something don't let the government tell you that you can't drive without a seat belt or give you a ticket because like it's all the

same classic conservative how dare they suggest that like you don't have the freedom to act in ways that might like severely endanger yourself or others and then like on top of that is this very very silly layer of anti-technocratic bullshit despite the fact that they love people like elon musk who are building the ai cars right like the cars aren't coming i don't i've been talking about this for a long time doing ai ethics and stuff and i've long felt that like we are grossly overestimating the speed at which like ai cars could be rolled out in the world one of the few ways they could be rolled out would be if, as they describe, they ban all non-drivers and only require AI drivers. But that's never, ever, ever, ever going to happen. Like there's no universe in

which this is going to happen. People still resisted like manual transmissions. You think they're going to hand over their ability to drive freely to a robot like it's just not gonna fucking happen so like they're afraid of a tyrant that will never ever exist they've also got this thing about the un making everyone eat bugs which is again it's it's similar it's like it's it's this thing which all any mention about the fact that some people on the planet eat insects and that is taken as they're gonna fucking steal all your meat and shove locusts down your face and they're and serious about it right like and that's the thing that's an example of just how and james and o'fallon talk about that i. Talk about bugs and eating bugs and how this is Cloud,

whatever his name is, like the UN villain guy. It's all the great reset plan is heavily around getting people to eat bugs. So we introduced this by saying, this is them before they get more extreme, at least in James' case. This is him on this radicalization pathway

and and they recognize that too so let me just play this clip which which highlights that but let's say for just a second that who you are today in the chaos of 2021 And what you know today in 2021 could travel back in time to 2017. To speak to 2017 you. Would your 2017 you believe 2021 you if you told 2017 you what would be coming in 2020 and 2021 i think we have a pretty strong feeling that your 2017 self would have said that 2021 you was absolutely crazy that 2021 you was spending too much time reading conspiracy theories 2017 you would have told 2021 you that you know what 2021 you um you really need to trust

the lord with some of your concerns so we before you comment we've got two characters there, right? 2017 you and 20, I don't know if you picked them up, but 2021 you. That's not all. We've got a looper situation going. You just yet. You are still stuck

in the fog of cognitive dissonance somewhere between 2017 you and early 2020 you. And ladies and gentlemen, it is time to snap out of it. You've probably figured out that I have been 2021 me publicly for about seven years now. Going way back. 2021 has been my marker. It's when I knew that things would drastically change. I knew that 2020 would lead up to it, but I knew that 2021 was the target. Privately to specific leaders and friends, I have been 2030 me for at least five to six years.

That is why Dr. James White is saying the things that he is saying right now, especially on Twitter and on his podcast. We've got the kind of inception, I don know back to the future level you like science fiction i do oh fallen is this he's been 20 30 him for five years but he was 20 20 and for seven years he's which what are you jizzy i know publicly 20 31 him but what has it been privately this is the rise of non-linear storytelling he's 20 21 him publicly but he's no yeah publicly he's 20 21 him but privately he's 20 30 him oh i mean this is this is like classic cult stuff right like telling your cultists remember who you were before you came here? What would that person think about you now? They wouldn't recognize you and you wouldn't

recognize them. And like, isn't that wild and fascinating and stuff? And like, it's just proof that you spiraled, buddy. It's not a good thing. All you're saying is the person who you were seven years ago would not have believed that you would have gotten to the point of thinking that klaus schwab is going to murder several billion people and then like force feed the rest of the crickets or something it's not a it's not a good trajectory this is another version of the cassandra complex thing that i know matt likes to get as many points for as possible and like it reminds me of another thing in the background here is the ai technocratic stuff these guys are also into this idea i think to some extent of the microchipping thing a little bit and that gets into that alex jones stuff and you see in sort

of joe rogan's discussions of alex jones where he's like alex saw it coming ahead of time but like that's all just like nonsense like these people just throw out a bunch of ridiculous darpa based predictions and then claim credit for having successfully predicted the scientific dystopia that we're going to live in when the reality is most of us can barely get access to testing much less microchips i mean my takeaway from this is just one he's just not very good at this right like that that was the most labored analogy metaphor whatever that you could possibly imagine as a piece of rhetoric and and you know yeah like you said eating bugs and artificial intelligences and the woke nfl or whatever it's just scattergun batshit crazy right so the the nice classical music at the beginning the serious centaurian tone of

voice it's it's all window dressing for what is alex jones level nonsense so and i refuse to i refuse to decode it it's below the standard all right all right goodbye this is a good thing to finish with because it's it shows that you know if you listen to some of those clips earlier and you you were thinking aren't they making you know relevant points here or that or they're just concerned about excesses about critical theory and and wanting social revolution no right this is the bedrock and o'fallon is the master right right? He's the one that's giving James the books about Marcuse and saying, you know, maybe read this essay. It'll blow your mind.

There's two clips to play where he outlines his vision of the future, like what's coming, right? And I think that's a good thing to listen to to end on that there. I'm sorry, Matt. I'm going to force you to the code two more before you get the stop hearing from him. So here's number one. People ask me all the time. They say, you know, what's the end goal of critical race theory? What's the end goal of critical theory or whatever? It doesn't look like this will work. It doesn't look like any of it would work. They tell me that all the time. And

they're like, you don't understand. Yeah, it's not meant to. The point is to break what is. That which exists now, to break it. And they said, well, why would they want to do that? Because they know that they're going to be able to mop up, or they believe at least they're going to be able to mop up. Build it back up. Yeah, out of the rub. Get their own upside down hierarchy. and they're going to order the world, and we're not going to have any longer a nation or world based on ideas, which is what the Enlightenment and the liberal revolutions of, you know, I guess the 18th century really led to. We're not going to have certain inalienable rights anymore. So,

that, I figure, is worth all, because it wasn't O'Fallon, right? There was a slight change of cadence, but that's James, right? And it's the same. The same conspiratorial nonsense. Yeah, and he wraps that up by saying

they want to be the kings of the rubble pile, right? Like, that's his view of what the critical theories are doing. Hold on, hold on hold on oh sorry let james speak for himself we're now going to have a party that understands the subject subjective truth correctly whereas everybody else doesn't understand the subject truth for your claim to objectivity is just the wrong subjective tip it's just another story they say right and you know science is just another story, they say. Right. And, you know, science is just one story among many. And we have a better story now because we have the power. And their goal is to break everything and then make themselves king of the rubble pile. That was seriously funny that that was the best material from James for the big epic wrap up with the music coming.

Because that was just one. Oh, and they're going gonna be kings of the rubble pile and everything's just gonna be a story and we're not gonna have our rights or our freedoms and there's gonna be no nation that's under god that was so weak yeah it helps if you play swelling music to the to the back yeah that's right i think they thought that would help it but man it did not they're not good at this they're they're they need they're not good at it there are accelerationists in the world and there are probably some woke accelerationists who think that like the goal is to destroy the current state of things to bring about a new state of

things it's a little ridiculous to suggest that what the next thing they want to bring about is not what they think of as their utopia rather than like you know just like a bunch of dystopian broken castles or something like that and the worst part is this is a non-visual medium so you can't see but if you watch these videos the last shot of this is like a castle being destroyed by the waves it could not be more heavy-handed in its in its you know symbolism i have an issue that there's like these conflicting views of the dystopia are we bug eating half cyborg pet creatures of the technocrats being driven around in robot cars Or are we Mad Max world survivors that have to fight off queer black feminists in their enclaves of intersectionality? And it's a very similar, Brett Weinstein and Heller Hain outlined the same thing about like the liberal cities will collapse.

There will be roaming bands of woke mobs kind of like i guess you know themed gangs in the wastelands in between conservative bastions of stability and civilization but like it's all so stupid it's a cartoonish i kind of think they get off on imagining it but like at least have a consistent dystopia that they're aiming for is it a rubble pile or is it like a technocratic fascism because those are two different things right get get consistency with your canon it's no parable of the talents to be sure it is much more in the turner diaries vein of in terms of consistency of what's happening in the world and you could you could make a coherent world building kind of game out of this, right? Where it's like,

what happens to the cities when they're overtaken by the woke? What happens to the you know, the rural areas when they resist the woke who come and start raiding them for food? Like, you could you could do that whole thing if you wanted to update the Turner Diaries. But again, why? Why would you look, look, look, I think we've got really far afield from what the core point, the core message that they're both trying to offer is. So before we get to the final thoughts, I just want to bring it back to the thing which this is really all about, that we need to keep at the front of our minds. I love art. And if that looks, if it looks like something somebody wants, it doesn't have to look good. That's to some level subjective.

Great. But it's not glaciology. You have no seat at the glacier table because you painted a picture of a glacier. You have no seat there. And that whole paper is designed around the idea that glaciology only favors one type of story. that glaciology only favors one type of story. They only favor the white Western scientific story that's rooted in masculinism and in scientific reasoning and objective beliefs that objective truth

is accessible or relevant. And we should be incorporating the subjective, the story, the narrative. Right. So you start creating subjective narratives that include teenage girls that have no knowledge on the subject at all, that are just emotional and script reading and so forth. I've been, I mean, to summarize, you know, I've been convinced that this is something that I have to be extraordinarily emotional about. Here's me wailing into a TikTok that I guess gave me a Nobel Prize in chemistry or something. Which on the cover of Time Magazine.

Yeah, exactly. Right. That is what James has been convinced of, what he was just complaining about. But I can't say it better than him. The thing is, it's feminist glaciology. That's what it's all about. I'm sorry, gentlemen. And I don't really have anything to say except, fuck that paper.

If I ever have to hear james talk about it again i'm gonna blow my brains out like marcus he should be banned from talking about marcus and feminist glaciology i don't mean them i mean the people who wrote the paper they you know they're fine write a paper about feminist glaciology but if i have to spend one more minute talking about that paper, I'm going to become a clear seer. And I just, I don't know. That's my wrap up. So what's your up up?

Aaron, you go first. Uh, sure. Good thing. You have to add the good thing. That's our rule. You have to say one good thing. I have to say one good thing. that's our rule you have to say one good thing i have to say one good thing um i think it's good that this was all out in the open now because for the first year or so that i was covering james

lindsey everybody pretended like none of this was real and it was all guilt by association and it had nothing to do with his spiral or anything like that. And now nobody does that. Nobody defends him in my mentions. Nobody's like, we should actually still take him seriously or something like that. So in that sense, I really appreciate that they have, you know, I don't know that he's no longer a factor because I think he still influences, is going to influence Republican politics in various ways. But I really genuinely appreciate that he successfully isolated himself into the maga world and like away from as many other human beings as possible so cheers for that and he yeah he just recently appeared on our friend joseph rogan's show so i think his influence at least in the the manga right wing sphere continues but um matt okay so that wasn't

really a good thing though aaron i mean it was like a backhanded it was good for me yeah yeah no because i i can't think of a good thing oh i'll be trying to think of one i just can't i really i i've got one i i think you know it's very important that we don't let obscure papers from critical theorists go unnoticed it's important you know because they've got important things to say and so if it wasn't for james we would never hear about many of these papers or the arguments or the NFL that's a concern becoming pets, eating bugs these are all, no, are

they likely? No, but you know, I'm glad somebody's flagging up that these things are concerns. I don't feel as if they're less backhanded than my particular version of this. That's very What can we say?

A very earnest artistic designer made some money making these videos, right? Like somebody got to buy a fancy drone and fly it out over some sand dunes. That person had a good time. And like, it's hard to make a living doing that kind of creative work. So I think it's good that they are,

you know, job creators in that kind of way. I noticed on one of those sets on the beach when they're sitting at the table, they had three coconuts arranged like so. And like a basket of seashells just scattered across the table. Very, very nice little coconuts. Antithesis coconut and synthesis coconut. That's the way that works. This makes me think that Alex Jones did this thing where he put a chessboard and various items

on his table. And then he was talking to his audience and he was like, you might be wondering what these items represent. And he was like, that's actually the point, just to make you think and, you know, free yourself. He just was saying, you know, I i put a rather assortment

of items so i'm just fucking with you with these items yeah i kind of hope that you know following the stuff we're like the coconut on the left represents candy the coconut on the right is marcus and the this middle one is the nfl i i hope there was symbology to the coconut. So good call out, Matt. I will say, for me personally, my favorite part of all of this is that, true story, when I first reached out to James when I was early in ETV

and he was doing the first penis hoax, right? And I offered to have him come on and talk about ethics and stuff because it was related to the issues. He made it clear in no uncertain terms that he thought that philosophy was the greatest waste of time, like possibly in all of academia, right? And now, he gets to spend all of his time explaining philosophy that he hates and doesn't understand to people who don't care and won't understand it either. He has selected for himself a very,

very special kind of hell to live in. And I, I guess I'm happy about that. Like, cause I think he does a lot of horrible things and I think I don't have to feel bad being amused that he spends all his time that he's not on Twitter, torturing himself, reading things that he hates.

My wrap up of him and, oh, Fallon is like, it used to be, maybe it was a little bit more difficult to spot. And James has spiraled. He's went more extreme. But if you go back to our second episode,

we covered James. And a lot of the kind of core features to his worldview, it was there, right? That this was a possible trajectory for him. You can see the figure who may have helped him along that trajectory in material

that we covered. And if some of this sounded extreme, this is child's play to where James is now. He's much more beyond this. That Dr. Phil appearance is much more closer to what he's like now and what he's like on Twitter. So, you know, he is a conspiracy theorist and a right wing

partisan. And if anybody in our audience is unable to recognize that at this point, oh my God, I'm just very sorry. You bring up that talk. It's important to note there's a reason they're connected to these things is because that was an event organized by Sovereign Nations, by Michael O'Fallon. The talk you were referring to is the one that he gave, I believe, in London at their event. That was the beginning of their ongoing business relationship. of their ongoing business relationship. And he's very clearly in that talk catering to that O'Fallon style sort of more right-wing audience.

And so you can see him test driving what is going to be his shtick for the rest of his spiral. Aaron, you did a very good episode covering Lindsay at the time, but I also want to highlight that at the time I made a thread and other people

made similar comments saying, isn't this a problem that there's a potential influence of this kind of worldview when you're supposed to be like secular, atheist, promoting science? And at the time there was a lot of pushback about, oh, come on. Oh, come on. There's no sign. pushback about, oh, come on. Oh, come on. There's no sign. There's no indication of it. They're just speaking at a conference organized by evangelicals. Are you anti-religion?

Is that what it is? And this was like, you know, Helen Pluckrose's response. And again, I'm not, am I taking the victory lap? Am I? I don't know. I'm just saying, who was right, Helen? Who was right? Yeah. And everybody wants to hand me the victory of saying that he has, that James has converted to Christianity.

I don't think he actually has yet. I do think it's still a likely possibility. But we can certainly say that he is all in on the catering to Christian grift. And you can see it more and more as he gets involved in these Twitter fights with actual Christians where he claims that they are promoting the devil's vaccines and stuff like that, right? Like, he's clearly sliding in that direction, even if he's going to continue to pretend that he himself is still an atheist or something. He's definitely all in on the grift at this point. I remember back when I first became aware of him,

and it was just the so-called squared hoax papers. Now, I remember being something of a fan of the original so-called paper because I thought it was a great send-up of a certain kind of ultra-dense social philosophizing. Fashionable nonsense. That's right. Great site. I made a good point.

And then when those ones came out, again, I didn't have a problem with it. A lot of people wrang their hands about, oh, they didn't get ethical clearance or, you know, violated good faith or whatever. But I'm all for it. If you can trick a psychology journal into publishing some bullshit, then I'm all for it. Like, that's, you know, it can be mean, it can be unfair or whatever. But where James took that, and to some degree, all of them, is first of all, very much into a kind of social and political activism. It wasn't an academic thing anymore. Very quickly became not an academic thing, became a political and social thing. And this is true of all of them.

They took this sort of fine reading critique of these fundamentals of critical theory and philosophy and the Frankfurt School or whatever it is, as like a social critique of political correctness and wokeness and leftism and gone too far and all that kind of, which is completely wrong because those things are so far apart. They're far apart in terms of the general population and sort of very highfalutin abstract academia. And they're far apart in terms of being like, what is it, 70 years, 80 years distant? So completely disconnected.

And then James in particular has taken it even one step further. And now his whole thing, all of this reading of Foucault and Marcus and all that stuff, it's serving as nothing more as a bookend. They're eating bugs or, you know, making a robot drive you around in your car. robot drive you around in your car. It's serving as just another one of those little bullet points on what is paleo-fundamentalist Christianity. So, yeah, well done, mate. Nice trajectory. Good on you.

Conservatism. Well, Aaron, we've consumed quite a lot of your patience and time but we do greatly appreciate you coming on there's very few philosophers that we can tolerate to be in the presence of for multiple hours and

anytime anytime so just to say you know for a philosopher, that was really good. So thank you for coming on and helping decode O'Fallon and

Lindsay. And I do think you're due your victory laps because you called a lot of this many moons ago. So heed Aaron. I appreciate that. For an Irishman, you did quite well do too. So heed Aaron. Heed Aaron. I appreciate that. For an Irishman, you did quite well here too.

And so, thank you all for having me on. How dare you? How dare you? Jesus, Jesus at the end. No licks and boots, pirate boy.

All right, I'm stopping now. So, bye, bye Aaron. So Matt, that was a decoding par excellence we we did our duty we took them apart we found out how important glaciers are to to everything really and here we are did you enjoy that no I didn't really enjoy that one Chris yeah it'll be good for us to get a little bit out of the Culture Wars,

which we're planning to do, continue our trek, our long march out of the Culture Wars. And who were you thinking we might cover next? Well, there's a man called Jeroen Larnier. Larnier? Larnier? We'll have to find that out. His middle name is Zeppel. As it happens. And he is a

computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, composer of contemporary classical music, etc. He is a man with dreadlocks and a tendency to play various musical instruments before he gets into his

lectures and walk around barefoot. He's an interesting technologist for us to look at, and he's basically warning about the dangers of social media and technology. So a tangential figure to culture war, malarkey, except of course, every time we say this, we end up going into a right-wing death spiral. So he'll probably be out marching at frigging the next Trump rally in a couple of months' time. Watch out, Lanny. The being covered by Decoded Gurus is the kiss of death. Like JPCs, for instance.

I remember back when we covered JPCs, you know, we almost didn't cover him because he seemed like just this kind of... Insubstantial piece of fluff. Yeah, and, you know, records, you know, mediocre, somewhat funny, back then, videos on YouTube. And, you know, he's one of these guest speakers at this big anti-vax march up there.

Matt, Matt, remember, it's about mandates. All those anti-vaxers have been there. That's, you know, they just have a variety of interests. So, yeah, it's not anti-vax. It's anti-mandates, very separate issues. Very separate. Oh, dear. Yeah, so, but yeah, I recognize Lanyard.

Like, I don't know him well, but I remember some of the stuff he did, like 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. I remember some kind of pretty strong, if not hyperbolic, concern raising regarding social media. I'll hold my tongue, Matt. I have, you know, maybe I'll really agree with everything you said. That's why I'm picking him. I will say that he appeared on Barry Weiss's podcast recently, and that was a pretty good

introduction to his worldview. So if you want the recent piece of content to consume of his that, uh, you can find on Barry Weiss's podcast, whatever it is, unheard, uncensored, honestly, the truth can't speak lies podcast.com. Um, so Matt time to take it to our audience to give them the proverbial metaphorical fist that they deserve as we look at their reviews and respond to their reading of us by reading their reviews. We follow review of reviews. Yay. Everybody's favorite section. And you got one good you found, one good one, and one bad one.

That's good, because you're having trouble sometimes finding some bad ones. Oh, don't worry. Since we reviewed popular right-wing figures, we have regained our negative feedback quotient. So would you like to offset those? Please feel free to do so. But let's hear some of them. So this one, I can't actually attribute this one to right-wingery because it could just be a fair critique.

It's by Onomatopoeia 7654321 and the title is Pointless 1 out of 5 stars. And it says, there is no point to this podcast. It is a big waste of time. Pointless, 1 out of 5. That's it.

That's it. They got the message out. I reckon that was written by a 13-year-old. I reckon that person is 13 years old. With the brain of a newborn pigeon. Just because it's short. Yeah. They're 13 unless until proven otherwise. And there was nothing that they wrote that demonstrated that they weren't 13 that's right they didn't and that's probably the attention span of a 13 year

old so they're all nihilistic at that age anyway that's why it's all pointless isn't it that's right what's the point anyway that's right that's right keep your angsty teenage keep it to yourself mate we don't need to hear it on our podcast now Now, in the next one, I'm not sure, Matt, but I detect a tinge of, you know, there might be some right-wing leaning. I can't tell, but let's see if you can detect that. It's very subtle. This is John Bursleton.

Oh, and the title is Who is the Expert? Listening to a psychologist and anthropologist try to discredit the most cited doctor in his field in history seems a little silly, doesn't it? It should probably be noted Peter McCulloch has treated thousands of COVID patients with phenomenal outcomes and shared what works on a worldwide scale. In an altruistic world, we would see him on the nightly news sharing what worked to save lives. I'm not trying to slander him. It's up to us to bring that altruistic world to fruition. Wow.

That's, that's, well, that's clearly Brett Weinstein. That's it's clearly, yeah. It says, no, there was not enough obscure analogies thrown in, or it's not even obscure analogies. He didn't mention Harry Potter, Transformers. Every cultural reference was not shoehorned in, so it can't be Brett Weinstein. That's true.

It wasn't pretentious enough. Yeah, well. Yeah, that's good. I mean, we're probably going to attract the attention of anti-vaxxers, let's face it. Yeah. Well, in fairness, he could be a left-wing anti-vaxxers, let's face it. And, um, yeah, that's well, in fairness, it could be left wing anti-vaxxer. It could just be a fan of a notoriously right wing doctor.

And he doesn't like that part of his output. He likes his anti-vaxxer because that's what he talked about. So, yeah. And I liked the way that he just wanted to clarify. He's not nagging Petereter mcculloch for not being on the nightly news just in case mcculloch read it and thought this was a dig that you know he could be working harder it's up to us us the people reading the reviews of the coding the curators to get him on the nightly news so so try harder everyone and we might be able to get them there.

Yeah. Well, we're not going to make all the people happy all the time. And we'll definitely not be making anti-vices. Sorry, John Bursleton. And what kind of a name is that, really? But, Matt, apart from those idiots, there are people with sensible, well-thought-out opinions. Because idiots, there are people who have sensible, well-thought-out opinions. And, you know, I don't like to put these positive reviews in, but I have to do it for balance.

So, yes, there's no way around it. Sensible, well-thought-out, five-star opinions. Yeah. I just have to put them in. There's no way around it. That's what the format demands. We decided on the format at the beginning. We're not in control. We're not in control.

We just follow what the script says. So this is by Kitty McTackle. See, a good name as well. And the title is People, the Length is Necessary. Yeah. Already, I like him. Or her, Kitty. Yeah. Already I like him. Or her kitty. Sorry.

But a kitty could be a man. There are meal cats as well. I see some folks complaining about the episodes being too long. There's not that many of them. We just highlight them. Put it on 1.5 speed. If it's really that much of an issue for you. The ungodly

amount of hours of disinfo being spewed by these gurus constant, and they're not talking about us here, constantly requires thorough debunking coverage if you expect anyone to A, be equipped with all the necessary information to help

in the battle of fighting disinformation, or B, to cover all aspects of what about-ism counters you're going to get from folks resistant to accepting the debunking in the first place. That's a convoluted argument, but I think I'm on board with it. Yeah, it was a difficult one to read but i think i did it and then it finishes with great work guys you're providing a great service to society which is what i keep telling all my critics so so i'm glad someone else's the bravery

to say it yeah and yeah kitty kitty taco is definitely brave. Yeah. It is. Brave to say such hard-hitting, honest truths. And there we have it. Not from our mouth. Someone else said it. And I hadn't, you know, that was just the one I rested my finger on randomly when scrolling through. So, yeah, that's it.

Yeah. Two negatives, Matt, and one positive this week. The, you know, balance just to keep it a little bit skewed towards negative. So there we go. That's it. More reviews like Kitty McTackle, less like John Fersal Bottom. That's right. That's right.

We'll get depressed. We'll get unhappy. We'll just, we'll go into a funk and we'll cancel it. Just like the portal was canceled because the fans were misbehaving. That could happen to you. That could happen. If you guys don't step it up, if you don't step up to the plate and start counteracting all these negative

reviews, I don't know. I don't know. I'm just might have to withdraw and cancel all these exciting episodes. We have planned. No, you're on line. Yeah,

that's right. I get nagged on social media all the time and there's no fans jumping in. Yeah. Where are they, Matt? Yeah. Where are they? They need to sacrifice themselves.

Like you, you get in there. Are you with the reply guys? Come on. What are we doing this for i remember one time was it brett or eric but somebody clearly was like in their minds it was eric it was eric seeking their army of fans on yes he tagged us he tagged us. He tagged us. And various people. Nothing happened. It was great. Yeah, yeah.

Just some people DM'd us saying, oh, you did it. Thanks for... Eric down the peg or two. But yeah, so... Well, I think our appeals will have a similar effect. But should you be inclined

to write a five-star review, we'll be open to that. And now, Matt, the real five-star fans of the podcast, the people who make it all possible, the shining stars of the Guru Night Sky, the Patreons of Decoding the Gurus. And actually, there's a bit of a surprise this week. Because I fucked up the Patreon document

that I currently have. I'm trying to sort it out and I'm coming up with a new system. So we're going to get caught up with our Patreon delays. But I am going to be referencing recent Patreons because I don't want to mess up

the ones that have already shouted out. And just trust me, it'll be easier for me to give shout outs to recent patrons. So if you're a very recent patron, you may be about to get a shout out. How exciting. Um, so for today, we'll start with the conspiracy hypothesizers. We'll start with the conspiracy hypothesizers. We have John Bergner, Jason Efferidge, Xiaoxiao Li, David, no, Kathy Cox, John Gao, Adam Sher, and Joe. Maybe Joe Rogan, could be Joe Rogan.

It's Joe. Anyway, these are our conspiracy hypothesizers, Bob. Thank you. Nice combination of names. I just realized something with the format here is that there's no ranking. Everyone, doesn't matter what tier of patron you are, we shout out a batch

from every tier. So there's no jumping to the head of the shout-out queue just by donating more money. You see what I'm saying? Matt, are you essentially pointing out to the patrons that they get no benefit from paying more money for higher tiers in terms of shout-outs?

Is that what you're doing right now? I think people are just admiring our egalitarian principles here. You know, luxury space, communism and action. Yes. And you are right. And in shout out terms, it's all the same. You are a unified whole to us, but, but in all the things like getting

access to the monthly live stream, you're not the same. I'm sorry. There are, there are perks that are only available to the highest paying tiers of the massive sum of $10. Don't don't blame us. This is how neoliberalism works. This is, this is the system we live in people. We told you in the first episode, we warned you. So that's, you've only yourself to blame.

So thank you. So that's only yourself to blame. So thank you, conspiracy hypothesizers. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Thank you, Brett Weinstein. So now, revolutionary geniuses, Matt. Revolutionary geniuses, Matt. Here we have David Ferguson, Matthias Bolton, Gary Gutt.

Jerry! Not what the hell am I saying, Gary. Who has a name called Gary? Jerry Gutt. Jerry Gutt. God, it's not your fault. It's my fault for getting that name wrong. Jar Gar and John McKay. All revolutionary geniuses.

Fantastic. Middle tier. I like it. Not, not showing off, not falling behind with the rest of the rebel. It's, you know, just in the middle. It's like centrism, but for patrons. That's right. Gary.

What is called Gary? Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking. What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know. Indeed you are. And now I'm at the final tier, the most equal of all equal tiers. The Galaxy Brain Gurus.

I've already made the joke. I won't read it. I won't repeat it. These guys are the pigs at Animal Farm, you know. Exactly. But a little bit more equal than the rest. Yep. Yes.

Yes. That's the way. That's the nice image for them. So William Crawley and Jay Jones, also Tim Rossiter and Go-Kart Mozart. Go-Kart Mozart. I like that one. That's a good one. Go-Kart Mozart.

That's good. Well, that's great. I mean, look, we definitely appreciate the elite tier patrons, but the best thinkers, but it great. I mean, look, we definitely appreciate the elite tier patrons. The best thinkers. The best thinkers. But also, you know, you have to wonder whether that $10 might be better if you use, like, preserving habitat for gorillas or something. I mean, it's slightly problematic, isn't it?

Is it a luxury thing? I mean, it's mainly problematic because of your deep admiration for Scott Adams. It's almost like they're funding him directly by supporting you. But as outside of that, I think their conscience can remain free. But yeah, maybe reconsider lowering your pledge after this one. Or Matt will give you further abuse, but I will thank you. So, so thank you all. And especially go-kart Mozart.

Yes. Mozart, Mozart. It's spelled with a Z, isn't it? It's a Z. That's what I said. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you said.

Yeah. Yeah. Silency. Mozart. It's like, it's like Matt. Yes. Silent tease. Ah, here we go.

You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. And you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert? Kind of am. Yeah. I don't trust people at all. He's a, he's a, he's an expert.

Like we're an expert and able to evaluate these pretend virologists. This is directed at that negative review before. That really got there, didn't it Matt? Don't worry. Don't worry. He's just an internet rando. Find people on both sides, Chris. Find people.

Agreed. Agreed. So that's it. Next we'll be away from these culture war-pilled mad brains for a little while, getting to a technologist. And yeah, I look forward to it. So, Matt, thank you for all you've done today and all you continue to do in the world.

Yeah. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon. Thank you. Oh, and gravel at the feet of your muscle master. Already did it. I did it before breakfast, but I'll do it again just to go on the safe side. That's good.

Okay. Okay. Ciao. Bye. Thank you.. Matt, I've got another secret piece of Northern Irish lingo for you. Oh, okay. For behind the music. Oh yeah.

For behind the music. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What is it? So for people that are getting over their skis, they're, you know, they're sticking their, their heads above the parapet and, and getting a bit too big for the boots. We have an expression that says, wind your neck in.

Oh, I know that one. I know that one. You know that one? Is that not Northern Irish? It exists outside? I feel like that's a UK thing. Yeah. Is it? See, this is the thing. No, they probably took it from us. They took it from us. Just like everything else at my right. They did. Alright, I'll give you another one then that I know they don't use. So if someone's being annoying, right, you can call them an idiot, which is the Irish word for idiot.

Well, not the Irish word. It's just an English word that Irish people invented that means idiot. But then the other one, Matt, if they're a bit more than an idiot and they're a bit more annoying, you can call them a gobshite. Oh, yeah. That one's pretty good. You might have heard it through Follow Ted. Yeah, I've heard it through Follow Ted.

You're right, actually. But there's a thing with gobshite that you can do, which is reserved for when somebody is the ultimate gobshite, like when they're really, really annoying. And then you can call them a gobshite of the highest order, that's true. I like that. Yep. First of my gobshite.

Truly unparalleled in the gobshite-ness. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. My dad said that many times to me. Yeah. There, there we go. That's your Northern Irish lesson for today.

Now, are these things that just old people say, or young people are on board with all this? No, you'll hear. I mean, depends on which one. But yeah, no, they're in common usage still. Good to know. Good. Yeah.

Very good. Well, top of the morning to you, Chris. Top of the morning. I'll be off to catch me. Putter cold. Bye-bye. Bye.