Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Michael Knowles: Speechless (#160)

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Michael Knowles is the celebrated host of “The Michael Knowles Show” at the Daily Wire, “The Book Club” at PragerU, and “Verdict with Ted Cruz.” In 2017, Michael published the #1 national bestselling treatise Reasons to Vote for Democrats, which President Donald Trump hailed as “a great book for your reading enjoyment.” In late 2020, after an appearance guest-hosting “The Rush Limbaugh Program,” it was announced that Michael’s daily podcast would be syndicated to terrestrial radio. Michael has appeared regularly on Fox News Channel and other major networks, and his writing has been featured on the Daily Wire, the American Mind, Fox News, and the Daily Caller. Michael is a graduate of Yale University and has lectured at colleges and universities around the country. Thanks to our sponsors! https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible http://betterhelp.com/impossible The Culture War is over, and the culture lost. His latest book is Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling MindsThe Left’s assault on liberty, virtue, decency, the Republic of the Founders, and Western civilization has succeeded. You can no longer keep your social media account—or your job—and acknowledge truths such as: Washington, Jefferson, and Columbus were great men. Schools and libraries should not coach children in sexual deviance. Men don’t have uteruses. How did we get to this point? Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire exposes and diagnosis the losing strategy we have fallen for and shows how we can change course—and start winning. In the groundbreaking Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds Knowles reveals: How the “free speech absolutists” gave away the store The First Amendment does not require a value-neutral public square How the Communists figured out that their revolution could never succeed as long as the common man was attached to his own culture Where political correctness came from How, comply or resist, political correctness is a win-win game for the bad guys Why taking our stand on “freedom of speech” helps put atheism, decadence, and nonsense on the same plane with faith, virtue, and reality The real question: Will we shut down drag queen story hour, or cancel Abraham Lincoln? For 170 years the First Amendment was compatible with prayer in public school How the atheists got the Warren Court to rule their way To this day, there’s a First Amendment exception for obscenity. What exactly is the argument that perverts’ teaching toddlers to twerk is not obscene? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Michael Knowles, author of many books, many wonderful books now, some with words, some without. If you put together his previous book, which I have here, reasons to vote for Democrats, if you put it next to and combine it with speechless, you get a pretty good book. You get kind of the time, the sum total of a career. Brian, I fear that, you know, I've spent about a year writing this book. I think it's making points that have not really been made in the conservative space. I think it's making very important points about political correctness, about language, about censorship.

And the simple fact is, it will never live up to my first book. It was my first blank book was the magnum opus. This, I hope, is my modest sequel. Well, indeed it is. And if nothing else, just the footnotes and the citations. at the very end are the length of a normal best-selling page-turning book. And this is, I got it two days ago from one of your assistants there. I want to thank you for that.

But unfortunately, it's so large that, you know, I haven't gotten past the equations in Chapter 4 yet. So I'm working through those equations. I salute you for all of Einstein's general relativistic field equations. We'll get to all that at the end. Why am I having Michael Knowles on the Into the Impossible podcast, the top 10 science podcast on iTunes? and other places. Well, he is a scientist. He is a knowledge maven. He has deconstructed and reconstructed our popular culture. And he and I have been together. We've talked about Galileo and his contributions to not only to science, but to writing as well. And you can look for an episode.

I'll put a link to our book club episode that we did together. And he's also, he's been a guest on the podcast before. But today, it's to celebrate the release of his new book, which came out today. it's called Speechless. And so, Michael, I love to play a game, which is called, you know, cover, judging, you know, judging a book by its cover. So I want to ask you, this is kind of obvious how you got up with this cover. How did you come up with the cover and the title of speechless? So the title of speechless was a little bit of a nod to my first work, which had no words. This has many words, and it's speechless.

But the full title is controlling words and controlling minds. and the cover, you know, is the guy with the gag on his mouth. Now, the reason for this is I know that there's been a lot of right-wing talk about how we're being silenced by the left and we support free speech and they're censoring us. And unfortunately, I think that so much of that talk about wokeness and political correctness and cancel culture has been shallow. I think that in many ways the victim narrative that the right has portrayed, that we are the stalwart defenders of absolute total.

free speech and the lefters, they're the authoritarian censors. I think, look, that may be true right now, but that doesn't really get to the whole picture, okay? The fact is that in the 1950s, you could be canceled for being a communist, and it wasn't the left canceling you, it was conservatives canceling you for being a communist, and the fact is today you can be canceled for being an anti-communist, and that's a problem too. But really what we're describing here is not just the purely negative, terrible thing that happens now of how people control words to control minds, but how really whoever is controlling the words is controlling the minds. The words that we use, the pronouns and the verbs and the nouns and the adjectives and all the other words do shape the way

that we view the world. And there are going to be limits to what we can say. Language itself imposes limits. If we call, for instance, Bruce Jenner, Caitlin Jenner now a she, then we are not calling him a he. If Caitlin Jenner really is a she, then that says something about reality. That says something about the limits of what we are permitted to perceive in the society. And the right used to understand this. The right used to understand that there are limits to speech and to society, and that there are just standards, I guess, is what you'd call it. And the left, I think successfully engaged in a campaign to destroy those standards from 1920 to say 1960, 1970, when it really broke into the main that was called

political correctness. And they've now convinced the right that we should abandon standards entirely. So you'll notice the more and more we fight back against political correctness over the last 30, 40 years, the more ground we have lost, both the people who give into the left's new standards, obviously they've caused us to lose ground. But even the people who say, you know, I'm a free speech absolutist. I think they've caused us to lose ground, too. I think this is a trap laid by PC, and I think either way, those traditional standards are abandoned, and the left, because nature abhors a vacuum, has filled that vacuum with their own radical standard that's totally redefined society. So I knew you would bring in some physics there. You're dropping some Aristotle on us already

with nature abhors a vacuum. You know, most of what Aristotle said about physics turns out to be absolutely wrong, that there were only four elements, earth, air, wind, and fire, that heavy things fall faster than lighter things, all things that he could have observed with his eyes, as Galileo would later do, as you and I discussed, as we talked about the parapetetics. But on contradistinction to his laws on physics, his thoughts on politics are run through, speechless, and you really trace that through line and make it very bright. I want to ask, what is the legacy of Aristotle? And how do you reconcile this guy who got so much wrong about observable things? things and yet was so right about things that are purely hypothetical or intellectual, like political animus,

the political animal that he described mankind as. Yes, Aristotle, for a guy who, you know, obviously he got some things wrong about the natural world, there's no debating that. Though I think we should give him a little bit of a break. He lived a very long time ago, did not have access quite the same technology that we do. And I think it's worth pointing out, actually getting back to our discussion of Galileo some months ago, Galileo got a lot of things wrong about the natural world. Actually, the central aspect, I suppose, of his famous discourses, he gets wrong the way that the tides were.

He gets a lot of things right, but he gets that wrong too. So yes, Aristotle, get some things wrong. And he did get right, by the way, as you and I discussed, you know, the very, very important to both of us, the notion that whales are mammals. Aristotle was the first to point that out. So Mazel to Aristotle to Arrissotov to Arrissol. But yeah, going to. So how did this notion, what is a political animal, are you a political animal, are we all political animals? Talk about that. We are not just us total political junkies who follow all the websites, but all of us are political animals. When Aristotle says that man is the political animal, he means that the defining feature of man

is that we are sociable. We form society. We are not, contrary to the modern, I think, ultra super duper libertarian or liberal idea, we're not just free-floating atoms. We're actually always in the state of nature or otherwise. We're always together. We're always forming societies. The word political refers to the polis, right, the Greek city state. And Aristotle says the thing that makes us political is our speech. Animals grunt and occasionally our politicians seem to grunt as well.

But you like to hope at their higher end that they're engaging in speech, which refers to objective reality and the way that we use speech, especially in a self-governing republic such as ours, is we use it to persuade one another. We use it to have debate. We use it to try to make sense of the world and how we're all going to get along together in accordance with one another and in accordance with society. So when you control the language as the left has done, not just through the government, but through our educational institutions, through Hollywood, through the mass media through big technology, which will outright censor people now for saying perfectly ordinary and accurate things. When you control the speech in a society, you're not just controlling one

little aspect. You know, the First Amendment is not just one little amendment in the whole body politic. You're really controlling the whole thing. This is why when Google or Facebook or Twitter, these handful of oligarchs in Silicon Valley, hipster Rasputin out there, Mr. Jack Dorsey, when they control speech, they're really controlling our whole politics. And so this is not just a side issue or an aspect of the culture war. Really, when we're talking about political correctness, we're talking about the whole damn thing. And what do you say to those critics who say, and these are just some people I've had on my show, Dave Rubin, a man by the name of Ben Shapiro, I've heard of those guys.

Michael Shermer, James Lindsay, who I know, Heather McDonald, who I know, I haven't had Candace Owens on. I don't know if I will. I don't know how much thermodynamic energy I can handle. She's the force of nature. She is, yeah. Senator Ted Cruz, who you share the verdict podcast with. Shout out to that.

And Ann Coulter, I haven't heard her on. Not sure I will. But anyway, all these Encomia appear in and on your book. Michael, I have to give you a tip as someone who's written a book that had words in it before. You've got to leave some room for people to buy the book. You know, if you set the only book, now they're not going to buy it. Anyway, so how can you, you know, this supposedly victim, potentially victim of cancellation, how can you decry this when all these people, these ladies and gentlemen, have written books

about the evil, you know, suppression of speech and ideas coming from the left? How can you say that with all these books? And that's just a handful of the ones I've mentioned that have been on my show. There are lots of very prominent people who have endorsed speechless. And I'm very appreciative to them, lots of political people from different, whole different parts of the right. You've got people like Adrian Vermewell, who is a Harvard law professor. He's a Catholic integralist. You've got Ben Shapiro.

He's certainly not a Catholic integralist. He's probably more on the libertarian side of the conservative movement. Senator Cruz and Coulter, all sorts of people. Yes. I am not saying that I am being censored. I'm not saying that I've been canceled. There have been high-profile attempts to cancel me on occasion, and I'm pleased to say that I've survived those attempts.

even from powerful institutions. I'm reminded of Winston Churchill's phrase when he was describing, I think he was in Cuba at the time. Someone shot at him, and he survived, and he said, it was the first time I ever had the joy of being shot at to no effect.

That's right. It's a very nice thing. But I'm not saying that I'm being censored right now. I'm saying something a little more dire. We are all being rendered speechless. It doesn't matter how many people download my podcast. Big Tech tries to censor my podcast on occasion, but sometimes they let them through.

Sometimes Amazon throws up some obstacles to listing this book. Sometimes they let it through. That's not the issue. The issue is the way in which the left has broadly reshaped what is in bounds and what is out of bounds in society. Truly today, if you go onto the Internet and you say that a transgender person, you know, a man who identifies as a woman, if you refer to that specific man as a man, you call him he, or you call him by his proper name instead of whatever new name he's adopted, you very likely will be taken off of the internet. Not 100% guaranteed the rules are opaque, but it's possible and probable, actually, that you will.

I give these speaking events at colleges around the country, and some of them, I think, are controversial, and some of them really are not controversial. And the only one where I was physically attacked was at the event that should have been the least controversial of all where I said this very topic, men are not women. If you come out and you say on the internet that there were any questions about the 2020 election, any hint of impropriety or fraud, if you point out the plain fact that the Pennsylvania election officials violated the state constitution in the way they conducted that election, you are liable to be taken off of the internet. Now, for some people, we have a big enough audience. We have a big enough

platform that big tech is going to think twice about taking us off or they'll do it in a very clever way. For a lot of people who don't have a large platform, their accounts will just be deleted. They will just be shut up. And it's arbitrary in many ways because there aren't fixed rules. There are double standards and triple and quadruple standards. But really what we're talking about here is the exercise of power. One of the observers of political correctness in its early days pointed out that political correct, I think it was Angelo Cotevilla, pointed out that political correctness is less about the rules themselves. The rules are always changing, the terms are always changing. It's much more about the imposition. Who can force you to say and think

what they want you to? So yes, I hope, and I expect that my book will be allowed to stay on big tech platforms, at least for now, have a nice big podcast and reach a lot of people. But what are the bounds of discourse? Now, the traditional. I don't even mean traditional. Over the last 15, 20 years, the conservative response to this, to the left imposing newer and more restrictive rules around our speech, has been to say, hey, we've got to get rid of all the rules entirely. You should be able to say whatever you want. And do they really mean this? Do they really mean that you should be able to walk up to the water cooler?

John from accounting walks up to the water cooler in his office. He's got a swastika arm band and he starts yelling Zig Heil in the workplace. He should really be allowed to do, I don't think. I don't think it would be cancel culture if he is fired. Conservatives once understood this. William F. Buckley Jr. used almost the same example. He said, academic freedom, as we understand it today, is really just a hoax. No one believes that Yale University's sociology department should hire a neo-Nazi

to teach about the superiority of the Aryan. No one thinks they would do that, nor should they. Of course there are going to be limits and standards. The question is, what are there? those standards and I think will conservatives have the philosophical sophistication and more importantly the courage to actually assert them. I once heard, you know, that hopefully Donald Trump lives a long life. I hope he has a nice time.

But someday death comes for us all. When he dies, one hopes that he donates his body to science and his spine to the conservative movement because I think so much of the reason we've lost our speech is because we are unwilling to exercise the virtue of courage. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed.

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One of the messages that comes through in the book is that, you know, as I often say, I think most debate is pointless. I don't know a single person who's gone into a debate. You know, thank you so much, Ida Bay Wells or, you know, whatever her name, Hannah, Hannah. Nicole Hannah Jones. Nicole Hannah Jones, yeah, Pulitzer Prize winner. You know, oh, thank you. You changed my mind, you know, thank you.

I can't imagine you and Ben Shapiro, you know, really coming to agreement on it. So what is the purpose of debate and putting it out there? And a through line in the book, as I take it, is that, you know, it's almost depressing if one is a conservative that, you know, the attempts to date have been one of compassionate conservatism of George Bush. And it's always the guy who is in office, you know, two offices ago that gets all the credit and he hugs, you know, the current president or, you know, and then he gets canceled last. And it's kind of that Churchill quipped that, you know, giving into the mob is like feeding an alligator hoping you get eaten last. But I wonder, you kind of come off a little bit depressive, or it's depressing if one is a conservative, to think that the more you fight, the worse it gets for, say, your side on the side of conservatism. So what do you make of the prospects for those on your side of the political aisle? Well, I'll give you hope. I remember there's a Chesterton quote that said it's the job of liberals to go on making mistakes, and it's the job of conservatives to make sure those mistakes are never corrected. And that's a little bit depressing. But I think there is hope.

You're so right to observe that I observed that these old Republicans are always considered wonderful guys, but the new Republicans are always Hitler. They called Reagan Hitler. They called the Bush's Hitler. They obviously, we remember, they called Trump Hitler, and they still are doing that. But then now George W. Bush has been rehabilitated because now he's a really nice guy. few conservatives are willing to make strong arguments. The two exceptions in recent memory are Reagan to some degree and Trump to some degree.

And what I mean by a strong argument is arguments that do not accept the premises of our opponents. Arguments that are not just working around the edges, trying to make things a little more efficient, you know, run the leftist programs, just a little bit better and manage it better. but actually challenge the fundamental assumptions. The one issue that I think conservatives have consistently done this on, and they actually have gained ground, is abortion. The abortion debate generally is not about managing around the edges and working here and there. The abortion debate is a debate from justice.

It's a debate from reality itself. It is simply a fact of nature that a baby is a baby, and a baby is not a duck-billed platypus, and a baby is not a giraffe, And a baby is not an appendage of his mother. A baby is a baby, and you should not kill that baby in the womb. And that's the way it is. That's the argument conservatives have made, and that is persuasive, I think.

But on so many other debates, we're unwilling to make that argument. You know, on the issue of the transgender bathrooms, for instance, we keep making the argument, well, it's harmful for women's sports, as if anyone really cares about women. Very few people care about women's sports. Those of us with daughters, we do care about women's sports. I mean, I don't mean to be flippant. Yes, I mean, you know, women, there are plenty of interesting women's sports.

I like seeing Venus and Serena Williams scream at the coaches and the referees at Wimbledon. Sure, of course. And it actually is very unfair for girls who are competing in track. Maybe they're trying to get scholarships or something. And then men come in and beat them. That is unfair. But I think that's a side point. I think the real argument against the radical transgender ideology that has infiltrated our government

and our boardrooms and our schools and our preschools, for goodness sakes, is the fact of nature that a human being cannot just change his sex. The philosophical premise that belies, or that is underneath transgenderism, is this gnostic heresy, this idea that my true self has nothing to do with my body. That's simply not true. We know that our person, as old uncle Aristotle will tell us has something to do with our body and something to do with our soul, something to do with the physical world, something to do with the metaphysical world. And that's an argument from justice, that's an argument from philosophy, and it's an argument a lot of conservatives don't want to make.

You know, getting back to your point on debate, think about the debate over redefining marriage. This to me was one of the most telling examples, regardless of what you think about whether or not we ought to call certain same-sex couples marriage or whether we shouldn't call same-sex couples marriage. We never had a debate over marriage. There was no debate. We had a very powerful radical interest in the institutions come in and call the rest of us bigoted if we held the view of marriage that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton held as late as what, 2012, I think the date was. If we held the view of marriage that everyone for all times in all places has held that sexual difference has something to do with marriage, we were suddenly awful, terrible bigots who didn't want to give gay people, poor oppressed gay people, the right to be married. The marriage debate never was about rights, properly understood.

The marriage debate was about a simple question. What is marriage and does sexual difference have something to do with marriage? but the institutions that control our culture, the media and the schools and the government, and the Supreme Court that ultimately decided it because of the romantic poetry of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who somehow found that the Constitution gives us a right to intimacy, which his colleague, Justice Scalia, quite rightly noted, intimacy is rather restricted by the institution of marriage. Ask the nearest hippie, was his line in the dissent. Anyway, I digress.

We never had that debate because those institutions shut it down. redefined marriage as having nothing to do with sexual difference. And so then when the debate became, hey, should people with different sexual preferences have the same rights? Well, of course they should. Nobody would suggest otherwise. The trick of that debate was that they had redefined the whole issue before anyone had the opportunity to actually debate it. So one example among many of how if you can control the language, if you control the words, you can control the whole culture. And then you can have a kind of mock debate, but that doesn't really matter. The debate was already won when they changed the words. I wonder, you know, by its nature, you know,

and I speak mostly as a political agnostic. You know, I've supported Democrats. I continue to support Democrats locally. I continue to support Republicans if that's, if they align with my value system, obviously. And, you know, sometimes it could be a one-issue voter if, you know, a particular topic is more important than others. But it seems to me if conservatives are naturally in a time lag scenario where they're reacting. We think of progressives as being reactive or reactionary, but actually by its nature, it seems to me, as a novice political theorist, that conservatism by its nature is fighting, you know, skating to where the puck was rather than where it's going. And I wonder with new technologies coming on board, and actually conservatism and your organization,

etc., being at the forefront of some of these things, you know, kind of preempting cancel culture by thinking, where's the puck going to go? And I'll give an example. Podcasting, you mentioned it. Podcasting is one of the more durable and less cancelable sorts of media that we have right now. Of course, it doesn't stop, you know, articles in the New York Times, you know, from coming down on people like our mutual friend Eric Weinstein

and other people try to cancel their podcast or what have you. But by the same token, you could post it on your own website, as long as Amazon decides not to take down AWS. And even that, you could get around. So what about, like, looking forward to where it's going to go? Instead of fighting the pronouns and fighting the marriage, equity battles, what's the next issue pre-gaming that, thinking where that's going to be, and then not reacting to it, but being out in front of it.

What do you think about that as a political threat? Well, the question is often framed, is this really the hill to die on? You know, there's some, and I think you're totally right. conservatives are usually quibbling over issues at way too late a stage at the point that we've already lost. The issue, of course, with the hills analogy is if you refuse to die on any hill, eventually there aren't any hills left. I don't have any interest in dying on a hill, but I think that one has to be willing to do that. One needs to be willing to risk something or else we've simply surrendered. And so, yes, you're right. We're always so behind the eight ball.

It seems that all we ever seem to do is try to, in Bill Buckley's words, stand athwart history yelling stop. And frankly, a lot of conservatives these days aren't even yelling stop. They're saying, well, slow down just a little bit, actually, go by a little more politely, please. So the question has to be, do we stand for anything? And if we do, what is it that we stand for? The reason I titled the book, Speechless, is beyond the joke of the blank book, is that we spend so much time on the right, prattling on about the abstract right to freedom of speech or the abstract right to freedom of belief. And yet, when we have the opportunity to say things,

we don't really have very much to say. We don't really seem to believe very much at all. This is why whenever Republicans have managed to rest a little political power out of the system over the last several decades, what's the only thing we ever managed to do, cut taxes. That's the One thing, we can always cut taxes a little bit, then they go right back up when the Democrats get in power. But we never seem to do anything else on every other major cultural issue we have lost. And the reason for that is that the right to free speech in the abstract means absolutely nothing to people who have nothing to say.

And when we think about where did these ideas come from, you know, the origin of it, you go over the history, the kind of Frankfurt School is a very illustrative history in the book. I enjoyed that. and seeing some kind of history, as Mark Twain said, rhyming if not repeating. But wanting to kind of move in a direction that I heard you speak about on your podcast,

Michael Moll's show, and I know you've talked about on your podcast with Senator Ted Cruz. And that's this notion of kind of McCarthyism. And I want to let you kind of give a full-throated defense of McCarthyism. But before I do, I want to point out, you know, I am affiliated with the Arthur C. Clark Center

for Human Imagination at UC, Diego, where we value academic freedom. We value freedom of speech, obviously. But we also value science fiction. And I want to take you back to my favorite science fiction book of all time, which is Fahrenheit 451. Fahrenheit 451, which I'm sure you're aware of, has a theme that ran through it with the overarching kind of menace of McCarthyism.

And Ray Bradbury said he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concern that the McCarthy era would lead to book banning, book burning, and in his later years commented on how mass media reduces the interest in reading literature, and that the threat was coming from the right. And you're now not only agreeing with him that the McCarthyism was from the right, but you're sort of seeming to intimate that it's maybe not an unhealthy thing. So let's talk about that. McCarthyism as a force for good? How could that possibly be, Michael?

It's a movement around which people of good moral fiber can can circle the wagons. This was the language of William F. Buckley Jr., most mainstream conservative ever there was, who wrote a book-length defense of McCarthy. In later years, he came to temper some of that defense, really for more practical reasons, actually, than anything, because McCarthy sort of self-sabotaged.

But for many years, Buckley defended McCarthy, and for good reason. To this point on Fahrenheit 451, the prediction was that if we do not stop Joseph, McCarthy and McCarthyism, why then we'll get books banned, books burned, we'll live in this dictatorship of an increased censorship. That could never happen. So, well, what happened? We defeated McCarthyism, and now we've never burned books nearly as much as we are doing right now in America. I think that the fears of McCarthyism were extraordinarily overblown.

I think that the anti-McCarthy forces, also known as the communists, that's who he was fighting, and the fellow travelers and the useful idiots of the communists are far more liable to burn books and censor people. And worse yet, they're going to burn bad books, rather they're going to burn good books, and they're going to censor people who have something important to say. You know, Joe McCarthy during his life, before he unfortunately kind of sabotaged and fizzled out, had some great admirers from across the political aisle, not just Bill Buckley, not just virtually every prominent conservative, but the Kennedys.

I mean, John F. Kennedy was a big admirer of Joe McCarthy. When Joe McCarthy died, Robert F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, attended his funeral. I mean, they were really staunch defenders of the man. What McCarthy, the history of McCarthyism has been so horribly revised by fiction writers, who masquerade as historians. But the claim about McCarthy is that there were no communists in the government. It was a red scare. That's just simply not true.

We know there were very high-profile communists in the government. We prosecuted them. Most notably, Al Jir Hiss, who was a high-ranking State Department official. He had been at the DOJ. He was a spy for the Soviet Union. He helped form the United Nations. And actually, the way that we found out about him was because his former communist ally, Whitaker Chambers, came out and testified against him and wrote an excellent book on this called Witness.

So that was true. Harry Dexter White, a top-ranking communist in the federal government. I mean, this was really happening. And they say that McCarthy never got a conviction. McCarthy's job was not to prosecute. McCarthy was the United States Senator. McCarthy was able to bring names. There were many, many communists who were prosecuted in the United States,

as well they should have been. You know, there was a separate issue, which is the Hollywood blacklist. communists were being blacklisted in Hollywood. And I find it so rich when cultural conservatives today who say that we need to take back the culture, take back Hollywood, take back the academy, when they speak ill of the Hollywood blacklist, these same cultural conservatives are implicitly calling

for blacklisting communists. We are implicitly saying, in some cases, at least in my case, explicitly saying we need to kick the communists out of Hollywood. We need to kick them out of the academy. They are undermining students' education. There is a thought that stops thought, and that thought ought to be stopped, to quote G.K. Chesterton. Radical theories that contributed to political correctness, like critical race theory, which is a derivation of the Frankfurt School Project of Critical Theory, that actually undermines a student's education. And I'll give you an example of how. The premise of some of these

kooky academic theories, notably critical race theory, is that objective truth does not exist. There is no objective truth. There is no objective reality. Everything is words, words, words. Everything is socially constructed. We can remake society as we like. Some other radical theorists from the 20th century, I think of people like Jacques Derrida, who says there is no outer text, which has been interpreted to me, there's nothing outside

of the text. It's all just words. if you teach a student that they cannot rely on their faculties of reason, that there is no such thing as objective truth. You are not expanding their education. You are undermining their education, because education relies on the existence of our faculties of reason and on objective truth.

When we talk about expanding the curriculum, you'll hear this a lot, they'll say at Yale they did it. We need to decolonize the English department, to expand it and make it, first of all, I don't know. How do you decolonize an English department by kicking out all the English writers? That seems like colonizing. It doesn't seem like decolonizing,

but neither here nor there. They say we need to be more inclusive, and so we're going to add, I don't know, into the curricula, we're going to add some useless writer like Robin DiAngelo, these race hustling people, or Ebram Kendi,

all the critical race theorists. That does not expand the curriculum. You know this very well. You cannot expand a curriculum because there's only so many weeks in the semester. There are only so many hours to teach. And you have to make certain choices. And when you teach one thing, you are inevitably not teaching something else. And, you know, the left understands this very well.

The right used to understand this very well. And I think the right has just bought into the left's crazy talking points now. And so the language that we use on McCarthyism or free speech or, or academic freedom or whatever. This is all the language that the left used to use in the 1960s and 70s is, I think, a disingenuous ploy. And conservatives then opposed it. Now, the only people left using this kind of shallow language, I think,

is the squishy right, and it's why I think we've lost so much ground. Yeah, I mean, just hearkening to the college campus that I inhabit, UC San Diego. And, you know, we can take you next time you come to town, We can go have a meal at the Che Cafe. So we have a cafeteria named after Che Guevara, with his painting on it lovingly adorned, along with Carl Marx and many other people. And the comment I always wonder is,

do these students who come from all different racial and gender orientations and so forth, do they know his history? And I don't think that they do. I don't think that they know what a vicious, racist person he was, what a homophob he was. And it's painful to walk by kind of an illustration of such a person, along with Karl Marx. And that really brings up this comment that I feel nowadays is really quite pernicious, which is that the academy is also accusing itself of being systemically racist.

In other words, that the physics department that I inhabit potentially, or physics in general or journals like nature and science, that they can be riven with anti-black racism, et cetera. At one hand, it seems impossible almost taught to logical for me to refute it. I know if I see a racist, I want to punch him in the face. I hate racism. I hate anti-Semitism. As a Jew, I've suffered from anti-Semitism. It's still the best country in the world to live in as a Jew, right? But the point is, I find these notions abhorrent, and yet I'm told that I have to receive

training in order to combat my implicit racism. But I say, wait a second, I don't know anybody who's going to admit that they're a racist, and I'm certainly not a racist. I hate racism. I really, I do. And so because of that, we can't falsify it. And that really brings up this notion of Carl Popper, who said that the notion of real science is that which can be falsified.

And at the time, in the 30s, he was really arguing against systems like dialectical materialism and communism and phrenology and even psychology and dream interpretation. But anyway, we get into the situation. If I call you Michael, I say, Michael, you're, what anti-Semitism are you working on today? I mean, you can't refute that. So do you have any advice for academics that find racism abhorrent, detestable, hateful, and repugnant to us? But we also don't want to say that, you know, we have to undergo training to become less racist because I don't feel than I am. And then I'm told that that's a sentiment of, you know, exhibiting my potential dissent into this abhorrent trait.

So where do you take this? Where does this all lead to? You say this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

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Here's how I respond to these people. Brian, you might be familiar with this gesture, but I will instruct your audience, if not. You take your hand and you put it underneath your chin and you flick your hand out. This is an Italian gesture. Antonin Scalia got in trouble for doing this to a report. It means, no me ne frega, I don't care.

I don't care what you have to say, you crazy people. It's so silly, because by the way, not only is it unfalsifiable when they accuse you of the implicit racism, but if you refute it, if you protest, They will say that your protestation, your denial, is evidence of your even greater racism. That if you were slightly less racist, you would at least be aware of what a vicious racist you are. It's all very silly stuff. It's not worth taking seriously.

These sorts of people, the deputy assistant, deputy deputy, deputy dean of inclusion in diversity and diversity. They are mere parasites and leeches on the university. The Robin DeAngelo's of the world are absolute extortion artists. You saw this actually recently with Patrice Cullors, who was the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and a valid Marxist herself. She recently had to step down because she managed to transform BLM from Black Lives Matter into by large mansions. She was caught spending millions of dollars on these mansions. And the way she got the money, by the way, was not embezzling it from the cash-rich $60 million cash-on-hand BLM organization.

They raised 90 last year. It's because she had a separate group that was a consulting firm. She'd go into local governments and other organizations. And she would say, look, if you want my stamp of approval that you're not racist, you need to pay me money to give you these sorts of ridiculous training session. And that's documented, Michael? That's been documented. That is documented. It's actually, it wasn't the conservatives that uncovered this.

It was actually other rival BLM organizations who got a little upset that she was skimming so much money that they looked into it. And she all but admitted this recently when she resigned from the organization. So, you know, to me it's a total grift, it's a con. There's no reason to pay attention to it. The question that I ask these people when they throw this word racism around,

a word that has now been defined into nothingness, is I ask them, why is racism wrong? Why is it wrong? Why is it a bad thing? I think it's a bad thing. I don't engage in it. But I think it's wrong. because man is made in the image of God.

So racism is an offense against human dignity. Simple, it's easy. I don't need to, you know, flagellate. Well, as a Catholic, I suppose I could flagellate myself anyway, but I don't need to go on and on about, oh, no, seriously, believe me, I'm not a, it's very simple. Not a racist because I believe man's made in the image of God, and it's an affront to human dignity.

Done. Spick and spam. Why do you, woke person, believe that racism is a bad thing? They won't have it. They usually don't believe in God. They certainly don't believe in human dignity. They won't have an answer to it. Actually, their answer will usually be that, I don't know,

black people or name whatever victim group is a special class and deserves special privileges, which of course reveals that they themselves are engaging in a sort of racism. To say that white people are irredeemable, which is what many of them say, is to engage in a kind of racism. So what you reveal, of course, is what they refer to as racism is nothing,

of the sort. It's just a cudgel. It's just a word with which they can beat their political opponents into silence and leave them speechless. When I, yeah, how he turned back to the cover of the book, it's a good, Truman Capote would be proud of you. He said, a boy must hustle his book. But let me take the steel man opposing position.

So also at UC San Diego, we were the first university to offer a tenured position to a physicist by the name named of Maria Gepart Mayor. She was a Jewish woman, but she was also a woman. And she was denied a tenure role at University of Chicago, at Argonne, at Hopkins. And we were one of the first institutions to take her. And actually, she had some difficulty along with other people getting housing in the early 60s because there was a covenant against Jews buying property. You shall not, it said, in the original title to my home in San Diego and in La Jolla, it said, you shall not sell to a black, a Jew, or a Mexican.

So I, by the way, parenthetically, I think scientifically racism is evil and abhorrent and self-destructive because we know that, but merely assuming the most basic characteristics about a person are somehow indicative of their intellectual power and shutting that out of the scientific endeavor, that is intrinsically anti-scientific. If I judge somebody and say, because they're black or because they're a woman, that is repugnant and abhorrent. But it's fundamentally anti-scientific also. It's excluding scientific progress, and no good scientist worth his or her or their salt would want to exclude scientific progress and preclude it. We'll go into more detail on that later. But I want to ask you, I asked Heather McDonald, your fellow Yale graduate. I said, Heather, do you think scientists have changed in 100 years? And she said, no, science is about a meritocracy.

And I said, oh, yeah, well, Einstein couldn't win the Nobel Prize for about 15 or 16 years because he was basically because he was a Jew. And if you don't think that science has changed over time, as I don't either, how can you really refute the statement that, that, you know, science is systemically plagued with sexism, with racism, et cetera. In other words, we had bans, we had covenants, we had restrictions against Jews and women and blacks. Why is that not, why are you so confident that that's not an issue today, Michael? Yes, no, I think this is a very important point, and I think it's one where conservatives get things pretty wrong. You know, the language, that has cropped up over the last 30, 40 years about equality of opportunity and about how, you know, everybody in America is on equal footing today. I think it's a little overstated. I mean, certainly people have immense opportunity here today. But history matters. I wish conservatives would recognize. We seem to know that, at least when we're speaking specifically about the study of history, but then we don't apply it to the situation today.

It is a fact. Half my family came over on a sardine boat, but the other half came over on the Mayflower, and I can trace my lineage back, and it gives me a certain perspective on the country. And I suspect, no matter how much I loved my country and how grateful I were, if my ancestors had come over on a slave ship, I would have a different perspective. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews.

We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur Seekings. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating.

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