Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 350 | Explaining the 'Logic' of Leftist Hypocrisy | Guest: James Lindsay

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

Joining us today is mathematician and author James Lindsay, who has been spending his time trying to educate regular people on the realities of the woke movement. James breaks down the mindset of the progressive Left and the historical origins of the radical rhetoric we're seeing today. --- Today's Sponsor: Ettitude creates bedding essentials that are comfortable for you & the environment. Go to Ettitude.com/Allie and use promo code 'ALLIE' to save 20% off your order & get FREE shipping! --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys. Welcome to Relatable. Happy Tuesday. Hope everyone is having a good week.

So we've got a special episode for you today. I am talking to James Lindsay. He's the author of Cynical Theories. He is also the president of new discourses. and we, he's an expert on critical theory. And we're going to talk about a lot of what's going on right now with the censorship. Some of the rhetoric that we're seeing from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris about splitting up people by their racial groups. Where that comes from, where these ideas and these policies come from.

We're also going to talk about who Biden tapped as the head of the civil rights division of the DOJ. She had some interesting things to say. about people of different races back when she was at Harvard. And so you're really, really going to enjoy his analysis. He has so many interesting things to say. And I'm going to have him back on in a couple months, too, to talk a little bit more about the philosophical origins of all of this craziness. But I'm so excited for you to listen to this interview. It really was supposed to be a short interview. It ended up being, it was supposed to be 10 minutes. It ended up being like 45 minutes long because I couldn't stop talking to him and asking him questions, and I could have kept

going for like another two hours. And so I know that you guys are going to feel the same way when you listen to it. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false. comfort, we ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're

looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this T-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. James, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. Can you tell everyone quickly who you are and what you do? I am the founder and president, I suppose, of new discourses, which is a company that is trying to articulate what's happening with the woke movement. I'm trying to build a bridge in a sense between their academic literature, their activist literature, and everyday people, or at least smart, everyday people. So it's that kind of, I describe it as peeling the onion. If you think of how an onion's constructed, if you want to cook an onion and, you know, you can do whatever you.

want with it, it's got that thick papery layer on the outside. And that's sort of like what I'm trying to take off so that even if you want to fry the onion, if you want to make onion rings, whatever you want to do with it, you can do that. But I've got to get the thick, tough, papery outside off. And that's what I do at new discourses. Other than that, I've written some books. Most recently, a book called cynical theories that explains the postmodern elements of the woke movement. And so mostly I explain the woke movement all the time. My background, I have a PhD in mathematics. So I'm not from the humanities. I don't work in the university anymore. I do this full time. So I think that's kind of who I am and what I do. Yeah. And are you surprised that the work

that you do has placed you in common cause with people on the right that people really regard you now as a conservative, even though you might not identify as that? I'm not surprised, but it wasn't something that if you would have said, you know, two years ago that I would have believed, I would have said, well, there's some hints that, you know, the conservatives are going to be more receptive to this than the people on the left. But I think all reasonable people will. And that turned out not to be true at all. reasonable got overridden by bipartisanship. So I've been pleasantly surprised, I think, to find quite a warm welcome from my many new friends on the right and in religious circles. And I think it's been kind of more pleasant than not, to be honest with you. It's a very eye-opening as well.

Right. And you voted for Donald Trump. And the last time I talked to you, you told me that you have voted for Democrats, your entire adult life, but not this time. Over the past week or so, as we've seen a lot of the chaos go on, do you regret that at all? Or do you still, you know, stand by the decision to vote the way you did November? Oh, I don't regret it a bit. I still completely stand by that decision. I am still very, very worried about what a Biden administration is likely to do with regard, especially to the work that I do, which is about that woke movement. For example, we've already heard with the events at the Capitol, Biden characterized it as being, you know, it would have been totally different, he said, had it been black people.

He stoked that racial fire. He's already made indications, for example. openly said, I think it was on Twitter either yesterday or the day before, that we're going to have to now start doing this building back better program, and we're going to do that with racial equity in mind. And he named specifically racial minority groups in the U.S. that are going to be favored under his program. That's been on his website all along. I don't believe that any of this is going to help. In fact, I think it's all going to make things worse.

that's even compared with the fact that Trump became kind of a singular object of focus that stoked the culture war to the fevered pitch that it's at presently. So no, I don't regret my decision. And I also, just to be up front, I don't agree with the consensus view of what happened at the Capitol, which is not to say I have an alternative explanation of what happened at the Capitol. My position has remained. I don't know what happened at the Capitol and neither do you. And so I don't jump on bandwagons very easily or very quickly. It took me months to decide even after studying all of this for so long that I would vote for Donald Trump. And you can see, I talked to

Glenn Beck over the summer and he was like, who are you going to vote for? I was like, nobody. I'm going to vote for myself. And I talked to Jack Murphy before that. And he was like, are you going to pull the trigger? And they kind of did his whole like emotional guilt thing at the end. And I'm like, I can't vote for Trump. He's part of the same problem. And so then finally, it took until October or something for me to decide that I would vote for Trump and to get over that. So I don't jump on bandwagons very easily. And I'm not jumping on that bandwagon yet either. I want to go back to something that you said, in particular about the threat that you see of wokeness within the Biden administration. And tangibly, what you see is the consequences of that.

But first I want to play the clip that you talked about that we saw on Twitter of Joe Biden saying that he is going to prioritize black, Latino, Asian, small business owners. Our priority will be black, Latino, Asian, and Native American owned small businesses, women-owned businesses. And finally, having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild. So can you translate this for us? Basically, he listed every demographic besides white male business owners. Was Asian on there, by the way? Did I see Asian? Asian was on there.

Yes, I know in the world. Because they often get lumped into white now. Right, right. And some people listening to this really have no idea what we're talking about. We're talking about wokeness or intersectionality. So can you translate as the person who is peeling back the skin of the onion? What Biden is saying and what he really means. Okay.

So the key thing to point out is where he says that we're finally going to give them equal access to the resources of society. because the point of view from which they're coming is one under a heading that's called critical race theory. I can say that now and people kind of know what I'm talking about, you've at least heard of it. Critical race theory begins with the assumption that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society and that it has not been improved upon. In fact, it only has been hidden better over all of the different things that we've done, like abolishing slavery, ending Jim Crow, ending segregation in schools and in workplaces, passing the Civil Rights Act, the critical race theory holds that those things didn't end racism,

they just hid it more successfully from people and made them less aware that they're participating in racism. So there's this belief that they're coming from, and Biden actually acknowledges that belief explicitly, that we're finally going to give them equal access to the resources of society. The belief says that that is not the case, and it has never been the case. And And until there's a complete, this is truly the belief in critical race theory, that until the system itself is overthrown and replaced with a new one constructed by these race theorists, that it's not possible for there to be equal access to the, uh, the resources and opportunities.

What are they mean by resources? And what do they mean by equal access? Money and power are the resources, frankly. So, uh, and also, how do I phrase it? cultural, being viewed equally, like in a very culturally relativistic sense that all cultures are exactly identical in terms of their capacity to produce success. So the view from critical race theory is that when you hear this phrase cultural racism is that the reason that black people are actually not as successful in the United States is in part because black culture

is not held in equal esteem to white culture. We have a predominant white culture and that black culture is different. You'll notice that this assigns cultures to races, which is a racist thing to do. So it's a very difficult way to think about the world until you understand how they think about it. But this is what they're talking about. So when you talk about access to the resources of society, we're primarily talking about money. And with Biden, that's explicitly what's being discussed here and power. And so with money, what will happen is there will be these so-called equity programs.

And the equity programs are being used to prioritize access to money. With the COVID pandemic, it'll be prioritizing access to vaccines. They've said that they're going to do this by race to, and I quote, level the playing field, which in practice is a literally means having to let older white and other people die. of the virus because we have to level that playing field apparently. So those are the kinds of resources that can also include freedom or ability to travel. And that's the rubric of equity. And under the rubric of diversity, it will be access to power.

So it'll be positions that are higher up in companies or in government. You see Joe Biden appointing people explicitly doing so, as he says, because that they have certain racial or sex characteristics. And so access to money, power, including the basic liberties to participate in society. Like it could be connected through COVID to the ability to travel. If they prioritize the vaccine and then say people who aren't vaccinated can't travel, then they can do that way and make it just your even basic freedom to move. Gotcha.

And tell me that for the people who are listening to this and they're like, you know, that doesn't sound like that's actually going to be the tangible consequence. He's just talking about equity. Who doesn't want equity? He's just talking about equality. He doesn't want equality. When I posted about this on Twitter that this is partiality, he claims to be a devout Catholic.

The Bible explicitly speaks against partiality. The pushback that I got is, well, what's wrong with finally allowing these people? to just have the same kind of power and influence his money as white men have always had. Why are you so hateful? Why are you trying to push back against these disenfranchised groups? And it's really hard, obviously, to engage in this in a Twitter conversation. Thomas Soul calls this cosmic justice that is not actually accomplished without injustice. You have to discriminate and hold back one group and push forward other groups, therefore not seeing people as individuals who might actually be disenfranchised in some way,

whether they're white or black, but seeing people as part of a collection or a whole group that is just from our own perspective has been oppressed. And so it necessarily leads to some kind of other oppression or injustice. How do I explain that in layman's terms to people who haven't read your books, who haven't read Thomas Soul, and who really just think that we don't want any kind of fairness or equality for people who may or may not have been disenfranchised? It's not easy because it really frequently comes down to haggling about the meanings of words. Yeah. And for example, use the word disenfranchised. Technically with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, full enfranchisement was given to all people of all demographics and was protected.

So nobody's been disenfranchised for a very long time in that regard. So when I say that, I'm not trying to make a, oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, that kind of an argument. It's we have to haggle about what you mean by the word disenfranchised before we can even start to have this conversation is the very difficult part. Because if you look, for example, at the way that different groups are succeeding in society, what you find is that the narrative that is being pushed by, say, critical race theory or by Joe Biden in this case, bears very little resemblance to reality. For example, they are claiming that race is a determining factor, okay, that requires you to be able to explain why South and East Asians and very dark black, on average, Nigerian immigrants are the most successful groups in the United States by most of the outcome metrics.

And they can't. It also requires you to explain if white people have always... had access to money and power and privilege, why white Appalachian people are overwhelmingly, statistically, the poorest and most ridden with deep societal problems like deaths of despair and opioid addiction and so on. And so the narrative that they're pushing is a very simplistic one that does not match reality. And so when you say, well, why don't you care about the enfranchisement of these people, you have to specify which people you mean. And then you have to then figure out how race becomes or remains the relevant variable. And then when you push that against

the picture of the Civil Rights Act, which made it absolutely illegal, what are we talking about? 56 years ago made it absolutely illegal to disenfranchise people intentionally by race or by sex. It's very difficult to say what's going on there. Now, by the way, speaking of, you know, you mentioned Thomas Sowell and he talked about cosmic justice. Thomas Sol, I would put on the good guy's side of this argument. There's a bad guy side that you have to bring up this philosopher, one of the critical theorists from the Frankfurt School, named Herbert Marcusa, who was very prominent at Columbia University and eventually at UC, I think San Diego, where he was the mentor to the black activist Angela Davis, who is prominent within Black Lives Matter and so on.

He was, in fact, her mentor, Angela Davis says that he radicalized her. He wrote an essay in 1965 called Repressive Tolerance in which he called this exactly what you're seeing discriminating tolerance. And he also referred to the same discriminating tolerance as liberating tolerance and as repressive tolerance. And the idea that he was pushing is that we should only, and this is explicit in what he says. I'm not, I'm not, uh, editorializing this. He explicitly says that we should not be tolerant of right-wing movements, even if we have to use violence to suppress them, but we must be tolerant of left-wing movements, even when they are violent because of the goals that the liberation goals that they seek to achieve.

So what we see is a profound logic of asymmetry that's being pushed on a narrative that doesn't, like there are big question marks around if racism is the determining very, Why are South Asians, East Asians, and Nigerian immigrants the most successful groups in the United States if you talk about their ability for educational or financial attainment? Yeah. So you're saying the consistency is not the goal of critical race theory. They're not concerned with, okay, well, we denounced violence. If we denounce the violence at the Capitol, we have to denounce the violence that happened over the summer. So they're actually operating from what is in a very strange sense, actually a congruent worldview. you're arguing that says, well, the reason why someone like AOC or Iona Presley can say unrest is okay because there's unrest in their lives or protesters are supposed to make people feel uncomfortable even as there are people who are being murdered in these riots. The reason why they don't have to denounce those, but they can say what happened at the Capitol is domestic terrorism

is because they're actually operating not just from a place of hypocrisy, but from what they see is a very consistent and a congruent worldview, which is that liberation, what they see is liberation. We would obviously disagree with that. What they see as liberation is worth murder. It's worth arson. It is worth looting whatever it takes. That's what they're going to do to accomplish that. These goals, whatever they may be of storming the capital, they're not good because they are allegedly right-wing goals. And therefore, violence is all of the sudden very bad. Is that kind of the mentality? I don't even think they realized that's the mentality, but is that where they're coming from without knowing it? Yeah, that is the logic of repressive tolerance, which,

again, I'll point out, that was written in 1965, and then it was circulated very rapidly. Marcusa at the time was a rock star in radical left circles. It was written in 1965, and then we saw massive riots in 67, 68, and 69. That logic has mainstreamed again, primarily since 2015 and what do we see through 2020 riots. And we see people who have taken on that logic doing the exactly exactly as you just perfectly expressed it. You see these people showing a very asymmetric analysis of what is and is not acceptable. Now, to be completely fair to Marcusa, which isn't going to make him sound very good, in that essay, he says explicitly that all violence is always evil. Then he goes on in the next sentence to say, however,

when have ethics ever been relevant to the making of history? So this is the argument from which they're coming. So they have an internally consistent logic that doesn't match with logic. They have an internally consistent moral framework that doesn't match morality as we should understand it in a bigger picture sense. Yeah. And they're kind of unable to explain, I think, where it's coming from, what I've seen on social media as well, this is just different.

They are, the people over the summer, they were, you know, protesting and rioting for the safety of black bodies. And we could even talk about that phrase and how strange it is and where it comes from. These people, you know, they just believed a lie. This is totally illegitimate, probably not even realizing that they're actually starting with a philosophical premise that has some kind of history. They're just repeating the talking points. I've been very disappointed. You know, you and I have talked about some people in the woke evangelical world who are so bravely coming out against the Capitol Storm, which I agree.

I'm against political violence of all kinds. So call it out, condemn it, absolutely. But who had nothing to say about the communities who were destroyed last year. I know for a fact that some of the people writing these articles like Dr. Russell Moore, for example, that he would not call himself a critical race theorist. He probably wouldn't call himself a last. He certainly wouldn't say that he subscribes to anything at the Frankfurt School. And yet we see this lack of consistency that seems to be justified by, well, the ends justify the means kind of thinking that it just, it really blows my mind.

You would better than I would even. I don't know. The atheists were fairly astute on this point as well. But you will understand very well that there are lots and lots and lots of people. who call themselves Christian, who may or may not qualify, and I would in fact say do qualify, in the broad sense, who have read virtually none of the Bible. And unfortunately, Russell Moore is not one of those people. Well, this is the point that I'm making is that he doesn't have to have read a page of the

Frankfurt School to have adopted the same belief structure. And so I know so many Christians whose favorite Bible verse would be something like God helps those who help themselves, which is not only. Not in the Bible. It is not, it is an anti-Christian sentiment. Right. And so it was a, it was one of those strong agnostic or deistic sentiments from the 18th century. And so, and that's their favorite Bible verse. So here what you definitely can have.

So that's a Christian who's taken on an atheistic worldview without realizing it. Here you can have a person who's taken on this very broadly critical worldview without having, without having realized it, they can have taken on the fundamental asymmetry, the fundamental premises of critical race theory and repressive tolerance without having fully realized that that's what they're doing. So the second, they set a different standard that's based in race, and they say, well, look at the history of injustice in this country, and then they go one step further from that point and say that therefore makes us think that there are systemic injustices in this country

today that cause us to need a double standard, they've already adopted the logic of critical race theory, even if they speak out against its specific tenets, just like you can have people who have adopted in reverse. You have atheists, for example, who act in very, a lot of the Christians during the atheist, Christian, remember how quaint that was when we used to be able to argue about religion? How cute, how fun. There were a lot of atheists, or Christians, I'm sorry, who pointed out the atheist, you're like, well, that's a Christian belief.

That's a Christian construct. I just had a conversation with someone who said, you know, I was talking about how secular humanism, something about it. It doesn't make sense. I don't even remember what I said. And some secular humanist said, you know, I'm a secular humanist. We just believe in taking care of the widow and the orphan. I'm like, yeah, that's from the book of James.

That's a, that's a verse in the Bible. And so you're just adopting Christian tenets and you're applying it to your belief in that there is no God and saying that this is actually a tenet of atheism. It's not. No, so exactly. So you also see then at the same time that somebody can have taken on the tenets of critical race theory while believing themselves to be opposed to it. And what's actually, if we're, depending on how philosophically you like to get on your show, the postmodern philosopher who was actually very good at diagnosing this, but also overdiagnosed it and made a lot of mistakes. John Francois Leotard called this legitimation by parology. And what parallel,

parology, I almost broke it down as parology or parologic beside logic. And so it's a fake logic. It's a different way of thinking about the world. And for Christians, of course, because of the centrality of the logos to for example, the book of John,

you would have a really profound understanding of how dangerous legitimation. So making something true or valid by means of a false logos. how I mean that's by definition. I don't want to speak for Christians, but that's heresy.

Yeah. That's literally heresy. And so when you have folks like, like I think he's Dr. Moore, right, maybe he's Mr. Moore. Speaking up like this, if he's speaking out of a Parologos, he's speaking heresy. He's taken on tenets of another faith, mixed it into his Christianity, reinterpreted it back through a Christological lens. And now he's in a bad place. and doesn't know it. And on the one hand, you have to feel a bit of pity, but on the other hand, you have to realize that this is still, I mean, Jesus was right when it was like, you'll know them by their fruits. This is going to bear bad fruit. And we already see the division that it's tearing and tearing through the country, the division it's tearing through the churches. It's bearing bad fruit already. I can't understand why people who are so deeply aware of the know them by their fruit gospel, part of the gospel, would not realize when they see the fruit that

they must be on the wrong branch of the tree. You know, he would probably argue, and we're really, we were supposed to keep this to 15 minutes, but no, it's not your fault. This has just been really interesting, but I think he would probably argue that while the fruit of so-called, you know, Christian nationalism, which is an accusation that we're hearing from a lot of people in evangelicalism toward people who voted for Donald Trump, the fruit is what happened at the Capitol. That is bad fruit. I'm the one bearing good fruit. And I actually agree with so much of what his article said. My only contention with it is where is the consistency?

Where is the consistency? There were people that were hurt by the violence that happened last year. Some of us have been condemning violence, political violence, for more than one week. And so for this, for him to take a strong, courageous stand on this one thing and not having taken the same strong courageous stand on another thing that would have probably had a much higher cultural cost than making this stand. That makes me say, okay, yeah, what you're saying is true right on, obviously, very well written, but where were you? But, you know, you already explained kind of the philosophical origins.

That's important. That's, yeah. I tweeted this morning that the capital is the distraction, the asymmetry is the story. And that is, that's the key here. And so I also tweeted the other day and somebody emailed me and said it was super deep. So I'm all proud of myself. But I tweeted that when a society starts to reward cowardice as though it's bravery. And so it could be a church rewarding cowardice as though it's bravery.

That's when you know it's slipped off the rails. That's when you know that something bad is going on. And so it requires zero courage to condemn. Maybe it requires some if you're in Trump circles. I talked with David French yesterday. I had a short debate with David French yesterday. And he has received death threats. And many of the never Trump Republicans have received death threats from hardcore Trumpers

and these kind of lunatics that most of us all don't approve of and have been condemning from the beginning. Of course. And so I can understand where you can have this, you know, feeling that it does take some courage to stand up against the hardcore Trumpers. So I don't want to go too far with it. But when you start rewarding in general, when you start rewarding something that only requires cowardice or going along with the crowd as though it's brave, you've got a problem going on. And it takes very little effort to condemn what's going on at the Capitol. Even people that were at the Capitol, I just saw a video of a guy being.

interviewed today that had come out, he had just been pepper sprayed or something. And he's like, the people who were doing violence, that's not what we were here for. So he's, he's there with pepper spray in his face, condemning the violence. It's like a lot of, not very many people supported what was going on in that regard, although altogether too many did. But to focus on that, rather than to be aware of the asymmetry, is falling for the distraction of the moment. that we will all rue. And he is right in the sense that there has been a history of white supremacy in the country and in the convention.

There has been a problem of racism in the past in the country and in the convention, Southern Baptist Convention, I mean. And those branches can grow poison fruit and do grow poison fruit as well. I even said also on Twitter, another one somebody emailed me about, was that I said that if we're all created in the image of guns, God, then color blindness of all forms must be holy because God can't possibly have a color. And then that would mean that racism and this neo-racism in critical race theory would have to be evil.

And so if you don't understand the asymmetry, I mean, there can be more than one bad fruit, right? You don't have to say, oh, that's a bad fruit. So this fruit must be good. That's the opposite. It must be good. You can diverge both ways. Right.

Yep. Absolutely. I think there's a force about something. like the straight and narrow or take the narrow path or something. I'm not a biblical expert. Well, you seem to be more biblically literate than some people who profess to be Christians. All right, I've abandoned the goal of having this be a short interview. So I do want to ask you one more question because I saw this on the news last night and I figure that you would probably have a take on it. So Biden has tapped as the head of the civil rights division of the DOJ, a woman named

Kristen Clark. Now, she has an interesting background. She went to Harvard, and she wrote in the Harvard crimson that black people, according to her, have superior physical and mental abilities because of their melanin because white people can't produce as much melanin as black people that they're actually inferior, both mentally and physically. Now, this is someone who is supposed to be a champion of civil rights and is going to be put in an official position to champion. and civil rights for the country. Now, this fits in to a worldview that critical race theory is somehow going to achieve liberation and equity and equality.

But for the people like you and me who sees that, okay, this is just another form of racism and discrimination that's going to lead to oppression, what do you think are going to be the tangible results of something like this? There's just going to be more justification of this. What we used to call, I don't know, I mean, some people called it reverse racism, but It is just racism. Some people now, I think, very cleverly are calling it. And I just use the word neo-racism that they've reinvented racism.

I think the tangible aspects of this. But they would say that, you know, black people can't be racist because they say racism is prejudice plus power. And since, according to critical race theory, black people don't have power. They have been disenfranchised as we talked about. It's impossible for them to be the opposite situation now as to who has power, though, doesn't it? And that's why I like this term neo-racism, because all of a sudden, you know, oh, you took racism away. Fine, you're a neo-racist. And then what does that mean? And they look into it. And it means what they are. So it means reinventing racism. I've been arguing from when I was doing the basic research for cynical theories several, a couple of years ago when we were writing the chapter on critical race theory and finally really, really reading into critical race theory to write it. My big discovery, and I remember I remember contacting Helen Pluckrose and so much excitement when I realized this is like, Helen, they reinvented the same problem. So what happened in the 1600s was that white people put social significance

of racial superiority and inferiority into the categories of white and black. And then we unleashed a monster doing that. And it took us three centuries or more, almost four centuries, to fight back against that we had to bear on the question scientifically. We had to, we had bear on the question ethically. We had to bear on the question religiously. We had to bear on the question just about every way that you can possibly imagine. Finally, we achieve abolition. Finally, we write the Declaration of Independence, actually, and all men are created equal. And there we lay the seeds. We write the Constitution. There the seed is planted. And finally, almost 100 years later, we get abolition. Finally, almost 100 years after that, we get rid of segregation in Jim Crow.

We finally, 30 years after that, 40 years after that, have used comedy and social discourse and the interactions between everyday people to have brought racism down to a low simmer at the worst. We've really made some progress undoing the mistake of just to put a fake date on at 1650. And then I said, Helen, these critical race theorists made the same mistake. They put social significance back into racial categories. They said it is important to distinguish the sentence I am. am black, and this is quoting Kimberly Crenshaw, who is credited as the founder of intersectionality and the co-founder of critical race theory, she said it is important that we distinguish between the sentences, I am black and I am a person who happens to be black. And her problem with I am a person

who happens to be black is it centers their universal humanity rather than their race, which would be useful for identity politics. So that's reinventing the same mistake of 1650 that took us three and a half centuries to undo the ravaging damages of. And this fits exactly into that logic. This woman is a race essentialist. She believes that there is some biological, this is actual biological racism coming back onto the scene, that there is a biological reason why black people in this case are genetically superior to white people. And therefore, they have what, she said, intellectual, physical, and spiritual powers that exceed that of the white. She talked about calcified pineal glands and all of this.

And if she is in a power in a position of judging civil rights law and she has beliefs like this, granted, that was in the 90s that she wrote that, then we have every reason to believe that what we're going to see is more of this asymmetric treatment and stronger justifications for it or more ability for the people that are supposed to. to be the adults in the room to apply a biased, as we would have said 20 years ago, backwards or reversed standard. But in plain terms, it's a reinvention of, in fact, I got this talking to a Kenyan man on the phone, a Kenyan scholar called me a few months ago, a couple of months ago, and he said that he's like, you're the only person who'll understand. He's about to cry.

you know, they tend to be so like big emotion. The African people tend to be. And he's like, he's like, you're the only person who'll understand they've reinvented the mistake of 1650. And that's where I chose that date from. And so this is, we're seeing that now being deliberately empowered. Yeah. By this administration.

And so tangibly what we'll see is justifications coming from that civil rights office to continue tilting the playing field under a guise of leveling it. Right. And that's going to create, again, problems, division, alienation. If we want to talk in Marxist terms, which I'm fluent in those two, it is going to alienate an awful lot of people. And it's going to create nothing but problems. Yeah.

And of course, if you react to this as someone who says, you know, a white male, the only demographic that was left out of Joe Biden's speech when he was saying, you know, we're going to build back better by resourcing, prioritizing these people. If you do react in a way that says, hey, you know, like I need help too. My business closed down to. Whatever it is, then you are told that that is your white fragility. That is your white privilege. And so you were told that that's actually an act of racism to say, hey, why, you know, why am I being punished? someone who was just born with a gender, who was just born with a skin color. But you're not allowed to care, you, James, as a white male about those things. You're not allowed to say anything about it.

And then we wonder why there is so much division and so much hatred and so much resentment. I was reading, I don't know if you've read C.S. Lewis's abolition of man, but he is talking about creating men without chests. And he's talking about the school books at the time, how, well, I won't even get into his whole critique, but his entire point was that we are saying that society is trying to build these virtues or to say that, for example, sacrifice is a good virtue or that charity is a good virtue while also rendering them impossible by what we're teaching people. And that's what I think of when I think of you talking about repressive tolerance or when I hear people say, oh, you know, I just want love and unity and within the evangelical world racial reconciliation. Well,

you are saying that you are upholding these virtues, that you are making it impossible for us to actually manifest. You cannot find reconciliation and unity and so-called equity, equality, liberation, whatever it is that you are trying to achieve through the vehicle of critical race theory because it does the exact opposite. It divides. And so I see that problem within the church. I see it in the secular world. And I truly think that there are tangible consequences. Some people just think that we're talking or having an academic or philosophical conversation. It's not. It's going to affect your neighborhood.

It might affect your suburb. It's going to affect your kids' school. It's going to affect how your kids act possibly. Like in 1984, when Orwell talks about how everyone over 30 is scared of their kids because of how horrible they are. They, you know, snitch on their parents and things like that. It's because of this kind of mentality that is going to flourish that has been flourishing and is going to flourish even more. Under the Biden administration, I'm afraid, and I'm afraid we're going to see the worst of it in the next few years. I think so. This year will either prove pivotal or it will become much worse over the next three.

And then we'll see. And I don't know what will come. This is exactly what you just described. Things like that are already happening. We saw an 18-year-old who turned in her mother for being at the Capitol. Not even storming the Capitol, correct? Just there peacefully, I think. I have no idea what the story where that is. All I know is that we have an 18-year-old eagerly turning in her mother to go viral on social media and then vigorously defending it and being vigorously defended for doing it.

So, and we already see this, you know, separations of families. You talk about neighborhoods. You talk about whatever club or affinity group, even the knitting community somehow became like a flashpoint for this. early on like knitting like you know yeah that's so street yeah it's it's got just out of control it will tear the the logic of this is to create polarization to where you have to pick a side and one side is the again we see that asymmetry one side's always right the other side's always wrong and um i i mentioned the marks analysis and alienation and all of this a few minutes ago the truth is

what we're seeing is that people have taken, the most charitable way you can read, you can say Marx wrote a great critique of capitalism, of the dangers of capitalism. You can say that the critical theorists wrote a great critique of the dangers of fascism. You can say that the postmodernists wrote a great critique of the ideas of social power. And all of that is correct. But what we have now is people who have taken those things. And I think it may have been those writers' intentions, but never. Nevertheless, as instruction manuals. If you read them as warnings and as critiques and as, especially the postmodernists are easy to read as warning people of what can go wrong because they didn't want to commit to anything. So they weren't pushing any kind of agenda. They were just playing around with words and tearing everything apart. If you look at them as warnings and then you realize that people have said, oh, those are tools we can pick up and use against society. then you find yourself that's where I am now in a very awkward position of realizing just how dangerous this stuff is. For example, critical race theory will create only division polarization in particular.

Not just division. You will have to pick sides and one side will be asymmetrically viewed as evil where the other side will be viewed as good in a way that is almost incomprehensible unless you're playing within it. And nothing good happens here. So we will see all kinds of problems emerge out of this. And if you read those theories, especially Marx and their critical theorist, less the postmodernist, that alienation was the goal. They want critical race theory was born out of a tradition that wants to alienate people specifically so that society will fray and come apart. And then they, by having that asymmetric position, will be able to claim the mantle of power for their project. Right.

Right. Can you give anyone a little bit of optimism or at least some advice because I think what people feel after this, even if they're not looking for some rosy picture of the future, they just want to know, okay, what do I do? Because I see this in my kids curriculum. I see this at the college that I'm, you know, paying to indoctrinate my adult child. I see this at work in diversity and inclusion trainings. I see this among my friends. I see this in my pastor. And they don't feel equipped to be able to say anything and they don't know if they should say anything. They really just want to be quiet so they don't get canceled. What's your advice to them? Well, you're going to get canceled. So, you know, I should warn you about that. So speak up while you can speak more rather than when you won't be able to speak as much. That said, there are a lot of reasons for optimism and there are a lot of things people can do.

One reason for optimism is that the United States was built on firm principles, good principles, and good ideas. And the Constitution has not been shredded. It's just being threatened. And so the courts may be a wonderful line of defense against this that starts turning things back. We see already indications that the tech companies are going to be pushed on antitrust legislation. We'll see how that pans out or an antitrust charges at least. We'll see how that works. That may change some things very quickly. We see schools being pressured in the same way. So there are ways that things will turn back. As a point of optimism, more people are now aware of this problem than ever before. And awareness is actually the main thing that it takes. When you realize that these things

that are happening are manipulations, and you're aware of the manipulations, they don't work. They don't work on you. And so this rapid awareness over the past first six, months or eight months or whatever, and then again in the past week or two, that has arisen to what's going on with this rapidly progressing movement seems to be happening faster than the people who are pushing it would have wanted. People have become aware that they're in a totalitarian trap much sooner than they wanted, and they're becoming aware of the manipulations. So something you can do is learn a little bit about. You don't have to learn a lot. You can learn a little bit about critical race theory and these other ideologies. And then you understand what they're doing and

you won't fall for it. And then you won't get sucked into those traps where you feel bad and you go along with it. Another thing that you can do is just the proverb in Poland during the saying in Poland during the Polish Revolution, I'm told, was live as though they don't exist. And so you can carry on to the degree that you need to. And I think that's actually got a very Christian background, right? You know, the Roman persecution, people certainly were not having a good hundred years there as Christians. And they still had to do their Christianity, they had to live their beliefs as best they could, as though the Roman persecution of them did not exist. And then eventually, the truth outs. The truth, reality always wins. So the bad times may last.

a week. They may last a season. They may last a year. They may last 100 years. They may last a thousand years. But the truth in reality always went out in the end. And so people who are willing to take the side of that now are already, you know, we always hear, yo, you have to be on the right side of history. The right side of history is on, is whichever side is on the side of truth. Right. Right. And that's, I think, the most optimistic and hopeful thing. And more and more people realize this and realize that there's a need to stand up and just not go along with the crowd right now is it's just a really hopeful sign to me. So there's lots of reasons to be helpful. The U.S. is a good place. The truth, reality bats last. The truth wins out. I won't be so cheeky

as to make a claim about, you know, it's in God's hands and bear into your faith because I don't want to come off awkwardly. But I hear a lot of Christian. and say that to each other. And so to remember, I think Daryl Bernard Harrison recently said, remember that this is God's fight. And so I'll say it through him because that way I'm not being inappropriate or something. Yeah. You're close. You're close, James.

You're going to be back on this show and you're going to tell me about how you traveled theological and you realized that really the real, the only real lasting and ultimate pushback to all the craziness that we're seeing is a theological one. And I will have a conversation with you about that at some point. This was supposed to be a short interview. It wasn't because I couldn't stop asking you questions. So thank you so much for taking the time and peeling back the skin of the onion for us. unfortunately discourse, which is what you are trying to do and trying to lead is getting

harder and harder with that kind of repressive tolerance that we're seeing. But while people can support you, how can they? Where can they find you? Where can they buy your book? So, well, I would say normally that you can buy my book anywhere where books are sold, but there are certain companies that sell books right now that maybe you shouldn't use and because they're exerting monopolistic control over the whole world. So my book is pretty easily available until it gets canceled from most booksellers. So, you know, pick your favorite one that maybe doesn't sound like a jungle in Brazil and do what you will with it. And you can find me also as long as it lasts on the website, new discourses.com.

That's the home of my company, New Discourses. There are lots of ways to support. There's a support button that's easily found. right at the top so you can find ways to support it if that's what you want to do that way. If you just want to share the articles and share the information on there, that's supporting me too. If you just want to send a nice note, that's also support. I'm very grateful for all of that.

You can find me on social media everywhere that I have one so far at Conceptual James. Mostly active on Twitter, I find more than one social media platform exhausting, so I kind of stick to one. but I do copy most of it to the other ones. So as long as I'm still on social media, you can find me and support me there as well. Same stuff. You can, you know, send me kind words or you can share my message and hopefully get that out there. Or you can send you can send your disagreeing words to him too. And he typically does respond to those on Twitter, right?

Yeah, that's true. If you're rude, though, my rule is tip for tat. So if you come politely, I will be polite. And if you come rude, I'm probably going to say something rude back. Yeah. Yeah, that's typically how social media goes. I hope people understand, though, that first of all, it is that I will not provoke rudeness. And second of all, I do try to keep good humor about it.

I don't try to be mean to anybody and I don't try to make it too personal, although some people would read it as personal when I'm trying to be funny. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that about you. And like you said, truth, we say on this podcast, truth is like a B. ball. You can try to push it under the water and you might be successful for a little bit, especially if you have a lot of people doing it, eventually it's going to pop back up. And that's exactly what you were saying in your last answer. So that is a bit of optimism for people.

Doesn't mean it's not going to be a hard fight. Does it mean, like you said, you won't be canceled in the process, but it will be worth it. You want to be on the side of the beach ball, not the people trying to push it down. So thank you so much again. We will have you back on soon. Thank you. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality.

We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.