Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 366 | NYT, the 'N-Word,' and Becoming Uncancelable

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

Today we're discussing cancel culture through a theological lens. The leftist outrage mob came for a longtime NYT writer reported to have used the "N-word" in a meeting. From a biblical perspective, Christians don't need to be worried about cancel culture, since even though the standards of the world are always changing, God's standards aren't. Then, we talk to Professor William Jacobson, who created CriticalRace.org as a resource for parents and students to see what kind of ideology universities are teaching. --- Today's Sponsor: Annie's Kit Club: No matter your crafting experience, you can make a picture-perfect project you'll be proud to display. Save 50% on your first kit today —> AnniesKitClubs.com/ALLIE --- Show Links: Intelligencer: "Describing a Slur Is Not the Same As Using It" https://nym.ag/3d9GgYb Areo: "Utopian Dreams and Totalitarian Nightmares: The Coerced Morality of Critical Race Theory" https://bit.ly/3cXZkrV CriticalRace.org - Critical Race Training in Education https://criticalrace.org/ --- 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 guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Tuesday. Hope everyone has had a wonderful week so far. We've got a great full episode up ahead. I am going to talk about this New York Times reporter that had been writing for the paper for, I think, about 40 years, 30 to 40 years, a science writer. The cancel mob has officially canceled him. He was fired from his job for repeating a racial slur in a particular context a couple years ago. We'll talk about the ever-changing standards.

of woke righteousness and why we as Christians get to get off that hamster wheel and look to real righteousness and the rest that we find in Christ. And so I'm going to talk about that story and then bring it back to the freedom that we have in the gospel. And then if I have time, it depends on how long all of that takes. I'm also going to talk to a professor from Cornell who has been, he created this website to chronicle or to call out, I guess, which university. universities in the United States are teaching critical race theory. So you can go to this website and you can click on a state and it will tell you which universities are teaching critical race theory and then it'll tell you which courses or which programs they have been putting on that are promoting that kind of

ideology, which is really interesting. So I want to talk to him about why he created it, but whether or not that podcast is going to or that interview will be in today's episode or tomorrow's episode will just kind of depend on how long it takes me to get through the first part of this episode. Before we get into all of that, I got to clarify some things. So yesterday I was talking about how much I learned from the book, Love Thy Body. And I said that it was a book written by Nancy Pelosi. It was not written by Nancy Pelosi. Now, all of you who have listened to me for a long time, or if you're part of my Women's Book Club with Ali Stucky on Facebook, you know it was written by Nancy Piercy. But their names are so similar.

And we have to talk about Nancy Pelosi kind of frequently on this podcast that it just slipped out. And I didn't even realize. And I guess Nolan realized on this side until one of you guys, until I listened to it. And then one of you guys reached out to me because I almost couldn't tell if that's really what I said. But then a lot of you guys reached out to me and were like, you know, you said Nancy Pelosi instead of Nancy Piercy.

And some of you got a kick out of that. but maybe some of you had no idea what I was talking about. And you really thought that I read a book about theology and our bodies and gender and sexuality written by Nancy Pelosi and then I got a lot out of it. I think Nancy Pelosi should probably read, Love Thy Body by Nancy Piercy. There's a lot of good stuff in there about how Christians should approach things like abortion and sexuality and marriage and all of that good stuff. So Nancy Piercy, not Nancy Pelosi. Another thing that I want to clarify or just maybe bring up is that I got a couple of angry messages, tweets, comments from people who were aghast that I said that I liked

Tom Brady and that I liked some songs by the weekend. And the reason why people were angry or upset that I said that I like Tom Brady is because apparently his wife, Giselle, calls herself a witch. And I kind of heard that before. I mean, she kind of seems new age, all the stuff that she posts on social media. But I'm not saying that I think that he is like my moral exemplar, or that he's my pastor, or that I go to him for life advisor, that I am approving of every part of his life and his belief system. I was just saying, I think that he comes across as a good leader and a compassionate teammate to the people that he has played with over the years. And so we don't need to read into all of that. Like we understand that unbelievers are going to have different beliefs than we do.

And there are things that we are still going to like about them. There are people made in the image of God and they have gifts of common grace like talent and leadership abilities and things like that that that we can still admire because there are. objectively good. As for the weekend. So I didn't bring up yesterday. Some people are talking about like this satanic imagery. And every year in the Super Bowl, people talk about certain kinds of satanic imagery. Now, with the weekend's performance, it was weird. I remember thinking this is really weird. There was like almost this Messiah like figure that came down in the middle of the stage wearing this white robe. But it was obviously very dark. And it probably was actually supposed to be demonic. I don't actually think this year that people are reading into that. Sometimes it seems

like they are. But this year, it kind of seems like he meant for it to be supernatural and dark and demonic in that way. And so again, I am, I'm not approving of that. I just think that he is a talented person with unique songs. That doesn't mean that I think that they are wonderful praise and worship songs that glorify God. I just think he's a talented guy. And I thought that his was on display, at least somewhat during the Super Bowl halftime show. So that's all of that. When I say that I appreciate someone's talent or that I like someone in a certain way, it doesn't mean that I am approving of everything they do or everything they believe in.

So for those of you who are confused about that or confused about any of those things, I just wanted to add some clarity. Okay, let's get into our first story. our story that's going to set up the rest of the podcast. A lot of you have told me, I just want to talk theology. Like I want to talk big picture stuff. I'm tired of the news. Well, this episode really will be a lot of that. And I think on Thursday is when I'm going to dedicate an entire episode to nothing to do with the news and politics. And we are going to talk about love since it is almost Valentine's Day and the theology of love. And I know that you guys

are going to like that because you've been asking for that. But even today, we're not talking heavy into politics or heavy into the news cycle. There are tons of news stories that I think that we could talk about today that I want to talk about. There are some illegal immigration policies that are being pushed forth that I think are important for us to talk about. There's that crazy Time magazine article that said basically it used the word cabal, like a cabal of powerful people trying to quote, fortify the election. And of course, Trump supporters read that as, okay, so you're trying to, you were trying to change the results of the election. by ensuring that the laws and the voting policies and all of this were in your favor.

There's a lot to talk about, but I want to talk about this example of, I think, very arbitrarily applied rules when it comes to the cancel mob and the progressive powers that be and what it means for us and what it means for our theology and then how the gospel actually saves us from the exhaustion of that because I think that this is fundamentally more important than a lot of those other news stories that I want to talk about at some point. So this story, a New York Times reporter, got fired for saying the inward a couple years ago. And I will tell you exactly what the context was, because of course, that's a terrible, awful word that we would never approve of saying. But it matters what context it was in and how this all came about, I think. So this is according to,

to New York Magazine, quote, in 2019, New York Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr., working as a tour guide for high school students traveling to Peru, got into an argument with several of them. The debate centered around whether one of the students' classmates deserved to have been suspended over a video that surfaced of her as a 12-year-old, saying the in-word. McNeil, according to a statement released by the Times, asked about the context of the word. Was she rapping or quoting a book title or using the word as a slur? McNeil's distinction apparently made little headway with the students who accused him of using the term himself. So apparently when he was asking about the context that this 12-year-old child had apparently used this word and he actually used the full word himself.

Two weeks ago, the Daily Beast reported on the student's allegations. At first, Times editor Dean Beckett argued that McNeil's action was regrettable, but that he deserved another chance to learn from the mistake. But after 150 times staffers wrote to express their outrage, McNeil resigned. In his first statement explaining his decision to retain McNeil, Beckett explained, it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious. And his second statement explaining McNeil's departure, you know, after all of the reporters, became outraged. Bichette wrote, we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent. Remember that phrase will come back to it.

The article goes on. It would be one thing to decide that not only is it unacceptable, so this is now the author of this article in New York Magazine, it would be one thing to decide that not only it is unacceptable to use the slur, but it is also unacceptable to utter or mention it in any form. It is another thing to treat those two different actions as completely indistinguishable as the Daily Beast appears to have done. What's even more troublesome is when authorities decide to apply the new norm retroactively. Remember that too. We'll talk about that. I know of a teacher who lost

her job when a video surfaced on social media showing her reading the word to her class. She was reading from a well-regarded book by a black author about Jim Crow era racism. The video was a decade old. And yet when it came out last summer, when student activists in the wake of the George Floyd murder were looking to bring change to their immediate surroundings, she became the proximate target. summer after New York Times staffers claimed an op-ed by Tom Cotton put their lives in danger. You remember that? The Times officially apologized for publishing it. Crazy. The official line is that the column failed to meet its standards, i.e. Cotton alleged that Antifa radicals had infiltrated

some racial justice protests. He was right, and that its tone was, quote, needlessly harsh. Oh my gosh, what babies. As if the op-ed page had previously been devoid of harsh tones. Now it is applying no tolerant standard toward the vocalization of racist language, quote, regardless of intent. So that, I think, was good reporting and analysis from New York Magazine. So a man who had been writing for the Times for decades was forced to resign for an account from teenagers that he repeated this word, which is understandably off limits, is understandably a word that we don't like and that we should not condone saying, but a phrase that he was repeating for clarity. He was repeating a word that someone else had said to try to talk to these students about the

question that they were posing to him. This was a word that the editor knew. Dean Beckett knew and said that this reporter McNeil had said without malice. And yet the standard apparently is that when a forbidden word is uttered, the utterance may be fireable, no matter the context, no matter the usage. And the questions that we should ask are this, does this go for any word? Or is it just racial slurs? What about the C word for a woman? Like, what is the standard? Is there any setting in which an employee can repeat a word and not get fired for it, at least from the New York Times? Why shouldn't context and intent matter? Why should the word, why should the word said matter more than that which actually speaks to a person's character, which is why it was said and how it was said?

And these standards are retroactively applied. How far do they go back? You might remember the Boeing director who had to resign last year because of an article he wrote in 1987 that women shouldn't be in military combat, which, by the way, I agree with that. They shouldn't be. We've talked about that before. This article was uncovered and he apologized and he resigned. This was an article that he wrote in 1987 of a perfectly logical and a perfectly rational position. Maybe it's arguable you could say, but that women shouldn't be in combat. That's a,

that's a perfectly rational position to hold. Even today, he wrote it in 1987 and he was made to resign. But so these rules that we are retroactively applying to people who may have broken the rules before they even existed, and which aren't even sensibly applied today, we are saying they are absolute. I mean, it's, it's quite the paradox. It's quite the contradiction that we've found ourselves. And Maria Navratilova, the famous female tennis player, you might remember she was dropped as an ambassador of the LGBT group athlete ally. I think it was last year, 2019. She was targeted by transgender activist groups because she said that it is unfair for men to compete against women in tennis or in sports in general. And of course, that is true. But she was

made to apologize she was dropped from this organization that she had worked with for a very long time. But Ibra Mexcindy, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, said on a Zoom meeting the other day with the New York State Association for Independent Schools that he and his wife were horrified when his daughter came home and said that she was a boy. And he said that they were going to do everything that they could to affirm the goodness of being a girl. First time that I have agreed with his logic, by the way, I haven't seen any reports from CNN or MSNBB or transgender activist groups, anyone besides conservative media saying that this was problematic, that he didn't just immediately accept his daughter's declaration of being a new gender.

Nicole Hannah-Jones, writer for the New York Times, an author of the largely fictional 1619 project, has two tweets from 2016 that include the N-word, fully typed out, which, look, I understand. People argue that it's different when black people say it, and I get the argument. But remember, the statement around the reporter being fired for repeating the word in 2019 was that the New York Times doesn't tolerate the use of slurs, quote, regardless of intent. And so apparently these very absolute and strict and retroactive rules are applied to some people, but not to others. If what they actually mean by regardless of intent is regardless of white people's intent,

then they need to just go ahead and come out and say that. And by the way, when Nicole Hannah-Jones was asked about these tweets by a Washington-free Beacon reporter on Twitter, she docksed him by replying to the tweets, by publicly posting the cell phone number in response to his inquiry. I mean, what just a terrible, miserable person, always doing stuff like that. Like, cannot receive any pushback whatsoever. I've watched it happen many times, just so vicious. The point is the rules are different.

for everyone. Like they're very strict and they're very absolute and yet they're changing constantly and they apply to people differently based on who knows what. If you are, I guess, sufficiently woke, if you've done enough performative activism or certainly if you're a woke person of color who is contributed to the anti-racism movement, then there are different rules for you according to the progressive cancel mob, then for the white science reporter or the Boeing executive or the female tennis player apparently. But if you don't fall into the right categories that the progressive cancel mob arbitrarily decides upon today, then no matter what you've done, no matter what kind of good,

what kind of activism you have done in your life, you will be labeled a racist and you will be canceled or a transphobe or a homophobe, whatever it is. It doesn't matter how kind you've been to people, how well you treat people or your employees or what a good friend you are, what a nice neighbor you are, how awesome of a parent you are, how much time and energy and effort you've put into caring for the vulnerable in your community, or if you posted a black square and announced that you are going to commit to anti-racist inner work last summer on Instagram, if you say the wrong thing, or if you said the wrong thing many years ago, according to today's rules, and you don't have sufficient woke

credentials or you don't fall into the right intersectional categories, then you are immediate and automatically exiled. It didn't matter that Navratilova as a lesbian had been representing LGBT issues for decades. She said the wrong thing according to today's rules. It doesn't matter that Tom Brady has played with and befriended and mentored football players of all different skin colors for decades. He is still going to be accused at least implicitly by a,

a player on the losing team that he called him some kind of unrepeatable slur and all of leftist Twitter is going to believe that automatically because Brady doesn't hate Donald Trump enough and probably embodies white privilege. On the other hands, if you do have the right credentials, you can say almost anything and it's ignored. For example, if you're Joe Biden, you can say things like, quote, poor kids are just as smart and talented as white kids, or that you don't want your kids to grow up in a school that's, quote, a racial jungle, or that all gas station owners have Indian accents, or saying, quote, you ain't

black to black people who voted for Trump, or eulogizing a former KKK grand wizard. You can do all of that if you're Joe Biden and you're fine because you have power. You say the right things now and you are going to be in a position to be able to direct money and influence to the causes that progressive activists like. So it's all well and good. This is all what happens when right and wrong is subjective. When they're based on the latest whim of the social justice mob, rather than an innate grounding principle, this is a small group of loud people that directs corporate policy, that directs, unfortunately,

the policies that are pushed by the Democratic Party, even sometimes the Republican Party, that are pushing particular curriculum, that are able to silence people on social media, get them docks and get them fired, because they hold the cultural reins. It doesn't indicate everyone on the left. It doesn't represent even, I think, the majority of the left or the majority of Democrats, certainly not the majority of the country. But they have been given power because they are told yes, over and over again. When they want someone fired, that person gets fired.

When they want a corporate policy changed or some kind of woke message displayed by a corporation, they get that. when they want the NFL to say or do something or donate money, then they get it. So just like toddlers, they are told over and over again, yes, that their temper tantrums are completely justified and they're going to work. And so what do they do? They pitch of it over and over again. And they don't care who gets canceled or who gets fired in their wake.

Now, look, I don't know that the reporter did the right thing by repeating their racial slur, even if it was just a reference. wouldn't have. Like, we all know, it's an ugly, terrible word with a long, ugly, terrible history that I would prefer no one use. But I also absolutely believe in fair, even impartial standards for everyone. In objective definitions of fireable and not fireable that are defined by principles, not by emotions, not by mob outrage, and I absolutely believe that intent and context matter. I believe that time matters, how long ago something was, how old you were, where your heart is, who you are now, all of these things should be factored in before making

judgments and cancellations that tarnish people's reputations and in some cases ruin lives. The lack of objective standards of ever-moving goalposts is exhausting, not just with this, but with everything. What is acceptable when it comes to stances on gender, on sexuality, the family, justice, race, it seems to be changing every day. But unless these changes that we see in culture are in, are moving toward greater conformity to God and what his word says is good and right and true, then we as Christians do not need to worry about them because we don't abide by them because God's goalposts do not move. Let me tell you some good news.

Christians do not have to try to keep up with this madness because you can't, okay? I want you to take a deep breath and I want you to realize that you cannot. You cannot keep up with the ever-changing standards, with the ever-moving goalposts of the progressive cancel mop. You will never say all of the right things. You will never do all of the right things. That inner work, that divesting of your privilege, the decolonizing and deconstructing of your faith, the listening and learning, the adopting the social.

justice language, the performative activism to try to fit in with the mainstream will never be enough. It'll never be enough. The religion of the woke is merciless. It is exhausting. It is always changing based on absolutely no grounded principle. Trying to avoid cancellation by saying and doing all of the right things to please the progressive powers that be is a hamster wheel that I am very glad to tell you, Christian, you can hop off of. We don't need the ever-changing standards of the world. We have a standard already in Christ. He set the perfect standard. He and he alone represents perfect righteousness. And if by grace through faith, you have put your faith in him, you have that righteousness, no matter what the world says. Second Corinthians 521. For our sake,

he made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. So in Christ, you and I, Christians, are the righteousness of God. Already right now, not because of anything we've done, but because what He, by grace, did for us. You are made holy and acceptable before God because of what Jesus has done for you on the cross. And if you follow him, if he is the Savior for your soul, if he is the Lord of your life, then you have already been made perfect and completely, eternally uncannelable. That is good news. That's really good news. Matthew 10 says, do not worry about those who can hurt your body. Fear the one God who can throw your body and your soul into hell. And in Christ, you are reconciled to, made friends with forgiven by the only one who has the power and the right to destroy both you and me as sinners because he is a holy and perfect and just God. And if that is true, if we are saved from that, if we are reconciled to the God, the all-powerful God, who has the authority to, to destroy all things, to destroy you and me completely justifiably, then what do we have to fear?

As Romans 8 says, if our God is for us, who can be against us? 833 through 35. Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died, more than that who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? The answer is no one.

no one in nothing, no power, earthly, or supernatural can separate God from his children. And this is all important because the cancel mob doesn't just go after what is objectively right and wrong. Like we know some words are wrong. We know some actions are wrong and are actually cancelable, not just according to the world standards, but according to God standards. But when those two standards differ, when worldly standards and God standards are not the same, when the worldly rules are constantly changing and arbitrarily applied, we don't have to worry about catching up with them. That is what I'm saying. And that is the relief that I'm offering in the gospel. God is the standard bear. He is the rulemaker. And Hebrews 138 says that he does not change.

He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. We don't have to worry about keeping up with worldly standards of wokeness and righteousness. And in fact, if we do, we will be at some point in disobedience to God because the world's definitions of righteousness, of justice, of goodness, of morality are all contradictory to God. James 4-4 says, therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. We don't want to be an enemy of God. We don't need or want worldly definitions of right and wrong, correct, incorrect, just, unjust. We have Christ is our standard and through the power of the Holy Spirit. We become more like him, more obedient to God, more conforming to God's standards of right and wrong, more truly, biblically just, more truly, biblically loving, more

gentle, more gracious, more generous, kinder, more in love with truth, more hopeful, more joyful. Have you noticed how unhappy some of your friends are who were chasing the ever-changing standards of worldly wokeness? How hypercritical they are of themselves and others, how unable they are to enjoy life, constantly trying to evade cancellation by saying and doing all of the political correct things, how hard it is sometimes for them to give grace to people, to give people the benefit of the doubt, all while accusing everyone else of lacking tolerance and nuance. Like how their definition of sin and sanctifications have changed, how their definitions of justice and holiness now look nothing like the Bibles, even while co-opting some decontextualized biblical vocabulary. How hard they feel like

they have to try to prove themselves worthy and good, intolerant, and open and progressive and anti-racist. And at the end of the day, they're still unsure that they've done enough to prove to themselves and to other people that they're truly righteous. Have you noticed how exhausted they are? It's because it's a trap. Because in Christ, as Christians, we are already made righteous. The fear and the trembling that we feel toward the cantle mob should be morphed into a reverent fear directed toward the God of our souls. God has graciously told us what standards to reach, what examples to follow, what love looks like, what justice means. He has graciously revealed all of that to us in his word. There are no good ideas about morality to borrow from secular

culture. A lost world has no power whatsoever to teach us about love or mercy or honesty or generosity, none. And you will be exhausted trying to learn and pass their tests, which are not fairly graded because they don't have a fair rubric. Let me read this long passage to you to remind you of what exactly the Christian is called to. I think that this is a good summary. Ephesians 417 through 32. You guys know I love Ephesians. Quote, Ephesians all the time.

Quote, you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do and the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. they have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way that you learned Christ. Assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self created after

the likeness of God and true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up

as fits the occasion that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you are sealed for the day of redemption. let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice, be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. That is what God calls us to. That is what God empowers us to do. The world will tell you that it's hateful, that it's not enough, that it's wrong, that your

definition of love is wrong, that you have to adopt and adapt to theirs. it will beckon you to follow its guidelines to chase after its approval. Praise God that you get to say no to that. You get to say no to the exhaustion and yes to the rest and the peace that is found in life and God. The world's burden, cancel culture is burden, the religion of progressivism's burden. The burden of politics and trying to fit in perfectly with those around you is heavy. and the yoke of those things is difficult.

Jesus' burden is light and his yoke is easy. So you get to hop off the hamster wheel. You get to find peace in the fact that there is righteousness to be found in Christ and wisdom and power from the Holy Spirit that dwells in you when by grace through faith you believe in and follow Jesus. James 314 through 17, I think is a perfect depiction, a perfect contrast of worldly wisdom and the ever-changing standards of the outrage mob with. the wisdom of God and his saints. Quote,

But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but it's earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exists, there will be disorder in every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial. and sincere, open to reason, and impartial, and peaceable.

How different for the rabid approach of the cancel mob. All right. I do have time to talk to this professor from Cornell about the project that he has developed this website, and it really does tie in to what we have been talking about, what we've been talking about with the arbitrary standards of the world. You guys know we've talked about critical theory and critical race theory a lot on this podcast. It's the perfect depiction of these subjective arbitrary standards based on ideas and based on a kind of partiality that is sinful. According to God, it is corrupt.

It is historically inaccurate. There is no part of it that is redemptive. There is no part of it that accomplishes reconciliation. I want to read you this excerpt that's going to. to serve as our transition into the conversation that I'm about to have. And it is from Aereo Magazine. And I just thought that it was a great representation of what critical race theory does and its consequences. And this article is titled Utopian Dreams and Totalitarian Nightmares, the coerced

morality of critical race theory. And it is by Justine Waters. So she includes an extract from one diversity council's cultural competence action plan for South Lake, Texas. It was presented to the local school board for adoption in August 2020. It says this. No, microaggressions are defined as everyday verbal or nonverbal snubs or insults, whether intentional or unintentional. See, that whole thing is a part of an ideology. It's part of critical race theory that no matter the intent, if the wrong person says,

it in the wrong way, the wrong time, then it is cancelable, no matter the intent, no matter the context, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized or underrepresented group membership. The article then analyzes this. Are all of us guilty until proven innocent for everything we don't do as opposed to being innocent until proven guilty of actual harms we do cause? If so, we can only earn back our innocence by selling ourselves into permanent servitude to a utopian ideology in which we ceaselessly strive to make the world perfect. We will need to constantly seek to expose all the myriad forms of dislove that might arise in any human interaction and set about converting everyone to

enthusiastic love of all that is good according to the infallible definition of goodness decreed by an omniscient subset of perfect human beings. Social justice activists seem to be engaged in something along those lines. That is an extremely apt definition of critical race theory and what the social justice elites are trying to do and push perfect description of something like Robin DiAngelo's white fragility. The article says, white morality is little more than slavish obedience, motivated by fear and self-preservation, not virtue, and its dependency on a vast bureaucracy of public surveillance, monitoring and intimidation, if not downright violence or excommunication,

identity politics is more like a theocracy or a malist cultural revolution. revolution than a genuine improvement on social justice. And yes, of course, this is always how it goes. This is how it's gone throughout the 20th century, I told you guys about how in the malice revolution and the cultural revolution in China in the 20th century, how they would have these things called struggle sessions where someone who had the wrong idea or said the wrong thing or had a dissenting opinion would be taken into the public square and would be publicly tortured, would be publicly chastised, would be yelled at, and would be emotionally and physically abused for having the kind of wrong idea. That's no different than the cancel mob today. That's no different.

And remember, it's not just for things that are objectively wrong. It's also things like, remember, taking care of babies, taking care of babies when she was canceled and she was targeted for simply donating to the Trump campaign or Dr. Crenshaw, the professor that I had on last week, who simply said, does it matter that some people don't want their daughters to share bathrooms with boys. She was targeted by a small but loud mob who wanted her fired from Baylor University. And so it's not an improvement on social justice. It is much more like a heartless, puritanical theocracy, something that you would see in the scarlet letter more than any kind of progressive or tolerant utopia or some kind of evil Maoist revolution, which

killed, by the way, tens of millions of people throughout the 20th century. It's not good. Don't be fooled by it, Christian. And thankfully, through the gospel, we have an escape from it. You get to get off the hamster wheel. All right. Now we're going to talk a little bit more about critical race theory and how it's infiltrated colleges and what we can do about it with Professor William Jacobson, Cornell Law School professor. Here he is. Professor Jacobson, thank you so much for joining me. You started this website, Critical Racialrace.org, can you tell us what it is and why you started it? Sure. Well, what it is, it's a website devoted to documenting critical race training on campuses around the United States.

And what it is is we have a map of the United States. We have various school entries, and you can hover over the map and click on your state and click on your school and see what activities they have going on. Now, some of the activities you may like, some of the activities you may not like. It's actually a very neutral database. Well, we have our own views of critical race training, and we don't think it's helpful to education. Nonetheless, this is a resource that really anybody can use, and that's why what it is. Most of what we have on there are things the schools tell themselves. The schools tell their students. Everything is sourced and everything is linked.

no rumors or anything like that. And so there's a link for everything and you can see what's going on. Now, this is not a list of schools to avoid. We don't take a view on any particular school. It's really a resource for parents and students so they know what they're getting themselves into if the student attends this college. Now, the reason I created it was I've been watching a lot of these developments over the years and I follow them.

I have a website called Legal Insurrection. and we have followed these things, but it really crystallized last spring in June when the president of Cornell University assigned as suggested reading to the entire campus, the book How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram Kendi. And in fact, that book was going to be the basis for summer discussions at Cornell University. And they made it available to everybody free of charge online electronically. So I went and I read it, and I was actually pretty shocked because the philosophy there is quite discriminatory. It's actually the opposite of what Cornell's non-discrimination policy is. He explicitly advocates current discrimination in order to remedy past discrimination.

So it's an advocacy for discrimination. It also sets up a very coercive paradigm, which is you are either anti-racist, and that's the word. or you are racist. There's no in between. So the traditional American civil rights notion of treating people fairly without regard to skin color, et cetera, has no place in that universe. You're either with them or you're against them. And if you're not with them, you are racist. He refuses to recognize any concept of being non-racist. A non-raced is somebody who simply goes around treating everybody fairly, treating everybody equally, is in fact racist unless they become an activist.

So this was very alarming to me. That was furthered when in July of that year, the president of the university announced that she was starting an initiative to push anti-racism teaching and training into every aspect of the university. Now, she left the details to be worked out by the faculty, Senate, and other. others, but the, but topics it included curriculum, possible mandatory course requirements for students, possible mandatory training for faculty. And so this was extremely alarming to me. And so we started to look into critical race training, anti-racism training, and gather the data. But what really pushed us

over the edge to starting this website is feeding off of what the university had announced, several hundred faculty students and staff signed an open set of demands in September, fulfilling or calling for the university to fulfill this anti-racist initiative. And those, some of the things they called for included explicit discrimination in hiring and promotion. They called for racial discrimination in promotion and hiring, that certain people of certain races should be hired and promoted above others. which is completely shocking because that's actually illegal. What's even more shocking is that numerous law school faculty signed on to this.

And now it's over at the Faculty Senate. So it actually, and I've gone back over my timeline here, actually was after the September set of demands that we made the decision to construct a separate website because we don't feel that parents and students know what's going on. The way I was feeling is somebody applying to Cornell has no clue. what is really going on on this campus. I'm not saying they shouldn't apply. All I'm saying is people need to know, and that's what our website does.

And tell me what you think the practical implications of this kind of anti-racist theory would be, obviously, discrimination, at least when it comes to admissions or when it comes to choosing faculty. What other consequences do you think this has for students, for society in general, if we are saying the only way to rectify the faculty? past wrongs is to now commit wrongs against other groups today. Right. And now that you mention it, I haven't thought of it this way. This whole philosophy is essentially two wrongs make a right, which we've all been taught, or most of us have been taught as children, is not actually a good thing.

And so what I think it does is it really creates a fissure on campus because you are either with them or you are against them. And if you're against them, by definition, you are racist. Forget about what your views actually are. Forget about how you conduct your life. And so you set up this conflict on campus of the anti-racist versus the racist, but it's completely constructed by them. It's not reality. Most people on campus are non-racist. They go about their life. They don't get involved in politics. They don't get involved in activism. They treat everybody fairly. they don't discriminate, that whole cohort of people who might, who is almost certainly a majority of students on campus are now branded racist. And that is a coercive tool that is used for political

purposes on campuses. It's, we see it all the time, but particularly this year, it's us versus them. And I think that's entirely negative for a campus. It's also very coercive. You don't learn things by being coerced. The school might be able to force you as a freshman or a sophomore to take a course where they teach this stuff. And we all know the vast, vast majority of students are just going to sit there and shake their head and go along to get along because they don't want to be called names. But it doesn't change any minds. It doesn't convince anybody. It perpetuates what's been going on that they claim is negative. So I think what's the downside? It, Brands people who are not racist as racist because that's the way they've constructed it.

It demonizes large sections of the campus. It coerces large sections of the campus. And it doesn't change any minds. I don't know how it could get any worse than that. Right. And we kind of skipped by in academia or just in society in general in politics in the social and cultural sphere. The debate of the premise of critical race theory, which is that America, even in 20, 2021 is systemically and pervasively racist. And therefore, everyone in particular who is white is at least

complicit, if not actively a part of all of these racist systems. And you could see how if you believe that, and that is your premise, how people who don't fight to dismantle that kind of systemic racism, in the same way that you would say someone who sees bullying happen and just walks right by it, well, that's not enough. You need to fight against that bully. You could see how Ibram X. Kendi goes to his, gets to his conclusion, if you believe in the premise that America is systemically racist in 2021. But I would say that is debatable at best. And we're not even allowed to push back against that premise to say, is America in 2021 systemically racist to where we actually do need to discriminate against other groups in order to make other groups feel better or to lift? them up, right? That's right.

They set the parameters of the conversation. The parameter of the conversation is that we need to upend our society because it's systemically racist. Now, I don't accept that that's true. There may be inequalities. There are inequalities in many aspects of life. But systemically, we're actually anti-racist. We have laws.

We have enforcement. We have bureaucracies. The law does not sanction racism. That is what a systemically racist society, would be where the law actually upholds racism, and it doesn't here. So it's not a systemically racist. That's not to say there aren't things that can be improved, but they have created this construct where everything needs to be torn down.

And if you're standing in the way of that, you must be complicit in the system. And if you are supporting the system, they call you a white supremacist. Now, I'm old enough that when people, when I grew up and people were called white supremacists, it was people who had explicitly racist views. It was not people who simply support the existing system we have, maybe want to improve it, maybe want to, you know, do other things. And so they demonize people and they try to set people back on their heels by applying phrases to them and characterizations to them, which are not actually accurate.

And I think the one thing you've pointed out, the systemic racism is a very pernicious view of things because if that is the truth, then everything needs to be torn down. And we know that's not true. We are a system which tries to enforce non-discrimination. We have non-discrimination laws. Campuses, more than anything, have enormous bureaucracies devoted to non-discrimination. It's the priority on virtually every campus on this country. So I think that this notion that we need to tear everything down and we need to brand everyone who doesn't agree with us as a racist is so pernicious. And it's really, I think, tearing a lot of campuses apart. Yeah. And, you know, I think some people would argue that there actually is discrimination on college campuses, but it's not against, it's against groups like Asian Americans, perhaps, or white Americans in the admissions process.

There have been people that argue that that is actually a form of institutionalized discrimination and racism against groups that are typically not seen as the victims of that. And so that would meet Ibermaxcindy's definition of what it means to be anti-racist to actually discriminate to try to make up. for past discrimination. My last, my last question for you is what parents and what potential university students need to be on the lookout for when they're trying to figure out if the college that they are applying to, if it teaches things like this, because a lot of times it's covered in euphemisms like diversity and inclusion training. What do they need to be looking for? Right. I think you're right. They use the euphemism of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And equity is the key word because equity does not mean equality. A lot of people mistake that.

They think equity, equality, it's the same thing. Equity is equal results. And that's why sometimes in Kennedy's view and other views, you have to discriminate to get those equal results. Because we know historically for reasons that have nothing to do with race that different groups perform differently in different aspects of society. And that's a natural occurrence. It's not necessarily the result of racism. It's the result of a complicated set of factors. On campuses now, and there have been lawsuits against Harvard,

which I think is there is a lawsuit against Harvard that I think is going to end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging the affirmative action that Harvard has. And the people who are most discriminated against statistically were Asian Americans or people of Asian descent who had to receive some enormous multiple higher, on SAT scores and grades to be treated fairly, who had a one-tenth chance with the same grades and SAT scores of getting in. And that's really at the forefront. And that really shows the

complexity of this issue, that there are systems in place now meant to address historic discrimination, which themselves may be discriminating. And the courts will have to decide that. But that is, I think, one of the conundrums here is, and we saw this out in California where there was a proposition passed, I think it was 30 years ago, I might be off on the number of years, to essentially do away with affirmative action in higher ed admissions as discriminatory. So it basically said you cannot discriminate on the base of race and other factors in admission. And that essentially did away with affirmative action. And there was just a proposition this year, in a year when Biden won, where they were going to

undo that. And they would now allow discriminatory admissions practices. and it lost significantly in California. So I think we have to sometimes put aside the people who run the campuses and the student activists who run the campuses from the rest of the population. I don't believe a lot of these practices

are actually popular in the general population. I don't believe they're popular among non-whites even because I think most people in the country recognize that discrimination is a bad thing, no matter who it is against. And I don't think that a lot of other racial or ethnic minorities necessarily adopt these proposals because they statistically have been the victims over the last several years. Yep, you're absolutely right.

I think most people agree that meritocracy is fair. Most people agree in true equality, not this convoluted definition of equity. Most people agree that we shouldn't be discriminating against any group in pursuit of some kind of cosmic, and tangible anti-racist justice, our Ibermexcindy's definition of justice anyway. Thank you so much for what you do. Thank you for creating this website. Send anyone, you know, anywhere that you want them to go to your websites

or to any work that you've written. Tell them how they can support you. Sure. The website that we just created is called criticalrace.org. My main website is legalinsurrection.com. that's legal insurrection.com. That's a politics and law website, which deals with a lot of other issues. Or you can just Google my name and you'll find out plenty about me. Some good, some not so good. Well, thank you so much, Professor. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Great. Take care. All right, guys, hope you enjoyed that episode. I was just thinking as he was talking in that interview, just how opposed that idea that Ibramax, Kendi and many critical race activists posit how opposed it is to Christianity that, yes, it is enough to love God and love your neighbor. People who want to cast Jesus is this kind of social justice revolutionary who dismantled all of the systems that we don't like. It's just not what we read in God's word. It is enough to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself, no matter what they look like, no matter what their background is. Remember, God's definition of justice is both truthful and impartial. It doesn't discriminate against people based on what they look like or based on how much money they have no matter their status.

And so it is diametrically opposed to what we believe is good and right and true. Once again, I'm encouraging you, get off the hamster wheel of woke definitions of righteousness. They're ever changing. And quite frankly, according to God, they're not righteous. But we do have objective truth and standards in God's word. And hallelujah, praise God for that. All right. We will be back here tomorrow.