Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 431 | Dissecting the Dangers of Critical Theory | Guest: James Lindsay

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Today we welcome James Lindsay back to the show. Lindsay is one of the most knowledgeable people out there when it comes to critical theory, and his website New Discourses is dedicated to pushing back against woke narratives. Despite the good things that came from the Trump presidency, it also allowed critical race theorists on the left to exploit fear and misinformation, gaining ground in American culture. James breaks down the Marxist ideas behind critical race theory and draws many parallels between wokeness and religion. However, unlike in Christianity, there is no forgiveness for nonbelievers. James Lindsay's books available here --- Previous episode with James Lindsay: Ep 350: Explaining the 'Logic' of Leftist Hypocrisy --- 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. Hope everyone is having a great day. Today I am talking to James Lindsay. He is an author, a scholar, an amazing thinker. And you can already tell as you've started this podcast, this is a long episode. I already, I told my team after I finished this conversation that I actually need to book four hours when I talk to James Lindsay because you'll be able to tell. Like I can't, I just can't stop talking to him. My brain just keeps going. because he says so much that there that needs to be dissected and analyzed and questioned. And you are going to love this conversation. You're going to feel so smart after it because he is so smart and gives such great insight. And I'm really excited for you to listen to it. If you haven't listened to our first conversation from a few months ago from January, I'll link it in the description. So you can go back and listen to that.

It gives a little bit more context about what we're talking about today. But nevertheless, love the dialogue that we have. So without further ado, here is James Lindsay. James, thank you so much for joining me again. Last time we talked all about your book, cynical theories. We talked about critical race theory. We're going to continue that conversation today.

I want to first talk to you. We're recording this in January. This will come out sometime in May. And so who knows? Who the heck knows what's going to happen over the next few months? But as we're talking, we've seen a flurrying. of executive orders from the Biden administration in regards to sex discrimination, racial discrimination, that maybe all sound good in the name of equity. But it seems to me that those people who voted for him thinking that it was going to end wokeness and a lot of the stuff that you've talked about are wrong. Can you break that down for us? Yeah, I did think and still think that those people are wrong.

We'll see where that is when this comes out, I suppose. But I want to be as generous to their argument as possible. So their argument is that Trump was radicalizing and galvanizing the left so that it was impossible to make the argument against wokeness to normal people. because to try to argue against wokeness to normal people would result in them saying something like, but Trump, you know, so Trump is a bigger problem or Trump is the problem. And we wouldn't have to do this if Trump wasn't in an office. So their belief was that if we remove that irritant from the White House, then we can start to make headway on the cultural argument against wokeness.

We can start to show normal people just how bad wokeness is. My counter to that, I do sympathize and I do think they are actually right that certainly much of the left was galvanizing around anti-Trumpism to the point where they were unable to, I mean, it became very tribal and partisan. They were unable to give an inch on almost anything because Trump. So I understand their argument and I sympathize with their argument and I think it's actually largely correct. The thing that I disagree with them on is that I believe that they're operating under the assumption that politics as usual and culture as usual are still in operation. And I think that that assumption has failed. I do not think we're operating

in politics as usual. I think we are now operating in a very different circumstance and that there is now no check on a movement that Biden is either controlled by or is bought into or both to some degree. Yeah. That wants nothing but more power and is going to put the pedal to the metal to get as much, not just power, but unassailable power as it can take while it has the opportunity. And we see literally his first hour in the White House, Biden signed something like 17 executive. orders, at least a handful of which are brutally woke. We're sending the critical race theory ban that Trump had put in in October or September, doing whatever it is with gender identity.

And so basically women's sports and probably lots of women's safety is now compromised at the level of executive order. And this was, I mean, we're talking first hour in office. So these were extremely high priorities and are just the tip of a very large iceberg that I'm very worried about. So I think those people have a compelling argument. And I've always maintained since I've started making it that they have an argument that is a correct argument if things are normal. And I disagree with the assumption that things remain normal. Yeah.

I think that there is something too, like you said, the argument that Trump was galvanizing people. but the assumption that after after he was out of office that that galvanization or that feeling of anger, anti-Trump anger, anti-right anger would just go away and dissipate because now they have the cell for their wounds in Joe Biden is wrong. They are still feeling that galvanization. They are still feeling that resistance. They almost still see themselves as the resistance in some strange way. And I think that misunderstanding of their attitudes and why they're going to linger also goes back to a misunderstanding of when this all began, wokeness. I can't even say it began, but really started to ignite. It wasn't under Trump.

We started to see things really shift. It felt like to a lot of people around like 2015, it seemed like, okay, things are getting weird. Things are getting weird with gender. Things are getting weird with race. it seems like we're in this, we have a lot of class tension. We have a lot of tension between these groups that it didn't seem like we had before Obama took office. Do you think that feeling is correct? Or am I laying blame at Obama's feet that doesn't deserve to be laid there?

Or what do you think? Some of all of that. But I want to nuance a bit of it. So first of all, they will not calm down. The galvanization against Trump will be permanent so long as they are able to maintain it. For example, Amy Siskind tweeted following the inauguration that it can't be overstated that they have toppled a dictator. They genuinely believe that Trump was a dictator and that they toppled a dictator and everybody who supported him supported a dictator. And they genuinely, if you get not terribly far left, believe they have defeated the rise of the Nazis.

And everybody who, I mean, this is still a thing people are writing about in Germany, you know, 80 years later that people, normal Germans were complicit in the rise of the Nazis. And so this attitude is not going to diminish. This is what they genuinely believe. So just to put that out first, as for where woke. arose and ignited, I go back a little further. I don't just go back to 2015. I actually want to go back to 2008 when Obama was elected. And I live in the southeast and I had eyes that were fairly open at the time. And I did witness and I know the media jumped on it and probably, I don't know, poured a lot of gas on that fire. But there were certainly very ugly reactions to the fact that we had elected a black Democrat to the office. I think that most of the rage was Democrat and not black, but nevertheless, I saw the bumper stickers.

I can't deny having seen T-shirts and bumper stickers that said things like it's called the White House for a reason. I mean, they were blatantly racist. And critical race theory started, this wasn't Obama's fault. So critical race theory and critical race theorists had been forwarding for decades already. The claim that America is systemically racist and has just been hiding how racist it is. And so they were able to play off of that reaction, that genuinely racist and also then other people who were just kind of swept along with it. They were able to play into that reaction and say, see, we knew what we were talking about.

There's way more hidden racism in this country. So it started the mainline then. And a lot of people blame Obama. and maybe he has some, maybe he does deserve some blame, but I think that it's more that we saw a reaction that the critical race theorists were offering an explanation for that many people found persuasive. So by the time we've had two terms of this, and we're getting close to 2015, we have this event at the end of 2014, as a matter of fact, I think, where Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri by a police officer. And obviously, the story that was told does not match reality whatsoever.

The true story is now known that Michael Brown was, as the juries found, justifiably shot by police because of his aggressive behavior. But that's not what happened in 2015. And again, you had this mainlining of a narrative that the cops now were the target. And the cops must have all these major racism problems. So here again, now we have an institution. It's filled with hidden racism. And so the football moves a little further down the field in terms of getting people to believe that a systemic racism explanation for the phenomena of society is the correct one. They could point back and say, see, remember how people reacted when we elected our first black president, hidden racism?

And now you can see it's all in the police forces, et cetera. Then Trump ran and it was just racist, racist, racist, racist, he's a racist. Only racist would vote for him, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they were very, very successful at mainlining that narrative, which set the stage so that when Trump won and you saw massive vulnerability on the left. I mean, literally, people crying in the floor, going to therapy, not able to go to work for days. Like, can't process what just happened. They're still acting like they're trying to process what happened in 2016. They still are.

They have no idea because they don't actually, because they've adopted the frame of critical race theory, and because they are stuck. and I hate to say it, but just a frankly elitist like the woke would call it respectability politics orbit. They don't have the necessary tools to understand. We call gaining the necessary tools

to understand taking the red pill and they have not taken the red pill. So they don't understand. They don't even have the tools to understand what happened. And that vulnerability, again, with only racists would vote for Trump was just a absolute perfect storm for mainlining the critical theory view, and particularly the

critical race theory view, but you see it also with the queer theory, you know, apparently Trump hated gays, even though there's like the opposite of evidence for that, etc. And so they mainlined it very successfully into that vulnerability, which, you know, as you would know, my research before I got involved in studying wokeness was in terms largely of cults, but also religious conversions was a huge thing. I was studying psychologically. And vulnerability is the place where that tends to happen. And so if you can manufacture vulnerability, you can induce somebody into a cult in particular.

And that's how cultists tend to do it. They tend to find and prey upon vulnerabilities. Trump's election was a wellspring of vulnerability for people on the left. And that's really how this thing took off. So I don't want to lay it at Obama's feet. But I will say that that was really the first place where critical race theory was able to get its claws into normal people's heads. Yeah. And I do think that, you know, I obviously don't think that Trump, I think there are a lot of reasons to criticize Trump from his rhetoric to

some of his actions. And so as much as I lay responsibility at Trump's feet for some of his failures, I also lay things at Obama's feet for his failures. I think that he totally played in to the false narratives at Ferguson that helped fan the flames, literally, of the riots that were going on there. I think that he did play class politics when he said, you know, eventually you have enough money, never mind the fact that he is now a multimillionaire, when he said when he was campaigning that the people who didn't vote for him are either racist or they're just clinging to, you know, their God, their guns, their religion, whatever he said. he made it very clear that he looks with disdain upon the average working person, especially the average white working person. And so I think that became very normalized that you were allowed to talk about the working class like that. You are allowed to start

talking about people in racialized terms and class terms. You are allowed to start looking at especially Christians in a way as if they were oppressive and part of the problem. You're allowed to, and this probably didn't start with Obama, but, you know, calling everyone who disagrees with you racist. Obama certainly wasn't necessarily leading the charge in all of those things all the time. But he made it posh. He made it okay because the president with all of this decorum and respectability was saying those things in a way that was persuasive. So it must be okay for us to do it as well. And then you get the wrecking ball of Trump doing the exact opposite. opposite and saying whatever he wants to say. And I just think that it caused a lot of fragile people to

lose their minds. I think so. And you have to acknowledge the fact is that Obama said that one of his more influential professors that he had worked with and was friends with was Derek Bell. Derek Bell is the creator of critical race theory. And he propped up Derek Bell on a few occasions. So certainly, certainly Obama would have been familiar with what's going on with critical race theory where the vast majority of people in the country would not have had the slightest idea what it is. Nobody until like the last maybe six months except for a few people have known what it is or had the slightest idea about it. And so for him, when you say that, you know, they defam the flames of these things, certainly the activists would know who

Derek Bell was. And certainly they would have felt extremely encouraged. And, and and would have seen that as a signal that he was taking their side. And certainly that would indicate that he would be sympathetic to many of those arguments, even if he's sympathetic to them in a more nuanced or more responsible way, because I think there are responsible ways to talk about the issues that critical race theory raises. So you do have the issue that you had a president who not only behaved in the ways that you were seeing, But he also did act in ways that directly supported the narratives that we now understand to have been as divisive as they really are. Whereas at the time, I don't think most people, a few people certainly conservatives understood or at least intuited what was going on.

But most other people didn't know what was going on. And as you said, kind of fell in and felt like it kind of normalized that approach to analysis of what's happening. And that's actually pretty serious looking back on it. Yeah. It does seem if you, if you look, there's a tool that you can use on Google that tells you when a word started to be used more and more pervasively. And so these words, these woke words like intersectionality, probably not critical theory. I feel like that's not often used blatantly in the media, but intersectionality, systemic racism, white supremacy. see, all of those words really started to be used in a pervasive way around 2015.

So what happens? Like I know that you said that this, you know, started much longer ago. You could even say that it has roots more in the 1960s. But what happened that all of a sudden these words and these terms and critical race theory came on the scene just a few years ago? And gosh, it's gone so fast to where now this is the subject of executive orders in some of our legislation? It's funny because we're in the middle of a pandemic.

And so in the beginning of the pandemic, we all got kind of a crash course in exponential growth. And if you, where you have something that grows very slowly and then suddenly it grows very fast and gets very out of control. And there's sort of this point where it takes off in appearance. If you look at those graphs, that's actually kind of what you see. You see this slow growth of these terms. Certainly there's a first time the phrase, say, systemic racism or intersectionality got used.

And then there's this kind of slow growth. And then all of a sudden there's this point of inflection where it just takes off. And the obvious thing that happened in 2014-15-ish where that fire kind of caught was the emergence of Black Lives Matter and thus a very polarizing event, but more importantly, a very polarizing movement where the argument about whether or not things. in this country are systemically racist and whether or not intersectionality is the right way to analyze these things really grabbed hold. We could talk about lots of different factors that maybe went into that about, you know, the degree to which it became standard in college course material, therefore priming journalists to use phrases like that and getting them, those people into positions where they're starting to write. We could talk about the influence of social media,

which is now going to allow people to mainline words that maybe editors wouldn't have done earlier. Lots of different factors kind of all kind of come into it. But I really think that if we just had to boil it down to a single thing, it's that Black Lives Matter polarized the country in 2015, partly for reasons that at the time I think were justifiable and also for reasons that were pretty bad. So I really think that the, which we saw and we had a huge kind of,

of thing about them in 2015. The Black Lives Matter eruption at the time really was the thing that started to mainline those ideas. And then, of course, the media was just making money, hand over fist, fanning those flames. And so they continued to fan those flames. We saw that the same with Trump. The more that they talked about Trump, the more money they made. I'm old enough to remember 2016 CBS, the CEO of CBS admitting that he shouldn't be covering Trump the way he is, but he just couldn't stop because he was making crazy money off of it. Of course. And so, yeah, the media got into the business a long time before that of selling hysteria and paranoia.

And critical race theory is like the mother load of hysteria and paranoia. So it's like they found a gold mine full of what they sell. And they were off to the races. And I think actually, as people become convinced, you have to understand that critical race theory all of these critical theories present a worldview. They are not theories. In fact, if you read the book Critical Race Theory in Introduction, which is a standard undergraduate textbook in the subject,

the first sentence says that it's a critical race theory is a movement. Yeah. Well, a theory is not a movement. The theories in movements are different things. So the thing is never set up to have been an academic theory in the real sense. It was always set up to be a movement. And that's a requirement of a critical theory. So it's not surprising.

All critical theories have to be able to be used as social movements, or they're not critical theories by definition all the way back to the 1930s. So it's no surprise that that's what would be going on with critical race theory. But they see themselves as operating in a movement space, not in a theoretical space, not in an explanatory space. And so when it found a place to take off, it took off. And once you start to get into that, what they call a critical consciousness, or in this case, a critical race consciousness, it becomes

a self-affirming worldview. You start to see the world that way. It's very much, you know, for religious people will understand that when they are saved, they often begin to recognize the fingerprint of God or of Christ on the world everywhere they look, and how amazing providence is or all of these things that they hadn't noticed before. It's like that, but perverted. And you start to see racial problematics everywhere you look because that's what having a race critical consciousness means. Right, right. I think that one of the things that makes it so effective in what has helped it gain ground

over the past few years is that so many people didn't know what it was. So many people, I, you know, I didn't know what critical race theory was until, I don't know, a couple years ago. And people who I talk to today, most people do not know. Hopefully everyone listening to this podcast now knows because we've talked about it so much. If you don't, we'll link some previous episodes where we talk to James and some other people about what it is. But I think that it is so effective because it just comes in under the guise of compassion. First, it was if you want equality, this is what you should want. Well, then it's

not enough to want equality. You have to want equity, which, of course, has some convoluted definitions of it. And I hear a lot of people in the church today in particular say social justice. types in the church say, well, I don't even know what critical race theory is. So I can't be a critical race theorist or, you know, I affirm some parts of critical race theory, but I don't affirm other parts of critical race theory. I also hear an excuse of that, well, if there wasn't such pervasive racism, then we wouldn't need critical race theory. And people like me, they would of caring more about critical race theory than I do about racism. And of course, I'm part of the problem because of that. And these are all like axioms. They're not arguments. Like you can't

argue against them because they're all self-certified. And so, because if I say anything, then again, it's because I am part of the problem. And if I have to ask, then not just indicates that I am the reason why critical race theory exists because of ignorant people like me. Can you speak to any of that confusion? Yeah, I mean, it does. It's a very wolf and sheep's clothing kind of situation. I've also, I guess, fairly famously in Christian circles, referred to it as a Trojan horse. In fact, I say it's a Trojan horse full of bureaucrats.

So it's usually busybodies who want to set administrative policy and set up your training programs for new recruits. But anyway, it comes in with under two guises, one of which is that it's sophisticated academic theory. and therefore you don't really understand it. You don't understand how sophisticated or nuanced it is. You don't know what the definitions, details. And so since you don't know just how sophisticated it is, you must misunderstand it. But they explain quite clearly if you read enough of the theory, you start to see. They explain quite clearly that to have engaged with critical race theory means to have engaged with a critical race consciousness.

In other words, you have to believe it before you can understand it properly. So everybody who doesn't believe it doesn't understand it properly. then you get that self-affirmation there. But because it looks like a scholarly academic theory, critical race theory itself sounds scholarly and academic, it gives off this impression that it's smarter than it is, rather than just complaining about race and racism all the time in ways that are often either exaggerated or wholly fabricated. Secondly, as you said, it plays off of compassion. and it is extremely good at making the case that people who disagree with it must not care or in fact care about the wrong things or care about evil things, whether it's this kind of callous not caring about the harms of racism or actively wanting to participate in racism. And so it's a very seductive worldview when you don't understand it, when you haven't taken the time to read it and then process what it says and then read it again. You kind of have to do that to get that it's actually academically very shallow.

It's compassion is, I don't want to say that it's necessarily cruel. I want to say, in fact, something much more specific is that what it has is it has way too narrow of compassion. with the compassion then turned way too high on that very narrow band. So what it's very good at is caring way too much about one very specific type of harm while being extremely good at ignoring all the other types of harm. And that's an extremely important situation because that's where you land in what C.S. Lewis is talking about where he warns that the tyrant who believes they're doing it for your own good is the worst kind of tyrant. Right.

That's where you land in that, where you have a very narrow sense of empathy turned up to, you know, volume level 11. Right. And then that then overshadows and silences the ability to care about anything else. So if you care, oh, we have to care about racism and we have to care about black people or whatever they say, turn that up so loud that they can no longer hear the damage that they're doing to other people or other circumstances or letting institutions fall apart. tearing churches apart, driving people crazy, accusing people falsely of racism and destroying their lives. No longer is any of that relevant to them because their empathy or their compassion has been narrowed to a very, very, very small band that they then make so loud they can't hear any problem outside of that band. And I've argued, and I know it's very controversial,

but I'm quite confident that this is correct, that that particular pattern, and I don't say that that's going to bear fruit, but that particular pattern is that. a seed from which a genocide grows. Because if you can only care about a very small band of problems and you care way too much about them and you can't hear the harm you're causing somewhere else, that's a necessary precondition. It's not a guaranteed conclusion, but it's a necessary precondition to be able to start to perpetrate something as horrible as a genocide. You have to not care about the harm that you're creating to be able to do that. And the easiest way to get there is by caring way too much about one specific harm to where you've now

lost the ability to care about any other harm. In critical race theory, I hate to say it, but it's true, is designed to make people continually drive into a smaller and smaller range of empathy. We can talk about that, for example, you say, oh, it's about, you got the idea of like white fragility and white complicity and white privilege. And then what do they do? As soon as that's taken off and it's gotten, you know, to the point where it's mainstreamed, now it's like, oh, there's brown fragility and brown privilege and brown complicity, and brown people are also inherently anti-black. So, again, it goes from being all non-white races to know we're going to narrow the range even further and implicate everybody else. So you can see that the theory is designed to continually narrow the range.

And where critical race theory comes from, I know I said Derek Bell, who certainly was not this, but it got co-opted by his student Kimberly Crenshaw. who was informed deeply by the Kambahee River Collective, which was this, is it is queer black feminism, which is a very, very narrow, very specific ideology or kind of combination of ideologies. And that's what it will narrow to, is queer black feminists will be the only people who you are allowed to care about at the bottom of that game. And it will continue to narrow to that. And those people are the only thing that have a legitimate claim on suffering. Yeah, which is who the founders of Black Lives Matter are, by the way. Like that is the philosophy and the worldview that they have, that queer black feminism that's been written about blatantly, that that's what they represent.

And I think also people need to understand because to those of us who are still in the world of sanity, we're just like, well, this just sounds like a whole bunch of hypocrisy. and how do they not see the duplicitousness of their thinking? But I think you have to also understand that critical theory, and you can explain this better than I can, so please correct me if I'm wrong. They also subvert this idea of objective truth. They say, well, objective truth is this Western construct. So that's why, you know, if you try to get a critical theorist

or critical race theorist to define their terms objectively or to point to historical events to be able to support their narrative or talk about facts and data and things like that. They will kind of brush that off and say, we don't need to talk about that. This is not a debate. I don't want to argue about those things. But it really goes back to this kind of standpoint epistemology that says that truth comes from my standpoint, in particular, if I am a non-white person. and that they, it's almost a form of Gnosticism where they believe that special knowledge has been revealed to non-white people and therefore a white person with all the data and objective

truth in the world can't argue against them because they even argue what truth is and where truth comes from and how to find truth. And they argue that someone like me or you doesn't actually have access to that truth without them. And without them telling us what that truth is, it comes from their own standpoint. And so that is also why I guess this has taken off so much and why it's so hard to rein in with debate, because debate is moot, especially with people who either are white or who they would say black people have internalized whiteness or white supremacy to the point to where they don't need to be debated with either. Is that a correct assessment? Yeah. I mean, I know that we're recording this ahead of time in January, and so people will have

forgotten, but it did just come out a week ago or so in January or in the past week that they're now going after this idea of multiracial whiteness. And so you certainly are right that people who are not white by any usual definition are being classified as white by the theory when they disagree or when they raise problems with it. This is exactly right. And this is why they don't see what they're doing is hypocritical at all. Whether you want to talk about it from the perspective of historical critical theory, or you want to talk about it from the influence that they imported from postmodernism, both of these traditions have lent them the tools to deny the idea that objective truth exists, and in particular, to claim that the attempt to

say, well, let's look at this objectively, or let's gather the evidence, or let's see, if you say this church or this university or this police force or whatever is racist, let's go gather the evidence. Let's go see what, you know, let's see how arrest numbers have really worked out. Let's see use of force numbers, see how they really worked out for police, for example. Or, you know, let's look at grades and see what happened, and let's find out why. Let's at a school, you know, whatever it happens to be. Well, let's look at the incidents between, you know, pastoral, this or that, or whatever, in a church.

By you saying, let's look at this objectively, what they are saying is, no, now what you are doing is forcing us to participate in what they would refer to as a white racial frame. white people prefer the idea of evidence and the reason they prefer the idea of evidence is because it allows them to deny the lived experience that people outside of that frame have experienced. What the heck does that mean for a justice system then? Like, I mean, how does that affect how we see justice and how people are actually proving guilty if evidence is just a construct of whiteness that needs. to be deconstructed and defeated. I mean, that's really scary. Well, what it does to justice is exactly what you think it would do to justice. It sets up these people who will refer to as critical race theorists who have the ability to read the tea leaves of justice and then to determine what is and is not just in that moment.

So evidence, the preponderance of evidence, beyond reasonable doubt, these kinds of standards, a reasonable person standard in court, which is, necessary for dealing with things that are not just cut and dry. What would a reasonable person think about this? Those are thrown out the window because those standards are held up as supporting a racial frame that is in the terms of critical race theory explicitly created and maintained to exclude other approaches or other ways of knowing or much more explicitly black people often and their claims. And so what you will then have is you will have a collection of people who we will rightly name as critical race theorists who become the genuine judges who are able to actually adjudicate what is and is not just according to their subjective

understanding of this racial politics. If we stick just in race, of course, with the queer black feminism, we're going to have other dimensions of identity going to weigh in on this, which is exactly what you would see under, say, a kind of kangaroo court or a communist court where it is the will of the party that determines everything. And if you start to think of the critical race theorists as the party who get to determine what is the right way to think and what is the wrong way to think, what is the right evidence, what is the wrong evidence, then you start to really understand how this thing operates. So what it does to justice is that it certainly takes a blindfold off of justice, as they say.

And it makes justice not very just because it becomes extremely biased in the favor of, a group of people who claim to have special knowledge, as you said, based in standpoint. So that's what it does to justice. That is how this is all organized. That they literally believe, and again, we can talk about it in terms of the critical theory aspect or the postmodern aspect, which they've combined into one kind of monstrosity. But they have arrived at the belief that all approaches to understanding the world are just applications of the politics of the people that that approach to the world benefits.

So they think that white people cooked up our justice system, our evidence-based courts, for example, so that they could bias the system for themselves and maintain white supremacist politics. And therefore, that has to be held as suspect. So that's where, for example, at the Evergreen State College, where Brett Weinstein famously got, you know, protested and eventually chased off of campus and with his life in threat, where he at one point said, look, if this campus is racist, this angry mob of students, he said, if this campus is racist, let's see the evidence and let's fix it. And they said asking for evidence of racism is racism because it denies the lived experience of people. who have experienced racism, and therefore, if you had experienced it, you would already know. There's your Gnosticism.

And so what it does is it creates a party of people who have the right politics, or if you want to say theory, I suppose we can say that, but the right political view, who get to become the arbiters of what is just, what is real, what is true, and everybody else has to be subject to that. It's really kind of interesting because, you know, I think we're probably about to talk about postmodernism and maybe we should. But the postmodernist actually, this is what they were warning about. And so these, the woke have picked up postmodern tools to do exactly the thing that the postmoderners were like, this is going to be, this is a problem. We shouldn't do this. We should avoid this at all costs. And they basically figured to have to engineer the most

poisonous movement in the universe by picking up the postmodernness warning about truth and socially mediated truth and truth by consensus that you could possibly imagine. Yeah. It seems like progressivism has a problem with overcorrection. We talked about at the beginning of this, very real problems. Like when Obama was elected, there were some racist out there who said, you know, I don't want a black president. Obviously, America has had at one point a history of racism. You could even argue at some points. It was systemic racism. And so it seems that the correction that progressives are now proposing is not just, you know, what Martin Luther King proposed, that, hey, we just want to be treated like men. We want to be treated as human beings, as Christians would

say, made in the image of God. Like Frederick Douglass, he believed that the Constitution was a glorious liberty document. He didn't, he didn't believe in getting rid of it. He actually believed, okay, let us live up to these ideals. We talked about in our last interview, you talked about liberty and justice for all, the founding ideals that we have were seeds and they were supposed to take root and grow. They weren't. They weren't going to be perfect at that time and they, and they weren't. And so we can accept and acknowledge the fact that we have very serious past mistakes and injustices that have needed to be rectified. But this seems like a case of overcorrection and almost vengeance. Thomas Soe calls it Cosmic.

justice deciding that, okay, we've got to hold back these groups, not looking at their individual experiences, but just all white people. We've got to hold them back so we can push these, at least in our perception, oppressed people forward. And you do that through punishment of the oppressors or the privileged people and through given privileges to the other group disregarding individuals' experiences, what they've actually gone through, whether they've actually dealt with some sort of oppression or not. And I think the hard thing that I have is understanding how people don't see that that is an entire worldview, that there aren't parts of that to pick and choose and to say, you know, part of this critical race theory, cosmic justice idea

is okay. And part of it is not. It seems to me like just, throw that all out and let's agree that, okay, maybe there needs to be some work done, but our goal should be true liberty and justice for all. Our goal should be equality and viewing all people the same in value and having the same rights. But, you know, when you talk about that, when you talk about any form of neutrality, you're also called a white supremacist. And so I don't even know what my question is. I just don't know what to do. I don't know what to do in those conversations. That's the thing. So what you have to do actually with when you're in the conversation with somebody who's woke,

it's, I know it's a really weird thing to say to you, but it's like dealing with somebody who's super, super religious. I mentioned earlier conversion experiences and everybody knows, I know that many of my Christian friends will appreciate this, just how annoying a new convert is. We have lots of new converts to woke right now. Yeah. So it's very important to realize the zeal of the new convert. but you probably won't make a lot of headway with a newly woke person. But you will talk to a lot of other people.

And the first thing to do is every time. So just start naming the dynamic. And in particular, naming the asymmetry that you're trying to point at here. And even naming the fact that there's a level of vengeance. Like, yeah, I agree with you that there was a problem. And yeah, I agree with you that that problem should be undone. And I'm even willing perhaps to have a reasonable conversation about a little bit of makeup for this. However, this isn't what's going on.

And, you know, there's a blatant asymmetry in how things are being treated. And then, like you just said, that if we're going to call for neutrality, and then we're going to say, wait, neutrality itself is racist. If you want to understand why that is, they believe it's because the playing field itself is tilted. That's what systemic racism could be boiled down to. It's tilted in the favor of white people. And therefore, if you act neutrally, if you try not to rebalance that thing, you know, water will always roll downhill. and head toward, you know, the benefit will roll to the white people or whatever. Yeah.

And so, or punishment will roll away from them or, you know, disenfranchisement or roll away from them. However, you want to picture the tilt. So they are arguing that we must artificially tilt the playing field back the other way. And there's not a lot of reason to believe that that's going to work out very well. In fact, it seems not to be working at all. I will, however, say that it's very useful to point out to help people understand. Like, okay, there are at least two big things we could talk about, about systemic racism, for example, to make it clear what's going on. And at least one of these I want to bring up for sure, which is you said, you know, perhaps we were systemically racist in the past. No, we were. There's no perhaps. And so here's what systemic racism looks like. This is what actual systemic racism looks like. Systemic racism looks like a person of a particular race coming up and saying, you know, this is what I experienced.

and this is a big problem and I need to be heard. And the response being, shut up racial epithet. You are an ignorant racial, racial epithet. You don't know what you're talking about. That's what systemic racism looks like. That's the system. Well, the word systemic means, I think that doesn't it kind of depend on what you mean by systemic racism, and the word systemic means everywhere, which I would argue.

I would say yes. Exactly. There are times in history where that has absolutely been true. but I also know people who would say, well, there were times in history where maybe that seemed to be true, but it wasn't actually everywhere. I have heard people argue that no, racism, has it been systemic, absolutely everywhere, like a malignant, you know, tumor in society. But you're kind of describing it a little bit differently, I think. So it depends. Yeah, what they usually are referring to is that the way that we interact with the world, every bit of the system, whether it's what we claim to, Who we were willing to believe, who we're not willing to believe, who we think knows things, what constitutes knowledge, plus the laws, the institutions, all of those things combined form a system of society, how society operates.

And if that thing is severely tilted, then you have a problem. But of course, when you take, you don't specify which race it is. It's pretty clear that we were in an unambiguously, systemically racist situation. Yeah. Now, then we were in a much less but not perfect situation. And now we're putting systemic racism back in in the opposite direction. So the vengeance aspect becomes a lot more clear, or at least the overcorrection aspect. Another thing that you can say about systemic racism is just how, when you say everything and everywhere, just how preposterous this idea is.

I gave this example when I went on Joe Rogan last summer. And I talked about, I realized this when I was out on a walk with my wife around our block. And we were walking down this hill by the road. And I noticed, you know, a car went by really fast. And, you know, as your brain sometimes does weird things, it was like, you know, what if I got hit by that car? And I don't know, you know, why does it do this? And then all of a sudden I had this whole understanding of systemic things much more clearly, which I thought, imagine that I, like, tripped. Right.

And actually, instead of me getting hit by the car, I tripped over a bottle that was laying on the sidewalk. And I knocked my wife into the road right at the wrong time. And she got hit by the car. who's at fault? And what the systemic explanation would be is, well, we have a system that involves people buying and driving cars. If our system didn't have cars, then we wouldn't have that if our economy didn't depend on cars. That bottle, assuming maybe it's a beer bottle or something, if we didn't have a culture that drank alcohol, if we didn't support the idea that anybody drinks alcohol, then that beer bottle wouldn't have been there for me to trip over. You can start

getting into any number of things. But the idea is that now we have this whole economic system where the very existence of beer and the very existence of cars. Yeah. And thus, the people who purchase and indulge in cars or beer become, and if you don't want it to be beer, it can be Coca-Cola, but beer makes it a little bit, you know, a little bit more punchy. That we have a society, a capitalist consumer society that would would rely on those things and name those things as good.

and name those things as indicative of freedom. Everybody who's involved in those industries, everybody who's involved in propping up those industries, which means everybody bears some moral complicity or moral responsibility for the fact that my wife died by me tripping over the bottle and knocking or in front of a car. That's what systemic thinking, that's actually how it works. If you read this book,

being good, being white, or being good, it's one or the other. I always do these things backwards by Barbara Alpabom from 2010, which is about white moral complicity and racism, that's her argument is that you have to just keep expanding until you get to the point where all white people and all people who benefit from whiteness are complicit in whiteness and are therefore complicit in racism and white supremacy

and must therefore be able to be identified as such as people who are complicit in racism and white supremacy. In other words, that they're racist and white supremacists. And this is a terrible way to think. And so using that kind of example has also helped me show people that the systemic approach to understanding racism is not a particularly good one. People who literally had absolutely nothing to do with racism in their entire lives who have been in the real sense of the word anti-racist or entire lives are still implicated in racism. And you read that in their work too everywhere. They're blaming white progressive liberals as the worst kind of racist because they're the kind that think they're.

get it. They're the kind that don't, don't think of themselves as being racist and therefore aren't doing more, they're willing to sit on their laurels and not do more work according to what the critical race theorists say. This is a preposterous way to think about the problem. Yeah. And then if you think of, again, like I said, I think it's very important to realize what real systemic racism looks like. It looks like shut up inward. That's what it looks like. Yeah. That's not what's happening today. That's not anywhere close to what's happening today. In fact, it's so far to the opposite of what's happening today, that it's almost laughable that somebody would think that that's what's going on today. It's like if a black person at this point in society complains, everybody in the whole

world, like, gathers around them and tries to fix the problem. It's the opposite of shut up N-word. But instead, now we have shut up white man. Your story has been told. So you can see the reinstallation. You talk about an overcorrection. You can see the reinstallation of systemic, in this case, racism in the opposite direction. And they say we can't call that racism. So some folks are calling it neo-racism now, and I really like that. So, yeah, it's neo-racism, fine. Yeah, yeah.

It is, it's, it's an awful way to think because it's also, it's confusing because in your metaphor, they would also say if that is like a metaphor for like some kind of systemic problem where everyone associated with even the manufacturing of the beer can and the car is morally implicated. They would say, you can't, like, if this is a metaphor for systemic racism, they would say you can't point to people who are successful, who are black, to say that that's not systemic racism. So even if you're, if you didn't trip over the beer can and you didn't push your wife in front

of the car and she didn't die, they would still say the fact that those impediments existed, the fact that those risks existed, even if you didn't trip and nothing bad happened, that is still evidence of a systemic problem. And still everyone is morally implicated. So that's why you can't talk about, well, hey, non-white people in America are, you know, if you're looking at a variety of standards and categories, are more successful than non-white people anywhere else on earth. Well, that does it matter if the problem is that the beer can't exist. If the problem is that the car is speeding by, then it doesn't matter whether or not you trip over it. And I hope people are following our metaphor. That's correct. But, and so that's another reason why it's like,

okay, but so then by what standard are we looking at improvement? Like, by what standard can we say, okay, things are better now? Things are good now because it's almost like anything that you point to to say, look, things are good. The gaps are closing or whatever it is. I mean, that's another fallacy, though, saying that every disparity equals discrimination. But whatever standards you want to point to to say, things are a lot better than they were in the 1960s. We keep hearing over and over. No, they're not. They're not better than they were in the 1960s. And again, it comes down to the whole theory, the whole worldview is self-certifying. And you do wonder these people who say, okay, we've got to fight systemic racism. I had a conversation with someone the other day who said, you know, Christians,

white evangelicals need to do a better job of fighting racial justice. And I said, okay, what? tell me, I'm ready. I'm ready. I want to do this with you for, you know, I want to, I want to come alongside you and do this. You say that I'm failing or white evangelicals are failing in this area. What? And it always goes back to, well, just think about or look at this disparity, or let's consider or let's talk about or read this book. Okay, I'm all for thinking and reading and talking. That's pretty much all I like to do. But that doesn't solve the problem, does it? Like, that doesn't come to any solutions if you really want to close these gaps and look at these you know actual inequalities it just makes me wonder is there like is there an actual end goal

do they want it to do they want actual so-called racial justice it makes me feel like no they don't no so what you hear with that and they say it very frequently in fact now is that they are calling to inner work that literally they call it doing inner work. So you have to think about it. You have to read this thing and then think about it. And the goal is to induce that critical race consciousness is to get you to think about the problem the way they think about the problem so that you now agree with one another. And then you are on this kind of according to the way they think about it, magic path that when everybody is on the same page, then they will be able to liberate people from racism. And so it is a goal of changing mindsets

rather than changing almost any material condition. And when they do try to change material conditions, as we've often seen, they do it in a clumsy kind of post hoc way where they just try to change the outcomes or take away the test. You see it with the SAT. Oh, there's different scores on the SAT between different racial groups on average. Therefore, the test itself must be racist. Let's get rid of it. Let's just not have that assessment anymore.

So what it's really calling to is a form of spiritual work to get you to have a critical race consciousness, which is to say to convert to their religion. That's the plainest way to put it is what they're asking you to do is to convert to their cult. But you can't ever really get there. Like, in Christianity, we're told the same thing. You work out your salvation with fear and trembling. That is, that's a directive that we're given. But also, it is under, it's under this cloud of grace, this knowledge that, okay, we're going to keep sending, like the Apostle Paul talks about in the book of Romans. Like, the things that I don't want to do, the sins that I don't want to commit, I keep on doing.

And thank the Lord that there's grace, there's mercy, there's forgiveness. And one day, I'll be in heaven and I won't have to worry about sin anymore. And that's the hope that we cling to. That's the grace that we have. But within this religion of critical race theory, who calls you to the same, what we would call sanctification within Christianity, this inner work, there's almost no carrot at the end of it. There's no, like, you know, it's okay if you mess up. You know, you have a hope of redemption and a hope of having you have a hope of future glory to where you won't have to worry about this struggle.

There's no, there's no hope and there's no grace and there's no forgiveness. There is, you'll always be racist. You have to continue doing the work. And like, and we don't even know what it's going to look like in the end. They talk about liberation. I don't even know. I don't even know what they mean by that. I don't even know what their picture of society looks like.

So it's amazing to me that people engage in this stuff without ever asking those questions. So like, what does society get out of your self-hatred and your inner work? Like, who is benefiting from it, except for you and getting cultural capital? Right. So this is, actually, you could very easily put this as being like Christianity in a sense, but with grace removed. And so the fear and the trembling, if you look at the Puritan tradition, the humiliation is kind of constant. Puritans on this show. We like puritans on this show.

Woke is the Puritanism of this very Hegelian religion. So it is, I'm not hating on Puritans. I'm saying that the Puritanical impulse has re-orisen in another faith. And it has a different God. It does not have grace at all. And so where Christians can harken back to grace, as you very clearly explained and very eloquently put, that doesn't exist here. So what happens in a faith system where you don't have that? Well, you only have one option. You have to buy indulgences from the church. And so that's what you see. You see another extortion coming down the pike every single time. I know that's Catholics, but that's why I wanted to say it to my Protestant friends here, because they'll get it. The critical race

theory church is going to force you to buy indulgences because there is no grace to rest in. You can't go and say, no, by God, I have grace, or by God, there is grace that I'm not worthy of and whatever else. You can't say that. There is only the institution, which is going to be set up by the critical race theorists, and because there is no grace, the I at the end of history, in history with a capital H in the way that Hagel and Marx would have used it, is the moral judge for them in their faith. There's no appealing to that. There's either being on the right side or the wrong side of it. So in the meantime, the cathedral that's set up around it, if you want to call it Catholic style, that's fine for me. I don't have a problem. We'll sell indulgences. And that's what you see.

Take up this diversity training and pay us a million dollars. And all of a sudden, you know, you're good until we say, whoops, you're not good anymore. Take up this diversity training and pay us another million dollars. Why don't you give up your pastorship or why don't you give up your CEO position to somebody who's one of us and we'll give you another indulgence? And that's, and that's, That's the process that we're actually seeing. So this is a church, in a sense, is being built out of the sale of indulgences forever. It's exactly the thing Luther protested against, except now it's using race instead of, you know, maybe mafia bosses wanting to whack a guy and go into the Pope ahead of time or a cardinal

and asking for, you know, pre-forgiveness in exchange for plenty of gold for the Vatican. Yeah. It's a very corrupt system. And by the way, you can pay lots and lots and lots of indulgences and it can be all taken away from you. If it's found out that at one point you said something, you know, that you regret or doesn't fit into today's definitions of what it means to be anti-racist, it can be all taken away. If you don't do the proper work, if you are not following the proper rules. And by the way, the rules are also arbitrarily applied depending on your politics. Like you can be a rich white man, Joe Biden, who signed one of the most draconian crime bills that

disproportionately affected black Americans and who has said lots of things that could be arguably actually described as racist. And somehow, it's all okay. So that's also another confusing part about it is that critical race theory is not really just about race. It's also just about believing in the right. politics, that's also a way that you can get some kind of social credit, right? Yeah. So we've talked about, we can talk about with politics, you've brought up class issues

repeatedly. And critical race theory uses race as a proxy for those things. And so it's not really about race at all. It's about having the right politics. And if you are useful to the critical race theorists, as Joe Biden is, obviously with his equity proposals and so on, and getting rid of Trump as another one who was resisting them, then you get all kinds of indulgences for however long that lasts. You're off the hook because your politics suit their agenda. And the second your politics don't suit your agenda, they're going to start twisting it the other way, and you're going to have to buy indulgences from them again. It's a very important thing to understand that this is how this works. It's when your politics align with theirs, you're good to go

until they want something from you, and then they'll find a reason to twist you. When your politics don't align with theirs, they're going to twist you all the time. It is wholly corrupt. And again, I think that's because, to put it in a different frame than usual, because it's very easy for people to say, oh, because it's godless and maybe it's communist and all of this, it's ultimately Higalian and in its structure. And it's very important for people to understand. Hegel forwarded the idea that ideas perfect themselves through dialectic throughout history.

the ideas become perfect. The dialectic, sorry. Yeah, so the dialectic process, really, I think, derives from Kant before Hegel, but Hegel took it very seriously, and he wrote in 1807 a book called Phenomenology of Spirit that's virtually impossible to read. And so the phenomenology of how spirit evolves, the phenomenon of the development of spirit is what he's about. And he's got a dialectical process.

It's actually Kant's expression to say what most people talk about, which is that there is a thesis, an idea, and then it confronts its antithesis, something that negates it, or Alphabin and German, and then you take those two pieces and find some greater hole by synthesizing them. So you have thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and a three-stage process. So you put out an idea, you look for the contradiction in the idea, and then you try to find some grander hole. So the best example I've encountered of this is thesis. The sky is blue, antithesis, not at night. And synthesis, the sky changes colors and is blue during daytime. And so it seems like this creates a greater understanding and a greater picture of the whole. But it's in fact a form of alchemy.

By working through contradictions, you're working through a process of negating things to get something more and that doesn't actually work. It can expand horizons when you're being too narrow. So there is a positive use to this. But it's also not possible to get a greater understanding. I go believe that the spirit of the world, the Veltgeist, as he put it, evolves according to this, and that there's actually behind the scenes a, and so it's people doing this process that allow the spirit of the world, which is kind of how the world believes about things. It's not the same as zeitgeist, which is kind of more narrow. He wasn't a big fan of the idea of zeitgeist. He had this Veltgeist. So the ideas of the world evolve as people go through this process of negating bad ideas and then finding a high-regeist.

higher synthesis. And he had this idea of an absolute spirit that he talks about, or an absolute that is the equivalent for him of deity. It is, in fact, often treated as though it's the same God as the Christians talk about, but it's not. And the idea for him is that this God becomes aware of itself when enough dialectic has happened, when the Veltgeist gets to the right place and has merged fully. He was a big, big statist. So when it merges fully with the state. And at that point, the eschaton occurs because the absolute becomes aware of itself and understands that it is the absolute.

And in other words, you now have a utopia that has been built on earth and is enshrined in the state. And for Marx, that's when socialism falls apart and becomes communism because the state becomes redundant. That's the dialectical materialist version of that same thing, of the Hegelian Eschaton, being the awareness of the final awareness of the absolute spirit. And so what you have here, in Christianity, you have a God that is. I am the I am, I am the Alpha and the Omega, that which is before everything and after everything.

I am eternal, I am unchanging, I am, right? Yahweh, I am. And so you have this idea of a God that's eternal and outside of the circles of the world. in fact, he's sovereign over the circles of the world, whereas in Hegel you have an absolute that becomes. It's not a God that is. It's a God that becomes. And it becomes through the process of constantly criticizing and poking at the world

and our ideas about the world and changing them. And Hegel saw this as being kind of perfected by being entrusted to an increasingly perfect and increasingly powerful state. And like I said, Marx translated that into the material around. by saying that capitalism will give way to socialism and then eventually the state will become redundant when we realize we no longer need a state and then we'll have a communist utopia, which is never happened. The same thing, which will never happen. Utopia means nowhere.

And so this is, you have to understand that this is the process behind it. And this is the basis their deity is this God that's becoming by our process of picking at the world. and it is not a God that is. It is a God that becomes by picking at things and picking at things and picking at things. And as a judge in the sense that we would see, like, you know, God is as merciful judge of the world. We don't have mercy. We have the judge that says, were you on the right side of history or were you not at the very end of this process when it becomes aware. And so, though, what it is is like, you know how you can look at, we can look at ourselves and we can look back in time two generations.

and think, wow, look how racist everybody was two generations ago. That's bad. And then you can look forward and say, wow, our grandchildren will probably think we're really racist. That's, we're bad. And then now just kick that out to infinity. And that's where you get the idea of this. I've referred to it as the eye at the end of history as the Higelian judge. So you can see how this becomes the god of progressivism because progressive progress progress away from these evil.

is kind of taken as the axiomatic thing that's happening. And so the more time goes by, the more of that will have occurred, and the more horrific we'll look back on ourselves and think we were in the past and be ashamed of that. And so it's like trying to circle back around and get ahead of that thing and trying to force the world to change to that perfect Star Trek universe. I mean, Star Trek universe isn't perfect either. They got that whole thing with the Romulans and the Klingons. And it's like a thing there too, right?

So, but nevertheless, to understand it in that sense, and I know that's heavy, but that this is actually a faith based in a completely different conception of God. And the simplest way to say the difference. With the different eschatology, you've talked about eschatology, completely different. Christians, we've got, you know, we've got disagreements within, you know, we would call each other still, you know, faithful Christians, our disagreements on eschatology. We see that as, you know, more of like a tertiary issue. that's not something we would call a gospel issue. But we've got disagreements there.

But it's all within the framework of biblical Christianity. Our idea, at least among Orthodox Christianity, is that the Bible is inerrant. So we might have different interpretations of it, but we can both agree at the end of the day between, you know, theologically conservative Christians that, okay, the Bible is right. One of us is probably wrong, but the Bible is right. And so at the end of the day, we agree on these things. We disagree on that. What you're describing is a completely different narrative of what eternity looks.

like, like of what the human timeline looks like. And I've talked about there's been a guest on my podcast who wrote a book about that progressivism, progressive Christianity brings another gospel. It brings another form of salvation, another definition of sin and salvation and a savior. It's not the same thing as Orthodox Christianity. But you're actually kind of showing why it's not just a different gospel, but it's an entirely different understanding of the history of the world.

and the trajectory of the world. And another reason why all of these theories are incongruent. And I think probably created to be purposely incongruent and a replacement of the Christian understanding of Christianity was definitely targeted by these things. Gramsci. And people don't understand that. That's for sure. Yeah. Antonio Gramsci explicitly laid out five pillars, which I can probably remember four of them off the top of my head of culture that had to be attacked.

order to bring communism to the West. And religion is one of the first ones he mentions. It's religion, education, media. I've got three. Family is a fourth one. And there's a fifth one, but I forgot what it is. And so these are the fundamental pillars of Western culture that he, but religion faith is right at the top of his list of things that have to be targeted and targeted deliberately. The best way I could explain in kind of in eschatology in terms of kind of Christianity, and this is going to be a bit awkward, I apologize. But it would be as though you had a cult within Christianity arise. And the thing that it believed is that Jesus will come back,

if and only if we have a complete Christian theocracy, so we're talking full theonomists, and at the same time that Jesus will then only come back when that Christian theocracy has total control. So that's your total control of the state. And then simultaneously has the exactly perfect interpretation of the Bible. And just so everyone knows, it's not my eschatology. I'm a premillennialist, fat post-millanialist, theonymous on this show.

But yes, that's— And I don't know the difference. I don't know the difference. Well, my view is that the world is going to get worse and worse, which I think that we are winning that argument. right now. Yeah, the world is going to get worse and worse until Christ returns. But anyway, keep going. So that's what it would be, though. That's as close to within, I mean, it's a bit different because Jesus still represents the second figure of the godhead. And so you still have this idea of a God that is rather than a God that becomes, but it would be actually more like

saying Jesus doesn't realize he's Jesus until we get the perfect theology and it becomes the one global state. That would be the idea. And then suddenly, by the process of these, these, you know, priests or whoever it is, figuring out the proper Jesus and enforcing it on everybody, Jesus would suddenly realize, oh, that's me, and then come back down. That would be the kind of picture. And you can see how freaking heretical that is. I mean, I've never heard any Christian ideas that are like that, that haven't been, then if they do come up that aren't branded as insanely heretical. You can also see how dangerous that is. You can also see how different that is to what, you know, for example, Christ preached. No one knows the hour and things like this. So that's, I mean, that's, like I

said, it's just an analogy. It's not going to be perfect, but that's kind of the shape. And they think of that instead of it being that you're bringing Jesus back, it's that the world will launch itself into utopia, a material world utopia with a perfect philosophy, where everyone will be liberated from all suffering, all unfairness, all oppression, when that realization occurs. And the state will then become perfect and drop away. And everyone will get along, kumbaya, in perfect harmony, because we won't have any of the oppressive power dynamics that need to be contradicted out of existence. And that's, people need to understand the, the Christians that hold to, say, they say that they hold to parts of CRT, they're also being influenced by people like

James Cohn, who basically believed this in his own liberation theology. We talk, I mean, the Bible does talk about Jesus freeing people from oppression. And yes, we believe that Jesus cares about physical oppression and that we should actually care about physical oppression, real physical oppression or earthly oppression that's happening. But we also understand, I guess it mirrors what you were saying. But in the Christian sense, we also understand that really he came to liberate us from the oppression of sin and that the true liberation is in eternity when there won't be any suffering, there won't be any sin. But we believe that's a future state really outside of the time in which we exist. Outside of the world. Right. That's crucial.

Yes. Whereas this believes they can force it to happen in normal material reality. And so did, and you know, I saw this very, very well Christian say the other day that, until we see Christianity not as a means of salvation, but as a means of liberation from oppression, we will see, we will continue to see Christian terrorism, which is just crazy. And so they see people like me who see, you know, the future state, sans suffering, sans sin of Christ, reigning in perfect peace in eternity. They see that as a real, I don't know if they really see it this way or they just say that they do. A real. danger and a prospect of harm. They say it's an immediate prospect of harm, but really, I think

what they believe is what you're saying that, like, people like me and even people like you will stop the, will stop the, the, the utopian state from coming. And if that, like, if that is your religion, if that is your goal, if you believe thy kingdom come means Hegel's kingdom, then yeah, you're going to get all of the infidels out of the way. Like, you're going to push people to the side because that is your eternal goal. So your argument is that this is a whole other faith. It's a whole other worldview and its adherents are a lot more merciless than, I can't say, than any other religion, but then Christianity, that's for sure.

Sure. Yeah, it's, how do I phrase this? It's like what you said is on some level. there's genuinely the belief that we could have a perfect world if everybody who didn't have the right beliefs somehow got taken care of, whether they're reeducated, whether they're removed, whether they're liquidated, whatever it happens to be. And on some level, that's sort of it. If everybody would just get on the same page, then we'd finally have the right thing. And I, you know, to try to be as charitable as possible, the communism, which is a weird thing

to say. You can kind of see. That's that's the line of thought that they have. And that's why you end up with situations where people are going in like gulog and everything else. Is it if everybody just got on the same page, you start off there. If everybody just got on the same page, this would work. And I don't think that's true, but we'll take it as an assumption that, okay, fine, we'll pretend it's true. If everybody got on the same page, well, the problem is some people won't be on the same page. So what do you do with them? You try to convince them, then you can't convince them, then you start to kill them. Right.

You start to get rid of them. You exile them or start killing them one or the other to get them out of the situation. And when we're talking about something that's planetwide, you can't exile them. We can't. Elon hasn't got it together yet. We can't send them to Mars. Yeah. So we do end up in that kind of mentality underlies this.

When you think that it's your job to create the material conditions. So again, to put it in a Christian phrasing, It's your job to build God's kingdom rather than your job to stay faithful and await faithfully Christ's return for him to establish that kingdom. It's that same confusion. And that's, again, that's what liberation means. Liberation means a liberation from all of these systemic oppressions and so on. And I do actually agree with the idea that you could focus on a figure like Jesus and use that figure to, you know, overcome biases that you may actually have. In that sense, you know, Jesus, Christ can liberate us or the gospel can liberate us from racism.

Okay, fine. But that's a really inaccurate understanding of what's meant by the duration. Yes, but we also do believe that. And we actually, that's really the argument that we have. And I really have to wrap this up. I was just, I was messaging my team. And I was like, I can't stop talking. My brain won't let me stop talking, even though we're over the time.

But, and we do believe that. Like, that's the argument that we have between. people who are theologically conservative and, you know, professing Christians who hold the CRT, is that we say,

look, the gospel regenerates hearts. That's what we believe, turns hearts of stones to hearts of flesh. And the Bible is very clear in First John that you can't love God and hate your brother.

And that includes hatred because of race, hatred because of sex, whatever it is. And so, you know, we do believe that it is the gospel. It is Jesus Christ who helps us in these things.

But the problem is that we, the argument is, is it just the gospel that can do those things? Like, for example, William Wilberforce was motivated by the gospel of Jesus Christ to lead the abolition against slavery. And we see that as a very good thing. So is it, is the gospel enough or is it the gospel and? And what I try to explain, and I think you even try to explain, even though you're not a Christian, is that the gospel, it can't be the gospel and CRT, because CRT has its own gospel. It's got its own eschatology. It's got its own. It's got its own on basically biblical canon. And I really want to keep going and I want to ask you your thoughts on what I

just said, but I've got to wrap this up. I would just say that Augustine would have named it a heresy. Yeah, of course, of course. And you can't, all of us, we all know that you can't pick and choose parts of a heresy and say, well, actually, I'm going to keep it and apply it to my Christianity and it still be biblical. It's just not. It's like I say, it's a bad tree that bears bad fruit. Jesus said a Bad tree can't bear bad fruit because it's rotten to the roots. And you explain that really well. Thank you so much. I will include all the links to new discourses, your book and all that good stuff, your social media,

so people can follow you. I know people are really going to appreciate this conversation like they did with the last one. Thank you so much for being generous with your time and for talking with us. Cheers. You too. Thank you.