The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Helen Pluckrose

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

Helen Pluckrose has been a formidable voice in the cultural and intellectual debates surrounding critical social justice, liberalism, and free speech. I've admired her work for some time, particularly her rigorous analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of these movements. In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Helen about her new book, "The Counterweight Handbook," which offers practical strategies for those navigating the challenges posed by critical social justice ideologies in the workplace and beyond.As with all Origins Podcasts, we spent some time learning about Helen’s own origins, which are just as compelling as her work. From her early years, where she balanced a career in care with a passion for English literature, to her later involvement in the Grievance Studies Affair, which exposed the weaknesses in certain academic fields, Helen has consistently demonstrated a concern for the wellbeing of others and a commitment to liberal values and intellectual honesty.In our discussion, we covered the origins and evolution of critical social justice, the impact of postmodern thought on modern social theories, and the ongoing challenges of promoting free speech in an increasingly polarized world. Helen shared insights from her work with Counterweight, an organization she founded to support individuals facing ideological pressure in their professional lives. We worked through her new book, which provides remarkably useful guides for dealing with challenges that misplaced critical social justice pressures might impose upon you in the workplace and elsewhere. This conversation was both enlightening and engaging. It offers valuable perspectives for anyone interested in the intersection of culture, politics, and philosophy. Helen is a wonderfully clear thinker, a sympathetic presence and a powerful advocate for the principles of liberalism, and it was a pleasure to spend time discussing her work and writing. I hope you find this episode as insightful and useful as I did.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krauss. In this episode, I was privileged to have a dialogue with Helen Pluck Rose, who I wanted to have on the program for quite some time and was finally able to get her on in connection with the publication of her new book, The Counterweight Handbook. This is a book about critical social justice, and Helen has written about social justice issues and cultural issues for some time

and have been involved in something called the Grievance Studies Affair, which we talk about in the dialogue, and later on wrote a book called Cynical Theory's. And what she does very, very well is trace the philosophical and sociological background of what is now called critical social justice, which, as she points out, is neither critical nor essentially involve social justice. And so while one can say, how could you be against social justice, the recognition that critical social justice theories are really designed to be authoritarian

and interfere with free speech and free expression and due process is incredibly important. And Helen actually began a program in the United Kingdom called the Counterweight Program to help advise people who've suffered at the job or elsewhere because of these new authoritarian rules that forbid you from speaking your mind or asking questions even. what this book does, as we discuss, is defined very clearly the basis of what is now called critical social justice carefully and thoroughly, which is really her trademark and a trademark of all of her writing, and one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of hers, and then discusses the kind of things you can do if you find yourself in a situation, in a job where you have to

pledge adherence to some political philosophy that is completely irrelevant. to the carrying out of your job, or if you've been fired because of that, for speaking out or asking questions. And it's a wonderful tool that she has created for people who are in that situation and for anyone who wants to understand really what critical social justice theories are all about.

And in fact, she told me in the podcast that she's going to create another book for actually employers, many of whom aren't aware of the kind of things that are asking their employees to do. Helen has a fascinating story which we explored in the podcast. She actually returned to university, I think at the age of 34 or 35, after spending 17 years doing basically caring home care for elderly and infirm people and went back to school

and studied English literature. And I'm glad she did. She's a fantastic writer and a very clear speaker and writer about this. issue of great controversy and like many issues that are controversial, it's really important to understand what the issue actually is and define it carefully. And as I say, I think that's one of her great strengths and one of the reasons why I wanted to have her on the program. I hope you'll enjoy the discussion and be enlightened about this threat to classical liberalism and free speech and perhaps be able to use some of the pointers she discussed in the program and

then later on her book. Either way, I hope you enjoy this podcast with a remarkable woman, Helen Pluck Rose. You can support our Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit foundation, which produces this podcast by subscribing to our Substact site, Critical Mass, where you can watch this podcast ad-free, or you can watch the podcast on YouTube later on or listen to it at any podcast site. I hope you'll support the foundation. If you watch it on YouTube, I hope you'll subscribe to the YouTube channel. And no matter how you watch it or listen to it, I hope you'll be entertained and enlightened with this discussion with a remarkable woman, Helen Pluck Rose. Helen Pluck Rose, I am so excited that you're with me today. I wanted to have a conversation

with you for so long and I'm such a great admirer. So it's wonderful to have you here today. Thanks. Thank you, Lawrence. It's great to be here. It's to you? Well, the proximate cause of why we're having this discussion is a new book you have coming out called The Counterweight Handbook, which I'll get to. I actually think, I was thinking about this today. It should be compulsory reading for all

university administrators, government agency heads and business leaders. I think it would be the best thing one could do to somehow send to all of them a copy of it because it's such a useful book. But I want to, and we'll get there. But as you know, this is an origin

podcast and I like to find out how people got to where they are now. And I want to talk about your origins. And I know a little bit about you. I know where you studied in college, but I don't know anything before that. You did English literature, so obviously liked reading and all of that. But were your parents, were they academics at all or working class or what was their background. My father came from a working class background, but he was very autistic and very brilliant mathematically. So he studied, he left school at 15 and he studied at night school while working for 12 years to become the youngest ever insurance broken fellow. So he's, you know, very proud of him. But I feel that's given him this kind of sense that, you know,

anybody can achieve anything if they just work hard enough. And he's quite conservative. And so I've had to say, no, Dad, you have a brilliant brain and a very obsessive brain. You didn't want to do anything apart from study markets and figures all night every night for 12 years. It's not quite as easy for everybody else. My mother very differently was a second wave liberal feminist. Oh. And she was dealing with issues in London, working in.

in banking. At that time, women weren't allowed by her company to take accountancy or banking exams. They weren't allowed on the bank floor. They couldn't get mortgages in their own name or loans. And so she was addressing all of that. She kind of left the movement in, I think, around 1984. And she'd always fallen out with the radicals who didn't believe that men could be part of the feminist aim for equality. And so she, until her death, was still believing that the issue I was dealing with was the radical feminists and trying to, you know, critical social justice is a very different thing. But now, so I had, I came from quite a wealthy background and I was privately educated.

But then I left home at 18 and I worked as a care assistant. for 17 years. I noticed you did that. So you started that before you, you worked as a care assistant while you were in college as well before. No, no, I started working as a care assistant when I was 17. I really just wanted to be independent. And we were having a property price slump then.

So I managed to get a mortgage at 18. And, yeah, and sort of I wanted to build a life working. But after 17 years of that, and I found my husband and married and had a family in that time as well. I had a neurological accident. And I lost my balance. I lost a lot of nerves in the right side of my head. And I couldn't do very much.

And so my husband encouraged me to do what I'd said I always wanted to do, which was get my degree in English literature. So I did that and they accommodated the fact that I'd only have about 75% attendance and I'd, you know, had to spend a lot of time lying down. And so I did undergraduate and then postgraduate in early modern studies, 1,700 to 1,700. Yeah, I was reading about early modern studies. In fact, in fact, your thesis or the work you did really intrigued me. I want to get to that in a second. But let me ask you, I'm amazed. So you went to university at age 34, which is a really brave thing to do. I'm always impressed when people go back.

And I think that's wonderful. For 17 years before that, you worked with caring, which I think is also obviously equally wonderful, something I don't think I have the patience or ability to do, and I admire people who can. If you wanted to do a green English literature, you obviously liked reading. Was it was, did either your parents encourage that?

Was it someone at school, or what got you interested in reading when you were young? I have always read an enormous amount. Even now I read about five novels a week and a similar number of nonfiction books. My mother was, she was a writer as well. She was a playwright and a stand-up comedian. So she wrote mostly humorous poetry, which she performed at various outfits. So I did, and I've always, I have always written.

I just didn't send it anywhere. I've never actually sent any of my work anywhere. But when Twitter arose and I started blogging, then publishers came along and said, would you write that for us and we'll give you money? And I thought, okay, yes, thank you. That'd be very nice. So I was going to ask over that transition from reading, right? But, but, but so probably was you interested in reading and writing more from your mother

then for your father, I guess. Yes, yeah. My father wasn't, I mean, he worked so, so very hard. We barely saw him. But yes, Mom was the one that, you know, we'd write each other messages in poems, silly doggerel. And we'd read a lot together. And yes, Anne of Green Gables, the country I can see through your window. Yes, she introduced me to that.

Yeah, wonderful book for you. young girls, particularly, but actually for everyone. Did your father was, do you didn't get your, any of your father's interest in math, I guess. I'm terrible at maths, but what I do have from him is this meticulous systemizing mind. If I, when I get interested in something, I want to know, read absolutely everything there is to read about it, gather all of the information, break it all down, and then put it into systems so that I can understand it. And that's what cynical theories. Yes, in fact, I was going to say it characterizes all your writing. I'm always amazed you break things down systematically, comprehensively,

understanding all the details, including the, you know, the bibliography of the things, and then lay it out systematically. I think it's true also counterweight. It's a wonderful, it's a very, it helps the reader tremendously. I'll say that. And it's clear you have a very systematic mind in that regard. I say something that might amuse you, Lauren. You used to be able to check your analytics to see who was following you. And I looked to see who I wasn't imagining. It would be people interested in culture.

No, the overwhelming interest of people who follow me, 97% was physics. Oh, really? After that, it was tech and general science. And I asked some of my physicist friends, why do you follow me? And it's, you, you write about culture stuff like a, like a physicist. You break things down.

Yeah, no, it's true. You know, key ideas, you know, progression and logical progression. It's true. I hadn't thought of that. But it's remarkable. And, and, and, and. And, and, and. And, and detailed.

And, you know, it's, at the beginning, I sometimes feel a little overwhelmed. And then I realize that I'm getting everything. It's really kind of amazing. I want to ask you a question. I don't know if anyone's ever asked you this, your master's thesis was on ways in which medieval women negotiated the church narrative, the Christian narrative, which, and I thought, well, maybe, now, maybe you've never thought of this. That seemed to me to be a precursor to counterweight in a sense, because

understanding how medieval women dealt with a narrative, which was probably oppressive, in some sense is what counterweight is, how we can deal with a critical social justice narrative nowadays that's that's oppressive. I actually I've out of interest or two minutes how did not how did medieval women deal with the negotiate the Christian narrative? This is why I was interested in doing 1,300 to 1700 because obviously an England then changed from from being Catholic to Protestant and now I am it is very much like what I'm doing with with counterweight I wanted to I want to understand Christian narratives on their own terms. I sort of do the discourse analysis. I myself am a non-religious critic of religion.

So, but yeah, getting into that is, is something that I find very interesting. So before the reformation within the Catholic tradition, that there was scope for women to empower themselves because there was this mystical tendency. It was a very patriarchal society, but God is the ultimate patriarch. So if you look at some of the people I've written about Julian of Norwich, Marjorie Kemp, they received messages from God, which then allowed them to defy, in Marjorie's case, her husband, who seems to have been quite an easygoing guy anyway, and actually say, no, I'm going to go and do this, I'm going to travel, I'm going to do that, this is what God says, the ultimate patriarch. But after the Reformation, there was not this scope for

revelation and mysticism that was seen as papacy. But what came in then was the Protestant idea that every each individual needs to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. So this is when literacy among women took a big step up. And some of the earliest writings we have are from Puritan women. And so we can see what they were doing then. And there's a wonderful thing. I don't you saw my Amelia Lanya.

She's very, very tongue in cheek because a lot of the justification for holding women down at that point was that Eve took the apple. She was frail and subject to sin. And so men need to control women for their own good. And then she wrote this wonderful poem with many biblical references arguing.

Yes, very disingenuously, look, you killed Christ. There weren't any women involved in that. pilot's wife told him not to. You didn't listen. We'll forgive you. Let bygones be bygones. You forget about the apple. We'll forget about the crucifixion. Oh, that's pretty good. Wow, that's fascinating. Okay, well, that's great. You did, you just sort of alluded to the fact that you went from reader to writer. I was going to ask how that happened. You called, you described as a cultural writer, and I think you do write about culture and the things that. But you say it began as you just started to blog. And, and that's, and then. And then. I've,

always, I've always written, of course, because I'm 50 now. So most of the time I've just written with pen and paper and not done anything with it. But once I started having tweet threads and also putting things in, in blogs, people took an interest. Wow. And then through that, well, I mean, you went through that, you first, I think, I'm not trying to remember if you came on my radar before this, but certainly the grievance studies, how did you get, so that the famous grievance studies affair with you and Peter Bogosian, I think, what's the name? Yeah, yeah. Was a wonderful follow-off, if you wish, to Alan Sokol's efforts many years earlier in the case of

social choice. How did you get involved in that? Was that, did they reach out to you because of your writing, or is that how it happened? Yeah, Jim and Pete had done the conceptual penis paper, which was amusing and it was interesting, but it was limited because the journal was one that you paid to publish him. So they couldn't be entirely sure that it had been accepted because of its thesis or if it was predatory. Having a look at it, it wasn't. and it's one of the ones that is considered reputable, but that still put a doubt on it. So they decided to go for a more sort of multi-layered one and put out a lot of papers to journals which were not paid to publish and to see what that would do.

And I started out as red flag catcher. So they'd put things through to me first, and I'd pick out anything that I thought would be problematic theoretically. And then I just started doing doing more and more. And then, you know, wrote a couple of papers myself did a lot of the theoretical stuff. Jim, Jim was the sort of structural organiser. He was thinking, what do we want to show? Which ideas do we want to get in there? Where do we want them to go? And he had a particular focus on men and masculinity is Pete is just insane. So when you get tough about humping and that kind of thing, you can thank him. So he was, what Jim would say is that Pete was pure satire and I was pure

theory. Exactly. I mean, you added this. I tend to think of you adding the meat. And also you do a great job and we'll talk about later on of mimicking the proper language. to appease, if necessary, certain people. We'll talk about that as a counterweight strategy. Discourse analysis, that there really is a good thing in discourse. But I don't want to say that, you know, the theory wasn't all me. Jim and knows the theories in great, in as much depth as I do. And Pete, Pete has a strong grasp of them, although he operates more in the activist realm.

So, but yeah, Jim's, Jim's thing was essentially looking at Pete's satire. and my debt, because I was just writing papers as they would be. And he's like, there's nothing funny here. There's nothing to, you're bringing Pete's nonsense and that, and then adding his own structure in. That was the kind of way it works. And I should, you know, I'm assuming people listening to this, know about this, but if they don't, the grievance studies papers were a series of spoof papers

with ridiculous titles that were submitted to gender studies, journals and other things were felt that they weren't, you know, to demonstrate they weren't scholarly. And they were, as you say, the conceptual penis was dog, dog rape in dog parks, I think. And it caused a big store. And in fact, it got people in trouble like Pete with his, with his university, because they claimed ridiculous things. But it certainly raised the specter that these, that many of these journals, especially in, I think, gender studies are, have a have a very low bar for scholars. rigor. Let me put it that way. I mean, they certainly have an intent. People have said, oh, this is a problem with peer review. And that's not quite right. They were certainly very stringent about what they would let in and what they

wouldn't. But their criteria is not a good one. And what I've argued before, because they removed some of our papers, which had data, which should have been clearly implausible, if not impossible, which we then read wrongly and then drew conclusions from that weren't warranted. Those should have been removed. But the ones that were theoretical, there's no cause to remove them. And what I said before is imagine if a creationist wrote a paper on evolutionary biology going completely by the rules of the field. And he got it published and then he said, ha, I fooled you, I didn't mean it.

The journal would have no reason to remove it because the paper remained sound. whether or not the writer believed it. Now, our papers, if they were sound when we wrote them, the fact that we didn't believe them, that we didn't think that was ethical, shouldn't make any difference. Yeah, it raises a lot of interesting questions. And it certainly raised your profile, at least for me.

And then you followed it up with a book with Jim, I think, on cynical theories, which was really elaborated. especially of people who didn't have a philosophical background, the postmodernist underpinnings of what is now called, I think, critical social justice. And it was a, it really demonstrated the emperor's new clothes base up. But it was really, I think of it that way,

looking at these theories at their very base and demonstrating, first of all, their background, and secondly, their vacuity. is probably the way to say it. I don't know whether you want to comment on cynical theories anymore before we move on. Yeah, I mean, with cynical theories that we had to write a book on that because people, despite the grievance studies, we keep saying we didn't know what we were talking about, or that, you know, honest critics would disagree with me that this was rooted in postmodern ideas.

And I really wanted to trace it back. So cynical theories really works backwards and looking at the theories that are out there now. And then it's tracing the citations back. And there's a very, very clear central thread that goes back to the Foucaudian notions of power, knowledge, language, deridean notions of language and grand narratives. So, but it really could take an entire book to show the two evolutions that had happened and, and how it all fit into, to make that case. because otherwise people in good faith could be quite skeptical that this is, it doesn't look that much like Foucault in various ways. But if you know it's a few core ideas of him that have been bastardized twice and how,

then it sort of becomes a bit clearer. Yeah, certainly it was a, it was a very scholarly book in that regard. I learned a lot. But then that brought you, you know, because of your work, and obviously you became well known in this regard in terms of, critiquing what is now, what you, what you describe clearly as critical social justice ideas. You, before writing the book counterweight, you began, you actually founded a program which basically helped people who were suffering in one way another by either not being able to get

jobs or being canceled or other things and created this counterweight online service in January 2021. You want to talk about that a little bit, what that was about and what it still is about, I guess? Yeah, I mean, it was in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, and businesses started enforcing new policies, new programs. And because of the grievance that is a fair and cynical theories, everybody was writing to me, hundreds of people and some of my colleagues were getting even more emails than I was. and I started pouring everybody into a discord server. And the idea was that I just wanted them all in one place

and to try and then sort through and triage, who is having an immediate problem and what can I do to help? And I am extremely, you know, apart from setting out theories, the least organized person in the world, absolutely chaotic. So Carrie Clark, I. Angel, she arrived and she'd worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau, which here, any problem you have at all, you can go in and an advisor will find you the relevant legal policy,

whatever documents, and she'd written pathways for this. So she came in and just did her carry thing of dividing people into groups. Here are the people having a problem with race-based theory in business. Here are the people doing this, and producing and taking. note of what the problems were producing documents for them to, so first try this, try this, try this, try this. And then we had the clinic in the middle, which was people in danger of being fired at any moment. And those were the cases that we took on and worked with the individual. And that could range from, you know, a junior engineer to a senior and academic, a medical professional,

emergency services personnel, anybody. How did it get funded? Or did people just volunteer their time? It was voluntary, yes. And I, fortunately, I didn't at that point have to make a living because cynical theories had just done well. And two of the people that we got to work full time did in the end. But the way that we got funded is because it worked.

I mean, not invariably. We did lose people, but quite, know, a lot of the time, we did get people to push it back. They either got their employers to see what they were recommending, because a lot of employers didn't know. They were bosticking, reacting, or to get their employers to be, to see the problem, potentially legal problems with enforcing things. So we had a high success rate.

And then what people tended to do after we had helped them was that they'd just set up sort of $5 or $10 a month. sort of recurring fee. So we had in the end, you know, quite a lot of these five and ten dollar donations, which enabled us to have two people

sort of dedicating their time to it. And then we were able to just sort of, the volunteers were putting a lot in, we'd be able to sort of have 250 pounds for you here. But mostly, yes, volunteers. Okay, well, it's a great. And then it was based, am I correct? Am I correct then it's based on that experience in some sense that that that this book is arose the lessons

learned the necessity of of training people and and so the subtitle for the book is principled strategies for surviving and defeating critical social justice at work in schools and beyond now and it's it you know it's it's it's particularly useful as as we have described for actually defining what these terms are and what the concepts, which are often very nebulous and because of the verbiage, it often seems like, you know, how can one attack this, as we'll talk about. In page one, in fact, you say companies, universities, and schools have a legal responsibility to comply with anti-discrimination law and a moral responsibility to oppose discrimination against people on the grounds of their race, sex, sexuality, etc. Isn't

DEI just a natural extension of that obligation? obligation, it should come as no surprise to anyone reading this book that the answer is no. In practice, diversity, equity, inclusion are inextricably connected with a liberal authoritarian ideology. And then later on the page you say this book is intended to be a resource for people who are suffering from the imposition of critical social justice ideology on them and in their place of work in their university or school or in their wider community and who object to it and wish to combat it based on liberal principles. So we're going to go through and talk about as you do what critical social justice is to define it.

But the first thing you talk about is the meaning of liberals. So why don't you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, so I needed to set that out because in the US, there's a tendency now to relate the liberalism to the left. That isn't the case so much in the UK, although we're starting to see that because when America sneezes, the world catches gold. But yeah, so what we're looking at really with liberalism is those fundamental principles of let people believe, speak, live as they see fit, provided it does not harm anyone else, nor does, nor denies them the same freedom.

And so under this liberal system, and the way that it's most graspable, I think, in the US context is that it's the founding principles of the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment. You know, the unalienable, all men or people are created equal, and they have the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The government shall not censor any speech, any beliefs. And so these are the very fundamental principles of liberalism. In a workplace context, this means that you do have a responsibility to treat everybody as equal. And that was what we had in the count to join counterweight. Or we didn't, because I'm a liberal humanist, a secular liberal humanist. We did not, counterweight was a liberal humanist organization.

We didn't require people to say that they were liberal humanists, but we did require them to say that they accepted the value of all people as individuals. They did not want to discriminate against any group. And then we would assist them. So if you wanted as two people did, to be allowed to be racist or in one case get a trans-identified person out to your place of worship, then we're not going to help you. But if you're actually not racist or homophobic or anything else and you just want to oppose things from your own point of view and have your own beliefs, then we'd help you.

Okay, that's great. Now, okay, that's important for the American audience. You're right, because liberal, well, all the classical terms have now been so distorted. Conservative has been distorted as well. and from what they were. But, but, but, um, I think sometimes, sorry to interrupt you, but I, I think sometimes you should interrupt. A better American mind, that's a thing, but then, you know, people, Americans who, who are

talking in popular discourse and are not political philosophy, if you think in terms of social libertarian, that, that is, um, the most sort of strongly glass, graspable, um, concept. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, okay. Well, but then and then the first bit you go into, and it's very important, is to understand what critical social justice is. And I want to read some quotes and we'll go through this because I think it's important for people. But you basically give a one paragraph summary saying critical social justice is at root based on two core premises. One, invisible power systems like white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity permeate all of society.

and two, most people cannot see them because these systems seem normal to us, and for the majority and the powerful, it's more convenient that we do not see them. And you basically discuss the systems, include whiteness, patriarchy, colonialism, heteronormativity, cis-normativity, transphobia, abelism, fatphobia. These are believed to infect all aspects of society, and even the most benign everyday interactions, the belief that people are unable to avoid being racist, sexist, or transphobic because they have absorbed bigoted discourses from wider society

is a tenet of faith that bears testament to it in its origins to postmodern thought, particularly that of Michel Foucault. So those to me seem to be the sort of core, cogent, short version of critical social justice. I don't know if you want to add to that at all. No, I mean, that's it. It essentially is that knowledge is a construct of power. It's constructed by the people in power who understood to be essentially straight white men in their own interests.

Then they legitimize this knowledge and everybody else just speaks in the ways that they have been taught by this knowledge and just speaking in these ways, then perpetuates those oppressive power systems. So of course on the most defensible level, all this is saying is culture exists. We know that there are cultural norms. They do change. Homosexuality is a very good one. Right up until the end of the 19th century, homosexuality was a heinous sin. Then it became a disorder.

Then it became some people who are gay, get over it. And now, you know, with the critical social justice movement, it's moved in another radical direction. So we can see that discourses and general understandings change. But what the liberal point of view would be is that we'd never ever denied this. This is what the marketplace of ideas is for. We believe that a number of different discourses exist, that people should get together and discuss them.

And this is how we can influence the zeitgeist to change in a positive direction. The critical social justice activists will say no to this, that that very process of debating and critiquing ideas is a white, Western masculine way of knowing, and that we must all accept that we have all been socialized into exactly the same prejudices, most commonly that of Robin DiAngelo's grandmother, and that we cannot think any other way, and that we need to dismantle our thinking with this critical ideology. Now, I had more to say. No, no, that's great.

That was a wonderful elaboration. But it also, there's one thing I did want to stress, and you do stress, when people hear critical, they think it critical social justice, they think of critical thinking, which we want to encourage. And I, all my life talked about encouraging critical thinking. And they say, and one of the things, well, how can you discourage critical thinking? And they don't realize what the word critical in critical social justice means. So why don't you elaborate on that a little bit as well? Yeah. So the critical tradition in theory, it has at its root.

Marx and he's criticized all the things that exist. And so he wanted to get beneath capitalism, which he called then liberalism, and see the power structures that underlay in it, that moved far away from Marx. And the critical theory of the Frankfurt School is Marxian. But this is when a critical consciousness, here's the best way. Palo Friere, when you accept that there are systems of power that are operating beneath the radar, beneath your consciousness, and the critical tradition tries to pull out these threads and make them visible. So in the Marxist tradition, it's been this consciousness raising of the proletariat and false consciousness, if you don't see it. In the radical feminist tradition, there's been consciousness raising for women to recognize that they,

are subordinated by patriarchy. Within the critical social justice tradition, it changes from the Marxist one where it's the oppressed who have the false consciousness, to it being privileged who have the false consciousness because the oppressed can see more layers of society because they're having to, I as a woman, having to work according to a masculine society. So I can see the masculine society, but I also have a woman's way of thinking. then a black woman would have another layer as well. So it's the people who have the privilege who are not typically not see. Yeah. And so it is they and but everybody has a, you know, a black person is also socialized into white supremacy, but they they can see more of it. So the

critical methodology then is to pull out these, these power systems that are theorized to exist, get people to affirm that they do exist, that they have internalized them, and then dismantle them with this critical way of thinking. So you would have to say, for example, one of the things that some of our clients had to say was all white people are racist and I am not an exception. And then once you have made this affirmation, then you can then start to get at your own racism and dismantle it. It's very much like, On the other side, the red pill discourse, you have people who are seeing, you know,

from the Matrix, of course, they've suddenly seen through the surface of things and they can see these systems that are working against men and particularly white men. And so they're doing a very similar thing. And of course, humans do. The human tendency to think they alone have seen the light and must spread it to everybody else is extremely common.

Yes. Well, but, you know, even more so, I found one sentence which really clarified things beyond neo-Marxist and postmodern thought. You say the word critical here refers to criticizing power structures that are believed to exist according to the ideology and not to seeking truth. So when we think of critical thinking, we think of it as an effort to seek truth. But the word critical here is really based on criticizing the power structures that are assumed by the ideology to exist.

and in fact, not just assumed, but insisted to exist. So critical here is to criticize power structures. I think that's the important. Exactly. Exactly. It is not about finding truth. Objective truth is not an aim. It's about, and the theorists say this repeatedly, critical thinking is about systemic, epistemic adequacy and proper reasoning.

And this is a white, western, masculine thing. And that's not how we find out what is true. We critique power structure. and it doesn't actually matter if we're right or wrong. It's just being able to see them and talk about them that's helpful. Yeah, okay, that's wonderful. Now, I am going to read from you here. I'm tempted to read more, but I basically,

you say you've traced the complicated evolution of scholarship elsewhere, but the assumptions and doctrines are foundational critical social justice ideology are rather simple. The core tenants are as follows, and you have 10 of them, and I guess I'm going to read them, and then ask if you want to add anything, but one, knowledge is a social construct created by groups in society. These groups are determined by their identity in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and more,

and are deemed to have either dominant or marginalized positions in society. Two, the dominant groups, white, wealthy, straight, Western men get to decide which knowledge are legitimate and which are not. They choose the ones that serve their own interests. Three, these legitimized knowledgees then become dominant discourses in society and simply the way to speak about things. Everybody is unavoidably socialized into them and cannot escape being so.

Four, people at all levels of society then speak in these ways, thereby creating and perpetuating systems of oppressive power like white supremacy, patriarchy, and cis normativity. Five, most people cannot see the systems of oppressive power that they are complicit in because they've been socialized

into having those very specific biases and thus unconsciously act on the socialization. 6. Therefore, the systems of oppressive power are largely invisible, and their existence and means of operation need to be theorized by critical social justice scholar or activists. 7. Only those who have studied critical social justice theories, particularly the marginalized groups who subscribe to them, are fully able to see the invisible power systems and must convey them to everyone else. 8. Social justice, as defined by critical social justice theories, can only be achieved by making everybody believe in these things. theories. This entails seeing and affirming these invisible power systems and their own complicity in them, as well as committing to dismantling them. Nine, any disagreement with or resistance to affirming critical social justice beliefs

is evidence of either ignorance or selfish unwillingness to accept one's complicity in the oppressive power systems. Thus, any disagreement or resistance is automatically invalid. And 10, therefore, the liberal belief in the individual's agency to evaluate a range of ideas and accept or reject them is a self-serving myth and liberalism above nearly all other ideologies is a major impediment to achieving critical social justice. You know, these concepts will come in as we talk later on about how to address it. Obviously, I guess if you felt there was anything else, he would have written it, but that's a wonderful summary of critical social justice.

One of the things that I think is important when one talks about criticizing social justice, people think how can you criticize social justice? And you say, a primary reason that an illiberal, authoritarian ideology that spreads by rejecting the marketplace of ideas and individual autonomy, demanding religious-like adherence to its tenets, and taking advantage of people's basic sense of justice and empathy, has been able to become culturally powerful. One of the reasons is that no one of goodwill wants to stand against.

social justice. No one ever says, there's too much justice in the society, we need to reduce that. So they've co-opted the words, just in some sense as many religions have co-opted morality, but they've co-opted the words. So when you, so the minute you sort of appear to criticize social justice, critical social justice, you appear to be criticizing social justice itself, which is a very different thing. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit? Yes, I mean, that kind of linguistic sort of appropriation, trying to make it difficult in verbal terms to argue with it, is very central to this whole set of theories. With other sort of ideological frameworks, they've described themselves as what they're aiming for. liberalism is the aim for freedom in liberality and conservatism is the aim to conserve culture

and Marxism is the aim to put the plans of Marx into practice. So when you have something calling itself social justice as though everybody else is aiming for something else and then their movements are called things like Black Lives Matter and Antifa as though other people you know, this is the only way to accept the Black Lives Matter and to oppose fascism, then that it's setting itself up really as, you know, it's naming itself after things that everybody who isn't an amoral psychopath

would agree with. We just disagree on how to do that. And that does make it difficult. And I think that's why the word woke has become popular because people have been looking for something distinctive about this. And it is that idea that you can see these power structures that nobody else can that people have picked up on and why woke has become what it's called to distinguish it. Yeah, in fact, I think that you talk about this sort of, and I've experienced this when I write about it as well, the evolution of the term woke. I mean, woke initially was simply meant, as you say, being kind or empathetic and caring about social injustice.

And it's, you know, so it's how can one be against it? I've distinguished it, by the way, from what I think woke now means by talking about fundamentalist wokeism in the same way that sort of, you know, fundamentalist Christianity can be love your neighbor, but fundamentalist Christianity is a little bit different. And I wonder if you, you know, so that's the way out when I now don't criticize woke per se because the intent, the original intent of all of this, and I think it's, you point this out, this arose from original tent to make things more just, which no one can argue with.

It's then what happens to the implementation of it, and the ideology that develops from it then becomes authoritarian. And that's why I think, sort of I'd like to call it fundamentalist wokeism, as religion in its most authoritarian form is fundamentalist. Anyway, the history of the term woke, it really goes back into the civil rights movement. And it was first popularised by the musicians and lead belly. After some young black men who had been minding their own business

and were then wrongfully arrested for resisting aggression from a group of white men. And the artist led belly then to be careful out there, stay woke. and what he meant there was be aware of these power systems that are around you, don't put yourself in a position where it can be used against you. And so it's gone through the tradition like that. And very few people would say that black Americans living through this period should not have been alert to social injustice, should not have been very careful about what they were going to do

were wrong to say the system was stacked against them. But then when it's sort of revised again later, and it's then applied to things that can be complementing a black woman on her hairstyle or a talk that she's given. It's sometimes now problematized if you say you're such an eloquent speaker because it's seen as expressing surprise that a black person can be. Then we're into a very different way of thinking and this is what is much less accepted as as legitimate being awake to social injustice.

Yeah, in fact, you do say many who are skeptical of critical social justice claims are unsure how to say so without being thought of being racist, sexist, transphobic or otherwise bigoted. And the way to do that is to analyze the core claims of critical justice and respond to them. So I want to go through this and give you a chance to do just that. So you have, I think, 10 claims. I should keep my response is short. I keep anticipating, I keep going into detail on something.

It's something that you then bring up. So I shall stay. No, no, no, it's all right. No, no, no, it's good if you, no, I like to think of it as you're making a nice segue to where we want to go. And if you've done it, I hope I have the wherewithal and the ability to skip something. I don't have a, I have a lot of things I'd like to cover. But in my, and in general, I'd like to cover what you think is important to cover.

So in any case, I want to, but what I want to do is. is talk about the 10 claims, the core claims of critical social justice, and you describe them and then give a response. And so I'd ask you to, we'll go through each one, and I'll ask you to briefly elaborate and your response.

Now, obviously you've written 40 pages on this, but we're not going to do there, but we'll give a brief summary. So claim number one is all white people are, and only white people can be racist. And I think you're primarily talking about DeAngelo and other people. Do you want to comment on that?

But let me also say, you say things that have been claimed as evidence of whiteness include science, justice, liberalism, punctuality, hard work, and individualism, even those, of course, all these are valued by people of all races. But comment on this claim that all white people and only white people can be racist. Yeah. So this is a redefinition of the term racist to mean a system of power. So racism is prejudice plus power. So if a white person is prejudiced against a black person, this is a power play that goes into a system, whereas if a black person says something negative about white people, they can be prejudiced, but they're not enacting this system.

So this is why it says that only white people can be racist and also all white people are because we've had those systems so deeply internalized. them. And I argue that the way to address this is not to go down the road that is quite sort of intuitively, it feels the way to do and say, but I'm not racist. I don't see judge people by their race. I've always opposed racism. A lot of my friends, my husband, is that don't do any of that. Come away from the, don't justify yourself on those terms. Instead, say, I do not accept this premise. I believe that I have the right and the ability to evaluate ideas for myself. Racism is a bad idea and I reject it. And that's a liberal point of view.

It's also in other sort of ethical frameworks as well. God given free will gives people the ability to evaluate ideas, the conservative focus on personal responsibility particularly. So just don't play that game. Just say, no, I know that framework. believe it. Okay, good. That's wonderful.

Yeah, exactly. Because you do, if you do, because you can't win the game, as you point out, it says, you know, the, the charges utterly unfalsifiable leaves only two options, be racist and admit it or be racist and deny it. And so if you fall into that, there's no way you can, you can win that argument. Yeah, you're just a bad person. Yeah, exactly. Claim two, science is oppressive.

This is something I have written a lot about lately. And you say your initial comment, which I think is really important here, is science is generally regarded negatively within critical social justice because it aims to discover objective truth and is regarded with good reason as the most authoritative source of knowledge production yet discovered. But why then is science oppressive? So why don't you explain the claim and then how to respond to it? So science is largely seen as a, again, as a white, Western masculine way

of knowing this is a historical and it doesn't represent current reality either, but when we're going into this epistemological injustice thing, then that's where the decolonial movement comes in and they want to sort of other ways of knowing and essentially anti-scientific ones. So the way to respond to this is, of course, to point out that the first science works, that other ways of knowing which include myths and religion and lived experience are perceptions or history or culture and they can be meaningful. But they're not the same thing as being as sure as we can of knowing something always provisionally. We have to keep those separate. And further, the idea that science is white, Western and male is recreating very old colonialist sexist tropes.

that underlayed the justification for the British Empire, for other forms of colonialism. We are scientific, rational, liberal, and we must civilise the rest of the world. And they're doing that the same thing. So it's a point out that this isn't the case. Science is universal. Antibiotics discovered on my island, work in Asia, the numerals that we use that have come from the Arab world, work perfectly well here. So this is a universal thing, and it is frankly insulting, both to history and to all the black, South Asian, East Asian doctors, scientists, engineers, who the West is essentially brain draining from the rest of the world because we are having a STEM crisis uptake. Yeah, exactly.

And yeah, where I live, it would be great to be able to have some of that brain drain because we don't have it. We have such a shortage of doctors here, for example. But your point is well taken that making the claim that science is white male patriarchy is essentially saying that is putting down females, blacks, and everyone else saying that obviously they can't do science in some way or at least they, yeah. And that is that is ridiculous. It's racist. It's racist.

One example that I use that may be useful for you, but and I carry. used to carry it around is when I, I think I put such a picture in something I wrote, maybe in the Wall Street Journal, I can't remember, but is just, I love having a picture of the large Hadron collider and the, the 5,000 physicists on one experiment. There's a picture of all of them, and you can see all of them working towards a common goal to try and figure out something specific and also build something that works. But if you ever wanted a spectrum more of humanity, you'd see 100 different countries, every color, gender, every language you could imagine in that group.

And it sort of belies, therefore, this claim that somehow science is white male patriarchy. It's not a, I mean, the methods of science have been constructed by society, but the knowledge produced by science is not a cultural construct, not in the same way that, say, Islam, Christianity, various different political things, art movements that prop up differently all over the world. The principles of science are going to be the same no matter who does them.

Yeah, exactly. And I used to point out that it was a great time, in fact, to be, I got hated and attacked because I said it was a great time to be a woman in science because it happened to, it was. And, and, and, and, and, and, And this notion that we'll get to ways of knowing. And as you know, there are academics who've now been canceled for arguing that other ways of knowing are not the same thing as science.

They may be culturally useful, historically useful, but they're not the same thing as science, which is a fact, not an opinion. But they've been canceled for that. Okay. Next one. That was claim number three. No, no, sir. Clay number three is everything is a social construct. You want to,

you said this is direct correlation between the rejection of objective knowledge and skepticism of science. So for these theorists and activists, the important thing is not what is true, but how this knowledge has come to be socially constructed. So I'd say if you had a scale and at one end, there is this perfect scientist who doesn't actually exist and who is completely objective and they want to know what is true all the time. They would say to you that yes,

objective reality exists and also that we cannot be entirely sure that we have achieved it. And then at the other end, if you have the worst postmodernist, they would also say, yes, objective reality exists, but we can't be sure that we've achieved it. But the postmodern branch will focus on we haven't achieved it. How has this got constructed like? this. And Rorty, I think he says it's saying truth is out there. It's very different saying reality is out there. There is a reality, but it's mediated through so many human brains that what we decide that is true at any time is always a symptom of power. So that is where they go through. And then you get some ridiculous things like nutrition, dietetics, critical dietetics,

just trying to unwrap everything that can be known about. what the human body needs to eat and rewrite it. But why have we decided that it's better not to be morbidly obese? Why have we, why is it that more people are heterosexual? We're a sexually reproducing species. No, no, this must be a power system. Well, you know, it's, for me, again, my approach as a physicist, is when people talk about everything as a social contractor,

and reality comes from within, you know, as to point, I don't understand how you can't get, how one cannot understand that stars exploded before humans even came to be, produce the elements that make us up. And all of that happened before any, there were any social constructs.

And whether or not, whatever you like or whatever your ideology is, it cannot interfere with the fact that, that elements like carbon, and nitrogen, oxygen are created in stars and were created, the elements in your body were created before the earth even formed. And that's not a social construct.

That's a fact. It is, but I mean, the way that they see knowledge, I think one of the best examples comes from David Detler's book, and he asked a theorist, can we say that giraffes are bigger than ants or is that a social construct? And she said, that's a social construct. Now, what she meant that by that wasn't, that the reality of the mass of these two animals is different.

But the way that we have chosen to decide the concept of size, had we chosen it in a different way, then we could say an ant, you know, if we've chosen the size is about, you know, how big the species or something, it would then be different. Yeah, you could say whether, which, you know, an ant can carry more on its back compared to its weight than a,

than a giraffe. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, you could. So you just get nowhere. That's the thing. It just descends into utter nonsense. Well, as often, many of these things do, it seems. Claim number four,

policing language and silencing speech is not only necessary, but also good. And this is a very important thing because it's really at the heart of cancellation of this ridiculous statement that, which people don't, it's easy to sympathize, you know, when someone says something you hate

to cancel, but, but, but, but, But two things, of course, free speech. The basis of free speech is to have speech you disagree with because you might be wrong. And if you don't hear it, you might, you interfere with your own rights to find out you're wrong.

But this cancellation thing is, policing it implies that if you don't like it, no one should hear it. That you, that's the solipsistic, the egocentric viewpoint, that because you don't like a person or because you don't like what they're saying, no one should ever be able to hear it. And this policing is a good thing. And so that's very important. So why don't you talk about that claim and your version of the response to that claim? So that's the, it's underlain by the belief that these power systems are perpetuated by people speaking in certain ways. So in order to achieve social justice, we have to stop people speaking in certain ways and make them speak in different ways.

And the example I gave is when J.K. Rowling said that biological sex, is real. And then some of the actors responded straightforwardly with trans women, trans women, women, trans women, women. So what had happened was that she was seen as putting out a transphobic discourse. And rather than engage with a lengthy essay in which she said this, the important thing was to silence her and then put that positive discourse back in. And so it's not ideas doing battle with each other, it's which discourses, which ways of speaking about things can we make dominant? Yeah, exactly.

Instead of having discourse, instead of the liberal idea or the scientific idea, that everything should be subject to question and discussion, instead the idea is that certain things should be dominant and other things should not be mentioned at all, which is really a religious idea, as you mentioned in a way else, it's really a religious idea that some ideas are so sacred they cannot be questioned. And of course, that's the anathema to science and reason and intellectual progress. Nothing is sacred. No idea should not, even if it's offensive, as we'll talk about, no idea should not be,

should not not be subject to question. And okay, this claim number five, which has had a big impact in academia of late, and here in Canada and New Zealand and elsewhere, is the marginalized have access to special forms of knowledge. And you said, related to the belief that science is a white, Western,

a male way of knowing and developed from the social constructionist beliefs of earlier theories is the current critical socialist belief that all ways of knowing are related to identity and in some sense are,

are not only are they related to identity, but the marginalized have special forms of knowledge that are, that are, well, are special, are in some ways better. So you want to comment on that? I mean, the most repeated one at this comes from critical race theory in which there is

positive to be an authentic voice of colour that has a greater competence to speak about race and racism. On one level, this is very likely true. If you are a black American, you are more likely to know what anti-black racism feels like, how to experience that. But this is taken then to another level where there is only one right political view. And so they'll take certain people like Ibrahim X Kennedy, Tenehisi Coates, and there is within this, this genre and say this is the authentic voice of colour. Meanwhile, people like John McWhorter, Thomas Salle, you know, Shelby Steele will be the inauthentic voices of colour. Because if you take any group at all, you're going to find viewpoint diversity. But this particular set of theories will not have that because it's got

that unfalsifiable bit, it will take the, say, black or female or trans individual to agree with them and say this is the authentic voice. And then everybody else is either they've internalized the power system and they have internalized racism or they're trying to curry favor with the dominant group. So whereas the liberal approach would be to actually just state this from the first place, I agree with this particular individual because I think their ideas are right. I'm not claiming this is the authentic voice of color. I just convinced by his or her argument. I think you're and you related that as a point you make here and earlier,

that one response is to point out there are many voices. Even if people don't talk to the inauthentic voice color, they often say, you know, blacks have, you know, have this unique perception. And of course, and if you could point out, it's not unique. I mean, that within that identity label, there are many different viewpoints. That can be a useful thing. And I think you actually point out earlier when you talk item one about only white people can be racist,

you point out one good response to that is to point out that I never know how to say his name right. Actually, who's the father of a lot of critical social justice modern movement, points out that it's not only, it's not true that only whites can be racist. So and so even within that that community, there are different viewpoints. And you have to accept that there's no one, one viewpoint that that, that, that having an identity and having a viewpoint are not always exactly the same thing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I mean, Ibram, X. Kendi, he doesn't come from the postmodern mind of thought.

He comes from the materialist. So he does believe that individuals have their own minds. And because of this, it is very useful if you're being subjected to Robin DiAngelo to counter it with Ibramex, Kendi. That's where I do give him credit. His individualism there. He gets illiberal in different ways, as the material is to do, reading everything through one lens. But on that, he is good. And you can, that's the strategy, the third part of the book, strategy is, yeah.

It's a counter-de-Angelo with Kendi, which is it. Yeah. But I think it's worth of pointing out, and I don't think it's in the book so much here, but that this marginalizing, marginalized groups having a special form of knowledge, you know, we're countering ideas here, which I think we can show are ridiculous, and you do a good job of it, but they're dangerous. And of course, you talk about later on the book ways that people have been, have been hurt by these ideas.

But I want to just point out. out here that, you know, it's amazing to me in academia how just simply making the claim that perhaps marginalized individuals don't have a special form of knowledge or that their knowledge may not supersede science has resulted in numerous cases of people being removed. There's a Canadian professor, Francis Woodison, who basically, who was fired from a tenured position for asking at a meeting, well, someone given a lecture on indigenous astronomy more or less. And I said, well, you know, this is historically and culturally interesting, but is it necessary in an astronomy 101 class where you're talking about telescope-based

observations? Is it really the same thing? Ultimately, that led to her being removed. And as you well know in New Zealand, where the claim the government wants, and still does, I think, wants to try to by edict, say all forms of knowledge are equivalent. And in science classes, we will have indigenous knowledge as well as science knowledge and we'll call them equal. And several academics spoke out against it and were removed from the royal society of science in New Zealand for making the claim that it isn't science. And if it isn't science, it shouldn't be taught a science. It's kind of remarkable. Something very familiar about that, isn't there? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay, number six, the claim, the lived experience of selective

groups and individuals in brackets. The lived experience of selected groups and individuals is authoritative. You want to describe what that means and the response to that? Yes. A lived experience is tapping into that special knowledge. So you as a white straight man will not be able to see below the surface of things. So if somebody come to, if I tell you that you are being a sexist right now, then my experience is that you are speaking down to me because you underrate my intelligence because I am a woman,

then my experience is just as valid as your intentions and you should apologize and do better because the important thing is not intention but impact. If I feel impacted by you disagreeing with me, for example, and I feel that that impact is misogynistic, then my experience is more authoritative than you who, if you know, said, no, I think you're wrong about this because this evidence shows that and that and you said something different, that would count for nothing. The fact that, yeah, that, that, that it's that certain lived experience is authoritative, but others, which is based, say, on study and expertise is not authoritative because it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not lived experience of those who, who've, who've been marginalized

or otherwise denied some, some power. Yeah, that's where that lived comes in. Because often when we talk of experience, we might, we might say an experienced physician of something. It's not that kind of experience. The lived experience is the world of perceptions that have shaped your worldview. And what's the response? You know, you point out, how do you respond best to this claim?

Sorry, that lived experience of some groups is more authoritative than others. And, you know, you say to stress the need for separate perceptions and feelings from data and facts. Yeah. And as humans, we can actually care about. both, which I think is interesting. Yes. That is what I would

say, yeah, that it isn't that we only care about how somebody is feeling or we only care about what is true. As humans, we care an awful lot about what people are feeling. The most analytical

systemizing mind a physicist is still likely to enjoy a good play or a book. And, you know, suspend disbelief, get into that. So we need to keep things where in the right place. If somebody has a perception that this thing is happening and it isn't actually related to reality, then let's look at those differences. I gave the example that Britain's, when surveyed, thought that 21% of the population is Muslim. It's actually 5%. So we don't then say Muslims please be less visible

because our lived experience is that you're sort of overrepresented here. No, and we don't just say, well, no, you're wrong. We look at why that is. Why are people feeling this way when this thing is true? And we can care about both or on a more daily basis. If somebody's father has died of a heart attack, then we want to know how they're feeling, how they're dealing with the grief.

The sort of facts about myocardial infarction aren't what she wants to hear. And it's not what we want to know at that point. Okay, I like your example of the Britain's perceptions. It's really quite interesting. The media plays into that, I think, of course. Claim number seven, a key claim that the denial of racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. is evidence of racism, homophobia and transphobia. I can't help whenever I hear this, and this is a very important part that you, if you deny it, you either, you know, we said earlier, you're racist, and if you deny it, and if you deny it, you're racist, and if you deny it. it you're racist and if you accept it, you're racist. So it's a, and it really reminds me of actually probably something you may have even dealt with in your thesis when you talked about medieval responses of women to Christianity is witches. You may, I mean, it just seems to me exactly the same when you, when someone was accused

of being a wish, if they denied it, they were a witch and if they accepted it, they were witch. And either way, they should be burned. Yeah. I mean, that, that's the, the very nature of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the trap, isn't it? And in this case, it really has been very strongly theorised. For example, Robin DiAngelo, who is at the head of so much of the training, has said that white people have defensive moves, which involve disagreeing, going away or staying silent. And these are all the

symptoms of white fragility. So the only way not to suffer white fragility is to stay where you are and vocally agree with her. So as soon as somebody says, well, actually, no, I don't think that that was racist or they just leave or they're quite, then they have suddenly proved that they have white fragility, which is evidence of being racist. And other than stating that obvious fact, you talk about how to respond to it. And so how can you best respond to it?

And I think with, you just say, I do not accept your underlying, premises, you know, that the reason that people are disagreeing with you so often, Robin DiAngelo, is not because they're all reading from the same script. It's because the flaws in your arguments are so clear to so many different people. So that's a time then again to step back and say, I understand your belief in this universal socialisation. I do not accept it. And I think that I have the ability to evaluate ideas for myself and to reject or accept. them.

Based on presumably, ideally based on evidence. Yes. I mean, about your own self, because of course we do all have biases. And so if, you know, and sometimes they are cultural biases. So if you do think that you have made a judgment about somebody because of their accent, their subculture, then yes, you know, ideally you wouldn't be put on the spot for that. You would reflect about that.

You would fix it. yourself, that this thing where everybody has to have the exact same biases as Robin DiAngelo's grandmother is, is frankly ridiculous. I agree. Then the next one, which is, again, equally pernicious. And I think I'll give some examples if you don't. But the claim number eight, intentions do not matter. Only impact matters, which you began to allude to before.

But this notion that, yeah, that the person. who has been impacted, bears no responsibility for their own interpretation and in some sense has special rights. You want to comment on this? Yeah, that perception that a microaggression is something that makes a certain person feel a certain way. And so it doesn't matter if the individual meant to make them feel that way. If they have, they just need to be aware of it. They should have been aware of it. better. To some extent this is, there is truth, of course, in this. If somebody said to a black Irishman over and over again, you don't look Irish, it could start to feel a little unwelcome. This gets taken to an extreme where you just have to say, no, come on, you do actually have

some responsibility for how you interpret things. You know, if I have just complimented you on giving a really good talk. It's up to you, to a certain extent, whether you say, oh, thank you, you appreciated, you recognise my ability here, or you feel offended. And this, of course, is what cognitive behavioural therapies is very good for, because it sort of puts a stop to this kind of catastrophizing, where people who are very anxious are then likely to read things negatively, and it sort of is this really a good interpretation? And of course, Haighton and Lukianov have been very good on this, how how these kind of theories are reverse cognitive behavioral therapy. And it's teaching people to see a fence where they could be a compliment. And it's,

it harms most of all the minority group who is being, who has taken on these theories. And it's, um, is reading the world through them. Yeah. I mean, when I, when I, hear this and I've had conversations and some of them public, but now, I mean, I do, I do like the viewpoint of what Christopher Hitchens used to say, you know, when someone would say, you know, I'm offended and he'd say, well, okay, big deal. What do you have to say? And then, and Stephen Frye, who was clearly said, you know, being offended does not give you special rights in any way. Just, you know, go away. Or you have a choice of responding to me with an argument, deciding that I'm, that you don't want to walk away, or deciding that, you know, maybe it's worth

discussing and maybe your offense comes from your background. But it's up to you. The problem, what is remarkable is if you're offended, you own the problem. But in this case, but in social, too much in our society and as central part of critical social justice is, is if you're offended, someone else owns the problem, which is remarkable. And, you know, again, that may sound trite. But let me give you some examples, which you're aware of. probably, but let me give listeners some examples. There's a famous example of a New York Times science writer,

a distinguished science writer who was taking a group of kids to South America, and one of these kids, I think they were 12 or 13, talked about how one of her friends used the N-word. And he wanted to talk to her about, you know, and he talked to a group of why it wasn't appropriate to use the N-word,

in the which, during which he used the N-word. He was fired by the New York Times, who said his intent didn't matter. The intent that he was trying to educate didn't matter. It was the impact that mattered. And then it goes just from there to where, again, my own sensibilities are greatest when it comes to science. The journal Nature, as you probably may be aware, nature behavior, has given an edict to their editors saying that any article that might cause offense should not be

accepted, regardless of the intent of the author or the validity of the science. If for any reason, and they list every reason that any reasons why I might offend. And they list everything under the sun. Sex, gender, politics, size, weight, anything. I mean, any way you could be offended. If it has the possibility of offending, it should not be accepted. These are the gatekeepers of scientific articles. And so that's how deeply this kind of, I would say,

ridiculous argument has infiltrated academia and scholarship. It's not just out there in the society or in the writings of Robin DiAngelo or anyone else. It's become deeply ingrained. Yes, we have got more and more sensitive to words. Yes. Words, you know, exactly. And I mean, I think there was a, well, this will get me hate mail, but it doesn't matter. You know, there was a big joke. Unfortunately, in the response to the horrible attack on October 7th, there was,

remember that afterwards people, you know, there was a joke about kids at Harvard, leaving their class on why misgendering is violence and going to the, you know, destroy Israel rally or to kill the Jews rally, as if language, as misgendering is a form of violence that's worse than actual violence is a remarkable notion. Claim nine, we're almost through the claims and then we'll move on. Claim nine, anyone who does not subscribe to critical social justice ideology does not understand it. Yeah, so we've seen this, of course, before. Yeah, I come from the new atheist moment as well.

And that thing where you, somebody, you'll say that these claims don't appear to be true. And it's, well, read the Bible. I have read the Bible. Well, you haven't read it properly. Otherwise, you would believe it and agree with me. And that is what, because there is that absolute certainty of their own rightness. anybody who has, and obviously that includes me, read the theories in great depth and still disagrees with them, either does not understand them or is opposing them for sort of

of selfish, bigoted reasons. And how can you respond? And I say we have to oppose this by pointing out that you can disagree with people on a number of reasons, you know, it isn't the, I'm kind of, well, in some sense, you say a key point. Sorry. You say, I think, and I had a discussion with some about how to have successful conversations, someone to written book on them, but you say, I understand your

conception of the world, an ethical framework, but I'm not share it. I think it's a key point, is not to deny that they're, that, that, you know, that you haven't listened to it. You understand it and, you know, and maybe even ask them to elaborate on it. But then you can disagree. But once you indicate that, and even regurgitate their arguments, are you saying, are you saying this? Do I understand this? Is this what you're saying?

Oh, okay. Well, now I disagree. But at least you show that you, by regurgitating, you show that you at least understand the arguments. Yes. And it still doesn't. It works just as well as saying that to a fundamentalist Christian, who believes you just, sin and that I think because with these because they run into each other and overlap so much when I wrote that bit I had to kind of separate out the answers and decide which bit went

where so I'm and maybe I may repeat myself that yes that that's it's that that's a thing that's running through it as as well when if somebody is is is making that that claim you take them off that that ground don't don't don't go to them and say and try to argue with them on their own grounds and come, come away and say, well, yes, I understand your beliefs, but I, I hold these ones. I mean, if somebody said to me, homosexuality is a sin, it says so in the Bible, there's no point me going back saying, well, actually, in the sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke about false, not, and nothing about homosexuality. I would say, I understand that this is your belief. I am not a Christian and I don't believe that. That's the place to take it to.

Okay. Last claim. Liberalism is an oppressive power structure. Yes. So liberalism is seen as it's targeted directly. It's one of the core tenets of critical race theory, in particular critique of liberalism and the civil rights movement and occasionally Martin Luther King because liberalism tries to level the playing field. It wants to take social significance out of categories. That doesn't mean your identity cannot be. important to you. It means we don't assume things about you because of it. But the whole thing with thinking of people as individuals who can discuss ideas, who can evaluate them, is a particular threat because liberalism has been the most successful system for overturning oppressive systems from feudalism to theocracy, to patriarchy, colonialism, slavery. You know, Jim Crow, the gay pride movement, these have all been liberal developments. So the critical social justice movement takes aim at liberalism saying this has not worked.

This is encouraging that the status quo, we need to go further. And their belief is that after laws had changed, attitudes still remained and we need to get at them. The way to respond to this is to say, yes, we do. It's not going to change, change some laws. Attitudes aren't going to change, but you are not the only game in town for doing this. We don't have to get at them via your critical methodology. We can continue what we were doing in a liberal framework.

And say, well, look at this idea. It may be legal. It may be protected under freedom of speech, but is it based in evidence? Is it ethical? And we can continue to erode bad ideas like racism, sexism and homophobia that way. And yeah, in fact, you point out at the end in your response to this, you say the raging political polarization in the United States is frightening in the extreme, and it certainly is with people on both sides becoming increasingly likely to justify violence to defend their cause, but violence is the epitome of authoritarianism and the apex of illiberalism.

And I think that's the key point to point out. Okay, so having discussed those kind of arguments that you might hear and how to maybe respond to it and understanding the context of what you're likely to find in the workplace or academia or elsewhere, one of the things you then go and devote a whole chapter to, I think perhaps because Robin DiAngelo focuses on so much is this notion of unconscious bias. and you point out that we all have biases, that's true, but that's very different than this notion that we all have the same unconscious biases.

And so, you know, for example, you say within this framework, there's no possibility for any white person to legitimately disagree with the claim that they harbor deeply entrenched negative's beliefs about the characters and capabilities of black people within their unconscious mind. Any such a disagreement is dismissed at best as ignorance

due to having failed to engage properly with the training meant to reveal such beliefs or at worst as a sign that the individual is invested in maintaining their white privilege and the white supremacist systems that harm people of color. And you point out, and I want you to elaborate on this, since then, a mountain of scholarly research has catch much doubt on the ability to test

of this IAT test, which is one of the harbingers of unconscious bias. And you point out that a mountain of scholarly research has cast so much doubt on the ability of this test to measure unconscious bias in any kind of reliable, valid, or consistent manner that is largely considered unfit for this purpose. And so why don't you spend some time talking about the notion of unconscious bias and where it's used?

And I'll help guide you because you say this chapter will focus on three simple objections. One, critical social justice uses a very limited and flawed approach to unconscious bias. So I'll ask you to comment on these three things. Two, the implicit association test is not fit for purpose. And three, critical social justice based unconscious bias training does not work. So the floor is yours. So the very limited range of bias that people are looking at.

are the ones that are theorised. It's those specific power systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, homophobia, transphobia, fat phobia, ablism. And these are the ones that are considered, and they are also already assumed to be there in everybody, and it's to dismantle them. But over, I was very pleased to see, because I had a break from the book because I was unwell. And then when I came back and I got the three bestselling books on Unconscious, bias in 2023, much more rigorous approaches. And I recommend Pamela Fuller to anybody in particular, because she's pointing out quite rightly that this isn't how biases work. We do have cultural biases, certainly, but we also have individual biases. So I give the example that the two mean girls in my

class were called Kelly. And now if I meet somebody called Kelly, I have to remind myself she's not going to be horrible, that's meaningless to anybody else. And then there is those universal ones as well, which Fuller and others look at, like confirmation bias, like affinity bias, which doesn't only affect majority groups. Of course, so when, if you are actually looking at making a workplace more harmonious, more productive, you need to look at a whole person who exists as an individual and as a member of various groups and as a human with typical flaws. that all humans have and not just drill down on this, this one, that this sort of few intersectional framework dominance of matrix of domination

and try and train that out of everybody as though we are all just programmed in exactly the same way. Okay, that's a limited and flawed approach to bias. Everyone has these biases because we say they do, but we don't worry about the other biases and we don't even ask the question if it's possible for people not to have those biases. That's item one, two, the implicit. Association test is not fit for purpose. Maybe you could spend a little time talking about that.

Yeah, so there's now a repository. Lee Jessim, I think, the social psychology manages it. All of the papers that have been written finding flaws with the implicit association test, which of course works on response times, how quickly you can associate positive things with certain identities and negative things with others. And there are a number of flaws that have been pointed out with that. firstly that this depends very much on hand-eye coordination. If you're good at video games, you're going to be less biased, apparently, than if you're not.

It changes depending on various things that are happening in your own day. So you could be racist in the morning, but not in the evening. If you took this test, we cannot actually tell the difference between implicit bias and explicit bias. You get just as good a result if you ask somebody. You know, do you think this group is inferior, that you're going to be more accurate than if you do this test? So where is this gap between implicit and explicit? The divisors of the test have said themselves that they haven't actually defined it.

And whereas at first it was put forward as a diagnostic tool for an individual, the Greenwald and Banerjee have now stepped back from this and said there's a very high error possibility. and studies have gone into this finding that most of the results are error. And so it at best can give a general overview, but that not say anything about any individual. And then there's the problem that having implicit or explicit biases doesn't translate very well into behaviour. And that the processes that are then used to try and address implicit bias

can teach people to answer questions correctly, but it's very short-lived. So the main result of putting someone through an implicit association test is to make them, if they're a member of a dominant group, seems to be to make them neurotic about engaging with members of other groups and withhold natural communication. And if they're a member of a minority group, to assume that everybody else is much more racist or sexist than they first thought they were,

and workplace environments deteriorate. Okay, so I think you partly answered, Maybe you have answered the third part here too. We're talking about, and that's great. The reason we talked about the implicit association test is that in training, in workplace training, people are likely to encounter that test and find out supposedly that they're biased in ways they might not happen. There's no justification for it.

20 years now since then, so many papers have come out, pulling it into doubt. It's not valid or reliable to a significant extent. And maybe, I don't know if you need to elaborate, maybe you did say everything you want to say, but the item three was critical social justice based on conscious bias training does not work. And you just gave some examples, short-lived makes people erotic or feel that everyone around them is racist or whatever. Are there other arguments for why they don't work? Other evidence? I mean, the thing that it validates.

I mean, what I started that chapter with was criticizing the, again, Again, DiAngelo, and I have focused on DeAngelo in that chapter, because that's what most of the anti-racist trainings are, or her school of thought. She epitomizes it. When racism isn't bad, it's inevitable, you just have to dismantle it. But what happens when you tell people who hold racist views that when you can't help it, everybody does it,

is that they then tend to feel validated in those views. It does not encourage them to think this is a shameful belief that I have and I should work on it. And at the same time, you're then alienating other people who are of a minority group, who believe people are more racist or sexes than you thought they were. And people, I loved it, Dobbin and Kalev found that people do not like being told what to think. Now, anybody who's met people should know this. But what the studies found was if you asked, if you have a voluntary,

thing and you let people go in and you let them make their own minds up, they're more likely to respond positively, find the contents believable. If you have a mandatory thing and you send them in there, they go in, feeling defensive and coerced and more likely to reject everything that's in there. So even if the contacts were good, which they're generally not at the moment, you're acting very much against your own interest. So I put at the end some recommendations that are coming now, from more evidence-based trainers which have, you know, keep, see everybody focus on belonging,

bringing people in. If we're talking about diversity, that needs to include dominant groups as well. They can't just be the problematic. People have shared goals. Foster team spirit don't go into stereotypes. You believe this because you're black. You believe that because you're white. This makes people stereotype. So it really does, when you go through, you think, well, surely we knew this, didn't we? But these theories have brought us so far away from, I think, sort of common human instincts. Common sense. Yeah, that it now needs, studies need to be done to say, you know, if you talk about people as though they are stereotypes, stereotype bias will increase. That's, yeah, that's what we're having to see now. You shouldn't have to say that,

should you? You think you wouldn't have to say that. And you'd also think anyone who's been apparent, especially if a teenager would recognize it telling people what to think is as particularly effective. Okay, so then, okay, so then we move to the, I mean, the purpose of the book is to give people tools and the kind of tools that you've developed in your organization. So those are the knowledge sections, that those three are, here's your foundational knowledge, then we move into principle and strategy. Yeah, exactly. So we've gotten the knowledge and now action steps.

And you say, for many people outside the humanities are, activist faces, the critical social justice ideas that today permeate not only our workplaces in schools, but also our broader political, cultural, and social landscapes are often baffling. This is because critical social justice ideas ignore, accept standards of evidence and reason and operate on their own logic. And it's hard to, and, you know, they focus on, on, buzzwords like diversity, equity, inclusion, unconscious bias, microaggressions, etc. So, you know, you illustrate to people, okay, you might begin to hear this and how can you assess the situation? It's the first step before taking action is assessing the situation.

And you talk about, quote green, cold yellow and code red. So let's talk about situations that where your hackles might begin to go up, code green. So that's when you have some language like equity. diversity and inclusion. But there aren't other signs that the company is going through, going down a critical social justice route. This is when I say to people to get more information. Because what a lot of organizations are doing now,

because they have to tick these boxes, but they really don't want to go down the critical social justice route, is that they will use some of these words. And then when you look into what they're doing, it's a thoroughly liberal thing which accords with the law. You know, there won't be any prejudice or discrimination. Racism will not be tolerated. Report this here.

Treat people as individuals, work as a team. So if you don't be misled, some of our clients saw some language and overreacted to situations which weren't what they thought they were. And if you do that at the beginning, then you're going to get dubbed a reactionary, you're going to be seen as less credible because you've just, you've tapped into a discourse and, and you've run with it. Now, if it is the start of a burgeoning problem, you still don't want to do that because you will undermine your credibility as the problem develops at this point, say, how are we understanding these terms? What sources are we going to be used? Is there a

reading list? And if you then hear that, yes, there's going to be unconscious. bias training based on the implicit association test. Yes, there's going to be Kendi and DeAngelo. Yes, this is going to be mandatory. Then move into Code Yellow. Yeah, the code. Yeah, you have the warning signs of Code Green, which we should say, which is your organization frames its training in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion. Those are buzzwords, but as you point out, they don't necessarily mean, you know, you should see what they really mean. Your organization expresses support for organizations to promote critical justice ideologies such as Black Lives Matter, etc.

your organization requests optional DIA statements and job applications and your organization's training is optional or strongly suggested but not mandated so so those are warning signs but we move to code yellow when you the moment you know for a fact that your organization is subscribing to an unscientific and decidedly ideological prose to advancing diversity equity inclusion in the workplace that's the time it's necessary more assertive action so maybe you want to talk about code yellow So once your employer is saying that we're going to have this unconscious bias training, here are these trainers, they're based very much on this, and everybody is socialised into racist and sexist and transphobic views.

Here are our sources which are all entirely critical social justice, no other scholars on race or racism at all, then this is when, if you can, and ideally you can is that you take more direct action and you say it's great that you are focusing on anti-discrimination policies. I am concerned about the bias here. Here is evidence that this, the IAT has been largely discredited. Here is evidence that the unconscious bias training doesn't work. These theorists all come from one school of thought you're missing out on a lot of other. If we're in the grounds of race, you know, have something perhaps from Thomas Chatterton Williams, from John McWater, from Thomas Sowell as well.

You don't want to give everybody the impression that everybody agrees with Ibra Max Kendi and Denheesicoat. And then you, in a very cooperative way as though to try and, because very often the employer doesn't know exactly what they're signing up to. We've had a ridiculous situation where one of our clients was accused of being a conspiracy. theorist because he said that Robin DiAngelo says that it's not possible not to be racist and Ibrax Kendi also for white people not to be

and Ibrahim X Kennedy also says there's no not racist, there's only racist or anti-racist and that's a straw man it's white right wing right wing speaking points conspiracy theory it's right that this is what the training is based on but employers

very often don't know they just think it's something much more liberal and inclusive than it is. So they think it's the right thing to do. Once again, they don't like the word, they like the word social justice. They like the word diversity, equity, inclusion. And therefore, if there's a man, if there's someone is produced a pamphlet and how to do it, why not do it? Exactly.

So this is the point. Don't overwhelm them with information, as you might think from the list I just gave. But go in, but with a short email, raise, say, three concerns. that you have and give some evidence for why you have them, and then close down by saying, I want to help with this, address any discrimination that's going on here, but I am concerned about how this is being done.

And that's sort of yellow, and then we get to quote red where they're really, it's, the train is left the station, and I guess I'll read your opening paragraph, if your organization is threatening disciplinary action or other penalties against individuals who articulate principled opposition to critical socialist justice,

ideology, this is an urgent situation that requires immediate action. A simple letter explaining the problem with critical social justice methods and appealing for a more genuine diversity and inclusion in the form of acceptance of a variety of worldviews will likely be ineffective at this point. Negotiating on behalf of freedom of belief can and should still be attempted to leave a paper trail of your attempts, but if there's clear evidence that your organization knows exactly what it is advocating and is committed to openly enforcing compliance with it. Doing so is likely to be very difficult and needs to be handled with great care. You almost certainly will not be able to make any headway on your own

and will need to contact organizations that promote freedom of speech and free expression for legal and logistic support. Yeah. Once you're into an organization that is fully captured and run by activists, the best you can do at this stage. is to register your objection. If it's safe to do so, it might at this point be better to keep your head down and job hunts for a while and get support from relevant organisations.

Because we here, we have the free speech union and we have the free speech officer in universities. So trying to source out who could we have helped you at this point and make your own principled and knowledgeable objection clear and put it in writing. But there's, if, if an organization is captured, then negotiation is unlikely. Unlily, yeah. To work. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, but it's, but in general, then you go on, give, uh, in this case, seven steps to addressing problems. And I think I'll read all the steps and then I just ask you to, um, you know, rather than going through each one, as we did before. Yeah. Step one is to understand critical social social justice terminology. and concepts. So this is what to do if you're beginning to be worried or you are worried.

First, understand the terminology and concepts, which of course your book is a great way to understand them. Two, understand your own principal objections to critical social justice. Understand why you object to these ideas. Three, understand and keep records of the communications and our policies and programs being proposed. Four, network with others in your organization. Five, determine a strategic response that will be most effective and least risky. Very important.

Lease risky is important for people. Step six, be part of an ongoing change and build a community. And step seven, seek immediate support from relevant organizations and groups. So those are the sort of levels of response. first to understand it, then to understand why you disagree and then go beyond. Those steps are clear. I don't know if you want to, if you want to elaborate, because you certainly do in the book

on the basis behind those seven steps or anything that they don't, that just what I've just said alone doesn't, doesn't encompass. Yeah, hang on. Let me get, grab a copy of my book. You know, you list those points. And, and you say you can have. ask yourself questions about how do I understand the subjects, which of my values. But, you know, I mean, it's clear.

But I don't know if there's any, those four points themselves sort of indicate a progression and you elaborate on them, but I don't know if there's anything you want to elaborate on here. I think the first thing to do with any stage of the problem is making sure that you understand the terminology in the concept. So that that's what the first three chapters of the book are for. Yeah. So that you're fully aware of what you're doing.

For the next thing that you need to do is think through your own. principles because this is is something that people often don't do in words. We just know, don't we that we don't evaluate people's worth by their race. That's, that's racist. And so actually sort of bringing it back to first principles, because quite often people will respond with that's unreasonable, that's unfair, that that's racist, that's authoritarian. Bring it back. What are the problems that you're having? So if we take one subject, which is the one that we keep coming back to, all white people are racist and only white people can be racist,

then think through why do I disagree with this? Do I believe that I have the ability to evaluate, reject, accept ideas for myself? Do I think that the principle of not evaluating people by their race is one that should be applied consistently? do I think in different contexts, then it might be an advantage to be a non-dominant race. So sort of looking at these, and I argue for people to almost write a constitution of yourself so that you have thought through your own principles and you have them at the tip of your tongue so that you're not reacting defensively. We know that's not true.

I don't think that that's unethical. And instead saying, I understand that you believe this, but I hold that. this view because I am a liberal, a Christian, a conservative, a socialist, whatever you are, these are the views that I have. And of course, the good thing with constitutions like this as well is that they can have amendments. And I'm thinking of writing a book about writing a constitution of yourself anyway, because people tend to slide. If you haven't thought your views back to the first principles and you're reacting to things, then of course, in motivated reasoning and confirmation bias comes in.

And you can, with the best will in the world and while trying to be consistent, you can find yourself evaluating things differently. So I have quite a long section on, yeah, understanding your own principles and sort of prompts for people to go through. Absolutely. And yeah, and the next chapter is specifically writing templates for addressing it. You say there are two distinct situations in which you might need to put pen to paper to talk about your principles. The first involves writing a letter of objection or concern regarding training or policies of critical social justice.

And the second involves crafting a DEI statement for the purpose of a job, job promotion, grant, or application. And you provide these templates which can help you gently, well, we'll talk about different levels, but initially gently raise your concerns and the guidelines you should. should use for raising your concerns, show that you're familiar, show that you fully support anti-discrimination policies, etc. And then you provide templates for actually writing a DIA statement where you're not lying, but you're knowing how to frame what you believe in a way that seems to confirm the apriory beliefs and ideology of D.E.I. saying things like that subterfuge essentially that one.

Yeah, you know, I found it fascinating. Go on, sorry. Sorry, interrupt. Yeah, that was the one for a university system. I worked that through with a young adjunct professor who really needed to say the right things, but did not want to say anything that went against his principles. So yes, if you can say, I will make sure that underrepresented groups get to speak. then you're certainly talking about any group that could be underrepresented.

If there's only a couple of black people in the class and they don't seem to be able to speak, then yes, making sure they're not let out. But also, if there are a couple of conservatives who are trying to put forward views, make sure those are included. And of course, that isn't what's understood when you read that. But when you write it, you can mean that and keep to it. Yeah, let me give you some. I thought these statements you put down are brilliant, so I want to read them.

because they resonate. As you point out, and famous in University of California, that's simply saying you treat everyone the same regardless of their background and you don't, and you'll supervise students of any gender, that puts you on the lowest on the list

immediately to be rejected. That's what people are shocked by. You'd think that that would be what you'd have to say. So you have to figure out a way to say it, to say it more carefully. You can choose to lie, which some people do, or you can choose to,

what I find these things, you can choose to say things that appear to resonate, but that they can mean many different things, such as, I'm strongly opposed to any form of essentialism, whether it be related to race, culture, gender, disability, sexuality, religious, or philosophical belief. And because essentialism is a word that the critical social justice people like to use. In my experience, while most people treat everyone as an individual, we are prone to falling prey to biases that can amount to stereotypes in which can constrain people.

again, accepting that we have biases, but not arguing that we all have the same biases. But again, it resonates with the people who are looking for that kind of things. And there's more and more of these. I ensure that I myself work reflectively to minimize my own biases in the classroom. I actively take steps to create an environment

in which none of my students feels unsafe to speak. Again, interpreted safety in this context often is not using certain words or not having a student have to hear a word that they don't like, whereas in this case it can be, you know, unsafe can be, in your case can be, you know, a conservative person speaking who may feel unsafe to speak in encouraging that. So it's a wonderful set of templates that people can use,

but that leads you to the next chapter, which is choosing the best personal approaches for combating, for combating critical social justice with a bunch of case studies. And obviously we're not going to go through the case studies here. But you talk about, about four different approaches, actually five different approaches. Maybe I can ask you to briefly summarize them, the gentle, the stealth, the firm, the hard and the public. It's going from the gentlest to the, so why don't you talk about that transition of approaches? Well, I think that this

stealth one is the gentlest in that you're not actually doing anything. So in that one, this is when somebody just really has to keep their head down and give an employer what they want. And then, and this is, I would argue, because a lot of time people sort of feel, feel shamed because they feel I need to speak out. And I say, well, you do ideally at some point, but we will not do very well if all the teachers, therapists, healthcare workers, social workers all get fired before they finish their university degree. So if you have to keep your head down at this point to get through, to get your qualification and then bring your principles into the therapeutic profession,

the social work profession, the teaching profession, keep your head down and do that. That's that stealth. So that's what we did with a couple of people. So they had those kinds of statements. They didn't say anything that they didn't believe was right, but they also, you know, they live to fight another day. And the gentle approach, the most minimal approach you can take,

because people feel like they either have to, you know, buckle or throw themselves on the grenade, the most minimal point is not contributing to the preference falsification. While other people are kind of speaking into or nodding along with critical social justice ideas, just take steps not to do that, put out some other, thoughts out there, nothing particularly problematic, and maybe sound out some other people, see if you're alone there, just to try to not increase or contribute to that.

And sort of sound out your colleagues more tentatively. If you're in a very vulnerable situation where you're going to get fired or you're a very conflict-diverse person, then this minimal approach is good. Then with the gentle approach, this is when you come in and you don't assume that there is a problem and you speak very cooperatively and you said, I'm glad that we're addressing discrimination here. I'm a little bit

concerned. Are we biased on some of the sources we're using here? Should we have a wider range of people? Should we, I'll be assuming that everybody believes the same thing. Here is that perhaps a little bit racist to more gently question and challenge. And then the more firm approach, and that's where we have individual templates at the bag, is when you say, I support your aims at anti-discrimination here, but there are problems and these are what they are. And you just set out uncompromisingly that this test has been discredited. This is not appropriate to be enforced on other people. And the hard approach is when you get very assertive.

about this and say this is an unacceptable denial of my freedom of speech and belief and you need to stop imposing views on on other people right now and and make some very specific asks. This is something that we always say to people to do because if you get waffled at, you can kind of lose the track here. He's like, no, I want your confirmation. We're not having unconscious bias training. Training will be mandatory. It won't be mandatory.

voluntary, we will not be separated into affinity groups by our race. So these three things and keep repeating that and push for an answer to that. Is that the firm or the hard? That's the firm or the hard? That's the hard approach. Yeah. At firm, you're still here is the problem, but I'm assuming that you're going to address it. I see it. Hard is saying you must address it.

Yes. You have not addressed this. And now I must insist that you do for my own rights, employees, rights, general running of the place. and then if you get into the public, this is when people have either accepted that they're going to lose their job or have already lost their job. So we had a few clients go public.

Of course, a lot of stories just aren't of enough interest because it's been a lot of back and forth with emails. But sometimes it has been. So we had one of our black engineers who was being pushed into, anti-racist training that he found insulting. He didn't want to be racialized at work. He spoke to the telegraph.

We had one of our firemen. Did that help, by the way? Speaking of public, I'm assuming these are success stories. When he spoke to the telegraph, did it help or did he get fired? No, I mean, these are the ones that aren't success stories. By the time people go public, I mean, this man, and actually, I think I misrepresented that because he went public, but, anonymously he was pointing out the problem.

People could work out the employer, but not him. And he, in the end, went to a different job because he'd attained a high position in his company. And then the company announced that they were going to try to promote more black people into that position. That would have damaged his CV. So he moved to a different company. Oh, okay. And one of our firemen, he went public. because he'd really been targeted by an activist group for being conservative.

But all he had actually said at the beginning was these reports of racism in the organisation are serious, please give me evidence of them so I can help you fight them. And that apparently showed that he would not respond as well in an emergency to black people as you would to white. So they got him on losing his temper in the end. And that's why we also say in the book, to be very careful not to lose your temper, once you have problematized yourself. And of course the accusations that he might essentially let somebody burn to death

if they were the wrong race was really far too much for him. And he left the room to avoid losing his temper. And he headbutted a locker on the way out. And so, you know, leaving the meeting damage of property and they got rid of him. And the other two in there are people that you can find easily, which is a Jody Shaw's case where she went to public. She was a counterweight client and Elizabeth Spivak, whose case was dealt with by fire when she designed a social,

one of her students designed a social psychology test that included the Black Lives Matter movement, wanting to look at responses to it if it was presented with quite emotively negative words. And she was then dubbed a white supremacy, even though she had been very active on social justice issues and had not quite realized the problem that was arising in it and understood it as a more liberal and inclusive thing that it was.

But that one, including that one image in that study, and even the accusation against Elizabeth was that she included an image of Black Lives Matter while being white. And it wasn't even her study, it was her student study, and her student was back. But the narrative still built up around her. So fire helped Elizabeth not to be fired. She's still in her tenured position.

But the narrative about her, which is so far from the truth, it's ridiculous, continues. And her stress levels are extremely high. So you can say that you win in some case. No. Yeah, you win a battle, but you lose the war. I mean, it's hard. As we were talking about before,

we even started. It's hard when people are labeled in the modern world, especially when people who are the most vocal are willing to continue to label them, even if they're a very small minority. It's hard to overcome that. In fact, that leads us to essentially the last chapter, which is dealing with what you can do, and it's dealing with troubleshooting. And you talk about three challenges. So I thought we'd quickly talk about the three challenges and then move on to actually something more optimistic, I think. Anyway, challenge one, you made a principled statement of concern about critical social justice ideology in your organization, but you've been met without outright rejection or radio silence by your employer or school, and you continue to receive official communications based on critical social justice ideology,

and to be encouraged if not required to attend mandatory training sessions, mandatory training based on critical social ideology. So how do you deal with that challenge? So either being ignored or just getting a dismissive response and things carrying on. In that case, you have to, quite often people will find that they will say, can you please stop sending me all of these emails about these ideas that I I am necessarily racist or I am necessarily a victim of racism or these gender-related ideas. I don't believe.

Can we have a more balanced approach and they're either completely ignored or they get to things saying, your concerns have been noted and we are looking, we are inclusive or world views, but then only one worldview keeps being posted over and over again. So the things to do in this is to bring your concerns down to, again, as I've, I've said maybe three very specific asks and send it as an email. You may then be invited to a meeting, but then still keep on those three things. Follow that, that meeting up with that. And just keep trying to press home.

I would like an answer to this, please. And here are the three questions. And somebody then finally answers you. I'm moving into the buzzword waffler now. but so yeah the next one is okay so you make specific gas the challenge too is you basically you've been met with a waffling response as you're pointing out so you've you've made a principal statement of concern you're met with the waffling response to your employer and you continue to receive official communications and be encouraged if not required to attend mandatory sessions so

they so if they're waffling what do you do that that's when you you and then this is the point where you have to put things into writing And quite often, the kind of HR manager or boss who is going to waffle at you, try and just sort of settle you down without actually answering your concerns and then carry on doing what they were doing does not want to operate in email. They want you to come in and have a meeting so they can waffle at you. Try to avoid that if you can and put in a very clear framework. So I've set that out as well to say,

please can you reassure me of this, this, this and this. If you have to go to the meeting, then you say again, so here are the five things that I would like to be assured of, and you get waffled at again, then you follow that up in an email saying, you know, thank you, we talked about this and I understood you to agree because this is often what happens. One of our clients had endless meetings

where he'd given evidence that unconscious bias training of the kind that advocating did not work. They'd reassured him they weren't going to do that, and then they kept sending it out. So he kept sending back again this information. So you have affirmed that you are not going to use the implicit association test. Then if your buzzword waffler doesn't want to affirm that, they will have to have you in for another meeting,

or they'll have to respond to you and say, no, actually, we haven't confirmed that. The point with a buzzword waffler is to bring them down to what they are actually going to do, what their justification for doing it is, have them of them they have heard you. And it's a risky process, obviously, but with a lot of this kind of response, it's because people are box ticking.

They have certain things to meet them. They want a quiet life and they want you to go away and just keep your head down and do it and get it out of the way. So if you can be a polite and persistent nuisance, until they see that actually getting rid of you will work much better if they actually address your concerns, that's the way forward.

And then the last challenge is you made the principal statement and your concerns about your organization, but you continue to experience problems in the organization because one or more co-workers or peers problematize all professional and personal interactions in the workplace or classroom. Yes, the problematizer. Yeah. The problematizer is the code red of problems.

The problematizer is somebody who is usually very familiar. with the theories and the activism and who is skilled in sophistry and they have you in their targets and they're going to find a problem with anything that you do. This is the person who is waiting for you to say something like pregnant women so that they can point out that trans men also get pregnant and that you need to challenge your assumptions. or one of the clients disabled was a word she used, and that's problematic in disability studies to just use it that way. Another one, there wasn't even anything subjective he could do,

but he had asked out, he was a white man who'd asked out a black colleague. She'd said, no, she wasn't interested him in that way. And there was a little bit of awkwardness for a while, but they never mentioned again. The friendship resumed. They worked happily together. And then a problematizer came to the organisation. And on learning that this individual had asked out this other individual,

decided that he was a sexual predator at some kind. He had literally, I saw the email that he sent her. Would you like to go out for a drink? Just if you don't, just say, I won't raise it again. I know it's bit awkward. And she said, oh, no, sorry, I don't see you that way. That was it. He never mentioned it.

But this was the problem. And after that, it was subjective things. They worked in a social care environment. And they're saying, you didn't speak quite as much to this black person as you did to this wise person. You were more reserved with this black person. And in the end, that individual had a really good reputation for helping people in underserved communities left in protest. because the problematizer had got him in his size. I think in that case, she just had to have an objection to somebody.

In the other case, the woman that I was telling you about, who had got into trouble for using the word disabled, it seemed very much that the problematizer wanted her job because it drove the woman to having a breakdown and took that position in the end. So it's very, very... You know, I've seen this happen directly. And I guess I have a question that isn't in the book,

but right now this kind of problematizing is almost always rewarded. You can always find a way, say, well, that person spent five minutes talking to that one, and when this person came, he spent two minutes, or, or,

you know, I didn't like the tone or, or whatever it is, those get a response, H.R. And, or whatever. And there's almost never any negative consequences of,

of problemizing. And I don't know what the resolution of that is. I mean, I think the bottom line is that false accusation should be, you should be confronted and have consequences as well as real, but even attempts to make an environment less pleasant should have some consequences, but they don't. Yeah, I mean, that is the problem with the problematizer type.

And I've, since I came back after being well, I've been working with employers rather than employees. And they hate the problematizers just as much. So there are things that we can do with this. We have a very lengthy, you know, code of conduct, a thing which includes not, you know, being charitable to others, not imposing your ideas on others. And then a complaints form which really requires people to fill in evidence of something, not I had this perception that this, the way that she asked me if I wanted a cup of. T was a bit abrupt because I'm black. You know, this, this kind of, I think so there are ways to put a raise, but you need the employer

to do that. And that's the problem. And even for the employer, it can be quite difficult. But I am working with employers on doing that. Oh, that's great. For an employee, it's the same principle as, say, a social media dog pile. If you are problematized for something, you either say nothing at all, or you make one principle statement short.

This is not what I meant. This has been misinterpreted. And my views are this. And I'm going to respond to accusations of things I don't believe. And then you do not put any more blood in the water. Because as we know, as soon as people start apologising or trying to explain what they meant, then there's something else toomatize. And that is exactly the same principle in the workplace.

Very often that the women I mentioned who ultimately had a break. down was a very genuine and sincere person and she was horrified by the things she was being accused of and she felt she had to defend herself and that then she would get tearful and upset the manager was having difficulty saying who was the problem because they had one person saying oh this this this attitude is happening and then somebody else in tears and again with the the firefighter i mentioned he was was needled he into to such an extent that he did out. He did thump his desk on the table and he did walk out of a meeting. So then, you know, trying not to do any of that, trying to stay very, very calm. And this was something another

emergency services personnel managers sort of worked out that it went against his will because he's used to responding to emergencies to not respond. And so rather than seeing himself as capitulating to it, he imagined himself as. was a rock standing tall amid a sea of nastiness. And he was able to kind of go to that image and keep himself very calm. And then in this sense, when the problematizer was raising issues that were completely ridiculous over and over again, it just responded with a very short statement of saying, no, when I used the word stupid, I was not being ablest.

that that was a bad idea. I'm not defending that any further. And leave it there. And ultimately, the best you can do so that your manager can see that the person causing them problems is the one who keeps bringing up these vexatious complaints all the time. And all you are doing is saying, no, I don't believe that. You have misinterpreted that. I'm not defending myself on the rounds of something I don't believe in a dignified way.

And that can tip the balance for the, manager to see who the problem is. Have you thought it. Everybody's getting upset. Yeah. Then it gets messy. It gets messy. Absolutely. It's hard.

And as you say, most managers just want it to be, get over with and, and move on. I was wondering, I mean, this book in some sense is for, it's for people who are subject to this and employees. Have you thought of writing a book for managers? That's what I'm on at the moment because I'm working with a few. I'm not actually writing a book, but I am, because of, That book comes from the pathways and guidance that we developed in counterweight for employees. So I'm now developing a lot of policies and codes of conduct with employers.

So at some point, I will adapt that into a book as well. Well, that's great. That'll be wonderful. I'll look forward to it. I think it'll be very useful because often, in my experience, it's the heads of the organizations that are problems because they commit. they would rather virtue signal and capitulate rather than a deal with what's really happening. And so even if they don't believe it, the example I often give is a friend, a guy knew,

Francis Collins, he was the head of the National Institutes of Health. And he stated, you know, biomedical research is racist. And of course, he really didn't believe it because if he did, I said, well, why didn't you resign? If you've been head of an organization for 20 years that you know is racist and you've maintained that, then if you really believe that, you should resign. But the statement was what he wanted to make to try and get in front of the, and be a, you know, virtue signal that he agreed with claims of people. And so managers, especially at the highest level,

the university presidents and heads of scientific organizations are often the biggest part of the problem, because they'd rather say the right words and rather than think about the right actions. Yes, I think this is a start. difference that I'm glad you've given me the chance to point out between a university setting and an employment setting because when you you have people at the highest points of academia what they are essentially selling is ideas now ideally they'd be rigorous rigorous ones but if they're in this realm of critical social justice then that is their business but when you get over to employment that the people who own businesses do not tend to be committed critical social justice

activist. They're usually practical people trying to get a productive and harmonious workplace to work and said that this is why some of the sources that have come out for employers in the last year have been very good and they have sort of been focusing against taking on these kind of policies and employers are moving away from it. Well, that's a perfect segue to the last chapter, which is the optimism part, the fall of critical social justice. And I don't know, I mean, I have a pre-publication volume, I think. It's out in the UK, but not in the US now. I don't know if you were able to include it,

but one of the things that's happened that's been announced in the last two weeks, so maybe you haven't been, obviously, but as you know, that at least 12 major universities are now come out and said, we're not going to have the IE required statement. So this is happening. Yes. And it's happening. a wide variety of places.

And of course, sometimes it's happening for the wrong reasons. You see a government mandate that universities can't do X, Y, or Z. But you're also seeing universities realize that they're shooting themselves in the foot by getting rid of potential good people by some arbitrary set of rules run by some bureaucrats who really have no connection to the academic running of the university. But you point out that it is, that the postings are going down, that there is a sort of a movement against it.

Do you want to comment on that at all? Yeah, from Musa El Garby is a particularly good source on this, looking at the rise of Woke and the waning of Woke. I haven't read his book yet. I think he's more optimistic than I am. That FIRE as well has particularly good stats, which are less encouraging. but what the pattern seems to be in the UK and the US,

particularly the US, a little bit ahead of the UK, is that in about 2015, as so many have commented, the language of anti-discrimination moved from civil rights discourse, which can include things like regardless of race, gender, and into the language that we recognise as critical social justice. Yes. This hit a peak in 2020. And from 2021, it's been coming down in various metrics.

So what papers are being published in universities, there seems to be less focused on the critical social justice scholarship. Now, what communications from employers' management has less of the language in it. The output from companies has less signaling. the uptake of DEI programs has dropped a little. The mainstream media is not, is focusing, has less of the buzzwords in it and is starting to write some critical pieces. And social media seems to be calming down a little as well. There's been a change of tone on there.

Public opinion has certainly said, particularly in the year. UK. It seems to be staying more steady in the US, but the UK move from understanding woke as a good thing to a bad thing has certainly increased. So we're seeing that waning, which doesn't mean, I mean, it took five years to get there. And I would say 10. We saw it in 2013 on university campuses, but I saw it in the literature in 2010. So we can expect it to take some time to go as well, particularly as a lot of companies and universities that are committed to certain programs. So we can see it wane, but it's going to take some time. And unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be waning in Canada. And in northern Europe, it's starting

to rise. Yeah, no, certainly now I live in Canada, I'm seeing it there. But I think it's, my wife often reminds me, it'll often get worse before it gets better. I think, let me, the challenge, I see it waning, but the challenge, and I want, maybe you could comment on this, but a friend of mine, actually a Nobel laureate physicist once said that the U.S. government still has donkeys left from the Civil War. Once you create a bureaucracy, it's very hard to dismantle it. Bureaucracies are self-sustaining in a very effective way. And universities, the largest growth in academia, and certainly in the U.S., and undoubtedly in Canada, too,

but is in DEI bureaucracies. There's many more hires, much more money spent on it. Hundreds, if not thousands, and hundreds of millions of dollars are in this organizational bureaucracy. So I see that as a challenge. It's true that I think you're right, and you're seeing this recognition of the dangers and failures, but what do you do about the bureaucracy?

It's a real problem, and I don't know how to solve that. one. No, that's, this is something that Elizabeth Spivak, the social scientist I was talking about earlier, keeps pointing out to people who are getting too optimistic that there's a sort of sea shift in culture can quickly make a change in universities. And I don't know how universities would step back from that. I'm going to have a conversation with Eric Kaufman as soon. And I think we're going to disagree about rules that should be imposed on institutions where I, I can say, if the government is to have any power at all over what universities teach, it can only be to ensure that there isn't an ideological bias.

It cannot be, we must ban these particular ideas. It must be, you know, forcing people into certain kinds of academics is not allowed consistently. And I don't assume Eric will disagree with that, but he's been critical of people like me saying, we do not let the government decide what can be taught in universities. So we'll see how that conversation goes. You know, in that regard, I want to conclude, let you have the final words, but I'm going to give you the final words by reading them because of yours. I can't get over hearing my own words in an American accent. It sounds very sure. I'm sorry, but I apologize in advance. No offense intended.

Anyway, whether any is taken. But you point out, that's the key point. Again, you've given me a beautiful segue to it because you point out the part of the problem we're seeing in Florida and other places is the governments are mandating against against critical social justice ideas on ideological grounds and saying,

this can't be taught, but you're right. They're not saying the key thing is to say ideology shouldn't be taught. And therefore, you make this point, right near the end of the book. Let's be clear. Requiring critical social justice advocates, I'm not going to put on a British accent,

sorry, requiring critical social justice advocates to accept that other world views have as much right to exist as theirs do and requiring those who work with people to have some idea of what they are, to enable them not to trample over the freedoms and belief of others is not authoritarian, although it may feel like it believers.

Basically, you're saying, look, these people have a viewpoint and they can make it, but you're free to disagree with it. And the expression, when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression, which is often so used by critical justice movement, also applies to it. So that the idea is that, you know,

it's not one, one should outlaw critical social justice. One should put it on the framework of ideas, which are subject to criticism, like everything else. And I think that's the key idea. And I love your last paragraph, which I'm going to read. Well, last paragraph before you get to the glossary and things like that. In the meantime, we can all continue to do our part to hasten the demise of the critical social justice movement by pushing back against it in principled and knowledgeable ways in our institutions and lives. Understand what critical social justice is and be able to articulate your own principled objections to it clearly.

assess the problem arising in your organization accurately and formulate a plan to address it that is appropriate to its severity and your own position, personality and skill set. Sound out your colleagues and peers and address it as a group where you can. Be polite and persistent in your objections. Be clear in your support for ethical and effective anti-discrimination policies. Provide your employer or educator with information on what they are promoting. Keep records of all communications and leave a paper-dustraud. trail of your own. Genuine, knowledgeable commitment to the political ideology of critical social

justice is relatively small. By taking a principle, informed stance against it yourself, you will embolden others to do so. As others work to address the problems from the top down, whether on legal or institutional levels, join the groundswell of people pushing it up from the bottom up. Pushing it out from the bottom up. Be part of the counterweight. Thank you. And it is, it's wonderful that you are not just a part of the counterweight, but someone who's so eloquently and gently and knowledgeably discusses these problems. And that's what I've always appreciated about you. And it's been such a joy and pleasure to be able to have this conversation.

I hope I've represented your views when I have accurately. And I certainly encourage you to keep up the good work. And as I've said before, in this program, my late colleague, Stephen Weinberg, who is a Nobel Prize winning physicist and a vocal atheist, would say, you're doing God's work. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. Thank you, Lerick.

It was really good talking to you. I've really enjoyed it. And I hope people are empowered. And I hope, you know, what we haven't gone through are some of the templates. But it's a great place for people to look at suggestions for how people might actually write. and as well as learning about the ideas and learning about the threats. So thanks for having this conversation with me and keep up the good work. Thank you.

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