Theology in the Raw - 827: Evergreen College and the Evergreening of America: Benjamin Boyce

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

In this episode, Benjamin and I talk about what happened at Evergreen and some of the cultural implications of these events. We then talk about the so-called “evergreening of America.” In many ways, what went down at Evergreen in May 2017 has become a proleptic microcosm of what’s going on today in 2020.  Benjamin Boyce is a popular YouTuber and podcaster. He was a senior in college at Evergreen University when the campus experienced an interesting upheaval that had to do with racial tensions. Or, at least, certain ideologies about racism. He’s extensively documented the whole incident on his YouTube channel here Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. If you would like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw and support the show for as little as $5 a month and get access to premium content in return and become part of the Theology in the Raw community. Also, my forthcoming book, Embodied, Transgender Identities, the Church and What the Bible Has to to say will be released on February 1st of next year. And it is available for pre-order now. If you would like to engage the transgender conversation from a relational, pastoral, theological, scientific perspective, one that values people and also values the text of scripture and is, I would like to think,

text of scripture and is, I would like to think, informed on the greater cultural, scientific, biological, gender theory conversation, then I think you would enjoy this book, Embodied. It took me a long time to write and a long time to research. And I try to convey some fairly complex topics in a conversational way that the average person can understand. So again, it's embodied transgender identities, the church and what the Bible has to say. My guest today is Benjamin Boyd. Benjamin is a popular YouTuber. I would say he's growing in popularity. He doesn't have like 10 million followers like some people do, but he does have a very engaged audience. Um, I think he actually

has like 50 something thousand subscribers to his YouTube channel. And I have been a big fan of Benjamin Boyce for at least maybe a couple of years. I don't even know how he came across his channel. Um, but he has done extensive interviews with people. Um, well, he, he's done expensive, extensive interviews with people who are voices of authority or voices of, for lack of better terms, experience in the trans conversation. Um, I think he has over a hundred videos where he interviews loads of different people from, um, from trans people, trans men, trans women, people who have transitioned, people who have detransitioned. He has interviews of people who have followed the trans conversation from a journalistic

perspective. He interviews psychologists, endocrinologists, other medical professionals in the field. And he's just a really, Benjamin is a great interviewer. He asks really, really good, thoughtful questions. He isn't afraid to go to hard places with various conversations. He's also probably most well known for his extensive covering of the Evergreen situation. And that's what our podcast is going to focus on. I think Evergreen, Evergreen State College, and the events that happened three years ago there have become a bit of a microcosm for

various things going on around the country today. So I wanted him to come and speak about Evergreen and the evergreening of America. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Benjamin Boyce. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I have on the show today one of my favorite podcasters and YouTubers, Benjamin Boyce. Honestly, Benjamin, when I reached out and said, hey, would you be on my channel? And you said, yeah, sure. I was so excited. I mean, literally, I would like to think that um what i do on this youtube channel my podcast is similar to what you do uh i think very very similar approach um having just good

conversations across a range of topics um so anyway thanks so much for being on the show i'm super honored man thanks for having me preston so i'm excited to dive into things with you. Yeah. So I do want to focus on Evergreen, both the actual Evergreen story and what I want to call the possibility that that story is being manifested in various ways throughout the country today, the so-called evergreening of America. But before we do, why don't you just give us a quick background of who you are and how you fell into podcasting, YouTubing, and even maybe lead into why you got interested in Evergreen to begin with. Why I got interested in Evergreen. I arrived on the campus in 2013 as somebody who was in my mid-30s and I wanted to get a college education.

I had put that off for a long time and was just working different jobs, a lot of preschool. And I worked in preschool quite a bit. And then I worked in, you know, just various different jobs. And while I was doing that to sustain a certain amount of livelihood, I spent a lot of time or my focus was mostly on novel writing and literature. And I really wanted to be a writer. And I was in my mid-30s. I'm like, OK, well, I'm not a writer yet. I had stacks and stacks of books that I had written, but I just couldn't get them to be

satisfactory enough for me to go through the process of getting them published. So I'm like, well, you know what? I need cred. I need to be studied and known, and I need to insert myself into the system that I had denied because I hadn't been getting anywhere on my own. So it turned out to be the case that I was in Olympia, Washington, and just down the street from me, well, several roads, but close by was the Evergreen State College. And it was very cheap, accessible. And when I looked into it, it had a very strong focus on independent learning. And I had been independently generating content for a couple decades by then. So I'm like, okay, well, this seems like a really good fit. There's also the way that the classes were designed to remind me a lot of preschool and

the specific fact that there are all these activities that are, let's say, themed. So in preschool, when you're designing your education, you kind of say, okay, well, we have a month of activities, so let's get a theme, you know, like, well, let's go through animals and then let's go through colors or whatever, right? And then you assemble a bunch of activities around a theme. At the Evergreen State College, you would take a theme, such as, let's just say France in the 19th century France, and then you would have a bunch of different teachers talk about that topic. And the student would investigate that topic of France in the 19th century from a variety of different lenses, such as history, philosophy, art, photography, and the language. And that's actually one of the courses that I

took, probably the most quintessential evergreen course that I took. It was called Dark Romantics, and that was over the 2013-2014 school year. And in the spring, we went to France. So it was completely immersed. It was an entire year program where we studied one topic from a variety of different levels. And I tacked to that my own studies. And I kind of developed there over the course of the four and a half years that I was at the Evergreen State College. I designed my own coursework, which I considered to be narrative arts, where I investigated literature from the standpoint of consuming it, of criticizing it and consuming all the criticism around it and then producing it and figuring out ways in which it was produced. And while I was there, I was also studying how people learn at the age of 20 and so on. But there's something about the Evergreen State College that was beyond the academic environment. It was more of a cultural environment, and that cultural environment was very left, very progressive,

very incredibly progressive, even known in one of the most progressive states in the union as a very progressive place. So it was kind of interesting to be focusing on my stuff, which is rather apolitical, I thought, not knowing that everything is political now. And while I was studying literature, the production and, you know, studying literature, the production, and, you know, what stories do for us and do to us and why we are, you know, storied creatures, probably just as much, if not more so as languaged creatures. You know, while I was studying that, I'm watching a lot of these trainings and workshops and the community rally around ideas of anti-racism and anti-oppression, and that anti-racism and anti-oppression seep into every aspect of the college. Now, not every aspect. There are teachers

that would not really care that much about it, but it was creeping into the students' lives and how they thought about everything. And so long story short, we can get to this a little bit, but to kind of wrap up my arc, in 2017, the college experienced a major intersectional meltdown where the students kind of raided the college, took over the campus, roamed around with baseball bats, performed struggle sessions.

If you don't know that, that's a technical term relating to subordinates ridiculing a person of authority. And that comes from the cultural, the Chinese Cultural Revolution. But the students kind of took over campus for about a week, and they live streamed the entire thing. And one of the teachers that they targeted was Brett Weinstein, and Brett Weinstein wasn't going to have it. They accused him of being racist and he says, I'm not a racist. And he kind of spoke out against that. And then the entire media got a hold of this footage, which the students generated and made a lot of hay about that. And I was watching the Internet explode with storytelling about the material.

Like people were taking the material that was generated in those protests and they were making stories out of it because it's very compelling footage, incredibly compelling footage. But they weren't really seeing what was happening under the surface. there, I had watched the professors and the administration put the ideas of revolution into the heads of the students and coddled the students and then defended the students. And I decided that, you know, while there was a lot of people talking about this, I knew more than most. So I started to tell the story from my perspective. And I started from the framework of the ideas. And I started with the intention of focusing not on the students and the protest itself, but focusing on the theory behind it and the ways that the adults were acting. And so that's, I just ended up being on YouTube as soon as I graduated. And then I just ran with it. And here we are.

And just so people know, yeah, you have a, uh, uh, awesome YouTube channel and you've gone, how many videos you've done, like eight or 10 videos, like giving a, a real kind of in-depth overview of the whole evergreen story. Right. Is that, or, um, uh, I'm embarrassed to say I have, uh, probably about 150 videos. Oh mygreen oh my word there's a 24 episode documentary that's the assemblage of all the footage um that i'm almost done with and then there's about a hundred and some odd uh videos of me just going through um okay working through the all the material that i generated so i've got a lot more work to do okay um so what you you were there on that was your last year when all this erupted in May or were you gone?

You were there. So you were firsthand. You, so gosh, it just, it's a little bit startling that when you said students took over the university, like how does that happen? And you said what was driving that though were these ideas, these theories, these theories that came from the very people that they were protesting against. Is that right? Yeah. The Evergreen State College taught the students that all colleges are inherently racist. up itself as a explicitly anti-racist, anti-oppressive institution, they were the first target of the students that they taught. So the students not knowing any better or just taking

advantage of the inherent contradictions and instability of this theology or this ideology targeted the very people who were bending over backwards to empower them. And how did they, how did the faculty take that? Did they push back? Did they receive it? Did they say, yes, I am the problem. I am the racist. Yes, I need to be flagellated or whatever.

I mean, well, the guy at the very top, George Bridges, who came on the scene in 2015 and basically aimed the institution in this direction explicitly. He said it. His first remarks to the college was that the civil rights have come and gone and, you know, the civil rights movement has done a lot of work. But racism is still embedded in the fabric of our of our country and of our world. And we need to excise it. And so what we're going to do is teach you and teach us and encounter these difficult conversations so we can overthrow this 400 years of tragedy, right? So George Bridges, when being the president of the college, he was basically the second

person that they targeted. They targeted Brett Weinstein chronologically. They targeted him first, and then they went on to get George Bridges. They went directly to the top after Brett Weinstein and then kind of performed a bunch of struggle sessions, and he obeyed them as much as possible, catered to them and accepted all their criticisms and said, yes, I'm a racist. Yes, I'm a white supremacist. He's on footage saying that he's a white supremacist or on film.

And and then once he fell, then the entire institution had to bow down de facto. Like it was just like once the head of the figurehead, the authority in the room bowed down to this, the entire structure of the college followed suit. Though there were dissidents, most people fell in line or just closed their mouths and watched it happen. Now, when you say racist and white supremacist, I'm assuming that they were – when he says I am a white supremacist, it would be more along the lines of, say, Robin DiAngelo, third wave racism, where anybody who is white is complicit in a system of white supremacy. Therefore they are white supremacists. Yeah. They don't think like Confederate flag, pickup truck,

white hood. That's not, that's maybe the classic definition of a white supremacist. Like when I hear white supremacists, I think somebody who is alt-right, KKK or sympathetic with that. But that term white supremacist has been used to cover anybody, right? Who's white, who's just white, right? I mean, basically white and disobedient or questioning.

You can avoid your racism as a white person within this ideology by completely owning it and saying, I am a racist. So if you agree, you're a lesser racist, but every white person is racist. But there's good racists and bad racists. What was the evidence? So why did they target Brett Weinstein? Weinstein? Weinstein? Weinstein. Weinstein. It's kind of important to differentiate him from the other big name Weinstein. What would they say was the reason why he needed to be – why was he so targeted? What did he do that put a target on his back? So that's a complex question. So in my telling of the Evergreen story, I tell it from multiple points of view, but I'm not perfect and I do have biases. But I've tried to be as complex

as possible, even though I definitely am against this stuff. So I am hobbled in that respect. But there are different takes on why they targeted Brett Weinstein or why Brett Weinstein was problematic. I can point to three different incidents that kind of put him in their sights. The first incident is when he stood up against his colleagues a year to the day prior to him being protested by the students. So on May 23rd, 2016, the faculty of Evergreen, as a body, and Evergreen traditionally had a lot of faculty freedom. The faculty had a lot of power in the institution.

And funnily enough, George Bridges used all this racism stuff to buckle down that and revert to a top-down, he's more powerful than everybody else. So he really betrayed the institution on a number of different levels. But the faculty wanted to implement in their self evaluations, specific section on your anti racist work that you've been doing. So evergreen has a particular model of what it views as education. And instead of having grades, they have evaluations. And those valuations are narrative. If you're in a more scientific pursuit, there is quantifiable data in that, but it really is a lot of qualitative data with regards

to your development as a student and as a teacher. So every year, the professors will do their own self-evaluation about where they are, what they're teaching, what they're learning, how they're growing. And so the faculty wanted to put specifically into the self-evaluation, how am I doing with anti-racist work? And Brett Weinstein had a problem with that to kind of truncate what I think he was trying to say is that once this becomes a part of the self-evaluation, it can be used for promotion and for hiring, which can be used to weed out ideological dissidents. Or if one says that, oh, I thought I was racist at one point and then I learned that I was racist and I changed, implicitly the person who wrote that in their evaluation, which is now a state document, was saying that I was a racist, right? So now you're documenting your own racism if you mess up. So it was pretty problematic, and he stood against that. And from his point of view, that put him on the map. But the college went further than that and developed a council on equity.

And this equity council went through, gathered a bunch of data and then told a story about the data about certain races or certain intersections of identities actually being very low in the outcomes. And they wanted to solve these outcome gaps. What they left out of the data was that actually white men, poor white men were doing worse than pretty much anybody else. And native men, too. But that didn't suit to their narrative. So they bushed it around. So this equity council overstepped.

They were just supposed to kind of give an inventory and some suggestions. And they made suggestions about them being involved in hiring and in firing and really overstepped their bounds. And Brett Weinstein, about a week after the election of Donald Trump to office or the election itself, the Equity Council put on an event, which is a fascinating piece. I was in the room for this event. It's called the Canoe Meeting now, and it's a very fascinating study where I was in that room, so I can kind of describe it. It was more along the lines of a religious service than anything I had witnessed outside of an actual church. The tone of everybody was very sanctimonious. And they were talking constantly about belief in the data

and agreement and not actually going through what they were actually saying. They didn't actually talk about the actual, you know, data or the actual, you know, the proposal itself. They talked about how important the proposal was and how much work they put in the proposal. And the language was really intense. And then they had this literal Native American religious ceremony where they started beating a drum and they all got into this imaginary canoe. And then they marched outside together and then got in a circle and put the students of color in the center and then the white students around the students of color and then the teachers around them and they all sang songs and they summoned they summit something in that meeting it was incredibly crazy stuff but brett weinstein and a couple other faculty attacked the actual data well you don't have to use the word attack but they argued against the data and said this is this is overboard what are you guys doing? Where are you taking us?

And furthermore, Brett Weinstein and a couple other faculty laid out arguments about how this stuff won't actually work out in the long run. It's actually not empowering. And that stuff was all performed over the email. And some of those emails from Brett Weinstein got into the student paper, which is decidedly has one direction of the way that they report things. And they kind of showed him to be this evil bad guy, this white professor. He's Jewish, but this white professor. politic there's no move against this force that you can do that isn't some form of bigotry either internalized or you know obviously self-interest self-motivated stuff and that self-motivation can only ever go one way in their frame of viewing things so brett weinstein um did and then there was this other event called the day of absence we don't have to get into uh that's the big story but

i think it's actually kind of just the the story. But he argued against that. So the students had these emails that they thought were racist because Brett Weinstein was challenging the orthodoxy. And when they designed their week of protest, I think that he fit the role of like this explicitly racist teacher that they could show was you know a part of a pattern of of oppression that this institution was foisting upon its wards being the students so brett in his sense was very symbolic like he stood for the very he he he was kind of a placeholder i mean a symbol of everything that was i mean the target of people's outrage, it seems like, regardless of who he actually was as an individual or what he was actually saying.

Yeah, he was like the lightning rod or the touchdown for the – I know you skipped over it because it was kind of a flashpoint, but for those who don't know, just really quickly, what was – because that is the one piece that I – that's the clickbaitbait headline that I saw that they had this national day of absence. So just explain that just briefly for those who don't know what that was. OK, there's there is some nuance to this. And the way in which it's reported can really show like the spin on it. And it's not really easy to spin it in a good light.

So I'm going to try to steel man it. really easy to spin it in a good light. So I'm going to try to steel man it. Every year, the college from the 70s, the college put on a day of absence. And then in the 80s, they tacked on a day of presence to this. So it was an event based on a play by Douglas Turner Ward about this town in the deep south where the black individuals in the town decided to absent themselves from the town so that the white folk could really understand how important to the functioning of this town the black people were. So the black people just took it for granted, the black folk, and they exempted themselves. And then there was like this awakening of the racial consciousness and then some sort of resolution. I haven't actually watched the play. I probably should get around

to doing that at some point. But the college ran with that and had a day of absence where the students of color would, you know, there would be activities off campus for the students of color so called to get together and to kind of ruminate over their experiences and, you know, find a sense of solidarity with one another. And then they would come back to campus the next day and everybody would have some sort of cultural feast. However, over the course of, you know, the 80s and then the 90s and then the noughties and then, you know, whatever the 2010s are going to be known as

that kind of cultural kind of the reconciliatory nature of the civil rights movement has succumbed to resentment. And and a lot of the white fragility and the privileged politic and the stuff that they're promoting actually exacerbates tensions between the races. And if you watch the programming for the Day of Absence over the years, it becomes more – less and less about solidarity in a positive sense towards different cultures and more about how oppression and privilege and the gaps rule everything and how solidarity with the black community is actually against the white community and how the white community needs to be against the white community itself, but not the white community, this thing called whiteness, right? So after the election of Donald Trump, the organizers of the event, they say that the

students proposed this, but I haven't found anything to that respect. But the organizers of the event, they say that the students proposed this, but I haven't found anything to that respect. But the organizers, what I found, the organizers decided to reverse the day of absence and invite the white faculty and students off campus to participate in events off campus and then have a bunch of events on campus for the students of color. And the way that they actually pushed this, Brett Weinstein had a reaction to that, because it seemed like the campus was, it seemed like they not only reversed the races, but they were kind of asking white people to go away. And they wanted to center the campus on students of color. Whereas, you know, previously they weren't centering whiteness on the campus. They weren't

having a whites only on campus day, right? But it seemed like they were having a no whites on campus day. And that's the perception of it. But from what I found, a number of different professors took that very seriously and required students to segregate themselves on race and required involvement of white students to go off campus. There were requirements in place to do that. And the language games are really interesting. So the optics are really terrible on that. But again, if you look at the programming, the white people off campus had a bunch of guilt, guilt based, we have to, you know, extract our evil whiteness from us. And then on campus was a lot of hate against white people or solidarity against the white people and

how Asians and Jews are actually white adjacent. And they participate in this program, too. Right. Why did Jason? So, yeah, I want to come back to that. Keep going. actually white adjacent and they participate in this program too right white adjacent so yeah i want to come back to that keep going there's you know there's there's white privilege and then it eventually becomes light privilege if you are of a lighter color you actually have to start being more and more conscious of of your race uh because you are associated closer to the white house so brett weinstein uh argued against and said, I'm going to protest against I'm going to show up. You can't do it. It's fundamentally a different thing for you to ask one race to leave. It's one thing that voluntarily excuse yourself. It's another thing to, you know, ask or push people out of the public campus for. It doesn't seem like that would help diminish actual racism to ask an entire race to not participate. And again, I want to be sensitive to the fact that I am white, raised in a majority culture, and I probably have blind spots.

So when I hear the race conversation, I want to come at it as a learner i want to understand different experiences um but i just i i don't help me to understand how that would i don't know and i know white people throw around reverse racism a lot and all this stuff but i it's hard for me to not to come to a different conclusion like i just don't see how that would help actual racism it seems like it would exacerbate it am i missing something i mean you were there that did did did that move seem to like help address actual racism in on the campus i might be wrong um from my perspective okay so i don't know if i'm wrong from my perspective from my perspective – OK, so I don't know if I'm wrong from my perspective. From my perspective, they started out by claiming that to be colorblind is racist. And by the end of my time at Evergreen, nobody could see past or through color at all.

Like no longer were we colorblind. All we could see was color. And there were events on campus where I was not harassed. I was put through a struggle session myself or I witnessed one up close. I wouldn't deign to submit myself to them. I just kind of watched them perform it on others because I knew that any sort of movement would just give them what they want. I'm not going to be for them, but to be against them is just to give them more fuel. not going to be for them. And, uh, but to be against them is just to give them more fuel. But by the, by the time of my last few weeks on campus, I was so hyper aware of race that I would, uh, have like this reaction when I saw somebody, a black person on campus, I'm like, Oh no, I'm

going to get, I'm going to get yelled at, you know? And I, and I looked at myself, I'm like, Oh my God, like I've never been this way. I've never had that instinctual reaction against somebody based on their race. And now all of a sudden, it's just in the air. And when I first started doing my evergreen videos, I was very apologetic because I was very hyper aware of my white male et cetera, et cetera isms. And I was apologizing and tiptoeing around it. Now I don't really care so much um even though people that discount me because of my identity i play the identity politic game and you can see that on my channel but it's not about my identity that i'm playing i'm playing with

identities that are so that are supposedly um the oppressed identities. And I empower those identities to speak about their experiences. I don't really care about my white maleness. I play around with my masculinity quite a bit because it's fun, but my whiteness is just like something that I deal with when I'm trying to tune my camera. It's not really something that I play with, though I understand that it's something that because I'm in the white majority culture, I don't need to. I understand all that stuff, but it doesn't really matter to me because it doesn't go anywhere.

I don't really see where privilege goes, but I'll play the game because that's what we have to play now. Interesting. You made a comment about why the white community versus whiteness. Can you just briefly unpack why? Like, what's the difference there? Like when people make that distinction between actual white people or the white community and whiteness, like what – aren't they two in the same? That's really interesting. So I'm going to – if anybody – I'm not – I find the definition of whiteness very unsatisfying. So I'm not able to really steel man those ideas because I saw that work at Evergreen and I've done several videos showing that this is taught at other universities where these teachers will really talk about whiteness. And when they try to define whiteness, what they're basically defining is really racist stuff. It's ascribing to white people the ability to be rational, to work hard,

to be individuals. It gets really racist really quick. There was one section of the Smithsonian that is concerned with African-American history. They published these resources on anti-racism, and this is very recently within the last few months um and uh one of their brochures was what is whiteness and they they went through this whole list of of behavioral patterns that are supposedly whiteness like scientific objectivity and like taking responsibility for yourself and it's like if oh my, okay, like, and I did a video on this, where I read that in a proud tone, and it's, it's indistinguishable from white supremacist talk. If you if you read it as something that you're proud of, and you say, look at the white people, they're so strong,

and they really care about like health, you know, like, well, what, wait, who's, who's, who's promulgating this stuff? So when you get into this, so there's that level, which is really obviously racist. But there's also like kind of a subtle level where they're basically making a Marxist argument that any sort of norm culture relies – and I have a problem with this, but this is the framework. Any sort of dominant culture relies on dominating something that's oppressed, right? So it's this kind of a conflict theory where power is – it's always a zero-sum game where you can't have anything without taking it from somebody else. You can't be just male and female. The fact that there's male and female means that there's going to be a dominant and submissive.

So the man is, of course, going to be the dominant one. So what you have to do is to destabilize and deconstruct that power hierarchy to put the woman on top, to raise up the woman, to raise up the female. The race discussion is a little different from the gender discussion. But within the context of what it is to be white, I have one professor saying, well, you know, meatloaf and ketchup, that's whiteness, right? Like it's just bland flavor. That's whiteness. It's just like something that you just always have. It's always there that you take for granted. It's just in the soup. Right. And then Robin DiAngelo will say that that whiteness is constantly being blind

to all these other identities that it's suppressing and leaving out. If you're black, you're left out of that white conversation unless you assimilate yourself into this whiteness. I think it's just basic human social behavior that if you have a conglomerate of millions of people, there will be a way in which they interact with one another that will become the standard, right? Grammar is just a standard. Yeah, it's arbitrary in a lot of its aspects, but it is the rules by which we just marginal, we marginate, right? Like margarine, we margarinize discourse so that everybody kind of like just takes it for granted so that we can do something with discourse, right? Like get things done,

like get hired, go up in a community, but they're trying to destabilize everything normative. And then you get into queer theory where queer theory is never, as soon as a queer theory becomes normal, it has to be queered even further. So it's very a dismantling attitude going on underneath this. It's a very anti, and my basic problem with it is that it's anti-creative. Ultimately, it's anti-creative. It doesn't allow you to actually create anything of high standards of beauty because you have to constantly tear everything down to the lowest common denominator. Is it too simplistic to say that this is straight out of classic Marxism or neo-Marxism? I've heard, at least in my evangelical circles, on the more, I guess, intellectually lazy end,

we tend to take a quick soundbite, a slur, and slap it on. So I keep hearing, oh, this is Marxist. I'm like, I don't know. Have you ever read karl marx you know but from the little i i know about classic marxism in terms of power and the oppressed if you're in the dominant if you're wealthy if you're in position to power then you got there exactly what you said the zero-sum game you got there because you oppressed somebody and if you're in the minority whether it's it's a gender ethnic financial socioeconomic minority you are in a sense it's almost like you're ascribed a higher intrinsic morality.

And if you're in a position of power of wealth, part of the dominant culture, it's almost like you have an intrinsic immorality. And we've seen many regimes, countries go down that route. I'm not a historian. Well, I'm an ancient historian, not a modern historian. It has, I think, always, at least almost always led to the death of millions of people. Because once there's a regime change, where does it end? There's always going to be, there's never going to be perfectly equal outcomes because we're humans i don't know i mean yeah there's a beautiful creational diversity within humanity that it will never there will never be that kind of perfect perceived equality of outcomes that doesn't mean there's an

inequity built into the system from my vantage point um anyway my original question i'm going off no is this because i mean yeah you seem to be very well read and educated and kind of the built into the system from my vantage point. Anyway, my original question, I'm going off. No. Is this, because I mean, you seem to be very well read and educated in kind of the source and the ideas behind this. Is this classic Marxism? Is it neo-Marxism? And why does that matter? See, I don't, you point out the inelasticity

or just the limit of a label so i always whenever i bring this up i always say this that or the other thing like whatever it is we're talking about because as soon as we ascribe it a label just like the id idw actually this is a great um example in relief. Once you ascribe something a label, it's inherently flawed by that label and by people who use that label as a slur or as a slogan. So if you bring the discourse down to that level, then, yeah, you're just participating in a lower level of discourse. I don't know how far you can run with that stuff. It's really good for tribal stuff and for the talking stuff. But like, what are we actually talking about then? Like that my way is righter than your way or your way is faulty because it's neo-Marxist. I don't care. Like, what are the psychological impacts of victim mentality, right? I would rather talk about the

behavioral patterns rather than the theological. Like talk about a specific strand, a specific idea, movement rather than the overarching umbrella label that it may or may not kind of resonate with. Well, yeah. I mean I understand. This is something that I wrestle with all the time and I'm not decided on what to do. Like do I enter into the tribe or do I not enter into the tribe or do I create a pseudo tribe of multi-tribes, right? Do I say that I'm politically homeless and I'm in shantytown of free discourse, you know, like what do I do? And then all of a sudden I'm the centrist. And then as soon as I'm a centrist, then I'm anti-woke. And then I have a bunch of anti-centrists that I watch and I watch it on

Twitter. I watch this source on Twitter and there's a lot of low level, not really juicy content there. Right. So I'm a storyteller. I build my stories out of character and event, not necessarily the ideology, the ideology I do critique. And, and the transgender topic was, it's very fruitful and encapsulating a lot of the dynamics and something that's very contained within this really interesting influx of women and trans women and all that stuff. That's a really good – it's small enough that you can get your head around it. The race conversation is a little too big for us to get our heads around. So that's where –

Let's go back to Evergreen. So I guess my question I have – I've got many questions. But the students took over the campus. What were they – for what? Like what did they want to accomplish? Was it just a shame session? Did they want to fire professors? Did they want no white professors?

Did they want, I don't know, more college tuition? What were they trying to get? They wanted justice. For what? Like who – or is that hard to say well okay so if if you are um if everybody's an identity group and there's the dominant identity that has the privilege right which is what they were taught They were taught that everybody has an identity and that identity bequeaths you unearned advantage in life. So, OK, well, how do you solve that? Well, OK, what we did is everybody admits to their privilege and everybody finds something that they're privileged about. Unless you are completely marginalized and there's one character who has the perfect quinfecta of marginalization, who's one of the biggest tyrants on campus.

It's amazing, actually. This guy's a complete performance artist. But he's black, disabled, and trans, right? And he's like a total ringleader, and he's going around terrorizing people. Now he's terrorizing the Olympia Council. He's a brilliant person. I was in class with that person. But what I saw take effect.

So at the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year, which would end in protest, the freshman orientation was preventing the collapse of civil discourse. And actually at the end of the year, there was a complete collapse of civil discourse. discourse. And actually, at the end of the year, there was a complete collapse of civil discourse. And in this session, what they did was that everybody, they had a panel of professors, administrators, and a couple students. And everybody up there like confessed to their privilege. Oh, I'm a white cis man. Oh, I'm a white cis female. Oh, I'm trans, but I, you know, have an able body, right? Everybody confessed to their privilege. Well, what do you do with that information? What ended up happening in practice was that if you're a white male with other vectors that go along the privileged path or the dominant path, you would have to put yourself in the back

of the bus, or you were asked to step back in the back of the bus. You were relegated because we're going to end racism. What we're going to do is we're going to assign all this unadvantaged, and then we're going to reverse the hierarchy. So what they were basically doing was working out on a psychosocial level, this theology, they're bringing it to the culmination of a morality play. So it was very theatrical. The events themselves are incredibly theatrical, and they really collapse under scrutiny if you're like, well, what do they actually want? Well, they want the fulfillment of what they were promised, which was that the oppressed will ascend into the status of the one in power. But they were only ever taught that to be in power was to oppress.

They were never taught what you do with power. Why do you want power? Well, I'm going to take power away from you so I can put you down. So I'm more powerful. They weren't taught that actually you need to know how to master power. If you want power, okay, you can have power, whatever you want. Well, what do you do with that power? Well, oppress other people. They were never taught about skill, about merit. So they have this big culmination. They issued a list about skill, about merit. So they had this big culmination. They issued a list of demands that's like 120 points long. They wanted a lot of reparations, basically, based on identity. They wanted special rooms and housing for special

identity groups. They wanted the prosecution of certain people who didn't live up to the ideals of being anti-racist enough. So it was not enough to be not racist, and it's not enough to even fight racism. You have to be specifically anti-racist and ascribe to every different dictate that the people who are marginalized pronounce is the correct path. You need to constantly adhere to this ideology or you are a heretic, right? So Brett Weinstein, incredibly progressive fellow, incredibly progressive fellow, Bernie voter, et cetera. More progressive than I am, certainly. He was targeted too, because he didn't go along with the path. He wanted the end of racism, but he critiqued their path because he knew that it would result in something that's the opposite of racism. Ergo, he's racist. To be anti-anti-racist

is to be racist. And when you say anti-racist, that is a specific kind of... Yeah. I put that word in quotes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. It's helpful for people that haven't heard that term because there's various approaches to addressing and combating racism. The somewhat recent, I call it third wave. That's probably not even the best phrase, but like this, it's a more recent approach to addressing racism. You can be against anti-racism in the quotes and yet still be very much against racism. Yeah. Is that just yeah um because some people are saying well wait a minute isn't it a good thing to be anti-racist but you're using a real specific way to describe one particular approach to addressing there's a

there's a movement about that that's uh sold as the end of racism and oppression and it's called anti-racism or anti-oppression. And ideologically, if you look into it, it's actually incredibly racist because it devolves everybody into their race, or it's incredibly oppressive because it oppresses anybody with perceived privilege. So it's the absolute opposite. I watched that. I was submitted to the whole thing. It's absolutely vile and disgusting. It's absolutely vile and disgusting.

It's absolutely vile and disgusting, and it denigrates the human spirit. It completely destroys human authenticity and the ability for people to actually find community across any sort of difference because it collapses everybody into this very narrow, very narrow ideological lens. It kind of destroys individuality too right i mean it's anti-humanist it completely destroyed all you are is the signature of your of your race and your identity and they even in the language they call themselves bodies right they they strip the agency away from everybody wow we're all just like vectors of this historical game of pool and like the chips just need to fall in a certain direction now right so that was 2017 mid-year it's now 2020 yeah um let's let's go to the evergreening of america that's a provocative phrase in a sense and i don't it should be

maybe a question mark because i i don't want to suggest that that is definitively happening. So let me frame it as a question. Is it happening? Like what you saw firsthand front row seat to evergreen, do you see that being manifested in various parts of the country today? And, and to be specific, you know, some of the protests and especially, I'm thinking like Portland and Seattle and other places. And even in just the rhetoric I see online and just in the media and everything, do you see an evergreening of America, to put it generally? There was an episode that I did, an interview with Brett Weinstein

that I had on my channel a, uh, you know, a few weeks into the COVID lockdown. I can't remember when it was, what exact date, but it was two weeks before the George, George Floyd, um, footage surfaced, um, where we talked about evergreen, um, three years later it was three years today. So it was May 23rd when, when we had that, um, it was three years to the day. So, um, and then like the next week or the week after that, the George Floyd, um, uh, footage and then protests and then whatever's happening now, um, happen. And we were kind of nonchalant about Evergreen, like, well,

what did we learn? Like, what was this BLM thing? Like, I have to get them back on because like things turned out to be like, we were kind of untimely with that episode and certain events. But we were kind of unpacking like what does it really mean? What does this stuff really mean? Why is it valuable? What were the lessons, sociological lessons, anthropological lessons, psychological lessons that we can derive from this stuff? Because Evergreen College, 4,000 people in the middle of the woods, very, very contained. 4,000 people in the middle of the woods, very, very contained.

A lot of the footage is just a perfect study because it was so encapsulated within what happened. So how do you extract that and make it meaningful to people? Or if you want to call me a grifter, how do you turn that into a career? And then the George Floyd thing happened and I saw behaviors that were completely rhyming with the behaviors that happened at Evergreen. There was a lot of religious activity going on where people were bowing to people and washing the feet of the people of certain races and praying to the different races and stuff. There was a lot of crazy stuff bowing down to the races, the people in the leadership collapsing under the weight of 400 years of oppression. And of course, I'm white supremacist.

Yeah, OK. So on a level of analysis that shows different municipalities succumbing to anti-racist dogma, then you have the same trajectory as the president of the Evergreen State College. There's a lot of similarities with the protests, right? And how the protests are righteous, but then they become violent and completely unexcusable. And then the liberal media or the liberal leadership completely ignores that and blames it on Trump. It blames it on the far right. It shifts the blame away from the Democratic cities are the ones that are burning.

But, of course, it's Trump's fault. Of course, it's the federal government because the states aren't handling or the city isn't handling right. So there's a lot of that excusing and inability to actually look at. So there's a lot of that excusing and inability to actually look at maybe there are certain policies that are drafted to be generous and drafted to help disparities that actually themselves away from the center, even hate the center, leave themselves completely divorced from reality, and then spin off into extremism. And then furthermore, the last thing, the most important thing for me is, how are all the institutions of authority in regards to media and culture now forwarding a certain agenda.

Now Netflix, like Black Stories, Amazon, Black Stories, right? Nike, all these different very, very powerful institutions are now pushing down all this training, right? So if you look at the Evergreen State College story, the protesters got their UUs out or their Yahas out or whatever that phrase is. Protesters got their you-yous out or their yahas out or whatever that phrase is. But then the administration used all that energy to bait and switch the faculty to diminish freedom and to implement a police state of controlling discourse, controlling communication, and then allowing it to be very easy to be prosecuted for thinking or saying the wrong thing. So what ends up happening, which is what I'm concerned with, and there is evidence that this is happening, is that there's this HR department kind of push, or these diversity heads are coming into prominence within all these different organizations. And the function of the diversity and the anti-racism training is to pad the elites from the subordinates, right? So it actually pits the subordinates against themselves and causes all this policing to

happen among that level, right? And then it causes the elites to basically get away with it because they, well, we did their training and we're just going to shuffle around the color of our staff or whatever, you know, but it falls in line with actually empowering the elites, this anti-racist stuff. So, wow. Golly. So we just passed three years on the anniversary. So what's happened with Evergreen since 2017 when all that went down?

Has it been flourishing as a school did the students like yeah what's the last three years since the students hated uh hated the administration um the students got what they want except for the firing of uh different people but the administration and the people who were targeted worked something out so that they would go away. So Brett Weinstein and his wife, Heather Hying, they left. And one of the main instigators of the protests from the faculty level, Naima Lowe, she left. And then various other people that were targeted left. But the 2017-2018 school year starts with a community, this community that they call it a

reconvocation, where they were in and this event for healing of the community, right. And what they did was they put all the protesters up on the stage, the protesters rewrote history, like just lied about the entire chain of events that I had well documented. And then they just like sung about how oppressed they were, right? How oppressed we are because the alt-right and nobody understands us. And it begins with that. And then at the end of the 2018 school year, they have this radical student, this radical protester student get up there and have all of the white people, all of the disabled people and the people of color stand up and everybody claps for them. And then all the white people stand up and then you need to do better.

Your job as a white person is to forward and put yourself behind everybody else. So and then they talk about how they hate the Bridges administration. So the Bridges administration, they didn't win except for the fact that they got more power. The faculty loses because they lose a lot of power. The project of education bottoms out because now everybody is so obsessed with identity. And I have interviews to this case. So many people are obsessed with identity and with being on the right side of history or not being on the wrong side of the people who are in power, that people just can't talk. You can't really talk about ideas and stuff.

Perceptually, Washington State is 70 percent white, and it's a state college, and it's very obvious that they hate white people. I'm sorry. But they have trainings, right? So they implemented an office of equity, right? And then they have these support groups and there's a support group for women of color to come together and to support each other.

There's a support group for men of color to come together and support each other. And then there's a anti-support group for white people to learn how their white guilt needs to be purged from them and how they need to overcome their whiteness, right? So they implement these programs that slander the majority, right? Because the majority being the majority is ipso facto wrong.

Why would you go to a college to learn to berate yourself based on race? Even if you are and want to become a radical social justice warrior, it turns out to be the case that every major college will teach you that. Evergreen State College, their track record is, yeah, they produced a bunch of radicals, but the radicals made fools of themselves, absolute fools of themselves that I don't think any sincere social justice warrior wants to be aligned with the kind of social justice warriorship that you learn at the evergreen state college. So they lost that market and long story short, their enrollment has tanked. They've gone from,

they've gone from 4,000 students, 4,000 plus to, um, I, they're going to be at 2000 something. So they're, they're about half now. Their enrollment is about half and it will go down even further as they keep

on graduating the bigger classes do you know what's happened to the white population if i could even ask that at evergreen i mean um are white people still eager to come to this school or um i i don't know that that's it i i don't know the thing is is that olympia and washington are very white right um you have uh you have portland which is incredibly, and you have Seattle, which is more mixed race. So there's more ethnic or racial diversity in Seattle. There's not a lot of diversity in Olympia. And for whatever reason, the college, the administration wants it to make it explicitly cater to certain races and stuff.

But the but even the races that they cater to, let's say the black radical that they catered to in these events hates them and gives them bad reviews. So this place is totally racist. Don't ever go there. So they lost the market that they want. So they're really struggling and they still want diversity and inclusion and equity to be first and foremost. But I don't think I think they kind of lost the plot and they don't really understand that they kind of made fools of themselves. And my biggest criticism, my biggest criticism isn't that they did anything that they did wrong. Like I go through and I'll show you how they completely screwed the pooch. But a year after the protests, the George Bridges administration releases an

independent review of the protests, right? By an, by independent researchers that are all, I did the research, they're all been friends with George Bridges for 20 years. So they're all friends of George Bridges. They give him a glowing review that he did everything right. And that unfortunately, Brett Weinstein, he did everything wrong because he went on Fox News, right? Or he did something wrong. Or Charlottesville happened. Three months later, Charlottesville happened. So of later charlottesville happened so of course we live in a white supremacist uh country because three months later across the country a crazy guy ran over a white girl right or whatever you know like so they even joe freaking biden is still pointing

just the other day he's pointing to charlottesville something that happened three years ago right look at all these white supremacists and and trump is is totally for the one because they're good people on that side right while democratic cities are burning they're still pointing to something that they can loosely tie to the all right what i'm trying to say is that evergreen is founded on self-evaluation they ran a social justice experiment and they proved themselves incapable of actually assessing where they went wrong and if their ideas were wrong they are incapable of admitting where they went wrong or that they went wrong which as an education institution you do not want to go and

learn how to self-evaluate from people who can't do anything but lie about themselves, unless you want to learn how to lie. But they're not even that good liars. If you want to learn how to lie, go somewhere else because they're not even that good at what they are actually teaching you to do. Hang out with some politicians and you become a good liar. So you mentioned the word diversity. And yet I always push back on that because my question is, is there healthy ideological diversity there? And the answer is absolutely not, right? I mean, there's... It's difficult. I mean, to say that would be disingenuous, because of course, there's ideological diversity, but there is a party line and it's policed. There's an official

party line, and that is what's front and center. And anything that doesn't jive with that is relegated and is marginalized. So yeah yeah they actively marginalize those who are not within their dominant culture right they have total woke fragility right they can't they can't admit anything wrong with their ideology and so they suppress it and put it on somebody else's i mean what would it be like i mean we don't need to keep we can move on but i'm just curious like to be a say a white straight male who is right of center politically um would they be accepted would their ideas be entertained listen to there or i mean would that be a and i'm not even i wouldn't even consider myself in that i mean it's not like i'm describing myself at all i didn't and wouldn't vote for Trump. I'm nonpartisan, you know.

So I'm not even thinking like personally, but just somebody who would be of that way of thinking. You're saying they might actually have a seat at the table or at least have – they wouldn't be looked down upon. I went there. So I haven't been there in three years okay so maybe it's changed uh the classes are really small um the climate across the nation on campuses is very suppressive there's just data after data anecdotal data after anecdotal data that being a white straight male on college campuses is something that you have to be very careful with, especially in the humanities. If you want to do science, you keep your head down. You just plow through it.

You'll be fine. No one cares. If you want to be in the humanities, you have to put everybody else first and accept the fact that you're going to be kind of battered. Ha ha ha, white male. So that's interesting because that was my next question is, do you see shades of what happened at Evergreen happening on other college campuses? It sounds like you've done a bit of work or at least study on that. So the whole idea of white privilege, which I'm really thinking through, and my audience has heard me kind of think out loud through that.

I like to listen long and hard before I make up conclusions. I am aware that people who occupy a majority context can be blind to certain things. My upbringing is a little bit messy i'm like a poor white kid raised in a hispanic neighborhood i've traveled a lot i went to a college it was 20 white um so i my yeah i've lived overseas traveled you know like i so it's a little bit i don't have your typical kind of white straight male kind of upbringing or um but this whole idea of white privilege like it doesn't sound so you would based on what you're saying if what you're saying is true given the state of most um state colleges or just universities today is there a privilege that comes with being white on college campuses

especially if you're in the humanities which you're you're saying it's actually not a privilege. It might be the opposite or. You're not allowed to say that as a white straight male, I'm not allowed to say that white straight males are despised by society because it's not the case because, you know, white straight males still get together. And like we're doing right now, we still have our little patriarchy corner times, right? So nobody's going to invade us here now. I think that the concept of privilege is okay at analyzing large group differences and patterns of behavior. I think that the concept of privilege doesn't really suit interpersonal relationships or personal growth. I don't know how you – by ruminating over your privilege.

There are certain forms of Christian meditation to become really grateful, you know, to, to just like count your blessings. I think that that is a positive thing. If, if it's, if it's about that, if, if it's aimed, if these uncomfortable conversations about privilege are aimed towards reconciliation, then they might be good, but they don't have anything that protects them from devolving into condemnation. And I don't see these conversations leading to communal, jovial effulgence. I don't see privilege being the path towards community building. I don't see that. I haven't seen it. And I see it so easily abused by narcissistic sociopaths to forward their own agenda, whereby they gain power by becoming the most oppressed or by lifting up the most oppressed. I think there's a lot of sociopathy that is engaged in because it's

underlying it is not charity, but envy, right? So i just have a problem with it on that level so i you can go and do all you want with white privilege i mean i've ruminated on that out loud but it's not really fruitful like if you want to create anything right other than social discord or like some sort of communal reckoning with their past And then all of a sudden we're bowing down to each other and we lose sight of the prize. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the way – I mean, I've – yeah. In my journey, and I'm only midway through my journey talking – thinking through this.

But just from my thinking out loud standpoint – You can't be midway because the work never ends, Preston. The work never ends. That does sound very religious. I mean, that's very much a Christian theme. You're never fully sanctified. There's always repentance that needs to happen. And you made a parallel between some of the stuff going on

and certain movements and religion. And there are certainly, from my vantage, as a religious person, religious qualities I'm seeing in some movements today, which is interesting, which is fine, I guess. But then at least own it. You know, don't say your religion is a problem when you're basically embodying a religion and then saying you're not part of it. Yeah, I don't think they're woke to that aspect of what they're doing. It's a religion that doesn't call itself it or doesn't understand how belief even works. So, I mean, they're storytellers. Well, they're doing. It's a religion that doesn't call itself or doesn't understand how belief even works. So, I mean, they're storytellers.

Well, they're critics. They're not even storytellers. So they know how to break down stories, but they don't know how to build them. So they know how to be anti-religious, but they don't know that they're being religious and they're anti-religion. You know, they know how to be anti-dominant, and then they don't realize that they're becoming dominant, right?

So it's really, uh, they have, it's got some big blind sites in it. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.

So with privilege, I would say there's certain contexts that certainly, um, aspects of my identity would bring me privilege, not at all denying that, but I would say there are certain contexts where it wouldn't again, being, um,

if I was interviewing for a job as a white straight evangelical at a humanities department at a secular university or even some christian universities that i don't think my that my identity um would bring me privilege at berkeley if i'm saying applying for a job in english even if i had all the credentials like i don't i don't i don't think that would work for me. There's many other examples I can give, but again, I'm going to freshly and eagerly admit that there are certain contexts where my various identity layers might bring me privilege, and I'm denying it at all.

But just to say, because you're a white, straight male, therefore you have categorical privilege in America, I think is sociologically unimaginative and naive about not recognizing just the vast diversity of different intersections of society that come into play. You're not a prophet. You don't claim to be a prophet. But where is this going to end up? I mean, it sounds like this way of thinking is not slowing down but gaining steam. We're in an election year. Yeah. I just – I do wonder – I just – I think if Donald Trump gets reelected, there's going to be riots in the streets and a lot of people are going to be killed. Which streets?

Like specific – riots in the streets and a lot of people are going to be killed which streets like specific i mean yeah it's not going to be the places that voted him it's not going to be the people that voted it's going to be the people that voted against him that are going to be shot yeah yeah um the left will eat its own um which is unfortunate because we need a strong left. We need a strong progressive party that's willing to play around with new ideas. And we need them to respect, and this is the problem, we need a progressive party that respects conservatives and understands that they don't have anything to play around with if the conservatives don't actually form the bedrock of society and continue to make it productive and function.

So we need to band together with those who want to play with the new and those who want to preserve the old and reinstitute dialogue between those groups because that's where the good ideas are going to come from because then you have people who are willing to experiment and then actually see if those experiments worked out or not. So with regards to the trajectory of this stuff is there will be more and more bureaucratic installations, which is what I'm really concerned with because this is going to be a huge sink. The bureaucracy behind the diversity industry, which is multi-billion dollar a year industry, is a complete waste of resources. It denigrates the ability for one person to do their workflow. It denigrates the ability for people to work

together in a group. It denigrates the way that the institution can function efficiently because it's introducing all of this politic into the inner workings of the institution. So it's going to be going through municipal governments and federal governments. It's already going through all these different governments and these institutions. governments and these institutions and you put that on top like this huge multi-billion dollar year in industry that's doing nothing but integrating anxiety and difference and a discord within the population sapping resources sapping productivity in the time of two things a virus that came from china and a government that's in China. Those two things, and then I guess global warming or the changing of the climate that we're going to have to figure out. We're just going to have to figure out that. I don't know that much about it.

But we have a huge economic downfall from COVID-19. We have a Chinese government that is authoritarian and that is quickly overtaking us in productivity. And their ideals, I don't think we want. We don't want them to win on the world stage. They are incredibly problematic, the Chinese government. And this stuff plays directly into their hands because it creates a lot of discord in us. to enter into conversations around disparity and conversations around different outcomes for different groups. That's absolutely efficient or necessary. But if we have to do it with the eyes on, well, how do we solve this stuff so that everybody's productive and everybody works together? And I think if you bring that into the conversation, this equity, diversity, and quote, unquote,

anti-racism stuff falls short. It falls short on producing the outcome that's desirable, even though it claims to have all of the history and the right side of history. It actually doesn't have the middle ground of actuality on its side. Who do you see? Who do you like to follow who you feel like is actually speaking well into this area of say race racial tensions um power and all this stuff like are there certain

thinkers out there that you kind of go to for you oh um the way that i is that i take an idea and then i find somebody off the beaten path that's thinking through this stuff so that's i i'm always looking for new speakers um and if i were to say that there's somebody that i promote right now i feel like i would be aligning myself with a group i'm very i idw in the fact that i don't want to have anything to do with the idw like i don't want to be associated with that um with regards to race i find that's a really difficult conversation um to have and there are like coleman hughes is very good yeah okay yeah totally glenn lowry glenn lowry and his conversations with John McWhorter on the blogging heads.

That's absolutely the gold standard for down to earth discourse. I'm probably saying that because I agree with them and they're very anti woke in their in their delivery and in their belief system. So I think that I can confidently say Glenn Lowry is like Adam reborn for our time. say glenn lowry is like adam reborn for our time i was literally going literally going to say glenn lowry john mcorder coleman yeah i have been devouring lowry's he is um yeah and i do have to be i always want to push back against myself am i gravitating because i think i'm agreeing with it but i don't i i'm genuinely in people who say no you're not but whatever i i am learning so i'm looking for people that make sense that are that are intellectually they know what they're talking about they're giving facts evidence they're considering things from all sides and they just

are really smart right um so i'm not coming in it with here's where i stand i'm going to find somebody who agrees with me i'm just coming in as a learner when i listen to lowry i'm like this guy there is not a thoughtless word that comes out of his mouth and even him and john mcgorder don't agree on stuff and they're both brilliant but on the big picture stuff they very much line up and coleman is some kind of prodigy brilliant dude i mean he's a college graduate i mean but he sounds like he's professor status but um and there's others in that circle that i've been listening to all black men would for those who don't know who these guys are um man um i was gonna ask you who you're gonna vote for but i'll save uh

uh i won't put you on the well i mean who do i worry about most um trump or biden i think that trump has got some pretty serious problems there's some pretty serious problems that he's introducing to our country and some pretty um some pretty negative effects but those um aren't the whole story he's doing a lot of good things with our economy and he's actually he's actually pretty good at this whole worldwide thing i mean with that middle east accord thing and the way that he's kind of turned around north korea he's actually got and he's putting china in his place he's actually doing some good things for our country um however the backlash to him is worrying because people are so crazy against him and so up in arms about him that I just want that to end. But at the same time, they're just destroying themselves by just melting down mentally and undermining – the Democrats are just undermining themselves.

So what do we have? We have Joe Biden who – I don't see him being healthy enough to lead. So he's going to die or resign. And then we have Kamala. And I don't trust her. I don't see him being healthy enough to lead, so he's going to die or resign. And then we have Kamala, and I don't trust her. I don't trust her, but I need to do more research in that. So I think that the effect that Trump's having with regards to possibly Internet censorship and the advancement of this diversity stuff through the world will – I think that the problems that I see with regards to diversity will come to the head much quicker

and really expose itself for what it is under a Trump regime because Trump is really agitating it. So it will really – it will kind of put us through a fever and like really exacerbate the symptoms. And then hopefully we'll be able to see that these ideas are if if Biden gets elected, I think we're going to see a huge intersectional push. And it's we're going to go down the path of having that stuff really deeply embedded in our culture. And I think that that stuff is really, really bad, really bad for us. So, you know, I want to ask you a question, and I'm going to let you.

How much more time do you have? Do you have just a couple minutes? Yeah, a couple minutes. Okay. That's good. You're not evangelical. You're not a Christian in practice or name or whatever. Us evangelicals, and I use that loosely,

most evangelicals we talked offline uh i would not um line up with especially as they merge kind of right-wing politics with their faith and i just they're very adamantly against that and have been outspoken against that so i use the term very loosely but for you if you were looking on you looking on as a somebody outside the church you would probably consider me probably a strange evangelical maybe in some ways. But as an outsider, how do you see – let's just say Biden gets elected. He lives six months or a year or whatever. I mean I think Kamala will be the next president pretty soon.

Here's my prediction. I'm going to go on the air predicting this um i think if biden gets elected within a year it will be the democrats that will say i don't think he's mentally fit yeah i think we need to get i i think yeah he needs like right now it's the republicans pointing that out and the democrats are like no he's fine what are you talking about like no he's cognitively awesome like Like, I don't know how dehumanizing for you to pick on somebody that's going to switch if he gets elected because they he is a placeholder. He called himself that they want Kamala in. And I from the little I've seen, she does seem not trustworthy and pretty far left when it suits her.

It does seem not trustworthy and pretty far left when it suits her. Where do you think this will leave evangelicals? We are already in some circles viewed as just synonymous with alt-right. If you hold to a so-called biblical Christian view of marriage like I do, one man and one woman. marriage like i do um one man and one woman um what's gonna happen to us um if politics leadership does seem to swing a bit farther left again as an one thing for evangelicals to say we're gonna be martyred whatever like but do you see um evangelicals being targeted non-profits being taken away, Christian schools being forced to have a certain ideology or they lose their nonprofit status. I don't know.

Have you even given us any thought? Well, you're not talking about the faith. You're talking about the group then as a block, as an identity or sector of the population, that's a really interesting thing. liberal interests and that you your group will be motivated to bring back a understanding of secularism where i have my beliefs you have your beliefs and we leave them out of certain domains those beliefs do not belong in i guess uh government or in uh well i guess you guys have already segregated yourselves in the school system, but even in business relationships.

And the thing about this anti-racist dogma is that it is a belief system that doesn't call itself as such, and it's implementing itself non-secularly into, you know, it's forcing the secular domain to collapse under a belief system. So I think that there will be incentives for evangelicals or any sort of conservative faith to band together across the different faiths and say, okay, we need to go back to the foundation, American principles, why we created this country is so we don't kill each other over these beliefs, where I respect your belief and you respect my belief. And there's a line in the sand for that. So I think that that will provide incentives for evangelicals to actually look outside

of themselves and build. I don't know if you guys have or not, but like to really build alliances with other faiths, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It is. I mean, evangelical is such a slippery term and it's so broad and there's it's interesting. I'm seeing within evangelical circles.

You know, you mentioned Beverly D'Angelo several times and that third wave anti-racism. A lot of somewhat moderate to even conservative evangelicals have embraced it hook, line and sinker. I remember I was very infectious. I'm the well, the UMC, the United Methodist Church isn't particularly conservative, but they have hired Beverly D'Angelo to come in and do diversity training within the denomination. That's not surprising, but I'm seeing a lot of people kind of read D'Angelo's book and say, this is amazing. And I'm like, this is one of the worst books I've read in the last 10 years, regardless of the conclusion. Maybe she's right. I'm just saying just from an academic level.

Like it's just – I don't know where the editor was on this one like it's i remember john mcgorder saying like i knew i wouldn't agree with the book i didn't know it was so bad like that that's how i read it so i'm like how does somebody read this and like there's a lot of good books that address racism out there this is just not one of the i don't know and there's certain things in it that i resonate with and i thought was helpful but i don't know that's a little troubling for me so i um yeah i just have a huge question mark what if there is a if if where we're going as a society keeps going in this direction the kind of evergreening of america if we can put a bow on it um i just wonder if churches, churches are going to

go through evergreens. Yeah. The stuff is evergreen is a really interesting situation because it shows the effect of these ideas within small communities. And the people who reached out to me after I was telling it were like, they're in the knitting community. They're in the atheist community. There's they're in all these other communities. The interesting thing about Christianity is that it's built out of believers or people who are prone to want to install in their daily lives a metanarrative that kind of transcends the activity and places it into a bigger context. And anti-racism gives you 400 years of oppression, you know, and then a glorious utopia at the end, which I think is a kind of a very materialist, very lowly repurposing of certain themes of the

Christian story writ large. It's really repurposed. So it really can fit itself and install itself into churches for different vectors. And the thing is, is that the values that are central to it aren't values that outlast it. The values that are central to anti-racism, which is selfishness and greed and identity and narcissism, all those values, they aren't stated, but that's the emotions that it brings up. It brings a lot of greed, a lot of selfishness, and then it shows you how to say, well, to act in self-interest for somebody else. So the values that it brings to the surface are very

antisocial and unjust. And so it really shakes out in these small containers, be it a church or any other group. It'll shake it out. There will be a crisis of faith, and then the church is going to have to reformulate itself around these ideas. But the people who believe in them won't understand what they're believing in until it comes to fruition. So you're going to see a lot of just struggle sessions and destruction of smaller groups until people catch on and wake up to it. Benjamin, I've taken you over. I could talk to you for hours. And again, I would highly recommend whether you resonated with much, all or very little of what Benjamin has said.

I highly recommend his YouTube channel and podcast. You have a wide range of super, super interesting guests on your show. And you have an amazing ability to ask great questions. So, yeah. Well, thanks for having me on, Preston. I'm glad. You really engaged me in a new light. So I hope I said something.

I've got to know Paul VanderKley. That's our mutual friend. I know you've had him on your on yeah paul's great yeah he's uh we've had each other on several times and we resonate very much with many things so um anyway thanks for being on man appreciate you class act absolutely thanks for having me Thank you.