TRIGGERnometry - Coleman Hughes: "BLM Moment Led to Racist Policies"

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Coleman Hughes is a writer, podcaster and opinion columnist who specialises in issues relating to race, public policy and applied ethics. He is the host of the podcast 'Conversations with Coleman' and as a rapper and musician, performs under the name Coldxman. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have a dream speech gives me goosebumps to this day. And I take that ethic very seriously, and when I see it violated, it makes me angry, and it makes me sad. In the midst of a revolution, it's like there's a frenzy. When the fog clears, you can see all the things that were done that were wrong, that were deeply wrong. There was four billion. $4 billion of aid for farmers with debt, only if you are non-white. If you're a white restaurant owner or a white struggling farmer that loses their farm in the context of a recession,

you are never going to forgive that you were not treated on the basis of need, but you were treated on the basis of race. Just like black people in America have not forgotten redlining, Jim Crow. Where is this going? Well, I don't know. That depends a lot on the actions and the bravery of millions of individuals, many of whom will be watching this video. Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Trigonometry on the Road from the USA. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin.

And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. A brilliant guest and returning to the show now in person for the first time. He is the writer and musician and podcaster. Coleman Hughes, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me again. Yeah, man, it's great to see you. We actually, by accident, got a chance to hang out last night. We went to see a show at the comedy seller, had a chance to chat it a little bit, which is great,

because the last time we had you on the show, it was summer of 2020. It was the peak of the BLM racial conversation that we had at the time. And we got a load of your ideas and thoughts about the world. But one of the things we're starting to find is people who talk about the stuff that you talk about it and that we talk about it and who are willing like you to actually be public about it and to speak about it and risk things. Usually there's like a reason or a set of reasons why they do this. It doesn't just happen by accident. So I guess the question is like what's your backstory? Why are you sitting in this chair right now?

That's a good question. I don't know how much I can answer it from the inside. Sometimes people can sort of see you more accurately from the outside than you can see yourself. But insofar as I understand myself, I think I was raised in a context where I really did not care about race one way or the other. I was raised in a very diverse upbringing and You know the consensus growing up was the Martin Luther King ideal and I lived that as a child very much I had friends of every race and I didn't think about race and suddenly 2012 2013 2014 came around and people

people started telling me you're a victim and race really does separate you from your friends that are white or Asian or like this is an important feature of your identity there are certain things you can understand as a black person that your your your white friends can't and I knew this to be instinctively wrong I had lived enough I think to know that race really is it's only as deep as you want to make it or as deep as you choose to make it and that it's it's wrong to make to make it matter and and so BLM hit and at the time I was a musician in mostly in jazz and I had friends of every race in that community and we really all connected on a deep level of

over loving the same music, which was further evidence, although I might not have said it this way at the time, was further evidence that the human family is not deeply separated into races, right? Like, you can connect with someone of a different race so deeply that you build a life with them and marry them and have kids with them, right? You can do the most, you can have the most intimate relationships of your life with people of a different race, and that happens every day's routine. So this new ideology, when I went to Columbia, I was inundated with this new ideology which

in the segment of society that had the least racism that I'd ever seen, right? Columbia University, Ivy League schools, as progressive as it possibly gets, right? progressive that there are posters on the walls of hallways that say Wamexen instead of women. Like that's how in Latinx, you know, like so progressive that there's a new language. Like 10 steps left of the Democratic Party, that's how anti-racist it was. Precisely in that space I was hearing activist students say I experience racism every day on this campus, right? I was hearing them speak about the level of racism in this environment in a way that I would hear,

like, my grandparents speak about growing up under Jim Crow. And that cried out to me as like, something is amiss here, something is wrong. I became very curious about what that was. Colin, just to stop you there, when they said that they were talking about their experiences of racism on the campus, on the Columbia campus. What examples did they give? So I'm not, I can't really recall, some of them would be what would have been called microaggressions a few years ago. More often they wouldn't give examples at all. And this is where lived experience can matter because if you're an outsider reading a black Columbia student say, I experience racism every day,

You may not know what to think of that. You might say, well, that's interesting. She experiences racism every day. As a black student at Columbia, that was, you know, staying at until 2 a.m. on campus all the time, giving security guards plenty of opportunities to be racist against me and experience, like, near zero racism, like really close to zero. Maybe once, one anomalous experience in four years, right?

Everything else was just totally, totally non-racist. I knew that it was a lie, that these kids were putting it on, and that they were highly incentivized to do so by the subculture because victimhood became currency, became social currency. And as social beings, we are extremely attuned to how to elevate ourselves in status, right? It's like, it's most of what we're

built to do is to, so if you live in a subculture where you are cool and high status precisely insofar as you can persuade people that you're a victim of oppression, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., people respond to those social incentives and I could see that that's what was going on. So you see this, which is cool. I think a lot of people see it. There's another piece to my first question to you, which is why are you someone who feels strongly enough about it to actually put themselves on the line over it?

That's a good question. I think I really took it seriously when I was taught Martin Luther King's words as a kid. I have a dream speech gives me goosebumps to this day. And I take that ethic very seriously. and when I see it violated, it makes me angry and it makes me sad. And when I see that people are hesitant and fearful to speak up in defense of it, it makes me feel that I ought to fill that role. Conwin, you've used the word violated, which is a very strong word,

and obviously you're a super smart guy. You've used that word for a reason. What do you mean by the word violated? Did I say violated? Yeah. Violated the MLK ethic? Yeah, yeah. Well, the ethic is that the principle is that race actually does not matter.

And the people who do make race matter are making an error. This is precisely what was the problem with white supremacy, Jim Crow, slavery, and all of the myriad abuses that black people suffered throughout the history of America from even before its founding was that people made race matter when it should not have and judged people not on the basis of their individual abilities but on the accident of their birth into a particular race. That is the error. It always has been. that principle has been violated in the name of paying black people back for history, essentially. The idea is that we're going to make up for all that, all the horrible white supremacy of the past by flipping the discrimination.

As Ibrahim Kendi says, I imagine your viewers are familiar with Ibram Kendi, his book, you know, the remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. A few anti-racists say it, say the quiet part out loud, but that, but Kendi does. The idea is we are going to discriminate against white people as a group in order to make up for all of what was, what has been done to black Americans in the past, which requires a violation of the civil rights ethic. The civil rights ethic was not to discriminate against white people. not to reverse the logic of Jim Crow. It was to start anew, right, from a race-neutral perspective.

And we can, you know, all of the problems of intergenerational poverty and really dealing with disadvantage and privilege and economic inequality, we can really address those in a race-neutral framework, in a framework that does not say, you're this color, so you're going to get, you're going to get this policy, and you're this color, so you're going to get this policy. You know, we have people, we know how much money people make.

It's possible to do any program that could be race-based, to do it based on income and class. And that's a much closer proxy to who is actually different. disadvantaged in society to begin with. And it's fairer. And so that's what I mean when I say that ideal has been violated. And do you think that one of the reasons that this way of doing it, I mean, one of the things we've charted on the show in many different formats with many different people

is the shift of the left from working people to certain racial and other minority groups? Do you think one of the reasons is that it's easier to motivate people in this way? Race runs deeper with people than something like class. It's easier to cultivate a sense of victimhood, for example, within a group based on their tribal sort of ethnicity or whatever than it is on something a bit more abstract like class? I do think that's right. I think one of the mistakes that the Marxists of the past made was thinking that class could be made such a salient and important identity to people of many different races that they would spontaneously unite and really feel one with

members of different ethnicities different languages because they were both poor and I think it turns out that human tribal psychology is more easily activated much more easily activated on the basis of ethnicity than it is on the basis of class to the point where you have have people that have almost nothing in common. You know, like a poor black person from the hood, right, has actually very little in common, I would argue. I would say he has more in common with a poor white person from the trailer park, from the proverbial trailer park than he does with a black person like myself that grew up with wealth.

Right. So, and yet, it seems to be easier to get people to connect. on the basis of race and ethnicity, then on the basis of class. It's amazing, isn't it? How we've seen race relations regress. It's really sad. Can you explain to us some of the things that are, or the policies that have started or have been spoken about that they're going to be implemented in the U.S.

in either the past few years or the upcoming few years? They're an example of this? Oh, sure, yeah. So we can start with the pandemic era aid policies that have been distributed on race. So there's the American Rescue Plan, which was a $2 trillion bailout at the height of the pandemic in 2021 to help Americans that were struggling, to help businesses. Part of that was $28 billion for restaurants that were going out of business every day. and the program was done in such a way that anyone not white was put to the front of the line automatically in so-called priority groups.

If you're white, it took a lot more work to get into that category. There was $4 billion of aid for farmers with debt only if you were non-white. of that money was available to you if you were a white farmer with debt. And there was zero money in the bill available to you in general, right? So it was just a pot of money only for non-white farmers. And again, if you are, if you're a white restaurant owner or a white struggling farmer that loses their farm in the context of a recession, people are losing their businesses every day, and your business is your life. Absolutely. You are never going to. You are never going to, forgive that you were not treated on the basis of need, but you were treated on the basis of race.

Just like black people in America have not forgotten redlining, Jim Crow, convict leasing, all of these policies that affected black Americans have not been forgotten and in many cases have not been forgiven. And we should not expect that these kind of things are going to be forgotten or forgiven. certainly not going to be excused on the basis of paying for other people's sins. The thing that I find completely baffling when you were talking about this and when you're talking about it now, I just think the people who come up with these ideas,

do they not realize this really pisses people off quite rightly? And there will be a backlash. Yeah, it's interesting. I think many people are able to ignore, ignore the backlash in two ways. So in one way, they will just actually not look at it, right? Like a lot of, I think, top Democrat party operatives would not actually like these policies

if they look them in the face. It's just they kind of sweep it under the rug. They don't report about it. They don't watch the Tucker Carlson segment about it because why would they watch that? and they soft-pedal it. If you bring it up, they say, oh, it wasn't really that. It was something softer.

They used the language, the Orwellian euphemisms of priority group and historically disadvantaged group, which, you know, all of which is intended to soften the truth, which is that you gave people money, limited money, because of the race that they happened to be born into. And you denied it to others on the basis of race, period. And so there's that, but then there's also, the way this will be reported on is the groups that are part of the backlash, well, they're MAGA-backed groups, right?

So there's a MAGA-backed lawsuit against the Farmer bill, right? When you read this in the New York Times, they will make sure to front load for you and therefore prime you as a reader. So like, I don't like MAGA. I don't like Trump. I voted against him twice. I read that, it's a MAGA-backed lawsuit, that's priming me to say, oh, well, their anger doesn't count.

Well, a bunch of racists being racist. They're a bunch of races being racist, exactly. Whereas if you were to meet one of these people, a white restaurant owner struggling, who may have had no, you know, you may assume this person had quote-unquote white privilege or whatever, but you know nothing about this person's background. He might have struggled just as much or more than a black restaurant, any given black restaurant owner. And you meet him and you look in his eyes and you go to his restaurant and you see that this person was reported on as basically a, quote, angry white guy in a way that was intended to let you dismiss his anger as invalid. I mean, you know, and by the way, what was the civil rights movement but a long overdue backlash to Jim Crow laws?

That's what it was. So the language of backlash, I think, is it's intended to make you feel that this is, that people are reacting, that they're coming from a place of anger that's invalid. and I think that anger should be seen as a, like a perfectly predictable consequence of people being discriminated against. Right. And the discrimination should stop. Right. Well, this is what I was going to ask you about because I talk about it in my book about one

experience that I had in the UK when I was invited to participate in a TV discussion of these similar issues. And afterwards, one of the, it was a panel of several people. And afterwards, one of the presenters during the ad break looked at me and they went, I'm so glad there weren't any white British people here to be involved in this conversation. And I was completely stunned by this. And it was only when I got home later. I was like, why would they say that? Like, they know I don't agree with this.

Imagine I recorded that and I put that out or whatever, right? And then it was only when I got home later that I realized this is normal to these people. This way of thinking is normal now. Do you sometimes wonder how, like when, because when you talk about MLK and that speech and the ideal, that's what I grew up with. That's what I, that's where I thought that was the destination. That's what we're all working towards. Yes. And here we are, not only have we not made progress towards that,

we are actually going back on that. How the hell did we get here? Yeah, I mean, that is a deep question. I think there are a few factors. So, let's be clear. The backlash, the race obsession goes back a long time. It was there during MLK's time, right? You had Malcolm X, you had the Black Power movement,

you had the Black Panthers, you had an intellectual tradition starting with critical race theory in the 70s and 80s and the precursors to critical race theory in the 70s, which came out of, more out of the black power tradition, which we're saying even back then, no, race really does matter. It intrinsically matters because of, you know, white, the country being steeped in white supremacy, being born with white supremacy, being stamped from the beginning with slavery, it will never not matter. And let's drop this whole naive, I don't see race. That strain has always been there.

It was just, it was fringe, it was small, right? It wasn't necessarily the ruling ideology of every elite university. It wasn't a major factor in the Democratic Party. So the question is, what change? to allow the idea that race matters, that race should be infused in every policy. What allowed that to really dominate society and dominate cultural institutions? And that's something I haven't totally figured out the answer to, but some parts of an answer, I think, are one, I think the decline of Christianity has something to do with

it because Martin Luther King was a Christian and he spoke in Christian language. He would say, in Christ there's neither Greek nor Jew, black nor white, bond nor free. And what that meant to an audience of Christians, black, white, and other was that we're all made in the image of God. God is the transcendent story that unites us, right? Like, how does it matter that you're black and that I am, that, you know, that you're white if we're both Christian, if we're both made the image of God? And that was a very powerful thing. That was a very powerful, powerful, compelling argument, actually, that persuaded a lot of people. Obviously, Christianity's on the decline, and I'm not a Christian. I wasn't raised with it.

at all, but it's much more difficult to get people behind a narrative of common humanity when you don't have a religious backing. When you're just saying, oh, you know, we're all one. That doesn't tend to be as compelling if there's not a religious element to it. It's a more difficult cell and then I think people revert into tribes. And so I think it has something to do with the decline of Christianity, I think it has something to do with the rise of social media and how fast ideas can spread, how fast videos can spread, and so forth. Do you think one of the things that is so powerful about these ideas and this ideology is it just taps into trauma? You know what I mean? Because everybody's had bad things

happen to them. You know, everybody, you know, particularly if you're an ethnic minority, background or your working class, you can name specific instances where you might have been discriminated against or people were racist to you, or maybe if we're going to be generous, people use clumsy language towards you. And once you start tapping into people's emotions, they stop thinking logically and they start reacting emotionally. And that's never a good thing when you react emotionally in a situation. And it encourages that. Right, right. No, it does. I saw a lot of this when I was at Columbia of a kind of social incentive to remember and magnify any real experiences of discrimination you've had.

So I even saw this when I was in high school, we once did a racial affinity group. This was just the beginning of the woke revolution, really, maybe 2012, where all the black students at my high school we got for... you know, an hour, a couple hours we got together, you know, directed by the school and, you know, talked about black stuff, whatever. And, but what, basically what it became was a competition to find the worst thing that had ever been said to you or done to you. And it was, it was interesting to me because it felt, it felt like the wrong way to actually deal with discrimination, right? It felt like, it felt very much like an echo chamber. And obviously, the

argument for that kind of thing is, oh, so we want a safe space to like talk about the time that you know, somebody grabbed my afro, right? Like, that's the kind of thing that would happen that a white kid would do, that wouldn't have happened if you were at a more diverse school where people or an Afro wasn't a weird thing to have, right? It's like, okay, so we need to be, we need to talk about that. And being around, only around other black people is a, you know, a safe space where you could do that. That's sort of the argument for it. And there's something to that.

But because what it very quickly becomes is just how, how, like, how, how much can we just crank the dial on our own sense of, grievance and like nurse it, nurse the grievance so that it becomes bigger in our minds. And that's what happens when you're in an echo chamber. We see that with political echo chambers on the right and the left. And that's what it is to be in an echo chamber. Like whatever it started with, it gets louder. And then we send ourselves back into the world with this sense of grievance that has become bigger because we've nurtured it. And I don't think that that's actually the right way to deal with trauma. It's a very tempting way to deal with it,

but it's actually not the mature or healthy way to deal with it. And one of the things that strikes me about this comment is, like, we've been in New York for a few days now, just walking around or sitting down, having lunch outside, watching people go by. It must take an extraordinary amount of effort to divide people on racial lines in the city. Because it's like everybody is, you know, like you see people of every race dating people of every other race. And it's like it's incredibly mixed.

And you can see that to the people that are walking down the street, their races are really unimportant. You can just see that by the way they, by who they're with and how they behave. Do you know what I mean? Like you're not seeing people hang out with only people of their race at all. And yet here we are where the elite discourse, and maybe this is where the problem is, the sort of conversations that people have about this issue are incredibly divided in a city that doesn't look at. How does that work? Well, yeah, I think there's a very big difference between the way elites think and talk about this

and the way the rest of people think and talk about this. Which is not to say, I mean, there's a lot of actual bigotry and tribalism out there. Sure. You know, I don't want my daughter marrying a such and such, no, no, you know. There's a lot of that out there among non-elites. Of all races, by the way. Of all races, that's right. It's often talked about as if this is, you know, one of my gripes is,

if you were to ask me on the basis of lived experience where I've encountered the most racism like what groups I've encountered the most personal racism directed at me from is actually not white Americans it would more be like immigrant groups from like other countries in terms of like who I've heard say the most racist stuff as an immigrant from an Eastern European country that does not surprise me right and it's not yeah it's not

not even white immigrants. Right, you know. Yeah. So again, neither here nor there. The point is racism is a sin committed by all groups of people. And yet it's talked about as if white people invented and are the only ones that perpetuated, which I think is a very, a very, that's the kind of idea you can only really believe if you're like overeducated and haven't really lived. in many places in the world. You know, it's like your only experience of life is like your Ivy League degree. If you actually live in the world,

you're going to encounter bigotry from, you're going to realize it's a human foible, it's a human sin. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, all the examples that you've given, I found it very interesting,

have all, a lot of it has come from your university. You went to Colombia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it was a big influence on me. You know, I think it was, It was kind of a culture shock in a way. I mean, in one sense, I was exactly the kind of kid that would go to Columbia.

So it wasn't, my whole life was tracking to go to an Ivy League school. So it was totally to be expected. And it was only a 30-minute drive from where I grew up. But it was a culture shock in the sense that I don't think I had ever been around that much. that much concentrated elite privilege at once. What about this room? And again, I think maybe the fact that I was a musician was part of it and I really saw myself as a musician first

because music is somewhat meritocratic. It's like if you're incredible, at the saxophone, you're going to get into Juilliard, where, like, you just, and it's not total meritocracy, but it's, like, quite close. More like sports in that sense. People come from all walks of life and end up, you end up in the same room as people from all different classes,

all different races, and you're bonding over this thing. And that's a kind of environment where race loses its importance or it's yeah where race loses it's important stand-up is exactly like that stand-up is like that too it's like that bond of both being on stage overcomes anything else that's right that's right and so to go from that as the defining like you know ecosystem of my social life to Colombia where it was like all of a sudden

there's like all these incredibly guilty white people that like are terrified of like saying the wrong thing around me and I'm I'm very aware of the social power that I have in any given situation like at any time I can pull the race card and it's going to be viewed as valid by enough people that I can do that and that's that's a very very tempting power to to wield and then I could see other black students doing that a lot. You know, like when you're back into a corner, you play the race card. And then, and then there was this phenomenon of like quietly coming out to other students as not woke. Right. It was like, there would be the first moment where you quietly like tell someone like, I'm kind of like not down with a whole, this whole like thing. Like, and then they would

admit to you like, me too. And it would be this moment of essentially coming out. And that is something I had not experienced ever. And it was, it was, I became of necessity extremely curious about it because I was like, what the hell is going on. So it was, in a way, it was a kind of a culture shock. And I talk about it so much because the genesis of me writing about this issue, it's like I used to, when I was a Columbia student, I used to write, you know, like thousands of words in a Google Doc to nobody, but myself, just trying to figure out why kids were speaking like we were living in Jim Crow in the, precisely in the most privileged, most non-racist place I'd ever been.

So, Carmen, let me ask you this. We had, when we first had you on in the summer of 2020, that was a peak, at least in this period of time, of the divisiveness, the tensions, the, all of that. Where do you think we are now? Well, we're definitely, we have descended from the peak. 2020, as you say, it was the peak of racial bullying, frankly. of horrible ideas like defund the police actually getting some traction, of people being fired for the slightest offenses and for non-offences at all, people losing friendships over disagreeing about race.

And yeah, I mean, we all remember it. I think it was in the midst of a revolution, it's like there's a frenzy. There's a frenzy where people actually can't think straight. And then when the fog clears, you can see all the things that were done that were wrong, that were deeply wrong. And it all looks much, it looks worse in retrospect. But at the time, it just seemed to be what was called for at the moment. And there were so many people fired and treated unfairly for saying really the most minimal criticisms of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example. And where are we now?

I think we're certainly in a better place than we were then, but that's not saying much. To me, and you can see this in the actual data on Google search terms for things like white privilege or any other. other term associated with woke, you'll see the trend line is like no mentions until 2014 spikes and then 2020 it goes way up and then it kind of has come down since then. But we're still not where we were even before the Great Awakening. So yeah, I mean I think it's gotten better in the past two years, but from a peak that was absolutely crazy. I mean, you know, every business in New York City was boarded up, you know, boarded up several times for months. And you had major media figures and politicians saying that that's okay, or it's called for.

So from that peak of irrationality, yeah, we've gotten a bit better. Do you know what I find frustrating about the whole thing? You just spoke about Columbia. I know people who went to Columbia. I know the grades that you needed to get into Columbia. I know what it takes to get into an Ivy League education. These are academically the brightest and best. And yet they just ingest this whole stuff without questioning,

without interrogating it, without thinking for themselves. How does that work? You're meant to be the smartest? Surely doesn't that mean that you've got the best mind in order to challenge these ideas and find out the flaws in the argument and the logic? Unfortunately, I think that intelligence is not that correlated with your ability to get to the truth about something, which is to say tribalism is much more powerful than intelligence, right? Like they've done studies where they show this.

It's like you show a person with a very high IQ, but who is part of, say, liberal echo chamber, and you give them some facts about guns, and they will just come to the conclusion, the scripted left conclusion. The right-wing guy will come to the scripted right-wing conclusion whatever level of IQ, often, like, the higher IQ you are, the more you're just able to find reasons why your party line is the right one.

And again, like you will find, there's a million studies where they'll have Biden and Trump say the same sentence, and Democrats will disagree with it when Trump said it, but agree with it when Biden says it, and Republicans will do the same thing. And they will do that no matter how smart they are. You could get a 1600 on the SAT and it doesn't actually make you less likely to have partisan bias. So I think the sad truth is intelligence is not that much of a bulwark against partisan bias. Well, that would seem to be the reality of what we're going through. So look, we've got...

We're going backwards in terms of MLK's dream, as you say. Our elite institutions are pumping out students who have bought into it despite their intelligence, as you say, yeah. Where is this going? Well, I don't know. That depends a lot on the actions and the bravery of millions of individuals, many of whom will be watching this video. I mean, which is to say it depends on every single person's ability to stand up for values and reason and speaking up when it's difficult.

You know, there will come a time where something is happening in your workplace or in your friend group or in your marriage. where you know something is going on that's wrong ethically and that violates your values but if you speak up about it you could potentially pay a price, a big social price. And, you know,

there will come a crossroads and hopefully you will find that listening to podcasts like Triggeronometry or my own conversations with Coleman or, you know, can give you the language to articulate your point,

the point you want to make to the relevant people in a way that communicates your good faith but gets the point across. And the more people do that, the more people speak up, I think the more, the better this situation gets. So where we're going is going to depend on a lot of people's ability to be brave in the face of difficult situations. And we'll be, we'll be. And we'll What do we do with institutions like Colombia? Very prestigious, you know, it's a seat of learning, etc., etc. But it's pumping out these students who are just regurgitating this narrative. What do we do with this place?

Well, we should support the professors and students there that are committed to free speech and viewpoint diversity, and there are many. The phenomenon we're fighting here is not that, you know, it's not that 50% of students hate free speech and diversity. It's that 5% of students hate it, and 95% are terrified of them. And so is the institution? Yes. Petrified. Right. To the point where, you know, you have the president of Columbia University, a free speech scholar, Lee Bollinger, First Amendment scholar, one of the foremost. And in his commencement speech this past year, he basically said, I know I'm a free speech scholar, but I'm actually going to talk about how there's a bit too much free speech.

Misinformation is horrible, and we really should be censoring a lot of stuff. So, yeah, and listen, you know, if he had said the opposite, if he had gone up there and give a full-throat defensive free speech, he would have been making his own life a living. hell for the foreseeable future, you know. So there's a... But I'll push back on that. Isn't that his job to make his life a living hell? Isn't that the role that he needs to play? It's a role he ought to play, yes. It's the role he ought to play. So your question, what do we do? We support organizations like Heterodox Academy, which are doing good work to support viewpoint diversity at institutions of higher learning and maybe support the more experimental universities that are coming around. I don't know too much about them, but I think University of Austin.

There's a couple that you may know about that are trying to innovate in the space of colleges. You know, it's a very difficult to innovate, right? It's like we're kind of just stuck with the incumbents in the college space. So I support the experiments and support the people fighting for viewpoint diversity and free speech. Colman, let's talk about culture a little bit because we were talking before we started about how we had the opportunity to meet one of our big supporters. And one of the points he made, he was sort of explained to us why he decided to support our show over other very, very good people who do good work in this area.

And one of the things she said is culture is really important. Entertainment is very important because in addition to doing these interviews, we also do like live streams where we joke about the issues of the day and it's humorous and it's offensive and all of that, right? And he was sort of making the point that the work of creating a healthier conversation around all of these subjects depends also on the entertainment side of things. and you are obviously a musician. How do those two things link up?

How do you see the role of entertainment and culture in this conversation? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, so I'm a trombonist and a rapper, and I've been releasing music videos. I've released three music videos this year. The first one was called blasphemy. And in that song, I kind of dealt with some themes of free speech and speaking your mind. and self-censorship. And it's interesting because I think the entertainment world is in a bit of a pickle because

it's in frankly the same situation that elite institutions in general are, which is that, you know, 5% of people have a kind of a veto on any, any new Netflix show, any new movie, any, which is to say what the market actually wants is pretty much what the market has always wanted. The market doesn't really want preachy, woke music or movies or anything. And that's proven over and over again by what sells.

Even when the market wants even when you have rappers that really do come from like a racial justice perspective, like a Kendrick Lamar, his latest album, the whole thing is he is rejecting being this sort of socially conscious voice, right? He's like, I'm going to tell you about all the fucked up things about me and I'm not going to be your hero. Like, I'm flawed. I'm, you know, like, I'm an asshole. I'm not your, like, I'm not the intersectional hero you're looking for, is kind of what his new album is. And there's obviously Kanye still doing extremely well saying what he's saying.

And so I think what I have to imagine is going on in a lot of, like, writers rooms for shows is you have good writers that want to ignore woke and just make a good TV show, whatever that means, like you would have if the year was like 2011. And if the jokes are going to be offensive, they're going to be offensive,

but they're going to be funny. And then you have a small minority of people in those rooms that is saying, oh, well, you can't say that. That's racist, that's sexist. We need more actors of color in this scene, or we need whatever, even if it doesn't fit the story.

And basically, what you have to do is sort of decide between whether you just want to make a good show for its own sake or you want to cave to a small minority of people that have a lot of cultural power right now and make your show less funny, make it less engaging, make it less relatable. But I think, for what it's worth, I think a lot of people are doing that effect

Even a show like Euphoria, for example, which some people might say is like a woke show. I don't think it is. It's just it happens to have a trans main character. They say the word retarded on that show unapologetically. There's one scene where Rue was like talking about how talking sort of praise in a praiseworthy way about Christians. And like, you can say something nice about. Anyway, the overall tenor of the show violates a lot of tenets of wokeness.

And I actually think that's why it's so popular among Gen Z's because at the end of the day, people never want preachy art, whether that is preachy Christian right-wing art, moralist art, or preachy far-left woke art. People want art that taps into deep themes of human nature and that goes as much for Gen Z as it does for millennials and boomers and stuff. So I think the good thing about the profit motive is that you can't really be successful

if you're ideological. As an entertainer, your ideology has to be to entertain at all costs pretty much, to make a good show. Atlanta is another great example. Donald Glover received a lot of backlash from The Woke over his reparations-themed episode where he actually showed in this kind of black mirror-esque way what reparations might look like if you actually had black people tracing their ancestors back to like specific, what would that actually look like? And when you see it, you can't help but think, oh, my. my god, this is a nightmare. This is like, and so, you know, an episode of Atlanta showed that

and got a lot of backlash, but again, Atlanta's an extremely successful show. And it's not anti-woke either necessarily, it's just orthogonal to woke. He like ignores, he's trying to make really interesting shows. And because of that, he can't really be married to any ideology. Because here's the thing is that Great art shows the complexity of life It shows the nuances It shows how actually this simplistic way of looking at the world It doesn't reflect life

That's why it doesn't work I remember watching Who Do You Think You Are? Which is a British program Where they take a celebrity And they look back over their ancestry And they had on this mixed race woman former athlete and they look back. And it turns out that one of her great-great-grandfathers,

who was black in the Caribbean, owned slaves at one point. And she was devastated and really upset. And to me, that seemed really incongruous because that's got nothing to do with you. You know, this idea that we have to look back and somehow, by looking back hundreds of years, we're going to be able to solve the problems of now,

it just seems bizarre to me. You know, it just doesn't seem to fit. And I guess the problem is, is do you think we're ever going to get to a place where we're going to stop talking about art being woke or not, do you know what I mean? We didn't have these conversations 10 or 15 years ago. We just judged the art, whether it was cinema or film or theater, whatever it may be. But whether the person who made it was a peterfoy. Yeah, exactly.

But on its own merits. Yeah. Well, we're entering an age of, well, we're witnessing the birth of a new major ideology, quasi-religion. You think birth, you think we're just getting started? I don't know. I don't know. It seems to have some staying power. And in the 1950s, we very much did judge art by whether it was Christian or not. You know, that was a huge deal in America at least.

And it was a huge deal for entertainers because they had very clear ways in which they could violate the mandate that all art must be Christian and must not offend the Christian base. And comics rebelled against that and got punished for it socially in the 60s. And Nadi Bruce? Uh-huh. And, but I think, you know, in the maybe 80s and 90s and 2000s, the power of Christianity waned in the culture, especially in the, in blue America. And there was some political correctness stuff in the 90s, but it wasn't, it didn't

really have staying power. it was confined to certain elite spaces. And in the 2000s, yeah, I mean, I don't remember having too many conversations. Or even in like 2010, I don't remember having too many conversations. Like, was this movie woke or was it anti-woke? Like, was this episode transgressive of like, oh, like, is this take canceled? It's like people will say that. Oh, like, I have a canceled take.

which is like, oh, like, whatever. Which is like, oh, top gun was really good. Like, is that canceled? So, yeah, I think we're going back into an era where there is an ideology that is very important, kind of the way Christianity was important in the 50s. And every individual filmmaker, musician, song. songwriter, TV writer, artist will have to make a decision of whether they want to and are willing to violate certain doctrines to make good art. And some of them are going to answer that, nope.

Like I got a family, I'm not going to do anything that rocks the boat. Others are going to rock the boat in all the right ways and I think they'll be rewarded for it by by the masses. Coleman, on another note, do you think we can ever truly separate art from the artists? We've seen a raft of, you know, celebrities, great artists

behave appallingly and abominably, and people were saying, you know, we should get rid of them, they should be taken off Spotify, we shouldn't be listening to their music. I mean, where do you stand on this? Because it's not as it's, you know, there are nuances to this argument, aren't there? I don't know.

I think I'm kind of a live and let live guy, so if you can't separate the art from the artist, then don't listen to that artist. Yeah. But I can guarantee you, I listen to Michael Jackson all the time, and I never think of what he probably did to children.

And I never condone it more in my head. It doesn't even occur to me. which is to say I can separate the art from the bad parts of the artist in that case. And if I couldn't, then I would just stop listening to it and get on with my fucking life. And I wouldn't demand that other people be just like me. That's an insane and narcissistic way of going through the world. Another thing that's interesting to me, and we were talking about it with a comedy club promoter here in New York last night,

is somewhere like Louis CK. And I sort of asked him, like, what was your take on that? Why did you let him keep playing your comedy club? And he was like, well, if I had a bartender who got accused of something with no conviction in court or anything like that, I wouldn't fire them. A union would never allow you to fire someone just because they've been accused of something. But on the other hand, I also think, do you think that in a situation where people, you know, are getting away with things?

we're trying to feel our way towards having it. Like, for example, there were parts of Me Too. You go Harvey Weinstein, absolute sleazebag. I'm glad that happened. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's not, so I guess what I'm saying is, do you think that there is some good to all of this too? Like we're making progress on some things

while maybe going too far in the process, or do you think this is all bad? No, the Me Too movement was definitely partly good because it was, it was shocking to many people that a guy like Harvey Weinstein could get away with what he was doing for that long in the modern era. I think a lot of people thought that that was a thing of the distant past rather than the present. And it took that much cultural power to give people the courage to come out and fight this guy who had so much power. And there were some others like that.

And then inevitably, as it always does, it went way too far pretty quickly. And the opportunists came in, and the dishonest people came in to cash in on the trend and get their 15 seconds of fame. And like I said, as it always does in times of revolutionary frenzy, people suspend all the important principles of due process and reason, and hearing both sides. And it all looks much worse in retrospect than it does at the time, right? Like, trying to think of a pretty...

Well, Louis is a perfect example, right? He's accused of something that happened many years ago, before he was famous, and no one wants to hear his side of it, right? Like, no one is interested in hearing his side of it. And from his side, it's really... What he was accused of doing was actually not that bad on his telling. And on their telling, there was something sketchy about what he did, right? And this is the kind of thing we normally settle in a court of law if a crime is being alleged.

and people go to prison on false charges, people appeal. There's a whole, we have a whole legal system set up precisely because situations like this are so complicated and so easy to run into mistakes. But in the frenziness of the moment, people are like, it's like how grasshoppers become locusts and seem like totally different animals, right? When there's a revolutionary frenzy going on, humans stop behaving like humans. We start behaving like locusts and we just swarm and bypass all of our better judgments. And in retrospect, you can look back and see how is it that people were so horrible to him? But again, it's just how we behave in times of frenzy. the reason Me Too always made me feel uncomfortable right from the start.

It's the allegations. Yeah, exactly. I was worried that I was going to go down. But thankfully, I've got great lawyers, Coleman. There we are. Coleman's looking at you going. He looks like you might actually have some allegations against him. I get that sweaty white man energy.

Now, but no, like, it's just that the moment you have a group of people who feel that they can get justice. And there's no checks, there's no balances, there's no ability really for the person accused of this to come back and to be listened to. All of a sudden, you're not getting justice. What this looked like. And that's not to say that there were people who, you know, like Weinstein, obviously awful, awful, awful. But it looked like fury and revenge. And when that happens, revenge and justice, they're two very different things. Yes. Yeah, they are. And the problem is that it becomes a bug light for dishonest people. If you send out a signal to the whole world, you say, okay, normally we do

the due process, we do due diligence on your claims. But right now, starting now, we're going to suspend all of that. There's a lot of people out there that are going to say, ah, this is my chance. This is my chance. And they're going to make something up. They're going to exaggerate the truth of a situation. And you're basically sending out a bat signal

for shitty people that want to ruin someone's life. And that is the inevitable problem you run into when you have even legitimate and good movements like Me Too. If you tell people, people respond to incentives, and this is what, you know, revolutionaries never think about. They never think about or consider that when you suspend the rule of due process, you're going to attract, inevitably you're going to attract bad people that see their chance. And they never account for that human nature always includes those bad motives. those bad people will always be there to make false accusations and to seize their opportunity to climb in social status as a result of valuing victimhood.

And so it's very important in those moments to fight for the rules of due process and all the principles that have made, you know, Western democracies fairly decent places to live relative to the alternatives. Well, see, the thing is that philosophically speaking, the progressive ideology doesn't believe in the existence of bad people. There are no bad people in the progressive mindset. There are people who've been failed by the system. That's why they're behaving the way that they are, but they're not bad.

They're not human beings. They're not prone to bad behavior. Well, what about straight white men? Well, they are imbued with whiteness, which has been taught to them, doesn't it? Mm-hmm. Right? So, of course, they think they're bad people, but it's because the way they've been brought up, and what we need to do is undo the whiteness, right? That's the argument. So I think that's where a lot of the progressive mindset goes awry.

It's based on the idea that human beings are infinitely perfectable. And the only reason human beings aren't perfect is we haven't done enough social engineering to get them to that point. That's right. That's right. Stephen Pinker's book about this was incredible and still the best treatment of the subject that I know of called the blank slate,

the modern denial of human nature. This is the belief always popular among revolutionaries of all eras that we are basically born with no nature, born inherently good, and only made bad by society. only made selfish by society. Whereas my view of human beings is that we are evolved by evolution to all have some degree of self-interest.

And we can never be made perfect. We can never even be made close to perfect. That there will always be a subset of humans that want to be aggressive and violent for its own sake. own sake. You know, this is like one of the things they, like, you look into like Ted Bundy types and you, you always want to find something in the background that explains who they became. And the truth is sometimes you find it, but sometimes you don't. Sometimes people just are fucked up. And beyond that, almost everyone is imbued with a kind of baseline self-interest as animals, you know, just like dogs have a nature, humans have a nature. And it's tempting

to believe that because human, our brains are malleable and culture matters quite a lot, which all of which is true, that we have completely, we've completely cast aside any kind of inherent nature. The truth is, yes, human beings more than any other animal, we're capable of, you know, learning a way of being from our culture. We learn a language from our culture. We learn everything from the hand signals we use when we talk to like what kind of style of dress we think is cool. All of that is malleable and can be learned and can change over time. But at the end of the day, there is still a core to us that is given to us by our nature. And that nature includes self-interest and it precludes the possibility of systems like communism working on a large scale,

right? People are always going to prefer their children to other people's children, their biological children for the most part, their biological family and are going to privilege that over the rest of the world and that's inherent. It's not going to change ever. So if you try to make all society like one family, you end up getting a disaster, right? If you, if your theory of criminal behavior is that all of it is caused by social circumstances and poverty, and you think you can get rid of the police and address crime by, with like social programs, you're going to, you're going to run into the fact that actually some people commit crime because it's fun and because they can. And this is one of the thing, this is one of the things that really

grinded my gears about the 2020 riots, which is like, okay, why are the riots happening? People say, okay, yeah, people are, you know, George Floyd, racial injustice, you know, etc. Like, okay, well, how come all the rioters are young men? Hmm, that's interesting. Are only young men the ones that are affected by racial injustice? Well, no. How come older women are rioting and are in fact begging the police to intervene. That's interesting. Well, maybe they're doing it because rioting is fun and you've given them a temporary pass to do it. I think sometimes people have to become like more in touch with their inner teenager and remember how fun it was to just do like mischievous shit for no reason when you were like 16, right? That is a

is to me the Occam's razor explanation is like a lot of people would be if there were no consequences if you couldn't if you couldn't possibly go to prison by doing it how many people would just do that type of shit just because because it's fun I'd do it yeah yeah it'd be a lot of fun go smash something up yeah young men have been doing this for centuries for centuries and and so I think the um as a some philosophers would say the the explanandum, which is like the thing to be explained, is reversed, right? People think you have to explain why people are like, you know, crashing police car windows with a bat. And to me, I think basically you have to explain why they aren't doing it more often. They're doing it because it's

fun. Yeah. And more importantly, in that particular case, is you gave them a pass. As you give them a pass, yeah. There's a socially acceptable pass, which is that a lot of people Well, for the moment, we're going to say it's noble. Violence is noble. It's justified by what was done to George Floyd. And again, you're sending out the bat signal to all the people in the world that want to have fun anyway. Up, all right, we got a couple months where we can do whatever we want. Let's take this pass.

You know, loot a store because it's fun. Lute a store of some, like, poor, like, Indian immigrant in Harlem that has nothing to do with this situation and just destroy his life. because it's fun. Coleman, it's been great speaking with you again about this stuff. I don't know where the fuck this is going, but wherever it is, I feel like your voice is going to be one of the important voices in shaping that conversation.

Well, thank you. Thank you. So we're glad you've taken the time to do that on here with us. We're really appreciate it. It's been a real pleasure to meet you. Likewise. In person. The last question, as you know,

that we always ask, before we ask a couple of questions for our locals, that only they will get to see, is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Hmm. That's a good question. So I have been a little bit thinking about this question of birth rate. Global birth rates declining in all developed nations. And Elon Musk has been talking about this recently. So I do think we have been talking about it. But prior to him and also someone like Matthew Iglesias in his book

One Billion Americans talks about this which is just, it seems to be close to a law of I don't know what you would call it developmental economics or what have you, that as societies become wealthier and more educated, people stop having enough children to replace their

numbers naturally. And you see it in pretty much everywhere on earth and the only places you don't see it are either societies that are that haven't become wealthy yet or the highly religious the ultra ultra orthodox jews the umish the amish and menonites um you know the omish in america have more than doubled their numbers in since the 90s which is incredible, right, while the rest of America has receded below replacement level. That's what happens when you don't use condoms, mate. It's what happens when you don't have entertainment, mate.

Yeah, what else are you going to do? Yeah. But it's interesting to think about the long-term future of humanity, right? Like, if everyone, what we want to happen is that poor countries stop being poor. Like poor countries, we want that to happen. So let's say that happens, and everywhere on Earth now is below replacement level, except for the ultra-religious minorities that are doubling their numbers every 10 years. What a great recipe for a future world.

It's interesting to think about what world that creates. I'm sure they won't be any division, right? No, it'll be fine. Maybe it's not a big problem. Maybe it's such a slow-moving emergency that the equilibrium, and will shift and, you know, it's kind of not something to worry about, but maybe, I don't know, maybe it changes the fundamental fabric of society. If you have, like, 40% of America is Amish in, like, the year 3000 or something, if America still exists. Anyway, but that, I mean, I don't know, that's

something that I think more people should be thinking about. Coleman, it's been an absolute pleasure, as always. If people, If people want to find you online, if people want to discover your work, where's the best way to do that? Listen to my podcast, Conversations with Coleman. Check out my music. Coldman, spelled C-O-L-D-X-M-A-N, the X-A-N. I have three music videos out. The latest one is with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I got to do a cameo.

So you can listen to my music wherever you listen to music, watch my videos on YouTube. And follow me on Twitter at Cold X-Man. Coleman Hughes, thanks so much for coming on. and thank you guys for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Orr Show. And of course, make sure you check out the bonus questions with Coleman on locals. They're only available as on locals. So if you want to see them, you've got to sign up for that.

But also, if you like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in and see you soon, guys. Coleman, with the benefit of hindsight, would you still vote for Biden?