TRIGGERnometry - Where Woke REALLY Comes From - Richard Hanania

Episode Date: December 24, 2023

Richard Hanania is an American writer and political science researcher. He has written for such publications as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic and Quillette. He is the author of ‘The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics’ - available here: www.amazon.com/dp/0063237210/  SPONSOR: Go to https://www.expressvpn.com/trigger/ and get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package! Become a Premium Member to receive exclusive benefits https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc 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

The invention of this idea that you referred to, that disparity means that there's discrimination going on. It is completely a historical and non-scientific in every way. Most people don't know what disparate effect was. If they did know what disparate effect was, they would probably be horrified by it. If you just had quotas, like it might even be better because you could at least give a test and just take the best people. But you can't, but the law is such that you can't do that because you have to have the facade of equal treatment. And so you can't just have quotas. So you just, what you do is you just get rid of the standards completely.

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Before we get into the origins of woke, the one thing that everyone who hates people talking about work claims is that no one can define what woke is. You actually start by defining what woke is. What is woke? Yeah, I mean, yeah, this is a sort of a strange thing to pretend like, you know, we can't define this thing. And sometimes people care because people don't think about definitions well. But I think that, you know, we all sort of have the idea. We know what something is woke. We know Ibrahim Kendi is woke.

And, you know, the Southern Baptist Convention is less so, right? I mean, we all sort of have this understanding. And so I think, you know, I have a definition that I think covers most of it. It's not too broad. It's not too narrow. It's the idea that disparities are caused by discrimination. They could be past or present. So if blacks do less well on a test than whites, or, you know, there's a difference

of arrest rates between races or men are more money than women. That's due to discrimination. past or present, you know, it has to be white versus non-white or men versus women. We don't care about other kinds of disparities. You need speech restrictions in the interest of overcoming these disparities. So you have to get rid of, you know, stereotypes, people, you know, having problematic thoughts about origins of disparities that are not discrimination. And then there's a bureaucracy that sort of, you know, tries to overcome disparities and also enforces the speech code. So this is everything from, you know, the DEI offices and universities to, you know, like nonprofits and

government institutions that are trying to close various racial and gender gaps. So the three ideas of disparities equals discrimination, speech codes, and the bureaucracy enforced these ideas, I think is the core of wokeness and how we talk about it in modern society. Very interesting. And particularly with reference to the bureaucracy, this is why I mentioned you have an original way of looking at where this comes from. Tell us where you think, workness comes from yeah i mean so you know the civil rights movement was sort of like this moral and legal and cultural tsunami that watched over the united states in the mid-1960s um and you know it did some things that everyone agrees you know most everyone agrees is good now like eliminate uh explicit

discrimination state sanctioned discrimination um even in the private sector uh you know told people they couldn't discriminate based on race and sex what you know so people that's sort of the standard history, and that part is true. At the same time, it's sort of empowered a bureaucratic class to look for discrimination wherever they can find it. And the definition of sort of discrimination and what counts as discrimination expanded, and it was given the force of law. And so a lot of these things that you see as wokeness, what people would call wokeness in the last 10 to 15 years, have been part of American law since the, sometimes in some cases, since the early 1970s. So the idea that if you take a test and whites do better than blacks.

You know, it's always funny to me that people, you know, Twitter, they sort of created like it's a new idea that no one ever thought of before. No, it's been law in the United States since 1971, right? We've had two, three generations of this being the law of the land that if you give tests, you know, you better be careful. Or if police arrests one group or the other, we still have disparities and we still have tests and we still have police arresting people, right? But it's always sort of, there's always sort of attention in all the rules that we have

for like having a society because literally everything you do that's meritocratic or that tries to keep order has a disparate effect based on race based on sex or whatever and so like it sort of goes through waves where some of the stuff sometimes this stuff becomes more prominent sometimes less but it's part of it's just very very deep in sort of the legal fabric of American society right now and I think that a lot of the cultural sort of you know these corporations like paying you know hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars um for these uh you know HR and DEI consultants I I think a lot of it is clearly downstream of the law, which I try to show, you know, just try to show sort of step by step in the book, the history of how that happened. Richard, do you think, because there's always going to be people who say, you know, this is a conspiracy, this has been put together by whoever it may be.

Do you think it is or do you think that these were well-intentioned people, as it were? You know, it depends on sort of what level you're, you know, you're talking about. you know, there's all, you know, the sort of civil rights movement always had a sort of communist component, even them you might say that they're, well, you know, well intentioned. They just think communism is a good thing. But, you know, there was always sort of that, there was sort of sort of that way. But then the people who actually made the decisions that really embedded whokeness in law, you can, you know, you could look them up. And they were, in many cases, sort of mainstream Democrats, center left, you know, judges. They were, they didn't want to throw capitalism or

get rid of the system. You know, they generally, they genuinely thought, I think, I think every generation probably believe, like, okay, we need, until recently, I think, I think, like, it's been going on so long. But I think, I think that, like, the earliest generations that sort of, you know, got the ball rolling here did think that, you know, you would have affirmative action for a generation, or you would have, make the police less racist for a generation or 20 years or whatever, and then you would move on. It didn't work out like that. And, you know, and even like Richard Nixon, who I cover in the way, not a leftist, not a communist, not trying to, you know, bring down the white race or anything like. like that, he was, he himself was sort of caught up in this in the early days of civil rights, in the civil rights era. You know, and then eventually, I think when sort of all that stuff was discredited, by that

time, it just became the status quo. It became, if you wanted to get rid of affirmative action, if you wanted to get rid of disparate impact, you were seen as this, you know, big racist and why were you thinking about these things? And nobody did think much about these things for a while until recently, I think, when sort of the great awokening took off and this stuff became so in everyone's face that, like, there was no choice but to talk about it. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, my worldview on this is more unintended consequences

in bureaucratic politics than it is some kind of, you know, conspiracy theory to bring society down or something like that. Because to me, this seems very much like the law of unintended consequences, that you implement something and then 10 or 20 years down the line, it doesn't matter how talented you are as a legislator and how smart you are, nobody can look into the future. And what you think that you're doing at this particular moment, I mean, what do you have to go on but an educated guess? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, one thing like Thomas Sol points out in some of his books is that racial preferences are pretty standard and diverse societies, you know, all over the world. And so, like, you know, there's not, you don't have to explain to that there was something in American ideology or somebody did that.

You know, I think this is sort of in a democracy with racial disparities. You sort of get this stuff. you know, naturally. And, you know, it's the America maybe was a little bit more resistance to it because of its constitution and its founding. But yeah, you know, a lot of, you know, the sort of the, and the sort of direction I took, which I cover in the book, like, why do we care so much about, you know, female sports in, you know, in colleges? I don't think we do anymore, Richard. Yeah, well, we found a little bit of a twist where the right wing position has become, you know, protect women's sports. It's a funny thing where it's like, you know, it's just like people don't really know the history here. just sort of flip-flopping their positions. But yeah, I think the American version of this is very, very, you know, intimately related with our laws. So, Richard, as somebody who doesn't know a great deal about American law, and certainly, you know, by state as well, can you give some examples to illustrate your case?

What exactly, give some specific examples for exactly what is actually going on here? Yeah, sure. So, you know, first of all, there's the disparate impact doctrine. So in 1970, with a Supreme Court rule that under affirmative, I'm sorry, under the Civil Rights Act, the discrimination did not just mean I have a job where I, you know, don't want black people to be hired or something like that. Basically, anything you did, that had a disparate impact means that one group did better than the other. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I'm not exaggerating and saying it could be literally anything. It could be a policy that says if you have a criminal record, I'm not going to hire you. It could be. It could be. a tardiness policy, all of this stuff has been sort of litigated or debated at some point, it becomes problematic from a legal perspective. You have to show a business necessity. So it's not necessarily illegal, but the burden of proof becomes on you, the employer, to show that, like, this is necessary and you can potentially be sued over it. So that's one. That's a disparate impact doctrine. That's pretty much the entire private sector. That's all government hiring. You also have affirmative action in government contracting where basically, you know, everything in American law,

they deny that there's quotas, and it's all done in the name of, it's all done in the name of equal opportunity. But if you have a contract with the government, and a lot of corporate America does, you have to basically give them numbers on the race and the sex of the people in your workforce, and then if one group is underrepresented, you have to sort of submit plans and how to address that. You also have sort of these like harassment laws where, like, you know, if men want to, you know, if you make a group uncomfortable based on their race or their sex, you know, before the 1960s,

this was, this was settled by, you know, the private sector. You didn't like the job. You got a new job. Even in the first decades after the Civil Rights Act, people didn't interpret it as,

okay, like you have to, you as an employer have to police the speech of your employees to make sure that the men, you know, don't be too aggressive hitting out the women or whatever. That was really an innovation in the 1980s. So a lot of the speech codes,

came out of that, came out of the idea that, like, you as an employer became sort of the babysitter for your population to protect some people based on their group identities. And then there's all this stuff about, you know, colleges. Colleges is their own category. A lot of these things that people think are organic to the university. They come from the federal government. So like when they used to have those title line kangaroo courts, when men were accused of sexual assault, in a lot of cases, that was the Obama administration. You may know the history here because this was covered well in the press that, you know, they would come in and they would say, okay, you know, you're, you're, violating the Civil Rights Act. If you're not taking rape seriously enough, what is taking

rape and sexual assault seriously enough mean? It means not getting any due process to the men and hiring all these feminist title line coordinators and letting them basically remake your university, right? So it's, you know, there's all these doctrines and all these sort of legal. And, you know, the point is not just to sort of explain to people how this happened, which, you know, is interesting and important enough. Part of the point is also to tell people, well, you know, here's how it happened. And there's actually something you can do about it because it's just laws. It's just executive orders, judicial decisions, you know, legislation.

The way this stuff was implemented, it can also be undone in the same way. Well, before we get to undoing it or changing the way that the structure of it is, how do you incorporate the impact of social media and the internet in the cultural dimension? Because what you're really talking about is the legislative and institutional implementation of workness. But I think we'd all agree that in the last decade or so since the emergence of social media, culturally, the ideas of wokeness have really taken off, fueled by social media, certainly in my opinion. How do you think about that dimension of it? Yeah, so my friend Zach Goldberg has written about the Great Awakening,

and he has all those charts showing that, you know, these terms like systemic racism and so forth go through the roof around 2011. I don't think it's a coincidence that at 2011 was around the time that Twitter became prominent. And I don't think it's a coincidence that as soon as Elon Musk bought Twitter, within the first year of that happening, there were all these stories of the media about, oh, wow, conservative boycotts are suddenly working. You know, before that conservative boycotts, if you're like a company doing some kind of trans initiative,

you know, that was considered hate speech and, you know, the algorithm either repressed your speech or, you know, you were bad completely. And so, yeah, there is room, you know, in this world for sort of technological forces and cultural factors. And I do think that the internet and social media was important starting around 2010, 2011. At the same time, a lot of these ideas that sort of became more like prominent in the minds of the public, they were there before. It's just like liberals were sort of, they had more cognitive dissidents. They were a little bit more ashamed of them. There was, I think, a little bit more of a sort of compartmentalizing.

right so like when imbram kendi comes along and says uh you know we have we need a department of anti-racism which says that anything that has a disparate impact on blacks relative to whites needs to be uh you know needs to be investigated or banned um you know that's been that's something close to that has been the law for 50 years just people started to notice it because abram kendi sort of you know he came and he made it explicit and like people stopped being ashamed of it and they brought them and they gave speeches and they said okay let's just say this stuff out loud. But like every corporation and every government department has been operating on this basis, has been counting people according to race and sex, and like, you know, doing soft quotas

and making sure, you know, policing the speech of employees. They've been doing that for decades and decades. So, you know, there is something new with social media. There is also a continuation that I think people don't realize fall has been there. Well, what I mean, though, is I think it's like I don't know I'm probably a bit older than you in when I was a young guy and I was kind of on the what you call liberal I would we in this country call left I don't remember people pretending that you can change your sex by no that's words yeah unquestionably yeah so yeah yeah please yeah I mean I read about this a little bit yeah I think there's a I say on race you could look at like a conversation from 2020 in the U.S.

and a conversation from 1975, and they're almost the exact same thing. I mean, even like the police, the riots, like the late 1960, some gangbanger would, like a career criminal would get killed by the cops. There'd be these riots. Some people would come out and say law and order,

and some people would come out and say, no, no, we got to get at the root causes. We got to stop racism to prevent this. 1970, 2020, pretty much, you know, the exact same thing. On sex, there's a little bit of development. There's this, you know, idea that women, should be just like accommodated and work, then it becomes, you know, women are oppressed class. Homosexuality and transgenderism.

Here, I mean, I think that you're right. There have been, it has been revolutionary. I mean, I'm also old enough to remember when, you know, being gay was, you know, in high school was, we had one or two gay people. And, like, everyone would be like, ew, get away from me. This is the most disgusting thing in the world, right? You know, 10 years later, you know, we start legalizing gay marriage. A few years later, we have, you know, we have, you know, we have. this new, you know, gender identity idea.

And yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't think civil rights law explains. It's a little bit. I mean, Leo Sapir, a guy at the Manhattan Institute has been doing some work about how some of the anti-bullying initiatives coming from the federal government might have made an impact here. But it's not as easy to trace with race and sex. So I do think, you know, I agree with you that if, you know, the gender identity stuff is

something quite new. Yeah, I wasn't trying to explore that difference in opinion just for the sake of it. It just seems to me that as we move on to talking about how to address some of this, you're probably in a harder place to do it because you now have social media where a lot of even crazier ideas have become embedded in the public consciousness. So when you're talking about repealing certain legislation or revoking executive orders or whatever, there's now a significant body of the public, certainly the chattering public, social media who are just like, you know, I can't believe you're even considering this.

Yeah, but it's a double-edged sword because there's also my, you know, I document the sort of evolution of conservatives and the Republican Party over the time, too. And there's also been a sort of conservative media ecosystem that has sort of, you know, come around. And if you look at the parties over the last 30 years, the trend is polarization on every, almost every issue, the left becomes more left and the right becomes more universally right-wing. So I think that it's true, it's harder than ever to convince liberals of this stuff. It's easier than ever to convince conservatives of the stuff and get the mess up there and show them how absurd it is. So I'm not, I think it's actually good because you just have to convince some people who are in power some of the time in order to do this stuff.

And it's also very damaging to the economy, Richard, because if you think if you run a construction company, most women don't want to work in construction. So, I mean, what are you going to do with that? Because construction is sexist, mate. Yeah. But so what can you do as a construction company? You know, how many women are you going to go start trawling the bars looking for women and asking if they want a job in construction? They do that with women's sports too. Yeah, you're right.

They do that with women's sports too and like, you know, like rowing. Like, because, you know, not many women want to participate in sports as men. So they put up these rowing programs. And rowing is a great sport because it requires tons and tons of people. So you just get as many women as possible. And you're like, okay, you're all rowers. And I remember when I was at UCLA, I do this girl who would like, you know, they were just, they were filling bodies. Like a girl would join for two weeks.

She'd recruit her friends. They joined for two weeks. Okay, I don't want to be a freaking rower. You know, that's not what little girls grow up, you know, dream of doing. But they'll just take anybody. They'll put them on the team. They've got to make the numbers work. I mean, you're right.

This is like a huge tax of like every part of society. And then it's just like, it's, you know, it's also a tax in a sense that like, you can't have standards. Like, if you just had quotas, like, it might even be better because you can, you could at least give a test and just take the best people. But you can't, but the law is such that you can't do that because you have to have the facade of equal treatment. And so you can't just have quotas. So you just, what you do is you just get rid of the standards completely and then hope the numbers work out. It's really, it's really a sort of a twisted way to run a country. I mean, it's sort of amazing. It's amazing at all. But there's also hypocrisy there because

nobody looks at the 100 meters final and goes, you know what, we need some more white guys here, you know? I mean, I'm sure there's some people who do, but they're kind of a minority. I was looking at the New York City Marathon. Yeah, I tweeted about that a couple days ago. I mean, it was like the top, what do you like, or something like that? Like 18 were from East African descent. And they were like East Africans from East Africa and some of them were from America and some of them were from Western Europe. And they were all happened to be from Savalia or Kenya or Ethiopia and not even remarked upon. I mean, you look at the you look at the New York Times where they're reporting out the New York City Marathon. Yeah, just

nothing. We ignore race in that situation. I guess it's just the best people won. And yeah. And do you think we're, we're ever going to get past the idea? Because Thomas Sol, who I'm a huge fan of, you know, this is one of the things he's been talking about for decades now. The invention of this idea that you referred to, the disparity means that there's discrimination going on. It is completely a historical and non-scientific in every way. Yet when I talk to people in the United States in particular, because it's less embedded actually here in the UK, I remember I was flying to Miami and I was sitting next to a guy

who turned out to be a pilot for the airline that I was sitting in. It was a very smart guy. He was a black guy. And when we were talking about what was happening in Florida, he said, well, I'm an independent, but, you know, DeSantis is anti-work, so I don't like him. and we got into a big conversation about it. And one of the things he was saying is this very simple idea.

And again, I emphasize he was a smart guy, right? But he was like, look, the statistics show that the number of black airline pilots does not correspond to the percentage of the black population of the United States. That means there's discrimination. And I'd like to think I'm a reasonably persuasive guy. I tried every which way I approached it from a hundred different angles. The poor guy was stuck next to me for about three hours. I know how he feels, Richard.

I couldn't get it. I could not get past the idea with him. To him, it's just like disparity, discrimination. I could not find a way through. It's just so embedded with many people now. This Christmas, as you're shoveling enormous amounts of turkey, roast potatoes, sprouts, lashings of gravy, stuffing, Christmas pudding, mince pies. Francis, are we actually?

going to do the advert or you're just going to bang on about everything you're going to stuff your face with over Christmas? Well, I wanted to do both. Can we just do the advert? I'll do it, right? Francis, think about all the naughty websites that you've looked at over the last few days. Okay. Now think about who owns that Wi-Fi connection. Uh, me. And you haven't been using ExpressVPN, have you? No. So I've seen everything. But I use incognito mode. Incognito mode does nothing except hide your history from yourself. What? So I've seen everything. and I mean everything. I'm finished!

Correct. This would never have happened to Francis if you had just used ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is an app I have on my phone and computer that encrypts all of my online traffic so whatever I do stays private. Finished! If you don't have ExpressVPN turned on,

you may as well just clink your glass at dinner and read out your entire browsing history to your whole family, Francis. My live streams crumbling into dust. Exactly. The same goes wherever you are. Work, home or traveling. are you really going to trust your boss, girlfriend or Airbnb host to respect your privacy? I should have used ExpressVPN!

Now you're getting the hang of it, Francis. That's why Trigonometry is partnered with ExpressVPN to get you a special holiday offer. Go to ExpressVPN.com forward slash trigger right now and you can get three extra months free. Come on, Francis, do this last bit. That's EXP-R-E-S-V-N-N-com slash Trigger. ExpressVPN.com slash trigger to learn more. Yeah, I mean, it is, there is a lot of historical guilt about the situation of black Americans. I don't think people, like Pete, nobody thinks that Asians doing better than whites on Tess is discrimination or Asians being arrested less.

Even Hispanics and Latinos, you know, like you'll hear the, but it's not, you know, you don't see a lot of New York Times or Washington Post stories about, you know, too few Hispanic pilots. I mean, sometimes you do, but it's usually piggybacking off of the black experience. So you're right. It's an American-specific idea, but it's also an American-black-specific idea, just because we have sort of all this racial baggage from our history that just sort of shuts off our braids, whatever we think of the black issue. And then that becomes transferred. Like when we think about Hispanics, when we think about women, we have this template that we

sort of just are so sort of emotionally salient, right, that it becomes sort of the way we think about everything. Well, that's interesting because this guy was actually not African-American, as you like to say. He was from the Caribbean and he'd moved to the U.S. as a teenager. Which is interesting because the people from the Caribbean do relatively well in the United States. So you think if there was discrimination, right, they would see that that's the problem. But that's often the case. I mean, Eric Holder, you know, a very left-wing attorney general under Obama, also of Caribbean descent, right? So often they come, the Caribbean, you know, blacks from the Caribbean succeed, but then they assimilate into the ideology that says, you know, black people

can't succeed in America. Well, what was interesting as well is when I sort of did get him to see that there are contexts in which you can't just automatically assume discrimination because someone is not as represented as they are in the general population, he then pivoted to, well, yes, but the company provides a better service if it's representative of the population, which I thought was an interesting argument because I don't know that there's any evidence for that. I mean, especially for pilots, like for teachers or police, you hear that sometimes, right? It sort of makes sense a little bit, but, you know, do you pay attention to the race of your pilot?

Do you feel safer of your race? It's in that context, yeah, it's a very odd argument. So given that historical guilt and history that is awful in the United States, let's be clear about that, right? How does that ever get healed? Is there a way to overcome that? Is there a way to heal that? Is there a way for, you know, people talk about reparations

and it seems like a very crazy idea just because you'd struggle to implement it and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But is there a way that the United States is ever going to overcome the fact that, you know, it was a country that used slavery for a long time and then discriminated against people who were descendants of slaves?

Yeah, I mean, and like, you know, sort of these, you know, in tribal society sometimes, just have like blood money, right? Something bad will happen and one group will just pay off the other. The point of that and the benefit of that is that that's it. It wipes the slate clean, right? So if there was some way to just, you know, have a, you know, cut a check, you know, we can't bankrupt ourselves, but, you know, something. You're already bankrupt. So, yeah, we're already bankrupt. Right. You know, very, very theoretically. Well, I mean, you do see this reparations movement. And, you know, you never see them say that. You never see them say, okay, we've

calculated, you know, 50,000 per person or something. Usually it's much bigger than that. It's some ridiculous number. But it's never like, okay, no affirmative action, no disparate in fact, no, no, no, none of them. We never talk about race. We can't complain about racism ever again. If it was something like that, there could be some kind of basis for a conversation, right? But it's always just more of the same. It's you do reparations and then you have everything else remain the same and continue to guilt people. And so, yeah, if we did, if we did have to do some kind of healing. I would prefer a one-time payment rather than 200 years from now. We're still talking about littering laws are racist because, you know, black people, you know, get cited for

them more than white people or, you know, airline, you know, the airlines are racist or whatever. Yeah, it's just, it's just very, very hard because I think that there's, you know, I think there's an understanding, even among, they, they don't, they know it won't fix it. They know there are problems in the black community. You know, they know that one group has, you know, 70% out of wedlock births and another group has, you know, 30% out of wedlock births, you know, that there's going to be disparaging that. You could give people a check. That's not going to, that's not going to fix that, right? And so I think they even understand that. So it's just a matter of, you know, it's just a matter of sort of this permanent, this idea of sort of permanent revolution. And, you know, conservatives,

I think, you know, some conservatives might be open to one type reparations payment, but they see what's going on. And they say, yeah, of course, we're just, this is just another, another program and won't do anything dead than anything else. Yeah, I think that's a very good point because the reality is, is these arguments, a lot of the time, they're not based in fact, they're based in emotion. And when someone is emotional, it's very difficult to rationalize with them and go, well, look, what is it that you actually want?

What is it that you want to achieve? What is it that you want from this particular discussion? Because they want to feel better or they want to win or whatever it may be. And that's very, very difficult to deal with. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I think, yeah, people just sort of, they need a, you know, sort of a, look, there's a, you have, I think you have to tell people a different story. You could tell

people that story, which is true that black people were enslaved and mistreated for much of American history, and that's fine. At the same time, you have to tell people that, you know, which is just as true, that America has been, you know, a, you know, a remarkable, you know, engine of sort of human well-being, bettering of all races, including black people in America, you know, there's a population of 30, something like 35, 40 million black Americans who have a higher standard of living than black people in any other part of the world. And, you know, like every other group comes here and does pretty well. And we should be thankful for that, right?

We should be thankful in the end that, like, as bad as it was in the past, we ended up in a pretty good place from a historical perspective. And, you know, I don't know. I think there's just sort of there's such a tendency to compare to, you know, or to obsess about, you know, past mistreatment or disparities between groups that it's hard to get. get there. But yeah, you're right. I mean, just like sort of fixing the civil rights laws, I think as part of it can make this stuff less salient and at least give them less political power. But as far as sort of the emotional baggage we have here that sort of envelops everything

in society, you know, that's a much harder question and sort of a larger project to deal with. Well, let's talk about fixing the civil rights laws. I mean, I wonder whether I agree with you that that would give them less salience. My sense, based on what we've observed in recent years, years of American politics, purely as an outsider is. And this is kind of the point I was making earlier to you is every time conservatives or the right attempt to deal with some of these issues, everyone freaks out massively. And we saw this with Donald Trump, where essentially his ability to do many of the things that he was trying to do was impeded by the fact that any time he, you know, took a breath, the media lost their share. And then, you know, he was evil, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, and then he ended up not doing many of the things that he promised to do. But tell us about fixing the civil rights laws and then we can argue about that. Yeah. So within the book, I mean, I do have like a political analysis. I do just, you know, I say that this is what you do, but I think that it's, you know, quite doable. So, you know, when the Supreme Court ruled on affirmative action, that got some attention, a lot of attention. It wasn't, there wasn't protests in the, you know, in the streets. It wasn't like when George Floyd got killed.

It wasn't even like Dobbs where it had this electoral backlash. Part of the reason why, because most of the public agreed with it, actually. And a lot of public debate, well, on the abortion issue, the left knows that most of the public agrees with them. And so they keep harping on it, and it's politically advantageous for them to do so. And so that was just, you know, that was sort of more salient than most things. That was, you know, getting rid of affirmative action in universities. A lot of the stuff that I'm talking about is very beneath the surface, right? The disparate impacts.

Or you define discrimination based on the number of people you, you know, the explicit discrimination or, you know, the tests are, you know, the disparities based on tests. You know, most people don't know what disparate impact was. If they did know what disparate effect was, they would probably be horrified by it. I think it was stupid. And so I think a lot of the stuff is, it's, you know, what liberals pay attention to and what, you know, sort of outrageous people isn't always the most important thing, right? So you could do some things that are important and can, you know, make a big difference,

but that people really won't notice the way that they notice a lot of other things. Well, and so the media blow it up. I mean, there's that, right? The media are going to say... But like I said, I think they follow public opinion, and even left-wing opinion. So, like, abortion, they will keep harping on because they think it can help Democrats

and they can win elections. They want to run out affirmative action and make that the biggest deal. You know, they've tried to brainwash people, all that stuff. It doesn't work. You know, people always think it's messaging. It's like, no, like, the public, you know,

they're not, they don't take the pro-life position and they're not going to be for affirmative action and, like, you know, the equity agenda. You just can't get them to do that, not even California, not even Washington, what they vote for. So they can freak out, but they're probably going to limit themselves just because they, you know, they're being strategic here or sort of like, you know, sort of subconsciously strategic about what helps liberals.

And at the same time, they're just, there's just not an audience for a lot of this, you know, sort of wokeness as law. And so I do think this stuff is doable. You know, and so, you know, a lot of it can be done through the executive branch. A lot of it can be done through the courts, the affirmative action that I talked about in government contracting. that was an executive order. That could be undone by executive order.

Vivek Ramoswabi, I told him about this executive order, and he promised that on the first day his office, not just to me, I mean, publicly that he would repeal that. It wasn't going to get that much attention because nobody even knows about affirmative action in government contracting, right? There's so many things that they could be getting outraged about. And so there's that, you know, there's the disparate impact doctrine,

I mean, it has to go. You could do that. That was not in the original Civil Rights Act. I mean, it could be done through courts or through the executive branch. And then a lot of this stuff is sort of the power of the purse stuff. You know, you see this isn't sort of realistic at the federal level right now with Biden in an office. But at the state level, you do see states getting rid of DEI offices.

You know, it's been happening in Iowa. I've seen it happen in Texas. It's happening in Florida. And so a lot of the civil rights stuff on the universities came through the power of the purse saying, look, we give all this government money to you. You do what I want. You could do it in reverse, too. we've seen some states start to do that.

Richard, sorry, just to finish on this point. A quick question I have is, particularly at the federal level of stuff you're talking about. I mean, you're a smart guy, but you're probably not the only guy that's realized this is going on. How come Republican presidents in the past haven't tackled these issues in the way that you were advocating? Yeah, I mean, a lot of people, you know, like if you go to sort of, yeah, this is such an important question. and such a good question that I have an entire chapter in the book about like, where have Republicans been? And I frame it in exactly that way. The public is sort of with you on this. It's important. It's a big deal. And so, you know, where have you been?

People don't, I think people, what people don't realize is that there really wasn't a conservative media until the late 1990s, right? If you look at the cover, like in 1980s, Ronald Reagan actually fought on this stuff. He tried to get rid of affirmative action to government contracting. He tried to do some stuff that I described in the book on civil rights law to sort of take the foot of the federal government off of the off of the off of he actually vetoed a bill to basically protect you know religious liberty and basically being able to get rid of a lot of this title line feminist regulations away from universities it got overridden and you look at the media coverage at the time the media coverage the only stories you could find are the Washington Post New York Times about how

this is just Republicans are racist and Democrats are not racist and so there's no conservative media it's completely, there's a monopoly of information. In the late 1990s, you get Fox News. And then you have 2000s, the war on terror sort of dominates everything. This stuff has now been around for 20, 30 years. So we've only had like 25 years of like conservatives sort of having, like, there's conservative legal scholars who've done a lot of good work that I've cited them, right? But they're not the people who are getting, you know, the attention of the senators and the president, right?

And so we've only had really like 25 years of any kind of real conservative needs. to any substantial degree. And, you know, a lot has been going on in that 25 years. And this stuff was, in many cases, decades old. So, you know, they're really, you know, you sort of have to, you know, people forget. I mean, a lot of these stuff was sort of life issues in the 1970s, 1980s. It went around for a very long time. And so I think now is the time to act on it.

I just think that people sort of, you know, people sort of, you know, people sort of, you know, how much like knowledge and knowledge can be just sort of lost if people don't pay attention to something, it just becomes part of the status quo. Richard, would you not say that it would need to be a very, very brave president to do this? Because if you think how charged, literally every discussion is now. Now, people can almost come to blows with a discussion about should men be allowed to walk into a woman's toilet. And we're talking here about dismantling civil rights laws.

I mean, that is going, that could very well be a powder keg of an issue. I mean, you don't call it dismantling civil rights laws. You say, and this is actually true. He's a political expert, man. That's what I do. We're going to come out and dismantle civil rights laws to put it to the head. Yeah. No, you say go to the back to, which is actually true, you say you go back to the original intent of the Civil Rights Act.

You're strengthening civil rights law, right? Like the people who sued to get rid of affirmative action, they didn't call themselves, you know, the anti-civil rights coalition. They call themselves, you know, students for fair admissions, right? So, yeah, I don't, you know, like, yeah, brave president. I don't know. Like, I mean, we have, I mean, Trump was a brave president. I mean, he did a lot of things that angered a lot of people a lot of the time. This stuff is a lot, you know, less unpopular than a lot of the other stuff he did.

So it's doable. I mean, he signed that executive order. I mean, sort of the closest analog to this is he signed that executive order in the last months of office. After he saw Chris Rufo on Fox News that said, no more critical race theory training in the federal government, get a little bit of attention. It wasn't the biggest scandal of his presidency. But, you know, Republican presidents are polarizing anyway. They do stuff that angers the media. It's not, you know, impossible to imagine. Richard, do you think it might be that we've reached

what is a lot of people term peak woke? And as a result of reaching peak woke, this is a much easier policy to implement. Or do you think we haven't reached that point yet? We haven't reached the height of the insanity. Yeah. I mean, I did, you know, I did write an article on this. I think that sort of, I do think we, it depends on where you're looking. So if you're looking at universities or the media, I think woke has been sort of institutionalized and it's, it's not like it was in 2020, but it is, I mean, it is sort of just, you know, it's in the, it's in the ether now. It's fundamental to like what institutions are. As far as the wider culture, I do think we're past peak, well, I mean, mostly because things can't go on forever. Like, you can't,

maintain the frenzy of summer 2020, you know, indefinitely, like, you have to go back to some kind of normalcy. But, like, you know, Ethan Strauss has got a good subtext, the sports writer has written about how basically the sports coverage just went back to covering sports, like two, three years ago, it was you go to the front page and half of it is, you know, some kind of woke nonsense. They're still liberal, but they're mostly just covering sports now. And I think that's sort of a good bellwether to where we are, to where we are. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that, Yeah, we are in a place where, you know, I think that people sort of, you know, there's people, media figures, you know, people in law and government, I mean, they've pushed back

on it. I think the ports of civil rights law is like sort of like, it's always, it's sort of like having a state religion. It stays latent, right? So like, I want to make sure in 15, 20 years, we don't have another summer of 2020. Civil rights law makes it very, very easy to do that because it's all, there's always lawsuits. There's always bureaucracies around.

And if they go away, you won't notice that they go away, but they just go away. And then we don't have a summer of 2020 again. We don't have, you know, all these crazy sort of initiatives. So, yeah, I do think overall we are probably past peak woke. And yeah, it's also a good. It's a good, I mean, it's something might make it harder because there's no, there's no urgency. It's just like, oh, the problem solved itself. But like, no, institutions are still doing racial being counting.

They're still relying on disparate impact. They're still doing affirmative action. So you've got to keep reminding people that it's actually, you know, it's important to, to focus on these issues and to do something about them. The thing that I always found very interesting is a role of shareholders in this. So, for instance, you know, all these shareholders who've bought shares in huge companies and then the performance of a said company, let's take Disney, for example, because it has these... Just a random.

Just a random. Just a random company. Because it embraces these policies and these ideologies, suddenly the profits go through the floor, I would always thought that there'd be a real tension there with the shareholder, because surely they're furious. Well, I mean,

maybe, but remember, before Elon Musk bought Twitter, you had civil rights law, you had sort of this bullying from the government, and you also had the media, which would, you know, you stand up to Black Lives Matter, they'll portray you as the Ku Klux Klan, and is that good for shareholder value? No, I think

in a lot of cases, they were following their interest by just giving in, you know, the mob comes and says, nice story you have there, you know, it'll be terrible, shame if something happens to it. It's often rational to just give in, even though you would rather, you know, you would rather ideally not have to pay any kind of protection money. And so I do, you know, I do think this is, I do think what we've seen is sort of consistent now with like, you know, now with like social media changed and some of the conservatives being, you know, pushing back through the state governments, you know, in other means. I do think that there has been sort of a shift in corporate

America. So yeah, I do think all of this is consistent with sort of a classic capitalist model where, you know, businesses do what's in their financial interest. The job of sort of activists and people in politics is to make their interest to do the right thing. Yeah, and we saw that. I mean, with Bud Light, they went from Dylan Mulvaney to now advertising with the UFC. That's a shift, isn't it? Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that

could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. But listen, it's a great book. I really recommend people check it out. There's one other thing I wanted to talk to you about before we head over to locals and ask you questions from our audience. People, when you wrote the book and when you were gearing up to promote it, some people in the media came after you and sort of did an expose on your past. And you were quite, you had some extreme views in the past that you've written about since. And I thought it was a very interesting thing where someone, A, someone in the public eye who did have. extreme views that were revealed they came for you and they didn't manage to cancel you. But the other thing that I thought was interesting as well was that you were someone who just

owned the mistakes that they'd made and kind of described how you went from where you were to where you are now. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I think that would be fascinating for people. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. You know, it dropped about a month and a half before my book came out. And this stuff was, you know, stuff that I'd written 15 years ago. I mean, It's not, I don't stand by it. I think it's, you know, I think it's awful stuff. And I think people sort of, and I was lucky, I think, because I had a body of work since then where people can see that like, that's not how I think anymore.

At the same time, I'm not. Just give us a flavor of some of the things that you were writing about back then and sort of some of the views you held. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, I believe, I believe that basically a white identity politics. I thought that, you know, even though I'm Middle Eastern, I thought that this was sort of maybe necessary to counteract, um, left. this identity politics. There was a sort of, you know, you know, like immigration restrictionism

on that basis, stuff about, you know, women shouldn't vote and this and that, you know, which I, you know, I've denounced explicitly even before this stuff came out. So, you know, basically, like imagine a right wing, you know, anonymous poster, but, you know, a little bit more. It's not hard to imagine. We see a lot of those. But what I'm curious about, and I know you've written about in your substack, is how you came to have those ideas. is in the first place because frankly, let's be honest, there's quite a lot of people that are leaning in that direction, certainly online, as you say, anonymously, etc. So please understand, I'm not trying to make you look bad here. I'm just very curious to explore how you come to that and then how

you move out of that. That's very interesting to me. Yeah, yeah, and I did write an essay, you know, explaining that. So, yeah, it's, of course, you know, I appreciate you asking. It's, yeah, I mean, I think you start out with, I think this is where, this is sort of my journey. I think it's a lot of people's journey too, is that you see the mainstream media and, you know, institutions, education, are absolutely insane on some issues, right? America is a white supremacist nation. There are no differences between men and women. I didn't have to, you know, I sometimes see people who read scientific papers, like, look, men are stronger than women. I'm like, you had to read scientific papers.

It's just like the moment I heard it. I was just like, you know, you watch the nature shows and they show the male behaves like this and the female behaves like this. And it's like, where does this stuff come from. And, you know, when I was in college, I would have, like, these cultural anthropology courses. And I remember just questioning, like, the professor of this, you know, this assumption of, like, gender blank slatism. And he just had nothing. I mean, it was just really, really bad. And so you started with that, like, okay, people are lying to you in an extreme, absurd way. You know, it's not like they're just, their facts are a little bit off. It's like they're telling you the sky is green. And then it becomes easy to think all society is corrupt.

You know, everything is false, right? I think people like, you know, they get into, like, revisionism about like World War II or like they get into like anti-vax or you know anything people will conspiracy theories people will buy into anything because of the because of just how crazy sort of society is on race and gender and now with gender identity I mean it's even it's even it's even it's even crazier and I think it's just sort of some part of it is just sort of like a logical thing where like people have been lying to me so I'm just going to think you know whatever anonymous person says on the internet you know it's true part of it is just emotional you become alienated from society You become angry.

You see sort of a lot of dysfunction and you see people are lying to you about it. And you sort of just take this, you know, antagonistic view towards society. And then you, yeah, it could drive some people crazy. And I think what's, you know, something a little bit different for me is that I didn't become like a leftist. I still think liberals are absolutely crazy on race on gender issues. But, you know, I grew older and smarter and thought more carefully about it and wanted to get people, constructive solutions to do something about it. And, you know, also my worldview sort of became less conspiratorial over time, as I did see, you know, sort of the history of civil rights law,

just more knowledge of where this stuff came from out of a genuine interest in it. And, you know, and then also observing that a lot of times the non-mainstream people, you know, the anonymous Twitter accounts or whatever, they're also crazy. They also believe things that are obviously not true. In many cases, they're, you know, worse than the mainstream media. And so, yeah, I mean, it's just having that balance, just knowing that they're lying to you, knowing what they're saying is false, but not going into sort of this habit of, you know, always talking about them lying to you. That's like the default state of interacting with the world. And, you know, that's sort of my process. And I hope that other people who sort of know the left is crazy on some issues,

you know, I hope they could sort of, I hope they could take some lessons from that. I think the dangerous thing about extreme ideologies, whether right and left, is that it co-ops people, but also it antagonizes others. And in many ways, it's actually the people who it antagonizes are even more dangerous. People go to me, you're worried about woke people, and I go, well, you know, I mean, they're here to stay and what they, I don't agree with a lot of what they've done. But I'm actually far more worried about the backlash that I see coming on the horizon than I am about woke people, if I'm honest. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, yeah, I mean, the, The backlash is interesting.

I mean, I do think that, like, you do see people who are on the right who are like, just they do become like anti-democracy. Like, it's sort of a trope that like, you know, liberals just made this. I'm like, no, like a lot of them do like Putin. A lot of them sort of have a grudging respect for the Chinese, right? A lot of them do just think democracy is false. So you're absolutely right. You know, there is a backlash that it can many cases be just as bad as what it's fighting

against. Yeah, I sat next to a guy at dinner a while ago. to like a prominent writer here in the UK. He was telling me how China is more democratic than the US. And I was going, mate, just like, whatever you're reading, stop reading it. Because your brain is melting here. Exactly. Perfect demonstration of the point. Yeah, you're absolutely right.

But it's also as well that, you know, they, people become more emboldened, the bigger the backlash grows. Yeah. And the thing that I find worrying as well is, you know, by deplatforming these people, what you're effectively doing is you're giving these ideas a kind of glamour. You can't listen to it because, you know, this is, this is so dangerous. And if you think about young people like yourself at the time, that's kind of, that could be interpreted as dissident thought. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of them have embraced sort of, right, the dissident sort of, you know, they call themselves dissident writer,

or whatever. You know, the problem with that is, I mean, to call yourself just a dissident, and say that's your sort of identity is like just as illogical saying I'm a mainstream media coming to say. Right. I'm going to believe, right? You'll end up just as stupid in many ways worse because like, you know, there's no accountability for like what anonymous people say online. We're in the media.

Like, you know, there's debate and there's people go back and forth. I mean, yeah, you could find a dissident view that China and Russia are more democratic and, you know, freer and better countries, you know, than the United States. It's, yeah, I think it's just a cautionary tale of like, you know, if you become, you know, anti-wokness becomes, you know, goes too far because part of your identity. Yeah, people, we've got to lead people away from that. That's not a good place to be. Yeah, I agree with you, man. And obviously, Francis and I, you know, people would say we're anti-woke because we are anti-woke. We've never made that our identity particularly. But we are dissidents.

But this isn't what dissidents look like, mate. But, you know, the thought that, what I started to notice with, I mean, Ukraine was a big one for me, but there was lots of others. Whereas, it's like, oh, you're not someone who's just concerned about the fact that the mainstream has gone bad shit, which it has. You've got a form of like oppositional defiance disorder where it's like whatever they say, you pick the opposite. And that's the entire posture towards the world that you have. What I wonder not to get too personal with you, but I'm just curious, quite often I think moving from that sort of extreme way of looking at the world, did you start to change how you see the world because you maybe became a bit, happier in your life? Was that part of it or am I projecting here? No, I think that is, I mean,

I think that is right. I was sort of, yeah, I was much less happy 15 years ago than I am now. And a lot of it was just sort of, you know, regular self-improvement, you know, getting in shape, you know, talking to girls, you know, the stuff that people, you know, the stuff that, you know, your uncle might, you know, might tell you to do. Yeah, I think that you can't really separate this stuff. I think that a lot of the wokeness, you've probably seen the data on wokeness and mental illness. I mean, it's undeniably, you know, there's a connection there. And just from being around sort of, you know, sort of the right wing, sort of dissident extremist fear, you see there's something similar going on. You know, that to me is absolutely clear from my experiences.

But the thing that I find frustrating with, should we just call them this dissident community, is they constantly attack woke people and they say, oh, they're losers. you know, they have a victim mindset. Well, mate, you've got a victim mindset. Yes, it's often, it's often, you know, it's often just as bad or worse, right? Like, you'll see, you know, they'll say, oh, you know, like a lot of, you know, it's like, you know, people still get married, people still have kids, people still buy houses. I mean, life is continuing, right?

There's not this apocalyptic dystopia that people on the online, right? Imagine, yeah, we have problems, but, you know, you do, you think about them, you put the mid-perspective and you think of like, you know, smart policy solutions to deal with them. That's the healthy grown-up way to think about these things. Richard, and one quick topic before we move to locals, because you mentioned being from the Middle East. Where in the Middle East are you from? My dad is a Palestinian Christian, and my mom is a Jordanian Catholic. I throw the religion in there because people, you know, of course, want to know for you.

I can't see you guys, by the way. You guys are frozen. I still hear you find out. You're frozen for us as well, Elliot. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Perfect. Perfect. Cool. So one quick topic before we move to locals and do questions from our audience with your

Middle Eastern background. How would you solve it? You've been going hard at it on Twitter, which I'm enjoying. You love trolling people. And I love watching, I love trolling people. I love watching other people trolling people. It's a past time of mine. But you are, I have not seen.

anybody go harder on the Palestinians than you, let's put it that way. So what is kind of your take on the Middle East and the conflict there and the events of the last six weeks? Yeah. So I have an essay on my substack that's going to be, I've written a few essays, but I have another one where it's just going to be talking about how we understand anti-Semitism and our anti-Israeli sentiment. So a lot of people they think, you know, look, I'll put it this way. I've been reading a lot of and listening to a lot of sort of liberals talk about the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And, you know, it's amazing. They don't deny what Hamas is. They can't deny it. They don't even like, they don't even have a suggestion of who you would talk to on the Palestinian side to ever get peace. It's just like,

don't fight, you know, don't fight the war. Hope, you know, give them aid. Like, don't like, go to war after this, you know, terrorist attack that killed torture people, you know, like a medieval raid, like took off women and children back to Gaza. And, you know, there's not even like a hint of a suggestion. And so, you know, it's, there's good, there's got, there's has to be an Israeli response. I mean, Israel is threatened long term. They're having rockets thrown at, you know, lobbed at them from the north and from the, uh, from the south. Um, you know, there's no, you know, there's technology that develops over time where the rocket technology and the drone technology potentially gets better. There's a terrorist organization, you know, it's basically a state,

Gaza, but it runs its own affairs that is dedicated to Israel's destruction, doesn't even pretend to want like a two-state solution or anything. And so like, you know, this is, you know, the framework here is not like, you know, a criminal organization or like a terrorist organization on the other side. The framework here should be, you know, the threat from Germany or Japan and World War. And to that, like, to the U.S. or Britain, like, I don't think Germany or Japan was as threatening as Israel or as the, as Gaza is to the Israelis, because they're right next to them. There's population. There's, you know, there's a, you know, there's a, you know, there's a, you know, there's a, you know, there's a different level of technology. And so, you know, I, and there's, you know, a commitment to their destruction in the way like Japan didn't want to, you know, necessarily destroy the U.S. that wasn't like they're, you know, a part of their, you know, governing ideology. And so Israel has to, you know, fight, I think Israel has to fight this war to win. In the long run, it'll be better for the Palestinian people if they're not, you know, ruled by these terrorists. I, I think that the idea of pressuring the world to open up refugees, open up to refugees,

and it could be the Arab States, it could be European states, it could be whoever. I mean, anywhere would be anywhere would be better than Gaza, right, under Hamas, and be, you know, constantly, you know, people call it an open-air prison cap. So I think that there should be sort of, I think Israel has to just do what it needs to do to ensure its own security. And I think that there is no optimistic scenario of like what Gaza looks like with the Palestinians living there. And, you know, when we have these tragic situations, we often, on almost every other case, we accept the idea that people should become refugees and go start somewhere else

because it's too, you know, the situation is too tragic and it's too terrible where they are right now. It's better for them in the long run. So I think that should be sort of the goal here. It doesn't seem like, you know, it doesn't seem like a lot of the people in the region agree because, you know, they want to, they care about the Palestinian cause and a lot of people don't want the refugees. But I think that's the sort of, that's the path to a long-term humane solution to all of this. And what do you make of the argument? I mean, I heard John Mayashima recently saying that the reason Hamasq attacked on October 7th is that their resistance force fighting against Israeli occupation, fighting against Israeli oppression, and as long as Israel israeli oppression, and as

long as Israel continues to have this right-wing government that is being controlled by far-right forces within Israel that believe in a single-state solution where Israel controls everything. They believe in greater Israel. That's why Hamas lashed out, and they'll continue to lash out as long as the Palestinian people are oppressed. Well, I mean, it depends on how you def-I mean, I mean, it's true in a sense, and that, like, it's because there's a dispute between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and they're oppressed. But what does oppressed mean?

I think that to the, to the, a lot of the Palestinian people in Hamas and Gaza, oppression means what happened in 1948, what's happened in 1967, right? And so, yes, they're oppressed. They see the existence of the Jewish state itself as a source of oppression. So it's true if you gave up on the idea of a Jewish state. Now, like this idea that like, you know, you could probably, you could have peace, of course. Now, this idea that, you know, I haven't heard, I haven't heard Mercerheimer's opinion on this, but of, you know, taking your word as, that's what he's saying. or we can use that as an argument. The idea that there's a difference between like a right-wing Israeli government

versus a left-wing Israeli government, and that's going to make Hamas moderate and less likely to attack. You know, Hamas itself doesn't say that. I mean, Hamas, you know, it's just a very big projection onto them. It's not like, oh, man, Nanja who won the election. If, you know, if it had been, you know, the Labor Party, if, you know, the leftist had won, we'd be, you know, we'd get to a two-state solution. There's not even, like, a hint of, like, pretending to think like this, right?

So I don't know what evidence it would take to get people to just see that like, look, Hamas and, you know, the Palestinian people in general, you know, the majority of them don't want Israel to exist. And their, you know, political and military actions are consistent with that belief and their words. I mean, and how they act. I just don't see what the evidence is for the opposite perspective. It's a sensible perspective. I mean, like, you know, you can in some, you know, in some, you know, the U.S. left Vietnam and. you know, the Vietnamese, you know, left the Americans alone. And, you know, they were, blessed a ideology of destroying America from the Viet Cong.

But in this case, I just don't see what the evidence is worth. I mean, it's a great point. And also as well, I just, it's that classic thing where people just want a simple solution to a very, very complex problem. Yeah, they don't want tradeoffs. They want to think, like, you must, if you're, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, if the if the Palestinians are angry, it must be you have to be sort of nicer to them or be more humane and then they're going to be less angry and you're going to achieve your security.

It would be nice. You see these ideas like, oh, don't attack the people of Gaza. Don't kill a lot of civilians. Just go like kill the leaders of Hamas. It's like you think like people weren't like nobody's tried that? You think Israel did it. Okay, oh, just kill the leader. No, they're in hospitals.

They're, you know, they put guns under the beds of their, you know, of their children, right? they live in these areas because that's their hope. That's their strategy for fighting, right? So they're not making it easy for you. They're not going off to a field somewhere and saying, come fight us and you can now drone us or meet us in the field. They're doing, they're specifically, you know, playing to this human right sentiment in order as part of their strategy because that's

what they have. They're not the stronger side. So yeah, I just think that, you know, just looking at sort of the left or the so-called pro-peace side in all this. It just strikes me as completely unrealistic. And Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show. The final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Yeah. So in the United States, we have a sort of a budget, you know, an apocalypse upon us in 10, 15 years.

The population is getting older. If you look at the percentage of federal budget going to old people through social security and Medicare, it's very high and these people are aging. And about 2033, the money runs out. We're either going to have to cut spending to old people. And even like rich old people get the same benefits that, you know, poor old people do. Or we're going to have to sort of raise taxes and become a euro welfare state, but without even the welfare. It's just all going to go to old people. Right.

And so there's a guy named Brian Rydall, who I have my own podcast at cspiCenter.com. I just talked to him about this the other week. And, yeah, this is the next 10, 15 years. I think this is going to really determine, you know, the future of sort of the American standard standard of living. So I encourage people to read up and think about the entitlements question because it's coming for us in the next 10, 50 years. All right. We need a call of old people. There we go. See, you are woke. Richard, great book, origins of work. I recommend everybody check it out to get your take on it.

We're going to head on over to locals where we're going to ask you questions from our supporters that they've submitted. So we'll see you there. Appreciate it. Thanks, thanks guys. In recent years, the woke mob and anti-racist authors have attempted to say that only white people can be racist. How can a white person legally complain against something that with modern language rebranding no longer exists when applied to them?