Full transcript: Exposing Social Justice Warriors
1:50 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is James Lindsay, the American author, academic and political commentator. Your work explores political and social issues, and your essays have been published in The New York Times, The LA Times, USA Today, and Time magazine. In 2018, you wrote bogus papers on race, gender, and sexuality that were accepted and published in prestigious academic journals, proving a bias to accept dubious science in order to further their own social and political agendas. Your upcoming book, Cynical Theories, How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, gender and identity, exposes encounters, cancel culture, social media dogpiles, and woke ideologies. James, welcome to London Real.
2:30 James Lindsay: Glad to be here.
2:31 Brian Rose: Hey, great to have you. Before we get started, I just want to announce that we are streaming now on our new Digital Freedom Platform which is a censorship-free independent broadcasting system that is of the people, by the people, for the people, and available exclusively on our website at freedomplatform.tv. Can everyone watching us now please share this link via the sidebar to any and all of your social media channels? Let me just repeat that. Can everyone watching us now please share this link via the sidebar? This is important. Just ask your friends and family to give us 15 minutes and then they can decide. James, I pledge to you and everyone watching us that none of this conversation will be edited, censored, removed, or banned, and that anyone in the world can watch the full version of this episode free at freedomplatform.tv forward slash Lindsay, thanks to the generous donations of over 34,000 people around the world that we affectionately call the London Real Army.
3:17 Brian Rose: For anybody wanting to become a founding member of the Digital Freedom Platform, they can visit freedomplatform.tv forward slash give to donate and fight with us on the front lines to protect our human rights. Here at London Real, we’ve been a platform for free speech since 2011. And James, I’m excited to have you here today. Maybe we can start and talk a little bit about censorship. You know, we’ve been in a pretty public battle for the last three months against a lot of platforms, including YouTube, where a lot of our content has just been taken down, censored. I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that we are one upload away from being completely de-platformed on YouTube.
3:50 Brian Rose: This is nine years of content, 8,000 videos, quarter of a billion views. And maybe we can talk about that. I know you had recently been kind of temporarily banned on Twitter and now you’re back. Why are we being censored now? Or why are we being censored at all? Do you have some thoughts on that before we jump into your adventures?
4:11 James Lindsay: I mean, it depends on how deep you wanna go. I have a large swath of thoughts on why we might be being censored at the moment and what sorts of discourses are being suppressed and why, if you wanna get really deep into it, we can. But yeah, I did get bumped off of Twitter for approximately 12 hours with no explanation whatsoever. I was writing, in fact, I’m writing an encyclopedia of social justice terminology for my website, New Discourses, and I was actually writing the entry for exclusion for my encyclopedia when I then came back to my web browser and noticed that I had been excluded from Twitter.
4:51 James Lindsay: And then I just was let back in about 12 hours later with no explanation whatsoever, ever given, no answer to my help ticket that I sent to Twitter, nothing. So I don’t know what that was about. I don’t know why it happened. We recently had a video we uploaded to YouTube where my colleague, Helen Pluckrose, who is one of the most, I guess, mild-mannered, least dangerous people that you could possibly imagine, gave a talk explaining the postmodern roots of the current social justice activism. She’s just talking about philosophy, French philosophy as it morphed into American philosophy over the past 50 years or so. That video was deemed unmonetizable, not suitable for all advertisers with no explanation after a human reviewed it.
5:37 James Lindsay: There is probably some sort of censorship going on. The reason in short is that the ideology we’re dealing with believes that discourses, the way things are spoken about, are constitutive of reality. So reality is made by the way we think and the way we think is shaped by the way we speak, what we consider to be legitimate, what we consider to be true. And so if they can engineer what we say and think and share and are exposed to, then they can stamp oppression out of the world by making sure that nobody gets the wrong discourses in their head, hence calling my website New Discourses.
6:16 Brian Rose: Hmm. Okay. And I think that’s probably a reasonable supposition. Is there a they? I mean, the strange thing about this is that we’re talking about a handful of people. I could probably count them on one or two hands in Silicon Valley that are probably controlling 98% of the digital communications out there between Mr. Zuckerberg, the CEOs of Google or Alphabet, you know, and Dorsey. I mean, it’s just a few people, too, and they seem to all have the same politics. I don’t know, what are your thoughts on that, James?
6:46 James Lindsay: So, I mean, I don’t know a whole lot about the specifics of who believes what and where they’re positioned. I do know that tech is rather heavily taken by this ideology that is concerned with discourse engineering. So I do think that it’s likely that a small number of people with similar or identical politics with regard to certain views of discourse or free speech or whatever, have the power through these platforms that kind of create the digital public square to affect massive amounts of censorship in alignment with their own views or their moral beliefs about how the world should be ordered. And so it’s an interesting situation we find ourselves in where a very small number of people who have particular sensitivities as all human beings do can enforce upon the entire digital public square their moral sensibilities with very few actors doing so.
7:43 James Lindsay: So when I say, you know, who are they in terms of the censorship? I don’t know, it could have been just Twitter’s algorithms that were tripped by a handful of activists going and flagging a bunch of my content. That’s a thing you can do, apparently. There’s a number of things that could have happened and Twitter, you know, itself probably has no idea. So it’s very, very unclear who the they are except that there is a very definite ideology that can be pinned to a very definite line of thought that has been developing and being taught in our universities and then our primary and secondary education systems now for a number of decades that inform this line of thinking and would lead to possibly that handful of very influential tech magnets having a certain view of the world that they can then enforce.
8:34 Brian Rose: You know, I always try to look at it like not from a conspiracy standpoint, although I’ve had some people talk about that on my show. And I just try to think, you know, I’m assuming these are pretty reasonable people, you know, they run businesses, they’ve created businesses. And yet what they’re doing, it seems kind of like it has this weird agenda. And I try to give them the benefit of the doubt and just thinking that I believe they’re probably doing what they think is right. but I just wonder how controlling speech could ever be deemed as right. And unless you think that the things that we are talking about are so wrong and bad that they need to be suppressed or is it about money at the end of the day and advertising?
9:14 Brian Rose: I don’t know, I’m curious what you think.
9:16 James Lindsay: I think yes, both. So certainly this, you could imagine if it were a religious movement that had somehow started to take over and you started to have a large number of new religious converts in the halls of power that decided they wanted to make everything to be their particular new sect of Christianity. Often new converts to a religion are kind of on fire for whatever the faith teaches. And so you can imagine that there’s a spread of a religious movement that then the people who have bought into it want to enforce and to put into the structure of everything. I mean, you’ve seen this, we see this throughout history, everywhere there’s been a serious religious movement, its adherents want it in the schools, they want it in the government, they want it in the laws, they want it everywhere they can get it until it kind of gets tamed and simmers down a bit.
10:05 James Lindsay: And so I think of this very much as a religious movement, and the people who have taken it up are actually people who see themselves as good people, who want to be good people, who want to do the right thing, and they believe in this. So that motivates them to do it. On the other hand, there are also rivers of money behind it, and it’s not just necessarily advertising money. There are large amounts of money flowing through what you might call woke ink, which is kind of a nickname you could give to the diversity training industry. It’s now a 10 plus billion dollar a year industry before recent events have put it in literally everything.
10:40 James Lindsay: There’s also rivers and rivers of money coming out of nonprofit organizations, 501c3s and 4s that are grant giving. And it’s a very common tactic within grant giving institutions that have a strong political agenda to give large grants, then tell people after they’ve built up their infrastructure a few years and become dependent on having large grants to say, Hey, you know what, you know, we’re ready to give you another grant. If you make a few changes in the way that your, your company’s direction is going. And so it’s very easy. You don’t have to even be a conspirator at this point. You can just say that, Oh, well, we have small numbers of people by definition who are probably billionaires are running billion-dollar-plus, multi-million-dollar-plus grant-giving institutions who have a particular agenda they want to see pushed into the world, and they are putting their money to work where they think it should go, and there are certain ways to make sure your agenda gets pushed that way.
11:36 James Lindsay: It comes up in the right, it comes up on the left, and right now these kind of left-wing think tanks and foundations are dumping rivers of gold into intersectionality and into critical race theory, into all of these movements and then the theory behind them that’s flooding our society all of a sudden.
11:56 Brian Rose: Yeah, we just saw like Soros announced I think 220 million that he’s dumping in. I mean, he was already a big contributor into, well, we rumored Black Lives Matter but other organizations are promoting similar agendas and these are these five year grants they’re talking and I’m guessing there’s more money behind that as well. So yeah, we’ve seen that on a public announcement although we kind of know that’s been going on behind the scenes. Do you think, to some extent, when they look at the other side, which I guess in this case is symbolized by probably President Trump and other people on the right, that they can look at that as this thing that we’re battling and maybe justify almost by any means necessary or we have to all do this thing and really push to kind of get over this battle that we’re fighting maybe in the next four months?
12:43 James Lindsay: Very effectively, yes. So if we wanna backtrack into the philosophy a little bit, we can go back to 1965 with a particular philosopher who was at the time at Columbia University named Herbert Marcuse, a very famous name. He was one of the post-war major critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, which had relocated to Columbia to escape the Nazis. And in 1965, Herbert Marcuse wrote a very famous essay that has been reproduced a large number of times called Repressive Tolerance, where he creates a sustained argument that in a world in which fascism has ever come to exist at all, we live in a permanent state of emergency that fascism is always right around the corner.
13:27 James Lindsay: And so we have to engage in a new understanding of tolerance that is utterly intolerant of anything that looks like intolerance. You have to stamp out fascism before it can take root because once it takes root, it’s unstoppable. and his arguments were appealing, I think, rather sloppily to the rise of fascism and the Nazis and so on in Europe in the years preceding World War II in particular. And so he created a belief on the activist far left, this not necessarily liberals, but leftist activists, that we live in a permanent state of emergency wherein any speech that could possibly, or any behavior, or any representation, any approach to learning or teaching or knowledge or anything in society that could potentially lead to what they define as fascism must be fought tooth and nail like it’s an existential emergency.
14:21 James Lindsay: And right after he published that, of course, that was 1965. It got a lot of traction in 1967 and 1968. And we saw very similar behaviors happening then with the election of Donald Trump, this exact narrative was reinvigorated. We have a fascist in the White House. He’s a racist. He’s a sexist in the years since racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on have all been linked into being forms of fascism or proto-fascism. And so the election of Donald Trump for everybody who had sufficient sympathies to this leftist argument, this very radical leftist argument, the election of Donald Trump became proof positive that we are now in the crisis situation. We are now facing a clear hostile Nazi style takeover of the United States that must be resisted by any means necessary so this is not just you know kind of a mindset this is a deeply rooted view that has profound you know philosophical history and you think it’s maybe irrelevant oh well Herbert Marcuse who’s ever heard of Herbert Marcuse not that many people
15:24 James Lindsay: well Herbert Marcuse had a student named Angela Davis and Angela Davis had a student named Kimberly Crenshaw. Kimberly Crenshaw invented critical race theory and intersectionality which are currently the things behind the movement. Ibram Kendi, whose books are now topping the bestseller list, how to be an anti-racist, but more importantly stamped from the beginning, stamped from the beginning his book from a couple of years ago, three years ago, I think, covers the stories of five historical figures, one of whom is Angela Davis. And so Herbert Marcuse’s ideas are definitely still active, definitely still having an impact. Antifa was basically built off of Herbert Marcuse’s ideas combined with that of a French psychoanalyst and post-colonial thought named Frantz Fanon. So these ideas are occasionally, apparently, in history in the Western democracies since World War II, occasionally going to flare up.
16:18 James Lindsay: And when they do, they cause mass riots, they cause mass chaos, they cause this potential breakdown of civil society with the agenda to cause exactly that. And they have deep roots that that have not been adequately addressed and have been allowed to fester an activist in academic circles for decades.
16:38 Brian Rose: And you mentioned ANTIFA, which kind of stands for anti-fascists. And yet in some ways they look like the fascists because they seem to be attacking things that could be fascism. And we’ve never really seen this from the left. Historically, this comes from the right and everyone’s kind of making this observation. Am I stating that correctly? And why is this happening now?
16:58 James Lindsay: Well, you are saying it correctly. The long and short is the Antifa following the argument and repressive tolerance believes that any seed of fascism has to be stamped out while it’s a seed. You could say that it’s almost like the would you go back in time and kill baby Hitler argument. So they’re looking for baby Hitler everywhere. And they firmly believe that it is a moral imperative to kill baby Hitler before baby Hitler has a chance. but luckily they’re not killing very many people yet. They’re mostly just canceling people, getting them removed from any position of power, influence, status, anything that might lead them to teach people or have journalistic standing where they can push out an alternative narrative because they’re motivated by the belief that baby Hitler is everywhere and it’s their job to find baby Hitler by their definitions and their standards and to root it out.
17:52 James Lindsay: The reason it’s flaring up now, I think, is because A, these veins of scholarship that have grown out of those lines of thought have come to full maturity in the academy. They’ve become standard to be taught in both university curriculums and in our K through 12 curriculums for about the last decade. They are actually made a part of every university curriculum. Almost every college in the United States has some form of a diversity course requirement that teaches this way of thinking about the world, at least in part, although I’m hearing from more and more students that it’s in most of their classes to some degree now, not so much in math, but pretty much everything short of that already.
18:32 James Lindsay: If they take psychology, it’s going to dive into the psychology of racism and so on and so forth. So then we had a series of events that the say Black Lives Matter movement was very successful at capitalizing upon to push this narrative. The narrative is that racism and fascism are hidden everywhere in society. Everybody in society participates in these, complicit in these, supports and maintains these, and hides it behind a nice-seeming mask, so they’re really racist, but they pretend they’re not. And it’s a matter of agitating them until their mask slips, and then you call them out for it. So this narrative has been building for a number of years. It mainstreamed significantly after the Ferguson shooting in 2014 of Michael Brown.
19:12 James Lindsay: And then, again, it’s impossible to overstate how significant it was to mainstreaming this narrative on the left half of the political aisle when Donald Trump was elected in a seemingly inexplicable election that nobody foresaw. I mean, people were going into therapy. They were shutting down workplaces and schools so people could cry for a week when this election happened. And people really did across much of the left believe that we have now installed our first American dictator with the election of Donald Trump. And so it’s impossible to overstate how significant that was in terms of shaping the view that we’re on the precipice of fascism and that baby Hitler has to be identified everywhere it can be. And since they can’t seem to actually touch Trump, whether that be fully legitimate or somewhat illegitimate or whatever it is, since they can’t seem to touch Trump, they have to do it other ways. They have to change the culture that elected Trump and now they will do so by any means necessary,
20:12 James Lindsay: especially as his re-election begins to look more possible. I mean, is anybody excited that Joe Biden was the winner of the Democratic primaries? I don’t think anybody was excited about that. So, you know, they didn’t get one of their radicals to go up against him. Their vision for the world looks like it’s being squashed again. Radical action taken to the streets is a typical kind of behavior that you see out of radicals in such situations.
20:38 Brian Rose: right that’s a really good description I mean and that that makes a lot of sense that they feel powerless and they feel like unless they do something different nothing’s gonna change he’s gonna get reelected they’ve already dealt four years of this I mean obviously he would get reelected if I guess more people voted for him or maybe the electoral college voted for him but now they want to do something and now you see these weird behaviors and we can maybe get into some of this about how the Black Lives Matter manifesting corporations I mean speaking of YouTube I just checked their Twitter feed and it’s it’s all black. It’s been black for a long time. You got the mayor of New York painting Black Lives Matter on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Towers. It just seems wacky to me that, you know, a political movement which, you know, has every right to move forward is being co-opted by corporations and the mayor of a city. It just seems it just seems like science fiction to me. Yeah, I don’t know.
21:31 James Lindsay: Very shocking. I mean, the most banal explanation for it is that this is what happens in a moral panic so if you get enough people super sensitive to a particular narrative and then you end up having the kind of flashpoint piece of evidence that seems to confirm it you can often spark a moral panic that you know our society is indelibly corrupt whether it’s sin and now we have to root out witches whether it’s you know being in league with the devil and now we have to do whatever that takes whether it’s we’re indelibly racist I mean this narrative has been being pushed very vigorously, again, all throughout our education system, strongly through our media, especially since Trump got elected. So at least going back to 2015, even when his campaign started to be serious. I remember in early 2016, writing an essay that I later took down, but I wrote an essay that said, if you want Trump to win, keep calling him racist. And because it set such a low
22:24 James Lindsay: bar, he just has to cross like plausible deniability of not being a racist. And well, there’s nothing wrong with them then. So even then this narrative has been being pushed so vigorously that it’s basically if you want a metaphor you can think of it as laying you know pine needles and dry tinder everywhere and then you end up with a killing of a black person by a white police officer and the spark lands on the tinder and the country goes up in flames. That said, a number of the people who we have in elected office, the mayor of New York City, probably among them, have deeply imbibed upon this ideology. You can see that even more particular, not just with the way that de Blasio is working with, say, Richard Carranza to remake the New York City school system completely in line with this ideology, but you see it also in the recent decision by the California state legislature, which voted to bring it up to our vote, I think by the
23:19 James Lindsay: population of California in November, to remove all of the anti-discrimination verbiage from their state constitution. So that it’s no longer California unconstitutional to discriminate because they want to be able to enforce positive discrimination for their favorite groups, which will also by default include negative discrimination against the groups that they will define as dominant or unprotected. So this is, I mean, a lot of people have taken this up and they now see it as a moral emergency. With corporations specifically, I keep getting emails from CEOs and CIOs and COOs, all these different people in the C-suites that are telling me, well, we don’t know what to do, but we know we have to do something because anybody who isn’t doing something looks terrible. So it’s moral panic speech. And we don’t know what else to do. And then these materials are just being given to us. Everybody who does these seems to kind of satisfy the program.
24:17 James Lindsay: And so a very coordinated effort to push a lot of this kind of material onto everybody with an urgent message of you must do something now, here’s something you can do. And most alternatives are insufficient because we’ve defined them to be. That’s the kind of milieu that the corporate C-suites are finding themselves in. Whether they’re just doing something because they feel like they have to in the present environment for business, whether they actually believe it, much harder to say but you do still have that underlying moral panic and you have this massive pressure. I mean who in the right mind if they were trying to run a business would say no we’re just not going to do anything with this we’re going to let it blow over. I mean they’re looting and burning down targets and Starbucks they’ll destroy you if you came out publicly and tried to do it. So it’s you know simple risk management of course that blows back the other way and of
25:07 James Lindsay: course they will make money off of it like hey you know here’s our t-shirts and shoes say Black Lives Matter, 150 bucks a pop or whatever. So it’s really kind of this bizarre perverse set of incentives that’s all kind of coming together at once. But again, it’s the language of moral panic. It’s the language of people who are out of control and knowing they have to do something and not knowing what to do.
25:30 Brian Rose: You said they’ve been supplied with materials. What do you mean, like, what do you mean? Who, first of all, who was supplying those and what are some of those? Like blackout your Instagram page or set up this community.
25:40 James Lindsay: So I’ve seen hundreds of examples, no, probably thousands of examples of statements from different companies, different schools, different universities, and even government agencies, cities, and the counties, and the language is so close to identical. I can’t say that, I mean, it’s not a very creative ideology. So a lot of it does sound the same, but the language is uncannily identical. I’ve also been sent just hundreds and hundreds of documents, like Google Docs, they’re public. So it’s not like there’s some secret stolen thing. Google documents that are like, here are a list of resources that you can use to bring anti-racism into your workplace or your school or whatever, you know, anti-racism resources dot Google Doc or whatever. And they’re, again, all very similar. Like I said, we are now in a situation where we have a large number of nonprofit foundations, we have a large number In fact, universities are basically, in many regards, not totally, but in significant regards within the humanities departments, de facto think tanks for this ideology, and they produce
26:45 James Lindsay: materials of this kind constantly. If you start looking into who’s been giving money, you see multi-million dollar grants going back, you know, at least a decade or more. And what do they do with this money? Well, you write books like Anti-Racist Baby, Anti-Racist Preschool, and you start producing these kind of like easy to digest PDFs and infographics and things like that that went out in a flood. So I don’t think it’s a conspiracy so much as I think that there are a large number of activists who have been waiting for a moment to seize and the moment came. And they produce these materials kind of constantly. I mean, my own work had showed they were producing these materials constantly before this. So all of a sudden, you know, they have these huge repositories of, hey, here’s what you do for K through three, here’s what you do three through six, different grade levels. And they just have reams of materials that they just started to very rapidly send out to school systems, to CEOs, to everything else. And of
27:43 James Lindsay: course they’re selling these trainings that they have and hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour to come in and give anti-racist training. And here’s a list of approved providers who have studied the relevant theory and know what we’re talking about with anti-racism, the proper scholars. This stuff is all, it’s not coordinated in the sense that they built a program and said, you know, we’re going to launch this into the world on, you know, May 27th or whatever. It was more along the lines of that they are constantly building up materials. And then as the DOE Chancellor in New York City, Richard Carranza said that you just never let a crisis go to waste. So they moved on it the second the kind of right crisis arose. I can’t deny at this point seeing how much I’ve seen that that’s probably what happened. Billions of dollars have been going into producing these materials, these books, these resources for the past several years and a moment to distribute them as widely as possible and move the football
28:42 James Lindsay: as far down the field as they could arose and they took it and they have they’ve got to first down again. I mean, they’ve gone way downfield in fact. Yeah. And I mean, like you said,
28:52 Brian Rose: it’s big business. It’s probably also de Blasio’s best chance of getting reelected. They’ve weaponized race in a way that I’ve never seen done before. And they’re, they’re riding this one. I mean, this is the, this is the biggest win. I think the, the left liberals will have to talk about the difference between those two as well. I’ve had in a while compared to all of Trump’s survival and wins, and they’re really running with it, so I guess it’s natural just to keep running with it, especially if you’re in politics, I mean, you want to be reelected, and this is the one thing that is weaponized almost to a nuclear level, where you can ride it out over anything, reasonable, logical, legal, it doesn’t even matter anymore, because it’s that phobia, it’s the I don’t want to be put in the racist card or the this card, and it feels like people are taking advantage of that.
29:42 James Lindsay: exactly right. People are so paralyzed by any implication that they’re in some form of complicity or activity with racism. They’re so paralyzed by that, that it is the kind of rhetorical equivalent of a nuclear weapon. And it is being deployed to massive effect. And as you said, you can literally call it, you can find racism in anything. An example that we give in Cynical Theories is the following. So imagine that you are a shopkeeper, and somebody comes into your two people into your store at roughly the same time, a black person and a white person. And you are, you know, the nature of your shop, maybe it’s like a clothing shop is you’re going to go up and you’re going to greet people and you say, Hey, how can I help you, you know, that kind of normal behavior you see in a lot of shops.
30:31 James Lindsay: And so now you as a shopkeeper have a decision. Do you approach the black person or the white person first? You can only approach one. It’s a zero sum decision. You can just one person at a time. And the game is rigged so that you’re wrong and it’s racist no matter what you do. Because if you approach the white person first, that means you favor white people over black people. And you are trying to treat the black person as a second class citizen who has to wait. That’s racist. But if you approach the black person first, that’s because you are afraid that the black person is going to steal something or that you wanted to get the black person out of your store as quickly as possible because you don’t want black people in your store and that’s racist as well. And so you have a situation where the entire ideology that’s pushing itself has this rhetorical nuclear weapon that it can apply in every
31:17 James Lindsay: situation because it’s allowed to mind read. It’s allowed to read the worst possible motivations in everybody’s head at every given instant. And the reason is because any possible whiff of being associated with racism will cause people to freak out and apologize and therefore admit that they were somehow racist. So with the shopkeeper, you could imagine somebody then coming up, whichever decision was made and saying, well, don’t you think that’s a little bit racist? And then the shopkeeper says, well, how? And they say one of the two things that I just said, whichever the situation applies or some other made up thing. And then the shopkeeper is stuck in this position like oh my gosh I hadn’t considered it I didn’t realize that I was being racist I’m sorry I didn’t mean to cause offense because there’s such a paralysis around being implicated in such a such a thing that people will bend over backwards and even believe that they had secret unconscious biases and unconscious motivations that led them to act in
32:11 James Lindsay: a racist way that they are unable and totally incapable of understanding or even seeing in themselves. In fact, most of the literature in what’s known as critical whiteness studies over the last decade has been dedicated to the project of explaining why white people never actually know how complicit and racism they are, and they are willfully ignorant about it. They don’t know, and they don’t want to know, and they don’t even possess what are called the epistemic resources to possibly understand it. And then they don’t have the racial stamina and racial humility to do the work to increase those epistemic resources. Reams of literature for the last 10 years, reams of it. I mean, it has been the standard in that entire line of thought.
32:59 James Lindsay: And again, this is being taught to our journalists in college. It’s being taught to our children in schools. It’s being taught in the diversity classes to every student who goes to university. It’s on it’s in the popular narrative through the journalists and people are picking it up. And then anybody who’s sensitive to that, who hears that phrase, well, don’t you think that was a little bit racist is suddenly caught in this trap where they start falling back into it and then apologizing and confessing and looking for how it was. And then there’s that same theory coming along and saying, Hey, well, let me explain to you this idea of white complicity. Here’s why all white people are always complicit in racism at all times, whether they want to be or not, and there’s nothing they can do about it. And that’s you. And so the only real action you can take is to now acknowledge it and start trying to do better, to basically start thinking about race the
33:53 James Lindsay: way we think about race, which is all the time and in a very particular way, and act in accordance with that. In other words, join our religious faith about race and racism. So this is this is very, very well developed. Nobody’s been looking at it. Nobody’s been criticizing it for years in the academic literature. You still have mainstream academics running massive interference for it for the same reason. If you criticize it, you must have racial motivations for criticizing it. So you must be a racist. No one’s going to criticize it. There’s no incentive to criticize it. It just causes you trouble and doesn’t advance your career at all. It doesn’t get you any money. It might get you fired. So why criticize it?
34:33 James Lindsay: So it’s really kind of this perfect storm of, I don’t know, rhetoric being weaponized against people. And this is why I actually say that I think it’s evil is because it weaponizes their own best impulses and turns them into kind of almost zombies in service to the cause by saying, you know, you need to care. I want you to care. And then the person’s like, I do care. And they weaponize care. They weaponize concern that they’ve hurt somebody’s feelings or offended them. They weaponize that. And there’s something just profoundly evil about that.
35:09 Brian Rose: I’m trying to think of equivalence, but it’s like McCarthyism, you know, if you were the communist or you said the other guy wasn’t a communist, you were the communist too. And the witch hunt in Salem, like if you said she’s not a witch, you’re a witch too. I mean, like looking at these parallels, this is stuff we do cyclically as humans and we always take it to the max, don’t we?
35:29 James Lindsay: Yes, I mean the closest parallels that I think there are to look at would be possibly the Bolshevik Revolution and even more so Mao’s Cultural Revolution where you saw especially younger people in Mao’s Cultural Revolution becoming the red guard that would go out and shame people for their complicity in the four olds and try to try to get them to do these struggle sessions, you know, where they put them in public display now on social media back then in the public square and humiliate them and yell at them until they cry and apologize in front of the crowd and promise to do better. The parallels, though, no matter which one you pick, are not exactly the shining moments of human history that we look back on and say, you know, that’s the future liberals
36:15 Brian Rose: want. And what do you say to people who call you a racist, James, for bringing all this up?
36:20 James Lindsay: I mean, so if somebody actually calls me a racist in practice right now, I mostly just ignore it. I get called a racist like a thousand times a day on Twitter. I just don’t care. Um, but if I had somebody that actually maybe I feel like I need to respond to, um, in particular, like a friend or a family member, because if it’s like some big account on Twitter, I’d just get sarcastic with them. I’m like, Oh, you calling me a racist? Is you trying to hide the fact that you’re a racist? Your white fragility is showing, you know, I just flip it on them. But if it’s, uh, if it’s like a friend or a family member, I start straight off with, well, what do you mean by that? When you say I’m a racist, very specifically, what do you mean by that? And let’s clarify it. And because there is a legitimate problem with racism, and everybody I think should, nobody’s required, this is a free
37:05 James Lindsay: country, nobody’s required, but everybody should want to not be racist, that I would say that we should encourage such a norm. So people should be willing to reflect, but they should be willing to reflect on reasonable and fair terms that suit their own private consciences, not somebody else’s terms that literally might be insane or the equivalent of witch hunts. So if somebody in my family or friends were to say, well, don’t you think that’s a bit racist? I would ask them to explain very clearly how that is, and then we could have a mature discussion about it. But if they start just saying, well, it’s white fragility to deny it, or asking for evidence is itself a form of racism, because if you lived it, you would already know. Like, I don’t have any time for that. You’re just wasting my time. And I actually have said that to somebody before in family members, as a matter of fact, they came after me with this. I just said, you’re just, you’re
37:54 James Lindsay: wasting my time. I don’t have time for this stuff. Um, come back when you have a legitimate argument for, for why what I did was wrong, which was something I probably posted on Twitter. Um, and then we can talk about it and I just dismissed it. I just don’t have time for it. And it did estrange the relationship that’s going to happen. Uh, but it is what it is.
38:16 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean, I’ve had similar conversations about freedom of speech with myself the last three months were funny enough like you know professional services companies i’d be on the phone with them and they’d be like well you know but that guy said this about this isn’t that wrong and you know he was talking about 5g and they burned a 5g tower and i’m like yeah they burned a 5g tower and he talked about that but you know he should have the right to say that and i get into this weird arguments and sometimes they don’t go anywhere i mean i remember
38:44 James Lindsay: when the ACLU stood up for the KKK’s right to speak. And this is actually a point, and I get in a lot of trouble. I’ve said this repeatedly. People get very angry with me when I say this. I always see the statement, racism has no place in our society. I disagree with that. I don’t like it. I wish nobody would be racist. I wish we would have no racism. But again, it is not the business of a free society to say that any view is absolutely intolerable. And I say view. I didn’t say action. You can have whatever view you want as a matter of private conscience.
39:25 James Lindsay: You cannot take whatever action you want. And so the blurring of this, the failure to understand these differences and the failure to understand that it’s absolutely crucial to defend the most odious views, because if things are going wrong, if things are really tipping into fascism, guess which views are going to be considered odious and unable to be held, which are those will be the true views, those will be the right views. When racism was the law of the land, it was free speech, it was the ability to speak against slavery during the abolition movement. It was the ability to speak against the racism of Jim Crow that enabled those freedoms to be enacted. But free speech for one means free speech for all because the second you start suppressing speech of anybody, it’s just the caprice of whoever ends up having the levers of power who gets to decide what hate speech is and what hate speech is not and gets to decide who can say what. And that’s one of the greatest and in fact is probably the greatest tool of
40:30 James Lindsay: oppression that’s ever come up in human history, repeatedly come up in human history, and it’s a lesson that clearly the people who wrote the Constitution learned very well because they made it the first amendment of the United States that we’re not going to abridge the freedom of speech. There are of course certain exceptions like clear and imminent threat, fighting words, or whatever they happen to be. But that’s a different thing from holding a view that somebody finds offensive or even that could be bad if put into practice. People have to have the right to follow their own private conscience and think and speak for themselves. And on the other side of it, people have the right to listen and to ignore whoever they want to listen to or ignore.
41:19 James Lindsay: This is a fundamental right of a free society and no society that has significantly abridged it has ever done well for long.
41:27 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a very good point you make. I’ve recently had Noam Chomsky on and Alan Dershowitz who both spent time as Jewish men defending, you know, Nazis to have their protests or whatever. And Noam said he much prefers the American model where you can be a Holocaust denier and it’s legal because you’d say that. and most people just don’t take you seriously. Whereas in Europe, it’s illegal to say, which in a weird way kind of almost gets the more press and gets, or maybe it just gets led to its own dark place on the web where it goes unchecked.
42:04 James Lindsay: So that- Well, there’s a natural moral currency to victimhood. So when somebody actually is being oppressed, there is more sympathy for their views. That’s exactly what the current, you know, whether you call it woke or critical social justice ideology, that’s exactly what it’s manipulating. So if you legitimately give somebody a thing to point to that says, I’m being oppressed, that actually increases sympathy for their views and you really don’t want that for odious views. On the other hand, if we reach back to like John Stuart Mill, he was very clear and he said, he who knows only his side of the argument knows little of that.
42:38 James Lindsay: And in that paragraph in the very famous, following that very famous statement, He explains that we should learn the views that we disagree with from somebody who genuinely believes them and who can argue for them very eloquently and very clearly because otherwise we lose the ability to understand and thus argue against, understand why those views are wrong and so we rob all of ourselves, all of humanity by banishing views that need counter arguments because if you don’t know them well, you don’t practice become aware of the counter arguments and thus people that start espousing them can start pushing them out unrestricted. There’s no known counter and you actually see this again with this same woke ideology is if you actually start presenting them presenting them I should say with counter arguments they very rarely can argue back very deeply and they sometimes literally just start screaming. They don’t know the counter argument they don’t because they won’t listen to the other side and you see it playing out in real time but of course screaming at somebody or shouting at them
43:46 James Lindsay: or using thought-stopping techniques like check your privilege or don’t you think that’s a little bit racist these are cult techniques by the way thought-stopping techniques or cult indoctrination techniques uh that’s step one but step two if those people become empowered enough is to start carting people off to prison or to start shooting them or to otherwise justify violence or property destruction. We’re already seeing that happen. Violence and property destruction are already being justified, including in our mainstream media, including by some of our politicians in the United States who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, which is just this, you talk about bizarre. Something is very rotten in the state of Denmark, if you will,
44:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s hard to watch. I had Michael Shermer on and we had the same discussion that you really need someone to counter-argue with you and articulate their point in a way so you can actually form your own opinion. Most of us walk around and we say, yeah, I’m pro this, I’m pro that, but you’ve never actually formulated the argument in your head. You’ve never had to crystallize it. I think they did a survey and they found that when it comes to a certain set of topics, there’s like an unnatural amount of correlation. So if you happen to have a remote Democrat, you also are in agreement with almost all of their platforms.
45:08 Brian Rose: And the point was is that you probably actually never thought about it. You’re probably around people and they’re like, yeah, I’m anti-abortion, me too, me too, me too. And you’ve never actually had to crystallize it and think for yourself. So Michael’s point was we need these healthy debates so you can really find out what you do believe in. And then if you really do believe that, you’ll believe in it more or you’ll be able to argue, like you said, with people when you say, okay, why do you believe this? but we don’t see that. And then taking it one step further, James, is this whole concept of digital freedom of speech.
45:36 Brian Rose: And so when YouTube sells me, I can’t say things. And it started off because I had a guest that was questioning some of the aspects of COVID-19, was questioning the tests, the false positive, the false negative, was questioning perhaps the effect that 5G would have on the immune system. And Lord, God forbid, we start talking about vaccines, it’s all get shut down. And so, but again, it was just literally a guy in a leather chair who was 68 years old talking. We did not advocate violence, the overthrow of governments, anything of that sort. It was a conversation and yet it violated community policy. And I opined before Black Lives Matter that if we had had the same discussion in 1860 and I was talking about how perhaps slavery was the wrong thing to do, that very possibly the community standards of YouTube at that time would have been against that and I would have been banned.
46:23 Brian Rose: So it’s like you need these discussions, Like you said, to maybe, you know, to do the right things. Right. You know, the progression we’ve seen over the last few hundred years has been because of freedom of speech.
46:37 James Lindsay: Right, because wrong views can be aired, thus become known, thus can be challenged. So it’s very important with something like, say, COVID-19, or with climate change is another example, or with issues around race and racism as another actually very good example. very important that we’re able to have the discussions around these issues. It’s very important that we are able to do so in a way that leads us toward finding out what’s true. And if there’s no challenge to a belief, very few people understand how we find out what’s true. Very few people have the scientific training or chops to understand how difficult it is, as I once read, to prize diamonds of truth out of the firmament of the universe.
47:23 James Lindsay: It is which is funny because it’s an anti-scientific statement, but it’s a it’s a beautiful metaphor. Anyway, There is no firmament out there kids, but it is very difficult. So the way that we find truth Is a is called epistemology in general and it has basically two steps You have to have a means of forwarding propositions that are reasonable Or really they don’t have to be but generally you want to have a means of forwarding propositions that will be taken seriously, and then you have a means of cutting down propositions that are incorrect. And so in the sciences, where we actually have demonstrably found large amounts of provisionally true statements about the universe, meaning statements that we can call true, because if we place bets on them, we’ll usually win those bets, and in fact, very reliably win those bets. If I wanted to say, if I were in the military, and I wanted to shoot a piece of artillery, you know, 40 miles and have it land on something the size of a Volkswagen,
48:22 James Lindsay: I could bet with an extraordinary level of confidence, you know, just from Newtonian mechanics that that’s going to give me an accurate shot and therefore that I’m speaking about something real in the world. So you have to be able to forward ideas through usually some kind of a theory that’s well-founded and well-grounded. There’s, you know, various ideas, pieces to that, but then you have to be able to cut down false ideas. You have to be able to see where they’re wrong. You have to be able to falsify in science or defeat in philosophy ideas that have gone wrong. And that process requires checking. That requires looking at counter views. It requires saying, oh, wow, maybe I didn’t think of that. And maybe we should actually take a look at that and find out and to do the experiment if it’s science or to entertain counter arguments if it’s a philosophical kind of thing or a political kind of thing.
49:19 James Lindsay: That’s absolutely required. With the ideology that we’re now seeing mainlining in the West, this woke ideology, you don’t actually use these mechanisms anymore. You don’t use let’s forward ideas from epistemically adequate theory. but let’s no longer worry about that. We’re now going to forward propositions using lived experience. My own personal interpretation of why I think what’s happening to me is happening to me. Anybody who’s ever had a stomach ache can tell you right now that lived experience very rarely tells you the relevant information. You know that you have a stomach ache, but you typically have no idea why you had a stomach ache. You don’t know if you need to take A and acids.
50:02 James Lindsay: You don’t know if you need to go to the bathroom. You don’t know what the problem is until nature takes its course and you figure it out, for example, and I mean, the examples of lived experience being a bad barometer are copious. Then you need to have a tool to cut it back and what they use is problematizing. Could it offend somebody? Could this idea offend somebody rather than is it true? That becomes the primary standard. Is this idea politically useful for our goals? That becomes the standard by which they cut ideas down. So the people don’t understand how to know what’s true And they’ve replaced it with this terrible methodology that really just enshrines offense as a knowledge generating, if you will, tool.
50:47 James Lindsay: And so because they don’t understand how to know what’s true, they don’t understand why it’s so vital that people are able to forward the counter argument. I’ve made the argument many times, for example, that I think that university economics departments, I am, I think a fairly reasonable person who believes in a capitalist system as far as the best workings of the economy, but I would definitely not be like an anarcho-capitalist or a far libertarian, you know, what is it, laissez-faire capitalist or something like that. But I think that economics departments for this reason necessarily would need somebody like an end cap. They would necessarily also need a communist, an outright Marxist.
51:25 James Lindsay: And the debates should be happening where students can hear the variety of views and thus winnow out a clearer understanding of economics, clearer understanding of how the world works, to see the best arguments from each side up against each other, and to come away more informed from those debates. It’s a very paternalistic way of thinking. In fact, it flatly believes that most people are stupid to think that you have to control what they’re able to hear so that they don’t believe the wrong stuff. It’s really a very dangerous way to go.
52:01 Brian Rose: Yeah, and the fact that it’s happening in these digital public squares is it’s worrying. We actually have 200,000 signatures on an open letter asking for the legislation of digital freedom of speech where these companies are required to allow that freedom of speech. Now the execution of that could be interesting, but they can’t just hide behind community policies anymore that a lot of times change on the whim and are very subjective. And again, we’re all subject to this now. Now there’s no debate and it’s just accelerating everything. So look, I want to get into what happened to you in 2017 and 18. Maybe before we do, my last question before we do that is, why do these educational institutions behave this way?
52:45 Brian Rose: I asked the same thing to Dave Rubin and Mr. Prager and Charlie Kirk and they just said these professors are power hungry and they want to just do their thing and I couldn’t get a really good answer of why they cultivate this really far left ideology in these institutions that, I mean, I have a 16 year old daughter, I want her to go to college in America, but now I’m wondering, do I?
53:10 James Lindsay: Yeah.
53:11 Brian Rose: And I love my college experience. I loved it, but, you know, it’s also a breeding ground for this stuff.
53:17 James Lindsay: So, I mean, what they pointed at is not wholly incorrect. It’s also not wholly correct. There definitely is an element where there’s careerism, definitely an element where some number of these people are power-hungry and status-hungry and control-hungry. But for the majority of the relevant actors, they are people who genuinely believe the smell of their own farts is great. To put it in a colorful metaphor from South Park. They are people who genuinely believe what they profess. They think that they have the truth. They and I mean that the capital T moral truth again, they’ve shifted away from a position where ideas are forwarded and Debated upon their merits or compared against the relevant evidence It is now whether or not they have the potential to cause offense in specific Do they the question is do they support what they define as systemic oppression?
54:15 James Lindsay: which they believe is the ordinary state of everything in society or do they allow for liberation from that. This is what they called the liberationist movement in the 1960s, kind of coming back in a new guise. And so they have decided that the ultimate arbiter of the validity of a statement is whether or not it is problematic, whether or not it whether it’s true or false doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether it’s problematic. So they have seen that the validity of statements is a moral decision, not a epistemological decision but they’ve completely blurred those lines and confused themselves. So they believe that they are teaching the truth like the capital T truth, like the Spanish Inquisition had the capital T truth, and it is their both moral and educational duty to make sure that they teach things in this way.
55:07 James Lindsay: It’s very difficult to look at this stuff because it looks insane, as I’m sure we’ll pivot to in a moment, but they genuinely do believe it. They genuinely think that the world is constructed by social conventions about how we decide what it is and is not valid to say or considered true, which is a wholly political decision that has been made by people with power who wanted to maintain their power over other people, and that it’s utterly impossible to get to true statements about the world as a result. And so we have to just start comparing things on the moral standard of does it facilitate or disrupt systemic oppression as they have defined it and decide it is the reality of the world. They’ve literally jumped track. It’s as if a new religion has come into the world that sees ghosts and demons and angels and gods and the whole thing under every rock, and you can’t see them unless you can learn to think like they do, unless you
56:04 James Lindsay: take in the faith. I’m one of these few weird people who has learned the faith without having and taking it on, which puts me in a very odd position. I’m fluent in both kind of moral languages.
56:19 Brian Rose: And they’re in this echo chamber and they constantly have an influx of 18 to 22 year olds that will probably listen to them by default, right? So it’s this weird thing where they’re surrounded by a bunch of academic, not only teachers, but then institutions, they kind of move together and you got these kids coming up who are looking for direction, probably can’t really argue very well or counter argue, so it’s the kind of the perfect, it’s the perfect forum for a cult in a weird way.
56:47 James Lindsay: Well, add in the students themselves that are coming up, you know, I don’t totally remove agency from them either. They believe this stuff too, whether they picked it up in their K through 12 schooling, or whether they, which is a thing for sure now, or whether they’ve picked it up just by the social milieu that they find themselves in with their friends interacting on social media. You don’t have to have read Michel Foucault who have taken up his view of power, that’s kind of the way all your friends think about power. And so they’re coming in, talking about the echo chamber that these professors are in, I’ve actually heard from a number of academics who said, well, these changes weren’t top down, they were bottom up, the students demanded them.
57:25 James Lindsay: And so the culture was changed in the young people as well. And so they become part of that echo chamber, they don’t want to hear a single thing that could be construed as racist. And of course, not to put any of our best and brightest down when they’re, you know, 22 and under, But all of us who are well over 22 can reflect back on our time at 22 and younger and realize that you know Some of our thoughts might have been a little bit half baked and idealistic at the time and a little bit uninformed by the realities and challenges that life will present or that Learning about history over decades will teach you so I think that you know Perfect storm is a really good way to put it. You see it from top down You see it from bottom up and you see it literally inside and outside as well
58:09 Brian Rose: And part of this is natural, right? I mean, there’s that old phrase, I forgot, I’m gonna butcher it, that says basically, if you’re not a liberal, when you’re under 30, something’s wrong, and if you’re not conservative after 40 or something, something’s wrong. I mean, you always wanna disagree with your parents. You look at Trump, and he’s 75 and old, and you’re thinking, F this guy, when I was a teenager, I remember not trusting anybody over 30. So there is this always, probably always has been this natural tendency for liberal ideas or contrarian ideas to be embraced by the youth. That’s natural, but that does, that itself doesn’t explain what’s happening here.
58:42 James Lindsay: What explains it is that the adults who would have been normally guiding them decided due to the influence of what’s called critical pedagogy to abdicate their role. And instead of guiding them, they’re like, oh, we’re gonna learn more from our students than we’re going to teach them. There’s a shift in power that the students had more to teach because they know the way of the future than the adults possibly can understand because they’re the ones who are invested the status quo already. And the young people are the natural revolutionaries. And the old people, older people, telling younger people what they should think and what’s right and wrong. That’s an imposition of an older moral culture, one of the four olds that has to go. And so there’s been this inversion where the adults have left the party. That saying, by the way, is if you aren’t a liberal and you’re under 30, you have no heart. And if you aren’t a conservative and you’re or over 40, you have no brain, I think, is how it goes.
59:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think you’re right, okay. All right, let’s get into what happened with you in 2017 and 18, because in a weird way, it’s weird how even more relevant what you were doing has become in 2020. Probably you never predicted that, maybe you did. Maybe we start off as why you did it and how you actually got around to doing it, because the whole process took a long time and you had a lot at risk, from what I understand. Maybe bring everybody up to speed here.
1:00:07 James Lindsay: Okay, so for people who don’t already know, in 2017 and 18, I worked with two colleagues, Helen Pluckrose, who I wrote Cynical Theories with, and Peter Boghossian, who I wrote how to have impossible conversations with. The three of us spent a little over a year writing as many gender studies, ethnic studies, African-American studies, critical race theory, queer theory, generally social justice epistemology, you will, papers as we could at the academic level and submitting them to the highest ranked journals that we thought would take them. And we ended up writing 20 in the course of about 10 months of writing. We started off trying to hoax the journals by just writing deliberate bogus fraud articles that we didn’t even know what we were talking about. None of that worked. We realized that wouldn’t work. So we started learning the field from the inside around Christmas of 2017, starting actually literally at Thanksgiving and then by Christmas we kind of got a sense of what we were doing. Now why do this though maybe I
1:01:08 Brian Rose: should take you back a step further like why do this in the first place? Well we
1:01:12 James Lindsay: realized the three of us had been trying to actually criticize the rising social justice as it called itself at the time movement we now usually call it woke or whatever but at the time it was calling itself social justice and we We were trying to criticize it in the traditional fashion, writing essays, writing articles. I even mentioned it in a book. And what happened was nothing. It had no effect. And what we kept being told was that we didn’t understand. We didn’t know the material. You need to go read this academic paper. You need to go read that academic paper. Scholars have been saying, there’s a study, blah, blah, blah.
1:01:52 James Lindsay: So we started reading the scholarship that they were telling, you know, what a weird thing to do. We took our critics seriously and started reading the stuff they were telling us we should read and we were looking at it and we were like, wow, this is insane. But we already knew that criticizing it had no effect. And so we decided following in the footsteps of a friend of ours now in the 1990s named Alan Sokol, where he was, people were trying to criticize postmodern scholarship, literary criticism and social criticism in the 90s to the same effect. And what he decided would help was to write a fake academic paper, hoaxing them, showing them that they don’t even know what they’re talking about. And they’ll publish anything that flatters their biases and has the right kind of jargon in it. So we attempted that and it didn’t quite work. So we learned how to speak their language and understand their morals, because we wanted to expose
1:02:45 James Lindsay: the public that there’s this problem happening in scholarship that can’t be criticized. If you can’t criticize it, you’re left with one and only one tool until it finally gets its iron boots on, which is to make fun of it. And so we wanted to try to satirize it and parody it and show the public, look, something bad is happening in certain sectors of academia. And this is like a, it’s like a runaway train that’s had its brakes removed, and it’s already left the station, it’s barreling down the mountain. And you really don’t want entire sectors of scholarship going off the cliff. Because what’s it going to take with it? What else is on the train is a lot of what we depend upon in society. And so we decided like, let’s point people to the train and say, look, this train’s happening, we can’t stop it. So what we need to figure out now is a way to divert it, to change the track so it goes somewhere else and has the minimal
1:03:43 James Lindsay: amount of damage. So we wrote these papers, seven of them ended up accepted by journals and high standings, seven more were still under consideration. A sociologist guessed that 11 of them total probably would have been accepted in the end by his assessment of A, the papers themselves and B, the responses that the peer reviewers had given, and we publicized that. The reason some were still under review was because the Wall Street Journal publicized it for us. They found out what we were doing and had to tell the story and couldn’t let it be seen through. So we got found out partway through and we tried to tell everybody like this scholarship about race, gender, identity, sexuality, and so on. This is all really leading us to a bad place because it’s being institutionalized across all the universities. Every university has a diversity board that uses a scholarship as its mainstay. It’s showing up in corporations.
1:04:46 James Lindsay: It’s getting people fired. It’s impossible to have a conversation in social media, which means it’s influencing the culture, which means it’s going to start leaking into our politics. Obviously, it was like a giant culture war on Trump that was all couched in this language at that point. So we were trying to point that out to people and say, look, something terrible is happening. It’s coming out of the university. And the problem is, is that literally you can make stuff up have terrible or lack of any methodology, crazy ethics, get papers published, and then they’re going to be turned around and used as evidence to push policy to change to teach
1:05:21 Brian Rose: classes to shape society and it’s give us some examples so people can understand what you mean by
1:05:28 James Lindsay: that satire so i mean there are the more famous examples that catch people’s attention but i’ll i’ll do those second um one paper that we wrote was accepted by the leading feminist philosophy journal was praised as an exceptional uh example of feminist philosophy and the argument we made was actually against our own project. We said that making fun of social justice is completely inappropriate. Criticizing social justice is always an application of political power, and there’s no legitimate way to satirize it or use humor to criticize it. And it’s, of course, known that using the own literature that we cited to bank that argument, that criticizing it directly just proves that you haven’t actually studied it to the point of understanding it. So you must agree with it in order to have been considered somebody who understood it. Again, very religious. So our probably most valuable paper that we had that we wrote was that saying that there is no legitimate way to criticize, not by argument, not by humor, anything coming out of the
1:06:36 James Lindsay: critical social justice movement. We argued that which supports critical social justice is morally good and there’s an imperative to support that and that which criticizes it is morally bad and cannot be allowed. So that’s the paper given the argument that it makes in the degree, like the standing of the journal that took it, it’s shocking it didn’t get more traction. But that’s how the cookie crumbled. We had another paper at the same journal that had not yet been accepted, but we’re all quite sure it would have been. They argued that we should rearrange all of our college courses so that they operate on what’s what’s called a progressive stack.
1:07:14 James Lindsay: So the more marginalized you are, the more opportunities you have, the more privileged you are, and we gave different ways you could try to assess people’s privilege status. The less opportunities you have, and the people with the most privilege could be invited to never speak in class, to listen and learn in silence, as we phrased it, and even to experience reparations by not being allowed to sit at a desk or in a chair during class, having to sit in the floor, maybe wearing chains to simulate slavery and to be spoken over by women any time if they were male so they can know what it’s like to be spoken over constantly and not allowed to express their ideas to not have their emails answered.
1:07:56 James Lindsay: So we advocated for this and we said actually that we had implemented this in our own classrooms to great success, which was made up. But they thought this was great. They thought this was wonderful. Their biggest concern was that we were treating the students that we were putting in the floor with too much compassion by advocating that we use a compassionate method rather than a pedagogy of discomfort to engage the fact that they don’t like being discriminated against. So that one, again, got much less attention than I think it deserved. But then the two that got the most attention were first, rather hilariously, the very famous dog humping paper, which we submitted to a feminist geography journal in which we argued that you could watch the way that men and women straight and gay interacted with their dogs when they got in dog fights or dog humping incidents as we phrase them, the dog rape at the dog park in cities like Portland, Oregon specifically.
1:08:58 James Lindsay: You could watch that and determine whether or not there’s some bearing from a canine rape culture that crosses over to a human rape culture through something like implicit bias. And thus you can conclude that human culture is filled with rape condoning behaviors, rape condoning spaces that can then be regulated by training men the way we train dogs. And so, I mean, it’s rather hilarious. We asserted that we spent a thousand hours in dog parks. We looked at the genitals of just under 10,000 dogs, interrogated their owners about their sexual orientations, all kinds of ridiculous stuff, filtered that through black feminist criminology came to the conclusion that the only reason we can’t leash men and yank on their leashes and whip them with leashes is because it’s not politically feasible to implement such policies.
1:09:45 James Lindsay: So, I mean, that was a train wreck. That one was actually not just accepted by the leading feminist geography journal, but it was given an award for excellence of scholarship and feminist geography by that journal. Very alarming. And then another one that did get a lot of attention that seems a bit more prescient than we meant was that we rewrote a chapter of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism. And we argued that solidarity with the intersectional cause, basically, we just said that that was equal, we didn’t say we just translated Hitler into where he said our movement, meaning the Nazi Party, we just changed that into solidarity with intersectional feminism. And we massage the language enough where it wouldn’t get caught by a plagiarism checker and then interlaced it with some scholarship so that it would look like a real scholarly paper instead of a maniacal rant of a genocidal lunatic. And that was accepted by a feminist social work journal, literally Hitler. I mean, I hate to say it, the joke that I laughed
1:10:49 James Lindsay: about privately to myself, I’ve never been a fan of Rush Limbaugh. I think he I’ve never liked anything that the guy does. But he was the one who coined the phrase in this in the 90s feminazi. And I was like, holy crap, they made it true. I don’t know what you do with it. So that’s four of the papers that we wrote, but there were 20. And there are a lot of things that we could talk about if you wanted to either laugh or be horrified. And so what do you conclude by
1:11:16 Brian Rose: these being accepted and published and be given awards by it? What, what is the conclusion?
1:11:21 James Lindsay: That the academic culture in those disciplines, and I won’t necessarily extend that too far beyond those disciplines. So we’re talking gender studies, African-American studies, critical race theory, queer theory, you can be very specific. But the academic culture in those disciplines has led the people who work in them to believe that those kinds of bad arguments that don’t, one point doesn’t follow from another, those kinds of dangerous conclusions are acceptable, that they’re good. And that because we know that we wrote our papers by starting with the conclusion, working backwards and making the other literature say what we wanted it to say, we can also conclude that there’s a crisis of faith. For everybody in the world should be in a crisis of faith about scholarship that claims to talk about race, that talks about gender, that talks about anything that doesn’t use very rigorous scientific methodologies, because literally you can make it up. We did. And it was accepted and given awards and it was taken in by top journals, you can literally just make it
1:12:20 James Lindsay: up. Just the most asinine mind reading arguments with no logic from one paragraph to the next. And they think it’s great. I mean, they literally gave it an award for the least sensible paper that we wrote. And so there has to be a crisis of faith. So when people say, Oh, well, race scholars say blah, blah, blah, I can’t trust anything race scholars say, I don’t know who the legitimate ones are and who the illegitimate ones are anymore, unless they’re using a robust methodology that other people have checked through statistical methods or people that are called quants, quantitative analysts have checked. There’s no way to trust it.
1:13:00 Brian Rose: All right, so they were just looking for anything that confirmed their agenda, and when they saw it and it was somewhat reasonable, they just jumped on it.
1:13:09 James Lindsay: Yeah, I mean, somewhat reasonable is the reason I hesitated there. I don’t even know that a lot of it was reasonable. I mean, it’s just argued within this kind of different paradigm that treats knowledge and information and ideas in a very different way where something being true or false is less relevant than its political utility or its ability to cause or liberate from oppression or offense.
1:13:32 Brian Rose: Now for someone who’s saying, I don’t read this journal and I don’t go to this college, it doesn’t have any effect on me, what do you say to that?
1:13:39 James Lindsay: Well, so here’s kind of a chain of events one of our papers that I’ll point out. So we had another paper that we claimed to be a group of guys who went and analyzed male behavior at Hooters restaurants. And you know, we concluded all these horribly sexist things and that the whole point of the restaurant is to push sexism and to turn guys into crude cavemen who just want to tell pretty young girls what to do, take their orders. Pun, of course. And so we wrote this, and one of the peer reviewers wrote back that very enthusiastically, I could see this paper being the basis for a collegiate course and masculinity studies at the graduate or undergraduate level. So okay, let’s say that that gets taken to its logical conclusion. That paper was accepted by a very high ranking journal also, by the way. So that gets taken to its conclusion. And now there’s a college course about masculinity that’s taught, that’s just as made up garbage about how men behave in Hooters.
1:14:39 James Lindsay: and let’s say that some journalists take that course and then some small scandal comes up around something that happened at a Hooters restaurant or some sexual objectification thing comes up and the next thing you know it’s a national news incident and the thing they’re turning to because some guy took a class or some woman took a class based on this paper and that’s how they think about masculinity and masculinity in society and the current day all of a sudden, that paper is the background that leads to a national conversation about, say, sexual objectification and rape culture. So you don’t have to take the class, you don’t have to be the one to take the class, all it takes is somebody who took the class, or to take a class that’s informed by similar ideas, which existed a huge number of colleges, to then decide that that’s the relevant piece of information to launch into a national conversation when the right event happens that gets national attention in the media.
1:15:39 James Lindsay: And all of a sudden, that bogus crap becomes the standard narrative. That’s the study that showed what the narrative around this must be when you know, the argument you have with your friend is like, oh, blah, blah, blah, I don’t think that’s quite right. And they say, Ah, but there’s a study. That’s the study. I made it up. I made it up in about two days sitting at my desk laughing my head off the whole time about how ridiculous it was. And so when you have that kind of a situation, it’s like, you know, the saying is, you know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, it’s the exact opposite with university, what happens in the university takes usually somewhere between five and 10 years, and it becomes pretty standard in culture, because it’s our educational systems and who does it educate, it educates our elite professionals who then go and set the narratives and journalism and education and faith, even. And so that’s how
1:16:31 James Lindsay: this crap gets out there. And maybe it’s not my silly paper about Hooters restaurants, but all the, you know, 40 papers I cited to write that paper, those are real, those are actually being taught, those are those are out there in the real world informing people, or misinforming them, I really should say, who are now going on to say set policy, like the American Psychological Association in 2018, announced that there’s a massive psychological problem associated with traditional masculinity. And so now it’s considered problematic from the American Psychological Association. We’re not talking about some small fry thing. Their entire policy guidelines for psychological treatment of men and boys is now being influenced by exactly that line of scholarship in which my stupid Hooters paper fit perfectly.
1:17:20 James Lindsay: So that which happens in the university makes it out into the world, which is why we need to have rigorous scholarship and not ideological driven nonsense that looks like science. I mean, it’s a crisis.
1:17:35 Brian Rose: And what was the reaction to all of this and has anything changed or will it change?
1:17:42 James Lindsay: Reaction by who? I mean, it was just polarizing like everything else now. It’s almost just depressing to say. So the reaction was swift and immediate in terms of media attention. Obviously we’re talking about it now two years later almost, but we made the print editions of something like 400 or 450 newspapers worldwide, including a print edition in Shanghai. So Mainland China even printed a picture of us, which is bizarre. We were on the front page of the New York Times. I was interviewed, or the three of us collectively were interviewed probably five or 600 times in the, you know, five to six months after we went public with it. And if you really wanted to name it, probably 10 outlets that interviewed us have a identifiable left leaning bias and whatever hundreds minus 10 is, we’re all conservative.
1:18:37 James Lindsay: So we immediately got lumped into being alt right grifters, even though we didn’t make any money from the proceeds of the project and in fact we kind of all just sort of didn’t have a job well Peter kept his job at the University but went through a big like inquiry he had to go through Diversity Board and other the ethics board reviews to find out what a horrible person he was and was put through that for a year and eventually very lightly punished so it wasn’t like anything great happened in terms of our personal lives but nevertheless we were grifters right-wing etc white men and even though one of us is a disabled woman she’s clearly a right-wing you know she’s borderline communist and her morals and yet nevertheless she’s still listed as far right you know lunatic alt-right Nazi fascist the whole thing we just got called us these names, and the left more or less ignored us and decided that we couldn’t be possibly engaged with or listened to, and the right kind of
1:19:45 James Lindsay: thought that we were great, which increased that same dynamic of polarization. We’re now children of one side and not the other side sees this as unacceptable. So what changed? Maybe something, I don’t know, not much visibly, but I do get a lot of emails from people in the Academy who are very content to tell me that they support what we did and are glad we did it and hope that it creates change but they can’t speak up because they can’t risk being put through their own diversity board, kangaroo courts, so until people are willing to start taking those risks nothing much will change. I’ve heard now that there are some people who are I know that there are people starting to cite the work we did academically.
1:20:31 James Lindsay: So maybe it’s gonna start filtering into the academic body of knowledge. One truth about that is that it is slow moving. It’s a very slow moving way. It’s like journalism moves at the speed of the news cycle, which is I think like every 45 seconds now. Whereas academia, I mean, I predicted that it would take at least two years to three years before we would start to see any significant changes in academia if they were going to come in 10 before they manifested in a real way. So we’re still too early. So I don’t really wanna pull the trigger too soon and say, well, nothing happened, boo-hoo.
1:21:06 James Lindsay: Maybe something’s moving, but if it’s moving, it’s moving slowly and it’s moving quietly. Mostly though we got called names and told we were mean and very few people engaged with the substance of what we did whatsoever. And then said that that was because we didn’t engage with the substance of the scholarship that we clearly engaged with well enough to get accepted and honored at the highest levels of scholarship.
1:21:26 Brian Rose: Got it, all right, well, I appreciate what you guys did and I appreciate that story and it’s kind of eye-opening to see what happened. You talk a lot about kind of woke ideology and there’s obviously a lot of pressure for people to comply with that. I’m just curious, there’s people watching us now, again, that will be polarized, that will just say, James, there’s nobody’s talking about, he’s a racist, Brian has white privilege in this. And then some other people will say, well, let me maybe engage with these guys and these arguments and let me just see how I can test my own brain. And if those people are listening, or to anyone who’s listening, how can people get around this wokeness in the world right now, whether it’s in the workplace or in their social circle, or even in their own corporation, like what can they do?
1:22:13 Brian Rose: And I heard you talking in an interview recently that said that you think the extremes of this movement will eat itself alive. Well, what are your thoughts right now?
1:22:21 James Lindsay: They actually are eating themselves alive. want to get lost in that and not give any practical advice. So let me give a little practical advice first. So it depends, you know, of course, where you’re being, where you’re encountering it, what you should do. But I have to actually admit that this is a this is not a kind of small change. You actually do have to if you want to counter the so called woke ideology, you actually are going to have to learn what it’s talking about, you are going to have to go engage with its terms, you’re going to have to go engage with his tactics and figure out what those are so that you can spot them and start working out counters that apply in your specific arena.
1:22:57 James Lindsay: Many of the tricks that it plays are by using multiple meanings or tricky meanings or redefined meanings of words. So if you don’t understand the manipulation of language, you can’t possibly say, now hold on, you called me a racist or you said our organization is racist and we’re gonna specify what that means and here’s these various definitions. Why did you choose this one over that one? Here’s what that one implies. Here’s what the normal ones imply. You have to be able to know a little bit about it to possibly counter it. In fact, one of the maneuvers that it plays, and this is a very kind of blitzkrieg like technique, is we even spoke about it earlier in the interview, is that they try to make people that they’re going after feel stupid and uninformed.
1:23:42 James Lindsay: Like they’re the only people who actually know the real definition. So they’ll say something, something racism, and you’ll say something, something to definitions, and they’ll say, you don’t even know the real definition of racism. They change the definition of racism and you don’t even know it. You’re not even informed. And so the idea is to discredit you to anybody and discredit anybody who’s disagreeing by showing them to be too ignorant or willfully ignorant or blind or privileged or something like that so that they aren’t credible people who offer credible arguments against it. And so you have to understand that tactic. And the only way to circumvent it that I’m aware of is that you have to know enough to kind of answer that and say, no, I understand where this comes from.
1:24:22 James Lindsay: This comes from a bit of philosophy that’s called discourse’s theory and that arose from the postmodern tradition which holds that the truth or falsity of an idea is irrelevant to its political utility and I don’t think that that’s actually true. I do think that the truth or falsity of an idea actually matters and why don’t you? So you have to be able to kind of do that. You have to be able to redirect it. You have to understand the words they’re using and the way that they’re using them and then catch them on the spot by showing that you are actually informed because the game they’re playing is to make you look uninformed, whereas they’re the only informed person who can be listened to.
1:24:55 James Lindsay: And it is a tactic in the game. The lucky thing is that their work is actually as complicated as the language and the jargon is. And as complicated as they try to present that it is, saying it’s so sophisticated, there’s so many dimensions to different kinds of identity and they intersect in complicated ways. They say all this stuff, it’s super simple. It’s always the same thing. Where is the systemic oppression? How can I accuse somebody of bigotry? That’s all they do. And so it’s actually really simple to learn. You do have to stretch out and learn some five syllable words though, and get familiar with the language in two different ways and say, look, I understand the fallacy of equivocation and I see what you’re doing here.
1:25:34 James Lindsay: And here’s the two meanings and I understand both of them and here’s why I stand with a reasonable one. And then what that does, it doesn’t change their mind, but all of your reasonable onlookers suddenly realize, oh, wow, there is an intelligent answer to this. I am kind of, people, once they’ve realized they’re being fleeced, are not happy about the people who are fleecing them. My position, in fact, is that I don’t even want people, I don’t tell people they shouldn’t be woke. I tell people that they should understand what wokeness is before they decide to take it on. So I just want them to understand very clearly.
1:26:05 James Lindsay: And then freedom is freedom. It’s a matter of your private conscience, do what you want. But I’m gonna explain it to you and take away that illusion that they’re the only people who know what they’re talking about or the only people who are moral. So you do have to do that, you have to learn some of it. The other thing I would tell people is they do need to understand that this is organized. You can’t go one individual against your HR department. You’re just gonna get nuked out of your company. You can’t go one individual against your school. They’re just going to ignore you. you actually have to get like-minded people who understand that there are problems with this, who don’t necessarily agree with it, you have to start informing yourselves, inform groups who will show up and take it on in teams.
1:26:50 James Lindsay: And if you do get fired in the attempt who are willing to hire an attorney to take up their case, I mean, there has to be that kind of solid, organized, actionable pushback or else it goes absolutely nowhere.
1:27:04 Brian Rose: So it’s a long haul battle and it’s going to get messy and bloody for anybody.
1:27:10 James Lindsay: Hopefully not bloody. Hopefully it just stays in calling people names and unfortunately some proportion of them wrongfully losing their job and then hopefully going and starting a new business that outcompetes these ones that are mired 30 to 40% of their time and arguing about race and diversity all the time instead of doing anything practical.
1:27:31 Brian Rose: So James, what does this look like in five years? Is it better or worse, whatever that means?
1:27:35 James Lindsay: I keep getting asked this and I don’t know, there are too many variables, like who gets elected in November, what impact does that have, right? So those are a huge thing.
1:27:44 Brian Rose: What are those scenarios? So say Trump gets elected, what happens two years later? Say Biden gets elected, what’s happened two years later? It’s not obvious to me.
1:27:52 James Lindsay: It’s not obvious to me what happens in either case. I can actually make a case in both situations where things get better and things get worse. And I can, it’s very unclear. What happens the next time a black individual who maybe is unarmed gets killed by a white police officer and somebody puts it on camera? Like everything’s, it’s virtually guaranteed that’s going to happen again. What happens then? Everything’s gonna blow up again unless we start reckoning with the fact that there are better and worse ways to try to interpret such an event and that there are some very, very aggressive agenda-driven people, whether they’re coordinated a conspiracy, which I don’t think we’re not, who will take full advantage of such an event to, again, move the football downfield in their direction. So what happens in five years depends on so many factors. What are people waking up to this? And are they willing to say no?
1:28:48 James Lindsay: Is some radical lunatic right wing thing going to rise up and decide to go to war with it, which is just going to turn everything messy? Who’s going to get elected? What is the impact of that, what’s the next, you know, inflammatory incident that goes viral on the internet, you know that you have every media personality from the smallest local news guy all the way up to the biggest, you know, CNN anchor or whatever, every one of them is looking for that next huge cash cow of an incident. I even was talking with a friend the other day who had an incident happened in a small local sense where she lives. And she happened it turns out where she is, like literally in her yard, criminal had broken in and to their property and was hiding out from the police or whatever and there’s some incident that came up.
1:29:34 James Lindsay: And so the result of that was that all kinds of journalists are coming around and trying to like do the narrative weaving question and the feeling is very strong. Like, are they trying to blow this up into a national incident? Because why wouldn’t you? That’s where you become famous as a journalist. You’re the one who broke the next huge viral outrage of the country that inflames everything for a month and turns you into the hottest commodity. The incentives, again, are all screwed. So unless we start figuring out better incentive structures, which could happen, is there gonna be legislation that ensures freedom of speech across digital platforms?
1:30:09 James Lindsay: There’s so many variables that it’s almost impossible to tell what will happen. I see people waking up to the ideology. I also see people rapidly radicalizing into the ideology, meaning wokeness specifically, but also there’s a counter woke thing that has a sensible approach and then it’s properly insane wing as well. Does that get empowered? And again, what happens if Biden gets elected? Does Biden actually run middle of the road Democrat or does he get run over by the radicals that are kind of behind the scenes? It’s hard to tell what would happen with him. Does Trump get elected and they finally realize defeat or does Trump get elected and they go absolutely berserk believing, oh my gosh, it’s totally true.
1:30:52 James Lindsay: Does that discredit them? I can’t even start to answer. We are in, when I was in grad school, I was a mathematician. I was in grad school, I had to take a dynamic systems class and we learned about this thing called a bifurcation diagram and then chaotic behavior. And all I can think is that the variable has moved into the chaotic range. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. There’s no clear way to predict what’s happening next.
1:31:15 Brian Rose: And what are your thoughts on Black Lives Matter and its future?
1:31:19 James Lindsay: Ah, the organization officially, the movement. I mean, which thing do you mean? There’s at least five Black Lives Matter movements, one of which is a corporate one that we talked about, one of which are these anti-fagoons that are going around or they’re not all anti-fath or other, you know, radical leftist kind of anarchist type organizations that are capitalizing upon it. Do you mean this weird movement of white people washing black people’s feet and crying at their feet. Like that’s a weird black, is that black lives matter? I mean, this is so weird. Even black people are like, stop doing this. This is weird. And then you have the movement that is just a statement, which is an obvious truth, lowercase B, black human beings lives do matter just like everybody else’s life matters.
1:32:03 James Lindsay: And then you have, and also though, the point of that being, listen, our experience feels different to us. And can we acknowledge that and try to do reforms? and maybe those reforms are necessary, I would love to see some of the reforms that are being called for in the spirit of that be brought to serious national discussion and policy changes. And then there’s the official movement itself, which if you go read the Revout page is full of crazy stuff, like we’re going to abolish the family. And we march with our queer brothers and sisters and comrades, which they talk about the liberationist agenda, which is explicitly Neo-Marxism, which is a front therefore for ethno-communism.
1:32:45 James Lindsay: And they openly say that that’s what, the official Black Lives Matter thing openly says that that’s what they’re about. And their monetary fund is run by an organization called Thousand Currents. It has on its board, Susan Rosenberg, who’s a convicted left-wing terrorist that tried to blow up a building. I mean, which Black Lives Matter, what’s its future? I hope that the official movement gets seen for what it is and relegated to a very marginal status within our community. people want to be involved in it, fine. It’s their right, it’s their privilege in the United States to have that freedom of conscience. But I would hope that most people realize that it’s not what it is it’s presenting itself as.
1:33:24 James Lindsay: And in fact, it’s co-opting a legitimate cry for recognition and acknowledgement that, like I just told you, I agree that I would like to see the conversation around the very simple phrase, Black Lives Matter, why do you feel like things are so different. What parts of that are legitimate? What can we look into? What reforms with say policing of communities, not necessarily even reforms of police, but of policing communities, what are needed? What kind of programs? I know there were very successful programs that I remember reading in Chicago that were reducing crime rates tremendously and then those got canceled and all of a sudden crime rates started to go up.
1:34:01 James Lindsay: So there are successful methods that were working and why did those get canceled? And how do we resurrect those that do work and improve them so that the community policing project works better, rather than say the official Black Lives Matter narrative, which is that we need to defund the police and abolish prisons. Like, why would you, what, how does that work? Do we decide that we’re gonna societally follow with that? And then like we saw in the CHAS chop thing in Seattle, do we now have people declaring themselves a police? Do we have roving bands of the warlord toughest people who are the police and probably not?
1:34:36 James Lindsay: Do we install something like the Chinese social credit system that keeps everybody in line? And all of a sudden, you know, your financial and social standing are tied to whether or not you’re behaving the way the state says you have to? That could work. What’s their agenda? I don’t know, but if you get rid of prisons and you get rid of police, something has to come in and I don’t see any good options. So I really hope that the actual official Black Lives Matter movement dwindles to a tiny, tiny thing and the real call for acknowledgement and empathy and reform is able to come back to a place where we can have a reasonable dialogue and create those changes.
1:35:16 James Lindsay: And then all this weird stuff, like capitalism gonna do what capitalism does, it’s gonna sell woke stuff until they can’t make money off of it. And so corporate woke, there you go, whatever. I don’t really support that. I think it’s annoying, but money is what it is. As far as these other movements though, these radicals that are just busting up shops because there’s mayhem going on I have no patience for that. I have absolutely no patience for those people I hope they go away, too I hope actually a lot of them get arrested as they should be and as far as The this whole like white guilt movement that’s passing as black lives matter I hope people start realizing that this is manipulative and nonsense and they grow a spine in certain That the call is to have authentic cross-racial relationships There’s no such thing as an authentic cross-racial relationship where you call your black friends and cry and wash their feet all the time because of your white guilt.
1:36:09 James Lindsay: That’s not an authentic relationship. So that just needs to, people need to just grow up and realize that’s nonsense.
1:36:16 Brian Rose: And what about this eating itself from, you know, eating themselves where there’s now lots of different groups kind of fighting over this status or is this how deep do we want
1:36:26 James Lindsay: to go with it? The theory is in many different branches. theories maps out six, but I think there are probably arguably nine major branches. We only had so many words we could use, you know, in the process of writing the book. And we even went over that limit. So there are many different branches. And the theory from branch to branch doesn’t actually agree. They’re not consistent with one another. So for example, queer theory and critical race theory are fundamentally incompatible in terms of how they theorize identity. So they’re going to have to fight. So that’s your trans issue on the one side and your race issue on the other.
1:37:04 James Lindsay: They’re going to have to fight. So who’s more oppressed, trans people or black people? That’s going to be the practical side of the battleground, but there’s no resolution within theory, at least not yet, because they theorize identity in opposite directions. Queer theory says that liberation from oppression is made by getting rid of significance and identity categories related to sex, gender, and sexuality. Critical race theory says that liberation from oppression by race is achieved by imbuing racial categories with more social significance. So you have one that says get rid of social significance. You have the other that says remove social significance. They’re directly incompatible. They can’t be forged into a single thing.
1:37:42 James Lindsay: They’re already fighting with each other. I saw the trans flag with a black power fist got raised in some display in some protest a few weeks ago. And it just was wash of all these angry black liberation people saying, That’s trans, that’s white people stepping in and trying to cash in on our movement. And then vice versa saying, oh, well, Black Lives Matter doesn’t care about trans life. So you see the fight breaking out. You have the same fight happening now because obviously they’re pushing more and more with the slavery narrative toward reparations, politically speaking. And so now you have the fight breaking out very vigorously between the critical race theory and the post-colonial people in terms of particular indigeneity.
1:38:19 James Lindsay: So you have the people of color wasn’t a sufficiently bland term or is too bland, actually. So they decided they had to split that into black and indigenous people of color, BIPOC, B-I-P-O-C. They spell it. Well, now there’s a war. Should it be BIPOC or should it be IBPOC? Should indigenous be first or should black be first? Which one’s more important? So you see Nicole Hannah Jones of the 1619 Project, this big America is slavery project that they pushed through the New York Times last fall and got a illegitimate Pulitzer for. She’s all saying, well, some Native Americans own slaves. she’s just trying to throw the Native American straight under the bus and make sure that they’re not going to get cashed in on this. And meanwhile, you have Native Americans pointing out that the black people are settlers of color. You know, maybe you got brought over here by means of slavery, and maybe that wasn’t your fault, but you decided to stay here and
1:39:07 James Lindsay: you still live on stolen land. And so the war is pointing in both directions. And what it is is a fight over who’s going to have the biggest share of the pie or ideally the way they think because it’s zero sum conflict theory, who gets all of the pie on these identity statuses. So they’re fighting with each other. They’re already fighting with each other. And there aren’t even like dollar signs on the table yet. So the theory is grotesquely inconsistent. And the activism based on it is grotesquely envious. And so it’s a natural consequence that it’ll start to eat itself in that regard. It’s unstable. On the other hand, like all kind of movements say like the communist takeovers what you always saw was people who decided that they were going to try to get the keys to the castle and they do the big the big activism push or whatever thinking they’re gonna be big and then they’re the first people who get the guillotine
1:40:00 James Lindsay: they’re the first people to get taken over when the real party steps into power so they eat their own to make sure the power goes where they want it to go in all such revolutions the whole thing is designed to eat itself from within. I still think because of those inherent inconsistencies that it will implode into a fight you know a mess of internal fighting that’s irreconcilable but the cost will be that everything that it has taken over will go down with it will lose all of its credibility and go down with it. Corporations will be able to save themselves to some degree by you know whatever money is money so just they can do that. The university, however, schools, government institutions that took this stuff on significantly are just going to be utterly discredited. I don’t know how the Democratic Party and now the Libertarian Party, which has explicitly taken it to, I don’t know how they live this down.
1:40:53 James Lindsay: I just don’t understand. They’re totally, they’ve bought into something totally corrupt and if the thing falls, they fall with it. So I think that that’s what we’re going to see is it collapsing whether very soon or within a number of years and as it collapses everything that it took power over collapses with it so we see a grotesque hollowing out of our institutions both vital and not vital like do you take the ACLU seriously anymore does anybody Southern Poverty Law Center all of these things who can take the New York Times who can take these things seriously anymore after seeing their woke coup and seeing the stuff that they’re they’re putting out on social media and they’re publishing routinely.
1:41:35 James Lindsay: It just hollows out their credibility. It’s Keith’s law, that’s what they call it. The more political a thing is perceived to be, the less credible it’s taken to be. The simple rule of thumb, this is purely political. Ruin yourself if you want. But I think that the internal contradictions will make it destroy itself from within eventually.
1:41:53 Brian Rose: Eventually, interesting. Wow, it was a powerful prediction. Just wanted to finish on your thoughts on this thing you call clip culture. I think it’s really interesting and some of your ideas around it in the fact that, you know, a lot of times small pieces of video kind of get co-opted and you had a way of saying that we all can kind of read in what we want to read in based on kind of the size of the clip. I wonder if you could talk about that.
1:42:16 James Lindsay: Yeah, I mean, so I actually spoke about this with Joe Rogan on his show and I specifically mentioned a clip of an African-American guy that somebody sent me a few weeks ago on Twitter and it was just 40 or so seconds long. Maybe there were two of them and it totaled up a little over a minute. I don’t remember how exactly it went, but it’s just a very short clip. And he’s saying, white people ain’t gonna take it no more. They’re not gonna take, they’re gonna rise up and I’m going with them. And he’s like all fired up. White people are gonna rise up and the context in your head is like, whoa, there’s these riots.
1:42:43 James Lindsay: And so I wanted to share the clip. So I went on YouTube and I found the clip and it has a number of different versions on YouTube, one of which was a very short, 40 some odd second or minute and 15 second or whatever. And then there’s another one that was four and a half minutes and there was one that was 10. And I think there was one that was over an hour from which it was pulled. And I watched the four and a half minute one and I was laughing along. I’m like, oh my gosh, this guy’s so angry and it’s like he’s speaking to a piece of anger that people aren’t gonna keep taking this forever.
1:43:12 James Lindsay: Not that it’s right that people rise up. I don’t think people should rise up. I think people accept in saying no, that’s enough. I don’t think people should rise up physically. But I’m kind of laughing along with his passion and then all of a sudden it switches past the end of what I had seen And he’s like, this president is divisive. This president is tearing the country apart. This president is the problem. This president has to go. And I was like, wow, that kind of doesn’t quite square with some of the stuff he was saying before, but he’s railing on Trump. Wow. That’s what this was really about, was railing on Trump.
1:43:45 James Lindsay: The white people aren’t gonna take it anymore. All this mayhem happening in society and you’re piecing together the story. As though it’s mayhem, Trump was divisive. Trump caused the mayhem. Nobody’s gonna take it anymore. And then all of a sudden, another minute or so into the clip, He’s like, President Obama’s the biggest problem that’s ever been in this country. You’re like, oh, this is totally different. Then I finally looked. Maybe I should have looked in the first place, but how my brain works is how a lot of brains work, I would think. And I was like, seven years ago. Clip was uploaded seven years ago.
1:44:18 James Lindsay: So the context was assumed where the facts weren’t all present. And especially on Twitter, there was no context. it was just this guy at a microphone ranting. And it’s like, wow, this is what’s happening. There are actually several books that are out about it saying that we live in an era of images. And so that we see the picture on the internet, which is scary because of Photoshop. And we see the video, which is scary because of clipping and which is scary because of deep fake and which is scary because of, you know, the ability to manipulate video in other ways. And we project what we believe is going on onto that clip or onto that image and thus then draw significant conclusions about the reality of the realities of the world based upon that.
1:45:07 James Lindsay: And it’s a very mediated kind of culture. There is actually a book called Mediated that talks about the media universe acting in this way. I think it’s from like 2005 or something it’s old and refers to it as the blob. the blob comes along, that’s the media, and it consumes and digests with this digestive juices, all the information of a real event in the world, and it does this very quickly, and then it regurgitates the various clipped out narratives. And I think this actually happens to people. There are like probably 10 James Lindsay’s on Twitter. There’s only one that’s, you know, the account. And then there’s 10 different versions where people clip up my tweets and change the wording and try to create a narrative of who I really am based on selective readings of my tweets.
1:45:55 James Lindsay: I even see it in real time where I’ll make a tweet that has a context of a tweet from say two hours earlier. And maybe not many people saw the tweet two hours earlier or maybe even they did. And they run with the context of just the one tweet they see, which often they see only in screenshots, which is now a clipped image. So I could do a thread, for example, that has some controversial take in it, and then they could clip out one of those tweets and create a whole narrative about how psychotic I am, where all the context has been removed, and this happens in real time, and they deconstruct people even at this point.
1:46:35 James Lindsay: And anybody who’s been in the center of a media event knows that this is what happens, you lose control of the narrative. But it’s like on hyperdrive now with this kind of clip culture mediated epistemology would be the kind of nerdy academic way to say it, that we now have to figure out how to navigate, because it’s a genie that doesn’t go back in the bottle. So we have to figure out how to navigate the fact that we live in a world that is more or less constructed in social media universe out of deepfake everything. And that will get worse. When we can properly deepfake video, that will become an intolerable menace.
1:47:14 James Lindsay: we have to actually start figuring out how to deal with the society. I’m not talking about you and I, I mean, everybody. We’ve got to start figuring out how to deal with this new mediated universe of social and even mainstream broadcast media. Long form interviews like this are an answer, but they’re hard.
1:47:33 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s almost like you got to teach your kids, although I’m not saying that this great things happen. You teach your kids when they’re young like to look both ways before they cross the street. You know, I teach my boys right now, They’re super young and we always hold hands and we look both ways. But maybe you gotta teach your kids that your first impression of a clip on social is not necessarily right. And you have to do these three things before you even consider that it’s right. And then you have to, you know, maybe it’s just like basic stuff. Like, you know, when you go out at night, you, you know, make sure you have a light and you don’t go into dark alley, you know?
1:48:05 Brian Rose: Maybe it’s some kind of a weird education process.
1:48:07 James Lindsay: No, it makes sense. It’s the world we live in now and there do need to be heuristics for dealing with that. That’s actually fairly brilliant to say that we need to start teaching our kids. That first impression you have on social media is probably wrong. Social media is crafting narratives to make you misunderstand what you’re seeing. And us old people who didn’t grow up in that world are gonna be the least savvy to it. So give dad a chance here.
1:48:34 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, I know authors like Tim Ferriss stopped doing print interviews a long time ago because he said they were taking these quotes out of context and even, how about say high level publications like the New York Times where taking things out of context and so he said I’m not gonna do that, I’m only gonna do long form podcasts because then it’s all in context. And I know of other people that would do interviews that would record a version of their own because it might be taken out of context but the truth is is that you could have your own version that proves that they’re wrong but if the clip goes viral then it doesn’t matter, right?
1:49:09 James Lindsay: control what’s gone viral and that that becomes a version of you that’s now out in the world in many people’s heads that you have literally no control of and so it’s exactly like I’m just stunned by the brilliance of look both ways before you cross the street as like a kind of basic heuristic for dealing with the dangers of this new world that we live in it’s it’s really a profound way to think of it I love that metaphor I’m gonna take it I’ll give you credit and I can.
1:49:39 Brian Rose: Okay, thanks. I appreciate that. I can add to something, you know, with all the great stuff you create. It’s something I always do now. Whenever I read something, first of all, I don’t believe it. Then I say, what’s the agenda of someone doing it? Are they trying to get famous? Are they trying to push their own political agenda? And unfortunately, I have to do that now with places like the New York Times and other publications, which I used to thought were objective journalists, and now they’re just not. So now I just have this constant doubting nature, and unless it’s confirmed by multiple sources, you know, and maybe a long-form piece of content, then I only entertain that as a possibility.
1:50:14 Brian Rose: Otherwise, I just clock it up as a bunch of clickbait nonsense, and I try to move on, and I shame myself for even engaging with it. But, you know, that’s probably not a great
1:50:23 James Lindsay: strategy going forward. Yeah, I think that this is the challenge of our times, and it’s, you know, not on any one of us to figure out the solution to it. But I think about it a lot. I really do think that this is the shape of the new world, and figuring out how to navigate it in a way where, you know, expertise still matters, where you can figure out what’s got authority behind it, and what’s what’s trustworthy, is now a, it’s the new issue of navigating the world safely. It’s the new crop look both ways before you cross the street, really, because we live in an information economy now, we all live to some degree on social media. And so many of the dangers that we encounter in the world are not physical dangers that we have to be worried about, except walking maybe into a pole while we’re looking at our phone instead of paying attention to what we’re doing.
1:51:16 James Lindsay: It’s that we actually have to understand that the information universe that we’re exposed to has its own sets of risks and dangers that have to be understood and approached. And for what I hear from my friends who have kids that are teenagers, apparently they think this is all kind of funny and it’s like stupid old people don’t understand like that the stuff that’s on the internet you know it’s like mom that’s on the internet what are you talking about you know I keep hearing a lot of people telling me that their teenagers have this attitude and that they’re not quite as gullible to the to the information landscape as us old people who I mean I still remember you know I hear even from elderly people Now still we’re like, well it was on TV, you know, right? Yeah, right. It was on the news And it’s like the news is like 24-hour opinion BS now with like 10 people yelling at each other all the time
1:52:12 James Lindsay: What are you talking about? It’s on the news, but then that was authority when they were you know Forming their understanding of how to engage with information and for us, you know, well, there’s a study and And well, was there, you know, ask me about that. And then, you know, these kids getting younger, you know, the clip is funny in its context, but doesn’t necessarily imply as much as they like to think or as we’re afraid they think. It seems to be that, you know, they’re adapting to the world quicker than we are.
1:52:44 Brian Rose: Yeah, maybe that’s the silver lining here is that they don’t take things as seriously. I think you and I, or maybe I grew up in a place, you know, pre-digital world where when someone said something bad about you, it hurt, it was a bully in school. And then maybe when we went digital, we kept thinking that those comments were the old way. And whereas the kids these days, maybe they know that it’s just digital nonsense and maybe they treat it, like you said, maybe less significantly with us. I hope so. One thing that I use as a tool is I got some digital messages from people saying, how come you haven’t come out and said this?
1:53:20 Brian Rose: And how come you haven’t declared this when all this stuff is going on and I said, I wrote back and said, I’d love to have a conversation about this with you, you and me in person, let’s do that. And that was my solution as opposed to this, but a lot of them weren’t used to that because they were used to this kind of digital bickering and I didn’t do what they wanted to do and I felt like I was maybe in a long list of things and they were like, ah, I don’t know, maybe you don’t get it and then it was to the next one.
1:53:48 Brian Rose: So maybe that in-person conversation is the great way to get to the bottom of a lot of this.
1:53:53 James Lindsay: I think that there’s a very profound, I’ve been thinking about this for a month or two, there’s a very profound idea there, which is that real life is what happens when you’re not online. So the mediated epistemology information economy exists on the internet for the most part. I mean, it does on television too. And I often forget that because I don’t watch television at all. I just decided that it confuses me more than it helps me. So I stopped watching television entirely a number of years ago. And I think that cultivating an ethic that real life is what happens when you’re not online. So if you wanna understand somebody’s real views, you have a person-to-person conversation with them or a small group conversation with them and you talk it out.
1:54:35 James Lindsay: Not, I mean, I guess Zoom or whatever would be okay, but ideally face-to-face over coffee or drinks or food or something like that, or a walk. But what’s happening on your phone or in your laptop isn’t real life and the more we understand that that’s not real life. It’s like going to, in a very real sense, it’s like going into another dimension where everything’s a little bit different. And if we start to realize that real life is what happens, like when you have a face-to-face conversation, you see how people react and you connect this digital picture and falls away. Real life is what happens when you’re out there trying your best to ride a skateboard down the street, not when you’re watching some video of somebody doing some cool maneuvers or falling off and cracking their head on the ground.
1:55:25 James Lindsay: Real life is you interacting with reality, not with digital stuff. I think that cultivating that ethic would actually be a huge step in the right direction for a lot of reasons, so I’m glad we touched on that.
1:55:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, me too. And it’s what we try to do here at London Real when I have someone in the studio and we have them for two or three hours. I mean, yeah, it’s not the same as in real life, but without any editing or scripting and it’s six camera HD, I’d like to feel like we do as good of a possible way of encapsulating their personality digitally. And I’ve had people from all sorts of walks of life, people I’ve completely disagreed, thought were crazy, thought were weird, but when you sit and listen to them for two and a half hours and hear their whole journey and why they believe what they believe.
1:56:11 Brian Rose: It’s hard not to find some empathy with them and realize, okay, they’re a human, having a human experience. And I can definitely have a conversation with them and I understand them and I think about it more. Whereas like you said, when you go into this digital universe, it’s like a different world. And yet we try to treat it with the same rules as the real world. And it gets confusing.
1:56:31 James Lindsay: That’s where it’s very interesting for me. I interact with people nearly across the political spectrum now. And I say nearly because the woke people do not interact with me, except to throw swear words at me, maybe. But that said, you know, I often find myself getting either emails or messages sent to me or attack on Twitter saying, oh, well, you talked to this guy and he has these politics and you guys talked about something and he said some stuff that, you know, you probably don’t agree with. Why didn’t you go after him for it on the spot? Why didn’t you push back? there’s this constant demand to engage in what looks like online bickering in a natural flow of conversation that has other purposes. And again, part of this mindset and the woke critical theory ideology is that every interaction contains the seeds of the evils of the systemic oppressions of society. And so that it’s everybody’s moral duty and obligation to be uprooting those and
1:57:35 James Lindsay: tearing those up and if they don’t they must be complicit in that secret bad agenda. The reality is I’m not very conservative but I can talk to conservatives and I can let them say conservative things in my presence and I can actually I even it’s in the book that I wrote the section I feel like I contributed most to how to have impossible conversations which I wrote with Peter Boghossian is let your friends be wrong. You don’t actually have to be in a fight with your friends about everything and most of the people I sit down have a conversation with I try to think of them as my friends.
1:58:05 James Lindsay: I don’t have to fight you on, you can say your conservative thing. You can say something I completely disagree with that makes my eyelid twitch in the moment and it’s okay. It can go into the air and people can evaluate it and we don’t have to lose the plot of what we were trying to talk about to argue something. Very interesting example of that. I was actually sitting with some colleagues once making, we were on camera making a video and we were supposed to be talking about the rise of something to do with a scholarship and how it influenced the experiences at the Evergreen State College.
1:58:38 James Lindsay: And then all of a sudden, we’re talking about Bret Weinstein and Bret Weinstein has a particular view of faith. And so he brings up something about faith and we came from kind of this more atheist perspective and my colleagues, Peter and Helen are a little bit harder on the atheism and they’re like, no, no, we’re gonna argue about faith now and for like 20 minutes, it just completely derails while we argue about faith, whether or not science requires faith or not, which has nothing to do with the conversation whatsoever, but this is a behavior that makes sense in online bickering, but it’s not a behavior that makes sense in a natural conversation with people that you’re trying to either accomplish a goal or to bond with or just communicate about a certain idea, derailing a conversation like that does occur in real life, of course, but it’s a very prominent feature of online bickering that’s, I think, not as, it’s not as well accepted in person-to-person conversation
1:59:42 James Lindsay: in long form. So I think that bringing the online world into the real world is sort of more of a mistake than the opposite. So hopefully, you know, that ethic of online bickering doesn’t start to shape our relationships. I know I actually am very susceptible to it, but for a while, I was getting attacked on Twitter all the time, and I got in the habit of muting people and eventually blocking people who were being abusive. And I started to find psychologically that when people interacted with me in person, I wished I could mute or block them, or de-friend them, delete people from your life. And this is not something that we should be importing.
2:00:26 James Lindsay: we do want to have challenging relationships across difference because that’s what causes growth. That’s what causes humanity to flourish, both in terms of shared different ideas, but also in terms of being able to tolerate people with different ideas and to try to find where they’re coming from and learn those habits of mind rather than block, gone, you know. So I feel that seduction in myself and I worry about it because I know I’m being reflective. I hope other people are being reflective, but I know statistically speaking, there’s going to be a spectrum of reflectiveness and not everybody’s going to be as reflective as everybody else.
2:01:04 James Lindsay: I don’t know where I am on the spectrum. I’m not claiming superiority. I’m just saying that I’m virtually certain by the way that normal distributions work, that there are a lot of people worse at it than I am and some who are definitely better.
2:01:15 Brian Rose: Yeah, those are good observations on both sides. And it’s funny you mentioned the bickering and the cutting people off and the challenging culture. I think that comes from even our television and where we see that to be good TV and the ratings TV. And over here in Britain, funny enough, the conversation that was censored, banned, and deleted on YouTube for me on April 6, which was the second largest YouTube livestream in the world that day. So it was a huge demand. People wanted to listen to this conversation I was having with a 68-year-old man in leather chairs and calm demeanor. But one of the criticisms I got from Ofcom, a regulator here in Britain and the BBC was that it went virtually unchallenged.
2:01:58 Brian Rose: And I was like, you know, who says you have to yell at someone, argue with someone, cut them off to make it an equitable conversation? You know, we live in the internet now where you can go to YouTube and get all these different opinions. And as an adult, you can make your decision. This one interaction doesn’t have to have, you know, criticism or equal representatives from all spectrums to make it just and good as a piece of media. It’s like this antiquated television type lens I think they put on long form internet content. And I just rejected the whole premise entirely but it was kind of funny to get that criticism here, so.
2:02:36 James Lindsay: Yeah, you might be right because there is a fairness doctrine kind of mentality where everything needs to be challenged. And again, the mentality is fueled by this, literally by this kind of mainstreaming ideology that sees that anybody who’s not challenging something they disagree with, that has political valence especially, is somehow complicit in that. So, you know, if you, and Dave Rubin gets criticized for this a lot, if you were actually interviewing, say, some complete nut job who’s just, you know, maybe it’s me, just running with this thing and your job that you saw as the interviewer was to draw as much of that out of them to get it aired and visible as possible.
2:03:19 James Lindsay: and you don’t see your job as fighting with that person, but your job is actually to draw it out and let the person speak at long form. I know that that was very much what Dave Rubin’s objective was, was to let people speak at long form and say what they wanna say where they feel like they can’t say it. Then you’d be doing a disservice to your very project by cutting in and so what you’re saying is, you know, and trying to cut over it. And you’re also therefore doing your, going back to John Stuart Mill, you’re also doing your audience a disservice because they don’t have to agree.
2:03:51 James Lindsay: They’re not going to automatically agree with everything they hear. But it’s very important if you want to understand people, especially people you disagree with. It’s very easy to not pay attention to the details of people you agree with. People you disagree with, you need to hear that thing espoused as accurately as possible so you can understand if you care about that issue, how to put down the bad argument. You have to know what kernels of truth they have so that you can claim those kernels of truth and say, no, I do recognize what you’re saying there. There is a point there, there is a validity there.
2:04:23 James Lindsay: And we need to understand that there is more than one way to understand that point of validity. And you have presented one way, I disagree with it for these reasons. And here’s another way that might, you know, have fewer points of disagreement in general. And now we have the ability to begin what’s called dialectic, where we start to modify one another’s beliefs to get closer to truth rather than, oh, let’s just cancel what we disagree with. So there’s purposes beyond, like put two people on the five minute news show chair and let them yell at each other and yell over each other. And one agree thinks this way and one thinks that way.
2:05:06 James Lindsay: And now it’s fair and equitable. It’s just squabbling at that point. There’s a very large value to letting people both share their views in long form, but also to draw those views out. And really, you know, a good interviewer isn’t necessarily going to challenge people on everything. They’re also going to draw places out where they’re, you know, are you sure that you’ve really thought this through? Like, are you sure you really know what you’re talking about? Ask that kind of question to get somebody because it’s a humiliating to a view and this is backed by data that we drew upon writing how to have possible conversations. Humiliating a very moderating thing happens for people’s views, when all of a sudden, the person’s being asked a question, and all of a sudden, they’re like, I don’t know. Like, what do you think of immigration policy?
2:05:50 James Lindsay: And I say, blah, blah, blah, talking point, talking point, and you say, Well, what about this? Have you thought about that? I’m like, talking point, talking point. And then you say, you know, well, you know, I don’t really understand who exactly is going to have to enforce that? Who do we hire to enforce that? And I’m like, somebody, you know, I look like an idiot at that point. And my view that I just talking point talking pointed through, gets discredited by my own ignorance. And there’s a strong value that’s called actually the illusion of explanatory depth in the cognitive science literature, by the way, there’s a huge value and a good interviewer to be able to draw that out and expose it, which requires letting somebody talk enough rope to hang themselves as the saying goes, rather than cutting them off at every instant and having this kind of like, I don’t know, everything’s a sporting event, everything’s the arena because it sells tickets mentality to
2:06:43 James Lindsay: conversation and dialogue and news. I think you’re right that the evolution of kind of talk news
2:06:51 Brian Rose: media has fueled this problem as well. Yeah, for sure. James, I really appreciate your time. What I really like about you is there’s so much more to you than the studies you did and what you did in 17 and 18. I mean, you really have a great perspective on this, a great way to articulate it, lots of nuance points that we didn’t even get into. How can people get more information about you, follow you, and then the book, when it comes out, how can they get a copy?
2:07:19 James Lindsay: So the book is easy. It’s going to be sold pretty much everywhere where books are sold. It’s called Cynical Theories. It’s available for pre-order now so you can secure a copy already. It’s ambiguous as for when it’ll actually be out because the pandemic has messed with all things, but no later than August 25th is the current stated date. You can find me on Twitter at Conceptual James. That’s where I’m literally the most active by many orders of magnitude on social media, but I do have some presence on Facebook and all the rest of them. I don’t really like any of them, but here we are.
2:07:55 James Lindsay: I try to post articles and I’m curating an encyclopedia of this woke’s social justice terminology on my website, newdiscourses.com. So you can subscribe to the newsletter, for example, or you can start visiting it and seeing the resources. I’ve actually put up a lot of information in the six months that it’s existed, or that I’ve been working on, it’s only existed for three. So that’s where you can find me, Twitter at conceptualjames, newdiscourses.com. The book is Cynical Theories, and it’s out ambiguously soon, available for pre-order, or wherever you like to pre-order things on the internet already.
2:08:33 Brian Rose: Fantastic, excellent stuff. Well, for everybody watching, if you could please share this link in the sidebar to all your social media people. And again, if you’ve got a woke following, just ask them to give us 15 minutes and let them decide. And look, I need to get out of my comfort zone and I need to get some woke people on here and listen to them, honestly. So if anybody has some suggestions, send them in. James, if you have any suggestions, you let me know. Because freedom of speech is important when you’re hearing things you don’t agree with. Otherwise, it’s not really freedom of speech. And I’ve been learning more about this issue and it’s not something any freedom of speech person wants to hear initially.
2:09:10 Brian Rose: They don’t wanna hear that. They just wanna hear about there, right? But not other people’s rights. So I need to just start hearing more about this and engaging with it because look, I wanna have these conversations. But I appreciate yours. I appreciate you saying things that aren’t popular. And yeah, I’m really happy to have these conversations. So thanks for what you do.
2:09:29 James Lindsay: Thanks for having me.
2:09:31 Brian Rose: All right, James, next time, let’s do this in person, maybe in your hometown or mine. And until then, all the best with the website, looks great, by the way. Love what you’re doing there with this project and with the book for pre-order and yeah, keep doing what you do.
2:09:46 James Lindsay: You know it.
2:09:47 Brian Rose: All right, awesome stuff. Thank you so much and thank you all for watching. Again, share this link to all your friends, let them know and let us know what you think of that and we’ll see you next time on the Digital Freedom Platform on London Real. Take care, bye.
