0:00

Can't do any jokes about identity politics.

0:02

They're all fucking they're all watch

0:04

they're all battle on B shit You can't

0:07

do a satirical crack about it because

0:09

it won't register to 90% of

0:11

our listeners who already believe that

0:13

I'm a conservative But

0:16

a sexy conservative Peter due to the voice they

0:19

They they know that I have woke elements,

0:22

but also listen to or watch watch football

0:24

highlights and that is That's

0:26

reactionary coded I admit from a from a

0:29

team with a problematic name. I've made the promise

0:31

I've told people that if we don't win a Super

0:33

Bowl this year, we're getting more racist It's

0:35

the only way to fight the power. I like

0:37

that this podcast has become a venue for us to

0:39

repeat our best Twitter jokes Banger

0:42

you're getting it again Peter

0:45

Michael, what do you know about

0:47

the identity trap is the trap that

0:49

when you're a white guy who turns 40 You

0:52

have to start complaining about identity politics So

1:08

Today's episode is about the identity

1:10

trap by Yasha Monk It's

1:12

a little bit different from the other

1:15

books that we've done in that

1:17

it's not like the best-selling ist

1:19

book imaginable But it does make

1:21

a series of arguments that are

1:23

increasingly Prevalent about like the problems

1:25

with identity politics, etc. And so

1:27

I think it's a good Encapsulation

1:30

of this argument and something

1:32

that we should confront. It's

1:35

emblematic. Exactly. It's also very

1:37

deliberately Attempting to

1:39

be like the non psycho version

1:41

of this argument. So the author

1:43

Yasha Monk Yeah, he's acutely aware

1:45

that he's making an argument Pretty

1:48

similar to people like

1:50

Chris Rufo and Richard Hennania basically people

1:52

who explicitly want to get Trump elected

1:55

Uh-huh. And so what he is doing

1:57

is saying, okay, we know that this

1:59

has kind have been hijacked by some of

2:01

these further right people. What I'm trying

2:03

to do is make like

2:06

the good faith, smart version

2:08

of the argument that identity politics

2:10

has taken over the left and

2:13

is becoming an electoral liability.

2:15

I'm intrigued to see where Yasha goes

2:17

here. We're both going in with an

2:19

open mind. Absolutely. This is

2:21

a no dunks, listen and learn podcast. I

2:23

know that he's a political scientist and it

2:25

feels to me as someone who has a

2:28

degree in political science. There are two types

2:30

of political scientists, quote unquote. There

2:32

are the types that just like deal

2:34

with really noisy data and

2:36

will like post on Twitter

2:39

with their conclusions and then

2:41

a bunch of caveats. And

2:44

then there are the types that write books

2:46

about identity politics, if that makes sense.

2:50

To start with our

2:52

protagonist, Yasha Monk is born in

2:54

1982, same as me. He

2:57

grows up in a small town and then moves to Munich

2:59

when he's 12. He gets

3:01

his BA from Cambridge. He then

3:03

goes to Harvard for his PhD.

3:06

He writes a memoir about growing up Jewish

3:08

in Cold War Germany. And

3:10

starting in 2016, he kind of

3:13

makes his name as a like

3:15

failure of democracy scholar. He starts publishing

3:17

this research about how people in liberal

3:19

democracies are like less enthusiastic about liberal

3:21

democracies than they used to be

3:23

and kind of the rise of

3:25

these authoritarian attitudes. He then

3:28

starts racking up these like CV

3:30

bullets of just like establishment institutions.

3:32

So this is from his website.

3:34

Yasha is a contributing editor at

3:36

The Atlantic, a senior fellow at

3:39

the Council on Foreign Relations and

3:41

serves as a publisher at DeepSight.

3:43

Oh, hell yeah. Aspen and bio. He

3:46

is also a senior fellow at the

3:48

New America Foundation and he

3:50

was the executive director of the

3:52

Renewing the Center team at the

3:54

Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. How's that

3:56

mission going, folks? Yeah, that sounds like a 30

3:59

Rock joke. And

4:01

so this book is basically an

4:04

argument about how like identity politics is

4:06

leading the left astray. And the way

4:08

that he defends writing this book is that he's

4:10

written two previous books about like right

4:12

wing radicalization. And so that

4:15

sort of gives him a license to finally turn

4:17

to the problem on the left. Got it. Okay,

4:19

we're now ready for the episode to get good. We're gonna talk about the

4:21

book that he's written. This is a

4:24

pop political science book, Peter. So what do

4:26

we have to start with? Are we talking one

4:29

book? We're gonna need an opening anecdote.

4:31

Oh, God. A little story that encapsulates some

4:33

of the little themes. Okay, let me,

4:36

can I guess? I do, do, do. This

4:38

is going to be something that's emblematic of

4:40

like the worst excesses of

4:43

lefty identity politics. So

4:46

I'm going to guess that this

4:48

is something involving children, maybe

4:50

like a middle school teacher trying

4:53

to teach something about race and

4:56

losing the plot. Wow. Is

4:59

that right? I mean, it's actually shocking how wrong you

5:01

were. This is actually about an elementary school, where someone

5:03

loses the plot about race. But edit this out, edit

5:05

this out so I don't look foolish. Really embarrassed for

5:07

you right now. I am going to send

5:10

you the opening paragraphs of

5:12

this book. In the late summer

5:14

of 2020, Jennifer Kingsley asked the

5:16

principal of Mary Lynn Elementary School in

5:18

the wealthy suburbs of Atlanta whether she

5:20

could request a specific teacher for her

5:22

seven-year-old daughter. No worries, the principal

5:24

responded at first. Just send me the teacher's name.

5:27

But when Kingsley emailed her request, the principal kept

5:29

suggesting that a different teacher would be a better

5:31

fit. Eventually, Kingsley, who was black,

5:33

demanded to know why her daughter couldn't have

5:35

her first choice. Well, the

5:37

principal admitted, that's not the black class.

5:40

The story sounds depressingly familiar. It evokes the

5:43

long and brutal history of segregation, conjuring up

5:45

visions of white parents who are horrified at

5:47

the prospect of their children having classmates who

5:49

are black. But there is

5:52

a perverse twist. The principal is

5:54

herself black. Perverse twist. As Kingsley

5:56

told the Atlanta Black Star, she

5:58

was left in disbelief. that I

6:00

was having this conversation in 2020

6:02

with a person that looks just

6:04

like me. It's segregating classrooms. You

6:06

cannot segregate classrooms. You can't do

6:08

it. So, it's like

6:11

a weird version of like horseshoe theory

6:13

where it's like people have moved so far

6:15

to the left now. It's like they've ended

6:17

up in this right wing place. They're like,

6:19

yes, let's separate the races, separate the children

6:21

from each other due to my wokeness. Oh,

6:24

no. Okay. All right. I'm

6:27

ready for whatever this actually is

6:29

or isn't. I

6:32

love that you're already rushing into like, I don't

6:34

know about this, Mike. This seems

6:37

a little short, this retelling of like what

6:39

might be a more complicated anecdote. He

6:43

tells this story in basically every interview that

6:45

he's done. He's been interviewed on kind of

6:48

all of the main liberal and centrist podcasts,

6:50

and he always like starts with this anecdote.

6:52

He talks about the principal. He

6:54

says, she had bought into an

6:56

identitarian ideology that is attempting to

6:59

reshape the norms of the West. According to

7:01

this worldview, we shouldn't be teaching school

7:03

kids if they have things in common.

7:05

We shouldn't be telling them to stand

7:07

in solidarity with each other. We

7:09

shouldn't show them how to recognize

7:12

injustice. Instead, students should define themselves

7:14

as strongly as possible by the

7:16

particular racial group to which they belong. Immediately

7:19

off the rails with the

7:21

description of the ideology. It's

7:23

not just like, oh, they're

7:26

sorting kids based on race, and

7:28

here's what that might lead to. It's

7:30

like they're telling them that they have

7:33

nothing in common. They're telling them that

7:35

they shouldn't speak out against injustice, that

7:37

they should be anti-solidarity. It's like, whoa,

7:39

whoa, I don't think you've established this.

7:41

It's also cast as this betrayal of

7:43

like what makes us liberals. When

7:45

he's defining this, what he basically says is like the

7:48

left used to fight for

7:50

universal values, equality, liberty,

7:52

freedom, but now they've abandoned

7:54

that effort. They're now fighting in favor

7:56

of the things that divide us, things

7:59

like race. and gender, and

8:01

all of these identity markers that are what

8:04

makes us different from each other. So

8:06

he says, this trend is especially striking in

8:08

education. Over the last decade, many schools

8:10

have introduced race-segregated affinity groups,

8:13

some as early as kindergarten. In extreme

8:15

cases, principals who claim to be fighting

8:17

for social justice have, as Jennifer Kingsley

8:19

experienced in Atlanta, even put all the

8:21

black children in the same class. A

8:23

similar set of trends is now changing

8:26

the nature of higher education. Old-renowned

8:28

universities are building dorms reserved for

8:30

their black or Latino students, hosting

8:33

separate graduation ceremonies for students of

8:35

color, and even excluding some students

8:37

from physical education classes on

8:39

the basis of their race. In the place

8:41

of liberal universalism, parts of the

8:43

American mainstream are quickly embracing what

8:46

we might call progressive separatism.

8:50

You can hear Inception horns. Blah.

8:53

Oh, God. So...

8:56

Whatever. I do want

8:58

to flag one thing about this, because I don't

9:01

think it's crazy to think that there are teachers out there

9:04

who are misapplying social justice

9:06

principles and saying dumb things

9:08

about race. One hundred percent. That is

9:10

very believable, and in fact, pretty much

9:12

inevitable. Yes. But in the

9:15

quote you sent me, he said, in a growing number

9:17

of schools all across America, educators

9:19

who believe themselves to be fighting for racial justice are

9:21

separating children from each other on the basis of their

9:23

skin color. That is

9:25

a quantifiable claim that should

9:27

be backed with clear

9:30

data, and yet all

9:32

of these conversations happen in

9:34

a barrage of anecdotes. One thing I started

9:37

to notice very early in this book is

9:39

the way he relies on your mind filling

9:42

in the blanks. So in this

9:44

little litany of anecdotes, he says they're

9:47

hosting separate graduation ceremonies for people

9:49

of different identity groups. One

9:51

thing in favor of this book is that

9:53

he gives very meticulous footnotes. So every single

9:56

claim in the book, he has a link

9:58

to where he got it. appreciate

10:00

that. But then when you go

10:03

to the description of these

10:05

separate graduation ceremonies, they're actually

10:07

in addition to the main

10:09

graduation ceremony. He also has this

10:11

thing of affinity groups in schools now.

10:13

They're doing racial affinity groups. But

10:16

again, we had those in my high school in the 1990s.

10:19

We had the Filipino club and the

10:21

black students club. He says that this

10:23

hearkens back to 1950s segregation. But

10:26

these are students opting into

10:29

voluntary groups. There's actually a

10:31

huge difference between that and

10:33

you must attend a black

10:35

only or white only school. Something about this that always

10:38

gets missed is you're not going to see a lot

10:40

of black affinity groups

10:42

at vast majority black

10:45

schools. These are groups

10:47

that form among kids who

10:50

feel like they are looking for some

10:52

sort of cultural connection. Yeah, I mean,

10:54

he mentions university housing, that they now

10:57

have housing for specific identity groups. One

10:59

of the examples that he gives in the footnote

11:01

is Berkeley. It's true that

11:03

Berkeley has something called Africa House for

11:06

black students. But it houses something

11:08

like 200 students and Berkeley

11:10

has 43,000 students altogether. You can find

11:12

actual articles about

11:16

the creation of these institutions that Berkeley is only 3%

11:19

black, despite California being like 8% black.

11:22

And they've always struggled to recruit black students.

11:24

And one of the reasons is that there

11:26

aren't that many black people at Berkeley. And

11:28

so black students feel really isolated. And so

11:31

in this context, they're like, well, why don't we set

11:33

up a place for black students to kind of like

11:35

find each other and like offer each other support?

11:38

Is that bad? Maybe if

11:40

they stopped viewing themselves as black and started

11:42

viewing themselves as human beings. We

11:45

wouldn't have this problem. So are you are you

11:47

ready to talk about our opening

11:49

anecdote in the Atlanta suburbs? Yeah, yeah,

11:51

let's do it. So again, when

11:53

he says this thing about like,

11:55

there's the black class, your brain

11:58

fills in that like, oh, It's

12:00

an all-black class. That

12:02

is not what happened. What actually happened is, this

12:04

is a school in wealthy, overwhelmingly

12:06

white suburbs of Atlanta.

12:09

And in the second grade

12:11

class, there are 98 kids

12:13

altogether. There's only 12 black

12:15

kids. The second graders are split

12:17

up into six different classes. There's like around 16

12:20

kids per class. If you distributed

12:23

all of the black kids equally,

12:25

you'd have two black kids per class. So

12:28

this black principal, she

12:30

grew up attending almost exclusively white institutions and

12:32

she felt really isolated as a kid. And

12:34

she felt like she had no community. So

12:37

she decides she's going to group together

12:39

the black kids. So she decides to put

12:42

six black kids in one class, six black

12:44

kids in another class, and the other classes

12:46

have zero black kids in them. So at

12:48

the most basic factual level, there's

12:50

no all-black classes anywhere in this

12:53

anecdote. There is this accusation that

12:55

the mom tried to move her

12:57

kid and the school was like, no,

12:59

no, no, you can't, because that's not the black class. I'm

13:02

actually changing the name of the mom because I love

13:05

the way these anecdotes get litigated in

13:07

national media. I'm going to find the

13:09

real name and I'm going to tweet

13:12

it out. Yeah. Thanks. Brave, brave Peter.

13:15

But so it appears that what happened was

13:18

this mom, who's like really involved in the PTA

13:21

and runs an after-school program, her daughter tested

13:23

below grade level on a test. She tried

13:25

to move her daughter to another class and

13:28

the school basically was like, no, you can't

13:30

do that in the middle of the year.

13:33

One of the few articles that actually interviewed people at

13:35

this fucking school talked to an administrator who said,

13:37

this is basically a mom asking for

13:40

special treatment. She wanted to move

13:42

her daughter to a different class with a different teacher and

13:44

the school was like, no. And then she

13:47

complains and then they cut her

13:49

after school class and she says

13:51

that's retaliation. And then she starts

13:54

recording her conversations with the

13:56

principal and then eventually she goes to the media with

13:58

this all black. class story. And

14:01

like, I hate how much I know about this.

14:03

I hate how much fucking time I've spent looking

14:05

into this. The whole thing honestly smells like an

14:07

interpersonal dispute to me. This has been going on

14:09

for years. We can't say

14:11

exactly what happened at this one fucking school, but I

14:13

feel like what we can say is that

14:16

the worst possible version of

14:18

this story is not reminiscent

14:20

of 1950s segregation. What

14:23

was distinct about like early 20th

14:25

century segregation in America was

14:28

that students of different races

14:30

were receiving different educations. Not

14:32

that like teachers were trying to like, you

14:35

know, pair them up in ways

14:37

that they thought would like help

14:39

with their sort of like shared

14:42

cultural understanding or whatever. Exactly. And

14:44

like putting aside the stuff with the mom and

14:46

like whatever the interpersonal dynamics were, the basic

14:48

facts of this story are

14:51

a principle at an overwhelmingly

14:53

white school without the power to

14:55

make the school more diverse, doing

14:57

her best in a

15:00

structurally unsound situation. My,

15:02

you know, my instincts just hearing about

15:04

it as a lawyer is like, not

15:06

good. The thing is, I

15:08

think there's actually like, this is something that comes up throughout

15:10

the book is that like, there's a lot

15:12

of these cases that like are actually quite legally

15:14

dubious, but it's not clear if

15:17

they're like morally or ethically dubious. Right. That

15:19

also means that there is like

15:21

an apparatus for shutting this down.

15:23

You know what I mean? Like

15:25

to the extent that someone is

15:28

sorting children by race exclusively, you

15:31

can point out that that is most

15:33

certainly illegal and shouldn't be done. And

15:35

that is how you handle it. Right.

15:37

What Munk wants to argue is that

15:39

this is sort of like the

15:42

manifestation of a mindset that

15:44

has gone too far. But

15:47

I'm not sure that it's

15:49

a particularly strong example. You know, yeah,

15:51

again, this is just someone who felt

15:54

isolated when she was a child

15:56

and tried to sort

15:59

of piece together. a system that

16:01

would avoid that for the

16:03

black students in her class. Now, is that

16:05

like thinking race

16:07

first too much or something? Maybe? But

16:09

it's not, it doesn't seem like a

16:11

moral disaster, right? It doesn't seem like

16:14

we are a small step

16:17

away from racial segregation as it

16:19

was in the South. He also,

16:21

he describes this as symbolic of

16:23

like a much larger cancer on

16:26

the American left at like, oh,

16:28

progressive separatism, right? But it's also

16:30

noteworthy that there have now been

16:32

three different investigations of this after

16:34

this mother went to the media with

16:36

her complaint about the principal. So the

16:39

Atlanta School District investigated, there's now

16:41

a federal investigation and the

16:43

NAACP sent somebody there to investigate what

16:45

was going on. So it's like the fact that

16:48

something happened at a school that you

16:50

think is bad, it doesn't really say anything, right?

16:52

There's tens of thousands of schools in the United

16:54

States. To claim that this

16:56

is like a much broader problem, you have to

16:58

show that left wing institutions are accepting of this

17:01

or cheering it on, right? Like, oh, put even

17:03

more kids in the one class. Yeah, I love

17:05

it. No, there was a huge

17:07

outcry about this. And the

17:09

school, it appears immediately changed this.

17:12

By the time the NAACP even gets there, there's

17:14

two black kids per class. This is

17:16

the problem with like all of our

17:19

discourse being filtered through anecdotes

17:21

that are one sentence long. Yeah, yeah,

17:24

yeah, yeah. If I just like walked

17:26

you through the dumbest shit that my

17:28

elementary school teachers told me, dude, it

17:30

would be jarring. Dude, I had a

17:32

Spanish teacher in high school who made

17:35

us watch Shall We Dance, a movie

17:37

that is in Japanese because she was

17:39

really into ballroom dancing. And then we

17:41

learned ballroom dancing for like a whole

17:44

week. Being a bad teacher must rock. You

17:46

know what I mean? She

17:50

was so excited to teach us to dance. Like

17:52

she just didn't want to teach us Spanish at

17:54

all. But the fact that

17:56

you can sort of pull up a couple anecdotes like this really

17:59

says nothing to me. me, especially when

18:01

like, if I were to

18:03

start compiling anecdotes about

18:05

like, the imbalanced

18:08

treatment of black versus

18:11

white defendants in Louisiana criminal

18:13

court, right? Right.

18:15

Right. The anecdotes I could

18:17

pull out would be endless. It would ground the

18:19

bullshit in this book. I think that's also

18:21

emblematic of like where this anecdote

18:24

sits, because school segregation in

18:26

the United States is still a huge

18:28

problem. That's the thing is that it

18:30

seems like the story that Monk and

18:33

a lot of the folks on the

18:35

right want to tell about this is

18:37

like, we reached a place of perfect

18:39

balance and equality, and then

18:41

the left kept going. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

18:44

But what actually happened after like Brown

18:46

v. Board was that

18:48

Southern schools put as many

18:50

roadblocks between them and desegregation

18:53

as possible. Eventually, they

18:55

were successful. I mean, I spent

18:57

quite a bit of time like reading about

18:59

the dynamics of current school segregation in the

19:02

United States and like, roughly half of minority

19:04

kids attend schools that are 75% minority,

19:07

10% of American

19:09

students attend schools that are 90% one race, like all

19:12

white or all black. It's also

19:15

darkly funny that the stakes of

19:17

Yasha's Atlanta anecdote are like, oh my god, there's

19:19

like all white classes at the school. But

19:22

one in five white kids

19:24

attend 90% white schools. So

19:27

like, there's a lot of all white classes

19:29

in the United States of America. And

19:32

yes, there was this period, there was after

19:34

Brown v. Board, there was a period where

19:36

everyone fucking ignored it. And then starting in

19:38

the 1970s and 1980s, we had all these

19:40

city programs to like do forced busing or

19:43

like to kind of directly address segregation.

19:45

And there was actually a period where

19:47

segregation in schools fell. But

19:50

as the Supreme Court basically neutered

19:52

all of those programs and white

19:54

parents lost their fucking minds, cities

19:57

one by one totally abandoned these

19:59

plans. And so since the 1990s,

20:01

there's actually a debate among academics whether

20:03

segregation has gotten worse or whether it's

20:06

just stagnated. But we essentially have not

20:08

made any progress on this for

20:10

30 years. And in

20:12

all the literature that I've read on this, I

20:15

didn't see one mention of like

20:17

wokeness. The primary driver of

20:19

school segregation is like the way that

20:22

we fund public schools, right? People

20:24

pay for it with their property taxes, and

20:27

most kids attend the nearest school. So

20:29

when you have all white neighborhoods and all black

20:31

neighborhoods, you have all white and all black schools.

20:34

That is kind of the original sin of schools'

20:36

segregation. We also have rich white

20:39

people protecting their privileges, and

20:41

like there's actually these like super bleak

20:43

studies that as the percentage of black

20:45

students in a school rises, the

20:48

white kids start increasingly flowing out to

20:50

private schools. And that

20:52

effect only shows up for

20:54

highly educated white parents. Highly

20:57

educated black parents don't do this. So

20:59

like there actually is a case to be

21:01

made that like white liberals are the problem

21:03

here. But like Yasha isn't interested in making

21:05

that case because that would require looking at

21:07

the actual dynamics of segregation.

21:10

It's incredibly frustrating to have

21:12

someone sort of like pontificating

21:14

like, ooh, you know, liberals

21:16

in schools are recreating segregation.

21:19

And it's like segregation still exists for

21:21

us. And we just have the segregation.

21:23

We don't need to recreate anything. It's

21:26

just now de facto instead of de

21:28

jour, and some fucking principal shuffling around

21:30

the six black kids or whatever is

21:32

not going to make a difference. Dude,

21:34

he thought this anecdote was so strong

21:36

he opened his fucking book with it. This

21:39

is like the first three minutes of every

21:41

season of The Wire. So that is

21:43

the overture chapter. He

21:46

spends the rest of the book

21:48

laying out the characteristics and

21:51

flaws of what he

21:53

calls the identity synthesis. They

21:55

have to do so much to finding in these books

21:58

because like at no point do their ideas like. sort

22:00

of naturally cohere. This is, you should watch the

22:02

interviews with him where they're like, define the core

22:05

concept of your book and then he talks for

22:07

like four minutes. Right. Okay,

22:09

well. Define the core concept of the

22:11

identity trap and he's like, it's

22:13

Atlanta in the year 2020. No.

22:21

So he's very open about the fact

22:23

that like, you know, there's all this

22:25

stuff about wokeness and identity politics in

22:27

the 1990s and people on the

22:30

left have been like kind of clowning

22:32

on conservatives for like being totally unable

22:34

to define this term that they spend

22:36

all their time whining about, right? And

22:38

he's like, I'm trying to set myself apart from

22:40

that. But also like, this is basically the same

22:43

thing. He's quite explicit about it. He's like, look,

22:45

we just need a name for this. Whatever, whatever

22:47

you want to call it, I don't really give

22:49

a shit. But like, we all know this is

22:51

happening. This is as close to a real definition

22:53

as we get in the book. So I'm going to

22:55

send this to you. Good

22:58

luck with that first sentence by the way. The

23:00

identity synthesis claims to lay the

23:03

conceptual groundwork for remaking the world

23:05

by overcoming the reverence for long

23:07

standing principles that supposedly constrains our

23:09

ability to achieve true equality. Crystal

23:12

clear. Sorry, I'm just I'm just

23:14

rereading it. You're not laying conceptual

23:16

groundwork? Claims to lay.

23:18

Claims to lay the conceptual groundwork. For remaking

23:20

the world by overcoming the reverence for long

23:22

standing principles that supposedly constrains our ability to

23:24

achieve true equality. Genuinely doesn't

23:27

mean anything, I don't think. Many words. It

23:29

seeks to do so by moving

23:31

beyond or outright discarding the traditional

23:34

rules and norms of democracies like

23:36

Canada, the United Kingdom and the

23:38

United States. How dare they

23:40

list Canada first. Many

23:43

advocates of the identity. How

23:46

many times am I going to have to say identity

23:48

synthesis throughout this episode? Luckily not anymore because

23:50

he needs identity politics and it's just

23:53

going to be easier for everybody if

23:55

we just say politics from now on.

23:57

Many advocates of the identity synthesis feel.

24:00

righteous anger at genuine injustices,

24:02

but their central precepts amount

24:04

to a radical attack on

24:06

the long-standing principles that animate

24:08

democracies around the world. Basically

24:11

what he's saying here, I mean tell me if you disagree

24:13

with this, but the identity synthesis is

24:15

people taking the desire to

24:18

rectify injustice too

24:21

far to the point where they

24:23

end up giving up democratic norms.

24:25

And before you know it, you're you know

24:27

segregating kids and you're shutting down

24:29

free speech, etc. Well yeah I

24:31

think that's right. This is the

24:33

sort of common refrain that social

24:36

justice movements are illiberal and

24:38

these centrists are in fact

24:40

the true inheritors of

24:42

Western liberalism. I do find

24:45

it interesting that when

24:48

you're taught when he talks about

24:50

the norms and traditions of democracies,

24:53

we all know that he's talking

24:55

about very abstract things like speech

24:58

and not voting rights for

25:00

example. So the rest of the book

25:03

he spends laying out like the

25:05

main sort of themes and content.

25:07

This is what he does when people ask

25:09

him like can you define the identity synthesis.

25:12

He's like well it it consists of like

25:14

seven precepts. Okay. The book is like structured

25:16

really weird. He has like the main themes

25:18

and then he's like the flaws of the

25:20

identity synthesis, but then they're like kind of

25:22

the same as the themes but like a

25:24

little bit different and he's like how to

25:26

fix the identity synthesis and then he like

25:28

lays out the same thing again. So like

25:30

I kind of pulled this apart and

25:32

put it back together of like what I

25:34

think are like the main things that he

25:37

like keeps returning to. I hate it when

25:39

they're like well it's not really an identifiable

25:41

thing. It's like

25:43

ten concepts in any

25:46

arrangement. It's like fibromyalgia. So he's

25:48

now going to walk us through

25:51

the main themes of the identity

25:53

synthesis. The first is skepticism about

25:55

objective truth. You know where

25:57

you know what he's gonna say. Michael don't tell me they were

25:59

doing Foucault. Just clip

26:02

my reaction. God damn it. I

26:05

was like, oh, don't make me do

26:07

fucking Foucault. I have a new motto

26:09

for our podcast, Foucault, fuck no. Not

26:14

engaging. So

26:17

the first third of the book

26:19

is like this philosophical historical account

26:22

of these thinkers post World War II

26:24

who are basically starting to question these

26:27

quote unquote grand narratives of history, right?

26:29

These things like everything will always get better.

26:31

We're protecting the rates of man or whatever.

26:33

And there was a school of thought kind of

26:36

personified by Foucault that questioned the

26:38

extent to which we can really say that

26:40

we can gather quote unquote objective

26:42

truth, right? Because

26:44

these concepts of kind of progress

26:46

and advancement and scientific

26:48

accuracy are oftentimes used by

26:50

the powerful against the powerless.

26:52

Yeah. Before this,

26:54

I talked to Sam Hunkey

26:57

who's a historian at George

27:00

either Mason or Washington University,

27:02

the weird libertarian one. Irrelevant.

27:05

He's also a friend of mine because like we're

27:07

both homosexual males who lived in Berlin. The

27:10

reason I like exploded laughing at that Peter was

27:12

like I literally texted him like I

27:15

know that he's wrong about Foucault, but don't make

27:17

me read Foucault. Like I don't

27:19

I don't want to read Foucault. I was like Sam, what's

27:21

the deal? Basically,

27:24

Sam who knows way more about this

27:26

shit than I do was like he's

27:28

not wrong about any of the Foucault

27:31

shit. He's essentially just summarizing like Foucault

27:33

and then eventually he moves into like

27:35

Derek Bell and like Kimberly Crenshaw and

27:38

this kind of critical theory stuff. He's

27:41

roughly correct about it, but it's

27:43

like that's not really the thing that he has

27:45

to prove. It's like, yes, these ideas

27:47

were being published in like obscure law

27:49

and philosophy journals. What they're trying

27:51

to do is imagine

27:53

that like by going back 40 years and

27:56

saying here's what leftists were writing in like

27:58

the 70s, for example. that

28:01

you can sort of infer this is

28:03

what leftists actually believe, right? It's sort

28:05

of like an atheist trying to do

28:07

a gacha on a Christian by reading

28:09

the Bible. And you're like, aha, it

28:12

says this. And the Christian is just

28:14

like, I don't actually believe that. This

28:16

whole section is like where we

28:19

get into one of his tendencies

28:21

throughout the book, which is just kind of like this

28:24

use of gacha in place

28:26

of actual argumentation. So throughout

28:28

the book, he comes back numerous times to this thing where

28:30

he's like, these critical race

28:32

theory scholars said that race is a social

28:34

construct, and yet black

28:37

people are the most qualified to

28:39

talk about their experiences. That's just

28:41

a misunderstanding of like what a social construct

28:43

is. He also has this bizarre

28:45

section at the end about like gender stuff,

28:48

where he points out that GLAAD

28:51

once tweeted like congratulations to Rachel

28:53

Levine for being like

28:55

the first openly trans like federal

28:57

official. And he's like, ah,

28:59

so they do believe it's worth

29:02

distinguishing between trans and cis women. That's

29:05

not what people mean when they say trans

29:07

women are women, that there's no distinctions. When

29:09

people say Toyotas are cars, they

29:11

don't mean that there's no differences

29:14

between fucking Toyotas and Hondas. He

29:17

also does a thing where he takes suspiciously

29:20

short quotes from

29:23

his source material. So

29:26

here's this. So

29:46

I got this critical race theory book, and

29:49

here's the actual original

29:51

citation. For

30:00

the critical race theorist, objective truth, like

30:02

merit, does not exist, at least in

30:04

social science and politics. CRT's

30:07

adversaries are concerned with what

30:09

they perceive to be theorists'

30:12

nonchalance about objective truth. These

30:14

people are summarizing an argument against

30:16

themselves. They're not making this argument.

30:18

Right. It's like me saying, like,

30:20

according to the Westboro Baptist Church,

30:22

gays are degenerates. And then someone else

30:24

being like, Michael Hopps admits gays are

30:26

degenerates. First of all, it's

30:29

just an incorrect citation. Second

30:31

of all, it's like no one was saying

30:33

that, like, the Hubble Space Telescope can't measure

30:35

how far a fucking galaxy is. That's not

30:38

what people are actually arguing. The point

30:40

is that, like, a lot of things

30:42

that appear very simple and objective on

30:44

their face, when you go one level

30:46

deeper, it's actually a little greater than

30:48

that. And a lot of these theorists

30:50

are just sort of pointing that out.

30:53

That's different than saying there's no such

30:55

thing as objective truth. Yes. And like

30:57

immediately descending into nihilism, which is what

30:59

the right thinks that, like, Foucault represents.

31:01

Another, like, subsection – we're

31:04

doing subcategories now – of his complaint

31:06

that the left doesn't believe in objective

31:08

truth is this thing about standpoint theory.

31:10

Okay. This is the concept of, like,

31:12

if you're going to write an article

31:14

about trans people, you should, like, interview

31:16

some trans people. Okay. Yeah. He

31:18

says, the core claim is that a member

31:20

of a privileged group will never be able

31:22

to understand a member of an oppressed group

31:24

however hard they may try to do so.

31:26

Okay. As Janetta Johnson, a prominent black activist

31:29

in San Francisco, put it in a debate

31:31

about how white allies can help to fight for

31:33

racial justice, don't come to

31:35

me, because you'll never understand my

31:37

perspective. Yeah, this is a common

31:39

complaint from the right that when

31:41

people on the left call for,

31:43

like, input from marginalized groups,

31:46

that what we're actually doing is

31:48

saying that objective truth doesn't matter.

31:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, dude, like,

31:52

getting people who are close to

31:54

issues to weigh in is a

31:56

way to get closer to

31:58

the truth. basically makes like

32:01

three arguments against this. The first

32:03

is that like empathy is possible. I'm

32:06

not really gonna cover that one because like it's

32:08

really just obvious. It's like, yes, we can talk

32:10

to each other and learn things. The second is

32:12

that by constantly deferring to marginalized groups, the

32:15

experiences of the majority are

32:18

being left out. White people can also

32:20

help us understand racism. And like he

32:22

says, you know, if you wanna understand

32:24

police brutality, you should probably also speak

32:26

to like cops. Yeah, what they

32:29

should have is like both

32:31

nationwide, state and local police

32:33

unions that can make public

32:36

statements that are constantly

32:38

amplified by the media. No one ever talks

32:40

about how cops deserve that. I mostly included

32:42

that because I wanted you to make a

32:45

little quip. And then his

32:47

third argument is that all of this

32:49

deferring to minority groups basically makes organizing

32:51

much more difficult, right? Because you can't

32:53

come up with a broad based political

32:55

program. If you're constantly just being

32:57

like, oh, I'm gonna step back now.

32:59

I'm gonna defer. I'm gonna let you guys take the lead.

33:01

You need a strong white man to take

33:03

charge. I'm

33:06

just gonna keep going and let you quip on all of them. You

33:09

should paragraph by paragraph now. But there, I

33:11

guess there's the tiniest shred of truth

33:13

in there in that like lefty organizations

33:15

can eat themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And

33:17

plenty of people who actually care about

33:20

the success of the left have like

33:22

talked and written about this, right? Well,

33:24

he actually makes a very similar argument

33:26

to Olafemi Taiwo who wrote a book

33:28

called Elite Capture, which I also read

33:30

for this. His argument is

33:32

basically that like the problem with what he

33:35

calls deference politics is that like it's

33:37

very difficult to figure out who is

33:39

a representative member of a group. If you're

33:41

a middle manager at Amazon and you're like,

33:43

okay, I'm white, I'm gonna step back. I'm gonna let

33:46

like the black people in the company take

33:48

the lead. Like a black person who

33:50

is a middle manager at Amazon is

33:52

not going to necessarily be all that

33:54

representative of like the needs of black

33:56

people generally, right? And we have all

33:58

of these institutions that tend to. choose

34:00

for minorities with particular characteristics,

34:02

right? Especially minorities who are

34:05

well-versed at moving through majority

34:07

institutions. And so what you might

34:09

be doing is plucking out these minorities that

34:11

basically will just like say the same shit

34:13

as people in power. And you're

34:15

not actually getting like the purpose of doing that, right?

34:17

You're just getting this kind of like thin veneer of

34:20

it. Yeah, I also I actually have like

34:22

a broader critique of this like Yasha,

34:25

a lot of my views

34:27

are based on my personality flaws

34:29

and political grievances and I

34:32

the last two years I felt

34:34

like I'm absolutely shouting into the

34:36

fucking void on trans rights. And

34:39

when I've talked to cisgender

34:41

like sort of more establishment journalists like

34:43

much larger platforms than me, part

34:46

of their reluctance to weigh in uncharitably, you

34:48

could say it's like there's probably some

34:50

anti trans bias going on. I think

34:52

people are just generally a little bit

34:54

uncomfortable with the sort of gender non-binary like

34:56

the way that gender binary is shifting. The

34:59

charitable interpretation and I've heard this directly

35:01

from people is that like, I don't want to speak

35:03

on this issue because I'm not trans like I want

35:05

trans people to lead that conversation and like I

35:07

really do think that that comes from a good

35:09

place. But the problem

35:12

is that trans people are only like 1% of

35:14

the population. And by

35:16

definition, they have been locked out

35:19

of all establishment institutions, right?

35:21

There aren't that many trans people with

35:23

a platform. We're basically talking about like

35:26

five people. Yeah, I know them. I

35:28

know them. We're thinking of their names right now. It's not

35:30

fair to put the entire onus of

35:33

responsibility on those five people to like

35:35

fix this and roll back the

35:38

tide. Not to mention that there's

35:40

value to cis

35:42

people seeing cis people make these

35:45

arguments, right? I think that Yasha's

35:47

argument that like, well, what about the

35:49

majorities? It's like, I think what he's kind of

35:51

saying there is like, well, what about straight pride?

35:54

But I think that he is onto something in that there

35:56

is this research about how like white

35:58

people are more likely to recognize that. racism

36:00

when they are told about it from a white

36:02

person, right? Sin people are more likely to

36:04

care about fatphobia when they hear about it from another

36:07

sin person. There is something

36:09

about having members of the

36:11

majority, like, visibly care about this shit. And

36:14

also, I've noticed from talking about trans rights

36:16

that, like, straight dudes are good

36:18

at packaging messages about this issue

36:20

for other straight dudes. Yeah. Right?

36:24

Like, I can't really talk about, like, sports and, like, trans people in sports

36:26

if I don't give a fuck about sports. You're

36:28

not like the Fox News viewers who are sincerely

36:30

passionate about women's sports. That's all

36:32

they've been talking about for years, and

36:34

the trans issue comes up, and all

36:36

of a sudden, wow, this really fits

36:38

into our preexisting beliefs. After 25 years

36:40

of attending local female high school track

36:42

meets. Although, I think what he's implying

36:44

is not just that it would

36:47

be useful for members of majority groups

36:49

to talk about this stuff, which is,

36:51

I think, unquestionably true in a general

36:53

sense, but that there

36:55

are people on the left who are trying to prevent

36:57

that from happening. Thank you for giving me an excuse

36:59

to circle back to this quote that he used, Peter.

37:02

He ends his section by saying

37:04

that this woman on a panel said

37:06

that, like, don't come to me because

37:09

you'll never understand my perspective. Right? He's

37:11

like, these activists are saying, like, don't even engage

37:13

with me. Right? And, like, this

37:15

makes organizing much harder. Like, he is quoting someone

37:18

who was speaking on a panel

37:20

called How White People Can Support the

37:22

Movement for Black Lives. Right?

37:25

And the full context of this woman's

37:27

quote was that, like, there are white people

37:29

who have been engaging in anti-racist work for decades, and

37:31

if you're a white person, the best thing to do

37:33

is go to those people because, like, they know the

37:35

kinds of resources you have and they know the kind

37:37

of messages that are going to resonate with you. She

37:40

literally says, you need to go to your white folks and ask

37:42

them because you're not going to hear it from me the way

37:44

that it needs to be served to you. No

37:46

one is saying that white people should

37:48

not care about racism or that cis

37:50

people should not care about trans rights.

37:54

Members of marginalized groups are begging

37:56

for engagement from the majority. little

38:00

bit of humility so that

38:02

people do the work necessary to

38:04

understand the issues and also the

38:06

most effective solutions. They're

38:08

literally making an argument about the most

38:10

effective forms of political organization and Yasha

38:13

is like, these people don't even

38:15

want political organization. You know, I've

38:18

heard horror stories of small scale

38:20

organizing sort of falling apart because

38:22

the group becomes too

38:24

focused on centering

38:26

the right people and stuff like that in

38:29

a way that ends up being counterproductive because

38:31

you end up way too focused on that

38:33

and less focused on accomplishing your ultimate objectives.

38:36

That stuff is happening on a very small scale.

38:39

On a large scale, majority

38:41

groups are obviously the dominant

38:44

voices in nearly every conversation.

38:47

So like, what the fuck are we talking about?

38:50

When you turn on like

38:52

MSNBC, it's not like there's

38:54

like a black trans person talking to you

38:56

and it's been like, you know,

38:58

Yasha Monks watching that being like, oh, leftists

39:00

have done this. He has later in the

39:03

book, he talks about sort of like the

39:05

stakes, like the ultimate destination of all of

39:07

this like identity synthesizing. And he

39:09

lists like three institutions as like how

39:11

you can tell it's gone too far.

39:14

And he talks about NGOs, colleges,

39:16

and like corporate America. All

39:20

three of those institutions, everyone in

39:22

power is overwhelmingly white and cis

39:24

and male. There's

39:26

more CEOs named John and

39:29

James than there are female

39:31

CEOs. Like whether or not

39:33

diversity initiatives or like diversity

39:35

trainings have gone too far

39:37

does not mean that actual

39:39

diversity has gone too far. If I

39:41

were a casual American racist, I would look

39:43

at all these corporate initiatives and be like,

39:46

well, at least they're not really

39:48

doing it. Yeah. You know what

39:50

I mean? We don't have to have this conversation.

39:52

Can we talk about something else? Like,

39:55

you know, fucking Amazon is not

39:57

it's not like a beacon of

39:59

racial justice. So the first

40:01

problem with the identity synthesis is that no

40:03

one believes in objective truth. The

40:06

second problem with the identity

40:08

synthesis is doubling down on

40:10

identity. So we started

40:12

out with like Focquot and like Critical

40:14

Rights Theory and like obscure law journals.

40:17

We then smash cut to this.

40:21

God damn it. The

40:25

culture of Tumblr, Tumblr encouraged users to

40:28

start identifying as members of some identity

40:30

group, whether that identity was chosen or

40:32

descriptive, and whether it reflected a pre-existing

40:35

social reality or expressed a kind of

40:37

aspiration. As Catherine Dee, a culture

40:39

writer who has interviewed more than a hundred early

40:41

users of Tumblr about the role it played in

40:43

their lives notes, quote, Tumblr

40:46

became a place for people to fantasize

40:48

and build upon ideas about real identities.

40:50

Most of the people involved had little lived

40:52

experience as these identities. This is my groundhog

40:55

day, Peter. Every fucking episode we have to

40:57

talk about Tumblr. People will be

40:59

like, there are kids online who claim that their

41:01

true identity is like a wolf. Yeah.

41:04

Yeah. They're

41:06

like 12. And also like the part of the

41:08

argument that like I want him to establish, it's

41:10

like how we went from law journals

41:13

in the 1970s to fucking 13 year

41:15

olds on social media 30 years later.

41:18

Well, I mean, you're 11 when your

41:21

teacher puts you in a race

41:23

segregated class and makes you lead

41:25

Foucault. And

41:28

you start talking about identity groups. He's

41:30

also basing this on. He says like Catherine

41:32

Dee, a culture writer who's interviewed 100

41:34

Tumblr users, this is based on

41:36

an article in the American conservative by

41:38

just like a random lady with a sub stack.

41:41

Like there's also like a weird thing in this book where

41:43

like a lot of the

41:45

citations are just to like articles he

41:48

read online. He cites Chris

41:50

Bruffo like directly. I just went

41:52

to Catherine Dee's Twitter and her

41:54

pinned tweet is about other kids.

41:56

No, I went there yesterday. He

42:00

then, he tells us how he became interested in

42:02

this. I

42:07

know, I know. Then I

42:09

came across everydayfeminism.com, a

42:12

website that expressed a simplistic version of

42:14

these new ideas and idioms in a

42:16

highly accessible form. The concepts

42:18

I had first encountered in stuffy

42:20

academic settings were now being packaged

42:22

into easily understandable and readily shareable

42:25

slogans. This, I quickly realized,

42:27

was something genuinely new, a

42:29

way of interpreting the world through a

42:31

narrow focus on identity and lived experience

42:33

that might appeal to a mass audience.

42:35

Here we go. The articles that

42:38

adorned the homepage of everydayfeminism.com in March

42:40

2015 give a sense of

42:43

the worldview that was starting to congeal.

42:45

Its headlines read, four thoughts

42:47

for your yoga teacher who thinks appropriation

42:49

is fun. People

42:52

of color can't cure your racism, but here

42:54

are five things you can do instead. You

42:57

call it professionalism, I call it oppression

42:59

in a three-piece suit. He loves listing

43:01

examples. Once I discovered the website, I

43:03

couldn't stop looking at it. I'll

43:05

bet. Over the next six

43:07

months, I read articles with titles

43:09

like six ways to respond to

43:11

sexist microaggressions in everyday conversations, white

43:14

privilege explained in one simple comic, and

43:16

so you're a breast man? Here

43:19

are three reasons that could be sexist. So

43:21

in fairness, I did go

43:23

to this website and

43:32

read this piece about being a breast man

43:34

and why you're problematic, and it is by

43:36

far one of the dumbest fucking things I've

43:38

ever read in my entire life. But

43:41

this is actually like a perfect encapsulation of

43:44

how these sort of like

43:46

reactionary thinkers become

43:48

obsessed, right? Yeah. I

43:52

came across a website where

43:55

every other article was

43:57

dumb and condescending at the same

43:59

time. time and I became

44:01

obsessed with it until

44:03

it took up a massively disproportionate

44:06

segment of my mind space and

44:09

then a few years later I wrote basically wrote a book about

44:11

it. What he's talking about

44:13

is like self radicalization. This

44:15

guy is a scholar of how

44:17

various countries are radicalizing across the

44:19

world and like the rise of

44:22

right-wing populism etc. It's happening

44:24

to him but he just

44:26

describes it not as like I had

44:28

an unhealthy obsession with

44:30

this extremely obscure website but it's like

44:33

look at look at what's happening look

44:35

at what they're trying to do to you. This is

44:37

like pop pop feminist

44:39

bullshit right it's clickbait

44:42

nonsense with like feminist

44:44

overtones written by people

44:46

with no academic credentials.

44:49

It's not absorbed as

44:52

anything other than that by the community. Yeah

44:54

that's the thing. There's a

44:56

much bigger culture on the left of making fun

44:58

of this shit then there's an actual culture of

45:00

this. I went to this website I spent like

45:03

a day looking into this because I thought it

45:05

was one of those like fake websites that

45:07

set up by right-wingers like

45:09

exclusively to provide material to these

45:11

reactioners like look what the leftists are saying

45:13

now because like the articles are fully like

45:16

really fucking out there. This like

45:18

Europe Rest Man it's sexist article

45:20

is like if you don't like being cat

45:22

called like why is it okay for your

45:24

boyfriend to comment on your body which like

45:28

but also I looked for this article on

45:30

Twitter to see like okay who was sharing

45:32

this I found one

45:35

or two right-wingers posting this to

45:37

make fun of it. Yeah like I could not

45:39

find a single person like posting

45:41

this earnestly being like wow interesting article

45:43

good perspective right right if you're gonna say

45:45

that this ideology has like taken

45:48

over the brains of millions of people you

45:50

have to establish that people read it and liked

45:52

it you can't just be like this exists on

45:54

the internet. If you're looking at like 2012 to 2015 you have

45:58

two things happening at once. One is

46:00

the increasing awareness of social justice, and

46:03

two is the general higher

46:05

use of social media. And

46:08

these things sort of come together, and you have

46:10

a lot of people being exposed to these ideas

46:12

for the first time, processing it for the first

46:14

time, and like spitting out their thoughts for the

46:16

first time. And a lot of those thoughts were

46:18

very dumb. The meta conversation,

46:20

even in like popular feminism, has sort

46:23

of moved past this sort of bullshit.

46:26

The only people who ever say stuff like this now are

46:29

kids. Again, encountering it for the first

46:31

time, processing it for the first time.

46:33

This actually leads to the next section

46:35

of this like historical piece that

46:37

I think that he's totally right about. So

46:39

after he talks about like Tumblr and everydayfeminism.com,

46:42

he talks about vox.com. When

46:44

Vox was founded by Ezra Klein, Matt

46:46

Iglesias, and Melissa Bell, they wanted to

46:49

do kind of like these card stacks

46:51

that were like explainers. Yeah, the whole

46:53

point of Vox was like, the news

46:55

media ecosystem is getting too noisy. We're

46:57

gonna put out like quick and easy

46:59

explainers of current events. Exactly, but the

47:02

problem is they launched it kind of at

47:04

the tail end of like the blog

47:06

era. And this was at the

47:08

rise of social media sites, right? So everything

47:10

became about like how shareable, how viral something

47:12

was gonna be. And these like

47:15

explainers of like existing issues, people

47:17

just don't share them in the same kind of way.

47:20

So he talks about the sort of the transformation of

47:22

the site into publishing more social

47:24

justice oriented things, really trying to capture like the

47:26

news cycle. Like what are people interested in today? And

47:28

like, how can we grab a piece of

47:30

that? So he talks

47:33

about the institution of Vox first person, which

47:35

is exactly what it sounds like. People send in these stories

47:37

of themselves. He says

47:39

that like based on Facebook and

47:41

Twitter distribution, what they started to

47:44

notice was that the sort of

47:46

identity stuff just became like

47:48

more popular. Like that's what people wanted. There

47:50

is a kernel of truth here. There's

47:53

also a kernel of falsehood. First of all,

47:56

this is exclusively based on a

47:58

Matt Iglesias blog post. And

48:00

then if you go

48:02

to every single first person

48:04

feature that Fox published in

48:06

2015, which I did, you do

48:08

find some sort of SJW

48:10

stuff. These are a couple

48:12

of headlines. I'm a black

48:14

activist. Here's what people get wrong about Black Lives

48:17

Matter, what it's like to be black at Princeton. I

48:19

never noticed how racist children's books are until I

48:21

started reading to my kids. So like,

48:23

you know what? SJW stuff. But

48:26

those were like actually the minority. So these are

48:28

some of the other ones. Married

48:31

with roommates, why my wife and I choose

48:33

to live in a group house, what breaking

48:35

up with my best friend taught me about

48:37

male friendship. I complained about helicopter parents for

48:39

years. Then I realized I was one. How

48:41

working for a suicide prevention hotline made me rethink

48:44

pain and empathy. I was a

48:46

rural homeschooled Christian kid. Then I converted to

48:48

Islam. I'm a marriage counselor. Here's how I

48:50

can tell a couple is heading for divorce. And

48:53

this is maybe my favorite one. Shark Week is upon

48:55

us. As a shark scientist, I both love it and

48:57

hate it. I read that one. Every

48:59

single one pains me in a unique

49:01

way. And I'm sure that some of

49:04

them are totally reasonable, but something

49:06

about the way those headlines are written, like PTSD in my

49:08

brain. I

49:11

also think that the way that Yasha is describing

49:13

this is like the internet

49:15

got flooded with these pieces that are like, I'm black

49:17

and here's why racism is bad. You

49:20

don't really find that in these. What

49:22

you mostly find is this obsession with

49:24

like counterintuitiveness. Like one of them

49:26

is like, I'm a left wing person who likes guns and

49:28

here's why. Why being run over by a bulldozer

49:30

was the best thing that ever happened to me.

49:34

The way that he summarizes this is he

49:36

says, a large percentage of the most successful

49:38

articles spoke directly to the interests and experiences

49:40

of particular identity groups. And

49:43

like on some level, yes. But

49:45

it's like another problem with this book is that

49:48

he never actually defines identity groups. I'm

49:51

a homeschooled Christian kid. Well,

49:53

homeschooled is an identity. Like

49:55

I'm trying to think of a article

49:57

like this that wouldn't appeal to some.

50:00

identity group. When you look at

50:02

the trend of reporters

50:04

going to diners in

50:07

the Midwest to interview white working

50:10

people, no one would

50:12

ever characterize that as pandering to

50:14

an identity group. But I think

50:16

by the definitions that Yasha is

50:18

using, that's what you would call it,

50:20

right? He basically says that like, you

50:22

know, we go from Tumblr to Vox,

50:24

which is sort of one foot straddling

50:27

online and one foot straddling traditional media.

50:29

And then eventually this outlook goes to

50:31

traditional media. So he talks about how

50:33

the word racist and terms

50:35

like structural racism start appearing

50:38

in the New York Times and the Washington

50:40

Post like tenfold more than they did, you

50:42

know, pre 2013. Okay.

50:45

He sort of says that like a kind of group thing kicks in.

50:47

There's now this peer pressure. No one's allowed to

50:49

dissent, right? Because we get yelled at, we dissent on Tumblr

50:51

and people yell at us. So because everybody's

50:53

so afraid to push back, you then have

50:55

this kind of ideological conformity kicking in.

50:57

Seems to leave out Ferguson, but all right.

51:00

I mean, this is what happens when you base your

51:02

entire argument on a single blog

51:04

post from Matt Iglesias. As

51:07

opposed to like the vast literature

51:09

on like why beliefs about

51:11

identity groups have changed in the last

51:14

10 years. Who needs a vast literature

51:16

when you have the incredible brain of

51:18

Matt Iglesias, a man who's read dozens

51:20

of abstracts? I think the first thing to note, I mean,

51:22

we've mentioned this on the show before, but like this is true. Progressives

51:25

have become more progressive on race. There's

51:28

like a lot of kind of long and short

51:30

term shifts. The longest term

51:32

one is that like basically since the

51:35

Civil Rights Act, whites have

51:37

been slowly drifting out of the

51:39

Democratic Party and minorities have been

51:41

slowly drifting in. So

51:43

as recently as 1992, Asian Americans, only 31% of them were

51:45

Democrats, right? And

51:49

sound like 75%. It's like really easy to

51:51

forget that like the coalitions of the parties used to

51:53

be like much more evenly split. And

51:56

then this process of course like

51:58

massively ramps up after Obama. gets

52:00

elected even during the campaign, like Hillary Clinton

52:02

would propose like, let's make community college free.

52:04

It would be like, okay, whatever. And then

52:07

Obama would say, let's make community college free

52:09

and people would be like, what is this

52:11

black separatist bullshit? Is this like a

52:13

black thing or what's going on here?

52:15

Right. So like there's some

52:18

percentage of the population that basically starts to

52:20

see everything through the lens of race because

52:22

they're consented by like a black dude doing

52:24

it. Right. The biggest like shift, I mean,

52:26

if you look at the sort of racial attitude surveys, there

52:29

are huge spikes between 2012 and 2014

52:31

because we basically have the first round of like

52:34

black lives matter protests. Right. Right.

52:38

We have Trayvon Martin, we have Michael Brown,

52:40

we have Eric Garner. There's

52:42

also a social media story in that a lot

52:44

of these things are captured on video. Right. We

52:46

now have the ability to see and hear

52:49

these events that basically black people have been screaming about

52:51

for decades and white people are like, are you

52:53

sure? Right. The sort

52:55

of theory on attitude change among

52:57

social scientists for a really long time was that,

52:59

you know, when Democrats and Republicans like

53:02

appear to shift their views on stuff,

53:04

it's not individual people changing their minds.

53:06

It's mostly the coalitions changing and you

53:08

can sort of track these things over

53:10

time. But during the 2016 election,

53:12

you then get people updating their

53:15

views and actually changing their minds based on

53:17

what the candidates say. Right. On

53:19

the Republican side, you know, Trump only won

53:21

44% of Republican voters

53:24

in the primary. Right. But

53:26

then once he wins the primary and becomes a general candidate,

53:29

what you find is a lot of sort

53:31

of center right, quote unquote,

53:34

respectable Republicans finding excuses to

53:36

support him. So there's this really interesting survey

53:38

where they give people a bunch of like

53:40

statements, one of which is you're

53:43

with a friend and he describes somebody else's wife

53:45

as like a great piece of ass. And

53:48

it's like, how common is it to

53:50

hear stuff like this? And

53:52

people report like, oh yeah, that's like a pretty normal thing

53:54

to say. And like, this

53:56

is how people like started to justify

53:59

it. They didn't say,

54:01

like, oh, I like it when people say that. But

54:03

they're like, eh, I don't love it. But it's fairly

54:05

typical to say that, even though a couple years previously,

54:07

they had said it wasn't. When me

54:09

and the homies get together, we talk

54:11

about banning Muslims from the country. That's

54:14

what it's like. But then the

54:16

same thing happened among Democrats, too,

54:18

where Clinton's campaign was all framed around opposition

54:20

to Trump. Like, basically, whatever Trump is,

54:22

I'm the exact opposite of it, right? And

54:24

so you then find among liberals

54:27

more liberal views on

54:29

immigration that this is also kind of

54:31

at the same time as me, too,

54:34

and eventually the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. So

54:36

people do actually start changing their minds.

54:38

In 2015, if you asked a liberal,

54:40

how do you feel about giant suits

54:43

that just drape over you

54:46

preposterously, they would have said it's

54:48

fine. But the last big shift,

54:50

obviously, is fucking 2020 George Floyd.

54:54

Like, if you look at, again, surveys

54:56

of, like, racial attitudes, there's a huge

54:58

jump based on essentially just,

55:00

like, news events. Like, people were seeing

55:02

demonstrations of the fact that these inequalities

55:04

persist in America. You're forced to engage

55:07

with it, right? Yeah, exactly. To

55:10

circle back to his overall narrative, I don't want

55:12

to say that, like, Tumblr and other

55:14

forms of social media played no role

55:16

in progressives becoming more

55:18

progressive. The political science literature, I

55:20

think, gives too much credit to political candidates.

55:23

But all of the messages from those candidates

55:26

are being filtered through media, and they're being

55:28

filtered again through social media. Yeah, it definitely

55:30

seems to be true that social media, for

55:32

example, can create echo chambers and all that

55:35

stuff that everyone writes about all the fucking

55:37

time. But the other side of

55:39

that is that all of

55:42

media consumption used to be an echo chamber,

55:44

right? Yeah, exactly. Because we were all

55:46

reading The New York Times and,

55:49

like, listening to, like, fucking Dan Rather. I'm

55:52

fascinated by the way that these

55:54

books mix, like, true things and

55:56

false things. The fact

55:58

that liberals became more of a liberal.

56:00

liberal over the last 15 years, he's

56:03

framing it as some sort of threat,

56:05

right? And like, well, now we're giving

56:07

up on democratic norms. But like,

56:09

I mean, you could easily see this as like good

56:11

news, right? Like, there's a

56:14

good argument to make that like, policing in

56:16

America is very discriminatory. And people are more

56:18

aware of that now. And like gay people

56:20

do deserve all over the rights. He

56:22

seems to just take it as a

56:24

given that like, oh, this should worry us.

56:27

But like, why? There's the anti democratic

56:29

forces in America are extremely

56:31

concentrated on the right. Yeah, I

56:33

think that what

56:36

he's trying to do here is play

56:38

a bit of

56:40

blame game. What the conservatives

56:42

are trying to claim is like,

56:44

yeah, this is your fault for

56:46

moving left. And therefore, the conservative

56:50

reaction is justified. It is

56:52

the sort of natural outcome.

56:55

I've seen this from others on the

56:57

right, the idea that it's not

56:59

the right radicalizing, it is in fact,

57:01

the left, which again, is based

57:04

on like a very thin,

57:06

non comprehensive bunch of political

57:08

polls that don't capture the

57:10

fact that QAnon exists. One

57:13

of the office earliest Atlantic

57:15

articles is about how like, see

57:17

leftists, nobody likes political correctness. And

57:19

it's the result of a survey

57:22

where they ask people like, do

57:24

you like political correctness? And like 80% of

57:27

Americans are like, no, it's like, right, because

57:29

that's like a negative term for something that no

57:31

one can agree on what the fuck it is.

57:34

Right? Of course. Do you do

57:36

you object to government overreach? Yes. Right.

57:39

By definition, it's something people don't like. A better

57:41

question to ask would be like, do you like

57:44

it when someone calls you sugar

57:46

tits in the workplace? Exactly. So,

57:52

okay, speaking of words, the

57:54

next aspect of

57:57

the identity synthesis that Yasha is going to guide us

57:59

through. is discourse analysis

58:01

for political ends. Ugh.

58:04

So he basically... I mean,

58:06

I'll read this whole fucking thing. He

58:08

says, "...many scholars who are immersed

58:11

in the identity synthesis are deeply interested in

58:13

the way that dominant narratives and discourses

58:15

structure our society. Inspired by

58:17

Edward Said's work in Orientalism, they hope to

58:20

put the tools of discourse analysis to

58:22

explicitly political use. Their ambition is

58:24

nothing less than to change the world by

58:26

re-describing it. This has had a major

58:28

influence on the way in which activists engage

58:30

in politics. In virtually every developed

58:33

democracy, activists now expend enormous efforts on

58:35

changing the way in which ordinary people

58:37

speak. In the United States, for example,

58:40

activists have successfully championed new identity labels

58:42

such as people of color and BIPOC.

58:45

Prominent institutions such as Stanford have even

58:47

published long lists with terms ranging

58:49

from guru to sanity check..." Oh, god damn

58:52

it. "...check our bonus episode feed that

58:54

affiliates of the university should avoid using

58:56

because they could inadvertently perpetuate discrimination or

58:59

commit cultural appropriation, a

59:02

newly popular term that describes a broad

59:04

class of circumstances in which members of

59:06

one culture co-opt elements of the culture

59:08

of another group in supposedly objectionable

59:11

ways." Oh, man. Okay. There

59:14

are many things that frustrate me about these

59:16

conversations, but one is like, I

59:18

actually think that it's largely true that

59:20

too many people argue about like the

59:22

best terms to you. Dude,

59:25

same. I understand that

59:28

is mostly as like an expression of

59:30

political powerlessness by many of those people

59:32

who are sort of trying to grab

59:34

on to something that they feel like

59:36

they can control. I

59:39

just can't bring myself to get riled up about it. I

59:41

can't believe we're in, we're finally for the first time on

59:43

the show in a position where like I'm about to be

59:45

more of a dick than you. I

59:47

think that you're right. I think that that's like some

59:49

aspect of it. I also just think that like some

59:51

people are really annoying. It's like

59:53

really easy online to like police

59:56

people's speech. It sort of serves

59:58

two purposes at once. One is you get to

1:00:00

sort of... of like express your knowledge about this

1:00:02

issue, right? The other is

1:00:04

you get to express like almost like

1:00:06

a moral superiority. Like you're actually going

1:00:09

about your allyship wrong. And you know,

1:00:11

as much as the right focuses too

1:00:13

much on those people, they absolutely exist.

1:00:16

I do tend to think that they

1:00:18

are unpopular. And also,

1:00:20

I mean, as we've discussed before, it's not like

1:00:22

language has no importance. My

1:00:25

approach to these things is like some of the language

1:00:27

stuff I think is silly and some of it I don't think

1:00:29

is silly. And the silly stuff, I just don't do it. I don't

1:00:31

spell women with an X. You want to spell women with an

1:00:33

X? Whatever. It doesn't

1:00:35

harm me. It's not anti-democratic. I find it a little

1:00:38

silly, but also like I'm not going

1:00:40

to spend a lot of my time being like, did

1:00:42

you hear they were spelling women with an X now?

1:00:44

I just like quietly don't do it, which I

1:00:46

think is what like most people do with this

1:00:48

stuff. You hear somebody language things and you're like,

1:00:50

ah, that resonates. Like, yeah, that's a fair point.

1:00:53

And some of them you're like, I don't know

1:00:55

if that's necessary. And like, whatever.

1:00:57

Over time, some of these things take, right? We

1:01:00

were spelling women with a Y for a while.

1:01:02

That also never really took. Maybe

1:01:04

women with an X will go the way of women with a Y.

1:01:06

Maybe it won't. And I'll be spelling it with an X in 10

1:01:08

years. Who fucking cares? I like, is

1:01:11

that a future with less democracy in it that

1:01:13

like I spell a word differently? I don't know.

1:01:15

I don't. I just really don't fucking care

1:01:17

that much. But then he gives a very telling

1:01:20

example. So he spends basically

1:01:22

like the rest of this chapter talking

1:01:25

about cultural appropriation. Oh, hell yeah.

1:01:27

Do you have a definition of this, Peter? How do

1:01:30

you describe this? Cultural appropriation

1:01:32

is when you take something

1:01:36

from another culture and

1:01:38

you do it, but not in

1:01:41

a nice way. All you had to

1:01:43

do was say Justin Timberlake wearing cornrows

1:01:45

at the 2008 MTV Video Awards. And

1:01:47

I would have known what you mean,

1:01:50

everybody. That's not cultural appropriation because that

1:01:52

is humiliating for him personally. We

1:01:55

all were just like, oh, Justin, no.

1:01:57

This is how he starts this chapter.

1:02:00

delineate this concept and tell us why

1:02:02

it's bad. Some cases of so-called cultural

1:02:04

appropriation do undoubtedly amount to real injustices.

1:02:07

It was, for example, immoral for white

1:02:09

musicians in the United States to steal

1:02:11

the songs of black artists who were

1:02:14

barred from big careers because of racial

1:02:16

discrimination, or for collectors in the United

1:02:18

Kingdom to loot art from the country's

1:02:21

former colonies. Is that cultural appropriation?

1:02:23

That's like stealing? But as it

1:02:25

is now applied, it mis-describes what

1:02:27

made those situations wrong and inhibits

1:02:29

valuable forms of cultural exchange. You

1:02:31

know how when you're watching

1:02:34

an action movie and you know there's a montage

1:02:36

coming? Peter, you know there's

1:02:38

a litany of anecdotes coming. You know

1:02:40

we're about to fucking list. Justin Trudeau

1:02:42

at a party. Yes.

1:02:45

All right, here's where he goes with

1:02:47

this. By now, debates about cultural appropriation

1:02:49

have gone mainstream and cover a very

1:02:51

wide range of supposed offenses. As

1:02:54

part of its archive repair project,

1:02:56

Bon Appetit, the American Culinary Magazine,

1:02:59

apologized for allowing a gentile writer to

1:03:01

publish a recipe for hamantaschen,

1:03:03

a traditional Jewish dessert. In

1:03:06

Germany, their Spiegel worried that gentiles who

1:03:08

donned a kippah in a show of

1:03:10

solidarity after a man had been assaulted

1:03:12

for wearing the traditional Jewish head covering

1:03:14

were guilty of cultural appropriation. And

1:03:17

in the UK, the Guardian has weighed

1:03:19

in on whether Jamie Oliver, a star

1:03:21

chef, can cook jollof rice, whether Gordon

1:03:23

Ramsay, another star chef, should

1:03:25

be allowed to open a Chinese

1:03:27

restaurant, and whether it was offensive

1:03:29

for Adele to wear a traditional

1:03:31

Jamaican hairstyle to the Notting Hill

1:03:34

Carnival. So the argument here is

1:03:36

that cultural appropriation has use

1:03:38

in these very narrow circumstances, but

1:03:41

it's now being so broadly applied

1:03:43

that it's creating a chilling effect.

1:03:45

So people are afraid to publish recipes,

1:03:48

they're afraid to open restaurants,

1:03:50

because no matter what you do, even if

1:03:52

you're doing these harmless activities, people are going

1:03:55

to come out of nowhere and accuse you

1:03:57

of cultural appropriation. So we're going to work

1:03:59

with you. walk again through the

1:04:01

examples that he uses. So the first

1:04:03

one is, as part of its archive

1:04:06

repair project, Bon Appetit

1:04:08

apologized for allowing a Gentile writer

1:04:10

to publish a recipe for hamantaschen, a

1:04:12

traditional Jewish dessert. This is

1:04:14

not true. What

1:04:17

actually happened was the original recipe

1:04:19

was basically written like pretty insensitivity.

1:04:21

The original headline was how to

1:04:24

make actually good hamantaschen. It was

1:04:26

basically by this person who wasn't

1:04:28

Jewish, and they're like, I appended a

1:04:30

bunch of bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, and I was like,

1:04:33

13. I'm allowed to weigh in

1:04:35

on this. It's like this tongue in cheek thing. And

1:04:38

then she said, I asked around

1:04:40

the office, and all anyone could

1:04:42

remember is really chalky and terrible

1:04:44

hamantaschen, so I'm gonna get it right

1:04:46

this time. There's an implication that the

1:04:48

people who generally make hamantaschen aren't good

1:04:51

at it, and let me show you

1:04:53

how. I mean, they left the recipe

1:04:55

up, so there's still a recipe by a

1:04:57

Gentile on the website. It's not like this

1:04:59

has been wiped from the internet. It's

1:05:02

really not an appropriation thing. It's really

1:05:04

just a insensitivity thing. And also, why

1:05:07

the fuck are we talking about a website updating

1:05:09

its fucking recipe? But whatever, we're gonna

1:05:11

go to the UK. He says, in the UK,

1:05:13

the Guardian has weighed in on whether

1:05:15

Jamie Oliver can cook Jollof rice, whether

1:05:17

Gordon Ramsay should be allowed to open

1:05:20

a Chinese restaurant, and whether it

1:05:22

was offensive for Adele to wear

1:05:24

a traditional Jamaican hairstyle. So

1:05:26

the Jamie Oliver one, at

1:05:28

no point did anybody accuse him of

1:05:30

cultural appropriation. He basically put a recipe

1:05:32

on his website that had coriander parsley

1:05:35

and lemon in it, which aren't part

1:05:37

of the traditional recipe. And people

1:05:39

were basically clowning on him for being like, ah,

1:05:41

this isn't traditional. This is your own thing. And he's

1:05:43

like, you're right. This is my own weird spin on

1:05:45

it. I mean, that happens every time anybody cooks

1:05:48

Italian food of any kind. Someone

1:05:50

will be like, this is what my grandma does.

1:05:52

And you're like, okay. Everybody kinda

1:05:54

moves on. The Gordon Ramsay

1:05:56

one is not about whether he has the right

1:05:58

to open an Asian restaurant. It was about

1:06:01

the opening, like it was an opening party

1:06:03

for one of his restaurants in London where

1:06:05

an Asian writer went and she's like, it

1:06:07

feels weird to be at the opening of

1:06:09

an Asian restaurant and there's 40 people here

1:06:11

and I'm the only Asian person. This is

1:06:14

also part of a trend where a lot

1:06:16

of, like I remember that there was a

1:06:18

piece written about the Luke Holmes cover of

1:06:20

Tracy Chapman's Fast Call, which has been a

1:06:22

sensation and a black person writing a piece

1:06:25

about basically processing their feelings

1:06:27

about a black artist work

1:06:29

being taken by a white man and a

1:06:33

white guy sort of profiting off of it and

1:06:35

the piece just read to me like literally a

1:06:37

black person thinking out loud about this stuff and

1:06:40

people lost their fucking mind. Yeah. You know what

1:06:42

I mean? And like you have

1:06:44

to allow some space for an Asian

1:06:46

woman to go to an event like this and be like, this

1:06:48

feels a little weird. Yeah. So many of these things

1:06:50

are like, did you hear that a minority had

1:06:52

thoughts? And like, again, at no

1:06:55

point in this review does she say that

1:06:57

like his restaurant should be shut down. Yeah. And then

1:06:59

Adele one is by far the closest to like

1:07:01

an actual cultural appropriation blow up

1:07:04

where like she posted this. She wasn't at the Notting

1:07:06

Hill Carnival, but it was on the day of the

1:07:08

Notting Hill Carnival. And I believe she happened to be

1:07:11

in Jamaica and she posted a photo

1:07:13

of her in like a Jamaican flag. Oh,

1:07:15

that's true. Suit with like Bantu knots in

1:07:17

her hair. And like this

1:07:19

was like there was kind of like an

1:07:21

internet outcry. People were like, ah, this is

1:07:24

like not cool. Now I remember this

1:07:26

one and there was a little internet

1:07:28

outcry. But again, it was just a

1:07:30

bunch of people being like, I don't know about this. Yeah, exactly.

1:07:32

And then Adele doesn't give very many interviews. Like five

1:07:35

months later, her new album was coming out and she

1:07:37

was giving an interview and they were like, hey, what

1:07:39

was the deal with that like Instagram blow

1:07:41

up a couple months ago? And she's like, you know

1:07:43

what? It was cringe. I shouldn't have posted it. I just

1:07:45

kind of wasn't really thinking of how it would look. And

1:07:47

like, you know, my team or whatever was saying that I

1:07:49

should delete it. But I want to leave it up just

1:07:51

to kind of remind people that like I'm a human being

1:07:53

and I make mistakes and like thanks a lot for letting

1:07:56

me know that that like felt weird. Whatever, whatever, right?

1:07:58

It's just like a little discussion. about

1:08:00

whether or not this shit is insensitive,

1:08:02

and it seems weird

1:08:05

to act as if this

1:08:07

is like reflective of a global ideological

1:08:09

shift that we should all be concerned

1:08:11

about. But then, okay, but then the last,

1:08:13

or this is his middle example, but we're

1:08:15

going to talk about it last, this example

1:08:17

is, I think, the most interesting. He says,

1:08:19

in Germany, Der Spiegel warned that Gentiles who

1:08:21

donned a kippah in a show of solidarity

1:08:23

after a man had been assaulted for wearing

1:08:25

the traditional Jewish head covering were guilty

1:08:27

of cultural appropriation. So this is actually

1:08:29

like a real and really fucked up

1:08:32

incident. This guy adds a video,

1:08:34

like a YouTube experiment, was like, I'm

1:08:36

going to walk around Berlin wearing a yarmulke and

1:08:39

see what happens. And then someone beat the shit out

1:08:41

of him. And it was on video and

1:08:43

it's super fucked up. This was

1:08:45

a huge deal in Germany. The video went

1:08:48

super duper viral. Yasha, again, great footnotes. He

1:08:50

links to the piece in Der Spiegel. It's

1:08:53

by a Jewish guy who's basically saying, like,

1:08:55

you know, there's a huge show of solidarity.

1:08:57

People are protesting. People want to do

1:08:59

something to show that they protect and

1:09:01

support the Jewish community in

1:09:03

Berlin. And people are showing up to

1:09:05

these rallies wearing kippahs. And

1:09:08

he's like, you know, this is like a traditional

1:09:10

Jewish head covering. It's really important in my religion.

1:09:12

And he has this little thing at the end

1:09:14

of his piece where he's like, you know, there's

1:09:16

this term that they use in America, cultural appropriation.

1:09:18

I think that it's a useful term

1:09:20

that we could talk about in Germany a little

1:09:22

bit. I don't think it's

1:09:25

appropriate to use, like, my religious symbolism

1:09:27

to, like, show solidarity with me. Please find

1:09:30

other ways of showing solidarity with me. Yeah.

1:09:32

Okay. That actually feels like just a very

1:09:34

straightforward, reasonable application of

1:09:37

the term cultural appropriation. Right. It's

1:09:39

not like you're using it to

1:09:41

be symbolic of something, but it

1:09:43

actually is meaningfully a

1:09:46

religious symbol for me. Right. This would be

1:09:48

like if a Catholic got attacked and then,

1:09:50

like, a bunch of non-Catholics were like, we're

1:09:52

as a show of solidarity, we're going to

1:09:54

take communion. What I find so interesting about

1:09:56

the way that, like, Yasha Monk is framing

1:09:58

this is, like, he's stirring. with this

1:10:00

like you know cultural appropriation describes something

1:10:02

real right you know but now the concept has

1:10:05

gone too far and like none of his

1:10:07

examples are really the concept going too far

1:10:09

right some of them are just straightforward like

1:10:11

reasonable examples of it most of

1:10:13

them are not even cultural appropriation being invoked

1:10:15

in any way like with the recipe right

1:10:17

it's like sorry what's the actual problem it

1:10:19

sort of seems like we have this term

1:10:21

that you just don't think people should

1:10:23

use right because he's basically being like

1:10:26

okay so you have colonialism

1:10:28

and also Adele yeah well what

1:10:30

then what are we talking about

1:10:33

right what is your complaint what

1:10:35

criticisms should be allowed and what

1:10:38

shouldn't be allowed is your problem

1:10:40

just that there is terminology for

1:10:42

this or is your right concern

1:10:44

that Adele is being criticized

1:10:46

right it doesn't entirely make sense and remember

1:10:48

his original definition an ideology

1:10:50

that seeks to remake the world and like

1:10:53

erodes democratic norms the democratic

1:10:55

norm of going to

1:10:57

Jamaica and getting

1:10:59

your hair braided and saying yaman why

1:11:03

do we fight the revolutionary war if we can't

1:11:05

do that well my my both sides take on

1:11:07

this is it like I do think that it's true

1:11:09

that like people on the left can like maybe spend

1:11:11

too much time fighting about language stuff but also no

1:11:14

one is more obsessed with language than

1:11:16

fucking conservatives who complain about it all

1:11:18

the time 100% if

1:11:21

if your actual complaint here is that

1:11:23

like people shouldn't use the term cultural

1:11:25

appropriation it's too broad we don't really

1:11:27

know what it means it's misapplied or over

1:11:29

applied totally fine sure you

1:11:31

could also say that about all the terms that he invokes right

1:11:33

free speech he talked about a lot in

1:11:36

this book well people miss invoke fucking free

1:11:38

speech all the time constant welcome to turn

1:11:41

the become popular get over applied I

1:11:43

also feel like circling back and reminding

1:11:45

everyone who's listening that these are the

1:11:48

worst anecdotes he could find yeah like

1:11:50

the fact that what we're really talking

1:11:52

about is a couple

1:11:55

of editorials and Instagram

1:11:57

comments it just sort of

1:11:59

goes to show that there's

1:12:01

no way for the left to

1:12:04

like squash this stuff, right? We

1:12:06

can't like get together and be like, alright,

1:12:08

we're gonna stop using this term because the

1:12:11

point about complaining about the use of cultural

1:12:13

appropriation as like a vector for political infights

1:12:15

is that you're complaining about the left. Yeah,

1:12:18

that's what Monk is doing even if he

1:12:20

doesn't actually think he is. He also has

1:12:22

a large section in the book where he

1:12:24

basically makes the same argument about like microaggressions.

1:12:27

They're like, microaggressions are an interesting concept but like people are

1:12:29

taking it too far. But what's very

1:12:33

frustrating to me is that it

1:12:35

becomes clear that his beef is

1:12:38

exclusively vocabulary because

1:12:40

Yasha Monk wrote

1:12:43

an entire book about

1:12:45

microaggressions. So his first book

1:12:48

is about growing up Jewish in Germany and

1:12:50

at the time in West Germany was like 40 million

1:12:52

people population and there were 3,000 Jews in the

1:12:55

entire country and of course Germans are sort of

1:12:57

famous for like learning all of the ugly parts

1:13:00

of their history and so when people would meet

1:13:02

Yasha and find out that he was Jewish, they

1:13:04

would sort of like treat him like a celebrity.

1:13:06

He talks about going to a party and sort

1:13:08

of coming on to a conversation where

1:13:10

people are talking and he's like, what are you guys talking about? And

1:13:12

they were like, ooh, locas. No,

1:13:17

they say they're talking about movies and they're

1:13:19

like, oh John was just saying how he

1:13:21

like hates Woody Allen movies and then John

1:13:23

is like, oh, I actually really like Woody

1:13:25

Allen. I think his earlier work is really great.

1:13:27

And what he did was fine. I think it's

1:13:29

okay. But it's like

1:13:33

it makes Yasha really aware and the

1:13:35

whole book, parts of which are like

1:13:37

quite good, is about how he just

1:13:39

felt this like weird sort of sense

1:13:41

of friction. What's interesting is that this

1:13:44

is sort of like a something you

1:13:46

can extrapolate from as sort of a

1:13:48

criticism of like certain iterations of identity

1:13:50

politics, right? Where everyone else being hyper

1:13:52

conscious of his identity ultimately

1:13:54

made him feel uncomfortable. It also

1:13:57

reveals how identity politics is...

1:14:00

exclusively something other people do,

1:14:02

right? I do not think that Gashah Monk

1:14:05

thinks that writing a memoir about his experience

1:14:07

as a Jewish person and like coming to

1:14:09

grips with his identity, he wouldn't consider that

1:14:11

engaging in identity politics, right? He, one of

1:14:14

his main critiques of like the left is like,

1:14:16

they make your identity markers the most important thing

1:14:18

about you. Yeah. Is that what he was doing

1:14:20

by writing a book about his Jewish identity? Is that the

1:14:22

only identity or the most important identity that he has? I

1:14:24

wouldn't accuse him of that. This is the thing with

1:14:27

like a lot of these conservative

1:14:29

commentators who have been very upset about

1:14:32

identity politics the last several years. As

1:14:34

soon as the identity in question is their

1:14:37

own, all of a sudden they are willing

1:14:39

to fold in all of the nuance that

1:14:41

they deny to

1:14:43

other groups. Also, Peter, it

1:14:45

would be mean to do this, but- Well, if it

1:14:47

would be mean, just don't do it. That's not the

1:14:50

kind of podcast we're trying to put out there. I

1:14:52

was going to read you the final paragraph of his

1:14:54

book because he talks about like moving to New York

1:14:56

and how the fact that like there were so many

1:14:58

Jewish people in New York that became like

1:15:00

a much less salient part of his identity

1:15:02

was like really meaningful to him. And then

1:15:04

his like final paragraph, he's like, I realized

1:15:06

I wasn't a Jew and I wasn't a

1:15:08

German. I was a New Yorker. Oh, God.

1:15:10

And then the book ends. Maybe

1:15:16

2014 was a different time. Like

1:15:18

it's so fucking annoying. Like how

1:15:20

much they love New York. That was right when

1:15:22

Taylor Swift was arriving in New York. He should

1:15:24

have had a little vignette about getting in a

1:15:26

cab and welcome to New York is playing. Every

1:15:30

New Yorker who was here during 2014 remembers that

1:15:32

phase where you'd get into a cab and it

1:15:34

was just Taylor Swift singing that fucking song. The

1:15:36

book is actually a singing. It's like one of

1:15:38

those greeting cards you opened in that song. It's

1:15:41

incredibly got the right. So again, to

1:15:43

be totally clear, I think it is

1:15:45

absolutely valid for Yasha to write a book

1:15:47

about his Jewish identity. I think that's great.

1:15:49

But what is fascinating to me is that

1:15:51

he spends so much of this book

1:15:53

complaining about people invoking

1:15:55

microaggressions, right? So he

1:15:57

clearly does not object to the... The

1:16:00

concept of microaggressions, he only

1:16:02

objects to the term. I

1:16:05

actually think it's totally fine to write a whole book about microaggressions

1:16:07

and not use the word. You can

1:16:09

talk about cultural appropriation without saying cultural appropriation.

1:16:12

It's an important issue to you. He

1:16:14

ends that section saying like, a lot of what we're really talking

1:16:16

about here is just like racial insensitivity. And

1:16:18

like, you know what, Yasha, if you want to

1:16:21

write a book about racial insensitivity and like draw

1:16:23

people's attention and you don't want to use the

1:16:25

term cultural appropriation, I don't really think anyone would

1:16:27

notice, honestly. I don't think anyone would care. If

1:16:29

that's not a framework that you like, fine.

1:16:33

But why spend all of your time

1:16:35

complaining about people who have a term

1:16:37

you don't like for a concept you

1:16:39

agree with? It's just so

1:16:41

like lacking in empathy

1:16:44

to like an embarrassing degree.

1:16:47

I don't know. It's like seeing someone

1:16:49

like stub their toe and say ouch and

1:16:51

being like, people say ouch too much when

1:16:53

they get hurt. Not realizing that

1:16:55

you've done it your whole life. It's something

1:16:57

so simple, you know, that like

1:16:59

the idea that he can think

1:17:01

about this enough to write

1:17:03

a book about it and then

1:17:06

not realize that when other people

1:17:08

are talking about similar experiences but

1:17:10

they're not Jewish, they're black or

1:17:12

whatever, that they're talking about the

1:17:14

same thing. Human empathy. It's

1:17:16

been waiting for you. I'm sorry. I

1:17:19

didn't know where to go after that. So

1:17:22

the fourth category under the

1:17:24

definition of identity synthesis, the

1:17:26

problem with the identity synthesis

1:17:29

is that it seeks

1:17:31

to pass identity sensitive public

1:17:33

policy. This is things like,

1:17:35

you know, anything that basically takes people's

1:17:38

race or gender whatever into

1:17:40

account. He complains about a

1:17:42

basic income project in San

1:17:44

Francisco that was only eligible

1:17:46

to trans people. In

1:17:48

the book, he has basically two

1:17:50

big marquee anecdotes. One

1:17:52

is the segregation in the Atlanta

1:17:54

schools. The second is about the

1:17:57

rollout of the COVID vaccines. We're

1:18:00

due to loosing ourselves back

1:18:02

to December of 2020. Obviously,

1:18:05

in the first couple of months of the vaccines,

1:18:08

there weren't very many doses available. So

1:18:10

countries had to basically do triage to

1:18:12

decide, okay, who's going to get vaccines

1:18:14

first, right? He says, countries

1:18:16

from Canada to Italy came up with

1:18:18

remarkably similar plans. To begin with, they

1:18:20

would make the vaccine available to medical

1:18:23

staff. In the next phase, the

1:18:25

elderly would become eligible. Only one

1:18:27

country radically deviated from this plan.

1:18:29

The United States, in its

1:18:31

preliminary recommendations, the key committee advising

1:18:34

the CDC proposed putting 87 million

1:18:37

essential workers, a broad category that would

1:18:39

include bankers and film crews ahead of

1:18:41

the elderly. So this

1:18:43

is about the CDC basically

1:18:46

saying essential workers are

1:18:48

going to get the vaccine before over 65. And

1:18:52

they were doing so for explicitly like

1:18:54

racial justice reasons. So he's talking

1:18:56

about this presentation that was given

1:18:58

to this vaccine prioritization committee within

1:19:01

the CDC. The

1:19:03

key problem, the presentation highlighted in red

1:19:05

font, is that racial and

1:19:07

ethnic minority groups are underrepresented among groups

1:19:09

over 65. Because

1:19:11

the elderly are a less diverse group than

1:19:13

the younger group of essential workers, it

1:19:16

would be immoral to put them first.

1:19:18

So this is basically like most old

1:19:20

people are white. And even

1:19:22

though they're way more likely to die

1:19:24

of COVID, we should actually prioritize younger

1:19:27

people because they are

1:19:29

more diverse. Okay. Is

1:19:31

that something that they really said?

1:19:33

The thing is, this is as close as

1:19:35

he gets in this book to like a

1:19:37

real anecdote, like something that actually happened and

1:19:40

like I find kind of troubling. I mean,

1:19:42

that does sound stupid. Yeah. That

1:19:44

seems to put prioritized diversity over

1:19:46

like efficacy of the vaccine rollout,

1:19:49

which is in fact a

1:19:53

problematic manifestation of identity

1:19:55

politics. Exactly. And that

1:19:57

was what was wrong with the presidency of

1:19:59

Donald Trump. The constant

1:20:01

prioritizing of diversity. So

1:20:04

to understand what's actually going on here,

1:20:06

you need to go back

1:20:09

to where we were in late 2020.

1:20:12

When you're talking about a highly infectious

1:20:14

disease, there are two ways to

1:20:16

protect people at risk. One

1:20:19

way is directly, right? So you just vaccinate all the old

1:20:21

people. Another way is indirectly by

1:20:23

preventing infection and transmission of the

1:20:25

virus. Basically if you can prevent

1:20:27

a surge, you may end up

1:20:30

saving more old people's lives even

1:20:32

if the old people themselves are

1:20:34

not vaccinated. The conversations going on

1:20:36

at the time were mostly about

1:20:38

whether or not the vaccines would

1:20:41

prevent infection and transmission. The

1:20:43

early vaccine trials hadn't measured that. And

1:20:46

so some virologists thought that the vaccines

1:20:48

could prevent another surge and

1:20:50

others thought that it couldn't prevent another surge.

1:20:53

So Yasha describes this as like

1:20:55

the CDC doing the button meme

1:20:58

where it's like, should we kill a bunch of old people

1:21:00

or should we not kill a bunch of old people? I'm

1:21:02

like sweating over the decision. But

1:21:04

because he didn't reach out to anyone

1:21:06

on the committee and he's relying

1:21:09

exclusively on a bunch of gotchas

1:21:11

from these slide presentations, he doesn't

1:21:13

seem to realize that this was

1:21:15

a debate about how to save

1:21:18

the most people's lives. Isn't all of

1:21:20

this a good example of when

1:21:23

identity politics is useful? Because

1:21:25

no one talks about targeting

1:21:27

the elderly for vaccines

1:21:29

as identity politics, right? If

1:21:32

someone's like, hey, black women

1:21:35

have particularly dangerous pregnancies, we

1:21:37

should target them for funding. Those

1:21:40

get challenged as like racist and

1:21:42

discriminatory and as the manifestation of

1:21:44

identity politics. Well, this

1:21:47

is also something that's so interesting is he takes it as kind

1:21:49

of a given that it was

1:21:51

insane to be like taking things like race

1:21:54

and social justice into account in

1:21:56

this process, like one of their categories, the three

1:21:58

categories that the CDC does. was using to make

1:22:00

this determination was science, like how

1:22:03

much is it going to affect deaths

1:22:05

versus infections? Two, implementation,

1:22:07

how easy is it going to be to get

1:22:09

it to people? And three, ethics. He seems to

1:22:11

think that this entire category of like

1:22:14

thinking about ethics is totally

1:22:16

invalid. But what the CDC

1:22:18

meant by that was people

1:22:20

who are at higher risk of dying from COVID, they

1:22:22

don't just mean social justice

1:22:24

reasons, like we must mediate America's

1:22:26

racial past. It's like black

1:22:29

people were dying at like three times the rate

1:22:31

of white people. It just seems that he's

1:22:33

saying like, well, but they shouldn't be like,

1:22:35

right? The reason that elderly people are more

1:22:37

likely to die is probably due

1:22:40

to sort of like these biological factors,

1:22:42

right? The reason that black people are

1:22:44

more likely to die is almost certainly

1:22:46

not biological. It's due to these other

1:22:48

factors, right? You have to consider it.

1:22:50

Yeah, exactly. And also, he's also lying when he says,

1:22:52

you know, every other country just did age, you

1:22:54

know, 75 plus, 70 plus, 65 plus, he presents this as

1:22:58

like this really obvious decision that all the other

1:23:00

countries made. That's not true. Like

1:23:02

Germany vaccinated essential workers before

1:23:04

they did over 65. France also

1:23:06

took workplace into account. So Canada

1:23:08

did it province by province. But

1:23:10

in some provinces, they said you're

1:23:12

eligible when you're over 65. Or

1:23:14

if you're indigenous, when you're over

1:23:16

50, because indigenous people had way

1:23:18

higher death rates. Another province did

1:23:20

hotspots, like they were supposed to

1:23:22

be zip codes. I like the

1:23:24

hotspots concept because it's a way

1:23:26

of avoiding having dipshits like Yasha

1:23:28

Monk write think pieces

1:23:31

about how what you're doing is

1:23:33

racist. Yeah, exactly. Oh, no,

1:23:35

it's geographical. The problem with the CDC's

1:23:37

framework and like where I think he's

1:23:39

right to criticize them and like say

1:23:41

super duper fucked up is that like

1:23:43

the definition that they were working with

1:23:45

of essential worker covered 70% of American

1:23:47

workers. You're

1:23:50

all essential folks. If you're listening

1:23:52

here at home, you are essential.

1:23:54

I think I was an essential worker

1:23:57

technically, because I was working in like

1:23:59

the media. and the nation needs

1:24:01

information to be democratic or whatever.

1:24:03

But like I was making a

1:24:05

podcast about the maligned women of

1:24:07

the 1990s. I

1:24:11

absolutely should not have been

1:24:13

prioritized for the vaccine. When you when you

1:24:15

got your four million dollar PPP loan to

1:24:18

do the Lindsay Lohan Chronicles part

1:24:20

five for your wrong about. It

1:24:24

would have been insane for the

1:24:27

CDC to prioritize essential workers over

1:24:29

people over 65. Like he's

1:24:31

just right about that. It would have been fucking

1:24:33

bananas, partly because the implementation would have

1:24:35

been nuts. Right. It's not meaningful

1:24:37

prioritization to say that like now

1:24:41

70 percent of the workforce is eligible. Like that

1:24:43

doesn't help the triage. Right.

1:24:45

There weren't enough vaccines available for that

1:24:47

group. So you had to have a

1:24:50

more granular categorization. So what about like

1:24:52

black bankers? With

1:24:54

our most important groups. But then this

1:24:57

is what's so weird. Again, this is

1:24:59

as close as he gets to like

1:25:01

a real problem caused by identity politics.

1:25:04

But it's sort of tucked in. And I don't

1:25:06

think you noticed it. What actually

1:25:08

happened with the CDC is in their

1:25:10

interim recommendations at the beginning of December

1:25:13

2020. They said, OK, we're

1:25:15

going to do essential workers and then we're going to do

1:25:17

over 65 over the course of

1:25:19

December. They then changed that. And the eventual

1:25:21

recommendation was everybody over 75 and

1:25:24

frontline workers. Right. So people who

1:25:26

are like seeing people in person, nobody who

1:25:28

works from home and that's a much smaller

1:25:31

group. He chalks this up

1:25:33

to he says intrepid

1:25:35

journalists like notice the slide presentation. He's

1:25:37

talking about Nate Silver tweeting about it. And

1:25:39

Matt Iglaseus writing a blog post about

1:25:41

it. Just kill me. Their original decision

1:25:43

for the interim recommendations was on December 3rd.

1:25:46

Their eventual decision where they made it final

1:25:48

and made the right decision is on December

1:25:51

20th. The Nate Silver tweets

1:25:53

were on December 19th. I

1:25:55

don't think that 24 hours before

1:25:57

this was about to happen, in

1:26:00

this committee would have looked at like, oh

1:26:02

shit, Nate Silver's mad at us. Time to

1:26:04

change course. Yeah, we don't know what happened behind the

1:26:06

scenes. I actually reached out to two different people who were

1:26:08

on the committee, neither of whom got back to me

1:26:10

because I'm sure that they're so sick of talking about

1:26:12

this. Yeah, but I reached out to Nate Silver and

1:26:15

he says it was him. So

1:26:18

like, is it possible that that's

1:26:21

true? Sure. But

1:26:23

he says it was like the backlash to

1:26:25

this that made them change their recommendations. There's literally

1:26:27

no evidence of this, other than the fact that

1:26:29

there was a backlash. Also, even if that was

1:26:31

true, wouldn't that just mean that there were like

1:26:34

a couple of dipshits at the CDC who were about

1:26:36

to do the wrong thing, and then like, because

1:26:38

our society disagrees with it so

1:26:40

strongly, they had to change

1:26:43

course. This is again, the best

1:26:45

that he can do is some

1:26:47

temporary interim recommendations that however you

1:26:49

think the process went, weren't

1:26:52

implemented. When you're like, let me

1:26:54

tell you how pervasive and dangerous identity

1:26:56

politics actually is. Briefly,

1:26:58

the interim recommendations of

1:27:00

the CDC. Almost. Incorporated

1:27:02

too much identity

1:27:05

politics before they changed course. Yeah.

1:27:08

If that's where you are, then you need to

1:27:10

move on. You need to write about something else.

1:27:12

And like every other anecdote in this book is

1:27:15

like one sentence he does, these like little montages,

1:27:17

like we had with the Adele culture appropriation stuff.

1:27:19

It's like bang, bang, bang, bang. I looked

1:27:21

up almost all of these. This is why I

1:27:23

spent like three fucking weeks researching this episode. I

1:27:25

have almost 200 pages of notes. Basically

1:27:27

none of them hold up, right? I'm

1:27:30

really doing him a service here by

1:27:32

saying like, this is as

1:27:34

close and as good as it gets. And

1:27:36

like, it's not that good. I mean,

1:27:38

you just said that he was bothered by

1:27:40

the fact that San Francisco had a basic

1:27:42

income program targeting trans folks,

1:27:45

right? That's identity politics, right? Now,

1:27:48

I imagine if you ask the folks

1:27:50

implementing it, they would say, well, this

1:27:52

is a population lacking in wealth, right?

1:27:54

Lacking in income, perfect, perfect

1:27:56

targets for a basic income

1:27:58

program. He doesn't mention, like

1:28:00

I said, I looked up all these fucking anecdotes. He

1:28:03

doesn't mention that the program was only open to trans

1:28:05

people earning less than $600 a

1:28:07

month. Oh, that seems interesting. It wasn't

1:28:09

going to Caitlyn Jenner. I'm just

1:28:11

sort of curious about what, in

1:28:13

his mind, is the substantive difference

1:28:16

between that and rolling

1:28:18

out vaccines and prioritizing

1:28:20

elderly people in that rollout, right? In

1:28:22

both cases, they're sort of imprecise in

1:28:24

a way. You know, there was just

1:28:27

sort of the wages of

1:28:29

government programs, right? That's just how it

1:28:31

sort of works. One

1:28:33

of them is objectionable identity politics to

1:28:35

him, and the other is just common

1:28:37

sense. Well, this is the exact

1:28:40

thing that he lays out in the

1:28:42

next section of the book and the

1:28:44

final section of our episode. He's

1:28:47

delineated all of the categories, all of

1:28:49

the characteristics of the identity synthesis, and

1:28:51

then we finally get to the end of the book where he's like, all right, how do

1:28:53

we fix it? How do we solve the identity synthesis? To

1:28:57

discuss this section, we have

1:28:59

to talk about reactionary centrism.

1:29:02

Peter, this is something we've mentioned on the show before,

1:29:04

but I don't think we've ever like really laid out.

1:29:07

So this is an

1:29:09

excerpt from his previous book,

1:29:11

The People versus Democracy. When it comes

1:29:14

to race, the noble principles and promises

1:29:16

of the US Constitution have been violated

1:29:18

over and over again. For the

1:29:20

first century of the republic's existence, African

1:29:23

Americans were enslaved or treated as

1:29:25

at best second class citizens. For

1:29:28

the second century, they were excluded from much

1:29:30

of public life and suffered open discrimination. Nowadays,

1:29:33

these realities are mostly empirical

1:29:35

rather than legal. If African

1:29:37

Americans face discrimination on the job market,

1:29:40

if they are given higher prison sentences

1:29:42

for the same crimes, the reason is

1:29:44

not a difference in official legal status.

1:29:46

Rather, it is that the neutral principles

1:29:48

of the law are in practice administered

1:29:51

in a discriminatory manner. This

1:29:53

is why the standard conservative response to the

1:29:55

problem of racial injustice is so unsatisfactory. of

1:30:00

the Supreme Court to Tommy Laron, the

1:30:02

conservative commentator, like to point out how

1:30:05

noble and neutral the country's principles are,

1:30:08

only to use this fact to deny

1:30:10

that there were serious racial injustices to

1:30:12

be remedied. This is disingenuous.

1:30:14

If private actors from real estate

1:30:16

agents to HR managers continue to

1:30:18

discriminate on the basis of race,

1:30:20

then a state that pretends that

1:30:22

race doesn't exist can't effectively remedy

1:30:25

the resulting injustices. So it's pretty

1:30:27

good so far, right? Tell them,

1:30:29

Yasha. Yeah, it's like, all right,

1:30:31

we got people at the head of the Supreme

1:30:33

Court who have this dumb understanding of race, and

1:30:35

they're like, the laws are neutral, but they're not

1:30:37

being applied neutrally. It's like really fucking head in

1:30:39

the sand bullshit. I'm not sure I agree that

1:30:41

the US Constitution's principles are noble. But, you

1:30:43

know, I want to- All

1:30:45

right, so here is where he goes with this.

1:30:48

The insistence that the noble principles

1:30:50

of color blindness will fix everything

1:30:52

is either naive or insincere. Following

1:30:56

this, parts of the left have started to

1:30:58

claim that there is only one way to

1:31:00

face up to racial injustice, to reject outright

1:31:03

some of the most basic principles on which

1:31:05

the American Republic is founded. How did he

1:31:07

take such an aggressive turn? Incredible.

1:31:10

If much of popular culture ignores

1:31:12

or demeans ethnic and religious minorities,

1:31:14

they claim, then insensitive portrayals of

1:31:17

people of color or instances of

1:31:19

what has come to be called

1:31:21

cultural appropriation should be aggressively shamed.

1:31:24

If free speech is invoked as a

1:31:26

reason to defend a public discourse

1:31:28

that is full of overt forms

1:31:30

of racism and microaggressions, then this

1:31:32

hallowed principle needs to be

1:31:34

sacrificed to the cause of racial

1:31:36

justice. Sacrificing principles. There is something

1:31:38

genuinely righteous in the anger that

1:31:41

motivates these ideas, and yet

1:31:43

they ultimately throw the baby out with the bathwater.

1:31:46

Far from merely going too far

1:31:48

or being strategically unwise, they embrace

1:31:50

principles that would ultimately destroy the

1:31:53

very possibility of a

1:31:55

truly open and multi-ethnic democracy.

1:32:00

Like he lays out the problem

1:32:02

very clearly. He's like, oh yeah, the Chief Justice

1:32:04

of the fucking Supreme Court has

1:32:06

this like totally disingenuous understanding of racism.

1:32:09

And that's why people shouting

1:32:11

about microaggressions on Twitter are a threat

1:32:13

to democracy. Like what? I don't want to get

1:32:15

too on my Peter shit. But

1:32:18

there's sort of an express statement here that

1:32:21

America was founded on

1:32:23

these righteous principles and

1:32:26

that those principles are sort of under

1:32:29

attack from the left. When

1:32:31

I think what's actually happening in

1:32:33

many cases is that the left

1:32:35

is identifying that one, many

1:32:37

of the principles that the Republic was

1:32:39

founded on are in fact not good

1:32:42

and noble, but are bad, racist, dumb,

1:32:44

etc. Two, many of

1:32:46

the principles that the Republic was founded

1:32:48

on that are in fact good are

1:32:51

misapplied consistently to the

1:32:54

detriment of racial minorities,

1:32:56

sexual minorities, etc., etc., etc. So

1:32:59

when he sort of like has this

1:33:01

aside about free speech, right, and what

1:33:03

he's sort of invoking

1:33:05

is like students protesting

1:33:07

speakers on campus, he's

1:33:09

not engaging with whether or not

1:33:11

the like project of free speech

1:33:14

broadly is impacted by this, how

1:33:16

much it's impacted by this. You

1:33:18

know, we're one year away from

1:33:20

like coup attempt number two. And

1:33:24

these fucking losers are still

1:33:26

talking about like college kids, like

1:33:29

they're the true threat to democracy.

1:33:31

It is absurd. Dude, Yasha's book

1:33:33

came out a month ago. A

1:33:37

month ago, bro. It's not even like 30

1:33:40

fucking days old. And

1:33:42

then I also the passage we just

1:33:44

read, I'm pulling that from his

1:33:46

previous book, because his

1:33:49

whole excuse for writing a book

1:33:51

about fucking identity politics in 2023.

1:33:54

He already did it about the right exactly. I

1:33:56

already exposed the right and then you you look

1:33:58

back like the most. cursory fucking glance at

1:34:01

his previous work and it's not about

1:34:03

the right. It's weird both sides bullshit

1:34:05

I went back to his other older

1:34:07

books a great experiment and he has

1:34:09

two entire Sections about

1:34:11

how people should stop complaining

1:34:13

about cultural appropriation He

1:34:16

talks more about the excesses of

1:34:18

cultural appropriation complaints than he does

1:34:20

about voter suppression This

1:34:24

is like the perfect example His whole

1:34:26

career is the perfect example of like

1:34:28

the way that reactionary centrism has like

1:34:31

taken over American punditry So

1:34:33

this term was coined by Aaron where

1:34:35

tests who defines it as someone who

1:34:37

says they're politically neutral But who usually

1:34:40

punches left while sympathizing with the right?

1:34:42

Throughout this book and

1:34:45

like all of Yasha's work. He

1:34:47

has this weird fucking howdy-duty ism

1:34:49

about like right-wing threats So

1:34:51

in the identity trap in his current book He

1:34:53

has this whole section about like to be sure

1:34:55

like Republicans have passed a bunch of bills like

1:34:57

in Florida They don't say gay bill and all

1:34:59

these like there's a dozen states that

1:35:01

are past like these blatantly

1:35:04

authoritarian shutdown all

1:35:06

discussion of like America's racial past

1:35:08

bills He summarizes them and then

1:35:10

he says because the language in all

1:35:13

these bills is very vague There's a real

1:35:15

danger of them chilling legitimate forms of

1:35:17

expression. Thankfully key constitutional protections Put

1:35:19

limits on the extent to which coercive

1:35:22

authoritarians can punish private citizens for what

1:35:24

they say Even at the height

1:35:26

of Donald Trump's power most Americans did not need

1:35:28

to fear that their government would punish them for

1:35:30

speaking their minds Wait, sorry. So

1:35:33

there's all these protections against

1:35:35

the laws that Republicans have

1:35:37

already passed and yet you

1:35:39

dedicate a fucking entire chapter

1:35:41

of your book to everyday

1:35:43

feminism calm So

1:35:45

like obscure websites and people

1:35:47

over using terms on social

1:35:49

media are enough of a threat to

1:35:51

democracy to dedicate a whole fucking book To it, but

1:35:54

actual laws being passed six

1:35:57

Supreme Court justices. He's like,

1:35:59

oh Luckily, there's all these safeguards in

1:36:01

place. The Constitution also protects Gordon

1:36:04

Ramsay's right to open a fucking Asian

1:36:06

restaurant. It's just so frustrating. Like,

1:36:08

we can fully concede. Like, yeah,

1:36:10

you're right. There are some fools

1:36:12

and miscreants on the left when

1:36:14

it comes to this stuff. But

1:36:17

if your concern is like

1:36:19

the survival of liberal

1:36:22

democracy in America, you

1:36:25

need to pivot 180 fucking degrees. The

1:36:28

thing that I really want to stress

1:36:30

about the reactionary centrist and this

1:36:32

entire worldview, which is fucking everywhere,

1:36:34

is that it cannot propose solutions.

1:36:36

The most fascinating thing about this

1:36:38

book is that when you get

1:36:40

into the alleged solutions section,

1:36:43

all he does is just

1:36:45

restate first principles. We

1:36:47

must return to our

1:36:49

core understanding of liberalism or whatever.

1:36:52

Exactly. He says, it

1:36:54

is impossible to understand many fundamental aspects

1:36:56

of human life without paying due attention

1:36:58

to categories of group identity, such as

1:37:00

race, gender, and sexual orientation. But it's

1:37:03

impossible to understand other fundamental aspects of

1:37:05

human life without paying attention to economic

1:37:07

categories, such as social class, ideological categories,

1:37:09

such as patriotism, and theological categories, such

1:37:12

as religion. So it's like, okay, it's

1:37:14

okay to focus on some identity stuff,

1:37:16

but we should think about other things

1:37:19

too. Oh, so we

1:37:21

should look at how they intersect? And

1:37:23

then there was a word for

1:37:26

that, Yasha. Wow. These books, their

1:37:28

solution is often just like, what

1:37:30

if everyone essentially adopted my worldview?

1:37:34

And that's the solution. And then fade out. This

1:37:37

is what I mean with it can't

1:37:39

propose solutions because the entire ideology is

1:37:41

based around punching left, right? Don't do

1:37:43

anything that's going to piss off conservatives.

1:37:46

But everything the left does is