Michael Knowles - The Problem With Political Correctness | Modern Wisdom Podcast 331

Michael Knowles is a political commentator, podcaster, and an author. Ostensibly, political correctness is the right thing to do if you're a responsible human that is respectful of other people's emotions. Encouraging people to be mindful and precise of the words they use makes sense. But demanding for tolerance becomes undermined when the people doing the demanding are overbearing and intolerant. It’s like punching people in the name of peace. Something is obviously amiss... Expect to learn why people who respect free speech may need to restrict free speech, how political correctness lays a trap for everyone, whether Michael thinks we're closer to a Brave New World or 1984, his thoughts on Steven Crowder's situation and much more... Sponsors: Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Speechless - https://amzn.to/3vTcmxS Follow Michael on Twitter - https://twitter.com/michaeljknowles Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #michaelknowles #politicalcorrectness #freespeech - 00:00 Intro 00:30 The Problem with Political Correctness 06:00 The Need for Censorship 11:25 Language Has Been Politicised 21:35 The Inner Citadel 28:10 Why the Left Hate the Working Class 31:45 The End Goal of Political Correctness 38:28 Should Intolerance Be Tolerated? 45:22 The World Without Woke 51:29 History's Grounding Effect 55:43 'Seasons' Are Triggering 59:20 1984 or Brave New World? 1:10:00 Reality & Accountability 1:15:35 Steven Crowder's Cancellation - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  None of these radical, woke, politically correct people seem all that happy to me. I don't know about you, I've never seen, not one of them, a radical feminist, a radical leftist, you know, any of the constituent parts. I've never seen one of them that seems happy. Well, you know, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Perhaps that's because that premise is wrong. Maybe the truth actually will set you free, and maybe lies actually will delude you and make your life worse.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  What's the problem with politically correct speech? The problem with politically correct speech is that it attempts to transform reality by redefining words. So, I think we can all agree, at the most basic level, that's what PC does. It redefines all of our terms, and in so doing, it hopes to redefine reality itself. The problem for conservatives, though, is that it lays a trap whereby, basically, any way you react to PC strengthens PC. And I use the term "PC," you could also use the term "woke-ism" or "cancel culture," whatever. You know, part of the issue is they change all the words, so we're talking about the same broad phenomenon.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Obviously, the one way conservatives can react to help PC along is just by giving in, right? You just, you use the new terms, you call Bruce Jenner "she," you, whatever, you obliterate women's sports, you use all the kind of new jargon. Obviously, that gives them what they want. But then there's another group of conservatives who say, "No way, I'm not going along with these new standards, you can't make me do it, I'm a free speech absolutist." Right? And I think a lot of us have maybe used that kind of language in the past at various times. But the problem here is that the whole point of political correctness is to destroy the old standards. Right? So, if you go along with that, then you're helping them to do that, you're destroying the old standards.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  But if you throw your hands in the air and you say, "You know what, I'm a free speech absolutist, say whatever you want, do whatever you want, I don't care, I'm a purist," right? You're also destroying the old standards, because now no one's... So either way, PC gets what it's after. And this is why, you know, the phenomenon has been in our public consciousness probably about 30 years, a little over 30 years or so now. It's been building for more like 100 years. And it's why, in that whole period of time, there is no shortage of conservatives who said, "Oh, we're fighting back against PC. PC's gone too crazy." Donald Trump basically staked his 2016 campaign on this issue of political correctness. But we keep losing. I mean, this is the first day of Pride Month, where now first graders in the United States... I don't know about the UK, it's probably the same there too, though.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  In the United States, first graders are being taught transgender ideology, and Kellogg cereal is telling them to pick their own pronouns. So obviously, we haven't done a great job pushing back against PC. And I think the reason is, no one is willing to stand up and offer a substantive vision to defend the old standards. Does that make political correctness conservatives' fault, then? Yeah, basically. You know, Chesterton, one of your fellow countrymen, had a great line where he said, "It is the job of the liberal to go about making mistakes, and it is the job of the conservative to make sure that they never get corrected." And I think that's basically what conservatives have been doing the past 30 or so years. Part of this, I think, is because we don't want to offend anybody. We want to be very nice. We're sort of generally content.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  That's why we're conservative, right? That's why if we were not content, if we thought everything had to be ripped down, we would be radicals. So we don't want to be offensive, really. And then, the other issue is, a lot of conservatives basically share the liberals' central premises. And this is especially true in the United States, because in the United States, there is a robust liberal tradition. And I mean, even the classical sort of liberal tradition. I think it was Tocqueville who made the observation that Americans behave like conservatives, but they talk like liberals. So the language of liberty and individual rights is all... You know, it's throughout all of our founding era, and throughout, really, all of our history. But we don't talk a whole lot about tradition.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  We don't talk a whole lot about order. We don't talk a whole lot about, well, law and order, even. I mean, Donald Trump, you know, kind of brought this back in at the end of his presidency. But it takes the second position to this idea of emancipating yourself from everything, this individual autonomy. And, you know, ultimately, I think that the only logical conclusion of that... Is going to be this transgender ideology. And you see it actually with the development of political correctness. First, you're trying to liberate yourself from social mores, from traditions, from religion. Then you're trying to liberate yourself from the family structure. You saw this a lot with second wave feminism. And then ultimately, you're trying to liberate yourself from nature.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  I mean, this is, this is, I know a lot of people believe that transgenderism is kind of the opposite of feminism, right? One says women are real and need to be protected. Transgenderism says women aren't real, it's just men can actually become women too. But it's kind of that logical consequence of this radical liberation, which I think is kind of the theme that defines Western modernity, the last 500 or so years. And I think we're kind of on the fumes of that, you know, where that only lasts so long as you've still got some animating principle and tradition in your society. But goodness gracious, it seems like that's fallen down around us. So I, I just sort of think either we will defend old standards, return to tradition,

• 5:28Speaker 00

  if you will, or, or we're totally lost because the momentum of the radical left as expressed in, in political correctness is just so great. And it's only been accelerated in recent years.

• 5:42Chris Williamson?

  If you're stuck in this catch 22 though, and it's essentially impossible, or the situation that you've laid out is very difficult semantically for conservatives not to fall into one of a number of holes, or anybody that isn't a leftist to not fall into one of these holes. You don't need to be a conservative to disagree with some of the semantic and lexical games that are being played.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:01Chris Williamson?

  What do you do?

• 6:04Speaker 00

  This is the hard lesson. I know a lot of, a lot of people aren't going to want to hear this, especially conservatives. We need to embrace a just and prudent censorship. Now, people are going to tune out. They're going to say, Michael, you're no-

• 6:19Chris Williamson?

  That's the word, that's the word. I knew, I was always suspicious of that Knowles fellow.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  You, you know, you're a censor, you're an authoritarian, okay. From the very beginning of our country, there have been whole swaths of speech that you cannot engage in, that are not defended by the First Amendment or our broader free speech tradition. That includes fraud. You're not allowed to engage in fraud. That includes obscenity. Increasingly, you are actually encouraged to engage in that, but still, we have laws on the books against it from the very beginning. We were throwing pornographers in prison for obscenity as recently as 2009. It wasn't that long ago. And that was at the federal level. You're not protected from sedition in certain forms, going back to the earliest days of the country, all the way well into the 20th century. There are whole swaths of speech that you're really not allowed to engage in. And the argument for that, by the way,

• 7:07Speaker 00

  is that certain speech undermines speech. Actually, I'll go back to Chesterton, who has another great line. I think he's the most quoted man in the history of the world. Chesterton says, "There is a thought that stops thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped." And you see this especially in some of the woke PC educational ideologies now. Critical race theory is the one that's very popular. But all the kind of critical theory derivations come out and they say, "There's no such thing as objective truth." If you teach a child that there is no such thing as objective truth, first of all, it's completely incoherent because you're making a claim of objective truth that there is no such thing as objective truth. But you're also undermining their education. You're not expanding the curriculum. You're not opening their minds.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  You're undermining the whole purpose of education, which is grounded in the existence of objective truth and higher faculties of reason and all these sorts of things. Same thing with fraud, right? If you can abuse your speech to commit fraud, you've undermined speech because now speech cannot be relied on to convey any sort of truth. If you rely on free speech protections to defend obscenity, you're undermining free speech because obscenity and all sorts of licentiousness undermine our own freedom. The founding fathers were very clear about this. Even some of the greatest liberal writers in the classical liberal tradition will say, "You can't abuse your liberty to the point of licentiousness because then you've undermined your liberty." And the example I use on this is a heroin addict, right? Right now, there's a big push

• 8:36Speaker 00

  to legalize all sorts of drugs. You see that from the derelicts on the right, on the left, rather. But you also see it from some more libertarian types on the right. And they'll say, "We've got to legalize drugs because it's an unjust infringement of your personal liberty for the government to say otherwise."

• 8:53Speaker 00

  I think most of us have known drug addicts in our lives, right? Think of the heroin addict, who, according to the modern definition of liberty, is the freest man in the world. As long as he's got a buck in his pocket, he can go buy whatever he wants, he can shoot up. Oh, the pinnacle of liberty, the whole purpose of the United States, right? I don't think so. I think, actually, we all know that man is a slave. He's a slave to his lower base passions and appetites. And this is because man, uniquely, has intellect and will. And we actually have two kinds of will. We have the lower will, which is when we want to just stuff our face with cookies or drugs or booze or whatever. And then we've got a higher will. And very often, they're in conflict. St. Paul writes about this. He says, "The things that I want to do, I don't do.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  And the things that I don't want to do, I do." And we all know what this means. You're at the bar, and there's a cute chick at the end of the bar, and you say, "I don't, don't, Michael, uh-uh, don't." But the lower part of you, it's the little devil on your shoulder, right? He says, "Go down there." So we've got the lower will, we've got the rational higher will. And the rational higher will is mediating between the lower will and the divine will, which is this divine logic of the universe. And we have an intellect to help sort it all out. And Aristotle says, "This is what makes us a political animal, you know, more so than any of the gregarious animals." And the expression of that is in our speech, right? That we're, you know, we don't just grunt, we don't just holler. Increasingly, we do, actually, in US Congress and elsewhere.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  But, you know, in our best selves, we are speaking. We're persuading one another. We're using these symbols of words to communicate things about objective reality. And the moment that you compromise that, the moment you say, "There is no truth to convey," or you say, "You're not permitted to say these things, and you're gonna muzzle everybody up. We've just come out of a year where we've literally been muzzled by these masks everywhere." Then you are cutting to the heart of what it means to be human and trying to liberate oneself from reality, I think. And I think that's the whole purpose of it, and it's why the Left has been so focused on this sort of thing. And unfortunately, the whole time, so many conservatives will look at PC and wokeism, and they'll say, "Oh, it's just a distraction. Oh, who cares?

• 11:05Speaker 00

  If you're gonna call Bruce Jenner a she, or it's not..." Don't get hung up. We ought to talk about real things that matter like cutting taxes a little bit more again. And you say, "Well, you know, I like tax cuts as much as the next guy." But if you lose our relationship to reality, if you lose the whole culture, then tax cuts and a buck fifty will get you a cup of coffee.

• 11:26Chris Williamson?

  The problem is semantic games can be thrown away as, "Well, it's just semantics. It doesn't really matter." But as anyone that's read 1984 knows, the breadth of your language is directly proportional to your ability to think the thoughts that the language enables. And given that the quality of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts, the quality of your thoughts depend on the breadth of your language, you restrict the language, you restrict the thoughts, you restrict the life. And yeah, as someone that adores speech and language, and you know, it's our language after all, Michael, although you guys deploy it as best and as worst as you can sometimes.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  We took all the "you's" out. I know, we did. We made some alterations.

• 12:03Chris Williamson?

  Kept hold of faucet, though, for some reason. We dispensed with faucet, but yeah, you kept hold of that. But yeah, it is, I understand why some people think that it doesn't matter. I understand why the death by a thousand cuts, the very, very slow erosion of language, seems like there are bigger problems out there. But it's so fundamental to your ability to communicate with other people, but more importantly, to your ability to communicate with yourself. Because if you can't put the thoughts that are in your head into words, even for yourself, it's really the same as not being able to think them. Because the process of formulating thoughts into words, it concretizes them in a way that nothing else does. Otherwise, it's just a notion, right? It's just this

• 12:46Chris Williamson?

  cloudy, ephemeral sort of wishy-washy thing, and you can't really grab a hold of it. You put it into words, and it takes form. And slowly eroding away at this, I think, is it's something that we should all be really concerned about. But it just smacks massively of conspiracy theory, you know, they're coming for the words. And you think, well, it's hard to find a narrative that puts across the seriousness of it without getting caught up sounding like a cancel culture devotee yourself.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  George Orwell, as you point out, saw this happening 60 years ago, 70 years ago. So was he a conspiracy theorist? Aldous Huxley saw this happening around the same time. Is he a conspiracy theorist? This has been building for a very, very long time. And just because some people don't know anything about history doesn't make the rest of us conspiracy theorists. And Orwell was very explicit. He said, "The purpose of limiting the lexicon is to limit the range of thought," exactly as you say. And just think about what the words do to you. I mean, you're so precise and insightful here to say that our consciousness, the way we view the world, comes out of the words that we use.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  One of the recent coinages out of the university is this phrase, "justice-involved person."

• 14:08Chris Williamson?

  That was my favorite. That was my favorite one from yours. It used to be "young criminal." It's now "justice-involved youth."

• 14:15Speaker 00

  "Justice-involved youth." You think, "Well, hold on. The one thing I know about these kids, the only thing I know, is that they are not involved in justice. They are actually involved in injustice." But they've totally flipped it around. And so if you're thinking of "young criminal," right? What image does that conjure? You say, "Well, okay, some guys, maybe they got some weapons, maybe they're terrorizing Granny or something. Okay, we gotta be a little harsh on them." But if someone is a "justice-involved youth," well, it would be very wrong to punish them. Another one is "a bum." You know, a bum is no longer a bum, or a... Then they became a homeless person. Then they became unhoused. The unhoused people...

• 14:57Speaker 00

  If they're unhoused, that seems like it's kind of my fault, is it? You know, I mean, everybody else is housed. What's happened to them that they've been unhoused? Well, no, they've unhoused themselves, usually through poor choices, or through mental illness or whatever. But we don't want to deal with any of that. We can never permit there to be a moral explanation or consequence for people's behavior. It's always got to be somebody else's fault. And if you use all that language... I guess the clearest one is just the pronouns. If you refer to Caitlyn Jenner... Well, even if you call him Caitlin, that conjures a certain image. But if you refer to Bruce, you know, the future governor of California, if you refer

• 15:38Speaker 00

  to him as her, and you say, "She's this, and she did this, and she won the decathlon, you know, some years ago, and she did this and she did that," you're going to picture a woman. And the issue is, he is not a woman, and he might very much wish to be a woman, and he might even think that he is a woman, but he isn't. And the insistence that we participate in this lie, the insistence that we participate in a delusion, is not only deeply offensive, but it is the end of society. I mean, if we cannot agree on the most basic aspects of reality, then we are not going to agree on anything else, and self-government will not be possible.

• 16:16Chris Williamson?

  What it seems to me is that it's compassion poorly aimed. That a lot of the concessions that I make, and I'm sure that you make with regards to your language, simply out of the lack of arse-ness to be able to just get into another argument, a lot of those come from a place of goodwill. They come from the place that, "Look, I think that this is perhaps a good concession to make," or you bring up in the book that there's some variance to do with people that are mentally disabled, and there are ways to remain factually correct, which are emotively less harsh, right? So those are ways that we can play around with it, but how do you avoid that being

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  a slippery slope? How do you stop it from going from perhaps something which most people would agree is offensive and accurate, to something which is less offensive but still accurate, to something which is neither offensive nor accurate?

• 17:15Speaker 00

  I love this point. By the way, it just occurs to me, I think you are the first interviewer who has read the book, and it's not, this is not to knock other interviewers, but we've only just recently sent the book, I mean, it only went to the printer about a week or so ago, and we sent out some advance copies, so I am very honored. Thank you for reading the book.

• 17:32Chris Williamson?

  Welcome to the UK, Michael.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  I know, they're really, people in the UK, they read, you know, they're very sort of urbane. There are two different kinds of euphemisms, right? A euphemism just sugarcoats harsh realities with nice terms. And PC is certainly a form of euphemism because you're redefining all these words. But I'm not, just like I'm saying that I'm not against all forms of censorship, just like I'm saying that I'm not against all forms of ostracism or cancel culture even, I'm also not against all euphemisms. When I see a woman of a certain age, I'm not going to call her an old hag. I'm going to call her, I'll call her a woman of a certain age. Now, that's obviously a euphemism. But it's not a euphemism that contradicts the reality.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  The thing is, she is a woman of a certain age. Technically, every woman is. Technically, every single woman is. But we all know who we're talking about. We all know we're talking about older women when we say that. If I say, you know, I'm gonna go hit the water closet, or I'm gonna, I'll try to affect a little Britishness here. Or if I say, I'm gonna go, you know, if a woman says, I'm gonna go powder my nose. She may very well powder her nose, she's gonna do other things, but you just don't want to conjure those images in polite conversation. Okay, that's fine. If, to your example on mental illness, or people who are a bit slower, you know, if you call them a bit simple, you know, a bit slow, even the word retarded was a euphemism for previous terms, and because of the euphemism treadmill,

• 19:01Speaker 00

  you're gonna, you're going to regularly change those euphemisms. It's just the way it works. That's perfectly fine. It doesn't, it's not contradicting the reality. A handicapped person, you know, we went from cripple to handicapped. Okay, there's, that doesn't contradict the reality. It makes it a little less harsh and offensive. But then we went to handicapable. What handicap, that implies that you've got extra superpowers or something. That is contradicting the reality, right? I mean, it's not, no one wants to be offensive to anybody, but you don't, you can't make me lie, you know, you can't. I'm not going to call the woman of a certain age a hot teenager. You know, she isn't. She's an older woman. And, and so what PC is getting us to do is tricking us and pretending that, oh, this is a very polite thing. But lies are not polite.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  And I think one of the premises of the modern left is that...

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Lies are compassionate and the truth is cruel. If you go and you tell Bruce Jenner that he's really a man and not a woman, or especially when we hear about trans youth. We're hearing more and more about trans youth because there is a social contagion aspect to this cult as well. But if you tell a trans youth, "Hey, mister, you are not a woman. You actually, you are a guy. And I know you're going through some problems right now, and I'm sure that's very difficult and you gotta work it out. But just know this: you are a man, you're not a woman." We would be told this is harsh, this is cruel, this is gonna make people more depressed and anxious. There's really no evidence of that, but we'll be told that. But I think it's very disrespectful to lie to people.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  And I think that if you live in lies, you're going to set yourself up for a very bad life. And one of the bits of evidence of this, by the way, this is totally just anecdotal, this is not scientific. None of these radical, woke, politically correct people seem all that happy to me. I don't know about you, I've never seen, not one of them, a radical feminist, a radical leftist, you know, any of the constituent parts. I've never seen one of them that seems happy. Well, you know, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Perhaps that's because that premise is wrong. Maybe the truth actually will set you free, that's our old understanding of it, and maybe

• 21:15Speaker 00

  lies actually will delude you and make your life worse.

• 21:19Chris Williamson?

  You've got this quote where you say, "No revolution can succeed if it opposes common sense. Therefore, the clever revolutionary must transform the common sense to accord with his vision." I think that really succinctly explains the inversion that we're seeing with language at the moment. Are you familiar with a concept called the retreat to the inner citadel? Do you know this?

• 21:40Speaker 00

  I don't, actually.

• 21:41Chris Williamson?

  Let me educate you.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Please do, yeah.

• 21:43Chris Williamson?

  So, this is from Isaiah Berlin, and he says that- When the natural road toward human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves, and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally. If you cannot obtain that from the world which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of inner citadel in which you lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. So a simpler way to put that would be, if your leg's wounded, you could try to treat the leg. If you cannot, then you can cut off the leg and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued.

• 22:28Chris Williamson?

  So basically, if you can't win at a game, you stop playing. You say that you never cared about the game and you create your own game with rules that you can more easily win at. So this is something that I've been trying to put in for years and a buddy explained this to me, and it's a red pill that I can no longer stop seeing. So if people can't get a relationship to work, how many of them declare that all monogamous relationships are just restricting and they go polyamorous? Or they can't gain status in a meritocracy, so they announce that the system's rigged and it keeps people down and now they're going to gain status by being a critic of status structures at large? Or you struggle to be popular and well-liked, so you convince yourself that you're an introvert? Or you find losing weight difficult, so you say that losing weight has no bearing on health and that any encouragement to lose weight is an attack on your identity? Or you have trouble staying out of jail,

• 23:13Chris Williamson?

  so you say that jobs are for suckers and you just retreat to a life of crime? All of these different things, these retreats to an inner citadel, to me seem to be a big explanation for what we're seeing with much of the language. It's, look, here are some things, some levels of discomfort that I have come up against in the world. Reality and my experience are not meshing as smoothly as I would like them to. Therefore, my solution is to try and change the rules of the game so that they do.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  At a social level to it, it reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron story, where, another terrific story where the last capable man is being hunted down because this, what you would now call woke tyranny, is trying to drag every single person down to take away excellence, to utterly upend our traditional understanding of society, and say, "Yeah, my leg can't be healed." Well, yeah, who needs legs? Legs are awful. People are very wrapped up in this themselves. You know, a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package indeed, and one of the issues, I suspect, is that people are thinking

• 24:24Speaker 00

  of themselves a lot. You know, if you want to break out of that, if you want to kind of reengage with society and have a better chance at a flourishing life, it's not that you need to think less of yourself, it is that you need to think of yourself less. No one's asking you to think less of yourself, but we are now told that, we are not allowed to tell the man who thinks he's a woman that he's really a man, because, gosh, you know, it would be so awful for him, it would be so... He just has this problem, and so we all need to go along with that. We're not allowed to say that it's better to be married than not to be married, you know, and going back to our example at the bar, you know, hitting the bar every night and picking up the cute chick. Well, some people just can't

• 25:05Speaker 00

  get married, right? That's too bad. Yeah, people suffer. Everybody suffers, okay? You and I have suffered, everybody watching this right now has suffered, and the fact of that is not a reason to deny that there is such a thing as the good, or the true, or the beautiful. The fact that we don't always get to attain it, the fact that not every kid gets a perfect SAT score, is not an argument for doing away with the SATs, right? It's an argument for, hopefully, people can work a little harder, and we need to be nicer to people, maybe, who can't succeed in a certain way, and we've got to bring them in and help them flourish, and they're, "Yeah, sure, I'm all for that." But don't destroy the conception of excellence,

• 25:49Speaker 00

  don't destroy the understanding of good and true and beautiful. And this is something conservatives have really fallen for, because when the left comes in and destroys the old standards, they'll say, "Look..." What you think is good, I think is bad. What you think is true, I think is false. What you think is beautiful, I think is ugly. And the modern conservative response to that is like, "Well, I guess you're right, man." You know, I guess, yeah. No accounting for taste. But that's pretty lame and gives away the whole game to the left. The true response has to be, "You're wrong. You're wrong. We're right and you're wrong." And by the way, if you're right and we're wrong, you need to convince me of that. You need to make an argument that persuades me. But the radical subjectivism that we have all fallen into is what has allowed these

• 26:34Speaker 00

  kooky theories to take hold. I mean, you referenced this point I made in the book earlier on, which is that the revolutions need to take control of the common sense. This is the insight that began political correctness. It began about 100 years ago. You know, Marx failed to instigate his worldwide revolution. He wanted all the lower classes, or the working class, to unite across the world. They were going to throw off their shackles and the chains of industry, and it didn't happen. Turns out that the working class feels much less of a bond to its fellow proletarians

• 27:14Speaker 00

  than it does to its fellow countrymen, its fellow parishioners, its fellow members of their race, whatever the group is going to be. And so, Antonio Gramsci, this brilliant Marxist theorist and communist politician, he said, "Ah, the problem is, the conservatives have the common sense. They have the culture. And so, what we need to do, if we want the revolution to succeed, we need to go in, infiltrate all of these institutions through a war of position, and then transform the common sense, such that, you know, the workers who won't get on board with our theories right now in the factory, they will be so steeped in our culture and our ideology that they will naturally follow us."

• 27:56Speaker 00

  And, you know, it's hard to deny that the left has been fairly successful at that over the last 100 years.

• 28:03Chris Williamson?

  My favorite quote that summarizes that is, "The left won the culture war, now they're just driving around shooting the survivors."

• 28:12Chris Williamson?

  Which is just the most accurate thing. It really does seem to me like the left really hate the working class at the moment, though. Do you get this, Sants?

• 28:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is a clear disdain and contempt. I mean, you see this over the past year with the exaltation of our Dr. Fauci, peace be upon him, and all the other high priests of progressivism. I mean, these are the experts who know much better than the "deplorable, irredeemable, bitter clinging." I mean, these are the words that just the Democratic presidential candidates and presidents have used to describe the lower classes, also known as the American people, a huge portion of the American people, over the past 10 years. They hold them in great contempt, and it's, I think, comes from an irony that

• 29:01Speaker 00

  the left purports to love humanity and fight on behalf of humanity. And they're so focused on humanity, they can't concern themselves with actual humans. The humans really drive them nuts, but humanity they love.

• 29:13Chris Williamson?

  It's weird as well, because the vast majority of immigrant populations, of black and ethnic minorities in America are probably going to be working class. But it seems like their label of ethnic minority has superseded their label of working class. So the culture provides them an exit route out and kind of a safe space within the leftist ideology. Is that right?

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Yes, and this was Gramsci's observation, too. He said, "People actually don't really identify with their job, their economic status."

• 29:47Chris Williamson?

  Not anymore, definitely not anymore.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, but they could identify much more with, say, their religion, their nationality, their race, their whatever. And so that does give the left an out. It's why the left has done very, very well, certainly with black voters, but with other minorities, too, other immigrant groups. Is because they can really gin up that kind of grievance and resentment. And where it didn't exist before, they'll sort of manufacture it like they did through institutions like the Ford Foundation and other groups in the 1970s. You know, even the moniker Hispanic did not really exist, you know, before, about 50 years ago.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  The idea that someone in Mexico and Brazil and Peru and Guatemala and Spain are all somehow the same thing is quite offensive, I think, actually. But same thing with Asian. The idea that Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, all that, somehow it's all just the same, is offensive and silly, but politically it's very useful. And so, you know, they've... Unfortunately, the Left seems to understand politics quite a bit better than we do. And it's a point I make in the book. I think we, as conservatives, tend to pat ourselves on the back and we say, "We understand reality so much, but we understand speech, free speech. Oh, we're way smarter about that than the Left is." But the fact is, we're not.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  They understand it much better. They understand its role in a polity much better. And it's how they've been able to manipulate it so successfully while we twiddle our thumbs.

• 31:23Chris Williamson?

  I definitely think they understand the delivery mechanisms better. Now, everything that the Left creates is slicker and sexier and cooler. And I know that you guys at The Daily Wire are trying to slowly sort of claw your way back into the culture at the moment, but it really does feel like the Left won the culture war and now there's just a few silos left over from the Right that are trying to sort of hold on. What about the destination for the PC types, then? Have they got an end goal that they're trying to achieve here? Does it ever stop?

• 31:52Speaker 00

  So, I think it is a purely negative campaign. I don't think that it is exactly like... We've got the traditional moral standard, which asserts that certain things are good and true and beautiful and others are not. And then we've got the PC standard, and that's going to assert certain things. I just think the PC version, the leftist version, is an inversion of the traditional. It's just seeking to destroy. And it's why... Leftists don't ever seem to really edify anything, right? They just, the BLM mostly peaceful protests left rubble in their wake. I mean, they actually burned down the country. This is true of Antifa, this is true of so much, of the leftist political action.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  So, the only thing, if I were trying to be charitable toward the left, something I don't do very often, but I'll try, I'll try. But if I were trying to give a charitable read, and in many ways, that's what my book is trying to do, I would say that the left is interested in the most radical extreme of liberation. And the most radical extreme of liberation is self-undermining. It destroys your liberty, because it requires you to liberate yourself from reality, from nature, into this mad mind. Another one of your countrymen, John Milton, I think, described this quite well in Paradise

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Lost, where, and actually, he described your discussion of, you know, the guy who can't get his leg to work, right? He says, "Well, I hate legs, you know, I don't want it." When Satan is cast down into hell, he says, "Well, good. Who needs heaven? The mind has its own place, and it can make a hell of heaven, and heaven a hell." And, of course, it can't. You know, the problem is that heaven is going to be heaven, and hell is going to be hell, and the moral order is going to be the moral order. But people can delude themselves a lot, and it will lead to misery, as is happening right now.

• 33:53Chris Williamson?

  Turning the bar stool upside down can only last for so long, though. You can't, you can't create a foundation upon nothing. So what I'm interested in, you know, it's fascinating, living through this slow-motion car crash, and kind of watching it all unfold. But, what I'm interested in is where this continues, where this ends up, and none of us are clairvoyant, but I still do think it's a fascinating thought experiment to go, "Okay, so just roll the clock forward. Let's say that everything becomes deconstructed, and this utopia, the utopia arrives." What then? If all of the conservatives decided that they were going to back off? What would be the end goal? Because all of the groups that we're talking about, whichever group they decide to latch

• 34:36Chris Williamson?

  on to to use as the vanguard of the next particular political push forward, that then gets sliced up and sliced up into increasingly finer and finer slivers. So it's not just black people, it's black feminists, then it's black feminists who are differently able, then it's black feminists are differently able to like Mexican food, and then so on and so forth. You know, it just continues to be chopped and chopped up. And you think, well, that's self-defeating. That's the snake that eats its own tail. And inevitably, all of those groups have differing... You see this with LGBTQ plus, right? You see the Ts don't really have an awful lot to do with any of the other groups that are in there, and the Gs and the Ls actually don't have anything to do with each other other than their mutual disdain for each other, because they don't care about each other sexually.

• 35:19Chris Williamson?

  And then my interesting thought experiment is, where does it end up? You roll the clock forward, what happens then?

• 35:25Speaker 00

  It ends up in the abolition of humanity. And what I mean by...

• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  Cataclysmic, yes.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I think that's exactly what it does, because it's an antisocial ideology that says, "Our only obligation is toward our own selves, and ultimately even to our own basest appetites." And so it views social relations such as they are as merely contractual or predatory. So, you know, the traditional understanding is that we love one another, we love our fellow man, we treat our neighbors as ourselves. And so when one loves someone, you are willing the good of the other. I'm not just... If I love you, I'm not just going to treat you as an object for my personal pleasure. I'm actually... Maybe I'll have to sacrifice. No greater love has a man than to die for his friends.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Maybe I'll have to give you some tough love if you're going in the wrong direction, but I'm really willing it for you. But I think the modern radical vision of it... ...is that other people are merely around for our financial betterment, for our sexual pleasure, for our personal amusement, but this deeper foundation of society is totally gone. And actually, another Englishman, C.S. Lewis, describes this kind of demonic love in The Screwtape Letters, where he depicts this kind of love as a desire to consume. The uncle demon loves his nephew demon because he wants to eat him. He wants to totally devour him. So I think it ends there, and then it breaks society. So no longer is man the social or political animal.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  But it also robs us of our speech, because if there is no such thing as objective truth, and if, in some cases, we're literally not allowed to speak, we're being shut up and censored from speaking the truth, then our essentially human quality is gone too. And so when I say that the end game of this radical leftism is the abolition of humanity, I mean, anything that distinguishes human beings from animals, from the beasts, would be taken away. Our social bonds and our ability to communicate reality, to perceive truth and to communicate that, that would be taken away. And so we'd be divvied up into essentially a perfectly atomized world,

• 37:45Speaker 00

  just individuals with no bond to anybody else. And we would be grunting animals with sticks because we couldn't persuade anybody of anything. We wouldn't speak the same language. We increasingly don't speak the same language. So then politics becomes less a practice of persuasion and building consensus, and much more a process of imposing one's will and interest on another person or another group, which increasingly you are seeing that happen. You're seeing the decline of deliberative government. And you're just seeing a bunch of yelling and screaming and violence in the streets. And that's... So my bleak picture of that utopia is it would look a lot like warring tribes of animals.

• 38:27Chris Williamson?

  Well, you see this with the eco movement at the moment, right? Green, as Alex Epstein calls it, is human racism.

• 38:36Chris Williamson?

  He says that it's such self-hatred of the human race. And it's almost cool at the moment, within certain circles, to talk about the disdain that you have, a curse on the earth, destroying Mother Nature, as he calls it, the perfect planet hypothesis, that everything would be fine if only we weren't here. And yet, in the same sentence, many of those people will have an overlapping ideology with people that want to completely change the current way that the planet is made up and the way that everybody's preconceptions about how the world works should operate. And it seems as well, encouraging people to be mindful and precise of the language and the words that they use makes sense to me.

• 39:18Chris Williamson?

  But demanding tolerance becomes undermined when the people doing it are insanely overbearing and intolerant. It's like punching someone in the face in the name of peace.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  But, you know, to give them their due, there's a very famous, infamous essay on this topic by Herbert Marcuse, who was one of the Frankfurt School critical theorists, who then reappeared in the 1960s as the father of the new left. And he wrote this essay called Repressive Tolerance. And it's a diabolical little essay, where he says, "Look, the current mainstream tolerance that we have in the West is very wicked and evil, because there are certain things that are off limits and certain things are censored and ostracized, but the dominant sort of Western view is protected. And so what we need to do is go in and correct this."

• 40:09Speaker 00

  And so a liberating tolerance, according to Marcuse, would not tolerate conservatives, right? It would just censor conservatives and encourage speech from leftists. And his argument is that the conservatives are not tolerant, and so you can't coherently tolerate intolerance. And I think he actually makes a decent point, not in the particulars, but in the broader principle. You cannot have any sort of society that, no matter how tolerant the society is, that would undermine its own existence. You just can't do it. It doesn't make any sense. And even the great philosophers on toleration talked about this. John Locke, who is the father of liberalism, for goodness sakes, he wrote in the letter concerning toleration, he said, "Well, look, we've got to tolerate everybody, and we've got to be really nice and tolerant."

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Except for atheists. We should never tolerate atheists. Those guys, man, they'll... Because, according to Locke...

• 41:01Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't that align with what you suggested at the very beginning? That there needs to be a concession. There does need to be a small amount of this that's permitted.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  There does, yes. I mean, there needs to... We want to have a nice, broad society. We want to be able to, you know, perceive the truth. But that is the point. You know, let's not... The purpose of keeping an open mind is not so that it can stay open forever and your brain falls out. The purpose of having an open mind is to close it again around truth that you have perceived. A good line from this comes from Bill Buckley. He was quoting, actually, a liberal president of Yale University. And he said, "Skepticism has utility only when it leads to conviction." You've got to ultimately believe in certain things. And Buckley, actually, as mainstream a conservative as it gets, he described himself as an epistemological optimist. He said, "Look, I think..."

• 41:57Speaker 00

  You know, and he even made fun of what a silly phrase that is. And he said, "You know, I believe..." A typical Bill Buckley way, he uses a $20 word to describe a very simple concept. He said, "I believe that some things are true. We know them to be true, and we don't need to relitigate them every five seconds." You know, there are certain premises that our society is going to embrace. And so he said, for instance, that we don't need to constantly be entertaining the ideas of the Nazi or the communist. These are bad ideas. They're antithetical to our civilization. And so, we're done with that. And your point is so perceptive on the self-hatred involved here. There is no country or no civilization ever in the history of the world as self-hating

• 42:42Speaker 00

  as ours is. I mean, we're the only people on Earth who are constantly prattling and babbling on and on about how terrible we are, you know? As though we... People in the West pretend that we invented slavery. We're the only civilization in history that has abolished slavery. Slavery still exists in virtually every other part of the world, except for in the West, and yet we pretend that we're unique. I suppose we are unique in the fact that we abolished it. We pretend that we're the only racist civilization. We're the least racist civilization in history. Every other country in the world is extraordinarily racist. Not us. We take people in from all sorts of backgrounds and things like that.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  But I suspect a lot of this comes down to a very personal point, which is that people hate themselves. We've gotten to a point in society where people really seem to hate themselves, and they say that mankind is overpopulating the Earth. And none of these people, by the way, who talk about overpopulation, ever want to take themselves out of the population. It's always somebody else comes out. But we kill our children through abortion, a million a year in the United States. We are trying to convince people not to have children quite as much, whether for ecological or social reasons. This is why the birth rate has plummeted. I mean, it's now at a historic low, but you could say that every single year we seem to hit a new historic low.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  We want to give away territories, cede them back to conquered peoples. It's a bizarre thing, and I suspect there's a religious component here as well. Cardinal Manning has a good line. He says, "All human conflict is ultimately theological. Cult and culture come from the same root word." And I suspect a little bit of that self-hatred reflects a hatred of God, in whose image we are made. And it's why there seems to be such a bizarre religious component to all of these various ideologies, notably transgenderism, which adopts a gnostic view of human nature. The idea that our bodies have nothing to do with who we really are, that we're purely soul, in contravention of the true understanding of our self, which is that we're body and soul put together.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  It's curious to me that the radical left simultaneously advances these two apparently opposite views. One, that we're just meat puppets, just synapses firing off in our brain, all our hopes and joys are illusions, the materialist view. And then the other, that our bodies have nothing to do with who we are, and a man can be a woman if he really feels that way, the gnostic view. They're opposites, but they both contradict the traditional view. And I think, actually, that's a good example of the way that political correctness works. It doesn't matter what argument they're putting out at any given moment, as long as they destroy the traditional understanding of the society.

• 45:22Chris Williamson?

  Talking about the big picture and the globe at large, I often think about this. I read a lot of existential risk, which just in case the current situation wasn't cataclysmic enough, it makes it feel even worse. And what I'm thinking is, how much of the smartest minds of our generation's time has been taken up debating stupid shit over the last five to 10 years or so? Literally, some of the best brains on the planet have had the lion's share of their online time spent debating whether men are men and women are women or not.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:52Chris Williamson?

  And the concern is, I can't quite put my finger on it.

• 45:57Chris Williamson?

  The debates around semantics are immediately visible. You can see the unfolding of all of the consequences of at least the speech itself, not the second order, third order effects of what happens due to the speech. But you can at least see the argument on its own merits, right?

• 46:16Chris Williamson?

  But what you can't see is what happens down the line from that. What is the world that we could have had if we hadn't got caught up with this or that or the other? And it seems like, you look at the Wuhan lab leak flip-flop from Facebook that's occurred recently, right? That's a prime example of a semantic game being played. This type of speech is not allowed. Okay, so the speech is obvious, it's very easily defined and it's immediate, you can shut that down. But when the facts start to catch up to the narrative eight months, 12 months later, you think, okay, so actually what we did was we punished people who had truth as opposed to people that had falsehood. I'm not sure if it's true, it might be, it's purported, it's possible, it might be probable,

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  but you know, at least it should have been permitted. And you think-

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 47:05Chris Williamson?

  This asymmetry in the pace at which arguments are visible, I think lends unfair weight toward people that want to play semantic games as opposed to people that want to root what they're doing in reality. Because reality is always going to move more slowly. The consequences are always going to be seen down the line. Does that make sense?

• 47:26Speaker 00

  It does make sense. And it brings to mind that meme that shows up where someone will say, you know, this would be the world if so-and-so had never been born. And it's futuristic and it's, you know, everyone's in flying cars and everything, you know. If only Dr. Fauci stopped speaking, then, you know-

• 47:41Chris Williamson?

  This would have happened.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Usually, they come from the left, but, right, then we'd all be in this very advanced civilization. I think that's true, however- The thing we've got to grapple with is where the fault lies in ourselves. And I'm all for owning the libs and dunking on the left when they're going crazy, which is all the time. But we can't just leave it there. The fact is that the left has developed its ideas in a certain culture. And so when we say we want to defend the West against the predations of the radical left, well, the radical left arose out of the West. The left, even the term "the left," goes back to the French Revolution. And the French Revolution was a historic tragedy. But that came from somewhere, too.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  And so one does wonder, and this thesis has been advanced in recent years by people like Patrick De Neeuw in "Why Liberalism Failed," and other writers and thinkers, too, that something went wrong somewhere along the way. We somehow lost the thread somewhere along the way. I mean, Oswald Spengler's book, now it's not really read quite as much, but 60, 70 years ago it was read quite a bit, "The Decline of the West," maps out why the West has to go into decline because of the circumstances that have arisen from within it. And so I think it's very frustrating. I wish that we didn't have to spend all this time saying that men are men and women are women and babies are babies and there is such a thing as truth or whatever.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  But maybe the reason for that does not lie in, you know, just only in Herbert Marcuse 50 years ago, or only in Antonio Brom, or only in Karl Marx, but actually goes back even further than that. Where did we lose this thread? Because there are major ideas at play, and ideas obviously do have consequences. And I just think if we try to fix the problem solely based on the Clinton administration to the present, we're not going to get very far. And one of the things I've tried to point out in this book is that political correctness, which seems like it's 30 years old... It's at least 100 years old. And so, the modern radicalism goes back so, so far. Where are we gonna find those answers?

• 49:50Speaker 00

  Are we gonna find it in science? You know, capital S, trademark over the E. So many of our debates now are so reductive and shallow over gender or babies, right? They'll say, "A baby should not be killed because he has unique DNA." They say, "Okay, sure, yeah, I agree. That's true, he's obviously a distinct entity." But, plenty of things have unique DNA. "Why should I not kill the baby?" "Well, because the baby's a human being." "Why shouldn't we kill human beings?" "Well, because, you know, they're self-conscious." And they say, "Well, no, a baby's not. A baby's completely unconscious, basically." "I mean, even a newborn baby is not a walking, talking..." "The reason we do it is because humans have dignity, because they're made in the image of God,

• 50:35Speaker 00

  because they have souls and they are this very dignified being." Well, now, we've left the realm of science now, haven't we? Now, we're in the realm of philosophy and religion. And we're very uncomfortable talking about those things. The way that we talk in the West today about philosophy and religion is like an anthropological exhibit. We talk about it like we're in a museum. And we say, "Oh, look, here's philosophy over here. People used to think this, then they thought, 'Oh, look at religion. Look at these grunting idiots used to think, whatever.'" We don't treat these things as though they... We don't treat Aristotle as though he tells us something about the way we're living today. We don't treat Thomas Aquinas, for that matter, as though he has something to say about the way we're living today. It's not...

• 51:19Speaker 00

  Our understanding of philosophy and religion is not a living one. And so, our civilization is not a living one. It's a dying one. And that's a sad fact.

• 51:29Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how much of the difference between how the UK and America at the moment culturally is split? That's not to say that there aren't sort of progressive crazy policies and stuff like that over here, but it really is orders of magnitude different to where it is with you guys. How much of that do you think is because your country is based in a history which is only a quarter of a millennia old? That we can roll back? Yeah, fair enough, Vikings and... Normans and so on and so forth, we're hardly sort of genetic purists ourselves. We are an amalgamation of a lot of different things. But you know, there's castles in the UK that are thousands of years old and we can track that history back. I wonder whether the roots lie sufficiently deep with regards to tradition over here,

• 52:10Chris Williamson?

  that there are more tangible artifices that people can grab on to. Do you know what I mean? That there's a genuine sense of history. Whereas for America, you know, the history very much still is unfolding. There is still a lot to be discovered about what the country is. It just seems unfortunate that it's occurred at a time where the free movement of information has enabled some bad actors to weaponize that.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  I think your point is totally right. Because when you even say, what is the founding story of America? You could get different answers. Is it the pilgrims? I tend to trace it, I suppose, to the pilgrims. Is it the settlers in Virginia and Jamestown? Some people would say that. Is it 1776? That was the very beginning, nothing happened before that? I don't think that's quite fair, that's a little shallow. Is it the Wild, Wild West? Well, it might be, a lot of people trace it to that as well. Or is it the story we're increasingly told? That we're a nation of immigrants and really, America begins at Ellis Island. A lot of people want to believe that. Well, depending on which story you pick, you're going to have a very, very different understanding of America. And they all seem equally plausible because the country is not particularly old.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  Add to this the problem of totally open borders, which effectively is what we have today. And you have a country with historic levels of immigrants who have not assimilated in any way. America always did a basically good job about assimilating its immigrants. And then when it wasn't able to do that, it would restrict immigration. And this gave us a relatively stable society. But now that's gone. And so if you... If you have a country and you, at the corporate and governmental level, try to replace and undermine its institutions and traditions, and then you actually change the people of the country such that now something like one-fifth of the country was not born here and does not really know particularly much about the country. Well, then you're going to get a different country.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  And the UK has probably survived a little bit better because of that weight of history. And you see it especially at the religious level. You see this in the Catholic Protestant split. The idea when Martin Luther was nailing his theses to the church door was that finally we were going to have a recovery of truth after the absolute corruption of the Catholic Church and the Roman hierarchy. And what happened? Did you get a reformation? No, you didn't get a reformation. Did you get a new singular church to challenge the Catholic Church? No. You got 30,000 churches because there was that crack.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  And the Catholic Church, despite its many, many problems and scandals that continue to go on and have gone on for a long time, it remains, I think, because of its divine institution, but also, without question, because of its history, because of its tradition. Helene Belloc has a good line on it. He says that he has to take it as a matter of faith that the Catholic Church is divinely instituted. But for nonbelievers, and evidence of its divine institution is that no other institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight. And this is certainly true. And it's true of other places with a long history. But what are we doing now, especially in this country, to our history? We're tearing down all the statues. And I think it's why the left focuses on language

• 55:30Speaker 00

  and, of course, on our national memory. Tear down Washington, tear down Jefferson. When Trump said that would happen four years ago, everyone laughed at him. Within 18 months, they were pulling down those statues. And where does it go from here?

• 55:43Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that summer and other seasons have been added to a list of triggering terms?

• 55:49Chris Williamson?

  Did you see this?

• 55:51Speaker 00

  I did see this because, you see, summer in one hemisphere

• 55:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  may not be summer in another hemisphere.

• 55:56Chris Williamson?

  Let me, let me read this out for the people that haven't seen it. So this is Laura, Lara Hogan adds summer and other seasons to list of triggering terms. Twitter's status as a think tank for the nation's brightest minds took a hit once again when Lara Hogan announced that she will no longer use the word summer because it may be triggered for some. According to her Twitter profile, Lara Hogan is the founder and leadership coach at Where With All. The company website states that Hogan spent a decade growing emerging leaders as the VP of Engineering at Kickstarter and an Engineering Director at Etsy. So she makes nice posters and stuff like that. Hogan's full tweet reads, "A teeny tiny inclusive language thing I've tried to get better at this past year is avoiding northern hemisphere specific seasonal language.

• 56:37Chris Williamson?

  Like, instead of this summer, I say the months I mean, or a Q3, because it might be that season for me, but not that season for everybody. Joining the call for the season sensitive lexicon are chipmunks and squirrels notorious for the preferring of summer season over the snow laden winters."

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Q3 time and the living is easy. I don't think anyone's gonna be singing that. Do you know, I love that she suggested Q3 because what she thinks she's doing is this very liberal impulse to take away all considerations of particularity, of time and of space. She's going to take away, you know, yes, you're right, it's when it's summer here, it's not somewhere, somewhere else. She's gonna take that away. I'm no longer a citizen of this country or that country. I'm no longer, I'm in the realm of the universal. Okay. But she's using terms that are used almost exclusively by neoliberal elites. The idea of Q3, what are we, now we're, we're gonna replace the language of summer.

• 57:37Chris Williamson?

  Sales report for this season.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, finally, we're going to adopt the much more inclusive language of a McKinsey associate or someone at Goldman Sachs. Yeah, okay, sure. I mean, but they do this so very often. You see now, you know, there's a move against the American flag in the United States. A lot of the left will protest the flag on football fields, or they'll take it off of clothing, or they'll say it's a symbol of oppression. But they will wave the BLM flag or the pride flag, especially now where I guess we're in pride month. Pretty soon we're going to have pride year. It's just going to be 12 months of the year. And I think the reason for this, in part, is because the American flag is particular. It exists in a place, it exists in a time, it has certain people, and it's got the mountains and, you know, the various seas.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  But the pride flag is universal. It applies to everybody. It makes imperial claims. This is why I think they're now flying it on embassies around the world. The American flag makes no claim on someone in Iran or on the Iranian society. The pride flag does. BLM, the same thing. It describes this worldwide phenomenon of the oppression of black people at the hands of white people. And so that flies around too. They want to, in the name of liberty and tolerance, talk in these universal terms.

• 58:53Chris Williamson?

  Universality, yes. Yes, that's exactly what I had in my head.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  But the irony is, it's as imperialistic as anything. It's actually more imperialistic than the national claims, which are at least somewhat modest.

• 59:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, they're bounded.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  They're at least bounded, but even that, even now, our nation is not bounded because the borders are totally open.

• 59:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I couldn't believe that. You just think that if you didn't say good day to someone, is that it's nighttime somewhere? If you say good morning, it's evening time somewhere? I don't know, man. I don't know. I can't work out if we're closer to 1984 or a brave new world. It feels like some awful love child of both.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  I think it's brave new world. I agree, yes, it is, but it's not a love child like 50/50.

• 59:37Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  You know, sometime in the future, they're gonna figure out how to engineer our DNA. So we're only like 10% this guy and 30% this guy and this or whatever. I think it's about 10% George Orwell, specifically because of the language focus of the radicals. But I think it's about 90% Huxley, because Huxley, and Huxley actually made this point to Orwell, because Huxley was Orwell's teacher.

• 1:00:00Chris Williamson?

  French teacher, right?

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  He was a French teacher. Right, yes, I think so. And so...

• 1:00:03Chris Williamson?

  Read the book. Read the book, Michael.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah, truly, I'm so honored, because you've read the book now probably more recently than I have. So you could probably tell me things about the book.

• 1:00:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  But yes, Huxley was Orwell's French teacher. And he said, you know, George, your dystopia is fine, the language stuff is good. But you think that the totalitarian government is gonna rule with an iron fist. And it's going to, you know, take away all people's sorts of pleasures and... But no, actually, what's gonna happen is, the totalitarian government is going to rule by playing to people's pleasures. By getting people so drugged up on actual drugs, by getting people so over-sexed with casual, non-committed sex. That they're totally outside of their faculties of reason, and they're susceptible to being controlled.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  And when you look around our society today, worst opioid crisis we've ever seen. You know, marriage rates in the doldrums, but people having creepy sex, you know, all over the place, doing all sorts of things with any number of people, and that being normalized. We're seeing that, and we're seeing the idea normalized, that any sort of sacrifice, any sort of burden, any sort of suffering is wicked and evil and has to be overcome, so that we can just pursue our passion. You do you. Don't yuck my yum. This kind of language. I mean, that's the language of Huxley's world state. That is not the language of Orwell's Big Brother.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Even if you think about what social media is doing, right? It's an internal, it's a systemic rather than exogenous way to manipulate the chemicals that you've got in your body. Immediate guilt-free pleasure. The same goes from Amazon. You know, you can Amazon Prime yourself a lovely new item that will give you that hit while you DoorDash or Deliveroo a Michelin star meal while you sit on the couch and watch million-dollar produced TV shows on Netflix. It's, it really is. Yeah, for all of human history, we've had problems of scarcity, right? And now our problems are problems of abundance. And I think you're right. I think that 1984 might have happened if technology hadn't enabled Brave New World.

• 1:02:15Chris Williamson?

  Without the technology, I don't think that Brave New World can happen because you, it requires such sophisticated coordination. It requires a degree of siloing of information whilst also free, free communication across that. And the levels of comfort and convenience that are required in order to enact a Brave New World, you need to have, here's the thing, right? So I think about this to do with existential crises all the time. How luxurious of a position it is to have an existential crisis? Because the only way that you can get to that situation is if the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs have all been sorted so much like if you, if you're worried about where the next meal's coming from, you don't have the luxury to concern yourself about whether you are contributing to your own highest good within the world.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:58Chris Williamson?

  So yes, Brave New World, I'm, I'm with you on that. 9010, it's a language from 1984 and everything else from Brave New World, except for the soma, which was still yet to go.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  Except for the soma, although I don't, I guess OxyContin or something is the soma now. And I think that this issue of that existential ennui, people who work a lot don't have existential ennui because they're busy working. They have, they have needs to meet. And, and beyond that, by the way, it's not even just that we don't work enough or we're all telecommuting or something. It's, because there are plenty of people who can't telecommute. I mean, this was one of the arguments for the lockdowns is all the genius experts said, oh no, you can work on Zoom. And I said, oh, right. None of you know people who work physical jobs. So you don't, you think that everybody can just telecommute in on Zoom. Actually, believe it or not, there's some people who do real things in real places.

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  Wait, so you need your plumbing fixing via Zoom? Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Get the electrician in on Zoom. It's not going to work very well. So yes, you've got this problem of, of abundance and the, the chemical aspect of social media is, is pretty clear too. The one that I get sucked into. Is Twitter. I'm on Twitter a lot. I'm just the one. I don't do Facebook as much, I don't do Instagram, but Twitter I do. And I was talking to a friend of mine. He said, "Why are you on Twitter so much?" And it just came out of me. I said, "Because I don't want to look at porn." So if I don't want to look at porn, I still want to get the same sort of, you know, pleasure, oxytocin, whatever. And so now instead I'm just getting sort of political, you know, rage tweets or something.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  But everybody seems to be hooked on these things. And for a lot of people, I suppose, it is literally porn, right? It's not even just... Which is this other issue of abundance, right? I mean, truly, that there, you know, if you can think of it, there's a porn for it. And I think it's why you're seeing a reaction among younger conservatives, you know? There was a big debate that busted out, partaking in some ways of the PC debate, because we do have laws against obscenity, and yet they don't really seem to be enforced very much with porn. And the debate to ban porn or not, or to regulate porn, you would imagine it would be the old fuddy-duddies are against porn, and the young, you know, raps gallions are for porn. But actually, it was totally reversed. The people defending porn were the boomers.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  The boomers who were using this kind of pseudo-quasi-libertarian language of the 80s and 90s, and saying, "Oh, well, you know, if it feels good, do it." And the younger people, who grew up on this stuff, who I think that the median age of porn exposure for boys is like 11 years old or something. And they were saying, "No, man, this is really bad stuff. It's kind of messed me up. It's hard to work through." Like, how are we not regulating this? And, you know, they are obviously much more in tune with political reality than these throw-your-hands-up conservatives who get rid of all the standards.

• 1:05:49Chris Williamson?

  I'm so glad. I don't know by what quirk of this version of the simulation I managed to avoid a porn addiction. But I'm so glad that that's not one of, you know, of all of the vices and odd quirks and behavioral problems that I've managed to sidestep through life, I'm really glad that porn addiction isn't one of them, because it's so inconvenient.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  And I suppose it's just available all the time. But you know, part of it might just be that if you're a millennial, you've kind of just missed it. Or you know, maybe it was still there, I guess, when we were kids. But, but you know, still.

• 1:06:20Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Dial up internet. But think about if you're a zoomer, right? Think about if you're a kid who right now is 18 years old or something. You have had some kind of high-speed device in your hand from the time you were like three. And so your brain just isn't built for that. And it's, you know, I think it also gets a little bit to competing theories of the mind. You know, there's this one theory of the mind, which is that our mind is like a steam engine or something, you know? And we've got, we've got to just let it out. We don't want to repress anything. We've just got to, if you blow off a little steam, you'll feel great and then you can go on.

• 1:06:56Chris Williamson?

  You said that, sorry to interject there. You said that this aligned with the technologies of the day, right? You kind of had these different sections. Who was it that was the steam thing? Was that?

• 1:07:07Speaker 00

  So, so coincidentally, you've got sort of Freud coming up around the same time as the steam engine, right? And so Freud is, you know, and Freudianism kind of leads to this idea that you shouldn't, you've got all these repressed desires and feelings and thoughts and you've got to just sort of let them out. And then you'll have a much healthier society. And you then see this expressed in the kind of kooky theories of guys like Wilhelm Reich, who believed that the life force, the life energy was something called the orgone, this esoteric particle. And the cause of war and cancer and death and everything was a lack of orgasms.

• 1:07:45Chris Williamson?

  A little bit more masturbation fixes a lot of problems, Michael.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  Yes, no, I mean, this is truly what the left is saying now. And you'll see it being taught in kids cartoons. They'll say, you know, it's perfectly healthy. It's totally right to, in the words of Woody Allen, have sex with someone you love alone in a room. You know, the one person you know you love. It's perfectly good to, it's very healthy. You've got to do that. During the lockdown, the New York City Health Department was saying, oh, yeah, you can't hook up right now, but you've basically, you've got to go, you know, turn the blinds down and have fun with yourself whenever you can. But this is actually the opposite of healthy, right? The traditional view is. That virtues and vices are habits. And the more you do them, the more you do them.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  So you, I mean, you make this point where you say, "I'm glad I never developed a porn addiction." Well, I suspect part of the reason you didn't is because when we grew up, you know, it just wasn't quite as available. But if you had, you know, had a device in your hand at three years old and you were just doing this constantly, it would be very difficult to break that sort of...

• 1:08:50Chris Williamson?

  I would be a pathological thapper, yes.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  That's right on your business card, is what I would say. I mean, this sort of, you know, I think people are beginning to recognize this a little bit more, especially as we, as we become more digitized, as we live more of our lives virtually, as we are zooming in to our friends and our work and our parties and things. We realize, as, as the language of universalism has taken over the language of nation or country, we're beginning to realize, wait a second, I'm a, I do have a body. I am in time and space. I know I'm told that my identity has nothing to do with my body, but I think maybe I do. And, you know, I think it's why Jordan Peterson has, has become so popular and resonates so well as he says, "Hey, clean your room. The things you do actually, actually do matter." And one of the really insidious aspects of political correctness

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  is that political correctness takes old moral codes and replaces them with new speech codes. So it matters less and less and less what you do and more and more and more what you say. It's this, you know, we've kind of created this, this prison of our own minds. And that, that way lies madness.

• 1:09:57Chris Williamson?

  Casting off the wisdom of old times is so dangerous. There's this quote from Donald Nuth, which I adore. And he says, "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems."

• 1:10:10Chris Williamson?

  So good. And yet, when you have collapse of grand narratives and the lack of religiosity, you have the changes with regards to the way that family structures are, are accepted and so on and so forth, it doesn't... Didn't surprise me that you have this. Like, there is, again, to use the Barstool analogy, it's been upended and now it's sat in some sand and there's nothing, as soon as you start to pull away at the traditions of the past, there isn't anything to hold on to it. And this is coming from someone, I'm from a very salt-of-the-earth, normal northern town in the UK. All of this sort of stuff wouldn't come to us in terms of culture wars. And yet, I'm seeing now, even somewhere that is fairly traditional, I'm seeing this

• 1:10:53Chris Williamson?

  harkening back, this desire for people to have their older ways a little bit more. And yeah, man, it's the bifurcating that you're seeing as well with regards to how sort of people are living their lives. But again, as you brought up there, first we make our habits, then our habits make us, right? You can tell anybody that you want, you can do what you want. You can eat the ice cream, you can, but when the diabetes comes for you in 10 years' time, reality will end up winning because reality doesn't stop. And if your language and the lexical manipulation is malleable, that's going

• 1:11:33Chris Williamson?

  to fold around reality as it comes in. Okay, so now diabetes is what, like an accepted side effect of you eating whatever you want because you shouldn't be told that you're supposed to diet? That doesn't seem like a very healthy way to go through things. But because the effects of a semantic game are immediate and the consequences of a semantic game are delayed, we've got to it. I've done it. That's what it is. I think that plays a big part in it. You have these lagging measures that occur down the line, but you have the lead measures that happen during the argument. And those are the ones that people are playing about with at the moment. But as Douglas Murray says, when the barbarians are at the door, we'll be debating about what gender they are. If you don't focus

• 1:12:15Chris Williamson?

  on the here and now with the future, the consequences of the future in mind, you're going to end up with a future that you really, really don't want to live in.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  We do, and we also have to acknowledge something that the left gets right. And the diabetes example is a very good one. People's private decisions and private behaviors have public and therefore political consequences. Public and political are synonyms. Now, the left uses this, they'll say, "Look, you know, we ought to be able to tell you whether you can smoke or not because we're gonna pay for your healthcare. And we've got this federal healthcare program, our city healthcare program, and so we ought to be able to tell you whether you can smoke or not." And you say, "Okay, well, actually, I don't want you to tell me whether I can have my nightly cigar, but I do understand the logic here." And conservatives, well, obviously, we want to have some sort of a private sphere, we

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  want certainly protections for the family, for local government, local community. It is the case that if you have a country of vicious people, if you have a country that just engages in every vice under the sun, and they are allergic to virtue, then it doesn't matter how nice your constitution looks, doesn't matter how beautiful your Supreme Court building is, you're gonna have a vicious country. Your private life will have that public effect. And this is why, you know, I think the collapse of any kind of traditional understanding of religion is so bad here. What you've seen, actually, is as religion has fallen apart, right, and religion entails

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  that every time I commit a sin, at least my religion, because I'm Catholic, every time I commit a sin, I've gotta take note of it, I've gotta count it, I've gotta think of the circumstances, I have to go into a little black box and tell a man in a collar what I did to receive absolution from God. Does that happen? Yes, yeah, not him. No, I mean, it's really anxiety-induced. How many times have I gone to confession? A zillion times? And every time, I still think, "Oh, gosh, he's gonna, I did this horrible thing, oh, I did it again, too," you know? But I know that I'm answerable in my most private moments, in my most private thoughts. Even if I break it, even if I fall short, as we all do, I know that I am answerable here in the public. But for the people who say, "Okay, I'm done with religion,"

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  often you'll hear, "I'm spiritual, but not religious." You know, it just usually means, "I'm not that interested in God, but I'm very interested in me, you know? I think I'm a pretty interesting chap." So that if you've got that idea, or even the idea that, you know, a private confession is sufficient, or, you know, if you just think about something, then it's fine. C.S. Lewis makes fun of this idea, too. Then there's really no accountability for what you do in private. And when there's no accountability whatsoever, don't be surprised when that bleeds out into the public.

• 1:15:01Chris Williamson?

  I've never realized the symbolic nature of going through that process in church. I've never realized that, but it makes a lot of sense. It reduces the lag between the semantic game, or the thought, or the immediate action, and it creates a breakpoint in between that, perhaps being instantiated as a, "First we make our habits, then our habits make us." The repetition of that is going to be much harder if every time that you go back, and you do go to confession, you're like, "What, this again? This Saint Michael, again?" You know, so, talking about social media, have you been watching what Steven Crowder has been getting up to recently?

• 1:15:40Speaker 00

  You know, I've been friends with Steven for years, and whenever he texts me, I sort of think like,

• 1:15:47Chris Williamson?

  What have you done now?

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  I don't know, what did he do now? What did he do this time? What's he in trouble for? And yes, I mean, they are gunning for him, I think, in a special way, because they can go after him on the jokes, and they can say, "The jokes were too far," and because he's so mainstream. I think he may be the most mainstream conservative that Big Tech has really gone after.

• 1:16:08Chris Williamson?

  What do you think we've got to learn from his situation at the moment?

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  Well, I love, I mean, the man has cojones of steel. He may be a complete lunatic. He's so, he's got such brass couleons, you know? I mean, we have seen this guy be waterboarded for a very long time. He is, he's done all sorts of crazy things that most people would not do. And he's stood up to Big Tech, and he will not bow down. And I think, the point that he and I were discussing this the other day...

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  You go after Alex Jones. "Oh, well, Alex Jones, he's just a kooky, far-right guy." Turns out, he actually appears to have been right about everything.

• 1:16:47Chris Williamson?

  Terrifyingly, yeah.

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  The more we learn about the gay frogs, and yeah, I mean, he's a... But, you know, "Well, Alex Jones, he's a fringe figure." Okay, you go after him. You go after Gavin Mcginnis. Gavin Mcginnis founded The Proud Boys, very funny comedian. But no, his jokes, they went too far. Okay, you gotta get rid of Gavin Mcginnis. Now, you're going after Steven Crowder. I mean, Steven Crowder, I think he has the largest online following of any conservative, basically. Certainly in the top three. If you go after and you take him out, they can take out any one of us. And I think that's really what this is about. And I give him a lot of credit. You know, I sometimes think if the big tech oligarchs have not gone after you at all, it means you're doing something wrong. It means that, you know, you're... When I think of the really squishy conservative types,

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  you know, the ones who write for The Atlantic and The Washington Post, and go on MSNBC or whatever,

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  I realize that they're actually worse than the left. Because the left is being honestly dishonest, right? The left is telling you what it believes and all the ghastly things it wants to do. But these guys exist to legitimize the leftist, the liberal establishment. Their role is to act as a court jester in the kingdom of liberalism. And so, whenever you have an actual conservative raising actual questions that might seriously threaten the left, well, they can't tolerate that. You're not gonna get your CNN invitation, and more likely, they're gonna try to boot you off like they're doing to Crowder.

• 1:18:12Chris Williamson?

  The interesting thing with talking about Gavin Mcginnis and Alex Jones is that although those guys had huge, especially Alex, right? Like, terrifyingly big audience. And he's still holding on to it. You know, he's broadcasting every day for ridiculous numbers of hours, even more than you guys. It certainly does feel like, once someone is pulled out of the delivery mechanism of normal social media, the Youtubes, the Twitters, so on and so forth. Milo Yiannopoulos, where the fuck's he? You know, like, what's Milo? I saw him throw a half-a-million-pound ring into the coast of Hawaii a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, "Milo, you've been drinking." Like, that was... But I haven't seen him for ages. I'm like, "Oh, he's still got a YouTube account." Wow. And then he's going through all of this other sort of stuff.

• 1:18:57Chris Williamson?

  But you'd have thought traditionally, if Milo had gone through something as big as that, it would have been everywhere. But you really can, excommunicado, you can take someone out of the public zeitgeist very easily with this. And even if, you know, let's say that Stephen's got all of, every single one of his 4 million, or whatever it is, how many subs he's got on YouTube, huge amount of subs. Let's say all of those are part of his private sites, the Mug Club thing. That's now siloed. That's it. Shy of a very well incentive incentivized referral scheme. That's your audience. And you think, okay, is this it now? I get to affect these people and that's it? As everybody knows, the way that the delivery mechanisms on YouTube work,

• 1:19:42Chris Williamson?

  it's not just the subscribers that see the content. Even if you don't think about the people that view it, it's 10 or 20x the impressions. And even just seeing the content or seeing the tweet, even if you don't decide to engage with it, counts for something in terms of moving. So I think

• 1:19:59Chris Williamson?

  some political commentators, specifically on the right, because I think those guys tend to try and silo themselves or create these fallback plans a little bit more, as you guys, you guys have it as well, right? You know, just in case big tech decides to come for you. I think the idea is fantastic and it's obviously the only one that you have. But I don't really think it's an acceptable or a successful, I don't think anyone should see being cancelled and still being able to exist and make a good living as a success, because you are now taken out of... The people that already subscribe to your stuff, they know and mostly agree with the talking points that you've got anyway. Yes, they need to be educated and entertained. But I don't think that should be classed as a victory if people get cancelled like that.

• 1:20:43Speaker 00

  This is something so few people understand. The utility of YouTube is not primarily as a broadcast device. It's a fine broadcast system and, you know, there are lots of broadcast systems and that. The utility of YouTube is the ability of discovery, right? The fact that new people then are going to find your stuff. So if you get booted out, and let's say you take your million person audience with you, or your 2 million person audience with you. Okay, 2 million people. And who knows how many of those will remain active? That's it, that's all you've got, and it will not grow, and it will actually shrink over time as people die and get interested in other things and go away. And, and, so, yes, that's not a victory at all. And the censorship and the ostracism is real.

• 1:21:26Speaker 00

  I mean Milo Yiannopoulos got truly canceled, truly unpersoned, and, and now he's out of the public discourse. So, this, again, ties into the trap. Conservatives are reacting to cancel culture one of two ways. Either they'll say, "You know, Alex Jones really did say some things that are not good, and that's okay, I think it was fine, as long as it's just Alex, and it's totally fine, right." So those, the squishes go along with it. And then, the other way is, "We should never cancel anybody." But, there is a third option here, which is, "We should cancel other people." And I, I just think that this middle idea, "We should never cancel anybody," is, has never existed anywhere.

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  All societies have standards, all societies have taboos, also, when you transgress those, they will ostracize you. And this has been true in the furthest annals of history, all the way up until the present. The question is, what is the taboo? Who is going to be ostracized? In the 1940s and 50s, we prosecuted and ostracized many communists. This was colloquially known as McCarthyism, but it wasn't just McCarthy. I mean, he was one anti-communist senator, but there was the House Committee on, on American Activities, there was the Hollywood Blacklist. These were largely distinct institutions, and what it meant was, if you were advocating the overthrow of the United States government, the way of life, if you were actively supporting the Communist Party, which is a, a front for the Soviet Union, then you were out, you

• 1:22:53Speaker 00

  were canceled. And I think that's a great thing. The difference is that in the 1950s, you were canceled if you were a communist. And today, you are canceled if you are not a communist. And it's, you know, if, if conservatives understand this, and we say, you know, ostracizing people who are contrary to our understanding of the world and our way of life, you know, that's a fine thing. What the, what the left will tell us, and the squishes will tell us, is, "Well, now you're no different than the left." But we are. It actually is a different thing to cancel communists as it is to cancel anti-communists. And it's a different thing to wave the, the hammer and sickle than it is to wave the American flag. And I, I just think that, yes, politics involves form, it involves certain, you know, broad abstractions, but it also involves substance and particulars.

• 1:23:38Speaker 00

  What are you being canceled for?

• 1:23:41Chris Williamson?

  That's not a very scalable solution, is it? It means that each individual broad range, each region of cancellations, needs to be looked at upon its own merits, that's going to be much more effortful, that's going to be a challenge.

• 1:23:55Speaker 00

  Well, it requires some kind of conservative unity. So, right now, you know, with the current cancel culture, which is exclusively leftist, we know the criteria. It's if you say anything that can in any way be disingenuously twisted and misinterpreted to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, phobic-phobic, whatever, you know, whatever, the list goes on and on. If you in any way contradict the leftist orthodoxies, you can be canceled. And if they just don't like the cut of your jib and you say any, like, I think of my

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  Daily Wire colleague Gina Carano, who tweeted out something that was anti-Nazi, and the left interpreted, completely flipped it on its head and said it was pro-Nazi or something, therefore, you know, you could get rid of her, it's just because they didn't like her because she was conservative. So, yes, the left is unified and the right is not. You know, Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House, who seems like a perfectly amiable fellow, is very much an economics-focused conservative, and he really doesn't seem to care very much about cultural issues. And he just gave a speech the other day and he said, you know, "We've got to stop talking about how they're trying to trans the kids and we've got to stop talking about all these cultural things, which are just distractions. We've got to talk about the only important conservative issue, namely, cutting taxes a little bit more."

• 1:25:18Speaker 00

  Once again, and I thought, you know, pal, you obviously don't know what time it is here, but that, we have to deal with that problem. The only thing that has united the right since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been cutting taxes. You can't agree on anything else. And so if you can't agree on anything else, then you're absolutely right. You're not going to be able to enforce a set of standards. So I'm hoping now, I think there is some hope. You're seeing on the right, the ascendancy of much more traditional, serious conservatives. I'm thinking of guys like Soorab Amari at the New York Post, who just wrote The Unbroken Threads, very good book on this topic. Guys like Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law professor, really good on that topic.

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  Yoram Hazony, the writer of Virtue of Nationalism, Israeli philosophy, is really good. Patrick De Neeuw, Why Liberalism Failed. I mean, this actually has really been emerging, this call for a substantive conservative vision. And so I hope that we can get it. But are we there now? Absolutely not.

• 1:26:19Chris Williamson?

  Michael Knowles, ladies and gentlemen. Speechless, controlling words, controlling minds. We'll be linked in the show notes below. Where else should everyone go check out your stuff?

• 1:26:27Speaker 00

  People can find me, you can find all my links at MichaelJKnowles.com for now. But as you, as you well note, I'll probably be booted off of social media at some point, certainly when the book comes out. So I just really, I really want to thank you, though, because it's been such a blast to talk with you. And I can't believe, you are the first person in public to have ever read a book that I wrote with words. So I'm very, very thrilled to be able to do it. And I would encourage everyone else to go get the book.

• 1:26:52Chris Williamson?

  My pleasure, man. Thank you.