 So Chris Mooney, a liberal, wrote quite an interesting book called The Republican Brain and he draws on all sorts of scientific studies which indicate that Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives don't just think differently, but they experience the world differently, not just cognitively, but overall physiologically, that people who are right-wing conservatives, they have a much stronger startle reflex, they have a much stronger psychological physiological need for closure, for law and order, right, for distinctions, such as distinctions between men and women, adults and children, between the in-group and the out-group, between your nation and other nations, between law and order and anarchy and disorder. To be on the right is a much stronger need for law and order, for closure, for these fundamental distinctions, such as between men and women, while to be on the left they believe in a much greater distance between your instinctual reactions and how you finally speak and behave. So when people tap into more primal experiences, such as they consume alcohol or they get married, they have children, they want to be able to hold on to their spouse, they want to live in a society that perhaps treats sex as something transcendent, and so they want to decrease incentives to have abortions, to have extramarital affairs, to have promiscuous sex, right, they want to live in a different sort of society, they want to live perhaps in a transcendent magical society where people experience the presence of God, where the fellow citizens are much more likely to feel like they're walking with Jesus, to have, you know, the presence of the divine in their life, all right, if people start tapping into these traditional legences, feelings, emotions, cognitive and physiological states, all right, people are much more likely to become right-wing. So it doesn't surprise me that in today's world, all right, today's world, our leading institutions, our elites, dominantly come from the left because the way the world is currently constituted, putting a great deal of space between your instinctive reactions at what you finally say and do, that seems to generally be a winning strategy in the professions such as law, medicine, accounting, dentistry, in academia, in being on TV, in being in the public eye, right, the greater the space you could generally put between your instinctive primal emotions and how you actually speak and behave, right, it seems to be much more adaptive to fitting into our leading institutions to any company with an HR department, all right, you're going to do much better if you're able to suppress your primal emotions. Now, there's a big difference between codging and courting, all right, so if you're on the right, you're going to say, look, there's just a word of difference between codging and courting and the further left you go, the more likely you are to understand codging as not that different from courting, just a different expression of courting. So let's get Chris Mooney here speaking on the Republican brain works, and I first became aware of this strange smart idea effect in 2008 based on this Pew data, just basic polling data on Republicans independence and Democrats belief in global warming, except they broke it down by college grads and not college grads. So what this means is if you've got Republican independent Democrat college grads Republican independent Democrat not college grads What you're seeing that is that if you're a Republican the higher level of education the more likely you are to reject scientific reality because global warming is real and caused by humans. But if you're an independent or Democrat the higher level of education the more likely you are to accept scientific reality. So this is a smart idea effect, more education for Republicans equals more denial of reality. Now this guy and liberals and leftists in general, they love evolution except when it comes to evolution over the past 10,000 years as it affects the brain and physiology and different personality basics between different groups. All right, obviously different groups of people evolved in very different circumstances producing people with very different levels of personality traits as well as cognitive traits and athletic traits and predispositions towards physical aggression. That part of reality that part of science right liberals and lefties don't want any part of generally speaking so the most replicated. So the most scientific part of the social sciences is that there are significant group differences, particularly with regard to IQ and that IQ has tremendous predictive power for groups, not necessarily for individuals, but for groups. All right, that part of science, all right, they don't want any part of. So again, like what is up with this and it doesn't just happen on scientific issues. This effect has been detected the same smart idea effect with a non-scientific but clearly false claim the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. And John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington, studied how belief in this false. Okay, so this idea of the Bertha controversy that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Yeah, factually inaccurate. Does it get at something that Barack Obama feels quite separate and distinct from any other president we have, that he feels quite separate from many, perhaps most Americans that this is, you know, somewhat of an alien figure who's coming to govern us. Yeah, I think they may be getting onto a more profound truth than just the facts on the ground where they're clearly wrong, right? Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and Barack Obama is not a Muslim. He's not a religious guy. The false claim had increased from March 2009 to August 2010 and again he broke it down by education. Alright, so you've got Republicans on the left, the red lines, Democrats on the right, the blue lines. Okay, clearly the belief increases more among the Republicans, but then you've got college grads, high school or less, and some college, and the slopes are much greater for the some college and college grads than for the high school or less. So again, it's knowing more as a Republican that makes you more likely to believe these wrong things. So, like, what is going on with Republicans? What is up with this? And is this sort of political environmental account where, oh, there's... Okay, so Republicans are much less compliant with elite directives because elites tend to dominally come from the left. Republicans are much more suspicious of the establishment and of our leading institutions because the establishment and our leading institutions are dominated by the left. This makes sense. Now, I am not inherently anti-establishment or pro-populist, nor am I inherently anti-populist or anti-establishment or anti-elite. I think I have a newest perspective. Sometimes the populace are right and sometimes the elites are right. Sometimes the people are right. Sometimes the elites are right. Sometimes the institutions are right and sometimes the great mass of people are right. So I don't side with any particular partisan perspective on life here. I believe that sometimes that a left-wing approach to life will be more adaptive. We've got a suit to dealing with a particular situation and other times a more right-wing exclusive high-in-group loyalty doing things traditionally will be more adaptive. So we have quite a few studies that show when people get drunk, they become much more right-wing. That higher blood alcohol content correlates with more right-wing perspectives. When people get married and have kids, they become incredibly busy and their life shrinks down to their family and looking after their kids. They tend to become much more right-wing. They tend to be much tougher on crime. They tend to have more strongly pro-military, pro-police perspectives, having a pronounced startle reflex. Particularly if you have kids. If you're startled by some threat to your kids, you're going to generally speaking have quite right-wing perspectives. You're going to have more concern and fear about outgroups. Talking about all this in neurological terms, we've got evidence that conservatives may very well have larger amygdalas that affect how they process information in general. Amygdalas come from perhaps the earliest parts of our evolutionary process. These are just instinctive responses. Conservatives tend to have much greater need for closure than liberals. Liberals tend to be much higher in openness. Conservatives tend to be much higher in consciousness. Liberals tend to have much more gray matter in the anterior-singulated cortex, the ACC. That's a newer part of our evolutionary system that suspends many of our automatic responses to assess facts and to detect errors. So it wouldn't surprise me that liberals, people on the left, are better suited for some professions and that people on the right are better suited for other professions. So conservatives have this higher need for closure, higher need for law and order, higher need for conscientiousness, higher need for loyalty to the group than do people on the left. So conservatives and people on the right tend to have more immediate reactions and they are less likely to restrain their impulses. So they are less able to suspend judgment and people on the left are more tolerant of ambiguity and more willing to suspend and hold judgment on their immediate impulses. So which is best? Well, it depends on the situation and depends on the profession and depends on time and place. I don't think either reaction is inherently superior. Now people on the left, people who are liberals, they don't place a premium on obedience and group solidarity. They are children of the Enlightenment and they have an ethos that they don't bow to authority or pledge allegiance to a team. Anyway, this is how they perceive themselves. They like to be allied with scientists because being allied with science, you get to enjoy all sorts of perks such as you are regarded as open-minded and curious and tolerant and flexible. You get to side with the elite when you ally yourself with science. Being a child of the Enlightenment means that you are much more predisposed to welcoming facts, except when those facts are basic bitch evidence about group differences. There somehow is an Enlightenment conviction that we should ally ourselves with facts. There it seems to break down. So the old Enlightenment framework is that we can reason our way to an autonomous superior, more enlightened life. The new Enlightenment perspective says that reason is not quite so strong and that reason is just part of our overall physiological makeup. So reason our brain takes place within the body and it's going to be profoundly affected by whatever's going on in the body. So if you're tight in your body, if you're ill at ease in your body, you're going to likely be tight and ill at ease in your emotions and in your thinking. So recognizing how our brains are part of our bodies and that they're part of our overall survival reflexes, this is more of a conservative and a traditional perspective. That we have these instincts and that we develop these basic instincts because they've served us for thousands of years and we don't aim to just completely corral our instincts on the basis of the power of our reason. And the broader sense Enlightenment means respect for facts here. I'm reading from Ronnie Goodman's terrific book on conservative claims of cultural oppression. But our reason, right, it's shaped by our bodies. It's shaped by what's going on in our physiology and our conscious thinking is not nearly as powerful as our genetic instincts and our early imprinting and all sorts of things that we are ignorant of that are shaping us. We have all sorts of vast invisible realms of neural circuitry that is not accessible to our consciousness. This is the conservative critique of the Enlightenment. So the need for a narrative, the need for closure, the need for law and order cannot simply be erased and replaced by called hard reason. I'll play a little bit more here from Chris Mooney talking about the Republican brain. The conservative movement came to exist, it pulled the coalition together, it needed the people who hated taxes, it needed the corporate people, it needed the religious right. Is that really getting at this kind of effect? Or do we need something more? And I now think that we do. What my first book didn't consider and what political and journalistic classes today are terrified of facing although they cannot avoid it anymore because I said the science is not controversial, at least among the scientists. Is the growing body of evidence suggesting that people who are liberal and people who are conservative are just different people. And this is Chris Mooney speaking 10 years ago and science as it's developed and studies as they've developed in this area since that has not changed. His theory still hold up overall, the studies that he cites, they have not been invalidated. So the modern liberal secular leftist perspective is that modernity is something we've got right at by subtracting primitivism, by subtracting religion, by subtracting outdated folk ways and traditions and bigoted racist intolerant xenophobic homophobic Islamophobic perspectives on life. And so by subtracting all these dumb bad things we now get to become enlightened. Ronnie Goodman's perspective is not this subtraction theory is the mutation theory that the impulses of Protestantism to be wholehearted with God to have our faith in God shape all of our behavior and all of our thinking and all of our words. This is now mutated into a totalitarian left wing approach to life. So Chris Mooney's theories on the amygdala theory of conservatism, this comports with the Ronnie Goodman mutation counter narrative. So the Ronnie Goodman mutation counter narrative is kind of a philosophical expression of Chris Mooney's neurological perspective. And so the amygdala theory of conservatism kind of reveals the biological substratum of conservative and liberal thinking and also reveals the changes in the overall human makeup and physiology that has occurred over the past couple of centuries. So the amygdala theory of conservatism is a concrete physiological correlative for the progressive buffering, the progressive reasoning, the progressive distancing, the progressive autonomous strategic sense that we should develop as kind of courtyard morality as opposed to the lord of the manner morality. All right, courtyard morality means that we have to learn how to behave at court. We have to take into consideration the effect of our words and deeds on every person who might possibly come into contact with what we're saying and doing versus lord of the manner morality where, hey, this is my home. This is my manner. I'm going to say and do what I want. And so conservatives tend to much more, you know, my home is my castle approach to life. People on the left tend much more to a courtier approach to life where you flatter the people in power and you continually adjust yourself to how all the different elements of your community can then affect you and how they might receive whatever you're saying. And doing so the amygdala theory of conservatism provided by Chris Mooney. Right. It's a physiological correlate for Ronnie Gouldman's philosophical understanding of a mutation narrative. So the mutation narrative places the amygdala theory of conservatism within history just as the amygdala theory of conservatism places the mutation counter narrative within our brains. It provides a neurological perspective on the philosophical mutation theory. Back to Chris Mooney. Different in ways that go far beyond and that are probably prior to their beliefs in politics. The beliefs in politics seem to be subsequent to the basic core differences. And the different beliefs in politics are what happened when people who differ already are kind of pushed to figure out what they feel about the world and then some things just feel right naturally and some things just don't feel right naturally. As I went to work on a new book to succeed the Republican war on science. Right. So much of conservatism revolves around a greater trust in basic allegiances to blood and soil to family to try to nation. And from a left wing, you know, liberal perspective, we should try to transcend these primitive ties and become more enlightened. So from a conservative perspective, we notice that when people say something politically incorrect, such as what has been revealed about Richard Ananya was writing under the word, you know, the pseudonym Richard host. Right. He got incorrect for got into trouble for saying things that are politically incorrect. And when this happens, people on the left are prepared to bring the force of their rhetorical firepower to bear in their attacks against conservatives. And they can always line up 15 different academic experts to, you know, eviscerate conservatives. And so liberals will try to argue through the power of reason, you know, why conservatives are wrong. Conservatives will use the power of reason, but their ties are to a different place ultimately than reason that ties are to tradition to family to tribe to nation. Right. To familiar ways of organizing people to God to religion to allegiances to blood and soil. So the liberal left that their allegiance is to reason and enlightenment and education and science. People on the right, their allegiances or 10 much more towards blood, soil, family, tribe, nation, traditional ways of doing things. So we're talking here about a battle over neurological stakes. And people on the left will try to, you know, argue their way to success. People on the right will tend to put their allegiances to family, tribe, nation to traditional ways of doing things first before the power of reason. So people on the left, look at beliefs and worldviews and political religious cultural orientations as disembodied, you know, separate from our bodies kind of suspended above us in the ether. And that we should strive to that kind of disembodied suspended application of reason turning us into strategic autonomous buffered agents. Right. So the left wing perspective is, oh, all you have to do is change this bit of information, replace incorrect information with correct information. And wrong beliefs will be dispelled like bursting a soap bubble. But the truth is, our beliefs are physical. Our beliefs come from within our body. They're part of our anatomy. Right. Attacking our beliefs is like punching someone in the face. It's like pricking his skin or worse. So liberals or shrug off claims that they're engaged in an assault against conservatives and their values because they remain under the spell of the old enlightenment. They believe that our beliefs are something that is suspended above us in the ether, therefore immune from assault. So liberals are outraged when conservatives complain of their persecution by liberals. When what conservatives really mean is not imprisonment, not excommunication, not disenfranchisement, but criticism, such as editorials expressing disagreement with them. But when understood in a natural way, this criticism is an intrusive thing. It is like punching someone in the face. Right. Our beliefs are as precious to us often as our face, as our skin. Right. And so cutting away traditional forms of identity such as that marriages between a man and a woman that sex gender is something that is biologically determined that the military should be a heterosexual institution. All right. By cutting away these traditional forms of identity, you are cutting away the synaptic strength of the neural connections that underpin strict father morality or conservative morality or the traditional perspective on life. This is experienced as an assault. And so this is why properly understanding the new enlightenment that our reasoning faculties occur within our bodies. This endows the conservative claims of cultural oppression with a new credibility. So Jonah Goldberg, when he talks to young people about whether conservatives can replaying culture, he says, yeah, be happy. Nothing ticks off the left more than a happy conservative because a happy person is generally someone who's behaving and acting within the traditions of their people within the allegiances of tradition to family to tribe to nation to to religion. So the more the liberal left wins, the more that means the unraveling of the social structures that sustain meaning and that sustain the synaptic firings of people on the right. And to deactivate these synaptic firings to deactivate the social structures that undermine meaning is to deactivate the persons constituted by these mental makeups. Right. So this is experienced as tantamount to imprisonment or disenfranchisement. This is why many Americans feel like they are in captivity because they are operating in a world where the left dominates our institutions dominates our elites. And so many Americans, particularly on the right, feel like they are living in captivity that they are living disenfranchised, even imprisoned life that the very foundations of their self of their meaning of everything that brings purpose and structure and coherence to their life is being rapidly hacked away by the liberal left. And this makes it very happy for people on the right to be very difficult for people on the right to be happy when liberals are just systematically, you know, cutting away the very basis for their meaning of purpose and life. Now, I want to be clear at the outset that liberals and conservatives are different people on average is just a fact. It is a fact that is value neutral. What you make of it is in your own hands. My contention is just that you cannot ignore it because it's a fact about the world. I think it helps us see a lot of things that is wrong with liberals, a.k.a. us as well as things that are wrong with conservatives and also see strengths in conservatives. And I'll explain all that. But right now let's just deal with the fact itself. It turns out that like all. Okay, so what happens when people lose a sense that life is worth living? What happens when the structures that give their life meaning and purpose and coherence are hacked away and destroyed? When people stop feeling that their life is worth living, they stop reproducing, they stop making an effort, they stop working, they simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish. This is, anthropologists report that. Food is not the primary nourishment of man. It's the New Testament knows man will not live by bread alone. So short of natural catastrophe, the only time that life grinds to a halt or absolutely explodes into anarchy and chaos is when a culture falls down on its job of constructing a meaningful hero system for its members. And because the left dominates our institutions and our elite, our culture is steadily losing a meaningful hero system for people who are not on the left. So why have so many Americans lost interest in having children? Perhaps everything that used to give people's lives meaning is being steadily eroded. So liberals say that their arguments are merely symbolic, right? That their conservatives are overly sensitive. But the institutions and the practices such as marriages between a man and a woman, that people are of the sex that they were born biologically, that the military is a heterosexual institution, that homosexual sex does not enjoy the same sanctity or approval as monogamous heterosexual marital sex, right? When you reduce these social structures, right, you are hacking away at the structures that give meaning to people who are not on the left. And if we have strong emotional convictions about something such as that marriage is heterosexual, that a military should be heterosexual, that people are born biologically male or female, then these convictions are effectively an actual physical part of us. These convictions don't reside in a particular brain cell or neuron. They reside in the complex connections between our brain cells, between our neurons, between various patterns of neural activation that occur within our body. So the more we activate a particular series of connections, the more powerful these connections become. And these connections grow to become more and more a part of us, like the ability to play a guitar or juggle a soccer ball. So the more you go to church, the more you go to synagogue, the more you participate in a traditional form of life, the more upsetting it will be for you when the secular liberal left takes more and more control about society. So liberals dismiss most conservative complaints as just vague premonitions of erosion or unraveling of some ethereal social fiber. But conservatives, they just have these kind of weird irrational concerns. But the gradual unraveling of a neurologically encoded hero narrative, the erosion of its synaptic strength at the hands of a hostile, hostile cultural environment that fails to activate and works to deactivate the very synaptic connections that underpin conservative identities in hero systems is cutting away everything that makes life full of meaning and purpose and coherence for millions of Americans. These neural connections are as much a part of us as our limbs, our organs and our bank accounts. So these hares may not be clearly visible and incontestable, like the harms of famine and disease and stagnating wages, but that does not make them any less real if we develop a more sophisticated understanding of reality. So one way of understanding difference between left and the right is the right is more about strict father morality, which is concerned with moral order, and the left is more about nurturing mother morality. So right wing grievances, just like left wing grievances, not just merely symbolic, right? Symbols such as heterosexual marriage or a heterosexual military or that we are the biological sex we were born as, these are as substantial as anything else. So lefties will say strict father morality, that just puts a priority on metaphorical morality over experienced morality. But strict father morality versus nurturing mother morality, these are both equally experiential. Morality itself is encoded in our neurological system. The highest ideals of strict father morality may not track human flourishing in the same sense that those on the left who associate with nurturing mother morality believe, but the frustrations of strict father morality do have profound consequences for people's flourishing, right? So many conservative polemics against the left get their facts wrong. Much of right wing punditry is absurd, but they often get the subjective experience right. So from an old Enlightenment rational distinction, if you don't get the facts right, then your argument doesn't matter. But the new Enlightenment understanding that our thoughts occur within our bodies, right? That our thoughts and our synaptic firings that form neural patterns, right? This is just as much a part of us as our limbs and our organs. And it's just as tangible and just as real and just as valuable as many facts and many economic realities that liberals privilege as uniquely substantive. So people on the left, like Chris Mooney, you know, deploy the alternative reality of the right. And it's development of a counter expertise to thwart scientific, academic, elite, mainstream knowledge. These are just expedients serving some general need for belief, affirmation, ideological activation. But what's going on with the right is much more profoundly understood as specific responses to the growing prestige according to the left wing strategic autonomous Buffett identity to the particular social and cultural conditions under which this identity is nearly activated and considered the one that we should all strive for. So conservative counter expertise, it's not just about advancing deeply held beliefs, but something much deeper than beliefs. It's about the assertion of one's hero system as against another. It's the assertion of one cosmological orientation against another. It's not just a brute refusal, you know, against facts. It's a protest against the liberal, non-explicit, buffered strategic distance engagement with the world. It's against, you know, certain privileging of certain functioning of the body in the physical and social world. So people like Chris Mooney, they talk about the conservative quest for ideological activation as just some kind of irrational special defensiveness vis-a-vis cherished convictions. But this activation is ultimately the defense of one hero system against another. It is the defense of one physiological, neurological affective, meaning emotional instinctual structure against the imposition of another. It is the activation not just of a belief system, but of a hero system. It's the activation of an entire organism against an environment that's become hostile to it. It's the activation of an entire being against social meanings that have been changed that now work to undermine the being sense of self. So people on the left focus on epistemology, right? They want to trivialize this cosmological grievance, this hero system, this physiological total being protest against a liberal left rationalizing civilizing process. So the conservatives may indeed have a larger amygdala and they may need a higher need for closure. But this very neural pattern, this very organ in the body, this very amygdala is being targeted by the disciplines and repressions of the distant autonomous buffered left-wing identity that is taking over our culture. The success of the left feels for people who are not on the left like an alien imposition just like Barack Obama's rise felt to many Americans, particularly on the right, like an alien imposition as a transgression against our very human nature's default setting. So people on the left, they fail ultimate sophistication because they overlook the implications of what's going on in our bodies, the natural neurological impulses behind our political beliefs. So what we have here is a conflict not between primarily rival ideologies, not between rival systems of belief, but between different makeups of the human being for whom their belief systems and ideologies are simply expressions of this different physiology. Here's Chris Mooney. All important insights, this is not a new one. And as I researched this, I came across this Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera called Isle of Empty, which is from the late 1800s actually. And in it, they're kind of joking, but they express this idea that, hey, our political views are really inherited, and they do it in this comic verse, which I'm going to read to you. Nature always does contrive that every boy and every gal that's born into this world alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative. At least that's how I have to make it rhyme. I don't know how they made it rhyme back then. So what is this? We can tell liberals and conservators apart as children like in the sandbox? That's not how we normally think of politics. But actually there's research suggesting that that may well be so. So the observation is not new, but it's extremely controversial and not accepted because we like to think about politics from a sort of blank slate perspective to invoke Steven Pinker. We like to ignore all kinds of things about human nature, and this is one of them. And so we like to assume that, oh, you know, we came to our views by thinking about the issues. But we just, you know, we started out from different places, so we ended up in different places. You know, put me in a different situation with different influences on me, and I could have been a right winger. Okay, so people on the left like Chris Mooney, they want to associate themselves with science and they do that because they believe they're primarily just motivated by truth. But a large part of their motivation resides in they want to surround themselves with the prestige, the admiration surrounding the scientific stance and with a sense of freedom, power, control, and vulnerability, dignity, which it radiates. So it is this need to bask in science's, you know, winning ethos. Is there any approach to life that is more venerated in our society today than science? Right, it's the need to bask in the scientific stance and ethos of disengaged self-control, self-reflexivity, distance from traditional emotions and ties to family, nation, blood and soil. But this compels people on the left to see conservative claims as confused and contrived. But their own particular brand of enlightenment and empiricism is not culturally neutral. Their own pursuit of truth is not neutral, right? It's rather, it's crafted in reflection of their own particular subjective hero system. They want to uphold a set of social meaning, a hero system that will ratify the ethos that they try to embody of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity. They see this as essential human nature, the true self that lies dormant and suppressed among the unwashed masses, right? They believe that the world should be freshly flooded with the light of enlightenment. And so this buffered liberal disengaged rational identity is the silent and questioned backdrop against which they experience life, against which they define what is harmful. And they see everything outside of this engaged buffered identity as rightly an object of scorn and incredulity. Right, so people on the right are much more at ease with the irrational in human nature, right? Nationalism is not particularly rational. A love of family, love of people like you is not necessarily particularly rational. It's just something that has power over us. But it's something that the liberal left thinks that we should try to overcome and supersede. So people on the left see the issues between us as primarily matters of truth. They fail to see what lies underneath it, which is not dogma, but it is dopamine. It's the activation of a neural circuitry that sustains us in our various hero systems. So this is what the culturally inflected naturalism of people on the left cannot see. So people on the left think they have this evolved need for truth, need for cognition, need for accuracy, and need to distinguish themselves from the herd, right? And this is the culture that produces the cognitive elitism that now rules us, right? This is a culture where those who lead have been trained and groomed to bear the appropriate cultural markers of being anointed as an intellectual and then accorded a deference that is withheld from those who lack these cultural markers. So we have an evolved capacity for disgust. It can be directed, for example, against outgroups or against homosexuality. The intellectualism of the liberal elites has evolved their capacity for disgust and turned it not against homosexuals, not against racial outgroups, but against those who hold on to traditional allegiances, such as the blood, soil, family, nation, to heterosexual understandings of marriage and military and to biological understandings of sexual identity. So we all have a disgust reflex. People on the left have it as well. They have developed their disgust reflex against traditionalists where people on the right have developed their disgust reflex for people outside of the type of ordered traditional society that makes them feel safe. So people on the left with an evolved need for cognition, need for accuracy, right? That's been embedded in their angular, singulated cortex, right? This is being culturally harnessed to all sorts of imperative, that produce the desired neurological stimuli, but at the cost of truth of intellectual substance, honesty, and traditional ways of living. So liberals find it hard physiologically to disagree with what scientists have to say. But this is not the product of individual reflection. It's not the product of a desire for truth. It's a reflexive, socially inculcated response to the rhetoric in the airs of the scientists, of the intellectual, to the language, the style, the demeanor of the new cognitive elite, which is a mutated, secularized version of the original spiritual vision of Protestantism. So for our ruling cognitive elite now, identity trumps truth, right? If you have the cultural markers that you have this distant autonomous buffered identity, then you are considered a worthy person. So people on the left think they're primarily motivated by seeking truth, but much of their motivation resides in they want to be surrounded by the prestige and the adoration that comes with the scientific stance itself, right? With the freedom, power, control, invulnerability, and dignity that it really radiates. So for people on the left, the notions that the common people hold true, such as clinging to guns and religion, these are all just like grunts. They're mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, right? So the liberal left has taken on this peculiar courtly rationality. And people who don't have it are assigned a merely animal status. People who are just grunting bereft of cognitive content, they're just expressions of the merely animal. So people on the left, they operated out of this sublimated, disciplined, intellectualized, distant, ethereal hero system, quite distinct from the traditional allegiances that gave life coherence and meaning. So very few people on the left, and very few philosophers, and very few academics, and very few elite realize how much of their influence is conveyed through expression, through tone of voice, rather than argument. So nuances of disappointment and contempt often do far more to direct people than a ton of good arguments. Let's get a little bit more here for Chris Mini talking about the Republican brain. Right, right, yeah, in a way. So the New Science really challenges that assumption, because if your political ideology is really just your set of conscious thoughts about how the world and how politics should be structured, if that's really what it is, then why on earth, and if it's purely the result of thinking rationally about the issues, then why would you find differences between liberals and conservatives in all kinds of areas that have nothing to do with politics? Why would you find differences between them in how they organize their bedrooms? But you do. Liberals are messier. And I think you guys probably know that. This is probably kind of obvious to you. Liberals keep messier living spaces than conservatives do. Everything I'm saying here is based on published peer-reviewed research. And if politics is just about our rational differences about how we think society should be ordered and structured, then why would liberals and conservatives have different preferences for art? What they do. Liberals are more appreciative of abstract art. Conservatives are more like representational art. Portraits and landscape paintings. Is that political ideology? And if it isn't, why is it a reliable way of distinguishing between what we think of as left and right? Or why do the two groups have different senses of humor? But they clearly have very different senses of humor. And there is actually a real psychology study showing liberal conservative responses to Colbert. And what it finds is that good news is that both groups think he's funny. Bad news is they think he's funny for completely different reasons. And liberals think he's funny because he's using satire to make fun of conservatives. Conservatives think that deep down he is a conservative. Now, what is that? Okay, so Steve Saylor writes about the Richard Hananya controversy. Richard Hananya's got a new book coming out, The Origins of Work, Civil Rights Law, Corporate America and the Triumph of Identity Politics. And Steve says, I never docs anyway, but a few months ago, from my own information, I looked into the rumor that Richard Hananya used to be Richard Host, who might vaguely record as an intelligent strident on the nose and not usually interesting minor far-right internet personality of a dozen years ago. I didn't find anything to disprove the rumor. Hananya and Host were both anti-Christians who had read the bell curve. On the other hand, Richard Hananya, who was in his late 30s, is now so much better of a writer than Richard Host was 12 years ago that I wasn't sure I believed they were the same guy. I mean, how much do writers change? Steve Saylor says, I have always been who I am. As David Foster Wallace said, in the end, you turn out to be who you are. So Steve Saylor filed away the Hananya Host question away as unanswered. If Richard Host had improved enough to become Richard Hananya, that would be unusual and impressive. Now, The Huffington Post has exposed Hananya as Host and Hananya has admitted it. But Hananya now says he's not an extremist anymore. He's now a Brian Kaplan style open borders libertarian. Because what could be less extremist than supporting open borders? Steve Saylor concludes, I went ahead and pre-ordered Richard Hananya's book from Amazon to do my bit to persuade the publisher not to cancel it. Back to Chris Mooney. What does that say about the nature of political ideology? You know, and the differences, the differences between left and right, you know, they just go on and on and on and on. A scientist with whom I collaborated for part of the book, his name is Everett Young, he found in his PhD dissertation studying liberals and conservatives, the conservatives were more likely to think the fans of rival sports teams are just bad people. They were more likely to want to keep germs out of their bodies. And they were more likely to elect a candidate to Congress who keeps his or her lawn neatly edged. So is that ideology? It's a reliable way of determining who's on the left and who's the right. And the research just gets weirder because there's also fascinating psychology studies, again peer-reviewed published in the literature, suggesting that you can take a liberal or conservative, through various kinds of psychological or physiological manipulation. You don't do this by convincing them of the rightness of conservative ideas. But you know how you can do it? One way you can do it is through alcohol intoxication. So the scientists actually did this. They set up outside of a bar and they had a political questionnaire and they had a breathalyzer. This is good research, right? Yeah, as people get drunker, as people get more in touch with traditional ties, they become much more right-wing. When they have children. Let's have a look here at what's going on with the Sean Hannity show. We'll keep an eye on Sean, see if there's any breaking news. Meanwhile, back in 2011, Steve Saylor says, in a much-praised article, Chris Mooney, who I was just playing excerpts from, writes in the left-wing publication Mother Jones about the science of why we don't believe in science. And he explains why Republicans hate science. But to be fair, he then goes on to ask, so is there a case study of science denial that largely occupies the political left? Yes, the claim that childhood vaccines are causing an epidemic of autism. Its most famous proponents are environmentalists, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and numerous Hollywood celebrities, such as Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey. Huffington Post gives a very large megaphone to Denilus and Seth Manukin, author of the new book, The Panic Virus, knows that if you want to find vaccine deniers, what you need to do is go hang out at Whole Foods. So, right, autism vaccines are examples of science denial on the left. But what else is there? You've got the hounding of great scientists, such as James Watson, formidable thinkers such as Larry Summers. They both were hounded out of their jobs for politically incorrect statements about the science of intelligence. Right, and this hounding, I mean, that's far more significant than what Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey and their views on vaccines. So, there are a lot of people on the left, much of leftism who is very anti-science when the science shows that different groups have different strengths and different virtues. Now, most of the people who get all worked up about vaccines are parents of children with autism. Right, they've lashed onto an idea that wasn't terribly implausible at the time, an idea that gave them a little hope or some notion of cause and effect didn't turn out to be right. But how can you make the same excuses for the commissars of political correctness who go after those who simply try to tell the truth? Right, back to Chris Mooney here. When they turned, they saw one, maybe they would always be conservative. But it's probably a temporary thing. So, it's suggesting there's something about ideology that you're activating these kind of visceral impulses or in the alcohol case, you're doing something cognitive and it's leading to ideological outcomes. And these are not the only things that reliably turn a liberal into a conservative. The most reliable of all, and we all know this, even if we may not admit it, the most reliable of all is causing them to feel mortal fear. You want to push people to the right, you want to push a country to the right, just attack it. Just attack it and make people feel like they might die and you will see people move to the right. So again, this suggests that ideology is about something below the surface, not rational. It's not about the facts of the issues. So what the heck is it? Where does it live? Where is it housed? Well, as one scientist put it to me, it is not going to be in the elbow. It is going to be in the brain. And yes, we have studies showing brain differences between liberals and conservatives, measurable brain differences. Big caveat. This is not what I based the book on. This is the new stuff. This is the controversial stuff. We don't know exactly what it means and if this was the only research that we had, I wouldn't write a book about it because I think it's too new and too uncertain. But given that it is kind of the icing on the cake and all the psychological stuff has been going on for decades and it is in line with that research, it doesn't refute it, it just confirms it in a new way, I think we should talk about it. So this is a study of University College of London students. So we got British left-right, not American left-right, and there are differences, and what they found was that on average, and that's very important to say on average, the conservatives had a somewhat larger right amygdala. What is the amygdala? The amygdala is the brain's fear and threat center. We share it with other animals. We should be glad that we have it because it keeps us alive. It is there to preserve us in situations of threat and situations of fear. When the amygdala is activated, you run. I mean, it does other things as well. All parts of the brain do many things, but this is one of its clear core functions. And in a situation where you're feeling that kind of fear, the amygdala takes over. It runs an automatic response program. It's called fight or flight, and it runs your body. It runs things, and it has evolved to do this, and it has evolved to keep you alive. Everybody has one. It's just that in the conservatives, it was in this study slightly larger. And in the Liberals, they found more gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex. The anterior cingulate is a region that has been shown in a lot of studies to be, seems to be playing a role in what's called error detection. In other words, you're going about some pattern of behavior, and suddenly you say, wait, stop. I've got to do something different. I've got to change. I'm making a mistake. I shouldn't do this. Liberals are somehow doing that more. All right. In this study, and these are not the only studies that. Okay. Let's play a little bit. This is a Mickey cows talking with and culture. Can't just say Jeff, you're fired because they have to be technically independent. He could stand over Casey and she could just glare at him until he. You know, he doesn't have control of his own campaign really, at least the money part. And that's where that ad came from with the Brad Pitt ad, right? What's the Brad Pitt ad? You know, the one about Trump supporting transgenders. Oh, right. Was Brad Pitt in that one? Oh, I thought he was putting up, putting up the antenna and once upon a time in Hollywood, probably. Yeah. Yes. That is where that ad came from. And he's not, and he phrases everything in, in strange ways. Like for example, he was totally right on this African American studies thing. Tim Scott, you know, but totally buys the liberal line and implies that the status just doesn't realize how evil slavery was. The whole 166 of the 167 points were how evil slavery was. This one point was how resilient the slaves were. And they actually managed to acquire skills under this horrible oppressive regime. And it was endorsed by the black professor. It was pushed by the black professors from Michigan who, who was head of the panel. So instead of saying, you know, you fell for Kamala Harris's pitch, you know, that you're, you're, you're calling people racist when in fact we were just trying to teach this and keep critical race theory out of the schools. He started to get substantive thing. He said, you were disloyal and, you know, sided with Kamala and me instead of the substance out. Yes, I agree. That was very weird. He should add this. He makes it all seem like it's almost Trump Trump like it's personal. Now, Brian Donalds is who was another black congressman who, who jumped on the con of the bandwagon a little bit. He has a beef with, because Donald's indoors Trump instead of him. So he's pissed at Donald. That sort of understandable. The Tim Scott thing should have been more substantive. I still think it's interesting to rank them on how, how are the three black people who sort of. Can I say the word now, now they've been now my job, but they fell off. They fell in line with the Democrats and basically implying that the status was a racist. Yes. You know, Donald's his, he only, he tried to have it both ways. He said that the standards are pretty, this course is pretty good. There's just one thing I don't like. Well, that was that one thing was stupid, but the rest of it was okay. By Scott didn't seem to have read it. I mean, he sort of was, he was like confronted with it. He said the same thing, which is, you know, slavery is bad and we should realize it, you know, and so he was just sort of uninformed. I don't think it was a calculated stab in the back. I think it is calculated. And if we could pause for a second on, on Tim Scott, I mean, it's just appalling the two judges. He rejected the Trump judges and the judges were actually really great under Trump because he had nothing to do with him. And one was, I think a Stanford law grad who had written pieces in her Stanford undergrad, at least written pieces in college criticizing the diversity regime, the diversity regime and criticizing all of these college groups. I know we had them at law school. And you know, there's the Hispanic law students association and the black law students association and the Pacific Islanders law student association associated and the lesbian and gay law student association. And he wrote, I mean, you have to really dig into the news coverage to see what it was he said, because thanks to Tim Scott, oh, and Marco Rubio, all the headlines were Tim Scott rejects judicial nominee who had racist writings in college. And it's just racist, racist, racist, racist, racist. So questioning the diversity regime is racist Tim Scott. And the other one, he had worked for Jesse Helms. That was basically his crime. And he supported voter ID. And that was racist voting restrictions and postcards that were, you know, this is very suspicious. I assume they were sending out postcards saying that voter fraud is a crime and the Helms campaign, although this guy who was nominated for a judgeship apparently had nothing to do with it. According to the New York Times, but the Helms campaign is sending out postcards. I mean, this is going back a long way to black areas, black people have always and will always vote 90% for the Democrats saying, I assume you can't vote if you were a felon or just sending out postcards saying voter fraud is a crime, but they'll never tell us what was in the postcards, which I always find that suspicious. If it was such a nasty, vicious racist postcard, can you tell us what was in it? So I'm very suspicious of that. And again, it was definitely Tim Scott. And I think Marco Rubio voted against these judges. So, you know, Tim Scott, whose entire campaign is going around saying America is not a racist country at the drop of a hat will accuse anybody, as long as it's a Republican of racism. But they won't, these conservative blacks will not give up the race card. It's too easy. It's too cheap and advantage to play. And they played it pretty quickly here. The worst of them was James Congressman James from Michigan, who had no, there was no question of ignorance. He had plenty of time to review the facts. He made up a quote that somehow this course said that blacks had a net benefit from slavery, which is completely insane and not in the course. It just said that they managed to learn some skills that, you know, helped them in some way. Obviously slavery as a whole was a horrible oppressive regime. And he said, you've now, I counsel brother to Sam, it's my brother in Christ. You've, you've now attacked two of the five Republicans in Congress. So he totally plays the race card. How can you attack your black Republicans? That's going to, you know, I mean, totally plays identity politics. So he was the worst of them. And I also want to make a note here in case everyone doesn't read everything I put out on subject. The famous AP course in African-American studies that was loaded up with all the CRT stuff that you just mentioned. And whoa, we had to listen to weeks and weeks of how Governor DeSantis was a fascist for refusing to adopt the AP African-American course. It had the same language. Mickey chaos. It's the same language. The national park service uses. It's the same language. The library of Congress uses. So cut the crap. Tim Scott and James Johns and, and Byron Donaldson cut the crap. It's disgusting. It was a completely phony issue. And I think it's unforgivable for a black Republican to attack another Republican sucking up to the left and the mainstream media by falsely accusing someone of racism. There is, there is nothing worse than being called a racist. And when you're called a racist by a quote, fellow Republican, there, that is unforgivable for any Republican to do that. I know that. Okay, let's get a little bit more here, Mickey and and. I mean, I'm not a Catholic, but I think the reasons I read them at some point, the reasons the Catholic church gives for annulments, there's a list of like 10 things. And they're really serious things like affairs, like a gambling addiction, like, like violence, but they're really serious things. I mean, unless you're a Kennedy and pay money to get your divorce. But no, that is my view of marriage. I'm not picking on the gays. I'm not picking on the women who are in fake marriages with gays. And again, I know a lot of them, but I'm against it. You did suffer a huge defeat, I think on the cultural front this week when Joe Biden. Recognize his seventh grandchild, which is the child Hunter had with a stripper in a night. He doesn't even remember. I believe where he says he didn't remember in his book.