 It's my great pleasure to introduce the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Yusuf Almoyed, who is here with us today. Our speaker, Michael Rectenwald, is a retired professor, is a professor of liberal studies at New York University where he taught cultural and social history, as well as academic writing since 2008. He is the author of eight books, including Springtime for Snowflakes, Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage, which I just finished reading and I highly recommend and we have copies of. 19th century British secularism, science, religion and literature, academic writing, real world topics, and social secularisms in a post-secular age. His academic essays have appeared in the British Journal for the History of Science, Endeavour, and the Cambridge University Press Anthology, George Elliott and Context, among others. Dr. Rectenwald is a prominent spokesperson for academic freedom and free speech, and an expert on the history and character of the social justice movement. He has published articles and essays on these topics and several periodicals and news outlets and has appeared regularly on national television as well as on numerous radio and internet shows. He holds a PhD in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University, a master's in English Literature from Case Western Reserve University, and a BA in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. The topic of the lecture today is Libertarianisms versus Postmodernism and Social Justice Ideology. Dr. Rectenwald. Thank you very much, Joe. And I'd like to thank the Institute for having me here at this very venerable institution. And I'd like to thank Pat for making everything possible for me here. And so my title is Libertarianisms versus Postmodernism and Social Justice Ideology. As as usual, I veered a little bit away from the topic slightly. And when I said Libertarianisms, I'm speaking of not the various schools, but basically civil, cultural, and economic Libertarianism, not any particular schools within it. And what is Post, how they conflict, how it conflicts with postmodern theory and social justice ideologies. If you've read my book, Springtime for Snowflakes, there'll be a few passages that'll sound somewhat familiar, hopefully. But most of this is entirely new. I'm gonna be talking about social justice not in the university or the academy actually, but in the corporate world. So a peculiar phrase recently introduced into the political lexicon by media cognoscenti describes a new corporate philosophy, woke capitalism. Coined by Ross Dutthott of the New York Times, woke capitalism refers to a burgeoning wave of companies that have apparently become advocates of social justice. Some major corporations now intervene in social and political issues and controversies partaking in a new corporate activism. The newly woke corporations support activist groups and social movements while adding their voices to political debates. Woke capitalism has endorsed Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, contemporary feminism, LGBTQ rights, immigration activism among other causes. How can we understand woke capitalism? What is it? Is it effective and is so why? Meanwhile, what is now meant by social justice? And is it a good thing? As it turns out, analyzing woke capitalism will tell us a great deal about contemporary corporate capitalism, the contemporary political left and the relationship between the two. It also recalls an earlier corporate leftism as I'll discuss later. Woke capitalism helps us to make sense of the topic of my next book. Yes, hip promotion, shameless. Google Archipelago. Titles are getting to be my thing. Which is the study of big digital, the mega data services, media cable and internet services, social media platforms, artificial intelligence agents, apps and the developing internet of things. The scary thing about the global, of Google Archipelago is not merely that it is this huge amalgam of digital business interests but that it operates as what Michel Foucault, one of the few, if not only redeemable of postmodern theorists called a governmentality, a means of governing the conduct of populations but also the technologies of governance and the rationality that underpins those technologies. So, as for social justice, some would call a 20th century social justice movements. The civil rights movement comes to mind. But due to the influence of postmodern theoretical ideas and Soviet and Sino-communist disciplinary techniques, social justice has taken on new distinct features. Whereas the free speech, the campus free speech movement was the hallmark or a hallmark of social justice in the 1960s, violent skirmishes waged against free speech and academic freedom are now associated with the term. Events that have unfolded on college campuses such as Yale, New York University, UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, Evergreen State College and many others bear the social justice insignia. Among other postmodern theoretical notions, the contemporary social justice creed draws on what is called social and linguistic constructivism which is an epistemological premise derived from the postmodern theory that holds that language constitutes and often social and often all of reality rather than merely attempting to represent it or some other theory of language. Under social and linguistic constructivism, language is considered a material agent. It's uses as tenement to physical acts. This belief explains the term discursive violence. For the social justice believer, language can enact violence by itself without any attendant actions. Today's social justice creed is marked by preoccupations with new identities and their politics. It entails a broad palette of beliefs and practices represented by concerns and chivalrous, including privilege, white privilege, privilege-checking, self-criticism or auto-critique, cultural appropriation, intersectionality, discursive violence, microaggressions, mansplaining, man-spreading and many others. The terms multiply almost as rapidly as the gender identities. Self-criticism and privilege-checking are the vestiges of auto-critique and struggle sessions, purification methods of the Chinese cultural revolution. In the late 1960s, as words spread from the Communist revival to the West through student and feminist movements of Europe, especially France, the birthplace of most postmodern theory, they became part of the Western Left's vocabulary and toolkit and have not left. In struggle sessions, the guilty party, accused of selfishness, ignorance and the embrace of bourgeois ideology, was pilloried with verbal and often physical assaults by her comrades until she broke down and confessed her characterological and ideological flaws. Today, the confessions involve privilege or the unearned advantage to enjoy members of a dominant group based on appearance. Usually on demand, checking one's privilege means to acknowledge unearned advantage and to atone for it publicly. Meanwhile, in the Chinese cultural revolution, auto-critique began with the guilty party who subjected herself to verbal self-inspection and denigration before the jury of her comrades. By the way, I'm using the feminine here because it was often, it often was a lot of women because it was a lot of teachers who were exposed to this. Auto-critique and struggle sessions could lead to imprisonment or death as the comrade was often or almost always found to be insufficiently pure. In self-criticism or self-crit or call-out routines today, which are soft forms of auto-critique and struggle sessions, they have become prevalent on the internet, they became prevalent on the internet sometime after 2009. They then infiltrated universities and other social spaces. Intersectionality is the axiomatic oppression-ranking framework that establishes a new social justice hierarchy based on the multiplicities of oppression as they may intersect and affect subjects in multiple supposedly subordinated social categories. It is no less than a scale for weighing oppression. It then inverts the supposed existing hierarchy on the basis of this intersectional oppression-ranking, moving those on the bottom to the top and vice versa. This is not a temporary feature of social justice but represents a hierarchical inversion that must be maintained to engender the animus and resentment necessary to continue fueling the movement. This ranking system began in Soviet circles, Soviet theory, with the Hungarian and Soviet literary critic and Marxist philosopher, Georges Lukash. In his book History and Class Consciousness, 1923, Lukash introduced a form of epistemology that has had an outsized impact ever since, serving as a source for postmodern theory and social justice. The social justice notion that each person has their own truth based on their own type of subordination can be traced directly to Lukash. He argued that the unique position of the working class within the social order and the relations of production provided the proletariat with a privileged vantage point for discerning objective reality and called the theory proletarian standpoint epistemology. Lukash argued that reality under capitalism is a single objective reality. That now is a very scary, you can't say that anymore. But the proletarian has a peculiar relationship to objective reality. The objective world strikes the proletarian differently than it does the capitalist. Like the capitalist, the proletarian is a self-conscious subject. However, unlike the capitalist, the proletarian is also a commodity, an object for sale on the market. It is the proletarian's consciousness of the commodification of his selfhood that contradicts his experience as a living subject, a person with subjective experience. The proletariat's self-consciousness of the commodity that is himself explains the working class's antagonism towards capitalism as Lukash saw it. While the proletarian fully grasps the contradiction of his self-conscious commodification, the class can only come to terms with the contradiction by upending and abolishing existing conditions. As of course we know, happened in a way. Feminists and post-modern theorists later appropriated standpoint epistemology and siphoned it through various identity filters. It is the root of the contemporary social justice belief in the connection between identity and knowledge. Social justice holds that membership in a subordinated identity group grants members exclusive access to particular knowledge, their own knowledge. Members of the dominant identity group especially cannot access or understand the knowledge of the subordinated others. For example, a white cis hetero male, which is a white straight male who accepts the gender he was assigned at birth. I didn't know that. Cannot have a black with lesbians experience and therefore can't access or understand her knowledge. Individuals within subordinated identity groups also have their own individual knowledge. So for social justice believers, knowledge is ultimately personal, individual and impenetrable to others. It is my knowledge. I call this notion of knowledge epistemological solipsism. Under the social justice worldview, everyone is locked in an impenetrable identity for solace with access to a personal knowledge that no one else can reach. Therefore, social justice ideology does not foster egalitarianism. The rank is maintained, only the bottom becomes the top when the totem pole of identity is inevitably flipped upside down and stood on its head. Is it any wonder then that the social justice warriors compete valiantly for the status of most subordinated in the games derogatorily referred to as the oppression Olympics? After all, the race to the bottom is really a race to the top, although the race runs downhill. Both it's epistemology and ontology. It's assumptions about how one acquires knowledge, who can know and what the nature of the objects of knowledge are are enforced within authoritarianism. And this is necessarily the case with subjectivism and philosophical idealism. Claims made on behalf of correct beliefs, correct wording, proper naming, that is language itself, Trump empirical evidence and nullify scientific findings and methods in advanced. Thus, the social justice rep creed represents an entirely new understanding, quite distinct from previous versions. It also involves an entirely different set of practices and methods for implementing it. The social and linguistic constructivist claims of social justice ideologues amount to a form of philosophical and social idealism that is enforced with a moral absolutism. Once beliefs are unconstrained by the object world and people can believe anything they like with impunity, the possibility for assuming a pretense of infallibility becomes almost irresistible, especially when the requisite power is available to support such a pretense. And we saw that, of course, in the Soviet Union. Lysenko was a great example. In fact, given its willy-nilly determination of truth and reality on the basis of beliefs alone, philosophical and social idealism necessarily becomes dogmatic, authoritarian, antirational, and effectively religious. Since its sanctions no pushback from the object world and regards it with indifference or disdain, it necessarily encounters pushback from the object world and must double down. Because it usually contains so much nonsense, the social and philosophical idealism of the social justice creed must be established by force or the threat of force. Excuse me, I'm just getting dry mouth here. I have something for that. And here we go. Today, I will discuss some contemporary manifestations of social justices, but not as it plays out in the academy. The topic that I have treated in my recent most book, Springtime for Snowflakes, which is downstairs in the bookstore. Instead, my topic today is the social justice of U.S. for-profit corporations. Although regarded as new, I will show that woke capitalism is but a subset and recent type of a broader and longer standing corporate ethos that I call corporate leftism. As it turns out, analyzing contemporary political left and the relationship between corporate capitalism will give us a great deal of information. Woke capitalism helps to make sense of the topic of my next book, Google Archipelago. Despite the backlash, Nike's ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick with his national anthem Neil Downs brought Black Lives Matter protests to the NFL dramatically boosted Nike sales. The ad's success supported business insider columnist, Josh Barrow's theory that woke capitalism provides a form of parapolitical representation for corporate consumers. Given their perceived political disenfranchisement in the political sphere, woke capitalism offers representation in the public sphere. With wokeness, do thought of the times argues, corporations offer workers and customers rhetorical placebo and lieu of costlier economic concessions such as higher wages, better benefits or lower prices. Short of a socialist revolution, New York congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal seems unlikely to materialize. Do thought suggests that woke capitalism works by substituting symbolic for economic value. And these same gestures of wokeness may also appeal and appease, appeal to and appease the liberal political elite promoting their agendas of identity politics, gender pluralism, transgenderism, lax immigration standards, sanctuary cities, and so on. In return, the woke corporation hopes to be spared higher taxes, increased regulations and antitrust legislation aimed at monopolies. This is not my theory, this is do thoughts theory. Meanwhile, now here's a reading, my reading of one of the ads of woke capitalism. At least one woke capitalist corporation appears intent on scolding its customers. I refer to Gillette and its We Believe ad. Like Nike, Gillette is a subsidiary of Procter & Gamble. First posted to its social media accounts in mid-January 2019 and the ad condescendingly lectures men, presumably cis-heteroman about toxic masculinity. In the provocative ad, three men look into separate mirrors but not to shave but rather to examine themselves for traces of the dreaded condition. Voiceovers admonish men to say the right thing, to act the right way, quote unquote. Dramatizations of bullying, mansplaining, misogyny, and sexual predation shame bad men and enjoy a woke minority of men to hold other men accountable or else fakes shame as well. For Gillette, shaving now apparently means shearing away the characteristics associated with manhood now deemed pathological by the American Psychological Association. To prevent the sudden onset or relapse of man disease, self-groomers must exercise vigilance, scathing self-scrutiny and unwavering determination. Even though their gender malignance has been socially constructed, men are responsible for immediately discerning and excising its outgrowth. The Gillette ad thus prescribes a new gender hygienics by which such brutes can move upward working out the beast, to quote Alfred Lord Tennyson. Becoming the best a man can get, quote unquote, a newly shorn animal or rather a new kind of man shorn of animality. Like the Nike-Capernick ad, the Gillette we believe ad provoked significant backlash, but parent company and Procter & Gamble's executive response to the ensuing furor suggested that the corporation was willing to forego profits for virtue points, at least for now. John Mueller, Procter & Gamble's CFO, told reporters that post-ad sales were, quote, in line with pre-campaign levels, end quote. In advertising terms, in other words, the ad was a failure. Yet, Mueller viewed the expenditure as an investment in the future, quote, it's part of our effort to connect more meaningfully with younger consumer groups, he explained, perhaps referring to those too young to sport the toxic stubble. I remained unsatisfied with the above explanations. I still wondered why and how corporations assumed the role of social justice arbiters and how and why social justice came to be an ideology of the US corporation. But before venturing my own theory, however, I'd like to retrace a history of corporate leftism which will shed light on the relationship between leftism and corporatism. Corporate leftism has a long history dating at least to the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. I first recognized the corporate leftism through the histories that documented the funding of the Russian and other socialist revolutions by leading US capitalists and bankers. As Richard Spence boldly declares in Wall Street and the Russian Revolution 1905 to 1925, the term socialist capitalist is not an oxymoron. Spence was not referring to so-called mixed economies but rather to a false dichotomy, a mating of two supposed economic atiminies, socialism and capitalism. Understanding why the term is not an oxymoron does not necessarily depend upon historical knowledge uncovered by Spence and before him rather sloppily, I should say, by Anthony C. Sutton. Although given that I am an historian, I found this material very revealing. But the apparent contradiction in terms is based on a mischaracterization of economic opposites and a failure to detect in the original name to the field of economics, namely political economy, the inherent possibility of such a conjunction. The real opposites are not capitalism and socialism. They are individual freedom versus centralized political control, whether statist or corporate. According to Sutton's Wall Street and FDR, 1975, corporate socialism is a system where those few who hold the legal minorities of financial and industrial control profit at the expense of all others in society. For Sutton, the most lucid and frank description of corporate socialism and its moors and objectives is to be found in a 1906 booklet by Frederick Clemson Howe, entitled Confessions of a Monopolist. In attempting to validate Sutton's reference to Howe as the prototypical monopolist or even corporate socialist, I was disappointed. But ultimately, I found the excursion rewarding. I began by looking in Spence's Wall Street and the Russian Revolution, which had the same title as one of Sutton's major books, except for the added date range. I searched feverishly for Howe and Confessions of a Monopolist. Actually, as is my want, I was using electronic texts and the Kindle version of Spence, so my search produced nothing like a fever. I'm nostalgic for a past that I never knew. In the 19th century, in novels, the researchers of fictional characters like Victor Frankenstein resulted in life-threatening frenzies. Call me romantic. My problem was that I wanted to introduce corporate leftism and corporate socialism by referring to a television sitcom of the 1970s, namely Gilligan's Island. Some of you will be old enough and will have hailed from backgrounds as plebeian as my own to recall this program. The situation for this quote-unquote dumb TV show as Mesa scholar B.K. Marcus Apley put it is a small community of seven American castaways on a deserted island. Because it aired in the 70s, Gilligan's Island is a collectivist, Robinson Crusotia with a socialist pretext. Each character represents a different life station in an otherwise lost world of individualism, cast from a division of labor that has rendered absurd, let alone inapplicable by the social and economic life of desertion. Since the show's creator Sherwood Schwartz was at least an unconscious Marxist, the sitcom demonstrated episode after episode that quote, in a communist society, no one has one exclusive sphere of activity, end quote. Actress, professor, millionaire's wife and all the rest must quote, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner. That's Marx from the German ideology. They must outgrow the limited specializations imposed on them by the capitalist order. This goes for everyone on the island, except it seems for the monopolist, Thirst and Behow the third. Although their names were not identical, they were near hominins and I'd hoped to connect Frederick Howe and Thirst and Behow. They had to be connected. I hadn't been so sanguine as to expect that Thirst and Howe had been directly named after Frederick Howe after all their names were spelled differently, yet I hoped for some reference. And they were both monopolists or so I thought. Uh-oh, Spence did not mention Howe as the model monopolist or corporate socialist. In fact, he curiously admitted any reference to Howe's name and his rule book for monopoly. Coming up empty in such a cognate publication, I began to feel flush and somewhat panicky. And as you know, humanity scholars are susceptible to this kind of hyper-emotionality. Nor could I find any mention of Frederick Howe in connection with Thirst and Behow at all. And while a few of the early reviews of confessions took the book at face value and came to the same conclusion as Sutton that it represented the autobiography of a real monopolist giving away his secrets, even the most cursory assessment of Dr. Frederick Howe's life and other works would have quickly disabused anyone, but the most tendentious polemicist of the idea that Howe's confessions was a rule book or Howe too manual for the monopolist. Howe was nothing like the corporate magnate or mega banker that Sutton suggested he was. And so he could not possibly have helped bankroll the creation of a quote, captive market and a technical colony to be exploited by a few high powered American financiers in the corporations under their control. End quote, that is the Soviet Union. First of all, Howe had earned a PhD from John Hopkins University. A real monopolist would wait for an honorary degree. Further, confession of a monopolist was not even an autobiography. It was a biting satire, a criticism of monopolists and monopolies written by a progressive reformer and later FDR, Staten, who of course then knew about monopolies, but he wasn't the prototypical fictional monopolist or monopolist that Sutton had made him out to be as it turned out both Howe and Howe had been fictional monopolists. Yet the thirst in Howe on Gilligan's Island was certainly something like the stereotypical monopolist described in Frederick Howe's book. Like the character in Confessions, Howe's number one role was quote, to make society work for you, end quote. Thirst in Howe certainly managed to command the labor and deference of his fellow Islanders as Marcus notes in the monetary economics of Thirst in Howe the third. Yes, you have a scholar who has written about this here. Howe was able to commandeer labor and goods by virtue of his off island status to procure goods and services by writing checks drawn on US banks. The fact that this fiat currency functioned in the absence of the government that backed it suggests that money operates according to a cultural Lamarckian evolutionary process. This is my idea, probably crazy. Money's governmentally enforced fiat characteristic is an acquired characteristic that has passed along through future generational transactions and retains these characteristics even after its basis and force disappears. At least until it is replaced and sometimes even after that. As Mises showed, the value of a currency as historical and the study of currencies must be historicist. Howe's expressions of monopolistic to sit her off to however, are best expressed in the episode nine, the big gold strike when Gilligan acting as Howe's golf golf caddy falls into a giant hole where he notices something golden embedded in the walls of the cave. Naturally Howe recognizes gold and assumes that it is his property. After all Gilligan was in his his employee, albeit fulled by a foe fiat currency, Howe swears Gilligan to secrecy to secure his ownership against the Islander's agreement that all property on the island would be communal. But soon the mine is discovered by the rest of the community. The unreliability of the state appears to account for Howe's problem in securing exclusive gold mining rights. Gilligan is the nominal and ineffectual president of the Island and a buffoon who has no power. But Howe's failure as a monopolist is more fundamental. While he is perfectly capable to quote, let others work for you, it does not know the language or ways of corporate socialism and does not understand how to establish monopoly within such a state. Rather than continually yielding to expressions of blatant self-interest, a corporate socialist would couch his monopolistic ambitions in the language of equality. Rather than Frederick Howe, King Camp Gillette would have provided a much better model for Thurston Howe. The founder of the American Safety Razor Company in 1901 who changed its name to the Gillette Safety Razor Company in 1902, Gillette published The Human Drift in 1894. While acknowledging that quote, no reform movement can meet with success unless that movement takes into consideration the power of capital and is based on present business models and conformance to the same laws and quote, Gillette's human drift railed against competition which he believed was quote, the prolific source of ignorance in every form of crime and that which increases the wealth of the few at the expense of the many. The present system of competition between individuals results in fraud, deception and adulteration of almost every article we eat, drink or wear, end quote. Competition resulted in quote, a waste of material and labor beyond calculation, end quote. Competition was the source of quote selfishness, war, murder, robbery, lying, prostitution, forgery, divorce, deception, brutality, ignorance, injustice, and drunkenness, insanity, suicide and every other crime which have their base in competition and ignorance. This explains the recent Gillette ad after all. The company has finally discovered that the root of competition and thus of all evil is toxic masculinity. So, give me another second here. But the corporate socialist King Camp Gillette may as well have patented the disposable safety razor to prevent so many desperate people from cutting their throats. At least until they realized that the answer to all their problems which he introduced in human drift, a singular monopoly which would quote, naturally control all production and distribution, specializing in everything such that quote, every article sold to consumer from the package to its contents will be the product of the United Company. Under the United Company, the production of necessary goods and eventually of everything would be consolidated and centralized, eliminating the wastes and hazards of the many and widely dispersed manufacturing plants and buildings of the current haphazard and chaotic system. Most cities and towns would be quote, destroyed as would all competitors. As the vast majority of the population would relocate to the metropolis where powered by Niagara Falls, all production would take place. And everyone's lives would center around the corporation whose commercial and governmental power would be total. Lest anyone think that the human drift represented the lark of a young idealist before he came to his senses and founded a company with almost unparalleled name recognition, Gillette went on to publish the World Corporation in 1910, a prospectus for developing a worldwide singular monopoly, but founding his company and patenting his razor between writing these two treatises, Gillette's biographer Russell Adams equipped. It was almost as if Karl Marx had paused between the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital to develop a dissolving toothbrush or collapsible comb. A few passages from World Corporation should be sufficient to establish Gillette as the prototypical corporate socialist. Corporations will continue to form, absorb, expand and grow and no power of man can prevent it. Preventor, promoters of World Corporation are the true socialists of this generation, the actual builders of the cooperative system, which is eliminating competition and in practical business, reaching results which socialists have vainly tried to attain through legislation and agitation for centuries. Opposition to World Corporation by individuals, by states or by governments will be of no avail. Opposition in any case can only be a temporary effect. Barriers will only centralize power and cause increased momentum when they give way. The corporation will also dominate material but also mental production as Gillette praises the hive mind. World Corporation represents individual intelligence and force combined, centralized and intelligently directed. Individuals are of the corporate mind but not the corporate mind. And as if anticipating Google secret mission statement, Gillette wrote, World Corporation will possess all knowledge of all men and each individual mind will find complete expression through the great corporate mind. Finally, waxing poetic and Ray Kurzweil mode, Gillette wrote, World Corporation will have a life everlasting. Individual man will live his life and pass into the great beyond but this great corporate mind will live on through the ages, always absorbing and perfecting for the utilization and benefit of all the inhabitants of the earth. It is worth noting that Gillette's business practices were not wholly at odds with his ideas in his books. True to his monopolistic impulses, he regularly filed patents. And in 1917, with the outbreak of World War I, the company provided every soldier with a shaving kit paid for by the US government. But Gillette's expressions of corporate socialism did Gillette's expressions of corporate socialism actually help his business efforts? Or merely ease his guilty conscience or what? We can't be sure. But speculating about the objectives of today's corporate leftists may help make sense of the rhetoric of such corporate leftists of the past. Back to the contemporary world capitalism. Today's corporate social justice rebranding represents at least a rhetorical overthrow of Milton Friedman's extremely narrow view of corporate responsibility. In capitalism in freedom in 1962, Friedman declared that one and only one social responsibility of business is to increase profits. Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976 and by the 1950s, his notion of limited corporate social responsibility had become widely accepted. Yet woke capitalism could still satisfy Friedman's profit only maximum. If all the world's a stage, then the corporate mouthing of social justice bromides may be play acting and therefore a mockish parody. To be truly woke then might mean that one is awake to the woke acting corporations, the woke believing consumers, and maybe even the demands of wokeness altogether. This explanation is consistent with the profit requirement and allows one to make short shrift of newly found corporate virtue. It is a cynical sham and proves more than ever that the chicanery of corporations and their billionaire owners knows no bounds. This view is very similar to that held by the critic of woke billionaires and author of Winner's Take All. Now, as tempting as such post-truth cynicism may be, it doesn't explain the promotion of woke or leftist views by corporations and the effects that such promotions may have in making their consumer basis more leftist in the first place, a circumstance that they will have to deal with at some point. Arguably, corporations would not espouse and thereby potentially spread political views merely to assuage a consumer contingent unless had views aligned ultimately with their own interests. One has led to wonder what politics would best serve the interests of corporate leftists, especially aspiring corporate socialists. To benefit corporate leftists, corporate socialists or any other monolithic singular producer and governmentality, a political creed would likely place a heavy emphasis on equality. Such an emphasis would likely be accompanied by shaming of the privileged, along with demands that they surrender their advantages. All this takes place in Gillette's books. To emphasize equality, the creed benefiting the corporate leftists would recognize refugees, the disenfranchised, and at least in theory would be internationalists rather than nationalist or nativist. While declaring equality, the political creed of the corporate leftist might nevertheless stress difference endlessly between identity groups and even within them and might benefit from the creation of utterly new identity types. Such a creed would consistently keep the identity groups concerned with whether or not they were losing ground to other identity groups rather than worrying about the corporate socialists. Watch words might include such things as equity, inclusion, and diversity. Always on the cutting edge, the corporate leftists would welcome the promotion of the new and disruption of the old, but always with improvement in mind. A political creed that aimed at dismantling traditional gender to the family, local customs, tradition, and even historical memory would remove the last bastions against state or major corporate power. Ultimately, the corporate leftists or corporate socialists would benefit from a singular governmental monopoly with one set of rules. As Gillette noted, ideally, this global government would be the corporation itself. Bus, woke capitalism or corporate leftism does not consist of merely rhetorical placebos symbolic over economic concessions or even the mere placating of liberal political elites. Woke capitalism or corporate leftism actually represents the corporate interests of the would-be monopolists, the corporate socialists, and the corporate leftists in general. Thank you. How long did I go there? Good, perfect. I'm told to look for the scary blue box. Where is it? Give me the blue box. Thank you. In the book, The Most Dangerous Superstition by Larkin Rose, he equates stateism with religion. And I'm kind of curious as to if you look at the inquisitions, the witch trials, the Roman inquisitions, Spanish inquisition. That was dealing with the heresy of the Roman Catholic Church or the witch trials as far as basically mind control as far as the dissidents. How do you see as far as this postmodernism, the new inquisition with a secular state and is there any connection historically or theoretically to the inquisitions? Wow, that's a great question. Let me start off by saying why I chose this idea of libertarianism versus postmodernism. Because on Tom Woods' show he suggested that there was a contingent of libertarians who believed that postmodernism, because of its willy-nilly anything goes sort of theoretical whatever, is actually compatible with libertarianism. And that's why I wanted to point out that it's very incompatible, because whenever there's no objective correlative for knowledge, and whenever knowledge is basically asserted rather than demonstrated, you have the problem of it being enforced and used as a form of power. And it's connected to, it's an inquisition. I'd say right now it's a soft one. I think we're more or less in a soft cultural revolution. It's more like it, as in China, 66th to 76th. We're in a soft cultural revolution. They haven't started tearing professors or teachers out of the classroom yet. Well, yeah they have, but I can't talk about that. But I mean, they haven't physically brutalized them yet, I guess, although it's close. So I think we're in a, I'd like to keep religion out of it because I just think it complicates it. It's, I think social justice represents a religious creed because it is based on ritual and belief with no, without knowledge, there's no knowledge base there. It's just religion, it's just a ritual and belief. They have a lot of rituals and they have beliefs and they enforce the beliefs with rituals generally. But I don't know about an inquisition because, you may not have people being torn out of classrooms. Physically, yeah. So basically what you have is you have fear of being used to control people because they know that their careers and their social standing are then at risk. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you have a tremendous amount of intimidation going on. There's the threat of force for sure. The woman who invited Charles Murray to speak got in the hospital and there've been cases of young American for Liberty kids being punched. So we're moving in that direction. You seem to have thought very carefully about this. Do you have any thoughts about how we can oppose it? Yeah, actually it goes back to the first question. I think social justice has to be understood to be religious in character. And it's being taught in public schools, okay? So that to me, it could be the separation clause could be applied. Once we can show that it has a religious basis, we can oppose it on the basis of its dissemination as religion in public institutions. That's the best answer. My historical work is in secularism, which comes from the free thought movement of the 19th century, which is very akin to the free thinking libertarian classical liberal position. And that's I think the best way to deal with it is to try to get it across that this is a religious movement that's not based on any evidence, it's a creed, it's dogmatic, it's being forced on people they must adopt it at their own peril. Things like that. You must be a social justice warrior then. Technical difficulties aside, I have a question. Now you draw the similarity between our modern identity politics and the culture revolution in China, but I would say there is a major difference between what we have then and what we have now in that in China there was one identity, as far as I understand, the Marxist. Here if you look at our identity politics, it's a polytheistic religion. I am black, I am homosexual, and all this. So would you say that this is a major point into how it's being administered and its prospects? No, I would think that the creed is what you have to adopt. If you sufficiently adopt the creed, and depending on your identity status, where you are in the hierarchy, appropriately castigate yourself or otherwise self-flagellate et cetera, et cetera, you're fine. So it's ultimately about confession of the creed. So in that sense, it's very similar to the cultural revolution. Yes, there were no differences in identity, but quite frankly there were, they were looking at people that held positions of authority and cultural traditional values that were the holders of the cultural heritage. Those were the people that were attacked most vigorously and first. Well, keeping the parallel with the cultural revolution, how, what do you think that means for your argument for considering religion and excluding it from schools because no legal arguments would save you during the cultural revolution because it's the government establishing itself that is imposing those threats. And the same thing goes here. It's all government sanctioned. And my point is it is, it's not an argument, as you said, it's a religious thing. And just like in the cultural revolution, it was not a discussion, it was physical aggression. So shouldn't physical aggression perhaps be met with physical resistance? The first part of your question, I think you're asking me, is it coercive to keep religion out of school? Is that the first question? No, my question is, why would the state, why would we seek legal remedy for something that is imposed by the state? Oh, okay. Well, I mean, it's a, I think this is something that's happening within public institutions, not with state sanction, frankly. So, I mean, it's not like the senators are writing bills, yeah, let's indoctrinate them into this social justice business right away. And passing this legislation, this is fairly, this is subliminal almost. I mean, there's really serious indoctrination going on from kindergarten, I say K through PhD, really. Is there any evidence that corporations or corporate leaders are actively, directly financing some of these social justice organizations? If you could find me that evidence, I would, oh, you have no idea how hard I'm looking for that. But actually there are some evidence, in particular at certain high tech corporations. And I'm tapping into the culture of these institutions and connecting it to their politics as it's disseminated through their technology, actually. So, I think it's there. It's a very tough argument to make, but somebody's gotta do it. Unfortunately in Italy, the indoctrination, unfortunately in Italy, this indoctrination is not happening only in public institutions, but also in private institutions. Private institutions, religious private institutions, not religious private institutions. So, this is happening anywhere. Agreed. Well, I agree, and that's why I say that if you're gonna be a social justice university, that's fine, just declare it. This is a social justice university, this is a Catholic university, this is a whatever. But just tell us what it is, don't lie about it, and hide this thing from us. Whatever we think of President Trump, do you think that the attacks on him, which seem to be over the top, have anything to do with this, you know? Yes, G.W. Yeah, I mean, he's triggered them. I mean, that's basically as, Trump is either, I think he's probably purposefully doing it. It should trigger them in order to get this reaction, because he knows exactly what the trigger points are, and he's saying the absolutely improper thing, almost in every circumstance, seems to me purposefully, unless he's got political Tourette syndrome or something. Well, that may be the case. So you've talked about intersectionality as being a kind of attempt to reorder, and that if you are on, if you are at a certain order and you do the correct amount of self-ladulation, you'll be okay. But it seems to me that if you are deemed the wrong kind of person, no amount of self-ladulation will save you. And so I'm wondering if instead of an attempt at reordering, it makes more sense to think of intersectionality as a mechanism by which anyone can be deemed guilty. Oh, yes, I think that's right. I think the creed comes first, and violating the creed is really what will, strangely enough, especially if you are of a particular identity that is supposed to have certain beliefs based on your identity, it is enforced with even greater rigor, and intensity. Like, if you're, well, I don't wanna really use him as an example because this is his thing, but you know, Myluianopolis is gay and he's married to a black man and he does everything that, he believes everything he's not supposed to, things like that is a person that would get punished, he's gotten punished for all the things. Clarence Thomas, too. Ryan, I mean, that's sort of the beginning. Clarence Thomas, that's right. Yeah. Martina Navratilova. That's correct, very recently. Yeah, you know. Dodd was, you know, and would have been able to say, hey, I'm Martina Navratilova, I don't take this crap from you, but you know, it's like everybody gets laid low. I mean, there's nobody willing to stand up to it. Yeah, I mean, the only good thing is the left eats it's own, but not fast enough. I think on that note, we'll end.