 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Modern Day Debate as we are thrilled to have you here for this epic debate and panel. And want to let you know folks, if it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, we are a neutral platform, hosting debates on science, religion and politics. And also want to let you know, we hope that you feel welcome and no matter what walk of life you are from. And so with that, I'm going to kick it over with our co-host for the night, Dylan Burns. We are thrilled to have you here who also hosts debates on his channel all the time. So highly want to encourage you folks to check out the links, not only of Dylan who does host debates at his channel all the time, but also all of our speakers as we're very thankful to have them here. And with that, Dylan, thanks for being with us and hosting the floor is all yours. Dylan Burns, I'm the host of the Hippie Dippy Roundtable, the Hippie Dippy Championship and many other hopefully lovely programs that you all hopefully know about at this point. You can find me at twitch.tv slash Dylan Burns TV. Today, we're going to be talking about critical race theory and transphobia. We're going to take it straight over to the guests, but once again, I'm happy to be collabing with James because together we're a tag team that cannot be beat. We're going to start with Destiny, who's going to tell us about his channel and his thoughts on the topic. Hi, my name is Destiny. You can find me at twitch.tv slash destiny, youtube.com slash destiny or instagram or tiktok.com slash destiny. I'm broadly considered like a social Democrat and I'm pretty far left leaning socially. I'm fairly left leaning economically, depending on who you talk to. In terms of critical race theory, I think that a lot of the fundamental assumptions of critical race theory asserts are probably pretty like agreeable to most people. I think that some of the ways that it's played out publicly is maybe been a little bit problematic. So like some of the, like we read through some of the curriculum for some math stuff today that was pretty cringy, but in standard fashion, conservatives like hyper exaggerate some of these negative parts or make some stuff up like that guy in Tucker Carlson does. So yeah, I'll probably be advocating broadly speaking for the concept of critical race theory while acknowledging that it has some problematic implementations that we can improve on. Okay, next we're going to move in over to Actual Justice Warrior, also known as Sean and his co-host of Skeleton. Yeah, so I'm Sean, you can find me on YouTube at the YouTube channel Actual Justice Warrior. I'm libertarian, leaning, conservative, whatever you want to call it doesn't really matter. As for my position on critical race theory and whether or not it should be taught in our public schools, the answer is absolutely not. I don't want conspiracy theories taught in our school. I don't want an insane racist dogma being taught in our schools. So I will be coming out 100% against it and not just for its impact on white students. There's actually elements of critical race theory that are incredibly harmful for black people, the very same people that supposedly this framework is designed to help and appeal to. Wonderful, thank you for throwing it back to me when I just put some chips in my mouth. Now we're gonna throw it over to Riley, one of my close personal friends. Oh my God, thank you. Yeah, hey everyone, my name is Riley Grace Roshong. I talk about largely law and public policy. I'm a dual JD master's in public policy student here in Maryland. I'm involved in Maryland politics and I talk about, I just try to read up on academic literature and see what good policy is what. So on critical race theory, and I'm gonna be trying to do the best I can because like some people, like I worry that in a lot of these conversations, people will accuse each other of straw manning, but here from listening to a lot of different perspectives on critical race theory, it seems that there's not like one coherent definition of what it is and a lot of people take it to mean very different things. So just based on what I've heard, here's kind of like the major tenants, right? It's like systemic racism exists in the US today through our legal system, which is something I agree with. A reason that systemic racism exists is because even if we don't have laws which explicitly discriminate against people of color, we still have laws which just barely impact people of color and we have not adequately dealt with the effects of those laws, which did explicitly discriminate against people of color, which I also agree with. Some things I don't agree with are like that the reasons that systemic racism exists, which is pushed by some people, you hear that like racism is inherent in society since it benefits white people. That's an argument that people make that I disagree with. People argue that white people do not fight against racism since they're not incentivized to, which there can be some arguments to make there, but I probably wouldn't agree in some of the ways I've heard it made. And that systemic racism is done in order to prevent like the rise of communism. And this is where you hear a lot of people arguing that like, oh, critical race theory is inherently linked to like Marxism, right? To some extent, the realist analysis can be beneficial but there are some people who actually will go and like make a lot of like very far left arguments, which I think I'm broadly opposed to. So those are like what critical race theory is. Is it being taught to children? It's like teaching it in schools. No, it's not being taught in schools, it's being taught primarily at the graduate level. Should it be taught at the graduate level? Probably, I mean like in the same way that we teach lots of the different things at graduate level, the people who are able to access them and all that's to be said that like people usually are bringing this up now is kind of like a way to focus on like lower schools to try and prevent the teaching of any kind of racism. And we probably shouldn't allow that to happen since this isn't really a problem at like the K through 12 education level. So, you know, we wanna make sure that we're still teaching about racism in schools and it would probably be reasonable to keep this to like more graduate levels. Those are probably my thoughts. Wonderful. Now that we're done with introductions, I guess we're just gonna throw it over to a general discussion. I'm gonna ask you all that, of course while it's not a rule to be nice, make sugar your favorite spice, you may all begin. Okay, so I just wanna make a couple of things clear. Critical race theory is not teaching about the civil rights history of the United States of America. It's not teaching about negative history or history that doesn't look positively on the United States of America. It's a specific ideology that was developed in universities in response to disciplines like civil rights disciplines and like critical legal studies. And to my knowledge, the reason that we're talking about this is because of the potential for implementation in K through 12 education, not necessarily in the university level. Is that not the case? Did I like misread the parameters of the debate? I think that's pretty true. Can I just curious, what is your impression of why it was developed in response to things like critical legal studies? Well, they tell us that they don't like the fact that there were too many white people in these disciplines that specifically for the civil rights discipline, it was almost like a counter movement against that. And it was the idea that like white scholars could not represent the actual experiences of these black people. So I believe it was in the 70s. They, and correct me if I'm wrong on the year because whatever, I read it a little while ago. They were trying to discourage white people from writing about race and academia and forming this new discipline for them to better like articulate what they're feeling in society. It's very much reliant on feelings, which is one of the problems with it. And it also avoids outside scrutiny from other parts of academia because it actually, this is like intentional. It claims that it's being critical of those like outside institutions that do normal academic scrutiny. So it doesn't even subject itself to the normal rules of academia. So I don't understand why we would allow these people to implement their curriculum in our public schools. So, just on the line of questioning. So critical race theory developed. So we listened earlier to Derek Bell talk about this. The reason why critical race theory developed in response to critical legal studies is because the idea of analyzing certain things. So in this case, the criminal justice system just through the lens of laws seems like it wasn't perfectly explanatory for some of the things that people wanted to look at. So for instance, when we look at something like Brown v. Board of Education, if the 14th Amendment has existed for so long, why would it take so long for the Supreme Court to overrule like segregation of schools? If you look at it through a critical legal studies lens it's very hard to make arguments based on precedent. It's very hard to make arguments based on new legal analysis. It seems like you're missing something in terms of how you analyze these particular rulings. So we need like another lens or another tool that we can view these kinds of legal changes through. And then this was largely in the mid-70s, I think where critical race theory came in. Where it was more like, what's another critical theory that we can use to kind of critique or add to our understandings of the legal process in the United States? So insofar as that's concerned, I mean, that's pretty convincing to me that the idea of analyzing the legal system only through laws is a little bit silly. It's pretty obvious that our legislature, even all the way up to the Supreme Court is going to be influenced by the society around us and an intersection of other things and not just like, you know, letter of the law. So insofar as that goes, I don't think that it's like a wholly absurd method or wholly absurd way of analyzing, you know, structures in society, especially the legal system. Cause there are things that like a critical legal studies take would miss. It seems to be the case. And also Sean, can I like respond on the point about like the, oh, well, there are some people in this movement who don't want white people talking about it. Cause I mean, I read some of the literature earlier today and we can come back to this more if you want to. It doesn't seem to be the case that it's just the rule is white people cannot talk about this, but it's rather recognizing that because white people do not have the shared lived experience of people of color that they're less likely, not necessarily the case, but they're going to be less likely to understand those kinds of experiences than people who don't come from that experience. I kind of get that because like as a trans person there's always trans discourse happening as will be the case later in the panel. I mean, I'm not going to say here and say that like cis people can't talk about these issues, right? Like obviously there are a lot of cis people who contribute lots of the discourse, but also, you know, there can be cis people who don't recognize some things because they don't have that same lived experience. And simultaneously there can also be trans people who also don't have the greatest arguments just because they're trans, right? It's just a likelihood thing, you know? That's not to say that there probably aren't people out there who will take that to the extra mile. They'll say like, oh, no white people can talk about that. Those people are silly, don't listen to them and I will criticize them as much as needed to. But like it's more about just recognizing likelihoods. Let's give Sean several minutes to respond to both points. Okay, so on the point about how lived experiences aren't shared across all demographics. Yeah, I can understand that in like, I can understand that like premise, but the problem is we're talking about an academic discipline. And when we're talking about an academic discipline, there needs to be some way to verify, check. There needs to be some scrutiny. What you find in a bunch of critical race theory is storytelling. As people talking about their personal experiences and they use as a shield of criticism, the fact that they are often personally hurt. So most of these critical race theory scholars are scholars of color. And they'll be telling a story that happened to them in their real life, which is I guess fine. Like, and a lot of them are sad. Some of them are ridiculous, but a lot of them are sad. And I feel sorry for that person in that story, but we're talking about a discipline that is supposed to be implemented in our public schools. And you can extrapolate off of a story only so much. And I have examples of these stories and the wild extrapolations from them that I would love to go over with you if you think that this is something that we need to be teaching in our public schools. I mean, like, that's not to say, I mean, like quantitative or qualitative data can be useful to an extent. It's just important to be able to recognize the difference between qualitative and quantitative data, right? Like, you know, like stories and like individual, like, you know, individual anecdotes, like they can be useful, but it's primarily important to make sure that we're using them to be able to demonstrate larger phenomena that's otherwise qualitatively provable. But that's not to say that they don't have any use, right? Now, if these are being used in place of quantitative data, then yeah, then there's a valid criticism to be had there. But as far as I'm aware, like a lot of these issues usually have some kind of quantitative data to be able to back them, right? So, you know, being able to have the stories in that instance can be beneficial to see how these things actually play out in people's lives. So I think what's happening here is we have a fundamental misunderstanding of what critical race theory is because I've spent, you know, a good amount of time reading over this in preparation for this. And the idea that we have, we could check these stories or this myth-making against more objective numbers and like that is somehow a counterbalance is something that is completely divorced from critical race theory. They reject objective metrics as white supremacy or indicative of the overall white culture. They say objective truth is just the dominant culture's truth. This is why all of this is taught. Sorry, do you have just like an example of that? Oh, so a, okay. So a perfect example of this comes from Regina Austin and her promotion of conspiracy theories. So Regina Austin is at the Pennsylvania School of Law and she's claimed that O.J. Simpson, Clarence Thomas, Malcolm X, Mary and Barry, the Coors Brewing Company and Churches Freight again have all been the subject of what you call anti-black conspiracy theories. But what got her in a little bit of trouble is when she was called out for promoting the conspiracy theory that AIDS was created by the United States government. And her response to this, and you can find this in her readings, was that, well, it might not be literally true that AIDS was created by the United States government, but it's spiritually correct, which is something that Ocasio-Cortez obviously borrowed for her famous quote. And the reason it's spiritually correct is because it reminds us of the Tuskegee experiments. And like in the Tuskegee experiments, it's not really a point about whether or not the source of AIDS is the U.S. government, just like the source of syphilis wasn't the U.S. government. What really matters is that the U.S. government has the cure. So it's very conspiratorial. And when confronted on their conspiracy theorizing, this is how they respond or this is at least how Regina Austin responded. So yeah, like they reject objective metrics and promote and excuse negative behaviors. Well, how is that like represented? Because I mean like that doesn't seem to really connect with the idea. Well, how does that connect to critical race theory? Because I like, yeah, like if we're going to spread what amounts to a lie or at least to spread an accusation that's unsubstantiated that the government spread AIDS or that the government created AIDS for some kind of purpose. Like, yeah, that's condemnable, but like how does that connect back to critical race theory? Like I'm missing that later. It's from Regina Austin, critical race theory scholar at Pennsylvania School of Law. She's one of the leading scholars. But how does that make it, like we can take critical race theory and like look at what it is. So part of critical race theory is excusing negative behaviors from the black community. Whatever behavior you can possibly find is excused by critical race theory. So when questioned about conspiracy theorizing, she said that this is okay because this is a way to fight back against the counterculture. And then even if it's not literally true, it's okay, it's spiritually true because it reflects the experience of black Americans in this country. And her example was the Tuskegee experiments. This is a common theme throughout critical race theory literature is that whenever they're proven factually wrong on anything, they fall back to, well, what you don't understand is that these are the things that are related to reliving in a white supremacist society. And again, this is not an objective discipline. So like this is not stuff I want taught in our schools. I guess that what I'm missing is that like, I don't understand what makes it critical. Like can you define to me like what you think from looking at the literature, what you think critical race theory is? Well, you read the scholars of critical race theory and they define it. Well, yeah, but what's your impression of the literature? Like after having read it, like what's your takeaway? Your core tenants are a rejection of color blindness. Like I just said, there's excuse making for minorities for any type of behavior, no matter what it is. There's the rejection of integration as it's considered cultural genocide, which is repeated by many critical race theory scholars, including Patricia Williams. And I believe this guy's name is Gary Peller. Like these are the core tenants of it, that there's a white dominant culture and any move toward that dominant culture is cultural genocide. And that we should- I mean, it doesn't really, I mean, like some of those I don't think are actually representative. Like the idea that critical race theory, like by definition rejects any criticism of like when minorities do like take certain kinds of actions. Like I just haven't seen that in like any of the, like you can bring up examples where people who are associated with it have tried to excuse it, but that doesn't seem to be like, like we could criticize those people and their excuses, but that doesn't seem to fit in with like what it is. I'll give you a perfect example. So Patricia Williams is an advocate against proper English being taught in our public schools, right? She believes that black people with, they used to call it ebonics. I forgot what the word is for it now. African American vernacular English, huh? Yeah, ebonics. So like they're, like that's their own distinct dialect and that it serves them well in their communities and forcing them to learn English is improper. Like it's a form of cultural genocide. Now this is incredibly harmful to the black community. And the reason why it's incredibly harmful is once the last time you saw a math textbook written in ebonics or a chemistry textbook written in ebonics, the reason we have a common language and the reason people are trying through the public education system to get people to read and write appropriately is because you're basically putting them behind the eight ball by not doing so, but it is viewed again as a form of cultural genocide to go in the direction of speaking proper English or as it is called in critical race theory, cracker English. I got, well- So before we go too far into this, I hate the way this is set up because it feels like a two-in-one. So we, yeah, this is really- Yeah. But before we go to into this, it might not even be worth discussing critical race theory. It might actually just be worth discussing the foundations of critical race theory because it might be the case that we either completely agree or disagree with each other based on our agreement or disagreement with those foundations. So for instance, when we talk about like, when we talk about like teaching African-American vernacular English versus like contemporary English or whatever, it's probably a good thing that we all like have a common language that we speak, but to claim that AAVE or Ibonics as we wanna call it, to claim that that's like a separate language is not necessarily true. It's not like it's random. It's just another dialect that's emerged in English speech or more precisely in American speech. I mean, we can talk about like, I think any of these particular like foundational things like should AAVE be taught or not taught or should we encourage or discourage it or like should we teach that upholding certain norms is a form of cultural genocide? Like we probably have to hammer out our conversations on those topics, otherwise we're just gonna be speaking past each other to where one person is gonna support critical race theory because they believe in these underlying foundations versus another person obviously disagrees not because they disagree with critical race theory but because they disagree with the underlying foundations of it. Yeah, sure. I mean like I'm fine. I mean like I don't personally for the reasons I laid out earlier really like adopt it as like I don't find it to be the most useful framework personally. Like the idea is like there are some people who interpret it to be like, oh yeah, the reason why systemic racism exists is in order to perpetuate a system of hierarchy that specifically benefits white people which I don't think is satisfied. And there does seem to be like a lot of speculation there but I mean like as far as a lot of the other tenants you know like acknowledging that we should probably be able to like teach some form of systemic racism in school like yeah we can discuss a lot of the promises. We can start with, go ahead. I was gonna say I'm not against teaching the history of racism in schools. And again, like I have to ask what is it exactly this debate about? Because if we're just talking randomly about critical race theory that gets us nowhere. Like I was led to believe that this would be about whether or not this should be imported into the classroom like what's going on nationwide. You have a bunch of votes up and down or whether or not this is gonna be incorporated in the curriculum. California passed the law a couple of years ago they have yet to implement the curriculum that requires this as a graduation requirement. I thought that's what we were discussing. And to me to discuss that it would be logical to discuss what's in critical race theory textbooks what the major figures have written about the subject and the ridiculous extrapolations that they make based on their anecdotal experience that isn't very valuable. Yeah, so I agree but that's what I'm saying is we should probably focus on it because if you believe in all of the core tenets of critical race theory you're gonna probably think it should be implemented. But if you don't then you're probably gonna think it should be implemented. So it seems like it would just make more sense to talk about like what fundamental aspects of critical race theory do we accept or reject and then kind of move from there would be my guess. So like that would be my suggestion. So you listed out earlier some things that I've heard that most people won't that most people like there's some commonly shared elements of critical race theory like upholding like a certain type of society can be considered a form of white supremacy or the teaching of AAVE as a dialect versus incorrect speaker, something. I mean, like we could, I mean, we could focus in even on the African American vernacular English or what? Yeah, but I, because it just, if we argue like yeah, CRT should be taught. Oh no, it shouldn't be taught. We're not really arguing over CRT we're arguing about the underlying ideas. This is what it feels like to me. Or we should be. Cause sorry, go ahead somebody say something. Jesus Christ. You're fine. I mean like also just a comment on the voting nationwide. My understanding is that like a lot of the voting has been specifically at the state level on states outlawing the teaching and public schools. My understanding of a lot of that legislative discussion has been specifically looking at like a lot of more conservative figures trying to push to outlaw in schools. And it seems to be and I mean like this isn't necessarily the case but a lot of people are talking about it as if it's already being taught in schools or as if a lot of people are like pushing for it. And I'm just not sure if the evidence is quite there that a lot of people really want it. And rather that people and rather that this is being used as like a sadden issue to prevent the teaching of like broader issues related to race and racism. I mean, critical race theory is already being taught in schools. I did a segment on the Adyna School District in Minnesota that was teaching this. They called it an equity curriculum and it required everybody that's on the staff including the bus drivers to be trained in dismantling white supremacy. So there are isolated pockets that form the basis for people trying to restrict this. There's also been a greater push to add this into school curriculums post the death of George Floyd. Like, so yeah, we see major news stories about states and local municipalities having hearings about it at their school boards and voting it up or down. But yeah, it has been implemented probably mostly in the electives like California has it in its electives right now they haven't implemented it as a graduation requirement. But yeah, this is what we're discussing, you know? Well, yeah, so to be clear real quick on that, right? So when we say critical race theory is being implemented even in elementary school curriculum that's not really the case. Staff training is gonna be a bit different than like the curriculum that's taught to kids because it feels like a little bit of a bait and switch where like conservatives will talk about the evils of critical race there and then you think, oh my God, they're teaching as well as teaching to the kids but in reality what this actually comes out is like in the form of like sensitivity seminars or critical race theory like seminars or like a way of teaching in the classroom that's not like teaching children critical race theory but it's just like a different way to guide like how you teach your function in the classroom. It's a little bit differently. It's a little different I think than just saying like they're teaching critical race theory to our kids in schools, I think. I mean, so let me be clear. They're teaching critical race theory to our kids in schools. Like I do a video series on K-12 indoctrination in conjunction with an organization and I have like 30 videos in the series. So like there are specific examples of this being implemented to children as young as kindergartners where they're teaching them about their white privilege and the systemic oppression and how the system is rigged against their black students. So yeah, like they are teaching it. I'm just saying, I understand it's not necessarily even on a state level that it's being taught in most cases. So there are individual examples. This is what the reaction or the response is too. And there's a greater push post-flood. Can I just ask like how, so you gave like one example. Do you have like any sources like on the example and like just like any source on like how widespread this is? Just like so I can understand like the scale of like the issue of it being taught to children. Well, like I said, California has passed a wall that says they have to come up with something. There's been sample curriculums that have been shot down. They have it in their elective courses. A Dyna School District was one example. Like I don't have them off hand. I didn't like review all my older videos on the topic, but like I do have an entire video series based on this. But there's examples every like, they come up in the news every now and again. And what the organization that I do those videos with does they like combine them into an overall thing. So I mean, I could look up what they got, but. Okay, I mean like it just doesn't seem like a lot of, like the law of the conversation seems to match with like the scale of the issue. I guess is like my concern, right? Cause I mean like, you know, like we could probably make some kind of like with the amount of national attention on this and we could say that there's like a reasonable issue to be had here. But it seems like a lot of people are using this or talking about it so much in the national eye compared to how much is actually happening to the point where it seems like it says stand in for some kind of other issue that people are trying to discuss rather than the actual issue itself. Cause that makes it like, I just want to communicate that like it seems like the reaction from a lot of people has been disproportionate to the size of the issue as it currently stands to the point where it makes me wonder if there's some kind of other motivation for people engaging in the subject matter, does that make sense? Well, I sure, but like that's like there are examples. And like, again, this is like saying like it's not that big of an issue. Like I didn't pick the topics for this. Like I'm not saying it's an issue. Like I'm not saying it's not an issue either. Like if children are being taught like, hey, the fact that you're white makes you inherently racist. Like like unrelated things like that. Like, yeah, I'll broadly agree like that is bad and children should not be taught that, right? Like, yeah, I agree. It just seems like the reaction that people have had if it's only in like one or a handful of schools is for the amount of attention it's getting nationally, it seems like other people are trying to use this as a stand in issue for other, you know, just like talking about racism generally. Well, Destiny referenced earlier that he was looking over some math courses on a stream. I didn't watch that stream, but would that be the math courses that were proposed in Oregon and California? Probably the one talking about like how black people need to run around the room to learn math, this is really stupid. Like, so I mean, I'm paraphrasing a bit, but yeah. This is, there is a push to implement this. Like it's like saying, oh, well, it's not that many places. I mean, like if I was a parent, which I'm not, this would be something that I would be concerned about. And again, even beyond that, there's like a bunch of pushes for equity that try to teach things like I was talking about before, that like Ibonics is just as valid a form of English. And as I previously stated, this sets back the black community. It makes it harder for them to read in schools. There's a reason that in India and in China, all these places where English is becoming a second language or has already become a second language, they're learning proper appropriate English because it's the language of international business. So a curriculum that rejects this is harmful to black students. Yeah, I guess that like what I'm asking here, let me ask this question. Do you think it's at least reasonable to come to the conclusion that like one of the motivations for why this is so widespread in America at the moment, why like a ton of major news outlets are talking about this at this moment, do you think it's at least reasonable to surmise that like one of the reasons why, since it's a relatively small scale issue is because other people are using it as a stand in for like trying to prevent the talk about racism at all in K through 12. Like do you think that's at least, like even if you don't necessarily think that's a case yourself, do you think it's at least reasonable that that could be why some people are motivated in this discussion? No, I don't think it's about trying to prevent discussions of racism. Again, it's like if you talk to these people, they seem fine with teaching like the ideals of like the civil rights movement or like certain like negative history of the United States of America. It's about the way that critical race theory frames it. Again, this is a movement that was anti-civil rights scholarship. It's anti the concept of color blindness. So I think it's- Well, then why is it only getting attention now? Well, for the outsized interest, well, the reason it's getting attention now is post George Floyd, there's been a push to implement this more and more. Any issue that involves angry parents gets disproportionate attention in the United States of America because children, like somebody think of the children, there's an entire Simpsons character based around this concept that's as old as time. So like that's not unusual. We're talking about the implementation in public schools. Also, this involves our tax dollars. So it's like, do I want my tax dollars financing something that by its very definition is pushing a political ideology. In fact, critical race theory scholars are often saying that you're trying to put forward a political goal or political goals in their work and they need to bias it towards those political goals in order to counteract the bias in what is called objective reality. We'll give you a chance to respond Riley. To be fair to like critical race theory, usually what critical theory entails is that they try to see, like they do own that they marry like prescriptive and descriptive thought in that like they try to engage with a lens that aims to improve society as opposed to just describing society as it is, right? Like that does seem to be the case. I'm not sure if that's necessary. Like you could say that's a critique for why you shouldn't use it, but I'm not sure if that's something to be said against like the tool itself. Did that make sense, right? Like that's not necessarily a reason why it shouldn't be taught to just like improve society. I mean, the reasons that it shouldn't be taught it's not like, yeah, anybody could say they're trying to improve society. The reasons that I said it shouldn't be taught is they don't subject themselves at scrutiny from other parts of academia. They reject that scrutiny as what you call as part of being absorbed into like the white dominance of objective academia. Like they're pretty obvious about this. The emphasis on storytelling and anecdotes that don't really connect to overall things and crazy extrapolations. Like the examples that like I'm ready to give like if you want to hear some of them are just absurd. Then let me ask the question then because I know you brought up some examples earlier. So I know that you brought up the example with the person who gave the unsubstantiated claim about the AIDS crisis. And I can agree that that's something bad, but now I'm starting to wonder like if we get into examples and we can go through them if you want to like, I guess I'm worried about describing things which may not be necessarily representative of the movement, but which are extremely bad examples of this idea or of this framework, right? It's an academic discipline. Like I'm going over the like foundational people in this academic discipline. I specifically didn't go after the easy targets like Ebermex-Kendi because people can argue that Ebermex-Kendi is relatively new on the scene and it's getting popular and all that. So I went back even further to look at like foundational books. Like for instance, Patricia Williams who wrote the book and I think it came out in 1989 called The Rooster's Egg, which is just a series of her telling stories and making wild extrapolations based on those stories has a section in there about how she went into one store and she saw a comparable black doll that was discounted compared to a white doll. And she extrapolated from that that capitalism perpetuates white supremacy and the devaluation of black people from one store. Like this is not a serious discipline. And this book, look it up, look up the reviews. You'll see all the big names saying it's a seminal work and criminal in critical race theory. Patricia Williams I believe still teaches at Columbia Law. Like this is what we're talking about. This is the foundation of the discipline. A sale at one store is evidence of capitalism being racist. Want to give you a chance to respond if you'd like Riley? Also then it is true a three person panel we lost a person two hours before we started. And so it is a different, you could say, vibe with three people. So we do want to ask Destiny any thoughts on what's been discussed so far. And then Riley, if you do want a chance to respond after that, we'll give you a chance before we go to a particular question that somebody had offered in the chat. Well, I think I'll let them go down a line of questioning and then I'll jump in. I don't want to like, she gives a huge response to him and then I give him a whole bunch of shit to do it and then he has to try to hurt and me. And then it's like a huge cluster work. So I'm just kind of letting them go. Appreciate it. I like it. Go ahead, Riley. Yeah, I guess I'm trying to understand like, and I can understand that that's like, so I think that there's a valid critique that like the founding like, that you can have someone who you're, so like you're alleging essentially that this person is representative of the movement since she's one of the founding authors. And right now I guess I'm wondering because I've been reading a lot of the literature I assume the same as you in preparation for this. And it doesn't seem to be like, that's an accurate representation of where a lot of people are at with the, with the ideas as they currently stand, right? Like it seems to be more focused on the idea that that there are certain forms of systemic discrimination that can exist in society regardless of whether or not they're explicit or implicit that can end up creating like social hierarchies between different racial categories. There's variations. There's not like a concrete definition, but it seems really weird to take like one person who may not be representative of the movement as it currently stands and say, this is the entirety of it, right? Like that doesn't seem to be charitable to what critical race theory says for itself nowadays. I mean, but you're giving me like vagaries when I'm giving you specifics. And again, I'm not taking like, here's a person that said something about critical race theory. Like I'm highlighting foundational works like a rooster's egg or the rooster's egg is a foundational work in the arena of critical race theory. Like you can look it up. I'm not like nonsensing you. I'm sure you'll find it on Wikipedia. I mean, like I've listened to several people talk about as well, I mean, like, sure, we can go into examples, but I mean, like- These are examples that are in there. And again, it's an overall, and like this isn't something like that's like conspiratorial or something that's outside the norm. Like these have always been the criticisms of this discipline that relies on storytelling and lived experience. And it avoids scrutiny because oftentimes the authors or the people telling the stories happen to be black or non-white themselves and they're reaching from their own experience and they're telling us about the pain that they endured. And it's not like you can build a discipline off of how some person subjectively feels when they're telling a story. Like that's not the good foundations of academia. And like this again, it's not something that is denied. They're saying they're trying to deconstruct our traditional views of knowledge and academia. They say that knowledge and objectivity comes from the dominant culture. I don't agree with that. That's why I don't want it taught in the schools. Well, do you think that you can reasonably parse out people who have engaged in this discipline who have engaged in a way which is negligently and be able to otherwise still like preserve some of the ideas which are actually useful. Because I mean, I understand like you're citing examples where if that is happening and to the extent it's happening, then yeah, that's meritable of criticism. But it seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater where it's, you know, I think that we can reasonably be able to criticize bad practices in academia while still otherwise preserving some good ideas because like what Destiny said at the beginning, you know, like when we're engaging in discussion of the law, especially someone who is studying the law, it is good to be able to look at the law through a lens other than just assuming that everyone is a perfectly rational actor always being able to come to conclusions in the law just based on precedent because that doesn't make sense either. And you know, there's worthy criticism to be had of that kind of perspective. So wouldn't you agree that we could be able to preserve some of the useful aspects of this kind of thinking and be able to simultaneously criticize some people who have engaged with it in a negligent manner. So I look, I would agree with that. If we're talking about like philosophy, like utilitarianism, and then I found like a dumb utilitarian argument, I totally understand that. But that's because the foundations of utilitarianism are somewhat consistent or mostly consistent. But we're talking about critical race theory, which specifically rejects objective knowledge. So that doesn't seem to be representative of where it's at now. Like if I've looked at like several different sources and we can, you know, like you said, like I can send them to you as well, but I don't see anywhere in any of them that they'd say that like a central tenant is rejecting objective knowledge. It's very much based on subjective knowledge and lived experience. And again, critical race theory does not subject themselves to scrutiny from other parts of academia. And they literally say the idea of objectivity, of correctness. I mean, there was the math, the math example, where like I've seen the screenshots of the textbooks where they talk about how it's not necessarily about getting the right answer. It's the journey to get there. And that's not what math is about. Like it's like, this is a fundamental disagreement. Like I mean, if you, if you read David Bell, if you read, what's the other guy's name? Delgado, I believe. Like this is what they say. They don't hide this from you. So I don't know where you're getting sources that say, no, no, no, but sometimes we do accept objective knowledge. If like your foundational writers clearly and unapologetically say this, that objective knowledge is something that is biased and it comes from the dominant majority culture. I mean, my understanding. Oh, sorry. So I guess like, okay. Just kind of like plugging into some of this. So I think that there are a lot of things that we take for granted in society. I think that there are different lenses that we can use to analyze certain things in society. And I think that like, there are some things that are packaged along with critical race theory that aren't necessarily the worst thing. So for instance, what you just said recently, there's a lot of different things we can pick out here but I'll focus on two. So the idea that it's about, that math is about the journey to the answer. Math is absolutely about the journey. The answer is one of the least important parts of doing any type of math problem. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but if you've taken any higher level math, the understanding of the processes is a billion times more important than winding up with the correct answer. Or at least in my calc assignments or on your tests, like if you had like a 10 point problem, I don't think it was uncommon for like, the answer would be worth like two points or three points maybe, but like showing your work and all the different steps are gonna be like, where the majority of the points are given on a run. Like you could pass a calc exam, like a calc B or C, you could pass these exams and get like half the answers wrong if you showed your work every step of the way and just missed answers. That's not necessarily 100% baked into this, but just on that math is about the journey and not the answer. There were a lot of cringy things in that critical race theory textbook about math, but there were also a lot of things that like are actually really true. We need to modernize the way that we teach math a lot because right now it's taught in a horrible way. That's just kind of like one thing to the side. A second thing is, I think that this, so I'm gonna sound like a critical race theory opponent. I think that we have a very Western centric view of some things like when we say objective fact or objective truth, I think we tend to look at things in a certain way where we believe that like, I'm gonna, I'll go to, I'll take the full position. Maybe because we're white or because it's Eurocentric or whatever to where we have like a correct view of how to view like something like say history, that there are objective facts there and that's how we view it. I think that it's good to take a step back and realize that when we look at like how events occur in history, that isn't actually really the case. Even for white people, for black people, whoever, we don't actually have like these objective views of history. Like we very much kind of pick and choose which facts we wanna account for, which facts we wanna talk about, and then some things kind of fall off to the wayside. I don't know if I'm gonna light a firecracker on this debate, but like a really good example that recently is like, we have a big disagreement in this country right now over what happened in the last election or I think around half the country believes that that election is fraudulent. So I find it a little bit hypocritical, I would guess, that we would look to like critical race theory and say it's absolutely ridiculous that you're going to reject the objective reality that all of us live and believe in when right now there is, and that's just on one issue, we're gonna name it Coronavirus or Global Women or anything else, but we actually do have not only these objective truth divides in the US, but we actually have like epistemic divides in terms of how we even arrive at truth. I don't think that teaching that there is some subjectivity there is the worst thing in the world, and that does seem to be how most of us live our lives. Well, look, I take your point about show your work in math classes, but like mathematics as a discipline is about getting objectively the correct answer. Like whether or not you get some points in school doesn't change the fact that if you're an accountant and you miss report profits or earnings, the SEC is gonna come for you and you can't say, well, I showed my work and it looks like I got everything right. I just forgot to do this or that. If you're trying to land a rover on Mars, like there's detailed math calculations that go into that. And when the rover misses Mars and ends up floating into space, you're not gonna be able to go to the heads of NASA and say, hey, look, I showed my work, seemed about right, my bad. Like there's actually consequences for not pursuing objectively right answers. And to the extent that show your work is graded, it's because they're saying that you're on the right path to going there. That's a weird like little tangent to go on. As for like the examples of the election or whatever, like, yeah, there's adults that don't agree on things. That's fine. And history is way more subjective than people believe because we're relying on the accounts of people. But critical race theory in our schools, at least in some of the ways that it's been proposed to be implemented, if not implemented, is not just about like the subjective studies. And on top of that, it's not so much that it's objectively wrong, that is my issue, which would be an issue. It's that they don't care about being objectively correct. It's a discipline that projects objectivity. So I don't think that it's, man, we get into very strange epistemic discussions. When we talk about objectivity, because it's such a hard topic to get into, to visit really quick. So when we talk about like it is important to get the right answer for accounting or for landing things on Mars, I absolutely agree with you there. Those are jobs though, right? That's like where you're supposed to be for the most part done learning. I mean, you learn some job things, but like you're out of school now and now you have to compute the right answer. But getting the right answer for jobs is gonna be way different than like practicing like the journey to get there. For instance, if you look at literally anything, it could be music, it could be sports, right? You're never in your life gonna play a basketball game where you have the opportunity to like throw like 100 free throws in a row. But that's how you practice, right? You're never gonna be in a game where you just do 100 free throws, but you practice that way, right? And then much the same way in school, right? Learning fundamentals or learning different ways to learn is like it's an important part of that quote unquote journey. And I think that especially when it comes to math, I think we have been hyper focused on just like get the right answer. That's the only thing that matters, memorize the formulas. And rote memorization is probably one of the most harmful things that exist today when it comes to the learning of math. I didn't notice this until I reached my mid-20s when I saw people getting really mad about Common Core. There are a whole bunch of like math like videos that show like train tracks and boxes and it's like, this is how you do division. And everybody got really fucking mad about it. And when I watched those videos, I was like, oh fuck, I thought everybody did math on their head like this. And it became very obvious that like a lot of people are really bad at math. And it's just because they don't think about it much in their head in certain ways. And you never really taught to you just like given rote memorization. So I do agree with you that like, obviously it's good to get the answer at the end of the day when you're working in your job, but in an academic environment, that's kind of like where you're more free to like explore and grow and like, how do you learn the processes by how we get to the right answers. In terms of like objectively correct, I just, so history, we always learn about history. We never actually learned history though. Like what we're learning in whenever we read a book or whatever we take a classroom is, we're engaging in something called historiography. Where what we've actually done is you don't learn every single event about anything. We don't learn everybody. We don't learn every territory we don't learn. What we learn is we learn a collection of facts that we've kind of taken in order to tell a narrative. And you can even see a divide in the country over some things that some people would consider like not ambiguous. So for instance, when we tell the story of the Civil War, the North were the good guys and the South were the bad guys. Traditionally, that's how it's taught most of the time at least, but there are a lot of people, well, some people in the United States that would disagree with that telling of the story, right? And then other people say that when we tell the story of like US history, we typically tell it from the perspective of like, well, who were the, who were Americans, right? It was like the Puritans, those four groups that came over initially, the people that fought wars and blah, blah, blah, but other people are like, we have the 1619 project from the initiative from the New York town. It was like, well, let's actually tell this story from a different perspective. Now, some people argue that like things like the 1619 project are wrong or that's fake or it's not that's not objective history or whatever, but it is, it's just history from another point of view. So I guess I would have to like see, I would be very surprised, I could be wrong, but yeah, I was digging into it like this. I would be very surprised if a proponent of critical race theory was like, oh no, I don't believe in any objective facts. And like I reject all mathematical axioms, I reject all epistemic axioms. It's probably more along the lines of like, we need to be really careful when we say objectively correct, because what we really mean when we say objectively correct is this is the prevailing culture of the time. And if you disagree with any of the narratives that exist, you are actually wrong and stupid. A really good example that keeps coming up is African-American vernacular English. Like we want to say it's dumb and we want to call it ebonics and et cetera, et cetera, but almost nobody in the United States, even in corporate environments, will speak like actual proper written standard English. I think it's standard American English might be what it's called. Like there are tons of forms of slang that are employed in a lot of different ways. And when we talk about African-American vernacular English, I don't think we're necessarily saying like, it needs to be spoken in a corporate boardroom, just more so that if you're in a corporate environment and someone comes in and they're like, howdy y'all, today we're going to talk about, maybe not howdy, but like, hey y'all, there's like a lot of slang from other parts of the country where if you speak it, people are like, okay, yeah, it's just like whatever. But if you speak ebonics or African-American vernacular English, people automatically think this guy is a fucking idiot. What a moron speaking, speaking ebonics. This guy's not educated. When in reality, like, I mean, it exists as a separate like legitimate dialect, just like any other dialect is formed. But for some reason, when we look at this particular dialect, we instantly think uneducated, stupid, immature, like idiot, local vocabulary. All right, sorry, I'm speaking a lot, go for it. I mean, like I said, you went over a bunch of different things and a lot of it's not related. Like I don't disagree that history is like the highlights from whatever historian or what we can glean from looking back on the past. The 1619 project is objectively wrong. The first black people who arrived in 1619 didn't come as slaves. So that's objectively incorrect. Free black people made it to the Americas before slaves. So I mean, that is what it is. But as for your point on ebonics, and I call it ebonics because I literally forget every time you go into the African-American vernacular English, if that was it, because that's what it used to be called. It's not about it sounding stupid or making you sound uneducated. Like I didn't grow up in a neighborhood where everybody spoke all prim and proper, but it's important that the school teaches you to read the version of English where most of scholarship is actually written in because it greatly disadvantages you not to know this. This is what we did with white Southerners who spoke ridiculous, broken English, a lot of which is what led black people to speak in ebonics because it traces back to the South. And that broken English actually traces back to Southerners origin countries, which is the borderlands between England and Scotland on the island of Britain. So this idea that we would say, oh, it's just as valid, sure, you can communicate information, but it greatly disadvantages you not being able or not being able to understand certain words and being able to have access to the wealth of knowledge that is written in the appropriate English language. We've seen other groups have to go through this over time like the Germans had written language well before their Eastern European counterparts. So a lot of Eastern Europeans in order to find scholarship had to learn German in order to learn whatever trades they want. And it gave the Germans or Germanic people a great advantage over their Eastern European counterparts. And it led to social problems between them and all that. So I'm saying the school should, this is like, to me, it's not even a debate. The school should teach appropriate English. It greatly disadvantages black students for the schools to try to cater to them out of some misguided white guilt or critical race theory that tells us that it's just as valid. I think I lost whatever. Oh, yeah, that's for your point about mathematical terms. In the Oregon textbook, it actually says that teaching kids about the Pythagorean theorem is damaging because it gives them the impression that math was created by white people because I think the Pythagorean theorem is Greek. So that was like a specific example of a proposed textbook that I saw today in the lead up to this. So like, yeah, no, they do wanna invade the hard sciences and the Pythagorean theorem is incredibly helpful. There's a reason we use it. There's a reason we use algebra and all these other terms that come from the Islamic golden age because it objectively works and it's repeatable around the world. Yeah, so I think that we would all agree on this and I think we would have to find, I couldn't find examples of this. So just very quickly on these two things. So maybe this is like, I don't think anybody advocating for critical race theory is saying that we should no longer teach proper English. I think it's just to be a bit more respectful to what we've now deemed AAVE. I think that's the idea. It's not that like we're gonna teach kids ebonics in school. We're gonna literally teach them how to write English like rappers or whatever. I don't think that's the case. I think it's just more to have, to treat it as a legitimate dialect rather than just like a horrible thing that shouldn't even be regarded as a dialect is the first thing. And then the second thing in regards to, no one has said we shouldn't teach the Pythagorean theorem. I think it was more just when you can find, not I think I shouldn't say this because we read this earlier. It was more when you have the opportunity to find and highlight the successes of like minority mathematicians, stuff like that would be good to do. A lot of theorems are named after people. A lot of these people are white. To have people in the classroom identify more with the stuff they're learning sometimes it might be nice if you can point out examples of like, here is a woman that worked at NASA doing computations for the Apollo missions. Here's a black mathematician that discovered this thing or another thing. I think the curriculum just wanted you to highlight if you could or encourage teachers to highlight when they could. Like these are the successes of minority mathematicians not to just stop teaching certain math or stop teaching English. And I don't think we disagree that either of those things are necessarily a bad thing or I would hope not. I mean, you say things like no one, no one is proposing this, nobody is saying this. But again, like this comes from the scholars. Patricia Williams compared teaching a proper English to Jim Crow. Like because you're imposing these standards on white, on non-white people. Like you have to read the scholarship before you assert that like nobody is suggesting this. Gary Peller says that not only proper English but a bunch of other things that were instituted on the South in black schools are forms of white oppression like the removal of corporal punishment. The expansion beyond single house where you get rid of the maternal relationship between the teacher and the student. Like these people are against integration and that's not just racial integration. It's like the standardization of education. They consider forms of Jim Crow or white supremacy. Like this is again, from the scholars in the field. Like I would say to you. I'm sure that they're, yeah, there are definitely. Any one of these scholars and their writings. I mean, we can look at the scholars but I think to what Riley said earlier about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Like there are going to be some scholars that have bad takes on things. But I mean like this is a very active field of academia. Like we can hop on Google scholar right now and there are people that are fiercely writing papers responding to other people that are fiercely writing papers that are asserting their own thesis and ideas. It just, it feels to me like a very authoritarian move to be like, no, we are federally banning all critical race theory. Like wouldn't it make more sense to- I didn't say federally. Oh, okay. Well, oh, so if we don't agree with banning it then we should probably just let school boards like decide of their parts of it that they want to implement in the curriculum or the parts that they don't want to. Because I think that there are things of value here that we can all agree that like, yeah, it might be good to teach this from this perspective or that from this perspective. Cause I think normally when people call for banning it they're talking about like this federal or every state banning critical race theory. It's education is handled on the local level. Like there's been almost no talk. Joe Biden's president right now about banning on the federal level. And even if the federal government were to ban it in public education, what they would be doing is not subsidizing it, which only accounts for like 10% of education spending in the country. So like the federal government could not ban this. Local school boards and states have control over their curriculum. And I'm glad you mentioned authoritarianism because Delgado is one of the founders of critical race theory and he's very much against freedom of speech. He thinks it's damaging and the idea that if you let all these ideas out into the world that it will eventually lead to good results or better results or a widespread debate is completely false. And he believes in punishments for hate speech which is authoritarian. And again, you could call him like a random guy. I mean, he's one of the two guys that founded the discipline but it might be like one random scholar. So Sean, we're just one last thing and then you can take off. My understanding was that like we were trying to federally ban that at one point that that's why I thought Trump started that 1776 commission in response to the six. Trump was not going to pay for it to be taught to the military and other government and other government employees that had nothing to do with the education system. That had to do with training based on critical race theory being done. So one of the goals was literally to increase patriotic education via like a nationalist. The 1776 project in response to the 1619 project is a different thing from... Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. Like that 1776 commission was literally trying to make like a centralized nationalistic curriculum that was kind of in response to like Trump's attacks on critical race theory. Well, in response to the 1619 project for sure. Sure, okay. Just to pick up. So Sean, then maybe this is... I'm gonna like try to bridge the gap here because I mean, like if you're not arguing that we should ban it federally, then let me ask, so would you be fine like leaving it to essentially local school boards to be able to vote on just whatever parts of critical race theory they find to be most beneficial to students to be able to teach and allow them to be able to implement it on a local basis? Like, you know, if we're saying that there's some parts of it that are harmful then leave it to local school boards to determine, all right, so what are the harmful parts? What are the parts that are actually beneficial and be able to like set it out on their own? I mean, I wouldn't want this implemented anywhere, but like a federal, again, a federal ban is like something that's not existing. We have a federalist government, like the federal government can't just ban something in the schools, but yeah, if you gave, if you had parents with like school choice and they could opt their kids out of it, like, you know, you could have it as an elective, like California has had a bunch of these like programs as electives in their state, I still think they're damaging, but at least like you, you opt into that. Like, I don't, I don't want this mandated, but. Then maybe the other question, all right. So I mean, like, if it's not, because I mean, like a lot of the question or a lot of the issues that you're bringing up, I mean, like, I would trust that school boards could be able to sift through and determine like, all right, so like the parts where like the, the authoritarian aspect that you brought up before, right? I would assume that school boards could be able to reasonably parse out like, okay, that's something that we shouldn't be allowed to, that we should not teach our kids, right? But like, you know, do you think that there's any aspect of critical race theory that could be reasonably salvaged if school boards are left to their own devices that could be taught to kids in a safe way? I mean, the whole program is anti-intellectual, so I wouldn't teach it. Like if you're gonna say, hey, here's one thing that one critical race theory scholar wrote that might sound reasonable. Like that doesn't mean that the discipline should still be taught or like that specific portion of the discipline. I'm in favor of civil rights education in our public schools. I'm in favor of teaching negative history about the United States of America in our public schools. But critical race theory is not, I have no interest in it. I read over the scholars and like, what their thoughts are in American society and how they come to justify their, their statements and policies, prescriptions and no, it's like inherently a political ideology and this isn't denied by any of the scholars. Like it's inherently an activist ideology. Oh, go ahead. You keep these that were like anti-intellectual. I don't know what you mean by that. They don't subject themselves to scrutiny from other academic disciplines. Like, what do you mean when you say that? So if you're a discipline in a university, right? There's like review boards and all this stuff to kind of, like, you know, it's like the peer reviewed system, right? Like they reject those things and are very insular. So they don't, they say that the objective standards of the modern educational institution, I believe this comes directly from David Bell. So critical race theorists don't, there's no peer review. They don't publish in journal. I didn't say that there's no peer review, but I said that they reject criticism from outside. They even label criticism from non-whites on the outside as people like basically catering to the white academic structure. I mean, you could look up critical race theories views or theorist views on academia. Like it's, isn't it doesn't peer review typically, like for the majority of peer review, doesn't that typically come from within your own discipline? Like don't psychologists get super asthmad when like neuro biologists or neuroscientists try to publish stuff related to like what they feel in psychology or don't economists fight with other disciplines because sometimes people that study sociology like criminal justice get asthmad because a lot of economists will take like models and try to like model crime and stuff. Like that doesn't seem to be unique to critical race theory in terms of like, they still subject themselves to it. Like, like, yeah, they can fight like pretty vision. I mean, like, that's what I would prefer. Yeah, but necessarily so do critical race theories as well. They must be. I mean, other people are publishing in journals. They're publishing in journals. Like every field is going to subject us off. I just, we're, you're saying this like it's very special or peculiar that like critical race theories. It's how it's designed. It is very peculiar. Like this was, I'm sure there's other disciplines that are like in the activist studies, like, like realm like this is that have followed suit. But yeah, it is. And they often label criticism against them racist and attacks on their person because they're telling personal stories about how they felt. It's really hard to review a personal story of how you felt in any kind of objective academic sense. Yeah, but so like everybody in academia will fight when outside disciplines try to critique their ideas. That's not unique to critical race theory or any field. Even physicists and other disciplines will fight over like mathematicians and physicists will sometimes fight over things. I think the idea that there's like a hostility towards external review of your particular discipline, I don't think that's unique at all to critical race theory. In terms of like they get mad because people are critiquing their stories. I mean, like, are you asserting that like the majority of critical race theory papers are just stories? Like that's all it is? My point is how can you critique like stories? Storytelling is a big component of it. It describes itself as a holistic discipline. But so obviously- So if I were to go and look up like the majority of like published critical race theory papers or all of them or the majority of them gonna be like yesterday I went to the store and there was a doll and she upset me because it was more expensive than- Is the overwhelming majority, like is that even a noble question? Like I would hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised that the answer was yes. I mean, Regina, I'm sorry, not Regina. Patricia Wilson's book, like The Rooster's Egg is a bunch of stories. Like stories about her going to adopt a black kid and then her deciding that this also proves that black people are undervalued in our society that the fee for older black kids in this adoption center was half of the fee for younger white kids. Which like, I mean, it could be indicative of racism but I'm sure like if anybody has ever looked into adoption ever, you know that adopting older kids towards adoption becomes more difficult the older the kids are. So obviously it would be more, they would try everything to get you to take those kids. But yeah, like it's, it's storytelling. For them, not at all, but yeah. You think that you might be being like a little uncharitable. I mean, like right now, you cited one example and when you were asked about, well, is this happening in the majority of cases? You're like, well, I hope not. And I mean, like right now, I mean, like if it is happening widespread, then yeah, that is a problem that, you know, the large academic field is based primarily on storytelling. But like right now, I mean, like sure, we can criticize one person and there's room to be able to do that, but it doesn't seem justifiable to be able to take like, oh, well, one person did it. So like it's possible that a lot of people could be doing that. Like that doesn't seem to be substantiated. Well, again, these are like common criticism of discipline that it's based on storytelling. And like, again, it's not something that's denied by critical race theorists. Like I don't know, like maybe you should read some like foundational literature on it. And for me, like for you to call or say, I'm being a little bit disingenuous, like I can cite multiple different authors and like absurd things that they said, but like I think there's nothing more disingenuous than saying, well, do you think the overwhelming majority of all papers written on this topic ever fall into this category? Like how would I possibly know that? I mean, I haven't spent my entire life studying this. Well, I mean, the reason that I'm asking that question is because when you bring up like individual people as examples for your argument to substantiate it, I mean, that falls into the same kind of issue as like citing two personal stories where you're only relying on like one example to try to prove a larger phenomenon, right? Like, I was reading like the Stanford encyclopedia philosophy earlier to read about critical theory, right? And like you get like a pretty robust definition of like what critical theory is that isn't just reliant on like, oh, well, this one person did something and that's, and this is descriptive of the entire field, right? Like, sure, like citing one person can be good if we're able to demonstrate like a representative of a larger phenomenon, but like you need a separate kind of example. Otherwise like it is like individual anecdotal evidence, right? Like it's the same issue that like you're bringing up to criticize or like to make the criticism that you're alleging. Does that make sense? Sure, but like I'm not citing random people that wrote some things about critical race theory. Like when I say Delgado, I mean Delgado as in Delgado and Bell, the foundational writers from it. Like, I don't know, like when I say Patricia Williams, she's a well-known scholar in critical race theory. She's often referenced in the papers of others. Like... I think that something that would be more relevant or interesting I guess is cause is rather than like this is like the foundational like writings on a particular topic. It would be more interesting to see like problematic implementations. Cause at the end of the day, implementation is what we're talking about. Like if we would have applied, you know, if you go back a few decades, we would have applied the same thought to psychology. You know, when it was a burgeoning field under Floyd, not Floyd, Freud, when it was like first taking off, like all of these same criticisms could have been levied at psychology. And it's like, well, should we do any further starting studying? Should we do any more paper publishing? Like this is like a waste of time. Like this guy is literally telling stories with no scientific backing and the foundational expert in the field. The first guy to take psychology seriously, Sigmund Freud is like, just not doing a good job. Like I'm sure that there are problematic views that are asserted by some early foundational critical race theorists. And there are probably like a wide number of topics that we disagree on. But in terms of like the actual implementation, like what, you know, boils down to the curriculum or what is being taught to like educators or whatever. I don't, I haven't seen, and this is why I said at the very beginning that maybe we should focus on some of these individual topics. Like, I don't see there being a huge problem of like analyzing like, well, what do we mean when we say like objective truth? Or when we analyze some particular standards by which we hold ourselves or, you know, like why do we treat certain dialects, certain others? Like I don't think these are necessarily bad, like things to be learning about in a classroom setting. I do want to give you the last word, Sean, just because it is true that it's, there's one person of your position, you could say tonight. And so before we do, we'll give you a pithy last word. We do want to then transition into the next topic, namely what is and what isn't transphobia, where there's a line drawn. So we'll give you a chance to give that last response, Sean. Yeah, so overall, like, if you look at the foundational writers and you can read like papers more common and well-known people are people like Iver Max Kendi who believes that no policies are neutral. Every policy either falls into the category of racist or anti-racist and we have to promote anti-racism in order to reach equity, which is policies that actively try to reverse discrimination by creating positive discrimination. Again, his words, not mine is that you like, is that you find this in the scholarship. There's an over-reliance on, I've lost my train of thought totally right there and I'm about to bail out of the sentence. But yeah, so what you find and what I gathered from my two opponents on this issue is what I believe to be a lack of understanding on the issues that we're talking about. So like, if I go to the foundations of the discipline and I talk about like what the original writers wrote about it and what scholarship through the years has promoted, I think that this is more substantial than the individual examples of schools because I'm certain had I brought up like implementation in Michigan or implementation in North Carolina of these programs and people's objections of it or the Oregon implementation, then those would have been also classified as anecdotes. So like, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I misunderstood the parameters of the debate, but like when we talk about incorporating critical race theory in the curriculum, I think it's important to examine the foundations of critical race theory. Like who came up with this, not just what one school board is doing here versus another school board over there. So that's really it. Well, quickly, James, I actually had three questions from Chad. Can I throw them at them or should we move on to the next topic? If it's possible to wait toward the end, because I think we do that clump Q and A in the end, but do want to mention folks, if you are new here, want to let you know in particular to my, right over here, my left, your left, Dylan is our co-host and co-moderator tonight. We are thrilled to be collaborating with Dylan who is linked in the description below, as well as our guests. So if you have not checked out our guest links, we encourage you, you certainly can right now as we really do appreciate them as well as Dylan for co-hosting and moderating with us tonight, we're going to jump into the next topic. In particular, where is the line drawn on transphobia? In particular, for example, would it be transphobic if someone happened to say that they were not for children, trans children being allowed to use puberty blockers? That's one particular example we could examine, but does anybody have any opening thoughts for this topic? Sure, I mean, I can go ahead, I've given some thought about this, not the trans youth aspect, but just like transphobia in general. So if you don't mind, I can go ahead and look at that. Yeah, you bet. All right. So basically, transphobia, I mean, I'll acknowledge it, like it's a term that's thrown around a lot. And so I want to be very conscientious that like, you know, we want to be like precise with what we're meaning when we're citing something as transphobia or else it becomes one of those terms that kind of loses meaning, right? So like the simple definition I would have is like transphobia is where one person causes another person harm by virtue of the fact that the person who is harmed is transgender, right? That's like the simple definition, but the problem with that is that like harm is a very nebulous term. So I usually think in terms of like two kinds of harm, right? Intentional harm where someone tries to harm someone else by virtue of the fact that they're transgender or negligent harm where someone directly causes, meaning that but for their action, the other outcome would not have occurred and proximately causes where an average reasonable person would foresee the action as harmful or transphobic where they cause someone to experience a harm by virtue of the fact that they're transgender. A good example to just demonstrate this is like if I were walking down the street with my yaya and someone, we pass someone and they see me and they see that I'm trans and they intentionally try to transgender me because they just really hate trans people, that would be like intentionally harm, right? Like they're trying to cause me harm by virtue of the fact I'm trans. And then a little bit later, my yaya who loves me and who I'm like best friends with, she accidentally misgenders me. There's still a harm there, but she didn't intentionally cause that. She was just negligent in that action, you know? She caused it directly and she well should have known that that was the outcome, right? That's usually how I'll parse it out. We can get like into more particulars, but that's how I parse it personally. You got it. Thanks very much. Anybody else in terms of opening thoughts? You got it. What? It's like, throw your opening thoughts out there, define it. I mean, I think I'd largely agree. I feel like this entire conversation is just gonna be about kids taking puberty bloggers, but we'll see where we go. I agree with everything you're saying. Okay, so I mean, I didn't know you just agreed. You should have said that. So I wouldn't ask you to take it. So yeah, transphobia, I mean, a phobia is supposed to be an irrational fear, but obviously we use like transphobia in the same way that we use racism as like, you know, so like, even though I don't think it makes sense or whatever, whatever, but yeah, transphobia is, I guess, like a hatred or an anger or some kind of prejudice against trans people as commonly defined. I don't think that certain concerns are transphobic. I'm sure that's where we'll disagree, even if they do cause hurt feelings by certain people. Yeah, so that's it. Not really. You got it. I do wanna ask. So for example, one topic we have coming up on a debate, this coming Monday in particular, is it transphobic if a person were to not define trans women as fitting under the umbrella of women? Are you advertising or are you asking us that? Asking you guys that. I would say so. I would say that falls under like negligence. Even if you don't intend to cause harm that like you're still directly causing, in this case, like a spread of misinformation. I'll qualify that as misinformation. I'll just say that's factually incorrect. And you're doing something which would lead any reasonable person to know or would lead like most reasonable people, especially like within the trans community to recognize it. Like, yeah, that would cause harm to trans people. So I would say that like, even if you don't intend it, that it would cause at least negligent harm. I feel like for this, like I'm probably gonna have a middle of the road here. I feel like you can literally just say cis woman or trans woman, or you can use biological woman if you wanna have like a medical conversation and you would literally cover all of your bases here and literally everybody's happy and you haven't lost the utility out of any word whatsoever. The people that like hyper obsess over gatekeeping like the category of woman or man like always does it under some weird guys of like biology or something when like you can super easily have these conversations by just using terms like, like they're sexist female or they're sexist male or I'm using cisgender versus like transgender. Like I feel like that solves for everything. So I feel like when people argue against it, I don't know where the inspiration comes from. Gotcha. Yeah, I mean, like it just depends on how you're defining woman. If you're defining woman as adult human female as in biological sex, then I guess no, like that would be like accurate. If you're saying like women as like currently vaguely defined in our society, then maybe, I don't know. I guess it could be like, I don't know if it's transphobic, but like, yeah, I can see how it could be upsetting if you feel like you're not included when you feel like you should be included. I mean, when we say adult, so like that's the argument that's usually brought up by like, so a lot of tariffs will bring up the argument and usually it's comes from like the dictionary, but even the dictionary, I mean like, we want to just like use that as a starting point. Even the ox, I believe it's the Oxford dictionary actually now includes like a social, like a recognition of like the social category one, like it finds it meaningfully useful in the same way that most academic organizations which study this find it useful to like delineate between like gender, which is largely societally constructed and then biological sex. Like even the dictionary nowadays like finds that distinction useful. Gotcha. So there's kind of a comfortable sitting together here. How about as an example, Joe Rogan's position, you already know what it is, in particular on whether or not trans women should be able to participate in women's sports. Would this be transphobic or is this reasonable disagreement? Does he have like a blanket ban or like what's his like full position? That's a good question because I don't know if it's for every sport, like a universal sport kind of rule. I know that it's for UFC in particular. He is specifically advocated though that trans women should not be able to compete with women's, you could say women competitors. I mean, like just so like this is probably one of the more complicated topics as far as like trans issues because like most of the literature seems to suggest that like one of the main defining category, one of the main defining features for why you have like men's and women's sports is the effects of testosterone, like as broad kind of over, there's a lot more there but that's like the broad defining distinction, right? Like the effects of testosterone. So like just to shortcut some of like my answer is that like I would probably say that like if you had been through like a testosterone based puberty and you've already experienced the effects of that then I would probably say like go on hormone replacement therapy for a couple of years which has shown to like decrease a lot of that like the advantage, quote unquote that would be conferred from testosterone to the point where, you know different athletics organizations have drawn like different lines for where to draw this. I believe that most organizations usually have it like two to three years draw like that kind of line and then, you know, you'll probably be fine. Yeah, I don't think it's transphobic at all Joe Rogan. Like it's all about what the purpose of these sports are. Men's sports is supposed to be the most competitive possible. It's like, you know, dangerous or more dangerous typically than female sports and female sports are made for like the safety of women. There's virtually, for most major league there's no rules preventing women from competing in male sports. It's just about like having like that level of competition for you to be able to get in there because there's that much of a distinct difference especially when you're talking about people who are already athletes in the other sport like these are people at peak physical condition for whatever game we seem to be talking about. Obviously there's some exclusions like less athletic sports, we get that but like I believe that Serena Williams the greatest female tennis player of all time. Like if you were to rank her serve speed it ranks somewhere where in a men's college server. So there is a distinct advantage. So I've been pretty clear. I think men's sports should be open to everybody because it already is. Female sports are designed for biological females. I have no problem with female to male transitioners going into men's sports if they can compete. I have no problem with women regardless of a biological women regardless of they transition going into male sports as long as they compete. If we have to reach a point in time where we have to make a separate league for transgender people then like, you know that remains to be determined at some point in the future but female sports are for biological females. It's for the safety of them. And a lot of it in the United States of America is done to like equality balance male sports and universities for scholarships, et cetera, et cetera. And it is an unfair advantage in a lot of these cases. Except I wouldn't say that it's like primarily for the like the protection of women, right? Like we could look at certain sports like sure, like with MMA or like similar like contact sports we could make that argument but it seems to be a broad like across the case primarily because of like the advantages conferred from testosterone. I mean, like that comes from a lot of people who draw these policies within, you know like the Olympics committee like they recognized that like, you know this is the primary reason why they make these distinctions so they wanna be able to like recognize that so they can be able to make space for like trans women to be able to compete if you know they meet certain criteria. But like as far as the harm argument I mean like, you know, we could look at like you know, if you have track where no person is touching each other they're just all running in a straight line or competing in their own individual events against each other. Like there's no possible harm that could be caused to each other. And I mean like as far as the idea that like oh well, maybe the harm is like that someone might lose a financial scholarship. I mean, like there's other things to be said about that argument. I would probably love you that more as a criticism of like our lack of access to education but as far as like physical harm there's no like, it doesn't seem like there that that's a reasonable justification to say like oh, that's the reason that this distinction existed this in these types of arenas. Well, that's one reason I said physical harm because Joe Rogan's position from my understanding it's probably more broad in terms of sports but he was specifically talking about MMA and a specific fighter in MMA. So, but I, you know, so I'm talking that was in the reference to like physical contact sports like obviously track, it's just the advantage of like male over female in running. That would be- Right, but then why is like why would it be more protective like in MMA? Like why would it be more protective? Cause my answer like why it would like protect women in that instance is because of advantages conferred from testosterone. So like if you had for example, like a pre like a trans woman who as a youth taking this back to like the trans youth argument cause this is why I think it's there's one reason I think it's very important to be able to make healthcare access or gender-affirming care very accessible to trans youth. You know, if you take a trans woman who realizes that she's trans from young age and you're able to put her on puberty blockers so she doesn't experience the effects of testosterone like the advanced like possible advantages like disappear, right? And so there would be like no possibility of harm from that trans woman if she wanted to to be able to go on and having never been conferred that unfair advantage from testosterone to be able to go off and compete in MMA. Like there should be no issue there at least based on the body of literature. I mean, like I said, I don't think it's just down to testosterone. There are advantages to going through a biological male puberty, especially in a lot of the sports that we're talking about. Like I'm not a doctor. I mean, if you want to say like the Olympic committee I think they say one year on testosterone suppressants therefore that makes it totally fair. I don't believe that when I see like a transgender person set records in weightlifting for women's sport for women's weightlifting. I think that like we all understand what's happening and it's a bit ridiculous but professional sports honestly and the Olympics like they can make up whatever categories they want like in terms of in our universities like the entire purpose of women's sports in many cases and men's teams actually get shut down because they don't have enough female athletes to counterbalance like the football team is for women to have sports, to have scholarships and for them to have it in a way that is competitive for them. And when I say women, I mean biological females in that instance, I'll try to delineate between women and females because there's different definitions obviously through this conversation. I don't want to get bogged down in that but like the purpose of female sports is to have like female sports. I mean like, all right. I wouldn't say that's not like the purpose but going back to like the weightlifting argument like I know that a lot of people will pick up like the individual instances where you have a trans woman who does very well but trans women have been competing in like a professional sports for a good while now and the vast majority of the time when they compete I mean, they can do like, all right but they aren't usually out there like setting these massive records, right? Like most of them have like a decent careers but don't actually like, you know it's not as if like every single trans woman who goes out and competes in professional sports ends up like dominating the field, right? It's only whenever like someone happens to be able to do that that there ends up being like all these people coming out like saying, oh, we'll see this is what's gonna be the case for every single trans woman who competes when it's not even the majority of the time. So it seems like when we're citing like, oh, you know, when we see this happen, you know in professional sports, it's implying that this happens a lot more often than it actually does. I mean, I don't know how often that happens. A lot of the sports that we're talking about I don't even watch, right? I'm just saying what the purpose of the of these sports are, what they're designed for. Like, again, if you were to set up side like a separate league, then I think that's fine. Again, I have no problem with female to male trans competing in male sports. I just think that women's sports is specifically for biological women for the number of advantages going through a male puberty and just the nature of our dimorphid species actually infers on them for people in terms of sports. Like, you know, again, I'm not an expert biologist. I don't watch sprinting or any of this stuff. I don't care about the Olympics. Honestly, torch out. Well, I mean, like if the literature does show, and I mean, it seems like the literature broadly shows this to be true. If we're able to show that like A, people who don't show don't go through like a male puberty actually experience like or are conferred any of these disproportionate advantages like what you're talking about as your main concern or that after trans women go on to hormone replacement therapy for a long enough period, then the majority of those conferred benefits whatever they are largely go away in terms of how they affect performance. Like, if those two things are true, then the argument that like, oh, well, they're going to have a disproportionate advantage seems to be reasonably settled. And also like going back because I mean like, and I mean, like we can have another argument about like what is the purpose of sports? Cause I don't think it's settled that like, oh, the purpose of these categories is just for biological females and just for biological males, right? Like it seems like we probably largely draw up these sporting categories just to have them be as fair as possible. Like to have as like, you know, in our imperfect society be able to draw up like the most like the fairest forums that we can have, you know so that we can get as close to a competition where or competitions where the only defining factor that determines who wins and loses is how much training and time people put in, you know, like as close to like pure egalitarianism as, or not egalitarianism. Meritocracy. There, yeah. As close to like a pure meritocracy as possible. So like, if the evidence shows that under certain situations, given the right kinds of steps taken by trans women that were able to like, you know, reasonably assuade concerns that that would not be the case. And I don't see any reason why not to allow them. I mean, like, as far as sports being about like having a level playing field or that training as a determining factor, I mean, that's not the case. I'm natural talent plays a huge role. Like, I could train twice as hard as LeBron James. He's still six, eight, 280 pounds and runs like the wind and can fly basically compared to me. Like it's not going to happen. So like we, like there's like natural advantage. There's training and all that stuff that goes into it, but like, we broadly use the categories of sex, even though again, there's typically not a prohibition for biological women to go into male sports. For the men, we're trying to have the most like competitive competition, which is why there's not really a barrier preventing women from entering men's sports. And for women, it's usually on the university level for scholarships and for them to have like more of a level, more fair playing field. I think fairness plays more into the female sports than the male sports, if I'm being honest. Because I mean, look at the disparities between college, you know, like teens. But if you're able to go back, like if we're able to, like if we're able to demonstrably show that if trans women either don't go through testosterone based puberty or they go on like several years of HRT, that it is a fair fight or it is a fair competition, then going off that logic, it doesn't make any sense to still keep them out even when it would otherwise be fair for them, right? Like I know trans women who are weaker, probably more so than like most cis women. It doesn't make sense to keep them out of women's sports if there's no possibility of a conferred advantage. I mean, ultimately, like, yeah, you can watch it all. If you like prove that beyond whatever standard, most sporting organizations say that it's already been proven to be on any standard than, you know, whatever, like I agree with Joe Rogan that I do think there is an advantage, but like, you know, I'm not in charge of these things. So, you know, that's how you end up with Fallon Fox fighting people in the U.S. city. So, I don't know. And as for people not going through male puberty, so like that's like an earlier in transition, honestly, I don't even know about that. So like maybe that does significantly deteriorate any kind of natural advantage. I wouldn't know, like I'm not a doctor. I don't pretend to be. I mean, like if you want, I mean, like I've read a lot of literature on that. I mean, I can send you that later, but that does seem to, at least based on the literature that exists currently. And like there can be more literature on it, but that seems to be at least what seems to be the case from what evidence exists currently. Like that for people who... I do want to draw one like delineation because a lot of the like cases that people reference of like this trans person setting this record or whatever is typically somebody who was already an athlete pre-transition. Because yeah, there are some men that are weaker than some women, et cetera, et cetera. Like I understand all those like logical exercises and all that, but like when you incorporate like training and specifically for like, you know, to be an athlete, like that widens the disparities like we... So yeah, like a lot of the people who set records were like low level weightlifters or low level runners in the male division pre-transition and then they transitioned and they blew away their competition. So I think that's like a little bit more like indicative than like this random trans person who didn't have an athletic bone in their body pre-transition is slower than this like top female sprinter like after her transition. Like to me, that's not like, yeah. That's not really anything that's... Like going back to, I mean, like there could be some argument there. I think that there's some literature out there that like if you do a ton of training pre-transition and then you go through transition even after a couple of years that you could still have some conferred advantage. But so like there is some evidence, I believe to make that claim. But again, like we've seen that a lot of people who have been career athletes who then go on to transition after already beginning their athletic career don't actually go on to like dominate the field, right? So even if that is the case for some people it doesn't seem to be the case for the majority of people like who you are describing. Since we... We haven't heard from... Like I don't watch like the sports that we're talking about. Like I'm a baseball guy and I'm missing the Grom Dominic right now. So... Since we haven't heard from Steven for a while Steven any thoughts on this? Otherwise, shortly we're gonna jump into the final topic for the night before we go into Q&A. I mean, it feels like there's pretty big agreement on both sides here. Riley is kind of trying to get actual just a word to say that like assuming there's no massively conferred advantage that it should be okay for trans people to compete. I think everybody would agree with that. Usually the debate is over whether there is a conferred advantage. I think Riley agrees it seems to be the case that if you do go through puberty as a certain sex there's going to be like undeniable and I don't have to say irreparable changes to your body, but like you go through like traumatic physiological changes that are more than just increase of production and testosterone or something. So past that it seems to be pretty difficult. I mean like we go back and forth I don't agree that the purpose of classes or whatever are to keep people safe. I totally disagree with that. I think that classes are created because people want sports to be fair. The idea is supposed to be that it's merit-based that whoever works the hardest can win. But I mean, as extra justice warrior pointed out I mean, if that were the case we would have height classes in the NBA and we don't. So I mean, yeah. I don't think I have much to add on this topic. Also it's just Sean. You don't have to call me by my channel name. I didn't wanna dox you. You got it. We can give you the last word on this Riley as I think you were about to respond to Sean before I jumped in there. And then what we'd like to do after that is jump into defunding the police. No, I think that actually like destiny like capture kind of my, what I will say is that just like just on like the testosterone conferring of benefit I think that is true in like the majority of cases but like this can be an entire conversation in itself is that like how do we draw these lines legislatively? Because we probably don't wanna draw it just based on like did you like go through testosterone based puberty because like there are also instances like plenty of people who I know where they actually go through that kind of puberty and they come out on the other end and actually like even without taking puberty blockers they aren't really conferred any benefit at all and they end up being like on it like weaker than most is women, right? There's like more nuance to be had in there. It's why this is one of more complicated topics but we don't have to get into it if it's just gonna be like an entire another thing. You got it. So just to point out, yeah, if there was no difference or whatever like I wouldn't have any separation in the leagues but like we draw a bunch of distinctions in our leagues, weight classes, et cetera, et cetera. Like, yeah, obviously there's no difference at all. I just, I don't believe that there's no difference but obviously there's no like unfair advantage, et cetera, et cetera, then like whatever like ultimately it's like female sports that I don't watch anyway. So, yeah. Gotcha. So we're gonna jump right into it. Defunding the police, good idea, bad idea and not necessarily binary. So maybe it's just kind of like, well maybe just to find it a little bit. Not too much. What are your guys thoughts? This topic is absolute unmitigated cancer even more so than the critical race theory topic. I think that for critical race theory I think there are some good ideas there that we can have but it's oftentimes sold with a whole bunch of the dumb shit and this topic feels exactly the same. There's probably good conversations to be had about reallocating certain types of police funding in order to make the police more effective. It's kind of weird that we expect a police officer to also be a social worker that responds to domestic violence issues. We also expect them to be like a fucking animal control thing that responds to crazy dog attacks. We also expect them to be like a social worker that can respond to like mentally deranged people doing shit. And then on top of that also be like police officers. That's not realistic. The great contradiction though in the slogan defund the police is that 99% of the things that people ask for like additional police training, body cams, additional training to deal with a different set of issues would all require an increase in funding. So I can support like the ideas that some of the people have about behind defund the police. But I think that the narrative has been largely hijacked by very far left people and very far right people to where people on the left will say shit like we need to get rid of the police entirely so that we can go back to Chas and raping people and shit and whatever crazy shit was happening there or people on the right will say like the police unions are perfect. They just need more money, more power. We need to militarize the fuck out of all the police because blah, blah, blah. And I don't know that the answer I think is I think that changing the purpose of what the police as an institution does I think is good. And then kind of shifting funding around to resemble those changes would naturally follow suit. Any other thoughts from anybody else? Oh, we should not defund the police. I bought a siren just for this intro. Don't defund the police. That is all. Gotcha. We might have something you all three agree on but Riley don't be afraid to disagree if you wanna throw your hat into the ring in the opposite direction, go ahead. Oh God, do I wanna be contrarian? I'm sorry, I'm not gonna be that contrarian. Well, I don't know, it depends. So like the thing is, so like my main issues with the police like if I wanna be complete are currently like legal issues. So like police use of force and what those standards should be. No knock warrants, police bill of rights and like certain protections that are conferred which they probably shouldn't have and things like that. Implementation, like Sean, you and I have talked about before, like over policing of poor POC areas. And then like, and this is like the weird thing, right? Is like a lack of training. Cause like, you know, when we look at certain studies and we see that there are ways even if it's relatively small where police disproportionately negatively treat black people I know that we talked before about the study where it showed that like all else equal police will pull over black people more often during the day. But at night, that difference goes away seeming to suggest like a racial bias. But there it's like, it seems to be a lack of training. So the things that I want are like a legal or legislative reforms and better police training. So it's like police budgets need to change however they need to to achieve these for me. I'm going to be largely fine with however they're changed. But that being said, right? I think that like if I want to like steal man the defund the police position, like if there are areas where we can demonstrably use some unused police funds to increase access to mental health care or related circumstances for where police are normally called but not needed that would be fine to me. It's just that like when people bring up examples of like police being overfunded right now they'll usually just show like flat stats for like oh ex police department is being funded like this much. It'll be like a crazy amount, right? But there's no good way as far as I can tell to be able to determine like if that's too much or like how much of those funds go unused because it could just be the case where police departments get like a lot of funding but actually like they do have to use all of it or they do use all those funding, right? So it's like if it is the case where police departments are being overfunded to the point where they're not using some of the funds that they're funded and some of those things could go towards other things that police are normally called for but not needed for out support that. It just doesn't seem like the evidence exists to be able to substantiate that right now. Gotcha. Everybody feel good about that? Refund the police. No, I mean, yeah. So since nobody's really taking the position of defunding the police, I mean we hear about some like reallocation of money from the police department. Public education is way more wasteful and oftentimes like way more money. So reallocate from over there. Like that's all being wasted anyway. As far as like racial bias in the police, I mean the study that you cited or the traffic stop data, it's something like the discrepancy between day and night is between five and 10%. And if you look at that data set, it's just like an Excel sheet of traffic stops. Like there's no indication of who's on the road more often or less often at different periods of time. And like this is a situation where people see a gap and they fill that gap with racism rather than like actually study and determine what the explanation for that is. I think police racism is greatly overstated. I think violence by American police is significantly higher than most European counterparts. Largely due to the fact that we have guns and higher rate of violent crime, not completely. There are instances where you can improve police training, sure. But like, you know, you can't really do that. I think Destiny said it. You can't really do that if you're cutting funding. You can't say train more, but also here's less money. So like, yeah, there's some police reforms that are good, sure, but a lot of, there's a lot of negative effects to the pullback on funding for the police that we've seen so far. And I think that in an era of spiking homicides we should add more money into our police departments, not less. I mean, to be able to respond to that. I mean, so with the study that you cited, I mean, my recollection from reading the study is that they control for as many other factors as possible. So they'll control for driving, like, you know, like whether each person was speeding or not, they control for driving records, they control for criminality. So it seems like they do a lot more than most studies in terms of mitigating other alternative causes, causative factors. And then to the idea that it's like 10 or 15%, I mean, like it did meet statistical significance, right? Like that's not nothing, right? Like it's like- And it's 10 or 15% over like, I think it was a hundred million stops, I think- It was like five to 10%, I mean, I don't remember 10 to 15%. That's what, oh, I thought that's what you said earlier. If I misheard then, okay. But like the idea that like it's statistically significant with such a high count, like even if it's not like, that big of an effect, like it does exist. And if the solution is to invest more in funding the police, then again, like I'm not really, I'm agnostic on whether or not to defund or refund, just whatever is able to like mitigate that to zero or as close to zero as possible. So like, if it ends up being the case that we just, in order to be able to get better police training, then we need to invest more than I'm on board with that if it's able to like reduce that number. But I don't see why we would avoid having more police training if there is like a pretty substantial likelihood that it reduces that and other, I mean, like there's other like studies and examples of empirical evidence. They're able to demonstrate like police bias towards people of color. But I mean, like that's not trying to say that, like police are individually racist or anything like that, right? Like we all allow our biases to affect the ways that we interact with the world. But it would seem beneficial to train police better to make sure that their biases definitely don't impact their line of work since they're one of the few professions that can take the life of another person in the course of their day-to-day life. Most people can't do that. So it would seem better to invest more training in them to make sure that like when that does happen, that these biases play as minimal to no impact in those kinds of situations. Right. I'm gonna ask you for like an example of something else because I haven't looked at the like traffics, the overall traffic stops analysis like from my recollection, like if you click the thing, it's just like an Excel spreadsheet of all these stops, which is a lot of stops. And then there's the analysis on top of it, but I don't remember specifically which factors were controlled for. So like, you know, I'll give that point to you on charity because I don't, I actually don't recall at the moment. And if you're telling me something different, I don't wanna assume that you're wrong or lying, but like the New Jersey traffic study is a perfect example of this where they determined that according to population, they were over targeting black drivers, but when they controlled for speeding, which is what they were being pulled over for, they found that they were actually under targeting black drivers on that offense because black drivers typically sped more and had greater speeding violations than other drivers on the road at the same time. And also the reason I bring up the day for night thing is we know like a number of different things between blacks and whites are different in the United States of America or other racial or ethnic groups. So it could be the case that a significantly less proportion of black people are driving at night as compared to during the day compared to white people. Or, you know, there's more, not even compared to white people but just compared to themselves. Like they might be driving more during the day than they would at night. Like I don't know that, but that's like one of the things that you would look for and try to control for in order to determine whether or not there's a bias. You have to exclude the other factors in order to get what you're looking for. Well, then let me ask you this because I mean, like, sure, like with any study we can be able to say that like, oh, well, there could be some other causative thing that wasn't actually evaluated here. But I mean, like it seems to be the case that there's like a reasonable amount of evidence that exists currently. Like, and again, we're not saying like, or at least I am not proposing me individual here, Riley Grace Rashong. I am not advocating that we like defund or get rid of the police. What I'm advocating for is better training and investing in training. Like that doesn't seem like a controversial ask when there's already a pretty reasonable amount of evidence to suggest that there's like, you know, like, I don't know, burdens of proof. Let's say that there's at least, that we've met at least a preponderance of the evidence that it's more likely than not in some respect, if not others that racism plays or at least like racial bias plays like some kind of impact or plays in some kind of way in how police conduct their line of work, right? So if we, you know, if we find that, like if that evidence does exist, criticize it as you might want to, I don't see a reason why not to take that as like a decent cause to at least try investing more in police training and then be able to evaluate from there like, oh, well, we've invested more, let's do some studies to see if that reduces these numbers, do some follow-up studies. Like it doesn't, I don't see why not invest more and then be able to like evaluate after like if there's any cause of relationship, right? Because that would be the best way to know, you know? Like see, like, all right, we're gonna invest more in training and then after we've invested in this training and we have some time pass, we do like the same kind of measurements, is there any kind of demonstrable change, right? And hopefully the number would go down. Like I don't see any reason why we wouldn't do that. If something like merits further study, I'm fine with that. But like we went from there's a five to 10% gap between day and night in the amount of black people being stopped by the police to like me asking, well, how many like drivers in proportion is there a similar change in the drivers to, well, maybe if there's a preponderance of the evidence, it might be indicative of this. It's like, sure, I'm down to like, I'm down to like go into that and look further into that. I'm always interested in more information and more data. We should be skeptical of our police forces, but we moved from this five to 10% gap is racism to well, maybe if, you know, instead of looking for this explanation to that, like we've like moved all the way down to like, you know, maybe there could be some bias, maybe. Well, it's not moving away. Hold on, it hasn't moved away from there, right? It's saying that we have this evidence that bias could exist. It seems like it's a reasonably indicative of that. So let me ask the question, like are you opposed to investing more in training? It's reasonably indicative of that. Because it controls for other factors which other people would normally point to in those kinds of situations. Like who's on the road? I mean, it controls for like driving record. So it's not the matter like, oh, well, black people are pulled over more because they drive worse. Like, no, that's controlled for, and I mean, there's other factors that I controlled for on the study. That was like the main one, right? Like it's a really good example of like taking all else equal. It seems to be the case that skin color is like the main determining thing for why black people are pulled over more by police during the day than at night when skin color wouldn't be noticeable by police officers. And in that instance, I mean like... Here's my issue is that, so what this study did is it looked at a bunch of traffic stops. Like it took traffic stop data from around the country. Now, because they were looking at stops, we know for a fact that they weren't looking at all of the cars on the road because this wasn't something that the police were actively gathering information on outside of their job as law enforcement officers. So my main issue with this is that this five to 10% gap. And if it's 15, and I'm wrong about that, then I apologize, but five, 10, 15% gap, then I'll concede that might be due to the fact that there could be a five, 10, 15, even 20% gap between how the black community drives in the daytime versus the nighttime. But we don't know that based on the way that the data was collected from the officers. So like you're saying, it's reasonably indicative. It's like, no, you're assuming that, but like all we have now is a gap. We don't have an explanation for why there's a gap. I'm interested in looking for an explanation as to why there's a gap, but until we have an explanation, I'm not interested in crafting policy to solve a problem that doesn't necessarily exist. As for more training for officers, sure. Like I would support more training. A great program is in San Antonio. It's called crisis intervention teams where they train officers to spot signs of people in mental distress. I think that this program has shown to be pretty decent in San Antonio. I would support that in other departments across the country. I mean, it's not, it's not, all right. So when we're talking about like what the study is able to show them what it isn't. The reason why the study is able to conclude that it's reasonably indicative of racial bias is because when we're talking about trying to determine what someone's bias is, we're talking about inductive reasoning, right? We can't like go up and like measure what's happening in someone's brain at the time. Like that's an impossible thing to do. So we have to be able to make these kind of conclusions based on circumstantial evidence. And that's why in these situations, having as many controls as possible is able to help us better come to a conclusion about what someone's intent is, right? I mean, like, you know this, you say that, I know that you've talked about like working in the criminal justice system or working in the criminal justice field. I've clerked for the Maryland Attorney General's office, right? Like this is how we in the criminal justice field like determine someone's mindset or intent is by looking at circumstantial evidence. And like, yeah, there's always ways that we can be able to improve inductive reasoning because we can never be able to prove it to like 100% certainty. Like there's always ways that we can be able to improve and we should always try to improve. But this here is like pretty good as far as like most measurements go. And so like here, we can at least be able to use this to say like, even though it's like, we can't really criticize it for being a perfect measurement because there's never going to be an absolutely perfect measurement. Like that would be like applying a standard that would be uncat, like that would be uncharacteristic to apply when no other study, like we can't even think of a study that could like do the thing of actually determining what someone's mindset or intent is. But we can, there's a reason I brought up the New Jersey traffic study because they specifically monitored the cars that they were not pulling over and the ones that they were pulling over for violations and compare that to the officer's actions. And that's how they determined that officers in that study were under targeting blacks based on the number of speeding violations and the severity of those speeding violations. So like that's the whole reason I brought up the New Jersey traffic study. Hold on, can you send that to me? I mean, if you look it up, you can find it. I don't have it like right in front of me, but I will send it via Twitter again. I'm just not gonna come up on my computer and pull it up. I think they've, so they've been going back and forth on like the traffic studies for a while. I don't know if they're at like a conclusive answer yet, but I know that like, I think initially they tried to study field of darkness and then there were conflicting studies on it. And then somebody, the Finn Institute tried to do like a conclusive study on it. And then they found no bias and then researcher Horace tried to do a study where he controlled for where, like where there were well-lit areas and not well-lit areas to see if they could tease out if people were being pulled over more for more or less where they were black and then they did find a big bias. So yeah, I don't know. And their bias was 15% in well-lit areas. So I don't know where the research is on that right now. It seemed to be the case that there's probably some increase in stopping. But again, like there are so many confounding variables here that it's pretty hard to say definitively. I mean, like right now, what I'm asking for, because I mean like, I don't know, this is why I'm trying to like bring in like burdens of proof because I mean like- To be fair real quick, just, I think you guys are missing each other. I don't think he's saying that there is a burden of proof that's not being met. I think what he's saying is that like, let's say that it is the case that in a given city, let's say that 40% are black drivers, 60% are white drivers, but let's say black people for whatever reason tend to work night shift jobs. Let's say that at night, 75% of people are, or I'm sorry, flip that around exactly. Let's say that more white workers tend to work at night. And you find that at night, let's say 75% of drivers are white and like 25% of drivers are black. Well, as the sun sets, you're gonna be pulling over a higher portion of white people than black people. But is that because of racism or is it just because a higher percentage of white drivers exist at night? So now, right? So if that was the case, if it could be explained by the difference in drivers on the road at different times of the day, then we really couldn't say that we could attribute that to like a racism intent from a cop trying to pull people over, right? Right, but I mean, like in this instance, I suppose that the way I'm coming at this is because like, if that is the issue, like sure, we could think of different explanations for why the statistic exists. It just doesn't seem like a really big ask to say that like, well, in the event where this is being caused by racism, you know, then what would probably be the best thing to do to have further study on this to resolve this question is to implement some kind of racism training or like training in police departments and then be able to do the same measurements after to see if there's a meaningful difference. Because if there's not a meaningful difference, there's either a problem with the training as it's implemented, it's not accomplishing what we want it to do or there is indeed some kind of other, like what we're talking about, there's some possible other explanation, but it seems like what I'm proposing would be like the way to figure out if this is causative, right? Or it'd be like one of the safest ways and also it would be productive to do in the meanwhile, right? The reason it's not just about this study, like I find these problems often in the methodology and people on the opposing side of the spectrum on these issues bring up because like you'll take like stop and frisk which was a huge issue for the left wing and might've been one of the things that not Mayor Bloomberg despite his billions of dollars also is terrible start with Super Susie strategy out of the presidential election. And people would often cite that New York city is a little bit under 50% or they might even be over 50% now black and Hispanic, but 86% of the people stopped on the stop and frisk program were black or Hispanic. Like they're like 86% to 49 to 52%, we'll just call it that. But stop and frisk is specifically like targeted to shootings. And if you look at shooting suspects in the city of New York any year over the last 20 years, you will not find a single year where the suspects aren't 94% or higher black or Hispanic and many years where it's like 97%. So obviously if the police are using a Comstat system which most police departments use where they're targeting crime geographically and people tend to self-segregate and the cops are going where the shootings are, they're going to be stopping people who live in the neighborhoods where the shootings are and therefore it is likely for them to be black or Hispanic and honestly, 86% compared to 94% of suspects is under targeting, not over targeted. So like this is like a constant theme I find in the stats that people present. They find a gap and it's usually between population and between stops or arrests or crimes or whatever. And they fill that gap with racism. It's the re-implementation of the God of the gaps argument except with racism. I think that what you're talking about again this goes back to like inductive reasoning, right? Because we can never be able to like conclusively know what's going on inside someone's mind. Like all we can do is be able to like make these kinds of inferences and sure if there are studies that have kind of the issues that you're talking about then we could be able to say, oh well there's this other kind of alternative or this other kind of alternative explanation but that's going to exist for any study where we're looking at this. That's why people usually when they're coming to these kinds of conclusions say that like racism is a possible explanation, not necessarily like the explanation that should really never be said in this kind of field because we can never know with certainty or at least rather when we're talking about like are police individually racist in the course of their field? Like that's never something that we can like know with 100% certainty unless police are going around saying like I am racist, right? Or we're able to have something that's like very clearly indicative of their intent. But I guess here like let me just ask the question like because like I do think like maybe there's agreement here like would you be opposed or are you opposed to just invest like let's even say that we're investing more would you be opposed to investing more in anti-racism training at minimum given this past year and given that a lot of people are not trusting of the police to be able to try and improve on the police if there is an issue and if there isn't an issue to be able to show the public like to be able to like oh reasonably show the public that the police are not going to make these same mistakes or that they're trying to not make the same mistakes that they were being criticized for in public. So two quick ones. One, originally yes I was talking about some a gap in the data but with the stop and first example I was giving the actual explanation like the police use comm stat. They go to where the shootings are which is just a program that maps crime geographically and that's why there was a disparity. So that one I was explaining. I did have the reason for that. Well there I mean like that could be the example in like that study but you don't know if that's going to be the case like any other really is study. It's people assert people assert that the reason for the disparity is racism and if you look at the NYPD practices and they've done reviews of this like this is how they target neighborhoods. It's not based on race, it's based on reports. And two like would I support anti-racism training? I don't know if this is effective train like a study on anti-racism training. Sure, I'm not comfortable with the term anti-racism because it comes from critical race theories like if it's it and I don't think it's the same as like racial bias training although they do overlap. But like yeah, like more conscious or community outreach like I would be fine investing in that. One of the things that I've been an advocate for is the restarting of a consent search program that was tried in St. Louis in the 90s where parents could actually call the police if they worried that their kid was involved in a gang or might get into a shooting and the police would come and search for contraband remove that contraband and not make an arrest against their kid, right? Because obviously parents are gonna tip off the police without, you know, with the fear of their kid being arrested. Like I support a program like that because it builds trust between the community and between the police and it helps gets guns out of the hands of kids. So like, yeah, there's certain programs I would support to build trust back with the community. I don't know if anti-racism training specifically is one of them. Well, I mean, you can call it. I mean, like if you're not comfortable with the label of like anti-racism training then you can call it racial bias training like training which would be specifically geared to mitigate any possible police bias in terms of executing police, you know in terms of conducting police activities, right? I mean, if it were effective, I'd support it. Like if it's proven to be effective I don't think that it is, but sure. Like, you know, try it, why not? All right. You got it. With that, we can, everybody feel good? Any last words from anybody on that? No, I don't think so. Superb. I thought we were gonna get more examples. I have all this data. Well, I mean, like I think I gave you the examples I relied on kind of like when I was in Kenosha. I think you should, I remember giving you my card that links like a lot of the sources I was relying on. Usually I use that one because it's like a pretty strong example, but like, yeah there's other examples if you wanna look at those. Want to remind you folks, our guests are linked in the description. We really do appreciate them. As always, we wanna ask you to attack the arguments instead of the person. And Dylan is also linked in the description, folks. Also, many debates on his channel as well, and we are really thankful. Dylan, I am really thankful for you. So sorry for turning you down on those questions earlier. I did not mean to have you sit for so long, man, but I hope you've enjoyed listening to it as much as I have. And those questions, Dylan, we are ready for them as we jump into the Q and A. And so if you've got them handy, please take the lead on the Q and A and getting us started. Sure. So the first question is to Sean as on the first topic. Kim Crenshaw's work, especially her concept of intersectionality is consistent with sociological evidence and does not rely on storytelling. Since it is a foundational work that does not have the weakness of other parts of CRT, should it be taught? Is Kim Crenshaw a critical race scholar or an intersection? I don't. I am unfamiliar. I believe Crenshaw was one of the founding people for CRT. It was my understanding that she was one of the people that started it. I thought it was Bell and Delgado. And it's really hard to hear you, Sean. I think that your mic maybe went down a bit. I thought it was Bell and Delgado. I don't know. I'm just looking at Columbia Law for apparently she has a page there and it says that she's a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, black feminist legal theory and race, racism and the law. I mean, I don't know her work, so I would have to examine it, but okay. Okay, is that okay? We can go on to the next question then. Okay, to Destiny and Riley, do you think that the concepts taught around CRT are too high level to be taught in public schools K through 12, I assume. A lot of it seems like you need a background of knowledge and sociology or philosophy that most grown adults don't have. This is why I think it depends on the specific aspects. This is why I was more interested in like, I don't think that like just writing something off because of like a foundational author is legitimate way to approach it. I'm more interested in the ideas and the implementation of those ideas. I think that there are aspects of critical race theory or aspects of how critical race theory wants us to look at society that are easily implementable at literally every level of teaching. So for instance, the idea that somebody that speaks in AAV is not an idiot or the idea that we do have a pretty Eurocentric view of looking at history and that we can like exaggerate or not exaggerate but at least highlight the achievements of like other scholars in different fields. I think that these are ideas that you can do in every school. And we already do that to some extent. I remember even when I was in Catholic high school, there would be like paragraphs in our book where like little known like woman mathematician worked on this project or whatever. So like I think that that's fine. In terms of like these broader like critical views of society or criminal justice, I don't see that ever happening outside of like maybe some, maybe like a special high school classroom. I don't think like a sixth grader is gonna be like, like, well, here's a critique of critical justice. Like I don't think that's gonna happen. So yeah, I guess it would just, it would depend on what aspects of critical race they were gonna talk about should be taught at different levels. Okay. For Sean, why do you think that racial sensitivity training is bad? Oh, if this is a question that goes back to the critical race theory portion of it, I think I try to make it clear that racial sensitivity, civil rights history, like negative histories of America can all be taught separate from critical race theory. I think I explained why I have issues with critical race theory, like separate from those things. So I don't think racial sensitivity necessarily is bad. It depends on the context of the training. It might have like no value. It might have the unintended consequences of making people have more negative use about race, but it depends on it. It's not bad on its own. That's a weird question. Okay. And James, if you have any questions for Riley and Destiny, please feel free to jump in. A lot of questions for Sean. So I'll throw one more. Do you believe that history education in the United States is neutral? This has to do with the first topic. I mean, like that's a broad question. Like history is taught differently depending on the school district in the country. So neutral as in what? I think they're asking this in reference to the conversation you were having with Destiny on different perspectives on like history being fact and fact-based and the different perspective conversation having with Destiny. They're asking like if it's neutral. We agree that it comes from like the historian and like history is one of the more subjective studies. So like overall history is less neutral or less objective than like a math or a science. But in the nation as a whole, again, it's down to the school board. I don't even know what that means. Gosh, I'll jump in with a question. Is that for anybody or is that just for? If you wanted to respond to what you could. Yeah, there is no absolute frame of reference in anything. We should know that in history. I mean, we even learn that in physics, right? I think part of special relativity was getting rid of the notion of like an absolute frame of reference and shifting that over to the idea of like an inertial frame of reference. And history is the same. There is no absolute frame of reference. There is no neutral viewpoint of history. A true neutral viewpoint of history would be an accounting of so many facts that it would be impossible to keep track of them all. You always have to kind of like pick and choose like what part of a story do we want to tell when we engage in history? But that's not like good or bad. That's just that has to happen. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to make sense of anything. We're dinosaurs have feathers now. And that's like, I'm not about that. I choose to ignore that and go with the Jurassic Park dinosaurs. GVC, this one coming in, and I think that when they use the word they in this question statement, they're referring to critical race theory. So just to give you the context in what part of the discussion this is about, they said, example, if a black man beats up an Asian woman in New York city, the critical race theorist or they put they originally will blame white supremacy for X, Y, and Z reasons as if that black man has no agency for his actions. I don't think the idea is blaming the black person. I think actually a lot of this, it's funny because we say that like CRT like rejects like the civil rights movement, but that the framing of that like super reminds me of Martin Luther King, white people's most favorite quoted black person. When he talks about riots, Martin Luther King unequivocally condemned riots throughout the entirety of his life, even up to the point of his death. However, he also, he would always say that it would be immoral of him to only speak of the negative side of the rioting and not the conditions that give rise to the rioting. I think that when we look at things through like a critical theory lens, I think that it is speaking to the same thing. It's not the idea that like, oh, you know, people are stupid with the character of their actions. It's more like, well, you know, we have this particular thing that occurs and we can also look at why it occurs too. It's really ignorant to only look at one part of that equation without looking at it holistically. And I think it's important to separate like white, guilted people in progressive media from scholars and critical race theory. Like, sure, there's excuse making for poor behavior, but would they say that specific thing is because of white supremacy? Some would, I would assume, and some wouldn't. Got you, and Chalice Pierre, thanks for your question said, if an MD medical doctor supported a conspiracy theory, does that now define the field of medicine? The link is what's important. I don't know exactly what context that refers to though. I think that was in reference to me talking about Regina Austin and her excuse making for the prevalence of conspiracy theories within the black community. You bet. If you'd like to respond, or if anybody would like to respond, you can. I think it's a problem when scholars excuse all manner of behavior in critical race theory, it's in reference to black people. And then they come up with their own conspiracy theories or endorsed conspiracy theories to explain their inconsistencies. Gotcha. And then I will ask one more for Destiny and Riley, and then I'll kick it over to you. Dylan, if you have any more questions in particular, I think you said you had a load for Sean, but this one comes from father of hair says, Destiny and Riley kept asking AJW to disprove, or show something wrong with critical race theory, but that's not how the burden of proof works. They need to provide the evidence and then support it. I don't, wait, did I, I don't think that I actually said to like disprove it. What I was asking for was like, whether or not there was anything, like any aspect of critical race theory, which has merit to it, right? That's a different question, because right now the allegation, as I understand it, and Sean, you can correct me if this is like not representative of your position, but my understanding of your position is that because there are some people who have advocated or who have been a part of forming critical race theory, that therefore all of it is without merit, and that seems to be a really big stretch. Like, like I said earlier, throwing out the baby with the bathwater when there seem to be other aspects of critical race theory that could have merit to it. Like that's why I'm talking about. I mean, look, you can find some merit in like whatever. Like I'm not saying that there's nothing of value at all, like, like, you know, unequivocally, but again, it's not like some people, it's like the foundational writings, like what they say that critical race theory is all about a fundamentally opposed to. So like, I keep coming back to like, this person said that, but that wasn't my point, but. Well, can I ask the question then? Cause this is something I was thinking about them, and it gets asked like, you said that like, so like the people that you cited to, well, first I mean like, so like Kimberly Crenshaw seems to be another person who's like a foundational writer. But then like, even if we're looking at the people that you cited, are the things that you're citing to the only things that they wrote about, or are there other things that they wrote about which do have merit, which people expounded upon? I mean, because if there are other things that they wrote that do have merit, and that were expounded upon by later people who ended up rejecting some of the more problematic aspects, then it doesn't seem like there's like, sure, like there's a problem there, but it could have been resolved like within the academic literature. I mean, if you like the rooster's egg is a book, that's why I said like in from her book, obviously there's more things than there. I believe it's like a series of stories or essays, however you want to say it. So yeah, obviously they wrote more stuff. Right, so it seems, so I mean like, we can criticize part of the literature and not say that all of it's without merit, right? Like if she went on to write other things which had more merit than just like, oh, I'm just in a basin. This is considered like a big book and it's full of like these kinds of stories, but like. But like, do you know that that's all that she wrote? Like she couldn't, yeah, I mean, she wrote a like, you know, I didn't say it's that all that she wrote. Like the book came out in 1989. I assume there's plenty of other writings like beyond that. Okay, well then would it be reasonable for if other, if she wrote other literature not just based on stories that other people relied on that had the kind of academic backing that you're looking for, then would that be fine? I mean, yeah, if like, if she wrote things that like better fit what I, like I just turned to be academia, then sure. Like I feel like I'm getting asked a lot of these questions. Like, here's a problem, but what if that problem didn't exist, would you be on board? It's like, yeah, I mean, if my issue with the program was gone, then sure. Well, I mean, like, you're just focusing on her as like a foundational author. And so like if she contributed to, like you're saying the way you're presenting her is if she contributed to the literature in only one way. And usually people don't contribute to like the entire body of literature in such a way as you're talking about in only one respect. That's what I'm talking about. Like it would seem out of character. Got to move to the next question. Go ahead, Dylan, if you have more for Sean. Sure, I do have one for Sean, one second. Since the big focus of the funding, the police is based on the fact that public services serve the black community better than police, shouldn't we focus on new public services to help black people rather than funneling more money into the police, i.e. relocating resources? Reallocating resources. Yeah, I don't like this idea of like investment which people wrongly label government spending that's gonna help better than reducing crime is not the case. Like if you want people to invest in these communities, you have to lower the crime rates. Like we, there's actually, I think it was something like 17 Walgreens recently closed in San Francisco due to shoplifting because the district attorneys stopped enforcing shoplifting. Those are stores that operate on low margins. So they move out. The people who work at those stores end up losing out because there's no effort to control crime. And then what ends up happening is stores that have higher prices in order to compensate for the shoplifting come and take their place. So like this is one of the ways that crime ends up driving poverty. Like you have to deal with the crime. Like nobody's gonna wanna actually invest in a neighborhood that has high crime or there's gonna be less investment and higher costs of investment. Gotcha, this one coming in from Hydrip. Huge fan of you, Sean says. In my opinion, Sean operates from logic and not emotions as well as, Sean can take on 100 lefties. All right, thanks for that. But don't worry Dylan, there's some love for you. Not here says, top left is pretty cute. Dylan. Next question. Spark344 says, my preference for a particular debater is neither, I don't know what this means in terms of whether or not this is a reference to something that, whether or not this is brought up. They said, my preference for a particular debater is neither, Ny-en-ya or Ny-ya. What? Do you guys know what that means? Oh, Ny-ah or Ny-ah. Okay, gotcha. I gotcha. Is this South Park? No, very important. Okay, next one. Hydrip, thanks for your question, says, gotcha, sunflower says, Riley and Destiny, are you familiar with the fiasco at the Evergreen State College a few years ago? Do you think critical race theory had anything to do with it? What was, can you refresh me? What was the fiasco at? It's the thing that Brett Weinstein became a thing for. Oh, that shit was all cringe as fuck. I don't know why people do dumb shit like that. I don't know if that, I think you could argue that that's like an offshoot of people who were bought into critical race theory. Sure, you could. Riley Ford, I'm guessing you're also against it. I'm not familiar with it, so I'm not gonna, maybe you heard of this, that was where, I think, I'm trying to think what this stemmed from. I think historically, I think there was like some day where white students, haze black students were going to school or something, or maybe it was just generally like black students weren't allowed to go to school or something. No, no, no, it's the day of absence, which is a reference to a play where all the black people who were marginalized or all the marginalized people in the community just showed up and it showed the oppressor. Oh, didn't show up. Yeah, okay, okay, yeah. It showed the oppressors, like how much they're actually dependent on the people that they're treating like trash. Traditionally, Evergreen would observe this and like have a mock day of absence for minority students, but one of the organizations at the school decided that they were gonna flip it, but order white people not to come to campus. And Brett Weinstein wrote an email saying that this is not in line with the idea of it, and then it led to a whole bunch of chaos. And honestly, one of those, a lot of that is like the infantilization of children. Like it might not be, like critical race theory ideology might have played a part, but a lot of it is like we treat college kids like they're babies and we cater to them. And like they need more hardship in their life. Yeah, I don't, yeah, I just, but that day, Brett Weinstein's response to it is basically he basically fired, I think, right? Or was forced to retire or something. Gotcha, this next one, Dylan, let me know, just jump in actually whenever you have one, but this one from NFL Sports Talk says, both, you could say a two prong question. They asked, did black people enslave other races in history and does critical race theory teach or acknowledge that black people had enslaved other people in history? Well, yes they did, obviously. Like we're all descendants from slaves and slavers if you go back far enough. As far as critical race theory teaching that, I have to be honest, I don't know, but I believe that they do based on the fact that I was reading something that references slobs and the origin of the word slavery. So it appears that they at least on some level acknowledge different types of slavery or different slavers throughout history, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. I have a question for Riley and Destiny. What are the downsides that you see of critical race theory? At least for me, there seems to be some speculation. So like first off, like there's absolutely, I'm not gonna speed that there's a lot of people who advocate for a critical race theory who have come out with some really weird takes to me, that like the reason why, like this is an argument I've heard a couple of times from people who seem to be pretty big in the field that like the reason that racism is perpetuated nowadays is as a consequence of trying to prevent the rises of communism or in the pursuit of like anti, in the pursuit of like anti-communism, and that seems to be like really weird, like trying to like integrate this idea that like, because I agree that like that forms of systemic oppression exists, that they disparately impact people of color, but then to impose like in some respects, this like intent that like, oh, the reason why it's being imposed is for like anti-communist purposes. It seems to be just like I said further. And also the idea that like, there are some people who will say that like white people, well, there are some people who will say that like, like the really bad version is that like, white people are not necessarily inherently racist, but that they are complicit in the system because they're not motivated to try and get rid of racist structures by virtue of the fact that they benefit from it. And so some people will take this and run with it and say like, oh, well, white people are inherently racist. And while that's not something that like, and I would never like agree with that idea that like white people are inherently racist and that's the way that some people end up interpreting it, which I think is harmful, even if there might be some merit to the idea that like, you know, when people are born into a society and they end up benefiting even from unjust structures that they're not going to pay as much attention to those structures. Yeah, there are other issues, but I mean, I guess it's just like kind of like some of the framing issues I have issue with. Yeah, I mean, there are definitely offshoots of really weird like us first, that mentality that can come or people thinking like all, there is an article we read the other day about the, oh God, what was it? This, it was like the psychotic, the psychotic intrinsicness of whiteness or something. And I remember it was a lady that gave a speech at Yale and holy Christ, that article went really, really, really far in some directions. And I mean, like any theory, like people can run off and do dumb things so that you could do it with intersectionality. You could do it with patriotism. You could do it with literally anything, economic schools of thought. So I mean, yeah, there's always like problematic things that people can take from theories. Our goal is to minimize the bad and hopefully capitalize on the good. Gotcha, any other questions Dylan? I'm sorting through mine looking for one for Dylan and Riley or for Destiny and Riley. I have a personal question. What's with the skeleton? Honestly, what's with the skeleton? What, what's skeleton? Oh my God. How long has that been there? Who knows? This next one coming up from, thank you very much for your question. Topher says, ask for math. If you learn the process and practice it perfectly, then you will always result in the one correct answer. Process is greater than answer. If you- What? So let me know if they are, I'm not exactly sure who it's for. I know that this was, I remember this in the conversation, but I'm not sure. They say, ask for math. If you learn the process and practice it perfectly, then you will always result in the correct answer. Process is more important than the answer. Oh, sure. I had the overall process, like, you know, because it gets you to more answers, I guess it's better than any individual answer. I guess that's what it's a reference to. When we were talking about the mass destiny. Yeah, it's probably. I mean, like, I remember when I was thinking this, I don't know, like, it is very important to recognize that like in math, also in other fields that like, because as I remember the conversation, the basic idea was that, you know, we want to teach other ways to be able to get to the correct answer. I know that Sean, you brought up the idea that like, oh, well, we don't want to teach just like, any way to get to an answer because some ways might not be better than others. It's like, no, we want to probably focus on teaching, like different ways to get to like correct answers. Like, of course we want to get to a correct answer, but they're, you know, to be able to recognize that there are other ways to be able to get there. Like in law school, I'll draw an analogy to like my own experience, right? They make a very big deal in exams that like if you just give the answer, then you'll fail every exam, right? Like the most important thing to be able to show in the field of the law is how you get to your answer. And there's never going to be like one objectively correct way to get there. There's just better or worse ways to be able to get there. So being able to show like variety and how people get to those answers, like it seems like there'd be some like diversity of thought and how to be able to get to those correct answers. So it could be to be able to demonstrate those, especially if they intersect in some way with, you know, different people of color or like, you know, famous people of color who have contributed to those fields. This is a related one. Spart344 says, so diverging or disagreeing, they say the journey of math is about logic and following the process, which is not up to interpretation. I mean, it depends on how deep you want to go there. Generally he's probably correct, but if you want to be pretty pedantic, that's not necessarily true, but I mean, sure. In the way that he intends it, I don't think anybody disagrees. I don't think you're gonna find a critical race theorist arguing that like, well, you know, according to black people, two plus two is five or something. Actually the person who wrote that Oregon curriculum, I think was the person on Twitter doing the two plus two is five. I would have to see the entirety of the argument, but I seriously doubt it's as simplistic as that. Yeah, I could be wrong on that, but it's somebody Gutierrez if we're talking about the same thing. But yeah, look, I think we got like a very niche in there and I don't disagree with Destiny on we should teach different methods on how to do math. I remember we had a kid come in like fresh, fresh off the boat from Taiwan and he had a way of doing factoring that they teach you over in China. It's just better. And like they don't teach it correctly over here. Like after seeing it, it's like a staircase method. It's pretty, it's pretty dope. So like, yeah, like different methods, as long as it gets you to the same result are fine. Gotcha. T. Newberry, thanks for your question says, hi, high school history and ethnic studies teacher here. Critical race theory is very pervasive in education. What do you all think the goal of critical race theory or critical theory in general is? As far as I know, like they say more equitable society, but to deconstruct society, but like as far as I know among scholars, they haven't like concluded on what the final society is supposed to look like. Like it's a work in progress. So yeah, a lot of people say communism, but like let's leave that out of the debates. It's nobody brought it up. Yeah, so I mean like, I mentioned this earlier that like critical theory broadly is supposed to like, look at like it's, it's prescriptive in nature. So it tries to figure out like, how to be able to improve society like what Sean said. So it seems to be the case that it tries to recognize like, okay, so if we have these systemic inequalities in society, then like what steps can we be able to take to actually realize them? That's why, you know, one tenant, it seems to be of critical race theory is that we should oppose colorblindness at least in the way that a lot of people mean for it to say nowadays where it's like, a lot of people will invoke this idea of like, oh, we should all be colorblind, not because they necessarily believe that it'll actually lead to better outcomes, but because that gives them the excuse to be able to avoid dealing with larger systemic issues, right? Critical race theory seems to say in this instance that like actually colorblindness is not great because it basically means that we can just avoid dealing with underlying issues that would otherwise go unresolved. So in that case, like actually resolve the issues so that we can move towards a better society, as an example. Gotcha. This one, I think the way they've interpreted you destiny is that I think they don't think that you believe in objective truth at all, maybe, but they, which I don't know if that... The problem when you use terms like objective truth is the reality is that there is a whole bunch of epistemic and metaphysical assumptions that people run around with on a day-to-day basis, and they believe that they have the world far more figured out than they actually do. There's two ways to solve the arrogance of an average person this way. Either one is spending a whole bunch of time on a fucking philosophy Wikipedia, or the other is to do a fuck ton of mushrooms or LSD. Thankfully, I've done both of these things so I can tell you very confidently that a lot of people have an idea of what is objective truth, but if you spend just a minute of self-reflecting or thinking about things, you find out that a lot of things that are a certain way could be another way. It's entirely possible. And there's a lot of things that we just take for granted. Like the nuclear family has to be the only way. No, there's tons of different ways to raise families. There are community ways of raising families. There's tribal ways, there's a whole bunch of ways of raising families. Or like the idea that male and females how we divide ourselves, we could sort ourselves a million different ways spending over one or two. Or like education has to be done for the first 20 years of a person like me. You could learn through life. There's a lot of new things. The only reason why I push back whenever I hear somebody utter the phrase like objective truth is because usually that quote unquote objective truth, what they really mean when they say that is this is my subjective lived experience and I can't fathom something differently. I'm not accusing Sean of doing this. I'm just saying that like a lot of the times in case that's what it felt like. I'm just saying that sometimes people say like, oh, like you just reject objective truth. To some people like objective truth are literally just like these subjective cultural phenomenons that they're always subjected to. And they think that that's the only possible way that society could be. That's all I'm saying when I challenge that idea of subjective or objective truth. Gotcha. I mean, so you'd probably... So if I was talking to like a philosopher, well, there's like, I can't answer that. I'm sorry. There's like 20 different levels. Like, do you believe in objective truth? Like, well, is an external reality knowable? I would argue no for that. But if we were to move past that context so that we could have like an epistemically meaningful view of the world. And somebody would say, is there objective truth? Well, I would say, yeah. With respect to like certain axiomatic systems, can we say that there are certain logical truths that necessarily follow employing like some form of proplogic order? Yeah, there can be objective truth. But if we go a step further and somebody's like, well, historically speaking, you know, the North was good and the South was bad. Is that an objective truth? Well, that's not an objective truth. Like this is a historiography. Like, so no, I don't even answer that question. That's a tough one. Okay, that's all I'm saying. This is, well, it's a fun question. So it's a, you could say with regards to history much further back than the civil war. But they say, if there is no objective truth, why don't we teach creationism? Because when we, so on the level of, do we believe it like deductive logic? Given some set of premises, will a conclusion deductively follow? That seems to be a thing that everything believes in. One, number two, do we believe that there is a knowable external universe? Yes, that seems to be the case as well. Number three, if there is a knowable universe, can we collect data about it and generate conclusions based on deductive logic? That seems to be the case as well. If we believe in all three of these things, we have enough logic to get off the ground the idea that we shouldn't believe in creationism. So there, okay. Gotcha. And then Tofer, thanks for your question says, clearly they do subject themselves to criticism. So I think this is for you, Sean. They say, considering AJW stated that CRT teaching plans were rejected in California. So I think they're saying that rejection was a form of criticism. I mean, that's like, there's a difference between scrutiny from like academic disciplines on the university level where this stuff is developed and a school board or the State Department of Education saying, we're not gonna go with this curriculum because included or not included in their definitions of historic oppression was anti-Semitism, which was one of the reasons why that California curriculum was rejected because it didn't acknowledge the existence of anti-Semitism. So yeah, I mean, that's not the same thing but sure. Gotcha. Any over there? Dylan for Sean or anybody? No, no, nothing else. Gotcha. This one coming in from just fresh off the press, Spencer Harmon says, my boss's wife had to create a critical race theory teaching plan in order to renew her teaching license in Nashville, Tennessee. And she never taught it. She had to learn it though in preparation to do so. Any thoughts on this? Send that story to stopk12anddoctronation.org. You can remain anonymous and I might make a video about it and get paid money to do so. Gotcha. Now, Tizzy says, I like Destiny and Riley. However, I think that Bell is one of the more reasonable CRT scholars and that they should know this and then says Bell's wiki page goes over the six foundational principles. The, I just, I challenge, I don't challenge that Bell might have said dumb things. I just, I challenge looking at like a foundational author in a field to either accept or dismiss that entire field. Like, we didn't really get to talk about this because we're mainly back and forth between Riley and Sean, but like using that is actually, in my opinion, a really bad thing that ironically some critical race theorists engage in. So there, we watched recently a guy named Adam Neely was going over some scholars related to music theory that talk about how the foundation of a lot of music theory is racist. And some have even made the argument that there is a guy that if you studied music, we perform a form of like shinkarian analysis is like going over music. And some people argue that that shankier guy, that that guy was super racist. So we should throw all of that out just because of that. And I think that if I was to take Sean's arguments that we ought to throw out critical race theory because the foundational authors are bad, well, fuck the foundational authors of the United States Constitution. Some of these were slave owners or supported slave ownership. So like that just, I just, I challenge on those grounds the idea that a foundational author ought to be the person that I go to to see whether or not I should accept or reject the tenants or the implementation of some ideology. Because the foundational authors have a lot of different things that have been super fucked in the head. But that doesn't mean that there aren't valuable contributions that they could have made to the field or that there isn't a field that we might be able to squeeze some sort of value out of. Is why I rejected that or why I would reject that. I mean, I think your comparisons are kind of like silly because like the critical race theory was founded in the 70s. It's not like this isn't well documented. People argue over does this writing from Thomas Jefferson actually mean he felt kind of this way about this or that all the time. And people still argue about the separation of church and state and whether or not that's implied in the First Amendment. But like, at least that has the benefit of like back in the day, like David Bell wrote most of the stuff in the 70s. You know, and I know he was a civil rights lawyer before or he wanted to be a civil rights lawyer but a lot of the major cases were resolved. But like we have a better understanding in a newer discipline. So, I mean, it's not a one to one comparison. I take your point. Some people would argue that filmmaking is racist because DW Griffith, who made famously birth of a nation is the guy who invented cross-cutting. Now cross-cutting still gives us the illusion that two different events happen at the same time in film. So I think that portion stands to test the time but people have made the same case for that Nazi lady filmmaker and how she expands and contracts crowds. I think their skills that transcend them being bad people but they are foundational people in films but I don't think that makes film itself or film language inherently racist. And other racist aspects of it. Got you a question for Sean. Are there any things you think are good about critical race theory? It's called CRT, I like nice abbreviations. Got you. And this one from William Kurt says, why does it matter if a historical account is biased or not taking other perspectives? The point is that we should strive for historical accuracy. There's, that doesn't, so history is what we think we do but in reality we engage in historical historiography. So history, there's like imagine, imagine you asking me, Steven, what did you do yesterday? Like if I were to give you a factual account of what I did then it was like, well, in the morning this was my blood pressure. These were my brainwaves. These were the processes going on in my body. These are like all the biomechanical motions that I made to lift myself from my bed. There's like a trillion different facts that I could account for like the first like three hours of my day but that's not really what you're asking me. You're asking me to pick and choose from that day a collection of facts that I think you might find interesting or relevant and this is what we do when we engage in history. History is not an accounting of all of the facts. History is telling a story using a selection of facts. That part is important because there are normative decisions that we make when we choose which facts do we tell? That's what we engage in when we engage in history. So if nothing else happens from critical race theory and it's all completely thrown into the garbage, the one positive thing that I would hope that critical race theory can encourage more people to understand is there is not an objective telling of history. Everything is a narrative and everything is a story. And sometimes it's good to look at things from other perspectives if for no other reason because it enriches your own life. It gives you like a different way to look at things whether we're talking music or other aspects of culture or even history. And there is a lot of value in being able to look at things from different perspectives in your personal life and your academic life and your work life. So yeah. Got you on. Shalice Pierre, thanks for your comment question says the host Elgato. Is that one of your guys' memes next this one from not here says Sean needs our help making a spirit bomb. Raise your hands. What's a spirit bomb? The Dragon Ball Z reference. Amazing. Tizzy, thanks for your questions as I like destiny. Oh, we got that one. Oliver Katwell says James was doing divided by controversy equals hit the like button. Thanks for that support Oliver. We appreciate it. And Spark 344 says for Riley the body of literature shows trans women have massive advantages and the International Rugby Board banned trans women in international matches. I mean, I'd like to see the body of literature because I've read the body of literature and that does not seem to be the case or at least it doesn't seem to be the case after you have situations where trans women go on hormone replacement therapy for a sufficient amount of time or if they've never experienced like it's testosterone based puberty at all. Maybe we're looking at different literature but I feel like I've read a lot of it. It's not all of it. You got two questions. The first question is going to be for Sean. Somebody is asking for a clarifying thing. Do you get paid by an organization to make anti-CRT videos? No, I don't get paid by an organization to make anti-CRT videos. I was referencing a series that I do for the Freedom Center. I'm saying when I make videos, I make money at the time of my living. Okay. The next question, how do you think everybody in this discussions ethnicity has affected how they approach the topic? I mean, like I reflect on this a lot. Like it does suck because I mean, like one of the court, so like the idea, as I mentioned earlier, like one of the ideas of CRT is that like, it's preferable that you have people of color who are talking about these kind of issues because they have the, but the reason why being that they have lived experience to be able to check their arguments again so that they're more likely to be able to make the right arguments as opposed to like that's like the single determinative factor. So I mean like, I would say that like I'm trying to the best of my ability to be able to understand the arguments that other people would make if they were able to check it against their own lived experiences. I can never know that with certainty. So, you know, there's, if someone wants to call me out and say that like, oh well, Riley, you didn't make this argument that any reasonable black person would have made if they were in your position, then feel free to call me out on it. But I mean like, I genuinely try to make like to the best of my ability and make the arguments as I understand that they'll be made by other people if they were in this position. Yeah. As a Hispanic, I feel like the whites in the chat disagreeing with me have offended me. Okay. I do also want to clarify, we do have two Biden voters on the panel. Just want to throw it out there. Get back to James, if there's any questions you have. You've got a bubble gum gun says, police are unconstitutional, abolish them. Anybody agree with that? Next up police, wait, what did that say? The police are unconstitutional, abolish them. That's right. That's weird. Constitution, no. This one, Morgan Gray says, only criminals would want to defund the police without the police killings would increase by 75% and no one would face any punishment. I don't think anybody here was arguing for the total abolition of the police room. I wouldn't say only criminals. Like there's a lot of wealthy progressives that I think it's a great idea because maybe they've never seen a crime or a criminal face or anything like that. But in Montreal, they had a police strike and I think shit went down in like 12 hours. People should look into that story. It was full-scale rioting and under 12 hours. So not a great plan, but there's definitely some, even criminals are like, ah, guys, relax. We kind of need some of the police. Juicy, Riley, any thoughts? No, not really. I mean, like, yeah, I wasn't arguing for defund the police. You got it. Anne, thank you very much for this question coming in from Amaretto says police are corrupt and then most places are overly funded compared to other parts of society. Also civil forfeiture is bull, defund the police. Civil forfeiture is bull crap. It's a taking under the Fifth Amendment. It's not treated like that. The idea that your property is guilty of a crime is nonsensical. That should be getting rid of. As far as police are bloated budgets, I mean, the most bloated budget of all time are public education. And I find it really funny when people show the police budget and always public education is higher, but they conveniently cut it off right there. Like they do that with New York City. They're like $6 billion for the NYPD. It's like 25 billion goes to our public school system. And most plenty of that's wasted. I mean, like, that's, well, I mean, like, you don't have to make the argument. I mean, like, that's kind of like a what about is, and it's like, oh, well, why are you talking about this issue when like, there's this other issue that's completely, or that's unrelated, but you know, there's a lot of funding there. I mean, like two problems could simultaneously exist, right? But the problem for me as far as like the, like being able to say that police departments are overfunded is that there's not really a good metric as far as I'm aware for saying that they're overfunded. Like you could, it could be the case that you just have a lot of police departments. I'm sorry, I just caught myself. Like it could be the case where police departments do get a lot of funding, but it could be like justifiable under like some kind of metric, right? Like it could be just the case that like, oh, they just, they just really need all those funds. And they're just as far as I'm aware, there's not like a good way to measure that at the moment. Gotcha. And just several more questions. Folks, we definitely can't take any, any more new questions that we've got. We should be able to wrap up before the three hour mark. And so we do want to get our guests out of here as they are busy people. We do appreciate them. And so run quick reminder folks, our guests are linked in the description as well as Dylan and Brian says CRT is not capitalism, not Marxism, not a cat. You see, in order to understand CRT, we must go to feudalism. It's powerful stuff. Next, they also said, thanks, 70D. Thank you for your kind words and again, paying that thank you forward to the guests. Kevin De La Riva says, hey, Sean, you should debate Mike from PA. He's an intellectual powerhouse when it comes to defunding the police arguments. I mean, all right. I try not to associate with people from Pennsylvania, but I'll make an exception. Gotcha. Julius Gray says, there is a miscarriage of justice every day. Granted, what's the proper proportion of POC to police interaction? What if certain areas have more POC crime? I mean, if you look at the numbers, interactions are usually determined by crime and certain people of color in certain areas commit more crime, depending on the crime. Gotcha. Bubble Gum Gun says, okay, I'm not reading that. Deprived Dolphin, thanks for your question says, not reading that out. Tofer, thank you very much. So Sean, we've been giving increasing money to police for decades. At what point would you conclude it isn't working and that there may be better ways to reduce crime? I mean, we've seen one of the greatest historical drops in crime over the last few decades. Since the 90s, crime has dropped like crazy. Like we've seen the pullback of certain units and certain funding since 2014, I believe Vox has an article about this and they estimate anywhere between one to 6,000 extra murders occurred in this country over that like five year span due to the reforms pushed on the police. And it's only prevented maybe 300 police shootings. So I would think when you see a spikes in murder across the country, maybe pulling back on the police, not a great plan. Gotcha. This one from best of ballers. Oh, interesting. It says for Destiny and Riley, is humor featuring race or trans topics completely off limits? I mean, as far as like trans, just because like I know that I've had to grapple this, it's not off limits. It's just that usually what happens is that people will try to use like a veneer of humor as a way to get away with saying just like really terrible shit, right? Like usually what will happen is you'll have like a comedian who will just come out and instead of actually like trying to deliver something that's like funny, they'll just like say a bunch of like really like blatantly transphobic shit. Like they'll just be like, they'll tell like some kind of transphobic story like, oh, you know, there was this person at the store. I'm just making this up. But like this would be like an example of like something out here, right? It's like, oh, I saw this person at the store and they looked like a man, but whoa, they're wearing a dress. How wacky and funny is that? Am I right everyone? That's so weird. Yep, yep, yep. I was giving you some music. Yeah, but anyway, so like the point being there that like usually it's like, whenever it's used in that way where it's just like it's a thin veneer for just trying to say harmful shit, then yeah, that's off limits. But like, no, obviously there's ways to be able to do comedy which incorporates these ideas. I would just rather be actually funny. You know, it's customary when somebody tries to think of a comedic presence, a premise on the spot that you guys back her up. Like I was the only one who did that. I'm with you, right? Future. Gotcha. And the Godfather says for Destiny, I don't know, what are butterfly ballots? They say are butterfly ballots a part of CRT? No, I think that might be a meme, but. Gosh, yeah, okay. Time Rift. Juicy question says, this is our last one, folks. Says Destiny and Riley, if you found that there was more racism after critical race theory was implemented in the country and actually caused harm, how would you go about dealing with that issue? And they say dilute CRT or would you say that real CRT hasn't been taught yet or something else? I mean, like as far as, so like first we would look at like the measurements, like how is that measured? Like what is more racism? But I mean, like assuming that there's like some kind of measure that like the total amount of the racisms in the country has gone up after implementing these kind of educational policies. And it's like, okay, there's probably like some reason to be able to say that like, there's a cause of relationship here. So we'd probably look into like, all right, so do you like some sort of study on like, what was the cause there? Is it something inherent to CRT or is it just like a matter of how it was implemented? And then try to resolve whatever was the cause of relationship there or the cause of factor there? Yeah, I don't know if CRT is supposed to fix racism in the country. I mean, you'd like it like other educational outcomes, I guess to figure out if it's working or not. Like if grades start going down or something that's a problem, if people, if grades go up or people are more conscientious about certain issues, I think designing a metric by which to see if it's successful is pretty important. I think with a lot of social programs, we don't do that all the time. So. One last one, cause I'm so curious about this. They say there is no police violence towards blacks compared to what it was like in the 1980s. Was it worse in the 1980s? Is there any evidence for that? Saying something is worse back then doesn't mean that it's acceptable now. If the violence is not justified, it's not justified. But I would assume that because police departments used to be more corrupt the further back in time you go and economic corruption was a huge part of that, which isn't the same today, then yeah, they were probably way more violent. I mean, like there's still as evidence that police departments are pretty corrupt even today, right? Like there's been surveys that like, there's a decent number of police officers who are currently serving where they are aware of other police officers that they've worked with committing infractions like acting outside of, you know, they're, sorry. Acting outside of what is acceptable or legally permissible for police officers and yet they go on to not report it, right? Like that still exists today. We could say it's better today than before, but like those problems still exist. It depends on the corruption. When I talk about the decrease in corruption, the police department from the 70s on, I'm talking about economic corruption, like the taking of bribes or favors or whatever. And that was usually a consequence of police officers being like a really terribly paid job back then. So like officers weren't paid enough to even live in the city. Like now what you're referring to is what's called noble cause corruption where cops like, you know, often like archetype of this is Clint Eastwind's character in that movie, Dirty Harry, where cops like color outside the lines in order to get like results. And I do agree that that corruption may not be on the increase, but it's not looked down upon the way that economic corruption is today in police departments. Quick question. I know I just wanted to ask this one quick. It was a big one from Chad. CRT or LED, which one do you prefer? LED lights. Gotcha. Destiny won't answer it? No. I don't know what it means though. So I said LED lights. You got it. Well, we wanted to say folks, Riley and Sean and Destiny and Dylan are all linked to the description. We encourage you to check out their links as we really do appreciate them. It has been a true blast with you guys. Thank you so much. We really do appreciate you. Thanks everybody in the chat. Hope, as always, folks, want to encourage you, tacking the arguments, be your regular friendly selves, not attacking the person. We do appreciate you no matter what walk of life you are from, folks. No matter where you are in the political spectrum, black, white, gay, straight, you name it. We're glad you're here. We really do appreciate you hanging out with us. And so with that, I'm going to be back with a post credit scene in just a moment, letting you know about upcoming debates. But as for now, thanks so much to all of our guests. It's been a true pleasure to have you tonight. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thanks. Give me a hand. Wonderful. Gentlemen, that was a true, I am so excited. Seriously, I can't say enough how much I appreciate our guests. Their links are waiting for you. So if you're like, I liked listening to what that person had to say. I'm like, mmm, I like that. I want more. You can hear more by clicking on those links. So, I mean, folks, that was superb. I was honestly so happy. And thank you, by the way, appreciate your super chat slam RN says thanks, James. Have a good night. Seriously, thanks for your support, slam. Really does mean a lot. And so I want to let you know, though, folks, yeah, we are thrilled to have you here no matter what walk of life you're from. You name it, Christian, atheist, politically left, politically right, Republican, Democrat, you name it. We are glad you were here. And so you guys, that was epic. I loved how first, just really interesting in-depth discussion. And so I want to say a huge thank you, by the way, to Destiny, as Destiny was kind of willing to kind of graciously sometimes kind of like step aside. And then it would kind of go deeper with Riley and Sean, for example. And I know that Destiny was kind of like trying to let that flow happen. And so we really do appreciate Destiny being a good support. It is true. So Victoria was supposed to be on tonight. However, a family emergency happened and we hope that everything is okay. I haven't gotten to respond to Victoria. I was so kind of rushed, leading up to the debate, but honestly, we do appreciate Victoria, who's been really kind to us. And so we hope everything is okay with Victoria's family. And we want to say though, folks, this was an amazing, I am so pumped about this event. That was just so fun to listen to. I get a kick out of this. I do want to say hello to you in chat, as well as let you know about upcoming debates. And so seriously, I am just in a great mood and I appreciate you hanging out here. And thanks so much, folks. I am pumped that we are already at 546 likes, which is amazing. We're close to 550. We'd be crazy not to get to 550. Whoa, almost dropped my laptop. Might as well hit that like for that, because I dropped this laptop yesterday. So sad. And now my clicker the most doesn't work on it. So I'm using my old school, like, check out this dinosaur. But hey, it works. I can't complain. But it is so hot in my lap, believe me. But here's the thing, folks. Let me tell you this. I am so excited and just want to say hi to you. Chris Ewing, thanks for coming by, as well as Michael Violette. Let me know if I pronounced it right. We're glad you're here, Michael, as well as Strange Monk or Monkey. Let me know. Stripper Ligger good to see you again, as well as General Balzac. Thanks for coming by. And the Twitch chat. You guys, I am so pumped. I think this is the highest viewership we ever had in Twitch. Which, folks, it was like, I think it got up to like maybe 80 in Twitch. That's amazing. So seriously excited about that. Thanks everybody for hanging out in Twitch if you were watching via Twitch. Don't forget to hit that follow as we have a lot more juicy debates coming up. In fact, you guys, I don't know if you had seen this, but it's already up on our page where it says on Monday, Jangle's friend of the channel, as well as T-Jump, my twin brother and friend of the channel. We'll be debating on whether or not it's in particular, the particular phrase. It's like Tom had a specific phrase he wanted to debate. So we ran it by Jangle's and Jangle's like, yeah, we can work it out. On whether or not it is transphobic to classify trans women as falling outside of the umbrella of women. So it's gonna be juicy. It's going to be controversial. It's going to be offensive. Want to let you know, though, folks, we strive to make sure that everybody's equally offended because we really are big on equality and really important. So we are going to have debates that will trigger some people. That's not our goal, to be honest. Like I don't have any pleasure in triggering people. I think it's no matter what walk of life you're from and the old saying is true. Don't ask for a light load, ask for a strong back. Namely, the more resilient you are in terms of being able to handle, I mean, so the Christians see it too. Sometimes we have like, is Christianity dangerous I think one time we did, is Christianity a hate cult? But I'm so, so the point is this, everybody at some point is probably going to be a little bit triggered by the topics. It's not our goal, but like I said, don't ask for a light load. Don't ask for an easy way. Ask for a strong back. And I think there is a lot of opportunity in terms of hearing different views and all these debates. There's value. It's great. So want to say hi to you, though, as well as this word, thanks for coming by, as well as saying amazing. I couldn't agree more. And then my name is last name. Thanks for your kind words. Said thanks to your show. Appreciate that. Means a lot. Vislo said, mood is so salty. I don't know if you're talking about me or somebody else, but yeah, we can't thank the speakers enough. I felt so bad when we had to go with three because I promised the other speakers and I think they were excited to dialogue with Victoria. And Victoria did a great job in her debate when she had come on here before. And so it was sad. I was like, I'm sorry, Victoria can't make it. But like I said, had a good reason. I'm glad she's taking care of family that's more important. So maybe we'll hope to have Victoria out in the future. And Orrin Montgomery says, great show. Thank you, James. Destiny did a good job of being midway with three people. So glad you enjoyed it, Orrin. And I enjoyed it as well. And yeah, that was the tricky part in organizing this debate. As I was telling Dylan, I was like, we wanted to be balanced. We were hoping for maybe extreme, somebody to the strong right stance, a strong left stance, and then maybe somebody with a light left and a light right stance so that it would be like a good mix. And I was like, I don't know where Destiny's gonna fall. And that makes a big difference because I was like, if Sean's the only conservative, that I don't want it. I didn't want it to be like two or three people arguing against Sean. So I was kind of like, well, I think Destiny would agree with him on some things. But anyway, pumped to have you here as well, Deke. Thanks for being here with us and subtracted. Thanks for dropping by. Slam, Orrin, good to see you. And Oliver Katwell, pumped you made it. Good to see you. I hope everything's going well in Africa. And Amanda says, oh, amazing. I couldn't agree more. And Sleepy Bush 211 says, mood is salty as well. Oh, it was salty. I missed it. I thought the speakers seemed like they were in a good mood when I said goodbye. I think they, I hope they enjoyed it. But General Balzac, good to see you as well as SquirrelAids. Wow, look out for that. Will A, thanks for coming by. And Chris Diggerolema, thank you for coming by. As well as Exxon Music and Stripper Liquor. And then, oh, the Twitch chat. Pardon my delay, my dear friends in the Twitch chat. Zacarta, first time visitor, or at least speaking out and saying hello in the old Twitch chat. We're glad you're here, Zacarta. And LatexFrog, good to see you, as well as LilyAja. LatexFrog, take care. Have a good night. Thanks for dropping in. And Topazul, good to see you. And Demogog69, good to see you. A lot of these are like 69 people tonight. But BastionGirl, glad to have you. Ozzie, and good to have you here as well. And you guys, we were excited, really fun. I honestly enjoyed this a ton. And we were excited. We were planning already. It's not like there's not a date or anything, but it would probably be like Lord willing in July. We'd like to have another collaboration with Dylan Burns where we do a panel like this. And in that case, it would be a panel where we basically do something similar to this, but with the actual full four people or so. And it's going to be great. I'm excited for that. So it's going to be good. And you guys, I don't know if you know this, but the Matt Dillahunty debate that we were originally supposed to host. And that, as you know, one of the speakers couldn't make it. It's been rescheduled to June 19th. Amazing. So you guys, I'm really excited. That is rescheduled. We've confirmed it for Saturday, June 19th. So that's a week away from tomorrow, folks. It's going to be epic. I am really excited about that. So boom, Matt Dillahunty, atheist, you could say, atheist juggernaut debater is going to be taking on Christian scholar and apologist Dr. Kenny Rhodes on whether or not there is good evidence for God's existence. It is going to be off the charts. I'm seriously excited for that. And so thanks everybody. I'm working on getting to the fulfillment in terms of the, I'm so sorry, I've been delayed. I think when the event got delayed, it put me into this delayed mode where I was like, I need to get to the Indiegogo. And so thanks for your patience. I'm sorry, I'm a little late on that. But I will say this. I think I mentioned it last time. Please really do let me know. If you ordered a T-shirt or a sweatshirt or anything for the Indiegogo, it's so helpful if you let me know. It's absolutely helpful to let me know what size T-shirt or a sweatshirt you want. That's really important. And then letting me know your address obviously because if I'm going to mail it, I need to know where. But second horizon, good to see you as well as mood. Thanks for coming by, pumped that you made it. And Smith Six, glad you dropped in as well as, is this pronounced Wim W? We're glad you're here as well as Chris Gammon says, amazing, I couldn't agree more, super amazing. And CD says, last call for hitting that like, that's right. This post-credits scene can't last long tonight because I'm kind of pooped out. But Rid district, thanks for coming by. We are pumped to have you here as well as Will A and Hannah Anderson. Thanks for all of your support in the chat. Always good to see you. And Jordan B, pumped you came by as well as Sleepy Bush. Where'd you go, Sleepy Bush? I saw it, you were here in the chat. It's moving on me. But there it is, okay. Brooke Chavez, thanks for your encouragement says, smash that like. If you enjoyed this, I will tell you folks, it motivates me, I get, when I see more engagement and things like likes and shares on the videos, that encourages me because you could say it kind of motivates me where I'm like, hey, people are really enjoying this. And so the more people enjoy it. So if you do want more content, that's a great way of, you could say, urging forward more content as we do appreciate that. And then Logan Pulo, thanks for coming by as well as Susan Wojcicki is, okay, I'm not gonna say that word. We are glad you were here despite your naughty username. And then Tofer says, you know what, Susan gives you the profile to make that name. We always say folks, you know, I know a lot of people, some YouTubers, they will trash YouTube. I gotta say, they've recommended our videos to a lot of people. Like we're thankful to be on the platform. And that's why some people ask, will you host any topic? It's like, well, to be honest, not exactly. We say we'll host like virtually anything. And we kind of will, but kind of practically speaking, the answer is no. Because, well, if we host stuff that'll get us kicked off of YouTube, well, we're kind of sawing off the branch that we're sitting on, right? It doesn't make sense. It's just not, you could say it's thwarting our own purposes as Kant would say. So not very wise, right? But now you get the idea. We are big though on trying to have it be as fair as possible. We wanna give everybody the, you could say the vision here folks, if you had not known, modern day debate is a neutral platform, hosting debates on science, religion and politics. And our goal is to give everybody their fair shot to make their case on a level playing field, no matter what walk of life they were from. And Justin Reschke, thanks for coming by, as well as Brett M, we are glad you're here. And Lulu Weirdo, thanks for coming by, as well as Lenny S, we're glad you're here. Bubblegum Gun, thanks for dropping in. As well as Let's Farm, thanks for all of your help. Appreciate everything you do, Let's Farm. And then Vislo, glad you are with us. And Cactus Kid, thanks for dropping in. TJB, amazing. Thanks for coming by. And then General Balls X says, I'm super triggered that light reflecting in your glasses. It is, it is, it really is bright. No doubt about it. And then I always get a kick, kick out of reading your guys' chats. I get pleasure, a lot of pleasure out of it. And Nick Garnero, thanks for coming by, as well as, let's see. Yeah, you guys, we will have, it's probably gonna be the last of our Flat Earth debates for a while. Tomorrow night, we will, heads up. If you're new here and you're like, I only like political debates, this channel is like a debate, or it's a buffet debate channel. So it's like, you know, that gives you that pleasurable feeling of being at the buffet. If you want some beef, you know, whatever, if you want some shrimp, whatever. The idea is, you're not gonna maybe like everything. Maybe you skip on the pudding. I mean, I wouldn't. But different strokes for different folks. What does that mean? It means you might not like every topic. I'm gonna let you know that. I would still say subscribe, because we are excited as, for example, we do have that juicy debate, political debate coming up on Monday. And you will enjoy many of the topics, even if it's not every topic. Spart344 says, but what if the person has scoliosis of the back? Hashtag triggered. I don't even get the joke. I'm too tired, man. Sight show now, thanks for coming by. Said it's a great job tonight. And then happy go, Rucky Randy. Said that made me lolajw. Is AJW in the chat? Let's see. I saw him earlier, but the point is this. Amanda, thanks for all your support. And Christopher G, good to see you here. And SlamRN, thanks for all your support. Says it worked out well. Thanks for that, I appreciate that. It did work out well. And Let's Farm says, can we hit 600 likes? Is it possible, my friends? Roman Medley, we are glad you are here as well. And Nero says, how many days do you go to the gym a week? And when are we going to see you in a stringer? What's a stringer? But I usually go five or six times. And I have a feeling a stringer is something scantily clad. Nasty guy, a lot of nasty guys here. But Orin Montgomery says, I hit like twice, so I did my part, JK. Well, you know, folks, sometimes people say, hey, James, I was like, I can't believe it. There's 500, or what is it? There's 580 likes, that's great. We're only 20 away from 600. You guys, what are we waiting for? And there's 727 people watching right now. Folks, we could easily, I'm sure we could easily get 700 likes. Believe me, let me tell you this. Sometimes people are like, oh man, you got 32 dislikes. Like, whoa, man, that's a lot. Don't worry, those are our 32 Australian viewers who hit the like button from Australia. So we do appreciate all of those supporters as well. And then, Eric Gershwin, good to see you again. We are glad you came by. What wasn't tonight civilized? Because it was like, you maybe were thinking like, man, I don't know. I was maybe expecting that to go off the rails. But it was very civil. So that was cool. I'm super encouraged by that. And I think I'm almost caught up with chat. Yeah, I'm catching up. That's right. Ross Thatcher says, Dapper Dino tomorrow. It is on the schedule. And Roman Medley, we are glad that you came by. Invisible Ninjas, it's fun debate. Thanks all the guests. Chatters and, of course, the wonderful mods. And I couldn't say it enough, folks. Our guests are linked in the description. We do appreciate Sean, Riley, Destiny, and we obviously appreciate Dylan. I felt bad for Dylan. I tried to get him involved. I should have let him ask those questions midway through the debate. I felt, I didn't mean for him to sit so long. It felt bad, but we appreciate Dylan. We really do. And so, Dylan helped us put this together. And we are excited to collaborate in the future. And so, I am excited, though, really fun stuff. And so, next up, let's see. Hannah Anderson says, thanks for all you do, James, for the channel and for us moderators. Oh man, I appreciate you so much, Hannah Anderson. Thank you to all the moderators for doing a great job. And also want to give you a quick update, moderators. This is not at all punitive, because you might be like, wait, did we do something bad? No, no, no, like it's not like that. We have new, you could say, moderator guidelines in terms of what we're asking moderators if they are willing to be wrenched, if what they're willing to do. And these are the things we're asking of them, moderators. They're in this list that if you contact Sideshow Bob, and I'm gonna actually throw his email into the chat, we really do want to encourage you to email Sideshow Bob as he has this list. And we basically just want to be absolutely sure everybody saw the list is we sometimes have moderators who are like, they haven't been here for a while. And they have like, let's say they're taking a stance and we're like, ooh, we actually don't want the moderators to debate anymore. So like, I love, love you enough. And I love the other moderators who have, who have didn't know the rule and they were debating people in chat. And it's like, actually now we have this rule where like asking people to not, we're asking moderators not to debate. We want even the moderators to be as neutral as possible. And so that's something to know. So let me put this info. Bob's info. I'm gonna put this in the old live chat and then it's accessible to you moderators. Mods, please. Mods, please contact Bob here. And it says Bob's info and it has his discord and his email. And that's like I said, just to be sure because we are going to take away the wrench from everybody, not to be mean. It's not punitive. It's just to be sure that all the moderators are on the same page as there are some like intricate type things too. Cause there's some things where it's like, is that hate speech? Is that not hate speech? So we're trying to iron out those wrinkles. And it's just a work in progress folks. I mean, that's normal. It's like normal to change and adapt as a channel. That's what we're doing. And so Andrew Kroll, good to see you. Thanks for dropping in. And then thanks all over Catwell for coming by. So I gotta check out. Thanks for coming by all over. I hope you sleep well. And I have to get to sleep too sometime soon. Fry Man X says AJW. We are glad that you're here. And then Pancake of Destiny says, new record in the live people watching. Keep up a good job. Bring more controversial topics. It was a big audience, that's for sure. Although I think our, to be fair, I think the biggest ever and it was only because Destiny and Vosh were like with us in person that day. When we did the in person debate with Destiny and Vosh, I think we had like 6,000 people watching live, if I remember right. Or no, I think it was maybe 4,000. That sounds more right. Which we've gotten like somewhat close to that. We've hit 2,000 a number of times, but this one was definitely a big one, which is really encouraging. This one was way bigger than I expected, which is super encouraging. And then, oh, thanks ASEAN for donating on Twitch. Folks, if you didn't know that we have a Twitch, we do, it's not a joke. I'm excited about it. And ASEAN, thanks again, seriously appreciate that support. Folks, we are excited about it. We are a neutral platform striving to put on debates in the fairest way possible so that everybody can make their case on a level playing field, making their case to the world. And we are excited about that. Folks, we have big aspirations. And I am honestly, I'm excited and I'm optimistic. I think there are big things are going to be happening with this channel. We are honestly, I'm telling you folks, seriously, it is, it's a bright future. And it's thanks to you. Seriously, you guys offer fantastic ideas and thank you, moderators, for keeping it reasonable in the chat. Thank you just for watching folks though. You guys have made this fun. It's an eclectic community of different people. I love that this is truly, like it's a melting pot of different people. I see in the chat all the time where it's like, wow, there's like truly a diversity of people in terms of what position they take in the chat, which is cool. I'm encouraged by that. And so yes, do want you to, but yeah, folks really do want you to contact Sideshow Bob just to be sure you're on the same pages. I will, I'm not joking. Tomorrow morning, I will take away every single wrench. You didn't do anything wrong. It's not punitive. It's just to be sure that you got in contact with Bob. And if you notice, you're like, oh man, my wrench is gone. What happened? I will let you know and please back me because there'll be some moderators who haven't been here for a while and they'll be like, where'd my wrench go? And I'm gonna be like, hey, it's not punitive. Nothing personal. Just want to be sure that all the moderators got to see this new guideline list. And so that's just a way that we can ensure absolutely everybody saw it. So G. Snead says, love you, James. Right back at you, G. Snead. I love you too. Thanks for your support. Seriously, appreciate your positivity. And Brooke Chavez says, Ozzie and give a bunch of bits in Twitch. Thank you for Brooke Chavez and Lilia Aja for letting me know that. And for all your moderating, seriously, it really does, it means a lot. And I'm encouraged by that. And the old Twitch chat, I'm excited though. It is, let's see. Oh, that's right. I thought about, you know that Twitch had that new topic or that new category of streaming from hot tubs? I thought about trying it, but I don't know, maybe. Mazzari stream, thanks for saying hi in the old Twitch chat. We're glad you're here. Thanks for dropping in. And then, amazing. Bob says, smash that amazing like button. I agree. Folks, we're close to 600 likes, which is phenomenal, you guys. That's awesome. And so, still those 32, what look like downvotes, but they're actually, they're likes from people in Australia. Appreciate all of our Australian viewers. And folks, you may not know this, but Modern Day Debate has a podcast for real. Did you not know that? Now, someone told me, does anybody listen to the podcast on Spotify? Someone emailed me today and they're like, bro, it sounds funky on Spotify. So let me know, because I know that's the only place I've ever heard of it not being easy to listen to Modern Day Debate. But folks, pull out your phone right now. If you're like, oh yeah, I listen to podcasts sometimes. Hey, subscribe to Modern Day Debate on your favorite podcast app. Here's my phone. You can open it up, my favorite podcast app, podcast addict. You open it up. You click on Modern Day Debate and there it is. Numerous Modern Day Debates and we are catching up. Our hope is eventually, so right now we're like four days behind where our hope is eventually that we are going to get it to the point where the debate comes out as a podcast episode within 12 hours of the debate. That's seriously, that's what like the goal is eventually, we'd like to get there. It's a little bit challenging because sometimes I have to, like I have to edit the debate long story short, but you guys, you won't regret it. You totally should join Modern Day Debates podcast. I'm excited that it's been useful. People, I've been so encouraged. People have been like, yeah, I use it all the time. So that's cool. And we are excited though, yes, tomorrow we will have a Flat Earth Debate. It's a guilty pleasure of ours if you're new. And Maurice Smithville, thanks for coming by, says Love, Modern Day Debate and AJW. Thanks for your support, Maurice. Seriously, that's super encouraging. We really do appreciate that. And Jordan B, we're glad you're here as well. And Jason, let's see. That's right, Jason Scott, we appreciate you. I am excited though, folks, as we are, we, yes, we basically will put on almost anything in terms of topics. And so that includes Flat Earth. I know it's a guilty pleasure. It's a fun one though, and it is juicy, but so Pancake of Destiny says, let's break the record on the mat debate. Otherwise, all unsubscribed. Well, it's going to be a big one. I am confident to that. I'm excited about that. And it's fun. It's good to get to have Matt back after a long time. And so we hope Matt's doing well. I think his recovery is going well, which is great. And so Let's Farm says, definitely demod that Larry, let's guy, I'm only gonna need the one wrench. I will totally demod him with extreme prejudice. And Stripper Liquor says, what is the general email for the channel? It's moderndaydebate at gmail.com. Thanks for asking. Maurice Smithville said, give me a wrench. Maurice, are you sure? It's a lot of work, for real. I can give you a wrench, but remember, I gotta take away everybody's wrench tomorrow. So I can only give it back once everybody is checked in with Bob. So here's the protocol. After tomorrow morning, all wrenches will be gone, which means complete chaos at the channel. It's going to be crazy. But we're hoping that during the day tomorrow, some moderators will check in with Bob. Bob will give me a list before the debate tomorrow night of people who have already checked in with him. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna put that list into the chat or I'm gonna put Bob's contact in the chat. So that way you can let him know like, yep, but basically ask, say, hey, Bob, wanna just be sure I've seen the guidelines. And folks, I don't know if you know that our Twitch is hopping right now. I'm excited about it being, what is it, 30? 23 people still, which is rad. Our Twitch, I am linking in the old YouTube chat, and that way you can see it and click on it if you'd like. And CDs is nine more to six, and we're at 603 likes now, folks. That's amazing. Folks, that's super encouraging. Slam Rn says, I just emailed him. Thanks for doing that, Slam, seriously. And I know it's like a tasteless joke giving the wrench out and then like taking it away tomorrow morning. But yeah, we appreciate you, folks. How are you guys doing? Let me know, like, what are your, how is your guys' lives going? Give me some updates. I'm glad I just get to hang out with you. Oh, Cytonaps says, I have no issues with it on Spotify. You sound as good there as here. Oh, well, that's good to know. Okay, well, maybe it's somebody else who's having problems with Spotify because I was gonna check it myself. I'll check it myself because I don't know why. I was surprised, I was like, well, that's weird. But Squirrel AIDS is liking on my way. Thanks for the great content. Thank you, we do appreciate your support. Seriously, I am excited, folks. Seriously, we are going to do big things with this channel. We firmly believe that YouTube deserves the highest class of neutral debate platforms and we're gonna give it to them. And folks, someday, I'm not joking. You might think I'm joking, but I'm dead serious. I love this channel. I am like, honestly, it's a way of life for me. I plan on doing it like Lord willing. I wanna do it the rest of my life. I just love it. And so the trick is, my dear friends, someday we will look back and we'll be like, wow, you remember when we were just a little channel and we were like, what is it, 48,000? We just hit 48,000 subscribers today, by the way. That's awesome. That is like, yeah, today we had like a surge, not surprisingly, because of the huge debate today. And then on Twitch, I'm excited that we're growing too. So thank you guys so much for all of your support. Holy smokes, Twitch is up to 822, which sounds tiny, kinda tiny. Although I checked, you know what's interesting? I saw this destiny posted on Twitter, this website that shows you Twitch statistics. We are in the top 1.6% of Twitch channels, which is cool, so that's encouraging. And so I am pumped about that, my dear friend. Let's see, I've got feedback. Thanks, Ozzie and for gifting those subs. Do appreciate that in the old Twitch chat. And so yeah, you guys, I'm excited though that Twitch is growing and that's like, thank you guys. Like that's all I can say is like, you guys make it fun. You guys make it rockin' awesome. I just appreciate it. And so thanks for all of your support. And someday though, we really will be like, wow, you remember when we were at 48,000 subscribers? We were a little channel back then. And we're gonna be like, yeah, those are the days. Cause in 10 years from now, who knows? It's gonna be gigantic. I really believe that. And that's how long it took. Joe Rogan took him 10 years, no joke. Joe Rogan had, I think it's like 12 years now. Joe Rogan's been at it for a long time. And so we do appreciate you guys. Saitronav says, I have no issues with it on Spotify. Oh, that's right, I read that. Thank you for that. Thanks for checking for me. That seriously, I appreciate you doing that, Saitronav. Cause I was gonna check it myself, but it's nice to know that you could say third party people, like independent people have said like, no, for me, it's working on Spotify. So, but yeah, thank you for that. And then compliment bot, glad you were here as well as General Balzac says, give rented. Oh, that's what you got that. And so thank you guys. And then pancake of destiny says, should we call you Dr. James after you get your PhD? That's funny. No one ever insists that you call me Dr. James. You can always, even then, I promise to just say, you can call me James. I'm excited about the PhD. It's a challenge. It really is. You probably have heard that, but, and I, you know, it's like, but living it out, I'm like, wow, this is a challenge. And now I, I am determined to finish it. And I'm excited. And I enjoy it, but you know, it's true. There are, there's like different seasons for it. Perfect one says, how would you, how would one use that Twitch link to contact Bob? Good question. What I'm going to do is I just put Bob's info in the chat, perfect one. That way you can click on it. And it's in the chat at the very bottom now. So it should be there right in front of you. And YouTube surgeon general says, life is great today, good sir. I'm so glad to hear that. That's great news. And then, but yeah, thank you guys. I'm just pumped. I'm encouraged. This is super exciting. It's, it's honestly been great that it's been, like things have just been going really well. And so I'm thankful for you guys. Thanks for all of your support. Sometimes we, we have, you know, people do all these different things to help the channel in all these different ways. And I appreciate it more than you know, seriously. Sometimes people are like, hey, I reached out to this big name person and asked if they'd come on to modern day debate for a debate. And they said, yes, James. Go, you know, James, you should go at email. And when I know they've already said yes, like I'm happy to email them. Cause you guys, I send so many emails to like so many big influencers where I'm like, Hey, do you want to come on modern day debate? And I never hear back. And I'm, I'm not entitled to hear back. So don't get me wrong. I'm not like, they're snobs. Like it's not like that. They're busy. I don't blame. I have trouble keeping up with modern day debate email. So if you have, so if they have like double the subscribers we have, I can't believe we're coming up on 50,000 subscribers. That's insane, you guys. That's like, it's getting close to the size of my hometown. Still not quite. Oshkosh now is like 70, I think it's like 72,000, but 65,000 when I was growing up. And so we'll get there soon. And eventually, you know, that's the plan. I'm, we're definitely excited. Rocco Leone, good to see you. Glad you're here as well as Tiggle Bitties. Only YouTube. We're glad you're here anyway. Brooke Chavez says, thanks for all you do. Thank you. Seriously, it means a lot. K.H. Stromsten, let me know if I pronounced that right, says thank you. Thank you. Seriously, that's encouraging. And then we're almost, Christopher G, good to see you. And then N-D-O-X-D says Ben Shapiro versus Matt make it happen. That would be epic. No doubt about it. Honestly, that would be phenomenal. I really believe that's possible someday. It's gonna be, you know, it's gonna take effort, but I'm like confident, like for real, I think that's really what, that's what I'm shooting for. Like that's the real goal. And like, yeah, it's maybe not gonna be in the next year or two, and maybe it's gonna be, like it maybe will be 10 years. But like, I'm like wanting to host Lord willing, like the plan is to host the biggest, baddest debates. That's my goal. That's like what I'm determined to pursue. And so Pancake of Destiny says, after you will start hosting people like Richard Dawkins regularly, will you still keep hosting small YouTubers? That's a good question. Frankly, I think that if people are really good debaters, like that's what the audience really cares about. And so I'm willing to make exceptions if a person's like a phenomenal debater and not even a phenomenal, that puts the bar really higher. It's like, well, jeez, you have to be phenomenal. But like very strong debaters, because like I can tell you one challenge is that like the audience, and I've told my classes this, sometimes I mentioned, I don't, I never mentioned the channel to my classes when I teach because that would be like a weird conflict of interest that I would never violate. But I do tell the students that I've taught, I tell them, I say, your education, and this is whether it be formal or informal education, namely just becoming a sharper thinker, a sharper communicator, like public speaking, writing, whatever it is. I always tell students, that makes you powerful. That really gives you skills to influence the world. And I said, people can tell, like I've told the students, and I believe it and I know it from this channel, people can tell when somebody is a good debater or good speaker, or when they are articulate and well read and well thought, those things, oh, people can see it. And so I can see it by the audience, like the audience knows, and so anyway. But yeah, so it's valuable to develop your mind, no doubt about it. Like I said, that could be informal education, formal, whatever you want. And so, but yeah, I'm pumped. But I wanna say thank you guys, I love you guys. Thanks for all of your support. I hope you guys have a great rest of your Friday. Honestly, this was such a fun time tonight. I seriously am like, I'm on a high right now, I just enjoyed it so much. And I really, I appreciate, it was so civil, wasn't it? Did you guys notice, like it wasn't like a zoo, like there wasn't really any cutting off? Like it was pretty civil and it was just great. That was honestly phenomenal. So I am so thankful. Like seriously, that was just great. Like just super encouraging. So, but yeah, I am excited you guys. I'm just so encouraged. I hope you know that I am pumped. And somebody told me once that I had that you could publicly see one of my like weird playlists because I have lots of weird playlists folks. I mean, I've got like my 90s alternative music that I love very much, very important to me. Nobody loves the smashing pumpkins more than me. Believe me, it's not even close. I can't remember what weird playlist it was. I've got like a judo moves one. But yeah, I do, I always, I hate saying goodbye. I can't say goodbye, you guys. I just want to hang out here. So I will tell you good night. I care about you guys. Good afternoon, good evening and good night. Church of Entropy, good to see you. Thanks for coming by. So glad you are here. And baby squirrels, thanks for coming by as well. And Corey Clark, we're glad you're here. As well as Linguisty. Let me know if I pronounced it right. We're glad you came by. Pancake of Destiny says, follow up. If someone new without experience asked to debate on your channel, would you let them debate? They said, maybe you can discover new talent. I don't know. I kind of would encourage them. We're not the only channel that hosts debates. I'd encourage them to do a debate somewhere and maybe send us the link. I'm really reluctant though. If they have like no experience, I'm like, ehh. Like, and yeah, there really are like standing for truth loves anything, anything related to religion, standing for truth is happy to like host the debate. Anything related to politics, there are a lot of small like, or not necessarily, it doesn't have to be small if they want to go on a big channel. And if they are let on a big channel, like, sure, like that works too. But oh my gosh, political debate channels like, we're nothing new, modern day debate in a way. I mean, I think in some ways we're new and I love that we have something special that it's like this eclectic melting pot and I love the chat and I love the people in the chat and the community we have here. And I've gotten really encouraging feedback from people who have said, this is really like a community for me. And especially during the COVID lockdowns, like they felt like it was a regular community and that for me felt amazing. Like I never felt, I felt so encouraged by it. So we have really, we have something special in that way. But in terms of like debates, a lot of channels host debates. And so anyway, I would encourage them to check out there. And then, oh, and then science debates. Ask Steve McCrae, Steve McCrae will host you for a science debate probably. Reservoir of Gorsas, are you a Dred Zeppelin fan? I've heard of, isn't it a Led Zeppelin? I'm not a fan, I've heard of them. Must have been a typo. Is that a, is that a different band? I don't know, but Lillia just says, appreciate you, James, take care. Thank you, Lillie. And then YouTube Surgeon General says, you can make whichever lists private that you want. I want my weird list to be seen by the public of my 90s alternative YouTube Surgeon General. And then Ross Thatcher, let's see. Yes, you're a wild man. As well as Andrew Kroll, thanks for coming by. Oh, my Zoom window expired because of 40 minutes of no activity. So folks, I'm gonna go, I really should, it is actually pretty late. I should go home and try to get some sleep because I didn't really sleep that well last night. So, wanna say good night. I love you guys seriously. Thanks for everything. Thanks for all of your support. I'm excited about the future. Seriously, we're just gonna keep up in this thing. It's just gonna keep getting better. Overall, I'm excited. And so, thank you so much, everybody. I love you guys. Oh, and then somebody said, CD said, make a second channel for Noobs. We do have a Discord, folks. Let me link that in the old live chat. Crap, also, moderators. Bob's Info, I just threw it in the chat right now. So if you wanna contact Bob, that's the way to do it. If you click on modern day debate, moderator, that is Bob, it's the moderator email. So once you become a mod, Bob's giving access to all the mods to go on that email. And yeah, so, hold on one sec. I know you can't see me. You're like, James, you're still there. I'm still here, don't worry. Don't let anybody leave. I'm like, still here. But basically, let me get this Discord link for you. You can join the modern day debate Discord, a great training round, getting experience and debating. And so, we appreciate the people who've done all the work on that. As I have to be honest, I haven't done anything. But people like Larry Latt's Platium, who is retired and others, I can't say it enough. I am so thankful for all the people who've done so much work on the Discord. And then, yeah, as mentioned, folks, we are excited that, hey, if you like podcasts, let me just be sure that you heard that, right? If you have a podcast app on your phone, hey, you could pull it up right now and find modern day debate and subscribe to one of the most epic podcasts in the world. Thanks everybody for all your support. We love you guys. Thanks, Hannah Anderson, you did beat me to it. Thank you guys. And so, I just love you guys. I'm excited. I'm encouraged. And I'm excited to see you tomorrow as we'll engage in our guilty pleasure, a good ol' Flat Earth debate. The last one for a while, because I know you guys are pooped out from Flat Earth debates. But thank you guys. I hope you guys keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable. Take care, everybody. Amazing!