 In May 40 here, Tucker Carlson just released an interview with Amy Wax, the University of Pennsylvania law professor who said a lot of controversial things that are being picked up by media matters and the left. So let's check out this interview. Amy Wax, controversial, about as far right as you can go in American politics today and still be within the Overton window. To start with the Glenn Lowry exchange, would you say that's where the trouble started or did it proceed? Well, actually, I think the first thing that happened, and this was something that really did surprise me, although I was less and less surprised with each passing incident, was when I… So you can tell by the draining quality of her voice that she has told this story a hundred times. I published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer praising bourgeois values and just saying this was co-authored by Larry Alexander, who's at San Diego Law, saying, you know, making some pretty simple what I thought were uncontroversial points about how important personal conduct and the norms that we adhere to in our day-to-day life. This is… We've already touched on this theme, how important those are to achieving success in life, no matter what your background and that. So I think my sound problems are problems from the past because I bought myself a new XLR cable, so this crappy old one is going in the trash. So let's see if my mic still keeps cutting off. Those virtues work especially well in our modern technological capitalistic societies, which have been the most successful societies on earth, comparatively speaking, on how we should return to those touchstones and take them far more seriously than we do. And that was the op-ed and it created a firestorm. Did you expect that? No. Honestly, I honestly was surprised that anybody would object to those points, not see them as basic common sense, or regard them as somehow racist or bigoted. I mean, one of the things we said is that not all cultures are equivalent or equivalently successful. Not all sets of norms are equipped people equally to function in our society. That also seemed obvious. But that was considered a racist thing to say. Is the counterargument that all kinds of behavior equally equip people to succeed in our society? So what's the argument against that? I think the counterargument is that behavior doesn't matter. Which is bizarre. It's not such a minority of it. And I think no one... I mean, she's obviously right. Not all behaviors, not all cultural values equally equip you for success in America or in the West. Not all cultures are equally good at equal things. So fine, let's say you're a cultural relativist, that doesn't mean you're holding that all cultures are equally adept at equal things. You're simply saying you can't proclaim that one culture is just inherently essentially superior to another. Or that there's one value or there's one measure that will rank cultures hierarchically. So yeah, obviously different people have different gifts, different groups have different gifts, different cultures have different gifts, different nations have different gifts, different YouTube hosts have different gifts, different genres, meet different needs in the human being, different religions are good for different things. If you're really concerned about your eternal salvation, then Christianity is the only game in town. There's no other religion that will promise you the assurance of your heavenly salvation like Christianity. So if you want a strong racially based approach to life, you don't have many options in America. On the left, you can go with something like Black Lives Matter or La Raza. On the left, it's Spanish for the race or on the right, you've got variations of ethnic nationalism and the alt-right, but you don't have many choices, for example, if you want to make race central to how you view the world. Really believes on some level, not even the limousine liberals who espouse this kind of stuff. No. Really believe it. They all get up early and go for a run, I notice. All right, and they teach their children to behave this way and not that way, I don't know why they bother. Of course, they would say that, well, there's no inconsistency there, that point is lost on me. But yeah, it's structures that matter, it's systems that matter. We are all puppets on a string and we are determined and affected by these outside forces that we don't control, and especially, I think they're... Well, structures do matter, systems do matter, and we are frequently affected by systems outside of our control, and we don't even realize how much, for example, our community or the system we're working in. There are plenty of places where you will go in life where the architecture surrounding you. For example, if you're in a church or you're in a synagogue, you're in a mosque or you're in a bar or you're in a sports stadium, that architecture will have more effect on how you behave. The building that you're in will frequently have more effect on how you behave than any personality variant, whether you're extroverted or introverted. Just being in a church will have a more profound effect on what you say and do than any personality difference between you and other parishioners. I is on the so-called oppressed or persecuted peoples, aka disadvantaged minorities. How dare you say about them that they have any meaningful control over their lives that... Okay, so there's understandable squeamishness about pointing a finger at groups and saying you're screwing up. Perhaps there's something to be said for some understanding that different groups simply have different strengths, right? Not all groups are going to be equally good at the same thing. I don't notice a lot of Jews playing for the Los Angeles Lakers. Yes, I know there was a Jew here and there was a Jew there. Generally speaking, not a lot of Ashkenazi Jews, not a lot of any type of Jews are playing in the NBA. So clearly different groups have different strengths. Therefore, perhaps we should be gentle when we highlight the, say, the shortcomings of a group, recognizing that the group's going to be, say, short in one area and overachieving in another area. Is a scary thing to contemplate because then you start thinking, well, if their lives are going poorly and they are bedeviled by inequalities and disadvantages, maybe, maybe it might be their fault a little bit or they could do something. All right, that's, she gets into a tremendous amount of trouble that is self-caused, all right? Most of Amy Wax's problems are caused by Amy Wax. They're not caused by the evil left. She can phrase things differently if she doesn't want to avoid giving gratuitous offense. I think a better way of putting things is that not all groups have equal gifts and not all groups are equally cut out or equal success in different areas of life. And that's not blaming. I don't blame Jews. They don't play frequently in the National Football League or the NBA, right? To the best of my knowledge, there aren't many Roman Catholic physicists, right? When it came time for the Manhattan Project, when it came time for building America's nuclear bomb, it wasn't Catholics that we were turning to, right? The physicists who gave us nuclear weapons were primarily Protestant and Jewish, right? I don't think we need to say Catholics. That's your fault. There's something wrong with you. Maybe there's something about Catholic culture or there's something in Catholic groups in the West or in America that has not predisposed them towards success in physics. I think there are more effective ways of saying what Amy Wax is saying that more people will be after here. She has apparently gotten to that place in life where she just doesn't give a damn and she's just going to, she's talking in public the same way that you would pretty much talk in a bar. And so, no, if your groups are low achieving in one area, I think there are far more effective ways of pointing that out than by saying it's your fault. Maybe your group isn't as abled, right? Differently abled, right? Different groups have different gifts. So it's not my fault that I'm not 6'10". It's not my fault that I don't sing for a living. I don't have a good singing voice. I could practice and practice and at best I'd have a mediocre singing voice. It's not helpful to say 40, it's your fault that you're not a great singer. I simply wasn't born with the gifts of becoming a great singer. They could self-improve in ways that would have some efficacy. Yeah, they could self-improve, but maybe they're better suited for other endeavors, right? Not everyone needs to become a physicist or a lawyer or a dentist, right? Not everyone needs to, say, make professional success or earning money, the number one priority in their life, right? Maybe some groups just want to put more emphasis on spending time with family and doing things that come naturally to them, such as, say, socializing with their their own group and seizing on their own native gifts and making the most of them rather than say, oh, we must imitate the white man, we must beat the white man at physics and math and dentistry and law, because unless we meet up to the white man standards, then the fault is with us. I don't think that's a helpful way of approaching things. Don't believe that. Then what you're basically describing is an animal. If you're saying that this person, this human being has no responsibility. We are animals, all right? We are animals. Now, you can make a faith-based argument that on top of that, we're gifted with the spirit of the divide. But we are animals, all right? We're animals. For what he does, nothing about his life is the result of choices that he made. You're not describing a human being actually at that point, are you? Well, right. I mean, that's the dark side and the downside of it. And I've joked with Glenn Lowry about this. He's interviewed me several times. He's a Brown University professor who has a blogging head. And I said to him, Glenn, here's the good news. The good news is that, or maybe the bad news is that white males are evil persecutors. But the good news, and they're responsible for everything bad, but the good news is they're responsible for everything. They're the only ones who are responsible. But it does seem they're the only full moral human being. So maybe, I mean, my theory is that all of this stuff really is just ruling class narcissism. And it's a way for, you know, beneath the rituals of self-abasement, what they're really saying is, I'm the most important. Well, right. I'm the only full human being. Right. The only full human being. Oh, no, there. There we're back. So I went to the beach yesterday. I went to the Venice Beach Boardwalk. And as I'm walking down the Venice Beach Boardwalk, talking with a friend right near the Pacific Jewish Center, this topless lady strolls by on roller skates. It was like roller girl out there on the Venice Boardwalk. And here I am, just like sharing words of Torah with a friend near the holy environment of the Pacific Jewish Center. And then there's this topless girl going by. And she was like a six or a seven. I mean, she was attractive. And according to peer-reviewed scientific studies, women who are sexes but who roller skate public topless, they are empirically verified as sevens. So maybe she was, you know, even harder than she really was, just because I didn't know you don't see that many topless women roller skating in Venice these days. Is there something I'm missing? In Australia, you used to have a lot of bathing beauties who would go topless about a third of attractive women between, say, 18 and 30 would go topless in Australia. But that pretty much died out in the early 1990s. So I was recently back in Australia for two months. I did not see one pair of tits. And here I am walking down the Venice Boardwalk yesterday. And topless woman goes by. And there were police around. So I'm not sure is that legal now in Los Angeles? I'm kind of proud of myself. I went to the beach. I hung out with a friend, went to walk about, spent about four and a half hours at the beach. And I did take one picture. I didn't go make one video. But I was sorely tempted to go make a video when there are all these plaques for blacks on Pico Boulevard and Fourth Street. So there were a series of plaques about the contributions of black people to Santa Monica, which is not a particularly black area. But apparently, there were a tiny number of black people in the early history of Santa Monica. They suffered racial discrimination. And there was a black doctor and a black dentist that moved to Santa Monica in the 1930s. And I would expect that in the 1930s, this was prior to affirmative action. So I would expect, say, prior to the 1960s, that if you got a black doctor or a black dentist, statistically speaking, on average, they're probably more likely to be competent than the average, say, white doctor. But now that we've got massive amounts of affirmative action, so that seven out of eight blacks who get into medical school according to recent surveys have benefited from affirmative action. So now there's widespread instinctive knee-jerk belief that if you get a black professional, that they're less likely to be competent due to widespread affirmative action. But a few decades ago, I would expect that the average person would have thought that their black professional would have been more likely to be competent than the average because there was not this affirmative action giving a big hand up and putting a foot on the scale. All human beings who have true moral agency in the complete sense of the term are white males. And everybody else is somehow compromised, victimized, oppressed, persecuted, you know, lax control, lax efficacy. Lax agency. There's something less. Yes. There's less agency. That's really the way to somebody. There's actors in our play. I mean, that's what they're really saying. And it's your play. It's like, too. Sorry, not to get far afield. Well, it's not far afield. That's the center of it. So what happens? So you write this piece in the Inquirer in Philadelphia. People don't like it. What did the administration at Penn say? Well, the way these things always play out is through the infectious media. I mean, social media just is so critical to how these things happen. A bunch of students get hold of this. They gin up some outrage. They, of course, go running to. Yeah, so the most activist have the most power. Moses's reforms for the Jewish way of life 3,200 years ago weren't overwhelmingly popular. But because his supporters were so hardcore, they essentially cowed the rest of Israel into following. And when much of Israel wanted to participate in idolatry, it was the hardcore that said, no, no, no, you can't go that way. So you don't see a lot of comics making fun of Islam because there's a hardcore of Muslims who really don't appreciate that. There's no reform Islam. There's no conservative Islam. There's only orthodox Islam because the adherents of Islam are so hardcore that they intimidate anyone who wants to make a more watered-down version. So this isn't just something that occurs on college campuses. This is just the veto of the dedicated 5% or 10%. You get a dedicated 5% or 10% of a particular group dedicated to some proposition. And they will consistently prevail over the 90% to 95% who oppose them but who are not nearly as dedicated. So yeah, I was at the beach yesterday. And there were quite a few fit white women. And some of them, I saw a group of them, they had headphones on and they were like dancing with each other. See, I grew up a Seventh-day Adventist. So dancing is a sin in the Seventh-day Adventist approach to life. And then I converted to Orthodox Judaism where you only dance with blokes. So I am only comfortable dancing with other blokes. But I have a dream, God forbid, but I meet a woman who teaches me how to disco dance or dance to rock and roll music. Obviously it's a sin and maybe it's be permitted with your wife. So I need to find a wife who will teach me how to dance because I have so many hangouts with regard to dancing. I'm just so awkward and maladjusted. But I just kind of envied them. Like they were there with their headphones on and grooving and dancing with each other on the beach and they look so fit. It's like when I go to a party and like women are greeting each other. It's like, oh, hey, baby. And like jumping into each other's hands or in arms and I'm sitting back thinking, oh, this is not very intellectual. But as my therapist pointed out, maybe you wanted people to squeal and jump for joy when they see you too. So yeah, I saw these hot fit white women on the Santa Monica Venice Beach. It was a very beautiful site. Okay, what else? So yeah, big Sunday, right? And I wanna talk about Elon Musk buying a substantial part of Twitter but deciding not to join the board of Twitter. Maybe Elon Musk will open up some more free speech on Twitter and bring Donald Trump back. I'll discuss that later in the show. The dean and to the powers that be at school, big daddy and friends and they complain. This is hurtful. This is harmful. This makes us unsafe. This is degrading to us. Do something, do something. You have to discipline this person. You have to get rid of them. You have to fire them. And of course the complainers have no concept of academic freedom. They're completely oblivious to it. To freedom of expression. I mean, free speech doesn't technically apply. Pretty much everyone is oblivious to everything that is not interesting to them. So let's say I spent much of my time dreaming that I was gonna become a great and successful YouTube host one day. I would interpret all evidence through that lens that I just have to unleash my natural gifts that thousands of people are gonna flock to my show. I wouldn't be living in reality. I wouldn't be confronting the type of shows that I like to do and not likely to have mass appeal. No, I'm much more likely to live in delusion. And so people don't think about other people, right? People don't think about you nearly as much as you think about you. And so empathy is a cognitive ability and there is a test that measures one's ability for empathy and that is IQ. And Amy Wax, we're talking someone with like a 160 IQ. So yeah, she is capable of far more empathy than these 120 IQ students. But these 120 IQ students, they're not an anomaly. This is just how human beings act, right? Do you think that Orthodox Jews go around deeply concerned about the fate of Christians or non-Jews? No, Orthodox Jews are primarily concerned about the welfare of Orthodox Jews. Seventh-day Adventists are primarily concerned about the welfare of Seventh-day Adventists. People don't tend to think about other people very much. It's not just a crazy college student thing. They don't apply to a professor at a private university, which is what I am, and they don't even understand that. But there is this core of academic values that, you know... They're not trying to understand that. They're trying to have a good time. They're trying to gain points for being an activist. They're trying to reach for a prestige and to appear to be an anti-racism leader. Like I see people all around me in my social class want to publish op-eds about the stains they talk against racism. People react to incentives. These students are reacting to incentives. There's not much incentive in America in 2022 for academic freedom. There's much more incentive to be an anti-racism crusader. So these kids are just reacting to incentives to incentives to the world that we have created for them. Lash leads the result of 1965 civil rights legislation. Well, it is supposed to be at the center of why we're here and what we do that a lot of people pay lips or... Academic freedom is not at the center of students' lives. Right? What's at the center of students' lives is getting drunk, getting laid, getting through class, and then for a minority, it's really important to them to get high grades so that they can get a good job. And academic freedom is not a leading concern for 99% of students, not now, not ever. Service two, you would think the students would understand that, but they don't. But actually, it wasn't just the students who wrote these petitions, but the faculty also was upset, a number of the faculty. But it's such a... Yeah, the faculty and the students are reacting to a system. They're reacting to incentives that have been largely put in place by 1965 civil rights legislation. People react to incentives, right? Institutions and groups, right? And legislation and things often outside of our unconscious control have a tremendous effect on us. Weird inversion just to touch on the students for a sec. They're students. They're there to learn, not to teach. How many students do you think go to university with the primary purpose of learning? No, they go there to party. They go there because it's expected. And they go there so that they can get a good job. Their job isn't to tell deans the way the world is. Their job is to absorb from the deans and the faculty the way the world is, right? That's the whole point. So why didn't any deans say, shut up, kid. Like, I'm not interested, you know, just shut up. Like, you're not qualified on this. I'm in charge. Like, nobody would ever assert that authority anymore. Tucker, I have been saying this forever. I have been saying the solution to this whole debacle of the cancel culture and the intimidation on campus is so simple. It's just for deans and university presidents to exert their authority and say, I'm sorry, your complaint is illegitimate. It's stupid, yeah. You know, there's nothing. So we live in the United States of America where there is an ethic that the consumer is always right. The customer is always right. You may not like it, but students are the customers of universities, right? So it's not surprising that there's a mentality on the behalf of universities that does not want to confront their customers and tell them that they're wrong. That's not usually a winning business strategy. Nothing I can do. There's nothing I should do. Faculty do this. They express their opinion. And they're there for that purpose of sorry, you're just going to have to get over it. I really, the number of university presidents or deans who have reacted in that way, and there have been multiple incidents like this all across the country, can be counted on half of one hand. But it's not just the deans. It's like the guys at J.P. Morgan and at the Pentagon and everywhere. And I have to say there's a general component. The majority of people we have on who are dissidents in the face of this stuff are women. That's just true. Yeah, no, that's true. There's a feminization of outrage that is quite disturbing. No, no, no, but like the majority of people we have, who say I'm not doing this, I'm not going along with whatever it is. Where are like, are there any, I'm sorry to say it, but are there any men left? Like anywhere? Who are just saying no, there's a limit and here's what it is and no offense, but we're not doing that. Well, not people in positions of real authority. And I think the reason for that is that to get to be a university president, to get to be a dean, you have to jump through these filtering hoops that ensure that you're not a renegade. Right. That you've, you know, you're right. You've had your balls cut off. Excuse the crew. No, you're right. You've been gilded. You have been male or female. And, you know, the filter is a very good one. Okay, so you went to Yale Law School and Medical School, right? Harvard Medical School. I mean, you're making my point. So here's Harvard Law School and Harvard Medical School. That's unbelievable. Yale undergrad. Right. In biochemistry. Right. Right, okay. So there's kind of no achievement on the ladder that you haven't gotten. And now you're a professor at Penn Law School. So you know the system that we use to raise up the next generation of leaders very well because you succeeded in it. And I wonder if you ever have second thoughts about that system and whether it produces the kind of people you need to run a country. Well, Tucker, you have to understand that things have changed drastically. Yeah, for sure. I mean, the change has been rapid and dramatic. When I was an undergrad, I graduated from college in 1975. It was a completely different world. Yale in the early 70s was not a place that apologized for its existence, okay? It was a proud place that carried forward or tried very hard to carry forward. Old traditions, you know, of dead white male achievement. And it was largely dead white male achievement. I mean, obviously there were other contributions, but there was no attempt to try to even it out. We were going to study Western Civ and we were going to venerate and respect Western. Western Civ is a cuck term for Christendom, right? So Western Civ that is proudly masculine term that we're gonna stand up for its excellence. Western, all right, Western civilization, that's a compromise with Christendom. We started talking about Western civilization in the last 60 years so that we could include Jews, right? The traditional term has been Christendom. So I would have liked to have heard us say Christendom. You're in Civ and recognize how important that legacy was to where we are today. I mean, that was the understanding. And women were expected, the women who were new on the scene at Yale, they had just been admitted, were expected to conform to these quote unquote male standards of intellectual rigor, of objectivity, of empiricism, and all of the post-enlightenment traditions and values and practices that we associated with the great universities. There was, the word diversity just was on no one's lips. I mean, there were students from minority groups, but they were also expected to achieve along the same lines as everybody else. Look, in the 1950s, Judaism was included as one of America's three great religions, right? That became deregure, even though Jews didn't even account for 3% of the American population. So there have been plenty of Jews who've been playing this diversity game. It's not just a Jewish thing, it's not just a black thing or a Puerto Rican thing. Individuals groups are constantly trying to position themselves for their own advantage, right? So Jews wanted to open America up so that we no longer said, you know, Aino Domino, AD or BC, we said, say BCE and CE before the common era and common era. Instead of saying Christ, we say Western civilization. We make Judaism one of the three great religions of the United States of America when there's really only Christianity as being the dominant religion. So groups have long been playing these games. So, and the other fact about Yale in the early 70s, and I've recently been on a list server, this has been discussed, is that we had a bare bones pared down administrative apparatus. I mean, it was 95% academics. That's what Yale was about. And everything else, the McCann. This is all the consequence of the 1965 civil rights legislation. HR departments were not so huge prior to 1965, right? HR departments, these type of administration departments have all had to vastly expand because civil rights legislation has effectively repealed the original constitution which allowed for freedom of association installed a whole new constitution where you don't get freedom of association and where the simple fact of having different numbers of groups in different areas makes you much more vulnerable to a lawsuit. And so as a rational response to civil rights legislation, you have the growth of administrations, you have the growth of HR departments, right? Do you think big business is just so devoted to critical race theory and to sexual harassment training and the like? No, they wanna make money, but if you have racial sensitivity training, sexual sensitivity, sexual harassment training, you reduce your legal liability, right? The reason that universities have all these administrators, have all this affirmative action and there are all these bloated HR departments, it's all to reduce legal liability and to fit in with the world that was created by 1960 civil rights legislation. So she's talking as though this is just some unfathomable, irrational behavior on the bar of faculties and on behalf of students and on behalf of universities when everyone reacts to incentives. The mechanics of operating Yale was handled by a very small group of people including academic advising, our dean of students. You know, you would talk to them once or twice in a semester. So guess what? The more you subsidize something, the more you get of it, right? The federal government has been subsidizing higher education on a massive degree. And so in response to all this massive government funding and with the funding always comes oversight, you have the growth of the administrative state, right? This is not just something to do with universities. You have overall the increasing power of the administrative state, which is largely beyond legal challenge, executive challenge and legislature challenge. If the DMV makes the rule that you don't like, generally speaking, you can't sue in court and the executive, the president or the governor can't take them down and the legislature by and large can't take them down. We have an administrative state. We don't have any alternatives in the first world to the administrative state. If you think the administrative state sucks and I think there are many valor criticisms of the administrative state, then show me a flourishing prosperous first world nation that doesn't have an administrative state, right? This is just what comes with an advanced economy. You have this massive administrative state. It applies to universities. It applies to corporations. It applies to unions, right? Life becomes increasingly bureaucratized. It becomes increasingly regulated, right? We have far more laws, far more regulations and far more restrictions on our freedom. Now, then five years ago, then 10 years ago, then 15 years ago, then 20 years ago, then 30 years ago. There's this inevitable march of the administrative state which has not been turned back significantly anywhere in the first world of which I'm aware. They had a secretary and that was it. There was no diversity inclusion on equity apparatus. So I just signed up for Fox Nation. I got a one year deal for like less than $40. I think it was even less than $33. So how can you beat that a year of Fox Nation for less than a dollar a week? And I pay $3 a week for CNN Plus. So I probably got like 12 subscriptions running. Of course, I've got Netflix and Amazon Prime, LA Times, New York Times, ESPN Plus, The Athletic, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. There weren't these dozens and dozens and dozens of people doing heaven knows what, Tucker making mischief really is what they do right now. You know, just... Making mischief is what we say when we don't want to have some empathy and try to understand how other people are responding to incentives just as we do. Now, look, I have frequently been absolute pig with regard to women and with regard to men as well, right? I have behaved so badly, so rudely, so inconsiderately, so selfishly. But do you think I want to look at that? Do you think I want to talk about that? I remember there was some woman who years after I cornered her in a kitchen at a Shabbat dinner and put the hard word on her who was like still crying about it, right? I don't know how many women I've traumatized. I don't know how many guys I've traumatized, right? But I don't want to think about that. I don't want to think about the negative effect I've had on others. It takes a lot of effort to think about why are other people behaving the way they do, but people are trying to do the best they can and we're all just responding to incentives. So if you want to actually make a difference in the topics that she is discussing, you have to understand, get to the bottom of these incentives that are causing people to act in ways you find unproductive. Ending up problems that justify their existence. We didn't have those people at all. And as a result, it was a lot cheaper. I mean, I remember, I remember my dad saying, holy heck, they're charging $4,000 for tuition at this place you know, every semester. That's a lot of money. Well, it seemed like a lot of money at the time, but it's- Most of the world's great universities are in America. So American universities certainly have their share of problems, but they're simply the best in the world by far, right? Approximately nine out of 10 of the world's top universities are American, probably 18 of the top 20, probably 45 of the top 50. So America's universities have their problems. These are all accurate criticisms, but compared to what? I live on planet Earth, right? You think it sucks in America. You think the American university sucks. That where is it better? You think things are better in China? You think things are better in Nigeria? You think things are significantly better in France or Germany or Sweden or Australia or Iceland or Ireland or Scotland? No, they're not. What's best universities are overwhelmingly American for all their problems? Nothing compared to what they're charging now. And why are they charging it? Take a list of, take a look at the- Because they can, right? It's just supply and demand. When I went to UCLA, I think there are more applications to go to UCLA than any other university in the country. It's a great university. It's a great place to be. There's enormous demand for a good university education. The list of DIE, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion-type people at University of Michigan, for example, which recently appeared- It sucks regardless of where the Bangladesh or Nigeria was. Okay, so you can choose to take that attitude and it's like, oh, it just sucks. But sucking is relative, right? If there aren't- Attitude that, you know, America just sucks, man, right? America's got problems, but overall it's the world's leader. It's the dominant superpower and it will become only more dominant in the decades ahead. So if you're gonna say America sucks, then where do you think it's better and why don't you move there if you think it's so much better elsewhere? You're online on someone's Twitter account dozens and dozens and dozens of people making tens of thousands of dollars. In some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unclear duties, you know, unknown purpose. Just- I remember when I worked construction, I made something like four, five, six dollars an hour, 650 I think was the max. This was 1985, 86, 87, 88, right? And yet there are other people who made $20 an hour in construction. All they did was ride around with the boss, right? So some people are just better skilled at finding those sweet jobs. I was swinging a pick and a shovel in 100 degrees Sacramento heat for like $5 an hour. But other people were riding around in air conditioned cars and all they had to do was be a pleasant company for their boss. So some people figure out how to do the sweet things, right? You're into sweetness. There are opportunities if you wanna roll that way. Just there, welfare for the upper middle class is really what it is. And of course, what happens? Parents are desperate to put together the money to send their kids to these prestigious universities. They take out enormous loans. They co-sign those loans. And there's no hope that a lot of these students will ever pay them back. I mean, there's of course, a push in how to stick the taxpayer with the bill, of course, which is a- So she keeps talking as though what's happening is just completely irrational. Why was it when I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, I opened up the LA Weekly and other help wanted sections in newspapers. And I saw there are all these ads for actors and models. How did I then get taken for thousands of dollars worth of scams? Because I was unconsciously a willing participant, right? The scam offered me the illusion that I could have an acting or a modeling career. And so I jumped for it. People signed up for these elite university educations that rationally they can't afford because it feeds an illusion that they can then become elite, that their life path will be smoothed over, right? So it's not surprising that people will spend tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars and get into astronomical amounts of debt to feed a delusion, right? People do that buying homes they can't afford. Settling down with a spouse that they can't afford. This is part of the human condition. It's just so easy to do what Amy Wax is doing here. It's just like they're sitting back, decrying the sins of the world and just how stupid and irrational everyone is. Instead, she could spend a little bit of cognitive empathy and talk about why things are the way they are and how people are just rationally responding to incentives and human beings do not live on bread alone. People wanna feel important, right? People have delusions, all right? We all have delusions and then we all filter reality through the prism of our delusions. And being an elite person is a dream for many parents, for many kids. And so they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars that they can't afford to feed this delusion. It's just how people work. It's not something that's unique to universities. A subsidy for the college-educated class that truck drivers and delivery drivers are gonna be paying. Yes. That's just the most regressive thing you can possibly imagine is discharging these student loans. But this is really what we have bought. We have bought a bloated, wildly expensive education establishment where the- I agree with pretty much everything she's saying, but you can tell by a very flat affect that she has just made these complaints a thousand times, right? There's no aliveness in her delivery because she said it a thousand times. I remember when I went for a voice lesson, my first voice lesson, and my teacher was trying to teach me how to resonate from a higher place in the back of my throat. And so she just asked me various questions. When I was answering all these questions, my voice was fairly flat. She picked up on it and said, oh, you've talked about this a hundred times before, haven't you? It was like, yes. There's a certain quality to the voice when you said things 200 times. And so Tucker Carlson's getting sloppy seconds here. Like he's not just getting sloppy seconds, he's getting sloppy three hundredths because she's said all these things 300 times. She is bored by what she's saying because she said it so many times. And I've invited her on my show where she could get to have a new experience, right? Where she wouldn't just get the same old questions and just tread out the same old answers. Like I worked hard to get her on my show and she was thinking about coming on my show, but she's always backed out of coming on my show. She could come on my show and have a new experience and she wouldn't have to just retread the same tired lines she's given 500 times before. The issue of administrators to teachers rises on a yearly basis. And that's the difference between now, Tucker, and back when I was in college. It's night and day. It's amazing. So under all of this is the failure of self-confidence. You described Yale when you went there in the early 70s as a place that was proud of itself, thought it had something worth passing on. That's not the case now. So this is how it was back when I went to university. Guess what? There were certain things that were better about life at universities in the 1960s than today. There are other things that are better today, right? Life in 2022 has its problems. There are some ways that life in 1452 was better. There are some ways that life in 1952 was better, right? Some things are better now. Some things are better then. But we're not living in a dystopia right now. Now, and so maybe as a result of that affirmative action, this idea that what we're doing is basically illegitimate until we quote diversify. And Glenn Medley says that Amy Wax would be good with Ed Dutton. What am I? Am I chopped me? You don't think that I would bring out the best in Amy Wax. You think that Ed Dutton would do a better interview with Amy Wax than I would. Buy it. That's kind of the reigning idea so far as I can tell. You addressed this pretty directly, I would say, in a conversation with Glenn Lowry, 2017 on Blogging Heads TV. I want to play it for our viewers who haven't seen it. This was a pivot point in your life, I would say. Take Penn Law School or some top 10 law school. Here's a very inconvenient fact, Glenn. I don't think I've ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class and rarely, rarely in the top half. I can think of one or two students who've scored in the top half in my required first year course. Well, what are we supposed to do about that? You're really, you're putting in front of this person a real uphill battle and if they were better matched, it might be a better environment for them. So there are two parts to that statement which grows out of your firsthand observations as a professor. The first is just a statement of fact. You said, I don't think I've ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of class and rarely, rarely in the top half, okay? Right, because the elite black students, they don't go to the University of Pennsylvania because they could get into Harvard and Stanford and Berkeley and the University of Chicago and Columbia and Yale. They're all going to better universities than University of Pennsylvania. Something that's speaking of empiricism, that's an empirical observation made by you. And the second is an expression of compassion for the students that you're talking about and you say, this is bad for them. I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but let's go to the first one. Well, there's an irony here, which is that what I say about blacks rarely graduating at the top of the class and here I'm specifically drawing on my experience as a teacher of a large first year class in which I have seen all the data every single bit of it for 15 years of where students are in the class and on the basis of that, but also my attendance at graduation and my service on the clerkship committee where we see students ranked quite explicitly in order to try to place them in clerkships. All of that teaches me that black students tend to clump in the bottom half of the class and actually it's- And when you look at the clerkships for the leading liberal Supreme Court justices, they have almost no blacks that they allow to clerk for them. So they're all for affirmative action, but not for themselves. It's worse than that. In my civil procedure class, they would clump towards the bottom 10% of the class or 15% of the class. Occasionally people would break out of that and even make it into the top, but what's ironic? And often university professors and college teachers and high school teachers have passed struggling minority students because they simply don't want to deal with the consequences of failing them. So when you make it hard for people to fail you, then yeah, you can intimidate people into passing you and you can then try to swim at a level that is just way above you. Here, and this is a very roundabout way of putting it is that this pattern has been well-known in law schools for decades, no one. So I know a lot of lawyers and pretty much every lawyer that I've done is race realist. They don't have the same expectation for a Japanese client or a Chinese client or a Mexican client or a black client or a white client. They expect that the Japanese-American client is gonna be more prepared than the average white client. They expect that the Japanese-American client is gonna be more educated to earn more money, to be more likely to be on time and to be polite and to be well-presented than the average white client. And they also have certain expectations about different types of white people. These to be different types of Mexicans and different types of Latinos and different types of black people. So pretty much every lawyer I know is fairly realistic about race. Seriously doubts that black students tend to underachieve in law schools the practice of hermitive action, selective law schools. A professor named Richard Sander at UCLA published a law review article. I think it was in Stanford. It may have been in another law review in which he just lays out the data that he obtained from a number of law schools. Of course now it would be almost impossible to get that data that showed that. You know, that showed that there was not an even distribution of grades. Now, you know, they made such a big deal out of it but it's really not that big a deal in the following sense, Tucker. You know, you could argue about the pros and cons of affirmative action. Well, the distribution of blacks in law school is no different than the distribution of whites in the NBA or the NFL. There aren't a lot of Asian players in the NBA or the NFL. I mean, is that because of systemic racism? Is it because different groups are different gifts? Right, there weren't any great Catholic physicists who were important to the Manhattan Project. Right, all the physicists were Protestant or Jewish. When I discussed this with Glenn Lowry, it was not. There are no Protestants of the US Supreme Court. Right, law does not have the same importance to Protestants as it does to Catholics and to Jews. The US Supreme Court, it's all Catholics and Jews for a nation that is long being primarily Protestant. Not along the lines of, well, this shows that we should just get rid of affirmative action. I mean, this fact alone means that affirmative action is a disaster. That was not the gist of the conversation. The gist of the conversation was, you know, there are upsides and downsides to affirmative action. And one of the downsides is that, you know, blacks have a hard time when they're overmatched by their classmates, which is the whole point of affirmative action, right? Doing really well academically, that's one downside. Well, the context of this, I mean, the clip that we just played was, again, one of empathy. You're saying it's not good for these students. I think it's hard. I think it is very hard for them. And it can be, do you want to? I mean, is it any different than, say, a football team or a basketball team that is forced to take on white or Asian students rather than simply the best student athletes? Moralizing, but that, to me, is not a slam dunk. Now, I happen to be opposed to affirmative action. I've become more opposed and I can explain why. Tell me why. The reason I've become more opposed to affirmative action is because I think it has poisoned the entire academic enterprise. It is like this poison that, you know, you drop into a well and it just spreads everywhere and goes through all the pipes and there's no place that's not... All the capillaries, yeah. Yeah, all the capillaries, all the tiniest little, you know, end point. It's similar to affirmative action for athletes when University of Washington had something like the number two ranked football team in the nation in year 2000. Half the squad had been arrested or investigated for serious crimes like rape and attempted murder, just awful things, but law enforcement and school administration had worked together to essentially get a free pass for the student athlete criminals. Points of where the law... I remember when I was at UCLA and a lot of the football players would eat in my Reaver Hall dormitory. It was just some really bad behavior. They would throw food around just awful, awful behavior. I remember in high school, often athletes did not have to take tests, all right, if they had had a long training session the night before. So athletes often get preferential treatment in schools and are not held accountable to the same work levels that everyone else is held accountable to. That's what our goes, that's an analogy. And what do I mean by that? I think if you were to look at the orthodoxy, at the accepted narrative, at the priorities of academia today, which is diversity above everything else and safe spaces and psychological comfort for minority students and disadvantaged minorities, especially or underachieving minorities, we'll never call them that. That is the most important thing. And anybody who says anything about groups or about race or about different populations that would in any way upset someone who is a minority, probably in many cases here because of affirmative action, that person needs to be punished. And it just affects everything that people study, the sorts of opinions that they can express, what you're allowed. Well, you can say the same sort of thing about America as a whole. You can't discuss any major issue in America without asking very quickly, how does this affect black people? So whether it's homelessness, education, public education, educational standards, crime, law enforcement, policing, public safety, housing regulations, who gets to take out a mortgage should we have affirmative action in mortgage lending? Pretty much every public policy, first of all, the dominant question is, how will this affect black people? Not really a strong recipe for building a productive and cohesive society. To say what you're not allowed to say, it all comes back to hiding the fact that some groups are more competitive than others, that there is this academic achievement gap that has not gone away. And because of it, we now have everywhere in academia, not just double standards. Look, we've only spent several trillion dollars trying to close the gap. I think if we just throw another 10 trillion at it, we'll get us sorted. But a wholesale attack on standards. Well, that's it right there. That's right. It's an attack on the idea of achievement, even. Achievement of merit, of standards, of any kind of objective metric of, who's more competent or capable than someone else? That whole system has gotta go. It is under attack. Now, if that's not the poison seeping into the capillaries, I don't know what it is. If you have schools arguing against education, which is essentially what they're doing now, then you kind of lost the thread, right? I mean, right? Well, I mean, they say they're for education, but what they're really for is indoctrination. Well, no, but I mean, there are school districts around the country, Washington State, Oregon, for example, California, where they've said, we're just not studying this because certain people aren't doing well enough and it's we're just giving it up. We're against learning now. We're against grammar. I mean, it's pretty scary, right? Right. Anything where one group does worse than another or the outcomes, of course, this is part of this broader focus on equalizing. Well, no, it's not anything where one group does worse than another. So there are consistently fewer men going to college and that's not a big concern. It's well known in education that women and girls are much better at coloring between the lines that men are much more likely to be rambunctious that we don't have many classes in military history and classes that boys would find interesting. Our whole educational systems become highly feminized, highly slanted towards female success rather than the male success. So no, there are favored groups in certain situations. It's not that we always want equal outcomes because there are all sorts of outcomes where women in our society do far better than men and that's not considered widely a very bad thing. That's considered not worthy of discussion. The outcomes on equity. It's just an important branch of the whole equity project which is all outcomes for all groups. Yeah, I'm not endorsing any hate speech. I'm just showing this for educational purposes. It's like pornography. Must be the same. And if they're not, then the only explanation for it is some kind of evil nefarious racism. So what do we do about it? Well, in the education sphere, we say, well, let's get rid of all the subjects where some people learn it better than others or some people get better grades than others. Let's just, let's get rid of calculus because blacks do relatively poorly with calculus or they struggle with calculus or they choose not to study calculus. Well, just dump it, right? That's the sort of thing that's going on. Certainly dump anything associated with white values, European accomplishments, Western Civ. What exactly are white values? I don't think she's on very solid ground there. I mean, I guess you could make the case in the United States of America that whites generally speaking vote for lower taxes and stronger law enforcement and the removal of affirmative action. But what white values? I think that's a misstep. I dump all of that because not only does that lead to unequal outcomes, but it also has that added effect of, implying that some things are more worth studying than others. Right, if you're studying the history of Rome, you have to study the history of Sierra Leone too. Right, or some other obscure place. Right. How is that different from vandalism? It just seems like people coming in and wrecking everything that was valuable in an institution that they never built themselves. It's very reckless and destructive. It's very vindictive, it's very angry. Yeah. Where does that anger come from, do you think? I think there is just a tremendous amount of resentment and shame of non-Western peoples against Western peoples for Western peoples' outsized achievements and contributions. I mean. This is something Steve Stanley talks about a lot, but if you're gonna say something as incendiary as this, this is what was picked up by Media Matters today and blasted all over Twitter and the internet. If you're gonna say incendiary things, you should step back and think, is there a way that I can phrase this so that more people can hear what I'm saying? And second, what's objective evidence? And you're not gonna find objective evidence that non-Western people just hate Western achievement and hate white people because they achieve so highly. I'm sure there are some non-whites who hate whites for achieving just as there are plenty of whites who hate whites, but I don't think she is on strong ground objectively or statistically. And if you're gonna throw these incendiary, you know, Molotov cocktails, then you gotta endure a tremendous blowback that's unnecessary. You could just rephrase things in ways that people could hear more effectively. I mean, it's really unbearable. I was actually, you know, leaving aside American blacks who I think do feel that resentment and shame. Some do. You really think 60%, 70%, you really think 80% of American blacks just resent white people and resent Western civilizations? I don't. I think maybe 2% do. 3%. But she's talking as though this is a generalized black phenomenon. I don't think she's right. Shame and envy. I mean, it's this unholy brew of sentiments. I was talking to Glenn Lowry about this bizarre. Right, I mean, she's saying these incendiary things that are unnecessary. You could phrase things in ways that people could hear and she doesn't have any empirical evidence or she'd be citing it. She's just channeling Steve Saylor. Fact that Asian and South Asian Indian doctors at Penn Med, which I know people there and I know what's going on there, that they're on the ramparts for the anti-racism initiative for Dump on America. America is an evil racist. Right, because those are the incentives that white people have set up. White people have made it cool to dump on white people and to dump on Western civilization and to dump on Christianity. These other minority groups are in large part simply responding to the incentives that white people have created. There's nothing essential, intrinsic and inherent in South Asians that they hate white people. South Asians overall are among the most Pacific people around. This place has their immigrants. The number one highest income group in America is. Right, hate America. Right. A goodly number of them. So, but you're from a group, I mean, first of all, I hate even thinking in terms of groups anyway. A goodly number of South Asians just hate America. And the evidence for this is what? That you've got a prominent South Asian activist here or there at the University of Penn Med School? Because what matters is the individual, obviously. But as long as we are, if you're a member of the highest income, highest achievement group in America and you're looking down another group, native-born whites for example, and saying you're the problem, like how does that work exactly? Well, that is to me utterly bizarre and fascinating. And I'm not- Why does anybody put up with that? Right, I'm not saying all Indians are this way. I'm just saying you look at the roster who's leading the programs, the endless number of programs where they talk about diversity and- Okay, so now she's coming alive. All right, now she's saying things that she hasn't said a thousand times. Unfortunately, she's speaking as though she was at a bar talking to a friend. All right, you're gonna speak this way. One, you shouldn't, you should perhaps rephrase so that more people can hear you. Two, you need to be citing evidence. And she's not citing any evidence beyond anecdotes, which is not convincing. Racism and all the racism that people have to encounter and medicine and how racist medicine is and all this. And you see these brown faces or you see these Asian faces and you think, I mean, literally you think, so you're coming from your country, which you're implying is equal or better than our country. Literally. And you're telling us how awful we are. Well, what's the explanation for that? China's an ethno-state, by the way, which no one ever says. It's about the Han Chinese. And if you're not, that's the problem with the Uyghurs. That's the religion, they're not Han Chinese. Yeah, well, China is about 92% Han Chinese, right? It's not surprising that a country that's 92% Han Chinese is a Han Chinese state. Whatever, I'm not even judging. I'm just saying people from there have no right to judge the United States. But they very much feel that they do. So take the Brahmin women who come from India and they climb the ladder, they get the best education, we give them every opportunity, and they turn around and leave the charge on we're racist, we're an awful country. Yeah, and 1% of Brahmin women are doing this, right? You're talking at most 0.1%, but she's talking as though it's 70% of them. New reform, our medical system needs reform. Well, here's the problem. They're taught that they are better than everybody else because they are Brahmin elites. Every group instinctively believes that they're better than everyone else. Jews do, Christians do, Muslims do, blacks do, whites do. This is just part of human nature. And yet, on some level, their country is a shithole. Excuse my language. Yeah. It's not providing them with the opportunities that they feel that they deserve in, which in many cases they do deserve. They come here and they see that we have this. And 2 cents makes a great point. Luke is a moderate now. Yeah, like many intellectuals or wanna be intellectuals, I am frequently engaged in the performance of positioning, all right? I wanna position myself in a certain area where life will be cool, calm and collected and easy for me, all right? I don't wanna position myself in front of the machine guns. So Jean-Paul Sartre, all right? He condemned artists who didn't take a moral stand to try to make himself look more moral because he was taking a moral stand during World War II against Nazism. Then after World War II, he came up with, helped contribute to the popularizing of existentialism, which was the, one widespread philosophical movement. But as soon as other people got on board with existentialism, that made him less special. So he had to go invent something else. So yeah, I like other YouTubers and like you, I'm constantly positioned myself, constantly engaging in some kind of performance to position myself this way or that way to make my life better, right? We all do that. We're all kind of squinting at our life and trying to think, okay, in what perspective am I totally cool? Or how can I position myself to make my life better? So I absolutely plead guilty to that kind of performance. This wonderful developed scientific and medical establishment, which they haven't managed to create. They realized that we've outgunned and outclassed them in practically every way. And what do they feel? Well, they're very proud people. They're a shame culture. And they feel anger, they feel envy, they feel shame. I think the role of envy and shame in the way that the third world regards the first world is underestimated. I think you're exactly right. I think you're exactly right. It's never talked about. No, and you've been really penalized for talking about it. And it creates a gratitude of the most monstrous kind. I feel like- Notice how alive she is now, right? The last three minutes, she is alive. Asking some of these people like, why did you leave your country? Why are you here? Have you asked that? Well, it would be considered not just a microaggression, Tucker. It would be considered a macroaggression. You don't ask people that sort of thing. Why? Well- Yeah, why is she so animated now? Because this resonates with her. This gets her excited, right? She, Amy Wax has a lot of the shock jock in her. I mean, if you're- I would. If you're born here, you're absolutely right. Like, compare a demeanor now, all right? To more than five minutes ago, all right? The first 30 minutes of the interview, she was just stuck in monotone, right? Just reciting things she said a thousand times. Now she gets to say incendiary things that she hasn't said very much in public. And she's just coming alive. I have to say, you know- She's glowing. I think most Americans have complicated feelings about immigration. I'm speaking for myself, but like, my best friend's an immigrant, who I got father my first child. I mean, I really love, there are a lot of immigrants much more impressive than I am. And I think everyone's for that. But part of the deal is, you know, you don't show up in someone else's country and like start attacking them, right? I mean, that's just bad manners. Why can't you say that? Hey, hey, I converted to Judaism and yeah, very quickly started going on the offense. Yeah, no, I think that's a very valid point. And I'm not talking about all immigrants. No, I get it. No, I think- What I'm amazed at is, you know, how some of the people- It kind of reminds me of Dennis Prager, big fan of Dennis Prager. And he experiences, you know, as absolute betrayal when I started writing some critical things about him on a blog. So we tend to expect that, you know, if someone's done us a kindness or if someone's, you know, expressed gratitude for us that they should just be permanently in some sort of subservient, grateful position. It's not really how a lot of people work, right? I can express my gratitude for you, you know, one day and three months down the line, I might have some strong criticisms. People in the leadership class behave and how they get away with it and how no one really calls them. That's what it is. And it does feel like, yeah, because, I mean, I know, yeah, I know an awful lot of the kind of people you're talking about and like all the ones I know, like, love America, you know, more than many Americans do, including my best friend. And the chat says, Amy Wax is much better on The Glenn Lowry Show. Tucker requires her to figure out the arena. Yeah, Tucker's doing a lousy interview here. Friend is like the most patriotic person I've ever met. But they need to speak out. I think- I think that's right. I'm disappointed at the way a number, the way that immigrants from Asia, from India, from places like that, you know. She's saying they need to speak out. Well, if you're gonna speak out, don't take Amy Wax here as a guide for how to speak out because Amy Wax is doing herself better side. No favors. You wanna speak out, learn to speak in ways that the largest possible number of people can hear what you're saying and not lose their minds. And second, provide evidence when you're saying things that are very hard to hear, right? Come at it from an empirical perspective. No, from non-Western countries are reluctant to get up there and say, look, these trends, the way in which this anti-racism, wokeness is going, we take issue with that. We reject that. I hear very, very little of that. No, that's right. And one of the issues I talked to Lowry about is, why do Asians vote so overwhelmingly democratic? Why would they vote Republican? Generally speaking, they're a minority group. You would expect the coalition of the fringe, right? You would not expect them to join with the white Christian core. You'd expect them to be part of the fringe. Like minority groups generally vote for the coalition of the fringe, as you would expect. How is that in their interest? I mean, the Democrats are the party of wokeness. They are the party of America is a pervasively... You can say a lot about Asians, but you can't say that they're not voting their interests, right? Blacks are obviously voting their interests. Latinos are obviously voting their interests. And Asians who don't want a dominantly white country are probably voting their interests, right? So Asians are not afraid to speak up for themselves when say school boards go crazy and water down the quality of education. So Asians are speaking up for themselves quite often. This is place. Yeah, and anytime you shut down a school, a public school, those rare public schools that use colorblind admissions standards, change Stuyvesant, Hunter College High School, Thomas Jackson. Yeah, and I haven't noticed Asians just bending over and taking it, right? They speak up in their own interest and good for them. Jefferson in Fairfax County, Virginia, these are like the best schools in the country and they're overwhelmingly Asian because... 40 teams a bit exercised. Well, I have to position myself. All right, if I'm gonna put this on YouTube, I'm in great danger of getting a strike. I have all the incentives to try to come up with criticisms against Amy Wax. I have no incentives to praise Amy Wax. I have to live in society, bro. I have to exist on YouTube. I am positioning myself as an Amy Wax critic so I don't get a strike. And you think I'm exercised? You should have seen me yesterday. I walked over nine miles and then I got on my bike and I biked over nine miles. So yeah, I'm pretty exercised. I'm pretty fit, bro. It's only about aptitude. So if you change those standards, who are you screwing? You know, you're screwing the Korean kids whose dad literally owns a liquor store and showed up just to achieve, like you're hurting him. I agree completely. Yeah, there's very little, there are groups and there are people in the Asian community who are same. And that's why you see so many homeless Asians because of affirmative action. They've just found no way to make it in America because of these horrible university policies. They seem to have done pretty well. They're high achieving. They earn more than white people. They have more solid family life. They have more wealth. They're doing pretty good. Ending up, a guy named George Lee just is the principal in one such group in New York that is opposing changes in exam school admission requirements, which, you know, will have... Luke, are you optimistic for America's future for the majority of Americans? Have claims of American decline been greatly exaggerated? Compared to other countries, compared to other competing great powers? Yes, I believe that America is in great standing. Visa V, everything's relative, compared to other great powers. Do I think the overall quality of life in America is going to improve in the years ahead? No, I don't. I don't think the overall quality of life is going to improve in America. We're an incredibly divided country. We have diminishing social trust and social capital. So, yeah, I think my experience of two months in Australia and the much higher quality of life in Australia was a profound experience. So, no, I think average quality of life for the average American is very likely to decline over the next 50 years, but America, Visa V, China and Russia and Japan and the other great powers, I think America will be even more powerful. America is in a far better position than the Chinese, the Russians and Japanese. Obviously hurt Asians, but very few people have joined them. So, I find that very frustrating because I don't like all this dumping on America. I think it's misguided. I think it's wrong. I think it's inaccurate. I don't think we're a pervasively racist society. That's a kind of make-believe that's there to excuse a lot of self-inflicted wounds, especially, I think, on the part of the black community. And I think it's very short-sighted for Asians to go, yeah, to go along with that. That's really what I'm saying. So, what was... Chat wants to know, why wouldn't general quality of life improve in America over the next 50 years? Because we have diminishing social capital and social trust. Very difficult to rebuild that. So, all the trends point towards continued diminishment of social trust and social cohesion. When you're steadily losing social trust, social cohesion and social capital, quality of life goes down. That's just how it is. What was it like when you got back to campus? So, you had said a moment ago that it wasn't simply the idiot kids at the school. It wasn't just the 19-year-olds who were signing petitions. They were also faculty members. You are a faculty member. So, what was that like? Well, I mean, there was one faculty member who came nameless, who ginned up a petition to condemn me. He's no longer at the school. Glenn Madly says America's decline is like YouTube. Yeah, remember how great YouTube used to be? And Twitter was pretty cool, too. And half of my fellow faculty members signed it. Half did not, so that's good. Did you know any of them personally? Oh, I know all of them. Because we're not that big a faculty. I know every single one of them. What's that like? Well, a lot of the people that signed it, I think, are on some level coming back to shame, ashamed of it because they know that they shouldn't be condemning a fellow faculty member for... Telling the truth. Well, for even having an opinion. I mean, holy, apart from whether it's a valid opinion or not, just having an opinion on some issue of broader import, that's what faculty members do. It's just, it represents a failure of core academic values. I think on some level they knew that. But the way that they dealt with me was pretty much by ignoring me, just kind of pretending I didn't exist. I mean, I had friends on the faculty who I socialized with who just ghosted me entirely. No. Oh yes, of course, of course. And my dean eventually, he told the associate dean because I asked the associate dean, why am I not on any committees this year? And he said, because the dean doesn't want you on any committees, doesn't want you involved in this school at all, he doesn't want you to have any power, he doesn't want you to participate in any way. You're essentially dead man walking at this school. So what happens is the faculty of a dean do what they can within the rules because I do have tenure. So that's like a big obstacle or at least ostensibly it is, although if they really wanted to, they could probably get around it. They do everything they can to sort of attack me and undermine me short of actually firing me, which would be a heavy lift. But they are working towards firing me, I think. It's just so, and I don't want to rub it in or I mean, I'm sure this has got to be really painful for you. But I mean, that your peers, your colleagues would collaborate with this is just so shocking to me. It's kind of childish. But it's been enlightening for me and you said, well, Lowry learned from some of the bad things that happened to him, but I'm not saying it's not painful at times and I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but it has been enlightening and educational for me because it has made me realize why so few people with tenure protection speak out. I mean, you know. Right, ostracism is really painful. I should know I've been ostracized many times throughout my life when I started writing my unauthorized blog about Dennis Prager's radio show in late 1997. I lost every friend I had in Los Angeles, essentially, because every friend I had, I had in common with Dennis Prager. Every one of them sided with Dennis Prager that committing a terrible betrayal of Dennis Prager. So yeah, if you want to say incendiary things, if you want to say things you're not supposed to say, this is the life Amy Wax chose, right? She didn't have to use the language she used, right? She didn't have to say things the way that she said them. She could have presented these things differently, right? She chose this. Negation to tell the truth. That's the whole point of tenure to make it easier for you to tell the truth. But they don't do it because of, you know, because social ostracism is a powerful thing. And it can be a hurtful thing. I happen to be pretty thick skinned. Apparently. Yeah, I mean, I definitely am compared to other people and certainly compared to women, because women, you know, I'm generalizing here. Well, she's not thick skinned enough to come on my show, right? We've exchanged several emails and she was tempted. She liked the interview I did with Greg Cochran, but she's not thick skinned enough to come here and get a real interview, not this Namby Pamby Tucker Carlson crap. Here, but I think they're more interested in being approved of and being considered nice, right? And I am certainly not considered nice. That's the first thing that goes. But I am maybe more sympathetic, marginally, to people who, despite their ostensible job protection through tenure, nevertheless, don't take full advantage of that job protection because they're all sorts of... It would be insane for most faculty members, even with tenure to behave as Amy Waxman, it'd be insane for anyone, for almost anyone, but 99.9% of people to conduct themselves in a way that is just going to provoke incendiary hatred by the people who are most important to you, by your peers is incredibly self-destructive for overwhelming majority of people. You should not essentially go out of your way to infuriate your peers. And much of what she's done is unnecessary, right? She's committed unnecessarily incendiary, evidence-free assertions that have led to their social ostracism, right? This is the life she chose. I've got the life I chose. You got the life you chose. She got the life she chose. The informal ways in which you will feel the effects. The students also ostracize you. I mean, the students won't take your classes. They shine you, they get on social media and say all sorts of things about you. Although I will say that there's a core of really wonderful students who take my classes, defend me, the Federalist Society, the people in the Federalist Society. There are some really courageous students. Who would have guessed that becoming a firebread, becoming a person of intense polemics, becoming a brave soldier to save Western civilization? Who would have guessed that that might come with a price? Like, people want to save Western civilization, they don't want to be inconvenienced. People want to save America, but they don't want to pay a price. Like, people want to do the courageous thing, but without any downside. That's not how the world works. You want to step up and save Western civilization? This is a very tiny price to pay. Who I think appreciate my presence. So that's the other reason I stick around is that there is a relatively small number of students who really need someone like me on the faculty And Josh says, I want to hear pre-censorship, pre-cancel, conscious, Luke's take on this. Well, if I was doing this show six years ago, this would be just whole-hum. I mean, I probably wouldn't even play it because it's not saying anything groundbreaking or terribly interesting. But this is edgy now. It's like you haven't looked at the sports illustrator bathing suit issue. And then finally you give in and you look at it. All right, let's say you're a sex and love addict and you've abstained from looking at the sports illustrator bathing suit issue and presuming if there aren't a lot of fat ugly women in the latest one, you finally give in and there's a good raunchy sports illustrator bathing suit issue, you'll get an intense rush, right? Where you used to be watching Bukaki gang bangs, that's what it took, but you've sensitized yourself. You've been on the straight and narrow and now you're just relapsing to like sports illustrated level, all right? So now I'm relapsing to a sports illustrator bathing suit issue level of race realism. Well, six years ago, this would not have even given me a chubby. If I weren't there, there would be no one. And they tell me that, they tell me that. They say, we can't talk to anybody on the faculty, we're afraid of all of them because we know that they're all politically correct, even though they say that they're open-minded, they don't really mean it, we fear that we will be called out by them, so we keep our heads down. So I think it's really important for someone to be there that they can talk to and they can speak their mind to. I mean, I teach a course in conservative, political and legal thought and I get a terrific group and we have some ground rules in that class. Basically what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Nothing that anybody says in this class is to be repeated if it would even remotely get them into trouble with their fellow students and the like. So you have an island of free expression. We have an island of free expression and you can't accuse other students of racism and sexism and all of this. I mean, you can tell them that they're wrong and tell them why they're wrong, but name-calling is not allowed. Just some basic rules, Tucker, that's all it really takes. I mean, if every professor- She doesn't get to have this discussion because of these great amazing rules, right? Some basic rules that's, no, that's not what it takes. She has got a self-selected group. She's teaching a class in conservative legal thought, right? She's already self-selected. It's not these amazing rules that she's come up with that have produced this intellectual utopia. Pose those rules, the act, a cat. That's nonsense if every other academic imposed their rules that we'd have a complete turnaround. No, not really. Atomy would be, I think, a much freer place, but right now it's really a place of fear and intimidation. That's- So I've counted four that you've mentioned, schools, of course, the study that you went through. Yale undergrad, Harvard Med School, Harvard Law School, and then Cambridge? Oxford. I knew it was one. I'm getting old. Anyway, you obviously are as deeply immersed in this world as anyone could be. Are you disappointed in what it's become? You must be disappointed. Come on. Totally devastated by what it's become. And I'm not the only person in my family who's involved in academia. You don't think that I could give you a song and dance about how disappointing America is or universities are, or I could find disappointing things in Jews and Judaism and women and dating and relationships. It's so easy to be like, oh, I'm so disappointed in life. The world has failed me. I don't want to blow the cover on my family members, but there is some real egregious stuff going on, not just in the law school, but in the sciences, in medicine. Oh, no, you cannot imagine how bad it is in medical schools and in science departments. And in medical schools, people's lives are on a line. Oh, it's gonna affect health outcomes. How could it not? No, I will say no more, but it's worse oddly enough in medicine than in law. Because in law, our stock and trade is argument, is discourse, you know, is, I mean, and certainly our philosophers, we have a contingent of philosophers and... Law is a conservative profession, all right? Our professions are primarily dedicated to defrauding outsiders and building their own power, prestige and income. Same for law, same for dentistry, same for medicine, same for accountants. And they're the ones I think who resisted the most. They don't ultimately succeed in resisting this orthodoxy that's been, this pall of orthodoxy in the law school, but they're maybe the best holdouts from it because if they can't argue different sides of a question like what's left for them to do, right? You eliminate the dialogue, there's no philosophy. Exactly, there's no philosophy. But in medicine, the people who are in medical academia are not trained in that way. They're not, I mean, they should be because they should be scientists as well as physicians, but somehow that didn't take. They have been so vulnerable to and amenable to this diversity and equity orthodoxy. And it is now part of medical training. It is part of the process of getting into medical school. You know, you have to put out a statement, include all the reasons and the ways in which you advance the goals of diversity and equity to be hired in a medical school. We're gonna kill people with this. You know, you have to pay fealty and homage to diversity and equity. I mean. Okay, Amy, if you want a good time, if you want a real interview, all right, come to the 40 show. We'll open up 40 university. We'll do something special. Okay, guys, Selma is tired of being just a symbol. They want change. Selma is tired of being just a symbol. They want change. Politicians flocked to Selma to use the Edmund Pettus Bridge as a stage for their agendas. Meanwhile, the city is one of the poorest in the country. News by Emmanuel Felton. Selma, Alabama, with the blistering Alabama sun beaming down on them, the crowd at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge was growing restless. The mass of marchers, which stretched a full city block, audibly grown when it was announced that not only would Vice President Harris speak, but so would the five cabinet members and many of the national civil rights leaders present. As the speeches continued, a cry would occasionally ring out from the crowd, echoing the calls made by marchers 57 years before as they tried to cross the same bridge, let us march. Don't these guys have jobs? Like, don't they have like volunteering to do? Don't they have families to look after? Don't they have like adult responsibilities? Somehow, when I hear that Selma is tired of being just a symbol, they want change. Somehow, I don't think they wanna work. I don't think they wanna do serious education. I don't think they wanna lift themselves up. Instead, we're gonna get a guilt trip about how the city is one of the poorest in the country. That's our fault. They're raping each other. They're stealing from each other. They're blaring loud music. They're destroying their own quality of life. They're murdering each other. But I'm just gonna bet somehow it's our fault. On March 7th, 1965, more than 500 demonstrators gathered at Brown's Chapel in Selma to protest poll taxes, literacy tests and other policies designed to keep black people from voting. They marched six blocks. Yeah, and as soon as they got rid of those policies, did prosperity reign? Did freedom and justice reign? Did quality of life reign? Did social capital and social trust and social cohesion? Did that all boom when they got rid of those awful policies? No, their problems were never because of those policies in the first place. Their problems are not outside of them. Their problems are inside of them. My problems are inside of me. Why do I have a horrible reputation with many women? Because I've acted like a pig to many women. Why do I have a horrible reputation with many men? Because I've acted like a pig to many men. My problems are my problems. Selma's problems are overwhelmingly Selma's problems not caused by outside forces. Fox to Broad Street, Selma's main thoroughfare and then tried to cross the Pettus Bridge where they were met by state troopers who attacked them with bully clubs and tear gas when they refused to turn back. Dozens were injured and at least 17 were hospitalized. The brutal scene was broadcast around the world and overnight the protesters and the city of Selma became worldwide symbols of the fight for equality. Two weeks later, Martin Luther King Jr. joined by more than 3,000 protesters. Like a fight for equality is the same as a fight against gravity. You can have the most courageous, inspiring people lead a fight against gravity, but gravity is still gonna be there. You can have the most inspiring people leading a fight for equality, but inequality is woven into the human condition. So this notion that you just get the right spokespeople or you mount some kind of worldwide awareness that now you're gonna overturn the rules of gravity, you're gonna overturn the rules of inequality which is just written into how people operate ain't gonna happen. And you will waste your resources and your skills and your talents from doing things that could make a real difference in your life and in your community's life. Marched across the same bridge and kept marching 49 miles to the state capitol in Montgomery, a demonstration that successfully pressured Congress and President Johnson to pass the Voting Rights Act. In the nearly 60 years since those events. Yeah, the Voting Rights Act, didn't that just transform Selma? Did that just transform the quality of life in black communities? Oh wait, motor rates skyrocketed after the Voting Rights Act. Quality of life in black communities fell after the Voting Rights Act. Black families fell apart after the Voting Rights Act. Quality of life, generally speaking, for most blacks, declined after the Voting Rights Act. Selma has become an annual stopover for politicians looking to bolster their civil rights bona fides. Each March, to mark the anniversary of what became known as Bloody Sunday, the city hosts the Selma Bridge crossing Jubilee. VIPs descend on the city to walk across the bridge arm in arm and commemorate the sacrifice. This is so shocking, you can get VIPs to your bridge in your town and you can be a worldwide symbol for resisting gravity and resisting inequality. And somehow that doesn't transform the quality of your life. Just imagine taking time off from work, taking time off from family, taking time off from getting a real education, taking time off from genuine volunteering that actually helps people, somehow not doing the things that could uplift your life and instead engaging in a masturbatory effort to undo the laws of gravity and inequality that are just written into the universe and that kind of masturbatory exercise doesn't make things super swell. Who would have thought, man, I was so super pumped, I thought that Selma was just gonna show us the way to reverse the rules of gravity and the rules of inequality that have ruled the human condition for millennia. Wow, I was so super pumped and it turns out they can't get rid of gravity. Like, who would have thought that? Like, who would have thought that they couldn't overturn how the world works? Okay, speaking of really uninspiring Washington Post journalism, let's have a look at this. Oh, we got another listen too. For unsettling takeaways from the French elections, first round results. Wow, I bet you're really unsettled about the French elections. I mean, I don't know about you but I couldn't sleep last night. I was just so unsettled about the French election results just deeply, deeply upsetting. Well, unsettling to whom? Right, I hate these news articles. It's always about, oh, so disturbing or this is so amazing or this is, you know, so bad and this is so good to whom, right? The same event will be unsettling to some people, inspiring to other people. Most people who watch my show are pretty okay with what happened in the French elections, right? Some people are gonna be unsettled. Some people are gonna be stoked. Some people are gonna be unsettled that a lot of masks bought 12% of Twitter. Other people are gonna be stoked about it but the news media acts as though it's just their emotional reaction, right? The universal mainstream media emotional reaction to event is the one that dominates from the Washington Post to the LA Times to CNN to ABC and it's just taken for granted that this is the only emotional reaction that all decent people have, right? This is just, this is much a fact of life as gravity from a Washington Post mainstream journalism perspective that's like, oh, it's just taken for granted that the French elections is unsettling. This is crazy, right? It's just for unsettling takeaways. Some people are gonna be unsettled, right? People who don't like the status quo are gonna be thrilled and the people who are unsettled are people who love the status quo. Opinion by James Macaulay. The results of the first round of the French presidential election are anything but comforting. They sh- To whom? Plenty of people received a lot of comfort but he's talking as though it's just an objective truth that if Marine Le Pen gets a certain percentage of the vote over 20% that that's just inherently unconfident. Like, how gay is this? Like, this is like dripping with AIDS that if an election does not go the way that the Washington Post thinks it should go that it's just objectively, emotionally, discomfiting and unsettling. Show an incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron, who performed better than initially expected but nowhere near as well as he should have. Most of all, they show a far right at the gates of power with a real chance of winning the final round in two weeks. Until now, Macron has essentially declined to campaign, styling himself as a wartime president, negotiating the bloody conflict between Russia and Ukraine. But French voters are skeptical and the next two weeks may not be enough time for Macron to fend off far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Here are the key storylines of Sunday's results. One. The election is now Macron's to lose. The French president was lead in the polls rapidly diminished in the lead-up to the first round of a- What a stoutly insight. This is why I subscribe to the Washington Post. Who would have thought that the guy in power and the guy with the most votes, it's his election to lose? Never would have guessed that. Vote, fared slightly better than anticipated. He came in at about 28%, roughly five points ahead of Le Pen's 23%. Though the far left John Luke Melanchon nearly topped Le Pen, the- Okay, look, there's a reason you watch this show and it's for high quality peer-reviewed academic discourse. It's not for this sexy Washington Post analysis of French elections. So let's go back to this terrific book by Professor Stephen Turner, Liberal Democracy 3.0, Civil Society in an Age of Experts. Right? So the political world that we have in the West is largely a result of 17th century European religious wars. That's what gave rise to modern liberal democracy. How do we neutralize religion so that people's Europeans in particular stop slaughtering each other over religion? So we developed a neutralization of the religious sphere. It was to become a matter of private conscience. The government wouldn't legislate what would be the form of religious expression that was socially acceptable. And so you don't like the government we have today. You don't like the political structure that we have today in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Scandinavian countries. These forms of democratic government all come as a reaction to the 17th century European wars. And so we're increasingly neutralizing more and more of life. So we have tried to remove religion from being the center of political fighting. And now with COVID, like we've offshored COVID to the experts, all right? We're gonna govern with science. So we've tried to remove COVID from the political. And if there's some other problem that nuclear plant explodes, then we'll have a commission, right? We'll remove it from the political, right? So objective solutions and facts, right? They're arrived at procedures that produce the same results regardless of who's following the procedures. Now, unfortunately, you do this with different groups and you reliably get the same IQ results, but that's bad. So that's a bad form of objective truth. So the problem with objectivity generating procedures and objective facts, is they're really sufficient to settle a question or to make a decision. Like unless one has decided in advance to let the results settle the question. So scientific facts, right? They're just another category like global warming, right? There are certain facts, but certain facts put together don't say that global warming is gonna end life as we know it in 30 years. There are deductions from facts that can possibly lead to that sort of conclusion. So neutral objective scientific facts usually are insufficient to be much of a constraint on political decisions, but the desire to move a topic out of the political, right? Global warming is not to be political anymore. It's gonna be removed from the political placed in the hands of experts, right? So we no longer really live in a democracy, we live in an administrative state, right? And so we wanna move more and more topics out of the political religion. Global warming, education, right? We wanna move these things out of political discussion into the hands of experts. So experts decide what you get to say on YouTube, right? The civil rights community, essentially the anti-defamation league decides what we can say on YouTube and on social media. And the World Health Organization decides what we get to say on social media with regard to COVID, right? We're placing more and more and more of our life in the hands of experts. So one of the central devices of liberal democracy to ensure that we don't slaughter each other over things like religion is to steadily shrink the realm of the political and expand the realm where experts rule, right? We delegate discussion and we keep removing issues from discussion and then give them to experts, right? We offshore discussion and give it to the experts. So in 19th century America, you had all these discussions of public health measures against cholera and they were transferred by acts of state legislatures from the hands of city councils to the boards of health that they appointed to other boards and commissions. And in the 20th century monetary decisions, right? Politicians don't get to decide monetary policy. It's been delegated to the experts at the Federal Reserve Bank. So there's relevant expert knowledge and we just keep handing off more and more of our world to the experts to decide because we are not worthy of deciding these things on our own because we don't supposedly have the expertise. And this widespread throughout the first world desire to resolve problems by delegating them to experts does not generally match the capacity of these experts. But we have doctors setting policy or medical experts setting policy but they're not doing it by acting within the domain of their expertise. They're not just applying technical considerations in some kind of scientific or objective way directly to the question, right? Instead, they have to use reasoning by analogy, right? They have to reason like a lawyer, right? So expertise is usually anything but expertise in a particular area for which experts have been given the power to decide how things are gonna operate. So a few decades ago, scientists were asked when it would be safe for farmers to return sheep to particular fields that are being polluted by radioactivity. And so based on their empirical experience and understanding of the causal process in a particular kind of soil, they estimated that the radioactive effects would dissipate in three weeks. Well, they were wrong. Kinds of soil that the sheep were grazing on contained a great deal of clay. Clay retained the radioactivity much longer than the scientists had predicted. So this is how expertise usually works. People have genuine expertise in one area but then they're asked to go outside of that. And so they reason, okay, I know in this particular soil we have studies that radioactivity leaves after three weeks. We're just gonna apply it into completely different soil where it doesn't really apply. So with regard to global warming, it's all supposed to be based on science just like the prohibition movement is based on alcohol science. We have experts telling women we need to get more and more mammographies, right? You need to get this radiological testing for your chest. Well, early mammography studies make no effect on mortality rates for breast cancer. So climatologists, they select the variables in their models and they analogize and they simplify to the real world, which will certainly behave differently than the model, just like lawyers simplify a complex situation to select those features which are best suited for making a particular case. And then there's a further decision, a decision to accept this extension of reasoning by the expert, accept their simplifications and their implications and then to act politically on them. Now, the reasoning of these experts in these special domains, whether monetary policy or COVID policy or global warming may be better than that of non-experts, but it may be worse. And what you're doing is you're making more and more life outside the realm of politics, outside of democracy. Regular people have less and less say about the way government works. We have more and more of delegating powers to bodies that claim to represent some group, the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association. So in ancient Rome, the institution, the dictator was a legal form, which an individual was delegated dictatorial powers for a limited period to deal with a particular crisis, but the way the delegation of powers is increasingly working in democracies is that we're giving powers to these groups, like the American Bar Association has a tremendous impact on how our legal system is operated. So we're delegating this power that rightly belongs to the people to a particular commission, a private commission. That much of what governs our daily life is the product of commissions of various kind, the labels on the food we eat, the standards for the air we breathe, standards for the water we drink. This is usually the product of collective decision-making by commissions of bodies outside of politics and their standards and their practices are contested inside their group, but not open to our vote or even to our lawsuit. Consider the children's playground. The standards for children's playgrounds in the United States was produced by a knowledge movement subsidized by the Russell Sage Foundation during the first part of the 20th century. So the standards it's defined were made an issue in social surveys promoted by reform groups, usually playground associations in each city, then taken up by civic betterment associations and then accepted by cities as normal. So this led to a uniformity of product and of experience in the daily life of children. And so this whole movement was a large part of commission from below. No government agency authorized it as political success depended on the endorsement of local leaders and community activists who pressured cities to live up to their standards. Now, we have another change in playgrounds in response to threats of legal liability. And in Beverly Hills, it's so shocking that they've ripped out public basketball courts because Beverly Hills doesn't like basketball Americans. I don't know why Beverly Hills has such a hard time with basketball Americans where they try to do everything they can to repel basketball Americans. They don't even want a subway going through Beverly Hills in case it brings basketball Americans. So Alexis de Tocqueville, when he visited America 200 years ago, he saw how there were all sorts of associations, but they're not the associations that we're talking about here, right? These were not associations of knowledge, right? Now to be an effective political association has become necessary to become a knowledge association, to become expertized, right? To have an association, you have to claim special knowledge. Think about the bar association. Is this a private voluntary organization or effectively an arm of the judicial system? Powers delegated to the bar association, including disciplinary powers over legal practice, the ability to represent clients before courts. These are state powers, but the bar association is not a state entity. It's a private entity that's been delegated these powers. So associations like the bar association, the American Medical Association, et cetera, their power and prestige and ability to make money depends upon their successfully staking knowledge claims that they know better than you, right? They concentrate opinion. They resolve disagreements internally, and then they try to come out with the presentation that they know better than you. And that's where their status and prestige and power comes from. So Leo, beginning out, Leo Szilard, right? An important figure in the history of the atomic bomb. He writes in the early 1960s, a biographer that Szilard's plight as a freelance thinker and policy proponent was poignantly described by his biographer. So Leo had begun to realize his limits as a humorist and outsider in Washington in early 1960s. Washington DC is a serious and self-important city that squanders laughter and lives by cliches. So I'm an Alexander technique teacher. Alexander technique, it doesn't have a ton of prestige. I remember who's that fat woman is always getting naked and making TV shows about women in their early 20s. And I remember one of those shows, a guy introduces himself as an Alexander technique teacher and says, oh, that's the gayest thing I've ever heard. So being an Alexander technique teacher, it doesn't come with like legal privileges, like a doctor or a dentist. So we didn't even have the privileges of chiropractors, which is just a complete scam. So America is incredibly credentialed oriented, but having a credential as an Alexander technique teacher, you know that and $5 will get you a small coffee at Starbucks. So Leo Szilard was a professor biophysics from the University of Chicago. He was not a consultant to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was not a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee. He was not a fellow at a local think tank. He was not a consultant to a congressional committee. So as he discovered during his first months in the capital of Washington is a city where what you do is often less important than where you do it. So you can be doing incredibly important things, but if you're not doing it in important places, then you don't have much prestige. Okay, so claims about global warming, right? They're subjected to peer review, but that does not make them facts like those of course science because the reviewers and the review process not the same as for genuine facts. Peer review is a procedure of evaluation. It's only as good as the peers who are reviewing. It's a decision making device. It's a usually low threshold on what is to be included in the literature for the purposes of scientific communication. So the power of expert bodies relies in large part on producing consensus. So and then you get to regulate and you get to standardize and you get to create certifying bodies that endorse particular practices, training regimes and standards. Now, the scientific basis for these practices is sometimes real and substantial, but it's frequently far removed from anything real and substantial. The basis of the practice is usually some combination of the scientific with the non-scientific, often with elements that are objective and then things that are just a mishmash of assumptions, common sense, statistical results and what will simply make you look good and enable you to extract the maximum of power and prestige, which is what all professions are out. They want to extract the maximum of income and power and prestige for their members by screwing over to the general public to the extent that they can get away with it. Karl Schmidt talks about judicial discretion, right? Many, many legal questions cannot be cited on legal grounds. They require a non-legal consensus by judges. Yeah, and in playgrounds today in America, the burden of standards has shifted to the court. So odd style playgrounds still exists following old standards, but the new equipment and new types of equipment, threat of litigation over injuries is the dominant fact, the result that even simple pieces of manufactured playground equipment come with complex lawyer written warnings. But this is another form of the delegation of expert questions to other bodies, in this case the courts, which they must hear expert witnesses about the risks of given designs based on supposedly objective measures of injury and on research about the product. So there are essentially three eras of liberalism. So liberalism 1.0 was really clientism. It was after the English Civil War and the German Civil War. So Karl Schmidt believes that the removal of religion from politics was an essential condition for the birth of liberalism in the form of rational public opinion. So you got the moralization of politics, the condemnation of one's opponents as sinners or as tools of the devil. This is the end of rational discussion and the beginning of religious warfare. So this was the experience of Europe in the 17th century, religious warfare, the suppression of religious opinion and this expression was the basic fact of the European experience prior to the 17th century. Now according to the traditional liberal account, we took the business of religion away from the state, separated religion from politics and then created a safe space for civility. Now the advantage of this traditional account is that it makes sense the dramatic and traumatic political history of Europe during the 17th century and the phenomena of war, civil war and the diasporas of Huguenots and others, the rise of religious solidarity across national boundaries in the terms of the eventual end of religious warfare. Now Thomas Hobbes, I've been reading Leviathan which I think came out in 1651. He claimed that the state should regulate all thought. Now Europe has obviously gone in a very different direction. The clientelism is the name of the system of relations between patrons and their clients as taken from the explicit legal form in the Roman Republic, but we still use this kind of language today when we sign a letter, you know, you're a humble servant. So clientelism is a pre-political surrogate for politics. It's the default form of the organization of peoples and groups. So in the Pacific islands and in Africa, you'd call this big man complex where members of society are dependent upon, you know, one big man protector. And you also see this in ghettos. A more refined version of clientelism occurs in several Hispanic societies in the form of debt relations. You've got the local landowners, the person to whom one can turn to to borrow money. You have a personal relationship with him. If you use, yeah, use phrases in your letters such as your humble and obedient service, servant, this is used by persons who are not literally servants, but is a characteristic frequent and a relic of a relation of clientelism which a person without such a relationship to appeal to would have found survival difficult. So then liberalism 2.0, democracy 2.0 was based on rational discussion that we could reason together. We could talk things out. So here is perhaps the best embodiment of liberal democracy 2.0 and it comes from a passage in John Stuart Mills autobiography where he talks about his father. How his father in politics had an unbounded confidence in the efficacy of two things, representative government, complete freedom of discussion. So complete was my father's reliance on the influence of reason over the minds of man whether whenever it is allowed to reach them that he felt as if all would be gained if the whole population were taught to read if all sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word and in writing and if by means of the vote they could nominate a legislature to give effect to the opinions they adopted. He thought that when the legislature no longer represented a class interest would aim at the general interest honestly with adequate wisdom since the people would be sufficiently under the guidance of educated intelligence to make in general a good choice of persons to represent them having done so to leave to those whom they had chosen a liberal discretion. So aristocratic rule, the government of the few being in his eyes, the only thing that stood between mankind and administration of their affairs by the best wisdom to be found among them. So the aristocratic rule was the objective is stonest disapprobation and democratic suffrage. The principal article of his political creed not on the grounds of liberty, the rights of man right, but on securities for good government held fast to the essentials. It was indifferent to monarchical and republican forms. We get a little bit more Amy wax here. It's everywhere. And there are these commissars, you know the department of medicine has a diversity and equity officer who sits in on hiring meetings, sits in on departmental meetings, is everywhere monitoring what people say, monitoring the policies, shaping the policies. That is happening in medical schools. Make no mistake about it. Every one of which takes federal money. Oh, well, I mean, part of the reason they're doing all this is that, you know, they, they are feeding at the trough of the federal treasury big time. And as a condition of getting these grants which are their life. So socialism is inherently elitist. Socialism and communism and left wing thought says that we're better off when experts run things as opposed to when the people run things. So the socialist idea is inherently anti-populist. It is hostile to the notion that untutored legislative preferences, opinions held by ordinary people of what laws should be enacted, that this ought to be paramount. So socialism is implicitly hostile to the idea that government by discussion ought to be the center of constitutional order. So the collectivist current and socialist doctrine emphasize instead the superior wisdom of the state and the consequent necessity of intrusions into the freedoms of individuals. And so that brings us to liberal democracy 3.0 which is the ever-increasing rule of experts. And that's the world we live in now. As each year goes by, more and more of our life is run by experts who are beyond the political. We have a steady withering away of civil society. We have less and less concerned with government by discussion. So the author of this terrific book, The World Democracy 3.0, Civil Society in an Age of Experts, Professor Stephen Turner. He has wonderful examples of his ideas and he talks about arriving in Sweden during a campaign. I asked a Swedish friend what the election was about. He found this banal question to be sufficiently intriguing to write a newspaper story on it. Why? Because not only was there no great issue in the election, the phenomenon of elections based on large issues was unswedish and the question misguided. The reason for this are many and they include a particular tradition of compromised politics. But some of them point beyond Sweden. Like Germany and much of the rest of Europe, there was no protected period like that in Britain in the mid 19th century during which a liberal bourgeoisie ruled through discussion. So liberal democracy 2.0 was ruled through discussion. So that was a phase that was partly a matter of form, a superficial phenomenon that barely touched the continued power of state bureaucracies. So in Sweden, everything in Sweden that is not nailed down is a subject for a royal commission and more and more of life in Australia and in England is a subject for a royal commission. After 9-11, you got the 9-11 commission after the Kennedy assassination, you got the Warren commission. So in Sweden and in most of Europe, commissions of every conceivable public body and interest associations are consulted, but anything goes wrong after a glare of angry publicity, all the experts in the country are mobilized overnight and they are organized as a commission to inquire into something. And that's just the most Swedish, the most German, the most European of all institutions, a commission to inquire into something. And what the commission decides is what becomes policy. So this is a form of politics that is a surrogate for government by discussion. This is really a surrogate for liberal democracy. Like publicity has its role in the acting, right? In the drama of legitimation, but the public does not get to decide in Europe, generally speaking. In all things Swedish, in pretty much all things German, in pretty much all things French, in pretty much all things Norwegian, the expert rules. So in 1957, a plebiscite, that's a straight up and down vote was held to inquire whether Swedes wished to be like other Europeans and drive on the right hand side of the road instead of the left. The vote went strongly against that. 10 years later, the change is made, even so. So even though the people had overwhelmingly spoken, against driving on the right hand side of the road, that was the policy that Sweden made, right? Because the public, having evidently made a fool of itself, is not consulted again. Then there was a public protest against public art that was selected by a state art council in Sweden. And the council had the authority to force through its wishes in the choice and placing of works of art in public buildings owned by the state, right? And they said, our choice of works of art takes a long-term view, cannot concern itself with the tastes and caprices of the public, right? This is the pure voice of expert bureaucratic power and this is dominates all of the first world. And we don't yet see any alternative to the administrative state, right? That's what we live in now, liberal democracy, 3.0, the administrative state. Now, close to where it's talked about, war is politics by other means, so the American Civil War was an extension of legislative controversy by other means. And many people learned a sobering lesson that a politics of moralizing intolerance has a price in blood. We once again have a politics of moralizing intolerance that will there be a substantial price in blood for our politics today. The English Civil War of the 17th century taught the same lesson. In the 19th century, in the first part of the 20th, demands of empire made stakeholders of those who voted and that both sobered and hardened them. So this political education was the tough core of liberal democracy in the English-speaking world. So in a 2001 lecture at Tomas Hendrick-Ils, the Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs, observes that at the root of anxiety about the European community, the European Union, there is the feeling that fundamental decisions previously made in a transparent and legally understandable way at the level of the democratic post-Westphalian nation-state are being transferred to a higher body, the European Union. So a body where decision-making is not clear, not transparent, not understandable, not in accord with standards of parliamentary procedures where the divisions of power are modeled, where the connection between the individual citizen's opinion and his opportunity to make his opinion clear through established means is no longer clear. So increasingly in Europe, the citizen senses Europe is replacing the government of persons with the administration of things. And it is this administration of things which dominates throughout the first world, the causes and ease among European citizens or first world citizens, right? There's this increasing fear that government of persons is less and less relevant. The democratic nation-state that developed in most of Europe after the Enlightenment, the French resolution has had as its core assumption that the citizen has his say in what happens in his country. It is the absence of this feeling that distinguishes un-democratic countries from democratic ones. It was the failure to allow the citizen his say that led, ultimately, to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Blood without which they can't survive. They have to engage in all these equity and diversity-related activities. Take a look sometime at what you need to say and do in order to get an NIH grant. A whole section of how your project is advancing the cause of diversity and equity and the participation of underrepresented minorities. And I'm sorry to say, Tucker, but one area in which underrepresented minorities are woefully lagging behind is in the sciences. It's not subtle, it's not a small gap here. It's an enormous gulf. And that is the gulf that they have to somehow paper over to get the required number of people from these various groups into science and into medicine. So, you know, you think law is bad, but you haven't really seen anything until you cross the street and look at the science departments. I mean, that feels unfixable to me. Oh, it's fixable. It is so easily fixable by a few key people just standing up and saying, you know, this is destructive. This is terrible. It's terrifying. I mean, if it's like- This shall not pass, but you know, it's a collective action problem. And what's interesting is I'm on a number of email lists with people in the sciences, some of them more prominent than others. A lot of them kind of junior or semi-junior who will have none of this. They are alarmed by it. They hate it. They don't agree with it. They reject it. But most of them are not in the position to do anything about it Okay. Twitter grapples with an Elon Musk problem. So notice that this is the dominant theme in the news media that what's the real story here is that employees at Twitter feel uncomfortable. What's most important with Twitter is that the employees feel good. The concerns of users of Twitter don't really amount to a hell of beans for the New York Times and for the other elite media talking about this Elon Musk story. And so Twitter grapples with an Elon Musk problem. Mr. Musk, Twitter's biggest shareholder is free to buy more stock in the company and could use the platform against itself. Some employees are dismayed. Oh no, employees are dismayed. My God, that's what's most important that employees are dismayed. What about millions of users are dismayed by the increasingly work politics of Twitter? The increasing censorship of right wing thought. No, that doesn't matter. What's important here is some employees are dismayed. Oh no, that really makes me feel bad. I doubt what Twitter employees to feel bad. So one bloke who's on Twitter's founding team says, Twitter has always suffered more than its fair share of dysfunction. But at least we weren't being actively trolled by prospective board members using the product we created. No, it's just for people who write a center. We've been actively shadow banned. Our voices have been taken away from us on Twitter, but that doesn't get a mention in this New York Times article. Patrick Gadsden, co-head of the shareholder activism practice at this law firm said, he felt sympathy for Twitter. What about sympathy for Twitter's users? You get this woke left wing slant. Like every time I go to Twitter and I open it up, it forces me to read like 50, no, like 10, 15 tweets. I have no interest in reading. People I'm not subscribing to. It's force feeding me, you know, left wing or just other nonsense I have no interest in before I can get to read the people that I actively choose to follow. So Patrick says, you know, it feels sympathy for Twitter. What about sympathy for its users? I would never want any director that I represent to have to deal with this situation. Oh, God forbid that they might feel uncomfortable. Right, forget the distress of the users. It's the directors. They're the ones that we should really be feeling sorry for. Did you know that Mr. Musk has long shown significant disrespect for corporate governance rules? Oh no, 2018, he faced securities fraud charges after inaccurately tweeting that he'd secured funding to take Tesla private. He made a 420 joke. And this is how the New York Times reports it. Inside Twitter on Monday, employees were dismayed and concerned by Mr. Musk's antics. Oh, no, those poor dears, right? After the billionaire's jester of the weekend, that Twitter convert its headquarters into a homeless shelter because no one shows up anyway. Employees questioned how Mr. Musk would know given that he hadn't visited the building in some time. Oh, right, the only way you can know about what's going on in a building is to actually visit it. You know, there's this thing called the cell phone. There's this thing called Twitter. There's this thing called social media. There's this thing called the news where you can often find out about events that you don't have firsthand access to. I mean, how gay is this article? They also point out that Mr. Musk could easily afford to help San Francisco's homeless himself. Yeah, that's what it's all about when he's making this joke on Twitter. Others said they were upset. Look, this article is dominated by the feelings of these awful woke Twitter employees. Others say they were upset at Mr. Musk's tweets criticizing the company's product and business model. Noting he didn't appreciate the time and the thought that went into updating Twitter's services over the years, and he had no knowledge of the product roadmap. Some employees said they were relieved after reading that Mr. Musk would not join the board of Twitter, the board of directors. I was reading an article in Breitbart the other day. Christian Satire site Babylon B, Turning Point USA, founded Charlie Kirk and Fox News, Tucker Carlson, are all still locked out of their Twitter accounts proposing that transgender assistant secretary Rachel Levine is a biological male. Telling the truth on Twitter from a conservative perspective, these people are just telling the truth. Telling the truth, you get bad about something so mundane. I mean, everyone I know is thrilled with the prospect of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. As the leadership is behind it 100%. So take Dorian Abbott. I'm not outing him because he's in the public eye. He was sitting in the seat you're occupying right now. Oh, good. Okay, so he's one of the people on these email lists and in these groups. These groups are starting to form. And he's been very outspoken, but he has suffered a penalty as a result. Oh, that's for sure. Yeah. So you look at him, if you're just Mr. Science working in your lab or even running a lab, you look at Dorian Abbott. You look at Dorian Abbott and you say, Oh, do I really want to do this to myself? And it's not just you and your career, but it's your associates. It's your family, right? It's your friendships. It's excuse me for being crude. You know, whether your wife will sleep with you. It's, you know, whether your friends will invite you over for dinner. That's a real thing. It's a real thing. Well, what I tell people is you will lose friends, but you know what? You'll make new friends. That's the interesting thing. Yes. People will come out of the woodwork. Very sophisticated, interesting, smart people. You know, what I call the smart deplorables and they will reach out to you. When I started writing my unauthorized, you know, website about Dennis Prager. Yeah, I lost all my friends and I started making new ones. You know, when I got out of a, you know, tiny insular community and there's a big beautiful world out there and I got to meet, you know, fantastic people like the regulars in the chat. So by popular demand, I'm going to tackle the topic of post-tradition. This is Steven Turner once again. The tradition of post-tradition. So according to Google and Graham, which tracks, you know, how often words are used. The term post-traditional arrives at the turn of the 20th century, but it only begins to be widely used after 1960. So you can understand it's some kind of novel theoretical concept which just applies to the last half of the 20th century. It tells us something about the meaning of our times. But post-tradition has a relationship to much deeper order and more pervasive sets of distinctions involving modernity and the larger trajectory of European society from the medieval period on the Enlightenment, democratization, capitalism, industrialization, urbanism, rationalization, differentiation. So it follows and it resembles a longer run discussion of the prospects for a new kind of society based on a new or revised spiritual order or new values. So this is getting to the deeper stuff behind all sorts of revolutionary movements including the alt-right and ethno-nationalism. So the transition to modernity, you could overstate and say this is the core problem for the modern social sciences like sociology, psychology, right? The Enlightenment thinkers said traditions are a problem. Human beings are basically good. We need to get rid of those things that holds people down. Then Edmund Burke, great founder of conservatism, he said that this notion that traditions are a problem, well, that's a problem. And the St. Simonians, they said, we have to understand Enlightenment thinkers in their own historic context. They're products of the decay of the previous organic epochs. So Kevin McDonnell kind of has this view that Europe had an organic, meaning living, breathing, functional, cohesive society before Jews came along and wrecked things. So the good baseline for understanding all this literature about tradition, post-tradition and modernity is the account given by Herbert Spencer who was incredibly influential at the end of the 19th century, libertarian, right? He was a resolute defender of the rise of the autonomous individual. He was an optimist about change. He rejected the idea that liberalism was just a passing thing. He believed that the decline of religion meant that mutual tolerance, the daily habit of insisting on self claims while respecting the claims of others which the system of contract evolves would be characteristic of a life carried on under voluntary cooperation rather than the traditional life carried on under compulsory cooperation. So tradition referred to life under compulsion, modernity referred to voluntary cooperation as a basis for social organizing. Now, other thinkers thought the corrosive effects of Protestant individualism were the central factor of modernity that this created political and moral individualism. Now, at the core of these critiques on both sides, the moral regeneration critique and the new values side is nostalgia for the integrated and ordered societies of pre-modern Europe which Kevin Macdonald is also nostalgic towards the alt-rights nostalgic towards. So modernity was the destruction of the organic, integrated, ordered societies of pre-modern Europe in this perspective. So until World War I from the age of enlightenment to World War I, there was this widespread intellectual trend believing that life was just getting better and better. Then we had World War I, things took a darker turn. So you had one bishop made a much publicized plea to completely suspend science until culture could catch up. And you had all these new ideas about women's roles, marriage and sex. These discussions perhaps reached their peak in Bertrand Russell's marriage and morals. I mean, that guy wrote like a hundred books and then there was a response to Russell by Christians. Then there were parallel discussions in the United States about companion at marriage. Instead of marriage according to tradition, we're now going to form a model where people just voluntarily choose to be companions and personally develop themselves and each other and marriage is going to be all about the individual satisfaction of both sexes. And religion no longer going to be about doing God's will. It's going to be about healing people, healing society. So in Britain in the 1930s, you had this rich mix of nostalgia for the orderly societies of the Middle Ages combined with a Christian socialism which led to the moral rearmament movement which launched in 1938 in response to the spiritual crises of the times and was explicitly conceived in response to Nazism. Now the arrival of World War II focused discussion on the moral crisis and one thing was the question of just what World War II was being fought for. And so Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago who got rid of their football team and John Dewey debated the question in the pages of Fortune magazine. Famous London discussion group, The Moot, that debated the possibility of reviving Anglicanism or creating a new social doctrine with the force of religion, the social gospel. And you also saw this type of discussion in T.S. Eliot Elliot with his track Christianity and Culture. So the Moots participants were concerned with the biggest of pictures. How do the lessons of past societies and social change? How can that inform the creation of future societies? So they thought of the present as an unsatisfactory interregnum between coherent orders. So they thought of the present as living in liminal space. You know, liminal space is an area that no one's ever been before. It's a new land. Now, these intellectuals had great trouble coming to an agreement and there's a famous book published called In the Year of Our Lord, 1943 where Alan Jacobs chose the idea of the war as a contest of values with Nazism. And this was widely accepted by all the intellectuals, but then the many intellectuals who contributed to this discussion, who were making the argument, yeah, World War II is all about a contest of values, but they could not agree on what those values were. And befriend you and invite you to their farm in Saratoga or whatever, you know. You know, it's totally true. They will come up to you at the gym and say, I read the article about you. Do you want to have dinner with me and my husband? I mean, there are such people. Andy Gutman, the Brearly Dad, I don't know if you've had him on, but you should because he's fantastic. He is? He is like on message, Tucker. The guy is smarter than 99% of the academic side. What a wonderful letter that was. And he never, he knows what he thinks. He understands its implications. He never, he never sort of strays and deviates. He gets it. But anyway, he told me something interesting because he lives in, you know, among wealthy people in Manhattan. That's his milieu, the whole Brearly shtick. And he said once this, once he wrote this letter, which created a firestorm, he realized something he'd never seen before. There are all of these charming, smart Republicans out there. He never knew a single one. So that expanded his world. So if you can take the rejection and the isolation at least for a while, it doesn't last forever. This is my last question. It's kind of personal, but I can't control myself. How essential is it to have the support of your family? What's the effect? It's a lot easier when you have the support of your family, but you can do it without the support of your family. To be a man, to be a fully realized human being, you have to be able to give yourself support. You can't be relying on the support of other people. I want attention. So instead of needing, having to have that attention from you and you telling me, oh, what an amazing show this is, if to the extent that I've done a good show today, if I can recognize that, I can give myself the attention that I previously just thirsting for from others. All right, so three most prominent thinkers associated with the concept of post-traditionalism, and you're listing off Alastair McIntyre, Robert Beller, and Anthony Giddens, right? They all came to it pretty much through Marxism. So according to McIntyre, the desire for new moral order was an alternative to the barren opposition of moral individualism and amoral Stalinism. So all three thinkers probably saw on one hand, you've got Stalinism and on the other hand, you've got this individualism, we need a third way. So liberalism, not an option because Marxism revealed that liberalism is a deceiving and self-deceiving mask for certain social interests, which tends to dissolve traditional human ties and to impoverish social and cultural relationships. So the Declaration of Independence, right? All men are born with certain inalienable rights, including the right to become a woman, right? That kind of inalienable rights orientation tends to dissolve traditional human ties. Like you marry a bloke, you turn into a woman. Yeah, not so easy for maintaining a marriage and family and standing in a community, right? If people just keep realizing themselves as another sex or this or that, liberalism tends to dissolve traditional human ties. And Robert Beller also shared McIntyre's horror of moral individualism. So moral individualism means the individual decides what's moral and what's immoral. So Beller cited as an early motivation his ambivalence towards the Southern California culture in which I grew up and the chaotic society in which I live. So Beller became famous for his leadership of the team that wrote the bestselling habits of the heart, which was a condemnation of American individualism. So Giddens believed that the tradition of social theory dominated by Karl Marx was no longer important. So he rejected communism. He rejected liberalism. He sought a third way. So traditional societies and you see this in traditional societies today, they kind of suppress the self in a prison of duties, demands, restrictions usually with religious justifications. Now, this isn't being fully removed by modernity, but it has been watered down. Now, the concept of post-traditional is to be a radical break with that. It implies not only a break with particular traditions, but with tradition itself. So post-traditionalism means the end of traditional social roles and burdens and the possibility of self invention. You can become a member of the opposite sex. Maybe you can change your race, right? So modernity refers to modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from the 17th century on and which became worldwide in their influence. Modern social institutions are distinct from the traditional order. They've been rationalized. So we've got this sheer pace of change. We've got the global scope of change, but many of our modern social forms are simply not found in prior historical periods such as the political system, the nation state, wholesale dependence of production upon inanimate power sources and the thoroughgoing commodification of products of wage labor and even sites of apparent continuity such as cities now ordered according to quite different principles from those which set off the pre-modern city from the countryside. So these are largely changes external to the individual and the individual mind by contrast, right? So that's the difference between modernity and tradition. By contrast in post-traditional society, in late modernity, it's characterized by an internal change rather than external change. It's the rise of a new self, a reflexive self, reflexive understanding your own position, understanding yourself, seeing how other people are seeing you. So the reflexive self does not merely occupy social roles but creates for itself through its beliefs about the self a new kind of self based on a person's own reflexive understanding of their own life. They kind of therapeutic self which a person's self deception depends on monitoring and continually revising their self understanding. So modernity is characterized by a mixture of traditional and novel forms. Late modernity or post-traditional society is characterized by the reflexive self. Now, there are a lot of problems with this claim of novelty as a historical thesis. The historical religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam discovered the self. Early modern religion found a doctrinal basis to accept the self in all its empirical and ethical ambiguity. Modern religion, the beginning to understand the laws of the self's own existence and to help man take responsibility of his own fate. So how do we date the reflexive self and the modern self? Is it really a product of an internal or an external change? So the pressures of modernization just do not undermine idyllic societies of happy farmers whose lives would be perfectly happy if they're only left to learn, right? That's a takeaway that many would get from reading Kevin McDonald that Europeans would just be perfectly happy if they're only left to learn by the Jews. So modernization provides the concepts to express doubts and demands are already just below the surface of consciousness. Modernity provides an atmosphere of hope often unrealistic. The things will soon get better. Now, Robert Bella is concerned with the coexistence of modern and traditional elements at the same time. So he presents an account of the good kind of modernization, one that tempers liberalism and individualism with modern versions of traditional collectivizing institutions that are functional substitutes for traditional institutions but which support the autonomous individual without oppressing the individual. So this would apply to radical political movements like the alt-right. So according to Bella, modernization carries with it a conception of a relatively autonomous individual with a considerable capacity for adaptation to new situations and for innovation. So such an individual has a relatively high degree of self-consciousness and requires a family structure the support of your family, right? Which is independence and personal dignity will be recognized where he can relate to others not so much in terms of authority and obedience but in terms of companionship and emotional participation. That sounds like our chat room. Like, I am not up here just firing down commands at you. I am not talking at you. I'm talking with you. I'm not talking in terms of authority and obedience. I'm talking in terms of companionship and full emotional participation. This is a safe space for you and for me, right? This is a place of love and inclusion, right? An individual in 40 university, right? He requires a society in which he feels like a full participating member. Don't you yearn for that? You want a society whose goals you share and that you can meaningfully contribute to and you require a world view that is open to the future that gives a positive value to amelioration of conditions in this world. Am I not just reading your heart and your mind and can help to make sense of the disruptions and disturbances of the historical process? That's the whole reason you come here. So this vision of modernity kind of echoes Herbert Spencer with respect to the demise of priestly authority and the rise of the autonomous contract making individuals. Here we are. We're autonomous contracting making individuals. I have no priestly authority. I'm just an ordinary bloke who likes to read books. But here we create a feeling like we feel like we're a member of a group and we've got goals and we've got feelings and we have a progressive social vision of solid heuristic values like community cohesion that we're all in it together. Right. So this this community here at 40 University is a dramatic counterpoint to the excessive individualism of contemporary America. So the 1930s and the 1940s gave us the new socialist man man of the left with a collective orientation. But you know supposedly this orientation was a product of his maturity and autonomous choice distinct from economic man who's enslaved to acquisition. So there's a new relatively autonomous individual Robert Beller with his newfound self consciousness. But is it really distinguishable from the reflexive self of Giddens and the optimistic autonomous self of Herbert Spencer? This is what Herbert Spencer says. The thief takes another man's property. His act is determined by certain imagined approximate pleasures of relatively simple kinds rather than by less clearly imagined possible pains that are more remote and of relatively involved kinds. But in the conscientious man like the kind of man who watches this show there is an adequate restraining motive still more re representative in its nature including not only ideas of punishment not only ideas of lost reputation and ruin but including ideas of love and inclusion of the claims of the person owning the property of the pains which loss of it will entail on him. I mean, I would cry to think that I might take something from someone who owns it like or joined with a general aversion to acts injurious to others. Is there any phrase that best sums up the quality of you in this show right now? You have this general aversion to acts injurious to others. I mean, that's that's 40 university. No, is Robert Bella's post traditional autonomous individual? Is he acting differently from the liberal autonomous man? Okay, Herbert Spencer thinks this individual has morally desirable qualities resulting from experience and from experience congealed into tradition while Bella does not. Is it the Bella as his rejection of the chaotic society of Southern California from which he came suggests does not think that people raised under the influence of individualism have these qualities or that unlike Southern California it is a society in which he feels like a fully participating member is goals he shares and can meaningfully contribute to. You're listening this right now. I hope you feel like a fully participating member of this community. The the the goals that we have here you share and you also sense that you can meaningfully contribute to this society with you know amazing amazing rhetorical discourses and super traps. Right. Though there are on the one hand the language and the concepts of those people have continued to live within a tolerably well established moral framework. With a well established moral vocabulary right traditionalist people on the right though members of this social group have a list of what they take to be virtues and vices they have a concept of virtues and the authority which requires the practice of virtues is not conferred by the agents choice right choices are moral standards a judge correct or incorrect in the light of their understanding of the virtues of vices on the other hand there those individuals have an entirely different moral vocabulary they do not belong to a single homogeneous moral community with a shared language and shared concepts like here we belong to a homogeneous moral community with a shared language and a shared concepts of of love and inclusion radical love and inclusion but these other tosses they find themselves solicited from different standpoints they cannot avoid choice and what moral standards they adopt depend on their own choices so one day they may wake up and decide to become a Sheila so choice is the fundamental moral concept for these blokes and there are no objective and personal standards in the light of which ultimate choice can be criticized like I stand for objective and personal standards that that go to God and Mount Sinai though the greatest contemporary moral achievement perhaps is the creation of the type of community where shared ends and needs make possible the growth of a common life expressed in a common language isn't that what we're doing here now that there is no such moral achievement on the horizon is the post traditional condition so individuals who are autonomous are forced to choose between standpoints then provide them with moral standards but these are standards that conflict with these standards of others so the problem of the actual existence of different moral standards mostly driving from traditions coexisting within the same community and faced with a problem of accommodating one another that's not much of a community so this gives us a new problem of multiculturalism so either we accept something like a liberal framework of shared rules but few shared ends and we just treat individuals as autonomous bearers of culture who get along with one another under these rules or as traditionalist we can hope for a spiritual regeneration that overcomes differences or we can perhaps seek out you know new values that allow for a positive relationship between cultures the tradition once provided the basis for community but it was rigid and it was oppressive and a crushed individual autonomy a bloke couldn't get up in the morning decided to become a Sheila he couldn't get up in the morning decided to shag the sheep or another bloke right so so this this traditional community was based on exclusion rather than radical love and inclusion and these traditions of family and gender incredibly oppressive right you want to you want to act out and get in touch with your your female self not on mate now modernity has all these variety of cultures which makes a return to this traditional kind of community impossible so that's what we need is something different something cosmopolitan maybe we need to you know radically love and accept and include all this variety and just seek these different moral standards but by appealing to cosmopolitanism as a solution we're conceding that non-cosmopolitan meaning mutual intolerance between traditions is the root of the problem so you know the persistence of traditions in different cultural communities right incredibly oppressive but still powerful right but do we need to accommodate it and recognize it and accept it as a good thing so one solution according to Giddens is move past the mutually intolerant tradition and build a community based on active trust are you ready to join with me in creating an active trust community are you ready to join with me in building a positive spiral of trust building that creates a functional substitute for traditional community builds obligation at the level of personal relations based on the communication of difference right geared to an appreciation of integrity right this this will be tradition free integrity does not require adherence to particular traditions it transcends difference it can be recognized in spite of difference it can be understood in terms of the fulfillment of reciprocity such as that the other is someone on whom one can rely that the reliance has become a mutual obligation so perhaps we can have obligation without tradition perhaps this will stabilize relationships that once we just meet that condition for mutual integrity it's kind of an echo of Herbert Spencer's vision of society free from religion and based on trust between free contract makers pretty exciting stuff so reflexivity that's the distinctive characteristic of modern life according to these great thinkers about the post-traditional world so the reflexivity the modern life consists that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information peer-reviewed studies mate what does the New York Times have to say what do the experts have to say so we're constantly act altering and adjusting the social practices that we follow so we've got the apparent continued role of tradition but this is just an illusion if tradition is justified reflexively by how I understand it it is no longer tradition justified tradition is tradition in sham clothing receives its identity only from the reflexivity of the modern so this way making distinction between mere modernity which social practices are questioned and post-traditionalism which the self is created reflexively kind of creates a model traditions persist in fact and in reality and need respect at least to enable dialogue between the adherents of different traditions the existence of difference as a result of these persistent traditions and their communities and this forces individuals into reflexivity and choice that one must choose right the fact that one must choose that itself marks a fundamental break with tradition I chose to convert to orthodox Judaism that is not a traditional thing to do you don't choose to convert to another religion right so you cannot wear a a head covering or a head scarf as a continuation of a traditional practice where's the autonomy in that traditional practice is not a choice but you can wear a head covering if you're making a choice based on your reflection on the practice availing if you're choosing to affirm your identity as a paradigmatic act of a post-traditional reflexive you know act of self-creation right so this kind of radical individualism is no longer merely an option we are condemned to it but what we condemn to it already by modernity isn't the justification of practices which is supposed to be fundamentally changing the nature of the traditions we continue accept precisely the altering that produces by definition the reflexive self so the general fact of reflexivity has turned all traditions into post traditions by definition that not only has any obligation of doctrinal orthodoxy being abandoned by the leading edge of modern culture but every fixed position has become open the question in the process of making sense out of man in this situation so we've got a profound commitment to process we've got historic religions rediscovering the self we found a doctrinal religious basis to accept the self in all its empirical ambiguity the modern religion is beginning to understand the laws of one's own existence and to help man take responsibility the fact been like on yours well I have three children they're in their 20s will actually one is now in her early 30s that happens yeah and they always say mom it's really lucky that we have a different last name than you because I kept my name I kept my name but my kids have been totally cool about it they are really yeah they are very strong and based and they've really been terrific are they proud of your bravery I hope I think so my husband I you know I don't want to say more about him but he's definitely been on my side but he has his own you know profession to worry about his own situation to worry about my youngest daughter Esther of who's now working in Philadelphia when she was at Penn as an undergrad she was on one of these discussion boards they're all on them online and some young woman went off about professor wax isn't she a witch isn't she a big it isn't she a bitch there's a lot of name calling I've known as a substitute for thought right which you know is sort of Gresham's law yes writ large and Esther finally just wrote you know you know that that's my mother you're talking about no way yeah it was funny and of course this young woman immediately says oh oh I'm so sorry I hope I didn't traumatize you and created unsafe space your words are violence answer oh well okay that that is a pretty good story right I'm building up to the climax of this Steven Turner essay so post traditionalism depends on this idea of rupture but our sense of rupture as well as our sense of continuity is subject to an important illusion that illusion is illustrated by Robert Putnam Spever's book of bowling alone which purports to show the decline in associational activities in the United States that necessarily this was concerned with associational activities popular in the past and their decline such as the bowling leagues which is referred to in the title but it did not address it could not address the development of novel forms of association such as what we have here right we've got internet-based forms of association that have increased radically got women's book clubs to become more important so if we do not take our eyes from the historical review mirror we are doomed to always seeing traditions recede think about the concept of honor on the one hand it is a relic of the past honor is relative to rank belongs to a society of ranks of the kind that Europe abolished and American never had it was governed by such sanctions as dueling which has declined that when we encounter the forms of honor and other culture they are alien and non-modern such as honor killings now in the 19th century honor had a large role in German law but the term is alien to Anglo-American law but we do have laws of defamation so did honor simply go away but is some of the external forms of honor change so we have Matthew joining the show how's it going Matthew Hey Luke how are you I'm a little a little waking up wiping the blood on my eyes so I won't use the camera if that's no worries no worries so are we on now yes we're live so do you have some thoughts on Amy Wax some thoughts on this so first of all I want on that plane just as a preamble I think I just start clearing that I fully respect your right to free speech and people who who feel afraid of having her in the same building you have if you're a lawyer you have to be around rapist murderers you can have all manner of clients and unpleasant people so that's just something you're going to have to cope with so I'm very strongly favorite for free speech rights her comments here I think are completely empirically baseless the the third world if you go to the third world generally speaking this is borne out by polling I'll actually send you a link from India United States quite popular well-liked people admire the productivity the freedom the innovation of the United States and for her to generalize from woke Cooke's at the University of Pennsylvania who I'm sure are just just anti-American if they're white or black or any color to is like this and thinking America is terrible and having this hypocrisy with with the cast system in India is just very unfair and has no empirical foundation and you can be irritated by individuals but her projecting at the whole ethnic group strikes me is deeply unfair yeah I totally agree and it's just it's incredibly reckless and stupid and self-destructive correct yeah do you think she'll get fired for and I I imagine you're with me that she shouldn't be fired or disciplined yeah but do you what do you think what in in terms of empirically what do you think will happen to her with this because the comments very I mean even even you and I who are not politically correct you know I'm it's on this to be very unfair to and just empirically wrong but also generalizing in a way that's not valid yeah so like how much how long does the university have to continue to employer her this is interesting as a 2019 Indians in India United States had a 56% favorability rating of Trump we beside the U.S. they like Trump right probably because of the affinity Trump had with Modi and you know there was some kind of charisma between him Indian nationalist community so it's just false and you never encounter this work and I've lived you know lived in the Middle East mother's Egyptian background immigrant immigrants actually people who just arrive and you I wonder if you have the same experience to from the third world nonwhite if you will immigrants I see very little anti-American and anti-white sentiment from these people and they seem to be very patriotic and my family and others I've met the where you get that is this next generation races where they're being propagandized with the woke and incentivized by woke that's my view but what do you think yeah I've never encountered anti-white hostility from Latinos or Asians I've encountered a lot of it from from blacks I've never encountered it from Latinos or Asians yeah I mean the Hispanic working class is also moving toward Republicans in terms of voting patterns if you look at the most recent polling data for the 2020 election we first of all we saw in the 2020 election one of the biggest surprises and the results was early in the night if you recall the betting markets and law Democrats thought Texas is either is a coin flip like because of how well they were doing in the urban centers in the suburbs but then came the Rio ground and Republicans are like getting you know working class Mexican communities essentially right overwhelmingly working class Mexicans and Trump was getting like 40 45% like winning some you know just other shop and that that sunk any Trans Biden had to in Texas which looked pretty good early in the night so there is there is this movement toward the right among working class Hispanics and you know her comments undermine the pushback against wealth which really needs to be to have any success even a pragmatic level multi ethnic multi racial you know yeah my number one critique is if you're going to say something incendiary and you have anything to lose it's self destructive because you can you can usually find ways of phrase framing and phrasing what you want to say in in a way that more people can hear so instead of just like burning a bridge now why not build a bridge to other people and say things in a way that people can can hear without just immediately hating you so she fails on that scale and then she provides no evidence like just these assertions that because for a super work in the University of Pennsylvania med school she was like a job requirement to work at the University of Pennsylvania I'm sure to be like she then generalizes it to all South Asians and blacks and non-Westerners without any that any empirical basis beyond her anecdotal observation which is just really bad reasoning correct yeah and it's not a productive it's just not a productive look the United States too has and I also disagree I like to I don't want to call her names you have them doing that either look so but I've many on Twitter that's a name that's a general response and in this case it's more understandable and almost any other case or usually it's a controversial opinion being said people say race space here she is I understand why people are saying that because she is making generalizations that are derogatory and false but nevertheless even these are citizens of the United States and they're going to be citizens of the United States going forward these immigrants from from around the world and you know you should we should try to all together promote a patriotic pro-American positive view of ourselves you know rather than I also would say this that you know while Asians aren't like attacked by the woke media they're not demean they are not beneficiaries of woke either I mean Indians if you check the Asian box on your application there's this object of a Harvard lawsuit brought by Adam Artar and other people actually knew that guy in law school vaguely I'm not convinced of that but the guy who brought this brought the lawsuit but these folks are not beneficiaries of the woke system particularly they might not be rhetorically attacked by the way whites are by woke but you know Indian immigrants from if they're uppercaster whatever the case may be they're coming and doing well academically intellectually and that's why they're getting positions and another disappointing thing is that this is the time that she comes alive in the interview so so the first 30 minutes or so it's just she's just droning because everything she's saying she said 40 times before but now she's saying something just comes alive so part of what people will react to is your words but also people react to your manner and she is so excited to be to be saying these things like she's suddenly like fully engaged fully awake fully alive fully emotionally attuned to the situation she's coming alive now to say these super self-destructive unnecessarily inflammatory things and again if you look at the racist Indians meaning that the people who believe in the caste system in India are probably supportive of Trump right right wing generally I mean if they're Modi voters and they like the United States not and you know liberal Indians don't like the cast it isn't as if the you know going back many I'm no expert in India at all but just as a historian haven't been a little bit about India you know it's not as if there has that every every every expression of opposition contempt for the caste system has come from you know whites in the west right I mean you have Gandhi you have many Indian governments with affirmative action programs I'm not saying that there isn't vast a vast legacy of institutional racism if you will in India but the people who are liberal in India aren't like an anti-racism in India aren't saying okay racism is good if we do it you know they're against this stuff too right and the people who are who have no problem with it they're happy exploited they're probably among the majority of Indians who like Trump yeah and let's say that there was some empirical basis you know let's say that there was a a survey that came out that they interviewed 5,000 South Asians in America and 80% of them said they hated America okay then then talk about that okay there's a survey and that would be shocking and disturbing and it's something we should talk about it's not true it's not after right you know right I mean I mean then then you'd have something like empirical to respond to rather than just gratuitously coming out and and saying this without also why are these people so I am sure that anti-American anti-white views are from white women and white men at Penn Medical School too right right so just woke horrible institutions that don't reflect views I might be people of any race and literally any race United States I think these institutions are unrepresentative of and kind of kooky frankly but why does she focus on the Indians who are doing this I'm sure they are at the people who need some Americans who need some at Penn Medical School and then project that on all Indians or most Indians in the United States are both pro-cast system and you know if frankly I'm sure that if you were to pull this most Indian Americans because first of all a lot of Indians in India against the caste system again it's not as if it's not as if this has there haven't been federal efforts that effort with big intellectuals and political figures to eradicate the system so there are a lot of Indians against in India but I would be overwhelmingly confident that Indian Americans namely people who have imbibed a liberal liberal values of the United States right are overwhelming against the cast system they probably don't think about that much because they're in America but you know I'm sure they're not for it right I mean they're responding to incentives that we have set up right there it's strongly incentivized to be morally outraged against white people because that's the system that we have created right yeah the United States has created this bizarre and all the Western nations mostly in the Anglicity really has created these bizarre and syndrome structures some of them are lying to they're not even they're not even genuine their beliefs you know if you look at the working class though I think being working class is slowly becoming a better predictor of how woke you are whether you're working class or bourgeois and of course the people in bourgeois positions are more woke I think and I am supported by the most recent polling day which shows a very strong working class versus college degree split in the midterm election voting that that is going to be the big predictor of wokeness are you a truck driver are you a janitor are you you know a plumber versus like some kind of blue collar occupation versus are you physician are you a lawyer you know and I think this is going to be the divide I think we'll see more interesting surprises of the kind we saw in the 2020 election with the working class Mexican vote in the Rio Grande and also people I don't buy essentialism people are not just woke I understand that but there are plenty of people who are woke and who are going to be doing amazing things for the country that they're going to be good neighbors they're going to volunteer and work with the homeless they're going to create jobs they're going to you know invent cures for diseases they're going to you know send rockets into space people aren't just one thing people aren't just work or anti-work and if you wanted to bet on who's more likely to come up with an important patent like three generations of the working class you know 1,000 people who don't graduate high school or you know one woke stir who went to Harvard or Yale you know I'd be betting that you're more likely to get important innovations from the person I said though I do think in the long run if you look at the trend line that this attack on meritocracy and assessments for intelligence that comes from woke will undermine the intelligentsia and stem fields I think I don't I don't think I can empirically measure that yet but I'm pretty confident it's the case that if we as schools are doing like eliminating you know intelligence testing like the SAT ACT I think that could spell trouble for our meritocracy and I'll say this to the working class I think the multiracial working class will be the body the political body that leads the push back to woke and also kind of like lower middle class like petty bourgeois people because people those people I think also can help because the problem is if you go to Yale or Harvard you are either like a dissident and hiding as if you're like a homosexual 1948 that's like how you behave if you are not woke in these institutions you just your whole life is a lie you run to the bathroom but instead of you're not running the bathroom to give a man a blow job you're running the bathroom to like say oh like I'm you know I'm going to vote for Trump or whatever it is you know woke start a permanent condition woke people have kids and when a woke person has kids and he starts seeing dramatic differences between his male kid and his female kid that that changes them when woke people are forced into a situation where let's say Russia cuts off energy to their to their state and you know there are no green energy sources that are going to be going to be have to be have to be the gap they're going to suddenly after confront reality and they're all sorts of situations where people are woke one moment they get into a different situation they start being woke and some people are right-wing activists their situation changes and they start being right-wing activists so people are not some immutable quality people respond to incentives 100% great and if you study history as as you have look and I certainly am you see that people's that we consider like an utterly different way than their contemporary stereotypes so the English the French are stereotyped as as sympathetic animals as cultured people and you know how medieval Frenchman behaviors utterly different like burning cats was a past time in heroes of medieval France so I just think that them empirically the idea that the behavior of people is essentially driven by ethnicity or race is just an empirically false thesis I think that there are many traits that are inherited but I don't think values are one of them I mean that there's just has been way too much differentiation values I mean you know white people in the United States 200 years 200 years ago defended slavery British people 110 years ago defended indentured servitude you know it's not that long ago even right and yet we find this all we call that human trafficking today indentured servitude and obviously slavery would condemn as well yet this has been like the hugest moral sins you could commit yet it's normalized just a few generations ago with genetically the same people so I really think that institutions far more the genetics affect social values I mean frankly frankly I'd even say something this provocative if you go to India today the average person certainly educate people but the average person I would even say is more liberal and believes more in human rights than the average American did in 1780 let's say or 1800 and again that just shows you that it's not about genetics it's about culture it's about liberalism right liberalism has emancipate us from ourselves just from our exploitative character and it has led us to indulge our compassionate side and our sense of concern for the other and liberalism is spreading and I'm very much in favor that he woke as a as a threat to it but not a huge threat to it really I think I think liberalism will win over woke in the long run and I don't understand why some people on the right are think woke is so horrible that we should give up on liberalism to fight it I mean first of all that's absurd because liberalism is what will be attractive regular people right a liberal outlook or we don't treat people by ethnicity etc. you know I could go through platitudes but you know a liberal outlook is what would appeal to regular people yet the well these national conservatives want this weird new movement that's has all this esoteric references is like vaguely theocratic you know now we just need liberalism liberalism is working it's been working for centuries it's making people around the world much better and Amy Wax uttered the phrase white values that's I don't think this is true like there's a ton of politically incorrect truth there's enough politically incorrect truth to go around without needing to make up politically incorrect false like white values was burning cats white value you know in medieval France or even right now you know let's say white values in America in 2022 what does I mean why people in in America right now have in common almost nothing right yeah I mean you can look at working class versus um what you mean look at America you know 300 years ago well not 300 years ago but 200 years ago let's say or even today compare like Russia predominantly white country the values of Russians are very different the values of Americans values of Moldovans are very different than those of French you know this isn't this isn't empirically true right it's not empirically true I mean I'd say the same thing for Christian Jewish and Muslim just saying Christian values it means nothing now if you want to say Lithuanian Jewish values you want to talk about I don't know some city in Nigeria if there's a big Christian community there you might start to get some some meaningful correlations with Christian values but but especially nothing that Jews are sharing common you know most American Jews don't care about Israel right or look at I mean even with Muslim like I do think that the plain language of religious texts has some power but I think it's very limited and here's how I defend that claim look at okay you can Islam is the is the one people like to to to pick on because there is high rates of support for criminalizing almost some for some things in more radical Heddy's like the sayings of the prophet that you you can find widespread support for the Muslim world but yet you go to like the North caucuses I mean leaving aside Cheshire which is obviously an extreme Muslim case if you go to like the North caucuses in the Russian Federation like Kibari Nabil Keria or or or you go you know to tartar sandwiches in the caucuses which is predominantly Muslim I mean these people are intermarrying with Russians they are drinking they're having premarital sex and it's not controversial and yet they're Muslim you know you go to Turkey nine the most of the religious conservatives don't want Sharia law they're against Sharia law according to the same bull Sam eras parades around like the 11% of Turks favor Sharia law so I think all of this that and even America like most Christians support gay marriage now so I think that the literal meaning of text isn't as has no no power but it's the power is much weaker than people think yeah it's situational it's contingent like everything else contingent meaning depending on other things so for example there is sometimes a dramatic difference between black value say with regard to the O.J. Simpson verdict 80% plus of whites were outraged by the verdict about 80% plus of blacks thought it was fantastic alright that's that's a black white values difference like at a particular time in a particular place you get a black white difference but generally speaking of white values it doesn't have any meaning right and again I would just reiterate that I think empirically if you study history the idea that one racial group was associated with a certain type of values is completely untenable and laughable now you can talk about other inherited traits and I'm not saying there aren't inherited traits that are relevant but in terms of values like is slavery wrong is indentured servitude wrong is sex with the fucking like 12-year-old wrong it wasn't wrong in medieval Christentum as bizarre as that may seem nowadays it's actually that's something I've been considering rang for tack although I don't think I'm going to because hearing all this debate about traditional values groomer all this I mean as somebody who who studies history you know in the 19th century child marriage to like I'm an older man was was legitimate if you had bled before the late 19th century you know generally speaking 12-13 this age was considered within the age of consent in European nations because then Napoleonic code it was 11 or 12 Catholic church was 12 most American states were 12 before and then the late 19th century you get liberalism saying this is wrong because of consent sexual morality should be based on consent because we're liberals it shouldn't be based on duty on the it shouldn't be based on the purity of the woman or virginity until marriage it should be based on consent so I don't know I guess I'm I'm sort of a a liberal chauvinist and I think that a lot of the claims that whether it's racialists I don't want to put words into waxes mouth but she does kind of sound like she's advocating these use whether it's racialists or radical traditionalist I think the claims they make about are just false empirically like liberalism has made us much better everybody so an extension of liberalism people even get the right to choose unfortunately I'm going to have to I'm going to have to take the coward's way I don't know that's fun that's very smart in my in my program I will say this I have compassion for people I don't think that if you feel that way you're you've harmed anybody but you know the rest of my opinion I'll keep to myself but I don't I will say this I don't think ridicule which is often the response is the right response but I don't nor do I agree with the idea of the ideas of the left on all of these issues let's say what what traditional societies would you be most comfortable in you know traditional opposed to liberal okay I don't want a little sorry I don't want a traditional society you don't want a little traditional most of traditional the people who call themselves traditional it's another thing that's funny so Rod Drayer thinks you know and I'm going to be I actually there's more free speech there than at university like I could bash him although I won't because he writes for the same magazine I do and he's a big dog and I'm just a random guy writes reviews every you know several months but Roger seems to think that the so-called traditional values he grew up within that 70s 80s that that's what was going on hundreds of years ago I mean basically the the new construction that the traditional values he grew up with sexual mores were an attempt to cope with feminism with the victories they applied chastity ethics to man instead of getting rid of chastity ethics they applied them to men even though traditionally they were not applied to men Augustin you know it was considered a sin under Islam or Christianity for men to have primarital sex it was also considered inevitable men will stray this is why Augustin for example support legal prostitution because he thought it's a natural thing for men to express themselves sexually and so you should have prostitution so you don't spoil virginity of women so women are to have a primarital sex because there needs to be a way for men to but Dreyer grew up with the values that chastity is for everyone including boys and this and this is really an attempt by traditional is to cope with feminism victories of first and second way feminism yet Dreyer thinks this is what like the church has stood for through the ages even though the church like with it as I meant earlier had the age of consent of consent of 12 was often took a casual view of prostitution when the papal states when the church had actually had state power I guess he's not Catholic anymore so I shouldn't associate him with Catholicism but I just think that even so-called traditionalists are liberals and many of their views as they should be right yeah I don't think that they're actually abiding by Christian theocracy right pre-liberal Christian theocracy I think they find grotesquely immoral yeah what happened to your upcoming space is Putin Hitler Mr. Bond sentence did you do anything with that? Oh yeah that didn't that didn't work out unfortunately I think the problem is what you wanted to say we didn't advertise it oh yeah I mean I think I was going to talk about where Putin lies in the Russian political spectrum I mean I was going to make a similar argument sadly on your stream before that it's irresponsible to call him Hitler although the war is obviously deeply immoral and I'm not I'm not defending the invasion obviously but I think I've said these views before yeah but the more interesting thing I think was talk about where Putin lies on the Russian political spectrum is there anything in that conflict Ukraine versus Russia since we spoke last that you found particularly I haven't been following it much I just find it very depressing first of all I feel sad for the Ukrainians I also think that we're not going to be able to sort out how many how much are the allegations are true what allegations are true until after the fight of war settles but certainly Ukrainians are being killed and and suffering terribly and I make it saddens me and you know the whole I have a personal a special distaste for this because of my of the Russians that I my my life and because I see this as interpreted in a very anti-Russian way not just an anti-Kudin way of course which I wouldn't object to but an anti-Russian way so the coverage of it rather depresses me and I I just have been checked out of it for the last couple of weeks although I'm thinking about writing an article about where Putin lies in the spectrum because of it's interesting how these far left and far right people in America have come to support him although you know it's still I was on the fringes have you ever thought about becoming a Baron maybe you can purchase one from Africa somewhere How does that work? I don't know you have to talk to Joseph Cotto I'm not saying he purchased his but he's Baron Joseph Cotto Wow that's a good idea Yeah how much are they going for? I know you all have to call me that like your audience has to I think that's they're legal yeah yeah first Baron Cotto would be a Lord Yeah or a Lord maybe you could maybe you could become you could be sir you know Matthew Gabriel yeah yeah yeah you're just sir you know I mean you'd have to remember in every like if you want to interrupt me you have to say pardon my pardons my Lord or something like my lady so I could get a Joseph Cotto actually get a Lordship or something he's a Baron Yeah he got one from Africa why I think he got scam but he it sounds like does he get like some kind of lamb he got a sash he's got a pretty stylish outfit out of it pretty cool so that was that like the cost of a of a steak dinner in in Texas or was that a serious investment now this is serious serious I mean this becoming a Baron it just totally changes your life I mean people just start treating Oh so he's like an aristocrat now he doesn't have to work he's a monochest an aristocrat he has like a household you know of maids oh yeah chef most writers gardeners he's got he's the big spiritual advisors yeah he's got a whole community that depends on is he a minor lord or a major which country is this by the way I don't know one of those African ones yeah so Sub-Saharan Africa or North Africa I don't know I don't see geography I don't see color and I don't see geography now I was wondering if he's um if Joseph is black I don't think he's black no but he's um he's a Baron you can buy if look if the law of the lands just if the law of America says immigrants in common as it does and frankly has worked for the United States is such a rich country our the stupidest thing about woke is like for all of our problems there's a lot going for us there's so many opportunities in this country and you know there there are people who are who would bend over backwards around the world to come here from you know all kinds of countries from the vast majority of countries really so we have so much going for us and it's we're we're kind of stabbing ourselves in the you know we're we're kind of um cutting off our nose despite our face with the woke stuff and also the kind of Amy wax racialist stuff I think too is it's just not productive just as woke isn't productive why not why not oppose both right and people say oh you're just cupping well you know they'll call you if you want to be criticized they will call you a neo-Nazi for simply saying anti-white stuff is bad so why would you if your goal is to be provocative you're already going to be considered provocative in this crazy woke culture you can be provocative without being racially hateful is my point so you can have both not like be able to sleep at night because you're not demeaning like millions of people globally based on who are objectively innocent right because you know um if you're demeaning people based on race you're not you're not you're not you're not you're not could have done or admitted to do that prevents there from being demeaned by you right you're you're demeaning innocent people whether they're white or black or whatever so you don't have to do that you can be a decent liberal moral person and still be edgy and be criticized if that's what you're into because the system will call you racist for saying anti-white stuff is bad that is sufficient so Amy Max also she called India a shit whole country do you think that's an objective fact I just you know I just think it's a narrow view I mean a lot of human innovation has come out of India you know the Buddhist religion for example came out of India which a lot of people a lot of Westerners have found spiritual insights in Buddhism in terms of the need to Chopin and philosophers as well Chopin hour Chopin hour wasn't some politically wasn't some politically correct man you know and he found great wisdom in in Eastern mysticism and so forth you know so I think it's ignorant and narrow and a little sad because someone with her platform and her she she's she's bright if she's willing to criticize you know she's willing to express views that are socially unacceptable but I just wish she'd be doing that in a way that's positive for the United States and is not demeaning huge groups of people right so no I don't agree with that I think I think that you lack a certain you're kind of viewing the world in very materialistic terms if you just arrived this entire country as a shithole and my is shithole a widely accepted academic category for different types of civilizations I wonder I actually emailed her I used like obviously a civil tone to try to differentiate myself from like screaming woke people but I didn't say that you're empirically wrong about this I didn't say you're racist or that right I just gave the data about how you know people all these developing third-world countries brown people as it were after and also people from Africa like the United States it's when people come here in a propaganda is by our system which is in which most of the powerful people are white by the way I'm not saying there aren't non-whites pushing this garbage there are but they're mostly whites are right in terms of the because they hold most the power positions then they get propagandized into here or they may not even believe it but they're incentivized as you say to pretend to believe it so I mean it isn't some intrinsic quality of like it just to say the third world is just motivated by resentment of the west it's such a narrow view which is so wrong I lived in the Middle East for two years America's quite popular Israel isn't popular but that's that's a different kettle of fish that's not about envy I choose white I mean Mizrahi Jews I think could be called non-white I don't really understand Ashkenazi saying they're not white but I don't really care if they want to say they're why you're not I mean Eric striker by the way on telegram has said ain't has implied that Amy Wax I'll send you the link has implied that Amy Wax is trying to lock is is trying to trick whites with this yeah with her can you saw this already no no about it just she's playing 3d chess yeah exactly she she looks Jewish and she is lying about the origins of political correctness and wokeism I don't even think did she even mentioned the origins these people are just so it's so obvious that they're trying to cram all the data in the world into their narrative so this is obviously a counter-example from the narrative that Jews are anti-white and that's the motivation of all this because she's like essentially espousing and again this is so overused but she's essentially espousing white nationalist views in my view I mean honest like you know you're not that those these the term she's just a meeting happening groups I'm sorry right like I don't want to call people that who aren't like I would never call Charles Murray a white nationalist right he doesn't express those views but wax seems to be a white nationalist I mean honestly maybe not maybe that's unfair but she certainly she's a fellow traveler she agrees with many of their views right and she kind of agrees with this denigration of of other ethnic groups you know what do you think about our government's reactions to COVID I'll say my opinion first so I think that our elites and our politicians did pretty much the best they could and I accept that there may be a wide range of policies that would be appropriate but I think generally speaking our academic elites our health elites and our our political elites did did the best they could with a difficult situation and I think they got overall more things right than wrong and I think that lockdowns were appropriate in in most instances that they instituted lockdowns that those that those those were good calls and I think getting vaccinated is is a good call and social distancing I think was appropriate for a time and wearing masks particularly when you're indoors around other people I think is is been a good idea so overall I think the elites and the politicians and the the people with power got more things right than they got wrong with regard to COVID and the lockdowns what say you well I have a strong view on one of these issues and I'm going to have to express acknowledges money others because I just haven't read enough to know my strongly think the vaccines people should get vaccinated you know in opulation say say protects yourself and others around you there's been this claim going around kind of anti-woke Twitter and I'm sympathetic obviously to anti-woke people but there's this claim going around Glenn Greenwell repeated this Jimmy Dore repeated this that you're actually not protecting others if you get inoculated because the chance that you transmit COVID assuming you have COVID the chance that you transmit it is no different according to some studies then for a vaccine or some vaccine but this is obviously a fallacy because if you're vaccinated your chance of getting so you need to get it to transmit it ergo since your chance of getting it is far lower and there's no difference between your chance of passing it on if you have it obviously getting vaccinated protects others and it protects oneself I mean the lethality of disease is decimated by inoculation so people should get vaccinated and the state should make it's I don't believe I don't believe in a law of applying people to get vaccinated because I think that forcible medical procedures I have a kind of libertarian I have enough of a libertarian streak not a very pronouncement but enough that that disturbs me even if it could be justified in some utilitarian basis but certainly we shouldn't incentivize getting inoculated and you know there was another there was a guy who died I have you read Lou Rockwell dot com a little bit okay it's like a libertarian website that's a lot of crank crackpot stuff on on scientific issues there was a guy who wrote for them for many years associated with Ron Paul incident there was a guy who wrote for them for many years Bill Sardi who who died last week he believed he said COVID is a hoax or it's exaggerated or the vaccine doesn't work and he died according the death certificate of COVID was one of the contributing factors so this does kill real people and the evidence is very strong inoculation so we should we should be getting vaccine now in terms of the lockdowns and other stuff I just haven't read enough to know how effective this was I think that the lockdowns were very grave infringements on liberty and I need to see a very compelling empirical basis for there being effective highly effective to justify them my intuition is to be against lockdowns for the lockdowns frankly but I haven't read enough to have an opinion that I'd be willing to stand by but very strongly support those vaccines and providing incentives to get them but not forcing it's interesting for for our different perspectives I think you're more of a you're more of a classical liberal I'm more of a nationalist and so I'm I'm not as wedded to rights I view rights as you know so heavily contingent and I understand that they can be ripped away at any time when there's when there's a when there's a situation that changes but for a liberal the the lockdowns and the social distancing policies must be yeah particularly hard to to handle because I don't right you know I think rights are nice but you know I don't don't view them with I don't believe and I don't believe in natural rights but I believe that rights and I also so I not only think that metaphysically the concept of natural rights is absurd first of all additionally I recognize that the notion of natural rights which implies a kind of human rights really because if you're if you're man or woman or whatever I'm not going to get into gender joke you know but it was tempting there to be honest um the you know if you're human being you had entitled these rights right so natural rights is implicit and that is adopted of human rights this is not the historical form sort of love of slavery served a fresh and exploitation you know exploitation of women child marriage very common history marring minors just the idea of that individuals are entitled to some level of autonomy is not character and then of course you have war and conquest murder by the state in this regard so these are not um as we sometimes talk about like people you know on the far right are certainly correct fascists are correct that this is not characteristic however I think it's a really good idea I also think that there's something in us even if it's been dormant for most of human history there is some capacity for compassion to the other and we need to create institutions that tap into that and I think human rights doctrine does and I think it's had an effect I mean people do even people like some racist fuck in Texas does not does not think like indentured servitude is right the way he would have before before before human rights became like a norm right he doesn't have any notion of human rights he probably would make fun of it and say it's stupid but he does have some implicit notion that you treat the other not so bad you know yeah I'm so yeah I I think we agree on the if you will the metaphysics of it I think we agree on the history of it that this is not how human history is proceeded but I think it's a good idea and I think it has efficacy and I think that since notions of and I they also think it's implicit in earlier liberalism the notion of human rights because natural rights doctrine the idea that which I I don't support obviously metaphysically but I I think is a is a good construction I like it as a social construction if you will that implicit and that is a notion of human rights because if you know if if one comes about this naturally by virtue of being human there's an egalitarianism regardless of nationality in liberalism so yeah I mean I'm rambling a bit but I think it's a great I think we have the facts but yeah I mean the covid was just a fascinating situation for I need to find good evidence but because I don't believe in natural rights and because I think this is just a highly useful and beneficial construction I am open to suspending rights in certain circumstances right because I don't believe they're like these you know inalienable things as the constitution says but I'd have to find very convincing evidence the efficacy of the measures that were taken so how bad is the situation in Australia I hear it's like a I haven't looked into this seriously but the kind of libertarian or right I found it a utopia I mean there are then about one fiftieth the per capita death rate of the United States and was with the price for that that you just had to check in on your iPhone every time you enter the store or had to show verification of vaccination I don't see that as a problem so very low death rate and yeah people in Australia have much more of a sense that the government's on their side have more trust of the government and the government does seem to work a little bit more efficiently and and effectively and overwhelmingly people went along with it like people also in the United States people supported tougher COVID measures than were actually enacted it wasn't that the government you know imposed lockdowns on people nearly as much as people wanted them and so too in Australia when you have a deadly disease that is is killing hundreds of thousands of people and you have you have ways of minimizing so the price of the the price of COVID measures in Australia that had to pay was just check in on my phone also when I got to Australia I had to I had to get a COVID test to even travel to Australia I could only go to Australia because I was an Australian citizen I had to I was I would get a text message from the government once I arrived in Australia after a few days mandating that I go get another test all paid for by the the government that each state in Australia had their own policies so you couldn't you couldn't travel to another state until about a month into my stay in Australia and then there's a whole you know bureaucratic process I just wondered you know what would 100 IQ people do to get through that like there are all these hoops that you had to jump through and then we got out for example we got our COVID test and then began the 12 hour drive to the Queensland border that we we could have been you know we could have driven a thousand kilometers you know found out we'd tested positive and not be able to get in but so there was things you have to do online you had to get a test then you had to show all that to the customers officers you're entering Queensland so I also had to get a special test to fly back so I was probably out I was out $400 total and I was probably out several hours of 12 12 hours of inconvenience or told but I think Australia's dealt with the in a fairly rational and effective manner so how punitive is the are the consequences for not because again well again based on most of the generally speaking it's it's fairly punitive like if you $5,000 like if you don't wow like so when there was a lockdown and there was series of Jews that insisted on holding Russia Shana services I think they all had to pay a fine of there was equivalent of 5,000 American each which was like 8,000 Australian. I'm laughing for a second my mind is on the I just remembered that so it's kind of funny the the right stuff guys striker and and the beginning of COVID they were said when they took COVID seriously they were they they actually unlike some folks in the conspiracy theory anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists community they actually were saying that this is real isn't fake but and then that they were claiming Jews because of this orthodox you know and so on Jews for spreading COVID and then they turned just seamlessly to Jews are pushing the lockdowns yeah it's just like obviously the obviously the first principle is Jews are to blame and you're not you're just trying to conform the facts that anyway let's get back and that's why I was giggling but let's get back on on the subject but what one incarcerated for not the blind I'm not sure I'm sure maybe approximately $5,000 that's that's that's that's a lot of money for yeah I mean but that's real I mean if you want to take it seriously that's that's what you need to do so true and the death rate this is way lower there that is interesting consideration again I I haven't studied this data these data you say technically I haven't say these data systematically but but you say that there really is there was it just was decimated the rate of death I mean the reason this is serious the arguments from the right wing have been very bad on this so the rate of death from covid isn't what is so horrifying what's horrifying is how quickly it spreads you know so if if everybody in the population could get something with the 2% and I don't know the exact figure but before the inoculation I think it was something like 2% 1.5% I don't know exactly don't hold me that but if everyone the population gets that that's millions of deaths you know and moreover there are certain groups where the risk is quite high if you're old or obese or what have you you know or have asthma so yeah I mean I don't agree with the right wing crackpot stuff on this but my inclination is also to be skeptical of policies like Australia but you know that's a relevant consideration if that's that's where just way lower in Australia way lower so there was one time the first time I went to synagogue I I didn't think about this so I didn't didn't bring my phone with me because it's coming up on Shabbat so I didn't have proof of my vaccination status so I couldn't couldn't go to synagogue one on Friday evening so you know that that's sucked and of course you know people in businesses that depended upon you know in-person traffic I mean they were devastated but I think governments did a really good job in the west by and large of cushioning some people starving and and people would be have to pay the rent and by and by and large we we miss that because the fed federal reserve got involved central banks got involved governments got involved they you know they subsidized people so you know we we dodged a bullet and of course there's a lot we don't know about COVID like what are the long-term implications for people who many of them will have you know long-term problems in the face of skepticism though I think we need to have liberty but what we do know is is frightening because as you say you know as I mentioned millions have died from this because of how it's just insanely contagious you know if the flu were this contagious the flu would be horrifying we'd kill huge numbers of people you know it's more much more lethal than the flu but the contagion factor I think is what is what scared people so much with this yeah and you know again so much we don't know we don't know what are the repercussions so to me it made sense it was a rational decision for individuals to take some measures to delay catching it because our therapeutics were going to improve our we would know more and more about what reminder is is that we had no effective as you're reminding them actually is beginning of this thing we had no effective treatment for that was another thing that freed people out well we got better as it went along initially people put on ventilators then we found out 90% of people have put on ventilators died so you you want to really not put people on ventilators like we we learned smarter ways of dealing with this and so when there's there's some unpredictable epidemic hitting yeah you want to try to to delay catching it of course you know everything's are weighing up of of various options so for me I did not get a synagogue for a year right that's how that's how seriously I took it I did not I did not I did not I did not Matthew you keep interrupting me man I'm just you got to let me remember a little fucked up today yeah yeah yeah so I basically didn't socialize for for approximately a year so to the extent I did it we we socially distance and war mass so that's how seriously I took it how seriously did you take it well I have I have a quick question for you first I'll tell you how I pressure so how did the orthodox you're orthodox Jewish right yes okay how did the orthodox Jewish community in general react to the lockdowns were they resentful of it were they skeptical of covid anecdotally and also empirically if you have any yeah the modern ones were were fine with it because the modern ones go to university the traditional ones who didn't go to university were much more opposed to the lockdowns but there was a trend that even many of the traditionalists came around to the importance of locking down when they saw more and more of their their their fellows dying of covid right so that that wonderfully wonderfully concentrated the mind yeah as for me I always and with no with no complaint or hesitation like any really internal agitation masked you know indoors obviously outdoors very different mask outdoors but indoors I masked because it seemed very logical that you know like the flu this this spreads through sneezing and coughing and so on so you to eat masking makes logical sense so I was happy to do then I thought that was the social a social thing to do I got to the accolation right when I was available when it was available I didn't have any hesitation of that either I read a little bit about like studies on defectiveness of the vaccine it's quite impressive so on the other hand I wasn't tying myself into knots to avoid any risk so for example I went to my so I went to Turkey recently but I went to Turkey before I went I traveled overseas before you vaccinated you traveled to correct yeah which was a risk now yeah which I suppose was a risk to myself and to others if I'm being honest I wanted to meet my girlfriend this was when we were flirting on the internet and I really wanted to meet her and I just thought she was special and still think that obviously by the way we're going to live together in Berlin I'm checking out apartments this morning after breakfast and then I'm going to go look at a couple apartments but that's either here or there I did go to Turkey though so I traveled and I obviously a sad and a plane I was wearing a mask by sad and a plane I walked to an airport and then that entailed risk for transmitting COVID right but I didn't get it I would have felt guilty if I got and spread it but I I was very selfish there I suppose not I love the I love the epistemic challenge of COVID and also the epistemic challenge of the voter fraud claim so with both of them my my reaction was fairly quickly to find what's the best book on this topic so early on in COVID I read the the best book on the Spanish flu so when I saw the severity of the Spanish flu where 40 60 million people around the world died I became much more open to government restriction measures to COVID and then when I read a book the myth the voter fraud I felt like I saw through these spacious claims of voter fraud so that's probably my primary epistemic approach to to topics I don't know anything about is to read say what's the number one book on this topic and then and then work work out from there yeah but you took it you took it seriously throughout the process only because I I read that book on the Spanish flu so I didn't have any opinion until in March 2020 and after I read that book after I read the descriptions of you know millions of people dying horrible deaths and how devastating this flu was and how that that seems to be like a devastating influencer about every century or so I yeah I took it seriously and I did not automatically dismiss government lockdown policies now I feel like I was kind of centrist I didn't automatically accept what medical authorities were saying and and political authorities I didn't automatically assume that they were doing the right thing but I did not follow the populace and automatically assume that they were doing the wrong thing yeah so what do you think of what do you think of the morality of COVID like like conduct regarding COVID so let's say you're unvaccinated and not wearing a mask you're just walking into like you know a place where you'd find elderly people like a casino let's say do you think that person is it's kind of I see what you think in terms of ethics yeah this was a big thing for me because most of my audience was I'm going to do what I like because I'm a man and I'm not a wimp and and my response was so it how many people would have to die as a result of your actions before you'd rethink what you're doing and nobody wanted to rethink it's like you know they were just weak and so I just found that that heinous that that that seemed that the dominant reaction I got from my audience was I'm going to go out there and do what I like and if what I does kills people I don't care it's all fake anyway so I found that that kind of populist reaction disgusting for me what do you think it is more so the two possibilities here that they actually like don't care about killing people through like you know so they're basically let's say they're not they're refusing to get vaccinated refusing to wear a mask indoors they're killing people are potentially endangering people just to get mild conveniences of not going to get the vaccine not wearing or not not wearing a mask do you think that said or do you think that they genuinely think it's a hopes in which case if you look at Oak The law like men's rate of state of mind matters 맏 month month month month so so So and I think that's the case so here too you if you if you if you honestly honestly believe it's gä good it's a think that this case here if you also too this case here too honestly believe it's a fraud would be a it would be a fool but you're not a fool but you're not a fool but you're It was so to started a big political issue in Australia. Was the light pretty similar to the left on COVID-19? No, no, because the right in Australia, like in Europe, is not anti-government. It doesn't have this instinctive rejection of government intervention. So there was a overwhelming consensus in Australia, whether you're on the right or the left or the center, that the government policies were probably of restriction and social distancing were a good idea. Interesting. How would you... Go ahead. So how would you care... So does Australia not have this, the same level of right wing? Is there a right wing populism in Australia? Is it much easier? Yes, but it's different. In America, the number one value is freedom. In Australia, the number one value is fairness. Interesting. So there's no freedom fixation and freedom fetishism in anywhere else in the world compared to the United States. Yeah, that's true. Because they're a product of the different enlightenment. So the United States was born by a revolution prior to the enlightenment. Then you get the enlightenment, you get this idea of universal values and a very different British empire that gave birth to Australia and New Zealand. So first enlightenment versus the enlightenment versus the pre-enlightenment, I think that's a lot of the difference. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I actually have lately been questioning how useful the term the West is as a broad characterization for societies that are developed but also supposedly share similar value. I mean, I think like France, for example, the values are vastly different than the United States, vastly different. Yeah, I mean, everything's relative. Like compare the United States, France and Japan, then France and probably France and the United States may seem more similar. I'd have to think about, but of course the West is a politically correct term for Christendom. Like the West is a term to make the Jews feel more included, like the West is Christendom. But I don't know if Christianity, I'm not saying that there's no rule. But Christendom, I understand what you're saying. It's different from Christianity. But maybe it's more about rich, because I don't think people mean Russia when they say the West. I don't think it's just white. I don't think that's right. But maybe it's rich whites. I mean, wealthy white countries that are perceived as having high standards of human rights and education and so on. I don't know though. I think the term is epistemically quite problematic because their cultures are so different. France is so different than the United States. Germany is very different than Austria. Here's how even though they were the same people just a couple of generations ago, they consider themselves the same ethnicity. So yeah, I think the term the West does obscure more than it sheds light. Yeah, like all these things are compromises with reality. French people are very nationalistic as you're seeing kind of with the Le Pen movement. Some of it does surprise me because France actually has a, they have a very emphatic colorblind ideology, such as it's politically incorrect in France to ask for like where are you from, what's your ethnicity? Because the idea is we're all French. It's kind of combined with the xenophobia though and a cultural chauvinism. Like the kind of rejection of racialism, you even see that in the Vichy regime, obviously the most racist regime since the French Revolution, really in the history of France. Even they, there was a, Leval had an African, a Frenchman of African descent in his cabinet of Vichy France. So they have just a different ideology. It's combined with like xenophobia, nationalism, a sense of superiority, if you will. And Le Pen is actually, she's moderated her views quite a bit, at least outwardly and is trying to, she's presenting herself as basically a dollist, you know, like in the tradition of the doll. Like so kind of French chauvinism, but no like affinity to fascism or racialism. And like, skeptical of immigration, but on cultural assimilation. She's basically tried to, she's trying to conform her right-wing views to French norms on race and ethnicity, which is to say, as I said, they're culturally very homogeneous, they're nationalistic, they're proud to be French, in a way that certainly they wouldn't, like Germans aren't proud to be German in that sense. But they also reject, you know, normative French culture rejects like racial ideology. Like this person is defined as X, Y, Z and cannot be French because he's X, Y, Z. I don't think she'll win because I think her past will come out to buyer, but she has, it is interesting that she's moderating her views and has met some success with that. She certainly has more of a chance than she did last time. Anything you found interesting about the French election results? Well, I mean, Zemmour didn't do well. He's like a burp and he's kind of, he kind of is pushing a more explicitly, ethnically based view, which is ironic because he's Jewish and Berber, but nevertheless, I think he actually allowed Le Pen, I think, to present herself as more moderate because she's a shrewd, like open racial appeals, whereas he's talking about things like the great replacement, essentially, Zemmour, and she isn't talking like this. She's talking about assimilation, cultural homogeneity, but all those things are really, they may seem right-wing to Americans, but all those things, the idea of monoculture is very normative French identity. Like Macron isn't saying radically different things, you know? I mean, they're much less tolerant of religious freedom, for example, than we are, right? They believe in secularism in the public square. They believe Muslim, like take a high school, Muslim girls should go swimming with the boys. In French school, we go swimming, right? They're not going to, so it isn't, Macron would be considered illiberal from our point of view, in many ways. Also, most Frenchmen are very hostile to Macron, who's center-left, essentially. He and his government have condemned, well, I don't know if you've seen that. There's been like public condemnations of this stuff from the French government, the center-left French government, which reflects how different their culture is from ours, right? Because yeah, you can become French. France has all kinds of different ethnicities, right? But you have to become French though, right? You can't have dual identities. That's a normative view. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but that's a normative view in France, you know? Yeah, I mean, that's similar to America in that they believe that people can assimilate and that they believe in the power of ideas, like... Yes. Which seems naive. Sorry, go ahead. I'm interrupting way too much, so you're right. But I would say one big qualification though is they're much less tolerant of multiculturalism, even though they are, you can become French in the way you can become American, true, but they're much less tolerant of multiculturalism. They want you to be culturally French. Right, which is, they believe in the power of ideas to transform people, just like Americans do, that you become an American or you become French by taking on our ideals. Right. And Le Pen is presenting herself though as just believing that more emphatically than Macron. She's distanced, she like has condemned her father, for example, her father was a kind of nostalgic for Vichy. He finally had her party. I don't know if you know about... Yes. Yeah, you do. So I think he expressed either soft Holocaust denial or dog whistle at least to it. And, but she's condemned him and she's condemned racism, you know, in some sense. But I just don't know if she can overcome the baggage from her past, you know? Okay, I'm gonna run off any final words, Matthew. No, thank you for having me on, Luke, and I'll try to end up less next time. No worries. I've been a bit of a jerk. Take care, thanks.