 in the United States, where, as you probably know, American universities are the specialists in hypersensitivity to offense. And so punching down is wrong means someone of higher status should not be criticizing or attacking someone of lower status. And that's wrong, okay? So that's the second value judgment I wanna work with. Punching down is wrong. And then the third is fairly straightforward, homosexuality is wrong. Let me just put a little context into this. Roughly once every year in the United States, some evangelical Protestant preacher who is a stern enemy of homosexuality, of gay marriage, or some very prominent right-wing politician who is an enemy of gay marriage and homosexuality is exposed as having gay sex on the side. And that will be important for purposes of Freud's example. Okay, now why should we be suspicious when people say things like the death tax is wrong, punching down is wrong, homosexuality is wrong? Well, let me just start with a kind of crude initial gloss on the way in which Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, what they might say about each of these. So why do people in the United States, many people, believe the death tax is wrong? The Marxian answer, and this is B1 on your handout, the ruling class made you believe it. It was a kind of ideological indoctrination. It was in the interest of extremely wealthy people that you be persuaded that taxing the estates of people upon death is wrongful. And let me just add a factual detail here that's important, which is that there are no taxes on your wealth at death, unless it's more than a million dollars now. It may even be higher than that. And even then, you really have to have more than $10 million to even perhaps run into some real trouble, as there are ways to avoid it before then. And Marx's thought is, if you, as a citizen worth $500,000 or an ordinary amount of money, not a super rich person, if you realize that the reason you had come to believe that this was a death tax and that it was wrongful was because it was in the interest of extremely wealthy people that you believe it, you'd have a lot of trouble believing it any further. And we'll come back to that. All right, how about the second one? You think that, and now this is in the spirit of Nietzsche, punching down is wrong. Well, the real reason you believe that is because you're envious to start with of those who are in a position to punch down. And at the same time, you're afraid, right? It's harmful, it's upsetting, it's disturbing that they can do this to you. But you can't do anything about it. I mean, you can't really do anything about it. You can't, by hypothesis here, punch back in any meaningful way. So you're left with this combination of fear and envy. And all you can do is declare, well, it's wrongful behavior. And of course, it's ironic because if you envy it, you'd actually like to do it too, but you can't. And so perhaps you're motivated by that emotion that Nietzsche called raison-t-amant, which is a kind of combination of both envy and sort of festering hatred, frustration. When something is harmful to you, you can't do anything about it, you wish you could do it too, but you can't. And this gives rise to a different value judgment. Oh, actually punching down is just wrong. Nobody ought to do that. Nobody ought to do that. And then our third, and this is Freud's hypothesis. And this is not Freud's hypothesis, just to be clear about anyone's judgment that homosexuality is wrong. But it often turns out to be a diagnosis that's apt for those who are most obsessed with the wrongness of homosexuality, namely that it's your fear of your own desire for gay sex that made you believe it. In other words, in Freudian terminology, hostility towards homosexuality is a reaction formation. That is, it's a kind of defense mechanism that the psyche puts up when it is aware at an unconscious level of a strong desire for homosexual sex, one that the subject experiences is very frightening, socially unacceptable, whatever the explanation is, they can't bear the thought. And so to protect themselves from their own actual desire, they adopt as their conscious posture the view that homosexuality is morally abhorrent. So yeah, this is the time and this is the place, right, for you to talk about your desire for gay sex and how you have developed this public posture that you think gay orgies fueled by methamphetamines are abhorrent, but share with us how you've only developed this public posture because you are frightened to your very core by how much you desire gay sex, right? This is the time and this is the place for you to share about that. So we're talking here about the homeunitics of suspicion and the professor there was drawing on the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Now, there's someone, a leftist who has developed this in a much deeper way that just kind of blew my mind. It's a philosopher, Ronny Gordman and he's got this work in progress called conservative claims of cultural oppression, the nature and origins of conservophobia. So he takes left-wing critiques and applies them to the left, right? So the left bills itself, let's just take the New York Times as an example of the left as objective, diverse, inclusive, thoughtful, reality-based, benevolent, well, perhaps not. So people on the left tend to be the worst offenders of their own axioms when they talk about the evils of those who dispute their liberal versions of reality, their liberal versions of facts and policy and morality. So the bigotry that people on the left direct was those with whom they merely disagree is staggering, right? So the New York Times, the mainstream journalists and academics and big shots in academia and bureaucracy they imagine themselves as uniquely objective and inclusive and thoughtful. And they've cultivated this automatic social reflex that dismisses conservative opinions as mental or emotional immaturity, some mindless reptilian instincts, some unthinking fear and hatred, right? That easily recognized as such by these sophisticated souls. So there's this social reflex that's become integral to liberal identity, it's become woven into the social fabric. So people on the right find themselves suffocated by an insidious and pervasive conservophobia, right? Fear and hatred and loathing of conservatives is America's last socially acceptable bigotry. Why is it socially acceptable? Because people on the left occupy the high grounds of American culture. They dominate almost all our institutions, right? So the left's aborted ideals of tolerance, diversity, understanding, they are not extended to people on the right, right? So if you expose the moral and intellectual failings that liberals associate with conservatives, you'll see this subtly mirrored in liberals own treatment of people on the right, right? So it's time to make people on the left answerable to their own professed ideals. And it's now fallen upon conservatives or people on the right to essentially uphold the left's professed ideals and hold them accountable, right? So this conservative claim of cultural oppression is not about defending some traditional order of things before which all upstanding God-fearing citizens must submit, rather it is a way of unearthing the deeper structures of liberal left discourse to expose how that way of talking and thinking and speaking about reality makes natural the unearned privileges of people on the left and passing it off as some sort of timeless order of things when really it is a contingent status hierarchy. So when conservatives claim cultural oppression they essentially hold themselves out as the counterculture to the dominant liberal culture. They are the last holdouts of resistance against the false consciousness of the liberal left hegemony. So the conventional wisdom of people like the New York Times is that conservatism thrives on vague cultural resentments that channel what are essentially economic grievances into symbolic obsessions with the depredations of an imaginary liberal elite whose haughty pretentiousness is spaciously contrasted with the basic goodness and authenticity of the conservative ordinary American, the sort of the earth. And so from the New York Times perspective this is how conservative propagandists like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity divert the attention of ordinary Americans away from the transgressions of the real ruling class the business elite who know how to harness social conservatism toward their own advantage. And so from a left wing perspective this diagnosis is supported by the historical record is the story of the modern conservative movement and it's just basic common sense about the average Americans real interests. Now, if liberals cannot be brought to acknowledge genuine conservative grievances that's because they're very identities as liberals ineurism to that to which the grievances react. It's a perennial theme of the left that oppressed groups can perceive iniquities that dominant groups are disposed to overlook. It's your white privilege that makes you blind to the horrible things that whites are doing to non whites. It's your privilege, bro, that is blinding you. Now, if the person on the left wants to be intellectually consistent they must ask whether the relationship between liberals and conservatives in America could be yet another instance of this phenomenon. Have liberals transgressed against conservatives in ways that their very liberalism does not allow them to recognize, right? So liberals are gonna claim that conservative claims of cultural oppression are just empty posturing but is that not to be expected that a ruling class will thus dismiss the outcries of the oppressed group, right? Liberals have this bemused incredulity toward conservative grievances but maybe that's just a natural byproduct of the very oppression being alleged. Maybe the dominant cultures, language and concepts will always privilege the perspective of its ruling elites who shape the common sense to which oppressed groups are made to answer. So maybe the critical theorists of the left have long made these arguments on behalf of racial minorities, women and gays. Well, what happens when you extend these arguments? The hermeneutics of suspicion on behalf of people on the right, right? So liberal elites believe that they stand above retrograde conservatism which they think they're enlightenment ideals, right? That everyone's born naturally good and a society that's corrupted people but through the pursuit of reason we can liberate people on the right from their various hero systems to which people on the right remain beholden. So hero systems are ways of thinking about ultimate reality. They are systems of collective production of meaning. And so liberals see conservatism as a stain by this primitive attraction to these relics of pre-modernity. But the conservative suspicion is that liberalism is itself a hero system in disguise. It's a hero system that stays concealed behind a secular facade of enlightenment, pragmatism and utilitarianism. So liberals wish to see themselves as committed solely to ordinary human fulfillment short of any higher metaphysical aspirations. But people on the right see that leftism, liberalism is unbeknownst to itself driven by a secularized religious impulse and a secularized spiritual ideal that plays themselves out through the medium of ostensibly secular goals. So liberalism is a hero system that disguises itself as the transcendence of all hero systems. So this aspiration to rise above the merely human was once conceived in expressly religious terms as fealty to the city of God over the city of man. But today this aspiration has become secularized and it transpires politically and culturally as the imperative to rise above conservatism toward liberalism and leftism. And it gives its adherents a special feeling of spiritual purity that stands exalted above the fallen realm of conservatism. So from a liberal left perspective, conservatism is not a competing philosophy to be reputed. It is essentially an ingrained sinfulness to be exposed and to be disciplined away. So the hero systems of the right valorize concepts like God, country and family. And they must operate in full public view. But the hero systems of the left operate secretly within insulated institutional enclaves whose specialized discourse provides them with a pragmatic veneer. So this is what distinguishes the power of the left from that of its rival power brokers on the right who do not enjoy the benefit of this plausible deniability. People on the left think they are objective. People on the right know that they hold a particular worldview. So this is why you have a proliferation of conservative laments about the cultural decadence of various liberal elite enclaves like academia, the media and the Hollywood, which are understood to perpetuate this essential inequality and deception and oppression of the right. So it is in these enclaves that the left rules that allows liberals to imagine they have transcended the primitive and unconscious identity affirmation needs of conservatives in favor of this new rational autonomy, this enlightenment that can dispense with the hero systems of the right. So today's culture wars are a contemporary recapitulation of the struggles by which modernity first emerged out of the pre-modern. It's a clash between elites trying to inculcate the disciplines and repressions of the modern identity and the unwashed masses trying to resist this extirpation of their traditional often disordered folk ways, a role now filled by traditional American values. So conservatives feel culturally oppressed by power hungry control obsessed liberal leftists where liberal leftists see only right-wing rhetoric because they haven't fully internalized the modern ideal of the self. So conservatives are more visibly attuned to its cultural contingency of liberalism. They're more averse to particular forms of disciplined disengaged agency into which liberals have been more successfully socialized. So contemporary liberalism represents the apex of the disciplinary impulses that created modernity and the most extreme outgrowth of the secularization of this religious impulse and the democratization of this sensibility, the now forgotten pre-enlightenment roots of progressive sensibilities. So liberals celebrate their superior civility. This is a modern and secularized variant of them supposedly superseding their base natural impulses and it is these impulses that fuel liberals reflexive aversion to traditionalism and conservatism, right? That right-wing ways of viewing life are just basically crude animal instincts, right? They are a sinful indiscipline and they are an affront to the higher refinement of liberal sensibilities. So politically incorrect gut enthusiasts tend to be the most intensely detested of liberalism's many enemies because they refuse this training. So they serve liberals as premier social symbols for the unhinged impulsivity and the potential violence of the undisciplined pre-modern self lacking the disengaged self-control and self-possession of the modern liberal New York times identity, right? So liberals define themselves in opposition to this barbaric past. So they must shame and stigmatize all who remind them of it and conservatives are replete with such reminders. Therefore, they must be extirpated. So liberals see themselves as at the vanguard of the modern West civilizing process. So this has thrust them into the role of disciplinarians. And in reaction to that, people on the right have cultivated their own special kind of emancipationist ethos. So conservatives may well have absorbed the moral and intellectual reflexes of the left and developed a postmodernism and multiculturalism of the right because they are targets of the same civilizing norms that the left used to protest had been imperiously foist upon non-white, non-Western peoples by a condescending European colonialism. So liberalism is secretly illiberal because it can flourish only in as much as it is prepared to coerce this particular brand of self-discipline and self-control upon the unwilling who's suffering an alienation in the face of this undeclared agenda never enters liberalism's moral calculus. So liberals cannot see the broader context of their idealism because their antiquated alignment of view of reason as predominantly conscious and disembodied leads them insensible to this embodied layer of human experience. And so overconfident of their ability to recognize oppression and inequality. So it's like the difference between going to yoga and taking Alexander Technique classes, right? You go to yoga because you feel like you need to get fit that you've got some back pain that you develop some unhelpful habits, right? And you wanna have a healthier way of living. But when you do yoga, you will only ingrain the habits you already have, your self-destructive habits of unnecessary tension and compression. So you feel like you are doing something good for you but you're really only ingraining the ways that you have unconsciously learned to oppress and pull yourself down and make yourself tighter and less flexible. Now, when you take an Alexander Technique lesson, you are learning to recognize your habits of compression and oppression and pulling down. And you learn ways to start to let go of your unconscious habits that pull you down and distort your body, distort how you do everything, ruin your posture and cause all sorts of health problems. So just before the 2008 election on MSNBC's Morning Joe program and the discussion was the increasingly unhinged racism and xenophobia seemed to be gripping crowds at McCain-Palant rallies where some attendees apparently driven batty by the prospect of an African-American president reacting with shouts of terrorists and kill him that the mayor mentions a Barack Obama's name. So the show's mild-minded conservative host former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough responded that these outbursts were surely beyond the pale but he then seized upon these reports as an occasion to remind liberals that they should also pay attention to their own incivility problems to stop judging conservatives by a double standard as though they were the only ones capable of lapsing into incivility. When a few misfits behave outrageously at Republican campaign events, this is taken by liberals as evidence for the latent racism and general depravity of conservatives, but no objections are raised when a well-respected liberal commentator like Thomas Frank writes a book such as What's the Matter with Kansas, a book that takes aim not at one man but an entire state and dismisses its conservative voting citizens as idiots. Right? So Joe Scarborough is quite willing to turn around and criticize his own when they cross the line, yet liberals seem unwilling to engage in similar self-policing and willing to acknowledge let alone denounce the hatred and bigotry that grows in their own ranks. So conservatives routinely held accountable for the slightest modicum of real or perceived bigotry while liberals can casually indulge their own bigotry against conservatives in plain view without any fear of reproach. So liberals routinely excoriate as beyond the pale any and all speculation into the genetic basis and heritability of intelligence, right? You can't look into the genetic basis and heritability of group differences or gender differences, right? But liberals are astonishingly hypocritical in their own giddiness to entertain the notion that conservatives have broken brains based solely on the fact that they are conservatives. So Jenner Goldberg makes this point in his book, Liberal Fascism. And so Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist argues in psychology today that liberalism represents a genetically novel dispensation. So we have an evolutionary history in close knit tribal societies. Who's your mob? Who your mob, right? Right? We grew up in ancient times in close knit tribal societies and this naturally disposes us to restrict our altruism to our kin. But liberalism has a willingness to devote large proportions of private resources for the benefit of those who are not genetically related to us. So liberalism perhaps represents the transcendence of our merely natural state. It's a freedom from the rigorous genetic logic that binds other animals. So perhaps this is why liberals are smarter than conservatives. Apart from a few areas in life, such as some areas of business, liberals control all our institutions because they are just so smart. But the Achilles' heel of this argument, you taught Jenner Goldberg, resides in the exceptions it concedes. So conservatives are frequently successful in business. Reason is that business, just like the military law enforcement engineering and the hard sciences, does not create institutional ideological filters to screen out conservatives. The bottom line in business is the bottom line profit rather than affinity for social engineering, liberal groupthink, or progressive do-goodery. So this is why conservatives can thrive in these fields as they cannot in liberal-dominated milieu. So the genetic argument is only plausible if we first discount the obvious cultural, historical, and social explanations for discrepancies in liberal and conservative performance in fields like academia, entertainment, and publishing. So anyone who knows how these institutions actually work knows that their gatekeepers aren't simply keeping stupid conservatives out. They're keeping conservatives out, period. And this kind of mirrors the historical dispute between white supremacists and their egalitarian adversaries. So the liberal here is attempting to defend an unequal status quo. Oh, so you think that some groups are smarter than others. You think that some groups commit more crimes than others. You think some groups have more stable families than others. You think that there are all these predictable life history patterns that can be basically broken down by racial groups. You're saying essentially that nature has color-coded people for our benefit, right? So the conservative decries this explanation of the liberal that unequal group outcomes are the result of culture. And the liberal says, oh, this explanation is self-serving, right? You're making all these claims of pervasive prejudice and discrimination, right? You're highlighting the need for egalitarian change. But many on the left regard themselves liberals as a master race, right? And people on the right could argue this is a social illusion generated by unequal power relations. The liberals dominate most parts of our society. They dominate almost all our institutions. So I'm sure you've all been enjoying these very tasty excerpts that I've shared with you from Decoding the Guru's latest episode on Lex Friedman and Jonathan Haidt. I guess Lex takes things seriously and tries extremely hard at everything. So I'm not sure it is performative. I think he might just be telling us what he's focused on at the moment. So would you say like, for example, base? Sometimes I stand, not wearing a suit. I sometimes wear a suit, especially I'm going to film. I wear a suit when I go outside. I just enjoy the way I feel when I wear a suit. But at home, I'm wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Right now, I'm not wearing any pants. Just kidding. I'm wearing jeans. But you wouldn't know it if I didn't, which is the magic of the internet. So I like that joke. He did have these quips that we delivered to that panel and he does it a couple of times. Sometimes they're not good, but when they're good, they're nice little sites. I feel like I get some insight into Lex's personality. And most of this is about his personality rather than about whatever he's arguing for or his takes on things, which we're going to get to. But yeah, with those little jokes and this little quiet smile he's got, I've met people like that. Yes, the jokes aren't super funny. But I think they indicate something nice. There's a poking fun. Yeah, I get a good vibe from Lex. The pole-facedness I think could do better with being a bit more punctured. And he does do that. He does. Sometimes I kind of poke fun at himself. That's nice to see. But like there, he described wearing a suit at all times when he's outside because he likes the way it makes him feel. And now, if you've seen Lex, he's always dressed in this kind of same suit, like a black, silver-black, then black tie. Yeah, like Superman. Yeah, or like man-black, right? That kind of look, if you imagine it. And so for you, and maybe for me as well, I'm just thinking this through, is you think that Lex is just kind of like it is. He likes the feeling of a suit, so he just wears a suit at all times outside in the summer. Yeah, my son, who's 12, went for many years when he was younger, just wanted to wear the same color shirt, the same color pair of pants and identical copies of those. And I think there's a certain kind of male instinct which is comfortable with having like a uniform. I mentioned Superman because I'm imagining like 10 Superman outfits racked up next to each other. I can see a certain kind of satisfaction and comfort in that for a certain kind of person. Yeah, yeah. I guess if you put it like that, like viewing it as a kind of a costume or a uniform that you wear, it doesn't make sense. Okay, and the chat asked, my circumcision did it hurt when I circumcised as an infant. And so I had two ritual circumcisions where they use that device where you prick the skin to draw a little bit of blood, right? So it's called a hata-fata arm. It's a ritual circumcision. So I had that done twice. My initial conversion was in 1992, 93 and then had it again in 2009. So yeah, you never really forget when someone pricks your prick to get a little bit of blood. But hey, it was all worth it. So I love this work in progress on conservative claims of cultural oppression, the nature and origins of conservophobia because this book is written by a leftist but he takes left-wing critiques and applies them to the left, right? And he displays empathy for people on the right, right? So you've got the gatekeepers of academia publishing Hollywood or these bastions of liberalism and they believe that they are judging merit and it's just purely on the basis of merit that liberals are succeeding in these institutions and conservatives are not. Just like when it comes to different outcomes for racists, conservatives say, well, this is merit, right? Different groups have different gifts. So some people are better suited to running fast. Other people are better at rapping. Other people are better at playing basketball. Other people are better at business that some groups are more intelligent than other groups. Some groups commit high rates of crime than other groups. Some groups have more solid family lives and the left-wing critique of that is, oh, that's just because society has been set up a certain way just because institutions have been set up a certain way. Well, why can't you apply that left-wing critique to left-wing institutions? Maybe it's not the left succeeding purely on the basis of merit. Maybe the institutions have been set up in a way that rewards people on the left and punishes people on the right, right? So people on the left complain that white people are constantly unconsciously discriminating against blacks, right? So the left-wing critique is that our prevailing measures of supposedly objective merit that these are just reflections of white supremacy, right? Maybe the whole idea of merit just serves white people's need to believe that their social positions and life outcomes the result of something more than the brute fact of social power and racial domination. But maybe liberal merit, maybe that's just merely an instrument of liberal domination, right? Maybe liberal institutions have been fine-tuned to exclude conservatives and to suppress conservative achievement, right? Maybe the shortage of black academics, as Henry Lewis Gates argues, is that white people are simply not being trained to recognize black intelligence. Well, is it not also possible that liberals have not been trained to recognize conservative intelligence or have been trained to not recognize it? All right, when you look at things like black nationalism, right, you've got critical race theorists who argue that liberal integrationism is premised on the mistaking assumption that the category of merit itself is neutral and personal and that it somehow developed outside the economy of social power with a significant currency of race, class, and gender that marks American social life. But maybe liberalism has its own economy of social power. Maybe only by ignoring this background can liberals bask in their imagined intellectual superiority. So liberals argue that conservatives are underrepresented in academia because they are temperamentally drawn to other professions. But maybe this is because conservatives, like black students lack proper role models. Maybe like blacks and other oppressed minorities, maybe from the beginning, they were dismissed by their liberal professors as hopeless cretins. Maybe they were never placed in a position to develop the talents that would allow them to succeed. Maybe they've been deprived of opportunity because of the domination of the liberal master race. So people on the left say, racists generate their own social truth by creating conditions under which oppressed races are forced to conform to racial prejudices. Or maybe liberalism produces its own self-fulfilling prophecies, creating what it then casts as the natural inequality of liberals and conservatives. Right, liberals may not see their intellectual and moral and social standards as politically motivated, just as whites do not conceive of themselves as a distinctive racial group. Maybe for white people, according to critical theorists on the left, their consciousness of whiteness is predominantly an unconsciousness of whiteness. Well, perhaps liberals suffer from an analogous blindness. Maybe they fail to recognize themselves as a distinct class with distinct values, distinct tastes, distinct interests. Maybe this is the silent background of their anti-conservative biases. All right, maybe conservatives should be understood on their own terms rather than assimilated to the values, the interests and the prejudices of the dominant liberal culture, right? The left has traditionally leveled a demand on behalf of oppressed minorities, on behalf of women, racial minorities, gays and the disabled against the injustices of patriarchy, white supremacy, heterosexism and ableism. Well, maybe it's time to turn those critiques against the left, right? Maybe conservatives should be issuing a parallel set of claims, which liberalism's own first principles require them to acknowledge, right? Maybe it's time. Right, you've heard the term people of faith, so that originally is kind of a new agey aversion to organized religion, but it's caught on among conservative Christians. They see the advantages of comparing themselves with other oppressed groups. So you have an anti-abortion activist like Lila Rose, who taught her supporters, who says we can't have an America completely free with the complete end of abortion. We can have that America. We overcame many things in our history. We've overcome many things from slavery to civil rights abuses in the 20th century to child labor. We've overcome many things, even the Revolutionary War to have our independence won. We've overcome many things in this country, the women's rights movement for suffrage, and we can overcome. We can defeat the hopelessness and the lies and the despair that says that we need abortion and we can overcome it and it's happening. So William F. Buckley defined a conservative as a fellow who is standing a thought history yelling stop, but conservative positions are perhaps better understood as onward. Maybe they are a core to forward-looking progress. Maybe they are the next courageous step in an ongoing struggle for the freedom and dignity of an ever-expanding circle of moral concern. That is the liberals of the civil rights era first chanted, we shall overcome, but it is now conservatives who ask us to overcome liberalism itself in the name of its own first principles. So Phyllis Schlafly, for example, railed against the meaninglessness lack of fulfillment among American women in the spirit of Betty Friedan and blamed those ills of American women on feminism rather than sexism. So the ERA, as opposed by Phyllis Schlafly, is a threat to women's most fundamental rights, such as the right to be supported by a husband and to keep one's baby. So the American Center for Law and Justice, the ACLJ, is the ACLU of the right, if you use itself as defending the religious freedom of Christians against secular oppression. So maybe the meaning of liberal ideals is essentially indeterminate and can simply be constantly reinterpreted in accordance with conservative priorities. So the initial prerogatives that the left threatened were things like landed titles, corporate monopolies, union busting, any kind of white male or heterosexual privilege. But now the left is going after the mere social dignity of simply not being a leftist. Right, liberal tolerance has not been extended to people on the right. The last remaining social group that it is perfectly permitted to scorn and to hate and to persecute with a good conscience. The forgotten minority that got overlooked amidst all the liberal celebrations of tolerance, sensitivity and diversity is the conservative, right? So conservative college students tend to be buried under an avalanche of scorn, both from their professors and peers. They are treated as if they are crow magnets with bones in their noses. Then one or two rounds in the barrel, conservative thinking students learn the local custom. And this custom is to keep their mouth shut if their viewpoints run contrary to the revealing winds of liberalism in the classroom. Now, for growing numbers of organizations of conservative women, they are developing conservative safe space stickers. So they're appropriating a concept that used to be used to highlight gays' special vulnerability to harassment and abuse, right? But gays are no longer the group shunned or berated on modern college campuses. Campus intolerance is now turned on conservatives and it is the conservative students and faculties who most need a safe space. So liberalism has erected a vast regime of sensitivity training to uproot every last trace of real or imagined homophobia, but they will not take the slightest steps to remedy another equally pressing problem and that is their own conservatophobia. So Ann Coulter notices that liberals, when featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek or The New York Times, always bathe in a beatific light while conservatives are photographed in lighting that casts a menacing glow and always seem to show five o'clock shadows. So TV and Hollywood tends to treat lawyers, teachers, social workers and others who work in liberal professions to mostly sunny portrayals while disproportionately casting businessmen in villainous roles. So if the entertainment industry formally relegated blacks to the roles of pimps, criminals, vagrants and other undesirables, so now it is conservatives who must play social prize and have been doing so in the entertainment industry for more than 50 years. And this environment of hostility is seriously eroding conservatives' quality of life. So just as blacks in the Jim Crow South face the constant risk of harassment from racist whites for whom simply being black was provocation enough. So Ben Shapiro argues that today's young conservatives have to face liberal bullying on a daily basis from the elementary school level through grad school and onto their careers, particularly in law education and Hollywood. Conservative commentator Laura Ingram was bullied at her first media job at CBS. She was prohibited from entering the makeup room until liberal Paula Zahn had exited. Conservative book buyers are bullied by the unionized employees of Barnes and Noble. David Horowitz alleges these liberal bullies go out of their way to make conservative book purchases in their regard as barely literate Philistines feel unwelcome. There's a book by Jebediah Biller Outnumber, the Chronicles of a Manhattan Conservative, and it recounts the author's life in New York City during the heady days of the 2008 elections. So in a hostile unforgiving war in which a conservative with a palan-power-label lapel pin cannot so much as enter a subway car or turn a street corner without being announced as racist, dumb, or an ignorant bitch bypasses by. So the author was flabbergasted when an acquaintance acknowledged, I just know that I was brought up to believe that conservatives aren't good people and people I've met, conservative people, always rub me the wrong way. So what Jews were a century ago, conservatives are today. They are the recipients of unthinking, inherited prejudice, and this bigotry is given a free pass in the mecca of enlightened progressivism. So liberals deny their conservative phobia. They chalk it up to the intensity of their anger toward conservatives to conservatives own beliefs and conduct, but don't opponents of homosexuality justify their homophobia in the same way. It's principled moral opposition to a socially deleterious practice like orgies at a bathhouse while doing a lot of math. So liberals claim that moral opposition to homosexuality simply reveals more about the moral opponent than it does about homosexuality than homosexuals. Well, if you then apply that argument on liberals, conservatives believe that liberals phobia about conservatives reveals the liberals unacknowledged internal conflicts. So people on the left are consumed with a primal but irrational desire to inflict their emotions on you so that you might share their misery and feel their pain. So conservatives are the new socially sanctioned scapegoats. They are foils on which liberals project every social ill on which liberals externalize their every psychic conflict on which liberals rationalize their projections with this aura of moral high-mindedness that disguises their real motivations. So if liberals insist on diversity, tolerance and equal respect, then conservatives should insist that they be afforded the genuine article rather than Orwellian inversions that liberalism in fact offers. That's because that's a serious attire when he's in the world living up to his principles as a man. Well, I think I'll be like that myself in terms of wearing the suits, in terms of wearing like the same thing each day. Like I just buy like 10 t-shirts from the same brand. I vary the color. They're not all black. I was waxing the color by the Unicode and it's the same night. The rebel summer wear is fantastic. So I do get that. And I guess if I wanted to steal money, it's a bit like in the pandemic when everybody was working from home, that putting on a suit or whatever you were at your office could put you in a different mindset, right? And that seems to be what Lex is angling for here. Yeah, like I was trying to say with the references to the Nazis and stuff like that. I think Lex is emoting things that most people think that he's saying it in a very simple and upfront way, a little bit like the idiot in Dostoevsky, ironically enough, but in a way that most people don't do. Most people are kind of more cynical and sophisticated than that. And actually that might speak to his appeal and why he is such a popular YouTuber slash podcaster while he does get such a wide variety of high profile guests. At some level, people, Americans particularly probably respond to that kind of innocence. So the last thing then, the end of his day, let's see what he does before he heads off the bed he buys. Actually, after the hour of literature reading, I always take a pause and do the part of the mantra that I do in the morning, that's gratitude. Again, it's being thankful that I'm alive, that I survived another day looking forward to the next day and just be grateful for all of the moments that are full of joy in the day. I mean, just even filming this silly thing, it's like one, there's a piece of technology that somehow is capturing this that other people might watch and then there's like a microphone. I mean, just the entirety of the technology, everything is magical, everything is magical. Everything's magical, that's freedom. All right, so conservatism, this is from Ronnie Goodman's Work in Progress on Conservophobia. Conservatism has always prescribed cultural nationalism on the premise that uprooted moral universalism cannot provide the social cohesion that is brought about by narrower circles of identification such as nationalism, cultural nationalism, in which true ethical feeling must always be rooted. So I understand people, not primarily as individuals, but members of a family, a group, a nation, a mob. So the little platoon we belong to is the first group that we should love. It's the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love towards our country and then to mankind. So conservatism is now a form of cultural nationalism for the little platoon is now defined by conservatism itself. So conservatism, conservatives understand themselves as a despised, stigmatized group, right? They are punished for rejecting liberalism. They've been unofficially banished from full and equal participation in public life. So by claiming cultural oppression, they celebrate a new quasi-ethnic identity and story. And Laura Ingram observes, they think we're stupid. They think our patriotism is stupid. They think our church going is stupid. They think our flag waving is stupid. They think having big families is stupid. They think where we live anywhere but near or in a few major cities is stupid. They think our SUVs are stupid. They think earning a gun is stupid. They think our abiding belief in the goodness of America and its founding principles is stupid. They think the choices we make at the ballot box are stupid. And without a doubt, they will think this book is stupid. So liberals see stupidity, but conservative claimers of cultural oppression see the silent heroism of a beleaguered and colonized people who resist the encroachments of a coterie of cloistered elites, uprooted rationalists and cosmopolitan, but nothing but contempt for the native culture of the less eloquent but more wholesome ordinary American who is now seen to exist on a lower moral intellectual and spiritual plane. They live in a world where liberalism prescribes not only the terms of the debate, but also the rhetorical atmosphere in which any debate must take place. So liberalism in the public square has become taken for granted common sense. Conservative initiatives must be advanced in a context saturated by liberal assumptions. So we're all liberals now by dint of contagion, if not conviction. So given liberalism's present rhetorical supremacy, it is natural that conservatives would prefer to reinterpret liberal ideals in their own favor, rather than categorically reject them. And this is what conservatives are doing by arguing that the protection of liberalism's own first principles has yet to be extended to them. And that liberals are therefore guilty of their immoral and intellectual vices that they associate with conservatives. So the social conservative will openly acknowledge his willingness to sacrifice social freedom, such as the right to abortion, to social order, right? We need order. Just as the economic conservative acknowledges his willingness to sacrifice equality for property rights. But by contrast, conservative attacks on liberals go to the core of liberalism's self-understanding. So conservative claims of cultural oppression seek to expose liberalism's core values, cultural diversity, tolerance, freedom of conscience, and social equality. These are all empty shams, disguising what is an entirely opposite set of commitments. And this is why liberals are criticized by their own standards. So George Will takes Walmart's critics to task, writing, liberals think their campaign against Walmart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument. And they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals are gassed. See the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots announced. Yes, announced that Americans are surely in need of more supervision by liberals. So the PaleoCon Magazine chronicles, laments that once upon a time in America, you could say you loved your country, you believed in God, your held marriage is sacred, and you would not be snicked out as a simple-minded simpleton. You could believe in honesty, hard work and self-reliance. You could speak of human responsibilities in the same breath as human rights and not be derided as an insensitive fool. You could speak out against profane books. You could speak out against depraved movies and decadent art. You could express your disapproval of drug, sodden entertainers, American hating educators and appeasement obsessed legislators. You would not be branded as an ignorant reactionary. Yes, once upon a time in America, you'd actually believe in morality, both public and private, not be proclaimed a hopeless naïve, or to be pity than to be taken seriously. But that was before the censorship of fashion took control of contemporary American culture. So this insidious form of censorship is not written into our laws or statues, but it is woven into the very fabric of our culture. It reigns supreme in literature and the arts, on TV and in film and music, on radio, now churches, public schools, now universities and even in our synagogues. It is dedicated to the propagation of one agenda, the liberal activist agenda for America. The censorship of fashion is not only sinister and subtle, is also ruthlessly effective, employs the powerful weapons of ridicule and condescension to stifle the voices of millions of Americans like you to still cherish our traditional values. Reminding myself of that doesn't take much effort by just taking a break, taking a pause, just breathing and just saying damn, it's good to be alive. Because I won't always be alive. The right ends too quickly. So it's an opportunity, a moment to appreciate the entirety of it. I know this grates at your very essence, Chris. He's like an anti-Chris Kavanaugh. He's like a pure beam of love. But the thing is, it's not that I don't like being alive. I love it. I love it too. And there are moments when you're lying beside your kid, and you have those moments where you feel that gratitude of existence. You don't want this right then. I get it, Max. I get it. I'm happy here too. But this notion that recording a YouTube video, looking at a microphone, me like start to appreciate the absolute beauty of the world, the interconnectedness of it all. Like it's not that. It's just every day does that. He has that moment of, and it's after an hour of deep reading the deepest literature mankind has produced after 16 hours of physical work and productive time management done well fasted. I know what you're saying. I hear you. The American part of it is it's the American cultural disconnect. I'm not saying all Americans are like this. No, they're not. We've interviewed many of them and some of them listened to this show and it would rub them the wrong way just as much as us. But there is a segment. There is a segment for which this kind of emanating this childlike love and purity and naivety and these platitudes. There is an element in American culture for whom this is real and true. And there's just a difference there. There was an element there amongst the Puritans in Europe or amongst the spiritual mystics in Russia at various points in history. I think there's a mindset which is just full ball just dancing like nobody's watching. And it's just different. You said platitudes and that is part of what I feel. It's not that I think people shouldn't be grateful or reflect on how lucky they are, how marvelous it is that we live in this era of modern interconnectedness and all that. I do all the gays at me over your microphone and just felt grateful just for being here. I mean, in the nice version of it, they simply being grateful for all of the wonders that he gets to enjoy and for being alive. What's wrong with that? But it's that kind of platitudinous. It's combined with the Nazis. What bad guys? And life, it's a hell of a ride while you're on it and you've got to love people out there. It's just like it's all together. It feels like a saccharine overload of sincerity. It's hard for me. Where is the cynicism? And where is the grappling with the world as it is where it is not this beacon of love and wonder like every day is optimized to the core where people sleep in and they have depression and they're not optimized in everything they do. And sometimes they fuck around and so on. And it's constraining the human spirit in a way. Well, I think what you're saying is it doesn't feel real. You should read. I'm sorry, but seriously, the main character is called the idiot and he is kind of an idiot. But the main thing is that he's simple and pure in the sort of Christian sense. And Dostoyevsky was super into this kind of thing. And there's a cultural thing where they see it as an ennobling, being hyper aware, being encultured and being contaminated by society and going back to a kind of simplicity and a purity is a beautiful and good thing. And in a way, Lex's shtick is kind of embodies that. So there's that. Okay, I think that'll do it for today. Take care. Bye-bye.