 G'day, May 40 here, sitting at the edge of the world, meeting a little of Ronnie Gouldman's excellent work on conservative oppression. So he makes the point that the traditional left-right spectrum right has collapsed because liberalism no longer sees itself as just a point of view. Rather, they see themselves as basically co-equal with reality. So liberalism is essentially the politics of kindness and tolerance. Magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful. It's the love of learning. So there's a great anecdote here. A young conservative describes her experience casually debating public school sex education with a bunch of liberals she met at a party. And the discussion was whirling along and she revealed that she'd been home-scored, at which point her credibility just dissipated. The liberals concluded that because she'd been home-scored, she had conserved her parents and that she'd grown up indoctrinated with Russian public and propaganda. So her opinion was just incurably biased, just an inevitable part of her upbringing. And so her arguments did not need to be met. They could just be dismissed. So liberals love to avoid the genetic fallacy in most other contexts, but they'll indulge it in their dealings with conservatives. Conservatives are essentially second-class citizens. They cannot escape the accidents of their socialization. So liberals see themselves as operating in the space of reason. Conservatives operate in the space of indoctrination. Ancient folkways are still clinging to their guns and religion. Conservatives are driven by things that only liberals can properly understand. So that's what liberals really mean when they talk about love of learning. They truly understand what animates conservatives. So liberals tend to have a reflexive dismissal of those of us who are traditionalists. And so the liberal antipathy to conservatives is not based on any particular ideas. It comes from a psychological dismissal. The conservatives are just clinging on to ancient folkways. And this hostility is constantly fed and cultivated. They're adapted to moving targets. And so what conservatives regard as normal and healthy by liberal perspective is reactionary. It's just an unfortunate relic of the knighted past. A blessings to Elliot Blatt here at the edge of the wall at the north side of the Manly Beach. Honored to be able to share words of Rooney Goldman with you. So the kind of family that for centuries and millennia has been regarded as natural, normal and healthy is now seen as pathological. It now conceals behind a normal facade, the original sin of child abuse. Child abuse has been so magnified and sanctified and extended that anything you do that does not assist the growth of your child spiritually, morally, psychologically, intellectually is practicing child abuse. So prior to the 1960s, there wasn't even a term called child abuse. So smoking, perfectly normal activity. Now from the perspective of the left, it's a vice, it's a sin. Or sexual promiscuity, which has long been regarded as something bad. Oh, that's just a healthy matter of individual rights and choice. So the type has been defined up to include any sexual activity that people regret at a later date. So people on the left tend to reject the common sense of traditionalist because its very commonness is an affront to their anointed identity. So the sure scenes from a traditionalist perspective that the left has driven to systematically invert every inherited norm and understanding. I'm reading from Ronny Gordman's great book on conservative cultural oppression. So the left presupposes a world that resists their prescriptions. A world that is too ignorant to recognize their superior wisdom and morality. And thus all the more in need of these. So the great left-wing cause is to constantly educate and help reprogram people away from tradition and prejudice. So whether it's the rights of criminals or the merits of avant-garde art, there is from our ruling class always this pattern of seeking to differentiate themselves from the masses. And then we use euphemisms like the politics of kindness, community spirit, love of learning. All these euphemisms can be reconfigured to generate a new chasm between the anointed and the benighted. And liberals are always moving the goalposts because their political vision is a vision of themselves that's more morally sensitive. So this vision of the left-wing anointed can never achieve the active consent of the great majority. So it must constantly be promoted and defended by our intellectual class. So the left dominates our most influential institutions. They largely control the production of cultural capital, dominate the media, Hollywood, the universities, public education, nonprofit foundations, government bureaucracies, the courts, the professions, dentistry. Those darn dentists and so liberals use their privileged position to constantly foist their parochial values upon a silent and what seems like a largely powerless majority of ordinary Americans who don't control our institutions. So if the people vote for something such as a proposition when NE7 in California to deny government benefits to people here illegally, well, the left domination of the courts can simply overturn that. So if people don't vote the right way, they can be coerced by the administrative state and the courts who are controlled by the left. So liberalcy and public policy, all sorts of discrete policy problems with discrete solutions, but from a traditionalist perspective, liberalism, you know, makes these local manifestations of their vision of the anointed. So since the 1960s, the right has tried to appeal on a collection of overlapping stories about the currents of contemporary American life, where we have declining patriotism, declining moral standards, out-of-touch media and a self-righteous liberal elite, we have a feminization of public life, we have minority groups demanding special privileges, and they are unwilling to assimilate to American culture and language, we have growing crime, we have overly lenient judges, we have ludicrous restrictions on permissible speech, we have disrespect for religious faith, we have a swollen government that intrudes into our private life, and arching over all of this, we have an America divided into two nations by differences in values, culture and lifestyle. So the elites on the left hold themselves out as post-ideological technocrats, but from a conservative perspective, this is disingenuous. It's a way to try to distract from the culture wars. Our culture is being inevitably transformed under the guise of, we're just objective true seekers, we're just technocrats. So the ultimate effect of liberal solutions is always to enhance and reinforce the symbolic prestige of the liberal left point of view. So every controversy is defined by the same basic divisions. So conservatives cannot restrict their attention just to the direct outcomes of particular policy procedures. They have a broader struggle. To concede anything to the left is to concede a portion of their power to resist further concessions. So conservative claims of cultural oppression, the name of this great Ronnie Goodman book, refuse to recognize a genuine distinction between liberalism and movements further to the left. His adherents profess to distinguish themselves from liberals. So both liberals and conservatives presume to believe in the legitimate sea of a state, which we are guaranteed equality before the law and which individual liberty is paramount, and just want to extend this equality and this freedom and keep maximizing it to the point where these freedoms begin to cancel one another. So with the civil rights revolution in the 1960s, some groups got more freedom, but this came at loss of community and loss of freedom to hire who you want and rent to who you want, loss of freedom in who you get to hang out with and employ and rent to. So people on the left tend to be most concerned about equality for those on the lower end of various social hierarchies. People on the right tend to be most concerned about maximizing economic freedom. So this is the framework of classical liberalism. Now the left does not accept the legitimacy of the liberal state as a given. It takes up its analysis at the level of the social powers producing the stratification that liberalism largely ignores. So capital, male dominance, racial formations, regimes of sexuality. So the left critiques norms, not just limited to class, gender, sexuality and race. So from a left-wing perspective liberals, conservatives just have trifling differences. So liberals are concerned with substantive equality and that draws them into the world of the left, where the both sides liberal and left become increasingly willing to deploy state power to modify all sorts of social practices, such as normal healthy marriage and family. So liberals are always seeing kinks in the system that require government intervention. They say they only want a level playing field, but they'll always find more maldistribution waiting to be discovered by these anointed. And so liberalism inevitably devolves into leftism. So from a liberal perspective, the right-wing mind looks upon the world as an arena of conflict between absolute good and absolute evil. And does not find serious importance in degrees of difference. So from this classic liberal-left perspective, those of us on the right are 100% thinkers. Everything's got to be 100% one way or another. So the liberal-left doesn't trust traditions. It doesn't trust the God-fearing and freedom-loving people. So the left has been infused with Marxism, anti-bourgeois, romanticism, anti-religious sentiments, Nietzschean immoralism and postmodernism. So this essentially permits the left and the liberals to maintain a continuous chasm between themselves and the great majority. So conservatives who claim cultural oppression get accused of playing the victim card. And they've come to recognize that their own passivity is to blame for their predicament, not just liberal ruthlessness. So the country class of ordinary Americans has been blinded by egalitarian impulses to the reality that a whole class of people are taught to the contrary. So conservatives, unlike people on the left, tend to fight only when roused by intolerable provocation. Most of the time they just concern themselves with family and friends and religion and going out shooting, watching football, going to church. Generally, conservatives tend to shy away from the fight and typically back down in the face of liberal bullying. Conservative students tend to accept left-wing classroom demagoguery as their lot. A conservative disposition is a disposition to suffer. Conservatives must be pushed to see that the injustice done to them is really an injustice and they should try to do something about it. So conservatives don't like playing the victim, but now they've been driven to it. They've been compelled to draw a line in the sand with the passing of gay marriage and ever-increasing rights for the transgendered and more and more conservatives are saying no more. So conservatives are overcoming their congenital lethargy. They've been finally roused to action due to the severity of the provocation. So they understand that their claims to cultural oppression along overdue exercises in assertiveness training. Now liberals regard this new assertiveness of the MAGA crowd, the Donald Trump crowd, the New Republicans and simply belligerents. Because until Trump, liberals could largely take conservative pre-essence, passivity for granted. So now conservatives feel like they are the resistance. And they're making war on the cultural monolith of liberalism which controls all of our major institutions. So it used to be the left that had a trope of resistance to hegemony. So this is how the left has become the right and the right has become the left. There's Russ Douthat wrote in The New York Times recently. Now the left controls almost all our major institutions. So it's the right that's taking on the revolution. Resistance to hegemony typically being a left-wing cause, now it's been appropriated by the right. So now conservatives see themselves as dissenters and revolutionaries. Because they refuse to capitulate to the dominant paradigm and to the armies of well-programmed left-wing automatons. So conservatives see that traditional values have lost their prestige. We have gay marriage, ever-increasing transgender rights. So some conservatives are simply hunkering down trying to preserve their culture. Robert Bork compares conservative talk radio and evangelical Christian organizations as the modern equivalents with the isolated Irish monasteries that safeguarded classical learning during the dark ages. So we have a morally conservative, distant culture that stands in opposition to the morally libertarian dominant culture. So the dominant culture that we have now is the heir to the counterculture of the 1960s. So now a distant conservative culture represents a counterculture. So conservatism now stands in a position of weakness because of its lack of power over institutions. So conservative elites cannot begin to match in numbers or influence those who occupy the commanding heights of our dominant culture. The professors, the journalists, the lawyers, the TV and movie producers, the various cultural entrepreneurs. The left dominates the means of cultural production. Even religion has increasingly fallen under the dominant culture's sway. And now mainline churches offer very little resistance to the prevailing left-wing culture. So conservatives are engaged in many forms of passive resistance. We have parents homeschooling their children, sending them to private religious schools. We have conservative foundations, establishing special campus centers, institutions, programs. We have these oasis of moral traditionalism in the desert of liberalism. We have Rumble and Odyssey and perhaps even Twitter under Alon Musk. So those of us who want something other than an aggressively secular education can avail ourselves of an ever-expanding number of religious colleges. In the face of increasingly offensive fare on TV, many people have begun to act as their own censors. Look, are you becoming secular, perhaps even atheistic in your worldview? No, I'm just as religious but I recognize many of the benefits from a secular and atheist worldview. And I want to, since I started live streaming almost every day, I want to speak to atheists and speak in terms that secular people can relate to. So I don't just want to speak to religious people. I think it's, I find it really helpful for myself to phrase things in different ways. So not just in religious terms, not just in traditionalist terms. But I like to be able to speak to people who are Orthodox Jews, people are secular Jews, people are religious Christians, people who are culturally Christian but effectively secular. I speak to everyone and there's something to be gained from understanding different points of view including the secular and the atheist point of view in addition to the traditional religious point of view. So I want to take advantage of all the wonders of intellectual life that are out there. Intellectual life, let's face it, is dominated by atheists. Intellectual life is dominated by the non-religious. They occupy the high grounds of culture. So the more intelligent people get, seems like the more likely they are to be atheists and to be secular and to not take into account religious explanations for reality. So even if you're religious, you're effectively much more secular than people were 50 or 100 years ago because if there was a giant wave right now, I would not seek an explanation that God sent this wave to punish me for something I said. I talk about the phenomenon of freak waves. And if there's an earthquake in Los Angeles right now, few of us would go for the religious explanation. So we live in increasingly, ever increasingly secular world and I see no prospects of that being reversed. So even religious people increasingly turn to secular explanations for how the world works. So religion provides solace and comfort for many people, but for others they find solace and comfort much more effectively from movies or TV shows or music. So yeah, you're right. I have read a lot more secular and atheist critiques over the past two or three years. And I've read fewer religious critiques, but I still practice religion at the same level of Jewish observance. I still spend most of my spare time where I'm socializing with fellow Orthodox Jews. But I welcome the secular critique and the atheist critique in addition to welcoming the religious critique. We need each other. Reality is far too complicated for any one perspective on life to have all the answers. That's my understanding of living in a postmodern world, that there's not one narrative. There's not one story that is sufficient to explain everything that we're up against. And the more sophisticated your understanding of reality, I think the more top-down explanations you have, the better off you are. As long as these explanations work. And it's kind of amusing. I want to be religious. I believe there must be some design, but he left us on our own. Yeah, so why do we like the music that we like? Why do we like the literature that we like? We have different programming, both genetic and cultural. And so the type of religion that works for me may not work for you. Usually people are better off going back to the religion that they were raised in. If there are some good memories there, some good friends. But if that doesn't work, then there are so many varieties of the religious experience to riff off the great William James book, that it's worth checking things out. And you don't have to buy into everything or anything. If you find friends at a particular religious gathering, if you feel comfortable there, if you find it elevating, then that might work for you. Take the person with ADHD. Often they will be much calmer after a session of prayer and meditation when they come out of church or when they come out of a synagogue service. Their system calms down. So there is a social and communal experience that is often much more accessible in religion because when you gather people together under the premise that God says so, it's often more powerful than secular explanations. It often provides more motivation for forming a community, sacrificing for a community. So if you can join a community where people look out for each other, particularly a high commitment, high intensity community, you've got a backstop in life. You're not just out there on your own. You've got people who've got your back and you get to contribute to the lives of people around you which fills you up, fills your tank, gives you strength and energy.