Speaker unverified: commitment

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…Kind of. Maybe, yeah. I don’t know what makes things do this, but it feels like we can never have a good thing and then have it end as a good thing. Things always get taken to their extreme, and then we have to fight on those extremes. I would argue that… Back in my day, we called it SJWs, Social Justice Warriors, before it became woke. I think it was like 2013 onwards, whatever. There are aspects to wokeism that I think are good. Like I like the additional representation that we have in media now. I like how, as much as people complain about the internet and how it’s regulated, that there are way more groups that are represented on the internet, whether we’re talking X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, or Facebook or whatever. Or whether we’re pushing women’s achievements in school and in the wider workforce. I think that these are all good things. The issue that you run into is people don’t ever have a stopping point, and I think people kind of get lost in this woke-for-woke-sake thing where we start to see these very weird workings of these academic, I guess, arguments that are used for really horrible things. So for instance, I think that you can talk about in the United States, things like white supremacy or things like Oppression or certain demographics, especially with Jim Crow laws and pre-Jim Crow, and you can even talk about effects from that. But then when you run into this weird world where we’ve kind of worked these things so that not only is white supremacy still as present today as it ever has been, well actually black people and other minorities can’t even be racist. They don’t have the power to, because we’re going to use a different definition of racism and we can only talk about punching up as opposed to punching down. And then we’re actually going to say it’s totally okay for these people to say or do whatever they want, and it’s never bad. But white people, who have always been the oppressors, even if you’re like a trailer park guy whose family’s addicted to meth, you have all this privilege, etc, etc. I think that you run into these issues where woke ism, it starts off as a really good idea and I would argue has achieved really good things, especially in regards to women’s education and everything, and then it just gets so academia-ized… There’s a word there, academic, whatever, where you take something and you put it into school too much and then it comes out as some Frankenstein cancer baby of horrible things, such that today when I’m reading stuff, and I know Ben is the same way, if I even hear somebody say the word anti-racism, I’m probably ignoring every other thing you have to say. If you utter the word like colonial anything, I’m probably going to say you probably don’t have anything good to say. Yeah, a lot of it has just taken way too far. But you know what I will blame on some of this is I will blame conservatives for some of this- going to say you probably don’t have anything good to say. Yeah, a lot of it has just taken way too far. But you know what I will blame on some of this is I will blame conservatives for some of this- But you know what I will blame on some of this is I will blame conservatives for some of this because I think one issue that happens, and I think Ben might even agree with me here too, is I think there’s two huge problems that have happened in the United States I think broadly speaking is that, one, we become more different than we ever have been. And, two, we become more similar than we ever have been. And when I say this, what I mean is like we’re splitting off into these groups and then these groups are enforcing this insane homogeneity between these two separate groups. I think one of these schisms has been conservatives’ reluctancy to participate in things related to higher education. For a long time, conservatives are saying, oh, the educational institutions are against us. Rush Limbaugh talks about how evil the colleges are and blah, blah, blah. And then what happens is conservatives are less and less willing to engage in them. So then you get this scenario or this environment where everybody that’s engaged in academia on the administrative side are fucking insane. They’re even more so to, and I also want to draw a distinction between the administrators and the faculty because oftentimes when you’re reading story after story after story of all of these insane admins that are pushing further and further left, usually the faculty is fighting against it. A lot of the tenure professors, a lot of people in their departments are saying, hold on, well, we actually don’t agree with this. But I feel like, because conservatives for so long have demonized these institutions rather than critically evaluated them and tried to have honest critique and engagement, that they’ve just completely broken off. And when you only have a bunch of lefties or righties together, all they’ll do is they veer off even more into their insane directions. I feel like that’s a big problem that we’ve run into in the country to where conservatives have totally broken off some conversations, broken away from where they won’t participate in them anymore, and then the people that you have left just run as far to the left as possible. Certainly when you look at certain institutions, I think that one of the things that people on both sides of the aisle are constantly looking at is has the institution suffered such capture that there is just no capacity to fix it? And when you talk about the universities, I’m not going to blame conservatives for the failure of the universities because they haven’t been present in major positions at universities since effectively the late 1960s. You can go read Shelby Steele’s work on this where he talks about how he used to be, he’s now a conservative black person. He was a liberal black person at the time. He was actually quite a radical black activist at the time in the ’60s. And he talks about walking into the office of liberal administrators who were largely on his side with regard to civil rights, and being a radical, him claiming that the systems of the university were inherently broken, were inherently wrong, unfixable. And he talks about this, it’s a very evocative episode where he’s talking about how he’s smoking, and as he’s smoking, the ash is growing more and more, and the ash falls down on this very expensive carpet. And the president of the university who’s listening to him rant and rave, Shelby Steele says, “I thought he was going to say something about this. I mean, I was wrecking a thousand dollar carpet in his office being a jackass, and instead, I could see him wilt inside. I could see him collapse. He didn’t have the institutional credibility or sort of the spiritual strength to just say, ‘Listen, I agree with you on some of these things, but you’re acting like a jackass.'” And what you see in the late 1960s and early 1970s is in fact the collapse of these institutions to the point where, by the time I was going to college, there was this radical disproportion between conservatives and liberals. The problem is that when it comes to a system like the universities, basically you have to separate the universities off into two separate categories. One is STEM, where the universities are still pretty damn good. American universities, when it comes to STEM, are still leading universities in the world. Harvard’s main creations these days are coming from actual hard science field. Then you have the liberal arts field in which you basically have a self-perpetuating elite because that’s actually how dissertations work. If you have somebody who’s very far to the left and you decide that you’re going to write a dissertation on the history of American gun rights, the chances that that is going to be approved by your dissertation advisor are much lower than if you happen to write something that tends to agree with the political positions of your dissertation advisor. Now, listen, I think there are open and tolerant professors, even in the liberal arts at these universities.…

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